A vast red and brown ocean of rock, dirt, and clay stretched out in all directions with tremendous waves that stood frozen in time. The high crests and deep troughs were littered with great gouges, products of both nature and mankind in an age long past, and now far more dangerous from the decades of intense sun and pounding wind. This was a fact at the forefront of the mind of the poor individual who had stepped on a particularly weak rock and was at the full mercy of gravity.
	For more than fifty feet the man bounced, slid, and rolled over jagged and shattered rock until he came to a stop in a long dried creek bed. As fate would have it, the most serious injury sustained was a small gash on his left leg, easily mended with a strip of cloth ripped from a dirty white shirt. The shirt, however, had been reduced to just that, strips of cloth, not that it had been much more when he had originally scavenged it. With a heavy sigh, and a small groan of pain, he pushed himself up from the dusty ground.
	"Ezrin," he thought to himself, "I hope this really pays off for you." Suddenly a harsh wind blew along the creek bed, contained on both sides by cliff faces that had been carved from the land over millennia. The wind was hot, but compared to the beating sun, it was a welcomed relief as it passed through the black fur, now exposed by the tattered rags of a shirt. Yet, it had quickly become a nuisance when a map that had slipped out of his pack during the fall was spirited away. Not one to let his few belongings be taken from him, Ezrin quickly chased after it.
*************
	Ezrin belonged to a new species to occupy the planet. During the years leading up to the Great War, a push for a better, stronger, more lethal soldier through the use of fruits of genetic research had become the primary doctrine at many laboratories, both government owned and in the private sector. The routes taken were as numerous as the laboratories themselves. Some tried to develop genetic therapies to augment fully grown soldiers, while others tried to do the same to a fetus still in the womb. Still others tried taking genetic material from outside sources and properly integrating them into the human genome to create something new altogether. While the previous areas found success far sooner than the latter, it did nothing to hinder the resolve of the most dedicated research teams. It took three decades of tireless experimentation, botched results, and crimes against nature that were the stuff of nightmares to even the most hardened murderer, to produce the first, successful human hybrids. 
	Seeded by the ancient myths of Lycanthropes, human DNA had been meticulously combined with that of other predators, primarily wolf; it had been rumored that a small handful of research teams had gone with predators outside of the canid family, but what had become of their research was never known. Over the next 23 years, until the beginning of the Great War, a military eager to have such a strong psychological weapon bred and trained enough soldiers to form a large battalion. Yet, such plans would never come to fruition. The Great War lasted only three hours; afterwards, barely enough survived to form a sustainable population.
*************
	Fifteen or so minutes later, Ezrin had his map in hand again. He held it open, and with the use of a beat up compass, his vivid yellow eyes scanned the paper, trying to determine just exactly where he was. The map itself was dated roughly ten years before the war. Judging from it, the area had once been a lush forest. Dozens of small ponds and a handful of larger lakes littered the area, many with recreational parks attached to them. In the middle of the map was a small metro area, the combination of several small towns that had long since grown past their original borders and merged into one by the time the map had been created. Within the metro area was a university, and that was his target. 
	From what Ezrin could guess, he was still far to the east and to the north of his final destination, but not terribly far away from a lake marked on the map. A small river ran south from the lake and eventually through the outskirts of the ruined city. That would be his path. With the map safely stowed away in his pack again, the wolven man set off while commenting to himself. "Fayetteville, sure is a funny name."