For nearly two weeks, Marcos had followed the trail of large tracks and mangled bodies. Most of the deaths were animals, thankfully, but not all. It was the body of a human that had set him on this trek... this hunt. His aunt Tara had been attacked and killed by the creature that had left the trail of carnage. The person who'd taken him under her wing, and taught him the art of Shaping... was dead... because of the monster that he was within a day of finding.
Clothed in his scale-shaped leather armor, his shadowy, dark gray cloak falls lightly around his form. The sheathed blade at his left hip and the quiver of arrows at his right are mostly concealed by the cloak. The bow and arrow in his left hand that he keeps free of the cloak are easily seen, though. The hood of the cloak is drawn up, concealing most of his features.
Seeing something out of place, he pauses and kneels at the impression left in the ground. Marcos brushes a little of the forest clutter away to get a better look at the print, and he narrows his eyes at the reddish tint in certain parts of the footprint. The creature had struck again, and recently. The print was less than an hour old, moreover. He pauses a moment, looking around the woods around him, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. Listening carefully, he hears only the normal sounds of the forest, of crickets chirping and songbirds calling.
Without the dead silence to indicate a nearby predator, he calms somewhat. If the exceptionally large feline was here, the forest would have become perfectly still and quiet until it passed. It was the way of things. Marcos looks around a little more carefully, but still doesn't see anything else, though his instincts tell him differently. Something or someone was out there, and they knew where he was.
Turning his attention back to the track, he shrugs slightly to himself as the image of his aunt's terror-stricken visage crosses his mind's eye. Whoever or whatever they were, it was of no consequence to him. All that mattered was the creature that had made this track. Whatever kind of large cat it was didn't matter to him. It was going to die. Whether by arrow, blade, flame, fang, or claw... mattered not.
All that mattered to Marcos right now was his vengeance. His protective dragon traits had been awoken, and the occasional slight orange-red flashes of flame that would cross his pupils was the only truly outward sign of his emotional state. While he never saw the flames himself, they were an overt warning to any who saw him, a warning more terrible than him actually drawing his sword. When he found the monster, his eyes would blaze... and it would die.
He finally stands, and continues down the path, following the odd track, the broken twig, the displaced shrub. He would find this creature, and there would be a reckoning. If it had been a person who'd killed Aunt Tara, he'd have let the authorities handle it, but that wasn't the case. The cat had killed at least two other people, and was a threat to many. To avenge his aunt, to protect others from the beast... these were the reasons he followed this path. When it was all over, he would grieve with his family, and continue on his way. There was still a lot of traveling, a lot of exploring, a lot of learning yet to do before he settled down. Maybe his mother was right. Maybe there was a lot of his father in him.
