sometimes i wish we could be strangers; Phae Pony

[Morgayne]

Rolling her black lips back from the fangs that have grown past her chin, Morgayne sifts through the scents of the wintery wood. Pine, snow, and decay. The crispness of the air bites at her nostrils. The forest smells much the same as it does every day, but this foray into the trees is not one she regularly makes. Getting her bearings comes first; the poles of the earth do not guide her, only scent and memory and instinct. Trees grow and twist and change month after month,  rendering all but the most well-traveled paths obsolete. Over time old stones drift, markers fall and this is no longer the forest she once knew.

It hasn’t been that long has it? Likely not, but the forest seems to have a twisted concept of time and she has been occupied elsewhere.

Blue eyes skip across the shadows between trunks and tangled underbrush. There is nothing to see. Briefly, the mare tracks the frenetic movement of a chickadee among the evergreen leaves. Beyond this avian distraction, Morgayne finds her surroundings suspiciously still. Turning her ears back and waiting for several heartbeats, she flings them forward again when a tangle of manzanita to her left drops some snow. It is now too late to notice what has been hiding there.

Beqanna is the home of a menagerie of creatures. What breaks cover when Morgayne finally picks out it's hiding spot is so out of place in the snowy mix of conifers and hardwood that the sight of it might have stunned another. Morgayne has been looking for him. His teeth are larger than those of a wolf, his spotted hide stinking and wet. When he slams into her ribcage in an attempt to send her sprawling, she confirms previous assumptions that her quarry is all-over muscle.

Her quarry. The bubblegum girl has been seeking him for weeks, laying herself as bait at long last to draw him into the open. He reeks of rot, death, and hunger. His eyes are white-ringed with madness and bloodlust in equal measure. Perhaps he was once one of those scavenging, laughing things that sometimes skitter through Loess. Magic or another force may have twisted him into this hulking and more vicious stalker. There's a ringing clarity when he slams into her ribcage and knocks the air from her lungs; awakening from her juvenile delusions of invincibility.
He is going to tear her apart.

Morgayne knows better than to lose her feet but slips in the snow. She does go down in the rear, throwing her head high to keep her throat clear of his blunt, overgrown claws. On the ground, he goes for her face rather than her fallen haunches. Morgayne stands. He does not expect her to turn into the attack. Her fangs clash against his massive canines and hurl his blow aside. Recalculating his strategy, he withdraws. Snow sprays around them as they both lunge and dodge in turn. Another turn still,  Morgayne's blood splashes across the milled snow and black earth, bright and beautiful in the dappled morning light.

Blood runs down her dark forelegs, tributaries finding their way down to the ground. His muzzle is red. Her fangs are bloodied but only just. He has lost purchase several times but finally grips the small mare above the withers and drops all his weight into dragging her down. Down to the filth, down into a shivering twitching mass of torn flesh and hide. A feeble kick misses and falls away into the mire. He lets go to find a new grip, to cut off the oxygen in her trachea, and let flow the rich red in her jugular.

A splendid agony screams through Morgayne's ruined muscles as she curls in on him. Her jaws part and fangs close on his yielding throat. The monster's hide is thick, but her grip cuts off the air to his lungs and the blood to his atrophied brain. Her stomach roils from pain, from the taste of his stinking pelt and the blood that wells against the pressure of her teeth.

He rattles and twitches beside her, the end a slow race between her exsanguination and his suffocation. When his eyes empty she takes her time in releasing him, cautious, jaw popping and cramped.

Morgayne lays down to luxuriate in her agony, in the torn flesh and the fractured bones. She closes her skyward facing eye and drifts into the dreaming place where she puts herself back together. She begins only with the worst of it, ending fatal bleeding, reknitting bone. In this state of disassociation she floats through pink and blue cotton candy clouds, drifting along with the ebb and flow of pain.

Beside her the creature shivers, but having pulled away she is not roused. Life blinks back into eyes full of broken vessels.

sometimes i wish
we could be strangers

Morgayne