EVERY HEART'S A HURRICANE, EVERY SOUL A STARLIT SEA
Sharper.
It is as if everything is honed by some invisible force, as if she is now a blade whetted to a new edge. The air is more poignant, colours brighter—so bright, she has to blink them away—and sounds more austere, more telling. A voice is a song. A whisper is a shout. Music is harmonious, intoxicating, brazen and resounding and echoing and rising, rising, rising. Scents assault her nostrils with stories, and there are now shapes in her mind that form to tell them—she can envision their source just from different tangs of the odour.
She runs, and she is faster—faster, she thinks, than she has ever been. Boudika is quicksilver sleek through the ragged terrain, pushing past the prairie and into the mountains, wondering how far she can go before the sea calls her back.
(What kind of question is that? Boudika already feels the seductive pull, the reminder that the only freedom she needs is in the deep, dark, beneath the waves—)
Yet, she feels a hunger she has never known. It gnaws at her gut and demands more. More what? Her teeth, sharp against her inner mouth, are still unfamiliar. They cut at her lips and tongue, and the iron of her own blood makes her feel frenzied, feverish, halfway to another state. She runs faster, and suddenly, her flaring nostrils fill with a distinctive, heady scent and it screams life, life, life.
She wonders if it is so very different from battle-killing.
Her thoughts, however, come in abstractly. An animal part of her, dominant until now, has awoken and rages—it demands her to run faster, faster, and there are the cache of deer that burst free from the undergrowth as she charges through them, and there is the sickly-sweet scent of rot, the deer that is too-slow, the lameness of an injured leg preventing it to leap from her crushing jaws as they split draconic, wide, reaching and then closing.
Boudika retracts her blow at the last moment. Her teeth click together, and the deer escapes. She thinks:
this is nothing like battle-killing.
The water horse comes to a stuttering, halting stop. She is breathing heavily, and what fills her senses is the fact the sea has followed her. It is in each inhalation; it is in the way her nostrils draw the odour of brine and fish and the crisp, crisp scent of the oceanside. There is no ocean here except for what lingers on her skin, in her hair, in her mind. Boudika listens to the birds and stares up at the changing leaves, marvelling at... at...
At the way life flows through her. There is a snap then, a branch breaking underfoot--and she starts, ears erect, nostrils flaring. All of her movements are feral, abrupt. But what leaves her mouth are words. "Whose there?" They sound nearly accusatory, but there is a part of her, new and wild and sharper than a blade, feelings a longing open up in her like a chasm. A longing for what, she does not know, but it speaks to her in the tongues of ancients, a drumbeat dance of her heart, that says more, more, more.
@Raymond
ooc things
