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Thread Title: 「 Can’t Help Falling in Love 」 

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The day has been normal, the same as the last, the same as it has always been. But, eventually a light catches your eye. It’s practically blinding with how brilliantly it's beaming at you. Though the light is small, it’s pinpointing your every move, finding its way to your face, only relenting when you move towards it. There must be a reason mother nature wanted you to walk this way. Maybe it is a shiny little trinket you can carry home? Unless someone else finds it first.

Thread Participants

OOC partner: Axte
Character 1: Lithe
Alignment: Lawful good
Desired skills: N/A
No triggers listed

OOC partner: Karleesi
Character 2: Sylvie
Alignment: Bird chaotic evil
Desired skills: Trickster
No triggers listed

The world had not changed.

Not in the way Lithe sometimes wished it would, peeling back the weight of familiarity to reveal something new, something different. The den was as it had always been, its walls pressing close, its corners untouched by light. She had curled herself into her usual space, where the ground was hard but known, where the chill of stone met the warmth of her skin. Outside, the wind whispered against the entrance, distant but steady, carrying the same muted chill she had felt every day before.

And yet, something was different.

A light.

One that should not be there.

That was Lithe’s first thought, wary and quiet. It wavered in her vision, too bright, too sharp, too persistent. A single point of brilliance pressing itself against her, pinpointing her face as though it had found her—chosen her.

Her ears twitched. She did not move.

Her siblings had pulled tricks before. Shadows against the walls, the soft scuttle of movement just beyond her reach, whispers where there should be silence. This could be another game, another cruel joke designed to startle her, to make her flinch. She should ignore it. If she did, surely it would go away.

But it didn’t.

Even when she turned, tucking herself smaller against the cold earth, she felt it linger. Saw it against the dark. When she flicked her gaze elsewhere, it followed, like it was watching.

Her breath came shallow. Her ribs ached with it.

Go away, she said.

The light did not listen.

A long moment passed before she moved. Slowly, hesitantly. A single paw stretching forward, testing the ground as though it might collapse beneath her. The light remained. It did not flicker out of existence like she half expected it to. It did not shift away. Instead, it seemed to brighten in a silent invitation.

Lithe swallowed. Her pulse thudded at the base of her throat. She did not want to follow. But she wanted to understand.

What are you?

The question swam through her mind, unspoken yet growing louder with each breath.

She pushed herself up.

Her legs felt unsteady, unwilling. The weight of hesitation clung to her, thick and heavy as she moved. But the light pulsed. It was waiting.

And then—she stepped forward.

The den’s threshold loomed, a line between what was safe and what waited beyond—where the world was open, where her littermates could find her. Where their eyes could land on her, where their teeth could follow.

She hesitated at the edge, and the light pulled, coaxing, beckoning.

So with one last breath, she stepped past it.

The ground beneath her shifted. The air changed.

And the world she had known was gone.

---

arriving in 1-2 rounds!

Sylvie was a complicated creature. Crafty, conniving, and chronically angry, she had ultimately failed in her longstanding quest to (discreetly) murder (or even lightly maim, she wasn't picky) Amaranth's children - all eight of the little fleabag shits. There was a part of her that refused to believe they shared any blood with Amaranth at all, given how variously hideous and cognitively impaired the lot of them were.

Surely they all belonged to Valeska.

Perhaps... perhaps. Is it possible she could plant a seed of doubt? A rumor of a rumor from someone, that they had seen Valeska shagging a stranger - for the matter of those tree pups, they could have easily been offloaded by a single parent who didn't care to stick around.

She wouldn't have blamed them herself. Gods - just look at those three.

Yes; Sylvie was a complex mind, but she was also a bird.

A simple, stupid bird.

The light was irresistible.

She hopped into it without a second thought, associating such brilliance with other bright lovely things like gemstones and quartz and her own radiant feathers catching in the warmth of the summer sun. It was beautiful, and so was she. It made sense.

The little raven suddenly found herself in the middle of a terrible downpour. Dark skies thundered ominously overhead, and lightning flashed against the clouds like fireworks; she recognized this place, but couldn't quite place it until -

The tree.

It was the tree she had fallen from as a fledgling, where Amaranth had found her and taken her in.

Her happiest memory, and it was a fucking thunderstorm.

Sylvie scowled.

Where had the beautiful light gone? Even as the threads of joy tugged at her heartstrings, beckoning her to embrace the memory (in spite of current weather conditions), she still felt thoroughly inconvenienced as she hopped through the tall grasses toward her old tree.

The world was wrong.

Lithe knew it the moment she stepped past the threshold.

She had expected the night’s familiar chill, the hush of wind through the trees. Instead, the silence split apart with a deafening roar. The sky cracked open, white-hot lightning carving jagged wounds into the darkness, and the ground beneath her paws was no longer hard-packed earth. It was damp. Soft. Wrong.

The light was gone.

It had pulled her here, lured her out, and then abandoned her.

Her breath hitched. The cold was different here, thick and heavy, curling through the air like unseen fingers pressing into her skin. A dull weight settled in her chest, something quieter than fear but just as hungry. She was alone.

She had been alone before. But never like this.

Rain lashed against her fur. Every flicker of lightning revealed new, distorted shapes in the dark—grass bending beneath the wind’s breath, the outline of something larger looming in the distance. A tree. It was the only thing that existed with certainty in this shifting world, a dark silhouette against the storm.

Something moved.

Small. Sharp. Purposeful.

Lithe stilled, ribs rising and falling in shallow breaths. Through the downpour, she caught a glimpse of something hopping forward, unconcerned by the storm, drawn toward the tree as if it belonged there. Too small to be one of her brothers. But moving with intent all the same.

She should not follow.

She should tuck herself into the grass, small and unseen, and wait for this place to spit her back out.

But then—

The light returned.

It struck her face like a second flash of lightning, too close, too sharp, pinning her where she stood. She recoiled, ears flattening, but the light did not let up. It pressed against her, relentless, finding her no matter how she flinched away.

It was waiting.

It was watching.

And it would not let her go.

A tremor crawled through her limbs. Her breath stuttered. She did not want to go.

But the light did not care.

The longer she hesitated, the brighter it burned. It hovered, unwavering, until she took a step forward. Only then did it relent, slipping back through the rain, drifting toward the tree.

Lithe swallowed.

Drenched and shivering, she moved.

One step. Then another.

She followed.

---

arriving next round!

Logic would have dictated that the tree of her childhood would appear smaller after having grown up and matured into a fine adult raven, but to her surprise, it actually looked about the same. She frowned, tipping her head back. Between her start as a fledgling and now...

... According to this notch in the bark...

... She had grown...

Well, she couldn't measure and she certainly couldn't count, but it didn't look like very much. Ravens were notoriously large, but Sylvie hadn't felt herself to have quite the commanding presence she deserved; what could the problem be? Had she been malnourished? Weakened by higher forces so as not to reach her full potential, perhaps because it would have rendered her too dangerous?

Ruffling her feathers, Sylvie scowled.

She could swear she saw movement in the distance. Rain cascaded down her sloped beak as she squinted through the dim light and felt her frown deepen.

Motherfucker better not be coming for her tree.

HEY, she shouted through the storm. HEY, BITCH. BETTER KEEP MOVING.

The raven puffed herself up.

THAT'S RIGHT. THIS IS MY TREE. SCRAM!

The voice shattered whatever quiet she had managed to wrap around herself.

It came not like the low growl of her brothers or the sharp hiss of her sister, but something stranger—shriller. Foreign. It pierced through the rain, through the thunder, louder than it should have been for something so small. Lithe flinched, as if struck. Her ears flattened hard against her skull, and her body dropped low, limbs locking tight in the wet grass.

She hadn’t seen the creature clearly before. But now ...

It was yelling at her.

She blinked up through the storm, rain slipping down her face like tears. The small shape had puffed itself into something round and ridiculous, perched near the base of the tree with all the defiance of a cornered god. Its voice did not match its size. Nor did its fury.

Lithe did not move.

She stared, sodden and wide-eyed, too stunned to feel the fear she probably should have. There was no fury in her—only confusion, a fragile kind of awe at the strange creature barking curses into the sky like they mattered.

Her ribs ached with the effort of staying still.

The light had vanished again, leaving her stranded in the wake of its insistence. It had led her here, to this place, to this storm, to this furious ... bird. Was that the answer? Was the light trying to show her something?

She did not understand.

But her breath had slowed. The panic receded like a tide. And slowly, cautiously, she rose—not fully, but enough to be seen.

I ... Her voice caught. It scraped against her throat, rough from disuse and rain. I don’t want your tree.

The words felt too loud, even though they barely carried. But she stood still, eyes on the strange creature, heart thudding in her chest like it might try to flee without her.

I was following the light.

And she didn’t know how to say it—but maybe the light had brought her to something real.

Even if that something was currently screaming at her.