Hounded [Wild Hunt Series: 2]

19: Claws

Karmina -- All the King's Horses 

(One of my fav protagonist songs; Allie from Run Cold &Tay both share this song)

For almost twenty minutes the earth shook in the wake of some terrible battle. Roars and reverberations must've sent smaller animals into hiding, for my staggering run was met with near silence from all but wind and earth. 

Luck more than any sense of survival put miles between myself and the monster's lair, and it was luck more than survival which saw me unharmed as inky twilight spilled over the land. In the musty burrow of some creature that had dug beneath the roots of a sprawling willow, I had caught my breath, my wits, and a small lizard I'd been planning on eating for dinner until I realized I couldn't start a fire. I wasn't often hungry in this land, but somehow after everything I felt ravenous. I looked down at the lizard I'd pounced on (not without a tiny nip to my thumb). It'd gotten its feathery wings tangled in a spider web. It'd settled down in my grasp for the most part, its limbs pushing every so often against my forearm as I carefully sat back on my knees.

Lizards here were a bit slower to run than those back home- from what I'd seen, primary locomotion occurred through flight. Sure they could climb and scuttle away, but they'd just as soon make a wild leap and a flap and be ten feet overhead. This one had tried to fly, and when its wings failed to spring open, its dark eye seemed about as surprised as I was to find my fingers closing fast around its soft feathers and belly.

"You are one lucky whatever you are," I said, twisting my head around to get a better look at its snout. They were beautiful in the way of sparrows and pigeons if you really stopped to look; tiny, prevalent marvels across all terrains of this hell as I understood it. This one, dusty with soil, had piebald scales of mossy greens with understated feathers of chocolate and cream. Carefully I transitioned the animal into one hand and used the other pluck the webbing off its wings. It hissed, hissed and snapped when I'd set it free on the ground, then without one lick of thanks crawled up a root and sprang into the night.

I waited several seconds, than crawled out, not in search of it, but water and to an equal extent: mud. A willow this size had to have a source somewhere close. I didn't feel particularly thirsty and yet after the show I'd put on with the frost that old part of me that guzzled water until I puked after basketball practice was saying that I needed to replace what I'd lost. Magic didn't work that way, at least not in my head.

Then again, magic didn't exist back home.

Not back home, I told myself. Back when I was alive. The worms wouldn't be at Tay Wilson yet, but they were coming. Blind, segmented, wriggling nasties feeling out the edge of the coffin...

Try as I might to turn off horrid imagination, I saw myself as I lay bleeding out in the snow, saw a casket, saw maggots wriggle under the thin film of my eyelids, flies crawl from the dark, now-bloodless hole Chiro's blade had punched through my gut.  And above the peaceful facade of grassy earth an antlered corpse of a different kind, of the only father I'd known, was dancing.

I managed to hold in my demonic guts and get out to the source of the willow's size: a rush of water that may have been a river source. Immune to the temperature, I drank my fill in the darkness, and then, water running down my chest, moved into the depths and cleaned my body. I was going to slather mud on to keep away insects and add camo, but it felt so good to clean myself. Water wasn't enough to wash the filth from my soul, but it was a start, a short lived start, mind you, considering the mud smelled more than a fair bit sulfuric.

I was smoothing mud against the crook of my neck, enjoying a sudden dissipation of small biting insects, when an orange glow, small as a penny, bobbed through the forest along the direction I'd come. Maybe ten feet off the ground,  it moved at a reasonably quick pace just a bit faster than a human could walk.