homestead. // Annora vs. Werewolf [Day 3]

.:WEREWOLF:.

They left you here and your blood is burning.

Chunks of hair under your fingernails and skin between them, your breath that billows from you white and steaming. You can barely see, lost in this grass that smells artificial and sour, listening to the distant shriek of the birds who covet the dead. You still know them, know the sound of the talons scrabbling in the dark of a place that isn't here, their beaks pecking apart flesh of someone you used to--

Your masters hammer a spike through your temple until you're bolted to the ground. There's a funeral procession playing in your head, urged on by the light of the moon that burns into the backs of your eyes, and every bone in your hand grinds as you clench it. You used to be someone before this fire in your lungs, before they wrenched your soul from your chest and placed it in your throat instead, and now it's everything you can do to keep it from crawling out of your mouth. You used to have a name, you think, dreams and destinations, the vaguest ghost of a life before this place. It's dead and gone now, but the dead are hungry here. So hungry.

You can hear the people like you calling in your head. They beg you to stop fighting, to let your joints crunch and tear, to let your spine snap out of alignment only to build back stronger again. They are a million voices you don't know, don't care to know; your ribcage groans open in your chest like a fist unclenching and your gasp brings wet dirt into your lungs. They're filled with the blood of people before you, people who didn't take properly to the needle.

The last wisp of cloud dissipates from the moon; its light makes your skin bubble and crack, sloughing off like melted wax. Let me die, you're screaming in your head, let me sleep, but your jaw is breaking in three places to make room for more teeth and your new tongue can't form the sound. You lose it like you lose everything else as your ankles bend backwards and your ears fall off and your tailbone grows and grows. Your hands, long and misshapen and dark, pull the rest of the skin from your chest like an ill-fitting cloak.

There's nothing but the hunger now. There's a longing in your belly, a vile fire, and it swells through you until your vessels burst with it. You gather yourself on trembling legs and rise from the ground as something new and awful, something wrong; drool leaks from your open jaws as you howl your new hatred to the sky.

In the distance, the things like you answer back.

A pale-skin that once looked so like you staggers ashore. You smell the fatigue in her bones, the cold that you've long forgotten. The hunger that's bloomed like a tree strangles your insides.

Before you even step towards her, she's thrown a clumsy knife into your throat. You taste blood, dark and tainted, staining your matted fur. The heat invigorates you, singeing your new flesh, and you run towards your prey with a scream that sounds nothing like anything you've ever known.

[attacks Annora]
za7x7Ciiknife
[deep gash on forehead - 9.0]

.:WEREWOLF:.

Ever since they put the needle in your neck, you knew you weren't long for this place.

Even now, trapped in this body that looks nothing like yours, you can feel your joints collapsing on themselves. Cartilage shivers and tears, claws rip themselves away from fingers, eyes threaten to roll from their overstretched sockets. Still, the hole she rips open in your cheek burns, almost as much as the fire that keeps propelling you forward. You meet in a clash of bone and steel and both of you have wounds to bare when you detach, the lift of her lips as furious as yours. Yours is deeper, darker, the flash of new teeth in this artificial darkness so raw it hurts. You were never meant to live, to satiate this searing hunger that's pulling your tendons away from your bones, but fuck if you aren't going to try.

She's angry. It comes from her in waves, as deep as the exhaustion you smell. There isn't anything that isn't angry in this place, this nightmare. That isn't scared. Your blood glints from her blade that's still trapped in your neck, tangled in your thick fur, and your fingers protest as you rip it out. It goes skittering into the waves, swallowed whole by the abyss. Like she will be, eventually, if not by your jaws alone.

Under the light of the moon, your whole body seems to ripple as you lunge. Your jaws hiss open in a way that's almost mechanical, almost practiced, ignoring the taste of your own blood as it wells up past the gash in your throat that lets out a little wheeze of air on each exhale. It's bubbling, frothing, and you know enough in your head that's been scoured blank that there's no coming back.

The thought comforts you, somehow.

[attacks Annora]
sd7eaUuFknife
[deep gash on left forearm - 8.0]