The brindle is snagged in the throes of dementia—his smile, a festering sore on his lips, grows and widens, thickening into a sardonic hyperbole. She aches to edge away; she quivers with the need to flee. The forest did not feel like her heart's reflection anymore. Shadows had become too grim, the night too grainy, and the stars too distant, their lacquered light colder than snowflakes drifting in the breeze. Here she was dragged into night and nightmares, into a sense of non-being interrupted with the flutter of her heart and the thrum of blood through her burning veins. I am alive—and yet she walked the edge of becoming a corpse. Didn't she?

The arachnid's head snaps towards the hellhound, unease reverberating through the sinuous coil of her body, paralyzed by the what-could-be's and what-might-be's, eyes locked upon the wolf's beseechingly. Fear and dread skitters through her bond's neurons, making their foray into her dragon's head. Acid. The hellhound's mouth was venomous, sickly green and oozing, and she is reminded, forcibly so, of her mother awaiting her freedom, of her mouth with her poisoned teeth and wild amber eye—thus forth Lilómiel screams. The drake's black wings snap and flare, lifting him aloft from his perch upon the branch. His neck curls, nostrils haranguing wide to release a smoke streamer, his eyes aglow with murderous light. Branches crack and shatter, tumbling down to the forest floor and the ice and the snow, burnt by the heat of his monstrous talons. There they smolder and hiss, steaming with their own sullen and contrary rage.

And what does the stranger do but laugh?

How can he—how—?! Nymeria grits her jaw together, the swift motion betraying her disgust, her fury. Again her companion screeches, suspended above her, all embers and prepared slaughter; and she, too, wants to shout her exhaustion, her bitterness, and show them what she can do. She is not lesser than them! She is not NOTHING and she will never be nothing. Of all of them, she and Volterra were born to greatness, to conquer and rule, reaped from the loins of a reaper and warmonger, raised and suckled on willpower, her morals and lessons beaten into her coat.

It grows inside her, slams and thunders against her skin, roaring and raring for a way to get out get out get out—her legacy, her curse and her blessing. This is what she was given; and she will use it.

But not today.

Instead her jaw tilts up defiantly, her lashes sinking together and lips twisting upwards into a knife-thin smile, and she matches him step-for-step, cold and couture, features frigid as sin. There are stars in her eyes and in her pretty, naive skull time seems to slow. "You would burn first."