Horizon Ridge You need it so believe it

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The huge dappled shadow roamed over the mountains that day, tracking what he thought might be a wild moose. Long ago he'd tasted one further East, and some lingering nostalgia compelled him to think this prey the same — though it was from another life he'd best forget. Back then he would have killed other wolves for that moose, driven by a vicious instinct that had caused him to hate his own existence. But now he was a peaceful soul.

So the pacifist knew he would not fight for the moose if it came to it, but he would track it nonetheless. Ryūjin was no longer starving, yet it would gladden the dark Kanpō to bring such meat to the tongues of his packmates — and especially to Asterr, the one he loved. The commanding beauty had missed the latest of their nightly meetings beneath the stars, and for this reason she was on his mind.

Perhaps it was for that precise reason that he suddenly picked up her scent. Faintly confused by the complexity of the otherwise familiar scent, Noctura stood up tall and alert until he lost the moose's trail and decided to follow Asterr's instead. It was rare in his experience that she venture so far in her scouting, and he was curious. She was also near, and he was able to sense her as he moved his large form smoothly but slowly over fallen boulders.

Soon he came to a standstill atop one of them. From this boulder, one that had seemingly come to rest here after a rockslide, he could see over the sapling trees in front of him. Beyond those trees, there blanketed young grass. And upon that grass, a strange male had sex with the girl to whom Noctura was devoted.

He felt his heart vanish entirely. It didn't break, because in that moment it simply went away. He did feel things though. He felt bile sting his throat at the sight of the skinny, dirty stranger claiming the girl's dignity with his wretched thrusts. He felt a growl in his chest so deep that it could not be heard — though perhaps the boulder beneath him felt it. Noctura remembered how he had once been, the type to savagely kill for a scrap of moose. He realised now his foolishness in not succumbing to the instinct to take take take.

In that moment, he would have leapt spectacularly from the boulder and crashed into the entwined pair, immediately digging his wide jaws into the male's face until it bled and shattered. He would have ripped him until his victim's solids were liquids. And he would have killed others, too, whoever crunched beneath his paw. But a semblance of the scholarly stargazer clung desperately to the emptiness where once his heart had beat, and that was enough for him to turn and run.

Noctura did not run to Ryūjin. Instinct drove him in the opposite direction, and the pace of his great bulk did not cease. He ran until his paws bled, he ran until he was lost, he ran until the sky changed colour, and perhaps he's still running.

Elsewhere, another moose roamed free.