Ahri

This story begins with curiosity killing caution.

None of her words were her own, to see something strange and nameless was to see… most things. The world was old, made of knots of ideas. Sometimes the knots had names, sometimes the strings did. Things were made of parts. Sometimes the whole thing was named for one part, sometimes it was named for all of the parts put together, sometimes the name had no correlation to the parts. Perception was copacetic, classification was not.

There was a time before words. It had been simpler then to find something she didn’t recognize. She could call it what she wanted and be done with it. Now, she had to assume that something had a name. There was still the raw, animal curiosity of new things, things that hit the blank points in her dictionary, but some of them prompted merely a sense of obligation.

The thing she found in the woods had been different.

The back of her neck had pricked even before she’d set proper eye on it. The air around it seemed ever so slightly thicker. Her tails had twisted in instinctive knots, flicking to and fro with agitation. It was some strange mixture of prey fear and heat. Twisted anticipation. Repellant yearning. Hybrid feelings that also probably had names she didn’t know.

The glade it had landed in was the same one where she’d learned what Noxus was. One of the times her feeding hadn’t been mercy. He had been a gruff, easily agitated man. His bullet hadn’t broken skin, and when it made her more angry than injured, he’d cried like he’d shot at a god. She’d grabbed hold of him, pressed behind him, arms around his neck. He’d cried once before she pressed a hand over his mouth, kissing his neck as their minds touched. When it couldn’t be mercy, she did what she could to make it easy. He’d slid to the ground in her grasp, expression dazed. Their thoughts came linear, and the first one he’d given her was a new song. One that a woman raising him had once sang. She’d hummed it and he’d relaxed further.

That was long enough ago that the bones were gone. The thing wasn’t in the spot the bones had been but it had been close. Both spots made her twitch and fidget. Both spots had bad energy.

She had picked up the thing like any other thing she might find while out wandering. With no knowlege of either, a bomb and a coin were of equivalent value. Once she had a name for them, lacking fear of **** devalued the former, and lacking need devalued the latter. The thing was just a thing, to be taken home and looked at. If she was lucky, she would find a name for it either in the deconstruction or in the next feeding. If she wasn’t, it would go with the others. It went in the pouch she had collected from the man who taught her about Noxus. The song came back to her, but it had felt sour to her ever since. Music was a color of time, and some time was attached to cruelty, no matter how it was colored. She hummed one of the other ones he’d taught her instead. The words had been about the power of Noxus, but the melody lent itself to her creating her own lyrics.

She collected three other things on her way home. It had been a good haul. On days where she couldn’t find things without names in the forest, she would venture into the cities under cover. But most of the things in the cities cost money. Better to travel into the city to learn what something else was than to find something new.

Her home was a hole in the ground, tucked in the roots of a tree. It was too small at the entrance for humans who couldn’t change their shape. She could be whatever she needed when she needed to… it’s just that the only things she ever needed to be were a fox, a person, and something in between. When she was a fox, all of that stuff in the other two forms just sort of existed in between worlds. The older magics were the ones that never needed to be understood, because they were the ones the user had been born with, had lived without questioning.

She set her pouch down on the table by the roots. She kept the things she understood under the roots and the things she didn’t near the entrance. Sometimes the fox knocked over piles of gears and springs on the way in. It wasn’t a perfect system. She remembered where every gear went to, even if she didn’t know how to put things back together, she could always remember how they’d been taken apart.

She fished the first thing out of her pouch. The big thing. She stuck out her tongue and tasted it, put to her ear and listened to it, brought it to her nose and smelled it. It was a metal thing, a mechanical thing. It was like a bow, with a big crescent part and a smaller part connecting the ends, but the shape was all weird. The small end had a big round part that moved up and down, not like a bowstring. When she moved it down far enough, something clicked. She turned the thing over. The crescent had a zig-zag running all down it, like a pair of teeth. She tried pulling them open, and they opened, but only with a lot of exertion. As soon as she let go, they snapped back together loudly. A bitey thing. Jaw clenched shut, teeth grinding. Lots of screws and gears. She would take it apart later, she was curious about the other things too.

The second thing was a new kind of mushroom she hadn’t seen before. These were always the most fun. She took a bite of it and chewed thoughtfully. It was bitter, like chewing on grass, but was nice and springy.

A moment later, her tails all fluffed up at once and her ears pinned back. Poison. Very poison. She shuddered and spat the mouthful back up, then made a mental note of what the mushroom had looked like before tossing it aside. Most of them were poison. Mushrooms were very hostile. But a few of them were fun.

She fished the thing out of her pouch. It was smooth, but kinda scale. Like a lizard. She brought it up to her nose to smell, but it didn’t really smell. She pressed it to her ear, but didn’t hear any sound. She licked it, it just tasted… stonelike. She tried to bite it, but it was rock hard.

It was weird for a stone to give off that kind of energy. She looked it all over for runes, but there weren’t any. She tossed it in the pile of stones she didn’t have names for, then fished the next thing out of her pouch.

When she was done with the items, her ears drooped. This had been a very boring collection. That was most collections, but everything had seemed so good when she picked it up. Especially the rock. She grabbed it out of the pile of other rocks and set it up on the shelf. The shelf was for things she was going to get checked next time she went into town. There were two other things on there, and she always waited for three before she went into the city to check. Tomorrow, she would do that.

She curled her tails underneath her head and dozed off. She dreamed she was chasing a rope, but lost it as it fled into the sky.