& in that darkness there will always be fangs and claws, murder and blood

grabs @Zagreus & @Adelaide frm the cookie jar,,

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[narrow width=800]"i know your face."

she speaks to the cowled one; he who stared back with bloodcraft eyes and fangs scything. she did not know which of her husband's gods had cut him through the mists of her waking dreams and cast him into her blindthird eye; crowding through the cobweb-thick gathering of her slumbering anguish and appearing so heavily before her as he had now. his name was not one of the things she knew, though; but at the present she neverminded it, for she was sotaherra, and she would demand for it soon all the same.

ever since she had risen from the henge, she knew him now to be one of her oathbled.

she would have his name and his word and his blood. she would have everything of him and call it to hers.

it was known.

"... but not yours."

her words were not unkind, here – turning now to scry the she-wolf made of finer things, as sweet and sugarspun things often seem to be – but they were without the warmth of summer and glinting entirely with chilled, careful curiosity, statement. for her, aėrith had not dreamed of; and for a moment she cannot help but wonder her presence is only some manner of haltija mischief, conjured into being and blinded to her up until now.

it would not be the first time.

though she stands on the earth before them both as an equal ( as always, for were they all not? ) the nightingale remains apart from them at a distance; lumine face inscrutable, pearlmade eyes watchful.

waiting.[/narrow]

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“...How very bold of you to believe you know a man who doesn't know himself...”

Wispy, lusting. She was melancholy for the finer visionaries, a siren bleached of colour with muddles of void seeping from eyes shied of sun. A silver serpent scaled of a past he had not written, though each page bled gently of his musk. He stood before this soothsayer, obelisk limbs triumphed beside such a moonborn diviner; the plunge of cruor upon his face undressing the waxen matron until what was left appeased his Lovecraftian appetite.

He hadn't left those lamenting hymns to coax moving feet, but indignation. A swelling emotion of curiosity beckoning him inward, to break through folly mist and tangled cries caught betwixt her teeth. Her words, yet foreign to both ear and tongue, they coddled to his brow. 

A man of many callings, the glutton of nowhere...

...And she believed she knew his face, his origin, his purpose, his blood.

A dreary breath heaved outward, optics snatching a portrait of the woman who was lingering close behind.

“...Then who am I?”

—

 

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[narrow width=800]she threw back her head at his words; grinned and crowed a short, harsh laugh with too much teeth and a wild toss of her moonshed mane:  "and is it not bold of yourself to believe that i should not?"  rising then, with cold, searching eyes brightburn and all argent and alight.  "that this vale's haltija should not bring you to me, to hunt my dreams? to draw you to my lands so that we may meet?"  charts her stalking, reverential, grasping path around his person; taking in the breadth of him and what is below and above him that has made him who he is, here and now.  "you are bloodborn and blighted  –  that is what you are. your heart fevers for the fears of those who have wronged you, does it not?"

the sharp peaks of her shoulders low and rise as the nightingale rounds him entirely; a crease working its way into her pale snout as she gazes hard up into his fell-dark face, stout ears splaying away in her conviction.

"tell me that i am wrong, and that not a part of it is truth, and that your purpose for such a great wander is not so."  a narrow peer at the accompanying she-wolf, tail arcing in stiff imploration over thin hips; coming to stand in front of them both once more.  "tell me that the accursed gods of my aviomies — husband did not bring you here to make a mockery of all i seek to rebuild as frostchant."

lifts her chin against him, and stares into his red-hewn eyes not for solace but for something other  —  even verbal riposte.[/narrow]

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A vision in white, an angel, a ghost... or something more sinister. What stood before her? Adelaide did not know. For weeks, herself and Voro had traversed hundreds of miles trying to find a place of respite from the sand-wraiths in their recent past. Their gnashing teeth still haunted her nightmares and if she wasn't careful to avoid them, they crept into her waking thoughts wearing grins dripping with malice and gore. Since they had found the snow such thoughts troubled her more. If she squinted hard, the glinting white drifts blurred and became golden, coarse under her feet. She felt the sun's rays and eyes searing her back when she walked; she cast backwards glances more often than she would like to admit.

Nonetheless, she was as happy as she could remember, even Voro was more content now that they had left the desert behind them. They spent the days ambling along, mostly in amiable silence, and during the bitter nights they curled around each other like snakes, each offering the other a safe haven from their Hadean subconscious. 

She had a suspicion something grave had changed. Blocking their path was a formidable woman, one who looked Voro in the eye unabashedly as though daring him to make a misstep. She was not afraid, as she was of the wolves of Sanatorium, but she was watchful. After all, she wasn't the same bairn that had woken in the desert alone those many weeks ago, she had learned how to discern her enemies from her friends. She furrowed her brow at the prophetic way in which the stranger spoke, as if she knew of their arrival. Well, Vorona's arrival at least. It made Adelaide's skin crawl, as if Aeri believed she had some sort of claim on him. 

At Aeri's clinical stare, Adelaide did not cower, though the woman reminded her of Andraste. She stared back with intensity, heat to combat her ice. "You speak of gods and fate, an echo of something sinister we were fed not so long ago. You say you know his face, but not him, nor I, and we do not know you. You say you own these lands and yet you're here alone. It doesn't seem as though we need to explain anything, so who are you?" The girl blinked at her own boldness and peeked at Voro's face. If she had surprised herself, she certainly would have surprised him. But she was not unjust in her sharp response. Aeri looked down her nose at her, both literally and otherwise, and a strange feeling coiled in her gut when she looked between the pair... envy. 
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“I do not have time for which I do not care about, I came here to live, to hunt, to breed. Not stand here within the snow, speaking as if the common language is a song.” He had expected such things from a frilly word-fucker, tassel erected upon his rear as he traced her through following lenses. Had this been a common occurrence amongst her apparent people? This group of faceless freaks who hide within fog and winter musk? She spoke of many and yet he witnessed few; observing her surroundings through optics lidded with annoyance.

Her phrases did little for him.

Out of vagabonds and corpses, yes, but from Ade? He turned, dropping lengthy jowls to express frustration.

Perhaps his feathered ears fell flat upon her tone, or was it she sang to him in a tune easier to palpate? They were breathing, were they not? Why speak as if on one's deathbed? With roses strangling throats raw from metaphors and personifications. The crow, he sauntered past, beckoning for the plump bitch to linger close by. “We have traveled too far to be halted by tomfoolery, if you insist on speaking, do so when my feet are rested.”

—

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[narrow width=800]

just putting a small warning since she's still a v unpredictable character to write so i apologize in advance.

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oh, she insists now:

"i will permit you both entry on the condition that, after several days' time, you will run with mine  —  or you will be run from these lands, should you waste this precious time and take of the resources you do not mean to replenish."  and yet once more she took her place before them, before him; standing rigidly in his path with the crease in her bloodless snout deepening.  "you will go no further, nor will you lie your ass on these lands, until you agree to such a thing."

if they both did, they would not laze about ... and if he so wished it, he could face her on the border of it all, for this was not the haven that had sprung from the well of her loving heart that seemed already of ages past. where once she had cared sorely for the distance and the desolation that others had trudged from and treaded through, now she paid it no mind. unless one was starved for certain and could truly not stand  —  to her, it was trivial. those who did not return her fervor did not deserve to delve into what she sought to remake.

damn that her call had only since reached so few. damn her, damn her dreams, briared and brutalized, and the palantír she would go unguided without.

as for the other ...

"i?"  she turns to the fairer sex, who had risen against her own words in such a bold and unbecoming  ( and yet, of course, sound-minded )  way.  "i am she who will join you in search for purpose, if purpose is what you so seek."  and she might have looked upon the more pliant of the pair with chilled favor; might have said something that ought to have brought them all to more even, figurative footing.

the collective exhaustion of the two or no, she was no wilting snowdrop to be crushed underpaw.

she would not allow it to be the beginning of everything. even if her scrying had been mistaken after all, she would not yield.

not this time.[/narrow]

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Adelaide was becoming just as impatient as her companion with Aerith's antics. She was in a haze of her own fever dreams, wielding power she did not yet have. She turned her soft eyes back to the women to examine her further, and twitched one of her ears in acknowledgement when she heard Voro's sound of agitation. She herself had fallen quiet, contemplating the nap she so desperately wanted. 

With a small yawn, she crossed Aerith's eyeline to walk side-by-side with Voro, who looked rather cross. She offered a comforting bump against his flank, but would save her opinions about their situation for a later time. Well, all but one, 
"What a cur," she said under her breath, careful to ensure none could hear her except perhaps the man beside her. Hearing her curse was a rare occurrence, but using vulgar language to describe another was altogether unheard of. She was travel weary, however, and the woman was like a gnat buzzing around her head in the heat of noon.  

When the ivory pelted madwoman continued her rant at them about her claim over the land, the small girl couldn't help but turn around again. She huffed in annoyance and stomped up to Aerith until they were almost nose to nose (she couldn't quite reach) and planted herself firmly in the woman's way. 
"If I were you, I would stop hurling threats at the toughest man in the world. I've seen him eat wolves bigger than you." She turned on her heels and marched back over to Voro, shaking snow out of her coat. All the ox-shit about her purpose itched her in the wrong way as well, and she called over her shoulder, "Maybe if you were nice, and didn't speak in tongues, we would consider your offer." 

Her ears were hot with embarrassment after her quick descent from anger, and she whispered abashedly, "I feel badly about what I said, do you think I hurt her feelings?" 
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[narrow width=800]a muscle flickered somewhere in that face frozen with unutterable fury;
and it was good that adelaide went away when she did; another moment, and the nightingale would have seized the pilgrim and rent her from crown to chin. she could still smell the stench of her aggression upon her, even as she took to the ironcast's side once more. the spring of her ribs was near painful; but all she could do was watch, with a slight, fraying wheeze, as the pair crossed over her poorly-maintained, weak suggestion for a border.

it took everything in her to put her back to the two travelers; everything to press her ears against the exhausted mess of her pale ruff in an effort to not set herself upon the smaller of them; to not force her belly to the sky and her spine to the earth and demand apology and appeasement. with a lash of tail and gnashing of fangs, aėrith flung herself from the foothills of her claim with a heavy snarl.

leaving her two sudden, unwelcome tenants to their own devices as her blood roared for a hunt.

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exit for angry andy lmaoo, feel free to continue without her or archive whenever u both want to

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