Contemplation rose in the form of mild agitation, blossoming like a burn throughout his head as Arkyn traced his gaze across the darkness of his chest. Rivulets of desiccated blood marred what should have been pristine fur, and altered his shadowed colors of gray and black into a palette of darkened red.

He didn’t understand.

—What had happened?

First, there had been the gathering…a memory that came easily to his discombobulated brain, but then…

‘Oi!’

Arkyn froze.

His ears pinned instinctively toward his skull as he twisted a careful glance toward the source of the call. A man, draped in the colors of a local shepherd he would have seen gallivanting in the fields of his home, appeared to stand before him. Though this one was notably larger than the dogs he had witnessed back home.

Where the fuck was he?

I—uh, he mumbled out hesitantly behind a curtain of fluttering blinks.

Whether wolf or man, Arkyn was certain that the blood was not a good look.

He cleared his throat, Evening, stranger— He all but purred into the night, a vocal quirk he had learned from months within that silent group. Do not worry, this blood appears to be...my own.