#sparingiscaring

If you’d like to learn more about them and thier dorky antics, click here!

She sniffed at the air again. Once, twice - wet nose glistening in the dim moonish light. Rising discontent growled low in the back of her throat, her lips pulling back into an anxious snarl. Something was not right. There was no scent of flesh nor fire in the air, no clumsy trundling-sounds of human hunters. But there was something there, nonethless. A subtle shifting in the eddies of sound and smell that she knew. A presence defined by absence; the ripples of a claw trailing in water. A predator, she pointedly did not think. For there was nothing in this place that could rightly call her prey - and she was more than capable of proving it. She stopped again, closing out all sight, all sound, all scent - these were worthless to her. There was only the cold mud beneath her paws, the pounding beneath her skin, the subtle wind through her fur. And-

Her muscles tensed. Her eyes snapped open as her neck snapped upwards, blood freezing in her veins.

There, in the hazy firmament above, a false-star winked.

She began to run, claws gouging the marsh-mud, adrenaline burning in her ears, the world both blurring and sharpening. Her ear twitched again at the wind-rustle of reeds somewhere behind her. Her pursuer was no longer bothering with stealth. Pursuer. The very thought made her entire essence boil with anger, with outrage. She was the predator, the apex, the incarnation of a thousand fears. Man-hunter, all-hunter, her white coat a beacon of superiority. She did not slink and hide in the grey mud as her lessers did, she was not a marsh-rabbit to be chased. But instinct drove her where pride could not, the little-whisper of death saying not here, not now, not in this way. Under the open roof was not the place to fight this enemy. It was gaining, behind her - but her intent was not to escape.

Logs. Briars. Brackish mud-pits. All of them whipped by, the treacherous landscape as solid as stone beneath her practiced feet, the paths etched into her very sinew, her destination blazing in her mind's eye. The trees all around began to thicken - sun-starved, salt-choked, revenants grasping with petrified razor claws for light long-gone. She could feel the pursuing wind of death behind her begin to slack; settling into the silent slinking prowl of a predator preparing an ambush. She was not safe. But its primary advantage had been eliminated. Her breath evened, she sharpened her eyes and her ears once more, her movements tense but liquid as she slowed from a run to a trot to a slow, careful, circling pace. This was to be a contest of tooth and claw, now - and in this, she knew she had no equal.

Stillness. Silence. Barest twinkles of blue false-starlight glimmering off the stagnant pools. Twisted shapes all around, black on black. Tension. Anticipation. Blood beneath skin, tendons and bone and flesh tightened to their snapping point, waiting, aching, with bated breath for the signal to release, to lash, to kill.

A shift in the air. A twitch of the ear.

Motion. Tearing. Ripping. Spearing. Sundering. Pain. So much pain. Nothing but pain. Gradations of pain, throbbing and piercing and burning, pain in a thousand colors and textures and shapes, a whole world rendered in pain, an image more clear and agonizingly detailed than any that sight or sound or smell could render. Claw and tooth sunken in yielding flesh, yielding red, so much red, red on black clouding and swirling among the twinkling blue above, red dripping off leathery black colder than death that screamed when her claws rendered it asunder

Breath. In. Out. In. Out. In. In. Out. Guarded. Circling. Searching. Waiting for the moment when the other's fear would overcome pain. Blood, flowing freely, red and black and not-black, dripping into the pools of false-sky. Twisted shapes, black on black, prowling, star-eyes not false but real, burning with fire older than this place, older than her, old as the freezing and ancient winds-between. Star-eyes, flickering with just a hint of…

She grinned. Oh, it didn't know, did it? She kept grinning, skin stretching, fangs growing, red tongue playing like a serpent across the perfect silver moon-crescent of her smile. Foolish is the hunter who does not know what they hunt. She let herself unfurl, claws sharpening, limbs lengthening, a nightmarish parody of that which she pretended to be. Foolish is the hunter who mistakes the territory for the map. Her eyes danced with a fire of their own, something wild and joyous and violant, old as the first predator and the first prey. Foolish is the hunter who mistakes reality for dream. She can smell it wafting from her enemy now, oozing, noxious, delicious. Fear. Good. It was correct to be afraid. To be afraid was its rightful and natural place, the rightful place of all prey, the rightful place of all those who dreamt in viric and violant of claw and fang and things beyond the edge of firelight, of those who had built fragile walls of glass and silver but had never truly forgotten what walked beyond them, had never surrendered the fear that it might walk through them - and so had made their fears come true.

She lurched forward with impossible grace, rearing up on two legs now, hook-claws latching, tearing the beast in two, its upper half flung aside while its lower one continued to squirm. Tooth and claw and wing and rage, familiar now, and slowing, laboring, easily countered. Vicious but pathetic. Cornered prey, fighting not for dominance but for survival. Her limbs were bowed willows one moment, ironwoods the next, turning aside its offensive with ease born not from practice but from sheer, unrivaled superiority. Its strikes, once so fluid, so powerful, grew clumsy and languid. Her fangs tore through its hide like lazy fingers through water, bloody ripples tearing it apart and apart and apart. And then, at last, came the decisive moment - the one she savored most. The slackening of the muscle. The intake of breath, preparing for the last exhale. The moment when hate, resistance and even fear died, leaving nothing in its place but submission. She reared her head back, jaws opening wider than a wolf's could, wider than anything, wide as the yawning gulf between stars, between mirrors, between life and death. A moment of exultation before the final blow.

A twitch of the ear.

Something in her defeated prey's eyes. Something from the trees behind her. Twin revelations, a moment too late, realized in a single instant.

Agony, white, endless, stretching from her back and across infinity to protrude from her chest, death-rasp of bone on bone. Claws and teeth piercing her chest, her face, her eyes, all its weariness gone, forcing her backwards, the harpoon withdrawn but the agony remaining, flowing from her wound, dripping onto the ground, ichor mixing with mud. A slash, another, blind, misaimed, clumsy, effortlessly dodged, vicious but pathetic. It struck at her leg and shoved at her chest, it speared her foot and turned away her claw, effortless, fluid, a synchrony of violence, as muscle and sinew. Two parts becoming whole again - no, that wasn't right, two parts that had never separated at all. A last buffeting of wings, a wind of death, she wasn't strong enough, leg buckling, weight shifting as she fell across the event horizon, down into the mud, her rightful place.