Lion Head Mesa and everywhere I turn's another wall

1/5 for mercenary general trade, keeping an eye on the borders

Her shoulder met the rock with a barely audible thud and a spike of pain, racing through her shoulder to her skull, making her clench her teeth.

You’re full of good ideas today, huh Nephele Came the internal berating of a voice that sounded like a thousand different others. She had long learned to ignore it. Sure, it was rather loud today, but she could function just fine under it.

She scrubbed the rest of her body against the rock, aggressively trying to rid it of an itch she couldn’t reach with her foot. Living as Sabah was nice, she had to admit. The cool, withdrawn guard to the royals, she who slept alone in her duty, near the borders to keep an ever watchful eye. It was a part she was happy to play, with all the free food that came with it.

Itch scratched, she lunged her way back to her guard position, settling in like a gargoyle above a church, keeping an eye on what was holy to Akashingo.

"Ho, ho, what's all this then?"

The raucous voice was a poor match for the alabaster she-wolf loping across the dry plain toward the lone mountain and its lone sentinel. The bob and weave of her tail as she approached was flagrant. The bitch walked like a ruler. Oni didn't think all that much of herself, but it was fun to act like she did, especially when it might get a rise out of someone.

That someone being Nephele, who looked plenty capable of scaring lingering vagrants off her lawn. Oni was a more persistent kind of infection, she would find. "Got any pretty treasures in there?" she asked with a deliberate cackle.

And that’s where it went wrong, because Nephele wasn’t capable of much of anything. Sabah, maybe, but Nephele? Nope. Absolutely not. She was a coward to her very core.

She was starting to see why she wasn’t a guard among the Monkshood when came a wolf who smelled like trouble. Nephele clenched her jaw, looking down from her rock with a bored expression.

Akashingo. She said, short and flat, trying to channel who she wanted Sabah to be. Everything she truly wasnt.

No. Unless you counted the people. By comparison, Nephele was rather...bland.