It happened that brutus lost his taste for blood. The day of his decline began as any other day had, with his release into the arena, the white roar of the shouting and cursing alone was enough to drive him into his habitual frenzy. He kicked up dust with his paws, feeling the familiar warmth of charged muscle as he paced around the edge of the ring. The coughing growl that rolled from his chest began, not so much as a part of his own will, but an extension of the noise that sorrounded him, the rumble that presaged the coming of stillness in death.

His opponent was old, a dog unlike any dog hed ever seen before. Broad shouldered, shaggy haired and blue eyed, yipping with anxiety, the stranger rolling his eyes carefully around the smoke and the darkness for an escape. The dog was clearly unsettled and even with the smoke burning his nostrils, brutus could sense the acrid stink of fear.

As brutus padded closer, he could sense more than the fear, other less familiar scents, the soft brown wetness of river mud, the dewy greeness of sap, the pungent and bitter taste of grass. There was the delicate sweetness of pollen, there the light freshness of rain.. he shook his body in disgust and wonder at the old thoughts stirring, imagining for a moment that he was walking under the sunlight once more, walking in outside in light, not the cold lying light that he had been born in, but the warm clear light of the great open sky that he has seen through the holes of his small, and now suffocating world.

It felt for a moment, as though a wound had opened up in his chest and the quality of his anger, the raw urge that had carried him through so many deadly battles, subsided. He regarded the stranger quizzically. He tasted his own weakness with alarm.

There was no anger reflected in the pale bright eyes, just a terrible eagnerness to be gone. there is no escape from here, he thinks, just a succession of terrible encounters without end or purpose, until in time it would be his turn to lie with his throat open, spilling his warm red blood on the sand. Even had there been a way to escape, it meant little to brutus who knew how he was bound this place, tied here by the irrefutable logic of his stomach.