🌈 - A dream from their childhood
When Alastor did manage to find sleep, the dreams often terrorized him, preventing him from any rest he hoped to get.
This time, however, it was a strange dream. He couldn't tell if it was a memory or a warped sense of one.
He saw himself as a child, roaming the bayou, and as children do, picking up sticks, rocks, anything 'neat' he could get his hands on. Little treasures, his Mama called them.
She had told him not to go near the waters of the swamp, gators lived there. Big ones, too. He had never seen one, and thought maybe his Mama was trying to scare him away from the water.
But she wasn't around, and curiousity got the better of him.
He hung around for awhile, a little disappointed in not seeing a giant gator, and was about to turn around when he heard the guttural growl.
Whipping around, he saw a burst of feathers take to the sky behind some tall grass. Immediately, he trekked over to it, climbing one of the bigger boulders to get a better look.
The large gator had a rather big water bird in it's mouth, the jagged teeth of it's jaws clamped down on it hard. Blood stained the feathers, and around the mouth itself, dripping into the murky water.
He watched in morbid fascination as the gator blinked it's strange eyes, almost knowing that it had an audience. It snapped it's jaws with a sickening crunch, more blood messily dripping and slowly dissipating.
What did that feel like? He wondered. The jaws crunching on bone like it was a flimsy stick. The sick cracking, the blood, the gator's feral grumbling. It was a short moment in time that felt much longer, taking the animal only two or three bites before it swallowed it's prey.
Then the gator turned with the flick of it's tail, back into it's swampy water below.
Completely in awe, he wondered what the bird felt in those final seconds. Did it die immediately or did it suffer? What did it think about, if birds did that? What was the gator thinking?
It was all so fascinating, watching something like that.
Watching something lose the light in it's eyes.
Scrambling from the boulder, he started skipping back towards the house. If he wasn't home before dark, Mama would worry, and he couldn't have that.