Creatrice opens her mouth to reply to the blue-eyed woman, but no words come out, only a startled exhalation as what she can only describe as a monster dredges itself up from the sea and falls down upon her in a fury. She barely notices the feeling of his fangs, only the way the force of his bite makes her breath turn raspy, and how he lifts her into the air as if she is nothing at all. Rock and bone and shell fly up in her defense, bouncing off his reddened skin. The small cuts heal before they even have time to bleed. The larger boulders slip out of her grasp - panic makes her grip on the magic too slick and they fall mere inches from where they had lain before.

Those awful fangs do something. She doesn't know what, for a moment her brain screams that something is so very, very wrong, and in the next moment she is full of fire and the Beast collapses, crushing her into the mud as he twitches and grinds his teeth even harder. The shadows that follow him wrap around them, they writhe and seem to hiss at her. The girl's eyes roll, her vision is full of static and darkness and the fire burning her veins turns to heaviness. To stone. She's so, so heavy, and cold.

And she's furious.

She throws that heaviness back at the seizing creature without thinking, rolling eyes turning marble-white. It's an uncontrolled, accidental, blow that glances off his clenched jaw. The skin there turns to pale, brittle stone, cracks, shatters, baring muscle underneath. The force - if not the injury - is enough to break the throes of magic transfer and the creature's jaws part suddenly. Creatrice scurries back to wobbly feet, darting behind the palomino with ragged breath and blood on her lips, her neck, her chest.

"What--" she gasps at the mare, drinking the air in with thirsty sobs, "What?"

- Creatrice

It all happens so fast.

The movement on the surface of the water stirs again with bubbles rising in a peculiar way that Aela has seen before. She has been dragged under the waves multiple times, and she knows what it is to have the air ripped from your lungs. There is something there, and Aela continues to stand perfectly still. She hopes that the yearling beside her will follow her lead. It was something that Kota had taught her when she had been younger than Creatice is now: ‘Never run from anything Immortal. It only attracts their attention.’

She has no way of knowing if whatever down there is some type of Immortal, or Baltian, or perhaps some other monster. But experience has taught her to wait and so she does, keeping that thousand-yard-stare on the shore. What happens next is chaos and confusion, but Aela doesn’t move from it. There are shadows and a creature that smells as if it had died a hundred times over. There is something familiar about the way it lunges forward. Even bogged down by debris and seawood, with barnacles clinging to its sopping skin, she begins to recognize him. If there had been any doubt before that this was Wherewolf, it fled the moment Aela sensed his rage.

That was familiar, more familiar to her than the uncouth mass that charged at the girl beside her. It happens quickly and though Aela rises on her hindquarters to strike a fiery foreleg out at her aggravated half-brother, he already has her in his jaws, shaking her like the palomino had seen him furiously attack his foal-sized mother before. Her gold ears pin and the slender mare half-rears again, snaking her long neck towards the pair in an attempt to separate them.

But then they are crashing, and rolling, and then the girl is up. There is pain that causes Aela to recoil away from the writhing pegasus; there is a glimpse of something odd and pale on Wherwolf’s neck; there is the girl behind. The former Seneschal lifted her refined head, glancing briefly back at the red-marked filly. Not a what, her knowing stare implies (though perhaps with the heightened emotions surrounding them, the girl can hear Aela’s thoughts in her mind), but a who.

The rest - whatever the filly has done to him - they can figure out later.

Turning her attention back to her brother, Aela scowls at his melodramatics.

”Wherewolf.”

@Creatrice @Wherewolf

Let's be better strangers

Minutes pass. There's a high-pitched whine in his ears that refuses to fade and it makes the voices lingering above him sound as though they are underwater - or maybe it's him underwater, still - and it makes them sound like they are in the heart of the Mountain where the Fairies' and their magic caught him up like a fly with blood pouring from his nose, his eyes, his ears, and the only thing he can do is strike stiffly at his own head with a clumsy forehoof. It leaves a smear of rotting mud across that skinless cheek. Then, like a newborn, he is finding his feet, all power is gone, rage quieted, forgotten in the postictal haze. He doesn't remember the fine red fog of his blood filling the vengeful cavern, but he does the moments just before, the sense of something crawling, just under his skin, skittering across his brain and his blood-blackened eyes, tearing and tickling and insistent. Something of that feeling overcomes him now, as blurry eyes find cold blue ones, familiar ones. It should put him at ease, yet it doesn't - after all, Wherewolf doesn't have any friends.

Trying to remember feels like screaming.

Trying to breathe feels like drowning. Saltwater streams from his nostrils every time he exhales, rusty with old blood.

Whoever owns the familiar eyes stands over him, waiting with an aggrieved sort of patience and the soot-and-salt stallion blinks and shakes his head, desperately trying to chase away the blur of eyes that are unused to the sun and the air. It is painful how slowly Aela comes into focus, and there's an irritating sense of deja vu when she does. How many times will they come together this way? How many times will he find himself again after a rage and wake up to those blue eyes staring down at him? Anyone else might feel ashamed by her condescension, angry to be made so vulnerable - and certainly, anger is a favorite emotion for him - but he, filthy, bleeding and bloodied from the red girl glaring over Aela's back, with bright crimson hairs still stuck to his teeth, grins viciously at the pair of them and swaggers drunkenly forward.

"Awful lotta eels hangin' around for dry land," he rasps, his unused voice catching harshly on the rough edges of his salt-sore throat.

Image by Vakrai

It turns out that she had been right, and while a part of Aela is pleased with that revelation, she isn’t pleased at the state she finds Wherewolf in. He’s alive, but just barely, she thinks. He is encrusted with mud and sand; he smells foul, as if he really had died and had been rotting on the shore for days. He isn’t Fyr, and while her half-brother is right in that they aren’t friends, he is a recovered piece of her sunken Court.

They aren’t friends; they barely acknowledge their shared blood; but Wherewolf is useful to Aela, even in this dismal condition.

He is a piece on her chessboard, and to his credit, he’s a piece that isn’t Cheri or Obscene.

Feeling the heat and the anger radiating from the girl behind her, a golden ear flicks one way while the other swivels forward. Aela keeps her cool, calculating stare on the splayed pegasus, carefully watching as he tries to find his footing. It’s a silent compromise: she won’t encroach on his space so long as he is done with the theatrics. He looks like a mad-man, grinning wildly with the girl’s torn hair stuck between his fanged smile and the dried blood running from his dark nostrils.

Keeping her part of the bargain, Aela remains where she stands and only raises a brow at Wherewolf’s statement before quipping cryptically back ”I didn’t expect to find a snake on the shore. Wouldn’t you prefer the long grasses than slithering out into the open?”

@Wherewolf