Spotted Eagle Mountain Sad nights linger through the blackness of a hound.

Once the buds had been pulverized she could swallow them, the pollen forming a paste that coated the back of her tongue. It was awfully bitter, but the green shoots off-set the flavor enough to prevent Stryx from vomiting everything up again. She was reaching for another clump of the flowers when she thought she sensed a presence, and froze with her mouth open around them. Her eyes darted around first; but when nothing emerged except the sussuration of wind in the trees, she deigned it a non-issue and chomped.

At about that moment, the stranger appeared and wuffed. Stryx was trying to mash the flower buds against the roof of her mouth and somehow managed to do a myriad of things all at once, mainly: bite the edge of her own tongue, shove a deceptively large cluster of pollen directly to the back of her throat, and fail to swallow.

Cue gagging, and coughing, and horking, and her eyes going owlish and wide as she struggled. She braced herself against the ground with the posture of a bull preparing to charge, her sides heaving and head bowed, until the spasm concluded. A nice wad of half-chewed plant matter rolled off her tongue, and after one more defiant half-cough-half-hurl, the soggy purple buds spattered across the stonework.

Stryx's fur puffed, her crooked tail twitching once as it stiffened over her hips, and she shot the offending stranger a look of pure outrage, as if he had done that on purpose.