In the long, many-legged shadows of the library...
Your breath is a ragged, uneven rattle. You are badly wounded, each rent in your flesh crawling closed with agonizing slowness, crackling orange around the edges as oxygen metabolizes in your blood; your savaged meat gives off a red scattering glow, electrons changing energy states in the furnace of your regenerative heat. Your blood flows like muddy, brackish water in your veins as your body works to filter the massive spider-monster's venom through your ensorcelled flesh - it drips from you, vented painfully as tears down your cheeks, as sweat down your back.
Your hand jerks uncontrollably as the venom wracks your nervous system, like pins and needles in your veins as you reach for your prize - that ugly, ochre covered book - you replay the nightmare ambush in your head. The shadow of the Prey's massive corpse (twitching unnervingly on occasion) looms large; in the unlight of this tenebrous place you can still see where it was once human.
You realize the vision from one of your eyes is milky, as if a bee had stung you in the pupil but it is but pain - what is mere physical agony to you? You simply will it not to exist in your mind, instead pondering what you'd survived - the Spider-Ogre, for that is how Mizrah had described them to you and it was a fitting description, had descended in silence, suspended by a string of silk while you were at your most vulnerable and awkward - stretching out on a rickety ladder, at least five meters off the ground.
Curiously, you feel an absence of anger; you're relieved to be alive, firstly, and above all, you've learned from this experience, as with every encounter with one of these strange, Cursed night creatures; there's even some respect to be had for the efficiency and singular might with which it tried to assert its place in the food chain over you. From the Bat you'd learned where to root and dig for power, and from the Spider-Ogre...every wound you suffered was a sage verse in survival.
The air is flowing through a jagged, round hole, drilled lance-like through your chest and out your back - truly your body is supernaturally resilient, this kind of wound should have put you down, but the most important parts (your lungs, your spine) had already healed. When you look at your chest, it speaks to you with a silent voice - this is a parable of the aerial strike, invoking images of hawks descending upon helpless mice; a jaguar upon an unsuspecting iguana; or in this case, a spider the size of a compact car, transfixing an unwatchful Werewolf upon a pike-sharp limb. You couldn't even scream when it hauled you upward into the air - could you strike in the same way?
Your neck pulses and throbs where its terrible, hook-sharp fangs had found purchase, injecting its venom directly into your bloodstream. Each aching pulse of your heart pushes acrid fire through your veins, and even as you dry-heave on your knees, you ponder the efficacy of fast-acting toxins such as this. Rolling along through your organs, pumped by your own body's functions to your brain, you reason that a second or third bite from the Spider would have doomed you. You were no spider, but...Mizrah had told you, bluntly, 'whatever they can do, we can do better'. What did he mean, exactly? Images of syringes and grooved knives flit through your feverish mind.
Asserting your will over your shaking legs, you rise but trip on the strands of steel-hard silk tangling your legs - so gossamer thin you can't even see them in the darkness. Your knees ache from banging them against the dirty linoleum, but you marvel at how quickly the enormous arachnid rendered you unable to flee, and your arms bound, unable to strike; you recall this silly independent Turkish movie your uncle made you watch with him, about this manly survivor in the Caucasus Mountains; you recall him tying stones together with twine and hurling them at a deer's legs, tangling its limbs. You picture yourself in the same light, breaking Charys' shins with a well-spun throw.
Everything the Spider-Ogre had done - and it'd happened in the space of six seconds, at most - had been engineered to render you helpless before it. It had almost gotten the better of you too, but that initial lesson Mizrah had taught you, the dissolution of structures and environment with your Will alone, was what had ultimately saved you in this musty place ripe with potential for destruction. The crude manipulation of entropy, more a brutal thrust against the integrity of the bookshelves than any elegance on your part, had saved you; two of the tall, wooden book stacks above your head tipped against one another, providing the anchor from which the Spider-Ogre had descended upon its web. A snap-decision, scarring the structural integrity of the shelves around you with your Will, and everything had come tumbling down in a chaotic scrum of scattering books, torn pages, and broken monster limbs.
From there, you'd taken the Killing Shape and after a painful struggle, ripped it in twain; its swollen, enormous abdomen, wrapped in pallid human skin and shot through with veins like a goiter, still throbbed with life. Its chest and shoulders, its head had been disturbingly human, like some mockery of a centaur, but bald and bony; the ogre's lower jaw had split open, massive chelicerae and pedipalps splayed across its chest and red with your blood.
The simple thing to do would be to simply leave with your book, but you, Isabel Aphelion, had survived by the hair of your teeth and even prospered by seizing every opportunity as it came by...and you see it embodied in the massive corpse before you.
You wear four legs and feast upon it until you are sated. In two legs, you use your talons to open its throat and remove an iridescent blue lump of flesh that you knew to be a venom gland, roughly the size of a pear, which you wrap in a torn page from an atlas. Similarly, you split that awful abdomen - blood gushes forth - and your fingers grow sticky with pure white silk as you haul it out, looping the strands over your sleeve -
- as the sweat trickles down the side of your head in this place, down beneath the concrete and rebar, where the stagnant air reeks of asphalt and overtaxed wiring. You're in a rather bad position, strategically speaking: a maintenance hall at the bottom of a parking garage. Only one clear path forward, and in it loomed Charys' menacing form. A retreat would simply return you to where her packmates guarded the door...though in your mind you likened them more to minions.
Neither of you says anything for a while. She's pulled up a chair as well, straddling the back and leaning upon her elbows, never taking her eyes off of you. A minute passes like this, staring each other down as you muse on the differences in each other's qualities.
She strikes you as an icy cold predator with few reservations in her winter-blue eyes. Charys doesn't walk, she struts with commanding arrogance that, unfortunately, she was able to hold over your head by virtue of having you in a compromising position. She's got another unlit cigarette between her lips, and you take note of how a sharp canine gently worries the filter, rolling it around in her mouth
You, by contrast, are the picture of elegant disdain. Your jeans may be torn from your scuffle, asphalt stains clinging to your cheeks and you may stink of your own blood, but you may as well have been a painting for all you gave away. Your bow-shaped lips are set in a quiet smirk of dismissal, leaning back in your seat with your arms crossed loosely over your chest. You grow tired of this stupid stare-down game, and lean forward, never breaking eye contact.
"Why are you trying to kill him?" you demand.
Charys plucks the cigarette from her mouth. "There are three reasons. The first is that he murdered my little brother, literally tore him apart, limb from limb." You're unfazed - well, not entirely. It tracked, you'd seen how he handled opposition - breaking it down, piece by piece, like the first Hisser you two had devoured together. The idea of him doing that to another Werewolf, however...you can't help but feel yourself recoil inside, an instinctive revulsion. You fight it down and deny it because you don't want to think of Yusuf that way, and even though the accusation doesn't
come off
as a lie...no, surely there have to be extenuating circumstances.
You don't bring it up though, Charys seems like the type who'd marr your face for questioning her brother's actions, so you tilt your head to the side patiently, waiting for her to continue.
"Secondly, he..." you watch as the chill, armored mask she wears creaks and cracks, just a hint, revealing...something ugly and tormented. This is hard for her. "He did the same thing to my girlfriend that he did to you - used the Hunt to seduce her and fuck her, and...he messed with her mind. He turned her against me and she ended up dead, because I wasn't there to protect when she left."
...that does sound like something he would do, and not for the first time you're wondering about the kind of person he once was, during the months before he met you. He'd dropped implications of some sort of conflict that went down between himself and the others, but you realize, looking back on it, when you'd asked for details he'd given you...useless information, or distracted you. He was
incredibly
distracting too, and already you find your mind drifting to the imagery of him seducing some faceless, shadowy female figure, taking her into his bed, fucking her and cumming in her and filling her with his Mark.
You want him. You miss him. Behind your ribs there is a clenching tension of longing.
Memories of passionate, almost surreal intercourse divert your attention, like an erotic lightshow through your mind. You realize that Charys has been watching you, as if waiting for a response. Valkyrie bitch...you have no sympathy for this woman, only for the people who must have stepped in your mate's path. "I'm listening," you add with no small amount of skepticism. Why should you respect this woman, just because she and her packmates had beaten you senseless and humiliated you?
She's got it back, that armored, cold-forged exterior that shows little yet reveals much. Quiet disdain for you is a cover for laser-intense focus, an obsessive edge that you could tell was ground against your packmate like a whetstone...she seeks to turn you against him; how could she not? She'd been after his life for months, here now was an opportunity to strike him right in his heart. Predictable...you hope he's alright.
"Has Mizrah even told you about the moon?" Now her expression is different...she's smiling a little, looking bemused; she knows the answer, because you do too and your own silence says much. That had always been a part of the equation that'd never been addressed, and even when you'd asked his answers had been simply a roundabout way of saying you were tied to its cycles, but never directly how.
Terribly distracting man.
"Hnnh..." She tsks three times, biting gently on the tip of her tongue. "Probably told you we're at the top of our little fucked up food chain, right?"
