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    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura


    [private]  howdy hopalong; longear
    #1
    He is in his tried and true shape: coyote, as he lopes through the tall grass of the meadow with his nose low to the ground sifting through each and every scent. His stomach growls and naturally, he is hungry and after prey. Woodrow will scavenge in this shape rather than shift back and eat grass; his hunger is the same in either form and still demands to be sated. He prefers to be a coyote though, to rend and tear strips of flesh from carcasses - there is something sweeter about meat, then there is about bland grass. He tracks his way to a recent kill and gorges himself on the bounty of meat still leftover there; it is so good, as gobbets of flesh and organ slide down his throat and cold blood splashes up and over his muzzle. Woodrow cannot help it, his needs are baser in this shape and more prone to darker violent things. Once full though, he takes care to find a stream and rinse the blood and gore from his mouth and fur. He slakes his thirst too, of course.

    Still in coyote-shape, he scratches his ear thoughtfully. What can he be up to now? Here the land is more sprawling and open, and he can really stretch his legs and lope around. Here there are more scents to follow, and it is sometimes fun to track different horses then pop out of the grass and scare them. His tongue lolls out of his mouth in a grinning pant as he considers all his options; mostly, he is thinking of how he can cause mischief because that is what coyotes do. Or at least, that’s what the one in his grandmother’s stories does. That Coyote was a trickster and a god, and she often teased Woodrow about how he was a little trickster too. But he hasn’t seen his grandmother in a good long while, she’s too busy raising her latest crop of scamps - he’s seen them from afar, they each have one red eye on opposite sides of their heads, and the girl could pass for his grandmother’s twin except black where Scalped is red.

    He shakes himself, too many thoughts! His head was always full of different threads tumbling around; he needed to ball up all those loose thoughts and settle for following just one, like he does now as he decides to put his nose to the earth again and track the many scents until one attracts his attention. Sure enough, one does. Except it’s not a horse, or not entirely. It is also a little familiar to him… RABBIT! He pants a little, excited at the familiarity of the smell and not because it would normally incite hunger in him but because he recognizes it as another shifter, one he met so so very long ago!

    Woodrow lopes along the scent’s path a little more quickly until he reaches the end. He’s not exactly prepared for what awaits him - rabbit or mare, because he remembers that he had nearly pounced on her once except where a rabbit had run from in the grass, there was a filly waiting outside of it. The shock of finding a filly where his prey had been had shocked him back into a colt, and that had begun an odd friendship between them. “Longear!” he bays delightedly, bounding towards her, his tail wagging happily. “I thought that was you!” Because you know, most rabbits smell alike - like food, except for her, she smelled a little like a horse even in rabbit shape.


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    #2
    “All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, 
    and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. 
    But first they must catch you, 
    digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. 
    Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”

    ------------------------------------

    Long before he speaks. She can hear him; she shapes the image of his approach in her head with the echoes of his familiar gambol off rockfaces and packed earth. She flinches.

    (Panic!)

    It is in her, so deeply hardwired – like his penchant for stalking, she is made to evade. But it is rawer here, she has always found this to be true. Here she loses some purchase, like she is the smaller of the two halves, ever in flux. Ever fighting and surrendering to one another. It has always been this way, though as she has aged, they have come to something of an accord.

    They have come to accept each other in their bodies.

    It can be a terrible violation, at first. A base kind of trespass, like unknown breaths tracing the queer seam where their beings were soldered to one so many years ago. Like a stranger fingering the oddities of that joint, looking for a loose stitch to pull and release the halves from each other.

    (Hide!)

    She scuttles sideways, away from him, breathing hard.

    (Run!)

    She flattens to the ground, gulping in the odd mingle of dog fur and horsehair. His scent, through and through. She can see him – his wild sable and bright, puckish eyes – and all the ways she could escape him. All at once, clearer further away than close up. A giant map of notches in the Meadow’s thicket, floral skirt and forest copses is etched in her mind. But she stays. Against her baser instinct; against the other’s insistence.

    Woodrow!” It is a diminutive voice. Distinctly hers, but made from smaller organs. She huffs, standing up ‘tall’ on her hind legs, brow furrowing, “what have I told you!” But she isn’t angry. She doesn’t hold it against him. She was raised to accept the nature of things, no matter how strange or different from her. And she knows he is harmless so long as she is her. This is their way. Her nose twitches, always in motion, and she drops to all fours, taking a loping step towards him, sitting back on her hind. Her other half does not approve, she can feel it every time she meets with him. They have their pushes and pulls – there are somethings that neither are willing to compromise on, and so she lives with the reprove that tickles her from her nose to her tail. “What have you been up to, then?”

    She waits for adventure, watching him – trickster – intently. Too intently. She has been spending an increasingly boring and lagomorphic amount of time sitting on her cottontail. Waiting for her mother to show. Waiting for the wind to tug her somewhere. Waiting for the memory, like a burning ember, of acrid, junglewood smoke and fire to wash from her.

    “My heart has joined the Thousand, 
    for my friend stopped running today.”
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