beyond the sacred smoke; Jah-lilah

[woodrow]

Woodrow is delighted to have his shape back, not an original shape but a shape all his own - coyote. His tongue lolls happily out of his mouth as he lopes between the tall grasses going brown from the long summer and the new autumn that lifts a hand to them. The days are warm and the nights have a bit of a chill bite to them. But no matter, the moon is the same and he likes to sit atop a hill and sing to it in this shape that has come back to him. How it had hurt to reach for the coyote and find it trapped beneath his skin, pushed by the Mountain and her anger until enough of them had recovered their senses and made some sort of amends to the magic in the land. So he was coyote again, and little enough of horse though the horse bits of him came through now and then. When they did, he remembered two mares he’d liked more than well enough and two little balls of foal-fluff that had more of his mischief in them than they ought to have had. Even now though, he can call his stallion shape back to him but he prefers the coyote’s shape. His loping pace switches to a low slink as he hunts for mice in the meadow, leaping on them and trapping them with his paws only to let them run away afterwards, their hearts surely in their mouths from the fright he’s just given them. His laughter precedes him, as mischievous as his amber eyes are from their gleaming points in the grass where he lies, rolling over onto his back as his paws scrabble at the sky because he’s tired of chasing mice and scaring them. His mind turns back to more equine pursuits, the color-changer and the rabbit-shifter, and his bright eyed daughters. What’s become of them? He hasn’t caught their scents in a long time, but then he’s only ever roamed the meadow and the forest, and that one time he had a strange dream quest about running a race with a human child on his coyote back… Pah! Beqanna was a strange place! The coyote flips back over and hoists himself off the ground. He slinks through the grasses, only pausing to look up at the sky - night is coming, dusk colors chase the sun away and shadows grow longer on the ground. He snaps at his own shadow, warning it away, before laughing (coyotes are mad creatures, not all there and more present than they know) and loping off towards a hill except that hill is occupied by a red mare. Hm… he thinks to himself, slinking up the hill anyway and plopping down on his hindquarters beside her, tongue lolling out of his toothy mouth. “Nice evening, eh?”