Destination of the Heart

The woods stretched further and further on west.

Or so Iskra, the large, white hyena thought as she trot along. For several weeks now, she'd been flirting with the edge of Sunnveil, never quite going in past the guards. What exactly was she going to say to them? That a dead hyena's words had stuck in her mind and now she wanted to see what exactly drew her to find out about the root of the odd ritual that they somehow knew? After all, who would have thought that eating one's clansmembers would lead to them living on in you? It was almost demonic in its cannibalistic implications.

What kind of terrible entity might be responsible for teaching them this knowledge?

Several things played out in her head the longer she thought about it, but she knew it wasn't an oni or a kami. There were stories of the kind that lived here, being wild spirits like herself. Maybe Cookie fit right in. Maybe cookie came, just as dumb as Iskra was now, and the experience changed her.

After all, it was well-known fact in her clan, and everyone had a consensus on this one thing: Cookie was crazy. Nobody ever understood a thing she said, and if they did, then they treated the revelation as something unusual. Her concepts, more often than not, were abstractions far beyond what a normal mystic hyena should have been able to conceive.

[ EXP: 266 || +1 TEXP (2nd thread) ]

It was as she tarried at this threshold that Iskra became acutely aware of a scent.

Now Iskra and Cookie shared a higher version of a common talent among her kind. They didn't invent cyphers of words as humanity had done in order to read. They were born with the ability to detect several million kinds of scents, and these scents would become linked with imagery over their lifetimes... with messages even. Cookie took this to an art, and indeed she could spell out words by having a certain smell stand for a certain sound. A "c" or "ca" might be represented with a scent not unlike a cat. Of course, this didn't take off with the vast majority of the clan. They really had no complicated messages to impart to each other other than the usuals: age, sex, general level of fertility... very mundane things.

But the book in the library that rode upon Jack's soul contained a book full of many scents, and most prominent in the story played out by those smells was the author of a particular poem... one that told of one eternity.

She had never encountered a creature with such a smell, and the smell only told her a few things out of context as it was in the book.

[ EXP: 235 ]
( Note: This thread is Path of the Researcher by the way )

The leucrotta couldn't resist following the scent, if for no other reason than that she was sure it would lead to the answers she was looking for.

The trees and the moss and the grass held smells rather well, and soon she found herself peeking over a particularly large set of rocks into a gentle, green glen. A small creek chortled through it, and in the midst of this creek, perched on the rock was a spikey beast.

Iskra tilted her head to the side. Out of all of the various woodland creatures she'd encountered that had monstrous parallels among the onikonjou and the mystic beasts, the creatures that this one appeared inspired by had little or no representation. It put her in the mind of a porcupine or a turtle, but the segmentation of its shell suggested some sort of armadillo-turtle hybrid that just happened to have huge, intimidating spikes along its shell.

But those spikes, though intimidating, were far from something she found very offensive. If anything, they seemed designed to keep some other creature from simply swallowing him whole, given his relatively small size. The spikes weren't even small and narrow and detachable, as the quills of a porcupine were. Nor did they look particularly useful for imparting a payload of poison.

[ EXP: 251 ]

Yes, of all of the goofy little critters that couldn't hurt a fly, this fangless little moveable shell of armor appeared the most harmless among them. The only thing she could possibly construe as possibly harmful were his proportionately large claws, but their thickness and dullness reminded her more of a mole than they would remind her of some carnivore.

Its slightly glowy eyes met hers and she somehow discerned that she was looking upon some great fount of wisdom, though how he lived long enough to gather such wisdom she judged must have come from a great many years of not-killing things.

She wrinkled up her nose, confused for a moment, before crawling forward, sitting silently on the shores of the waters that the other beast sat in the midst of.

The turtle thing appeared to be meditating, though it didn't really speak.

Finally, Iskra thought she should be the one to speak. "I... found your scent in a book. Did you know a hyena by the name of Cookie?"

She felt sort of odd talking to this thing instead of just eating it. After all, it was plainly prey with how defensive its body structure was. It didn't even seem to have long legs to get away with or hooves to deliver a dreadful kick. Just those... digging claws and its shell that would no doubt give out with a bit of pressure from her teeth.

[ EXP: 266 || +1 TEXP (5th post) ]