don't close the coffin yet, I'm alive; any

[atrox]

hangman hooded, softly swinging; don't close the coffin yet, I'm alive

Atrox does not spend a particularly long time dwelling on what has been taken from him.

He has never been one to sink into his feelings—to dissect them and pull them apart and try to understand them from all of their various angles. It never felt particularly intuitive to let the pain wash over and through him. (This is one of many things that he does not see eye-to-eye on with his son Magnus.) Instead, he has become the master of compartmentalization. He takes the pain that he has grown used to throughout the centuries of his life here and in the time beyond and he moves it into some dark corner.

To be dealt with at some later time.

Or, if he was being honest, never.

So, instead of feeling that familiar rage at something being ripped from him again, he turns his attention to that which he has been given. He feels it slipping beneath his skin, a power that he can begin to flex and yet does not understand fully. It ripples through his body and he becomes a panther first. He stretches his feline body, as comfortable in this as he had been in his equine form, and yawns.

The forest is not somewhere that he has spent a particularly large amount of time, but he figures that it is as good a place of any to rest and then test the limits of his new gift. So, he crouches and then leaps up on the branches of one of the nearest trees, claws sinking into the wood and body climbing up easily.

When he gets to a low-hanging branch, he stretches out alongside it and, without a little amount of interest, he pulls into his new gift. It is uncomfortable, but shifting had been uncomfortable at first too.

But that had not given the same kind of results that this did.

He practically feels the crack in the soil, the ripping of the curtain that had already been torn apart, and he shivers with delight when he sees the two beings appear before him. They are no one he knows, or cares to know, and he smiles a feline smile at the way they tip back empty heads and look up with unseeing eyes. At the way life has been drained from them and yet they stand there, so obedient and quiet.

“Good,” he says with a satisfied smile, stretching to rest his heavy head on his paws.

“Now make yourself useful and keep watch.”

ATROX | THE PANTHER KING