30th of Fall, 518AV
Ixzo prided herself on her kills. She was good enough with an arrow that she could usually get them in the lungs or the heart and not worry about them. But she was better as a lion. Her only weapons were the claws and teeth she was born with, and her senses were enhanced by her skill of the hunt. She enjoyed the hunt, but in times like these, she knew she had to focus. Today she was hunting for someone else, not for herself. Her kill had to be concise and clean, otherwise no sane butcher would take it.
So when night settled into the wild lands, and the lioness retreated to the woods for her prowl, she had begun to feel more at home in these woods. They were not the thick luscious rain forest that she had grown up in, but it wasn’t new lands. Even though her kind naturally hunted in the wide open plains of Cyphrus, she had learned to hunt from the tigers of the jungle, and those same skills could be put to use here. In fact, because the grounds around Sunberth were not so cluttered with consistent shrubbery and vines, like the rain forest she was used to, she could employ skills from both of the biomes she was used to hunting it.
She could stalk her prey using the trees as confusion and cover until she was close enough that she hardly had to chase the thing to take it down, but she could also be prepared to make the run if she needed to, she had the muscles for either. But the night was still young and the night lion found herself trekking far out of the city in an effort to clear her nostrils of the human smell, and the thick smoke of the slag heap that signaled all creatures in a five mile radius that humans were too close. So the lioness found herself walking further and further from the city as the night grew on the sky. She was not attempting to be sneaky, but allowed her mouth to pant in the chilly night air and take in what she could of bouquet of smells that surrounded her. She was looking for something big, but not too big she couldn’t carry it back to the city. Badger infected her nostrils, accented by the dusty feathery scent of quail. There were some foxes and smaller rodents stumbling through the trees around her, but she had not come across any prey of worth yet.
Her night vision was well enough that she could scan the trees around her to make sure she was not missing any other signs of the prey she wanted. The dry autumn grass beneath her was prone to tracks in a different way than the mushy lush grass of spring, and so she watched for anything of note on the ground in front of her. When her ears picked up the crisp, clean chatter of a stream, the lioness veered towards it, knowing it would be an excellent point to begin tracking something, and to find the tracks that she was looking for.