Others felt their magic returns, others felt themselves gifted again; but Briella is different in the moment that she hears the clatters of stone and shifting sand. Those pale blue eyes leveling on the creature: a beast of impossible size and brawn, of of smooth angles and predatory curves. She sees the ripple beneath the dark flesh, and all the visceral addendums like pearly fangs coated and dripping in saliva… claws yellow and stained with suggestions of blood.
Like an ancient typhonic beast it lurks and lingers, circles her and she feels as if this thing is more than it seems- as if the shadows around it are so unreal and thick that the light itself bends away from them… like the beast cannot endure the harsh brightness; but whatever the truth she feels it’s fetish and rotten breath. Heat and moisture hanging in the air: it’s sumptuous and gravel-like voice rolling through the distance between them.
As if growing shorter by the second Briella flinches when she feels the suggestion of the creature’s tail sliding against her leg, and yet, she listens with a weighted heart and a heavy soul: with purpose driving her every thought and desire.
“I’ve been waiting for you…” it purrs, grotesque and hungry: as if it’s very desire was to devour her on the spot.
Briella is not cold, not frigid: she is not frightened- oh no, instead she is wakened to a new sensation: to rage and bitterness, to malice.
She stares at it, tracks it with her eyes, her every muscle tensing and her long legs prepared should the beast strike; but she thinks at first of the intelligence it has and so Briella speaks. Persuasion is always her first choice.
“If you’ve been waiting for me or the others, than you know very well why we’re here. We seek to move on in completion of a task. I am not doing this for myself, I am doing this for others: let the plague have me; but you will not, and I will complete this task. Move, and maybe you too can be saved.”
She is severe and cold, pragmatic in the moment and Briella finds in herself a driving flame that had long been sequestered away in the shadow.