Smoke. It is a scent he wished to never smell again, a phenomenon he wished to never witness again, and it billowed from the thing which he hated - and feared - the most: fire. The acrid stench of burning wood, of life being consumed, infiltrated his mind, blown in by the breeze and through his nostrils. At first he thought it was a remnant of a nightmare, of figment of unreality haunting him as he pulled himself up from the thick heaviness of sleep, but he could not remember dreaming, nor find a cause for his waking. Blinking in the darkness that should have been compact, he realized that there was a little light, blotting out the stars to the south. Slowly, the monarch turned, head lifting up to watch the sky. Something dark and dangerous hung across it, a veil that brought a cold lump to his throat, an iron fist clenching around his belly and heart. Below it, there was light: flickering, orange and red, shimmering, casting his world into warm, dangerous shades. For a moment longer Mauja merely stood there, breathing in the night air which smelled more and more of sulfur, and watched the dancing shadows of licking flames. His forest was burning, again, in the middle of the night, and the first things that rolled in in wake of the confusion, was childish denial. It was unfair. It was bothersome. Why did it have to happen to him, all the time? His ears fell back against his muscular neck, and for a moment he toyed with the idea of discarding it all as a bad dream and going back to sleep.

But closing your eyes would solve no problems.

The downside of waking up was that his more accurate emotions kicked in. Anger. Fear. Mauja loathed fire, but not with the hatred that empowered him to charge in and stomp down the flames, but he hated it because it made him afraid, a cool of a different sort slithering through his veins like hungry, poisonous snakes. He gulped in a lungful of acrid air, and released it in a thundering bellow. Those who had not already wakened, would wake now, and without a care for the risk of pulling muscles the frost wraith powered into a canter, navigating the familiar terrain with ease. The heat of the fire lapped against him as he approached, burning away the tendrils of mist which otherwise obscured the ground, and Mauja's pale body was tinted with orange, lined in yellow. The moon-shadows across his pupils turned to the red of flames, and water trickled down the curves of his horn, pooling onto his forehead. "Seiren! Huyana!" he roared, calling upon the only ones he knew who had power over the skies. One could summon hail, the other rain; he hoped it would be enough, that they were here, that.. that.. that'd it save his blasted forest from burning down. Eyes began to water as he plunged through a drifting sheet of smoke, and then he came through it again, sliding to a halt to survey the damage.

Maybe four or five trees had caught fire, their branches burning, but it - thankfully - had a harder time spreading across the ground. He snorted, trying to clear his nostrils of ash, and when his gaze spun again, he found something most disturbing.

Interlopers.

At the base of one of the burning trees.

There was no need to put two and two together, he recognized the silhouette of one of them immediately. Slender, thin, bony, black as the night with eyes that shimmered like flames now - but he knew them to be vibrant green, sultry. He knew the curve of her back, the tail curling around her hocks, the arch of her neck and the horn upon her brow. A deep growl rumbled in the snowbeast's chest, and like a wolf he prowled closer, cast into shadow by the flames that flickered nearby, between them. With the whore was an equine, dark as she, and it only served to ignite the rage further. Pure, blind rage pushed the fear aside, and he skirted the few flames on the ground with ease. A familiar cold would seep through her body as the ice formed in her veins, but this time, he was relentless - vindictive. It would not serve as a mere warning, a taunting turn-off; it would serve its purpose of pain and destruction, trying to build as rapidly as possible, focusing on a few crystal. He wanted them to grow quickly, to faster tear the walls of her veins and not just chill her blood. With a monstrous snarl upon his face and a look of pure, cold-blooded rage in his eyes, Mauja crept closer, his body cooling rapidly with the use of his magic. The ice, he held it at the ready, mentally poised to strike. And, across the roar of fire, he roared, hoping that his pet was not far, which he rarely ever was. With the length of his dripping horn pointing at the hornless scum creeping here with the whore, he gave the command, relishing the rush of power, expectant of the results, for once freeing the Monster of the moral laws which bound him in the Edge.

"Drip drop!"
He wanted to see these pyromaniacs bleed.