Mazikeen’s ears twitch at the sound of the voice but they don’t stop moving, they don’t focus on the source - as though they can’t quite pin him down. He’s a blue, glowing blur in her vision nestled amongst the green haze of their surroundings. She had thought that her heart was racing before but now it is wild, and she knows it cannot keep this up, knows that something has happened (had that been a snake coiled around her talons as an osprey?). The game has shifted and she cannot claw the poison out of her own veins.
She doesn’t know how to fight like this.
She tries to shift, to grow wings again, but the ability eludes her. Mazikeen strikes out with her hooves when she thinks that he’s near, trying to remember the lessons that Gale had taught her that day long ago. On slopes not far from here.
Then she feels the sharp agony of teeth on her neck as she tries to twist away and it clears away some of the fog in her mind, but the thoughts that seep in are no relief. They are choked with fear and fury. She’s forgotten her theory that she cannot die and all she can think is how she’s not ready to fail - not this easily, not now. This can’t be how her promise to Gale breaks, can’t be how she betrays Breach’s faith in her. Those that live here are far from helpless but she can’t leave them.
Fueled by this fear of failure, the white-noise rage she had been fighting off meets no resistance now and consumes her easily. Mazikeen roars again - a primal, sputtering sound as her throat is torn into. It’s not just the chemicals in her system that blind her but this anger too, her mind empties of rational thought and turns into an inferno as her body burns with the venom in her veins. Her fire aura bursts into life around her and somewhere her rage finds enough energy for a few quick shifts - a rapid succession that matches the furious pace set by her heart.
Bear and panther and hippogriff and eagle.
It’s enough to free her and then she’s trying to tear into him while she’s wreathed in flame - she thinks she’s screaming in fury but every sense has dulled so she cannot say for sure. There’s nothing to see, nothing to hear, just the push to rend flesh from bone. The aura flickers with her shifting, each heartbeat bringing something new, something terrifying as blood pours freely from the wound on her throat and she completely loses control.
But she is burning bright in too many ways, her rage eating up every scrap of energy in a body already being attacked by poison and soon there will be nothing left. The leg that had been bitten seizes up and she half-falls but still, she tries to get to him. Still, she tries to fight.
@[Gale]