Marcello was hungry.
Not the normal "man-I-could-sure-go-for-some-chicken-nuggets" hungry, but the proper gnawing beast that felt like it was about to go Alien™ on his insides. The growling hunger was what led him away from the greater interior of the Teekon Wilds and back west towards the coast. It'd taken him a few days and, in the meantime, he found what little food he could which mostly amounted to the crunchy carcasses of the swarm that had swept over the woodlands and devoured the abundance of spring.
He set his ears back as he passed below the sentinel boughs of the Shadewood and his heart lept. Even here, so far removed from the heart of the Wilds, the forest was only a corpse. Half-eaten leaves littered the ground, curling up at the fringes; withering away. Something snapped within him and he felt a huge crash of emotion barrel into his chest. He'd been hopeful that the event was isolated, but he could find nothing, not even this far out, to discredit his theory.
This was almost enough to make him believe in something greater than himself. As if the Wilds bore a great and terrible secret that they were now atoning for.
Russet-kissed ears spun forward as a twig snapped in the distance, echoing loudly in the quiet hush of the forest.
He’d been fairly sated when he sauntered into the Teekon Wilds. The lands leading up to this place hadn’t been stricken by plague like it had (or, at the very least, not nearly as badly). With spring dawning and the animal kingdom waking up to greet the change in season, it’d been a fairly comfortable state of living. The same wasn’t true here, though. Cash was already beginning to wonder if staying here wasn’t some kind of fool’s errand, but there were two prongs to his thought. One was that it was something of a challenge to live through something like this. Unlike others, he had the freedom to leave whenever he wanted, so it was until he decided to say “uncle.” He’d always loved to prove himself, though he’d never really gambled with something like his own survival in a starvation situation. Might be interesting.
The other reason was he was kind of interested to watch all these packs around here go to hell once the food had them so hungry, they were beginning to see the edges of what they’d be willin’ to do to survive. He knows how it sounds, but, hey, he’s kind of sour on the whole idea of packs in general. Call him “defective,” but that’s how he’d lived for two years and it worked well enough for him.
Scanning the horizon of yet another devastated forest, he’d spotted the other wolf before the fellow had managed to do the same to him. Cash makes sure he’s not particularly stealthy, making enough noise to draw the stranger’s attention without calling out. He tried his best not to spook anyone; people could be unpredictable when surprised.
He approaches to a respectable distance, not too close as to raise concern but not too far that conversation would be strained. “Hey,” it’s less of a greeting and more of a lead-in to his next question, though; he casts his gaze around, as if noticing the destruction for the first time, then turning a lightly inquisitive face back to Marcello before continuing in dry, deep tones, “You wouldn’t happen to know who incurred the wrath of god around here, would you?”