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Paying a Call
There Goes the Neighborhood
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Native Ground
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Through the Looking Glass
Plucked
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Solitude
Clipping a Raven's Wings
When Once We Were Mortal
Neighbor of the Beast
The Hunter, Dawn
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It always started the same way.. with only the crudest of calendars and her sharp senses to guide her, she always knew when that devil moon was approaching. The hairs would rise on the back of her neck, in hot flashes, for the entire day preceding, and she would flinch every time someone touched her. After the last incident in Italy, when Otto had betrayed her trust so cruelly, she never again bothered to have herself restrained. It was no difficult task to carry herself away from camp for the night, to indulge in the blood hunt, rather than denying herself the sating of her hunger. And whether it was on the marshy fields of the Netherlands, or in the thick forests of her homeland, she would hide herself away, to ride out the sunset curled into a ball, arms clasped around her knees, rocking herself on the ground for hours, bracing herself and burrowing in the shadows until the moon began to swell in the sky. No matter how she tried to predict, she was never ready for the precise moment when her spine began to shift, the sickening crack of vertebrae as they shrunk down into place, the new growth of coarse hair that would prickle to life over every inch of her skin. But the most agonizing part was the hideous contortion of her lower limbs as they shrivelled into haunches, sweeping her humanity away in the process, and the straining of her skin as the once-aristocratic line of her jaw burst out, stretching into a taut muzzle, consuming every trace of her genteel beauty, all but the forest green of her eyes. And her hands - those slender, elegant fingertips - knotted and malformed beyond use, then withering into paws. Unwinding from her fetal curl, her twisted lupine body would settle into a natural crouch, and she would lift that cursed muzzle to the moon, baring gnarled fangs in a growl feral and tortured, singing of rage and blood hunger. No longer the essence of blossoming womanhood, she would go abroad then, joining other creatures so foul that they must otherwise hide from the light of day. Through the seemingly ceaseless moon after moon, she did experience a death of sorts - the slow rotting away of any kindness that might have existed in her. Torment and ugliness burrowed under the very foundation of her heart, and burgeoned up from within, laying down a new paving of cold, hard forbearance. By the time the first century had passed, all that hardness was mirrored in the refinement of her facial curves, and the growing hint of dark dementia in her eyes. |
