Swiftcurrent Creek there is nothing for me to burn, nothing but myself

maybe @Cupun? but all welcome! :-)

Baal shivers as the chill of the wind tears right through him as if he is little more than tissue paper. He might as well have been; though he has managed to steal from a few frozen corpses and hunt his own prey that is a little bit bigger than the scrappy rabbits and other small woodland creatures he’s been used to he is still rawboned. He is cold. Too cold to be tired but he thinks he is tired; or at the very least that he should be. He is tired of the endless plague of nightmares …of the terror that lives inside him screaming and demanding that he just give in. That it would be easy and wonderful to pursue the pomegranate once more …to sink teeth into the flesh that is expressly forbidden. Each wolf he passes Baal discreetly eyes them up and just for a second goes through the processes of imagining how he would kill them. How he would eat them. Slowly, of course. He would not devour but eat as if they are a masterpiece and he is to honor them.

Baal is startled from that train of thought, jolted back to present as to which he has unintentionally zoned out on as he steps in a small puddle of ice melt. The water is cold, so cold that it is monetarily painful and he withdraws his paw abruptly, giving it a few swipes of his tongue to collect as much of the moisture as he can. It is still wet, the fur now mussed from his rough and haphazard grooming. It has broken the compelling spell that the bêtes noire has begun to weave, exposing that visible fissure within Baal’s will. Baal does his best to patch it up each time but it is swift and sloppy and each time the fissure expands like the weight on thinning ice whose breaking point will eventually be breached and collapse exposing the dangerous and frigid water beneath.

He draws dry salmon tongue against his lips after he takes a few drinks from the very same ice melt puddle he stepped in seconds ago, savoring the frigid chill as it slides down his throat and settles in his belly, clinging to the chill that has begun to seep into his bones, that drives him to search for some sort of shelter to warm up in for a few hours he uses the cold to keep him grounded, to keep his mind occupied and to pin the objective of this venture to the forefront where it belongs. Find shelter. Baal begins to repeat it to himself like a mantra lest he risk losing himself in thoughts that he does not wish to revisit anytime soon.