[private] It's nothing complicated, I just want to kill him

[avocet]

Avocet wasn't initially bothered by @[Manikin]'s absence.

He had always preferred she did her... hunting on her own (though she seemed to love to taunt him with her claws and beak). Avo's teeth were as flat as his hooves and he didn't have talons like his mother or sister. He was just as a horse; as dull as his teeth (and as Manny liked to tell him, his senses).

There are no raptor-like features for the bay yearling. His only discerning feature was a smattering of bird spots that his twin also liked to tease him for.

The days that had passed without Manikin had been sweet. He had gotten Popinjay all to himself and as the winter weather worsened in the flower fields of the Pampas, he had huddled his brown shaggy form beneath one of her ink-black wings and they weathered out the storms together. To his young mind, all was as it should be in his small world. He wasted no moment with his mother because Avocet was always so certain that Manny would be back with that clacking beak and raucous laughter.

What he didn't expect is that one day he would wake up and not find Popinjay.
What he didn't expect is that one day would turn to two and then three.

It made him almost senseless and the near-yearling had bleated all over the Brilliant Pampas for his mother. He went to the tree that his dam favored for itching her back. He went to the large clearing where he had last seen her shift into that rather terrifying shape she could take - a large bird. He went and he looked and he bleated; what he didn't expect to find - to get in return of the absence of his mother - was Manikin.

What he didn't expect was to see her.. like that.

"Mom is gone," he laments first, the most obvious thing to him (the center of his whole world; the sun of his life, gone; all joy, vanished). And then he lifts his head sharply, realizing that hers was different. More... not beaked. He blinks.

"I, uh, think you lost some things." Avo adds, looking down to the hooves that should be claws.