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+----- Thread: [private] full moon, wolf moon (/showthread.php?tid=30252)
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full moon, wolf moon - Malik - 09-10-2021
The mountain kingdom is the only home that Malik knows. The craggy peaks, deep valleys, and moonglow lake are as familiar to him as the markings along his forelegs. He has spent all of the childhood he recalls here in the peaks of Beqanna, and cannot imagine a life beyond the high winds and the comfort of his Pack.
He thinks of them - his friends - this way while he wears the shape of a massive black wolf, prowling through the shallow snow in the forest.
There’d been a Pack in Hyaline once, he knows, back when his mother was the Alpha instead of the Queen, and there had been less fear in Hyaline. Malik had never known that world, but he likes his just fine, and likes to think that if the Pack were to return, it would be all the stronger for it.
He’ll need to be stronger too, he knows. That awareness had driven him to the mountain, and secured him a quest through which he means to do so. Of course, completing that quest was something else entirely, so when he had come home, he’d immediately started looking for his mother.
Malik had caught her trail near the northern river, and has followed it past the high cliffs and into the well-forested mountains. He is catching up, that he is sure of, and she is also making no effort to hide her trail.
When he sees her - through shifted eyes able to pick out white coat on white snow - Malik calls out: “Mom!” and increases his pace. By the time he reaches her, the melanistic leopard has become instead a horse, just as dark and striped as he’d been as a cat. THe thick ruff of feathers along his neck glistens in the dim sunlight reflected from the snow, and his bi-colored eyes are as bright as the horns (now pronged with adolescence) that grow from near his ears.
“I went to the Mountain,” he tell her, and then waits to see her response. He’s sought her out for a reason rather than his father. Gale is vocal in his distrust of the Fae and Fairy kind, but Mazikeen has far less bias.
@Mazikeen
RE: full moon, wolf moon - Mazikeen - 10-02-2021
@Malik
RE: full moon, wolf moon - Malik - 10-02-2021
Malik cannot miss a life he never lived, and when he looks up to meet his mother’s orange gaze it is with nothing less than adoration. Mazikeen is the only mother he has known, and so she is the best mother. She is a powerful shifter, a queen, the most beautiful woman in the world, and he is so very proud of her. As proud as he is of his father, but significantly less likely to inspire inexplicable terror in the adolescent shifter when he looks at her.
All children are sometimes afraid of their parents, Malik has reasoned; the world is not a place for the weak, so they have taught him to be strong.
He doesn’t step closer, but he does smile, and finds that as he meets her eyes he need not look quite so high as before. The feathers around his neck flare out with pride, pleased with himself and his growth, even if it truly means nothing more than the passing of time.
“I have to bring back to the fairies pieces of the things that I wish to become.” A feather, a claw, something that glitters and catches his eye, they had said. His mother seems surprised, but not upset, so he decides to push his luck a little farther.
“So I was thinking...maybe we could go and find a dragon?” It would certainly be an incredibly ambitious first attempt, but despite his unorthodox raising Malik has never stood the slightest chance of being anything less than bold.
@Mazikeen
RE: full moon, wolf moon - Mazikeen - 10-02-2021
@Malik
RE: full moon, wolf moon - Malik - 10-03-2021
Mazikeen asks if a shifter might satisfy his quest rather than immediately tell him no, and Malik’s dark ears prick up as his tail flicks in excitement. That he doesn’t know the answer doesn’t seem especially important. He does remember that the fairy had emphasized he must work hard to get it, overcoming obstacles, stealing, or bargaining.
He tells his mother this, and then shares with her the idea that he’s had: “I was thinking maybe we could find a baby one, and I could keep it. And if it’s a shifter, they could maybe stay in Hyaline too?”
This last he says hesitantly, knowing that his first pet has already outstayed her welcome. Yet Anath remains in Hyaline, which gives the boy the hope that perhaps he will be allowed another. There has been a change in his mother’s behavior, and Malik is hopeful this might mean more leniency in other ways.
Her second question is more difficult to answer, and not only because he cannot recall if the fairy had clarified.
Isn’t force the best way to get things? It is certainly the quickest way, and skirmishes are the way most small disagreements in Malik’s world are handled. The strongest always wins, and so is always right.
Would bargaining really work? Would it be as fun as taking things by force?
Malik frowns, and the black striped colt considers what might be worth bargaining for the ability to shift into anything at all.
“Do you think anybody would want to trade something for Myrna?”
RE: full moon, wolf moon - Mazikeen - 10-03-2021
@Malik
RE: full moon, wolf moon - Malik - 10-03-2021
The boy’s bicolored eyes flick back and forth across his mother’s face, reading her emotions with practiced ease. It is safest to know their emotions, Malik had learned early, and neither of his parents were very good at hiding them. She is amused by his tentative suggestion, but the emphasis on allowing a shifter a choice is equally genuine.
Malik nods agreeably. They will be given a choice first, that is right. “And then after, if they make the wrong choice, then we get to make them stay.” The black colt nods to himself as he speaks, knowing that this is the way of things.
Mazikeen laughs at the suggestion of trading away Myrna, and Malik wonders if perhaps she is not worth a dragon shifter. He’s never seen her turn into a dragon, after all, and she is still very small. Maybe when she is older? His mother suggests trading away his father instead, and Malik’s orange and blue eyes watch with eagle-like intensity when she glances away.
He has not asked about his father, but Malik knows he has left Hyaline. Suspects, also, that he is not coming back, but has not yet been bold enough to ask.
When Mazikeen turns back to him, she has done a good job of smoothing the emotions from her face. He can still see the way her orange-again eyes are overbright and glittering, and knows that now is not a good time to ask where Gale has gone. There is no indication of this awareness on his own face, which still wears a smile. A smile that brightens when his mother suggests the caves beside the sea.
“Let’s go!” He says, shifting his weight excitedly from side to side. What shape should he take, he wonders? A leopard? A bear? An eagle? Whatever his mother takes, he decides, surely she knows how to battle a dragon!
@Mazikeen
RE: full moon, wolf moon - Mazikeen - 10-04-2021
@Malik
RE: full moon, wolf moon - Malik - 10-05-2021
Sure of his own knowledge, Malik does not suspect that the small frown his mother retains is his doing. He’s accustomed to firm corrections when he’s been wrong before, usually verbal. Occasionally less so when his father was in a foul mood. He is not especially concerned by Gale’s absence, and so it is an easy topic to avoid, especially when it distresses his mother, and detains them from a hunt.
So Malik turns himself into an eagle, sanguine and certain that the pair of them will successfully capture a dragon for Hyaline today, even if it requires force.
The young shifter is not as large a bird as his mother, taking the familiar shape of a long-crested eagle rather than match her exactly. His coloring is as dark as hers is pale - iridescent black stripes on black feathers, and when they soar north together he is quite like her shadow in every way.
Malik can feel the excitement growing in his chest. This feels different, somehow, than the other hunts he has taken with Gale and Mazikeen. This time, they are not looking for a meal - rabbits, grouse, rock lambs - or for sport - the wolves, the bears, his other parent. They’re hunting down a dragon, and when they do, perhaps Malik will take some of its magic, and perhaps that is how he will learn to shift better. He knows that his father takes something intangible from his kills, even if Malik was not yet old enough to hunt horses with him, Malik wonders if he has inherited that ability. He hopes he has.
They reach the sea, grey-green and churning, and Malik dives toward the water. The wind rushes through his feathers and the salt stings his bicolored eyes, but he laughs at the surge of adrenaline that comes from pulling up just before he hits the water. The boy is not yet a skilled flyer, but he is rather proud of how quickly he can pull up from a dive in this shape, so he glances sidelong at his mother to be sure she has witnessed his most impressive feat.
The northern cliffs loom over him now, caves and crannies hidden in their dark depths. There is one larger than the others, and that is where he searches first. Something had lived here, he sees, something that had left the old bones of rock sheep and seals littered across the floor of the cave. Very old bones, he thinks; there is no flesh left on them at all. Undiscouraged, he leaps from the cliff edge, and resumes searching.
In the end, it is not a dragon that he finds.
It is a wyvern, its scales so dark a shade of blue-green that they seemed black in the dim light of the cave. Larger than Malik even in horse form, it towers over the young black eagle. It lunges for him, certain he is here to steal its recently caught fish dinner, and Malik lets out a startled cry.
@Mazikeen
RE: full moon, wolf moon - Mazikeen - 10-06-2021
@Malik