Rowling hunger gnawed at the beast's stomach, pawing at him like a child that demanded to be fed. Where his stomach arched up in his large frame was a slightly thinner waistline than what had been formerly seen on other wolves, and his ribs poked out angrily beneath his front torso. It had been some time since he had eaten in his journey to this land, and his strength, though he didn't want to admit to himself, was beginning to drain from his body with the lack of nutrition. Small squirrels and rabbits scampered about him and taunted his sea green eyes, their pupils latching onto the vision of his next meal with fervor and lust. But alas, it seemed that all these little rodents were just out of his reach.



Much everything seemed out of reach lately. His paws began to pick up speed and chase after one squirrel or the other, but each one ran straight up the trees or back into a knot in the side of a trunk. His food was escaping him, his targets were beginning to escape him, and sooner or later his thoughts would begin escaping him. While he was thinking of this, however, he chased and ran about in almost a silly fashion, trying to snag something of at least small substance. Before he knew it, there was a small brown squirrel wriggling for the last remains of its life between his paw nails, their sharp points skewering it and draining it of those last few moments before too long. Something to eat, finally.



His teeth had just begun to sink into its little body before he realized it was all gone. His stomach rumbled at him as if annoyed that he had begun to tease it with the taste of meat and blood, only to discard an empty carcass moments later. Tempest snarled angrily, tossing the bones to the side and continuing on down the road towards wherever he was headed, taking chunks out of trees as he strode on with his teeth or claws, whichever felt the need to take his anger out on the world around him at whichever given time.

Katja loped across the land, her stride loose and relaxed in the way of a wolf traveling a good distance. Her restlessness was eased by Raisa's return, but her failure to fulfill either of her oaths - to protect and obey Raisa, and to find Jaeger - had her feeling... unclean. Disturbed. More than a little unsettled. She'd temporarily left Ebony's lands in part to once more take up her oath-bound search for her cousin - an incredibly frustrating search, because despite her intuition, despite every hint that Freya deigned send her, she could find no trace of Jaeger in Alacritia - and because she wanted to consider carefully her options for an appropriate sacrifice to the gods as restitution for her mistakes... and it was difficult to think of such things in Ebony surrounded by the overly-nice unbelievers there. The sound of paws made her pause, ears flicking forward to the noises. The wolf seemingly made no effort to hide his passage, judging by the sounds of scraping and tearing of bark and wood. Impassively she stood poised, watching his approach and letting him come to her. Better to face him now than to continue on with an unknown wolf at her back. "Speech."

The angered beast had begun to cool himself off with each rip and chunk torn out of the trees and the dirt. With each flick of his paws forward, he was feeling a bit more relaxed, yet the hunger was still not yet gnawed off of him. Grumbling just below the base of his rib cage, he was growing hungrier and hungrier and it would be not too long until he needed to take up hunt again and catch something large before he began settling into starvation mode. There were no wolves around here that he could tell, and that made him slightly curious as well. Why was this land so absent of his own kind? Was there something about these trees and this forest that triggered an escape to the rest of them? Perhaps it was because there was no food here.



A simple turn of the head brought about the facade of a dark, thin woman. She was very petite and he was almost chalking his vision of her up to a hungry illusion. Was this really how hungry he was? Turning and finding strangers standing in the trees, silently staring back at him?



"Your name, stranger?" He murmured, a bit quieter than he would have said if he had been one hundred percent positive that this woman was truly there, but with his current state of slight delusion, he couldn't be too sure. And, if there were others around, speaking loudly to someone who didn't exist could be potentially embarrassing. Didn't want any of that happening.

The male continued to approach, though he seemed slightly less furious than when she had first spied him - or perhaps it was just the change in angle as he came closer that created that illusion. The russet tones of the man's pelt that would have done well to conceal him earlier in the season stood out like a beacon among the brown, seemingly dead branches. He finally caught sight of her as he came upon her, and the stared at one another in silence for a moment before he broke it with a cautious question. She regarded him with equal caution, for it was possible for any stranger to be a god in disguise, and with his fiery pelt this stranger could certainly pass for Loki in his aspect as a chaotic wildfire. "Katja Anke Finnvi," she answered. "And yours?" "Speech."