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+---- Thread: [P] to hint of malign pursuit, (/showthread.php?tid=5761)
to hint of malign pursuit, - Thana - 11-05-2020
For the vultures, the winter in the desert had not been kind. Horses did not stray into the Mors as they did in the summer when the desert did not plummet into freezing temperatures. The peace, or at least the illusion of peace, had mortals lingering in the city instead of the wilds. And those that did stray into the desert did so in packs of horses formed like wolves instead of herds.
Now that the spring has come, they are each gaunt in starving in a way that the mother’s could not explain away to their starving chicks. Territory has become a brutal and violent endeavor that has each turkey vulture lording over their meger kills like lions and gods instead of birds. Any fight, now, ends in death with insides and feathers strewn across the sand.
As the days, and the nights carry on, more and more tumbleweeds of carnage blow and billow across the lands.
Last night a dawn citizen did not return from a foolish foray into the desert. The colt’s mother had come to Thana for help-- because it is fear that causes one to seek a fearful thing, a terrible thing, to chase back the monster that suddenly seems so new and strange. Far better, Thana had thought as she watched the mother crumble to tears at her knees, the monster in your city than the ones outside it.
And so, in the mad moonlight on the desert that is both unlike the forest’s and so very like it, Thana finds herself wandering the Mors once more. At her side Eligos walks, with a wound she had cut into him as a lure, dripping golden ichor into the holes left behind in the wake of them. The tumbleweeds of carnage fester in her wake as she uses magic to beckon the swirling flock of vultures closer, and closer, and closer to the promise of a feast.
@Lucinda
RE: to hint of malign pursuit, - Lucinda - 11-07-2020
T
here is a part of her that's returned to Solterra to seek out the one who poisoned her. It's been some time, and the poison hadn't been that bad, but it's always been in the back of her mind that she never handled it properly. Of course, Lucinda mostly came back to look for Vercingtorix. There is something about the darkness of his soul that keeps luring her back in and making her hunger for more. She wants to see those parts of him that reflect her own so they can create wonderful chaos together.Soon, soon.
For now she is hunting, although there is not much to hunt in the vast empty desert. Abraxia flies above to look out for anything that might be worth tracking. After some time, there is a smell on the wind that lures them both. The dragon warns her of a mare and a creature walking up ahead.
Then there is the circle of vultures, but there is enough distance where the birds won't be spooked yet by their presence. She can tell her bonded is looking at them with hunger in her eyes, but the vultures are more interested in something else. They are flying lower as if they are flying towards the mare and her companion. Now the kelpie is intrigued.
"You two must be dead things walking. At least, I'm not sure why else vultures would have so much interest in you here," she says as she comes to face the other mare. Lu notices the blade where the tip of her tail should be- a valuable weapon for sure. Then, there is her companion who is unlike any creature she's seen before and that sweet, sweet smell of a wound in his skin. It's what makes the kelpie feel hungry now.
"Although I must admit, your friend there has a delightful smell to his blood," Lucinda says, her lips curving to a smirk. There is a look in her eyes that is both wicked and deadly, but she hasn't decided what she wants to do yet.
Then, the vultures start descending.
i wanna taste the way that you bleed, oh
you're my kill of the night
@Thana
RE: to hint of malign pursuit, - Thana - 11-09-2020
There is a beauty (or at least Thana calls it beauty) to the savagery of the desert. Each dune rises around her like an organ of the earth laid bare for the crows and the vultures. The horizon waivers frail and paper-thin all around her until there is nothing but sand, and sky, and the sound of carrion wings curling tornado wide above her head. Something in her heart, her never-full heart, leaps at the brutality around her. She thinks, just before the mare lands before her, that there is nothing in this place that does not belong to death, and decay, and suffering.
And perhaps it is more of a knowing than a thinking when she turns her gaze, her fat with the desert gaze, to the pegasus and her dragon. Her look turns to a smile devoid of teeth but with all the hunger of them. “We could be.” Together both Thana and Eligos turn to watch the dragon circling above like another carrion bird searching for a corpse to feast on.
But corpses do not tilt their horns towards a pegasus that smells like the sulfur tide, and corpses do not feel the gravitational pull of hunger in their bellies as a want sparks to need. Corpses do not cleave lines in themselves to draw the scavengers closer, and closer, like fish to a net. Corpses do not let the smile in their eyes unfold to a silent baring of teeth and wrath.
Corpses do not feast.
The vultures swoop in, some slow enough that Thana can almost feel the weight of their feast the night before, towards them. Her need sparks into something else, something deeper and more hollow than need. It feels like a blackhole has opened up in the center of her when Eligos leaps up to drag a carrion bird to the ground.
“Would that make you a vulture?” The black hole in her belly whispers the words like a mere flash of violence that lives no longer than the time it takes a star to die. And she does not look to Eligos who makes no sound but devastation as he feasts on the first vulture to fall.
Even when her tailblade cleaves a wing from a vulture she does not look away from the black mare and her low-tide warning.
@Lucinda
RE: to hint of malign pursuit, - Lucinda - 11-17-2020
L
ucinda has never thought much about dead things. She typically feels no remorse when she makes a kill either for food or pleasure. As she watches this pair, she likely wouldn't feel guilty tearing them apart. There is something beautiful to the way blood looks, especially when it splatters the ground in front of her or pools slowly into water.Would that make you a vulture?
"Maybe. Are you worth eating?" she asks as the woman's beast tears apart one of the birds for his own meal. There is a flurry of feathers in his wake and panicked squawking from the other vultures as they realize what's happening. It's the kind of pursuit that brings a smile to the kelpie's face.
For now, she doesn't wish to sink her teeth into either of them. There is a predatory nature to them both and sometimes it's a quality Lu appreciates (or hates).
A vulture comes between them attempting to escape. Without hesitation, she jumps up and snaps the bird's neck with her jaws. She sinks her teeth in to let the blood flow and it tastes sweet on her tongue. Not as lovely as the other beast's would have been, most likely. Above them, Abraxia follows their lead and pursues another one of the birds for her own meal.
"What does a dead thing want from vultures?" the kelpie asks, wondering if there is something more to their presence here than just filling their stomachs. If it's for finding fun in chaos, then perhaps Lu has found good company.
i wanna taste the way that you bleed, oh
you're my kill of the night
@Thana
RE: to hint of malign pursuit, - Thana - 11-21-2020
Thana, in the time it takes for her to blink, has catalogued each muscle by the order in which she would unstring them. She has divided the chambers of the pegasus’s heart into seeds that she might scatter to the wind. Each breath, each flicker of a feather in a wing, each dragon scale glimmering like obsidian waiting to be mined, each vertebrae from which she might string together a necklace for Isolt, each tendon waiting to be turned to music: Thana has counted them all, imagined the flavor of them all and watched an eon rush through the pegasus’s rib cage like she was more canyon than flesh, and bone, and sea.
“I would devour you,” she answers in the time it takes for her to blink, “from the inside out”. Each word is a crack of bird-wing as her tail turns it into less than a memory of flight.
Eligos fills her thoughts with an image of a shark beached on the shore and the way it had both brined and rotted in the sun. And on her tongue, as she shifts her gaze to watch him lift a bloody snarl from the belly of a vulture, is not the taste of the desert but of fat salted and brined by the sea.
When the mare rips a vulture from the sky Thana does not smile at the sight of her hunger (what wendigo smiles at a bear with a hare in its mouth?). She only lifts her head away, as a wendigo would, to watch the vultures screech and flee the unappeased wrath of her vengeance.
There is no where, her look tells them, that I will not annihilate each one of you.
And that look is still in her violet eyes when she turns back to the dark mare with her darker dragon. It’s in her voice when she says, not like a promise but a prayer, “They took something that was not theirs to devour.” But her smile, as she steps towards Eligos waiting with his paw on the throat of a frantic vulture, is all prayer and promise.
@Lucinda
RE: to hint of malign pursuit, - Lucinda - 11-22-2020
I
nstead of an answer she had been expecting, the woman threatens to devour her. It makes Lucinda laugh at the idea because no one is above her. Not even this one who is dead yet very much alive at the same time. She could try and maybe Lu would let her. There is some fun in the feeling of dying when your vision starts to tunnel and the pulse inside you grows stronger, faster. The scent of blood fills your nose."That would be some entertainment," is all she says on it though because she's not so sure of it now. Not when the sea is so far away from her grasp and there is nothing but the endless sand dunes around them. From above, Abraxia cries out.
The kelpie doesn't bother to finish her meal, but instead watches with curiosity at the unicorn's beast and the way it presses a paw into the bird's throat. It's pathetically trying to escape, but it's too weak to overcome the creature's strength. Still, it lays there wide eyed and attempting to scream.
The woman says they took something and it only makes her more curious and more hungry for chaos. She steps closer to them and tilts her head. "How badly do they need to pay?"
Maybe it's not each other they need to devour, but this creature. It didn't matter so much to her what they did and why anymore. She only ever wants to consume and destroy. Maybe now she can with someone else.
i wanna taste the way that you bleed, oh
you're my kill of the night
@Thana
RE: to hint of malign pursuit, - Thana - 11-27-2020
Eligos is bored with the shadow of dragon wings blotting out the echo of vulture wings. He is bored with the sound of language instead of anguish. His attention, his furious hunger, is already following the scrambling carrion creatures. Even with his belly full of the blood of the bird that died beneath his paw (nothing, he knows, has ever survived the loss of a head), his hunger is still a tornado of a thing.
And he, like the desert and the violence that created him, wants to consume every dune, every wyrm, every ounce of life until there is nothing left.
Thana watches him go, a flurry of golden blood flying from his paws like spit from a snarl. Her own heart, her own hunger, chases after him before her body starts to follow. Promise is still an ember in her gaze turning to inferno when she starts to follow after Eligos and the tornado in his chest. “Until there is not a single feather left of the flock.” Each of her words is more violence than language, more wrath and ruin than sound. And Thana, terrible Thana, does not pause to wonder how she’s dissolved so quickly from regent to horror.
It doesn’t matter, not when she curls her tail through the torn off head (from beak to open throat) and carries it with her when she goes. The weight, and the feel of its weeping slipping like a caress through her hair settles something loose in her. The feathers of it wave in the wind like a flag of gore saying: follow me, follow me, follow me.
But Thana is too consumed by the hunt, the wrath, the tornado of Eligos that has shifted in her stomach, to pause to see if the sea-mare will follow like a fox cub to the wolf-mother.
@Lucinda
RE: to hint of malign pursuit, - Lucinda - 11-28-2020
T
he two are an odd pair, but Lucinda doesn't mind. If anything, these are the kind of creatures she prefers to be around. They understand the language she sometimes doesn't know how to put into words. It's more of an instinct, close to hunger, and she lives for it. She will kill for it.When the woman's beast has destroyed the one vulture, he is off to hunt the others that have tried to settle farther away. She starts to follow and Lucinda does too. There is something in the way she says those words to the kelpie that invokes a fire in her. A desire, even. Her eyes are alight when the mare uses her tail as the spear to hold up the vulture's head as a war flag. She smiles, her teeth already full of blood and feathers, but will gladly take more of it.
Her heart is chanting more, more, more as she goes with them. Abraxia follows from the air and the four of them sing a war song only predators know.
i wanna taste the way that you bleed, oh
you're my kill of the night
@Thana