count the seconds [complete.]

Luka watched with mild disinterest as Raeras argued with the hawk, but he couldn’t keep the satisfaction out of his avian expression when she shooed him away up into the branches above them. He cooed softly as she redirected her attention on him once again. He met her brown eyes with his own as she spoke – his avian gaze sharp and piercing.

The shifter shook his head in response to her question. One of the hardest things when shifting is not the change to the body, but the change to the mind. It takes many years of experience to truly master it. In order to shift into wild animals you have to make yourself, well, more wild. It is so much harder to give into one’s primitive side, but without it the shift cannot take place. The harder it is for one to accomplish the mental aspect of shifting, the harder it is for them to successfully shift. Without the mental, for lack of better word, melding, the animal fights against the shifter, making the shift and all time spent in it horribly uncomfortable.

However, since Luka was already within that state of mind, shifting from one shift to the other wouldn’t be nearly had difficult as shifting from man to shift. The only state of concern at this point was his footing. His second shift wasn’t nearly as graceful in the trees as the eagle. They weren’t that high off of the ground, so a fall wouldn’t be terrible, but it would be terribly embarrassing. Then again, he hadn’t had any trouble standing on the branch fully erect in his unshifted form. Luka glanced at Raeras before looking back up at the crows. They were all watching him with keen eyes. That was right, they preferred his second shift over this one. The eagle made them uncomfortable, especially when he was this close to their nesting tree.

Cooing, Luka shifted into the big, black wolf – his icy gaze never once leaving Raeras’ own. His ears stood alert, ready should the hawk make any more startling movements. All four of his paws found stable purchase on the branch. He shook his head to realign the fur that was laying too flat against his body for comfort but was then still. Several of the crows flew down from their high perches to greet him and his snorted instinctively in recognition. A few of them landed on the branch around him where they stayed. This was the form that the crows first met him in. For them, the wolf meant many things. Though the birds knew him in all three forms, it seemed as if they still, and probably always wolf, prefer his canine self over the rest.

Luka bowed his head in response to Raeras’ gratitude as he could not respond to her vocally. He saw something behind her eyes akin to the way many people looked at expensive antiques, almost as if she didn’t know the proper social boundaries. He didn’t blame her. Though it was common knowledge that shifter kept most of their mind when shifted, he was a beast and every once in awhile he did lose control to it.

However, now in his wolf form he noticed something – a scent lingering in the air. Though his initial intent had been to shift back into his human form immediate after showing the fairy, there was something tugging at his conscience. As an eagle, his nose wasn’t nearly as strong as it was when he was a wolf, but even then he had noticed it. Luka had just written the mystery scent off as nothing or simply just Raeras. She was a creature he had never encountered before so it wasn’t that farfetched that she would have a new scent. No, but that wasn’t it. It was almost like there was… no but that wasn’t possible.

Luka’s ears instinctively lowered themselves. He felt another presence . Though his control over his element was not nearly as refined in either shifted form, he expanded his conscience throughout the darkness around them. He felt another being lurking within it, but there was no one else around. There was just him and Raeras who would have no influence on the darkness whatsoever. There wasn’t a stranger lurking, he would have sensed them before now. Luka’s eyes fixated their icy gaze on the hawk who seemed to glare back on him with equal intensity. There it was again, that almost human intelligence he saw behind those avian eyes.

The wolf’s jaws slightly parted and the shadows around him lazily danced without direction. The crows were calm. Luka, for the most part, was calm. The darkness was calm – if not slightly conflicted. Though it was true that the crows themselves had some semblance of influence on the dark, it was something that the shifter had grown used to. The interference he felt now was far different, and he wasn’t sure why he hadn’t felt it at all earlier. Wasn’t his elemental perception better in his unshifted form anyway? Luka growled softly, though it was directed toward no one in particular.

What the hell was going on?

Luka’s ears twitched as she addressed him, but he didn’t look at her until she spoke of the hawk. He shifted abruptly back into his human form. Several of the crows squawked in startled surprise but for the most part stayed put. The shifter stood erect on two legs once more. “How did you get him? The hawk, I mean,” Luka asked with a single eyebrow raised. His mind, still intertwined with the dark, searched for the presence again – that unmistakable imprint. He felt it, that was for sure, but he still hadn’t a real clue as to what it was. But, no, that wasn’t true. Thinking about it, it was actually quite similar to the feeling he would experience when around other dark elementals, but this was much weaker, subdued, almost… hidden away or covered up.

His gut told him the hawk had something to do with it, but his rational told him he was being paranoid. Then again, Luka had always been more partial to his instincts than anything logic could whip up. But there was nothing strange about the hawk save for what was probably just some elemental interference. Maybe he was once the pet of a sorcerer who excelled in the dark element. It would make sense that such a thing would imprint on the animal no matter how neutral most were in the wild. Besides, it was a hawk, and for the most part it acted like one. Though that thought made his mouth taste bitter. Sure, the hawk acted like one, but it didn’t really seem to, for lack of better wording, act like it thought it was one. Luka was not mistaken in the intelligence he had spotted behind the bird’s eyes, that much he was sure of.

Sighing at the futility of his endeavor, the shifter redirected his attention back on Raeras. It was then that he sensed and urgency in her stance as if she just realized that she had somewhere to be. For the first time during their encounter, Luka noticed the messenger back she was carrying. Why he hadn’t noticed it before, he didn’t really know or care to find out, but it wasn’t hard to connect the dots. He didn’t want to inconvenience her and, really, he wouldn’t miss the hawk much. “if you have somewhere to be, don’t let me keep you.”