Under the cool caress of moonlight, she discards her shirt. Even this light tanktop is too much for the moment. All of the sweat and the dirt and the dust she's caked it in today has left the fabric damp, clingy, and itchy. It is a distraction, and worth less than nothing as protection. And in any case a hunt against one of these superior crabs typically turned into a bath in the sea. Salt and silt were terrible for the skin on her back (her curse, Mosaic supposed), but it was a minor irritant at best compared with the agony of soaking a cloth with the stuff and leaving it against her all day. Nothing would be better than that. So it is Nothing that she wears.

She does not hide. It is not in shadows that she hunts, but in light. Sunlight, Moonlight, Starlight, Lamplight. It's all the same. What matters is the feeling of it on her eyelids, the pressure the seeps through her skin and adjusts her breathing to the shock of someone who is Caught. What matters is the subtle bursts of color that splash across her fur. The crab retreats, slowly. She follows with large, single steps. 

Her hands are in her hair. She smooths out the tangles. She ties it all into dozens of tiny, crisscrossing braids. Creating order from the chaos. Fixing what had broken down in the morning brawl and the afternoon construction. She hardly watches the crab as she works. Forward, backward, clack clack clack. When it shifts from being hunted to hunter, she will know. She will respond in kind. Her breasts lift up as she stretches to tie the final ends in her hair. Sweat soaked, slick, they glisten in the pale light of the paired moons.

Her lips are closed, and turned up into the shape of a quiet smile. They part slightly to allow her breathing, but no word passes through them. Her challenge is in silence. Her prayers are in silence. The clacking of crab claws, the squirming of tentacle armor in the salty night air, the churning of waves and the clattering of shifting rocks. These are her language, and her song. 

She lifts her hands higher, above her head until her back arches in line with the rotation of her shoulders. She is a constellation, fallen to earth. She is a bowstring, taut and bending backwards, waiting to be plucked. One by one, the sights and sounds and smells and sensations of the world disappear from her sight. The beach shrinks and the ocean retreats. The moons shine only on her and on her foe, but do not exist in the sky. There is no sky to begin with. The smell of a wolf hidden among the rocks vanishes completely. 

Her world is the hunt. Nothing else is important enough to be acknowledged. The clacking of claws is slowing. The creaking of carapace replaces it. One massive pincer lunges at her like a javelin. Mosaic relaxes out of her stretch, and empties her lungs into the breeze. Her tail twitches. Her arm snaps forward, whiplike, to strike the joint behind the knuckle. 

The best meat on the beast for you, Lady Artemis. This dance for you, Lady Artemis. Not a scratch on her body or she will cease the hunt immediately. All for you, Lady Artemis. May her efforts please you. May you find her worthy of bathing in your night airs.

May you smile. Like your brother.