"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
Persiphae couldn’t believe her luck this morning – an owl pellet, several nights old, lay nestled in the frosted autumn leaves at her hooves. Her white nose and forelegs had been scuffed with mud from her search, rooting around in the composting material not unlike a keen hog sniffing out truffles. She could sense the bones wrapped in matted fur and dried saliva, could see the discarded, indigestible, mineralized connective tissues that worked beneath the surface – the frame of organic creatures. A foundation for the body, a tool for the soul.
She stepped back, the capsule now exposed to the misty dawn and surrounded by a circlet of damp leaves. The filly slowed her breath and focused her emerald eyes at the ball of fur and bones, a steady plume of moisture billowing from her nostrils. It was the only movement present in the windless forest that morning… for a moment.
In the tranquility of the quiet fog is when the pellet began to stir, birthing each bone as it wriggled through the threads of matted fur. As the skull sprouted forth, it tore it’s nest in two, the yellowed incisors of the deceased rodent emerging first. Soon, the remainder of the spine snaked out, and each tiny phalange fell into place on the suspended skeleton. The last pieces to animate were the bones comprising the mouse’s tail, with the final vertebra caught on a strand of fur. Persiphae’s nostrils flared as she funneled a push of extra energy into her efforts, and soon the bone tumbled free from its snare like a cog snapping into place.
The complete skeleton hovered over the forest floor, suspended by the will of the ashen filly. She felt a chill – whether it was from the perspiration that had begun to form beneath her short mane or from satisfaction, she couldn’t tell.
Soon, winter would be here. Crevan could smell it in the air, could feel it in his bones that were not bone at all but something strange and silver. He tipped his brown nose toward the sky, not the nose of a horse but that of a wolf - his second skin - and whuffed every ribbon of scent and spore in the air with lip-curling satisfaction. The world smelled close to death; soon, the slumber would descend. Then the awakening would raise all that it had slaughtered or shuttered away, and hunting would be good again. Rutting season had ended and with it, the herds of so many herbivores had gone as well.
Crevan scavenged in anticipation of the harder months to come, and it wasn’t long walking that his sensitive nose caught wind of something possibly edible. This late into the season he would take what he could find without complaint: his skills at snow hunting were subpar at best. If he wanted a full belly to travel south on, he knew he should prepare. That meant debasing himself to the leftovers of other, more adept hunters.
This is how he came across the scat (and the filly) alone under the cover of a bare forest, and he paused to hunker down into the shadows so he could watch her for a moment or two before approaching.
She seemed studious, but harmless. The Wolf shifter slumped lower and layed patiently on his belly, watching her breath curl into the air from underneath the pricking cover of a holly bush while she worked her magic into the world. For a second he wondered at what she was doing, then the product revealed itself and his eyes widened as the bones uncurled themselves from the matted fur and danced again with life. Crevan had never seen anything of the like (and he’d seen a lot in his life and travels,) and he marveled with a half-curled smile at the little mare’s charge over her dead puppet.
The Wolf rose, rattling the bush as his hefty shoulders brushed their tight branches aside, and he slunk out from his hiding spot with his head low and his tail waving up above his curving hips. He was covered in creamy fur, offset by a darker stripe that ran right across his top line, and his inquisitive eyes sparkled delightfully as he approached the young horse.
“Playing with toys, all alone in the big woods.” Crevan’s voice sounded strange, his wolf’s tongue and teeth giving the words a hard, raspy tilt. “What an odd little girl you are.”
01-06-2021, 01:47 AM (This post was last modified: 01-06-2021, 01:52 AM by Persiphae.)
The skeleton was suspended, gliding in place over the frosted earth as Persiphae pulled its intangible strings. Its head moved robotically first left and then right, slow and calculated, anything but lively. She scowled faintly, the lifelike intricacies that she had been hoping for elusive as a strand of silk in the wind. Her green eyes shone a soft peridot as the dull morning sunshine injected the misty forest floor. Never once did they blink as she dug into the recesses of her memory, dissecting studies of her zoological observations and playing with the reanimated rodent before her.
Yellowed incisors clacked slowly, the jaw catching cockeyed at the hinge before sliding into place. The feeling she experienced was satisfying and correct, as righting wrongs often felt. The irony of breathing some semblance of life into something meant to be at rest was a faint tickling in the back of her mind, like the tail of a dream almost remembered.
She imagined what her subject had used the stained teeth for – chewing on berries, bark, and bird flesh. Tendrils of energy reached from her mind, testing each phalange, flexing them gently. Persiphae lowered the skeleton to the bare dirt, gripping the moist soil vicariously through the tiny digits. The thought of five toes was so queer and foreign it almost made her laugh.
The filly had been too enraptured with her studies to notice the scent of a wolf had permeated the chilled air. It was only when she heard the shrubs clawing at the silence did she freeze. The skeletal rodent stretched as if an electric current had run through it, extended to its limits until it stood rigid. Her ears flicked backwards and she laid the bones to rest, relaxing them to dormancy against the dark loam almost ceremoniously. The tail curled neatly beside the body like a dog before a warm hearth.
Slowly she turned to face him, eyes wide and inscrutable as she beheld the white wolf before her. An edge of instinctual fear warmed her ears, though his body language eased her tension. A gentle smile lit her face like a pebble settling in a lake, a microexpression conveying both just enough and volumes.
“Is the dog coming after his bone?” She jested, tilting her head and blinking once. “Surely odd is the new normal in Beqanna, no?”
Mentally she traced the navy dorsal stripe that stained his coat, feeling for a spine and receiving metallic resistance in return. She had never known if the living could feel her scanning - it was just another sense humming in the background as she beheld the world.
A slight furrow twitched on her brow, curiosity rippling through her at this unusual find.
Once, many moons ago, Crevan remembered sneaking up another little filly who was probably grown now. Back then he’d been living in Sylva, a hungry understudy of the more ill-inclined horses who took up residence there in order to sow the seeds of terror throughout Beqanna. His task had been to capture another horse, and Crevan had taken his duties seriously and to heart, finding a lone filly quickly enough since he’d bent all of his time and energy to fulfilling the needs of an alpha-figure. He remembered how the blue-skinned girl with a shock of purple hair had been alone in a dried-out creek bed, and how she’d turned (surprisingly expectant of his arrival) to blast him off his paws with a beam of white-hot light.
The young are full of vigor, and the old are stuffed with useless nonsense. He’s somewhere in between, eternally.
“Oh? And what would you know about ‘normal’?” Crevan challenged her with a mockingly surprised grin. He sat abruptly, thumping the ground once or twice with his tail.
“Nothing, I’d expect. In the same vein nothing you’d expect lies underneath my skin.” The shapeshifter tilted his head curiously, ears perked. He wondered if she’d tried to string him along like her little macabre pet; Crevan hadn’t felt a thing, if she had. His limited understanding of the world and magic within it reasoned that what worked on the dead could not, inversely, work on the living (and vice versa).
“Curious to see it?” He tempted her, straightening his head. He had, more than once. Seen the silver metal of his bones exposed before the skin could knit itself tight and clean again. To show the little puppeteer would be an instant’s worth of pain on his end. Worth it, he reasoned, to keep the young stranger entertained.
