Sunset was swiftly approaching when the hunter found the black haired girl. She was curled up in a ball beside her mother's corpse and under her sister's hanging body. Her body was drenched in the blood of her victims and tears unknowingly overflowed from her sky blue eyes, but a thin smirk was stretched across her narrow face.
The claw marks of a beast were slashed through the surrounding trees and bushes had been stomped flat against the forest floor. It was a messy scene, but the father was unfazed by it all. He had seen, and probably done, far worse.
Even though he was confident he could fall a small child, he took short and cautious steps towards her. His voice was thick with both pride and suspicion when he remarked, "Ah, so my maggot of a child has become more like me? I'm surprised, to be honest."
"Father? D-Did I do this?" The innocence that was weaved into her voice was a mere facade, for she knew very well what had happened and who had done it. After all, her teacher had taught her about her abilities.
The hunter's step faltered at her words. "You can't be stupid enough not to know whether or not you slaughtered your own family, right?"
A laugh, almost a cackle, slid through her closed-lip smile. "I know, father. I didn't do it." One of her slender fingers pointed at the bodies. "I didn't do it." She repeated herself, as if to make her point clear.
"Then who did, worthless child?" Sarcasm oozed from his sentence. To him it was quite clear who had done, but the girl saw it differently.
"The striped thing inside me did it. I turned into the striped thing, who then did it." She raised her other hand to point at her father. "And it is going to do it to you, too."
The corners of the middle-age hunter's lips turned downwards at her tone. He had faced many creatures in his life, but none of them had ever made him frown. So what made her different?
"Father?"
"What, you bitch?" He growled as he slipped the silver bow from his back.
"You should run. The striped thing is very mad at you."
He considered running in that very moment. His wife, who also had the trait of the striped beast, had once transformed in front of him. It wasn't uncommon to run into a tiger in the woods they occupied, but she changed into a different version of the dangerous feline. When she was in that form, she was well over a hundred feet tall. Her fur, the colour of silver and scarlet, glistened in the moon. The roar of beast shook the ground as though they were in the middle of a massive earthquake.
And it appeared that his daughter would inherit both her mother's power and her father's, for the moment the memory of his animalistic wife flashed in his head the girl's eyes turned pitch black like the midnight sky.
The two briefly made eye contact and the hunter found himself falling to the ground, slipping into a deep sleep that he would never wake from.