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 Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 5:41 pm
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Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 5:50 pm
Samsara awoke with a powerful hunger.
She could not remember as powerful a red rage within her since the fateful night in which she gained her pelt. It filled her with such immediacy that there was no denying that burning desire. She had to kill, hurt, and feed until at last her mind would clear. She sprung to her feet in the blink of an eye and was in the sky almost as quickly.
Her wings carried her higher and faster than ever before, but in her haste Samsara did not notice. Her body also responded with an unsurpassed agility and strength, but this too she paid no heed to. All that mattered now was the hunt and the kill. She needed a target... and found several soon enough. Beneath her in the darkness slept a family of soquili, two parents and their two children.
Samsara fell upon them, a dark bolt out of a black sky. Her urgency did not allow her to linger and in that they were fortunate. They died screaming, but they died quickly. That was all the mercy she possessed.
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Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 5:58 pm
Soon enough, her wings once more gripped the air like steel talons. The wind whistled in her ears as she soared over the landscape beneath her. Animals beneath her shivered in fear as the stars winked out above them in her passage, filled with a dread for which they had no name. Each moment only heightened Samsara’s need for carnage. The family of soquili had not satisfied. Four lives gone and the heat within was fanned into an inferno, rather than being smothered. She moved as if possessed and her infernal yowls to the abyss only made her seem all the more demonic.
There was a flickering in the nearby hillsides. A fire. Fires were the tools of humans and few others. Where there was a fire she would find prey. With a cruelly twisting smile, she angled her wings sharply and made her descent. In another flurry of blows and blood, the humans were dead as well. Wind blew through the summer leaves, making a sound almost like weeping. To that, Samsara could only smile. She would let the world weep, for her spirit still ravened for destruction.
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Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 6:05 pm
She couldn’t have said how long her rampage lasted. It could have been only that night or it could have been a month of nights. Never had she entered a red fury that had lasted so long or left as wide a trail of corpses behind it. Nothing was safe from that attack. Soquili, humans, and animals alike all fell before her rage. Each death that she wrought cleared her mind just a little. Fragment by fragment, murder by murder, her grasp on reality began to sharpen. She slowly became aware that something else was driving her. She wasn't simply killing at random, she was killing along a certain path. Her instincts were bringing her somewhere, and when her mind finally cleared of its deathly fog, she realized where she was.
She was in the mountains, and it wasn’t the tree-covered and blunted mountains of her youth. These were true giants, craggy and stone-faced. She couldn’t fathom what it meant to find herself there, except that the last part of the red fury remained and demanded to be satisfied. The slopes here were treacherous, paved in loose rocks that would slide down precipitous inclines if disturbed. Fortunately, Samsara didn't need to use them to climb. She flew with the grace of a butterfly up to the mouth of the cave, though no butterfly had ever been so terrible.
This cave was her new home. She knew this as instinctively as she knew her own name. This was where she had been guided to and where she would establish her new reign. She only needed to clear out the other inhabitants of the cave first.
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Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 6:14 pm
"Please, no no no!"
The young stallion's pleading fell upon deaf ears. Samsara gripped his back leg in her jaws and dragged. There had been a time when she would not have dared to even so much as offend someone like him. Back in the days from before her pelt and her awakening, the stallion could have set her trembling with just a few simple words.
Samsara could barely even remember that such days existed.
Even the most hated memories of her father were mere blurs and impressions now. It was the color of the stallion that reminded her of her father now, a rich gold that would have looked at home in the Padmapani herd. Hazy gray light fell upon them now. She had almost reached the mouth of the cave with her still alive and begging prey, but her mind was far away. Her brow furrowed. Her father, the one that had haunted her throughout most of her adult life.... Why couldn't she even remember his name now?
The stallion finally could take no more. His other three legs buckled, leaving him collapsed on the ground with his fourth leg ending in Samsara's jaws. The darkness roiled within her and Samsara's ponderings ended in a snap. After one last terrified cry, she ended the stallion's life. His blood poured out over the dun rocks and down the slope in channels carved out by rainwater. Remembering his weeping and with a sneer of disgust, Samsara sent his corpse tumbling after.
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Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 6:28 pm
Samsara stood at the entrance to her cave looking like a monster at the gates of hell. Blood streaked down from where she stood, with the stallion's broken corpse not far beneath her. Finally, the whirling in her head slowed. She was herself again, though she knew that the self she had been was no more.
She was transformed.
She felt the new way that her harder and sharper hooves dug at the ground. Her familiar wings hung by her side but they resonated with new power, unrivaled in her lifetime of slow and graceless flitting about between trees. She couldn't see most of her pelt but knew if she could that it would be glossy and thick, more alive now than it had ever been when being worn by even its original owner. She searched for the name of what had happened to her but grasped at nothing. What was it that had befallen her?
"Elder."
She heard it so clearly that she knew the word couldn't have come from her own mind. Did she receive this message from some trembling spirit? No god came to her to embrace her and give her their mark as a gesture of partnership and pride, no. Instead she had one whisper, tantalizing in its familiarity. It could have been the voice of her grandmother who died upon her very horns. It could have even been the voice of herself, of the soul that died long ago from choking on corpse powder. Samsara had no answer to that question, but did not need one.
She was Samsara the elder now, as implacable as Death and not nearly so kind.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 6:37 pm
Days and then weeks passed and the inhabitants of those mountainous passages soon learned to fear her. Only the scavengers truly rejoiced at her presence. The vultures and rats quickly picked the golden stallion's bones clean and they did not lack for meals after that one was gone. Many corpses soon joined that lonely first. Samsara dragged each and every one to the fetid mouth of her cave before flinging them down the slope. Most were dead by that time, but not all. Several times had black crow eyes watched the final protestations of her newest victim as they were pulled up that dreadful slope, and then seen the limp body fall down after.
The scavengers were so enthusiastic in their work that it wasn't long before the path to Samsara's cave was littered with bones. There were bones of deer and humans, soquili and songbirds. It wasn't until Samsara could hear the bones clicking and crunching beneath her hooves that she decided it was time to take a temporary break from redecorating her new home. She had unfinished business to attend to.
Carrion birds scattered as she took to the sky, but they were left unharmed. Samsara winged her way back to familiar terrains. Back to her Mahapadma.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 6:44 pm
Unenlagia fought off trembling and kept his eyes downcast. This was not the same mare as they had served. Her change was evident from the first moment he laid eyes on her. Before, she had been terrifying when angry. Now, she was terrifying simply to look at. His mouth formed words that didn't make it past his lips, almost as if he was praying.
She had asked him a question. Rallying his strength, he replied with a firm and level voice. "Yes. I... I understand." He swallowed and cleared his throat before continuing. "I will lead the Mahapadma from here on out." His. She had given him the reins to the Mahapadma almost immediately upon its formation. Now, she gave him the heart of it. He was no longer simply leader in her absence. Now, he ruled.
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Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 6:52 pm
"Good," she thrummed. She had never regretted the decision to make Unenlagia the manager of the Mahapadma. His mind was fast enough to even outpace his hooves. She knew him to be clever, ruthless, and above all, vicious. She could think of no one better suited to lead the Mahapadma now that she was prepared to move on to greater callings.
"Lead them as you wish," she told him in a voice like glass grating against iron. "Recruit more for them, or kill them as you like. But you will not disband them. You will preserve the Mahapadma and continue in its goal." She didn't bother stating what that goal was out loud. He knew already. After the assault on the Padmapani, the Mahapadma's goal had been to wipe out joy and peace wherever they could find it.
Her instructions were not complete just yet. "And once every moon, you will report to me. You will tell me what you have done, and I will tell you that I am pleased..." Or not. She did not speak aloud the end to that sentence, but it was evident all the same. "I may even have use of you from time to time."
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Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 6:55 pm
"I understand," repeated Unenlagia. He had no doubt that Samsara would kill him without remorse if she wasn't impressed with how he lead the Mahapadma. That thought might have worried a lesser stallion, but not him. He had no doubt in his ability to continue in her legacy. He would build a Mahapadma that she could be proud of, and someday it might even be his creation just as much as hers.
"I thank you for this opportunity..." He searched for the right term of respect and settled on one that was the most obvious and simple. "Elder Samsara." Sensing that their conversation was over he forced himself to meet the gaze of her one remaining eye.
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Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 7:06 pm
She met his gaze and held it just long enough to be a gesture of respect. Unenlagia was by no means an equal, but he was a powerful tool and a worthy servant. "I look forward to your first report." With nothing more to say to him, she departed, setting her course back to her mountain abode.
Before, she had always thought of herself as a soquili wearing the pelt of a panther. Now, she wasn't so sure. Was she a panther wearing the pelt of a soquili? Or was she something even darker? Could it even be that the soul of who she had been before still rested somewhere, pure and asleep just like the princesses in fairytales? What was the secret of the corpse powder that released demons into the bodies of previously sane soquili?
To those questions, Samsara could only smirk. Maybe she'd pose a few of them to Zulian the next time she saw the massive tiger skinwalker. She could easily imagine the confusion he would have on his face... right before she attacked him and turned him into a corpse to add to her collection.
Who she was before, it didn't matter now. All that did matter was who she was now, and in this new life, she had only just begun.
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