Felltree Marsh red duck

some small measure of satisfaction glimmered within sobeille to have known the taste of black scar's blood; though he be larger, what difference did size make to a caribou killer?

a dark excitement pulsed within her.

his reprisal came swift; he struck her hard, a volcanic blow that sent her reeling with cosmic rays of pain. something else erupted within her that somehow steadied her quivering limbs. she coughed, blood spluttering from her throat as his monolithic shape reared above her.

she saw the streak of ivory in her periphery and smug knowing spread within her. sivaak would show him what amounted of men who laid their teeth against women.

yet justice's loosened arrow flew past him and plunged its searing tip into her instead. bludgeoned by sivaak's form, sobeille was sent sprawling like a hare caught mid-air by the seeking talons of a hawk. her body twisting as the ground was stolen out from her, the world in spinning orbit, her eyes tracking a single lonely cloud --

she gasped, sucking air into lungs that burst with agony. though her eyes stung she saw yura inching close.

what blade was this to sink so deep?

spasms rent her spine; a lesson so cruelly applied that sobeille scarcely regathered herself, a thousand eyed stare upon her betrayer. gradually her eyes turned from glazed to dark, having tasted only bitterness in sivaak's parting lesson.

it stung all the more to have come from her own coven.

now sobeille did as the caribou taught her. rounding her shoulders, the girl dropped her panting head and bolted after yura's retreating form. teeth and claws made red ribbons of her auburn skin, but it did not matter to the girl whose only motive now was survive at all costs.