Blacktail Deer Plateau from the steeples in the church yard

He was awake but didn't feel coherent; numb from the cold, dulled by hunger. The scrape which had been his makeshift shelter lay abandoned behind him—he'd been wandering for a while without any understanding of time, as each day felt like it had gotten shorter than the last. He doubled back when his bladder gut-punched him and as he sat squatting over the gap in the snow, waited for that liminal satisfaction to flood him. Afterwards he withdrew again, scratching the earth by accident as he lunged through the snow, fought against it... As tall and broad as he had become, and as adept as his bloodline made him when it came to winter, this was the first time the boy had ever experienced the white-out conditions. He didn't understand what had happened to the world, or to himself. He knew hunger. He knew lonliness. A part of him was afraid, but he walled that away, having devolved in the weeks since his separation from Diaspora and fashioned in to something feral, solely invested in his own survival.

He still thought of home but not in the same manner as before; whereas once Mesa dreamed of Takiyok and his siblings, or thought he could discern the familiar shapes of their bodies between waves of flurrying snow, now he knew he had gone mad; or rather, he suspected it, and the lethargy caused by his hunger prevented further investment. He trailed after them sometimes—those shapes led him through the greylight and the darkness, vanishing when the stars were exposed, fading in the dawn. He spent many sleepless nights roaming, chasing these ghosts. Sometimes the act of moving one more step was too much for him and so he'd drop in the snow, sleep for many hours, and wake only to feel the same emptiness. He was like a hollowed out vessel.

When the warm scent of wolves hit his nose he almost didn't react; figuring it was another trick of the white, or something concocted by his strugging brain. He bypassed one marker only to find another a few meters away—strong, layered—as if taunting him with the possibility of life. The boy circled between the two of these positions until his legs were too tired to keep him aloft, so he dropped to his haunches, looking down at a frozen line of yellow in the snow while thinking of how strange it looked. Didn't he do this? Didn't he make this mark? No—that was hours ago now, this one was different.

Unsure of what to do now, he merely sat... Pelted with snow.