@MadEmperor
Marvelous Mortimer's Mysterious Menagerie was sold to its Connloathian patrons as the traveling home of dozens of exotic--and often intriguingly dangerous--animals. And of course they were just animals, because while
mages were a delicate subject at the best of times in any of the duchies, magical
creatures could often be sold to the populace as pure spectacle. The people could gawk at a glowing deerfox without fear of retribution from the church.
This was why Ghost had not taken the shape she'd been born in for the last six weeks. When the hunters had caught her in the form of a snowy white doe, they had thought her simply a moderate prize--albinism was eye-catching enough to hold some audience members' attention briefly, so she might be worth a few coins in the show. For a while.
After a week in the Menagerie, she had made her first mistake; there had been a moment, just the briefest chance at escape, and in her desperation she'd taken it. She had shifted from deer to dove and darted through the narrow opening of the door to her netted cage when the caretaker they'd assigned to her cluster of wagons had cracked it to slide her food in. Of course, she didn't get far. Mortimer himself had downed her with a surprisingly accurate shot from a sling.
And just like that, she went from being a mildly entertaining, edge-of-the-show sort of attraction to one of their main "stars". Her cage was moved to the center of the caravan when they moved, along with an ashen gray dire bear, a scrawny lion from the Serha plains, and a single, tiny cage which hung near the tent entrance and was the home of a listless, dull-plummaged teacup dragon.
Her second mistake came three weeks after they'd moved her place in the menagerie. She'd been poked and prodded and gaped at and called a cursed thing, a wretched creature, a marvel, a gift, a monster, a demon, a spirit, and she'd borne it all in silence.
But she was tired, just so, so tired. So when a group of visitors to the menagerie were tramped through the tent and they came to her cage, when her "caretaker" gave her a little poke with his long, thin walking stick to get her to change shape, she slid from raven to lion--she'd learned the shape from her time in this place--and tried to lash out at him.
That only earned her a solid beating and a week out of the eye of the public. A respite that she only had so that by the time she was out in front of people again, her wounds had mostly healed.
So there she was, a new town, a new cluster of gawking fools every day, and her just laying listlessly on the bottom of her cage, once again in the form of a pure white doe. A living ghost.
