Starve a Curse, Feed the Soul

Epilogue: Closing

The bright circle above had not yet finished its decent behind the trees, but the silent, lurking wulf could not wait to scour the darkness for a meal. The ravaging barrenness within it was becoming more and more unbearable with each and every awakening. For despite its best attempts without the soft-frosted imprints to track in its present terrain, the wulf could not locate its primary prey. It had never caught the correct catch, yet, its visceral drive was aware of what was required to fill the painful void in its thinning corpus.

A cadaverous grumble percolated inside the cavity of the famished creature as it traveled. The last hunt of the winged beasts did nothing but make it retch and prolong its perpetual hunger further. The primary prey must not have been an inhabitant of the frozen world of the thing, but it would find it.

The emptiness rose to the head of the hunched wulf, making it clutch its bony crown. With its other talons, the thing sagged upright, clinging to a tree to still the churning, rubicund vision.

It had to find it... It needed to find it!

Unexpectedly, a north wind carried something so greatly interesting to the wulf, that it had cleared its haziness. Its large, round ears gyrated with excited nostrils...

Finally, after all the failed hunts, it had found the scent of the primary prey!

The talons of the thing met the icy ground once more and it bounded forward as its snuffling nose franticly searched. Suddenly, it stopped to stare down at a strangely skinned scalp. The wulf did not know how the scalp had come off, but that did not matter to it nor did it care. Because the loose part of inedible hide was inundated with the trail of the primary-!

The drooling thing shook its head and bared its twitching muzzle as it growled gutturally. There was another scent that had finally reached its strong olfactory. The thing had been in such anticipation to sate itself, that it had ignored a very important signature, as well...

Another of its own kind. And this signature was... recognizable.

With flattened ears and hackled neck-fur, the muzzle flaps of the wulf flared widely as the old rival stalked into view. The rival then, stopped out of reach of contracting talons. The wulf was infuriated! This adversary had almost claimed its life and was the cause of its desolation! The rival had forced it to leave where the primary prey was detected. Now, the wulf was starving! Suffering!

The rival was still much larger than itself. But this did not hamper the drive of the thing to overcome it.

This time, the wulf would not back down.

Its hindsight retold it that the rival was impervious to ploys of the mind as it was. Thus, the snarling wulf began to close in while pacing to and fro for a vulnerable area. However, the adversary was also encircling. Though, not once, did its relaxed maw release a single sound. With confident, huge, oval ears loosely behind its great head, keen eyes kept on the entire movements of the much smaller opponent.

When it drew near enough for the wulf to detect its breath, the rival became stationary again. Instantly, the wulf came to a halt; its unblinking sights remaining dead-on the inert rival. Then, the rival slowly lifted its talons, and this triggered the creature to crouch, ready to strike. However, its attention dashed to the square flake that the adversary had drawn from the front of its neck-fur.

The rival slanted its large head to the left when the pink scleras of the transfixed opponent enlarged. As it stared at the image on the square flake, an unknown yearning pulled at its chest, causing the bemused thing to hack up murky, heated respires that dissipated in the frigid atmosphere. But the strange, new void within it was also evanescent. For the reviled, acquainted pang of hunger gnawed at the inner walls of both its body and head with such voracity, that the wulf shrieked its frustrations and lurched at the adversary with raw, feral malice.