Rupert
The air seemed almost sanctified with it's stillness. The world still yet silent, all endeavors laid to rest for the night. It was young but it was tiring. Those whom wander at the birthing of the dark find themselves with a mission that is generally kept to themselves, be it peace for a moment or just finding something to look at to not think of anything else. 
It welcomes all that dare endeavor into it's arms. 

The trees were wet from fresh rain, droplets gentle against the pavement. It was just another night to write away as one survived. 

There was lights in the distance, ones of authority. Sirens blaring in the city, close to the airport it seems. Something had happened, perhaps it was on the news. 

Breathing ragged, *Ah*, something is running. Chasing after something, reprieve from confusion of something it hasn't seen. Scared and broken, unfamiliar. Feral. Desperate to claw at any ladder willing to drag it out. Footfalls displacing the calm waters of rain. 
Something filled with adrenaline rushing through the city into trees that seemed so far it made one nauseous. Sprinting with energy borrowed, crashing through things haphazardly. 

Arms too many and lashing every wish way to make soom, teeth innumerable, ripping at air to breathe. 
It was claustrophobic, it couldn't see so the beast made eyes to see. Maiming itself to go faster to reach some form of safety sooner. 

It didn't know what it was doing, it could care less of how amalgamated it looked. Flesh coiling and squirming without care, it squealed and wheezed in it's strain. 

*Oh, how the flowers looked so lovely in the moonlight.*
Juan
Petrichor and distant sirens hung in the air of one of the last nights of the season that would be so cold; a full lung's worth of heavy breath from the last reach of the Cradle's softly buzzing lights, Sigrún's senses were sharp as winter. The last skeletons of a few dried and rotting leaves were brushed by her giddy steps deep into its makeshift abyss, careful and quick. It leaned on its toes when it ran, as little of its weight placed on the dirt as possible.

The sound of her boots on the earth pauses for a split-second as she hangs in the air over the creek that formed when it rained, and that was when she heard it. The dappled shadow landed hard on the still-damp ground and crouched there, fingers pressing into the mud, slow curls of steam coming from its nostrils. Listening. 

Certain sounds endear themselves to a living thing's pricked ears, high above trivial pleasures and the noise of machines. Life yearns to recognize life, even immersed in pitch-dark solitude; lungs contracting, flesh tearing, teeth cutting, whimpers of pain, every rhythmic shake of the earth beneath a fellow beast's feet. It is not a thing often looked for consciously, but always a thing that snagged.

This... Careening vehicle of such life was unlike anything the young beast knew to be alive. It breezed a few metres from her post, coiled stock-still, and yet its frigid wake still ruffled the loose curls floating over her forehead like she had been standing close enough to smell the green musk in its fur. Its heaving breaths were fast and wet like a wounded thing's; the teeth that the moon glinted off of for a splintered second were those of a predator, its furious desperation one of prey. 
_ _

The trees, the bushes, the rocks, and the smell of rain warped behind its path, as though the idle forces weren't sure where it ended and they began, all folded and strained like organs of a grander beast. It was so beautiful that Sigrún nearly forgot to take off running behind it, upsetting the crushed flower petals left in its heavy footprints in the thick moss.

Hidden nerves drank in the chemical sting of the remnants of the thing's hot, acrid breath as they lashed behind the smaller figure, vivid like terror. Crushed-opal eyes hardly knew to blink, only to follow the fluid shape ahead of them, fixated on the tips of gnarled antlers that bent like ancient branches cutting through the moonlight.
Rupert
Breathing, rasping, weeping. Living. All it knew, all it will know. It ran so wildly without a second thought that the thing that she passed was just a blur of messy colour, and it was bright. Colourful enough with it's sudden appearance that it threw the beast into another world of confused fear. Twisting to move itself away from the thing it now felt that it weaved behind. 

Without direction and without familiarity it stumbled and crashed into a metallic thing, is screamed and groaned and tore against the force of the beast eagerly. The steel tearing into a muscled arm with ease. It felt like hot red agony ripping into the beasts core, it hasn't quite felt a thing like it. Each pain so vastly different from the last yet still it was so awful. 

It screamed, it's keening yeoul shaking the every earth. There was something so distinctly inhuman about it, how shrill and haggard it broke through the throat. How gutteral it seemed to drag itself through flesh. A scream of pain a yell of rage that welled into something terrifying that broke the stability of ones mind into a cascading waterfall of jumbled fear. Hot air welling out of its many maws as it wailed. It's face breaking and reshaping into beast yet human and human yet beast. Everything unable to be named with it's cry.

The thing tore itself off of the metal, somehow no blood leaving a print behind. But, still the wound remains shown and how ugly it looked. Like digging a hole into skin through muscle, yet the muscle moves around it agonizingly. Reverent to the wound as it eagerly writhed inside hotly. It's fur warm as two hands come to brace itself on the wet earth. 

It's legs which lay beneath it moving to get up once more. Another arm pressing against the gaping wound and the other tearing into something around another arms wrist. 
The horns of it decorated in leaves and vines and earth, shaken into it as if it was born there. It glowed with a gentle pulsing rhythm unlike the beasts breathing.

.

It takes a moment to stand, before moving awake from the metal and bracing against a tree. A second too long and those people would find it. How their guns and things scared the beast. Something followed her, same ilk as those people. 

A rumbling yet broken growl bubbled through its throat. Teeth barred with intent and the things jaw snapping with a contained meaning of danger.
That bright thing moving against the water that fell from the trees. 

Claws against earth beckoning it to be closer, daring it just another inch. It was too human, and the beast as too fearful. 
The earth caved and moved the beast forward against another tree, helping it with whatever pain it could. Though it couldn't help at all, but still moving to brace something so interwoven with it.

This little thing small against the wild thoughts of gnashing teeth that dripped with drool from exhaustion. It stood tall for a moment before it was on all fours.

*It's many eyes now look to the seemingly hidden figure. Cautious.*
Juan
Sigrún's chest felt as though it were expanding around a slab of driftwood lodged between her brittle ribs by the time the beast she was entranced by halted—and wailed in pain. *The fence.* Her own brutally tender flesh twinged at the sight as she tried to find her breath behind the stump of a lightning-struck tree, fingers coming away black with charcoal as the icy chill of the distant stars clawed at her lungs. An errant limb twisted and lashed behind her, slipping into knot after knot.

Her cold fingers pressed her lips shut as the injured thing howled, three hearts pounding in her temples. Though it shook her down to the bone, such was the force of a writhing, furious sound, she silently willed it away from the ears of the sleeping and the suspicious back in their concrete boxes; such a sound must soak into the wood, the rot, the stone itself, or it would be followed and culled, strung up and puzzled over and utterly desecrated.

As it lay crumpled around its agony, Sigrún inched closer, melting through the shadowed patches behind a closer tree as quietly as possible, though it mattered little. The beast could undoubtedly smell her, past the coppery sting of its own blood—she watched its nose *(noses)*, flaring and melting to different angles on its impossible skull. It was though such a thing aimed its focus not by contracting a muscle but by rearranging its features like it were a soft clay effigy of itself, swelling and eroding like millennia were unfolding in the span of seconds.

It *Stood*, and the lone girl's fingers twisted and squeezed each other in the tightest knot they could think of.

*It saw her.*
_ _

For a moment, the moonbeams traced its—*Their? Her?*—face over the outline that could have been human. Its shadowed eye, though facing away from the only source of light, was one of a truly wild thing. Meeting it as a man herself would be certain death; a beast, then, slunk out from the hollow in the burned tree, wearing the night on its back like a borrowed mantle. A pale imitation of itself; *Curse that place,* She thought, *For being so far from my own.* Sigrún's breath still came lead-heavy as a single drop of cold sweat ran down its spine, quiet as the droplets of rain falling from the fuzzy green conifers far above.

They faced each other, all knotted muscles and sharp teeth and tangling arms, graceful in their ferocity. Perfect abominations, of the earth and sea.
Rupert
Every mouth coiled and bore it's teeth at different times, other parts of its body seem just as independently alive as the wound gorging itself within. Something hot moved in it, and it curled on itself. Gagging on wet air and wheezing on nothing. The body of this thing looked unfinished, the red of inside moving to open for another shine of teeth that barked and slobbered across it's wounded form. It was so confusing to which the only way one could recognize front to end was how it moved itself it displayed the ungodly hubris of some mentally forbidden thing, speaking of almost satirical musics. But, only a fool dare think this think similar to them. 

To the person that bore itself to, it's form was shown unrivaled splendor that ached the very bones. The moon seemed to cast itself away from the beast, in respect? Disgust. Unknown. Moving to give better light on the figure that has its unspoken courage to look. It looked almost at awe with it, at its pain? How foul. 
It smelled that wash of the ocean and the hand of something that didn't belong to the mother. It brought an anger to it's wounded thoughts that it moved itself from the tree. 

It moved towards the figure, it's footfalls rendering whatever else silent. All animals cowering in it's motions at the thing that may soon render another to nothing. The dirt and soil *Shook* With anticipation. 

The thing moved backward one- two steps away, the ground against it. It was losing balance and the beast encroached. 
A clawed hand reached forward slowly before pressing itself with force into the figure. The force of it pushing the person into the soft ground. It's paw? It splayed across the figures chest, the fingers gnarled and far too long but inhuman and another finger burst from in between two fingers to move across the figures chest, pushing it deeper into the ground. 

There was rope on its wrist that dug past the fur of it, ripping into flesh wetly. The beast ignored it to loom over the figure.

It's maw slowly going to find itself over the figure and so close that teeth touch it's skin. It was wet, but it didn't bite.
It's eyes moved ever which way, some spun in their sockets. This was before all stopped to stare at the figure, the focusing making them shake in strain. 

The earth was covered and all the figure could see could *Feel* Was this god forsaken thing.
Juan
The earth, this insurmountable being of heavy breath and iron lifeblood, changed its shape beneath her accursedly human feet. Sigrún was no hatchling—her sea legs were core muscle memory, which served her well—but this beast's gravity was another thing entirely, and the smaller of the two faltered.

She did not recover.

The soft ground moved to meet her back, the cold soil seeping through to her skin, sharp shoulder blades and marked backs of bare, strong arms. Her ribs ached to expand under the incredible weight pinning it flat, a soft and malleable body fighting to contort, to find some way to fit in the path of this beast that did not *Bend* Nature, but reshaped it, overwhelming her strange ribbon eyes. It made sense to her, in the most ancient part of her sight and memory, what this beast must be.

Its wrath was of no surprise, then; whomever had dealt these wounds, sent it running through this place cut-up and anguished, had done so with no respect. The hunt was botched, clumsy, cruel, an affront to nature. Anger mixed with the fear in her gut as the enraged spirit tightened its grip on her, gnarled claws threatening to carve through the delicate muscles stretching over fragile bones.

Knees dug into the sacred thing's chest, the object of its anger's feet slipping in the dirt as pins and needles shot through its arms and its sight. It couldn't afford now even to splutter, loathing to lose more air it couldn't regain. Kaleidoscope patterns of fear and wonder bloomed from where its tooth grazed her skin, and the tips of shaking tentacles tried to find purchase anywhere around its powerful wrist and the rope digging into it.

A single word made it past its dark-stained lips, in the old, old tongue.

"*Ísaivoî...*"
Rupert
The bear rested its maw against the beings neck, the feeling of flesh thin and fragile against sensitive teeth. It's words being felt not only heard with questions. A wave of something reverent spilling against its skull and thought like waves. A voice told the beast that the word was spoken with a thing that was felt deeply. The beast was broken from it's rage for a second. It's face(s) sinking into the flesh of its neck in a moment of judgement. The eyes and teeth moving to also cave into the void where that head was. The neck burst and wire-like flesh moved into the shape of a flower before a skull of a bear melded itself through the hot steam created by it. The horns glowed with glee, the flora on them shaking with the heads movement. 

There were eyes that grew and stared at the being, all of them in a circle each with a different pupil. It's teeth back to skin but the paw lifted it's weight slowly as it stared.

This thing was frightened but it also had history. Something beneath the mother reached to this one. It was out here looking at the beast like it was something to be hunted, to be killed. Not yet, never yet. The beast will never complete whatever deal it struck with the mother in death. 
It felt a thing worm its way around the beasts wrist that didn't feel like a hand should and it growled. It's jumbled and mixed voice heavy against the beings throat. Its other three arms finding purchase around the peculiar thing below. Two above, one to it's left. 

A claw that once rested on its chest seemed to reach upwards to touch the thing that stained her lips in confusion. It's claw gently pressing down, not enough to cut but enough to feel. Half of it's eyes stared to where the claw was but the rest continued to look into it's variegated eyes. 

It growled and chittered, it's voice seeming to warp to speak. And when it did, it almost seemed rewarding to the beast. It's haunting vocals ringing the beasts ears from un-use. 

"*Why.*"
Juan
Sigrún felt the vibrations of her own low voice against the creature's teeth, as though it were primed to tear every syllable apart as soon as they weakly clawed themselves out of her. *Such is nature. Be alert, and very afraid, but do not be alarmed.* 

The three hot, panicked drumbeats in her chest pounded like trapped animals beneath its massive paw, quickening as it began again to change; the moon had the sense to avert its gaze, casting the pits and hollows in the sacred thing's flesh into even darker shadow, lighting only on the tips of its outermost layer of fur, bouncing off of its glistening, wild eyes. Its captive could not *Want* To breathe now, even if it could—the sea-beast's opal-dust eyes, attuned finely for places in which no light shall reach, took in the blooming kaleidoscope pattern of muscle and bone and flesh. Secrets untold dripped from between its horrible, beautiful teeth; wide-eyed and clawing desperately for an inch of space, Sigrún watched them fall in hot, acrid drops to her cheek and the soil around her.

And, at the edge of her capacity, the pressure lessened—just a little, just enough, letting a ragged intake of cold night air and raw animal breath into her lungs. She gasped, and her sternum hit its palm again, once, twice, again. A weak cough escaped her, bringing with it splatters of something dark and oily and bitter like the sea; it pooled beneath her tongue, dripping down her jaw from the corners of her mouth. Without the water, it all sank like lead. The limbs coiled around the creature's immense wrist loosened, but didn't yet release. She had long lost track of her human hands.

"*Heh?*"
_ _

A twinge where the claw touched her, upsetting the wide, smudged grin that had crept across her face. It revealed the only part of her that could be considered sharp: her teeth, pointed and stained; vicious, earthly things. Little compared to the ursine beauty's, but not intended for the same things—Sigrún tried to remember that. To forget what she was in the face of such a thing was a death sentence for more than her soft, agile body pinned to the dirt. *Whatever did the beast think of that?*

*Was it... Confused?*

"Why not?" Was the first thing that came to mind; a wiser head would have curbed its need to be a contrarian, or at *Least* Had the thought to be confused about its ability to speak(and what a voice it had—thousands of pale spots rose over her skin when it echoed, like it twisted her muscles to hear). The kraken girl was far beyond that, though. This was no time to be spent pondering.

"*Heheheh.*" She stared back into its eerie, mismatched eyes. "You sounded... Pained... Forgive an interloper her curiosity, and a beast its instincts—" Invisible limbs squirm. "Or maul me. I couldn't fault you. Terrible things have been done." *I would run, though*, she didn't need to say, *And fight you bitterly for my life, and you wouldn't fault me for that, either.*
Rupert
The bear watched as the thing below her writhes with a futility unfelt by the beast in many moons. It makes the thing click it's jaw and claw the ground beside the being. 

It's eyes widened and swirled with an unspoken joy that echoed from a far off citadel in its mind. Oh, how the thing she gave herself to is ecstatic at it's almost frivolous survival. It's maw opened, a blast of hot air onto skin and the sound of life into ears. It was almost too loud. Just for a second before it's teeth slide shut once more. Pressing forward it places pressure onto the paws above. 

The one to it's left lifted, it's fur thick as it moved close to the things face. The beasts hand turns and it wipes the dark ichor that seeped from it's lips slowly and as gentle as it could before moving their hand back to its side. The beings speech garbled and coughed through adrenaline wired breath. Pained? No. It dosent need some broken demure help from something like this. 

"*Yunz all speakin.*"
Something wept in words the beast didn't know. Speaking about what the thing is, it dosent know. It dosent know. Sacred. *Sacred.*
"Ain't nothin be *Praised.* I pruhtect it."
It's maw didn't move as it spoke. A broken rage setting fire to it's words. It's voice twisting into a loud growl at the end of its words.

It's eyes leered and twisted angrily, some spinning in the sockets which it had been placed. Others being erased from the skull and the next melding with the one beside it. A heavy shuddering growl or inhale of air mixed with the acrid stench of the salt sea filled it's forsook throat. 

"I *Know* Ya. Not yur name." 
It says in another roar.
*What you're like. What you're willing to do. Tear apart your own world for your image. Maybe even yourself if you see it fitting.* It's name watery but it almost felt knowable. Almost. 

The beast ignored the things that snaked up it's arm. It felt odd, not unwelcomed but odd for something on the ground.
Juan
Sigrún pressed her toothy grin into a firm, hard line as the beautiful beast's claw neared it, watching closely, silently. It afforded her a small kindness, leaving a small smudge of soil in the place of her little trail of liquid fear, and yet still pressed its hot breath into the soft part of her neck, taunting her with its vicious teeth. The shadows on her (increasingly confused) face melted and morphed with every breath, hinting at the varied guises of animals on the edge of her mind as she jumped from place to place trying to find purchase on a form that rang true to the currents beneath her skin.

The look of bewilderment on her face when it spoke, though, was incriminatingly human. She had *Some* Idea of what a 'Southern' accent might sound like—her roommate rambling away on the phone while folding his laundry informed her one way or another—and so though she could feel her mind trying to pin the odd lilt on something close to that rhythmic drawl, all attempts failed immediately. 

Its voice *(voices?)* Rumbled just outside her frequency, forming unfamiliar words with obscured meanings. In wondering where their possible misunderstanding might have happened, its precious few offered syllables dissolved into nonsense in the fuzz behind her brain.

*Would she get a punctured lung for asking this creature to repeat itself?*

The curling form of a branched tongue's shadow twisted on her cheek.

*Ah.*
There was something she might be able to put words of her own to. Whatever words her strange encounter was looking for? Likely not. But that was impossible to say, certainly not through the shaking that had overtaken her.

"You do, yeah? Something of my choice-making in the woods at night, perhaps, and what my fear must smell like..."

She squirmed, trying to possibly get comfortable in the wall of earth at her back. The dirt had started to warm where her skin had touched it.
_ _

"Know my name, or don't," She wheezed. "Nothing good to offer you alongside it, though." A weak cough, and the painfully careful tip of a tentacle pointed at the binding digging brutally into a muscular, wounded arm. It mimed prying the awful thing out of the writhing flesh, hovering in the air to mark her question.

"Or—if I may use what I might know of you—nothing you'd accept?"
Rupert
This thing spoke in an off handed speech that reminded her of the joyful laughter of some poor sod hoping to catch game in her forest. That tone is wandering for something to grab onto anything to get a second chance, *There are no second chances once you've picked your road.* The Person below the beast seems determined to barter their way back into the good graces others have lost. The beast thinks in carved eroded stone, shuddered by time but still the same; Strong unless something almost cataclysmic was to snap it apart like brittle wood. *Once was too many*, twice was unreasonable.

It was a cautious yet adventurous thing below it. Spoken for itself when awe danced in its eyes but a confusing guilt spread across it's face. Did it not understand? People these days. They could never begin to understand the mother's intentions. 

There was a sting that slowly crawled up it's arm. Fusing into an uncomfortable sense of numbness, which numbness came uncontrollably. The beasts hand instead of staying cohesive was splayed further across the beings body, trapping it somewhat in a cage of confusing flesh. The beast almost forgot the rope was tied around their wrist in an effort to reprimand the person now. To keep something able to alert others standing would be ill advised, she has broken that new rule before coming here. Failing once got this punishment. 

The beings skin despite being shadowed looked effervescent and unusual. Moving into incandescent shapes piquing the beasts curiosity into another direction. 
With a few seconds of heavy silence the beasts huffs and releases the pressure moreso, it's now spindly fingers of many digging into the ground. Still the being is trapped but they can move. 

"Try."
The beast speaks one word and that's hopefully enough permission for the human to do what they thought was right.
Juan
A slowly expanding ribcage creaked silently in its walls of hollowed earth and tangled flesh. Sigrún slowly propped itself up on its elbows, still peering up at that circle of strange, strange eyes. There was no reason for them to fit together over that dripping muzzle, that shadowed brow, that impossible expression the way they did, but there was a rhyme. The shapes swimming below the girl's skin melted and fizzed as she lost focus trying to find the patterns, losing them all the moment one clicked.

The pile of mangled paper that would be on her floor by that time the next day would contain some very strange things, she just knew.

Slender, cool fingers slide deeper into the cold ground and a disc in its spine *Pop*S as she worked with the space she'd been given so graciously, the sudden taste of earth running along the jut of a shoulder blade, the swell of an obscure muscle. She would be much more careful than her human hands would allow, she swore, sliding those folded-ribbon eyes away from those brutal teeth to the twisted and bound suggestion of a limb.

An onlooker might not even think the delicately uncoiled arms to be touching the beast's foul wound; she tasted injury nearly through the scent of blood around the rope, searching for the softest place to snake beneath it. Slowly, ever so slowly, distance grew between the raw muscle and the shackle, replaced by things cold and alive that tugged and stuck and searched for ways in through impossible labyrinths of nerves and tendons.
_ _

Its hearts sped—it held its breath, then, and told itself to be underwater, plunged in the cold and dark where it could focus. Where life depended upon slowing those vessels, holding that breath for the span of a hundred; she recalled a game she had played, ages ago in the grand old kelp forest, where her skin mustn't brush the stalks of floating orange leaves. Mouth set, chest still, legs pinned, eyes wide. Each push and pull on the world around her had to be flawless and justifiable to even the spinners beneath the world tree, lest the pressure punctured a lung.

Sigrún rarely thought like that nowadays—it was refreshing, a whetstone correcting the balance of her skull, a stunned silence from the balconies. The binding loosened.
Rupert
The beast made no move to maneuver it's maw from its place, the being had slid underneath its jaw, eliciting a notion of silence to it's thoughts. The pure sound of something so tense striking it's nerves at a nauseous pace. Each sound amplified to a degree that had the noise pulsing in its ears like music. Oh, to heed the words of something so prone to the fiction of reality. The movement of something fluid and something so close, how long has it been?

With the loosening of the rope, it's fingers gradually sunk back into a more animal paw, it shifts around for a cohesive form, shifting from scales to feathers to something slick from the sea. Back to fur, back to roots, back to what was accepting. The muscle that was slowly freed tore off the rope and started feeding itself back into the hand to take away that feeling of nothing, it couldn't go back to that feeling lest all be shown. It's arm shivered sparking up into its head.

To feel, to be close. Foreign, foreign, It is not known anymore. A thousand memories and a thousand lives is the loneliest thing of all. The beast cannot remember the stakes of the game, for she can only see the being that speaks her name in forgotten letters. This was new, it was terrifying. What sort of lawless thing brought her here, what did they know. What did they see, for how many eyes she sports it can only see so much through her tainted lense. 

The beast completely lifted it's paw from the person below it, considering it worth not hurting. The rope was not completely off, it was still weaved tightly into a knot and the beasts hands were too big. But, thanks to the being the beast had been so graciously met with. The rope was almost gone. 

This was not meant to last, there was a noise that didn't come from the other. Multiple of them, footfalls and orders of trying to secure something to not accidentally hurt others. Those people that were sent to hurt, even if they saw it as help. It hurt, it wounded more than saved.

The skull sunk into the beast instantly and a flat face of skin was placed instead where many many eyes bore into the being below. It's head tilted downwards and it leered into the being, it's for head pressing into the others with force. It's paw hovering back over its chest, it meant hostility this time. To break if it had been so threatened. It wanted to see what this thing that followed it was, it wanted to know it's intention. Feel it even. It cannot live on to unprepared.

The horns shimmered and shook as a voice echoed from a maw unseen.
"*Ye lead 'em 'ere*?" 
It spoke in it's thunder, shaking the baritone of music from it's throat into a means to obtain the rawest truth.
Juan
"*No—*"

Sigrún's fingers fly out of the dirt, hovering between them, brushing the edge of the beast's thick pelt. The bridge of her nose kept the sharp, accusing expression from crushing her skull, but she still felt dark, heavy eyelashes brush against her cheek. Despite herself, in the back of Sigrún's mind, she couldn't help but note that the last time she had written something like this, she had woefully forgotten the dramatic edge that the cold shiver up her spine brought.

For the first time, her shining eyes widened with proper fear—she froze, listening, and those silvery eyes reflected rage. Those *Fools,* Those ceaselessly brutal bastards, those... Those *People*.

*"I, I didn't make a sound,"* She whispered, quickening breath raising her chest to graze the creature's paw again. It shook with anger now, intent to crush her, their voice sending a wave of cold sweat down her back. She fought the urge to scream.

*"They can't* Take *You, they—"*

Sigrún slipped out of the near-grasp like butter through claws, never breaking eye contact with the bear. It crouched, listening desperately. The intruders were perhaps five minutes away if their flashlights were good, six or seven if they kept up that level of noise. *Brutish fiends.* What would they do, lock the beast up? Pry those eyes open, file down its horns, pin its muscles open just to marvel at them like they were less grotesque for casting a static shadow? *They can't take you.*
_ _

Hurriedly brushing a strand of its mane out of an eye with three bloodshot pupils, the smaller of the animals in the moonlit clearing slowed its deep breaths that tasted of rain-wet pelt and sour steam. How would they vanish? How would she find it again, this wild thing, mouth of the wordless, walker of worlds? It was a deeply foolish thing to hold a life with such a magnitude so close to her concrete cell, but the kraken pushed that aside. If her face looked like a human's and her heart wanted like a human's like it had before this, she thought she might claw her skin off.

One beast looked at another, and to the thickest vein of trees, and back again with tightly clenched fists.
Rupert
The bear stared at the frail panicking thing. It's body coiled in such a way that it looks as though it want to spring out onto her and grab and cling onto what it can. It knows enough respect that it cannot do that, it cannot take them and expect it to stay. Though, the way it looked; broken yet so so alive it hurt. Ah, would she remember it's eyes at all? 

The moonlight shown like a blanket around the person to comfort, to soothe. It looked so scared. The beast would remember, hopefully. The paw stilled before pressing into the earth. It had no connection to the things that roam so brash and hot headed through her grounds. This thing had nothing to do with it, it was obsolete from everything else. Oh... It was innocent... The beast hath brazenly broken onto a mistake. 

The beast heaved, and broke the air into something heavy. Riding the sky with it now slowly standing on its hind legs. It's four limbs stretching outward, the limb directly across from the arm which the being had loosened the rope there was another, something wet was dripping from it as the hand pulsed. It was hard to walk with the violence ache in her head. The beasts face coiled and stretched back into something more beastial, muscles coiling onto bone and stretching along it. Soon accompanied by fur. Oh, not quite. Too many eyes were again the taken sight along with it's gnashing maw.

The air felt too hot, it's blood too cold as it moved towards the being. It's arms outstretched to the human? The vessel, something yet to be understood something yet to be help close to bore a thousand nights and thoughts upon. Never, no. It cannot be taken. She cannot waver, she cannot stray, she cannot think. 

Was it memory, Habit, Reflex, Or imitation; the beast wrapped all four of its paws around the being, gently but with an unspoken rally of urgency behind it's care. Cradling the thing like something oh so important, oh so *Needed*. The hand that leaked something stained the beings shirt and soaked it in something dark but it didn't have the colour as one would associate with blood
 As it cupped it's side, it was cold and it feels like an ice pack within the contact of the beings skin. The beast held the being close as it swayed and moved. 

The beast within all thought and reason, aimed for the fence which it broke only minutes prior. It looked as if it was topped over by a car, metal spread like shrapnel across the lot, some sticking out of vans and cars. Ignorant on the noise which it produced as it focused on the being it had. Each step steady but used much more energy than what the beast was able to receive. It was sluggish, and now breathing heavily. It ran so far, it had to run back. But, with what purpose. It had to run, to change that mistake which shook it so. Unusual, it felt brighter than usual...

The clang of metal and the beast finally looked down to find it had passed that line of fence, and with it the strung purpose. 
The beast placed the being down carefully making sure it wasn't broken for a moment. 

With it, it stared at the being in silence. Looking downward at it, oh how the beasts body almost looking as though it was being pulled inwards, perhaps it was. Ah... It hurt. But, it just looked, not at itself. At this... Person, this thing... It wondered... Oh, why? It didn't quite know. The beast was lost.
Juan
Sigrún would not have been content or satisfied if the beast turned and melted back into the green, but she would have been relieved, if nothing else. If it vanished, the hunters would have no one to question about its whereabouts, and the night would wrap perfectly around its form and swallow it until it reached whatever safety was.

The opposite, cool and surrounding, enveloped her senses in the dream of all the wild things, and she could not find it in her to wake. The edges of where her own comparably warm, sweat-salted skin met the air came back to sharp definition for a moment before she lost her fingers again in deep, thick bear fur, the smell of it, the feel of the stuff hanging in loose tangles against the sensitive webs on her hands. The dark, mottled pattern of its shadowed undercoat crept up her arms.

It hadn't been a long time since Sigrún had felt so small, but it it had been longer since eyes like this, limbs so strong and other had been set around her. Hot stars pricked the backs of her eyes as an errant breath was squeezed from her chest, little and crooked.

It was hardly an option to be afraid of the shifting beast, of where it might be taking her, of its changing shadow and teeth like giants' knives; it didn't hold her like a soft-mouthed dog carried birds back to its master, pristine for its reaping. If the girl curled any smaller, she thought she might be tiny again, asleep in the backseat, soon to wake up under her old, heavy quilt. The jagged, hiccuped breaths shook her chest with more of their lost and buried fury at that, breaking open the chest of salt water that she'd packed before leaving that path from the seat to the bed for however long she'd be lost from it for. It was a hole in her skull, the pressure spilling out with her hearts, all three of which so very tired and sick from longing.
_ _

The glaze of tears and the throb of sentiment made the bear's wounds look sorer still, every drop of blood falling to the damp gravel a strike to its guts. She stood, but her lean was unmistakable, the tip of a tentacle looped around one of its fingers still, like a child's. With every sob, every bone broke, spilling uncoiled springs into her system that pushed at her skin, seized and twisted her muscles.

The feeling was deafening, and it wouldn't be contained, and it couldn't possibly be let out enough to ever feel right again; shaking human hands took the monstrous paw that was slick with fresh blood, and she begged to once again be allowed to help. *Anything. Please, anything.*
Rupert
Unfocused, dazed and feeling faint in its own mind. Ground thyself by feeling the laceration upon thine breast and sink into the feeling of a thousand beast's and more some to devour it. To bleed up on the earth again and again and yet it always felt awful, the mother had yet forgotten how much the beast was willing to go through. What had she forgotten, how many times has it felt hollow? The beast can't help but feel like a small thing once more, just realizing it was remade into a forsaken thing. Its ribs were broken, of that she was certain. Puncturing a lung, if the blood he spat up with every breath was any indication. What made her unshaken drive unrooted so violently? Was it that she was no longer in the place which felt most close to that divine feeling of that breath stolen from her throat. It felt a deep sense of anguish being gored like a beast risen from hell over and over by which had felt not a single speck of respect for what it protected.

It didn't know what to do, though it wasn't the first time it lost a hold. It felt like something slid into the holes of what was made by hot iron and conflicted hostility. The beast had no hold on what was in front of it. The beast looked around this place with an empty stagger before it stared at the sobbing thing before it. Was it not overjoyed that a beast that wished to remain close at what gave it comfort was ripped from that very thing? 
The being was brittle though lithe, was it not one for just watching and screaming with zealous laughter? Where was that familiar squawk of that almost violating joy which it hated so, anything similar at least?

Yet it wept, for what the beast tried to understand on this slippery mind of blood soaked bones and thoughtless restrained animosity. There was an unspoken grandeur within the situation, what was there to lose? The small reverent touch creates a flash of gooseflesh snaking up the beast's arm.

What thing had the beast done to be gifted such an obtuse thing. Especially considering its fealty to which there was only one. 

It's bloody palm without thought unwound, it's fingers splitting and finding purchase around the beings arm. Winding over and over as one could see the being hand no more. Prey? Or a disregarded desire for companionship, the beast finds no joy which was usually born in moving feet. Surely laughter would be one's compromise for tears but the beast never quite learned how to do so. The blood. It felt as though it was rotten. It festered in the air, as if the beast it heralded walked clothed in an ever dripping wound, so indelibly stained that even the crystal waters of some isolated river could not wash it clean. The beast wanted to writhe because of the taste of rust that was growing insufferable to its more sensitive palate, it only wished to tear its own tongue out. 

The moon was thin, and the night stretched long across the grass in jagged stripes of blackness, as if crevasses had opened all along the earth, threatening to swallow them both, though the beast would not yield so easily to the endless brightness of night below. The beast could see the hound of fear prowling at the beings heel but she cannot see its ugly reflection in the beings eye. Complacency meant death. Stillness meant death. The marching feet of every man who served the rule of this order meant death. Built upon the beast, inside her, that horrible awful knowing of dread, the beast wished to wheeze beneath the squeeze of its chains.

It was in looking down at its hand that it saw the glint of steel, just barely noticeable in her ruddy nails. That was all the warning he received before the trunk of the tree a ways behind them exploded in a shower of splinters. It smelt as though it was wreathed in rust ocher, splitting the air with a dry shriek as it snapped in the calm wind. It showed malice. That only simmering speal of panic turned molten within a fraction of a second, a deep frenzy that poured and swirled beneath bone grounded it somewhat. 

The wet flesh tightened as the beast lurched into a sprint for the trees, bringing the mere mortal with it bringing it close once more in an almost claustrophobic hold. The moonlight showed with a jester-like humor, not casting it's light at which hunted them so. That fear danced at the beast's heels, it waded through the trees, crocodilian, thorns like talons piercing the beast's silhouette to tear at the air at anything which would dare cast a gaze, unfortunate as it would be, to it. A mere thing could not best a bear even if it was gorged on metal and the snap of a rifle in its hands. The beast, though large, moved and weaved with surprising agility. This wasn't a thing which required delicacy, something almost yowled in its ear at this. It bowed its head and smashed through thick branches and flora without care any longer. 

The beast could not run for long, the beast's injured body crumbled, it toppled to the ground, winded, the others yell of anger and stamping in the black night only in the back of its mind, subtle. The beast was left staring at the ground, looking at which was crushed into the grass. Through the beast's wounds it looked as though vibrant flowers of blood were blooming across its chest, it was filthy, reeking of the beast, though the thing in question could only feel the frenzied heat which moved under its wet fur.

The beast realized its hand was still attached to the being, unspoken it unraveled leaving the beings hand stained with smell though otherwise unharmed, its markings still blazing across it. The beast wished to bring its hand to its face, for which fear moved to think it would bring destruction if it touched it. 

This battle was silent, alas there was no struggle to be weaved in whispering trees. It dwarfed the being as it pinned it like things beneath a heavy palm. Though it didn't wring it and force it into a plain that would split like splashed water it just bore its heavy gaze into it once more. Watching and waiting for the boney things rasped curses with rapt attention stolen from it at the moment it dragged it's palm into it's blood soaked one.
Juan
The reek of crusting-over wounds under thick animal hide sank through Sigrún's sinuses and into her dry mouth, mingling with dirt and salty tears. She couldn't possibly know with which feelings the beast looked upon her, only that they confused the both of them, and only that it seemed possessed to stare, and stare, and stare; a shiver ran up her spine.

The bear coughed, wet and dark, and the girl hiccuped like a child—it pulled and crushed, she curled up and grasped tight. The world was a new creature of ragged breath, of flesh and muscle that ran cold, that lost its heat to dirt-streaked skin, coiled and stretched and bent in ways invented for purposes far beyond how the rational phenomenon of evolution built its beasts. Behind the smaller one's eyelids, pressed to the giant's blood-matted chest, dwelled a darkness even it could not see through, and in the chaos it was a welcome plunge. The scrap of a moon was segmented by the points of sharp antlers, eaten by the silhouette of impossible jaws.

As it ran, its passenger silently lamented the cracking and peeling of its own skin, searching the rain-fresh air for moisture to pluck, breathe, float through. In its void it pictured a plunge into weightlessness; it would stretch, past the limits of its form, and it would show the beast its own strength, drawing it gracefully up to the surface of a clear, black, glittering night.

The ocean would be like glass, she dreamed, and it would be whipped by fell winds, and she would master it like she once did and they would both be drawn back into it, spiralling through the depths clean and painted horn to sucker with patterns of spirals and veins.
_ _

And then—the wind was knocked from her lungs, the blunt end of an axe cracking across her back and jamming a sharp tooth into the edge of her tongue. Her mouth didn't fill with blood, but the taste of copper was nearly more abundant than air; she stared, still, at the crackling and fizzing image of a gaze heavy as hills and mountains, old as stone.

Her breath returned bit by bit until her voice was pinned only beneath the creature's paw, crushed between her soft innards and sore spine. Blinking the static from her eyes, Sigrún lifted herself to sit cross-legged, bent and craned to still look the bear in the eyes with her own bloodshot, shadowed stare.

Dark eyelashes fluttered, a wind-tousled blonde head flopped down, and her attention flicked back to the remaining chain, shifted by the sprint. Fingertips, now warm and slick with sweat, slipped under and began to work free a link of metal smeared with drying blood and the angry edges of infection.
Rupert
The beast stared, it's gaze mirrored and its mind ablaze. The chain on its other hand was left in it's rush seconds ago. Though this moment seemed to stretch long through time for it. Exhaustion laced through like heat with no end to this self made desert. Heat but it's hands were cold, still, ever it was to be. 

The beast didn't didn't feel its hands in those gnarled tears. It didn't smell the surrounding wake of something infectious. It stared at something with the scent of something so curiously similar to ice capped waves against a shoreline. It was so clear or the beast was on the brink of a delusion it though it had already lost itself to long ago on some blank summer night beneath a flooded oak. 

It needed to say something or anything to this person which it had unfaithfully tainted with whatever spilt so ungraciously onto it. It felt like static was racing against it's words to erase them as soon as the beast thought, dark nights and standing in something which would proclaim death upon ones soul easing its mind confusingly. This folk before it was new, though it was obviously hurt it was also taken by something. What had it abandoned when it was taken to this unfortunate hell of plagued minds. The ground felt heavy and burdened by which it dosent know, a couple hurt hearts and saddened scars. 

The beings stare was new and it washed against the beast and made it felt like it was drowning, it couldn't do so. It's fur slick and winded, washed through with carmine vexation. 

"M'Sorry. Didn't mean to hurt yuh." 
The beast reached out with a hand unoccupied and rested it against the beings collar with the pad of it's thumb soft yet slick with red against its neck. The markings almost seemed to mix into that smeared crimson, It didn't mean to. The beast ducked its head down slowly in an act of apologizing, it's horns coming to rest against the person's head like a grand crown. 
"Ye coulda gottin shot, yuh don't deserve that, yah ain't a damn fool."

.

The beast spoke with vitriol when saying that last word, it spat against the ground and seared it like water against the sun in its hate. The ground understood, she understood. Though the beast had met it's fair share of fools; ones matted with age, their eyes still bright with the embers of obstinate abhorrence and others bright in their smooth young grins but misdirected with their parents words. Both had ended in something foul in something splattered like dropped paint in the beasts memory. It loathe to admit how it thinks back to it often to help stabilize its actions when it's losing its waning tether. 

It needed to speak it needed to stand again and again, lest it will never find comfort in the rays that shine through hole-punched leaves or the water that roars beneath. How many times will it do so before it's knees shake and the hands that lift it grow tired of sealing the tears and holes it acquires. The beast didn't know, nor did it wish to but it also so desperately wanted to like a starving cat does to food. 

The other chain clattered against the ground, it's act muffled by wet dirt. The hand by being neck stayed though its head was lifted, the most and what lay in the beasts braids that moved with it clacked and shook. It didn't know what to do in acts of silence with others, it was rare yet foreign.
Juan
Though what the earthen dweller said to her was sympathetic, kind, even, Sigrún head the word *Fool* Spat with conviction and felt her intestines coil like snakes around the already-choked stuff of her midsection. Not a damned fool, she was? Losing water in heavy drops to the soil, wiping a bear's blood from her hands onto her pants, shielded from *Bullets* By the shroud of darkness, with its million holes of moonlight poked in the black velvet?

Swallowing the mist-slaked thirst where the sharp, needle-like fear of the world ought to be, it occurred to her that she had no concept anymore of a fool. And yet, the serpent gnawed on its tail, wound through her ribs, like a lectured child.

"Uh."

Those great antlers braced themselves on its brow like a crown, pressing heavy into its mind through its ever-soft layer of flesh. The gesture was weighed with gratitude, of which Sigrún didn't quite understand, despite the obviousness of it; the pressure of bone against bone was like a stone sinking to the silt, the clacking and jingling of its mane bubbles that trickled from the corners along its descent through the finite blue. The girl sank with it, coming down from the adrenaline with a stray hiccup and a sniffle and then a long, long silence.

There came a point, when she dove deep enough, when gravity flipped on its head. She swam through a portal, passing like an arrow through another layer of cold, on the other side of which she realized that she needn't move a muscle to press deeper into the body of salt and darkness. *'Negative buoyancy,'* It was called. Denser than the whole world, it seemed, now granted passage into the layer of the world that perceived her back as something magnificent, graceful, shining beneath no sun with its glossy-coated, strong-boned creatures.

Its eyes were of no use there, and so they hung barely open like windowpanes it hadn't cared to shut all the way before falling into a deep sleep.
_ _

It perceived, though, without them. Sigrún did not fear the dark. It welcomed its bloody hand on her shoulder, and understood that, in this pocket of perfectly still space that echoed the deafening throes of life from all directions, it meant her no harm.

Satisfied with that, Sigrún could piece together no words in any language that felt worth saying. From far, far away, the portal beneath the sea pulled her body down, down, down into the pressure against her head and her shoulder, the misty veil of the night's cold spreading from her back to the tips of her toes until she tipped into it completely. A stone.

Far closer, the exhausted creature's body loosened and sank in the beast's grip. Always the girl scolded for her haste—before slumber could properly collect her, she had lapsed into a dream.
Rupert
There was a weight in her arms, against its chest and breathing with the loose waters of the world at the crest of their head. What kind of thing was it to be beaching this folk onto land it wasn't meant for? Shoveling dirt over it's corpse as if it lived there in the first place, maybe with wished to be rotted and eaten at the floor of the deep. The beast wanted to lie there as well, it did once and it remembers pressure breaking it's body into peaces that formed a sort of art of tragedy. 

The beast pursed its lips, it's eyes growing heavy its mind unbearable when there's vines and wood growing into the crevice of it's memory. Speaking into the earth like it's tragedy of being broken amongst every grain of this world wasn't known by it intimately already. It could still feel the bits of pale hair against it's horns as if it was going to do the same, it was a mere person it didn't need this. Maybe the beast was the fool, gnawing at its own flesh at an aim to be rid of what ails it. 

The wounds on its wrists twinge, it wanted to become something below the soil, it wanted to be dug up again and again. It wanted to be a mural on a wall, it wanted, it wanted. 

The beast never cared for the depths when the pressure of a thousand minds was already far greater. It stared at a beast I'm the depths, it looked grand yet humble and unknowing of the red that stained it. It asked itself after if it wanted to bite and tear into the thing like a meal. To offer and yet hate. 

The beast laid down, the dirt welcoming it and it's lidded gaze. The trees before it seeming to grow closer and over it like a blanket. It's body aches and yet the world comes to swallow it and fill the wounds with a swathe of something to soothe it. It's what always happened when there were it's own claws ripping at itself like ribbons. Two arms laid across the figure it forgot about, two more move to cover its face.

Digging it's claws into flesh without care but just with need. To bring its outlandish thoughts to a halt, to bring the earth to it's knees for a moment. To speak to it and force it to hear it again.

It remembers something, words of another saying it being comfort to write something down. It's palms forced it's eyes to close. 
Maybe it'd do that later.