It is the smell of blood that catches Vadir's royal attention, bidding her to feed the information back to her bonded. He hardly stirs; a fresh corpse in the forest is nothing new.
"Foal," is all her piercing voice says. It is enough to lift the Indomitable's great head from where it is idly reaping the forest of its grasses, enough to send him launching through the forest behind the golden dragon in search of the dead child. In search of whatever bastard has done it, so he can end them.
Vérzés joins the hunt, his crimson form blurring alongside Vadir's golden one. As they fly above him, Volterra gallops below, fallen logs or debris proving no obstacle to his hell-bent search for the dead child. He half-hopes it will be the victim of a forest creature, a wolf perhaps, because in a way that is understandable - they prey on the weak. If it is a horse, though?
Well, it has been a while since he killed.
The first thing he hears is giggling, a manic, chilling sound that bids his ears to flatten. There's a sudden flutter in his stomach, though, because he recognises that voice, that laugh. Surely he must be mistaken. Surely it can't be her.
He knows there's something horribly, terribly wrong when the dragons begin to circle, and when their mental voices fall totally, eerily silent. Emanating from both of them is just a cold, stunned nothingness, and his heartbeat increases tenfold. What is it? No answer. Vérzés, Vadir - what is it? His pace increases, heart hammering, brain pulsing with a sudden writhing snap of fear. What can be so bad that his dragons won't even tell him?
The reek of blood reaches its epiphany and there - there's Airlia standing, laughing like a madwoman, slathered in blood and with a...thing at her feet. The Indomitable skids to a halt, sod flying from his massive hooves as he stills and allows his senses to adjust to the scene. In a way, he knows what he's going to see, knows with a conviction that shocks even him. His brain is cold, his muscles searing, his stomach knotted with something unrecognisable. He knows what he's going to see, but that doesn't make it any easier to see it.
"No." The word is uttered almost calmly as his eyes drift inexorably downwards, down towards the mangled pile of meat that lays ruined on the ground. It is a child, or at least it was a child. It is maimed beyond recognition, its blood strewn across the clearing, its body no longer a temple but a grave.
Why does he keep saying it, when he knows it's her?
"NO!!" He crumples like a stack of cards, falls to his knees beside the ruined lump that was once his daughter, his Vezér. His beautiful child, the darling spider-girl who held so much potential, who would grow to be a queen, who would bear him strong sons and help forge his legacy through the sands of time. He can't have favourites, not when he loves each child so dearly, but she was pretty damn close, so fucking perfect that it hurt.
And now she's dead.
Volterra has never cried before. The tear that drips slowly, almost apologetically, down his face feels completely out of place there, an unwelcome addition to features twisted in anguish. The sob, the great wracking, dry heave that blasts him forwards until his nose is almost buried in the neck of what used to be his Vezér, shakes him from head to toe. He's never felt anything like this before - it's beyond the petty flit of sadness he's suffered in the past over small, trivial things. This is bone-deep, soul-deep, so crushing and decimating that it steals the breath from his lungs and leaves him shuddering and shaking, the Indomitable brought to his knees. This is grief the likes of which he's never even thought possible, the unthinkable, wrenching misery of a bereaved parent. This is suffocating, this is crushing, this is the feeble half-breath that snags in his throat and the burning pit of blackness in the depths of his soul. There is no end to it, no respite from this black pit, this knowledge that his girl is gone.
Slowly he rises, shuddering with the effort of holding back the pain, looking over to Airlia. His eyes are like flint, moist with tears, his expression blacker than the skin that covers him. "Why?" The voice is cold, dead; his body may be shaking with grief, but his voice isn't.
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