and woven into shapes too bleak for dreams.
He isn’t left alone for long. In truth, he would have been disappointed if he had been, honestly. Noah flees from the side of his vision, never able to stay when others are too close. It makes Rhonan sad for a brief moment, but the moment is fleeting, knowing that Noah will always be back. He never really leaves, after all.
The thing that wraps around his neck is, he thinks, a horse. Thankfully, Rhonan’s shadow armor is hard, and though it cracks slightly as his concentration is pulled away from the armor itself, mostly it holds. Everything is uncomfortable, the pressure on his neck tight, but it’s not nearly enough to suffocate him. “Dude, not my thing,” he hisses through gritted teeth.
As he says it, spikes begin to form from his armor, solidifying as they shoot up from his body, not caring if they hit the other stallion or not. But if the other has half a brain, he’ll let go before the shadow spinner is simply a ball of spikes. Not the most comfortable thing to hang on to, he’d suspect.
His coyote disappears into scurrying shadows on the ground as the tortoise aims to smash him. There are perks to being made of shadows, just as there are spirits. The coyote doesn’t actually exist, and he had done his job. He’d distracted Weir.
Rhonan sees the ball of light quickly, and honestly, doesn’t react. He doesn’t have to. The shadows on the ground (there are so many now, with the trees closer together and the fire gone), leap up from the earth to protect their master’s face. They shatter at the light, but it never touches Rhonan.
Then they both disappear. “Coward,” he says with a laugh in his words. “Are you so afraid of me that you have to hide?” He begins to change, wrapping himself in layers and layers of shadow, turning them as real as any other kind of flesh. He cannot change his actual body, and so he grows in size as he wraps the shadows into the shape of a wolf around him. He’s twice the size of a normal horse now, but his black teeth gleam against the flashes of light from the battle nearby as he growls slightly. It’s still a horse sound, but there’s something feral to it anyway.
rhonan.
dark wolf of the valley
Rhonan grows spikes when Phaedrus attacks him, blocks Weir's light attack, and then turns into a giant shadow wolf.