TW for dehumanizing descriptions of a corpse/violent thoughts/minor blood and gore.
If killing Applejaw had been a high, figuring out what to do with the thing that used to be Applejaw is the crash. That's what it is, really, isn't it? Not a cat anymore, not a deputy's daughter or a self-proclaimed marsh princess. Just a lump of death-heavy flesh, void of all that had made it worth much of anything. The worth had been in the taking; Ghostmask entertains the notion that she had consumed what made Applejaw Applejaw whole for herself, like some perversion of a nine lives ceremony. What's left behind is an absence drawn in meat.
Her white muzzle, still dappled smeary red and pink with Applejaw's blood (the stuff drips unappetizingly off her chin), crumples into an unbecoming grimace as she considers the corpse-thing. It had been easy to leave the other three where they lie, but that hadn't worked out well for her, had it? And besides ... she casts her beetle-black gaze to the jagged maw of Highstones ... this is too close. Not to home, because DuskClan is the furthest thing from it, but too close regardless.
Grimacing, she takes the Applejaw-thing's cooling scruff between her crimson-clotted jaws and begins to drag. It's easier than she'd thought; though the thing is heavy with death, Ghostmask bears the wiry strength of the hungry and the damned. She will not be driven from her singular mission, and she pursues it with the wolfish hunger of someone with little else to strive for. Getting the corpse-thing to somewhere else is suddenly an ambition as monumental as leadership, and equally as important.
It is a long journey, longer still with the Applejaw-thing's now-cooled weight straining her jaws, but she makes it in the end. The line blurs between marsh and forest, delineated only by a strip of stinking asphalt. It feels like an appropriate place to leave the corpse-thing, better still in that it is distant from her world of dust and paltry scrub. Examining the thing, she does not find much evidence of her theft upon it; she is as soundless and hidden as her namesake, anonymous with her smell of blood and dust, the smell of a hungry coyote.
She lets it flop heavily to the ground just on ShadowClan's half of the border, watching with something like pity tempered by revulsion as its torn-open neck slackens and lets its head roll. If Applejaw-the-cat had deserved her final usefulness in her end at Ghostmask's teeth, Applejaw-the-corpse deserves its lonesome home, strewn along the Thunderpath's edge. She casts it a final passive cut of the eyes and then turns back not-homewards, long vanished into the underbrush by the time anyone arrives.
If killing Applejaw had been a high, figuring out what to do with the thing that used to be Applejaw is the crash. That's what it is, really, isn't it? Not a cat anymore, not a deputy's daughter or a self-proclaimed marsh princess. Just a lump of death-heavy flesh, void of all that had made it worth much of anything. The worth had been in the taking; Ghostmask entertains the notion that she had consumed what made Applejaw Applejaw whole for herself, like some perversion of a nine lives ceremony. What's left behind is an absence drawn in meat.
Her white muzzle, still dappled smeary red and pink with Applejaw's blood (the stuff drips unappetizingly off her chin), crumples into an unbecoming grimace as she considers the corpse-thing. It had been easy to leave the other three where they lie, but that hadn't worked out well for her, had it? And besides ... she casts her beetle-black gaze to the jagged maw of Highstones ... this is too close. Not to home, because DuskClan is the furthest thing from it, but too close regardless.
Grimacing, she takes the Applejaw-thing's cooling scruff between her crimson-clotted jaws and begins to drag. It's easier than she'd thought; though the thing is heavy with death, Ghostmask bears the wiry strength of the hungry and the damned. She will not be driven from her singular mission, and she pursues it with the wolfish hunger of someone with little else to strive for. Getting the corpse-thing to somewhere else is suddenly an ambition as monumental as leadership, and equally as important.
It is a long journey, longer still with the Applejaw-thing's now-cooled weight straining her jaws, but she makes it in the end. The line blurs between marsh and forest, delineated only by a strip of stinking asphalt. It feels like an appropriate place to leave the corpse-thing, better still in that it is distant from her world of dust and paltry scrub. Examining the thing, she does not find much evidence of her theft upon it; she is as soundless and hidden as her namesake, anonymous with her smell of blood and dust, the smell of a hungry coyote.
She lets it flop heavily to the ground just on ShadowClan's half of the border, watching with something like pity tempered by revulsion as its torn-open neck slackens and lets its head roll. If Applejaw-the-cat had deserved her final usefulness in her end at Ghostmask's teeth, Applejaw-the-corpse deserves its lonesome home, strewn along the Thunderpath's edge. She casts it a final passive cut of the eyes and then turns back not-homewards, long vanished into the underbrush by the time anyone arrives.
OOC : Applejaw's body has been left on the ShadowClan side of the Shadow-Thunder border, but Ghostmask is long gone. Open to ShadowClanners (aka not TCers, sorry) :)౨ৎ
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