(Seeker goes back in time ten hours.)(RIVER)
Tyler shivered violently, his fur in worse shape than the battered terrain around him. Anguish ran rampant through his pelt, yet he couldn't place exactly why he was experiencing the sudden onslaught of furious convictions. He pulled himself forward and continued his lopsided struggle along the shoreline, receiving repetitive watery slaps in the face for his efforts. Why he was suffering in this harebrained jaunt beside a raging river instead of curling up in a den was beyond him, and yet he had no desire to turn around now.
Where was he going?
Tyler himself couldn't answer the shallow question and it was unnerving him.
On one paw, he was seriously debating finding some sort of dugout and holing up for the duration of this freak storm's unbearable wrath. But then there was that nagging conscience biting at him, the kind of feeling that only surfaced when he'd forgotten something vital and everything was about to go wrong if he didn't do something about it... It was as though he'd gone hunting, felled a creature, then left without his quarry- the only meal he'd have a chance at for days.
Hmm. What was that, ahead, pressed flat to the shore by the angry tide?
Brow furrowed in concern for any creature stupid enough to be out in a storm such as this besides he, Tyler quickened his pace and soon found himself sidling up alongside of none other than another dog forced completely prostrate to the sand.
He glanced down at the smaller dog, a female, wondering why her struggle to rise from the current's pull weren't noticeable.
As his keen eyes surveyed her body, almost instantly, his heart sank.
She was most certainly dead. Her eyes were rolled back unnaturally in her skull, and her flanks were bloated with the water she'd inhaled in her attempts to flee a watery grave.
With a forlorn huff, he bent down and latched his jaws around her neck. He tugged hard, and found that the water's determination to immortalize her in its depths was unrelenting.
With a guttural growl seeming to emit from both his gut and the river's, Tyler was flung backward and landed on his back with the dead race-dog atop of him.
His fur twitching, Tyler squirmed out from beneath the shriveled corpse. He eyed it with disgust and began to back away.
But there was something....and in a heartbeat, Tyler found himself lost in her eyes. His paws, so ready to flee this freak show a moment before, rooted themselves into the mud. Then he was staring at this complete stranger, and, somehow, she didn't seem so foreign at all. He bent forward, his jaw slowly opening involuntarily in the stupor left as a byproduct by consternation. The chaotic storm no longer reigned- irrational desperation to recognize this rekindled sense of familiarity had overruled Tyler's instinctual urge to flee this torrent.
"Windsong! Wiiiiiiiiiiiiindsoooong!"
Tyler scrambled backward, and immediately fell back beside the drowned she-dog. Windsong.
The name matched the smoldering recollection Tyler's brain had been pressured by the ages to discard.
The she-dog beside him was Windsong.
"Windsong!"
And she was dead.
Tyler pulled himself to his feet and ran into the face of the roaring wind. The voices beyond seemed to be coming from the heart of the wind, spectral melodies embodied into flesh by the growing shadows that conceived them.
And then there was a dog before him. A tall race-dog, but her neck was curved with the musculature that came with genetics beyond her breed. Her eyes, desperate for some good amidst this darkness, caught his and it was as if she immediately knew. Tail dropping like a stone, she approached him, her head held level, but obviously pardoning him from the scene.
Sure, sure, she wants me gone- I'm a complete stranger standing over her packmate.
Tyler began slowly backing away into the ferocious mists, his tail whipping up around his flank like a dark veil working to conceal him from reality. More dogs began massing into view and clustering around the dead female, their soaked heads pressing tightly into shared grief.
Something bittersweet began stroking Tyler's heart, as if a cat's barbed tongue had made its way within him. The emotional arousal was comforting, painful, and collectively disturbing, so he found himself quickening his exit.
As he pulled his paws- bloodstained from the absence of claws that the mud had ripped- over the beach's rise into the woods, he was tempted back by an unseen force. His eyes were pulled back to the scene of broken unity, heeding to a memory he wasn't sure how had burned itself into his mind so instantly.
And, once again, some physically inaudible whisper reminded him he hadn't always beem a stranger here.
Her brown fur had been matted down against her from the rain, but Seeker didn't care. Before her, was the lifeless, unseeing, Windsong. Her body was coated in mud, her sides bloated with water she had inhaled.
A claw of grief ripped into her chest, taring into her heart and dragging it's-self down into her stomach. How odd, she had not felt this feeling for the dogs, wolves, and coyotes at the battle. Perhaps it was because she hadn't seen their families circled around them, mourning? Seeker was different from most other canines, they mourned for the lost canine, Seeker did not. If Windsong was truly going to be with Siris and Prycon, and with her dead, good family members, a better place, then why mourn? No, Seeker mourned for the families, who lost a loved one, for the friends. They had lost someone dear, and wouldn't see them again, not in this life, at least.
It was now, that for the first time, she noticed a he-wolf she didn't know. Had he drowned Windsong? Most likely not, since she had heard "Windsong!" Yelled earlier, and had thought it was a searching pack-mate. Perhaps she had been wrong, and it had been this wolf? But then that meant... He had known Windsong.
As he threw a glance over his shoulder, Seeker locked eyes with him. She searched through her memory, looking for that wolf's face, and she came up empty-pawed. Who are you?
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