Magnificence comes from the sky. He is flaming splendour, he is raw power and burning masculinity; he is war. He is beautiful, and he is....holy shit, he's charging towards her.

Her metaphorical balls get that little bit sweatier.

From the garbled blur of bronze flesh and harsh muscle that she glimpses in the short few seconds whilst he's charging at her, she realises that she recognises him. They'd interacted long, long ago, before the shadows that turned the silver into a wraith-ified walking corpse. She'd pledged herself to his cause, once. Now, years have passed, and he's here - and there's little doubt that Nyx is about to get the fight of her life. He's a leviathan, at least a hand taller than her, a good deal broader, a good deal stronger. Normally, she holds the edge on larger, slower opponents with her speed and agility, but she gets the distinct impression that this handsome piece of man-meat is no slouch.

In other words, she's outgunned, outnumbered, out of luck. She's a quivering mouse in front of a great big fucking lion; a trembling cloud in the wake of a heaving storm.

Well, not so much quivering and trembling, as exuding iron-like defiance in the face of being splattered into thousands of little grey pieces. Nyx might be shitting her pants at the sight of a giant devilishly handsome brute charging towards her like a yearling colt towards a mare in heat, but she's been in this game long enough to know better than to show her fear.

She might be about to become a vaguely Nyx-shaped pancake beneath the force of this brown behemoth's ire, but dammit, she'll go down fighting. She'll go down trying. She'll go down wanting to pound that like the fist of an angry god, because she can't ignore the fact that he's just as hot as he was last time they met.

But that's not a healthy train of thought. That train of thought makes babies. Ass-ripping twins. Hell, no.

She flings herself to her right, Dominus snarling and growling at her heels. She firmly demands that he move, because this is about to get messy. Obligingly he shifts aside, to glower nastily on the sidelines as his bonded is slammed by the massive chest of the Sultan. Her shift to her right means that his chest collides with her bony left shoulder rather than the meat of her own chest, but the silver soldier knows better than to try and stand against the sheer force of him. He is like the storm; sometimes even the mightiest of trees must bend beneath him, else they snap beneath his weight.

So, rather than attempting to stand her ground, Nyx allows herself to slide backwards. Her hooves slip easily along the moist sand, and her luck holds to the extent that she doesn't hit a rock during her backwards motion. As a result of giving to the impact rather than attempting to stand against it, the mare manages to lessen some of the damage to herself. She still receives a medium-depth, exceedingly painful bruise on the point of her left shoulder, which risks impeding her movement once the initial adrenaline has worn off. Jesus, he hits like a wrecking ball on crack. "Fuck, who pissed on your breakfast?" she gargles out good-humouredly, her words devoid of malice and her eyes gleaming.

For the first time in months, she feels alive. She needs to be hit, and hard. She doesn't know why Gaucho has swooped in like an avenging angel of feral power and death, but she's grateful for it.

Now it's her turn. She's not just a pretty(ish) face and a vulgar mouth.

His teeth just miss their target due to her movement to the right, although her new bruise is quite painful enough. Without missing a beat, the grey summons her magic; a thin layer of ice erupts into existence across her flesh, and an electrical current zaps across this frail shield like blue lightning dancing across a snowscape. Nyx presses forwards, seeking to prolong the contact between their bodies to try and give him a good shocking; she shifts slightly, however, to try and push her chest closer to him and move her bruised shoulder further away.

Her own teeth lash out, aiming upwards. She hopes to plant a harsh bite on the left side of his powerful neck, just so he knows she's here and doesn't bend that easily.