alfvaen | Botober 2022 #3: Interlude With Leucrocuta

Feeling a little underinspired today, so there's no plot to go with this vignette, but hey, there's characters and maybe vibes, so...?

Today's prompts are:

Animals: Dolphin leucrocuta
Halloween: N sculpture
Meat: a humanmonster with scissors for hair
Clockwork: SMALL CLOCK TREE

Ysbail sat pensively, her hair still, gazing at the block of wood before her. "What should I make?" she asked.

Phygellus, her leucrocuta, looked up from the corpse he had dug up, from last week's intruder. Phygellus often left them for a few days until, in his words, the entrails had reached their proper level of ripeness. "Why should you make anything?" he said. "You're a horrible sculptress. Medusa can make statues just by looking at people. She has snakes for hair. You have scissors, and you spend half your time sharpening them because you keep trying to use them on wood."

"Shut up, you horrible creature!" Ysbail shrieked. She sent her scissor-hair lancing at Phygellus, who laughed in an eerie high-pitched voice and leapt into the pool, becoming a dolphin by the time he reached the water. He whistled derisively at her, then leapt up and splashed her with water.

Ysbail sighed. She really wanted to do a sculpture of that man she'd seen the other night, the one she'd kept Phygellus from killing. He was a poet, and she'd heard some of his verses and thought them exquisite, but of course she couldn't actually approach him or she'd scare him off with her hideousness. Someone had called him Nemesianus... "Nemesianus," she whispered. She remembered the glyph for 'N', and with no better idea she started hacking away at the wood with her hair-scissors, not caring if she blunted them, making two deep notches until it looked vaguely like an N. Maybe she could spell his name out of wood. Except she wasn't sure how to spell it...

Her thoughts were interrupted by the jangling of chimes, as Phygellus, who had emerged from the water and now taken the form of a hippopotamus, was pressing his flanks against her small clock tree, the one that had been a gift from an inventor, so long ago, who'd fallen in love with her voice and died of a paroxysm upon seeing her face. What had been his name? It didn't matter. "Leave that alone!" she screamed at Phygellus, who just laughed and fell to the grass as a serpent and slithered away. She knew he'd stay with her, however much of a tormentor, when everyone else left.

She got up and began searching for a second block of wood.