banshee beat

[Shakadyn]

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Boo. 83 Had there been a fire in this forest, it wouldn't have looked so glum. Wildfires tore down the old and encouraged the new with the cremated ashes. Pretty sick, right? But nature was and is a sick place. Proof of this was Shakadyn's very existence. He grinned, cocky even while verbally abusing himself, black paws taking him up and up again over the hills (and through the woods, to grandmother's house we go... he wasn't sure he remembered what his grandmother looked like). With his fur fluffed out to protect him from the cold, he looked much bigger than he really was — which proved to be useful, because he smelled coyote. He'd never seen them, but he remembered the tales of their brutality in these parts quite well; well, whatever. Tonight was the night for bravery (if, indeed, "bravery" meant "hiding behind trees"), as he chose to draw closer, a bit of freshly fallen snow masking the sound of his steps. There was wolf here, too. He couldn't help wondering if he'd end up stumbling across some tense scene. Tense, not brutal, because he couldn't smell any blood besides that of a day-old kill and whatever aged tree sap wasn't encased in ice. At first he didn't see her, and actually came quite near to bumping into her (and though he walked on four legs, she was shorter than him when he walked on two, from what he could tell — so much for being the smallest one around now, eh?). A flicker of movement stopped him in his tracks, though. The slender figure was, in fact, not a cluster of saplings, but a wolf. Not just a wolf, but the source of the coyote scent, too. (One might have thought it strange that he couldn't quite distinguish her from the surrounding trees by scent, but one might also have done well to be informed that trees and wolves were equally alive, and anyway he had a slight cold.) "Well, hello." As was his nature, it was a little difficult to tell if he was amused, or being a jerk, or perhaps both.

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