Clouds began to collect upon the horizon – a shoreline of springtime hues darkening with a pregnant sluggishness, as though the nebular deities were purposefully painting an impression of foreboding. A brutish wind brazenly licked across the supple plains of her features, vaporous fingernails tangling in the unfastened whorls of her pearlescent mane – tendrils whipping across her pallid gaze – and the variegated pigments of an elongated tail, wrapped fitly in ribbon. Moisture pervaded her nostrils, the crispness of the breeze burning the vacuous, salved pockets of her lungs, persuading her to evadingly tuck her chin into the flexure of an oscine neck. The sharp motion – coupled with the startling chill – reflexively made her gasp, her teeth unhinging from the disentangling fabric of her makeshift rucksack (and as though the wind were sentient) it opportunistically plunged into the fresh aperture, ripping the bag open and spilling out its contents onto the ground. A collage of the deceased scattered across the greensward, and she snapped her incisors together with dismay, her façade of stoicism momentarily dismantled with furrowed brows and a worried frown.

Papa!

His skinned skull lay on its side, jaw slacked with disappointment. “Oh, this will not do,” she murmured, starting to hurriedly seek and collect every precious piece of her beloved cadavers. It was clear a storm was approaching – how would her father feel if he were caught in the rain!

“Alright, one more,” she murmured with a dulcet tone, which was swallowed hungrily by the deepening hiss of the breeze, once polite, now threatening to whip into a thunderous, vicious gale. The last piece to be amassed in her compendium of disassembled carcasses was His skull, though as she turned, content in the thought of completing her laborious gathering, she was startled by a sudden amass of shadow. Though this was not a simple motif of collective umbrage cast by terrestrial forestry – this amalgamation of tarmac and slick oil pulsated with the concavity of complex muscle and virility, life exhaling out of his broadening nostrils in smoky curls of breath that crystallized in the wakening chill of the torrential weather. She is stone – an effigy of caution – though the slenderness of her sides undulates with quickening, panicked breath. A pale gaze sweeps with exasperation across his features – across that devilish protuberance jutting from betwixt carved brows! “Demon!” She barks out, usually honeyed tones venomous with a defensive snap of gritting teeth.

In her religious vexation she might have mistaken those foxes for demonic wings; and in truth, she did.

Her imagination whisked her away for a moment, transient sightlessness seizing her pallid lenses as they glazed over with a repugnant illusion of impalement and steaming viscera; her own demise beheld in a nauseatingly sluggish narration, the vestal threads of her expression pinching swiftly in a noticeable flinch as she watched those frightful vortices puncture and gouge her like a flailing trout. It was no doubt that whetted rapier in which he employed to slay his prey – why, it had been used so much, it had been discolored perpetually red! A purely vulturine, thoughtless executioner – that’s what he was! She knew she had to vanquish this evil, snuff out this devilish maestro of misfortune before he could supplement another notch to his proverbial bedpost of postmortem –

– though admittedly, she found herself unable to recall a single incantation in her shock.

She could feel the endogenous pound of her veins, the auroral flesh of an oscine throat palpitating with the rhythmic tumult of her heart which assuredly threatened to vacate the imprisonment of her avian bones. “I suppose I shall submit to death, then,” she whispers, words as velvet as frangible petals slipping like gossamer over a tongue flecking gently against slackened teeth, “though I would like to request a swift death.” It is a simple request – one made as she placed a hoof gingerly in front of her, which followed another just as wraith-like and demure, until the distance betwixt their contrasting bodies was but a sliver of a memory. Her gaze travelled upward – a curtain of stiletto-black lashes, alike a dense canopy – dressing their margins, as she unabashedly confronted those cerulean hues, which admittedly reminded her of a briny, unruly sea. It momentarily brushed against the broadness of his shoulders, peering beyond to behold the fetchingly cute vulpine that roosted upon his backside. “Poor creatures, to be enslaved by such a brutish thing.” She frowned, ambrosial lips tugging downward, disheartened.