IN THE END WE ALL BECOME CURED OF OUR SENTIMENTS

The vagrant's delivery of Malachi's purposeful secrecy regarding Larus' location had sent Tuwawi into a tailspin. She drifted despondently across Duskfire's scrim and let the night's biting cover embrace her. It felt difficult to breath at times -- hard to maintain the clarity to decide exactly what she should do. If the dethroned hadn't been completely inconsolable before, then she was now; armed with the knowledge that her son wasn't lost for ever... but instead stolen by the heathens of the coast. She seethed viciously, heart bursting at the seams as if it had been scorched by a hot iron -- betrayed by Malachi and spurned by the sea witches of the West.

She gnashed her teeth indignantly at the thought, a strand of spit oozing from a canine. Had they abused her son? Refused his return? She could only imagine what Larus looked like now. Maera was fiery and beautiful -- the apple of her eye -- did her child resemble his father? Or perhaps his golden mask was as vibrant as Tuwawi's red cape. The memory of her missing boy made the ember's face burn, bereft by his absence, and her eyes welled with rare tears of complete, and utter remorse.

Without warning, a shrill cry pieced the glacier's silence and Tuwawi broke into a canter, fur wild and posture untamed. She was one of the last to arrive -- just in time to watch Malachi, Manauia, and Sen kick off into the outlands. Scarlett wilted away towards the territory's heart but Týrr stood, eyes gleaming, at a dark and ragged clump a few yards away. There, in the snow, laid the ruined head of a wolf. Its eye sockets were bloodied and gouged in the most horrific way, the tail end of its spinal cord spindled like a rat's tail. The rotting smell was putrid, but not nearly as strong as the message it represented -- something Tuwawi understood all too well.

Every hair stood on end as she ruthlessly beelined towards the decapitated head like prey, pouncing with a violent jab of both forelimbs. In a moment she snatched it up in her tattered maw and delivered powerful bites to rend the skull apart. Its taste was rancid, texture chunky but brittle, and the coagulated blood spilled on the ground in thick, soupy clumps. She broke the jaw in two and cracked the cranium in her frenzy, tattering its face until it was but an unrecognizable piece of meat. "I'll kill them!" the queen screeched, unbidden -- tossing the head aside. "I'll kill them all!"