Post by ' ' K.O.T.O.R.I. on Aug 16, 2009 14:33:27 GMT -5
She walked as if she had a purpose -- a useless, meandering purpose, but a purpose nonetheless. It didn't help that it wasn't really a walk, but more of a shuffle, a stunted, rocking motion of front paw hopping forward, muscles tightening along the line of her spin and curling her haunches to walk. She wasn't very silent, but then Kinx had lived far too long to care about being silent. Her very existence proved that her fangs were still sharp, even if her old, grizzled appearance said that death was rather close when it whispered into her dreams and brought her visions of blood, iron and death, well it hadn't quite caught up to her yet, now had it?
Muzzle rippling, her whitening eyes, short-sighted and painful where the sun was reflecting on them, hardened, and shifted over the side as if she truly could see beyond the tree over there, as if the distance between sight and blindness wasn't a mere seven feet. Nose wrinkled, the black leather muscle cold, wet and writhing from the intoxication of scents. It was the rotting season.
Ugh. She was going to turn another year soon.
Hackles shifting, the fur rolled forward, tufted, filthy and full of mange. Age had not settled well on the beauty of this girl, and it was something she had come to expect. Muscles hurt, but it was okay. Pain meant she was still alive and if it was difference between life and death, she would take the pain over the sleeping oblivion of death's lullaby. Then again, perhaps it was just her memories she treasured and she was selfish in hording them, clinging on to the image of the dead when she should just let them free and let their spirits rise. Or maybe, and more likely, she had always been alone and the souls of those she has loved have long ago gone from her and left her here.
To think she outlast her pups, and her mates! How horrible, how terrible that even her brothers and sisters were gone, scattered to the four winds and most likely killed by a stray antler gouging out eyes, or stomach. Maybe it was a hoof or the cold. Mouth dry, she hopped and moved, and walked, a gimpy gate that didn't impede her. She was used to her wound, used to the phantom pain of her lost limb. It didn't matter, not anymore.
She lived, and that's all she really heard, or thought about.How precious life, how delicate. She had, like most younger creatures before her, never given thought to how precious short time on this wretched planet was. She lived but a blink, and in that short span of existence her soul ignited like a wick, and burned just as fast until nothing but a haunting impression of fire imprinted behind your eyes. But she wasn't there anymore, just a lonely, unlit candle eclipsed by darkness.
How did she live, you must be wondering. How could she hunt with only three legs, with the web-eye clouding her eyes and her ear torn off? Could her bones, brittle, fragile things that they had become take even the slightest beating offered by chasing a hare? What could she eat? But she did.
Kinx smiled, a ghastly sight full of fangs, fur, and old, old flesh. Drool gathered at the edges of her mouth and dribbled down unheeded. Who cared for beauty when one was so old?
Where was she going? Purposes, purposes, like a maze that she followed, but she knew the steps well, knew them for what they were and followed heedless of danger but for the one that coiled in her stomach and twisted it. Hunger knotted there, a viciousness that made her seem deranged, dementia discoloring her eyes, the angle of her face where she was only half-tilted toward the stench of a rotting cache. Beautiful. Perfect.
------------------------------------------------ and she stole up to it. Curling her haunches below her, she pawed at the ground with her one good fore-paw, digging out the food buried beneath rotting earth, warming days. Winter was falling away from them like a vicious nightmare but Kinx would miss it. In winter she fed well, for creatures often died from the cold and when they left their frozen carcasses to be cracked open by her jaws, well, she fed very well. Now, though, she was forced to this. Petty theft, but Kinx didn't think too hard on it and instead pawed at the ground until it yielded up it's prize: a gaunt, mostly eaten cadaver of some deer.
Setting her jaws into it, she pulled, hauling it out and nosing around, searching with an air of despair, the last scraps the withered bones might yield to her prying fangs.
word count;; 798
tags;; OPEN! <3
OOC;; uhm, yeah. ^^