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Etojo had spent the day in the shallows, trawling over mud, sticks and pebbles, where the icy water didn't surge so fierce. Below he watched on as little river fish pooled at his ankles, too small to be worth the snack, not that he could snatch them anyway, he'd tried. He was too slow, perhaps even too old. His stomach gurgled with the familiar twisting pang. Winter especially never fed his hunger well. Etojo wretched his orange gaze away from them and sloshed on, looking instead between the jagged rocks and fallen branches where things no longer alive sometimes got stuck. Somewhere upstream a tree uprooted. The reverberating sound sending a swirl of feathers skyward and a skittish doe loped past him on the snowy bank above, vanishing deep into the trees. None of these things bothered him, except… It was the wings he saw first, bloody things, fluttering irritatingly in the dappled light. His jaw tightened instinctively, teeth ground down on teeth, his lip twisting into an almost snarl. Bloody wings! He'd seen enough of them to last a lifetime. This was his river. Well, he liked to think his part of it at least. And he wouldn't have those who wore them here. Etojo was a terrible hunter but he was good enough at tearing things. He had plenty of practice ripping into bloated corpses, prying away old toughened flesh from cartilage and bone, it's how he survived. He'd tear those damn wings off that boy, tear them off and… he'd think about that later. First things first. Etojo surged at him from the water. The little fish which followed his hoof-falls darting away into pockets of rock. He surged up the bank and into the snow, a whirlwind of dead shrivelled leaves and dried up sticks, all damp fury and chaos. "You!" He snarled, still a way off, his voice perhaps half indistinguishable with his very real need to suck in air at the same time. "Come here." |
@Picard