Open Play with Your Food - Printable Version

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She's made things for the Magus, her father and her beautiful Sarissa, but never for herself. Making and gifting is her way of giving something she thinks she doesn't have, of making someone else prettier than she could ever be. Miasma doesn't know who this is for-- an earlier attempt at taxidermy that slipped so badly it's been resigned to fur-less leather she shreds to strips with the sharpened edge of a scapula. Maybe's she'll string the strips with her growing collection of vertebrae and mouse skulls-- things with holes already in them, because she's still learning how to drill bone without shattering it. At least her failures in skinning, she can make something with.

A badger skin sways, stretched from a low branch next to crevice where she hides her supplies from the scavengers and bone-eaters. When the pelt is done, she'll drape it over that ribcage hidden deep between the rocks, fashion something of a cape from it. Maybe someday, she'll get her claws on bear. Maybe someone else will care what she's up to.

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Art, some called it, but maybe Jude had never had an eye for the stuff – it all smelled like death to him. Sure, who didn’t love a good roll in something rotting every once in a while? When that had graduated to parading about with corpses strung to shoulders and skulls sitting on foreheads – a skull on your own skull, really, maybe that was supposed to be some sort of commentary?– well, Jude had no idea. It did make the wearers awfully obvious. They clattered when they walked, bones all clacking together and announcing their arrival, or they smelled, much like one would expect something smelled when covered in a musty old pelt. Maybe that was the point? To be so proud, so confident, that they could afford the ostentation?

He wasn’t sure if the girl could smell him over the scents of her work, or if she simply didn’t care to notice – he smells of wolf, and of Alteron, as surely the Magus’ pawn as any of the rest of them, and perhaps that was finally enough to blend him in as much as keep him safe – but Jude watched her with an idle sort of fascination, his long tail curled about his dainty forepaws and his big ears pricked forward. Her den smelled sickly. The tools she used, not the physical ones but the liquids, sat uncomfortably in his nostrils. The badger strung out nearby, well, it was nearly as big as the fox. Bigger, maybe. That sat uncomfortably, too.

What other bones lay hidden in her pile?

“...Will you wear it, when you’re done?” He broke the silence casually, as though the girl had known he was there all along. Maybe she had; it didn’t matter. Jude’s tone was curious, if a little dry, and he smiled sharply, as if they were sharing some private joke. “It would go so well with your eyes.”