(will also drop this and this here, for reasons) — Older than her cubs, younger than Mother
Gender: — Female
Race: — Ti'kari
Psychology: — Now and always, until the moment she is required not to be, she is a watcher. She observes. At times, she merely stalks; at times, she prowls close and prods, paws, speaks,
asks. Anything to satiate the curiosity of a stranger in a strange land. Few are the things that scare her, the jungle sovereign, aware of her power, and not aware of yours. She fights not for fighting's sake, but if claws are to clash, she intends to outlive you and yours. She has a duty, be that she cannot remember it, cannot hear Mother here. But once she remembers, she will act, as sure as the sun rises.
⑇⑉What You Remember⑉⑈ [She who hunts]All she remembers is the hunt.
The soil underneath her paws, the silence and the sounds both, as the jungle held its breath, and her prey did not. Air escaped it in ragged wheezes, tore from its throat as screams and shouts and terror shaped into words she did not understand. There were those that would, those alike her prey, skin on two legs, but they no longer breathed at all, for she'd caught them a moment prior. They lay upon the jungle floor in her wake, feeding the very life they had tried to take. As she ran, their blood, still warm on her paws, imprinted warnings in the duff; stay away, for you are not welcome here, you who are not of nature and do not obey its laws. You take more than you are given, you take when you do not need to take, and you take, and you take,
and you take. The Mother has asked kindly - now, she demands.
There was one final scream, one final swing of a limb torn from a tree, shaped and shaved and made sharp by hands that wanted to take all. They would take no more.
⑴
A body; a weapon: her weapons were not forged in fire, not conjured by a vile humoid mind, that which dreams of war and death and conquest. They cannot be cast aside nor stolen from her, and even fear of death shall not make them tremble. They're Mother's gift to her and her kind, so that she may run, and hunt, and feed her young, and be not tamed by Them who come with cages. Fangs to break bone, claws to tear flesh, muscle to carry her,
a predator, to you, the prey.
⑵
A passenger; watchful: she is not alone. She never has been, truly, surrounded by life as she was, wherever humoid had not yet tread. Her jungle, ancient, boundless, was alive in so many ways beyond the comprehension of none but Mother, and it is what made it home. But this is different. 'Tis a presence inside her, lurking underneath her skin, breathing and stirring and bleeding out where her stripes run, dormant, always, except when not. And when it wakes, she sleeps, and her dreams are not of nature.
⑇⑉What You Don’t ⑉⑈ [What you took was not yours to take, nor mine to give]It had troubled her for a time by then, the pain in her shoulder. Pierced by the wooden beak of a humoid bird, the kind they let loose from wood and string, coated in black when it flew, then red when it struck. It had hurt, but she had been hurt before. Pain had not slowed her, so she'd pounced, and then the humoid had hurt worse. But briefly; always briefly, for a single beat of the heart, and no more.
When it did not go away, the pain, she lived with it, hunted with it, did not know it might fester, worse than anything had ever festered, in the jungle, in nature, under Mother's all-seeying eye. She did not see the signs because she could not look; the crawling up of new stripes, from shoulder to neck, to her head, to her skull, to her brain, to her mind. To what connected her to Mother and all her children, all that was.
It is not of nature to hate, even when one breathes their last. Death has walked with her since she first pounced upon an unsuspecting rodent, since her teeth first tore flesh. She has heard its whisper in the wind, as its taken away the fear of a felled boar, the pain of a deer in her claws. It has taken of her kind, too; a cub before its time, an elder calling for an end. One ought not fight it, the one enemy for whom strength means naught.
Yet, she did. And as she trashed, in pain, in fear, in agony, the dark descending upon her fast, too fast, not from the sky but from beneath her own skin, consuming her, she knew, and it made her angry. Whatever the humoids did, whatever manner of death they wrought, it was not the death of the old or the ailing, it was not the snap of a neck or the closing of tired eyes. It was devouring by a power unknown. It was consumption, as one consumes their prey, but from the inside, and for a time longer than a single beat. It was not of nature. And in fighting it, in fighting Death, she, too, was no longer of nature.
And so, she hated.
Kronshi,
TheMushroomLord,
canaryrose,
PapaOso,
Festive,
OwO,
bugmeat,
ERode,
Olive Fontaine,
Carlyle
