tin man
#1
Private.

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There was dark, there was silence, and there was still. To be frank, there was nothing—nothing but the perfect emptiness of oblivion, or at least one might wish. It started to slip away after a while, though, like someone dragging up a sea monster from the depths of the oceans. He sympathized with that forsaken beast; he did not want to go back to the surface. It was bright, loud, and there was pain there. Here, there was none of that, but here he could not stay. Consciousness drug him out of that oblivion, and the illusion was shattered. Suddenly there was noise—harsh noise. There was the rumble and roar of the ocean pounding the shores, the distant cries of gulls, the howling of the wind. Suddenly the entire world was the beast, screaming and crying. His ears pinned against his skull. It was loud—too loud. It was bright, too. His dull orange eyes opened for only a second before being overwhelmed. The light seemed as physical as a sledgehammer, down upon his skull. Christ, his head hurt—like something hitting him from the outside and trying to get out from the inside all at once. The light and the noise did not help the migraine. He curled up tighter, wishing it would all leave him. He wanted none of it. He would trade the darkness for all this confusion, if so simply offered.


He waited—nothing. No offer from on high. Disappointing. Gradually the pain lessened (if not infinitesimally), and he was able to open his eyes into slits. What he saw offered no explanation. It was a beach—litus—and then the ocean—aequor. The words were accessible, and with their meanings, but he could make no sense of why he was at the beach. He could not make sense of his being anywhere at all, actually. For a stunning moment he realized why the darkness had seemed so inviting: there had been no reasoning to answer to. Here, there were the thoughts of who he was, why he was here. The words, their meaning, he had. Answers, he had not.


He stared for a long while, as if the answers would come from the winds across the shore, or arise from the waves themselves. Nothing. He growled—a sound as deep and ominous as a storm approaching. Though he was excessively loathe to do so, he bore the pain of his pounding head and shifted into what resembled a sitting position. Long legs crossed, the man put his elbows on his knees and cradled his head in the ark of his hands. Still his head hurt as if someone were standing beside him, continuously pounding him in the skull with a hammer—centered on his right temple. He touched that part of his cranium gently, withdrawing a paw to look—blankly—at the red that stained it. Blood, cruor. He was hurt. He knew nothing. There was a word for this, though not one he wanted to accept. As soon as he began to think he had lost memory, he would begin to panic. He needed to remain calm.


He stared at the blood on his hand for a long moment before turning his attention to the far more interesting iron shackle upon the same wrist. He looked to the other—there, as well. The links had been roughly broken. With a nervous swallow, he blinked and brought his bloodied hand to his neck. There, too; a wrought-iron band, several links of the chain still attached and ringing with a quiet clink in the breeze of the shore. What did this mean—had he been a slave, servus, who had clawed for an attempt to escape? How did that fit into him winding up here, with his aching head? He was not injured anywhere else; he did not think he had fallen. It was not accident.


Trying to remember only hurt more, so he gave up. Time was something he had, he supposed. Soon he would have to make a decision. For the moment, however, he once more put his head in his hands and fell into the dissonance of his beating heart and the throbs of pain across his wounded temple.

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#2
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Word Count » 391
Lol I fail. Sad Sorry. <3

my road to hell is surely paved

The shores reaching from Salsola's territory was yet unexplored to the sable hybrid. Their claim was terribly small, though Eris did not mind this -- there was plenty of prey within it, and there was enough neutral territory between the Salsola claim and their closest neighbors to provide ample territory in which to hunt. It had not taken the coal hybrid long to learn the layout of her new home. It was not altogether unfamiliar to Eris, who had explored this way once or twice while living in Inferni. She had little reason to remain within the coyote clan, and so she had spent quite a bit of time away from it. Most of the time, when she had deigned to leave her room in the D'neville, she had left Inferni entirely, preferring the company of outsiders to the potential of running into someone she knew.

Now, it was much the same, and the hybrid woman instead stuck close by her own pack's territory, a thin driftwood branch found on the journey clutched in her hand. It was gnarled and twisted at one end to a thick, club-like point and nearly straight as an arrow near toward the bottom. She had discovered it some distance behind her, and found it pleasing to the eye. There was a strange compulsion within her to bring it, then, and so she had, finding it easier to give into these temptations than disobey her own whim. Why deny herself, after all? Who did she have to answer to, aside from Sirius? Larkspur wasn't her mate.

These thoughts drifted as she traveled further away from Salsola, and though she did continue churning the issues in her mind, she was also taking in her surroundings, paying sharp attention to the surrounding territory of her pack. It was important to know these lands as well as her own claim. There before her, several feet away, was something strange, however -- she squinted her gaze, halting her advance for a moment. It appeared to be a bundle of fur, far too large to be a child. Hesitating, the woman peered around a moment, as if to ascertain they were alone, and strode up to the man, making a face of displeasure as she extended the narrow end of the stick toward the other canine, wondering if he was alive.

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#3
Lol do not say these lies <3

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He would have sworn with vehemence that her approach had been a trick of his mind; the dark form merely a shadow cast by the gaps where memories should have been, and the scent so easily swept away by the saltiness of the ocean breeze. He ignored her. Partially, he loathed her if not simply for her existence. It was all black and red with confusion and the pain in his head. What else was there? And yet she approached, wavering on the fringes of his downturned gaze until the apparition came so bold as to make itself physical. Reaching out with some type of rod, she prodded him without an offered word. He was not offended, though excessively displeased that she were not merely a shadow cast by a feverish mind. He did not feel he had the energy or the cohesiveness of mind to deal with her.


Quintus' hands dropped to his lap, his pale eyes cast up to the dark figure. She was hazy, indistinct. It seemed hard to focus on anything. He blinked, attempting further, but it was still as difficult as grasping at smoke. He grew slightly exasperated, though it could only be visible beneath the stony expression on his face. "What?" he asked after a long moment, after his vision had sharpened enough to distill an expression of rancor upon her face. His deep voice was not so cross as it was worried; the confusion in the pain made him self-conscious, made him fearful of anything he might not know. "Quid est?" In Quintus' mind, the two questions were merely repetition in different terms; the same way that someone could refer to a rock as 'rock' or 'stone.' He had little concept of language, or the fact that there was anything to differentiate one from another.

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#4
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Word Count » 493 <3

the world shudders as the worm gets its wings

She saw she needn't have prodded him immediately; the rise and fall of his chest signified he was indeed, alive. The coyote woman was not particularly disappointed with his life, though she might have preferred a corpse washing ashore than a live canine. Now she was obligated to see to him and maybe make sure he didn't get swept back out to sea again. Or she wasn't. The sable coyote peered down at him and flicked an ear as he spoke, considering whether she ought to stay here and tend to him or simply continue walking.


The latter would have been the easier choice by far, but unfortunately for Eris's quiet walk, her cruel streak did not extend quite so wide, and she knelt down, her grip sliding down the gnarled branch. It leaned back against her right shoulder, quite ready to whack down toward his head if he chose to make a move for her. The arrogant coyote didn't quite think he posed so much of a threat, and most canines didn't spit in the face of assistance when it came calling. Some did, of course, and so the stick was there, ready to come bearing down on his head if he chose to make his rejection of her offer physical rather than verbal.

“I don't understand whatever that is. You've washed up on shore. Do you want help?” The words were simple, and she wondered if he understood them. The language he spoke was an utter mystery to her, completely foreign from anything the hybrid knew, the strange rapid-fire language Axi and Salvia spoke or the grumbling growl Larkspur sometimes adopted. The offer of help was not made entirely in generosity; the hybrid would expect something in return, but it was nothing to her to save the man's life and indebt him to her. She was not a healer, but he didn't seem terribly hurt, aside from a dark stain of red near to his temple. Of course, the coyote had no idea the potential severity of head wounds and underestimated the ding in the pale wolf's head.

She could set him up with a meal easily enough, and, dependent on his wishes, the coyote could take him back to Salsola, or she might leave him beneath a tree. He was too big to lug back to the pack forcibly, and even if she got him there in the first place, making him stay was another matter entirely. Keeping a slave of such size was unwise entirely; the idea had already crossed her mind and crossed out again. Still, though she could not have him forcibly, she perhaps wanted him still -- his size was formidable, to say the least, and the coyote woman had respect for that in and of itself. There were other factors to consider, of course, but the gears behind her chartreuse-yellow eyes spun ceaselessly nonetheless, scheming after the pallid thing that had washed near her shore.

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