466 Snow and Wolves

Story by ziusuadra on SoFurry

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#15 of Sythkyllya 400-499 The Age Of Worn Bronze

Confused? Consult the readme at https://www.sofurry.com/view/729937


Save Point: Snow and Wolves

By the time she's done, there are dead wolves piled up in heaps around her ankles, and it's started snowing. She's so tired that, in the end, she simply stacks the wolf carcasses around her into a wall, pulling the stained and filthy hides of the carrion up around her like warm furry blankets, to wait the weather out. A pillow-fort of toasty dead wolves is actually a pretty good shelter, out here in the middle of nowhere.

She looks at the circular hilt pin of her sword, staring back at her like a blood-marked eye as she holds the blade in front of her in a salute to cut the glare. She sits on her folded knees in her wolf shelter, the furred floor lumpy and kind of sticky but with a certain give, as she watches an infinite number of tiny particles of snow condense out of the air and fall ever so slowly to join their fellows in a blanket of white that gradually covers up the wolf-stains defiling the surface.

Finding the missing girl, come to preach the word in foreign parts, well that was the easy part. The mead hall was hard to miss, and when she stormed upstairs and burst the door open with the hob-nails of a brutally heeled boot, she fully expected to find the young lady hobbled with ties of twisted hide to the nearest iron fixture, much-starved and well-screwed and covered in whip-welts. There wasn't much other conclusion that could be drawn from the available evidence she'd collected on the way in.

What she hadn't expected to find was the girl humping the warrior who'd kidnapped her like a mad stoat, all horny sweat and wide eyes with glowing skin in the firelight and inadequate furs. Seems the pious little miss who'd come to persuade the locals of the benefits of virtue and sobriety had rapidly made it a personal quest to convert the one man who made her the most hot-blooded with his arguments, and after trying out the local mead (for sane and sensible reasons of course; a most empirical test of the issue; because how would you know if you'd never tried) he was the one who'd ended up persuading her.

It seemed likely that she'd be being fitted for a fur-lined breastplate, or maybe pregnant and then happily nursing the first of several children, before the year was out. So much for the heroic rescue mission she'd been sidelined into.

(From a profit-wise point of view it wasn't a complete failure, because the girl and her new friend had pawned her off with some miscellaneous small valuables of generic origin, copper cloak-pins and small broaches and the like, to report back that she'd found nothing and as far as she knew that proper young lady was just fine).

On the way out she'd managed to be convinced of the benefits of several large tankards of mead herself, which combined with her irritation at the waste of time allowed her to distract herself from what was, in hindsight, the clearly worsening weather. She'd settled the tab by offering the host one of the broaches, the whole thing not even having rated small change. She couldn't even be bothered to try and get her drinks for free by offering the warmth between her legs, she'd just stormed out into the snow.

Which was a decision she was now regretting, because the journey was a long way back over open country and the zeal that had initially fired her haste to get the girl back had cooled under the swift influence of too much drink and aggravation. Before she knew it, she was in the middle of almost absolutely nowhere, and face to face with a half-starved wolf pack driven before the oncoming storm front by poor hunting and desperation.

She plays idly with her free hand with the firm fuzzy balls of one of the dead wolves, caressing the stained and leaking sheath. This one will never get to mate a she-wolf again, which is kind of sad, really, she thinks, rubbing the dampness between her fingers. There's not much blood, this specific wolf having met with a precision stab, but the muzzle is frozen in a rictus snarl.

Eventually she falls asleep, and dreams that she is dead and someone has buried her under a heap of carcasses, but those memories soon fade and she is safe at home in bed with lots of warm furs and blankets and stuffed toy animals packed around her. Someone keeps trying to pull the blankets away though and it is getting cold, not to mention that she really needs to find a bathroom, and so after an indeterminate passage of time she suddenly awakes, feeling oddly sharp and clear as she looks out into the low, sharp sunlight of a clear and crisp winters morning.

Out of a sense of irony, she relieves herself on the heap of frozen-stiff wolves, splitting her pussy with two fingers to piss standing up into the warm light of the sun on bare skin. They'd have done it to her if they could. Besides, they're too frozen to collect the hides.

Feeling much more cheerful, she dusts herself off, then, just as she's about to walk away, takes a couple of steps back and drags one of the less pissed-upon canines partway out of the heap. A swift swing of the blade and she has herself a haunch of wolf, neatly severed. Once the weapon is safely back in its scabbard (she cleaned it with snow; rhythmic sweeping motion as ingrained as force of habit, helping to put her to sleep despite the conditions) she holds the limb by its bumpy-pawpads with one hand and roasts it with flames spun from the ether on the other.

There's a slight initial stench of burned hair as the fur is scorched off, but soon she has a tasty roast leg of wolf going and she gnaws happily on it, eating the outside as it reaches done and cooking the flesh slowly inward toward the bone. She's already envisioning cracking open the bone with her teeth when it's finally done and sucking down the delicious marrow.

Time to get back on-quest. She hums a little song to herself and scavenges on lean wolf-meat as she strides onward through the freshly-fallen snow.

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