Word Count → 528 :: OOC
Keldava was a noisy drinker but her ears were sharp and all movement stilled in an instant when she heard something rustling in the bushes behind her. Her heart started to race and her head spun round, black lips sliding upwards to reveal sharp white teeth, bared threateningly at whatever was following in the bushes.
The figure that came out of the bushes certainly wasn't what Keldava has been expecting, no blonde berserker with knives ready to add to her earlier work. Instead out came a young boy - though Keldava was being somewhat hypocritical to use that term even internally, having shifted the boy couldn’t be more than a month or two younger than Keldava herself. Keldava didn't quite know what to make of him; he was obviously canine and his peaked ears and coloured eyes suggested wolf but no wolf she had even seen had such clear cut patterns of snow white and coal black, not that it looked, she thought hastily, just weird.
Keldava was taken up enough with the boy's weird appearance that she quite forgot to continue panicking at the sight of a stranger until he spoke, his words soft and concerned. Keldava was thrown out of her stupor by his question, hastily looking away and down when she realised she had been staring at the boy's face while her brain tried to figure out what to do. Keldava paused as she considered the question; she thought that her back wound was fairly obvious but she supposed her dark fur could hide the red stains and scabs still attached to it.
"No more-so than the past week, 'm healing slowly." she said dryly, half-turning and shaking her backside to show the blood on her lower back, tilting her nose over to point as an afterthought. She paused for a moment, feeling awkward; before she would have been glad to meet someone close to her own age and chatting away happily but the memory of her encounter with Amy left her cautious of strangers. Still, someone wasn't really a stranger if you knew their name right? And this boy seemed nice. But first, Keldava was tired of craning her head to look at him.
"Stay here" she said, adding a low warning growl to her words as she backed into a bush. Keldava wasn;t particularly modest, she didn't care for clothes much aside from her cloak and that was more for practicality and comfort than modesty, but she didn't like people watching her shift. Keldava had been practising and she shifted fairly quickly, stepping out of the bush back into the small clearing.
This was much better. The boy seemed to be naturally bigger than her judging by the size of his paws but Keldava had a lot more progress towards being full grown and at the moment stood slightly higher than him, by about a foot or so. "Who're you?" she asked, no less blunt than usual for her newfound caution. Her voice wasn't as friendly as it would have once been but it was less hostile now, the shift of forms putting her on more even ground with the stranger.
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