BETTER THE WIND, THE SEA, THE SALT
than this, this, this
than this, this, this
The night is poignant with the smell of death.
Fresh death, like this, is visceral in the same way as crushed grass. The odour nearly blooms, as flowers do, a question at first and then a hard confirmation. There is only one thing that smells like this, fluids and fear, the result of things that were within now finding themselves out.
It draws her like a shark to blood; and perhaps that is an innate part of her now, an animalistic and primitive urge. Boudika finds it irresistible, and in this vein of thought she no longer understands the point of resistance. Her blood is full of vital magic; her blood sings in the night. She pads through the forest on a Bengal tiger’s silent paws. It is more than donning a skin, however; she is the tiger and the tiger’s urges; the well-practiced pause at a distant snapping twig, the curling Flehmen response to the scent that draws her nearer, nearer to the source. She is the supple dip into a prowling crouch, her shoulder blades jutting beneath loose skin and she is the frozen moment, paw upheld, tail flicking. She is the night that goes silent around her, a huntress. She is the dark stripes and burning orange moving again, and then she is the movement itself, swift and confident through the trees that become her so, so well.
Beneath the canopy, everything is dark. The chattering of night creatures becomes a blanket; but whenever Boudika enters a space, everything stills to a pinpoint focus on tigress. Boudika is consumed by her pursuit of the scent; this is the furthest from the sea she has been in longer than she knows how to fathom. But the forest welcomes her not so differently; even the boughs of the pines whisper like the sea does, when the wind rushes through them. Beneath their thick canopy, the moonlight barely penetrates; she is in Caligo’s world, a world of darkness, a world of night, on the trail of blood.
Eventually she finds it. The deer has been felled by a pack of wolves. When the pack notices her presence, they stop their feasting. In other forms, she might have only seen the floating, gleaming orbs of their eyes; but in this one she sees their full shapes, her eyes luminescent, her eyes made for this type of night-seeing. But Boudika is no scavenger. She is merely entranced by their presence, by their unconscious, natural reactions. They form a massed unit against the tigress, edging closer, and she does not bother to engage in conflict. The alpha female snarls in Boudika’s direction; the tigress lifts a lip in response, and turns to leave.
In doing so, she unconsciously lifts her head toward the breeze. Her lip curls; another Flehmen response. A new scent wafts through the night. Unfamiliar. Strange. But softer, marked by the sea, and the plains, and the woodsmoke of civilisation. Yet Boudika does not recognise it, and this raises her hackles as she melts into the forest of the night.
Boudika pursues the scent in earnest, not lackadaisically or out of mere curiosity. This is her land, by extension of Denocte, by extension of her place among the citizens of the Court. She is a protector, a guardian, a Champion—and as she lopes hurriedly through the mountain slopes in pursuit of the odour, she discovers the scent to be trailing and haphazard, clearly directionless. Boudika discovers the urge within her now is primal, possessive, beyond anything she has ever known; land is life, territory is everything, and trespassers are a threat to the most integral part of one’s being. Eventually Boudika catches a glimpse of a horse she has never seen before through the trees, wandering haphazard in the night.
The tigress is very still.
Her hunter’s instincts emerge first and foremost; her stomach is a pit of hunger, and the kelpie she has become hungers for this particular flesh in a way that nothing else ever quite satisfies—
Boudika follows the mare.
Boudika follows and follows. Until, eventually, the tigress reaches out a quiet thought from the darkness:
“Are you so very lost?” Boudika’s lips do not move; the one way telepathy is her only way of communicating when not in her first-born shape. Boudika does not mean for her tone to be so menacing; but as a tiger, she is nothing save a tiger. She drifts nearer the lone mare; a feline shape at the edge of the trees, where Caligo's light falls soft as a whisper. “There are many menacing things in the woods at night.”
@Elena "speaks" space for notes
