PRIVATE why does it matter where we bury our bodies?

[VALE]

graphic gore ★ genderpunk ★ lammergeier

The lammergeier’s beak sliced into the dead cheetah’s soft belly. Black sludge—the byproducts of bacteria eating the intestines once the immune system stopped fighting for survival—poured out. The smell of fresh fruit and yet wrong wrong wrong.

Seamus, Xanti’s brother, had rotted. The cheetah had been dead for almost a day and in direct sunlight. His body had held together for the journey to MNT Halelevu’s rim… but he was too decayed to cannibalize.

Except for a vulture! Like Vale! Honestly, Vale was hungry as fuck anyway?! Even if Seamus wasn’t, like, a Descendant of the Departed and Xanti’s almost-psychopath brother, Vale would’ve eaten this rotting corpse.

Vale snapped xyr beak together. Black sludge slid off xyr white feathers like water off a duck.

Xe’d eaten xyr fill. The vulture stared down at the cheetah: opened up chest cavity to devour his heart. Muscle ripped off the left side of his body. Vale’d feasted.

Softly cackling to xemself, Vale glanced at the lava below the lip. Then up to the sky where vultures and corvids circled. Vale stared up at the circling carrion birds and cackled louder. “Hahaha, poor little buddies, don’t they know I’m friendly?!”

CAUTERIZED AND ATROPHIED ★ THIS IS MY UNBECOMING ★ NOW I WAIT FOR THE

[kole.]

Kole's ears lay flat against the crown of his head, seated just slightly away from Vale's figure as the bird feasted upon Seamus's rotting corpse. The smell of fester and pus assailed his already sensitive senses, though Kole had spent enough time dwelling in less than savoury places to at least pretend as if he didn't notice the foul stench or the bloat.

Seamus didn't look much like Seamus anymore. Didn't make him any easier to look upon, though it eased Kole's sensitivity somewhat that he barely recognised the cheetah.

His gaze flicked to the scavengers circling overhead, peckish but too nervous to swoop down and take a bite of what they clearly saw as a tasty morsel, and Kole saw as stomach-turning. A corpse. A bloated, pus-filled corpse, at that. "I'm not," Kole pointed out blithely, rolling onto his side with a huff. It was warm here. Kole didn't feel quite so cold as he usually did—a small comfort, really. "They look tastier than Seamus does right now, anyway."

Not that Kole ever really went hungry anymore. He was still relatively full after he'd last fed from Meteor. The lion appeared to be adjusting to the biting pain of being, well, bitten, more and more each day.

"Are you going to throw him in, then? Assuming that's why you brought him here."

[VALE]

graphic gore ★ genderpunk ★ skeletal fox

The vulture looked up. A tendril of festering rot hung from xyr beak; xe tossed xyr head back and gulped down the sliver of decaying flesh. “Hehe, I suppose what’s tasty depends on your species!”

Vale shook out xyr body. Feathers cascaded. The wind stole those pretty baubles, and a skeletal fox stepped out of the shed skin. Xe was now smaller than the vulture had been. A paw kicked the bloated corpse, and then xe hopped closer to Kole.

After Vale abdicated the corpse, the carrion birds swooped in to feast… on Seamus and the shed skin.

“Nahhhh, not gonna throw him in. Xanti wants his bones, yeah? The pelt’s unsalvageable, but the bones? Bones gonna make good memorial art. And the only doctor on this island’s gotta stay in good enough spirits if the lot of us don’t want idiots to start dropping like flies from trivial lil infections, bahahaha!”

The skeletal fox sat next to Kole, leaned over slightly to look at Kole’s face. Empty eye sockets looking at everything and nothing. “Tell me, Kole, how’d you end up Meteor’s boyfriend? ‘Cause you two are adorable, but, damn, you’re a dumbass and he’s a genius, it’s kinda strange, you know?”

CAUTERIZED AND ATROPHIED ★ THIS IS MY UNBECOMING ★ NOW I WAIT FOR THE