In the deeps of the forest, there was only stillness and vacant shadows, but Nymeria welcomed the atmosphere that went along with it. Her breath was too loud, and her hooves sounded like thunder—but that did not prevent her from taking full advantage of the shifting shadows. Through what felt like night (so deep and lush was the darkness), she and her dragon roamed freely through the Wilds, in a loose and idle exploration of the familiar. Off in the distance was a faint and nevertheless pungent reek of amniotic fluids and iron-tasting blood, simultaneously hard and soft. She had never encountered anything quite like it (except in the very oldest of wasted and largely forgotten memories), and that was all Nymeria needed to go on a wild goose chase.

If she had known the complexity of the situation that would soon be facing her, she would've turned around, but she did not know, and the gods would not have it any other way.

It was Lilómiel who first found the mare and the twins as usual, and he who whispered to Nymeria to hurry. Her stride lengthened languorously, the sounds of her passing through the forest muffled yet loud, like a growl from bared fangs, or a distant howl in the night. The smell was strengthening, deepening, into a foul stench that caused her eyes to water. Nymeria was not a stranger to brutality, but this... this reek was a far cry from anything she had experienced before. It didn't incite her with hunger and longing for war or battle or carnage, but instead awakened distant, primal feelings, feelings vague and almost... almost maternal in nature.

Perhaps she shouldn't have been so surprised when she pushed her careful, cautious way through the press of trees; perhaps her heart should not have taken such a catastrophic tumble. The distant, sympathetic feelings, whatever they were, did not prevent her from the sudden and potent rage that tightened her breast beyond understanding, the rage that blistered away all rational thought and logic.

Looking at the mare with her callous face—she whose aesthetic was all barbed wire and bloody knuckles and cold bullets—Nymeria knows with a very real and physical pain too much. There, wet and slimy on spindly legs, was her face, her eyes, all the tiny and intricate little details that made her her; they were fucking imposters, fucking beasts, fucking creatures who were no better than the soil beneath her feet or the earthworms in the ground, grub who should be dead. She knew, with full and dreadful certainty, that the—the—the spawn were her brother's, because who else would've fucked this dread-eyed girl, who else could've made those hideous creatures?

Again the rage flares up in her breast, and the blood beating in her ears is so loud that she cannot hear herself think. She stares—and stares—agonized and pained, but why should she be? Why should she care?

He betrayed you.
Only she deserved him; only she could lay claim to her brother.
Maybe he needs to be reminded of that again. And how easy it would be to do so now: to crush the life out of her brother's fragile bastards, to smash their bones to dust and devour them alive, to hear their screams and make pay the whore who had been mounted by her brother. She wants to—she aches to, with an urgency she's never felt before—but she does not, because she is Nymeria, because she is a liar and a bitch and there were other things she could do to make her brother regret his promiscuity.

Previously silent in her musings, Nymeria steps out of the shadows, a faint and innocent smile curling up her lips. "Let me guess—" she says, courteous and giving the mare plenty of room for security—"the father's name was Volterra?"