The Floodlands feel like i don't even know me

successful hunt role — open for anyone! 'turo is just 'splorin the hinterlands. ;p

 

A steady rain had begun to fall, the clouds over head thick as the bithiúnach made his way through the Floodlands, drawn to the water source, even as he sloshed — albeit a tad unhappily — through the muck of the river's banks that had spilled into the marshland, little more than mud and locust carcasses. The tall grasses that Arturo imagined had once dominated the Valley had long since been consumed in the wake of the swarm. Like every other place in the Hinterlands — and likely the entire Wilds — the Floodlands were barren and skeletal echoes of what they'd once been. Arturo paused in his wading, a loud sucking noise echoing through the muddy landscape as he freed his paw from the muck and shook it off with a simmer of disdain tugging at the corners of his lips. He understood the action was very much in vain, for the moment he lowered his mud soaked paw back to the ground it would be covered once more. The rain, he thought, as it lightly pelted his muzzle, his ears slicking back to rest at half mast atop his skull, was something of an irony. The world needed water so sustain itself and all that lived upon it, but it seemed futile in the Wild's current state, Arturo couldn't help but think.

What good was rain when it had nothing to nourish? Perhaps it aided the wolves — like him — but it did not draw the herds that had long since abandoned them. Starvation was a very real threat, and the morbid and stark realization caused an uncomfortable rumble in his stomach. Hunger was not something the Fearghal monarch was inherently used to feeling. At least, not with any sort of consistency. He'd always had food, and when their caches were low he would lead his wolves on a hunt to fill them. Arturo Fearghal was not accustomed to scrounging for mere scraps and meager pickings of food and he wasn't sure how to deal with it aside from a shift in his temperance. As much as he missed his children and his Family, he was decidedly very thankful that they were not enduring this as well, wrongly assuming that he alone came to these Wilds.

Arturo tolerated it simply because there was no other alternative, and hunted whatever hot blooded — and occasionally cold-blooded, in the case of fish — creature that he came across. He was not always successful and some days he went without eating anything at all. It was ...humbling, to say the least. A reminder of where he'd came from, where he'd started from long since forgotten in the corollary of his successes. A noise caught his attention, his ears perking, alert, atop his skull. The small pitter-patter of tiny paws against the hardened earth — where the flooded waters had yet to reach — drew him in and Arturo's fiery red-orange gaze picked the small sand colored rodent from the darkened mud around him where he dug, presumably looking for food. The vole paused, bringing it's tiny front paws up over his ears to clean them before it gave it's coat a shake and resumed it's vigorous digging.

Arturo lurched forward and trapped the rodent, frightened by the sudden appearance of the large coywolf. The Fearghal made quick work of ending the small, fragile woodland creature's life before he studied it, wishing vainly that it was something much larger and substantial.