Prologue 1 - Wandering
The Southeastern Scar
Depala 13, Year 149
║The Howling Valley║
Bitterly cold were the first few days he found himself in this less than welcoming land, not that telling time had been that easy to begin with. Prior to him feeling brave enough to emerge from the small den he'd discovered, a raging storm engulfed the surrounding land in a chaotic swell of turbulent winds and calamitous lightning. From nearby the shelter's entrance, the small minccino repeatedly attempted to peer into the stark wilderness, the fleeting moments of light that illuminated the sheer darkness for him followed by roaring thunder that almost shook the ground and sent him scurrying deeper into his makeshift home.
Yet as quickly as his frayed nerves would pull him away, the kid would cautiously return to his spot, somehow fascinated by the powerful phenomenon. For him, it was one of the most awe-inspiring occurrences that he'd come across, and his thoughts were captivated by questions of exactly what it was and what had brought it about in the first place.
However nothing could have prepared him for what he saw late into the night, the windchill alone having ensured that he wasn't going to sleep. No instead he sensed something amiss, his ears perking up as he vaguely discerned wind howling in a way that he hadn't heard before. To his very limited knowledge, it almost sounded like rapid-fire gusts bordering on powerful impacts in sets of four, at first faint but quickly getting louder as if approaching.
Then, in an instant, from a few dozen meters away from his den, as the kid stared out to where the pummeling was set to reach it's loudest, a cataclysmic lightning bolt, the largest by a long way, struck, bathing everything in an almost blinding light, the nearly simultaneous clash of thunder that accompanied it feeling as though it reverberated clear through his stomach. Regardless, something within the minccino drove him to hazard an attempted look anyway, his eyes widening at what he saw, or rather what he thought he saw: a haunting yet strangely majestic quadrupedal form dashing across his field of vision. It seemingly paid no notice of the child at all, and as quickly as it came into the scene, it was gone, as though it were merely a figment of his imagination, leaving the world in darkness once more, the storm itself with a marked decrease of its fury in the hours to come. And the boy was more than a little unsure of the whole thing himself, as even a search of the area following the storm failed to give him any tracks as a way of proof, nothing but charred ground where the lightning struck.
With the storm now passed and the minccino free to start his journey in earnest, he took note of the sky once more. In truth, he'd been one of the latest to realize what many that called these scars home had taken for granted. The sky seemed to be trapped behind a gloomy, nebulous shroud, a dark cloud layer that blotted out what bright light the heavens would have otherwise provided, casting the region under a dull shade of grey. There was indeed not nearly as much actual rain in that storm as there would be elsewhere, that holding true for a long time considering how parched the pale colored ground was.
But even with nothing to go on, what could the little minccino do
but follow in the general direction that the ghostly figure went, his feet slowly taking him deeper and deeper into this foreboding land. He could almost still feel the tremor from the closest lightning strike that night, the way it rumbled from within him... no wait, this was different. The kid winced over the dull pain in his stomach. It had only gotten worse since the day he first woke up. There was only so much time he could go without food, yet as he was finding out the hard way, sustenance was exceptionally hard to come by. Fear, in a way, had kept him out of trouble in the days prior, but it was very quickly catching up with him.
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