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Survival Isn’t Grace

Day 4 Dangerous/Tremendous @daily-writing-challenge

Upper Right Arm Sleeve, The Predator Path

The Dire Worg on Vaelsnipe’s upper arm did not merely rest there. It coiled in ink and scar, jaw wide in a snarl so vivid it seemed mid-lunge, frozen in the heartbeat before the kill. Its eyes were wild, primal things of no embellishment and no mercy etched with painstaking care to catch the light like something still alive. The kind bred in the frozen reaches of Northrend, a beast built for brutality and endurance. It isn't simply a predator to Vaelsnipe, it's a reflection of himself. Years ago, in the bitter crucible of Northrend, Vaelsnipe found himself separated from his group after a Vrykul ambush. Wounded, staggered, lost in the white and dragging an injured leg through the biting cold, he vanished into the wilds while the convoy burned behind him.

Then came the howls. He became the hunted.

They say Dire Worgs are creatures the Scourge don’t bother raising because even in death, their loyalty to the living pack outlasts magic. Bigger than horses, built like siege weapons draped in fur and muscle, they hunt with hunger so tremendous it warps the shape of fear. Vael was bleeding. Slowing. A walking dinner bell. A pack of Dire Worgs caught his scent, and the chase began, a harrowing pursuit through snow and darkness. The chase lasted two days. Two nights.

He crossed frozen rivers and jagged crags with a leg that wouldn’t hold weight, with fingers too numb to reload properly, traps set half-blind in the snow. He killed two of them by moonlight... sharp, efficient, but each time it cost him more. Sleep. Blood. Sanity. And still, the alpha remained.

It was not just a beast.

It was the storm given form. Scars ripped through its hide like blackened lightning. It moved like it knew it would win, like the world would not turn unless it allowed it. Tremendous. Terrible. Intelligent.

And it wanted him.

When the rifle jammed in the final hour, there was nothing but a knife and his will. They collided in a storm of claws and steel, flesh tearing, frost burning. The blood soaked into the snow made no distinction between man and monster. When the alpha fell, it was still snarling with lips curled, teeth bared, as though even in death it demanded that the world fear it.

And Vael… He didn’t feel victorious.

In that snarl, frozen and final, he saw himself: wounded, hunted, furious, and alive because he refused to be anything else. A refusal to yield no matter the odds.

He stumbled into civilization three days later, fevered and skeletal. They said it was luck. He knew better. It was a decision.

Later, in a moment not of pride but necessity, he had the beast inked into his skin. Not to remember the kill but to remember what he had to become to survive it.

“Survival isn’t grace,” he told Lukel once, tracing the edge of the jawline inked on his arm with a worn thumb. “It’s teeth bared to the storm. A snarl in the face of the inevitable.”

And when he said it, something old stirred behind his eyes... there was no warmth from Lukel, no night, no distant future, only the long cold howl of the blizzard, and the man who walked through it with blood on his hands and a snarl stitched into his soul.

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