- Jul 25, 2024
- 18
- 2
- 3
CW : Death and emetophobia. Please wait for Cottonsprig to post!❀
Clouds coat the sky, their grey - washed bellies swollen with unborn lightning. The indigo greenleaf sky, blushed the warm blue of a sun - ripened plum, is hidden by dense rolling scales of pearled soot, fattened ashen clouds rolling across the horizon as heavily as the belly of a blacksnake, waiting to strike. They serve as the hall for a summer storm holding court over the landscape, wind whipping sheets of rain into fine mist that fills the air, the bigger droplets pelting down onto the wind - beaten grass of the moors, thick drifts of water that strike the earth with the force of an enemy claw.
Carrion birds pull their trademark pinwheels through the storm, dark wings splayed wide and rainslicked, daring the promise of lightning for the chance at fresh meat. To the discerning warrior, they seem to be gathering ever - thicker, a flurry of black feathers and bald heads lingering above a particular spot on the moor. One of them breaks from the pack and dives.
" No! " A small wail is swallowed by the storm, a kitten huddling close to her mother's cooling flank as if it might protect her from the bird's splayed talons . . . and it does, for the moment, the carrion bird sweeping back up with empty claws. The child crawls against the unmoving body of her mother, curling herself in a tight ball of shivering limbs against the bleak stillness of a white flank. Her tiny voice is muted by sniffling, jackal ropes of mucus dripping from her small pink nose; each breath hitches in her thin chest.
" Mama, mama, " she wheezes plaintively, ivory forepaws kneading at the loner queen's belly without any success. Her mother had told her they were taking a break, an increasingly common occurence ever since Mama had started coughing and stumbling, calling out to cats the kitten couldn't see. But . . . but now Mama wouldn't get up, no matter how much the girl cried through her own tight - chested coughs, tiny paws beating at the queen's side with only the heavy whacks of paws against dead flesh in return. " Muh—Mama, " the loner - child cries, rubbing her snot - smeared face against the queen's side in an attempt at self - comfort. Mama said they just had to walk to the . . . the place with Two - legs, whatever those were, and they would be okay. " Mama, get up."
Her pleading mewls are too much for the girl's overtaxed lungs and her breath hitches, iron claws tightening around her chest and constricting her breath. The child retches, her sobs turning into gags that bring up nothing from an empty stomach. The world is blurry and fever - hot despite the chilly summer rain plastering her feathery fur to her, and the kitten collapses against her mother's side anew, crying weakly into cold porcelain fur.
Such is the grim, rainsoaked tableau upon which @cottonsprig luckily stumbles: the nameless child curled against unmoving flank, shaking and gasping for breath; the loner queen, dead with her glossy eyes seeking a face unknowable; the carrion birds, swinging in circles above, waiting for the moment the kitten - cries will cease and they can swoop in for their reward.