[Quest] When you are being hunted,

[Random Events]

 surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment 

The summer heat has driven the wolf higher and higher into the mountains, until the sea is only a distant dream gleaming on the horizon at sunset and the city is a memory of the thick scent of smoke and horses. 

(He saw her again before he left, the mare with the mis-matched eyes that burned like coals and sparked like flame. He saw her and he smiled his long lupine smile, licked his teeth, willed her to follow. He knows something, feels something being born and forged between them, even if he doesn’t know quite what.)

For the moment, though, he is alone. He stalks hares through the thinning forest, dark-needled conifers that carpet the ground so that each step releases the sweet scent of spruce and cedar. The wind that sluices down from the peaks is cold and bracing and still tastes of winter, and the dark wolf’s ears turn at each sound, the high thin keen of an eagle (hunting, too) and the snort of a caribou when it catches his scent. It is good, he thinks, to have teeth, and a keen nose, and to course through the undergrowth as easily and swiftly as though he is a river cutting through. It is good to be a predator on the hunt (even if there is a space inside him that feels empty but never had before, like a room he never knew was inside him has been unlocked and is waiting to be entered). 

He follows the trail of a hare from a fallen log taller than he is, through a thicket of burrs and buckthorn. The former snags a tuft of fur from his haunch, but he does not notice; he is joyous with the hunt, and a thorn is nothing to a wolf. And then - oh then! - there is a clearing, and the hare is huddled in the grass, nibbling, wary, not wary enough. The wolf crouches, low and still, and creeps forward, each paw a whisper on the ground, silent as his own shadow. 

But he is not the only hunter. 

Before he can spring, before his jaws can close around the hare’s neck, there is a splitting cry that shatters the stillness of the forest. Even the dust-motes seem to freeze, suspended, golden as chaff. The hare freezes, too, one paw raised - and then there is a flash bright as lightning, and his prey is gone, gone beneath a body of snow and ash - a gryphon. 

He is too proud and too furious to think; the wolf leaps with a terrible sound rippling from his throat, his jaws wide, wide and his teeth sharp. The snow gryphon shrieks its surprise and fury as he barrels into its shoulder and wing and the beasts tumble end-over-end, spitting and snarling in a sound like the world being rendered. It beats its wings, it lashes its leopard-claws and eagle talons, and the wolf does not relinquish his hold on its throat. If there was snow it would be painted red.

And then its claws catch him, raking open his stomach, slitting open the skin as though he were the hare and the hunted. The wolf relinquishes his hold to cry out and the gryphon beats him back, back with its snowy wings. They are both panting, both bleeding, and the ground between them is sown with iron. Adrenaline is too much the master of the wolf for him to note how badly he’s injured, and neither of them take their eyes from the other, and both of their gazes promise only death. 

---

@Morrighan might feel the same hollowness in her that the wolf feels and then she might feel it ache like something is wrong, terribly wrong. She might too, feel pulled towards the mountains where a hare is dead and a gryphon and wolf are both starting at each other with blackness in their eyes and blood on their skin. And maybe, she might then feel a pull to do something, anything (because surely that hollowness is starting to feel as endless as hunger).

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This quest was written by the lovely @griffin

Enjoy!