Out of shoes and howling at the moon (Hirem)

[Dhanya]

She wondered if Hirem knew that she couldn't talk while she was a goat. Luckily they were close to the Oasis, so she waited until they were next to the water and awkwardly lay down so that when she changed her foot would be in a comfortable position. Hirem saw a flash of bright light again and then it was Dhanya, the girl, in front of him. She was seated, with her thighs together, ankles crossed, feet dangling in the water. As with every time she changed, she was naked.

She looked at her arms, which were a warm, dark tan up to her forearm and then pale above. She frowned at the line. She'd have preferred being tan all over. It was better than being pasty.

"It's beautiful. Dangerous though. Could you hand me my cloak?" She asked more for his benefit than her own.

She still rathered being naked over wearing clothes, except that clothes could be pretty and she liked playing around with pretty things. Humans seemed to place a lot of stock in them though. She wondered if there was a Kelvic city somewhere where everyone was nude. There wasn't but it would've been awesome.

"It's like being by the sea, when you hear the wind over the grass. It's one of my favourite places. It always smells clean and you can find water easily." She did not add that this was not the case in Eyktol. "The people are..."

Yes, the people.

"They're quite nice too." She added lamely. "Very welcoming to people like me."

Vagrants, performers, non-humans.

[Hirem]

Hirem handed her cloak without comment, averting his eyes to watch the oasis instead of observing her without her clothes on. He wasn't the type of person to stare and leer, but he wasn't nervous being around a nude person either. After so long in the desert all by his lonesome, he just didn't care anymore for nudity, and that was also true for sex and women. He had more pressing matters on his mind than his desires, after all. He didn't look at Dhanya for her benefit though, knowing that most women took offence to staring at them naked.

Hirem stared at the small, silver pool of water and tried to imagine Cyphrus based on her descriptions, and failed. Grass was something that he saw in tended gardens and rare, rare patches of desert, but from what he had heard previously, Cyphrus was a land filled with grass. He wondered how on earth the two could be connected by land, Eyktol and Cyphrus, lands of fire and earth respectively. Eyktol was a place where death was always pushing down on you, sapping your strength with every heartbeat and causing your spirits to fall with every passing day. On a comparison, Cyphrus almost sounded... nice.

For a brief moment, a thought flashed inside Hirem's head, a thought that echoed inside his mind as he tried to come up with a response to it. Why am I still in Eyktol? True, Dhanya had said that Cyphrus was dangerous, but it couldn't be worse than this wasteland. Besides, it had easily accesible water, water that was clean and fresh and soothin. That was a boast the desert could not fulfill. Why not leave?

Still, Hirem resisted those thoughts with something that rang out in his very being. I can't leave, he reasoned, because this is my home. Wasteland of death and starvation it may be, but he traversed this sands long and wide, survived long hours of heat with nothing but his clothes and a waterskin. He knew that if he approached the border between the two lands, he wouldn't be able to leave Eyktol easily. He belonged in the desert, just as the rocks and the people and the sand do. The question of where in the desert was something that he couldn't answer, but at least it was somewhere within its golden expanse and windswept dunes.

Still, Cyphrus sounded quite lovely, at least compared to here. Hirem nodded, dropping down to one knee and dipping the woman's waterskin under the surface of the oasis. "It sounds like a beautiful place to live. I'm sure you must be eager to return to it."

[Dhanya]

Dhanya did not answer right away, pretending that their comfortable silence was ongoing. She couldn't say that she was particularly suited to the desert. The kinship that tied Hirem to the sands had no place in her heart.

"Not really." She replied, leaving it at that.

She didn't want to go back, particularly. Not yet. The wound was still fresh. Hirem would have been able to see the way her shoulders slumped, free from the cloak that was wrapped around her torso and thighs.

She placed a hand in the water, just so she could pretend she was already thinking of something else and not a future that would never be.

"Would you marry someone that wasn't..." She almost said human. "A benshira..."

She wondered why she couldn't stop herself from running off at the mouth when she was confused. Humans seemed to be much better at it. Unless she was purposely bothering them.

She knew that she would leave the desert by the end of the season. She missed water and grass far too much. It outweighed the residual heartache.

[Hirem]

Her question caught him off-guard, but he hid his confusion by turning his head towards the sun and keeping his brow down. Why did she ask his opinion of this? Was this why she wasn't in Cyphrus anymore? He didn't want to pry, but the more he found out about Dhanya, the more curious he got. A shapeshifting woman from the grasslands of Cyphrus that decided to go to the desert?

He still had to answer the question, though. "I'm... not sure, really. I've never cared for someone that way, but if I did... I imagine race will have nothing to do with it." He didn't add his thought that only a Benshiran woman would understand him, but Dhanya probably didn't want to hear about that. Love was supposed to conquer all, even race, so it was a possibility. Hirem put the waterskin away and dipped his own fingers into the pool, taking a sip of the water for sustenance.

He was about to get up when he heard a harsh sound drifting in on the wind. He froze to a complete stop as the sound repeated itself, this time much louder and much more distinct. It was a growl, one sent chills down the Benshiran's spine. He slowly angled his head upward, and spotted a dark shape flattened up against the golden sands at a fair enough distance. But it was loud enough, and he didn't need to take too many guesses to figure out what it was.

"Dhanya... get behind me. Slowly." He stayed on one knee, fearing the worst if he tried to stand up or run. The jackal was waiting on them, though he didn't know why. Animals were never his speciality, and he just killed whatever jackals he found. But now he had an injured goat with him, one that he couldn't just leave behind. Sometimes, Hirem regretted his decision to never carry a weapon, especially in times like these. Wrestling with angry, ferocious animals wasn't exactly his favourite thing to do.

[Dhanya]

Moving at all was not the easiest thing to do bipedally, in her current condition. She hadn't noticed the jackal at all until Hirem told her to get behind him. Then the wind changed and she had a good whiff of desert predator. Just her luck. She tried to have a deep and meaningful and something murderous showed up.

She extended her awareness, reaching inside the pool of djed within her as she locked eyes with the Jackal. She felt its aura and gently pushed past it until she could feel the shape of its mind.

And then she clawed into it.

The ideas were simple. Fear and the sinking suspicion that it had just stalked something more dangerous than it was. She remembered how she had felt the first time she saw a glassbeak, the explosion of adrenaline and the pain that came with it when she had been too scared to move. She layered those feelings onto the Jackal's mind as she stared it down. She built the tempo of the concepts, like it was music, with every beat whispering that if the Jackal didn't leave now it was going to die.

She fed it chemicals and feelings and then, when she began to feel she had said enough, she changed.

The flash of light was like a flare. She hoped the Jackal hadn't met a Kelvic before. She hopped behind Hirem quickly, so that the Jackal wouldn't see her if it hadn't run away yet.

[Hirem]

Hirem had no idea what Dhanya was doing, with her long moment of concentration before finally turning into a goat and sidling up behind him. He didn't think that turning into a goat would be a particularly good idea right now, but it was done now. He just had to defend her at any costs, and the shape of his ward didn't matter that much. He clenched his fists and prepared to attack the jackal when it would inevitably charge them.

That didn't happen immediately though. The jackal just stayed put, watching them with crazed eyes. The thing was shaking, and it looked rather pitiful in its current state. The Benshiran waited for a few moments, just preparing for the animal to snap out of its daze and attack them once again. Instead, the jackal kept it's distance. He finally planted his other foot back onto the sand and stood up to his full height. "Shoo!"

The jackal let out a yelp and scampered away, rushing over the sand dunes like a demon was right on it's tail. He couldn't quite believe his luck, and Hirem waited once more for the animal to reappear. It didn't show, so he turned once more to Dhanya. He looked curiously at the goat, and dropped to one knee to better look into the eyes of the animal. What had just happened? That response had not been natural, that was for sure.

He shrugged and held out his hand for Dhanya to take, presumably in human form once she changed. "Come on, we have to leave." He cast his eyes on the dunes around them, watching for any other dangers that were laying in wait. The Burning Lands wasn't a place that allowed for much lingering or sight-seeing.

[Dhanya]

She bleated loudly as the Jackal quaked and ran from them both, not thinking of the consequences of being heard. It had worked. She had made it work.

Dhanya changed once more, with a flash of light. She seemed dazed now, as if she were tipsy from wine, though he hadn't seen her do anything unusual. She grabbed her cloak, still naked as the day she was born. It was a miracle that she did not fall over flat upon her face.

"I did that, Hirem." She said, sounding giddy. "I am... I am so impressed with me, right now."

She took his hand and looked at it. What was she supposed to do with it?

"I still have a twisted ankle. I can't walk."