CREATURE
It scents her first - the scent of prey, something thick and aromatic, but there’s something else to it, something unlike most of the prey. Before it can think on this further, try to pick apart the oddness of the whiff of scent, it sees the blur, and there is an equid creature there, where one had not stood before.
(It does not know how to change forms. It cannot. It can only slowly, torturously, twist its too-sharp lips around the sounds they use to communicate. It can watch their movements and try to mimic them, to play at being something it is not. It will never transform, in this way, only the barest shift. What would it be, to change so much of one’s self?)
It looks at her, glimmering in the shine - a different kind of sheen. Creature’s body brings to mind a carapace, but she is like a glint of sun on river water. It thinks the word beautiful, but it does not try to say it, the word would fall, mangled, from its mouth.
She speaks like they all do - fast, easy - and its head tilts. It does not know what is wrong with its face either - it feels no pain there, it has not been hurt recently. Maybe it’s a greeting of some sort.
It doesn’t know the response - is this a greeting to be mimicked, or is there another response to that call, some expected answer - so it goes with the greeting it knows, even as she is mumbling something else, something seemingly unrelated.
“I’m…Creech…er,” it says. This, it can say. Its name that serves as moniker and description both.
“Your…fa..ce,” it adds, nodding a little, satisfied with its attempt at mimicking her greeting, even if it does not know this particular ritual.
and what rough beast, its hour come ‘round at last
slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
