02-22-2023, 02:51 PM
No. It's wrong to say there is no summons here. Perhaps, for the others, their arrival is a mystery to them, but it is because they are not hunters. It is because they feed on grass and sunlight and things that don't stare back at them as life flickers, dulls, and dies from wide and rolling eyes. Things that don't cry or scream. For Marten, though, the scent of so much blood is a siren's call, a copper-bright flash that makes his brain itch, turns his head away from the deep copse he inhabits, and sets him slinking to the forest's edge. It calls him across a dimension, that ocean of blood, and he does not pause between the step that should drop him from Forest to Sea but instead leaves him upon the abandoned plain of the Meadow.
He remembers this place. It is distant in his mind, a piece of his childhood much forgotten, lost in the teachings of his sire. They had hunted here on occasion. It had not been necessary, but they had come, once upon a time, to test the speed of the rabbits and of the brown boy's long legs. Green eyes blink slowly, muzzle lifted to the sky to draw great draughts of air. Iron, salt, and sweetgrass fill the unlit prairie, and, gradually, the soft silver of unfamiliar stars. He is on a bank he doesn't know, a foreign ocean murmuring gently at his back.
He is as much a shadow as the bodies the starlight reveals, his coat dark beneath the sorrowful sky, but the Sprites rising from the waters reflect in sharp green eyes and in the gold star that fills his brow as he turns to watch them. His striped hooves carry him in liquid silence to the royal carnage. Baltian and Stratosian. He bares his fangs in disgust - not at the scene but at the smell of the Baltian queen and her drying tentacles. This is not his usual game. The feathered man, though...
Marten plucks a storm grey feather from the dead stallion, holds it between his teeth as he considers what to do. The Sprites are anxious, they did not bring him here to feed on the corpses but he is not really concerned with their preferences. Instead, he is concerned with the sound of hooves coming up from behind him.
This way, the Sprites are singing, spinning erraticly. A silver moon gleams overhead, breaking through the clouds that flee the sky and pour themselves like smoke into the bright-ringed circle. A black-trimmed ear falls back to the sound of someone else still creeping through the night. He considers the likelihood that this is a trick, but he is not hungry enough to defend this kill. His tail snakes against his flanks, lashing the air in warning, then, with a condescending sniff, the bay steps through the beckoning portal.
He remembers this place. It is distant in his mind, a piece of his childhood much forgotten, lost in the teachings of his sire. They had hunted here on occasion. It had not been necessary, but they had come, once upon a time, to test the speed of the rabbits and of the brown boy's long legs. Green eyes blink slowly, muzzle lifted to the sky to draw great draughts of air. Iron, salt, and sweetgrass fill the unlit prairie, and, gradually, the soft silver of unfamiliar stars. He is on a bank he doesn't know, a foreign ocean murmuring gently at his back.
He is as much a shadow as the bodies the starlight reveals, his coat dark beneath the sorrowful sky, but the Sprites rising from the waters reflect in sharp green eyes and in the gold star that fills his brow as he turns to watch them. His striped hooves carry him in liquid silence to the royal carnage. Baltian and Stratosian. He bares his fangs in disgust - not at the scene but at the smell of the Baltian queen and her drying tentacles. This is not his usual game. The feathered man, though...
Marten plucks a storm grey feather from the dead stallion, holds it between his teeth as he considers what to do. The Sprites are anxious, they did not bring him here to feed on the corpses but he is not really concerned with their preferences. Instead, he is concerned with the sound of hooves coming up from behind him.
This way, the Sprites are singing, spinning erraticly. A silver moon gleams overhead, breaking through the clouds that flee the sky and pour themselves like smoke into the bright-ringed circle. A black-trimmed ear falls back to the sound of someone else still creeping through the night. He considers the likelihood that this is a trick, but he is not hungry enough to defend this kill. His tail snakes against his flanks, lashing the air in warning, then, with a condescending sniff, the bay steps through the beckoning portal.