Prompt: Taste is often neglected in stories. Write a story about taste.
I tasted it. The sweet stench of victory.
I tasted that cat's death—in a figurative sense, of course.
The jeers of my followers were sweet—almost as sweet as that apple. The sweat and blood on the ropes binding him were perfectly salty. Perfectly painful.
When I stabbed his heart, finally ending the beast, I tasted victory. I could almost taste the smoke in the air, wafting towards me. I could almost feel their shouts of triumph. As I looked down at the cat's body, no longer proud and majestic, but bruised, battered, bloodied, and dead I felt the absence of him. He was no longer somewhere, walking the world. He was gone. I raised the knife in victory with a shout.
I was fighting the young king. I was about to end him.
Even the thought of the victory over that cat spurred me on to fight harder, to fight with even more vengeance. I was about to have victorious death again. I nearly smiled, but a sound made me freeze.
His roar.
His roar.
He was dead.
Yet that was his roar.
He leapt at me a minute later, golden mane waving perfectly in the wind. I was thrown to the ground, gasping for breath from the shock and the impact.
I tasted blood in the moment before he went down for the kill.
It was my blood.