A thousand razor tongues bathed her skin, punishing exposed skin and reddening broken flesh. Her body swayed limply in the ceaseless tide, up and down, up and down, till even the gentlest of beckoning was like a cruel torch to her battered frame.
Navne was exhausted.
She couldn't think. Thoughts were far too painful.
She could barely find it in herself to pull water through her gills. As if all but the most necessary of functions had ceased, her soul sucked clean of the broken vessel it inhabited. Her eyes pointed with the hollowness of the dead whichever direction the sea took her. She couldn't recall how she came to be where she was, nor cared, but she could remember flashes. Tiny, flickering snapshots of happenings that brushed over her senses.
Flickers of green and red amidst the rolling cerulean.
Sand clouding the world, kicked up by desperate fins.
The taste of blood and something sweet on her tongue.
An angry tiger shark with a vast, open maw.
Something hard prodding her side and darkness dappling her view.
A brilliant shock of light splitting the heavens asunder.
A storm.
Rain.
Kel.
A stab of deep, dark, heart wrenching pain tore her throat and lungs. Her jaw trembled, lips parting and closing as the cry struggled to escape her.
No, no. No, no, no nononononono.
Don't think.
Don'tthinkdon'tthinkdonthinkdonthnink.
Her hands clenched, forming makeshift claws. She felt something dig into her flesh as she did, and the water came away bloody. The blood brought red to her vision.
Red.
Like Kel's hair in the sunlight.
Pain clamoured at her side.
And she broke.
She bit into the swaying brown before her, a furious storm of teeth and claws and tail. With an energy she'd never known she possessed, she tore and she ripped and she shredded. Something - something immense was screaming in a voice she knew she never had. She felt her tail strike flesh, injecting poisonous cells into her target.
She was going to destroy them.
Totally. And utterly.
Again.
And again.
As many times as it took.
She felt bone crunch beneath her teeth, and reveled in it.
Suffer.
Suffer as I have.
Die.
Die.
Diedieidiediediediediediediediediediedie-
He smelt the blood before he saw it.
He'd been lolling on the coast that afternoon, considering stirring up a bit of trouble to sate his boredom. His favourite Shirokuma had been glued to her cabin, and the little Wolf King had made himself scarce. Added to the fact that the mail was late (mail which contained his precious cigarettes, no less!), it had been looking like a disappointing end to a disappointing week.
That was, of course, before a peal of distressed thrashing caught his eye.
Pain, anger, fear, hunger... They all had different intonations. This particular was giving off the very distinctive impression of pain. It was a given that he'd investigate; wounded prey was a favourite of his.
His sharp senses honed in on the silver glimmer, beckoned by hunger and a particular kind of curiosity. Bloodbaths weren't entirely uncommon - not for him at least. Especially when his prey was the fussy sort that tended to bleed themselves to death trying to run away.
Well.
He didn't mind it so much. He preferred his prey to die at his hand, not by their own stupidity, but a bloodbath without him... Now that was something entirely new.
The action was over by the time he arrived. Bits of severed flesh floated through the water in arrant, tattered chunks. Idate ran his tongue over his teeth, tasting the blood. The experience was surprising pleasing.
With the quantity of blood, someone was probably dead...
Rather -
- rather, someone was definitely dead.
Idate watched with dry amusement as the mutilated corpse of a sea lion emerged from the murky taint. He'd been hunting this morsel a few weeks ago. The long gash across her tail, still healing from his bite, was evidence of the fact. But as for the rest of her...
Someone had made short work of sea lion. She'd been fully ravaged from head to fin, great gouges in her tanned skin exposing layers of fat and alabaster bone. One fin had nearly been torn entirely from her body, and her killer was still locked in a bloody clasp around her neck.
He took a puff of his cigarette, deliberating the scene. That seal - what was her name again? Mika? Miku? Moku?
Well-
- it didn't matter so much, now did it? He didn't fancy scraps. What he might fancy was a bite of whatever got to her. The seal had been a fun distraction with a nice little nip. If the fellow had the cheek to challenge her, it would have to be marginally impressive at the very least.
"It's certainly an impressive mess."
Idate inclined his head as the perpetrator came into clarity. It's face was obscured behind that of the sea lion, but he could make out sharp teeth and stiff posture. A thin, barbed tail coiled around the corpse, ripping at the dead flesh around it.
"... Oho. You're a stingray?"
Which brought into question just how a stingray had floated itself this far from warmer waters. Or how one of those pliant pancakes had actually managed to kill a sea lion. But those weren't the kinds of question Idate was interested in asking.
"Are you dead?"
The only important question, really, when all things were considered. If it was alive, it might put up a nice fight. If was dead... That was that. At least he'd been treated to an amusing sight.
A low hiss.
His eyes flickered as he watched the stingray react to his presence. They were slow, pained motions which revealed the very kind of weakness he enjoyed preying on. But it bared white teeth at him all the same.
A slow smile slid over his lips.
This was turning out to be an enjoyable afternoon, indeed.