11-13-2024, 03:33 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-14-2024, 11:46 AM by 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.
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
I watch it stumble through the undergrowth, dripping and trailing small, spent carcasses as it goes. Eventually it will get far away enough that my magic will no longer hold it together. It will sink to its knees with a rattling groan, the white froth at its mouth tinged brown old blood. Its revived heart will slow until it ceases with a final, gasping throb, severing the puppeteer’s strings, falling into a crumpled heap to molder until it is once again teeming with what life there is after death.
I don’t know how long I stare after it, unblinking and lost in existential thought, but my eyes are dry and stinging when I finally tilt my head and swing my attention up toward the pale orange cat crouched on a branch.
I keep my magicks to myself, wrapped and coiled around me like a shroud, but after so long inhabiting my body, certain bits of it operate subconsciously and I know she is not truly a cat. Now that I think about it, I don’t know that I’ve ever met a “true” cat before.
“Friend of yours?” I ask placidly, stretching a foreleg out to rub the ache from my eyes. My voice is gravelly with disuse and I snort before shaking my mane out with a low groan.
@ Mafdet
The horse below looks up at her and speaks as though he expects her to answer, and Mafdet becomes as still as stone. Does he know what she is? Does he speak to animals as if they will answer? The oddities of this place have made it easy for her to blend in, and she has always been good at keeping to the shadows.
Making the decision to not hide, Mafdet then sits up on the branch, feeling secure in her altitude. Large, luminous eyes peer imperiously down at the earthbound creature beneath her, and she answers casually before licking at an already impeccably clean orange paw:
“I’ve never gotten along well with elk.”
Placing the paw back down on the branch, she lowers herself again so as to get a better look at the piebald stallion, her tail returning to its casual flicking.
“Or horses for that matter.”
Yet despite her disinterested tone and the words she speaks, she does not tear her sky blue eyes from the horse below her. The scurrying sounds of a squirrel in a nearby tree draws only one turned orange ear, which quickly flicks back to the stranger below her.
He hasn’t always possessed this affinity for all creatures, mundane to mythical. They’d been little beyond background noise before that battle decades ago, when the faeries had first touched him with their magic. Save for a select few, that is. A faint, self-deprecating grin tugs at the corner of his mouth and he rolls his shoulders to relieve the itch where scar tissue ropes across them. The irony that it was a feline who marked him so early in his life and that it is a feline (albeit a smaller one) who now crouches above his head is not lost on him. Though he instinctively knows what the cat is not, he cannot fully apprise himself of what it is without using his magic, which he still keeps neatly tucked about him.
Wary, he retreats a few steps at the same time she stands, both to give him room to react should this encounter go badly, and to lessen the angle he has to crane his neck to keep the cat in full view.
The bright gold of his gaze catches on the bright blue of hers, snagging for a moment before she sits to bathe herself, denying any friendships formed with elk. Around them the forest teems with life, life gone back to routine now that the disturbance his resurrection had caused is over. A squirrel searches for an old cache in the debris of a fallen tree while a mouse steals away with the last of it, darting away in another direction, careful to give the cat’s tree a wide berth.
Set watches the twitch of the cat’s tail a moment before meeting her eyes again. “What about …” He pulls energy from the life pulsing around him - not enough to kill anything, he’s not a monster - and shifts. One moment an earthbound piebald stallion with roguishly handsome good looks, the next a lanky piebald cat perched on the branch behind her complete with laughing gold-colored eyes and that same reckless confidence. He’d aimed to transport just out of immediate swatting range, and he grins like the wild boy he'll always be. “ … horses masquerading as cats?”
ooc - apologies for the pov change, trying to knock the rust off my writing 
@ Mafdet
Though she watches him unblinkingly, Mafdet sees nothing to indicate surprise at the fact that she’d spoken back to him. She sniffs a few times, but finds mostly the sharp tang of spruce from where her claws have drawn beads of sap from her perch. His words trail off and her blue eyes narrow in anticipation, only for the other to disappear right in front of her.
Well, the piebald horse is certainly not the first to vanish in the midst of a conversation, but most at least had the courtesy to finish a sentence.
Mafdet begins a low hiss of irritation, but the sound is strangled in her throat by the sound of a voice on the branch behind her.
At the first word she leaps from the branch, her front paws finding purchase on another just a few feet below. She twists slightly in the air, so that when the claws of her back feet land a millisecond later, her body is once more facing the piebald stallion.
No, the cat.
She processes that just as he finishes speaking, and this time her brief hiss of displeasure comes out fully formed.
His teleportation and the sudden loss of her advantageous altitude had been startling and unpleasant, and the hiss expresses that. Beyond the displeased noise though, she remains visibly unbothered, her ears upright and eyes wide as she looks over the handsome tomcat.
When finished, she twitches her pink nose with feigned disinterest.
“Definitely higher on my list than just a horse, but still…” she trails off for a moment, full of feline nonchalance as she peers up thoughtfully at the higher canopy as if she’d rather be anywhere else. “I suppose it depends on how good of a cat you are?” At that she looks back, and now there is mischief in her blue eyes.
There’s a solid branch just over his head that Mafdet knows she could reach with one good jump. Getting there would mean exposing her underside to this almost stranger, but he seems good-natured despite that corpse witchery business. As long as he doesn’t vanish again, she’s confident.
So she jumps, and the moment she’s secure on the branch, she reaches down with one orange paw to bat (her claws drawn tightly in) at his nose.
@ Set
ooh - your writing is as lovely as ever, and you're tolerating my inability to keep a consistent verb tense so we can call it even lol
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