He arose from his slumber in a treeless savanna; inky blackness had spilled over the sky in night’s wake, its only source of illumination being the flickering stars scattered across it. He shook the dew out of his goldish-orange pelage once he stood on all four limbs, flying out in little beads of water. The ground felt soft and damp underneath him by virtue of an earlier rainfall; his claws sunk into the soil as he began prowling toward the forest, where an alignment of redwood trees surrounded him on either side.

The Others, as always, were asleep in their obscured habitats until the sun’s yellow hue peered above the horizon again, which left him to rejoice utter solitude; after awakening from his diurnal rests, the nocturnal tiger always enshrouded himself within the lonesome depths of the vacant night.

But little did he know, however, that that night would bring him an uninvited encounter that was not one of the Others, but a foreign existence he’d never laid eyes upon until then.

The tiger sauntered between thick walls of white fog as he started on a mired trail in the forest. The jagged branches of the trees stuck out around him, swiveling his head as soon as its sharp edges lightly grazed him. It hadn’t taken long before his vision was fully adjusted to the darkness, which would appear as an interminable void to any other being.

Then, before the tiger knew it, he heard another pair of indistinct footsteps ascending. He halted to a stop in his tracks, those sage green eyes widening in alarm. Suddenly, a raw smell wafted through his nostrils, which elicited a scratchy growl from the back of his throat as if to warn whoever or whatever it was to stop—but the footsteps only got louder and closer.

He took a step backwards, oblivious to what awaited him from behind—

The tiger was covered with a large net, casted at him by a human; to the tiger, however, It was a fleshy Thing that hadn’t quite surpassed him in body mass, but did so in height. There were other accompanying Things that continued to smother him with Its revolting scents, but only one was hemming the tiger in Its net.

He thrashed and writhed at an attempt to escape from the net’s restraint, not availing him in the slightest. He let out a roar that echoed in a haunting chorale of distress throughout the forest.

The plurality of Things—whose occupations were to capture wild animals such as him, hold them captive away from where they once resided, and display them solely for the amusement of other Things—managed to take the tiger’s freedom away within seconds after he’d flourished in the wilderness for so long. After that night, never again would he be able to thrive in free rein, restricted until he couldn’t recall life outside of isolation.