Lucky Catch

Bane was laying splayed out along the shoreside not more than a few feet away from where he'd left his deer carcass the day before. A paw twitched as he slept, dreaming about nothing and subconsciously thinking about everything. He saw colors that weren't colors and shapes that weren't shapes. The deepest depths in the oceans and the highest peaks on Alacritis. Alarice and a black she-wolf. Rancor and Gerhardt being the same wolf that gripped its jaws around his throat that promptly swirled into a hazy fog that showed the unmistakeable yet tattered one-of-a-kind pelt of Valkis laying amidst bones next to his real father's own decayed pelt-wrapped skeleton. Both splotched parts of the wolves pelts touching in a fusion of decaying fur that swirled to show Loccain and Bane eating a deer. Bane shifted and squeezed his eyes at what was happening to his dream. Dlo, Ula and Soi, this was becoming to much, too surreal, too different. Not normal. The Banished needed to wake up. Wake up...wake up...wake up.

Wake up.

Bane inhaled a gasp of air as his sapphire eyes snapped open at his attempt to rise only to stop partially when he realized it was all just a dream. The wolf blinked away tears that had been flowing down the sides of his muzzle during the vision-dream, Bane shuddering as his tensed muscle's lowered himself back down to relax agains the loose earth of the shoreside. The last image was burned into his mind, Bane having been leaping over flames towards a wolf and latching to jaws around its neck before breaking it with a twist.

The wolf had been his freshly burned self.

Bane began to pant suddenly and jerkily stood on his paws before stumbling into the lake as he threw up in the water, having remembered the once forgotten the taste of burnt flesh in his maw, the weeping sores and the runny blood tainted his throat bringing back memories of his life as a yearling in Talutah. The aging Talutah-Banished, Ex-Tortugan-Raeker, Seracian-whatever strafed himself along the shoreline and stumbled into the water, thrashing about for a moment to get himself up onto his paws before running up the beach. Into the shoreside woods he went, needing to get the suffocating layer of water off of him as he scraped the left side of his fur against the rough bark of shoreline trees and switched to another group of sapling off to his right that were next to some bushes.

Bane cornered the sapling beautifully but was stopped suddenly.

A sudden dull aching sensation was along his leg and side as felt the sharp pain in his shoulder rapidly begin to grow.

Oh yes he did. But he didn't act upon the pain as he looked down to his right, a look of horror crossing his features.

A jagged branch had ripped right across his Talutah mark as it deflected into his side and through his pelt. The splintered tip of the mimosa sapling's branch punched a neat hole into him as it bounced off of his front ribs?only to be stopped by the cartilage covering the fourth rib in it's path as it lodged under his pelt.

Bane's howl of agony tore over the calm of the shoreline as his anxiety attack finally ended.