nature sucks

The slender young Beaufort scion meandered languidly through the new land he'd found himself in. Admittedly he hadn't spent much time back home just exploring - the kingdom was pretty well settled, and he'd spent most of his time either in classes when he was younger, or bouncing from one diversion to another when he'd skipped out on that. So his journey was doing a great deal to open his eyes and instill in him an appreciation for the natural world.

By 'appreciation' he meant seething dislike.

He'd woken up to find his fur coated in frost, to begin with, and had needed to mince his way over cold, wet leaf litter until nearly noon. The incredible fiery colors of the trees mostly served to remind him that he could even then have been sitting around a nice warm fire rather than wandering through the woods in the middle of autumn. Squirrels raced back and forth between the ground and their stashes, carrying burdens of acorns and other food items to store for the winter, the industrious gathering serving only to remind him of how hungry he was as he dashed from one to the other in a futile attempt to catch one of the little bastards to eat.

Once in a while he saw hares partway through changing from summer brown to winter white, the pale patches revealing them against the bright orange foliage without the snow that would later conceal them. Not that it did him any good, since he couldn't catch any of them either, and his stomach complained loudly every time he saw one of the stupid badly-camouflaged vermin.

High overhead and far distant, he could hear the mournful honking of geese travelling south for the winter. He could not ever hope to catch any of them, of course, unless he miraculously learned to fly himself, but the clatter of geese in the far distance made him wonder if there were a great deal of them on the ground somewhere. Did geese congregate somewhere? Like songbirds in trees? He admittedly had no idea about the lives of birds, except that they migrated when it was cold and made a great deal of noise. And tasted absolutely magnificent when properly prepared.

The frost finally went away around noon, shortly after he broke out of the forest and into the grassy plain. Of course, that was because the gray cloudy sky had opened up in an autumn thunderstorm, and the sheeting rain had quite washed away the frost. The rain wasn't much warmer than the frost, though, and he was quite shortly soaked through to the skin in icy cold rain. For a long moment he stood blankly, shocked at the sudden downpour and glacial chill.

Turns out, autumn is also known for it's storms.

Orthos had never needed suffer through an autumn store out-of-doors. At best he needed only to suffer a few scattering of raindrops in the time it took to scurry beneath cover, there to while away the time before the rains stopped playing at dice or drinking or other pleasurable pursuits in the warmth of civilized shelter, with lights and heat and music to chase away the gloom.

Now he stood frozen figuratively and quite nearly literally. He'd been shocked at how quickly the dark clouds had boiled up in the dreary sky, more yet at how quickly it became dark, almost as though night had fallen. And then, of course, the rain came sheeting down all at once in a rush of water as though the sky were upending a bucket overtop him, and his artfully messy fur was suddenly sodden and limp, pressed against his slender body as though he were a drowned rat.

He trudged on in the same direction he'd been going, not knowing what else to do. Even if he turned around and returned to the forest it would offer at most a dubious bit of shelter from the rain, but not much at that and certainly no warm fire to warm himself and no roof to keep the rain off, just the leaf canopy and cold dirt and those Ley-damned squirrels chattering at him from their own warm nests.

He continued on for what seemed like hours in grim silence but for the hissing of rain all around him. His skin had long since gone numb with cold, his elegant head and plume of a tail held low in misery. It did, in fact, take him several tottering steps to realize that he was now up to his underbelly in water and mud, already too soaked and numb for the additional wetness to immediately penetrate the numb fog of his brain. He stopped suddenly when he realized, but the mud squelching under his numb paws shifted and sent him even further into the cold water of the lake until he was up to his neck.

How could he have walked right into a lake without realizing it? Didn't lakes have like... frogs and stuff that were constantly shrieking out their various territories or whatever, or searching for mates or whatever it is frogs ribbited for? They must go into hibernation, like bears, because they certainly couldn't go south like the birds, and it was the only explanation his foggy brain could think of for the lack of peeping to warn him of the presence of a lake.

He stood stunned for a long moment in water and mud to his neck, coat bedraggled and splashed with the slimy substance that mired his paws, and began to laugh in bitter semi-hysteria. Of course this would happen to him. He was sure that the pious sour-mouthed old bastards back home would say Ley was punishing him for his hubris in leaving home. Who knew - maybe they were right. He stood there in rain and lake and mud and laughed until he began hiccuping. Oh, by Ley's hairy scrotum, he was a damned mess.

Seasonal Skill Prompt: Navigation (solo)
Word count: 982