moonsetter [event]

[Lexx]

Tigris was sleeping, deep and dreamless, when the curse he bore within him suddenly levered a sharp, twisting spear through his chest. He surfaced from his slumber with a pained gasp, as if he’d been dragged upward through lengths of ocean water like a fish snared on a hook. His head jerked away from his paws, feeling cumbersome and heavy in a way that it never had before, and he winced at how his neck muscles protested. Tigris snarled from the frustration of it all, and dark smoke, studded with sparks that winked gaily into the cool night air, curled out from between his clenched fangs. It was as though he cradled a lit fire in his jaws, and this image only made his ire all the fiercer. He tilted his heavy head downward, and looked anxiously at his broad chest, which still throbbed as though wounded. There was no blood that he could see or scent, and no hole from which hungry flames spilled out. He wondered if this was yet another sign that he was dying from Chaos’s anger. Had her curse begun to reach his heart? he wondered. He’d grown accustomed to smoldering from within, but he weakened every day that the fire inside of him raged. If the flames had started to consume the vital parts of him that kept him alive, could he still be healed? The thought was chilling; he forced it away. Why did his head feel so bizarre? It was throbbing, too, he realized now; there was a low, dull ache in the base of his skull, pulsing along with the rhythm of his heartbeat. He glanced around for Minske, and his neck, again, protested the movement, like there was some new weight pressing down on him from above. The white wolf was nowhere to be seen. Panic was beginning to well in him, but he stubbornly pushed it back, as if his emotions—fear, anxiety, that inexplicable longing he felt for Minske—were the tide, and he were the moon, dictating where they might go. He was not Minske’s keeper, he reasoned with himself. Minske deserved a rest from tirelessly keeping Chaos’s curse from consuming Tigris alive. Instead, he forced his muscles to relax, one by one, starting with his tensed shoulders, his aching neck, his sore spine. It was still night, which meant he could go back to sleep, and when the sun rose in just a few hours, he would accept Minske’s healing magic. He lowered his heavy, heavy head to his large forepaws once more. Overhead, the sky was so thick and close with stars that he imagined he could crane his neck upward and pluck one free with his teeth. Thin, gauzy clouds moved leisurely across the face of the moon, which was large and golden and almost uncomfortably low against the earth. He frowned at it. Unless it was far earlier in the night than he’d realized, the moon should have set long ago, and yet rather than slipping behind the horizon, it had merely drawn closer and closer. The air, which had been cool before, suddenly gave a low, ragged moan, and a chill dragged itself up Tigris’s spine. The wind picked up, grasping hungrily at his aching body, and he shuddered, curling in on himself for warmth. He still hurt deeply from within, but he realized, more and more, that he hurt on the outside, too. His tail swept over his paws. The moon was pressing in, ever-closer, bathing the world in a dim, ochre mockery of sunlight. He remembered being pressed close to Minske for warmth, as a late spring snowstorm raged around them in the mountains. His tail swept over his paws. He froze. His two tails slipped away from his hind paws, resting limply against the ground, and he stared at them in horror. He curled one. He curled the other. They were identical, bushy and black, tipped with silver. They both belonged to him. It was as though they had always belonged to him, but he knew he’d only had one tail before he’d laid down to rest that evening. Tigris felt sick down to his toes. He lurched upward, and his neck protested fiercely once more. What was wrong with his head? He stumbled through the woods, down to the lake where he had first tried and failed to extinguish Chaos’s fire. His great paws, when they reached the lip of the water, were trembling. He peered into the lake, but despite the moon’s eerie light, he was still a black wolf trying to stare into water as night-dark as ink. His chest still throbbed, with pain and with heat, and so, in pure desperation, he called that heat upward, upward, into his throat and against his tongue, and then he exhaled sharply into the cold air. A jet of flame shot outward, half-blinding him. He trembled, and waited for his eyes to soak in the darkness again; and then, with greater control, he called the fire to his throat, and breathed it overhead. When he snapped his head down to catch his reflection, he saw a monster staring back at him. The monster had his scarred, once-handsome face, with its strong cheekbones and proud muzzle; it had his silver eyes, wary and half-wild. But it also had a strange crown of dark, jutting horns, thick and wide at the base, flaring horizontally outward into sharp points. They were bull-like and strange, and awfully, awfully heavy. “Chaos,” Tigris snarled bitterly, adorned with horns and twin tails, wreathed in the smoke from the curse she’d designed to slowly kill him. “You old bitch.” He felt her smile against his skin. He felt covered in it, just as he was covered in the moon’s sickly light. Slowly, he sank to the ground, and let the leaf litter catch and burn around him. He supposed, in the end, there was nothing to do but wait, and burn. "speaking" codes & art by lexx