eat your young

Salt wind caught her. Auriga closed her eyes and breathed in deep, letting her lungs swell with air. This was perfect. She rolled her shoulders and stretched and began to pad along the shoreline, breathing in another deep, chest-swelling gust. Auriga adored her family. She would always share with them, pets and kills and whatever else. But sometimes even someone like Auriga, someone as devoted and deadly, needed time to be alone. Besides, she'd never gone to Auster before. This was entirely new.

A more exploratory-minded wolf would have dug into the sand or rushed about. Auriga did not. As the sun dipped low, she saw the lighting-up of the sea, the shore. Little lights bobbed in the waves. Her ears pinned forward. Curious curious curious. Auriga ventured closer, sniffing the air; she'd not seen something like this before.  This new phenomenon caught Auriga's attention utterly, but it could not hold her gaze forever. As beautiful as the land was, Auriga was not the sort who appreciated beauty. Not really. Not unless it was a woman's beauty. And even then, she did not appreciate it much beyond the initial tryst. Once she had a woman, once a woman gave in, she lost interest quickly. The same principle applied here, as Auriga gazed along the shore. An initially curious gaze soon turned cold. Uncaring. Auriga snorted and dipped a paw into the water.

The high tide came upon her; she could tell the tide was high for there was no mark of smooth sand-- at least yet. It must have just started. Auriga looked along the rising tide. Her fur bristled slightly.

Whatever she thought was soon discarded as she noticed... bodies. Little scaly bodies. There were dozens of them, washing ashore in the tide, flopping in the water. Oh. Perfection! The fish were weak. They were easy kills. Auriga laughed quietly to herself and ventured into the water, careful to mind the tide's ebb. She didn't want to get swept out. The first fish she killed was one that had flopped out of the water, spasming itself up and out, half-leaping. That leap, of course, brought it right into jaws that were not simply hungry for food but hungry for chaos and bloodshed and death as well. Auriga grabbed the fish by its scaly belly and sheared through ribs, throwing the bloody struggling creature back into the water. Even in the dark, in the beautiful scene, other fish scented blood, sensed it somehow, and struggled up. Up, out of the zone of safety. Hungry, or perhaps just searching for pain, the fish followed after the blood trail, and soon the high tide was bringing in both its natural catch and more opportunistic things.

Auriga, of course, wasn't going to let the chance go to waste. She selected one writhing target, splashing down in the surf with a glee that was almost puppylike but was not at all like the glee of a puppy when you looked at it; this was viciousness, sadism, hunger. She crushed the head of the fish with the first stomp, and then on the second one, she held the fish in place with her left paw before working with her right, slowly peeling the fish open, spilling its organs into the surf. She liked to rip things open.

With a grunt of delight, Auriga threw that fish back into the crowd, watching its insides float in the beautiful blue lights. She snickered. Crept forward. Another fish had been thrown by the surf, and Auriga grabbed it in her jaws, twisted, and slapped the fish against the shore, paralyzing it before she found a nocturnal sea-bird. She extended the fish to the sea-bird, watching gills flex desperately. She huffed. Happy. Heated. The sea-bird took its meal, enjoying a slow nourishment on the fish that could not even struggle as it suffocated as it was devoured alive.

The fourth fish was larger, with some great shimmering fin. Auriga hauled it up by the tail and laughed through clenched teeth, using her paws to pull scales from the fish. Blood and scales spattered together in the beautiful sea foam. She slowly lowered it, letting it get water in its gills, before pulling the fish free. It began to try and breathe, but she held it until it almost stilled-- then lowered it again. The fish wouldn't last forever with this treatment and Auriga didn't give a damn. She didn't want it to last forever. She wanted to see it suffer. She wanted it to wish for death. If it had been a wolf, she could have even more fun, but it was just a fish. Again, she pulled the fish from the water. Again, it nearly died, before she gave it a breath it needed. Eventually, the fish died -- shock, perhaps. Or blood loss. Auriga didn't care. She settled on the shore and began to eat her prize, smirking to herself as she watched scales flash against blue.

All in all, Auriga had made a good choice, coming to Auster. She snickered at the thought and licked her lips before pulling at fish-meat with a mocking delicateness, as if she were a lord in a castle.