[Flashback] Are you my master?

[Mihai]

45th Winter, 510 A.V. The unutterable dark of dreamless sleep changed tone, becoming a blackness somehow differentiated in that there were the first faint flickers of awareness returning. The world was a swimming, floating blank, but little sensations sneaked back into that world. His head felt muzzy, which meant he had a head. His mouth tasted funny, which meant he had a mouth. His ears buzzed, which meant he had ears. He was a he, which meant he had other things. He had a name, he recalled. He smelled humans and tigers, the new life and decay of the jungle. There seemed no reason to fear. He wasn't dead. His father had been a human, so at least some of them were worth trusting, and tigers, well, he was a tiger sometimes. Right now he was, though a bit of an aching one. His eyes opened blearily as he began to stretch and yawn, but startled when he realized those aches were due to things binding him immobile. It was then he panicked, because bindings were for prisoners, and he had never been one of those. There had been the freedom of Master's camp and the snowy forests around it, and then there had been the freedom of the wider world as he followed an old trail, his sister's, down to the jungles, a place the humans called Fallydor. Farandir? Something like that. He wasn't much of a one for names. He remembered his: Mihai. He remembered his sister's: Miharu. Neither were pronounceable while in his better form. He let out a frustrated, rather piteous, adolescent roar. He couldn't wait for it to mature and actually scare people, but it was all he had to work with at the moment, and it was more of an instinctual reaction to this predicament than anything else. Half-blind, deaf but for the buzzing in his ears, he still managed to have an idea. A brilliant idea! In a flash of light, the tiger disappeared, replaced by a human, somewhere in the awkward phases between boy and man. The ropes draped over him more like decoration now as he grinned triumphantly and wobbled to his feet. But it was then that all the toxins in his blood hit him, and it took much more of them to bring down a tiger than a boy. Blinking, he got dizzy, and the buzz in his ears became a roar and... oh no. He began to vomit on his ropes.

[Cayenne]

It was ridiculously hot, he found, when he awoke. It was humid, too, and dark. Despite the buzzing in his ears, he could hear the bird calls overhead and around him, and occasionally, softly padded footsteps. He could hear growls and snarls in the distance from tigers and other creatures, as his nose twitched and threatened to overwhelm him before he was well and truly awake. And yet, despite all that, he heard his own pulse, his heartbeat, pounding in his ears. For a predator like him, fear was not a natural thing. Sure, there were plenty of bigger things, especially in Taldera, but Falyndar couldn’t be much different.

His limbs were weak - even if he hadn’t been bound with sturdy ropes, he would have found he did not possess the strength or coordination to make them support his weight, much less stand upright or move. The feeling became even more pronounced, much to his detriment, when he shifted from tiger to human, shedding a good amount of body weight in the process. Myrians weren’t stupid. They were keen hunters, and they knew how to dose and trap animals. It wasn’t instinctual for them to hunt a cat, however. Hunting cats was never a good thing - it displeased Navre, and if there was one God, or Alvina, beside their Goddess-Queen that they took pains not to anger, it was Navre. It was Navre who had given them the Myrian tigers. It was Navre who sometimes acted as Consort to Myri. It was Navre who joined them in their fight against Siku and her nasty serpentine children.

As he vomited, retching violently from the herbal drugs in his system, he was barely able to hear, feel, or smell the people surrounding him. By the time he had finished, he found a carved wooden bowl of water pushed near him by one of the dark-skinned, painted people, if people they were. There were a bunch of them surrounding him, all bigger than him, mixed between male and female, best as he could tell, clad in leathers and some sort of cloth, all of them armed to the teeth. There were more weapons than he could immediately count or identify, but it was a tall female who pushed the bowl at him. “Kelvic?” she questioned in Common. Once he got a chance to look at her, her skin was darker than most any human he had ever seen before, and despite that, she was painted, either on or in the flesh. She was wearing leather, her long, dark hair braided flat against her scalp. Bones and other trinkets contrasted sharply with the braided skeins, and she smelled strange to him up close - an aromatic mixture of death and plants and blood and meat. She had a long dagger that was more sword than knife in her other hand, and it looked well-used. Was it a Kelvic, or was it a magic-user? They were going to have to find out.

[Mihai]

Vomit tasted nasty, but there was nothing to be done about it. Not yet. Shapes manifested, then coalesced into the forms of people, dark as stained wood, painted as flowers or birds, though not so cheery. They smelled funny too, but then his nose was not so keen in this more slippery form. The ropes were mostly falling away, though propriety, if such existed in this place, was mostly upheld. He took the water because it was offered and because he needed it, and drank. Knowing well enough to sip rather than gulp, he managed to get it down and keep it down. That was slightly better, and he was able to blink his eyes closer to normal, too. He squinted at the people, armed to the teeth; his teeth and the arms nature had given him were hidden somehow, folded within him where the tiger remained. "Mihai," he said, tapping his chest, but after a moment or two, he nodded. "Kelvic. I'm looking for my sister." It didn't occur to him to name her; after all, what good were names really? He couldn't describe the scent shared between them, and if he changed he would lose that similarity, though he might be able to describe it to another cat. Miharu was a wolf, after all.

[Cayenne]

The dark-skinned cannibals discussed this with each other in a language that he could not follow. It was strange enough to listen to them - they spoke quickly in murmurs, even as one of the biggest cats he had ever seen in his life stuck his head over the the armed and large female who gave him the water. And he was from Taldera - size was something. But this one seemed to be more like him in terms of colour, but Talderan in terms of size. And yet, the massive cat rubbed his chin over the barkskinned female’s shoulder, using her as a sort of scratching post, it seemed, and she didn’t mind. In fact, she seemed to be in charge.

The fact that they weren’t attempting to kill him yet may have been surprising. In any case, despite the fact that a number of weapons were actually pointed at him, though he was having problems even seeing it, considering the amount of sedatives that he had been hit with. He vaguely sensed activity somewhere in the circle around the ringleader, and something was passed forward, then, and she took it and held it out to him. It looked like a mushy ball of vegetation, and it smelled weird. “Eat,” the female told him, holding it in his face. “Helps.” Helped with what was the question.

“Sister...? Bond? Kelvic? She is Kelvic? Or human?” she questioned him even as the massive tiger sniffed at him, apparently unimpressed with his much smaller size. Apparently, the larger feline didn’t hardly think he -was- a tiger, if he was that small, even if he smelled a bit like one...