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.