Bearclaw Valley some kind of plastic i could wrap around you
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Ooc — Lauren
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#1
maybe @Taylor ..? open to any ursus wolf <3

no whispers from the bone as of late.

astara placed the pelvic remnant down on the dial, her eyes closed. relmyna's voice had long faded -- and as she thought back to her childhood, she realized the memories there were hazy.

she had forgotten the face of her mother.

her eyes flew open, their rims wide and stark. averna. relmyna. the ghosts of her past, slipping through her mind as if water through granite's cracks.

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#2
hellooo. can we forward-date this to the 21st?

New names, new faces, they clutch at his coattails. In his short and feverish dreams, Taylor sees them along with his brother. They stare at him whereever he goes, oil portraits with moving eyes in a hotel of endless halls.
This is the only way he can remember them.
It is in this way, half-asleep, that he comes across a girl. If he thought Merrick was ominous, this girl was Lovecraftian. Like the dark, turbid afterimage you get after staring at the sun for too long. More ghost than girl.
He approaches her with halting, awkward steps, head tilted in a way that supported both his fatigue and his hearing. His face is unreadable.
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#3
ofc! <3

one of merrick's recruits.

astara lifted her gaze to his, noting the blemish along the lean cheek, the shadows which beleaguered the flesh under the tall beast's skylit gaze. she shifted to attention, the bone forgotten -- this one was much more intriguing.

the head-tilt astara could not read; his akimbo stance was met curiously. she detected traces of merrick along his fur, traces of another wolf she did not know -- withdrawing her muzzle, astara canted her head to the side as if mirroring his head-tilt. who are you?

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#4
Wordless. She is wordless. She reminds him of himself from just a few months ago. The thought tugs at something painful inside of him until he snuffs it out. Easy as killing a fly.
She smells of life, of death, of the Valley, but most of all, of Merrick. He appraises her with shuttered eyes. He did not know who really masterminded Ursus (other than the bears of course) and he thinks that he wouldn't be surprised at all if she was the one that was weaving the web after all.
I'm Fields, he says. He doesn't take his eyes off of her. He feels as if he is dealing with a loaded gun or an angry bull, which were fundamentally the same thing.
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#5
astara had no rejoinder, but it did not mean she was not interested in merrick's newest acolyte. her gaze roved unabashedly over the male -- curiously tracking every hard muscle, every notch and depression -- wondering just what it was that drew fields into their fold.

her tail waved amiably. he was not a female, and so, he was spared the furious wrath of astara's fearsome jealousy. after all, merrick would never partake -- right..? her gaze panned off of the male finally, roving to a patch of fern where she had thought she had scented coyote.

walking past the tawny figure astara nosed the hard ground. she looked behind her once: coming?

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#6
A simpering smile, her night-sky eyes narrowing in a small black face.
An alien, impossibly intelligent, impossibly perceptive, but still childlike. He has never met anyone quite like her. But then again, he has never met someone quite like Merrick either.
He finds that he likes the girl's mute nature. There is no pressure for him to respond, to construct the proper words and facial expressions in a timely manner. Suddenly he's aware of how much conversation exhausts him. So Taylor eagerly catches up to her with long strides, equal parts cautious and painfully curious.
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#7
unaware of taylor's approval, astara moved on.

many wolves in her life had become perturbed by her silence; and in many ways, she had become perturbed by their insistence to hold onto conversation. there was something to be said for two souls moving as one, with no need for words to clutter the channels of their communication.

the nightshade's tail bobbed as she heard taylor behind her. somewhere here, the scent of coyote lingered. astara's black nose glistened as it twitched, her long ears straining to hear anything in the murkwood that might give her clues as to where their quarry had gone.

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#8
He watches her face sharpen. Like watching a periscope surface from an opaque ocean. The open and close of a massive telescope looking into the sky with its mirrors.
Through his closed eyes, he sees the deep red thrum of sunlight through flesh. A warm and colorful x-ray. The smell of coyote wafts into the fine hairs and the organ just under the bone of his nose bridge.
From somewhere to the right, he hears a twig snap underfoot. His ears perked, his postured lowered, his face already halfway in a sneer. Predators were born this way, and they lived this way, and they died this way.
This time, it is him that leads, quietly through the undergrowth. Quiet like sarin gas. The fog on its little cat feet.
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#9
her companion saw the creature first. astara's sharp eyes followed his gaze, noting the way his body instinctively morphed into something predatory and alert. before, he had looked innocuous. now, he was transformed to something feral and dangerous.

she slunk after him, her indigo eyes on the flash of russet pelt between boughs of grey and brown. the scent was thicker here, cloying her nostrils and summoning a territorial bloodthirst within her veins.

astara loped into a long run, the crackle of her forepaws on leaf-litter meant as a distraction as taylor closed in, like the knife the sacrificial lamb never sensed.

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Something in his DNA coils and uncoils. Millions of years of evolution— had speech and language been around for even a fraction of that?
The black-haired girl surges forwards, and Taylor unlatches himself from his thoughts. He lets muscle memory control him, as if in a cruel interpretive dance. The coyote growls, high-pitched and grating. It breaks into a run, unaware of its proximity to sharp and hungry teeth.
Taylor leaps into its path in a smooth and frictionless perpendicular collision; it whines, and then wheezes as the air is punched out of its lungs, and the noise grates at his ears even more. Annoyed, suddenly enraged, he grabs it by its pale throat and shakes it. Like a ragdoll, it falls to the floor. Still dimly alive, but barely. 
His breathing is hard and heated. A black anger tears through his chest, a forest fire on full throttle.
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the nightshade had seen the coyote, but it was taylor who struck it down first.

astara watched with an approving eye alight with dim pleasure -- violence was a language she spoke better than words could ever serve her, and taylor's slip into instinctual territorial aggression served her well.

she flicked her tail and walked stifflegged to the dispatched creature. its gurgling was met with a sneer of her lower lips in contempt. with zero empathy, astara lunged for the things' hind leg and began to shake her head savagely back forth.

the thing would be killed, that much was certain -- but astara would not let its passing go painlessly.

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#12
fading hereee
tysm for the thread :pleading_face:

The screaming— it rakes through his head and splits him apart down his nervous highways and alleys. There's an unbearable pressure on the back of his neck. He sees two of the dark girl, two of the coyote, twice the amount of blood as she tears its leg from its joint.
Warmth and wetness spray all over his legs, up to his chest. Screaming, more and more. Louder and louder. He thinks vaguely of how bodies are held together by bones and muscle and sinew. How hard it was to cut through, unless you knew where all the seams were. He closes his eyes, tries to steady himself. The noise pushes its fingers into his ears into his brain and it does not stop.
Bloody and shaking and hunched, he pivots sharply, and marches in the direction they had come from. His steps are curt, his footprints unusually deep. Though his face is turned away, there is a fleeting expression of pain and despair that wracks his boyish features.
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#13
good thread! lmk if youd like another :)

astara flung herself headlong into her task of subduing the creature. her ears hardly registered the screaming -- was it the coyote's, or taylor's? 

with limbs in her jaws astara flung her head up and down -- up and down went the shrieking cur, shook out like a dusty rug. the noises of bone, sinew, gristle all meeting their end; astara's eyes had filmed over, her body bent wholly to the task of ridding the life from this trespasser.

taylor had left some time during all of this -- astara blinked as she came to, noticing she was alone and covered in blood from chest to her flaring nostrils. she dragged the beaten corpse to relmyna's altar, where it would be presented for @Merrick as a pelt of yet another slain victim at ursus' hands.

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