A short story edited by   kaoshin (Thanks man!)

Someone once said that all men create solitude but few can survive it. Belkas had never really considered such a thought until his vehement protests of his chief's warmongering got him exiled. The wilds were no place for a village teen with just his claws to sustain him. A life of family and socializing vanished in all but the blink of an eye, and his voice for peace, mercy, and understanding drained away with his sanity as months and then years of hard survival without a soul to accompany him passed by. He had tried conversing with himself, listening to the sounds of his own voice, but it was only when he started answering that things felt a little better. Oh yes.

A wolf had changed all that though, a young male gray curled up in the lea side of a rock shivering and feverish with snakebite. By all rights Belkas should have simply left it to die, or maybe even slain it on the spot for a fresh meal. Skinny as the wolf was meat is meat, but instead a strange pulsing sensation in his chest drew the reptile to treat the wolf instead. The recovery was swift. Oh the young, and in a delightful irony the recovered wolf's first hunt yielded a rattlesnake. Was it the very same that had bitten him? Such a poetic justice that would be! The very idea tickled Belkas, and with that notion came a smile, a real smile, to the reptile's muzzle and the name the wolf would go by afterwards; Venom.

That was that. Belkas had a friend, and Venom had a pack. Sure Venom was not the most chatty of individuals. He did not speak at all in fact, but oddly enough it did not seem to matter. Just having him there meant there no longer needed to be two voices. Just one was enough. He was not alone any longer.