Well, well, well... what do we have here, another chapter? IN THE SAME DAY?

It's amazing, isn't it? (But why don't you tell me that in some reviews, you know, just to say something...I'm kidding, men and women who read

my story and don't make comment...ahahah sorry, I just ate something that makes me sour tonight)

I'D REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY LOVE TO KNOW WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS STORY!

Anyways, Enjoy this new chapter!

Chapter 12: Frozen time

VALEN's P.O.V.

I reached the clearing's entrance… I was in disbelief at what was in front of me. Uprooted trees lay here and there irregularly, with snow accumulated in different points, forming mounds. Snow was very high, forming a vertical drop at the entrance of the clearing itself… From there I could still see see small pieces of mountain detach from the high mountain peaks, crumbling downstream and getting larger and larger during their descent. I finally understood what happened: all noises had resulted in a landslide.

Another fit of coughing violently striked me, but this time i wasn't even able to let my paw reach my mouth, due to its roughness. I slumped to the soft snowy ground, trying to breathe deeply and recover my strenght, but disease was advancing at a very high pace. My uncontrollable cough yielded a more abundant blood and purulent product, sign that my time had almost come to an end.

I crawled along the recently-formed snowy slope…striving with all the energy in my possession… I could do nothing but drag my tired and weak body… Now I am just a pale reflection of what I was once…Strong, dismissive of the danger, unstoppable at nothing…And now… Begging to myself to find a shred of energy to mov-…to drag my tired flash on the floor…

Moving along the slope, my feet kept sinking into the tall snow, reaching the end of that inclination having the head as the only visible part and not immersed into the cold snow. Move with all that snow around the body required more energies…For a normal, salubrious wolf even move into that immense snowy tide was a difficult challenge, imagine what it might represent for a moribound wolf like him…

But I kept going on: nothing was going to stop me, not even death itself. I have to accomplish at least this mission. Achieved the center of the flatland, he began to feel Grin's faint odor, and began to follow his scent at the points where it became stronger. After several digging attempts, to get as fast as possible Grin, he began to smell a strange, rusty stench that hovered between some snowdrift.

"No…it couldn't be possibl…!* cough cough*" Another violent attack of coughing struck him, making him almost choke, at the very moment in which he made the bitter discovery: there was some snow that was dyed red. This wasn't his own blood expelled by coughing, no… This was a vivid red color, and it could belong to a single… it was Grin's.

"Hey!..." Valen managed to scream with all his remaining voice, his respiratory burned in an unbearable manner, with some purulent and fluid exudate ascending in his throat, coming straightly from his lungs.

"…Grin!...Answer to me!..." He was able to shout, with his raucous and bubbling voice.

Nothing. No answer, no sound. The snow had used its vim as an eraser and wiped out everything with its disruptive force.

Valen was beginning to lose his hopes. He, that he never had given up at nothing, found himself in that damned situation.

He now did not want to do anything but cower and cry… Cry,for the loss of a young wolf… for the loss of a child… for the loss of his first and only true son… a being who had loved him and respected him unconditionally… who treated him as a parent…

Tears of sadness and resignation formed in his eyes, reluctant to fall, maybe because they would not submit to his such unfortunate fate.

"I don't care about what is going to happen to me…but… if there's at least one way…one way to make sure he is still alive…please…" Valen thought, looking up to the white-greyish sky.

A light, small snowflake gently glided over his nose, gently tickling his not-anymore wet nose, melting istantly. Second after second, few snowflakes plunged onto the ground in a sort of a straight line, mixing with the surrounding snow… but somehow they looked like surrounded with a strange mystical air, as they…as they were somehow showing him a direction to follow and where to dig.

Not really knowing what else to believe in, but being in a desperate situation, in which even the second could establish a difference between life and death, he decided to dig along the line drawn by these strange snowy flakes.

He kept digging, and digging, and digging, using all his leftover energies, just to rescue him… but he could sense his smell getting intensified, sign that he finally was getting closer to him…

"DON'T dare to give up, boy, I'll never forgive you that…"

His efforts finally were rewarded: he found Grin. But his condition appeared to be almost critical: he was unconscious, he had a massive gash in his right side, but fortunately it seemed that excessive cold which has been submitted under acted as a vasoconstrictor, limiting blood's leakage from his wound… thing that worried him the most was his uncontrollably trembling in his uncosciousness , due to the extreme chill. But, at least, he was still alive.

"Hey kid…hey!" Valen shouted, trying to wake him up, but he continued to shake with no answers.

"I have to do something to raise his body warmth, or he's gonna die of hypothermia!" Valen commanded to himself.

Then he thought he could transfer his body heat to him literally placing himself on him, so as to greatly increase the contact surface between their bodies and have a fast heat transmission.

He could feel his almost-all-grown-up body shaking uncontrollably under his… but Valen began to shake too, but for the opposite reason… probably he got an high fever. During his shaking, Valen expectorated purulent material commingled in blood, but this time the amount was so huge that created a puddle in the snow.

After some time, he could feel Grin's trembling lessen, and he felt relieved. "He's going to be better, I know, but…" Tears of a mixed emotion between joy and sadness were pouring were falling into the adjacent snow, melting partially its soft texture.

Then, suddenly he felt something moving under his weight, and hitting him accidentally in the sternum, making him crackle because of the pain. The dolour tore him, starting from the impact point and spreading into his body, just like a powerful poison. Valen yelped loudly, almost collapsing to the intense suffering, but somehow he managed to maintain his balance.

GRIN's P.O.V.

Grin opened his eyes for some reason…maybe he just died, and was time to live another reality…but he find himself staring in what looked like to be a sort of hairy belly… and remembering what kind of beast previously was fighting against, he hit with both his front and rear legs that furry belly with all his leftover strength, not recognizing firstly who it belonged. A loud yelp followed his action, and his "aggressor" was pushed back.

He finally recognized it : it was Valen, come maybe to rescue him.

"What were you thinking, huh?" Valen said to him, slightly angered " Well, we can say you've reached another success in your life: How to scare the hell out a poor old man…" but his vocal tone went from an angry one to an rather happy one "Well, boy, now that our hide-and-seek question is finally over, why don't we go back into our den, so we can treat your wounds and fin-"

Cough had the upper hand on him, and made him collapse to the ground, worn out due to his previous tremendous efforts. Grin went slighly limping nearby him, deciding to help him to his feet, but Valen refused his help, saying: "No, thank you, i'm old, I know, but I still have my pride to defend…I have to do this on my own…"

Laboriously, painfully and slowly, he managed focus on the ground and rise up…but suddenly, with an unexpected and swift motion he jumped over me, screaming "RUN…AWAY!"

VALEN's P.O.V.

I was trying to stand up, pain flooded entirely my body, and i was trying to focus on the ground, in aim to distract me from my ache, when i saw a huge shadow cast on the ground before me… it belonged to something just behind Grin's back… I could see his huge paw and his to-its-paw connected sharp claws raised in the air, ready to take the downward movement, and surely take Grin's life.

"NOT…AS…LONG…AS…I LIVE!"I thought, and I used my latest energies to jump over him, trying to shield him as much as possible.

I closed my eyes, knowing that it was finally time to leave the world of the living in an honorable and dignified.

GRIN's P.O.V.

I heard a harsh impact just behind me. A cry of unimaginable painfulness was freed in the air. Severe clacks echoed sickly. A lifeless body flew, pushed by a giant animal power. Another unnatural snap. A wolf's corpse laid over a broken tree trunk. Unmoving.

Time seemed to have stopped. Frame by frame, locked into the various instants.

Sacrifice. Love. Care. Dead. Revenge. Wrath.

All these words crossed Grin's mind in a millisecond. His eyes closed, tears submerged his pupils, making them drown into a sea of suffering.

"…"

"Put your trust in me…I won't let you down…" A voice played in his head.

A voice that somehow he knew. A voice full of mourning and madness. He had no choices. Now was a survival matter.

He nodded and bowed his head, looking down, with his eyes still closed, ready to be engulfed by darkness.

General P.O.V.

The bear was uttering his verse… clearly, given its size, the avalanche had not procured to him a lot of damage, so he just had to dig his way out to continue to hunt its prey, previously wounded. The bear just come to see that there was more than one wolf, thus there were two potential preys. They seemed to be focused more on themselves than what surrounded them, not even going to notice a beast of this size that ventured in these parts.

The bear wanted to kill them to feed himself, so he went for the kill, clawing one of the two wolves, the slight bigger one, sending him straight to a certain death over a broken tree trunk.

Something had changed in the meantime.

The slightly smaller wolf was staring at the bear, with his head tilted on one side, a huge grin plastered all over his face. The wolf didn't move… it seemed he wasn't afraid anymore… it seemed he didn't care of nothing, except his desire to… annihilate every living nearby.

The wolf wanted to kill…kill the bear with all his heart.

The bear got up on his feet, trying to make his opponent more afraid, but the wolf tilted his head to the other side, as if being in front of him aroused in him some curiosity.

The bear was on the verge of beginning his attack, gliding on the helpless wolf…

But bear founded himself immobilized on the ground, with blood pouring from large gashes deeply opened in both his rear legs's hocks.

That little wolf managed to slide trough bear's rear legs, in a split-second speed, and rotate into his sliding maneuveur, sinking his claws in both his legs, and using his momentum to go forward, to cut deeply bear's mighty muscles, from the front to the rear.

After seeing the bear inexorably collapsing to the ground, he sparked a big diverted laugh, almost as if he was having fun in the break up.

He saw the bear trying to lift up, but the wolf jumped wildly on bear's back and began to shred him, ripping big and numerous pieces of fur, until he got to bear's back muscles.

After that torment, the bear collapsed almost slack, its breath extremely decelerated… but seemed that the wolf had not finished his opera yet: he began to clamp his teeth on the bear's throat, but not just once, but repeatedly, sentencing it to endure a cruel agony.

After the sixth time, bear's head crashed down, for its last time. Grin has committed a massacre…

"Oh…" Grin said, loudly, "I wonder where Valen is… oh, there…he…is!" He said, approaching his dead body, nudging him, but no getting any response

"Come on, get up…" He said, nudging him again.

He heard some paws steps quickly following one another behind him, but was too late: he was knocked out coldly.

Getting knocked out by someone from behind isn't very fair, isn't it? Who it would be?

STAY TUNED TO FIND what's going on... I'm gonna sleep, now that here's 01:30 AM, hoping that tomorrow I would find out that someone wrote something...

GrinWolf here... over and out.