"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
Sokali runs through the meadow at dawn, her fox-like and dusty pink body weaving among the summer-bright wildflowers and grasses. A cluster of five tails are what peaks through the grasses where she bounds, each one tipped with silver that catches on the light of the new day.
The growling behind her stopped some time ago but still she runs, laughter bubbling from her every now and then when she remembers the shock and then anger on the badger’s face when it woke up to find her snuggled up with its kits. It had been tricky to crawl into that den - and she had to rely on both luck and a little push from her abilities to keep the badger family from waking. There was a scratch on one of her hips, the pink fur there matted with drying blood, but it was a minor injury and well worth it. She had stumbled on her way out, a sloppy move. Next time, she’ll need to be faster.
Only once breathing starts to become difficult does she stop, climbing up onto a boulder and collapsing there. She intends to roll over and lie on her back but doing so makes the wound on her hip hurt so she sprawls out on the surface of the rock, still cool from the night air, and pants with a wild smile bright in her silver eyes.
04-24-2023, 02:00 PM (This post was last modified: 04-24-2023, 02:02 PM by Malik.)
Malik takes in the odd number of tails as the kitsune races past, his bicolored eyes following the running creature until it is nothing more than the grass bent by its passage. He’d stopped to watch it, and before he begins to walk forward again, he decides to attempt the shape.
His brow furrows, his eyes close, and his jaw clenches.
Nothing.
With an irritated sigh, he takes on instead the shape of a normal fox. The iridescent feathers thickening the ebony ruff of fur around his neck are nothing more than remnants of his equine shape - he is still unable to shift into anything unnatural or magical. With a shake of his head, the fox carries on the path that the horse had been taking, returning to the Forest.
When he spots the kitsune sunning itself on a rock not far out of his way, he makes his curious way closer in a series of leaps not much different than her own. He means to ask what magic she has, curious what makes her shape unattainable, but sees the wound on her flank and asks instead: “What happened to you?”
Someone approaches and her pink ears twitch at the soft fall of paws instead of hooves - and then Sokali is delighted to see it is someone else in a fox-shape. Her smile (combined with the panting) makes her mouth spread wide enough for her tongue to loll out when she turns her head and focuses her silver eyes on him.
She notes the feathers and feels a brief flash of jealousy - wondering why she couldn’t have feathers too - but he offers her a chance to talk about her most recent exploit so that thought disappears from her mind.
“Badger dens are a cozy place to sleep but you gotta make sure you’re faster than the mom.” She inhales a deep breath, trying to slow her heart, but she is still winded from her escape. Still, she sits up - her tails curling around her feet as she looks at him from her rock. “Next time I will be.” Her tone is matter-of-fact, even though her attention momentarily is caught by the flight of a nearby bird before she focuses on the other fox again.
She looks rather silly hanging sideways like that, and the edges of Malik’s eyes crinkle in amusement as he takes a few steps closer. There seems little damage to her pink-furred hip despite the blood dark fur; the badger hadn’t wounded her too badly. Her tone matches her expression, which soothes his oft-ruffled feathers.
They settle back down into the thick ruff of his dark mane, and he returns her smile warmly when he gives his name. “I’m Malik.” Her answer about the badgers seems a perfectly acceptable one to the shifter; he’s aggravated a fair number of animals before himself, and a badger is not an easy one to face down. He gives a shrug of his shoulders and an appreciative nod to convey that sentiment.
His head is tilted upward, and from his perspective on the rock below her silver-tipped tails seem impressively large as she twines around her pink legs.
“Are there four?” He asks, musing aloud and realizing only after the fact, but continuing nonetheless with a brief and diffident smile. “Tails, I mean. Do you you have four tails, or is it five?” He considers trying to take the shape of a kitsune one more time; perhaps he had gotten the number of tails wrong?
The idea of failing the shape yet again, and this time with a witness, is more than a little embarrassing. Malik decides that if he tries, it will be somewhere where no one can see him.
He doesn’t ask any follow up questions about the badger - which is somehow both disappointing and relieving. Sokali wouldn’t mind talking about the adventure even more (even though she had already said everything about it - but he didn’t know that!) but she also was glad to get the opportunity to not have to think of anything to beef the story up at all for Malik and entertain him. Perhaps she had been running away when she crawled into that badger den.
Even if she was fully grown and it wasn’t so much ‘running away’ as ‘moving out’.
Regardless, Malik instead asks another question about something she is happy to talk about - her tails! Her silver eyes are bright with a smile as they unfurl from around her paws and fan out behind her so they can be more easily seen - and counted. “Five. Every couple of years there’s another one, I have no idea how many I’ll end up with.” Her dad had tried shifting into a kitsune once, on her request, and he had six at the time - but there’s no telling where it’ll end. “I hope it stops before I’m all tails though.” She admits, half as a joke and half as a very serious, very real fear.
The tails keep growing, she tells him, another one every few years. Though it seems a fairly innocuous ability, it also seems like something that is most easily explainable as: magic. And Malik cannot shift into magical things.
Not yet, anyway.
First he must find one last gift for the fairies, one last bit of something magical. And since this awareness is always in the back of his mind, it seems perfectly sensible for him to offer: “If you ever get too many, I’d take one.” Exactly how she’d be able to give him one occurs to him only after he speaks, and he pulls his own fluffy black tail closer to himself at the thought of somehow severing it.
“If….uh…that’s a thing you can do?” He’s looking anywhere but at Sokali, feeling unable to stop the words that keep spilling out. “I didn’t, I don’t mean…”
Then he stops, closes his eyes, and takes a deep breath in. If she hasn’t turned and run in the time it takes him to gather himself together, he finally meets her gaze and says: “Sorry. That was weird. Can we start over? I’ve been on a quest for the fairies for most of my life now, and sometimes I forgot how to not think about it all the time.”
Malik