Disclaimer: Donnal and everyone else belongs to Sharon Shinn. ...If only she would give me Donnal. He's all I ask for, but no...
A/N: Audience: Lyk omfg, you're not dead!
Mme Obvious: ...Shut up. I know, I know. Hit me with your stones and such. I'm evil, awful, and worst of all, I have no excuses! Yey. I'm just lazy. And I been getting back into books. Oooo, books! Yesh. So, I'm gonna go now. You have fun with this ickle drabbling. I'm off to write some more substantial Mystic and Rider fanfiction (aka: going to read some Harry Potter fanfiction).
DdD
Donnal had never been particularly good at being a human. He had tried his best, because Kirra preferred human shape, and Donnal would do anything Kirra asked of him, but humans just weren't for him. They over-complicated the easy things and under-estimated the simple things.
He had tried, oh how he had tried.
But humans were hard. And on the journey with Senneth and Tayse and Cammon and Justin, Donnal had enjoyed his time in animal form best. And he found that he didn't mind when Tayse or Senneth told him to stay in wolf form. And he didn't mind when the other members of the group—even Kirra—forgot he was there.
In fact, he didn't even mind when, after Kirra and he and gone back to Danalustrous territory, Kirra had fallen back into her noble ways and started courting a young man (because Kirra was not the sort of woman to be courted herself, but to do the courting). He'd thought he would mind, because when he was younger he had always half believed that he and Kirra would one day fall in love, but he'd grown out of such childish ideas years ago.
For a while, Donnal believed that it was lack of new environment which was causing his apathetic ways—he never felt like mock-fighting or tracking or anything which used to please him—and so he left. He traveled all around Gillengaria, searching for that missing piece of his soul, but the restlessness never left him, no matter how far he went.
So he tried animal form. And he was never as happy as when he was a wolf or a bear—or even a squirrel. At first he only spent a few days in animal form, and then would switch back to human—that way he never forgot anything of importance. When no one came after him—but after all, who would? Kirra was caught up in the throes of new love, as were Senneth and Tayse, and who knew what Cammon and Justin were doing. Then, he spent weeks at a time, which slowly coalesced into months. Soon, after shifting back to human form, he was never even sure how long he'd been gone.
After a while, Donnal saw no point to coming back to human form, where the world was lonely and mean. And what was the point of that, when as an animal all he had to worry about was the next meal, the next home, the next predator?
So one day, he didn't come back.
His campsite was found a few days later, deserted. The hunters assumed he had been attacked in the middle of the night and eaten, for there was no sign of him anywhere. And indeed, as they were poking around, searching for valuables, they saw a lone wolf sneak into the green depths of the forest, looking, as much as a wolf could, content.