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All that could be heard was his own panting, his ragged breath permeating through the air as his chest rose and fell at a rapid tempo. The werewolf, lean and lithe in build and of a pale grey pelt, dashed like a shot through the frigid woods. His large, grey eyes, darting and squinting as he dodged through branches whipping at his muzzle and limbs, were possessed of an intense fright. The fright of a wild, injured beast being hunted, a paramount desire to flee from whatever force had accustomed him. The booming sound of the wind racing through him combined with the increasingly consonant rhythm of his heartbeat, completely drowning out all semblance of coherent thought in the werewolf's mind, beating logic out of him. He only knew one emotion as he bounded through the Russian tundra: Fear.

In a moment, int the chilling darkness, the same wolf lay face down in a lame, crumpled heap in the snow, a skid mark of upturned mud and ice a few short feet behind him where he stumbled. The dark of night diminished the color of his blood as it trickled from his maw, his senses dimmed as an unnaturally pitched whine buzzed throughout the very stratosphere. The wolf struggled to breathe as he reached an arm to wrench an ominous-looking arrow from his back, counting himself lucky that it just missed his spine. With a ragged yelp, he ripped out the offending arrow and brought it to his eyes to examine it one last time. The arrowhead was of a peculiar design; perfect silver, forked at the tip to strike with two pricks upon impact. Its appearance was not unlike a tuning fork, coated with blood and skewered with a tiny chunk of some internal organ. His attacker was amazingly accurate, so he deduced as he cast a painful glance at what was left of his left leg, formerly prosthetic, now shattered to tiny shards of plaster and alloy by a matching projectile. The wolf's large ears twitched ever so slightly, his tympanic senses slowly coming back to him, as he made out the sound of footsteps trudging through the snow with a soft crunch, only a few yards behind him now. The fur on his mandible and upper chest now matted with his own blood, all the feeling in his limbs trickling away, his pupils growing darker by each passing moment. His ears drooped pathetically as the footsteps grew louder, closer, until the archer who shot him down was right on top of him. The werewolf could no longer bear to move nor think, and simply shut both eyes as tightly as he could, expecting the stony embrace of Death as his attacker delivered the final blow.

Whimpering and freezing, the lame lycanthrope kept his eyes firmly closed as he felt his enemy reach over his body, as if searching for something. His assailant pulled his body over to reveal a small, leather pouch his stomach had been laying on. Pocketing it, the archer simply rose to their feet and continued towards the wolf's former path, leaving him to die. It was only after a few minutes passed, wracked with pain and shivering in the pit of his soul, that the wolf cautiously opened his eyes, finding that his hunter had disappeared from sight, already beyond the range of his useless olfactory senses, but to him, it was just as well. Realizing that he had failed, he brought both arms to the ground and fought through the wretching pain that spiked and nashed at his insides as he pushed himself up just enough to see the looming, pitch-black silhouette of Mount Beluhka, his failing vision only barely registering a dark cloud, amorphous in form and maleficent in appearance, swirling about the mount's twin peaks like a restless serpent with scales of lightning. All seemed lost to the battered beast, now collapsed in a pool of his own blood, mud and frost, trembling uncontrollably from a combination of fear and hypothermia, as he contemplated how events managed to take such a tragic turn. His family was gone, his fellow werewolves had now all but completely been wiped off the face of the earth, and because of him, a terrible cataclysm would soon befall the entire world. And it was all caused by him, at least so he thought, when it all began five days ago.