Was this lonely? She had never felt it. It was like hunger but deeper; it did not rumble nor roll but rather it swept like water over every part of her. Sadness, maybe, though she had never been made to feel such a thing before. It was all new and it made her itchy, made her want to crawl out of her own skin from the not knowing. How did somebody satisfy a hunger they didn't understand? How could one chase the sadness of out of their own bones? Her voice had practically grown sore from her miserable howls that filled the void of the night. Her throat was raw, her paws were raw, her eyes raw from sleeplessness. Everything hurt.

She had tried to find Eve, tried to find Blackthorne, the boy they had bullied into aggression but she couldn't find anybody. She had tried to find her way back to Taviora, back to the boy who had been kind to her, or to Solstice but she had grown too tired each time. Instead, she had drifted and drifted, a leaf in the wind of winter as she grew more ragged with each day.

With a whine, she had flopped onto the shoreline, desperate to feel the heat of the coming spring as she sprawled her paws out and rested her head atop them. She looked as pitiful as one might expect, like a child who had been scorned as she huffed and wheezed beneath her breath. She was about to let out another whine when a sound caught her attention - paws, in fact. The sound of paws. Rather than become excited though, she wiggled back suddenly, pushing herself into the grass and slush as she hid from view; she peered out several yards away and watched. Whatever hunger she had felt seemed to both stir and recede the longer she watched the stranger.

It was only when he seemed distracted by drinking that she began to wiggle forward; on her belly, like a child might, she shambled forward, eyes fixated upon the stranger with a peculiar kind of intensity. One might say the kind of intensity a wolf ought to view a deer and yet, she did her best to appear as she always did: her tail waved behind her, her ears back and tongue lolling out, the face of a child wishing to play. Yet, Eto was built like a warrior, a woman who ough to be fighting rather than playing. Who was she really? If she wasn't sure herself, she wondered if he might.