Blood streaked down the little human male’s face for their entertainment. As was often the way for Neath had a collectors eye and an envious streak wide enough to swallow a green spice aisle in a colour blind market, so whilst his new pet was at home scrubbing floors until her knees turned raw, he whiled away the hours watching the curious motions his demonic comrades put their prodigies through to train them up to scratch.<br/><br/>Knowing what one was up against kept one comfortably above the shoulders of competition.<br/><br/>Or at least he hoped so, even before he’d found Amora (unconsciously his fingers curled and toyed with the name nestled in his palm as he pictured her) he’d sunken countless hours into studying the training of Macyl-ku (or ‘apprentice mages’ in the common tongue) and invested in a few… ‘unsavoury’ methods himself.<br/>That was to say; everything was almost set up for The Girl.<br/>She just needed a little breaking in before hand…<br/><br/>Viewing was easy and free tonight.<br/>Open morning at the Ring Stadium.<br/>Folks brought alone their own skill or the skill of others, swords people, slaves, even animals and creatures from beyond the Cities gates were dragged in on chain to be starved and set upon each other. Hot food was peddled by gab-gifted vendors, bets were being made and settled in hushed tones beneath the stands (a few years ago he’d seen one poor sod lose a hand when he lost the bet/ failed to comply/ cough up the cash), there may as well have been a T-shirt stand and thrice damned ‘splash zone’ for blood in the front two rows.<br/><br/>Something caught his gaze as he was sprawled there, across  the back bench, boots perched on the seat ahead, coat splayed like a fond pet enjoying a laze. Oddly enough it wasn’t with his eyes.<span style="font-style: italic">His</span>. Keyword there.<br/><br/>Naeth scowled and homed in on the distraction.<br/>One of his babies had hawk eyed vile and appalling things. The nature of which he did not yet know…<br/>He sighed and started to borrow it’s gaze.<br/>At first he shut down his senses, plunging his mind into a meditative state. Step one was to concentrate solely of the function of his own flesh, his skin, his bones, the breath in his lungs, all the little internal noises and sensations, to let it wash over his conscious mind like a tide, rinsing away all of the outside world from his knowledge, leaving only a ghost of a memory like watermarks on wet sand.<br/>Heart rate plummets, breathing slows and then, slowly vision ebbs away, like falling into a deep sleep.<br/>Meditation was a difficult art to master because it was, well, easy. Ridiculously so. You ‘fell’ into meditation very much in the same way you ‘fall’ in love, it takes almost no effort, it’s accidental, it’s like trip on the curb, the only hard part was letting the part of your brain that made sense of everything, that instantly RATIONALIZES, to let go of its grasp on reality and accept just how easy it was.<br/><br/>Most people can’t meditate because they TRY to meditate.<br/><br/>Even Naeth had struggled with this concept for years, but you only needed to acquire that state of mind once, it was like finding a key, then that door to that deep red sanctuary behind your eyelids was forever open.<br/><br/>I digress!<br/>The first step was meditation, next came that awful jump. Sometimes it spanned great time and distances. It wasn’t natural, to flex the limbs of your very soul before stretching their reach across space, so your mind would fight it tooth and claw. It wasn’t so much a profound and alien event, the thing happens to everyday people in bed. Sometimes great cracks, like gunshots would sound, your centre of gravity would drop a mile and a stomach churning drop would bring you crashing back into your physical form, but Naeth was practiced and itched with curiosity, today he snapped into the gaze of his bird in a heartbeat.<br/><br/>Now the biggest adjustment was to get used to thinking with a birds damned pea brain…<br/><br/>…<br/>…<br/>…<br/>Plummage.<br/>Strange sensation, thick things, heavy, but not in a weighty sense, just… you felt them. They<span style="font-style: italic">tugged</span>on flesh when they moved. Scooped the breeze. Muscles were small and sharp enough to shift them when needed, but motion pulled flesh back in a million and one places with every quill-like pin and preened feather.<br/>Its tiny pulse hummed in its chest. Now HIS chest.<br/>He cocked his head. Strange angles now attainable to his new bird neck. The forest near his manor unwound before his scope, the view curved and distorted at the peripheral, like he was watching the wilderness through a marble. Neath supposed he was.<br/>A human stumbled through the woods beneath him.<br/>Ah!<br/>For a moment the crow paused and stared down it’s scaly little feet. It appeared that he was perched on a branch…<br/><br/>WAIT—it was far, faaar to easy to become one with his tiny new body, there was even a niggling little instinct cawing somewhere in the back of his palm sized skull that made him contemplate dining on bugs. Shuddersome!<br/>An animal cawed—no—the girl shouted. Rocks came his way, then instincts kicked in. He threw his head back, shrieking a furious avian noise, beating his wings on the spot, like a horse rearing.<br/><br/>More human words that he had to struggle or smuggle back across the link to translate in his moderately more evolved head.<br/><span style="font-style: italic">"I'm not going back to you! I don't want to call you Master! I don't want to see your horrid face again!"</span>She turned on her heel and lurched into an anxious run. Although his acquired bird mind could not cipher her from the next human that didn’t come bearing treats, Naeth knew it was his Amora, her message directed purely at him.<br/>Clever little chicken.<br/>Now she had his full attention.<br/>He took off from his tree, claws scraping marks into the bark, leaving the prone branch swaying. Gods, he needed to stop overfeeding his pets… diets all round when he got home!<br/><br/>.<span style="font-style: italic"> "Go away!" </span>Bird brain didn’t betray her emotions, but the rocks pelted his way certainly did. He swooped low, avoiding their path and flew ahead, perching on yet another branch.<br/><br/><br/>“And where do you think you’ll go?” he laughed. The words weren’t easy to form, his bird throat warping his voice into something raspy and full of bark, “IF you get away! What awaits you? These forests are staggering in size and riddled with danger… Tell me girl, AMORA, remember that? Or have you forgotten already? What about your village? Can you recall the way? Has that faded yet?”