The silence that followed them out of the guild was a physical presence… a third companion woven from grief and shattered myth. It was heavier than the dense, cold air of the forest path, and thicker than any shadows clotting between the ancient trees. The grand doors of the Mavis Adventurer's Guild had boomed shut behind them… sealing away the Guildmaster's haunted eyes and the portrait of the terrifying Lord of Mayhem… but they could not block out the echo of his story.
Aamon walked differently, The usual buoyant… almost clumsy energy that carried him was gone, replaced by a slow plodding walk. His massive wings, which often twitched and stirred with curiosity… were clamped tight against his back. His leathery membranes pulled taut like shields. His head was bowed, and his gaze fixed on the frozen ground, as if he were searching for the pieces of his mother he had just lost. The golden cat's paw pendant felt like a lead weight on his shoulder.
Ciel matched his pace, half a step behind and to his left. She did not speak. Words were inadequate currency for the economy of pain… she saw tightening his shoulders, her own past was a tapestry of silent hurts, and she knew the profound uselessness of platitudes. Instead, she offered her presence… a steady, quiet constant in the whirlwind of his confusion. The memory of the Guildmaster's tale… the wet, quiet death, the cold hand, the voice of grinding bones… was a cold stone in her own stomach… But her primary focus was the living, breathing wound walking beside her.
They had walked for nearly an hour before he finally stopped. He didn't slow to a halt; he simply ceased moving… as if his body had run out of the will to continue. They stood in a small clearing where the weak morning light filtered down, doing little to warm the air. The only sound was the dry rattle of bare branches.
Aamon's breath hitched. It was a small… broken sound. Then another. He wrapped his arms around himself, his claws digging into the fabric of his sleeves. His shoulders began to shake.
"She sang to me..."
he whispered, the words ragged and torn.
"Every night. Her voice was… it was the only thing that wasn't cold."
A tear traced a path through the dust on his cheek. It was not the hot… angry tears of the village attack, nor the surprised tears from the cat's scratch. This was a deep… slow welling of sorrow from a place that had never known such betrayal.
"She told me about knights. And dragons. And… and mercy… She said mercy was stronger than a sword."
His voice broke on the last word… He turned to look at Ciel, his ruby eyes swimming with a liquid pain that was more devastating than any scream.
"Why would she lie, Ciel? Why would she make up such beautiful lies if she was… if she was that?"
The word 'that' was a sob. Ciel's analytical mind, which usually sought patterns and reasons, had no answer. The dichotomy was too vast. The loving mother and the merciless abyss… they were two absolute truths that could not coexist… and yet… for Aamon, they had been the entire universe.
She did the only thing she could think of. She stepped forward, with a hesitation that spoke of her own unfamiliarity with the gesture, she reached out and placed her hand over his where it gripped his own arm... Her touch was light, like a wilting rose.
"Ciel does not know."
she said, her voice low and even.
"But Ciel knows the mother in both of the stories… She knows that mother was real to you. That love was real."
It was the truest thing she could offer. She wasn't dismissing the horror; she was affirming the love he had felt. It was the one part of the story that was unassailably true.
Aamon crumpled at her words. He sank to his knees in the frozen leaves… great… wracking sobs shaking his frame.
He cried for the mother who had cradled him…
he cried for the monster he never knew…
He cried for the eighty years in a cell that had been built on a foundation of love he now had to question…
He cried for the sheer, lonely terror of realizing the one fixed point in your existence might have been an illusion.
Ciel knelt with him. She didn't try to hug him; the gesture was still too vast… too foreign for both of them. She simply stayed there, her hand on his… a silent vigil in the cold clearing. She watched the way his tears sizzled faintly where they hit the ground, a small, pathetic magic born of profound heartbreak. This was the true cost of their journey… not the threat of blades or spells, but the unraveling of a soul.
The storm of grief passed slowly, leaving behind a hollowed-out quiet. Aamon's sobs subsided into shaky breaths. He wiped his face with the back of his hand… smearing tears and dirt. He looked exhausted, aged by the weight of the truth.
"The Guildmaster said I'm not evil."
Aamon murmured, staring at his mother's bone rings.
"He said I don't have her eyes."
"The Guildmaster is correct."
Ciel stated, with a certainty that brooked no argument. "Friend is good."
Aamon was silent for a long time, his breathing slowly steadying. The rising sun climbed a little higher, casting long… weak shadows. The light touched his horns… and he flinched almost imperceptibly. The world outside was still harsh, still painful… But he had to move forward. There was no cell to go back to.
He pushed himself to his feet, his movements slow and heavy. He looked toward the path ahead… where the guildmaster had said the goblin cave lay.
"Sir Aldric…"
Aamon began, his voice hoarse but clearer.
"He showed mercy to the dragon. He was a knight. A real one."
He wasn't talking to Ciel anymore; he was talking to himself… building a new foundation from the rubble of the old.
"My mother… the one in the stories… she taught me about him. She wanted me to know about heroes."
He turned to Ciel, a fragile… determined light kindling in his red-rimmed eyes. It was a desperate light… but it was there.
"Maybe… maybe that's the part that was real. Not the… the other part. Maybe she wanted me to be better. Maybe the stories were her way of being better, too."
It was a child's logic, a beautiful… desperate attempt to salvage a shred of goodness from the wreckage. But for Aamon, it was a lifeline.
Ciel nodded.
"Ciel thinks that is a good thought."
Aamon took a deep, shuddering breath. The practical need for their mission reasserted itself, now layered with this new… painful significance.
"We should… we should go to the cave. We need the practice."
The word 'practice' now meant more than just learning to fight goblins. It meant practicing how to be a knight from a story… instead of the son of a nightmare. It was his way of honoring the good mother, and defying the terrible one.
"Yes, we should."
Ciel agreed.
And so they began to walk again. The silence between them was no longer heavy with grief, but filled with a shared… unspoken resolution. The path ahead was no longer just a road to a monster's den; it was the first step on a much longer… more painful road… the road to building an identity from the ashes of a broken past. The trees around them seemed to lean in, witnesses to a quiet… private vow made in the cold morning light.
After a day of traveling the trees rattled against each other… a dry, skeletal clatter that spoke of a deep and biting cold. Their shadow cloaked branches twisted like a dead man's fingers against the bruised purple of the twilight sky. Each step Ciel and Aamon took was sharp in the freezing silence… the crunch of frozen leaves beneath their boots the only sound for miles.
Aamon's large, bat-like wings… usually held tight against his back, twitched and stirred with the wind… the leathery membrane brushing against the frost-laden undergrowth. The same gust pulled playfully at the hem of Ciel's dark maid dress… making the fabric flutter like a captured ghost around her legs.
High above, the moon was a pale, smudged coin behind a veil of swift-moving clouds. Its faint… intermittent light caused the shadows of the horned demon and the abyssal elf to stretch and shrink… to warp and twist across the path ahead. They did not simply follow their owners; they seemed to slither and conjure into monstrous, unwanted shapes... A dance of darkness that felt far more alive than it should.
"The cave should be just ahead. Where the guildmaster said goblins are gathering."
Ciel said, her voice quieter than the wind… but clearer and stronger than it had been in the city. The promise of a defined task… a simple monster to face was an anchor in the vast uncertainty of their greater mission.
"It's going to be so… instructional! Come there isn't time to be sad."
As the thought took hold, his bone-spiked tail wagged with a happy… unconscious energy… thumping against the cold, hard bark of a birch tree with a series of soft… hollow clacks.
The sound was small, but in the frozen silence of the woods… it was a gunshot.
From the shadows just off the path, a low… warning growl rumbled… a sound too deep and intelligent to belong to any ordinary forest animal. It was the sound of a throat full of focused hatred.
Aamon and Ciel froze mid-step… Aamon's tail went instantly still, the spikes on it bristling. Ciel's posture, always ready… became a statue of pure assessment. Her hand did not yet summon her new ice staff, instead her fingers coiled… ready… her eyes parsing the darkness between the trees for a threat.
A figure detached itself from the gloom, stepping into a shard of pale moonlight. The girl from Mavis village... The one with the silver wolf ears and the large, fluffy tail, which was now held stiff and low behind her. Her hands were curled into fists at her sides… her knuckles white and straining. Her golden eyes glowed with a feral light, fixed on Aamon with pure… undiluted hostility.
"You…"
she snarled, her voice a husky thing… laced with the same growl that had just echoed through the trees.
"I told you to stay out of my way, demon. Are you lost? Or are you just stupid?"
She took a step forward, her boot scraping softly on the cold earth. Her gaze flickered to Ciel for a half-second… a flicker of something unreadable, contempt? or perhaps a weary pity? before snapping back to Aamon.
"The Guildmaster's pity doesn't extend past the town gates. That goblin nest is my contract. Turn around. Now."
Aamon blinked, the insult seeming to slide off him… but the threat to their mission sticking. His ruby eyes widened… not with fear, but with a confused sense of injustice.
"But the guildmaster gave us the quest."
he explained, his tone earnest… as if logic alone would solve this.
"We have to clear it. It's our job now. We're adventurers… like you!"
The wolf-girl let out a short… sharp, humorless laugh. It sounded more like cracking ice.
"You're not like me."
Her eyes dropped to the spot where his tail had thumped the tree.
"You're a noisy amateur who's going to get himself killed. I'm not cleaning up your mess."
She took another step closer. Aamon's nose twitched… Beneath the scent of leather and cold iron… it was there again. That same, strange floral note that clung to Ciel… A scent that spoke of something other than violence. His head tilted, his demonic curiosity overriding the tension.
"You smell like flowers again."
he observed, the words leaving his mouth with blunt… unguarded innocence.
The comment was a stone thrown into still water. Her aggressive stance faltered for a microsecond… a crack in the armor. A flicker of raw, unguarded confusion crossed her fierce features. Her ears twitched forward involuntarily before she caught herself… the ensuing scowl was a mask of fury to cover the breach. The insult had failed; the observation had disarmed her. Now, only violence remained.
"Shut up!"
she snapped, the command now raw and sharp with genuine rage.
"Are you going to turn around, or do I have to make you?"
Ciel, who had been a silent observer until now, took a small half step forward… placing herself slightly between Aamon and the wolf-girl. Her voice, when it came… was quiet but absolute, cutting through the tension like a shard of ice.
"Ciel and her friend have a job to do. You will not stop them."
The wolf-girl's golden eyes narrowed… finally giving the abyssal elf her full attention. The standoff in the freezing woods was no longer just about a quest. It was about territory, pride… and the unsettling presence of two strangers who didn't know their place.
"You wanna act tough?"
The words were a low, guttural promise.
In a motion faster than a cracking whip, her hands flashed to her hips. The twin hand axes came free without a sound. They were not large… no, they were tools of pure… refined butchery, their edges gleaming dully in the weak light.
She didn't wait. There was no cue… no shift in her stance to warn them.
One second she was there, a statue of coiled fury.
The next… she was a blur of silver and shadow.
She bypassed Ciel with contemptuous ease, a gust of wind and the scent of frost and flowers the only evidence of her passing. Ciel's world slowed to a nightmare crawl… a cold knot of dread tightening in her gut as she tried to turn.
Thwuck…
The sound was not a clean cut. It was a wet, brutal impact… the sickening percussion of hardened steel meeting flesh. It echoed once… sharply… swallowed by the hungry silence of the woods.
Ciel's brain refused to assemble the image… The wolf-girl was there, pressed against Aamon… one hand buried in the cloth of his suit for leverage. The other ended at the haft of her axe which was buried deep in the center of his chest.
Aamon's ruby eyes shot wide open… not with alarm, but with profound… utter shock. A punched out gasp escaped his lips, followed by a wet… choking gurgle. He didn't scream. He couldn't. His body shuddered violently… Burning… crimson blood, black in the moonlight… that did not seep. It erupted. It sheeted down his front, steaming in the frigid air… hissing as it hit the frozen ground at their feet. The coppery metallic stench of it flooded the clearing, thick and cloying.
The wolf-girl leaned in, her nose almost touching his ear… her own breath misting in the air. She gave the axe a vicious, grinding twist.
Aamon's body arched in a silent spasm of agony.
She didn't even look at her axe… The metal was slick and dark, but unmarred. It did not melt. It did not glow.
"Tch. Durable shit,.."
she muttered, her voice flat… almost bored, as she watched him curl inward, his hands clutching the axe in ruin of his chest… as his life painted the hard, cold earth.
Then… she tried to pull her blade out, but it wouldn't budge. A sickening… wet suction held it fast, lodged in the rapidly knitting flesh of the demon. The wound wasn't bleeding anymore; it was consuming her axe. Panic, cold and sharp… lanced through her fury. Out of sheer, brute desperation, she planted a boot on Aamon's stomach for leverage and pulled.
It was too late.
Her tail fluffed out in a primal sign of alarm, her ears pinning back hard enough to vanish into her silver-blue hair. A clawed hand… the same hand that should have been clutching a mortal wound… rose into the air. With a motion that was terrifyingly deliberate, not slow or pained… a clawed hand rose into the air and darted toward her face… I'm doomed. By a fucking demon! The thought was a silent scream in her mind.
She instinctively flinched, golden eyes squeezing shut. She could have dodged… could have jumped back and abandoned her weapon… but that was cowardice. A warrior never surrenders her axe. She braced for the impact, for the shredding of skin and the shattering of bone.
Her life didn't so much flash before her eyes as a single… crystallized memory: herself as a pup, small and fierce… earning these very axes in a fight for what was hers.
But…
The impact never came.
Instead, she felt it. A… pet? A gentle, precise pressure at the base of her ear… right where the fur met the sensitive skin of her scalp. Impossible. Those were claws… needle-sharp demonic claws… and they were tracing a slow, delicate circle.
She froze, every muscle in her body locked in a paradox of terror and bewildering sensation.
"Oh my god…"
Aamon's voice was a rough, gurgling thing… still wet with the memory of his own blood, yet brimming with genuine, unadulterated wonder.
"This is way better! Don't tell the kittens I said that, Ciel. They might get upset… and I don't want Willow biting me."
His claws continued their methodical scratch behind her ears, an intimate… gentle rhythm utterly at odds with the violence of seconds before. It was exactly what his mother always did.
"Ciel will keep it in mind, friend…"
Ciel's voice was a thin whisper, a fragile thread of sound in the clearing's deathly stillness. Her knuckles were bone-white… the tendons in her hand standing in sharp relief as she forced her trembling to still. The scent of Aamon's steaming blood filled her nostrils… a metallic, coppery tang layered over a deeper… more primal odor of spoiled meat and ozone. It was the smell of a butcher's shop in hell.
She finally broke from her horrified trance… the world snapping back into a painful, high definition focus. Each crunch of frost under her boot was a tiny shot in the tense silence.
"Betty told Ciel to take care of Aamon."
The words were not just a statement; they were a vow… an anchor thrown into the roiling sea of her own fear.
Aamon, meanwhile… looked down at the axe with a detached, almost clinical curiosity. The wound had done more than heal around it; it had begun a grotesque assimilation. Pale… fibrous tissue… like the roots of some abyssal plant, had crept up the golden axe. A delicate web of thin, pulsing capillaries now veined the metal's face… each one glowing with a faint, infernal pinkish light. The axe was no longer a foreign object; it was becoming a gruesome part of his anatomy.
A low, involuntary whine escaped the wolf-girl's throat… a sound of pure, animal confusion that was utterly at odds with her fierce exterior. Every muscle was locked in a paradox… screaming at her to fight or flee… but she was utterly paralyzed by the surreal gentleness of Aamon's claws. The rhythmic, precise scratching behind her ear was a maddening contrast to the wet impact of her axe. It was a language she didn't understand… the inability to parse it was a defeat in itself. Her legs buckled not from weakness… but from the sheer weight of this cognitive dissonance. She collapsed to her knees with a heavy, final thud that spoke not of impact… but of utter soul-deep defeat.
"I guess I probably should…"
Aamon's voice was a worried murmur… pulling wolf-girl from her daze. He fearfully wrapped his hand around the hilt of the axe… the grip now slick and sticky with his own burningblood.
"Will it hurt?"
He didn't wait for an answer.
With a sickening, wet SCHLLLUCK… the sound of tearing muscle and unsealing flesh… he wrenched the axe free.
The noise was followed by a sharp… distinct CRACK… as a half-formed rib, caught in the healing process… splintered. A fresh torrent of blood, hotter and darker than the first… erupted from the gaping hole. It didn't just flow; it sheeted down his front… splattering across the frozen grass with a violent hiss… the blades withering and blackening on contact. The coppery stench intensified, becoming a physical presence… thick enough to coat the tongue.
"Ouch."
The hiss was a sharp, pained exhalation from behind his clenched teeth. A grimace of pure agony twisted his features for a fleeting second… a rare, honest glimpse of the pain he so often seemed immune to.
Then, his body went to work... The sound was not of magic… it was of violent… accelerated biology: a hundred wet, fibrous snaps and pulls… like a seamstress working with meat and sinew instead of thread.The wound sealed shut with terrifying speed… the splintered bone grinding back into place before the skin knitted over it, leaving behind only a raw… pink scar that pulsed once… twice… before fading into unblemished skin, as if the atrocity had never occurred.
"I guess a thing like that shouldn't feel good."
he sighed… looking down at the wolf-girl crumpled on the ground like a discarded toy.
Their eyes met. In that split second, she saw not a hint of malice or vengeance… but a strange, placid curiosity… as if she were a fascinating insect he'd found under a log. The sheer… terrifying innocence of that look shattered her stupor. With a snarl of reinvigorated fury, she sprang back… her boots scraping against the dead grass. Her remaining golden axe was in her hand in a flash… held in a shaking… defensive stance. The air itself seemed to hum with the threat radiating from the weapon.
Ciel reacted instantly, her own hand snapping up. A faint, crystalline crackle filled the air… the temperature dropping several degrees as motes of blue light began to swirl around her fingertips… ready to manifest her ice staff at a moment's notice.
"Slow it down."
Aamon said, his tone infuriatingly calm, as if asking them to lower their voices at a tombstone. He made no aggressive move. Instead, his ruby eyes drifted to the axe in her hand… losing himself in its intricate details. He saw the beauty in the engravings… the golden rivers and whorls carved into the metal… as if it were a museum piece, not a tool that had moments ago been buried in his heart.
"We aren't gonna hurt you… come on. We can be friends, wolf."
"Ciel thinks we should not fight."
Ciel replied, her gaze a laser fixed on the wolf-girl… unblinking.
"Friend is a good demon. He will not hurt you."
She paused, her words measured and final… a strategic retreat offered from a position of bewildering strength.
"If you want the cave, it is yours. Take it. We will leave."
The offer hung in the frigid air… a simple, pragmatic solution that felt, in the face of such brutal… reality-warping weirdness, like the most complex and disarming weapon of all…
A low, guttural sound of disgust rattled in Arya's throat. "Tch." The scent of his blood still hung thick in the air… a taunting… coppery perfume that mocked her failure…. a smell of a kill that wasn't. Her shoulders slumped, not in relaxation, but in a surrender to the profound… bending absurdity of it all. This wasn't a battle lost; it was a fundamental law of nature broken.
"You pitiful shit. You really are just… innocent."
The word felt foreign and filthy on her tongue, a blasphemy against everything she knew. Arya let out a sharp breath, a plume of mist that was the only honest… cold thing left in the clearing.
"I'm Arya. Remember it."
The name was a concession dragged from the deepest part of her pride, a line drawn in the snow she already knew would be washed away.
"Oh, Arya?"
Aamon repeated, his head tilting with a bird-like curiosity that was more unnerving than any snarl.
"That's catchy, I suppose. I'm Aamonith, or Aamon for short."
He took a careful step back from the discarded axe, his hands held open. The gesture was meant to be harmless… but the way his fine, dark suit had already knitted itself back together… the fabric weaving closed over the memory of the wound… was a quiet violence all its own.
"And that is Ciel. My first friend."
"Ciel and Aamon will leave."
Ciel's voice cut through the tension… flat and final as a tombstone. She placed her hands together at her stomach and offered a shallow… formal bow. The gesture, so pristine and out of place amidst the gore… was more threatening than a raised weapon.
"You do not need to worry. We will not continue this path."
Arya's ears twitched. An involuntary flicker of… something. It was the ghost of a sensation… the memory of those precise, gentle claws at the base of her ear… a touch that had short-circuited a lifetime of fighting instinct. She hated it! She craved the clarity of its strangeness. The conflict was a physical ache in her jaw.
"You've already bothered me."
she snapped, the aggression a flimsy shield over her confusion. She kept her eyes locked on them as she slowly… cautiously… knelt to retrieve her other axe. The metal was unnaturally warm where it had been fused with demon flesh.
"So talk. Why did you need the practice? What could two walking catastrophes possibly be hunting that requires goblin warm-ups?"
Aamon's face lit up with a radiant, unburdened smile… a sun breaking through storm clouds.
"Oh! We're gonna fight the Succubus of Sloth!"
The name landed not like a word… but a physical blow to the chest.
Arya's smug expression shattered. Her blood ran cold… colder than the winter air biting at her skin. Her tail puffed out to twice its size, a bristling brush of pure… primal alarm. The axe in her hand felt suddenly leaden, its weight the weight of a legend. Her jaw worked… no sound came out. She struggled to draw breath, the mythical image of the creature… a goddess of indolent decay… searing itself behind her eyes. When she finally found her voice, it was a shaky, fractured thing, stripped of all its bravado.
"Th… the… the Succubus of Sloth?"
Aamon, blissfully unaware of the tectonic shift he'd caused… just blinked. He casually brushed a hand down the front of his suit jacket… the fine, dark fabric was now utterly pristine, a void of perfection where a mortal wound should have been. The impossible repair was as unsettling as the healing of the flesh beneath it….
Ciel gave a single, grave nod, her red eyes holding the terrifying truth.
"Yes."
Ciel confirmed, her voice leaving no room for doubt.
"Ciel and friend are going to fight the Succubus of Sloth. It is the Queen's order."
Aamon trotted to Ciel's side, the crisp sound of his dress shoes on the frozen ground a bizarrely formal noise in the wild setting… He placed his hands on her shoulders… a gesture of pure camaraderie that made Ciel flinch minutely… a conditioned response battling a newfound trust.
"Yeah! Sayerra is what Queen Luna called her."
He leaned forward slightly, his ruby eyes wide with genuine inquiry... His entire being was a stark… mocking contrast to the violence of moments before.
"Do you know of her?"
A harsh, scraping laugh escaped Arya's lips.
"Skkk… of course I know of her."
The tremor was gone… burned away by a sudden, furious heat that ignited in her hazel eyes. It was the look of a predator that has just seen a path to a legend.
"Everyone knows that bitch."
Her grip tightened on her axe until her knuckles gave a warning crack. The fear was gone… replaced by a blazing, reckless resolve that felt like destiny.
"But you… you are in luck."
She straightened up, her smirk returning… but now it was sharp, edged with a terrifying hunger.
"I am a formidable fighter. I almost killed you, shit-for-brains."
She planted her hands on her hips… the movement radiating a newfound, explosive energy.
"Since it's pathetically obvious you need me… I'll aid you. I've been waiting for a chance like this. I'll be known across the whole fucking realm for this feat!"
Aamon gave Ciel's shoulders a friendly pat… then beamed at Arya… tail wagging. The sheer, unadulterated innocence in his smile was more disarming than any weapon. It made her gaze drop to her axe… as if to confirm the reality of the blood still staining it.
"Ooo! Yes!"
Aamon cheered, his tail giving a happy… bone-spiked rattle that chipped at the earth.
"We can use a good fighter like you! I would be honored."
Aamon placed a hand over his heart… striking his best impression of an honored knight. He looked toward the dawning sun, which was now spilling a soft wash of purple and orange across the horizon. The light was gentle… for now. He could bear a few hours before the familiar, searing rash would bloom across his skin.
Ciel, her worry, a constant silent companion… drifted to Aamon's side and took his hand. Her touch was cool against his, making Aamon's wings gave an enthusiastic, unconscious flap… the leathery tips brushing against Arya's fur and making her twitch. His claws flexed lightly against Ciel's pale skin… not enough to leave red marks, just enough for her to feel their sharp… solid presence, an anchor in the strange new world they were building.
"Ciel thinks we should go back to Mavis.We can talk at the inn."
Ciel murmured, her voice barely louder than the rustling leaves.
Aamon's tail swayed in a slow… contented arc, the spiked tip brushing against the fabric of Ciel's dress as he turned on the path.
"Ciel is right. I don't like how the sun hurts me."
He turned his beaming… ruby-eyed gaze toward Arya.
"Wolf, coming? I'll buy you a drink. My mother said, 'If you want friends, give them a gift.' I have the coin."
A shadow of pain flickered behind his eyes as he gripped Ciel's hand a little tighter, the memory of his mother's stories now tangled with the world's harsh truths.
"Drinks on you? Ha, you're talking my style, demon."
Arya snorted… her whole demeanor had shifted. The rigid aggression had melted into a loose limbed swagger. She didn't look friendly… not exactly… there was a certain fondness in the way she fell into step beside them, like a wolf reluctantly accepting two strange but useful pups into her pack.
Together, the three of them started back toward Mavis. The frozen leaves crackled underfoot… a rhythmic percussion to their silent truce. The forest around them was transforming with the dawn. The deep, possessive shadows of night were retreating… thinning into long skeletal fingers that clawed at the path. Patches of weak gold light pierced the canopy… illuminating motes of drifting frost and painting the frost laden ferns in a delicate… transient glitter. It was a world caught between the bite of night and the promise of a harsh… revealing day.
They walked on, their strange alliance sealed not with a handshake… but with the shared scent of blood and the prospect of a drink.
Deeper in the forest, where the sun's gaze could not penetrate…the shadows did not bend. They broke. The light surrendered, and the ancient dark held its breath…