Shadewood smokin' up a faded out 4x4

@Cash!

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.