Okay, time to stop ambling about willy-nilly. He needed to choose a direction and just go with it if he wanted to have any semblance of structure to this little excursion. He might be a runaway, but he wasn’t an emotional pup scrambling about wanton, waiting for his parents to chase after him. Ah, the irony.

Aiden halted and took a sweeping glance about the forest around him, iridescent cerise and cerulean eyes narrowed as they pierced the dim lighting beyond the closest towering, green giants. He figured any direction would do so long as it wasn’t back the way he’d come in. Not that he was entirely sure what direction that was at this point, what with all the layers of green and the aimless march he’d kept up before. He supposed that, whenever he found himself on the other side of all these trees, he’d have a better idea of whether or not he was successfully laying distance behind him, or if he was just making a giant loop back to where he began. As he recalled, there were supposed to be mountains on the far side of the timberland. They would either be blatantly there before him or very obviously missing.

Right! So…

The boy puffed up his chest with a sharp inhale, letting go of the air slowly as he took a decisive step slightly off-kilter and started down what he supposed was some large game trail stretching out far beyond his range of sight. From there, it was just “Tally-ho! And off I go!” as his large paws whispered across the pine nettle bed of the trail at a buoyant jog, tail waiving slowly at full mast. It felt good to make a decision, like he might actually be making real progress now – though, he wasn’t all too sure what any progress would really amount to yet. So much was up in the air, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Not yet.

Aiden kept up his pace with a sense of purpose, now, holding his head high with confidence. Well, at the very least, his posture alluded to confidence. It was a great ideal, was it not? Off on his own and far away from home, a young go-getter with nothing but adventure ahead – that’s what he was telling himself. He wasn’t some lost pup in the middle of nowhere, growing steadily fatigued and very, very much alone for the first time in his life. No, everything was fine. Everything was—

Whatever everything was, the thought was wiped from his mind as he caught a glimpse of some grey motion no more than a bound to his left. Aiden recoiled quickly, swinging with his senses on point to face the creature just as it stopped. For a moment, he stood with his two-toned eyes locked on the wide, oceanic pearls set in a feminine, graceful face of what he realized, perhaps a little late, to be another wolf. He did not moved as his eyes finally broke the stare to give her a fast sweep, and in this he saw the girl was quite young as him and seemed to be caught off-guard as well. Silly though it may have been, the boy honestly felt better knowing he wasn’t the only one taken by surprise here.

The girl relaxed her posture and Aiden found himself doing the same, though his ears remained standing tall and his tail still sailed above level. It took a moment for the fur to settle along his spine, and, in that time, the girl opened her tapered jaws and spoiled the silence that had fallen around them so suddenly.

Aiden felt himself grow hot in the cheeks at the unexpected compliment from such a complete stranger, and a sheepish hint of a smile pulled at his lips. He wasn’t so sure about her accuracy on the subject, but maybe he was more graceful than he knew? It wasn’t like he’d ever given much thought to it before, and the other kids had always been fond of calling him “Pretty Boy” over “Hunter” or any other sort of title. This was… sort of new.

It didn’t take genius to realize he should say something back to the girl, and, after a small pause, Aiden cleared his throat and forcefully replaced the bare surprise of his features with a chipper, neutral expression. ”You… too...” Much as he could hide the awkwardness from his face, the same could not be said of his clear, youthful tone which came slow and unsure.

”Um, hello,” he added with a bit of a jingle to the greeting. ”I’m Aiden. Pleasure to meet you. I’m... not trespassing here, am I?”

The boy lifted his eyes above the smaller girl and gave a quick look around, as if staring at a wall of trees brought him any closer to an answer on his own. Aiden hadn’t come across any border markers that he knew of, but, then again, he admittedly hadn’t paid all that much attention to the smells around him in the last hour or so. He supposed he should try to be a bit more careful going forward as, clearly, he wasn’t the only wolf in these parts.