A soft, cool breeze brushes your face, curls around your back and belly and your nipples stiffen as you stand there, your golden hair glowing bronze in the reddish light of the sun as it drops into the lake before you. Bathed in beauty you are enraptured, held captive by the scene before you, the endless open sky above you, the quiet glorious shift of day into night. For a moment, just for this one endless moment, you feel more alive than you ever have before.

One moment, and that is all that it takes.

A shadow moves in the darkened stand of trees to your left, a brief gleam of light reflected in that moment in hooded eyes. I am watching you, waiting, waiting patiently but with a sure-growing urgency, waiting for this moment, this very second, when your guard is dropped. I have waited a long, long time for this moment; i have waited far too long. I crouch there, in shadows, every muscle tensed, coiled, ready, and then i leap.

I am on you in an instant, hitting you full-force from the side, tumbling you to the ground, and the force of my strike rolls us over and over each other in the knee-high grass of the plain, but you are strong, stronger than i had calculated, and fast, indescribably fast, and my miscalculation nearly costs me my prey. I snarl in frustration and anger as you find your feet before i can and leap away, streaking through the grass away from the lake in the only direction possible, away from me, away from my hunger.

Your powerful lithe legs pound beneath you, faster and faster, desperation giving them strength, for your only hope now is in speed, in maintaining that small, that impossibly small sliver of distance you had just won for yourself, but your breath is now coming in gasps, a burning pain is gathering in your lungs as one minute follows the next, and behind you, relentless, you hear my low-throated growls, the soft pad of my feet coming closer, ever closer, until you are sure you can feel the panting of my hot breath upon you, closer, closer with each step you take.

I run, exultant, life surging through me in great gasping gulps; you are within my reach now, and i know it, but still we run on and on, i'm wearing you down, toying with you, choosing my moment. And then i strike again.

From the back, this time, i fling the full weight of my body upon you, catching you in midstride, and your legs give way beneath you, what breath remaining you explodes from your lungs in one painful gasp as you slam into the dirt. You struggle beneath me in vain, and then you freeze: pain, sharp incredible pain, unbelievable pain floods through you as my teeth sink in, piercing the skin at the back of your neck, tasting your blood on my tongue, shaking you, a fierce growl of warning in my throat. You cease to struggle. You submit.