He seemed startled, perhaps as much as she, and her lip could not help but twitch up in amusement. Before Thoth's death, she might have quipped at him, bitten back with a sharp word or three yet now, she remained only in silence as he composed himself. The child within her had been driven back into the shadows of uncertainty and unbalance and yet, in that moment, it peeked out, encouraging her to maintain her defensive posture - just enough to keep the boy on his toes. His discomfort was her amusement, though she desperately hoped he might grow disatisfied with her and leave, or perhaps the smell would be enough to send him recoiling. She had questions to ask the world and, with a skeptical eye cast over him, she doubted he would have the answers.
But he spoke, undeterred. He spoke many words, her eyes narrowed as she shifted her weight, moving to cover her eventual price as she watched him with suspicion. Use him? She sneered, a hiss of hair from between her lips before she leaned up, her head tilting as she inspected him. She placed her nose only inches from his, a shuffled step forward to bridge the distance, before she breathed in deep, sucking in his breath and scent with the fields around them.
Beneath her, the skull re-emerged as her paw peeled away from the earth. Its yellow bone stared up at them, the ridge of a brow pointed to the sky, the crack birthed from where an eye had once been. Tattered flesh, grey and stiff with age, stretched across the skull's cap, pulled away in such a way that it appeared the bone itself had escaped its own skin. She lowered her muzzle to it, staring up at Fenyang now as she coaxed his gaze towards where the rabbit's eyes had once been. She watched him wide-eyed and keen, her breath held deep within her -