burn your village

Marked M for both language and semi-detailed descriptions of a murder

He'd wandered off again, sue him. His dad was old as dirt, but he would probably be fine for a week or two without Val lingering on the borders like a serial killer. For whatever reason, the aurora painted male needed to explore. To be moved with the breeze and the whims of the world. So today he plodded through the surf, feeling cool salt water soaking his fur and clinging to his skin. Winter was nearly over, and he was a fully grown man now. It showed in the ripple of muscles over his titanic form, the strength of the musk in the undercurrents of his scent, the definition of a form fully devoid of puppy fat. Not that there wasn't any fat- he was a northern boy, born and bred, and that was part of the package. That extra, subcutaneous padding meant that when a smaller wolf, hungry and desperate, charged in from nowhere and tried to disembowel him with needle-sharp teeth, Valerian didn't lose most of his organs. The sudden warm spray of his own blood soaking his underbelly quickly turned into a ferocious burning as salt water infiltrated the wounds. The giant found himself stumbling into the waves, incensed by the unprovoked assault and ready for the kind of fight that would have any onlookers vomiting in the bushes- if there were any.

Standing up to his shins in the sea, surrounded by a growing puddle of redness as his blood dripped into the waves, he lowered his skull between his shoulders and lifted his lips in a terrible snarl. The whites of his opponents eyes rolled in a mixture of terror and desperation, unwilling to abandon the fight that he had started but seriously reconsidering his choice of targets. After a tense moment of standing off, one on the sand and the other in the water, the dark wolf lunged. Salt water sprayed this way and that as he charged through the shallows, relying entirely on his superior agility to keep him from behind snapped in half by the nordic colossus he faced off against. And for a few moments, he was holding his own. Slashing fresh new wounds into Val's limbs and flanks to try as he zipped this way and that- until he wasn't.

Valerian was not immune to pain, but he certainly was accustomed to it. So he endured the first few rapid-fire bites to the heels and wrists and thighs and elbows, the heat under his skin that flared was far more than blood soaking his pelt. The slow motions of retaliation, heavy jaws closing on the end of a tail or the edge of the hip, all a ruse. Let his opponent think him a heavy, pondering brute. Which, in the water, he sort of was. It soaked his thick undercoat, swallowed up his limbs with little intention of relinquishing them so that he could fight. It made the usual jabbing motions of his bone spurs against opponents useless, he couldn't lift and shove his joints outwards fast enough to land a hit. There was no question that the dark wolf attacking him was having a far more difficult time, with much shorter legs and starvation slowing his progress. As Val backpedaled, trying to get into deeper water that would slow his smaller opponent even further, he fought back a snarl as the seawater flooded the gash across his belly. A renewed interest in slaughtering the fucker who'd tried to gut him found its way into the forefront of his mind. Elbow deep in the sea, there was no shot that this asshole was going to be able to hamstring him or take a chunk out of the family jewels, at least.

There was an ace up Val's sleeve in this fight. Many of his opponents had remarked that he was unusually quick and agile for such a big boy, and it was about to turn the tides on this fight (badumtiss). As the ebony shade tried to slip past his shoulder, overconfident in his speed and size, Valerian lunged. The attacker got a frightening glimpse of a gaping maw with eerie blue-black gums and tongue, framed by a full set of sharp teeth and a pair of glinting tusks headed right for him. And then Val closed his jaws around the entirety of his much smaller opponent's waist- teeth and tusks puncturing deep into muscle tissue and viscera all at once. Generations of violence and carnage channeled into thick neck muscles as his huge jaws punched right through the abdominal wall of his attacker in one horrifying motion of snapping jaws.

The guttural scream that rang in his ears was a symphony of grotesque delight, and the amaranth goliath released his attacker-turned-turned victim. To the male's credit, he remained standing. Even tried to scurry away, as shock set in and adrenaline filled the tusk-shaped gaps in his hide with numbness. All of the sudden, the depth of the water in which they stood was the wounded male's undoing. He had to awkwardly hop-skip his way towards shallower water, worsening the damage to his flanks and hips. Val was able to trudge out of the surf at his own leisure, making a point to ignore how the open air made clinging salt in his wounds so much more painful. A low growl bubbled up from his chest and morphed into a guttural snarl as he stalked up behind the emaciated loner who'd decided to try and disembowel him. Rivulets of dark blood streamed from the gaping wounds that framed his spine, and if Valerian were a better man, he might have felt something like pity. But he was not a good man, and so he felt only contempt and wrath. And so with one last burst of fury he shouldered his staggering victim onto the beach and stomped one heavy paw onto the male's shoulder to hold him still. Heavy skull dropped to grab hold of a kohl-dark cranium, heedless of teeth puncturing soft flesh and tusks scraping gruesomely against bone as he wrenched his jaws up and to one side with a wretched crunch. Just like that, the half-dead male's neck was broken and his lifeless head flopped onto the crimson-stained sand.

WC: 1054