[ picking fights with the devil ] - open; discovery?

[daniel]

It had been close to a month, give or take, and Danny still did not know where his mother was. He tried not to think about the passing time, and how the longer he stayed the more he realized he didn't want to leave. Maybe deep down he'd accepted she wasn't coming back, for whatever reason. The idea of being abandoned was too much to consider, and he refused to believe that she would stoop so low anyway. That wasn't like his mother, it just wasn't. Maybe she just got lost in the storm and went the other way, or went to find her own family so they could all look for him. Something like that, anything like that. Still though, the sympathetic glances and words too quiet to truly understand never went unnoticed, Danny just chose to avoid them. Didn't make eye contact, never asked. He was not abandoned.

Kicking over half of a shell along the beach, the boy contemplated his own bitterness by himself, not feeling up to facing the chance of someone asking what was wrong. He didn't have a straight answer as to why he kept running off to the where the ocean met the land, but he could at least explain in very simple terms that it was a source of comfort when he didn't have one. He'd explored it up and down, from the shallows to the length of trees that bordered the sands. Although he'd been a little wary of the foliage since Deldrach stumbled out of them without an eye.

Soft ears twitched as the sound of smaller creatures among the leaves distracted him, inciting the usual sense of dread in the few moments of not knowing what he was really looking at, frowning at his instinctual panic. It was just some sort of rodent or something probably, sounded too small to be a threat. He growled at the shaking greenery, practicing his defense skills to try and scare whatever it was off. It didn't work, of course, and that just made him frustrated. So he kicked at the large leaves, jumping back a significant distance when he felt something both furry and cold underneath, by a tree or something. Heart pounding against his ribcage and rush of blood echoing in his ears, the wolf pushed the plants aside with a shaky paw. For investigating.

There was only three ways this particular chapter in his story could go, and one of them didn't seem likely. The reality was grim, much more macabre than what had been expected. It took Danny nearly ten minutes, by himself, to push the half of a fallen tree off the corpse of his mother.

The strain, of course, was a little too much, and besides the headache that went mostly unnoticed there were little bloody spots in his dark coat from scraping his skin trying to push the botanical death trap with his body weight. Paws, shoulder and hip alike. Not that he could complain, he was still very much alive. She was a little worse for wear, spine shattered and having been chewed on here and there by the local wildlife, to put it gently. To say the kid wailed would be an understatement, a terrible cry locked between mournful and terrified at the vision of canine remains before him.

Looks like he was staying in the Typhoon for sure.

[glow=black,2,300]— ❤ —[/glow]