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
