SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
She has no taste for chaos, Gospel.
Her blind want for destruction its forms pales in comparison to her desire to avoid the brutal pulse of panic in Nerine.
She is not built for these things. One-track-minded, she lacks the attention span necessary to throw herself headlong into battle. How quickly she would be felled there.
She follows Stave to Loess. Trails him by several lengths. Too proud to join him, perhaps. She does not know the purpose of this war, but she remembers, even still, what Ghaul had told her once. About prey and weakness. How desperate she had been to serve him then, how desperate to be seen as something worthy.
How terribly she had wanted to belong to him.
And now.
And now?
Stave is already lost to his magic by the time she arrives. He has already been protected by certain death by some figure she does not recognize. She watches as life is extinguished by fire and then wanders deeper into the smoke. It gets her eyes rolling, her nostrils flared. It makes her throat ache as she journeys.
She does not call out. Even if the quiet is eerie, thick. As if it, too, is a living thing.
She catches sight of him through the haze. An unmistakable figure, even in these conditions. She moves toward him, automatic, squinting through the burning in her eyes at the other figure approaching. She does not slow, does not hesitate, arrives in the fray just in time to watch the reptilian figure sink its teeth into Ghaul’s throat.
The sound is terrible, echoing as it does in her head. She grimaces against it.
She has no gift in terms of healing. Nothing to offer him except her own venom. So, she does the next best thing, and plants herself between him and the retreating figure. Slitted eyes trained hard on the reptilian figure, hissing and spitting.