Verdant Mosses So that others might live...

The journey had not been easy on him. He had wasted little time once he'd left the gathering at the Wildwood, making his way to Bramble Falls, where the large white male had called for everyone to meet. He was not so young anymore to look forward to any fight with excitement, but these strangers, well.... they meant death to those that he loved and that simply wouldn't do. For their sake, he would gather what information he could on these heathens and then he would fight by their sides. To the death if that was what it took. He had loved and he had lived life to it's fullest in his youth. The last two years had brought him little but sadness and he longed to be by his mate's side again in the afterlife. The here and now held little for the tired male.

Once he'd rested from his mountain crossing, the lanky male had criss-crossed the region, looking for evidence of the others. He'd scented five or six wolves, but only two or three of them carried the same scent. He presumed them to be from the pack the Lore mass would be hunting. It did not appear that they were too large in number, but that remained to be seen. It was then that a sickly smell caught his attention. The odor sent shivers down his spine, causing his hackles to raise instinctively. The scent of wrongnesss was nearly overpowering to the seasoned wolf.

The stench of dirt mixed with saliva combined with an underlying, yet overpowering odor seemed thick in these woods. Instinctively, he shied away, knowing deep down that this scent meant certain death. His iron will overrode his instincts however and he pressed onwards, trailing the sick wolf that had left him marker everywhere. Cisco's ears pinned to his head as he drew closer. He couldn't see him yet, but Cisco just knew that the other wolf was just around the next tree or bend, or clump of foliage.

His nose told him what his eyes could not at the moment. This wolf smelled the same as a couple of the others. The sickness in the air and this fact told him what he needed to know. The trails of the other two did not have this taint on them. It would seem that his small bit of exploration told him that the pack the others were up against was small and it appeared that the male he tracked was the only one that smelled of the sickness. Now it was time for him to step up to the plate.

There was nothing left of him.

He was a husk. A vessel of disease tossed about in a sea of foam. His foam. He had left the west a long time ago, sneaking back through their secret pass under the cover of a deep black night. There were no thoughts left to bounce about in his skull. Only sickness, only madness. The last of his efforts had been spent on remembering how to get here, of returning here, to this place. As the fatigue and senselessness closed in around him, his last thought was of moss. He fought to hold on to this tiny scrap of memory, of springy shoots and a soft carpet of jade, of being wrapped in silence.

Moss.

And then he was gone. He was a husk, a husk of mouse brown fur and foam. A wolf in form but not in nature. He moved with none of the familiar lupine movements, and instead of loping he slithered through the moss, rolling his body through it as if he were trying to scratch some sort of itch. Frothy saliva dripped from his mouth and was smeared upon the green felt and then smeared back into his fur with ugly squelching sounds. The beast moaned, as if it felt some sort of pleasure in the rolling in the flora. But there was no pleasure left to feel. Only sickness, only fatigue as his existence dragged on into nothingness, past nothingness, into an empty life.

And there was only a monster and its moss.

The old wolf could smell the beast. The forest here reeked of it as if it had been marking it's territory and perhaps it had. The smell, even the feel of the forest told him to go away, that this was a dangerous and unholy place. But he had made his peace and knew that chances were very high that he would not survive this encounter, but if he could put an end to the danger that his family and all of those to the west faced then his life would have had meaning, even as it came to a close.

Hackles raising instinctively, he moved forward, nose wrinkling against the stench as he came upon broken limbs and leaves covered in a sticky foam. A low eery moan caused him to bare his fangs and change direction slightly, creeping forward with as much stealth as his old bones could muster. After a few moments he came upon a sight that sickened him. Before him was a husk of a wolf, covered in foamy saliva, mud and who knows what else. As the creature writhed before him, he saw the eyes and they were dead eyes. Dead eyes within a moving body. Instinct and common sense told him that the wolf before him would be dead before long, with no help from him, but what if another came upon him unsuspecting and was bitten before that happened? He could not take that chance.

Not really knowing what to expect from the seemingly mindless wolf, the cinnamon male snarled a warning as he lunged forward, fully intending to sever the mans jugular from the get-go. He knew that the killing bite would be his own as well and he was ready and willing to make the sacrifice so that others might live.