Private The Roe of Stranger Tides

[Krava'quiloor]

Weightless. Twin roe, ruby-red, floated softly in the undercurrent, layers peeling from it until they were translucent fins, like the skirt of a cuttlefish. It was a thing more than a creature, in the same way a pupa shell is a thing. Slowly, undulating with the tides, it made its way toward the warmer waters of the shore.

She could feel the worry through the thick wall of muddled thought interchanging with sleep. Any normal person trying to pull the scope she had would have gone out screaming, on fire from the sheer energy of the Shroud erupting through their every orifice. She was *made* to do this, on the other hand. And yet, held to existence only barely, for a few long days of sustained hibernation.
'We are close.'
'Don't... Sleep. You'll go... hungry.'
'This body can withstand a couple weeks without, my lady.' Claws gently brushed against her scalp, straightening out the tangled, ripped mess of white hair. 'We are soon to wash ashore. Worry of naught.'
Her mind drifted off again.

*

Daev the fisherman skidded down the rocks and hid behind the large one. Thank the gods, the boat was still in place. And something like a piece of a ship's upper deck in the front, lodged into the shore by the tide, long after some bodies showed up, bloated and grey. Must have been hell out there on the open.
It was something else that made him hide, though.
A huge bubble. Like salmon roe, amber and... then it burst, with a deafening scent of fresh meat and lilacs floating on the salty wind. Daev peeked out, expecting no less than some water dragon spawn to come from an egg this large. Mayhaps, it was edible, too, would sell for a pretty coin in the market either way.

The waves were carrying the red away, faster than any kind of blood had any right to wash off. The wind was picking up again, sharp and cool under the daunting ashen clouds.
There was something white under the quickly dissolving layers. White and ochre-yellow and orange. Small for a fish.
Oh dear gods, was that what the merfolk were like?

Something else moved behind the carcass of the ship. A piece of wreckage - a large swath of sail fabric - was pulled behind the boards, and a shadow seemed to peek from behind the hull piece. Someone was watching him while he was watching it.

Daev suddenly felt like a mouse in the sights of a cat. No. There was no playful promise of violence. He felt like a hunter that came across a she-bear with cubs. Yeah, that was more like it.
The shadow retreated, hid. Maybe it was more afraid of him than he of it.
Maybe it was just waiting for him to get closer.

Well, Daev the Fisherman was no fool to some strange-looking merfolk to go traipsing into such a clear trap on his own!
He fled as fast back up the cliffside as his limbs could carry him.

*

In her dreams, she could feel the softness of the fabric that seemed black until it shone with sparkling galaxies and nebulas of purple and green. Like a gemstone, or bird's feathers. Like the expanses beyond the sky. She could hear the cadence, a song that was not a song, a soothing lullaby that carried her tiny mind and told without words of great journeys far from the ground. As she grew up, she knew the names of the stars that had never been spoken out loud. She knew the names of others that did not share the Creed. A fallen people, a larger hive. A hungry one.

The tidal waves of her mind were so weak, scattering so broadly, across minds and dreams with a touch that was barely a lint on clothing.
Behind violet eyes. Such sadness. Humanity lost, denial still alive.
Behind eyes of amber that burned like coal. Such loneliness. So many regrets. Never human.
Blue eyes. Hungry. Wild. Human but oh, he was yearning for anything but.
They looked back, if only for a moment.
None of them were the minds that she knew.

*

And then, the consonance collapsed, the wave receded, and she came to in her own body, far enough from the receding waves. She looked up to the sky, immediately probing the one link bound to her mind, receiving confirmation - near. Looking for shelter. Hid from human. More coming down the cliff.
Slowly, with the thick numbness of every muscle, the not-elf turned her gaze, her head, and then her upper body, towards the unknown resonance.

The garment's skirts weighed her legs down like a block of ice. Her spidersilk hair clung to the face in salt-weeping clumps.
Slowly, with a hiss of effort, she sat up, long sleeves clinging to arms like thin willow-branches, and tried to collect herself, come what may. The back straightened, the chilled hands, slightly purple-pink instead of reddish, tried clumsily to adjust her clothing, surprisingly intact, unlike the portion of her hair that was cut off by a piece of debris during the drowning.
Mind's tide gathered like electricity in the air before a thunderstorm. Tension of a string ready to snap. Heavy-laden grim expectation. The porcelain façade of civility. Thought sharper than a blade, hidden, wrapped achingly into restraint.

 

[Osytha]

Hoofbeats — dulled, rhythmic; waxing and waning. They pound through the sand, growing loud and near before arcing away in a recurring cycle. But, gradually, that pattern’s epicentre closes in on Krava’quiloor.

The sun is warm, shining bright off turf-cropped chalk cliffs and pebble-strewn sand, and the frothing crests of languid waves. It also glints off the hard line of Osytha’s sword as it weaves low and high, her sallet and clamshells, the buckles on Forbítter’s tack. And it shows the morbid hue of dead flesh on figures rising from the surf. They converge toward the show of life taunting them, that mount and rider wending across the beach. Salt and rot trailing in their wake.

The bodies had been out at sea for some days, from what Osytha can tell of their appearance. Plenty of time for the Blight to set in. Bloody shipwrecks, it’s always the same — drowned corpses gestating in the deep, only to come bobbing back once they’ve bloated with gas, and having already found their feet once more. When Daev heard there was a Knight about and came running up to her, she knew what awaited them in that regard.

His tale about the other things he’d seen, well… that’s a bit of a puzzler, and no mistake.

She gallops in gentle arcs. In toward the lurching mass, a lone point of contact just close enough to one of their number for her blade to flick out. Then curving back away, away from their outstretched hands and curling fingers, before their ranks can close in around her and pull her down, yellow nails gouging, rotten maws rending, overwhelming mass crushing her broken body without chance of escape.

One body crumples in answer to her strike, its head a mangled mess of splintered bone and spattered brain.

“One to stake!” Osytha yells back to the huddle of coastal folk holding behind the rocks. Daev, plus a few other souls who’d felt like the risk in helping a knight clear the beach of again-walkers is worth the salvage they might score at the end. “Careful, now!”

She keeps going, kiting the undead away from their freshly re-felled member. Men and women emerge from cover to swarm on the twitching thing, and quickly they hammer a great wooden post through its chest. Pin it like a butterfly, until they have the luxury of time to find a more permanent solution. Might be, the sword blow alone was enough. Or might be it wasn’t. Blight’s a funny thing, like that.

A couple more passes, and a couple more grey bodies crumple, before Osytha sees it. Her. A lone figure lifts themselves enough to sit upright over by the wreckage. Hair entire like the stripe in Osytha’s own, deathly thin, but clearly not, to the knight’s practiced eye, rot-blotchy and bloated.

Someone actually made it out alive?

Osytha presses a heel into Forbítter’s flank and he turns hard, until he’s bearing toward this figure. What she spies has her kick a little more speed into her horse, has her slip the longsword into her left hand as she hoists her spear out from its holster in her right. Couches its butt as the vicious tip angles down, forward, and she charges in hard. Though, not quite at the not-elf. Rather, Osytha’s trajectory is aimed maybe ten feet to the side.

That spearhead buries into the chest of what had been a young deckhand. The full, uncompromising force of steed and rider combined crushes her ribcage, cracks vertebrae apart, and hurls the shambling thing off its feet. Osytha immediately pulls Forbítter in a tight arc and slows his gait. Twists her spear free of the floundering mess and returns it to its sling. Salt from Forbs’ sweat flicks over that of the surf as his feet crash in the shallows, and by the time they round on Krava’quiloor, he’s moving at a gentle trot.

An elf, Osytha notes, now she’s close enough to fully see. Bright, emerald eyes. And she really is as gaunt as she had seemed at a distance. So, so pale, and the colour that’s there has the purple tint of one perishing from cold.

Days out there on the sea… it must have been utter hell.

“Can you stand?” Osytha leans over; frees a foot from the stirrup and extends a hand down, to help her up behind the saddle. Meanwhile, a couple score feet behind the knight, dead and seagrass-tangled feet scuff through the sand their way. “T’beachhead is too dangerous reight now. Come — Ah’ll get you to safety.”

 

[Krava'quiloor]

The vibrations that spread through the earth were like a scent to the sight. Despite the body's sharply pointed narrow ears, Krava's hearing has never been remedied to match an elf. But... she heard things minds connected to, sensations processed in the moment, complete, bare. Air tearing out of the lungs when the sword fell with force onto the forms. Another, panicked hitch of the heart. Frozen whisper of a prayer on the lips.

She closed her eyes and reached to one of the faint echoes. The wide berth of thoughtflow banked by cliffs of will, channeled and poured through a single entity for a moment.

One of the commonfolk stumbled, almost lost the weapon they were torching. Her eyes, hazel for every day of twenty-four years of her life, have turned a deeper shade of amber-green. A gasp of surprise, not quite pain, thoughts ringing with a clarity of the burning sun - a presence, cool and collected. It retreated like a figure fading into the fog, smoothly and completely, but the clarity remained, despite the shock, for quite a while. Coordination wove into alacrity, hold on the improvised weapon more confident and less desperately white-knuckled. Eyes would track movement with ease, body would respond with inspired efficiency. For just a few minutes, a small boon left behind through a bleeding nose. Waking up fully, for the first time in twenty-four years.

'Undead, in dozens,' Lock concluded from his hidey hole in the wreckage, as he fussed with the sailcloth, trying to fashion something of a cloak, a robe sufficient enough to be able to pass in the thundering approach. 'Your orders?'
In the thoughtway between them, there was nothing for a few long moments, though upon a wary prod - Krava seemed aware.

Her head had turned to the largest presence - the woman, the steed. The things that duo of entities was achieving aligned fully with the Creed's doctrine. The glimmer of steel and buckles like seawater scattered in the light. A warrior's heart, and warrior's means.
Putting heel to move towards.

*

Eyes followed. Measured.
The trajectory that would seem to be bound for impact with her sitting form, was a few degrees off, and would not in fact converge.
And, feeling Lock's rising alert, a short unworded command followed to stay by, answered by a pang of disgruntlement and obedience.

Being blind to the realm of spirit was a bane in more ways than one. The spirits of the fox-tailed lordling from the East, at least, could barely impact the material before manifesting with enough power - to fall prey for they had no body to protect them from the tide. But the undead...

Most of them had no mind. No hunger that could be satisfied for survival's sake remaining in the moving form. Just the void resonance that her kin had to craft sophisticated tools to detect, or - which was unthinkable in the world of thinking things - rely purely on their vision to be aware of someone. A true aberration worthy of destruction. Because some undead made more undead as they went. She'd heard a theory about unresting souls or some such - irrelevant, as none of her senses could put it to the test.

She had none of those sophisticated tools.

But she had eyes enough to spot the lumbering hulks waddling and swaying forth to the life that they all hungered for, all over the beach.
And a spot of entertainment, at the hurricane of steel and righteous inspiration, glorious in her mortal and persistent form, fighting alongside the mob - for a stranger's safety. At least, for now.

The long white eyelashes lowered.
The calculation, the fleeting exchange, the recounting, happened all in barely a heartbeat's lapse.

*

Once a thing was felled behind her, Krava's eyes opened, mouth remaining closed to limit access to the overwhelmingly clear scent of grave-swollen pustulence being burst and mauled. The unexpressive face shifted. Lips twitched, almost involuntarily, with a breathless chuckle - and she reached out for the offered hand, but could not as much as lift herself off the ground. Eyes widened with despair, narrowed with frustration.
She tried again, in quick succession, grabbed the hand with lukewarm, numb fingers, but only barely - hooked to the fingertips, and fell away, before calling out, "I can't."

If she were little, she would cry from the pain of her body's betrayal, from the frustrations of a hurt pride, from knowing that tides turned easily and there was little choice.
But she had not been little for a very, very long time. She had made choices, ugly choices, hard choices, to make sure that she and hers survived. And there were rarely tears left to shed in the middle of a crisis.

She caught Osytha's fingers and squeezed them with all the faultering might - but not to try and get up again. To hold her in place. Eyes shifted off the woman, off her own useless form, and her voice, sharp with that same quality coming from days of disuse, tore through the air.
"Creed! Protect the ally! Rout the sea-dead!"
The air sharpened like a storm wind, a shiver passing through it electrifying the resolve. Fight. Win. Concentrated confidence. Steady hand. It would last less than a minute, fading like smoke.

A creature that nobody had seen before this very moment, grown to its full form in the past several days, burst out from behind the hull in a flash of movement, the sailcloth wrapped around its form as much as shabby remnants of the rope and a borrowed clasp could offer. It had much more bulk than a man, tall, but gaunt as its apparent mistress, fur covering the limbs and the thick prehensile tail in patterns of a snow leopard.

"My name," the not-elf rasped, much quieter, her gaze burrowing into the knight, "is Lady Krava'quiloor of the Ascended Creed."
There was, in that tone, the weight of someone recognizing an ally, but also shrugging into a presence. Authority.
"This is Lock. We are on your side."

The furry onslaught had unfurled a second pair of arms, pushing off the ground at full tilt and leaping onto one of the hulks, arcing around it in a flash of claws, bursting flesh and tearing remnants of sinew and cartilage, tearing off the head, the limbs at the knees, shouldering the edge of the mass collapsing one-sided. And, once the dead had collapsed with not enough length of bloated legs to continue waddling or any arms remaining to speak of, the not-beastkin shook all four of its arms, and dead blood mixed with rot fell off in downward streaks.
"A spear! Give me a spear, instead!" it roared to no one in particular.

"I am fading," the not-elf's voice maintained the demand. And the dejection. "Help me, syr."
She would not plead. She wanted to. But she still held some pride that could yet see her dead.

 

[Osytha]

That’s what Daev had seen lurking in the wreck? Osytha tries to find some label for the great, hirsute whirlwind of fury, though much is yet hidden by its makeshift cloak. This Lock could maybe be some sort of beastkin, a big maybe, and that’s before you even consider the second pair of arms.

Well, whatever they are, the extra help sure is welcome right now.

Osytha looks back down at Her Ladyship. Help me, syr. Shit. Of course the woman’s body’s giving out now. It’s a miracle she even made it this far.

“Aye,” she tells the not-elf, and responds with a gentle squeeze of the fingers in kind. “You’ve done t’hardest part already, Lady Krava’quiloor.” Did she get the name right? Osytha hopes her accent hasn’t mangled it too badly. “You’ll be alreight — Ah promise.”

Better get on that, then.

She slips her hand free and kicks Forbítter forward, over toward her newfound ally. The spear is freed once again, but Osytha doesn’t couch it as before, instead holding it back-to-front with the haft proffered out.

“Lock — spear!” she calls, closing in on the gore-slathered monstrosity and passing close enough to bring the weapon into his reach. “Can you lure ’em a bit north? Ah’ll get ’Er Ladyship to safety an’ return!”

Then Forbítter is dancing away, back out of reach of the rank dead and their grasping hands. Osytha turns her attention to that motley clean-up crew next, and whistles sharply their way. She sees Loretta perk up, lock eyes with her as the knight gestures: come hither — circle widdershins about, but avoid contact. Hurry now!

It’s easier doing this with other Knights who’ve actually been trained to recognise the signals. But, to Osytha’s mild surprise, the young woman nods a reply and starts bullying a few bodies around her into coming down the beachhead to rendezvous. She guesses Loretta is a bit sharper than she’d first seemed. Good for her.

Osytha races back toward Krava next. The dusker is already out the stirrups before Forbítter has come to a halt, sabatons kicking into sand and wave-smoothed stone as Osytha touches down on the beach.

Could she get her onto Forbítter’s back? Maybe, but… strong as Osytha is, light as Krava’quiloor looks, she is not exactly a tall knight. And the elf hasn’t any strength left to help, so it’ll all be dead weight. No, Osytha probably won’t be able to do it — not in the time she’ll have to try.

“This en’t goin’ to be terribly dignified,” she apologises, driving her blade into the earth. “But Ah’m going to need my sword-arm free, so, uh — sorry ’bout this, my lady.”

She hoists Krava’quiloor up to her feet, and keeps her propped up against her as she crouches down. Shifts the woman’s midsection and one of her arms across her shoulders, then heaves up on those mighty legs, into a fireman’s carry. It’s not difficult. An ill-thriven thing like her, most of the weight Osytha feels is probably from the lady’s sodden raiment, which itself only reveals how stick-thin she is by the way it hugs her bones.

All the while, Osytha keeps a wary eye on some approaching dead — barely more than a dozen feet off at this point. Not nearly the entire host of them, thankfully, but more than zero. Her courser doesn’t like it, either, and shares his opinions via an angry twist of his head and kick to the sand.

“Easy, tiger,” she tells the beast, wrenching her sword back free. Then, to her ward: “Ah’ve got you. Almost there now, my lady.”

A full sprint, over sand, with the weight of a second body across her shoulders. Maybe fifty yards to where Loretta and the others are heading? Not to mention any evasive footwork and swordplay she’ll need to use along the way.

This is going to be a slog and a half. Happen I ought tell Dal when I return — seems like the sort of wretched drill he likes to torture us with.

Commanding Forbítter follow along with a cluck of her tongue, and with Krava’quiloor about her shoulders like a fur stole, Osytha sets off at a dead run down the beach.

 

[Krava'quiloor]

Her head inclined in a nod, dipped chin and eyes moving to the bulky figure painting its improvised cloak from sodden grey into a brackish brown with contagion. She could not help.

'You've done the hardest part already.'

Consonance. Faint gentle golden warmth of sun through the grey. The agreeable chest-feeling of opinions aligning.
Like a whispering water of a brook, wordless sensation instead of words, flowing around thoughts, between thoughts, in an offering.

Omella, and finally finding a place in Crorefell to start the work on what was dearest. Getting her people back.
Three months of accumulating matter, flesh and bone and the correct combinations of tissue for a growing pod.
Another while of weeks at sea, maintaining the pod's processes despite the damp, contaminated underhull, turning away curious eyes, until Momoshiro came to tell her that the weather was turning and the ship may not hold, and they can't fix it.
Urgent measures that she could, most certainly, manage at the peak of satiation and mastery.
But she herself had only woke a half a year ago, in a world that spoke a different language, far away from the place she fell asleep, with no landmarks familiar in sight.
The shipwreck. Days at sea, preserving her last strength for landfall.

She was Krava, when she met Momoshiro, because no one was left to remember otherwise.
A lady of nothing, who has not had the essential sustenance in half a year.
But, the turning of the currents was not always for worse.

*

A large, furry hand closed around the spear, and as the beastkin deftly adjusted the fabric of the sail, the bit that served to cover the head fell away, revealing an almost snow leopards head. Larger, on a body that stood taller than most men, with eyes as green as the elf's. The beastkin caught Osytha's gaze, nodded. And offered back, rolling 'r's with short growls,
"Grrratitudes. I cull the numberr and the rrest go norrth. Forrrty nine." The phrase sunk into a low feline creak, and he turned. His tail, wet and like a thick whip, was aloft in the air, to help balance the spear. Two hands held onto the spear. One more adjusted the sailcloth. The fabric shifted. One more, probably.

There were about fourteen undead immediately present, three or four of them beyond any necromancer's restoration.
Forty nine?

He lunged at the nearest thing of dead matter with a yowl that was not that of a snow-leopard, but lower in cadence. Closer to a tiger, moving something in the air that would make most things feel like prey. But the drowners weren't living things. They understood large, though. They understood movement, and life, and noise.

The spear pierced the skull through the eye, turned as it dove out with a streak of dark, broke through the neck and severed the vertebrae. He poked it, and prodded it, and sent another body past the first with a full body shove as he maneuvered the lumbering masses, their attacks, and their attention, toward himself, hissing, yowling, making sure to be a beacon of movement and noise.
Every body that did end up falling to accumulated damage, was torn, passionately and with conviction, limb from limb from joint, so that even if it had the necrotic powers compelling it to move - its earthly body no longer had the means to do so meaningfully.

He moved, too. Circled like a crow pecking, stroke, shoved, crossed into sights, made the lumbering hulks turn to him, maneuvered away from the running charges and swipes as they accumulated in number, focused on him. Lock was fast on his feet, nimble with his jumps. He dealt damage, retreated in time, took out the more damaged ones.

There was some sort of a spear form. When it wasn't used like a club, that is. But the format had to change in a larger body, and for that, time in training was required.

*

Like a sack of mandrake roots, it seemed most of the life remained in the head. As Krava felt her body lurch and breath leave her, she hissed something of a cackle. Spark of amusement, turn of kaleidoscope's new colors, surprise
breaking through a thick glacier of repressed fear, bitter cold, so weak, ashamed-
- Golden lanterns in a home. Dimming.
"Great form, syr."
The elf's head lowered, lulling with the steps. She was no longer awake.

Immediately, from the gaggle of corralled things and more converging away, drawn by the almost-beastkin looking ally doing the sheperding, a feline noise erupted that sounded more like a shriek. Wordless. Alarmed.

Lock emerged from behind a group of drowners trying to grab him, swipe at him, get to him, and his green eyes turned to where his lady was, without mistake. That almost made him lose the footing as a bloater rolled onto him. A moment's mistake, and the not-leopard would have been buried under the bodies. He barely escaped the weight, and, partially assisted by the whip tail, jumped heavily to the side, immediately retreating in quick steps, forced to put even more distance between himself and the source of worry.

A spear was shunted in the direction of a runner that went off the herd and tried to go full tilt at one of the humans.
"Let me thrrrough!"
He was starting to bend the trajectory of the hoard towards Osytha, maneuvering to try and get a clear look.

 

[Osytha]

There’s not the time to look back at what’s developing behind Osytha; neither the manoeuvrability nor field of view for her to easily do so lugging Krava draped across the shoulders like this. Her heart spikes to hear Lock’s frantic roar, and she fears the — man? Beastkin? — that he has fallen afoul of the horde.

“Keep mobile!” A scream of her own, praying Lock can both hear and yet has that option open to him “Stay aht of their reach — Ah’ll ne tak long!”

Osytha uses her sword to swat away the outstretched arms from a pair of drowned converging on her own position. Perhaps four or five of the dozen-odd (‘forty nine’?) have set their cloudy white eyes on the knight and are lurching after her across the wet sand. Another one goes parallel to them further inland, aimed more at Daev and the crew emerging from the rocks. She and Forbítter sprint — OK, well, she sprints, Forbs moves at a leisurely canter beside her — ahead. At first, the shuffling of the dead rapidly falls away.

At first. The sand holds a little more integrity here right by the surf, more than the loose dry stuff further in, but it still shifts and yields treacherously under her bulk. The burn quickly sets in, in her thighs, across her back. Then in her chest, rasping for breath to stoke the furnace of this machine of hers. The agony of weakness creeping up. And, try as she might to fight against it, she can feel the sluggishness spreading its tendrils through her. Legs which become slower and slower in responding to her commands. A growing wobbliness in place of balance. A klaxon ringing out in warning, of muscles which may not bounce back with her next heaving step, which might instead buckle and collapse…

Those lumbering footfalls don’t sound quite so distant any more.

Almost there, she prays. Just a little… bit… further…

She can see them, running down to where the water meets the land up ahead. And when Osytha realises what they’re carrying, she could weep with joy. Ghanga bless the ruddy fisherfolk for all their days, for Loretta and the others have brought nets.

Men and women step forward as Osytha staggers past their rank, and with practiced hands they cast out great swathes of weighted fishing net. Does it stop the dead in their tracks altogether? No, but close enough. They flail against their woven confines, slowed to a snail's pace as they only entangle themselves further and further. Sound of snapping hemp tells those listening that it’s a temporary measure. But with that, suddenly there’s enough time.

Osytha collapses to a knee, and lays Krava’quiloor down as gently as she can with her fatigue-shaking hands.

“Get this ’un to cover an’ keep ’er safe,” she instructs to Daev plus a few others gathering round. “Puir woman’s been aht at sea for days — she’ll need tendin’ to. An’ she’s a lady, so mind your manners, aye?”

The implication lands, judging by the thoughtful shift in those expressions around her. The salvage from this wreck might already score these humble folks a tidy sum, but if they play their cards right, the gratitude of a noble lady could help line their pockets even further. On the other hand, earning her ire could render everything for nought.

A couple of the women pick up the convalescent form of Krava’quiloor and start on returning to the relative safety offered amongst those rocks around the cliffs. The remainder bristle their improvised weapons at the stumbling dead; barbed fishing spears, boat hooks, even a good, solid oar or two in there as well. A pair of sea-grizzled mariners have planted their harpoons into that other lone runner’s chest and hold it at bay while the dead sailor flails and gurgles futilely. Osytha takes a few welcome gulps of air, busy figuring out how to stand back up when Daev taps her on the shoulder. Urgently.

“Uh, syr?” he prompts, eyes set on the scene back up the beach. “What, uh, what do we do about that?”

Osytha smears the sweat from her eyes and twists to look behind.

“Ah, fuck.”

There’s Lock, not keeping the swarming dead clear of his incapacitated mistress and this tiny band of noncombatants like she’d asked. What he is doing, however, is running over in a blind panic. And trailing all those dead things after him. Godsdamnit, she told him she was taking the lady to safety, didn’t she? What’s the daft ’a’peth even thinking?

At least it helps Osytha find her feet again. She clambers up, still panting heavily. “Hold this a sec, aye?” she asks Daev, holding out her sword. Foot in the stirrup, handful of reins and mane, one more tortured heave upward — and Syr Osytha is back in the saddle.

“Ta muchly,” she thanks the fisherman, taking back her weapon. Then louder, addressing all those gathered: “Reighto, you lot! Drop what you’re doin’ an leg it! On the double now, hup hup hup!”

They don’t need telling twice. Those two with their spears stuck in the shambler, they let go of their weapons and join the other bodies scarpering back towards the rocks. Some of Lock’s pursuers split from their current chase and move to intercept these juicy new targets. Well, bugger that, Oystha reckons. She kicks Forbítter into gear to cut them off in turn. Sword back out, and dancing in the sun. Eyes on me, you stinkers — I promised that lady she’ll be safe, and you ain’t makin’ a liar of me this day.

“Lock!” Osytha roars as she tears past on the courser. “T’lady is safe now — but not if we lure these bastards to ’er, unnerstand?!”

 

[Krava'quiloor]

Lock moved forward with a ferocity of a dragon amiss of his hoard. A wide berth off the path, which was far from linear, to recover the spear.
"Wherrre is ███████████ being taken?"
There was a space in the middle, certainly without a word being spoken out loud.

Like a spurt of water from a spitting fish, much less gentle or precise or gargantuan, but dwelling in the realm of mind rather than sound. The thoughts|inspirations that come at witnessing the dawn|beginning. Reverence.

The not-beastkin turned, his tail swiped under the smaller shambler, his legs sprung his whole weight into a larger one, collapsing them together to the sound of popping pustulence that marinaded in their gut as the spear pierced the mound. One arm torn off with a roar, another crushed at the shoulder joint. Spear was retrieved only to ruin skulls with a gruesome churning pierce - and be used butt-side to push away the nearest next.
"Fourrrty six!"

He was not awake during his time on the ship. But the lady counted.
The fox man, and the source of his furful alterations and the cuddly swath of his large tail - was the fiftieth.
He would not be among the regular drowners if he were dead, she conveyed during days in the ruby-dark and cold.

He eyed the drowners, a threat to all if not handled, an immediate threat that needed thorough enough cleansing not only by the common sense but by the Creed's doctrine.

For a moment, eyes flicked to humans taking his lady away - again - and the yowl-moan keened thin from his throat.
"Neverrr was not awake... Is alive, you swearr?"
And, with a hiss of breath, repositioned himself in a few hand-to-ground bound leaps. Something grabbed his tail and lost a hand immediately.

His eyes were odd, right now. Slightly closer to aquamarine, perhaps, but the sheen of reflected light was what made them the same chrysoprase hue. Sometimes light seemed to be reflected from things that weren't there.
"Let me tearrr at them, then!"

He could smell the sweat of her, hear the labor in the breath, the particular hiss to the way air traveled through the throat when exhaustion struck. The knight was tired.

The sound of wet flesh tearing, brittled bone squishing where it could no longer support limbs. Vertebrae being popper apart by spearhead and claws. The dead would come apart - if animate, they could no longer move.
"Fourrty fourrr!"