The Beast That Lay Dying. Who: Greed [notenough] and the Chimera [firetongue] What: A Sin walks into a building, and stumbles upon a chained animal. Where: One of Greed's many warehouses. When: Four in the morning on January seventeenth. Warnings: Language, violence, blood, blatant social awkwardness.
Several feet away from her, the casual drip of water--or something like it--could be detected. Her heartbeat pulsed inside her ears to the same metre, monotonous and slow, steady in an off-kilter fashion as per all of nature's rhythms. A symphony of percussion and brass crawled in through the cracks of the dark, metal walls, blending into a cacophony of white noise. Laying in what was once a pool of her own blood, she listened to the world die around her.
It had been many hours since the Chimera stopped struggling against the heavy metal cuff that bound her to this spot. Its anchor was a thick bend of steel, dirty and rooted into the floor with cement. Frenzied thrashing had proved fruitless after the first few hours of her imprisonment, and the desperate slashes of a knife had only succeeded in cutting her own flesh while leaving her bonds unscathed. Dark bruises encircled her bloody wrist, attesting to a fight that had been long since abandoned. To continue only killed her faster, so she closed her eyes and curled up to preserve what little heat she had left. Her torch had been knocked away, too far for her to reach, and without fire the bottle of oil at her side was as useless as a key to a lock it did not fit.
How many days had it been?
The city was very different from the small suburbs in which she was accustomed to living. The mortals there were most often weak and defenseless. They walked alone at night and fought like scared mice; easily found, easily hunted, easily killed. Streets were dark and the air was open. But it was so cold, and in the slump of winter there was not much to be gleaned from such small spaces. She had been forced to move outward.
Prey in this city had metal claws, loud explosives, and they traveled in packs. This fact she had learned a spell too late. Upon following one--just one--small mortal, smelling so sweetly of blood and heat, she had come across a whole flock of them. She made the mistake of allowing them to divest her of her torch... and then she had been outnumbered and outmatched.
Damn it. Through her eyes did nary more than twitch, she gave her wrist a listless pull, twisting it within the cuff, greasy with oil and sticky with blood. Useless. It had been at least an entire half-cycle ago that the Chimera accepted that this would be her end. She was loath to lose this vessel. At four years, soon to be five, it had been her longest kept body, and she liked it as well as any being could like an eternal prison. She had stolen it when it was young, tender enough to be trained into fitness, while innocent enough for her to reap the benefits of vulnerability. Humans had curious few preservation instincts. They were prone toward pity for anything small and vulnerable--unwise, for those who learned how to manipulate that in accordance to their favor. How many had she slain, simply because they had not been mindful enough to be suspicious of an adolescent's body?
One of her own would be able to sense the foreign intent with but a sniff in her direction.
And yet, despite the weakness, naïveté, and outright stupidity of their breed, a lot of them had managed to overpower her yet again and leave her body to fade. It would take years to regain a comparable form. What a waste.
The exhaustion in her bones was enough to make her rage of little more consequence than minor irritation. She did not resume her fight for life, as she wished to; as she might have many hours ago, before hunger drew in her stomach and thirst dried her throat. Instead, she simply curled in on herself, letting her chained arm dangle, wrist bent like a neck from a rope. A few minutes later she was too tired to even remember what she had been thinking only moments previous.
The Chimera quietly admitted defeat, and her mind went blank.