The nerves had been dulled when he’d done it, but it had hurt anyway. He still remembered how the ruby red had stained the snow, how the owl had twisted those eyes to look at him. Kassuq had just watched it back, weeping scarlet down into his ruff.

He had been far away since. Like his body was just a shambling homunculus, and he its unwilling spirit. He ate robotically, he did not speak, he just walked. He slept where he collapsed. His nose told him he was going the right way, at the very least.

He entered the wilds through a wide forest, though he did not know this, and continued going until he was in the shelter of a bracken thicket. Cold curled from his nose, lived in his chest. 

He couldn’t feel it. Numb to everything, to the pain of his healing stub of a tail, to the cracked, sore scabs on the side of his face. Nothing seemed to hurt anymore here, in this far away state where he observed himself as though he was a stranger. Nothing seemed to matter.

Kassuq sat in the shelter of the thicket, and stared blankly out into the trees.

The older man had ranged to hunt. He checked the cold places for signs of caribou so that he could report back to the Rise, and otherwise kept busy. There was a singular joy held by the feral man when winter was present in these Wilds, as the weather turned and became difficult. To test himself against the bite of winter was something he enjoyed.

There was a dulled bloodscent on the wind now. It pulled him in to a more confident stride; it wasn't until some time later that the scent was washed away by snow. Tulimaq had entered a thicket, and found there he wasn't alone.

He called to the pale figure, Are you hunting?

A voice.

It snapped him into some sort of awareness, where he was distantly sure he was cold, and sore. Kassuq turned his eyes from the trees, and the luminous eyes watching him, to the older man watching him.

He slowly shook his head. He made a gesture with his nose to the owl in the tree.

Watching, he tried to say without speaking.

There was bloodscent.

The stranger did not answer except to shake his head.

Tulimaq was unafraid. This was only a boy, and he was a creature of these wilds, not the north. There was nothing to fear of these people because they were not true warriors. Either he had hunted for himself or he had been injured.

The man saw nothing to indicate a meal. He drew closer and inspected the scents of the boy, finding little that would suggest illness but plenty to suggest injury.

Get up. He demanded of the stranger, wanting answers.