Overture Downs New Seasons

She’s hunting flood rats when a skinny solo soul scampers near. Falling onto her belly, she marshals forward to spy at them from between the twisting branches of a fledgling western yew. The little thing is fretful; dejected, hollowed out by hunger. All the symptoms that plague the lonesome kind.

Tauris chews the tail of the rodent that hangs from her lips in contemplation. Lone wolves here are in direct competition with one another over the valley’s finite resources. It would be so easy to turn and be on her way, and none could blame her, truly.

But she felt, well… bad, for the girl who was not so different from herself in many ways. So she tempers the idea to flee and instead crawls through the brush to manifest like a scrubby marsh creature before her fellow wolf.

Then drops her mangled rat corpse. It lands in the dirt beside the stranger girl.

Her lips twist, “Keep it.”

God, she’s charitable.