Barrier Gulch [m] Asp

She is not dying- but there was a death! And now this- this blood is all she has left of them!

Ignored, spoken over, she is as piddling as a grounded autumn leaf. With a summoned strength she lifts her head, snarling to the shamanic woman who would take them away from her!

“I am a healer,” she exerts with a rasp, pressing onto nerveless limbs to rise doggedly beneath the nocturnal gleam of ten watchful eyes. Deep crimson tears trickle from between her legs, and there is no volition left to secrete what should have been her intimacy to keep.

“Release him, Khusobek. That is an order.” She will not pass her seething gaze from Zaahira, finality in her voice aiming the effect of a slap in the face. “You have no cause to detain him.”

As for the sage-eyed coy, an ancient, rushing instinct told her to trust the medicine woman. So it was with a particular pain that her shaking limb swept for the pale flower as it sat so neatly prepared near the woman's side.

“This is poison,” she crushes the nightshade with her forepaw, smearing it stem, petals and pistil against the grit of the still-warm sands. “I expect a hemet of old Akashingo knows this,” amber eyes flick to the nameless man, “He certainly does.” Two suitable prospects for the Jodai and Mazoi to gratify residual bloodlust over.

And then there were none left to face but the one who she wanted to least of all. Eyes, freed now of their careful custody, she turns to him.

If there was a fair outcome for Akavir, she knew it was this one. For one week she’d had him; a sting of endless potentials and daydreams. But the kindling that had once drawn him to her was gone. They did not know one another, not truly, not in the ways that mattered. But she knew his heart was good, that he was deserving. Now he was untethered, plucked of the final feather on a wing that might have flown her same path. Freed of Pharaohs and kingdoms and the curse of blood.

His leonine stare drew her, and in her ambered eyes Eset hoped to convey it all.

“It’s alright, Akavir. I will nurse my own wounds. It is not the smartest way to live, it is not the best. But- it's the way I am.”