SLAYER OF WITCH&WOLF

🎬 + parent / guardian

🎬 + family (blood or chosen)

🎬 + friend

🎬 + partner (platonic or romantic)

🎬 + rival

🎬 + teacher / mentor

🎬 + associate / coworker / teammate

🎬 + boss / reporting officer

🎬 + enemy

🎬 + sender's choice (specify a second character for the scene to involve!)

"Ah, but we have barely seen much..." The grin widens a bit, with a quick glance over the shoulder. Marylin could sense the haste to leave, even before hearing it.

" Besides, I thought it was a mere rumour... dragons exist only in tales. Right?" she jests oddly relaxed, their situation considered, but with a hushed voice. If not a dragon, then something or someone else may as well take shelter there. Most likely, not too welcoming towards two trespassers. Aside their voices and movements, fortunately, she cannot hear anything far ahead in the darkness.

How easily a mere breath echoes and bounces the hollow caverns they follow deeper, darkness shifting aside as the cold light of her staff spreads on their path.

However, it is not the treasures Marylin is after; not the gold coins and pieces of jewelry and gems coating the path underneath the feline soft steps. Once a measure of a great wealth, now rendered almost worthless. Dragons were collectors she heard, alike to her. Instead of variety of goods, her thoughts are set on a potential stash of an ancient knowledge. " Who says we could not kindly ask for what we need." And by we, she of course refers to herself.

Wasn't it Marylin who suggested this journey.

But she needed someone to aid her on the way there, and potentially, help to keep her safe while they are at it. She cannot lie though, the deeper they go, the more she feels it in her stomach. Perhaps, a small kindle of fear, even. "No glory without some risk taking, I say."

BARELY SEEN MUCH, SHE says, as though they did not stand before a hoard worthy of a hundred kings. Still, the hunter should have known merely scouting the hoard’s location would not do - there are few things in this world so certain as a mage’s curiosity, and few creatures so stubborn as her current company. For one must be stubborn, to look upon this feast of wealth and think nothing of its gild, and instead dig and dig for any sort of meaning. Knowledge, she knows, is a most addictive thing; she merely wishes Marylin’s lust for life even approached the heights of her lust for said knowledge.

Now Alizebeth finds her focus tested by all this prattling, and thinks it may have been better to stay silent. The mage’s lilting voice is magnified by the cavern walls, as though there were five of her - a shudder-worthy thought that leads the Hawksblood to count her blessings. A whole team of scholars may have wanted to descend here, and then any pretense of stealth would have been thrown out the window. Fine, then. She’ll hold back on telling the girl to shut her trap.

“Who says we could not kindly ask for what we need?” she says, the light summoned at the crown of her staff guiding a seemingly endless search. It’s true that the myths speak not only of the dragons’ might, but also their great wit. She remembers a tale of a cruel prince having bargained his daughter’s life for but a shred of a wyrm’s great hoard. She also remembers what happened to the heroes who subsequently tried to save the girl. Unconsciously her hand tightens around the hilt of her sword; a foolish comfort when one’s foe spits fire.

“Not heroic, being eaten. Flailing, wet screams. Seen it. Worse than you think. Won't be a dragon doing it, but that doesn't mean it'll go better.”

The true dragons of old aren’t real, but many are the very real beasts who wear their shape, and of those she knows little, and apprehends much. Alizebeth thinks of their remains, abandoned here in the bowels of the world, after having been so gloriously maimed, and just as gloriously shit out.

Yes, she wants to get the fuck out of here, and soon. There's nothing she can do about Marylin's carelessness, but maybe there's another way she can precipitate their escape.

“What are you looking for? ...Could try to help.”

he's staring down the hard liquor in his hands like it could save him from a conversation. it won't. not when she stops expectantly in front of him and he knows he sticks out more here and now than he probably has before. he gives it a moment, maybe two, before slowly raising his head to meet her stare. the hope of just one uneventful night slowly spirals down the drain.

SHE WON’T BOTHER SITTING. Not when she’s got a point to make, and make now, not in a minute and certainly not tomorrow.

“No time. Three more dead. Family.”

She’d done what she could, instructing locals in rituals of banishment and bid them be wary of the night, but these sorts of beings were far from her speciality. No mere alp, nor even a banshee, could do what this creature had done: bodies left so twisted with fear as to break their own bones, their faces masks of a fear beyond animal. Men, women, children. She’d seen it, the spirit, glimpsed it as she holed up in the small town’s mausoleum, trying to ambush it, or at least study it; it moved in a fell way, as though it slipped in and out of this world with every step and shudder, unformed, not quite perceptible. It was all the Hawksblood could do to hide herself from the foul apparition with the help of blessed salts and burning herbs. She may as well have been tasked with slaying a nightmare. But though she does not know whence it came from, nor cares, it kills, it kills in the terrible way that spirits kill, and this she cannot abide.

And so she finds herself asking, veritably begging for the help of the only man she knows who can tangle with the immaterial. Arthur’s are unseen gifts, unfathomable to her, but the results are very real. And right now - not in a minute, and certainly not tomorrow - there are innocent lives whose fates hang on them.

“You’re the only one who can finish this.”

    William's stomach seizes with a new wave of fear and pain. Those are not the thoughts of a stable Shiftling. The balance between man and merrow lays on the verge of tipping. If he loses control, he is not getting it back, and he refuses to die the monster the huntress surely sees.

    Wrenching a knee beneath himself makes the world spin in bleary colors, but it frees his other arm. Clawed fingers dig under his mandibles, grab hold, and pull.

    His fae blood bellows with thunderous rage, hurricane gusts buffeting his human mind. He bites down on his own fingers, tastes salt and copper. Purple fluid glimmering with gold grit trails down his arm. His pincer rises, open wide--

    --like he knew it would. Fighting the storm clouds that threaten to blot out his sky, William wrangles it enough to miss clutching his own arm. It clamps around the knots on his chest instead. His fae blood screams with disbelief.

    Sharp sounds like gunshots bark as the knots crack, Otherworldly water spilling down his abdomen. Facing the typhoon in his head, William thinks: That. Is. Quite. Enough.

    Knots, claw, and mandibles rip off his flesh in a flash of white light. Wings and tail dissolve into fading motes. What's left behind is a man braced on his hands and knees, loose hair trailing down to his elbows. He pants for air, trembling like a leaf.

    Stranger still is the creature he yanked out of himself. Black, white, and red, the merrow's glow is muted as she lies limp on the ground. A hole in her belly radiates inky spiderwebs.

    William's voice is a harsh croak, eyes wide with horror. "Saoirse?" He gathers her into his arms, cradles her head. No, no, stay with me, he thinks.

    Choking on pain as he tries to straighten his back, he looks down. An identical wound mars his own guts, coating him in crimson from the waist down.

IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE. She missed a shot and the beast fell to its knees. Now her bolt is but aimed at its shelled skull when it begins to tear itself apart, claw first then abdomen, strange fluids bleeding from the gaping wounds. Stupefaction comes first, stilling the hunter’s hand as she watches the fell creature rip its carapace off in chunks that vanish into specks of light. Then, horror: there’s a man beneath it.

The man says something.

Alizebeth doesn’t understand it, just as she doesn’t understand what she’s witnessing. Nothing of the scene before her eyes makes any amount of sense to her, nor resembles anything she’s seen before. A beast what crawled out from some riverbed and gone on a rampage, suddenly stopping to gouge a grown man out of its own chest - a dying one, whose last words are undecipherable as he stares down to his arms’ empty embrace? She doesn’t know what any of this means, or what she could even do about it. Monsters, she can handle. But this?

This is the work of the fey.

The Hawksblood lowers her weapon. She’s certain of this; the shape of the beast, both animal and man, could have belonged to one of the fomori, but the light that enveloped it as it maimed itself spoke of aught else, something magickal in nature. But the man… 

Not a faerie, then. Rather, someone or something cursed by one, and dying before her very eyes. It’s - no, he’s sliced his stomach so deep, wrenching himself out of the hex. There must have been great strength in that man, for such feats are rarely accomplished. The selfsame power that had made his rage so violent now allows him one last moment of humanity, too brief, already slipping between his bloodied fingers.

Around them the chaos of flame seems to relent, the screams dim as the hunter kneels before the unfortunate man. Alizebeth peers beneath his ash-blonde hair. His eyes are bright blue, but the blood is so very red.

“ Rest well. ”