It had been the distant baying of once forgotten souls that had caught his attention. Thought he had been through countless forests, across rivers and valleys wide, this time he felt the compelling urge to investigate just this once. Maybe it was just the wind through the boughs of the ghastly hollows, but maybe it was something more. A siren singing from a metaphoric shore he had never been too. It was all but too long before Shrapnel found himself deep in that very stretch of wood, long off the original straight eastward path he had funneled himself through. 


But once inside the dark woods, he no longer heard the once alluring call. Instead it had been replaced by near silence, the wind no longer caught up in the tangled, arm-like boughs. Dusk was beginning to settle, another day bleeding slowly to an end. The sky through the canopy burned fiercely like his eyes, but he no longer felt the warmth that had previously shone upon him. Instead there was just a hint of a damp chill. Shrapnel  weighed the pros and cons of settling in for the night there despite the urge to keep going. A little rest wouldn't have hurt he considered, but his body urged differently for reasons he had yet to decipher.


Nevertheless, he pressed on, deeper and deeper through the woodland.

As the minutes ticked off the remainder of the day, he knew the forest wasn't desolate. Not like the charred husks of his origin. Those woods teemed with subtle life, and though the predatory traffic seemed slow, he knew there were others like him. His steps were not quiet, but they were driven. The way Shrapnel pushed through worn trails and offbeat paths spoke that he wasn't just a casual wanderer. One could have theorized that he had purpose to be there, but that purpose had gone quiet. What wind there was didn't stir the calling souls, though it did draw forth other things. He sussed out that there was some sort of water source nearby and had been steering towards it when something deterred him.


At first he had paid it no mind, taking a few more paces onward. But it was perhaps the wolffish shape that followed that caused him to take pause near the spearhead of pathways. Stark white as snow and decidedly feminine, he had come across a beast like he. His ears pulled forward to cup in any sounds he hadn't heard before, while his eyes locked with hers. They were similar, but unique in themselves; he took stock of her like any other, attempting to determine the likelihood she was a threat. Between the light and shadows he couldn't quite ascertain key things about her — like the fact she had held her own in fights, or that she was a mother — and the distance between them didn't help much either.


A thin smile broke across his face smugly in time however, and his dried lips opened to speak. "Do you like what you see?"