Verdant Basin you are a child of the cosmos, and ruler of the skies

The rivulet had cut a serpentine course through outstretched trees and washed banks, thirsty for a touch of promised rain. The sharp cut of daylight had been diminished by a swatch of roiling clouds. They had been thick and stout with deep grey that spread to the silver edges in a taut hold against a lashing storm. It was only after the sun had fallen behind a distant mountain that droplets fell. Light tapping against a fresh canopy of springtime foliage played like a natural jazz. Even the fresh flighted sparrows could not help but to flutter down and bathe, sharing in melodious song that echoed against tree bough. As the roughhewn nimbus passed, the sparrows returned to the crown of the tree and watched from the comfortable perch.
 
Cloaked in the shade of a night sky, Orion pressed himself onward through the thick of the wood until he was met with a quick jutting of the waterflow. If he should have followed it further northeast, it would have led him across stretches of open terrain and long sloping hills. To the east, he searched with a glittering, luminous gaze. To the east, the wendigo could see a large watershed, and beyond it was a rough mountain. For only a spell, Orion trailed the jagged cutting of the stone and marveled. He would not attempt the excursion over the top of it, but had sought a path to trek around.
 
A cool lick of the air toyed with the frays in his starlit cloak. The freshness of the draft was so foreign that it found a means to take him aback. The transformation was a slow buildup to the arching of his back and the jutting like rigid quills along his neck and shoulders. Freedom was untrodden, new in a life that had only been accustomed to the shackles of slavery.
 
Having broken through the tree line, the Starchaser instinctively turned himself into an upward stare. Somewhere beyond the clouds, there was the faintest glittering of starlight. The moon glowed like a nightstand lamp from behind the concealment of thick brume. Even against the dismal backdrop and the roll of mile-away thunder, Orion pressed on. After he had ambled his way across the rolling hills before the basin, he crossed his path with the mouth of the watering hole. Enough for today, the winds reminded him, whispering softly with a gentle touch against his flesh. Bending himself to quench the dry itch at the back of his throat, the Starchaser quelled his thirst.

The tiny, seemingly hollow-boned wolf usually avoided stepping outside the protection of the forest for fear that she would not make it back before dawn, but when she arrived at the large lake, she found that it was surrounded by trees and hills. Good. She would most likely find some animal den before morning to dig out and make bigger and hide in until the sun went down again. What she was not expecting was the scent of wolf to fill her nose. She had not come across another wolf almost two months, and the smell of one now frightened her. What would she do? What would she say? Would they be friendly towards her, or treat her as her siblings and father had — as a weakling? Or would they treat her a precious flower to be doted upon, as her mother had? She shook her head. Both outcomes were bad. She simply wanted to be treated as an equal.

Still. She realized that she was being anxious about outcomes that might never happen. She couldn’t even see the wolf yet, due to her nearsightedness. If they wanted company, they would have to come to her. She had come here to hunt rabbits in the fading light and get a drink from the lake. Perhaps instead she could hunt waterfowl? She padded closer to the water and listened to the sounds of dusk — the insects chirping, the wind, the rain. The rain… She would have to act quickly if she wanted to eat tonight, for the rain would drive most prey into their burrows. She scented the area, trying to pick up some animal smell before the rain washed it all away.

She heard a rustle to her right and turned her head without moving her body. There was a rabbit far too close to her, having got caught off guard by her approach. It stared at her in fear, as some deer will do as well. She rose ever so slowly to her paws and then sprang suddenly! Too slow! The rabbit dashed away into the undergrowth, disappearing. Evening cursed in annoyance. Now she had scared all nearby prey away and would have to move left or right around the lake to find unsuspecting creatures to try and hunt.

The hunt was not his.
 
While the waxen stranger sought to overtake the fragile lapin prey, the starchaser did not know that he shared the lagoon with another. Whilst starlight danced along the wisps of his swarthy back and shoulders, the nimbus sauntered along; jagged, prowling. The diminished sunlight in his gaze swept across the water like a fine-tooth comb. There was almost peace to be found. Were it not for the reapers who followed closely at his heel, he would have vanished into the depths and made a home amongst the subaqueous foliage.
 
Freshly satisfied of the aching in his belly, the swarthy starchaser turned to circle the outside of the ewer. Life, as it so often did, had found a way to steal into the washbowl. There was a fresh scoring of fowl – the slight indentation as their clawed feet scrabbled against the grainy sands – and a more recent spread of predatory pawprints. It had been several hours prior to his passing, but their mark on the shore was evidence of life and all things distinctly savage. Even as the dark nimbus passed, he saw the trail of his own kin. The wolves had been there too.
 
Notched, and damaged as he was, Orion roamed with the confidence of a galactic huntsman. Each stride that pulled him further from the clutch of the Mal’um was a stride that bolstered the credence of his spirit. It was in this state of heightened tenacity that he saw the phantasm being.
 
It took the shape of a huntress – a wolf – seeking to find that which she had lost. The looming wraith was hobbled at the sight of her. He hunkered himself toward the cool possession of the earthen floor, instinct reminding him to protect himself before all else. The nimbus was unnerved by the sight of her lurid chassis; even the salient gleam of her roseate stare did little to pacify the wendigo. Perchance, it was that she resembled his twin sisters. The eerie parallel had taken him aback.
 
The hunt was not his, but he shared a correlation in harmony with the prey of the watershed; a prudence, a trepidation in the way his aphotic figure lingered for much too long and watched with a luminous, clinquant glower.

The wolf she had seen in the distance had disappeared, hidden in the grass, but Evening had forgotten about him altogether. Now she was hyper-focused on food. The animals that came out at dusk with her were rapidly returning to their holes and dens and she would go without food for another day if she did not quickly find more prey. Without knowing it, she was approaching the hiding place of the male, her head down, sniffing the ground for trails of animals, but she lifted her head suddenly at the wolf’s scent, which was now much stronger due to her proximity to him. 

“Where are you hiding?” she demanded, feeling suddenly on edge. “I saw you before and I can smell you. I’m not stupid. I know you’re here. So…” She hesitated, terribly frightened, but went on, attempting to put up a brave front. “So if you were planning on ambushing me then you’d better think again!” She managed to raise her voice at the last moment, trying to sound threatening. She was being ridiculous, she knew, but her father had always stressed to her that because she was so small and relatively weak from living off of mostly rabbits and things, and because of her strange coloration, others might try to take advantage of her. She hadn’t wanted to believe him, but now, out here by herself, she found his words coming back to her. She stood her ground and bared her teeth at the air, not knowing exactly where her opponent was.

The celestial hunter had faced brutal creatures far fiercer than the roseate-touched prowler. The stygian nimbus narrowly disguised himself behind the boughs of the thick boscage that lined the outside of the concavity. In his prowl, the wendigo did not pull his lambent sights from the shape of the moon washed she-wolf. Each step was reckoned, landing only on the soft sands so that he might avoid detection by sound. The starchaser was not keen on capture when he had maundered that far from the clutches of the Mal’um.
 
The voice that snapped was unheralded. Something had shifted in the gales and his rich scent had been drawn to her. He had been faced with far worse a challenge before then.
 
All movement ceased; the swarthy nimbus remained rigidly in his place among the umbrage. His aphotic cloak mingled with the veil of the dark undergrowth. Orion had been born to the nightfall; tenebrosity was so much a part of his ardor that they had adopted the very term as their moniker. The wolves of the night; those who had fallen from the sky. The celestial hunter only longed to return to his perch within the heavens. His heart thrummed with eventide, and though he had been banished to the earth, he still felt the affinity with the void. It was as though the harshness of the sublunary world did not suit his haggard, war torn truss.
 
… if you were planning on ambushing me then you’d better think again!
 
The leer that played at the edges of his sombre expression was life – at least – that had not been there before. The star children did not ambush the Mal’um; their fidelity to the terrene was incomparable. It was almost akin to plucking a shark from the seas and prompting it to contend with the catamount. Both were bestial warriors, but it was foolish to believe an alien to the world would find a modicum of success without having first traveled it.
 
It was then that the phantasm bared her fangs and issued the quiet guttural sound that only predators were capable of conjuring. The wendigo thought to stir and sound his presence, but he was fastened by the claws of dread. If the Mal’um were to bait him and succeed, his trials would have been for not.
 
The nimbus held fast to his fortitude and lingered in his stiff-limbed hunker, waiting for a chance to leap for her back.

Editing in an ending since Orion went inactive!

Evening was not sure what to do now. Her threat had not drawn her opponent out of his hiding place nor, indeed, given her any indication of where he was. She felt as if she were protecting herself from a snake in the grass — a snake with no rattler. No warning. Some voice in the back of her mind tried to tell her that maybe she was just being incredibly paranoid. Maybe whoever was there was just as afraid of her as she was of him. But fear coursed adrenaline through her body, which forced the voice back to recesses of her mind, drowned out. What would her father tell her to do in this situation?

Don’t turn your back on the enemy, he might say. But how could you keep face-to-face with an enemy you couldn’t see or hear? Evening swallowed, breathing hard. She resolved to back up away from the scent of the wolf. Keeping her eyes trained in the general direction of where she thought he might be, she began taking steps backwards. “Look, I don’t want trouble. How about you stay over here, and I’ll go around the other side of the lake? Okay?” 

Well, whoever was there seemed just fine with that and didn't attack her or anything as she slowly backed away. Eventually, she was far enough away to feel safe and turned and fled the scene.

Exit!