"How much farther do we have to walkkk?" A brown husky with  lighter belly fur and light blue eyes whined to Ol' Mackerel, clearly unhappy with the situation.

"Thirty minutes maybe." Ol' Mackerel replied, his voice creaky with age. The Irish Wolfhound was the oldest dog in the pound, the humans working there loving him too much to put him down. The group of six dogs had left the pound an hour or two ago, not knowing the forest was so far away. As the small pack made their way through alleyways, occasionally being petted by humans passing by, they realized that there was no way to tell where they were headed in the crowded town. They had to be out in the open to be able to get away from here.

The husky who had asked the question - she was the one called Nutmeg - gave Lemon a sad look that cried 'This is SOOO boring. I thought escaping would be funner!'. His imitation of her voice in his head caused him to chuckle quietly, which seemed to make Nutmeg happier. Lemon watched as the small husky bounced over to him. "Never met you before! I'm Nutmeg! What's your name?" She asked happily.

"Lemon," The retriever sighed, exhausted from the walk. His legs hadn't worked for this long since he was a pup, and the novelty of escaping had long since faded. He would give anything to curl up in the rusty cages again, even if it meant to be back in the crowded pound where the threat of being put down constantly loomed. But Lemon was starving, causing him to be so hungry that the thought of rifling through the trash had run through his head several times. He almost had fought Jack for a spare chicken bone the German Shepherd had found, but his common sense had stopped him.

"Pretty! Are you hungry? I'm hungry. I'm really hungry. I'm so hungry I could eat a horse!" Nutmeg shouted energetically, racing around in a circle for a couple of seconds before catching back up with the group. Apparently, all the husky cared about at the moment was food, but so did Lemon so he didn't even try and hold that against her. "If I don't get food in the next hour I'm going to eat," she paused to think, "Jack! I'll eat Jack! He's a big dog so I'll get a lot of food from it! Yuck actually, dog would taste horrible. Don't you agree? Too many muscles! Ew! You wouldn't eat dog, would you?"

"If I get hungry enough I'd try and eat the whole pound!" Lemon joked, chuckling. His spirits seemed to lift when talking to Nutmeg, even if she was the biggest blabbermouth he had ever met. The dog had been spared his sanity by never meeting her in the pound, but he needed her optimism at a time like this. A time where he didn't even know if he would eat that day. Free, was he? Was that how Jack worded it? This fear of death even worse than the pound was considered being "free"? He didn't get it. All his thoughts were bringing him down, so he just tuned them out and listened to Nutmeg talk and talk and talk and talk until the end of time.

Hours passed, hours of walking and scavenging for food, until the buildings started to thin out and they could see the end of the city. Lemon wasn't excited though, he was exhausted to the point where his legs didn't even want to move anymore. The sun was halfway under the horizon by now, sinking faster and faster. If they were still at the pound, the dogs would've been fed hours ago, their starving bellies wouldn't have had to go through all this misery. Why had he joined this crew? He would've just relied on Nutmeg to cheer him up, but she was even more tired than he was, most likely because she had been bouncing around earlier. Ol' Mackerel should've been the tiredest of the bunch, but he seemed more and more energetic as they grew closer to the forest. What was so special about that forest anyway? Lemon bet that Ol' Mackerel was just as tired as them, but his brain was just trying to fool him.

"Walk, walk, walk until your legs give out! The forest shelters many sprouts!" The old dog sang again and again, driving the whole group wild - well at least driving Lemon and Nutmeg wild.

"Ugh! Will he ever shut up?!" The husky growled, clearly tired of being so peppy all the time... or of just walking so much. Her tail wasn't even wagging anymore! It just put the retriever down more and more to see that even this trip could turn the happiest dogs to ever exist into the sourest of all time. It made him wish he could fall on the ground and just sleep... forever. But he couldn't, not with Ol' Mackerel howling those tunes into the dead of the night, and with the so-called 'holy' forest in sight.

"Not until we get into that forest, I bet," Lemon replied with a voice more bitter than he had expected. He almost felt bad for Jack, who had to carry Cinnamon on his back ever since she had fallen asleep. The whole group had begged him to let them rest, but he and Ol' Mackerel just wanted to get to the forest. It was strange to everyone how much the two dogs longed for the forest. There had been rumors in the pound that Jack had been used by his past-owners to track birds they had killed and bring them back. It must've been fun to run around in a forest all day, trying to find birds that had literally dropped from the sky.

But just as Lemon felt his eyes start to droop and his paws gave out, a new energy coursed through him. Everything was a bright, lush green, even though it was a new moon and no light should even be showing. "We made it..." He breathed out, his tail starting to wag.