Post by Adara Mathias on Jun 1, 2014 13:47:55 GMT -5
The night and day after a reaping was always one filled with a deep, all-consuming hunger. It was also the only time in her life where she felt like she could scale walls, fly and other feats of strength and endurance that her body regularly could not take. It had not taken her long to find her way home after the sacrifice had been made; while Maereth used his magic, she used her feet and had walked the path to her cottage into which she entered without delay. Her satchel, in which she had carried all of her equipment, was discarded in the doorway and the cloak she donned was also cast aside. Her skin tingled with her new found power and she could feel every fibre of her body renewing itself, in an endless cycle of renewal. “I never thought I would reach a day where she allowed this, Apex.” Apex cawed his usual caw from her shoulder before gliding down to rest on the back of a cushioned chair. Cassandra was stood in front of a mirror, her fingertip trailing down her cheek, she was pretty sure that it was even more defined than it had been before the spell. In the end a grin formed upon her lips and she looked over to her familiar. “I can finally keep a body, no more switching when I’ve burnt it out to nothing but a husk.” To say that was a weight off of her shoulders was an understatement. Apex didn’t really care though, he was an intelligent bird but he was still a bird and just like his mistress: he was hungry. “Let me don some clothing and we will attend to a hunt.” Apex cawed and Cassandra made her way to her bedroom to do exactly what she had said to Apex.
Hunting for a witch and a bird was much different to the generic vision of what hunting was. She was not physically fit, in fact most days she had a hard time getting out of bed in the morning: it was something she needed to work on. Still, a woman needed to eat and when she was at her cottage, it was miles to travel to the nearest village or town and that was just the way she liked it. It did mean that she was forced to manage her own food, which was what brought Cass and Apex to the woods. The bird had seen something from above the canopy that he wanted, so it was left to Cass to figure out what it was: which was when she heard the rustle in the undergrowth. That was when a small rabbit came bounding from under the grass and Cass looked up to give her familiar a dead-pan stare, “Really?” She said. That wasn’t going to feed both of them; Cass was agitated with the bird now, for making such a mountain out of a small, skinny rabbit-hill. Still, it would do for him at least. That was when Cassandra placed her hand against the ground near the rabbit; she had hunted this way for a long time by sending out a short burst of energy to quell any fears the subject of her hunt may have allowing her to snatch it up to take home.
It was what happened next that Cassandra to shoot back her hand, drawing it into her chest. Her eyes flickered with some dismay at first but then a grin formed upon her lips brightening up her whole face. All around her the plant life had withered, falling dead as the spell spread along the ground… it had taken little time for the spell to reach the target of the Rabbit, which dropped to the ground a mere shell of its earlier, fluffy, self. There was a caw of dissent from above as Apex’s meal had become nothing but a dried out husk. “Hush bird, do you not know what this means?” Her ability to connect to nature had been returned, it had been twisted but at the end of the day, it had been returned to her. It had been an ability she had not been able to draw upon like most other witches, her allegiance to the Devil Antaia, rather than to the natural order had seen to that. Her eyebrows knit together as she looked at the scene around her, in a perfect circle there was nothing living, everything was black, dismal and dying. “I wonder….” Moving from her hiding spot, Cassandra made her way over to the Rabbit and crouched down beside it; concentrating on the power that brewed within her, she narrowed her focus and considered the life of the precious animal. Cass could feel the lack of connection to, well, anything and it was that that she focused upon; the strands of its life were caught and knit back together as if she were tying the ends of two pieces of string together. No soon afterwards the Rabbit jumped back to life but it only managed to get to the edge of the circle before there was a scream and the tenuous hold of the strings of life snapped apart. “Hmph…” At least she could do it for a short time, it would do for something; interrogations, perhaps. “I should practice on people, now...” That meant she would need a newly dead person to test her newest spell upon. Well, there was a village near by and given the right disguise, it wouldn’t harm her reputation at all.
“Come, Apex. We have things to do.” The bird seemed sad that it wasn’t going to get its meal but gave to the witch’s request. He jumped from tree to tree before finally landing on the shoulder of his mistress, digging his beak into his feathers. “Worry not, I will buy us something from the inn when we are at the village. I will need to show her face around town, so they know where to lay the blame for the death.” There was a glint in her eye, an echo of a memory from one of her recent missions with the Heart. She would teach them for calling her a bitch and questioning her deeds… one way or another.