shiver with a friend — joining

[aema]

[div style="margin: 0 auto; border-width:0; width: 70%; text-align: justify; font-family: arial; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 9pt;"]Secrets are like bruises, tattooed upon the skin, hidden beneath fabrics intertwined. Often their discovery trickles like a stream. Secrets are but a convoluted glitter of words - words to be stripped bare of their disguises and twisted into tales of mayhem. They were all wolves who went rabid at the thought of fresh meat. Sometimes Aema noticed the way others seemed to gaze so longingly at the flesh of those around them. Like beasts, desire intoxicates their sense of reasoning, overrides the conscience of crowned morality. Animals, they are, biting into rumors, gnashing at the seams that keeps a soul together. Aema has witnessed this enough times. There is a pack mentality that lies within vicious cycles. A person with an injured reputation was no more but a deer with broken legs, unable to run and dragging its soon-to-be corpse towards broken salvation, surrounded by the horde of wolves watching in sadism. Rumors were just like fresh meat, thrown to the masses for vultures to circle and scream before feasting. When it comes to hatred and secrets, suddenly all morality turns ebony black. Everyone looks out for themselves.

Slit pupils dilate within dim overarching light, irises seeming to twinkle with an abnormal iridescence. Her nose twitches as she moves towards the marshy undergrowth that leads into a swamp. A patterned tail coils behind her lithe shape, thin spines retracting flat against her scaly skin as the hybrid stalks in a predatory fashion. Pairs of ears rotate carefully, starving to consume the sound of a whisper, perhaps even a faint shriek. How symbolic, the demon thinks, that she moves towards a hearth of swampland - a radiating brew of ill-harbored feelings, secrets awaiting to be known. While she knows little about the characters who inhabited the territory they dubbed 'Tanglewood', she is driven by overwhelming curiosity, emotions mixed with the element of chance. Today, she awaits by the border through the twist of fate. Her eyes are merely waiting to land upon the one who will be so kind as to entertain her starving mind.