Starglow Basin destripado

for any verapaz wolf <3

their numbers grow.

some are willing, some are not. there is the witch and her child-charge, @Nokht.

soto need only remember how nino died a dog's death for the clemency to fall to ashes in his mouth. juarez would take this boy and send only his bloodied skull back to his mother. nino would have taken an eye.

soto is neither of these men -- he is still alive. the similarities between him and his fallen brothers are becoming few and far between.

he could arrange something with safiya, maybe. have her take the boy and his spiteful witch.

but again, he thinks of khusobek -- who tortured soto alive before his darling daughter ever lost an eye -- and any conceivable mercy he feels dies a nascent, aborted death.

no, he must send a message. he had only ever come to muat-riya with gifts.

now, he will come to them with coal, and they shall see for themselves how bitter refugist vigilante tastes.

when will you set us free? qiao rounded upon the scoundrel, devoid of the respect she knew he commande. sangre's wounds have been tended to - between herself and @Fiamma, the woman had better prognosis for survival than before. and qiao, growing impatient in such cramped quarters, demanded her freedom.

she hobbled closer, peering at the ugly scar across the man's face. it was oozing still, and qiao had never once offered to treat it. she had hoped in doing so, the stupid man might lose his eye. a fair price to pay for breaking her leg and forcing her to heal her captors.

if the small fingerspells she wove under the cover of darkness were of any good, he would lose his eye and then some in the coming days.

the bruja comes to him. hobbling. bristling.

he can still see out of the corner of his eye those writhing things he first saw in khusobek's cellar.

he does not like her, or trust her, but sangre needs her. and so, he reluctantly kept her fed, and listened -- belabored at times -- to the incessant prattling of her hateful tongue.

and while he has no inkling of what each word means, the spiteful way in which she spits them out as if uttering them sours her tongue -- ah, he knows a witch's hate when he hears it.

callarse. he snaps at her face, a show of teeth to subdue her. he does not like the way her eyes trail over his face, as if waiting for something to happen.

he supposes that she, like nokht, is wondering when verapaz will have bled them dry of their use.

if he has his way, it will be soon. the only good witch is a dead witch, and soto is anxious to see this one put deep underground.

what could she do? she is a prisoner in his keep.

qiao quailed under his muscular show of menace. she'd grown accustomed to the luxury of a pain-free life, an opulence soto seemed diametrically opposed to withholding. if cooperation is what it took for her to break free, she would do almost anything asked.

and when she escaped she would see to it he lost everything -- not just that stupid eye.

soto's teeth flashed again, herding her to a thin wall of shale. any time she glanced back at him he snapped at the air between them -- a gesture the witch well understood.

piece of shit, qiao gritted as she limped towards her new holding block. it'd been her mistake to open her mouth -- but he will learn soon enough the soul-cost of stealing a priestess.

in time soto would learn his eye would not heal. he would draw parallels and wonder if this very second was the moment his right eye was doomed forever.

the witch's back turns to him, but even he can see the subtle fingerspell. furious, soto strikes her once more -- and again, and again -- waiting for the cries and whimpers that never come.

he should know better; he should remember the man from his villa -- but soto is lost in the moment and reliving all he has lost

juarez

nino

the garden in luneshale he had worked so hard to cultivate

safiya --

his dulce lluvia

and then, unbidden in his memory
an unb
the seeping, hideous image of marciela

soto beats the witch until her spine slumps beneath his teeth, his muscles tremoring with exhaustion and an unbidden, mortal fear that the jaguar that comes for them all is hunched over, lingering just out of sight.