[Shio]

Rrip.

Shio gasped as the hellhound loomed before her, its moon-bright fur in sharp contrast to the blood oozing through a gash in her skin. The sanguine fluid dripping from its crystal claws, its shards-of-ice teeth. Oblivion was approaching faster than it ever had, even in the temple of Haya, where the girl had sacrificed her own life's fluid upon the unholy altar... This was it, her courage had dwindled nearly to nothing, the last embers on the burned-out wick of a waxen candle.

It lunged at her again, vermillion maw agape, Shio just avoiding the attack by stumbling abruptly to the side. Her throwing needle trembled uselessly in weakened digits, curled about the object as if it were no more that an feather-light quill, not a subtle weapon of destruction. O, Jalat... Nall closed her eyes, feeling a heavy clawed paw swing just above her head, taking with it a few strands of paperwhite hair. The first test, and already she had failed, slipped into the repetitive pattern that her life had been following for so many long years... No matter what anyone said, no matter how they looked at her, Shio was no longer young, no longer a child.

At forty-four years of age, she was an adult, trapped in a body that no longer suited her, cursed with the perfect blood of her brethren, the divine taint that brought about such deadly visions... From Phedos... From Kaimelea... It was impossible to tell which god had decided to torment her so, she had offended so many.

Thud.

The monster's swipe hit the elf square in her chest, sending her flying, bone-thin back slamming against the stony embrace of an infuriated tree. Branches grasped at her hair, her hands, her ankles, ensnaring her in an inescapable net of dreaded nature. Shio struggled against her restraints with every remaining ounce of her strength, fear-filled eyes fixated upon the horrifying apparition that prowled closer with every passing moment. An infernal gleam in its hellfire eyes, breath reeking of brimstone, the cries of the damned spilled from behind its sharp teeth.

Mistress... The vision of the Cyraxian woman in all her fearful beauty loomed in the eye of Shio's mind, filling her senses with the master's intoxicating presence. With the primordial desires that she had felt during their endless sessions, the nonchalance with which she had killed that helpless man... His blood, his blood, she could remember the way it drenched her body, encrusted her hair like a crown of rubies, the way that it washed away with nothing but water, as if his last moments were never there. As if he didn't deserve to exist at all.

The absolute power she had felt... It was here, in the darkness. Nall slammed her iron spike into the bark of the tree, its cry reverberating through her body, its sticky sap gluing the painful instrument to her fingers. Slowly, it retreated, boughs curling in upon itself as if in an embrace, a cocoon of healing and anger, rejection, the place in which the girl had so recently been. Angrily, Shio jerked her defense from the screaming bark, throwing it overhand, with all her might, at the approaching dreadwolf.

Over and over it turned through the startled air before landing, with a satisfying crack, in her enemies skull. The creature landed on the forest floor with a thud, eyes glazed over, brains and blood drizzling through the gaping hole in the hollow cathedral of its skull. Nall crouched there panting, her hands on her knees, as she watched it dissolve into mist, into the air from whence it had formed. "Minhiriath!," she called triumphantly, the ghost materializing like smoke on the horizon.