[open quest] violence for violence is the rule of beasts; ROUND II

[bolder]

Bolder is still young, and so, perhaps it is with some naivete that he watches the Dark God (or perhaps it comes from the curiosity of never seeing a God before). Perhaps he should hood his eyes, mask them somehow so that the madness in them doesn't flee so fast. Perhaps Bolder should do something other than stare so openly at a deity (and some part of him knows he shouldn't; Bolder had heard strange stories surrounding the Dark God), and yet, his attention fastens on Carnage.

He looks at the gray stallion, only glancing away when the sacred stone beneath his hooves shudders.

It yawns, and Bolder finds himself on the edge of a precipice. He had made this journey because he heard the Call. It had grazed against his sentience, reaching him on the edges of his own wild Magic where the young shapeshifter sometimes lost himself. (How long had been a hawk? When had he changed the swift wings of a bird for the quiet stealth of a fox? What had he been in between, and what would he come to be next?) It had felt like the moment that he had been yearning for (another sign of his foolish, exuberant youth) and the striped adolescent had climbed the Mountain, past-ready for a Cause and not quite old enough for the patience to wait longer for another.

What Carnage asks of them - this group gathered on the peak of the Mountain - feels strange. It makes him feel like a boy again, the boy he had been in Taiga. His silver eyes keep staring down at the crack that has formed, and remembers the rift that came when he left it. His father had wanted him to be one thing - a lie - and Bolder had wished to be another. He wanted to be himself, to not feel shame for each time his hide changed color or the longing he felt when some new creature crossed his path, the wanting to know their kind of existence. Those first shifts in Hyaline had been filled with uncertainty and hesitation (because in those early days, Bolder had still been living with the thought that his sire might not forgive him, coming to understand that the path he was taking forward would not allow him to turn around). But one season went and another came, and the more that Bolder learned him from his Aunt and Uncle, the more Bolder came to understand it would have always played out that way.

One way or another, Bolder would have changed too many times (and in too many ways), and even if Gale and Mazikeen had left him instead of claiming him for the Pack, he would have eventually found a trail that took him out of Taiga and he would have never looked back. The winged horse peered down into the beginnings of a crater, listening to a God describe a bounty that he can hardly fathom ('All that Magic!' Carnage exclaims, and it fuels something in Bolder, a hunger left behind by his own Magican Uncle, an appetite he hasn't been able to fill despite whatever shape he hunts as).

Dig, the Dark God commands and Bolder becomes what Carnage needs. He lunges into his gift and begins to dig, trading his forelegs for something with powerful front claws. He becomes smaller, fiercer, and becomes hellbound trying to move the hard dirt, packed down by decades (centuries?) of travelers seeking what they were digging for now.  (Bolder does not take the time to consider the right or wrong of this situation; he is here now and that is all that matters to him.) The copper badger works relentlessly, clawing and scratching his way down towards what he thinks must be the epicenter of their world.

In his haste, the others had fallen away. And it is only when the dirt shifts in his crater that badger-Bolder remembers they had existed at all. He stops, looking up towards where the sunlight and Carnage wait, wondering what became of them. It all seems eerily quiet and still, and yet there had been no command to stop so the badger trades his shape for something smaller, something with a more cylindrical shape; something that can no longer see but where the now-Mole goes, it doesn't matter.

There is nothing but blackness.

There had been only a thin layer of sediment between the boy and the void.

Bolder falls into it, and falls back into the shape that he had born with; a chestnut horse with wings that now flare open and flutter wildly in the darkness, an attempt to catch himself against the swallowing descent.