Locke
Not many would classify being stared down like prey in a dark and quite wood as entertainment, but Locke was ever an optimist in situations which seemed to call into question his mortality. A pervasive, obstinate optimist. It is so easy to smile in the face of death when it seems still a stranger.
So it was easy for the boy to grin back at this wolf of the forest when she tosses his quib back at him in a dry tone. The youth took the signs where he could find them as he tried, and struggled to place her. As entertaining as it was to have a puzzle, the ticking tail seemed like a warning meter as to the consequences of his wrong guesses. A clock counting down to what end he did not yet know. Her expression remained a confounding mixture of frozen cold threat and avarice for something he held- but what? Yet as the boy begins to unravel it, he smells it. The forest was...more humid? Darker? As she cuts back at him again and he moves Locke sweeps his eyes over the carnage of life around him.
Wrong. It was wrong.The rotting leaves, wilted grasses all gaining the slime of decay and sinking into a weeping melancholy of muted browns and blacks. Magic. Must be.The emotion she brandished upon her face with a smile left Locke unable to do much more than maintain his guise, as he resisted the urge to look down and check it was only the forest floor feeling the life leeched from its roots. The spike of cold surging through his nerves the young liar wrestles with, spreading it with the rest to soothe his nature and brand his body with bravado of an acrobat upon a high wire. If the high wire was on fire and death was creeping through every height. Keeping his head up and false face on, the youth marked his potential for one day mastering the skill of illusion.
His payment for all his effort was not an answer to his question, to which the creature (for horse and unicorn simply no longer seemed to correctly classify her), earned a flick of Locke’s own tail. A fracturing of the glass which he had crafted so strongly before, or so he thought. The young thief tilts his head, watching, but nothing more comes. It was a solid real request- no command. Memories pull feelings of frustration, bitterness, and merge into a war with the ever present desire to simply know. The desire to take the world and place it all within his grasp for him to manipulate at will. The feelings of a youth wanting to make changes on the board of his world, but forced to sit on the sidelines. The limitations cause hesitation, until the potency of the memories drain with the inhale of decay and musk. Real. Here. No longer on the sidelines. And a furiously wicked gleam comes into the youth’s eyes at a hunger being finally fed, at an animal at last being loosed to feed on what it had always been forced to watch from a distance.
So the boy answers fully. “They are hiding or gone, or perhaps never where.” Head shifts to the path where he had tread, and down its trail, where it spread wide enough to allow a parting in the canopy and a blanket of snow. “There are few tracks, and never are they straight.” Locke then looks up to the canopy. “It is not normal. No birds, or sounds of life.” The last word brings his gaze back to the creature, the one standing in the center of all things wrath and ruin. “It is dead.” The words were weighted, slow and leaning to nudge she who took what he witnessed through his senses of observations and made visibly real before his very hooves. Puzzlement and fear may have twisted and morphed by his preconceived emotions about commands such as she gave, but the idea that there was a creature causing the difference in this wood rose in his mind as a real entity, no longer fantasy. Dead god ghosts simply became death bringing queens, and though the boy did not shy from her (in that twisted way, it thrilled the young heart), Locke wondered if maybe he might soon prefer the figurative dead god ghost to the very real reaper before him.
OOC:: @Thana This is turning fun! =D
