are you afraid to die?

There isn't a soul alive to explain how it is Ursula could have ever ventured near enough to anyone that she might have had a chance to be tethered in such a way as this. Already her hand has begun to ache from the push and pull of simply being at the whim of a limb that is not hers, though mostly it's her sheer annoyance at the situation that's contributing.

It's a real shame she hadn't taken more time playing at being a scholar of the arcane.

"Unbelievable." Their intertwined hands are held beneath her nose without a care in the world for the man she's attached to. With her brows furrowed and eyes narrowed, Ursula paints a wonderful image of a woman mere moments away from properly losing her mind. She turns their hands this way and that, inspecting them as though they will give her any sort of insight or answer to what sort of binding has been placed and (more importantly) how she can undo it.

Of course, the side of a decently populated monastery hallway is probably a poor place to be doing this. The shawl around her shoulders slips back on her head in her finicking and, frustrated, she lets their intertwined hands fall.

"I expect you know how to undo this, or someone who does." Her singular usable hand worries at fixing the fabric around her face, her lip screwed up in a scowl. She is the supposed troublemaker here, so he must be in on it and thus, Ursula decides, it is his fault. "Let us not waste our time with such a worthless exercise as this."

"Be welcome here, Ursula, within the halls of Tintagel, my home." He did not seat himself when she did, and remained standing, tall and straight. This, too, would be judged, no doubt - no less than if he took a seat beside her too hastily, he was sure.

"I have to admit that I'm…a little surprised to hear that your employers have…taken such an interest in the affairs of - " His mouth twisted here, a scowl that he found more and more lately that he could not help, the affectation of a rage barely controlled, when it was indeed all that he had remaining to his name - that rage, that control; "A small march in another country."

His steps took him a bit closer, arms coming to clasp behind his back. "The reach of the Black Fang is impressive."

More, perhaps, than the Lycian League of Lords might have been aware of. Had his father conferred with these Bernese that conducted within the shadow? Did Uther?

Connor popped his head back into the room, and Raymond stiffened. His valet scurried forward, struggling under the weight of the serving tray bearing tea service, the weight unused to of being vassal to a lord proper, rather than the lordling child's playmate.

"Er, excuse me, miss, milord."

"Leave it," Raymond said, gesturing to the low table in the center of the room.

"Oh, but I can surely serv- "

"I said leave it. I will serve our guest. Dinner?"

"Ready in a couple hours, milord."

A nod, a dismissal.

"You must be fatigued after your journey here. I have to apologize for the poor conditions - although I suspect an outlander would not consider the sun bright in the sky to be such, would you? We are normally rather more temperate."

The tea filled the cup with deep amber, his mother's service, heirloom to the name Cornwell itself, intricate porcelain with tableaux as green as the forests that surrounded them. Raymond set the tasse before the woman, this Ursula, and here finally did he seat himself opposite her, cradling his own tea in hand, elbows on his knees to lean toward her.

Likes in the same manner in which Ursula likes anything— in the way that is learned and thus chosen, a machination of the emotionless creature from which she was taught it. She sees in him purpose and, more importantly, a use. Of course it may be preferable to sink her talons into something softer, squishier, someone weak-willed and easily moved by the material. Money, sex, power— the usual suspects. It's the fact that he isn't that endears her to him, makes him something interesting. A challenge, something to pick apart and appeal to in a manner far more fun than the worse of men who might have been in his stead.

Ursula is silent as he speaks, eyes half lidded and smile unmoving, fox-like. She watches the clumsy entrance of a boy who, for all of the Lord Raymond's most impressive work of making the furs upon his shoulders fit, tells her all the places to look where it wears poorly. Tea is poured, an antique cup weighted comfortably between her fingers. As Raymond speaks still, she turns it gingerly in her hands, inspecting. A style that the waiting ladies of higher houses are likely to tease the others for keeping, perhaps fine decor for a cabinet in the memory of a mother. It is a sign that it remains in the home, one of the few niceties still left.

"I believe that you are deserving of honesty, my lord."

Her gaze slides up from porcelain to where his gaze awaits her own. Unhurriedly, she brings the cup's rim to her lips and drinks, a long slow sip punctuated with a pleasant 'hm' as her eyes reopen.

"You should not surprised by mine or my superior's interest because of your size or, frankly, your standing. What instead I implore you to be concerned with is that I am your first visitor and, if I am to guess, your only." She sets the cup down without looking away from him once, movements all languid and easy; a predator's. "You are weak." Her head tilts. "Or, at least, you are seen as such. To be thought of as weak makes you exactly that, for it is how you will be treated and what will be believed until disproven. Those in power should be clamoring to bite at what presents as an exposed throat, or to assess a new threat should they not find their new prey so willing."

The chair complains when she settles back in it, hands folded delicately upon her lap. "This means that the question is answered already, don't you think? That those who may have sat here before me have decided you a threat or unworthy of their time already. And if that's the case, which way do you figure the scale has tipped?"

She allows a pause only long enough to punctuate her words before humming.

Upon first glance, the invitations were nothing special, and there was no question as to why they were within the providence of the faculty of the monastery to deploy to those who had intended, or were deemed appropriate, to attend. She'd heard little of the details of the festival proper, even when taking the plain envelope into hand with a simple thanks.

Turning it over in her hand, her thumb rubbed over the delicate - and deliberate- emboss of the creamy ivory envelope, brow furrowing at the arced wings and open, crying beak.

"A raven?"

"Miss?" The cleric looked up from the bag slung across her body, blinking.

Turning the envelope, Lachesis tilted it to allow the embossment to catch the light, shadows dipping into the crannies of each feather delicately. "See here? Is it common for correspondence from Baile to have such a stamp? Are they not a more…temperate, semi-tropical location?"

"Don't receive much correspondence from Baile, matter of fact."

"Then…is it a symbol of the monastery?" She knew the answer to this, even before the cleric laughed and shook her head.

"'Course not. Seiros is a dragon. You foreigners do get funny ideas sometimes. If you'll excuse me, I got a bunch more o'these to be handing out. That one's yours, but I gotta find who everyone else belongs to. Toodles!"

"Ah, so you mean - ah…" And the cleric had left, waving over her shoulder, leaving Lachesis to contemplate the envelope in her hands.

It would follow, based on the way the cleric had spoken, that there was some differentiation between invitations - although why anyone would associate her with such an ill portent, she could not explain. A rose, perhaps; a lioness, certainly. A horse, even, would not have been so amiss as a carrion bird, and messenger of prophecy.

Good listeners who unfortunately cannot simply stop hearing. Because by now it has been some fortnight since first tell of it found her notice and, since then, Ursula seems to hear about little else. This must be the nature of living in the last place such fabled invitations are likely to wind up, or so she had thought, because the monastery's evening-lit courtyard begins to sprawl out before her and what is there to see if not envelopes by the dozens.

For someone who does not care, she is finding herself quite irate.

With lips pressed into a line intended to make that fact abundantly clear to any passerby, she draws the shawl draped over her head a bit further forward. Seems there is no escaping after all, and certainly not from the voices of what she can only assume to be the youngest of the academy's attendants, lording whatever status they believe some folded parchment means they have over whatever less fortunate soul will listen. Were she not decidedly fed up with the hullabaloo, Ursula might even be amused at such a display. There is nothing sweeter than insignificant symbols of achievement to those with nothing more fulfilling in their lives, after all.

But instead, she has made up her mind on being miserable. Resolute in exactly this, she turns up her nose as she passes a girl and two apparent lowerclassmen that have taken up residence upon a nearby bench to fawn over what must be an entirely uninteresting letter. It's as she is thinking to herself how there is absolutely no reason to be so thrilled over letters that certainly must be identical to one another that the toe of her boot nearly plants itself right on top of someone else's.

When Eir opens her eyes, she finds herself in a dimly lit room.

How she comes to find herself here escapes her. She remembers a quiet voice, a dull hum– the trace of death leading her down a path she has never walked. Curiosity begets its rightful punishment. The final glow of the torches behind her had danced against worn walls before disappearing entirely. The voice went quiet. Darkness swallowed her whole.

Now, she stands in a place she cannot recognise. Casting a cursory glance around, her gaze lands on someone else– a woman with dark blue hair, a face Eir cannot claim she has seen. There is comfort, somewhat, in realising she is not alone. The princess does not know if it will last.

“Where…” Her voice trails off. There were no entryways or exits; cobble stretched out between all four walls, sealing them in completely. Only two torches adorned the room, placed high on opposite walls– a height neither of them would likely be able to reach. Grout grows between the cracks in the floor. 

The air is dank, unpleasantly warm. It felt laborious to even breathe in the space. 

Something in it shifts. 

“Hello.” A voice, seemingly from nowhere, reverberates throughout the room. “I’d like to play a game.”

And in her dream, she had chased it.

Ursula wakes— or perhaps merely comes to— in a place she does not know. The room is small and the air within it is heavy, the only thing in the room to take up any space at all. It unsettles her instantly, and she pushes herself to stand with an air of disgust at having touched even the barren floors or vacant walls.

Her eyes find a woman, a girl. Porcelain carved and uncanny just enough that Ursula's eyes narrow, but she does not bother with a response to a question that she herself is above asking. She smooths at the fabric of her skirt, begins in a slow stride around the room's perimeter. Observing, inspecting. Flinching when someone ( something? ) speaks suddenly.

Tanya's eyes widened. The active stance she had taken on now fell apart, limbs going slack and her bow clattering to the floor. Fuck… fuck! She swore she fired into the ground next to her, but clearly, she missed her mark. The shame she tried so hard to fight back now boiled over, threatening to melt her into the very floor. 

Her heart ran circles in her chest. Unable to think of anything better, Tanya untied the bandana from her forehead and pressed it against the wound. The fabric drank up the blood, orange turning into sickly brown. She tied off the end as tightly as she could, then turned away and sighed.

"L-Look, I can admit I was wrong to shoot you but…"

Tanya swallowed. Though her eyes were drawn down to the floor, the image of the wound seared itself into her mind, and she could see it dancing around her vision. An ugly mark against such pure pale skin brought about by her delivery of justice. Above that haze of guilt, too, was the visage of the woman who she had hurt—hauntingly beautiful, mature in ways that Tanya might never grow into. Was there any fighting against that?

Still, Tanya could not let this woman hold dominion over her. The petty matters of aesthetic differences and spur-of-the-moment mistakes were not justice. She took a deep breath.

"But I still don't believe you. Good people just don't talk like you."

She'd learned that over years of hearing people like her belittle her, or underestimate her, or taunt her into changing. Her intuition had to be worth something, more than a miserable encounter in a lonely church in a continent so far from her home. Gods, she had to be right—this woman had to be evil. Tanya picked her bow up from the floor, but did not return to that stiff, active stance. But she turned to this woman, chin angled slightly upward, the small sliver of spirit she had left in this moment brought forward.

Ursula's nose wrinkles, her gaze piercing on that band of fabric that has been sacrificed for her wound as though it offends her. It does, frankly. A piece of fabric from this girl that goes against everything she expects of one. Something that lived just beneath those too-short layers of hair, against skin that knew the sweat of a soldier and not just a hot summer's day.

It had to offend her, she decides. It has to. For her to be anything other than appalled by this, by her, would be to deny every carefully placed piece in the definition of perfection that has bent and determined her every whim since Lady Sonia's hand first came beneath her chin. If Ursula was this way to be perfect, then what excuse had anyone else to be different? Certainly not this different.

"Act what way, girl?" She tears her gaze away at last, resigns herself to flexing the fingers of her wounded arm and tensing the lean muscle beneath the makeshift bandage. Anything to ensure that she is still in some way rejecting it, opposing it. "You keep up with these demands, and yet you don't once ponder hypocrisy. Good people don't shoot at strangers for the sin of a midnight walk. Good people don't others of being a way by characteristics alone."

Ursula was not a good person, she knows this. Lady Sonia had taught her that there was nothing desirable in being a good person, that there was nothing desirable in being a person at all. Good is merely an idea made up by foolish creatures to soothe themselves. That is all this child is doing, soothing herself by calling herself good and someone else bad. It's hilarious.

She does not question why she does not simply admit to her that she is bad. That she is all of the things she is accused of.

"Though it brings me no joy at all to consider us such, perhaps it is best that you look at me as your equal. All of the things you see in me come from nowhere and nothing other than what you see in yourself. What you don't want to see." Her gaze lowers, meets the stubborn glint of eyes in the endless dark. "I have answered your question, the only one that is fair to ask of a person. I am here because I prefer the company of the nighttime and its quiet to people and their noise. I am here because sleep often evades me. I am here for only reasons your small mind will not allow to be true because you have already decided me cruel."

It was unseasonably warm in Tintagel. The rains had ceased a fortnight ago, and the skies had remained a clear and gossamer grey, light reflecting so high in above the clouds that they seemed illuminated by St Elimine herself. It was not such a blessing, though, despite his peoples’ delight at the dryness of the air, the peek of sunshine that warmed their cheeks. They had stores enough that it would not become an issue, that the earth harboring the roots of their crop would not go thirsty, but when he looked at the sky and all that he saw was blue and the sun, it brought a gentle frown to his face.

Nevertheless, Raymond had dressed himself in the furs of his station, 

They had stores enough that it would not become an issue, that the earth harboring the roots of their crop would not go thirsty, but when he looked at the sky and all that he saw was blue and the sun, it brought a gentle frown to his face.

the heavy quilt and gambeson that despite a lack of armor made him look larger than his nineteen years, and all the fully grown man that he had needed to be when he had taken over after his father’s fall.

His hands stilled, lightly, in adjusting his collar, the drape of cape and broach across his broad shoulders, and his eyes fixed on the rider that appeared in the distance, neither hurried nor slow, but taking deliberate steps towards his castle.

“Connor,” he called softly, one of the few household members that had been permitted to remain after the incident, fingers working to complete his toilette, affixing the circlet around his head. “Ensure that our guest has a welcome ready.”

“Sir? My lord?” He wasn’t used to calling him that, the farrier’s son brought up into the household who had known him merely by his name without titles for longer than he’d known he was to become marquess.

Raymond’s eyes remained fixed on the road for a moment long, until Connor peered over his shoulder to see the rider approaching, and the boy nodded.

“Right, uh. This is the envoy from Bern, innit?”

Envoy was a kind word. The letter had come for him, tucked amongst other notices, and he had needed to read it thrice over before deciding the best course of action, not merely for himself or his people, but for his family’s name.

Raymond turned from the window, thoughtfully silent before answering.

Instead she is to arrive in weather perhaps better suited to the truth of her cause. Warm and still and out of place, promptly unsettling. Reprieve from an uncomfortable season only to promise another soon to come, obscuring that honesty beneath the relief of all those who had waited out the last. Dry grass crunches beneath her gelding's hooves, her movement towards the castle seemingly the only thing moving about the world at all.

It is all routine from there, a series of steps that make every different castle feel the same. Ursula dismounts, reins already relinquished to some stablehand she glances only once at. She lowers her hood with both hands as the shadow of the structure envelops her and offers a closed-lipped smile to the serving boy that remains. The weight of her cloak slips neatly from her shoulders and into his arms, and she does not bother to ask him to speak up and repeat the muffled greeting he gives. Her eyes roam appraisingly about the manor as she is guided through it, an air of superiority about her expression.

The place reeks of vulnerability. In everything she can see the circumstance, the boy-marquess come into power too soon. Luxuries sold by his former to repay debts she is certain now weigh upon his shoulders instead. A pitiful fate to be left in the husk of a noble home without even the ornaments to make it feel noble. It's a wonder he has any attendants to see to her at all, likely on contracts that pay in something other than coin. She wonders idly at what generosity this particular boy may be here on behalf of, assessing him as he stops before a door.

"Thank you," she says before he can speak to instruct her forward, "that will be all."

Head ducked, he shuffles off. Ursula's gaze lingers on his back, thoughtful. He had been young still, younger even than his new master. And would the late Marquess Cornwell not have preferred a girl of the same age instead? Her lip curls, amused. Had the father a taste for boys, then? Does the son?

The door groans beneath her palm as it opens and she steps through. Immediately her gaze falls to him, Raymond, not even twenty years of age and draped in the garb of older, uglier men. He does not suit it at all, still too young around the eyes for attire better tailored to drinking one's weight in ale and barking at wives and sons and servants all the same. Ursula moves to stand before him, presents herself with shoulders straight and hands folded in front of her.

"My lord," she greets with a smile and a respectful dip of her head, "it is a pleasure to meet you. I am Ursula, though I imagine I need not remind you for whom I come on the behalf of." A cant of her head. "I admit I am delighted to be meeting the young marquess so soon, you are the subject of much talk."

A vigorous shake was all the effort Tanya could put towards sending the woman away, though. For in truth, her senses were weakened by her. There was a sick joy in feeling her wrap her fingers around her bicep, giddiness in the attention she now kept all to herself, even if she knew its source came from some wickedness beyond her comprehension. Her heart, in lieu of beating, squeezed. How could she feel this way knowing what she came here to do, hearing what this woman said to her? What sick and twisted sorcery was this?

Tanya screwed her eyes shut. The light from this woman's spell was not bright, but it was overwhelming. She had hoped that by blinding herself she might have stopped the fire in her chest from spreading further throughout her body, but what thrived in darkness thrived in the imagination, too. That was to say, the less Tanya saw of this woman, the more bewitching a figure she seemed to cut. Her curves bent at different angles, her voice grew lilting in its cadence. She was surely the woman of someone's dreams—maybe Tanya's own. Breathing heavily, she opened her eyes, but kept her gaze trained to the ground.

Tanya had been right to go after her. Because good people did not move like predators, slithering throughout the night. Even if she was not a dark mage, she was certainly some other kind of evil. Tanya was right, she had to be right.

"I have a hard time believing you're unarmed and unassuming, n-not when you've got your weird spell pointed at me right now." Tanya swallowed. Her bow trembled in her hands, and the arrow she had so firmly nocked on its body had slid off to the side. "The knights would for sure believe me over you. So stop trying to pretend you're innocent because you're clearly not."

Not much changed in the letter of her words, but it was clear that she had been utterly defanged. Indignity and doubt swirled into a noxious elixir and trickled down into the depths of her stomach, tempering the tongue that had grown so sharp over these years. But she was a fighter by nature. She wouldn't let anything stop her, not even her own shame. She bit down on her lip, and her senses tried grounding itself onto that pain over everything else.

The way she asks it, Ursula sounds to be genuinely considering. A shove is enough only to cause her to reposition, to wind readily to the girl's other side and investigate it just the same. She leans close, wrinkles her nose as if the proximity alone is enough to disgust her, never mind that it is of her own volition.

"I'd wager the word of your victim, a woman they do not know from any other, might seem a bit easier to believe than a hotheaded deviant who would rather chase ghosts than do as she is told." It's a guess, but it's an easy one. No knight would send someone on her tail for such a superstitious matter, certainly not without trailing her a while before shooting. And to attack unprovoked without trial, interrogation? Ursula snorts. Every card laid bare without her even asking, it's adorable even.

Satisfied with her inspection, she pulls away. The light from her magic dims, whittles away into mere murmurs at her fingertips, and she turns her nose with a hum. Not much of a threat at all, this sniveling little thing. It is in this moment that Ursula decides she does not like her and all of her wrongness, the scratch of her voice against her throat and the sun warmth in her skin that not even all of this darkness can erase. They are nothing alike, not even with all of these layers of dust and ash over Ursula's once flawless skin.

Still flawless skin.

"See? Not a hair on that head of yours has been harmed." There's that venom again. Her fingers twitch for her own hair, for where time has let it grow just past where she once kept it so perfectly even. She wants to pull on its ends and drag it as far down her cheek as it will go before it tears, wipe the layer of dirt she cannot seem to truly escape from her face and shout: Look at me and all of the ways that I am not you. "But myself..."

Her heart pounded in its cage, and she could feel a heat rushing up from her stomach towards her head. She'd heard these remarks before in her childhood, from little brats in villages who found it fun to light up her short-fused temper by taunting her about her boyish appearance, or from her dad's bandits who snort at her roughness, posturing that a man would never marry a woman with shorter hair than him. Tanya's jaw clenched. She'd successfully evaded ever hearing them again by snapping at anyone who dared even speak of her tomboy tendencies, and this time is no different.

"You think that just because I look like this, that gives you the right to talk to me that way?" Well if she was a dark mage, which Tanya was certain she was, this woman was surely capable of worse things than bullying. But at this moment, where she is still tender from her own need for attention, it feels as though this woman could stab Tanya and it would hurt less. She puffed out her chest.

"I-I'm as much of a girl as you are, got that?"

But the retort was toothless. The lady's shift in posture, as well as the near-imperceptible glow of her spell had added some contrast to the form of her shadow, and Tanya could see it had curves in places her own body had yet to fill out. Tanya's eyes flickered briefly upward, and the heat in her head made its way to her cheeks, too. This woman's body was… Needless to say, she would have silenced all those village brats and ensnared those churlish bandits in ways Tanya could only dream she could do.

She sucked in a breath. It wasn't just her superiors that she needed to prove herself to—it was this woman too. Which felt wrong, because Tanya was supposed to be the powerful knight whose arrows were ready to enact justice. Instead here she stood in the dark, discomfort in how light and bony her body was all of a sudden. She didn't like it one bit. Tanya growled, a vain effort to dispel the tension that was now building in her throat.

"Do you hear yourself?" Her moment's ago venom has turned from searing heat to blistering frost. Beneath the heavy cloak of night there is silence in everything but them, the sound of breathing deafening. "Animal carcasses, children? You are so thick-skulled as to take the first mage you see and pin such a claim upon her? Come on, brat, I'd much like to hear this."

She steps easily out of the bow's way, turns about this short stranger as a snake coils around its prey. Her hand surrenders its hold on the weapon if only to grasp a bicep, nails digging in every tender spot they can manage. Strength has never been where she excels, and the archer's muscle beneath her grip tells her that she is outmatched in this regard, but she knows she has won in another. She's gotten a reaction, she's found a vein without even looking.

"Are you afraid of magic?" Poised now at the knight's flank, she raises the hand not currently burying itself in a sleeve. Pale light spreads from her palm in the shape of wispy sigils, writing their way outward as Ursula brings them nearer and nearer to the girl's face. A lazy threat, the usage of something so easily made violent for something as simple as studying the face of her assailant. "Did some great mage harm your family, your friends? Maybe it was a woman, one who unsettled you as I do?"

To the questions there is a strange humanity, a sincerity to the curiosity that blends itself within what is otherwise saccharine. Ursula clicks her tongue. "Tell me, do you believe yourself right to accuse me of such things because of how I look? I do make quite the nice candidate for the sort of villain you are trying to conjure in your mind, don't I? One who does heinous things to innocent creatures beneath the veil of nighttime... Perhaps there is a girl in you after all, buried beneath all these unsightly edges of yours. A joke of one, no doubt."

A breath through her nose, disgusted, though her hold does not loosen nor does the threat of her magic wane.

For there had been rumors of something wicked wandering about. Nothing tangible, just a lot of isolated incidents. Animal carcasses, mysterious traces of blood and ink and, most notably, a woman who moved only in the shroud of shadow. Her superiors had dismissed it all as hearsay, and assigned her to cases they deemed more important, but Tanya refused to let it go. She'd seen this all before.

Tanya tracked her target all the way to the Cathedral, quietly following her in before the doors could turn completely shut. Careless of her to leave an opening. Now Tanya crouched behind the pews, watching with all the hunger of a starved vulture. The woman's movements revealed little about her intentions, for Tanya was not knowledgeable enough in the art of dark magic to know what was ritual and what was trite. But she knew that this woman must have been evil. She brought her the same gut-wrenching feeling that the Loptr church had, that same acridness, same metallic taste that ripped straight to her throat. Eventually, Tanya could no longer bear just watching and leapt to action.

"Stop right there!" 

She emerged from her place by the pews, fingers pinched around an arrow that was already on its way out of her quiver. Her eyes narrowed. The dimness made the woman's shadows all the more sinister. The edges of her silhouette blurred so deep into the night that Tanya could not tell where the darkness stopped and the woman began. But that was precisely the nature of wickedness—incomprehensible and unnameable until one actually stood face to face with it. And Tanya was determined to dispel the veil.

"You're not here to pray, are you?" 

Her voice held all the tense anticipation of a drawn bowstring. The only thing left was to send her volley flying towards her target, which she did so without hesitation.

"Don't answer that. Because I know what you've been doing, sneaking around trying to perform your sick rituals. Well, I'm not letting that happen anymore! You're coming with me."

It comes as a surprise to her that nobody prays in the shadows here. Perhaps that is evidence of peacetimes and a society more loving such that no soul brandishes a sin so shameful that it may only be uttered at such an hour. Or perhaps it is proof of a place less honest in its hate, one where the only prayers offered so near to the heart of their so called Goddess are the ones deemed worthy of sunlight. She supposes it doesn't matter, for it means the cathedral stands empty for all but her.

With a frustrated sigh for nothing and no one, her shoulders drop in the same breath as they had raised. The endless ceilings and impenetrable dark make it as though the sky is above her despite the walls and shelter; an open maw considering her, never deeming her worth descending upon to swallow whole. Only haunting, lingering, reminding her that it sees her but does not want her. It's when Ursula lets her head loll to gaze back at it, to try and level its taunting, that a voice rings out from behind her.

Startled, Ursula staggers to turn. Her fingers reach instinctively for a tome she does not have, magic hot beneath her skin. The only light is its faint glow— the open cathedral doors empty of moonlight to spill through— and the glitter of a metal edge as it whistles towards her. A sneer pulls at her lip, torn into a hiss of pain as an arrow drags like a knife along her arm.

"What manners!" The words are spat from her lips like poison, taunting and ugly as a crow's laugh. "Who dares attack a lone woman in such a holy place as this? What rituals do you speak of, girl?"

She stalks forward, hands raised. Thin light can do nothing to pierce this endless dark, but it can show her the figure before her as the distance between them closes. The curl of her lip turns from snarl to sneer, if this woman wishes to loose another arrow than so be it, but she doesn't mind her odds. Especially not as the only space between them becomes that of the bow's curve.