There was a part of him that even on four legs had always longed for something indescribable, intangeable, something more. Where he had come from, sometimes he felt it in the way that the tree canopies gently waved, in the scent of first spring on a light, cool breeze, or in the warmth that spread from his fur to inside his very bones when he basked in the morning rising sun. He hadn't realized that he hadn't felt it in this new land, in this place of desolation and unhappiness. But, in his inner instinct, his internal compass that had been so disoriented since he had arrived, he felt it here. Soft as a breeze, gentle as a whisper, and as disorientating as both, as if he walked along the underside of the earth, backwards, thrilling, and chilling.
He had either annoyed the farmland owners, Dare and Dylan, enough that they had sent him away on his own to explore away from them, or there was truly so little to do that the same had come to past. In the short time he had toiled on their so-called farm, he had never seen a shortage in things that needed doing, so he concluded that he must have done whatever it was so badly that it had annoyed Dylan to sending him away. He wanted to find a place that was green and alive with birdsong, vegetation, and cloudy sky. His human nose sucked so much balls that they had might have been a pair of them for all that he could smell on two feet compared to the four when he had been a wolf before traveling through the portal light tunnel. Sometimes he loathed this form, and loosing his sense of smell felt as disabling as losing a foot - as a human.
He admired some delicate winter flowers, not having a single iota of thought to pluck them for himself, and reached into a thorny bush to retrieve a fist-sized half-frozen fruit that smelled sugary. Upon further sniff, it was pungently sugary, overly so, and bitey - no, those were the ants. He watched the ants attack his hand in dismay for a minute before shaking his hand once, like trying to wring off water. Then he shook his whole body in the manner of a dog, from head to butt. It wasn't effective, but it still had the same effect of wisking away a place of thinking thoughts that he no longer wished to be in and instead focusing in on the present. When Yll discovered meditation, he would be the best at it.
Over-ripe and somewhat frozen, ant-eaten fruit in one hand, he spotted less dense foliage ahead and wandered there, only to discover that he was at the edge of a clearing that made no sense. In the center, a pile of rubbish, stinky candles, rotting food, and a woman.
He stood there for a while, unmoving, unblinking, until the sun forced him to do the latter. He remembered that humans hated silence and offered his voice. "Neat shrine, huh?"
By now, he had listened to many stories of woe from Dylan on how women frequently misinterpreted the actions of men in the worst possible manner - that blinking only once meant a man intended to buy dinner but to breathe too slowly meant he intended to date her mother - but he thought them too gender-ist to be anything more than the musings of someone so set in their ways that they made excuses for their own condition and didn't try to improve them. Still, he took them into his caution and stepped forwards two steps, still a good distance away, and took care to blink at regular intervals, and to breathe at a manner that was neither too slow nor too fast. When he began to feel a tightness in his chest, a queer look like stomach sickness passed briefly over his face then passed. He shook out his hair, and breathed and blinked with impartiality, uncaring. He was wolf, what would come would come, what would happen would happen. He felt the sticky juices of the fruit in the webs between his fingers. Well, he was man now.
He frowned, a long, wide frown stretching as far as it could go across his face. He said nothing more, having nothing else too say, and beginning to feel uncomfortable with her, with this place, and with himself.
Something stunk.
He looked down and realized it was his overripe fruit. He released his grip, and the fruit dropped where he was, a good twenty feet away from the circle of discarded things. He looked at the pile, at his hand, and then at her. Really looked at her. At the way her hair was not curly or frayed but seemed confident in its splay about her head. In the way that she seemed confident in her feet. At the way her hands and fingernails seemed clean. He did not look much at her face or her clothing or even her body, as none of those things meant anything to him, only her general posture, her being, her self, as if he was trying to look through the air into another dimension and sense her matrix code. Of course, he could not do those things, but to him, his observance of her manner and vibe felt as if he was.
Yll decided then that he hated italics and other emphasis and that he would no longer use them in his thoughts. They were overrated like thoughts. He would no longer use those either. He stood there.
