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.
“What lies beneath that fur?”
Persiphae
@[Crevan] Thanks for your patience! : D