 What brought her back.
Instinct keeps her to the shadows and she finds a river to follow for a time while she gets her bearings. There are so many horses here, of all shapes and sizes, and it starts to call at something deep within her heart. Something that she has forgotten.
Did… did she use to be one of them?
Her immediate reaction is to shake her head angrily but the part of her mind and heart that have been awakening since she arrived in this land are growing louder and saying that yes, yes! She was one of them! She is one of them still! She’s spent the last 20 years living as she is now, as a cougar. Not really thinking about how that’s a curiously long life for the species, how she’s watched others come and go in such fleeting lives in comparison.
Her mind begins to tear itself apart with these thoughts and she scream-roars into the twilight out of frustration, giant paws clawing at her own head as if that could somehow get those thoughts out.
But now that they’ve rooted, they’re growing faster and faster and she begins to pant, her blue eyes wide and rimmed with white.
Suddenly, violently, she begins to tremble and shake. Her body feels as though it’s on fire and it’s no wonder - because her muscles and bones are beginning to shift. Another scream releases from her but it’s choked off because as she opens her mouth, canine teeth transform into those of a herbivore. She’s helpless against the change now, and it’s been so long since it’s happened that her body fights it ever step of the way making it blindingly painful and excruciatingly longer than normal.
It’s almost fully dark now by the time she’s lying in the cold mud beside the river, her wings flailed out around her.
The mare is breathing heavy and her eyes have not lost that wild, afraid look. But her mind has stopped screaming for now, it’s fallen as silent as the night around her, and she cannot do anything else right now but stay exactly where she is.
|
@[Pteron] <33333 Hope you don't mind the kinda dramatic beginning! Vastra demanded it of me.