by Bainrigh Mab » Thu Jun 22, 2023 3:01 am
The response is immediate. Kat's thoughts are pushed and pulled towards tangents and associations but she manages to hold on enough to not be drawn down rabbit holes. Still, the flickering of possibilities around her is seemingly endless. Stalking the woods, ancient things that move and prowl in the shadows and return to rest. A sense of reaching out and touching the wilderness, beckoning it's creatures to heed her call. No, she wants to be the creature. She has something very specific in mind, but as her guide had warned her, the Sparks don't understand 'wolf' the way she does and while she's made a shape inside of her it's more like a number of stakes placed to guide a flowing river. The flow is caught in whorls around them but it doesn't stop the stream.
Some are easier to dismiss than others. Hunt. Natural cycle. Nourishment from death. Preying. That one feels like it's bend towards her less from her own thoughts and more pulled in by the gravity of her guide, briefly catching in the hint of similarities before dissipating in a tangle of bloodied fur.
Some of them don't even arrive at 'animals' at all. Shapeless shadows. Raising bedrock and soil into protective shields. Gripping stormclouds to quiet or hasten the sky's wrath. Hollow. Protection. Nature. Weather. Bony spikes that shine white like long teeth sprout from joints and cover her skin, coated in poisonous gleam. Teeth, warning display, toxicity. Forest guardians of all kinds and varieties, some shaggy moving trees, a long-legged deer with her human face. Some tangents still happen and in them she can sometimes see entire people and lifetimes from decades, miles or even worlds away. Protectors of the forests loop around to guardians, tugged towards a cat-legged winged person at the side of an unfamiliar-looking Samantha. Sister. Girlfriend. Sheltered. Golden Eyes. All of it only makes sense in the strange dream logic she finds herself in and she doesn't really understand how one thing follows another.
Every once in a while she feels things passing that to her seem wildly divergent. Empty shelter. Loneliness. Home. That one catches a snag she didn't intend but cannot fully banish. Sam left her behind, leaving an empty space in what was once home. It's an old feeling but these currents find purchase in less. Calling something home. Summoning. Opening paths through the metaphorical woods. My what big teeth you have. She's found her way back towards the shaggy beast but this one's not nice. It devours like the monster that took away Sam. The monster she summoned. Her nightmare. Her creation. For a moment a swell of power turns stream into raging rapids. A terrible beast calling forth horrors from beyond, powers that twist matter and reality to find home for terrible things that act on her worst impulses. When previously she felt a gentle plucking from her guide relieving her of things seeking to settle in her, this time it's like a blow to the chest as a near panicked Cailleach thrusts Kat away from a flame that still clings to memories of being a conflagration.
They both tumble, away from something that scared even the Queen of the Unseelie. She grasps one of the whorls and with a shove it ensnares Kat. Shaggy beasts, creating 'monsters', a place for beasties in her chest. Too many bits that cling to her, that fit. Animals are drawn to her and into the hollow she's made, creating a strange hybrid that releases them back into the world with pieces swapped around or missing, multiple animals fused into one. Human eyes in a rabbit stare back at golden eyes set into a wild mish-mash of fur and limbs with too little control to catch the hare before it runs off with Kat's eyes, splitting her vision into a dizzying mixture of view-points. She can feel the potential settling into her, a sense for wild and untamed characteristics, not just fang and claw but nose and eye, flexible spine and muscles that tense without twitching or tiring in long moments before a pounce, balancing tails, whiskers that tell her things her eyes might miss. Gifts to take from animals, to borrow or keep, to return to them or others and making it harder and harder to reclaim the soft, pink human parts that whittle down with each exchange.
But all those insights and details fall away like the memory of a dream while others settle into instinct and intuition...