#Wordtober
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Ilharess had scampered straight outside immediately after scenting the chaotic waft of mummy-magic, nose wrinkled in patent disgust. She was rather enjoying her fourth life, thank you very much! No need whatsoever to get caught up in that uncomfortably unpredictable kind of precarious kerfuffle until many more details were much better known, and she was more than happy to leave the messy, risky discovery part of gaining that yet-unknown knowledge to all the brave
monster hunters within the keep. Andronicus would surely agree that ancient mummy curses and renegade wisps of wild magic weaving around transforming this into that all fell well outside the parameters of her geas! In addition to that perfectly considered, eminently prudent line of self-preserving reasoning, her empty gullet was indignantly reminding her about all those skipped meals today. Agreeing whole-heartedly with her panging, neglect-stabbed tummy, the winged tabby eagerly licked her chops, deciding that the unsavory prospect of potentially facing terrible magical peril positively demanded an equally worthy break for fortification first. Surely something tasty would be letting its guard down in the chilly dusk outside the keep…
With a hearty ‘murr-row,’ she alit on her wings, flapping strainedly for sufficient lift, her cobby girth seemingly in cahoots with the thin, slippery, ice-twinged mountain air. Her bushed-out, fluffy tail-tip grazed a parapet of the wall as she arced upward out of the keep.
Her preferred hunting height attained, Ilharess’s keen golden eyes rolled downward to start scanning the dark countryside below. Over crag and thicket she soared, as silent and hidden in the dark sky as the moon herself, tonight a subtle silvery glimmer outlining a steady river of wind-whipped cirrus clouds combed by the peaks of
the Spine. A meadow of wildflower buds spread out below, and her nose caught the briefest note of the scent of springtime heat. Her eyes popped full open, and she made a tight, whipping wing-over turn in the direction her nose indicated. Sure enough! -a pair of tender, juicy young coneys were sharing a tender, dangerously blissful moment of courtship. She soared down upon them with reckless abandon, teeth bared and claws out!
Fortunately for the cause of lagomorphic love, the swooping tabby misjudged the thinness of the mountain air, crashing to ground a mere bound away from the long-eared liaison, and the terrified lovers instantly parted ways, their paths of flight forked into an ever expanding V, hurriedly hopping at full panic-pace toward the nearby thicket that lay a few dozen yards or so uphill. Ilharess’s spurned gullet urged her up out of her embarrassing faceplow into a scampering, flapping, gleefully chirruping hot pursuit of the male suitor, whose long, sinuous legs promised an extra couple ounces of delicious, tender backstrap than the scrawnier female suitee could offer-barely a snack! the tabby admonished herself after the briefest of wayward glances. The coney-lad darted this way and that, Ilharess’s eager jaws snapping just behind his toes, just beside his rump, now just missing the nape of his neck. She had him, she had him! She… CRASHED with a snap, crackle, and pop, breakneck speed to a sudden stop, draped awkwardly sideways in midair amidst a poking, prickly mass of thorn-vined, white-flowered blackberry bramble!
Well, scat! -she harrumphed to herself, a grumpy murr issuing from her muzzle. She wriggled this way and that, managing to right her rump-half, but her winged torso was firmly stuck one-third-way twisted round. As the cobwheels slowly began grinding in the winged cat’s mind, a peal of tinkling laughter rang out, followed swiftly by a second.
“What a delicious, nay, scrumptious treat! All the way from
the Dawn Court to the Heights of the Spine, can you believe it, my dear Periwinkle? A true celebrity has graced us with her substantial presence!”
“Why, ‘tis truly an unbelievable honor, my darling Honeysuckle! Only… is she supposed to be all twisted up into a furry, feathery pretzel? Why, the pose she has struck reminds me of that newfangled Allirian artwork in the chest that ‘fell’ from that trader’s cart last month.”
The pair of snickering frost pixies flitted just beyond a paw’s stretch of Ilharess’s sidewards, grumpy maw, a thin, tickling coat of ice forming on the tips of her whiskers and ear-tufts as they approached. As best she could manage, she lowered her head in what would have to pass for a courtly bow.
Ah-haha! I salute your fond greeting and your good humor at my much-deserving expense, good sir and madam. I quite flew into this one! Niceties thus exchanged! Ahem! What shall it cost me to convince the vines I have so disturbed to, oh, I don’t know… let me go?
The pixie-warden stroked his smooth blue chin, considering. A grin bordering on malicious curled onto his thin lips, and he exaggeratedly returned a bow.
“Why, we shall ask only your solemn pledge not to go a-hunting in the parlour of the Winter Court! You shall not starve, though, in our lands! By this dweomer I bestow in friendship, for as long as you roam the Heights, you may take sustenance from the nectar of flowers, and by our grace, such fare shall sustain you!”
He waved his arm, and a thin blanket of frost covered vine and trapped tabby alike, before the bruised vines unfurled abruptly rolling and dumping the indignant gray tabbycat past the thicket’s margin and onto the meadow. The tinkling roar of pixie-mirth resumed, the pixie maid slapping her knee before adding a parting shot:
“Though, perhaps, not
all of you! Your wings shall surely thank us ere long!”
Ilharess hungrily sniffed the air, but neither fur nor feather nor heat could be smelt; only sneezy puffs of pollen and the heady saccharine of blackberry nectar. The realization of the pixie's curse sunk in, making her already grumpy maw even grumpier.
So that is how it is... Well, there is nothing else for it! She tentatively poked her tongue into a blackberry blossom, so starting the opening act of what would prove to be an hours-long comedic dinner theater performance for the pixies, rolling over one another, howling in amusement at their reluctant guest’s expense.
