May 25, 2017, 11:26 AM
(This post was last modified: September 23, 2018, 07:23 PM by Coelacanth.)
Moving north was Coelacanth’s sole instinct, and she allowed it to rule her with or without the companionship of the wolves she’d recently come across. She had allowed neither of them to touch her, leaving the fresh punctures at her scruff a fertile breeding ground for bacteria and infection. At long last she’d bathed her face, revealing a mild case of conjunctivitis that rimmed her eyes in an angry pink and wept a milky white discharge, but self-care was honestly not a current priority for the tiny Groenendael.
Home! Under cover of darkness she’d struck out, following the map of stars, but when a wall of wolfscent began to coalesce in the cleft of the mountains she’d fled, retracing her steps. Panic and habit found her back at the lake where she bathed her face again, sluicing the infection from her Neptune eyes, and this time when she headed out, she headed west. North was home. West was freedom. Home!
She found herself in a field of berries and picked out the soothing scent of chamomile — it triggered a memory that her feralized mind could not place — but her attention was diverted to a soft scraping from deep within the undergrowth. A pink, sharply tapered nose and a round agouti body registered immediately as food in her honed down psyche, a blaring neon signal that had her stomach clenching along with the bunching of her emaciated hindquarters and the curling of her dark lips. She threw herself into the foliage, perfuming herself in the ambrosia of crushed fruit as she snapped up the shrew between her jaws.
It was at this point that Coelacanth experienced a particularly odd quandary: she had the food, but how was she supposed to eat the food? She kept the little corpse between her jaws, her ridged spine arched impossibly as she huddled in on herself and glanced suspiciously around, her scalloped ribs heaving rhythmically as she spent each breath on a warning growl. They ticked in her throat, more akin to the purr of a particularly enthusiastic kitten, and she was perhaps kittenish in her defensiveness. Her fur, still dirty and tangled, stuck out in an array of disheveled quills as she scuttled off to a little hollow —
— where she continued to stand awkwardly, food in her mouth, and growl at nothing.
Home! Under cover of darkness she’d struck out, following the map of stars, but when a wall of wolfscent began to coalesce in the cleft of the mountains she’d fled, retracing her steps. Panic and habit found her back at the lake where she bathed her face again, sluicing the infection from her Neptune eyes, and this time when she headed out, she headed west. North was home. West was freedom. Home!
She found herself in a field of berries and picked out the soothing scent of chamomile — it triggered a memory that her feralized mind could not place — but her attention was diverted to a soft scraping from deep within the undergrowth. A pink, sharply tapered nose and a round agouti body registered immediately as food in her honed down psyche, a blaring neon signal that had her stomach clenching along with the bunching of her emaciated hindquarters and the curling of her dark lips. She threw herself into the foliage, perfuming herself in the ambrosia of crushed fruit as she snapped up the shrew between her jaws.
It was at this point that Coelacanth experienced a particularly odd quandary: she had the food, but how was she supposed to eat the food? She kept the little corpse between her jaws, her ridged spine arched impossibly as she huddled in on herself and glanced suspiciously around, her scalloped ribs heaving rhythmically as she spent each breath on a warning growl. They ticked in her throat, more akin to the purr of a particularly enthusiastic kitten, and she was perhaps kittenish in her defensiveness. Her fur, still dirty and tangled, stuck out in an array of disheveled quills as she scuttled off to a little hollow —
— where she continued to stand awkwardly, food in her mouth, and growl at nothing.
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a windy day with the white clouds flying - by Coelacanth - May 25, 2017, 11:26 AM
RE: a windy day with the white clouds flying - by Majorca - June 13, 2017, 08:57 PM