Wapun Meadow How else would we find satisfactory meats to feed those sad, scrawny animals?

Aventus snaked through the grass and wildflowers, the picture of a low-bellied reptile slithering unseen along the ground. Only he wasn't nearly as unseen as he thought he was. The sound of nearby voices was muffled at first and failed to draw his attention, but a chittering little voice rising in alarm made him crouch and go completely still.

There seemed to be a conversation happening nearby. One voice, the clear one, had a bit of a petulant note to it. The other was so garbled by squeaks and grunts that Aventus couldn't hope to make heads or tails of it. Granted, he couldn't make heads or tails of most wolves' speech, let alone a marten's. Let's just say having a mute mother doesn't do wonders for a kid's language acquisition timeline. Oh, he could speak a few words here and there, but he was rather behind other cubs his age in terms of vocabulary, which was only excused by his flawless pronunciation of the few words he did know.

Oh, right, back to the pair. The clear, ringing voice sounded excited and triumphant now. Aventus strained his ears to listen, picking out a few common words and guessing at the meanings of others. Mama sounded a bit like someone's name, so he concluded that the girl must be looking for someone. Not his business, truly... but he couldn't help leaning forward just a little, hoping to glean something interesting from their exchange. It wasn't like they knew he was th—

Aventus started violently when Phaedra abruptly appeared in front of him, crying and calling him Thadey. The hair on his scrawny back stood up like so many blades and he arched, stumbling a few steps away from her. Luckily, she didn't try to close the distance between them, but came to an equally abrupt stop and reconsidered. She sucked the snot back into her nostrils (disgusting creature) and arranged herself into what she surely thought was a dignified stance. She spoke, and Aventus did not respond.

Not verbally, anyway. His silvering eyes were fixated on Phaedra as she slumped to the ground. They traced the motes of gold woven into the longer hair that framed her face and draped down the sides of her shapely young neck. They rested on her pink-ass nose for a beat while he tried to remember if anyone else he knew had a nose like that, only to flicker up to her eyes, two soft sunrises set in a pale face. There his gaze remained, piercing and unwavering, the unnerving aspect of an intelligently watchful feline, while his tongue snaked eerily across his lips in some kind of bizarre, wordless greeting.

Or maybe it was just to acknowledge that there was a little bit of snot still clinging to hers. Who could tell?