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She plays at his feet as though he isn't a monster. Or perhaps it is because she is one, too, though of a different sort. Her dark tail flaps wildly before each pounce, and the black claws in her white-tipped paws catch at the long strands of his tail which move in a breeze that she cannot feel, one of the living, one different from the empty breath that makes her soft edges ripple. It gives him an Otherworldly feel, even to the little ghost girl whose body still lies lifeless and cooling beneath the merciless hooves of her grandfather. She is purring softly and barely listening - <I>again</I> - when he speaks, when he directs them to the fog and she is not the first to depart, but tarries and delays as children often will. There is something that draws her into the fog, though, something nameless and delicious, and the buzzing of the ghostly locusts teases her ears, sometimes pulsing, sometimes not there at all, only to start again in a new place. Manikin does not feel hunger, now, not in the sense that the living feel it, but the hunger to <I>hunt</I> is not like the pang of an empty belly, it threads through her soul, and at last she leaves Carnage to creep into that thick and blinding white sea.
At first, there is nothing. Shifting, billowing clouds, a tapestry of ether, of tattered souls too thin and weak to hold their own shapes, they grasp at her softly, but the girl pays them little mind, no more than she does the morning mists of the Pampas. They shred across her feathers like cobwebs, she shakes them out of her ears like cotton, they gather like the tufts of dandelions gone to seed in the seashell curl of her ears and whisper <I>stop</I>.
She does not want them to do that.
"Stop," she parrots back at them, and the thin ghosts moan.
Manikin is listening. The buzzing stops and the world is too quiet when it does, it leaves her empty and alone and her feathers lift nervously, rippling across her neck and shoulders. She digs her claws into the sandy gray soil, waiting, tense. <I>Nothing happens.</I> The waiting is the worst.
<I>bzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZT-T-T-T-T-Tuhhhhh</I>
It scrapes in her brain like a cicada screaming its dry song and Manikin whirls around, falls into a deep crouch, a purr curling in her throat, ready to leap on the source of the sound like prey. Something dark winds just ahead of her like a snake - yes, a snake could make such a noise, and she is no less opposed to hunting them than insects - and her attack is swift and savage with claws that rend and a beak that aims for black flesh, yet they find none of those things. Instead, she lands in a stream of foul black liquid with a furious yowl. It clings to her like old blood, like oil, and the little chimera pants and gags and wades chest-high through the coagulate back onto the bone-dry shore. Just ahead, a real shadow moves, it lumbers toward her on soft, padded, feet. It comes at her fast - too fast. A giant rat as big as a grizzly bear - <I>as big as a whale,</I> she thinks, flattening herself to the ground briefly before turning to run.
Manikin races, and something akin to fear washes over her, setting her back aflame with ice. The rat is faster, but less agile and she twists and turns, going Carnage-knows-where in that thick fog, and the thin ghosts howl mournfully in her ears. They <I>told her so</I>. She screeches at them.
<I>Mind your own business!</I>
Manikin runs, she runs her strange bounding gait, half horse, half lion, awkward. She runs forever, for no time at all, an infinity in a single second, and she does not tire in the normal way because she has no physical body to fatigue, but she grows weary of being the prey for a century. She grows bored and she realizes suddenly that her feathers have stripped away, that the fog spirits gather in the whiskers of her soft muzzle like dew. She feels naked with her neck and chest bare, the silky brown-furred skin exposed, her mane a tangle of short black curls, but she still has her paws. Until she doesn't.
Paws become long hoofed limbs in a blink and she falls, tumbling nose over tail again and again. The buzzing is so loud around her, but it is the rat that commands her attention. From a horse length away it leaps on her as she tries to stand, its incisors wicked, black, and gleaming too bright for the faint light within the fog. Nimble hands grab her tightly and its touch floods her with a memory.
<I>(It's her, it's Manikin, giant, a lion with a vicious beak and she pounces on a black rat on the filthy sands of the Beach. )</I>
It's her, unmistakably her.
"No-no-no! That wasn't me!" One hard fore-hoof strikes out. It catches the rat's nose like a pebble thrown against the face of a cliff, it bounces off and throws her back to the ground. The rats tail sways back and forth, an unmistakeable threat and the little bay frowns just as fiercely. "It. Wasn't. Me."
<I>Lies.</I> The rat seems unconvinced. Sometimes Avocet is not afraid of her. He expects her to be aggressive. Manikin adopts a smile she could not wear in the waking world. It is sad, sympathetic.
"Did she kill you? I'm sorry." She isn't sorry, little liar. The rat bruxes, she can feel it's indecision and stands again, "Do I look like her? Feathered and clawed and beaked?"
The rat comes more slowly now, snuffling and sneezing, a fine spray of putrid black raining across her smooth-skin pelt. The filly flicks her ears forward, her yellow eyes large and bright. She knows that she doesn't, she is almost identical to Avocet now, minus the bird catcher spots that dot across his body like stars.
<I>Like bird shit, </I> she thinks, but presses the thought away. Manikin is soft and quiet and lovely. She is friendly. She touches her velvet nose to the dead rat's cheek.
"I'll help you find her. We're on a quest, she must have gone this way, come on!"
There is a moment where he pauses and she thinks that her ploy has not worked, but then he steps after her more calmly. The girl thinks something dark about the creature's intelligence, but it is the beast's poor eyesight that has saved her. Manikin laughs and trots a clumsy circle around him, unsure of her new feet, but more than willing to accept the luck that stole away her paws and saved her from those murderous teeth. Behind him, black blood leaves a murky, putrid river to mark his trail.
"Come on!" She squeals again and tests a canter, pulling just ahead of the trotting rat, leading the way after the buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, and as the pair grow closer, it rattles every part of her until her limbs go numb and her vision swims. The fog itself seems to melt away from the reverberation in the air, revealing a cliff that looms threateningly just ahead. They are barely moving now, yet the noise grows stronger every second and Manikin falls sideways, dizzy, falls against rat, who whines softly. Black blood is pouring from its sensitive ears, and she remembers the way it bled on the beach and how the blood was sweet as rot on her tongue. It's a mistake to remember while touching the brute. He sees it, too. He screams, enraged, but the sound is barely anything above the droning in her ears, and she cannot move her legs in the proper order to shy away. The rat lunges weakly and she feels the sharp edge of its teeth graze across her cheek, and she remembers the way her grandfather chuckled over his final joke.
"What are they going to do, kill you?"
A crack, a wet pop, accompanies the bursting of the rat's skull around her as the drone become a scream. Manikin flinches back from the dark spray of blood in surprise and the rat collapses in a trembling heap.
"Oh." She blinks, "<I>Oops.</I>"
And then she laughs, too.
<center><p class="manalive_quote"><a href=https://www.deviantart.com/shevy-art>Image by Shevy-Art</a></p></div></div></center>
She plays at his feet as though he isn't a monster. Or perhaps it is because she is one, too, though of a different sort. Her dark tail flaps wildly before each pounce, and the black claws in her white-tipped paws catch at the long strands of his tail which move in a breeze that she cannot feel, one of the living, one different from the empty breath that makes her soft edges ripple. It gives him an Otherworldly feel, even to the little ghost girl whose body still lies lifeless and cooling beneath the merciless hooves of her grandfather. She is purring softly and barely listening - <I>again</I> - when he speaks, when he directs them to the fog and she is not the first to depart, but tarries and delays as children often will. There is something that draws her into the fog, though, something nameless and delicious, and the buzzing of the ghostly locusts teases her ears, sometimes pulsing, sometimes not there at all, only to start again in a new place. Manikin does not feel hunger, now, not in the sense that the living feel it, but the hunger to <I>hunt</I> is not like the pang of an empty belly, it threads through her soul, and at last she leaves Carnage to creep into that thick and blinding white sea.
At first, there is nothing. Shifting, billowing clouds, a tapestry of ether, of tattered souls too thin and weak to hold their own shapes, they grasp at her softly, but the girl pays them little mind, no more than she does the morning mists of the Pampas. They shred across her feathers like cobwebs, she shakes them out of her ears like cotton, they gather like the tufts of dandelions gone to seed in the seashell curl of her ears and whisper <I>stop</I>.
She does not want them to do that.
"Stop," she parrots back at them, and the thin ghosts moan.
Manikin is listening. The buzzing stops and the world is too quiet when it does, it leaves her empty and alone and her feathers lift nervously, rippling across her neck and shoulders. She digs her claws into the sandy gray soil, waiting, tense. <I>Nothing happens.</I> The waiting is the worst.
<I>bzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZT-T-T-T-T-Tuhhhhh</I>
It scrapes in her brain like a cicada screaming its dry song and Manikin whirls around, falls into a deep crouch, a purr curling in her throat, ready to leap on the source of the sound like prey. Something dark winds just ahead of her like a snake - yes, a snake could make such a noise, and she is no less opposed to hunting them than insects - and her attack is swift and savage with claws that rend and a beak that aims for black flesh, yet they find none of those things. Instead, she lands in a stream of foul black liquid with a furious yowl. It clings to her like old blood, like oil, and the little chimera pants and gags and wades chest-high through the coagulate back onto the bone-dry shore. Just ahead, a real shadow moves, it lumbers toward her on soft, padded, feet. It comes at her fast - too fast. A giant rat as big as a grizzly bear - <I>as big as a whale,</I> she thinks, flattening herself to the ground briefly before turning to run.
Manikin races, and something akin to fear washes over her, setting her back aflame with ice. The rat is faster, but less agile and she twists and turns, going Carnage-knows-where in that thick fog, and the thin ghosts howl mournfully in her ears. They <I>told her so</I>. She screeches at them.
<I>Mind your own business!</I>
Manikin runs, she runs her strange bounding gait, half horse, half lion, awkward. She runs forever, for no time at all, an infinity in a single second, and she does not tire in the normal way because she has no physical body to fatigue, but she grows weary of being the prey for a century. She grows bored and she realizes suddenly that her feathers have stripped away, that the fog spirits gather in the whiskers of her soft muzzle like dew. She feels naked with her neck and chest bare, the silky brown-furred skin exposed, her mane a tangle of short black curls, but she still has her paws. Until she doesn't.
Paws become long hoofed limbs in a blink and she falls, tumbling nose over tail again and again. The buzzing is so loud around her, but it is the rat that commands her attention. From a horse length away it leaps on her as she tries to stand, its incisors wicked, black, and gleaming too bright for the faint light within the fog. Nimble hands grab her tightly and its touch floods her with a memory.
<I>(It's her, it's Manikin, giant, a lion with a vicious beak and she pounces on a black rat on the filthy sands of the Beach. )</I>
It's her, unmistakably her.
"No-no-no! That wasn't me!" One hard fore-hoof strikes out. It catches the rat's nose like a pebble thrown against the face of a cliff, it bounces off and throws her back to the ground. The rats tail sways back and forth, an unmistakeable threat and the little bay frowns just as fiercely. "It. Wasn't. Me."
<I>Lies.</I> The rat seems unconvinced. Sometimes Avocet is not afraid of her. He expects her to be aggressive. Manikin adopts a smile she could not wear in the waking world. It is sad, sympathetic.
"Did she kill you? I'm sorry." She isn't sorry, little liar. The rat bruxes, she can feel it's indecision and stands again, "Do I look like her? Feathered and clawed and beaked?"
The rat comes more slowly now, snuffling and sneezing, a fine spray of putrid black raining across her smooth-skin pelt. The filly flicks her ears forward, her yellow eyes large and bright. She knows that she doesn't, she is almost identical to Avocet now, minus the bird catcher spots that dot across his body like stars.
<I>Like bird shit, </I> she thinks, but presses the thought away. Manikin is soft and quiet and lovely. She is friendly. She touches her velvet nose to the dead rat's cheek.
"I'll help you find her. We're on a quest, she must have gone this way, come on!"
There is a moment where he pauses and she thinks that her ploy has not worked, but then he steps after her more calmly. The girl thinks something dark about the creature's intelligence, but it is the beast's poor eyesight that has saved her. Manikin laughs and trots a clumsy circle around him, unsure of her new feet, but more than willing to accept the luck that stole away her paws and saved her from those murderous teeth. Behind him, black blood leaves a murky, putrid river to mark his trail.
"Come on!" She squeals again and tests a canter, pulling just ahead of the trotting rat, leading the way after the buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, and as the pair grow closer, it rattles every part of her until her limbs go numb and her vision swims. The fog itself seems to melt away from the reverberation in the air, revealing a cliff that looms threateningly just ahead. They are barely moving now, yet the noise grows stronger every second and Manikin falls sideways, dizzy, falls against rat, who whines softly. Black blood is pouring from its sensitive ears, and she remembers the way it bled on the beach and how the blood was sweet as rot on her tongue. It's a mistake to remember while touching the brute. He sees it, too. He screams, enraged, but the sound is barely anything above the droning in her ears, and she cannot move her legs in the proper order to shy away. The rat lunges weakly and she feels the sharp edge of its teeth graze across her cheek, and she remembers the way her grandfather chuckled over his final joke.
"What are they going to do, kill you?"
A crack, a wet pop, accompanies the bursting of the rat's skull around her as the drone become a scream. Manikin flinches back from the dark spray of blood in surprise and the rat collapses in a trembling heap.
"Oh." She blinks, "<I>Oops.</I>"
And then she laughs, too.
<center><p class="manalive_quote"><a href=https://www.deviantart.com/shevy-art>Image by Shevy-Art</a></p></div></div></center>