The beach-sand was gritty beneath her, the sigh of the freezing waves the only sound she could hear amongst the silencing effect of the cool, wet fog that clung to Rebekka's damp fur. She was seated, unable to remember getting here, or choosing to sit down at the edge of the sea. She could smell only petrichor, iron and brine - and her olive gaze could see nothing except the faintest eddy swirling amongst the mist mere inches in front of her white-speckled, slim muzzle.
Had she been dead? Had she always been dead? Was she dead?
Her thrice-tolled question rang without answer in her mind. The sea crept up the shore, foam just kissing the soaked strands of her tail. The Dusk princess felt mist-soaked breath fill her lungs with stinging salt and the spicy, floral scent of herself. She didn't remember her mother's face, but she remembered the desert sand burning her onyx paws and she remembered herself as shadow, tacked lazily to the heels of a pompous bitch. She didn't remember where she'd been. Had she been anywhere?
A whistling moan leered out of the shadowed fog, brushing against her tufted ears. It was no sound she'd ever heard another creature make, and it make her feathery, limp with saltwater hackles prickle along the huntress' spine. For a thrilling second, she wished to zip through the mist after the sound. She wished to chase, and ambush, and toy with her prey. Rebekka felt her heart skip at the prospect, felt her toes twitch and then curl her claws into the soft, dark sand beneath her mist-blinded body.
She was alive after all, it appeared. Her fangs flashed with mirth, and a joyous laugh barked once from her throat, a faceless echo of the previous eldritch sounds creeping through the mist. Alive, alive, after all, body and a good part of her mind returned sound, what delight.
Rebekka got to her paws, delicately picking her way blindly through the mist. She hoped she found a crab to pounce on.