he rose from a migraine that felt like a whale.

heat lightning energized his steps for a few days, on the run from the iris of the bypass. the lintel of the door was high enough to pass but low enough to illicit a feeling of foreboding in his gut, though that could be due to his erratic diet as einzelgänger.

he finds himself in the heart of the fire-pit weald, licking his chops as he scents the air for a much needed meal.

it’s his likeness to the broadsword himself that set him off when he acted from the telltale sensations reverberating up his spine, following a dark murder of crows, but with the confidence of a man with abandon he was foreign to—and from the look of it, to think they were matched in age!

he gives a click like a piezo popping back into place with his teeth in warning, bristling. he did not like being hunted, thought the right display of submissiveness would position him in a chessboard space, not exactly opposed to a two-bodied hunt.

relaxing his hackles and his white-knuckled fists, not so much the pelage along his nape, he shook his head with a bluster of indignation from his nose.

then what? why stalk?

he'd seen too many a vulture in wolf's clothing to not be wary, to many a young absalom who let their rot coalesce, not in a vacuum, but in a calculated way to strike his betrayee in the back, just for a selfsame reason—food.