[open] do i wanna know.

[Set]

Dawn splits the cold, winter sky. The weak light, filtered by the gray of a late winter storm threatening the northern peaks, chases the piebald stallion down the mountainside. The sounds of his passage break the still silence, the crunch and slide of hoof on crusted snow and wind-worn ice, the steady in and out huff of breath. The path he follows is one only he can see, one from memory, equal parts childhood and muscle. How many hundreds of times has he traversed these mountains? He pushes back the wave of nostalgia, the memories of a little queen and her flowers, a dark-eyed warrior and her flames.

Morning reaches the Chamber floor before he does. He knows the kingdom isn’t empty but it’s residents - its monarch - see fit to keep to themselves just as much as he does. Ice glitters on the lake’s surface, the thin membrane cracking easily when he lowers his head to drink. He wonders if the girl ever made it home; if Frostreaver would, too?

Water still dripping from his chin, he turns away from the lake, sauntering into the pines with loose limbs and a pensive mind, moving at an easier pace than the one he’d assumed coming down the mountainside. Restless, he moves from one patch of grass to the next, absently lipping at the still-frozen blades as he walks deeper into the forest. Now that Frostreaver is back topside and Niklas is … elsewhere. He pauses in his musings, the broken, humped figure of an elk’s carcass distracting him, drawing him off the path. It’s cached, half-buried by the predator that had picked it off - a bear, judging by the deep musk permeating the air - and the surface of the dead tree it’s slumped up against suddenly begins to writhe, squirming with dying bugs and other creatures as they bore out of the rotted trunk and fall to their deaths. At the same time, very slowly at first, the fallen elk reanimates. Set continues to shove the lifeforces of the tiny dying creatures into the partially eaten corpse. It stumbles clumsily to its feet, swaying first on bone and then newly knit tendons, ligaments, muscles. The earth surrounding it pits and hollows, more life giving up their last breaths as Set manipulates them into the once-punctured lungs of the bull.

It’s standing now, staring at him with sightless eyes. The ravens love the eyes and the Chamber has no shortage of corvids. Set shakes his mane out and tosses his chin. The elk turns and walks away on increasingly steady legs.

[Mafdet]

Her washing is nearly complete when someone interrupts it, and Mafdet freezes. Her pink tongue retracts, no longer combing through her thick white hair, and her triangular peach ears tilt down to where he walks below.

From her perch in the trees, she watches, broad paws gripping the branch below her. As time passes, and he does not seem to notice her, she quietly repositions herself to better observe.  Only her tail moves - a quick peach twitch now and again. The motion is bright against her plush snowy coat, and she knows she would not be long hidden were the horse below to glance up.

He stop by the elk carcass.

Mafdet is familiar with it, and especially with the delicious little scavengers that - both rodent and insect - that it draws. This is one of her best hunting places, but by its very nature it had always been destined to be an impermanent one.

So she is less disturbed that this horse has destroyed her hunting grounds than she is that he has done it in such an unnerving way. There are strange magics in this place, Mafdet knows, and she has done well at avoiding them. She does so mostly by staying in her feline shape, having shifted into the odd equine shape only a few times. But though she avoids them, she remains as inquisitive as all of her kind, and does not attempt to distance herself from this stranger who’s reanimated a dead animal..

Instead she watches, intrigued, as the elk stumbles away.

@ Set