faderift | CLOSED | i'm not one to ever pray for mercy

Agony whites out everything including its own source, so it isn't immediately clear to Gwenaëlle why she can't breathe—something is glowing nearby her, which is interesting until the fact that she's choking on filthy water penetrates the haze that will come upon a person who's just been dragged out of a tree and hit half of it with her head on the way down. She seizes air when she surfaces, heaving breaths that are equal parts water and pure fury. She cannot locate her blade. She can barely locate how her head attaches to the rest of her body, but something is screaming above her—

it might be her

—no, it's not her, it's something else, mingling with the growls and slap of dislodged muck, a black thing all shining feathers and sharpened beak. Her hand curls around the thing, glowing, and it's bitter cold in the way that clarity is, suddenly. How many fucking wyverns are there. A wolf is fighting a wyvern and she is unclear on exactly where the fuck a wolf came from, but the blur that is Guilfoyle is ignoring it despite a clear opportunity to rip into its flank as he comes knives out for the beast currently trying to rip her in two, so it's probably on their side.

The teeth sink in deeper with the weight of Guilfoyle's blades in its throat; Gwenaëlle cannot entirely feel her fingers, sighting down the length of the arrow the way that she's watched Iorveth do, loosing it at so precise an angle as to ruffle the wolf's fur on its way past her face. She feels the thud too far away from her to even hear, its point penetrating the beast's eye and lodging in the back of its skull. The wyvern that had prepared to take Adalia off-guard distracted with her kill slumps, teeth snapping in the air where they'd have closed upon her shoulder.

The water around her feels warm. That's probably all the blood.

Blood. Enough of it to draw the shape of small, sucking fishes below, bumping stupidly between slushed reeds. One of them nibbles experimentally at Alan’s knee,

Not as pressing as the teeth on Gwen’s. A curled fist pulls backward, the other palm rising to find the pattern of death about them. The wyvern beneath Adalia lashes her back and forth between rocks and rotten wood, wrestling with little regard for teeth and pressure (thick scales their own protection). A third —

— It sputters out like a light, the arrow in its eye glinting silver between spurts of black ichor; an echoing shine to the armored bones now exposed nearby. Still dying, it staggers toward the fray, collapses in Adalia's path like so much meat.

Guilfoyle’s on the last, and as Alan crooks his fingers the life of it pulls free into them both: Like an arrow from bowstring, old power slithers loose to coil unpleasant in the air.

The wyvern’s jaws grind open and away. The ice melts before Alan as he strides for Gwen, hand splayed to puppet the monster off of her. It makes it but a step or two before remembering Guilfoyle, tries to shake him for all the blood still streaming from its throat. All dragons heal fast. This one doesn't seem to be healing at all.

Adalia’s temporarily on her own.

Edited 2018-08-12 09:03 (UTC)

It's difficult to maintain a shape when one's concentration is constantly being battered at — somewhat literally, even — but Adalia refuses to allow herself to fail. There's a thump nearby as a wyvern falls, only significant in that it means they are, presumably, winning —

but to a wolf there is no winning or losing, there is only dead and not dead, and Adalia means to be in the latter category when all this ends.

She's forced to relinquish her grip on the wyvern's throat when it slams her into a rock, the force of the blow snapping her jaws open, but she doesn't give it time to gear up for another acid attack, lunging immediately upward with her paws to claw at its eyes. The wyvern shrieks and hisses, rearing backward not yet blind but halfway there. Adalia takes the opportunity to launch herself forward again, this time landing more securely on the wyvern's side and forcing it down into the muck as she searches for a weak spot on its hide.

It's an iron thing, old — older than the bones that choke this stretch of river — hide burnished for near an Age of skins shed and regrown.

And shed again. There's a hollow in the great hump of its neck, where shoulder meets muscle: A young wyrm's injury, never knit again quite whole. It gives beneath the press of teeth, caves unnaturally in place; enough brute force, and she'll have an end of this at last.

(A small dynasty of scale, snuffed out.)

"Let me see," Alan crouches beside Gwen to take her mangled leg, disregards the thrashing thing, the knives yet nearby. Pressure collects in the air nearby, or. Not the air. Something near to it. "Does it hurt?"

Probably. But the way she answers matters.

The beat of wings overhead and Gwenaëlle, dazed, oblivious momentarily to Guilfoyle struggling (not for much longer) with the last breaths of the wyvern, “Did you see the bird?”

—she flinches at his hands, pain sharpening focus in this moment and not wherever she was before, knuckles white clutching the bow and cheekbone and temple turning deeper, muddier colours where she'd collided hard with unsympathetic foliage. It hurts, and she's pale with it but pulled taut with triumph, too. The impact of arrow in beast still reverberates behind her sternum, rage a fist she's learning to wield and not a mouth sewn shut.

(This is probably fine.)

"Yes," He saw the bird. It’s entirely possible that Alan notices birds before he notices people, or the time of day, or whether the room is on fire. "Did you know him?"

What mangled muscles? They’re talking about birds. A hand to her face, slick with her own blood (as holy as the creatures dying about them, as much one). The other takes a tear in her sleeve, rips cloth free. There's no hope of soaking all the blood, and this isn't water to pour over a wound; enough death in it already.

The last of the wyvern's life slides out upon Guilfoyle's knives. The red thread winding through their little circle rips at once tight as cord, unspools itself into flesh with fever-heat. It's imprecise. Bruises bloom brown-green-yellow-gone before the marks of teeth begin to mend themselves. Awareness clears and —

That may not be ideal. The bow's good, for all its absent string: It's something to grip. This isn't pleasant.

It's not enough, either. Skin crawls with stolen life, restitches meat to bone, and Alan turns to bite his own hand, chews a great rend in old scar with the unflinching expression of old practice. Hurt can be turned outwards, but there are limits, and he's already overspent. The eroded edges of the Fade have worn a little farther from his grasp. Can't do more without digging in his own guts, or another's. That Guilfoyle might volunteer doesn't mean he's about to ask.

Gwen won't be walking steadily for a bit, and sickness is certain without minding. Adalia might see to that upkeep, if she's the skill — else they may need to make new contacts. Alan shoots a glance over his shoulder for the wolf.

Takes a while sometimes, to come out of a place. Takes a while to remember your own.

Edited 2018-08-27 03:48 (UTC)

The wolf stands over its kill, one massive paw planted on the wyvern's partially-removed foreleg and rent chest, maw bloody and dripping. Her head lifted and ears pricked to attention, they swivel this way and that as she listens for more enemies. None seem to be forthcoming, and the wolf gradually relaxes, licking its chops of blood as it turns to lope toward Alan and Gwenaëlle. The human she sniffs at, looking down at the wound in her leg —

and suddenly Adalia stands where the wolf had been, dropping to her knees next to Gwenaëlle, heedless of the muck. Some things fade with the sloughed-off shape; the wyvern blood around her mouth does not.

"Are you stable, can you walk?"

She might be able to give Gwenaëlle slightly more mobility, but this wound is larger than she can heal in one day.

Edited 2018-08-30 02:26 (UTC)

Pain strains her voice—awareness is terrible, her knuckles turning white around the bow that she is unlikely to release her grip on any time soon—but she is sufficiently stable to bark a laugh, to say, “Apparently I know the wolf as well,” which means yes, of the bird, or at least she thinks so—

It couldn't be, but maybe it was. It's gone, now, when she looks; maybe it's stupid that she looked at all. She doesn't believe in those things, she's sure, except perhaps while she's bleeding.

“I can try,” she says, but Guilfoyle is already wrapping an arm around her waist and lifting her from the water, only a tightening of his jaw betraying how much more effort doing so requires of him now than it once might have.

The shift hurts, too, but she grits her teeth through it. It's Guilfoyle who says, “Your own wyvern bite will need attention,” to Alan, impassively rewriting history. What blood magic.

It says something, maybe, that Adalia didn't even notice Alan's own wound, too preoccupied with Gwenaëlle's. She pushes to her feet, looking between Gwen and Alan with a rather torn expression — she can only do so much, and if she spreads her limited healing abilities between both of them she can do even less.

Not to mention that that hardly looks like a wyvern bite, but that's not particularly important at the moment, is it.

"I could... help? With that? I can try to help Gwenaëlle walk better or I can try to close that up some, or I could do both with less efficacy, what would be most helpful?"

CLOSED | i'm not one to ever pray for mercy

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