For Tay's birthday. 💙
Far beyond the shadows cascading over the entrance of the cave just outside the nearby village’s perimeters, there was said to live a beast, who preyed upon pets and humans alike. The tale was told throughout generations of the villagers, sparking a mutual fear of this beast.
However, this so-called ‘monster’ was nothing like the predatorized stories told.
Despite being labeled as ‘dangerous’, Hayden was barely that. Those noises emitting from his cave every night that were said to be attempts to spark fear and to express power and dominance? Snores. To be fair, he did snap at any who approached him, but he never approached any human with a deadly intent. Even with the many warnings he laid straight to the faces of villagers in the form of growls and hisses, the village still sent nominees exploring, as if he were to change with more apparent threats entering his territory.
As Hayden rolled onto his back, exhausted after his hunting spree of the night, he allowed his eyes to slowly fall shut, though he wouldn’t have been able to stop them if we wanted to. His tail flicked subtly as he quietly purred, the comfortable silence of his cave, excluding the occasional cricket, pulling him deeper into his sleep. Soon, as expected, started his snores, coming out of his nose as almost grunts and huffs of what was viewed as danger.
His snores and mumbles in his sleep seemed to have been louder than usual, as his sensitive hearing hadn’t been able to even notice the approaching footsteps. It wasn’t until his eyes slightly squinted with the sudden lighting change that he began to blink himself awake, believing it to be morning, because what else could be the reasoning of a bright light shining on his face?
A lantern. That was the reasoning that the tiger man wasn’t expecting.
Hayden’s eyes, once peacefully shut in a deep sleep, suddenly flew open when they caught an unexpected sight while blinking open, gaze flashing up to a man looming over him as if he were the universe shoving the sun—the lantern—in his face to wake him up. Momentarily, his stare flickered with fear at the sight of a human, though quickly toughened as he slowly rose, the human staggering away. He let out a growl, claws aching to unsheathe as his tail flicked in warning. “Who dares to awaken the one who sleeps?!” He questioned, voice booming as he glared at the human who seemed almost tiny compared to his monstrous size.
In an attempt to appear more intimidating to the stranger, Hayden slowly lowered himself to the ground, his glare holding on the stranger, though his eyes seemed to almost change. His pupils shrunk to slits, tail lashing as his features began to change as well. Soon enough, Hayden, once a mixture of a human and a tiger, was no longer human, reduced to simply a tiger. An angry one at that. A growl sept through his bared canines as he stalked toward the stranger, ears pinned to the striped fur of his head as he hoped to scare the human out of his territory before he himself got too fearful.