Nidalee: Moonlit Predator by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Nidalee-Moonlit-Predator-1298685452#image-1

Nidalee: Moonlit Predator ANIMATION

Sand-Drake's Kiss

Sivir laughed once, the sound a polished blade striking sun. It was all surface — humor for the caravan, bravado for the crew — and when she turned that smile toward Nidalee it became a different kind of sharpening. "You should be grateful," she said, palms flat on the relic crate, fingers splayed as if to show she could crush whatever slept beneath the woven linen. "With you prowling the dunes, I can risk being greedy."

Nidalee's eyes were the color of undersea glass; they had stopped reflecting the sky and begun to catalogue edge and echo. She did not laugh. At her shoulder a pelt hung like a ghost in miniature, and the scent of wet earth and distant rain clung to her — a promise and a lie, both, in a land that had forgotten rivers. "Gratitude is for those who survive to give it," she said, voice threaded low. "What is this relic, Sivir? Even your merchants bite their nails when you ask their prices."

Sivir rolled her eyes. "A disc. A disk of hammered bronze, studded with obsidian and carved with letters nobody alive can read. It hums when you hold it near the sand, like a throat clearing." She tapped her lip in thought. "It might be worth gold. It might be worth a war. Or it might be a thing that listens."

They camped in a hollow rimmed by dunes that had been folded by wind into the shape of sleeping beasts. The night was a black-blind with stars that pricked like a thousand needles; at ground-level the air tasted of old bones. The caravan had lost two camels and a guide the day before, swallowed by a seam of quicksand that had not been quick but deliberate — as though the desert had reached out. They had found no body. They had found only a wide, implacable print of something like a claw, and a snarl carved into the wind.

Sivir produced a bottle and uncorked it. The flame from her torch painted the relic with merciless bronze light. Nidalee felt the hairs on her neck stand. The disc had a warmth that was not from the fire. When Sivir lifted it, a thin thread of song ghosted through the hollow; it was not a tune so much as the suggestion of one, sounding like the remembered laughter of someone you had once loved and then forgotten.

"Listen," Sivir said. Her eyes shimmered with greed and something gentler, less honest. "It calls to me."

Nidalee listened not with the ears that caught whispers but with a body that read threat. She felt under the sand, where roots once lay, where the bones of cities slept; she felt the pattern of old things, the lines of ruin that hummed like a net under their soles. "It's hungry," she said. "It will wake whatever dreams around it. The desert is not empty — it holds grudges."

Sivir's hand tightened, and for a heartbeat she looked like the captain she was, the woman who had taken cities and left them stitched by trade routes and monuments where there had been nothing. "Then we'll feed it a price and leave," she said. "We take the disc, sell it to those who will bury it again, and no one else gets eaten."

"That is not how things are buried here." Nidalee pushed herself onto her knees and pressed a palm to the sand. A tremor answered: not the tremor of wind but of something far larger, turning in sleep. The grains murmured, and underneath the murmur she heard a sound like bone on bone. "It does not want to be sold. It wants to be fed with story."

"Story?" Sivir cocked her head. "You mean children and song, then?"

Nidalee turned her face hard on the captain. "The desert remembers names and deeds. It eats memory the way beasts eat flesh. Give it a story and it will return the favor. Give it a price in coin and it will swallow the coin with the rest of your city."

Sivir's mouth flattened, then she made the motion of shrugging away warily. "You have an orator's tongue for someone raised under trees," she said. "But tell me this: if stories are the price, are you offering yours?"

There was a pause. Above them the stars slid in their indifferent orbits. The disc hummed, a voice without a throat. Nidalee felt an ache that was not simply hunger; it was a longing that belonged to places made of water and sound and the carved bone of temples. She thought of a childhood that had been a myth told by other people: a mother who could vanish like a wisp, a father with hands like river rocks. In Shurima, she had been a hunter; in the jungle, a witch of leaps. Here she was only a beast with a memory, and even memory was a currency she
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