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  • Beqanna

    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]  i was upside down from the outside in
    #1
    Though he arrived on the broad dark wings of an eagle, Malik soon traded the avian shape for one more adept at stealth. He becomes a leopard, pelt as black as a midnight. The glowing, iridescent feathers around his neck and shoulders disappear into his black fur, and he slips into the darkness of the forest.

    Malik had seen the herd of deer from overhead, and he follows them now using his sense of smell instead. They have finished their browsing and now are heading back to where they will rest for the day. It would be better to wait and ambush them, but his stomach growls loudly as if to encourage the riskier - but faster - alternative. The leopard picks up its speed, moving through the grass that would have reached over his shoulders were he wearing his equine shape.

    The wind is in his favor, and he sees the flicking tail of the lagging doe disappear into the grass ahead. Licking his lips, Malik grows taller and broader, exchanging his quick-footed shape for one with more brute force. As a large black bear, the shape-shifter thunders forward toward his prey.

    Even though the herd bolts the moment they hear him, Malik still manages to leap onto the straggler. His forefeet slam into the deer’s side, knocking the doe to the ground. His muddy left foot pins its head and his right is just behind the shoulder. It thrashes and frees its off foreleg to batter at his sides, but Malik hardly feels it. Instead, he is ripping her open by the throat, feeling the warm spray of blood, and watching as the inevitability of her death blossoms in her brown eyes.

    The doe is bleeding out in front of him, and he feels his stomach growling, unsatisfied by a few warm swallows of blood. Malik rips open the white belly of the deer to better reach the organs. Those he tears free and swallows hungrily, staining the length of his white blaze to instead a brilliantly crimson red, and adding a ruddy glaze to the rest of his dark face.

    When the best of the deer is consumed he pulls away, licking his lips. He’s not full, but the raging of his hunger no longer clouds his thoughts entirely. He blinks his bicolored eyes, glancing into the waving grass around him, and slowly begins to make his way toward where he can hear the low murmur of the river above the whispering autumn wind. Once there, he means to wash most of the blood away, and seek out his next meal.

    Malik can hear the sound of his mother’s voice as he rolls in the shallow water, feeling the rough gravel and the cold liquid wash away the blood. ‘We should only do it when we’re hungry or when it’s absolutely necessary’. Should he go back and finish the rest of the meat of the doe? Or hunt something new, something warm and fleeing? Malik frowns, and wades out of the water. As he shakes himself dry, he shifts back to his equine shape - tall, dark, with a pair of glowing horns and a deep frown.
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    #2
    When the cat works himself back out of the water a kelpie girl stands at the top, looking down, blinking slow.

    She watched him before and has been since he spooked the herd of meaty cervids she loves to pluck from. She follows them, they follow the grass; something she can relate to on both ends. Today was a kill day… But no, no it’s not. And it’s solely because of this one, this leopard she looks onto, emerging from the cold water washed of the blood.

    She’s clearly not starving, with her healthy belly and clean shiny fur. She blinks her mismatched eyes and twitches her lips moving swiftly out of his path and walk in a half circle around him. It seems like a good time to say something but she doesn’t. The curious kelpie flashes her dimly glowing teeth, sharp and daunting, but hidden pretty well in her equine mouth. She’s capable of opening her jaw enormously, to decapitate a deer isn’t much hard work, but you wouldn’t know it immediately looking at her.

    “You took a rather scrawny one.” She tips both ears back and then slants just one to the leopard, looking down, stopping a few feet off his shoulder, somewhat behind. “Very unstealthy.” she smirks.

    @Malik
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    #3
    Though his dark mouth has been cleansed of visible blood, Malik can still taste it at the back of his throat, can still smell the thick metallic scent that lingers in the cold autumn air. It hides the scent of the kelpie, and he doesn’t see her until he has shaken the water from his thick feline coat, and taken his first steps forward on equine hooves.

    The kelpie, glittering and grinning, is greeted with immediate suspicion.

    Malik’s dark face twists into a deeper scowl, taking in the stranger’s appearance as well as her mocking words. Rich deep brown, with golden hair and long blue legs. She says he took a scrawny one, as though a healthy deer would take a position at the rear of the herd, and accuses him of not being stealthy.

    He’d caught the thing, hadn’t he?

    Though not unaccustomed to critique, the dark-haired young stallion does not appreciate it from a stranger, and that is quite clear in his response: “Do you offer hunting lessons to every passerby, or am I especially unfortunate today?”

    @Claudia
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