Redsand Canyon One more drink, one less I’ll lose

renard :handshake: finley
    sarcastic long live the queen quips

the canyon trapped sound, just like it trapped heat. the snarls rose over the eerie stillness of the desert like a clarion call. at night redsand, baked dry by sunlight and swallowed up in the dark, was an alien place that bore a lingering menace. around every cliff, a shadow waiting to strike.

and yet they weren't the one in charge of this.

an intruder this far into the canyon? when they'd been on such alert? abandoning the soundlessness of their tread, they picked up speed, sticking to the deeper shadows. the canyon was a friend by now, just like the dark; it led them where they needed to go, through the pass and over the hillside.

and at the top, looking down into the valley below --

donovan was practically bathed in blood. the star of his own little show. it dripped from him like water, dark and gleaming, and before him, nemisis. snarling, streaming blood as donovan bore down on her.

renard's own teeth had itched to teach her a lesson. none of the teasing dismissal from the glacier: a serious thing. a warning. you aren't a child playing with her toys. not anymore. if you don't wise up, next time i'll be coming for your throat. but donovan was smitten, and she, for all her posturing, was a brat. they knew where that would lead.

and they weren't her mentor. if they had been, she wouldn't have turned out like this: bleeding dark enough under the moonlight to look black. donovan's jaws locked around her neck like a vise, crunching through tissue and flesh, the windpipe, the jugular. blood spraying in glittering droplets like rain.

that was it, then. long live the queen.

it took her a long, long time still to fall. and in the interim, they began to pick out their fellow spectators, witnesses to an execution: the healer, first, offering her help. colin, gasping words like a condemnation, as though the saints did not come exactly as advertised. auriel. derg, pacing back and forth.

finley.

they watched her. a predator watching a wounded animal, waiting eagerly for the weakness that would invite it to strike. but she moved with a soldier's mindless blankness. nothing behind the eyes. did she have less of a stomach than they imagined? or was it something else?

something else. their eyes locked on the curve of her shoulder, hungry. they were eager for that conversation. 

but for now, there was only blood. there was donovan, standing over nemisis' broken body, a howl dying in the air. in the garden of the saints, there was silence, the kind that came only on the heels of death. and what better way to stake their claim?

thought you'd learned your lesson the first time, donovan. sasha wasn't enough? but maybe now you finally understand. 

didn't even have to hammer this one into you.