A Taste of Arendelle // Anna & Shere Khan
Miles away an empty boat rattled against the stones of the Norwegian coast. Deep trenches in the wood. Blood soaked rags ambling in the breeze. The crate, full of holes and marked with red letters indicative of the potential its cargo had demonstrated, had long gone. Kicked from the small wooden vessel during the chaos, it was in the process of being sucked out to sea. Carried above the waves, while those lost lives – those who had unknowingly ferried a not quite unconscious Bengal tiger to shore – rolled beneath them.
Claw marks on stone. Deep depressions in the earth and moss. Pawprints. From the coast it had moved inland, if only because the other direction would have required quite a swim. Corridors of rough bark trees. Beams of chilly northern sunlight burning bright white between the branches. Thick emerald moss thrown liberally up the trees and carpeting the wet forest floor in a thick down. It ebbed away when the rolling hills surrounding the human settlement became rockiest – making way for trickling streams as they dribbled frosty ice water down from the snow-capped peaks.
It was all….awful. Frigid. Foreign. Disgusting.
Then, just when the kidnapped cat (lost, wet, cold) thought that perhaps humans had finally managed to kill him – by flinging him to the very edge of the world no less – low and behold, it got worse.
Through a part in the trees, though it sprouted very distantly from his currently location, the tiger observed a human settlement. Stone stalactites springing from the middle of a doubtless cold lake. Claiming the land around them in their shadow and their size. Bending back the wilderness around them with walls and bleeding smaller huts up the hills. It was like a long legged, jagged creature had staggered down from the mountains shedding scales of ‘civilization’ in its wake until finally it had face-planted into the water and died. Now, people lived in it.
That was, doubtlessly, a place full of people. Full of women and children and hunters. And fire. With how much fire they kept back home, how must these worlds-end humans love the crackling red flower. They furless menace did truly inhabit every corner of the world, and that was bad enough. Did they really need to drag Shere Khan around to observe their every offensive temple to human hubris?
The tiger fought his muscles to cease their painful tightening against the gnawing of the fresh air against his thin orange coat. Flattening his ears against his skull, narrowing his pale eyes, the tiger emitted a low and bitter growl. Humans got him into this…