Phantom Hollow they say poison is a lady's weapon

ooc; @Dawn bby

terrible things happened when she grew bored with life. someone always wound up dead. never her though. never. she would not fall so easily into despair. she was... shall we say, experimenting. she had managed to bring down a hare, yet she did not eat it. no, she left the kill in the open for all to see. for anyone to just happen upon it. simple reasons at the core. she wanted to snuff the life out. not just with the prey, however.

having stuffed the body with foxglove, she had yarrow on hand to ensure vomiting. Huntington did not have the confidence yet to outrightly kill someone. she made it seem like an accident, or that she happened to just be walking by. either way, she would make sure to save the unlucky individual. she had never tried poisoning with foxglove. nightshade had always worked wonders, though.

settling down among the foliage, she waited. to see what creature would come along. a carnivore most likely. hungry for substance. if a wolf, she would assist them. if they were a lesser creature, well... they would be shown no mercy.

her range had grown wider, and she was away from the Hollow for longer periods of time. she'd reached a kind of acceptance, if not quite contentness with the way of things, and now felt a kind of aimlessness she found difficult to pin to any one cause. thoughts came and went like she drifting clouds above, and it was suddenly that she stumbled across the hare. this in itself was odd, normally, she moved with a hunter's precision and ought to have noticed it long before. the hare was recently dead - those marks were canine-made - and yet the scent upon it was stale enough that its killer ought to have left it here an hour or two beforehand. she sniffed at the hare, finding only faint vegetation and the distinct tang of blood that had the blade of her hunger push harder against her stomach. her mind felt dull, listless, and so she picked up the hare by a limb and strove deeper into the cover of a small copse, where she began dismantling and devouring the prey with learned efficiency. 

[...]

she was cleaning the blood from her forepaw, comfortably full, when some odd sensation pushed her to her paws. she blinked, offering her pelt a stiff shake, and abandoned the task at hand when a bought of nausea took over. she began to move between the tries, the rest of the hare seemingly abandoned, and for a few moments, it seemed nothing further was wrong. her flank twitched, as if a fly bothered her, but it was involuntary, the sensation odd. she moved toward the mountains, but they always appeared to be on her right. she kept moving, determined now not to let the nausea grow.

[...]

there was the rabbit again. bloodied and raw, and her heart was a nervous bird inside her chest. agitation built, and her forepaw drummed against the earth in staccato beat. acidic, vile. vomit? 

hers?

yes.

in the ground, on her paws. there was something thrumming inside her chest and it was her heart. keep moving, back to the Hollow. moving? she wasn't. there was something hard beneath her and it was the ground. the trees were gone. the sky. blue and burning and agonizing but that was not the sky, not her eyes but her heart, her limbs, but were they even hurting at all? this was wrong.



all wrong.

someone took her bait. perhaps there was an easier way to find a patient, yet her luck had been dulled from the last time. others seemed perplexed by her. whether intimidated by her appearance or her mannerisms. she had not the best time interacting. so in a sense, it was their fault for pushing her to this decision. and whether there would be more victims... well, that was also unknown. the wolf would devour the hare effectively enough before walking off. sticking close to the shadows, she would follow after. eager not to lose her in favor of turning into a cadaver. 

by the time Huntington arrived, she would wear a mask of shock as she bent over the shuddering form of the poisoned woman. nearby was the yarrow, placed on the ground before she spoke. a paw would come to rest on the stranger's chest gently as if that would comfort her. "are you alright?!" her exclamation was false, though believable enough. she'd lean forward more, sniffing at the corner of the woman's mouth. "poison..." as if she didn't know. her face was a scowl, pulled into disgust as she plucked the herbs from the earth.

no one would come after her for this, surely? she made it believable enough, had given enough time to let the other think nobody was coming to rescue her. that was indeed dying. "quickly, eat this!" she'd shove the herbs to the woman, a pleading look forming on her face "it'll make you vomit the poison. hurry!"

sky and blue and hurt and then there is a shadow and the shadow is a woman. she draws rattling breath and she hears but does not register the woman who blots out the sky. the woman needs no charade for the woman can make no sense of it anyways. there is something wrong. and things clear, momentarily, and she realizes that her forelimb is quivering still. the woman is offering her something, but there is something wrong and her lips curl back. "do not-"  she words are interrupted as she heaves herself onto her feet.

but she's still on the ground and nothing's changed, and the disconcerting feeling spreads and turns nausea to vomiting once more. vulgar and sharp, she scent is prominent again, and she may or may not have splattered the shadow that blots out the sun. "do not touch me."  instant bades her stand, for there is nothing worst to be sick and weak and stranded and in the presence of a stranger. 

and then she's standing, and she must have tried again and this time succeeded. or perhaps the first time had succeeded after all, and she does not know, and her heart is still driving against the walls of her chest. and her legs give out and the ground is familiar, and so is the dark.

fool. "you are going to die" Huntington adapted quickly back to her usual persona. the bite in her tone void, yet always blunt. what a child this one was. insistent on struggling without fruit being bared. her long spidery leg pressed the yarrow forward once more. "you have been poisoned. if you do not hack up the substance, your insides will give out. your heart will stop. you will die" it went unsaid that she almost questioned do you even understand? "unless you prefer to die" she would muse quietly, leaning backward to stare openly at the struggling stranger.

she's aware enough the detecting the abrupt shift in shadow-that-blots-out-the-sun, and her lips curl again. finally, feeling the press of vegetation against her maw, she swallows it. her hackles are stiff without her knowing, are had she more strength she would have set her teeth to this woman. but moment pass and her whole body spasms, and the last of her stomach contents, mixed with bile, splatter onto the earth. perhaps an hour had passed since she'd eaten the hare, but her body felt as if it had run the length of the sunspire in the same amount of time. a snarl rattled through her trembling muzzle, and then she falls motionless, oblivious now to anything but the blackness which fully clouds her vision.

it was always entertaining to see how motivated people were when facing death. Huntington clicked her tongue at the thrown bile, quickly burying it beneath the earth. yet she did a mental check of the other's condition before giving a small grunt. acceptable. perhaps no lasting damage. a weakness of the heart, tightness of the chest... she would feel dreadful for now. "shall I fetch you some water?" her eyes found the moss attached to a fallen tree.

she assumed the other did not want the taste of bile upon her mouth any longer. there had to be a puddle around here, a stream, a creek... something. Huntington made a wide berth of the woman, collecting the moss without a word. her back was to her for moments before she turned back. a dramatic turn of events to be sure. all this for a patient... it had been effective, so her behavior would not turn to angelic ways. at the very least she was gentle with her 'patients'. less so with cadavers.

in her unconsciousness, her pain fades and the tremors are ignored, but she can still hear the not-so-steady thud of her heart, like a startled herd of deer across the plateau. Huntington need not worry, for it was unlikely the woman would wake for hours more. in her dark of her stupour, she began, then to dream. of the plateau - the only place where she'd felt completely and totally happy, where she'd been most truly herself. it was an odd moment to picture it then, but in her mind, she was hunting. and there was Aviana, Aditya, at her side, and at the crest of the hill waited Grayday, Sunny. she was content.

no answer. no reply. nothing for hours it would see. "no? how sad..." Huntington's head twisted back to look at the unconscious form, a cruel sneer growing. she had done her job well then. plucking the collected moss in her jaws, she would leave the other be. her lanky form would disappear soon enough, the last flick of her tail discarding her used toy. she should have picked a lesser poison if the woman had played that quickly. it was almost disappointing how feeble the body was.