It was a sickening feeling.

Both the popping, ripping sensation that traveled up his trunk and the emotion that burst and coated his chest as Elsa’s cry filled his ears and drowned his mind. His trunk immediately released its vice-like hold, loosening around the joint he had injured and relieving the pull he had against her dug-in, resisting hooves. Navy eyes morphed from dark pools of rage to lined, mournful pits. His gaze swept from the point of his attack to her face—finding crystalline blue eyes welled with tears.

What was he doing?

This was the woman who had, without pretense, opened herself to him. She had shared her faults, the painful wounds of her traitorous past lover, and the scars he had left between herself and her children. She had stood beside him as a monarch. She had comforted and supported him when he had faltered beneath the weight of his demons. She had carried and birthed his child. And she had even stood strong in the face of his love for Rexanna.

Yet, here he was, turning on her in rage during her own moment of anger and passionate instability. His gaze searched her face as he slowly slipped into immobility, losing hold on his elephantine form. A barrier of ice flashed up between himself and the Icebound, obscuring his vision of her and cracking as his tusk-tips dug into it; but those tearstained eyes just beyond the spiderwebbing ice were burned into his vision.

Edgar’s painful keen echoed in his ears, a haunting accompaniment to Elsa’s angry, sad, fearful gaze. Her raw voice was muffled from behind the wall of ice she had thrown up between herself and his tusks. ”Is this what you want, Tembovu? The power to choose who lives and who dies?” His trunk had loosened from her wing, letting him evade the icy burn of her magic. But these words scorched and branded him just the same.

So he stood, frozen beneath the poisonous barrage of words and the fierce attacks Edgar’s talons rained down on his face. Though his thick, wrinkled skin provided some sort of protection against the zephyr’s icy, stormy talons. Only a few, superficial scratches made themselves known as bright red streaks on the black and white skin around his left eye as he once again became a stallion. “I want the power to protect life,” his answer to her raw question was hoarse, vocal chords chafed from all his trumpeting and the burning thicket’s smoke, when his shift-induced paralysis finally released him.

Though his answer was, in some parts, a lie. He did want the power to decide who lived and who died. He want to keep those he loved alive. And his demons (which had been so silent for so long), roared at the idea of controlling death. To wield such a power—to destroy those that might threaten his family… The idea was intoxicating. But the Elephant, despite the allure of such power, knew it to be unjust.

Still, his demons hissed in excited whispers beneath the layers of guilt and shame that faced him with Elsa’s accusatory stare.

And finally Mbwene, her small and wrinkled sides heaving with exertion, burst through thick tree trunks. Bright blue eyes watered against he smoke that was beginning to grow dense in the air from the burning thicket, though she did not blink as she stared angrily at both equids and the screeching Edgar. Her trunk raised in an angry trumpet upon seeing the defensive and offensive positions of each, her angry stare following Edgar around Tembovu’s face. But it was not until she saw the red tracks of blood on her bonded’s face that the rage which had billowed across the Edge to her through their bond manifested into action.

In her small body, the fury drowned the waves of uncertainty and guilt that now crashed and broke over the Elephant King. The small matriarch, fiercely loyal to (and permanently exasperated with) her bonded, screeched her displeasure; the noise akin to rocks scraping over glass as it burst out of her trunk.

And she charged.

A cloud of ash proceeded her, an irritating magic that she had yet to purposefully use. But she used it now. Though she was much smaller than the Icebound, she could try to blind her with her magic and skewer her with her tusks (finishing the attack Tembovu had started and failed).

“STOP,” Tembovu mentally bellowed at her. But she ignored the command, simply responding to him with, “You hurt enough. It end now.”

---

WC: 766
PC: 2/4
Damage tracker: tired from holding onto Elephant form/sending magmaphant @ thicket; lightly wrenched left knee; light scrapes around left eye
Summary/notes: Tembovu lets go of Elsa's wing when he feels it sprain/dislocate. He is immobilized as he shifts back into a unicorn, so Edgar's talons scratch around his left eye. Mbwene shows up on the scene and tries to use her ash magic on Elsa to blind her while charging at her.
- Ashen: veil produced from body in some manner that obscures vision for 30 seconds and may irritate lungs.

Tembovu

the elephant king