Who: Jörmungandr & the remnants of this unfortunate npc miner. What: Nomnomnom When: Friday night Where: Somewhere vaguely near Coal's mines. Warnings: Um. See what & who? Everything's mostly implied, this is a pleasant little glossed over piece of crap.
This succession of meals had come upon Jörmungandr as she tried to sleep in the cool shadows days ago (how many days? She did not keep track of the turns of the sun, felt the tides rise and recede but kept no tally). Unlike the first, he had not tried to nudge her with a shovel to see if she was alive: she had found water-flowing-aboveground and no longer looked like a drowned to death thing. She had submerged herself and slid eel-like 'round and 'round, reverse widdershins as she learned this new water that tasted not of salt, that buoyed her differently. No matter how distasteful she might find being Loki's child, movement toward the sinister side was ever-instinctive. Counter-clockwise. Against (against what? Just against).
No, no, no shovel for this one, no callous poking, just his nervous skittering forward toward her deceptively crumbled form, his miss? Miss are you all right? breaking the silence that her breath did not stir. And then his hand, unwelcome and unasked for but oh so convenient on her shoulder. Jörmungandr surely felt like liquid rock under his fingers, cold-blooded, but she moved like quicksilver as her hands caught his wrist and jerked him forward and down (surely, his mind must have babbled at him in confusion, surely she was too slender to be that strong? Surely). Pointed teeth slid into the meat where his neck joined his shoulder. Her slender arms and legs wrapped vise-like 'round him until the poison worked through his system, ushered by his quick-beating heart. She did not withdraw her fangs immediately, gnawed indolently at him as if testing his flavor, his ripeness. The way her jaw worked against him was grotesque, inhuman. No man or woman natural-born has bones that can shift so, like a cobra widening its maw to take in prey. She had dragged him with her once he grew lax in her embrace, dined on him slowly over several days. Tonight she split a final bone or two. Marrow. Waste not, want not. Had someone said that to her before she was thrown into the sea, or had it come after on the currents?
No matter. Miss current-quick was learning to see in the light, how to move out of water. Instinctively, she knew dinner would not continue to serve itself up so politely, so quickly and easily. This rebirth had all been good luck up to now. Fortune never favored Loki's children for long. Her just slightly wrong-looking tongue - too flexible by far, too long - flickered out to taste the air. There were other things in the wood and out of the wood. Predator-things, god-things, beings that were both at once. Jörmungandr wanted no easy meals. Instinct bred into the very bones that made up her double-joined skeleton made such easy pickings something to be disdained, nourishment barely worthy of consumption. She had no urge to seek out a god-thing (she harbored no love for gods beyond her brother-wolf and her sister-death but neither was she foolhardy enough to think that hunting one down while she was still newly rehatched, relearning the world was in any way a decent plan). But oh, the predators she would find.
And oh, the predators she would eat, and on the blood of feral things she would once again grow strong. These weak and puny fleshy things that seemed drawn to reach out and touch were barely enough to keep body and god-soul together but the warrior-creatures would come and she would take their fierceness into herself with their meat and marrow, mate it with her own. World-circler. Poison-spitter. God-crusher. Trickster's child. Giant spawn. Water demon. Sailor's misfortune.
Faded she undoubtedly was. But to shrink and diminish from being the one curled round the world, destined to poison the very sky, is not to become a garter snake. The world itself is tarnished and meek now, no longer the fierce warrior's playground she was born into. Perhaps she merely fades to match it, lest her burgeoning coils crush it entirely. Perhaps she is an almost-ghost too animal or too slow to realize that she is obsolescence personified. It matters not. The awakened snake lives and moves. That is enough. That is all she has ever had, since the day he was thrown into the sea.
Jörmungandr is not her brother. She does not howl to the heavens as she creeps through the woods. She does not move on all fours. Movement is the function of a complex undulation, a slithering crab-walk that uses her belly as much as her hands and knees. And the only sound as she crawls, gliding soundlessly through the brush like a particularly deadly pale moonbeam, is the occasional soft, sibilant hiss of anticipation, of laughter.