Avalesq was made to be a carnivore, to be clever, to be cunning and crafty and conniving, to hunt down little delectable rats like this... hellhound. Hellhounds in Rannigthein, the lightning world, were the most common of the common, barring nymphs. And nymphs were... well, usually, either stupid, or downright irritatingly difficult to catch. And the stupid ones were never satisfying, didn't give him an adrenaline rush, just like eating a steak doesn't give anyone an adrenaline rush. Unless you were forced to eat it off the back of a loosely bound rabid tiger. Usually, however, that wasn't the case.
But this one. Short and skinny, as pale as the moon with hair as red as the paint on a stop sign. And that face. He could always remember a pretty face. It wasn't the prettiness that ever caught his eye, when he became transfixed with his prey. It was the intelligence. Some people say that you can identify intelligence - it's a certain gleam in the eye, a quickness to the movement. He disagreed. You had to meet someone, make eye contact with them, watch them for more than a moment. She had seen this one in the marketplace before, had spoken with her briefly. He could see that something in her had registered his wrongness, that she was fighting an instinctive urge to run away from him. That was intelligence.
And here she was again, as if placed here to give him a satisfying object for the chase. There were some cyrei, hellhounds, who would fight to the death in their... relatively human... form, simply because that was the one they were comfortable in. He knew, somehow, that she would do no such thing. It had to be a psychological clue - it was only ever the cyrei loyal to their hellhound shape that loped across the hills like that, that knew exactly how to take cover under trees and in the underbrush.
He swiftly, silently, bounded up to a ridge slightly above his vantage point, in order to continue following her with his eyes. His body was much like a stag's; the legs, the body, the neck, the skull, the horns. He would have been the ultimate predator animal, completely fooling its prey, if not for the jagged carnivorous teeth that could rip a shark in half or the long, muscled serpentine tail that whipped behind him, he would have just been a deer. Just a huge, badass deer.
He backed up quickly when she seemed to detect something through the limbs that were his cover, and he closed his glowing yellow eyes, trusting nature to camouflage everything else on his body. When he opened them again several long seconds later, she was gone.
He picked up her scent again. She had gone... into the thinner woods. He huffed and followed, knowing that it would be more difficult to simply watch there.
Finally, he spotted her again. She had briefly come to a kneel, examining something on the ground. He could see her eyes moving, her fingers in a fluid motion across the thin, dry grass, could practically see her heartbeat in her neck.
He paced around her brief resting spot. When she seemed to have stopped paying attention - when she sat down, he sprung from the thickest of cover he could find.
His teeth were so close, his hooves inches from colliding with her slight skeletal frame - she was almost too easy -
But no. She was suddenly standing, with a long, thin iron knife in each hand, one flying and one instantly up where his throat would shortly be. He pulled back with alarm, avoiding the fatal throat slice, but not fast enough to dodge the first cut, which slid deeply into his right front leg.
Fighting obscene curse words - he never spoke in this shape, especially during the hunt - he made a cheap shot toward her stomach, that unprotected stomach with only a single layer of white cotton between his sharp hooves and some seriously vulnerable vital organs - but again she dodged, swinging out of his reach, and made another quick jab at him, this time only two shallow cuts across his ribs which hurt nonetheless. He lunged with his teeth once again, but caught only hair, red hair that tasted like the phosphorous on the ends of matches.
But then she was running. She seemed to have decided that a fight wasn't worth it, and off she sprinted, taking only five good steps before shedding her skin and becoming a powerful, muscular dog, exactly as Avalesq had predicted only minutes before.
Now was the chase. His heart pounded satisfyingly as he heard his breath get heavy, his feet pound the ground. Hellhounds ran fast, but they were terrible jumpers. He simply had to corner her, or, better yet, jump just right...
And there, he saw, in midair. He had her.
His front hooves collided sharply with her lower back, and he heard something crack as she half-collapsed, rolled over, scrambled with her front feet, clawed the earth.
He reached down, ready to rip her throat out. He could smell her blood from inches above her neck.
She lit on fire, consuming the grass around her, and igniting his nose.
He put it out quickly, but the fiery grass spread around, and he couldn't stop it. He could only try to avoid her body, which was covered in flame.
When he reached a safe distance away, he watched the flames die out. Cyrei flames always died out - they only began at all because of the phosphorous in their hair. Not many of them could do it.
Her hair was a pale, ashen brown now, tousled and thin. Avalesq stepped forward cautiously, leaned down to examine her face. Her eyes were shut, her breathing heavy; she was helpless, having exhausted her last line of defense. But there was something... wrong.
He couldn't bite.
It wasn't a matter of physical limitation. He knew that he could close his jaw on her throat and rip it out, right then and there, gracefully and deliciously. He knew he was hungry. He hadn't had a meal in a long time. He needed at least a big meal a month, and it'd been a while.
Why couldn't he make himself do it?
There were little voices in the back of his head, murmuring, Don't kill this girl. You need this girl. Don't kill this girl. You need this girl... Don't kill this girl. It's dangerous...
He'd never had intuition before. These voices certainly weren't his... and he didn't trust them. There were too many powerful mental magicians in the fairy lands for him to trust an intuition he'd never had before.
Hesitantly, he leaned forward once more and pricked the flesh just once, a little bit, with the largest and strongest of his teeth.
An electric shock ran through him, painful and immediate. His head pounded. He felt the little bit of skin go down his esophagus and settle on the bottom of his stomach. The magic of his species took hold, immediately consuming that little bit of skin. He felt his muscular and skeletal systems grind together briefly...
There he was - she was - a redhead cyrei, identical to his/her prey. He examined his pale fingers, his perfectly round fingernails in the shape of half-moons, his skinny ribs and his painfully dislocated pelvis, a pelvis which he immediately righted through sheer force of will. When the change finally stopped, he groaned and reverted. Always this happened, every time he ate someone. He had billions of shapes inside, ready for him to use.
He tried again. Teeth on skin, single scrape - fierce, painful shock. He whimpered - whimpered! - and took a small step back.
Nothing to do then. He began to walk away.
Don't walk away, you stupid snake, the voice said. You wait for her to wake up.
He turned back toward her, disinclined to disobey the "voice" again.
Renaissance felt the red phosphorous in her hair regenerating itself, felt her entire lower body out of alignment. She concentrated hard enough that it slid back into place. That was one of the things she had mastered, while teaching herself magic. She could fix almost any sprain or dislocation, mend any mild bruises or light cuts.
When it was done, she registered the mild breathing by her side. Memories came rushing back - seeing an emerald-green sianach tail in the woods, trying to take it down, failing, running, firing up. She rolled onto her back and scrabbled back a foot or two, panicking, panicking, trying to will her fire phosphorous to return right then and there, but it was physically impossible...
But no. It was the man she'd seen in the marketplace, the man who had given her the weird feeling that she had to run and hide from him.
Sianach, she thought, connecting the dots; This man is a shapeshifter.
"Good morning," he said. "Let's not bullshit each other. I'm Avalesq. And you are?"
She stared at him blankly.
"...excellent name. Now, let's get down to business: I've decided not to eat you... for now."
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