DAMN IT.

CAVES, DAMN IT.

Shoal let her guard down for five minutes and, somehow, this had happened again. She ended up here, again. In the dark, contained by a chrysalis. She shut her eyes, and when she opened them again, she was here.

The claustrophobia, mixed with the anger and frustration, was beginning to get a bit much. The owl flailed, but with one strong, practiced kick, the amber chrysalis shattered and fell apart. The bird went tumbling forward, bits of rock clinging to her ill-fitting feathers as she tried to regain composure.

How long had it been this time? Was Oliver still alive, the little bobcat she'd met when she hatched again the first time? What managed to kill her? Was it another fucking cave deer stomping her to death? She hoped not. She was unsure if even an extended chrysalis vacation could save her bones a third time.

Still frustrated, Shoal ruffled her feathers as she lifted herself back to her talons and fluttered onto a boulder, staring out into the swamp. Quietly, the old owl fumed. How many years had she missed of her life, spent trapped in a yellow prison? How many people had came and went, that she could have been friends with?

She feared to know the answer, even if it were much less time than she had thought.

Quietly, the scarred owl took a long breath of stinking swamp air before she settled down on her boulder, glaring out into the misty horizon.

Shoal had just begun to calm down.

Her eyes fell half-lidded and she settled her breathing, instead looking through Cetus instead of just glaring at a particularly skinny tree. With the anger melding away, she had begun to feel exhausted instead. Common affairs for a battle-weary owl, who was under the assumption they were eons old.

Quietly, and lazily, she surveyed. She turned her head this way and that, eyes gradually coming closer to closing-- until she saw something approaching. A very familiar something.

The marsh striders of Cetus were, in fact, mostly everywhere. But to Shoal, they were a far less pleasant memory-- the last time she had seen a cave deer sprinting this close to her, it had broken all of her bones and she'd been plunged back into her chrysalis to heal.

Caves, she fucking hated the marsh striders.

Instinctively, Shoal opened her beak to hiss and swear and scream until she died again, until she noticed that there was something hanging off it. A someone, in fact, but she didn't have the chance to do or say much until the deer was rolling over into the marsh-water and the someone was staring at her.

An odd thing, like Oliver had been. Except this one had a rabbit's pelt clinging to it.

The haggard owl shifted from foot to foot as she spent a moment tucking her unfurled wings back into her sides. "What, pray tell," she rasped hoarsely, with a voice that had gone mostly disused for thirty cycles, "the fuck?"

She turned her head one way, then the other, and then moved to hobble down close to the body of the deer, snuffling it with her beak briefly. It was... well, either dead or close to death. It's movements were quickly coming to a halt, though Shoal could still hear the bubbling rasp of blood in the strider's mouth.

"Did you do this?" She asked as she turned back to the hybrid, the feathers along her back bristled like cat's fur. "On your own?"

Shoal was rash, easy-to-anger, and increasingly bitter about the hand that life had dealt her. But she was not, stupid. For a moment she thought that Ashtoreth might have been a lesser, and one hell of a lesser at that, if she had managed to take down a cave deer on her own. That much, however, didn't seem to be the case. The hybrid very clearly understood her.

That meant-- as the whistling, rasping noises came out of Ashtoreth's throat reinforced --she was mute. There was a flicker of softness that brushed the owl's eyes for a moment. Of sympathy, but understanding. "Right," she murmured with a quiet click of her beak as she looked over the deer.

There was a brief rustle of feathers, and then Shoal was inspecting the deer again, prodding at it gently with her talons. Skinning a deer couldn't be... that hard, could it?

Perhaps about as difficult as Shoal predicted, if a little more. She drew her talon along the slender gut of the deer and found-- to her mild surprise --that it would just peel away like the skin of a fruit, if treated right. "Help me with this," she said gruffly as she sliced pelt from flesh.

It wasn't perfect, of course-- but for a first attempt it was fairly impressive. The ends that Shoal had cut away were a little frayed and uneven, and there was a considerable amount of blood bathing the throat of the damn thing, but some peeling later, a new coat came loose from the deer.

This was tossed to Ashtoreth.

The rest of the body-- which looked to her like a peeled, white-and-pink orange --was pickings. Dying and coming back always kicked in a hell of an appetite in Shoal, after all. The owl turned, peeling bite-sized strips of flesh off the corpse's haunches and gulped them down.

At least. It was probably a corpse. If it wasn't, it sure as hell was now. "Is that all you came here for?" Shoal asked, amber eye lazily drifting back to Ashtoreth. A yes-or-no question was deliberately chosen, of course, so that the hybrid could merely nod or shake or head in reply.