Failure; damned to lose, to be put underneath the glassy hooves of a necromancer, and she rages, she froths at the mouth, spittle bubbling and burning at her charcoal lips; the wolf hounds north and west from the womblike caverns, the brightness of sunlight dancing on her ashen lashes. How could she have lost? It was not a matter of skill; it was luck, sheer luck, and it would not happen again, she would die before the untamed coward defeated her; her, Confutatis the Great, the Almighty, the amber-eyed Villainess. No longer would she crawl and slither over the ground like a rat- she would bare yellowed ivories and roar, take on any who dared get in her way. If they desired to brand her as weakling, she would deliever to them shattered skulls and broken bones! She would cow them with snarling, snapping teeth and a rabid smile; she would enter the fray without qualm nor fear, dance with all the eloquence and grace of pouring water, and watch them, one-by-one, succumb to her defiant decadence, ruinous rot, and vile desecration.

The wolf marches home in high furor, hackles up and fangs bared.

She would confess, for her sins; enlighten her wicked heart to Tyradon, admit to her inability to fight as she should. Skills became rusty and dusty in their disuse, but she was confident this would be no longer. Every fight she would embark on would be a battle for supremacy, no matter how trivial; every spar a war of it's own, and she would not shame her forebears as she did not so long ago. Confutatis would brood, take her time, sharpen her knives in the dark- so when the time came, Seele would be bleeding from the back.

Skull-faced decay comes flying home to a place of glass and beauty, prepared to taint such glorious colors- and what does she see but a gathering, of pipsqueak cubs and horned fiends (enemies in black and white, she'll ruin them, they had best run before her teeth are clamped down on their precious throats) and others too, familiar faces: Morir and Morana. He shouts out, blaspheme (had she not told him to keep his mouth SHUT?) to her rule; she had told him not to speak of the Regime. Fool, idiot, bumbling dunce; if he had eyes, she would gouge him out for his insolence, or perhaps she would lick them with her acid mouth and watch the gelatin run down his cheeks, burning, scalding, boiling.

She goes unseen, lingering on the edges of the shadows, unwilling to yet intrude upon them, curious as to see the outcome- and then she hears the snarls and snaps of a little wolf cub, and her poison lips curl into jagged smile. Sinister, foreboding, she advances, omen of death, omen of ruin, sign of black magic.

"Daughters dearest," she croons to her children, to her pretty little whelps- she is savage, she is feral, she is destruction and annihilation. "I told you to go back to sleep. It's not good for little birds to over-excite themselves... a big bad wolf might just eat them in the night."

Unnaturally heterochromic eyes turn to the mare she had glimpsed just once before beneath ground, a mare struck with lightning whose name she knew not. "Would the storm-whore-" oh yes, the wolf sees the stretch marks of damning childbirth (she did not have them herself, having cut Veil from the womb before he grew too large) "prefer to be flayed or have the tongue cut from mouth? We can't have you thundering back to mama to SHARE YOUR LIES." There will be time to punish Morir for his disobedience later, but she cannot deny he still halted the seeds of an escape, perhaps that evens out the playing field. And Morana- she will be rewarded for responding so immediately to the threat.

Run.
It comes from nowhere; ears swivel, ears pin, head jerks upward aggressively, demandingly, eyes wild and haughty, but there is nothing, no skin to flit and shiver (is she- or he- hiding? Coward, craven, yellow-bellied dog.) "Where are you?" she snarls, "where are you hiding, little coward? Come out to play, and maybe we'll let you go free." Her magic seeps and swirls, veils of decay and destruction, nefarious sorcery that comes to kiss skin cloaked in chameleon-like ability, rings of rot and ruin slithering over ragged coats. "There you are," she hisses, she seethes; her head snaps to face the foals.

"Don't run now, children, your mother is fighting for you... and nothing good will come of it."