Blackfoot Forest BWP3: Let me go out with a bang!

In an instant there was a creature rising over him, flanked by others. They merged as he saw them, becoming a many-legged monstrosity as panic flared; wedge-shaped heads equipped with black eyes, blacker than anything, with peals of smoke huffing from flared nostrils, the clatter of cloven hooves against an uncertain earth—Mesa knew he needed to stand and to run and to do something or he was going to be crushed, but he saw all of this in a blink of the eye, and was frozen in terror, ill-equipped in that one terrible moment.

As those hooves came down upon him like many scythes to cut him down, he wedged against the dirt as tightly as he could. He took a breath, saw the entirety of his short life spread out in a panic-fuelled vision, just as something came to shield him. Mesa's eyes were shut as the shadow crossed over him and he thought, in that frantic and mindless manner of any animal faced with certain demise, that this was it. He was done. He would feel the biting pain and he would be with Stigmata again—

The scent of blood flooded through the air and he heard the violent crack and clattering of those hooves stabbing in to flesh, crushing, pulverizing. He felt something pinch the end of his tail and with a yelp Mesa's eyes flew open wide—and there he saw the bloodied silhouette of something canid, glinting like an iron barricade around him, rusted with blood and painfully familiar. Nothing prepared Mesa for the image that would be forever burned in to his psyche: the three-legged wolf, Kazimir, crushed beneath a stampede of spidering limbs. The warmth of blood as it flowed across his body—not his blood, not his pain, not his death.

He needed to move! Kazimir was shouting through shattered teeth, kicking at him, thrusting him away from beneath her protective carapace of a body; and he did, he moved as fast as he could, barely feeling the ground beneath his paws—Get out of their path! She was staggering behind him and he paused, just a fleeting moment of doubt, of wanting, as the panic mixed with his adrenaline. She was pushing him roughly along, scoring at his flank with her bloodied teeth as further limbs came smashing down around them both; Mesa dove around a hind, stopped short just as a pair of stags came veering in to his path, and ran, ran, ran, along with the herd, gasping and desperate, while Kazimir's protective silhouette faded to a shadow in his periphery.