you act like you just saw a ghost

Kaena Lykoi · 01-10-2011, 05:41 AM

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Word Count → 768 :: Daeva Veneum, gray and black with brown eyes. Yee.

Daeva was too young to remember the humans, but her mother and father did. They were born directly in the aftermath of the virus, and they knew the humans as monsters and devils. Still, her mother's parents had been around long enough to tell stories of the times before man had turned on them. She had spent most of her life in the old warehouse, already worn and torn with signs of chaos and looting by the time the dogs had moved in. It was only rarely she left her small family there and ventured out -- the others took care of the scavenging and what little hunting they could do. It was mostly rats these days -- larger animals still did not venture into these once-urbanized areas. The dogs, however, did not know how to survive in the wilderness, and they were afraid to seek refuge elsewhere. They were not Luperci or they did not know how to shift, and they were terribly frightened of the two-legged man-canines. Those were as scary as the rare human. Daeva had never seen either beast herself, nor any of her brothers -- sometimes she thought they were stories, sometimes not.

Daeva once knew the words for what her parents were, but having little notion of breed and other things that had been important in the time of humans, she had forgotten their meaning and eventually even the words themselves. Her parents had ceased to speak them, forgetting or burying the legacy passed to them by their parents. She herself was the result of too many mixed lines to pull any single idea of her heritage -- her face had a sighthound's sharpness, but she was built rather like a wolf herself, albeit impossibly short and small. Her coat was middling length, too short and useless in truly cold weather to mirror a wolf's. Her coloring was the crowning difference between Daeva and a wolf -- she was all pale blue-gray, dashed along her back with a darker shade of charcoal that also made up the streaked, blurry mask of her face. Tufts of white accented her chest and the tip of her tail. Her ears stood mostly erect, although the tips of them fell forward. Most of her brothers had fully erected ears and longer noses -- they could hear and track worlds better than Daeva, but it was never made an issue between them.

Competition was irrelevant in their harsh world -- despite the gloomiest of surroundings, Daeva and her family had something of a happy home. They were a tightly-knit group and fully supportive of one another. On the rare occasion they found a dog in the midst of the city, they took them in for at least a night. Few stayed very long, but a few had remained long enough to insure their blood had not begun to go stale. The scarcity of resources was forever present and looming in their mind, but so was the threat of breeding one another, too. One of her uncles had gone mad, and Daeva did not like to think of him. Her father had been too weak to kill him, and instead opted to cast him out -- still, he did not stop Daeva's brothers when they pursued the uncle. There was at least that small comfort to Daeva. It had been a long time, though, and the dog had recovered, for the most part. Were it not for the warmth and happiness of her family, she might have fared worse.

Daeva had only intended to stray a little way away from the warehouse, but she had found herself in an unfamiliar place and no idea how to get home after too long. An hour of wandering had gotten her nowhere, and the pale gray dog felt she was walking the same three or four blocks in circles. Regret filled her, and she whined softly, lamenting whatever foolish decision had brought her outside of her quiet and tucked away home. A strange smell filled her nose suddenly, and the dog's brown eyes lit up. This was someone new -- whether friendly or enemy, Daeva did not stop to think. Eagerness at meeting a stranger had filled her, and in an instant she'd forgotten being lost in the first place. Some of this enthusiasm faded as she realized she was leaving the vicinity of the city by tailing his scent, but optimism drove her forth after the stranger's scent. Her long snout was pressed nearly to the ground and she huffed air in greedily, trying to keep trail of the scent.

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