lullaby | lost child

[QUIET]

[align=center][div style="text-align:justify;width:55%;font-family:verdana;"]A life before this one was a thing she could not bring herself to recall. It was there, in flickering images, but that naive memory had shattered and found itself replaced by flashes of fire, violence and a quaking rebirth. She vibrates with it, the heaviness of the memory: the knowledge that she was no longer a being but a thing, spore-cloud skinned and living off the blazing of the sun. It seemed the fire came for them all, in one way or another, and while she'd been engulfed in flames once before she now turned to that star in the sky to sustain her. A dual life, in more ways than one, she had died once and now she lived again.

Fractals of light break through the trees and give her sight, wide eyes blinking rapidly as she tailed the bodies through the wood. Snarl left her cautious, wary of the trail she left behind. Both women bore scars to remember their pasts by, and while the creature could cover her tracks and dance through the branches like the birds above, the hyena carried her weight with a purpose, a centripetal force that careened her through the circle of belonging in a violent swing. And here, the creature found, the woman was forcing her hand: pushing that belonging as though the forest were hers, as though she bore the right to live and to die on her spit-dripping teeth.

The creature, if she could be so forward, had long since decided that no one knew this land quite like her. Snarl was fooled if she believed herself on par with Mother Nature and her death-bringing hand.

Mama.

If there is a pulse under her skin, she feels it quicken. The drone in her chest heightens, shimmering insect wings flitting in the breeze as they began to swarm. She would speak, if she could. Call out to the child, maybe, tell it that it was going to die. But where her vocal chords shift her trachea restricts, and in what feels like a thousand hands pulling back on the bands that allowed air through, she wheezes. Her mouth snaps shut, nostrils flare - and as she realizes that no word of warning will come from her throat today. She must, if words will do nothing, act.

A deep and lilting hum presses out from her sealed lips.

She matches the child's song, guesses the tune. The insects upon her coat writhe, reflecting the sunlight on their wings as the swarm extends itself in tentative tendrils towards the nervous man and the child he claimed his kin. As best she can, the mutt situates herself between Snarl and the vulnerable one - like Bloodhound had done for Aurum, when she rose from the crater wailing. In the back of her head, beneath the noise, she felt that perhaps this place and its people were something she ought to look out for. With a soft sound still wavering on her tongue, she carefully trains her eyes on the hyena, and dares not blink as they lock in. Lips peel back to reveal yellowed teeth, crowded into her gums. Where she usually allows herself to attack first, she considers the child and its innocent eyes; this is not a fight she wants to give, not with something so frightened and small watching them.