sensitive topics JUDGEMENT BY THE HOUNDS


ˏˋ*⁀➷  She has snuck off from her mentor. Not a good move, given Stormywing's neurotic watchfulness; perhaps the proximity to her warrior ceremony has made her bolder. She can handle herself, she's spilled plenty of blood to prove it.

It is a familiar scent which draws her away, trancelike. Something nostalgic and bittersweet, something she can't quite place. Something like mushrooms and bug-hunting, like stale fox-scent and earth. She knows it. She cannot quite place it, too distant and twisted in memory. Cicadas sing a lullaby with the birds forming a chorus. She feels as if she is in a dream. She remembers this scent from dreams and old memories, always just out of reach. Perhaps were she more careful, more alert - she might have realized before she happened upon its source that this was a mistake.

But the scent is so comforting, despite everything. Comforting in a way that makes her stomach turn with want. Her paws move as if of their own volition.

She should not be surprised by who greets her at the end of this sickeningly sweet trail - but she is, regardless.

A single glinting eye stares back at Fallowpaw, golden and sickly as bile. Whorls of fur tangle around a ragged, torn form, more scar tissue than cat. A familiar curl of a familiar lip, just as wild and frenzied as she remembers. The molly smells like earth and fox-scent.

"You," snarls Baying Hound.

And all at once, Fallowpaw is frozen.

Everything seems to stop, then. The dream twists into a nightmare, syrup-slow and agonizing. All the sounds of the chorus raise into a buzzing, a ringing in her ears. All she can hear is the harshness of her breath, the beating of her frantic - bird-flutter heart. She stares into the mangled face of her mother - and she is a kit again. She is small.

Fallowpaw has done everything she can to stop feeling powerless. She hates it, hates that rabbit-skip of her heartbeats, hates the memory of claws digging into her back, of weigh pressing her down into the earth. She has done her best not to feel fear. She has turned herself into something to be afraid of. A snarling, wild thing. Horrible and violent, always smelling faintly of blood. She looks into that looming golden eye, and thinks - is this what I look like, too? Frenzied, terrible as death's own harbinger. An image ripped straight from her own nightmares.

She has done her best to make everyone around her feel as she does now.

Pinned, like a bug beneath another's paws. Frozen and shaking. A helpless kit once again.

She does not fight back as her body is slammed against the forest floor.


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  • FALLOWPAW ⁀➷ she / it, apprentice of thunderclan, eleven moons.
    a scarred, pointed brown and white molly with shaggy fur and golden eyes.
    standoffish and solitary, always seems to have a dark cloud hanging over its head.
    baying hound xx npc, littermate to antlerpaw & doepaw.
    peaceful and healing powerplay permitted / / underline and tag when attacking
    penned by SATURNID ↛ saturnids on discord, feel free to dm for plots.
 
This world has set out to mock her. What a pitiful existence she leads, scartorn and yet living, still living. It is a testament of her resilience that she survives, although the whole world wishes to destroy her.

She is a clever creature. She lives, now, for no one but herself. Not for little leeches that suck the life from her frail form - no, those are merely a foolish indulgence. They'll leave her, they'll all leave her. Just as her mate did, her parents, her children. This world takes and takes and takes and leaves nothing behind. Baying Hound is a shell of a cat, a wrapping on scars and calloused flesh. She lives as any starving beast does. In the eyes of foxes and dogs she sees only her own reflection, snarling and desperate. She lives because she is more terrible than all which seeks to kill her. She lives because she knows the difference between trickery and kindness.

For the second time, the taunting ghost of her daughter comes to greet her. For the second time, she overpowers it.

Claws dig into shoulder blades. The flesh feels rotten and putrid, tearing as easily as prey. A corpse beneath her, a child taken too young by the harshness of nature and never truly returned.This is not self-defense, it is retribution. Retribution against all that wishes to destroy her. This mockery, this spectre - it stole her children from her.

That face, that terrible face -

A parody of youth, of innocence. A parody of the joy that Baying Hound was once so foolish as to indulge. It looks like her, a constant reminder of her mistake. And yet - it hardly even looks like her Fallow anymore, mangled and gnarled with time. Cowardly, so cowardly. Her daughter would have fought back, when death came for her. Her daughter was never a coward. Her daughter would never look at her with that horrible, twisting fear in its beautiful golden eyes.

She hates those eyes.

Doe and Antler have felt her retribution. They will know the mistake that they made to follow this beast every time that they blind, every time they see blurred reflections in water. They will never forget the mother that raised them, the way that they forsake her care.

Her claws tear at that mocking, terrible face. It's screaming, the thing beneath her. She does not hear its words. She only digs her claws in deeper, deeper. Blood stains her paw as she reaches into the hollow of its skull and pulls.

Feel what I feel, comes a wordless yowl of anger. Pitiful, writhing thing. That pain, that suffering - does it understand now? She heaves aching breathes as she stares down at the bloodstained face. It looks far more like her own now, and in that she can be satisfied. If it seeks to take from her, then let it be cursed just as she is. Let it feel loss. It will never be enough to atone, but it is enough to curl her bared teeth into a grimacing smile.

Her victory is short-lived. The beast finds its courage, and its claws find her belly. She is stumbling back, blinking a startled eye. Now, it will fight. Now that it knows pain, knows fear. Good. Blood drips from her wounded belly; perhaps she will have to seek out that twoleg again. Her mind is too far away to assess the depth of the wound.

The ghost of her daughter is tearing off across the underbrush, as fast as its shaking legs can carry it. How pathetic. She could almost laugh at the sight.

"SPEECH"
 
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