the new kings // "joining"

[PHOENIX]

[align=center][div style="borderwidth=0px; width: 55%; text-align: justify;"]☂ Fate was a fickle mistress, was she not? This was certainly a situation she had never foreseen; body in ashes at her feet, or the closest thing to "feet" she had now as they hovered from the ground. A ghost, a revenant, a lich wandering the earth in desperation to find a new host before her ethereal form faded from the world of the material. The remains of what was once her body blew away in the wind, shifting over the lifeless bodies of her companions. They died. Eternity was something she pondered, but she knew it was not something that would pass in a body of flesh. Everybody died. But their time wasn't supposed to be so soon, so sudden. She would find a way to get them back. She would bring them back to the world of the living if it meant sacrificing her own self, but there would be no bringing them back if she could not anchor herself in this world first. Her form was fading quickly, however. With her tethers to this world dead, she was shifting into nothingness as her soul was too corrupted to truly pass on. It had to be destroyed to preserve the laws of life and death.

A sickly wolf-like creature would be her respite. It was leaned against the trunk of aged oak, gnarled wood and outstretched branches providing adequate shade for the ill canid. Its chest rose and fell in heavy, labored breaths. It was dying. But even one day alive again would be beneficial. As she entered its body, as she gently pushed its tired soul from its withering body, the spirit of the animal faded with peace and content. She had possessed this body, pushing out its resident soul, but as its pain became her own she quickly understood why the afterlife was a pleasure to the wolf rather than something it fled from like she herself did. Her lungs ached, her legs too weak to stand, her insides churned as she was consumed inside out. Parasites, if she had to guess. The taste of iron coated her tongue and throat, not an unfamiliar taste but she could not place exactly where she had tasted it before. She'd been in her handful of fights, gums and nose bloody, but she could not recall faces or reasons as to why, which was... odd. She could have sworn she had got defensive about her - ... it wouldn't come to mind. Like a word on the tip of ones tongue or a memory of young childhood, it had an air of familiarity to it but she was entirely unable to recollect it.

A scrawny maned wolf rested in a heap beneath a burly tree many meters into Sunhaven's lands, eyebrows drawn tight together in concentration as a thin line of blood leaked from the right side of her jaw. Nameless, lost, confused, dying - what kind of fucking situation had she put herself into?