I AM IRON AND I FORGE MYSELF

She’s been too hard on her herself lately - literally. Between the battles and the fucking fire-cat, she seems to be a mass of bruised and singed flesh (not that anyone would notice beneath her silver-and-black camo coat), which makes the Corporal more than a little grumpy. Her ego is battered, her flesh is tender, and there is something that alternates between setting her hair on end and creating this uncontrollable itch that cannot be scratched. So you know, bad things all around.

Nothing seems to be going right. Nothing.

When a woman built like a tank has that many horns and is short on, well, everything good about her personality, it’s best for her to remove herself to the hills for awhile. Wessex could just as easily have baked the anger out of her in the hot springs, but she’s often the type that likes to suffer in indignation and self-righteousness. Pain for pain’s sake because she’s a mother-fucking warrior and that’s what warriors do, right? Erebos suffers in all his General, lead the pack sort of way, she can see it in his eyes sometimes. But then he hides it. Wessex’s suffering, however, is projected, and it is not pretty.

In the hills (ok, mountaintops) if we’re going to get technical - she happens to look out over the flat land bridge that connects the ice fortress of the Basin to the rest of Helovia, and lo and behold, what does she see but a group of visitors coming towards them. Her mind says visitors, because if they were invaders or anyone who means the Basin harm, she can’t imagine them coming in such a small (too small for an army, too large to infiltrate individually) group. As quickly as she can, the horned Corporal picks her way down from the crag, footing sure now, in the months of mastering the sometimes rocky, sometimes icy, sometimes mud or flower filled terrain. Her wide and bulky body surges into a trot though some muscles do protest too much, as she finds herself the first to meet the group.

If they were too busy to see the tall mare bounding across to them, hopefully her heavy hooves would announce her presence. In the shadow of the metal sentinel, she finds that as she draws nearer, she recognizes the stallion with whom she jumped into the Blood Falls with. Oh - he was cool. It puts a small, pleasant expression on her face. A call salutes them as Wessex slows to a halt, leaving enough physical distance between herself and the leader for safety - but close enough to talk.

“This is quite the group,” she says rather neutrally. “What are you looking for?”

Because that much is obvious; those who come here are rarely here for funsises. Might as well get it all out in in the open - the Basin rarely does subtle.

W E S S E X