I am a guide to the labyrinth - any.

[Ribcage]

The red woman presses her lips to the black boy’s brow and exhales, blowing his wispy forelock. She trances up and down his bridge, and then the the edge of his jaw. Up and around, and finally stops on the emptied space above his cheekbone, feeling around the leathery hollow with her flexible, soft lip. He flares, pulling in the scent of pine and horsehair, the musk of her flesh and her breath. Familiar and comfortable; her side is all he has known. So very alike to his own, it feels as gracious and homely as the ribs he had grown in.

He moves his head towards, just as she pulls away, seeking the reassurance of her touch. “Go,” she mutters close to his ear, then she moves away, like two planets separating from each other's atmospheres. But she is larger, and so she poaches his oxygen and leaves him reeling.

“Come on, brother!” He turns his empty head towards the sound, turning back once more where mother had been to steel himself before reaching out his soft, black muzzle, finding the crook of sister’s blue back. “Follow me!” He keeps himself pressed against the sweeping of her young hips, his ears twisting nervously as she hums and guides him from the border of their piney home and into the beyond.

The unknown.
So deeply unknown.
It is a long walk, trying the fibers of his trust and calm, and by the time the pair come to a stop in the meadow’s center, he is worn thin. 
“We’re here, brother.”
“W-w-where?” He pulls in air to test, but it is utterly unfamiliar.
“Where the big horses go!” She says jovially, and then she skips away to revel in the rebelliousness of it.
“Sister?” He sqwaks, his ears pitched forward apprehensively.
“It’s fine, brother! I’m here.” Her voice is more distant, calling over the belly-high sway of tallgrass.

He takes a tentative step forward, the toe of his hoof catching in a pit in the dry earth, stumbling the black colt. “Sister!?” He breathes in as panic takes him like a wild gale takes a songbird. He steps forward again, this time more heedless, rolling his ankle on a stone, staggering him to his knees. The colt winches, his breath labouring as he tries to right himself, “ahhh… Sister?” He does not catch her response, anything she might have said as she rushed to him is drowned out by a swell of immense sound in his ears. Then light…

Bright, clean, cold, confusing light. He shuts his eyelids tight, jerking his head down and away from the glint. He hears a high pitched scream, and it rings in his ears like nothing he has ever heard before. Sharp and loud, and agitating. He shakes his head, trying to push the rush of senses away from him–reaching for his simple darkness. But it only grows as the screams continue to assail his eardrums and from deep behind his ribs he pulls a mighty rumble.

He means to say be quiet. 
It is a heaving roar–nothing compared to what he will be capable of in the years to come, and it scares them both. 
The blue girl falls silent, quivering and rearing back. 
The tiger’s ears pin, and his tails curls around his striped belly and up his side. He crouches, looking down at the large paws pressed into the dirt, kneading his claws in and out of his toes.

He turns his round, orange eyes back to sister, but she is yards away now, her wide eyes projecting a panic he understands.

And something about it is enticing, causing him to roll his muscled shoulders back.
This, he does not understand.

ooc - reusing my late quest post. waste not want not. he's about the size of a 6-7 month old tiger, by the way.

[sinew]

She jerks awake; grains of sand shiver around her knees at each snorting breath that comes from where the press of her nose lies against them - she has been dreaming again and this time, he came for her, big and boar-tusked like always and for the first time, she had tasted the coppery taste of fear in her mouth before jerking awake. That was close, she thinks; little pants and gasps crowd her throat but she swallows them back down and rises up from her small bed of sun-hot sand at the foot of a large dune into whose shadow she has been cast. Her nap was fitful and frightening and she cannot shake the memory of it this time like she has been able to do all other times - he nearly had her! Even her ears still ring with that indescribably sharp high bone-whistle of his that came out of the mishmash of sinew and bone at his throat rather than his mouth - that had stayed drawn tight in a rictus-grin of teeth that did not scare her half as much as the tusks that poked out of his cheeks, garish and unnatural. Sinew, brave and rebellious filly that she is, does not seek the comfort of her dam’s side; instead, she finds one of the many trails that lead away from the desert of her beginning (she knows that she has been born before, is older even than her mother is though surely that cannot be but Sinew is the very grit and gristle contained in the spark of life, and there are things that come to her in dreams of lives before that might have been hers or another’s) and towards a more communal place - one that she has yet to visit though she has tarried a time or two in the forest close to it, but she veers away from the trees and their cloistered dark closeness (that forest holds the secret of eyes gone gold and other darknesses and is the cause for the strange little smile on her lips) and opts for the openness of the tallgrass meadow that tickles her belly at each step. The tiny overo is not long behind the screams and the roar that ensues that pulls at her primitively, an instinctual tug of warning that she ignores out of her own brave stupidity. Her head swings in the direction of a fleeing blue girl and the striped cat crouching low and lower in the tallgrass. His eyes pull her in, mesmeric and orange, and Sinew cannot help but go towards what instinct says to flee from. “My, what sharp claws you have…” she murmurs, circling him warily or so it would seem but there are no signs of fright in her look or stance, no hope that her flesh is found thin and unappetizing to him because Sinew is not afraid of the tiger in their midst though she should be. “My, what orange eyes you have…” and she pokes her face close to his, all the better to see him with though she is dancing on her toes, eager to leap back if he swipes a nasty paw at her. “So beautiful,” she tells him sweetly.

[Ribcage]

The blue girl is gone. That roar echoing in her ears. Running and running. Her heart is pounding, stretching the limits of her arteries and veins – oxygen depletion, she cannot suck in enough air to please her whining lungs. Her long legs ache, but she runs all the same. When she reaches the pinewoods and calls for mother, her head is swimming and she stumbles over every needle and stone.

‘Brother...’ She tells the red woman what she has seen. The impossible thing she has seen.
Aurane closes her eyes tight and leans her head back, her lip quivering. And then she touches the girl on her forehead gently, kissing the whorl in the middle.

‘Good,’ she whispers. It shivers over the girl’s forelock and she leans into it, her eyes closing too...

The tiger rounds his back. Curling in on himself. 
He blinks. His eyes are bright and wide. When they open, they reveal enormously dilated pupils – fear. His tail coils tight ‘round his body, the end flicking against his inner thigh agitatedly. His paws worry in the dust, they are strange and sensitive. They are dangerous and untried – he unsheathes his claws and stares at them, scared of their potential because he has not yet recognized it as his own. He imagines his own haunches shred to the bone when he sees them, and he rakes one across the earth, flinching back from the angry furrows he leaves at his feet.

He does not know this second body. He feels petrified in its skin, stiffened and stuck in one place, bombarded with sight and higher frequencies of sound. 
He has felt it, from time to time, just never understood it. Thought it just funny feelings and foolish games. The phantom way his shoulders sometimes seem to narrow and roll as he walks, powerful and athletic. In the way he often catches himself listening to those ravens rustle their wings, trying to track them with his eyeless head, licking his lips as he buys into the make-pretend. It makes sister giggle and call him ‘silly’, and he agrees that he must be. So he nibbles on grass and gulps mother’s milk, and forgets the curious appetite.

But, when he dreams, fitful and sweaty, of meaty things…

The grass swishes and crinkles, he cranes his head to peer over the islands of bromegrass, just enough to see her bobbing over them like a bouy in water. He sinks back down, his lips pulled back from his teeth, snarling quietly. He should not be scared of her. Somewhere he knows it. He feels encouraged to straighten his spine. To let loose the tightened spring of his haunches. He lifts a little taller, spitting between his bared, predator's dentition. But when she circles he lowers on stiff legs, spinning around on his heels to keep her in sight. Cornered.

He should not be afraid of her. But he is just afraid.
It is tiring. He lowers to his belly, keeping his feet squarely under him, his head lolling back and he roars again, a little weaker this time. A little more hapless in the way it stays on his tongue and reverberates mournfully. He realizes, suddenly, that he does not know how to get back.

He blinks. His eyes bright and plaintive. ‘I am stuck,’ he chirps.

[sinew]

Sinew can smell the fear coming off him in waves that fail to choke her with the toxicity of emotion. She can see the fear in him - the agitation in his tailtip, the tightness of the muscles beneath the beautiful striped fur that calls to her to bury her mouth in it, tasting the exotic flavor of skin different from her own. Sinew likes the strangeness of him, the way her own instincts rebel and balk at how close she gets to him, alarms ringing in her head and shooting down every red sped-up pathway of blood until she virtually sings from the inside out with exhilaration and her own skin feels tight and itchy from too much bound up energy. As she circles him, he spins in time with her, corralled gyrations that should make both of them dizzy and angry and she ignores the way he spits and hisses at her, his anger and instinct misguided but somehow not. She knows that, but she ignores it all the same, despite the way her body burns with tension and effort to not flee from the predator in their midst but Sinew’s mind - older than it should be - keeps a tight rein on the flesh that houses it, and she listens to commands she never attempts to understand. But something old and beautiful tells her to tempt him, for he is an evolutionary miracle to be feared surely, but Sinew is bereft of such a thing - emptied out long ago, before finding herself in this flesh, emptied out on a geysering river of blood and split flesh and terrible screams that might have been her own until they stuffed a scalp in her mouth and she tasted blood, skin, and hair coarse against her tongue. She blinks; the memories that are surely not her own have a way of taking over, a type of possession that leaves her empty afterwards, until she remembers that she is circling a tiger cub and his roar brings her back to herself. The moment he goes to his belly and stops following her circle, she creeps in closer and tucks her nose into the neck-ruff of his fur. He smells oddly, like tiger and horse and her instincts scream louder at how she tempts him with her tasty (she knows she is a walking delicacy, is certain she has been devoured before…) flesh but the horse-smell is faint at best and she thinks of burials, of tiny colt-bones inside a tiger cub’s belly and it occurs to her that he might be a shifter of some sort, a halfling creature that has no true form or flesh but is half of both things. “Stuck?” she echoes, realizing that he must be new to this and cannot change back. “How did you change in the first place?” because surely, the answer to his dilemma lies there, in how it happened to begin with. She steps back to regard him with a gaze much older than her own filly-flesh betrays, “I can help you,” she says rather fatalistically, as if resolved to do what it takes to make him learn how to control these halves of himself and shift rather smoothly and at will. Thoughts of a coyote-colt pop into her head, her nephew she knows, even though they were born at the same time and suckled from her mother-mare’s tit, she thinks this tiger must be of the same vein of magic that seems to be bred into all of them. Only difference is, her nephew prefers his coyote shape over his horse shape and tends to stay that way most of the time. That could account for why she is less afraid of the tiger than she ought to be but then, Sinew is foolishly brave too and knows about the immortality that courses richly in her blood so she has no reason to fear a predator as a regular horse would. She stares down at him, hungry for the story of how this happened and her eyes are just as bright, maybe even fevered.