01-28-2016, 08:05 AM
Sinew can smell the fear coming off him in waves that fail to choke her with the toxicity of emotion. She can see the fear in him - the agitation in his tailtip, the tightness of the muscles beneath the beautiful striped fur that calls to her to bury her mouth in it, tasting the exotic flavor of skin different from her own. Sinew likes the strangeness of him, the way her own instincts rebel and balk at how close she gets to him, alarms ringing in her head and shooting down every red sped-up pathway of blood until she virtually sings from the inside out with exhilaration and her own skin feels tight and itchy from too much bound up energy. As she circles him, he spins in time with her, corralled gyrations that should make both of them dizzy and angry and she ignores the way he spits and hisses at her, his anger and instinct misguided but somehow not. She knows that, but she ignores it all the same, despite the way her body burns with tension and effort to not flee from the predator in their midst but Sinew’s mind - older than it should be - keeps a tight rein on the flesh that houses it, and she listens to commands she never attempts to understand. But something old and beautiful tells her to tempt him, for he is an evolutionary miracle to be feared surely, but Sinew is bereft of such a thing - emptied out long ago, before finding herself in this flesh, emptied out on a geysering river of blood and split flesh and terrible screams that might have been her own until they stuffed a scalp in her mouth and she tasted blood, skin, and hair coarse against her tongue.
She blinks; the memories that are surely not her own have a way of taking over, a type of possession that leaves her empty afterwards, until she remembers that she is circling a tiger cub and his roar brings her back to herself.
The moment he goes to his belly and stops following her circle, she creeps in closer and tucks her nose into the neck-ruff of his fur. He smells oddly, like tiger and horse and her instincts scream louder at how she tempts him with her tasty (she knows she is a walking delicacy, is certain she has been devoured before…) flesh but the horse-smell is faint at best and she thinks of burials, of tiny colt-bones inside a tiger cub’s belly and it occurs to her that he might be a shifter of some sort, a halfling creature that has no true form or flesh but is half of both things. “Stuck?” she echoes, realizing that he must be new to this and cannot change back. “How did you change in the first place?” because surely, the answer to his dilemma lies there, in how it happened to begin with.
She steps back to regard him with a gaze much older than her own filly-flesh betrays, “I can help you,” she says rather fatalistically, as if resolved to do what it takes to make him learn how to control these halves of himself and shift rather smoothly and at will. Thoughts of a coyote-colt pop into her head, her nephew she knows, even though they were born at the same time and suckled from her mother-mare’s tit, she thinks this tiger must be of the same vein of magic that seems to be bred into all of them. Only difference is, her nephew prefers his coyote shape over his horse shape and tends to stay that way most of the time. That could account for why she is less afraid of the tiger than she ought to be but then, Sinew is foolishly brave too and knows about the immortality that courses richly in her blood so she has no reason to fear a predator as a regular horse would.
She stares down at him, hungry for the story of how this happened and her eyes are just as bright, maybe even fevered.
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