Mornidian surveyed her lair with pride. It was perfect. It was exactly what she had always wanted in the underworld, but never been able to have. There were far too many demons to contend with down there. Now, even here on the edge of the accursed graveyard she was left relatively in peace. There were other walkers about in the area, she was clever enough to pick up on those signs, but they all seemed content enough to attack interlopers rather than each other for now. This suited Mornidian well too. She didn't know if she would be able to fight off a strong and determined foe on her own, so letting her neighbors do the work for her was perfect. Now she could spend her time doing what she most desired- learning.
She had started small with her investigations. Her first subject was the humble squirrel, a bushy-tailed gray fellow who didn't have the sense to run. She had injected him with a dose of her venom and waited until he was limp, but still breathing, to begin cutting.
She'd learned a lot from that squirrel. She learned about how the bones connected and what minute squirrel organs looked like. There was much that she still didn't understand, but there were many more squirrels in the treetops, and rabbits in the grass.
Mornidian devoured knowledge like other skinwalkers devoured corpses. It was when her little grove of trees was littered with piles of small bodies that she realized that cutting them open wasn't enough. Her mind was sharp, but there were still little things that she forgot. Fortunately, there was a solution for that.
For her next kills and dissections, Mornidian began to keep records. She drew with her claws in the ground, and then began to draw with her claws upon the trees themselves. Where the bark was uneven she ripped it away in sheets, leaving the bare bone-white tree beneath exposed. Her drawings were records of her knowledge, and of her depravity. She did not know the secret human art of marking down words, but she could illustrate a cut open body well enough for her own purposes.
Smirking to herself, she surveyed her latest work. She had caught a heron standing in still water that morning and had spent the rest of the day meticulously cutting it to pieces. There really was astonishingly little underneath the gray feathers, just bits of bone and stringy muscle. Fascinating.
She added one final line to her drawing, comparing it to the dead bird that lay before her. Yes, that would do nicely. Did her wings have those same little brittle bones? That was something that she expected to never find out, but she could find more birds... and someday she might even find a winged soquili. How fascinating it would be to find out what a soquili looked like from the inside out. How fascinating indeed...