Bearclaw Valley and the space has been broken

The sweep of her tongue left a bit of fur sticking up, which cooled in the breeze and prompted him to give his head a rough shake as she left. He made to follow, beginning to pick his way down the mossy slope, but there was a firmness in her gaze when she looked back that rooted him to the spot. He wasn’t the most obedient of cubs, but there was enough sense in him to know he might be in trouble for his behaviour still, and so he didn’t move.

But she was gone a while. At least, it felt like a while to him. He kicked a pebble around for a few minutes until it became lodged in the stones, then he tried to bend painfully to drink the water trickling out of the medicine den. It tasted earthy and gross, like the moss. Flicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth, he wandered further down the hill, nearly loosing his footing on a particularly slick rock, and by then Astara was returning with something grotesque in her mouth.

It slapped the ground with a distinctly squashy sound that made him prick his ears up and stifle a giggle. What a delightfully disgusting creature! With a slow wag of his tail, he approached it with ginger steps that were still a little too fast, based on the dull pain spreading along his flanks, but he ignored that. He caught up to the slow toad and bent to sniff it, then wrapped his smaller jaws around its fat figure and hoisted it into the air.

While his bones screamed in protest, he drew back his head and tried to toss it back to Astara, as casually as if it were a baseball. It fell woefully short (he was a little too weak to throw it properly), but the result was even better. It bounced comically off a skewed rock and tumbled a few feet to the tune of Aventus cackling with glee, helped none by the weird tingling of his tongue where it had touched the thing.