we'll never get free, lamb to the slaughter
As she arcs gracefully up and over the log, Titanya is thinking only of her quarry waiting below. She is utterly, wholly lost in the moment just before a successful hunt - the absolute certainty that one has done one’s best and that they will be rewarded for it in short order. She is brimming with a killer’s confidence. It rushes through her veins, this confidence, fueling limbs that have long languished without purpose. Of course, there will be no blood-soaked meal waiting for her on the ground. This time the chase itself will have to suffice to sate her appetite for violence.
The bodies connect and tussle around the log and into the clearing. The cub paws at her and lands a blow to her right cheek. Fortunately, he has sheathed his claws, but the hit is enough to garner her attention. She roars in retaliation and leaps off of him. The raw instinct of the tiger floods her mind, it tells her to press her advantage and resume her attack. But Titanya-the-mare has long ago reigned in the wilder side of herself. As her roar fades into the faraway papaya trees, she straightens and accesses the younger male.
“Is that how you welcome all of your guests, Halcyon?” She grins right back at him. “I’d have joined a kingdom and been a productive member of society years ago if that’s what I’ve been missing.” It’s not true, of course. She has always been far too brash and autonomous to live like that, to be caged like that. Why bother with niceties when the direct message quivers on the tip of your tongue? Why roam hundreds of acres when there are millions without borders?
This place – though beautiful – is still a kingdom of sorts. Ischia, he calls it. She can’t know that this is the place her family founded after the Reckoning. It is an impossible coincidence that the boy she’d talked with in the meadow had lived here, more impossible that she’d found and followed his scent months later. But here they are.
“I wasn’t looking for you,” she starts, more sharp than she means it. The tigress digs her claws idly into the soft soil, leaving gouges in her wake. She’s been alone so long that it might seem like it to an outsider. Perhaps a small part of her had been looking, in fact. “I’m not sure what I’m looking for actually,” she says, softer this time. She glances to the side as if an answer will appear from between the trees. When she turns back to the growing cub, her eyes are brighter, her moment of hesitancy forgotten. “Will you show me around?”
what you gon' do when there's blood in the water?
@[Halcyon]