He lay perfectly still until all he could hear was the slowing sound of his own heartbeat, and the rush of air in and out of his lungs. His feelers hung loose around his body, draping comfortably along his back and legs, and a couple had split open to reveal the tendrils, which measured the vibrations of the world around him and allowed him to perceive the world in heightened detail.Slowly the rage, the anger, the confusion, the frustration, everything faded from him, leaving him briefly as nothing but the former King of the Pack. But it was only in these half-moments, on the verge between waking and sleeping, where he could recapture the moments as they had been before everything changed around him, before these new things had forced their way into his brain and changed his life.

His peaceful rest was interrupted suddenly by the feel of footsteps vibrating through the ground and the smell of another one of those creatures drawing nearer. He was awake in an instant, his head lifting from his paws, more of his feelers breaking open into feathered tendrils to allow him to sense farther and more accurately. There was a single creature, bending low to the ground and slowly tracking its way forward, drawing closer and closer to him. Confusing and conflicting thoughts raced through his mind, telling him to run, telling him to try and overpower the ward and teach these miserable, impudent creatures a lesson about the real world.

Ultimately, he did neither. The king was tired, frustrated, and weary. There was nothing that a single creature could do to him, not after he had just escaped from a whole pack's worth of them, and he was not going to dignify the creature with any sort of response. See what it thought about that. He rolled slightly, stretching out a leg, before returning to a curled position, trying to ignore the creature that was drawing closer. The things around his neck strained against his muscle, and he scratched at it with a foot, trying to see if they would suddenly fall off. No such luck. 

When the creature finally worked its way into the clearing where the King had settled, he didn't bother lifting his head. The only part of his body that twitched was one of his feelers, which sent a cascade of tendrils in the creature's direction. It was smaller than almost every one of the creatures that had tied to bring him to the ground before, although larger than the pups that had been hidden away inside the wooden rocks when he had first entered and the hideous cry had been voiced. Whatever the thing was in relation to the others of the village, it seemed wary of approaching him.

Only moments after appearing, the creature began to make noise. It was dull and monotonous compared to the sonorous cries of the Pack, but there was no overt hostility, either. Whatever this creature was, it certainly was vocal. On and on it went, like one of the silly birds that twittered away in the trees, just without the variation in the song. All the same, its voice was not bad. It was like all the simple, reassuring sounds in the world, the repetitious whimper of pups that cried for attention, the river flowing past on its way downhill, as steady and constant as the rhythmic sounds of his own body. It spoke of existence, nothing more and nothing less. Perhaps that was the ultimate purpose of the noise, not meant to convey any message but a reminder to the King that the creature was there. He could not decide whether this was annoying or not, but eventually he regulated the category into the same noises that the whimperer of the Pack would make, as something to be ignored.