KNEEL.

✖ ———— THE VALSHARESS ( aka SINVYL BARRI’TAR & SHIDRIIRA BLUDTRAEN & ‘THE QUEEN’. )

What do you think of when you think ‘stereotypical drow’? Power-hungry? Violent? Manipulative schemers? The valsharess is the embodiment of all those traits and then some. With some trust issues and risk-taking behavior as the cherries on top. And if you think accidentally breaking a binding contract with a prince of hell she enslaved to her will would deter her from trying to climb her way back into power here, you’d be wrong.

If you know her outside of her dealings in the Cotes Ward Underside, she’ll have given you the name ‘Shidriira Bludtraen’. If you frequent the Underside, you’ll have heard murmurs of a mysterious ‘Queen’ sinking her fangs into the area. And if you’ve cozied your way up into her little nest of vipers, you’ll know her as Sinvyl Barri’tar. But she’ll rarely introduce herself as ‘valsharess’. She is no dark queen of shadow here, like she was in the underdark.

So she should expect no summons to the Queen herself any time soon. The subject of desire passed without so much as a raised eyebrow; if one asked, emptiness would occupy the identity of desire. What use was there to crave and yearn in a land hurtling towards its inevitable end? When she contemplated if anything within the land of Spirale had birthed a want, the recollection was… indistinct. Perhaps she were as void as the kingdom itself.

A moment’s contemplation: as a rare opportunity, she ought not to waste an understanding of the woman who wove the web and cruise freely. Her intentions for the Knight were clear, her means of addressing any unfortunate to cast her eye established. There was little in way of meaningful information that was to be gained; leaving but a single, simple question.

“What is your endgame: to reign over this land? The city has its sovereigns with the power to erase you or anyone else within this land, if they saw fit. Your ambition to rebel might see you condemned like the corpses you envision. Or was it you sought to rule beneath them?”

✖ ———— “Rebel?” She sneers at the word, then rises to her full height. In this form, she is a goddess in every sense of the word, towering over the other as she moves from behind the table, arachnid legs skittering audibly as she circles around to Shielder’s backside, resting her cold, cold hands upon the girl’s shoulders. “The gods of this world are no different than the gods of Underdark. If they cared enough to interfere in my schemes, they would. And until they do, I will not humor their omnipotence for an instant.”

“Oh yeah? And what activities are those?” Leon stands his ground. “This is my first festival, so I want to make sure to get the full experience.” He knows he’s really pushing his luck here, but he’s never been the type to know when to stop talking.

“Actually thought I’d look around a little more before I worry about souvenirs– you know, hate to have to carry things around. Don’t suppose you’d let me pass…?”

✖ ———— “Don’t you worry about having to carry it,” he replies, nonchalantly raising the knife to point it at the other, not yet in a blatantly threatening way, but moreso as though raising a paintbrush to a canvas to try and figure out where to start. “It’s kinda like a tattoo. Except, you know...”

He stands up straight now, starting towards Leon, when a voice from behind interrupts them both: “Hey. Rothe. You got a death wish?” A woman says, a baseball bat perched on her shoulder-- appropriately adorned with nails and other unsavory sharp objects. “Call her first, fuck them up after. That really so hard to follow?”

It doesn’t matter where he’s looking. If Leon looks to the woman, then the man will lunge for him, knife poised to gut him-- and if he looks back to the man, she’s going to rear back the bat and swing straight for the head.

“Just a tourist on vacation,” Leon smirks, shrugging. All the intel he’s managed to gather told him that if something shady was happening on this island, the Underside was the place to poke around. He has no idea what he’s in for, but that’s no different from how he normally operates, right?

He eyes the switchblade, hand on his own combat knife concealed in his jacket pocket. If he can avoid a fight, great, but he knows that’s not how these situations normally go.

“What, you guys don’t celebrate Winterfes on this side of town?”

✖ ———— “Sure we do,” the other replies, nonchalant, keeping his shit-eating smile level with the other, not wanting to be out-smartassed. “Just not many people like the kind of activities we host over in these parts.” He stops fidgeting with the blade enough to gently poke the tip of the blade into the fingertip of his opposite hand. 

The test the other throws her way sails right over Jinx’s head, naturally.  There were a number of other languages on Runeterra besides common, but she’d never had the opportunity to learn any of them…not that such an opportunity would’ve done her much good in understanding the fearsome woman’s utterances.  She understands her sentiments in tormenting this man, though- she’d seen such motivations plenty of times before, and she could empathize with them.

“Ah.  A backstabber and a disappointment.  I get why you’re dragging it out.  Never been good at pacing myself, honestly, but…you know.”  She stands back up to her full height, prodding at the man’s elbow with the tiptoe of her boot.

“For me it’s liars.”  She’s getting lost in her thoughts now, the times she felt she’d been wronged.  The boot dances along the length of his forearm, up to his wrist.  “Someone hiding things from me…manipulating me, stringing me along so I act the way they want me to…telling me anything just so I-”

She’s jerked out of the rambling, realizing just how much pressure she was putting on the traitor’s wrist.  Not enough to snap it yet, but had she continued… She pulls the foot back, looking up to the self-proclaimed Queen with a chuckle.  “Right, your poor sap to torture- my bad.  Keeping my hands, feet, and various deadly weapons to myself starting now.”

✖ ———— It’s not often those chosen by the Stars come wandering into her web without some disgustingly annoying hero complex. The man’s whimper, sharpening with every second the stranger spends in reverie upon his limb, goes ignored. She’s far more intrigued by this girl, and, well...

Potential allies worth anything are few and far between in this place.

The Valsharess hums, pensive. “There is quite the story hidden in your words, jalil. I have always found liars quite... bothersome. The bloody squabbles of the drow have always been rooted deep in subterfuge, but truth be told, deception is but a tool of the weak.” She half speaks to the man at her heels, voice unusually soft. Unnervingly so. “A lie to camouflage the knife in one’s hand can be avoided if one has the sense to keep their weapon hidden in the first place.”

She is quiet, apparently lost in thought, only to finally pull her foot back from the man just enough to offer the stiletto swathed in the blood of the hand she had punctured. “Filthy male. Clean your mess and I may yet find it in me to let you live.”

He stares at her, not understanding, lips parting before she offers the stiletto to his tongue. He blinks tears from his eyes, horrified, but with his back to the wall, does he have another option? The male laps at her heel, gagging in disgust with every lick. An uncomfortable ordeal that stretches every minute into an hour, but she doesn’t move, face unrelenting, heel unyielding.

“Please,” he chokes out eventually, “Please, don’t kill me.”

The gruffness is brushed off easily–she could have insulted him and he would not have cared. Instead he’s lost in the wonder of his own body again, as he does whenever the topic presents itself.

“Yes, trite indeed–the world as either of us know it is stagnant and insignificant in comparison. A constant and everlasting state of evolution, are we–chaos in an almost perfect state. Hell may not even have anything to match it’s unfathomable potential.” 

Veins crawl upwards, and his trench coat squirms. Eyes distant with his hands wrapped around the heat of the bowl as he loses himself to his train of thought. ‘I’ continues to be replaced with ‘Us’ and ‘We’. Not in referral to himself and the Valsharess, no. 

It’s in referral to the collective within. 

“We continue to exist, as the world finds nothing wrong with us–what is there to correct? Nothing. Our needs and wants are not beyond that what already exists within the natural order.” 

She had asked him to spare her the curiosities, and yet…he continues on. A disturbing, bemused smile showing the top row of pointed teeth. Eye contact the same as staring into those hundreds of feral beasts that wait in their pitch black primordial darkness. 

“Immortality has long been mine, Valsharess. But my individual consciousness will not last forever. This miracle of life will reach it’s true state in time, beyond what could be considered ‘me’.”   

Catching a glance of a frightened onlooker, his face goes immediately neutral. Mouth shut, veins receding, coat slack. He visibly relaxes, sipping his soup once more. 

“I apologize, it would appear I lost myself for a moment. There are few to speak to about the subject.”  

✖ ———— He starts to drone on about his body, and she instantly folds her arms over her chest. Despite her own inflated sense of pride, there’s an audacity to his claim. That he is perfection, more complex and terrifying than the seven hells. Pitiful surfacer, she thinks to herself. You are but another rivvil who plays with magic beyond your comprehension.

The irony of that is lost on her.

“Yes, it would appear so,” she replies, flatly, though truth be told she zoned out for most of it. Instead she seethes a little at having been laid low enough to have to consort with a male-- let alone the humiliation at having been defeated by one. “You have told me much of this... miracle. And yet I cannot recall you ever having told me how this came about.”

She looks to him with a quirked brow. Wondering if perhaps...

The head of a snake peers from the back of his neck, aware of the Valsharess before Nrvnqsr is. Wrapping itself around before it slithers into his trench coat without a sound. 

He sips the hot soup from a wide mug made for the purpose, hardly offering the Valsharess acknowledgement. Lips mindful of hiding his sharp teeth. 

“A heartier stew of meat would be better, so your point stands.” 

“I’m enjoying it for the taste.”

Small acts that keep the small fraction of humanity in-tact. 

“And what of you? I would be interested to hear how your mind has been holding since your own near-consumption. You’re the only one we’ve ever decided to spare as such.” 

Taking another (somewhat blissful) sip, he adds, eyes filled with pride; 

“You should take it as an honor, to have come so close to something so…magnificent.” 

✖ ———— Taste? Eyes flick to the broth, and the edge of her lip curls up. She can’t fathom enjoying surfacer food, but she won’t harass him for it. He is one of them, after all.

“Goodness.”

With the way she says that- it sounds almost as though Leia is repulsed at the sight. You would think she’d run away, but Leia approaches the woman - and the man who happened to be on the unfortunate end of… whatever was happening here, and crouches down, looking at the man with a curious look. 

“Looks like he might’ve messed with the wrong girl, huh? What happened here?” 

She makes it very clear that she has no interest in helping the man. At all. 

✖ ———— When she crouches, the man reaches for her with his free hand, grabbing weakly at her ankle. “Help me,” he wheezes, “Please, help me. I’ll pay you, I-- I’ll--”

To which the Valsharess makes a disgusted noise, yanking her heel free of his hand to take a step back, brushing aside her cloak to take in hand a barbed whip that burns bright with enchanted flame. It bathes her profile in eerie glow, red eyes alight with malice as they turn back to the stranger.

A brief snort of a laugh escaped her.  “Hah!  ‘Surfacer.’  You’ve got jokes, lady, I’ll give you that.”  Not that this lady could’ve known the punchline- nobody here besides herself and Vi did, really.  Telling everyone around about Zaun didn’t exactly strike her as a fun time.

“Yeah, gawking’s about the long and short of it.  I’m a good gawker.”  She crouched down by the weeping man, eyebrows raised on an otherwise impassive expression.  “You grilling him for information of some kind, or is this just for kicks?”

✖ ———— She is silent enough in the aftermath of the girl’s laugh. Enough so that the man beneath her dares to breathe a snivelling, ‘h-help me, pl--’ before the Valsharess steps back, yanking her heel free from his palm, and promptly kicking him in the face. “Dos venorsh,” she hisses to him, in part a test to this newcomer. If she is familiar with the Underdark, she will know the tongue of the drow.

Regardless, she turns to the other, leering up at her, narrowed eyes attempting to figure out what sort of wanderer has crossed her path. “You are bold, female. I will give you that.” So I will answer you, is the unspoken agreement she comes to. She nudges her heel beneath the man’s chin and tilts it upward, though he’s adamant on not looking either of them in the eyes. “Neither. This iblith is a traitor... and a Queen tolerates treachery as much as she tolerates ineptitude.”

Words of praise were close to a foreign concept to a Fae Knight whose land wreaked of curse and decay, and coming from one who had snared her through use of blackmail, there was no desire to take anything of positive from the statement. If it weren’t a backhanded compliment meant to laugh behind her back. She stayed stone-faced, for a time. The sense of something against her leg raised the alert of a potential additional entity in the room. Her reaction was mechanical.

A step back to separate from the source and Camelot formulating in front, coming down upon the stone floor, the resulting clang echoed viscerally. Inches from the culprit to ward it off. Examining it from behind barricade did she learn of its nature, its attachment to the woman on the other side. It must have been her way of playing with her new toy.

Her stance straightened, moving the shield to her side. “You have lives in your web that I must safeguard, I don’t have a choice, your blade can rest easy”. Unless it was the kind that sought bloodshed. “There are whispers about the castle that not all are in their true state, there is no guarantee that you aren’t asking a fabrication. There is confidence that who I am now is a genuine existence, but that may be a part of this illusion, and what you might hear could be nothing more than a tale spun from a phantom. Who is to say the story will stay the same?

Galahad: a Fae Knight of the land Britain. A country built off the backs of corpses that some might call it barbaric, and many wouldn’t disagree. That is why the land calls me by a title: Child of Prophecy, and there isn’t a shred of doubt they would froth at the mouth seeing her reduced to some subordinate. As for who I can be, that would be for you to decide, as the one in charge".

✖ ———— She doesn’t pull her leg back despite how close it comes to being crushed underfoot the other’s shield. Her eyes dare not stray from the girl’s face and she laughs, a wicked and cruel chortle. “How intriguing. Well, know this, ‘Shielder’, ‘Galahad’, illusory being or genuine self-- I shall indeed rewrite your fate to suit my purposes, but my writing will not be unfamiliar to you. A mountain of corpses may be your past, and a mountain of corpses shall be your future.”

“Who those corpses will be all depends on your actions. Though death aside, I have called you here to tell you that your... agreeability will serve you well. A thrall whose loyalty has been forced may still know my grace. Should you perform to my standard, I may yet decide to grant you your desires. Desires that do not interfere with my designs, of course.”