Haunted Wood winter is coming

Referencing the storm warning on the weather bar, supposedly to hit at 3am Tuesday 10/1/18

The caldera might not have been too far from home but Mou was still weak, and likely would not be able to handle great distances even if he was in peak condition; so when he descended from the rolling cliffside and found himself back in the meadow, he was exhausted. His haunches had begun to tremble again — more out of this same tiredness and less because of his back injury — and overall, the boy began to worry. If he was gone for much longer then Maegi might start to wonder what was going on.

To top it all off, that incliment weather he had predicted wasn't rain, exactly. It had transitioned during his descent in to a freezing mix of water and ice, slicing through the air and eventually soaking him through by the time he was in the meadow. Without cover, Mou was at risk for all manner of ailments. He was very tired, but at the same time knew he needed to get back to the woods. The sky wasn't just overcast now — it was like a dense fog was rolling across the area and the rain continued tio slice in sheets.

Mou tried his best to find his way through the meadow, but by the time he saw the dark shape of a forest it was snowing. The sudden storm made it difficult to see, and all he could smell was the aroma of cold; his entire body was quaking by the time he passed through the fringe of the forest, and it was here that he collapsed against the unfurling roots of some distinguished trees, fighting the urge that had set in demanding that he curl up for the night. 

Hunkered down for the flash-storm, and looking almost maliciously on as her fellow wolf struggled, was a very damp and irritated Spider.

She rested beneath a carefully chosen tree, for both its thick canopy and full-bodied trunk, and yet stirred now as she felt compelled enough by the sight to venture out once more into the blooming snowflakes. Her investigation  was a slow process, and by the conclusion of it she came to stand  no closer than three wolf-lengths of him. Lest this weak-show prove to be a farce.

He was a rather poor-looking thing— nothing the small scourge would have liked to call a packmate; with all his terrible scars and apparent disabilities— but with the weather so blatantly turning, Spider felt the option of "choosy" being incontestably torn from her grasp.

Ears folded back and muzzle set grimly, the doomshadow started off waiting for him to notice her.

Although he had not heavily dosed himself with medicine prior to his adventure, when Mou came in to the darkness of the wood he, for a hestating moment, thought the yawning darkness that swarmed around him was not a forest but a cave. A flashback to the winding tunnels did not come — rather, the white of the snowstorm summoned the image of something similar. A cave slick with ice and layered with caps of snow; he thought he heard a voice crying in the night, screeching, and snapped his attention all around in search of the source.

The sound was gone. As if noticing it at all caused the vision to dissolve.

He saw a pair of sharp, hawkish eyes and then nothing but the falling snow. Mou huffed and shook his head, and the tremble carried down his back and through every part of him, shifting collected snow off of his faded pelt. The boy didn't know why he was seeing things; he couldn't tell if the eyes were any more or less real than the crying voices that had briefly found homes in his ears. He was unsettled, and crawled after the shelter of some tightly growing trees.

As the cyclops' eye pointed to her and then rolled away without recourse, Spider knew that this wolf was not only injured in some way, but delirious as well. She wasn't sure at first what to do with this information. Was there some angle she could play, or would it just be a kinder service to put him out of his misery?

The amoeba spilled forward like oil, and came to a rest at his dragging shoulder.

"Let me help you," she hummed from behind the bedraggled male's sooty ear; her warm breath swirling over his hanging crown in a brief halo. And though dulcet in pitch, her eyes— behind his back— were shrieking daggers.

The images became clear for a split second. He saw a series of black blobs that sharpened to points where ears grew, blunted snouts, small paws. The snow eddied and shaped a gray shape and he thought he spied familiar orange streaks, and trained his eye upon the image; but it wasn't something he recognized, and as the wind shot through the grove the spectral image dissolved, the orange streaks replaced with sharp golden eyes. He hadn't heard the stranger speak but the air grew stale as if they had said something, and he made a small sound - or tried to, a little whine that caught in his dead throat.

The snow didn't collect as heavily underneath the trees, so he squished himself against the trunks and tried to warm himself up. The stranger didn't leave him. Gradually Mou came back to himself and realized they were real. Whatever he had been seeing — the icy grotto and the shapes of children he couldn't recognize — were forgotten for now. He beckoned the stranger closer with a motion of a paw, the ducking of his head and chin, as if to say, come here, get warm, its safe, as if they were old travelling companions.

Where had all this snow come from? Would it ever end?

For all her impulsiveness and concealed wickedness, the thing Spider craved most in the world was affection— adoration. Servitude.

She would do anything to achieve these things, even care for the hapless and put herself in harm's way; if only for a brief reprieve from the cold, cold void she presently felt like a cocoon in her breast. A blackness, deeper still than her fathomless coat, stretched and yawned inside of her. It threatened to consume her— or maybe it already had— and this was why she chased, and clung, and obsessed and felt utterly dissatisfied unless she had survived something risky.

Spider crawled into him willingly, feeling the iced fringes of her pelt succumb immediately to snowmelt as she tried to bury herself in the thick of his chest. 

Before he knows it the shadows have condensed in to a facsimile of a wolf; he thinks for a second that it is a coyote, but what's a coyote doing here in the snow — aside from cutting a ragged figure against the waves of flakes — but they're warm and that makes things a little better. Whatever reason this creature has for being here, Mou is suddenly grateful. They burrow against his chest and Mou's mind makes leaps. He can barely feel them at first because its gotten so cold and he's confused. A darkness trying to - to - to get inside of him, no, but maybe.

He opens his eyes, having forgotten they had been squeezed shut against the sheeting ice, but sees the wolf-shape so cleanly against the white of the storm. His mind fills in the rest. The wolf is transformed in to something small and soft and he is too, returning Mou to a place he doesn't remember. The trees form the roof of a cavern and protects them both from the snow. Her pelt blooms with bits of white where the wind has rallied against the protection and for a split second Mou thinks, whoever you are, you look like a towhee.

His body is quaking with shivers but he reaches for the dark lump and holds them close, whoever they are, basking in their shared warmth, shutting his eyes against the strange vision-memory.

As she settled with ebbing quivers and softening breaths, she felt the potential threat of her companion fall away with the tenseness of her skin, and she became malleable to his shape; molding into one beast: two hearts, four eyes, embraced almost lovingly in the cold squall.

Spider remembered trying very hard to stay awake, but she could not remember the moment she fell asleep...

As she woke, she didn't know how long it had been— whether it had been minutes, hours, or days— but she had already forgotten her company, and realizing his weight around her startled the inkcage into a brief struggle to free herself.

However long it had been, the two wolves had fallen asleep and when they woke there was a heavy dusting of surprise snow around them, the wind having gusted much of it across the sleeping wolves despite the tree cover. The chill has almost entirely left the air when Mou startles awake, and it is the inky she-wolf that he spies trying to shuffle away from him, kicking at him and struggling.

Whatever memory had filled his mind in the brief storm has faded, turned in to dream and then evaporated from his mind; but he remembers finding the stranger, and feeling the warmth between them. Her struggling makes him recoil — happy to give her the space she wants — but he's half-asleep still and as he sits up, he conks the back of his head against a low-hanging pine bough that is covered in ice.

This, of course, causes a fresh layer of glittering white to cascade across him. The black of his snout is briefly highlighted by white specks.