The Proverbial Shiny

[Vicare de Lioncourt]

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no one is safe from nature's savagery, not even the innocent—the Savage Garden will overtake civilization and destroy it

lupus form — amherst limits — about 8:30 PM

There was something hard beneath the grass. It was an aberration reminiscent of when children shoved toys under rugs in the hope that their parents would not notice that they hadn’t “cleaned their rooms” at all. The golden tawny wolf followed the unseen road, feeling for the overgrown and hidden oddity with his paws. Every now and again, he would pause to sniff the earth, detecting the trace amount of rusted metal beneath the fragrant grass of early summer, and presently, he stopped walking to paw at the ground. There was no reason behind the act, really, unless the satisfaction of what seemed to be an insatiable thirst for knowledge counted as a reason.



What the luperci didn’t know was that he was walking along the path of what had once been the Intercolonial Canadian Railway, but now that there was no one left to maintain the tracks, it had sunk beneath a thriving carpet of grass and greenery, becoming no more than an odd bump in the ground and a lingering scent of iron alloy. Finding nothing interesting in the grass, the Vináttan straightened and moved on, continuing to trace the enigmatic trail that snaked beneath the earth.



He was somewhere just outside Amherst, and it was close to twilight. When he arrived on the outskirts of the once-city, the sky had already changed from a lovely cornflower blue to a pale shade of violet. Here, Vicare paused and let his eyes sweep across the ruins of the city, which had largely been reclaimed by the surrounding wilderness. He followed the main road, stopping every now and again to take a whack at the thriving clusters of weeds that poked out of the many cracks in the pavement, reaching for the sky, and every time he did so, the wooden owl charm tied around his right forepaw danced wildly and banged against his ankle.



Hawk yellow eyes roamed the landscape curiously, eager to take in every detail he could get a hold of. The practical part of his nature argued that he was keeping an eye open for prey to take home to the pack, but he couldn’t really be bothered to lie to himself. A vast portion of his interest in the ruined town was purely selfish, and a small particle of greed had lodged itself inside his brain—he wanted to see if he could salvage anything from the ruins. Slowly, he was growing out of his purely animal ways, and the few days that he’d already spent with Vinátta was beginning to condition him to the more human parts of luperci culture.



In short, Vicare was here to hunt—to hunt, that was, for something proverbially shiny.