OOC: Word count: 303.


IC:
Tendons fired. Saraqael felt the warm satisfaction of their snap but did not have time to see the pretty curtain of shimmering glitter she left in her wake. Her front and back legs crossed each other as she charged after the rabbit, leaving twin sets of tracks that were nearly on top of one another. While her bird's chest heaved with the scorch of iced air, the prey searched for sanctuary and found none. The tiny coyote had been careful to set her pursuit in the direction largely void of the pits dug out by the vermin. It was damned.

The pleasant heat was turning quickly to acidic fire as the sprint progressed but she was on her meal's heels. And then she was upon it, teeth flashing, seeking purchase in the lapine's flesh. Her jaw trapped closed irrevocably. She heard and and felt the crack of bones, shattering and raucous in her ears. The pallid coyote thought she could feel the thing's heartbeat pulsing in her canines, though she must have been imagining it because the rabbit was dead, its ribcage crushed to pieces by her unforgiving maw.

With blood melting hot pools into the uppermost level of snow, the Lupus settled immediately and began to eat. She had decided earlier to give up on the fur because it was not the desired white of the rabbit's larger cousin, the snow hare. Also, sparing skin and fuzz was always a hassle in quadruped form. It was relaxing in a strange way to tear with abandon. As its belly fell open, as easily as cutting soft butter, organs steamed and the stink of guts reawakened her tangled knot of a stomach to hunger.

Now black and white and red, the little vicious thing feasted, blind and vulnerable to the rest of her surroundings.

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OOC: Weeeiiiiird post. X_x Word Count: 1009.

IC:
The small creature's face had been stained bloody at her muzzle and around her cheeks, leaving her crimson and black, the colors of death. Her pristine pelt, previously an angelic white, had been marred but not irreparably. A good scrubbing could take care of anything she threw at it, including her own super-concentrated dyes. Water was a universal solvent, a primary destroyer of the other elements and any compounds composed by man or Luperci. She had seen great waves sheer cliff faces to rubble, leaky faucets turn iron to useless speckles of rust, spilled drink rot food to mush. Salted, it was even more damaging. The ocean laid claim to grand vessels, rendering them listless, floating particles in an ever-changing body of bacteria and shit. Saraqael sometimes wondered how many of man's grandest inventions had been reduced to their very basic parts, charged particles or quarks, things she did not know the names for but imagined as tiny, invisible-to-the-naked eye bits of whatever. Did man, too, float in disassembled base materials out there somewhere, waiting for an impossibly perfect recombination, or a grant architect, to piece him back together? And if man stepped from the depths again, whole, with his volumes of intelligence and generations of knowing, would her Luperci brethren strike him down out of ignorance, or fear? In her heart, she thought they would simply eat him alive before he could utter a syllable of great knowledge from his big brain. Perhaps that was the way it should have been, too, for Luperci to exist without homo sapiens. Her freakish and glorious species did not deserve to have any more handed to them. They had already begun from the middle up, stealing mankind's remnants like riches from an open grave. They were thieves, robbers, and she would not have had it any other way. Only the clever and lucky survived.

The heat of freshly-killed meat seared her throat which had been hoarse with chill from breathing in the frigid air. It slithered down her gullet, painting her red, veined insides redder, to settle weightily in her gut, filling the void of her hunger. The girl had gone so long without eating that the satisfaction of fullness was just as painful as prolonged emptiness had been, but a primal need demanded she tear and shred and consume anyway. Pain was a part of life, maybe even its best indicator, so Saraqael reveled in the clenching ache of her organ as it stretched to accommodate what she willed. She often mused that when she stopped hurting, then she would know she was truly dead, just as her prey, which was no longer capable of feeling anything. Winter eked all remnants of life out of it and she watched it go in streaks of silver steam between frenzied bites. Those dissipating curls would eventually stop, unlike the smoke from the heat of her breath which had beating heart, throbbing lungs, and pulsing veins to fuel it, hopefully for years, or until a hungry something decide to turn her into a hunk of fresh meat.

The first lick of sound against her erect bat ears thrust her into the mindset that today was that day, that she was about to be eaten by someone bigger and stronger, or at least toyed with until death for fun. Droplets of metallic-tasting blood flew from her soaked face as she twisted her body in the air to face the stranger. The Lupus's white hackles shot up like conjured icicles from a wizard's swiftly cast spell. At the same time, a harsh screech battered the hillside and bounced off of the trees, dusting snow from pine branches. At fourteen pounds and in her smallest form, she was at her least friendly and her most afraid. Saraqael was too busy instinctively backpedaling, abandoning her tactfully hunted kill, to take in the neutral words of the woman that approached. They were a pair, a simple, simple statement and question preceded by a greeting, but whoever she was, she was not supposed to be there. The sky had spit her out to land directly behind or, or she had stepped through the space-time continuum to this place where she was never meant to appear with the sole intention of scaring the teensy coyote's brains out. Mission fucking successful. The skittish thing just breathed, eyes as wide and round as chicken eggs. Her body looked contracted into itself accordion style, her middle refusing to unfold to her normal, still unimposing length.

As she recovered, she cataloged everything there was to notice about another person. Golden eyes and a vermilion nose stuck out first. Perhaps it was only a coincidence but Clover had a similar coloration in her face. That was where any evidence of kinship ended. The dark woman was cast completely in shadows, from cast-iron gray to slate, all the way to abyssal black, all glossy and sleek. Her face was even more pinched and slender than her own, making the ears look longer and larger if such a thing were possible. She, too, was leggy with tiny paws, a long tail, and round eyes. Some kind of jackal, by the looks of her, but there was a chance she was not purely bred. The coyote was not as good at identifying her distant cousins. When she finally calmed herself, she did not move back towards her meal but unfurled, scroll-like, where she was, her two ends pulling outward to reveal her center. Sitting in the snow, her long tail draped protectively across her paws. Her nerves were still taut, adrenaline surging inside of her, and it was all she could do not to bolt from the memory of trepidation and the most current sting of utter embarrassment. And she called herself Inferni. “I am new,” she confirmed. The scent of the land barely clung to her coat. “My name is Saraqael Destroying Angel Kanga.” The girl was too petrified to bow her head in the event that the coal mistress deigned to take it off.

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