Drekk's knife hovered, trembling, inches from the orc's spine when the figure turned.
The torchlight caught her first: seven and a half feet of scarred, grey-green muscle wrapped in blackened iron pauldrons reared from her shoulders like folded dragon wings, each spike tipped with ancient blood-lacquer that drank the red light. A single obsidian breastplate, narrow as a dagger's blade and shaped like an inverted heart, guarded only the sternum; its scalloped edges flared outward in cruel bat-wing curves, edged in wet crimson runes that throbbed like living veins.
At her throat, a wide collar of midnight leather clasped with a solitary ruby, dark and heavy as a drop of frozen gore. Around her hips, a thick war-belt of blackened steel and bone cinched tight, hung with the polished skulls of dead kings; from its center dangled a short, tattered loin-plate of the same void-metal, shifting with each breath to bare more than it hid.
