Sleepy Fox Hollow Must be the way you whisper.

He studied the darkness as if he knew it intimately, and maybe that was true — after living out multiple lifetimes within which darkness held a key position, it was utterly unremarkable that Mou was so fixated. Then again, this was a new home, a new start. Nobody knew his history except for Maegi, and she wasn't here right now to explain (in the many ways he could never explain) why this particular ass crack had him set in such a trance.

The young man envisioned dark eyes set in darker faces; figures drifting and coiling, serpentine, as if sprouting from one body; he could not move for the longest time. It felt like time stood still, but minutes passed within which Mou did not even so much as tremble.. Until there came the clattering of jaws at his haunches, a scissoring of teeth that erupted in a violent stutter and made him shrink down - wheel to face the oncoming danger in one fluid motion - and he wheezed a snarl.

Teeth were bared and his pale hackles stood rigid like stalagmites along his spine and scruff; he saw the dark shape and thought the creatures he had seen in the chasm had materialized -- but the face he found was grizzled, a bestial note cutting through the calm that had surrounded him. Whoever this was, whatever it was, they had encroached on his space and the ghost would not take kindly to it; he was already on-edge after losing his home, and without Maegi to anchor him in rational thought, he wouldn't take long to spin out with anxiety.