Her throat is protected but her neck is not, and the piebald stallion’s snapping teeth find their mark. Lepis bites back a gasp, her own teeth clenching tight to give it no indication of weakness. The original wounds along her neck are from more vicious blows than this bite, but the blue skin that makes up the scar tissue is more sensitive than her uninjured hide had ever been. Wolfbane had known that, comes an intrusive thought. He’d kneaded them so gently on those early nights when she was nearly too stiff to move, and even when the pain of them had faded with the years he was never less than tender.

The cursed creature in front of her might have forgotten the details life that its skin once had, but Lepis has not.

She has tried though, and the habit with which she shoves down the intrusive thought is one made easy by repetition. This is not Wolfbane in front of her. It is not even Castile. It is a monster, and her husband is dead. This thing in front of her had killed him.

‘Finally’ it hisses as they separate. The voice is strange – not quite Castile but not Wolfbane either. Is it Wyrm, she wonders, or Longclaw? It doesn’t matter, she thinks as her dark hooves shuffle about on the red earth. She feels it growing softer beneath her as she is backed closer to the water. Had she paid more attention to her Uncle’s lessons on battle she might have remembered the importance of keeping the higher ground, but she did not. Her only focus now is not turning her back to it, in never giving it the chance to attack unseen.

It feels the regret, she is sure of it, but it does not seem to slow it. It taunts her instead, and she wonders if perhaps the only things the Curse keeps of the lives it consumes is the knowledge of how to inflict the most damage on those they once cared for. Lepis doesn’t need the bravery she’d summoned to curl her lip in disgust when she realizes the answer he refers to. That’s why he’d waited so quietly through the spring and summer; he’d been biding his time. The dun mare has heard rumors the Taigan Ambassador had borne a pair of striped twins this past spring, but it seems the Curse has decided to spread itself out in a more literal sense.

She has worried much over what she might use to lure it here. Lepis had contemplated stealing away the trio from Taiga or launching another effort to find Heartfire. She needs bait for the trap they are setting, but getting it seemed always to require moral compromise. Unjust imprisonment is one of the very few things on which the grey-eyed mare does not compromise, and so she has struggled long to think of what might entice the thing. She needs it here only long enough to spring the trap, and with enough warning of its arrival to ensure they are ready.

Spring is farther away than she’d like, but the opportunity he unwittingly presents to her is too good to pass up. When the false bravado leaves her, Lepis is likely to regret the decision she makes. Why worry about finding bait when she might grow it herself?

‘Come closer’, he growls, and Lepis does.

The wariness in her face as she draws nearer is not manufactured, and though she does start at the transformation from wings to tentacles, she does not shy away. The bravery keeps the fear away; there is no need to put on a show for this monster the way she had for the Pangean one. It knows she is frightened – or at least the scattered remnants of her husband would know. Outwardly though, she appears nothing more than resigned and suitably wary for a woman approaching a monster with the appetites of a man.

She knows that the safest thing to do is run.
She comes closer instead, flinching as a pair of tentacles wrap themselves around her forelegs. Another winds its way around the base of her left wing, and the last squeezes around the narrowest part of her throat. They do not impede her movement for all their tightness, and she continues forward, stopping just near enough to be heard over the quiet slap of the crescent lake against the shore.

“You’re lucky there’s no line tonight.” Lepis tells it, quickly drowning the nausea that rises at this flippant reference of her past. Not a flicker of it appears on her shadowed face or in the low tone of her voice. “But you should know I prefer my payment up front these days.” The dark-haired mare appears entirely uninterested in picking a further fight. Lepis knows she takes a risk in this, in hoping it will believe that this is truly the type of woman she’s become in the four years since her marriage shattered. There have always been rumors that she had seduced her way to success, and to those on the outside there does seem some merit to them. Her hope is that there is little enough of Bane in this creature that it accepts that outsider’s perspective. Or perhaps just enough of him left to confirm the suspicions that she had always worried he'd had. 

The silence between them stretches just long enough that she prods: “So? What do I get out of this arrangement?” Her fondness for bargains does not appear to have changed, though it is clear from the distaste that deepens the lines around her storm-colored eyes that she expects a rather large repayment for her participation in any deal. The tentacle around her neck makes breathing slightly difficult, and her mouth remains open even after she is quiet. She does glance at the tentacle just to the side of her mouth, and then bares her teeth at it in a mocking grin as if to say: ‘See, I could bite but do not.’

@[Wolfbane] had told her she couldn’t bargain with the thing, but Wolfbane is dead. He clearly didn’t know the Curse as well as he thought he did.