NO LIGHT, NO LIGHT // JOINING?

[DANYLA]

[align=center][div style="max-width: 500px; text-align: justify; font-size: 9.4pt; line-height: 1.4;"]"Venieve meacum, ma aureum." The memory of sickeningly dulcet tones and a false smile sent shivers down his spine, kicked his quivering heart into overdrive. It wasn't just his master he feared, but that he had very nearly obeyed, that with escape so close, he was all too easily swayed by a saccharine voice disguising an acerbic command. Even now, stumbling through lands foreign to him, he didn't know if he would resist when they found him. The name given to Danyla by his master -Idrillas- was both a suitable nickname and a mockery. Little rebel. It was the former when he was young and spirited still, and the latter when his life became nothing beyond servitude. He couldn't even explain what, precisely, drove him to this point, when it had seemed he was a stone forced smooth by the river to settle silently in the silt, not a roughened rock unweathered by the elements.

Going back now was- he could still do it. He could turn and drag himself back, lay himself at his master's paws and beg punishment for his foolishness. Instead, the lean wolf pressed onward, breath ragged in his ears, and he knew he left a patent trail, golden glitter scattering from his fur with each shift. Danyla didn't want to know how awful he must look, how far he was from presentable, though he should be ecstatic he wasn't the pristine, glimmering trophy on display for a crowd of snakes.

There were many things he should be, and he was none of them.

His energy failed him, nearly a day of running without pause wearing down a body trained for decidedly different things than sprinting endlessly. That he managed was a credit to his genetics, not his own work, though it didn't matter now. Danyla fell, topaz eyes wide over ruined streaks of gold paint. He could smell people here, once he managed to calm himself down a bit, but he couldn't- he couldn't trust anyone. Danyla wasn't the first to escape, but he didn't want to be one of the many dragged back because they trusted the wrong people. Maybe if he laid still enough, kept quiet, no one would notice he was here, though they'd surely smell him as he did them.