Watching, each spasm of the mutating filly draw the waiting a little closer, her crown all the while gaining a sidelong tilt of wide-eyed fascination. Who is this, upon which she spies? What is it, she wonders, that causes such precious transformation from prey to beast? Her tongue probing her lips at the sight of the dark gray one’s new, furrier form, when she rises from where the magic had bid her bow, complaints of pain dripping from a noble, hunter’s maw.

Beloved’s laughter blesses the air at the sight of a wolf bemoaning the gifts of suffering, having never seen the beasts do so, but the most piteous of whimpers, of course, as her blade exited their chests. Of course, she’d never met a wolf with which she could speak, but the big one, that had served Oblivion, her darling Mask of Death; a wolf which was not a wolf, but a man, trapped in the thick furs of beasts, tailed by the haunting visage of his kills, heavy on a tender heart. Too tall, too gentle, to truly be that which his rows of fangs made him appear, so that even Beloved, small, pale, sleek, was more a snarling canine than he.

As she moves towards the she-wolf before her, mad-mind drifting in and out of her coiled memories, she wonders how savage this mongrel is, but just fleetingly so. A babe, in a man’s body, this time, Beloved wonders if the little witch, her damp, wolf’s muzzle already pressed to the ground in greedy search of Kisamoa’s bleached treasures, has done more than dream of the chase. Likely not, she thinks with a barking laugh, a maddened grimace of both panic, and pleasure, mind besieged by her own past hunts, and the haunting of those felled; their faces swimming through the black, static crackle of her mind, like so many soft, warm stones sinking into lakes of sticky red-black.

She dances over the strange dead; not her art, lying there, but someone else’s, already fetid in the warmth of the Spring. Had it been thus which had brought him death, riding the teeth of a foe, seeking the bitch upon which he rutted? Or had it been the winter, long, slow, that had ebbed his speed, his strength, so that the prey might slay its tormenters, in a natural uprising of nature’s rigid paths, before that murderous feast galloped on to meet its doom elsewhere? Where were his comrades, ringed, as packs do, voices gathered in mourning, their songs hallowed, and haunting?

"You, you there," she sings, and giggles, her mirth peculiar, too much, as she bounds towards the wolf, her divine gaze lowering to be at better alignment with the mongrel, her steps sweeping, bobbing, to keep in time with the steady sway of a hunter’s form. She must remind herself again, with a nervous, tutting noise rising from the peculiar writhing of her laughter, that this is not truly a wolf as she strides alongside him, but a female child, the white witch’s irrational mind attempting luring her deeper, as usual, into the twisted realms of a chaos stunted – or was it bolstered? – reality. "Clever, to take from the dead what they cannot defend. Beloved has not seen a being stolen before, while still remaining where they once were."

She’d heard as much before, but has forgotten. So she asks, then decrees, seemingly not caring if objections are made:

"You are doing as the Grinning Sea bids? Beloved will join you, then."



Beloved
rust every place that I touch