Black-rimmed ears were pinned flush with his skull as glittering, angry blue eyes that were as hard as cut gemstones stared out from the shadows. His magic clung as a cloud around his chest, darkening the already-lengthening early-evening shadows. The dark prince was angry. Kiada had hurt him deeply by her dalliance with Ru’in.

So he would make something else hurt.

To his dark, twisted mind (promoted both by his isolation and by Thranduil’s teachings), it seemed to be a perfectly natural law of nature. If you hurt, then enacting that hurt on another was not only right, but would help. Some how, some way.

He had found his victim: a lynx kitten. He had carefully watched it for a long while, ears perked and eyes sharp, looking for any sign of the mother. But the kitten was alone and silent, well-hidden beneath a fallen tree. Kianzo may have missed it, if not for Keusi’s sharp nose.

Anticipatory drool streamed from the hyena’s jowls, and a low thrum of excitement occasionally growled from her throat. Otherwise, she remained silent and crouched beside her bonded, waiting. Hyenas did not normally hunt live prey, they scavenged. But, with her bonded’s influence, Keusi was finding she liked the taste of fresh flesh.

The clouded ash at his chest suddenly exploded outward with snapping jaws, seeking to freeze the kitten for a moment as both he and Keusi stepped out of the shadows. The hyena let loose an eerie laugh as she sent out her own, Terrorize magic—though her sounds couldn’t entirely drown out the kitten’s pitiful and terrified mewls.

They were silenced for a moment, as Kianzo’s magic placed the kitten in suspended, frightened animation. His sharply spiraled horned head dropped down, intense blue eyes meeting the wide, terrified baby blues of the his prey. A cruel grin began to cross his face—

That was, it did until a sudden, white-hot pain slashed across his haunches. The mother lynx, returning for the evening to nurse her kit, came barreling in with fierce yowls and sharp claws. Her dangerous jaws snapped at the now-snarling Keusi—but the young, hunting pair was caught off-guard. They were too inexperience to contend with the quick ferocity, and both mother and kitten disappeared in the the night, growls left in their wake to warn Zo and his companion from following.

But Zo had no interest in following, he was too focused on the burning pain from the lynx’s bite wound. “Why did you let her sneak up on us, Si?” was his sharp, blaming rebuke of his companion. She responded only with a whining snarl of her own—her maw sported vivid-red slash marks from the lynx’s claws.