The Heartwood imperfection's glow

"every time her mind wandered there, she felt a sick and panicked feeling in her stomach" -- I KNOW THIS FEELING ALL TOO WELL UGH. Even worse when you start snowballing the problem and asdfkjsdl kjsfl jsdlf j...

Not more than several minutes into her meal, a sense of being sated rolled over Echelon. At that point, she had been so hungry that any meager scrap of sustenance was enough to bolster her strength. She made easy work of the best morsels she could find and pry from the hare. For the longest time, all Echelon really heard was her own progress with her meal; the crunching and snapping of the bones, the moments where she paused to clean the tarnish from her muzzle. It was in one of these stretches that something overrode those noises. Someone was creeping in close, though to say that they had been creeping was untruthful.

Her blue eyes found the form of the yearling just as quickly as the yearling offered up an apology. Mumbled words, but a distinct sorry, and by then Echelon had brought her head well higher than the hare she had been gnawing on. In spite of being fully grown (or close to it), she could see the traces of youth that lurked on the dark features. The wolf may as well have been a partial mirror of her, save for the personality. Though the darkness didn't offer up much, she was willing to believe that she wasn't lying in wait for a trap. "Are you hungry?" The question left her before she really thought about what she was doing, but Echelon did nothing to retract it.