#this is him dying after transforming and then reverting
The smell of blood is thick and cloying and delicious and it sears the lining of his lungs with every ragged inhale.
Everything is different. The world is distant, displaced, bleary, and the edges of Jamison’s vision stalk closer with itching darkness as if his consciousness threatened to collapse into void. Poison drips from his teeth, slavering remnants of where his jaws had clamped down, slick with mingling dark and viscous red as if the beast’s essence meant to make a second home out of him—he is the catcher of echoes, the vessel, the Hunter, and he will gladly devour any beast.
The earth beneath him feels too wet, too slippery; something spilled here. Her? His left palm clenches into the soil, claws tearing away spidering roots, and hurls him toward the heaving creature across the clearing. His nose, now elongated and at the end of a long blond muzzle, gathers the forest in a greedy breathful. No, comes his humanity; no, not her. She’s still here. He couldn’t forget her smell even if he wanted. The wet beneath him must be prey.
His teeth gnash into ripped flesh and the Old Blood reaches out for the monstrosity. He can’t control it. The power that makes him whole raises its hackles, a growling and cornered beast, and the ethereal claws from his right arm dive through its abdomen, cleaving between cages of sticky bone. Its howl lodges into his ears, primal and angry and keening and vicious and you must die, and before Jamison can lunge for its throat and close off that awful scream, something slashes down his back and laves it in fire. An unholy sting irrigates the wounds, and the next thing that ripples in among the encroaching dark is the rustling forest canopy.
If he could shout, he would. Something happened to his mouth. Welded shut by poison? Or is his voice unusable like this? His tongue writhes behind his bared teeth, canines glinting with red and rot and torn skin from his impaled quarry, and in a vain attempt to wrest control of his body, he shears sharp nails at the ground beneath, burying dirt and pebbles between the pads of his hands. He breathes in shallow gasps, as if more would make the pain that much more crippling, incapacitating, as if it might slow his heartbeat and stall the poison’s travel, but the still stable shard of him knows his fate—it’s off to the Dream with him.
Slowly, slowly, the forest bleeds back into focus. The darkness is still there, scraping, scraping at his peripheral, threatening to swallow him up, and yet the central point ushers away the fog. She stands over him, her red cloak shrouding her shoulders, black hair spun at the crown of her head and ornaments affixed through it like stars. Her posture is regal. It’s stoic, but power radiates from her entirety. The scent of her blood is somehow saccharine and peels away all other smells; the Old Blood has done nothing but dull his senses until this very meeting, nothing could ever compare, and the beast in him wonders how he could keep it, savor it, consume it, until the poison leeching through his bloodstream thrusts a spike of agony inside of him, and then the pain becomes too much, too much—come on, let him die already, let him die, no use in lingering, come on, bloody hurry up and cark it—and he supposes lying here helpless and weak is a sort of cruel justice for attacking her as he did.
Instinct, the beast reminds him. The Hunt is in all of us.
Drops of vibrant gold watch him overhead. Cool, cautious, she regards him with an air of pity. At least he thinks it’s pity. Might as well be. It’s hard to tell. His vision’s going out again; everything is shifting into the familiar. The fangs have receded, his face has reverted back to jagged shapes, and the claws have retracted into normal nails. His prosthetics are missing. God only knows where they are. Not that he needs them right now, anyhow. If he can suffer this long enough, the Dream waits for him, and he will have no need of them there.
“That was unwise of you.” Her voice is silk and drowns out the monstrosity’s death throes. Blood spatters her face. Had she struck the final blow? “I don’t know if you are brave or stupid.”
He wants to answer both and laugh, but something is wrong with his mouth, like wet cement hardened between his teeth, like his voice knotted itself down his throat and has no means of escape. How far did those wounds go? Did something else get punctured? No, it doesn’t matter. He’s a bleeding mess, pulpy and battered and shorn and watering the earth with some potent cocktail that is bound to birth mutant insects; whether he can talk should be the least of his worries.
The Vildblood cocks her head, curiosity and intrigue. “You’re a Hunter. I see no benefit in your actions. Why?”
His tongue forms the word because behind the flats of his teeth and up on the roof of his mouth, sour blood and bits of flesh lingering by salivary glands: because dying to you is a treat.
With all of her regality and poise, she continues to watch, seeming to find some sort of sport in the event of his slow, agonizing death. She could choose to end him quickly and send him hurtling into the Dream that much faster, but no blades come forth, and the blood gem in the palm of her left hand remains a quiet shimmer. A statement, he assumes. She could be merciful, but she won’t. He respects that. And deserves it.
He doesn’t know how many excruciating minutes it is until the transition finally begins, but when it does, the pain dulls, starting with his fingers, his toes, his leg, his arm, and then his abdomen; once it might have been painkillers, alchemical concoctions, but now is the healing sensation of the Old Blood. His nerves register blessed nothingness. The ground beneath him no longer feels wet, and the distinctive metallic tang in the night air becomes faint, distant, lost. As the world around him begins to wither away into a pale sunset somewhere on the cusp of twilight, she gives him a wry, cunning smile.
“You madman,” she says, and the world goes dark.
