11-09-2009, 01:10 AM
Quite all right. It's been a while since we've threaded. :3
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He had found it far in the steppes in the northern part of Inferni: a cow skull. Although not quite what Inferni lined its borders with, Hezekiah thought it seemed reasonable to add to their collection. Bleached white and weathered from what was likely years of being half-buried in a hillside with grass, he had painstakingly pulled mud and earthworms from it, cleaned it up, and had started to transport it towards the borders as though it were a Fabergé egg rather than some old cattle head. But nevertheless, it was his way of contributing to the clan in some small way, although he had seemingly procured one of its handy ranks as it were. For the time being, he hardly thought of himself deserving of it. But he was becoming better acquainted with those around him, even if it seemed a slow process in hindsight. His solitary nature, his self-sufficiency, it wasn’t going to go away overnight. It wouldn’t ever go away, but he did make himself more social.
As the visual markers of the borders came into view, he started to consider where along the line he would attempt to set the skull. He had seen how Anselm had gone about the order and though it had not been committed to memory, it didn’t seem too hard to do. Plus there were always places along the pikes where skulls had either been taken or knocked down and smashed, so surely he’d find a place in no time. All of that was going well until he had spotted something very out of place against the early-winter scenery. Though designed of the earth, the towering form of a wolf was really hard to miss for someone who had been warned time and time again to avoid them.
Even though every bone in his body told him to drop the skull in his hand and turn tail to alert the rest of the clan, Hezekiah was consumed by two things. The first of those was an instinctive reasoning to protect the home that had given him so much for so little in return; the second was an innate curiosity of a creature he had only seen from either afar, dead, or not at all in reality. She did not seem aware of him just yet, clearly taken by the arrangement of skulls. The objects in her hands also intrigued him, but the distance and the resulting assortment of landscape between them obscured their identity from him. His grip tightened around one of the remaining horns of the skull, his body still as he waited for her to move in a little closer before closing him an angle nearly behind her himself.
And when he was close enough, he made a clean issuance of warning quiet and firm.
“Don’t take another step.”
Hezekiah had no idea whether or not he could intimidate her, given the difference of size between them, but he unknowingly preyed upon her apprehension in the same way his father had done him so many times before. Halo had gotten that notion across to him with a simple stare; Gabriel did it with his presence alone; Anselm with size. Hezekiah had none of those things to back him up and he knew without a doubt that a cow skull in hand would do little to defend himself if she turned on him with teeth and claws. But he did have Inferni at just a call away. Had he not been uneducated on the fact that the region was privy to travellers who knew nothing of Inferni, he would have been hoping that she wasn’t ignorant and unaware of what she was walking up to, instead of immediately being met with hostility.