Keeper-
The grizzly sow has awoken; hunger stirs in her gut and she can sense that her hibernation, though short-lived, is over at last. She lifts her head to scent the stale cave air but nothing more than a wayward squirrel has come through there. It is possible it was looking for a reprieve from the winter cold and might have snuggled up next to the slumbering predator, or it came to leave behind a stash of nuts in a dank corner of her cave. No matter, the squirrel and it’s nuts are of no further concern to her since the hunger amassing in her gut takes precedence. She needs to hunt, to rend with claw and teeth.
The bear lumbers to the mouth of her cave, then begins the climb down the mountainside. She can smell horses, dimly knows there might be foals dropping to the ground and a foal is no different from a moose calf - sweet meat, easy kill. But something else intercepts this line of thought, a second awareness of self that determines the horses are friends not foes. The bear pauses in her climb to think on this a moment, ancestral instinct warring with this fiercer, fresher voice that tries to reason with the grizzly’s primal brain. She grunts, then continues to amble off but heads away from the horses.
Keeper awakens with blood and bits of fur smeared on her mouth.
Oh god! What has she done? The copper taste on the back of her flat square teeth is old, but not by much - an hour, at the most, perhaps. It clings to her throat and her lips feel furrier beyond that of their whiskery entrapped velvet. No, something isn’t right. Hasn’t been right since just before winter. Ever since that haunting melody of the fairy and her transformation into an old horrid legend left her…
She squeezes her eyes shut against what her brain is trying to tell her. Her heart tries to reason with her to listen but Keeper is stubborn, resistant. The musk of bear that has overlaid her scent, the blood on her muzzle and bits of fur stuck to her face from an earlier meal that is not one of grass and water… She has to stop ignoring the signs that she is still the same mare before all of that happened but the evidence is mounting against this train of thought. Keeper might still be small and thin and feral-looking, but she something else too that takes over when she sleeps - for now, until she can master it and marry the two creatures together.
Keeper opens her eyes at least and discovers no bones picked clean or a half-eaten carcass nearby. Whatever monster she is becoming, it has been decent enough to remove itself from the scene of it’s kill before she wakes in this familiar horseflesh. A ragged sigh of gratitude and despair tears from her lips, as she climbs to her feet and shakes the loose bits of grass and some other animal’s fur off of her. The bits of branch and birdbone clank together in her tangled mane, but she is used to those sounds since her days of lurking in the labyrinthine woods of the Forest.
She is not in Hyaline, either.
For that she is immensely thankful as she sniffs the air, still not scenting a recent kill but picking up the scents of wildflowers. For a moment, they are too cloying and sweet and evoke a snort from her fluttering nostrils. The sun felt good on her back, suffusing her skin with a warmth that she had missed. It also makes the still-thick winter pelt itch and she decides to seek a good tree to rub against in hopes of helping it shed faster from her flesh.
Her black eyes begin to assess the landscape and she realizes that she is in the Field, a familiar enough haunt of hers - she comes here so much to fill Hyaline with fresh faces that her scent is all tangled up in the scents of others’ that are much more travel-worn. Well, there are trees enough here to rub against, she thinks just before a high painful wail cuts the air and causes her to bolt momentarily. She’d only gone a few yards before she reined herself in with a laugh at her own silliness. Her nerves were still on edge from this morning’s discovery and she still hadn’t clean her face off now that she thinks about it as her eyes cast wildly about for the source of the scream. Something about it tugged at the strings of her heart, softened her wild look into one of compassion as she finally found the source of such a sound - a red and white stallion, all alone, and worse, covered in gashes that were deep and unmasked tendon and tissue.
Keeper couldn’t help the natural way her nose wrinkled at the sight of the exposed tendon and tissue. Nor could she help the sudden visceral punch to her gut and brain, a simultaneous thing that almost made her sink to her knees. Not because of the gashes’ depth or from disgust, but because it summoned a hunger so powerful and a need so raw and primal that it almost overtook her. If Keeper could look at herself then! Her front hooves had shrunk into paws with wicked curving claws and her pale dunskin fur has begun to darken and thicken as her spine bowed and something else flowed along her shape - a bear’s.
She moaned too, hardly aware of it as she fought to swallow back this sudden overtaking of herself and her skin. It was something that she had suspected but this only served to confirm her suspicions, Keeper was something else altogether and it felt predatory and cold to her. But she managed to master it, to change paw back to hoof and sheath the teeth that had lengthened and curved behind her lips. She could do nothing at the moment about the blood and bits of fur that still clung to her face, but she could approach him now with a soft foot and a kinder look. Except the closer she came to him, the more she realized that he seemed not to see her…
“Are you okay?”
Was all that she could manage to ask just then.
not knowing how deep the woods are and lightless
@[takei]