Every day that elapsed in this cavern, Lord Dhracia observed. The ash in the air was an echo of time—an echo left to degrade eternally in this chamber until the artifacts of its final vibrations were but a slough, and yet every echo she still received. She could feel it in the air, how its composition now burned where once it dripped. She could taste it, beyond the tar of smoke, the atmosphere electrifying like the distant cousin of its creation, the End of all things—the true taste was that of ozone, white-blue and static and insulting. See, it didn’t used to be like this. These walls saw her once before, when they were darker, bending holographically in mercurial blacks and not pale or throbbing with fire. Few things could bleach them, but they were, it was done. Yes, this was an act of desecration. Deliberate, and hypocritical. And it pleased her to see it burn.

This was supposed to be the hub, the core, plasma and neurons hungrily pulled tighter and tighter, destined by atomic seduction to coalesce into stronger things. It still was, just in a different way. She could feel the pull from Pisces; it was her molecular nature to want to be there, because all things did come from Natural Order, and she loved to watch Progenitor smolder. And on arrival, she found it was exactly what she expected. Vibrant and infested. Empty of the beautiful things that churned and spat out other things, and instead littered with the biological residue of interference. It could have made her ill, if not for the countervailing fact that it was all wreathed in delicious fire.

The Lord moved like a shark through the tropics, command worn on her foreboding fin, overriding the steer of the fires. Her trajectory was immutable. She tasted blood. The destroyer, the beast, his bleeding heart. She cut through bedlam relentless for him—whoever might endure this inferno would see her wield it like she was the one who made it. Twisting, heated winds lashed erratically out of her airspace, and flames writhed and screamed like her footsteps warped them into submission.

They bent to her, recognized her, distorted for her,

Lord of this Chaotic Realm.

That devouring sea of incandescence parted, and it lead her toward the thrumming organ in the fetal, venous map of the nest’s single egg. Shadows rippled overhead as she went. Shadows, and flares of light as new fires touched the air, but she remained undeterred until before her stood the spire in full—the spire to the cave as the transparent heart twitching in the body of a bulgy-eyed embryo was to the nest. Innocuous, until you remember that His nest is not one built by birds.

The shadow swelled across her back, and Lord Dhracia turned the world around her to see it. It all fell into place in the cradle of fire and smoke: his emberous, smoldering wings. His hide the event horizon of destruction. Enchanting, the smog that coiled from his nose and teeth; ribbons that she would leaf through with idle fingers. Inside him was the scalding red nucleus of his nativity: his anger, his injustice. The great dragon bore down on her with rage unbridled and unmatched by anything else in existence, so contrived by his schematics, like she was promised. He shook the earth when he struck it with his feet, and bellowed with heliacal storm.

Hollow cracks shuddered reverently across the spire. Even it could not outmatch the dragon’s sheer hatred.

Death was laser focused on her. But this Chaos Beast seems to have forgotten how easily she whispers death around her, how merely, among countless other aftermaths.

He trembled the ground with a titanic heaving step. Lord Dhracia countered without so much as a flourish, nor move that was seen, but the steadfast grip of her stare. The aperture narrowed in impending doom—flagrant Raheerah, disobedient Raheerah, looking at her as the riotous hellion he’d always been. She knew he wasn’t ignorant, no, all of this—

It was in his irradiated programming. A viral cell sent to wage war on its host.

Lord Dhracia didn’t take it personally.

Raheerah howled and coiled his neck, and shot toward her, flames strafing from his gums. And—for the first time in a long time, she felt her heart beat excitedly.

A single thundering clap that resonated a brush with mortality,

Before she raised her hand with the moonstone nestled in her palm. And it reignited. A snap, a gasp of life rushing back to its haunted crystal matrix, where pearlescent ghosts were forever galvanized with only enough sentience to recite old neural loops. And he felt it—the deep and intimate resonance that followed. He heard the auroral winds of her sighs and hymns, all at once smothering him, trapping him. The dragon froze suddenly then, and his fires froze around him, and he beheld the heart that stirred with life once more.

Lord Dhracia extended the hand to him. Under his reverent breaths, Dawa hummed intangible.

“Today you are repossessed,” Lord Dhracia said, scripture implied in the warmth of her hand nurturing the stone. “I will disassemble you to memories bobbing in your visceral soup, and rebuild you until your pieces become annihilation’s most explosive shape. You will know the pain of being dissected and put back together a hundred times more before your tenure is fulfilled.”

The Chaos Beast churned deeply within himself. Those words were ultimate Fate. And while every fiber of his mortal vessel screamed to resist it, he became reminded of the futility of it when Lord Dhracia turned the stone in the light, and he recognized that her voice was not extended to him at all.

It would all be Dawa’s pain.

“Cruel Fate,” the dragon’s soul was what spoke from dark within his chasm. “What compels us to obey when our firmaments are reduced to torment? Why do we drink from your well when we know it is suffused with poison?” he reverberated, desperately angry but suffocated in magnitude by her purposeful clasping hands. Raheerah, Chaos Beast, humbled again to teeth in chains.

Lord Dhracia clutched the stone close to her breast, and instead offered her other hand, gracious, to his nose. “His Servants obey no true authority,” she said. “It is entropy which compels you. Mindless, beautiful entropy, which has always been yours. You wished to harness it—as I did, long ago—so this, this is not your torment, Raheerah,” the Lord cooed his name, her newest toy, and leaned into the shimmer of heat on his scales to whisper, “all of this is the expense of agency.”

He craved to destroy, so he would be made to destroy.

“Do you understand?” she beckoned.

Raheerah, a man once teeming with selfish, reckless rage, had followed his lover, who followed her fathers into the House of Chaos. His gambit was made for love: and so eternal union of love was his, in exchange for what their union could catalyze. Dawa’s pain as Raheerah’s fuel. That was how it was destined to be for the rest of eternity.

The dragon made his surrender a woeful quake, his great head brought back and pealed, and the fires he caused wailed with him. But there was nothing he could do—he was bound—he was Dawa’s—and Dawa belonged to Lord Dhracia.

Defeat slumped the dragon into Lord Dhracia’s command. The inky black incinerator deferred to her, and Lord Dhracia knighted him as hers with a featherlight stroke of her fingers on his jaw. And then, her wrath dragged toward the repulsive spire behind her back. Whether or not she had gained an audience for consorting with the Chaos Beast, she felt something watching, and it coaxed malevolence to manifest on her brow.

Somebody else had come to greet their Lord.

Characters who may be present in Polaris are welcome to join the thread in this round. As this thread is backdated, characters will only be permitted to be written as observing in order to not disrupt the flow of the story. This round will only be active for a short period of time, so it is recommended that if you want to join, to prepare a post ASAP.

His drifting image had followed, the stag desperate to keep track of Raheerah's movements. He himself struggled to stay close; the flames were roaring through Tunnel N. He could not follow. He'd considered going around, to Tunnel I, but to travel and maintain his spell both would have been nearly impossible.

Instead Pride stood silent at the mouth of N, watching with unseeing eyes as molten rock dripped and flames gnawed at stone. His mind, rather, was with his other: his drifting-self, incorporeal and swift. It was behind Raheerah--even a form of energy had to catch up to the beast of beating wings--but he had caught much of what had happened. He couldn't hear it all--couldn't see it all; his other-self he left crouching in the dark, or as close to dark as it could get.

His mind sharpened on this stranger. There was something... about it. He could not have said what, being unfamiliar with such power, with even the nature of her; but something terrifying, something overwhelmingly strong. Something horrible. It was clear, too, in the way that the dragon bent his head. Clear in the quiet cracks that appeared, splaying weakly, across the surface of the Spire. Some of the exchange was lost to the stag, and he fought to focus, refusing to lose sight of what might happen next.

Though there was fear in him, too: a sense that he didn't want to see. That he would not want to be here, when whatever happened next, happened.

His magicka obeyed, and relief and dread both flickered through him. The white stag stood silent in the tunnel, and the white stag stood in Polaris; and he had never felt so grateful that he was here, and his other was the one observing. Yet even here he feared: what if whatever-she-was saw him? Saw his other, and saw through it, saw him, somehow, beyond?

...What was she?

Hargrave'd been a silent observer of the Black Dragon's rage, his mutation of fury into flame into stone into magma. She'd sat in careful awe of it, the immense displays of power offered by that beast out of hell. She'd - of course - ducked beneath any untouched stone and finally tread water that was vaporized by dragonfire before her eyes. A few burns had resulted from all of that.

The state Polaris had been left in didn't deter the Gray Hare from continuing to stay there, though. No, this cavern was alive, yet. As long as the Spire stood, there would be little birds to study it and light-bringing wolves to spur the generator. (She was tragically unaware of Tyr's fate at the teeth of the very thing she admired so.) She continued life as usual, milling about and preferring to avoid conversation. Once the Lessers tentatively returned, she was settled well enough.

Of course, until the object of her fascination returned, fire lit anew in the ceiling and dripping magma everywhere. Hargrave scattered for cover once more, the flames around her reflecting in her eyes. Were she any closer, her tail and the rest of her might've been completely incinerated by plasma.

Voices, voices, voices and the canine peeked out from her choice of shelter - a humble boulder - and watched as the Black Dragon bowed his head in deep, fearful, shackled reverence. Such an awe-inspiring beast was reduced to nothing before this one and her strange garments. Hargrave knew, quietly (through the dread setting teeth and hooked talons into her bones) that this was someone to be in further awe and fear of. A being not to be trifled with.

She knew not of who they were - only that she should not move from her cover.

She had felt the arrival as most of the masters might have; it wasn't a quake or rumble, but something deeper, at the very core of their magic. The pure chaos energy that emanated from Her was almost intoxicating—and it brought the masters' energies to the surface. It Demanded their attention. Lord Dhracia.

Jupiter had become sensitive to magic since she had stopped taking from the Spire, refusing to be yet another mite in the plague. But Dhracia's? Dhracia was a well that the others might drink from, or that might poison them in its sufferance of pure chaotic energy. Either way, it was hard to miss. With the absence of their original well, it was hard not to notice Her. It was like being freed from an addiction for so long, thousands and thousands of years. It spawned a hunger that grew deep within any of them, whether they knew it or not, but Jupiter felt it. She despised it. And it was because of this that she noticed it acutely, stirring the stale air of the cave with its pungent and tantalizing reach: His energy, pure and unfettered, as free as the air above them rolling through grasses and plains.

Her fist clenched and she hissed under her breath. Why? Why had they returned?

She shuffled to the back of her den, hidden and tucked away in the bone fortresses of Canis, where she moved and dislodged several bones and stones to reveal her most precious stock. Twelve. Only twelve arrowheads crafted from stones from those before. They were a difficult piece to work with, and often broke down into goo as she cut or shaped them—but she managed to forge twelve in her time being here, which she had tucked away for a... special occasion. They had been placed on arrow shafts made of hollowed mother-bone, with feathers she had saved from her partner. These were her strongest arrows. Only twelve of them.

Frail, bony fingers gently ran over the cut, sharp edges of his feathers, sparks tingling her fingertips; her heart lurched at the feeling, the memory of him—how was he? Was he still being a mopey, sad child? She laughed under her breath at the thought of mocking him again. Oh, how she missed him, her fellow Vagabond. For a moment, she closed her eyes and imagined herself there on the surface with him: its transformation from a dusty, barren hellscape to a beautiful, lush world; the silly way they taunted each other with their newest wildlife creation; and inevitably, her thoughts nosedived to the war—where she shook her head and freed herself, her eyes opening back to the gross, disgusting, pitiful hell that was the nest.

She sighed. If she were going to do this, it might be her last act as Vagabond.

"Tamulus," she whispered, rustling the feathers again, letting the familiarity of his magic touch her, "thank you for everything, my dear friend." Jupiter slowly emptied her quiver and began to place her rare inventory into it, counting them as she did so; she held onto the last one for a moment, and found herself shaking. Was she scared? No. It was pure adrenaline. She had waited for this moment for eons. She would avenge them, all of them. "Goodbye," croaked her voice as she placed the last arrow into her quiver, turning and leaving her den likely for the last time.

Outside, Batcat waited; he was good. Too good. She placed a gentle hand on his nose and brushed the fur back on his face. "You stay," she said softly, leaning in to give him a small kiss. "Please don't follow me." She could feel her voice wavering, and he pushed back against her, drinking in her fear and her solemn seriousness. Jupiter leaned down to embrace him tightly and he chirped.

"WHAT?" he called, unsure what was happening. Batcat was not made to know sadness, so instead of asking her why she sounded sad, he could only ask her what. What was wrong? He had been intentionally made to not know chaos; he had been freed from the rife stench of this horrible place, and she wished she could have done more for him.

"Goodbye," came her voice as she pulled away from him, standing and waving. "This is goodbye, my friend." She shifted the bow across her shoulders and gave him a broken, forced smile. "Be good, okay? You were always good."

"GOODBYE?" croaked Batcat, falling back onto his haunches and tilting his head, his ears swiveling to see as he chirped to find her. But she was gone. His chirping grew frantic as he stood, turning his head, his ears moving like rader: but he could not find her. "Goodbye?" he asked into the emptiness of his world; he didn't really know that word, but he felt... he didn't like it.

---

Her travel through the vents was awful; smoke billowed at their highest reaches and she shielded her face as she moved through it, thankful for it if only because it had quelled the Batcat spawn into sneezing and hiding. She was loathe to visit Polaris—to actually step foot in it, the very source of everything she hated.

When she reached Polaris, she only waited, watching for a moment from above as She chained Raheerah to Her pinky. Disgusting. No life should be made to bow to others on Command. There was the slight shift in Lord Dhracia's expression and Jupiter held her breath: She knew. Without any second thought, Jupiter launched herself from her place in the ceiling and skirted down the length of the Spire, the skin of her feet peeling away as she angled herself for the best vantage point—and how she wished she could bring this whole ugly rock down with her!

She immediately nocked five arrows, a barrage, and let them loose upon Dhracia.

And without another breath, she nocked and loosed another five. Whether or not they hit, she didn't know; she blindly attacked, saving the last two for specifically targeted shots. Her alien-like body leapt from the girth of the Spire and onto a floating piece, where she nocked and aimed one arrow quickly at Dhracia's abdomen—where Her Heart lay—firing; and then the next arrow, her last, aimed for the same spot, with which she yelled, "FUCK YOU!" For Tamulus! For her! For the life of others, others that deserved it!!!

It was just a twitch, a suggestion in the ripple of spacetime--and then all of existence burst into anarchy.

Where the Lord was aware the air had changed and warmed with the body heat of some other participant, she hadn't pinpointed exactly who it was, for so many heat signatures in this cave already made her points of interest merge among their creations. It was a clever device, if made to sheath themselves from her prying stare, but it only protected them for so long. No matter the means, she made herself known--

The Master of Atmosphere.

A deluge of arrows flung first from the blur that dropped out of the vents.

There was scarcely a passage of time before they hit their mark. The sharp clatter of hearts on stone coincided with the sting, biting, horribly burrowing, electrifying--one plunged deeply into the flesh above her right breast, another in her left thigh, all the rest bouncing haphazardly off of the floor, or Raheerah's hide as the Chaos Beast suddenly shifted to shield his tamer from the onslaught. The dragon coiled, parted his maw, uttered another shattering roar, but Lord Dhracia remained frozen in time, surprised by the arrows that pierced her. That so threatened her perfection, and, simultaneously, merely advanced it.

It was unexpected, confessedly; but then again, Lord Dhracia had anticipated that things would corrupt in the wake of this nest's assimilation. She'd not been prepared for an all-out attack without warning, but maybe she'd been too quick to assume that at least those capable of damaging her were still in a position where they remembered the risk it posed.

The pain was never something she would forget. Lord Dhracia had always known pain, and this was no different; if anything, it was exhilarating, the way these foreign weapons sought to split her. The crackle of electricity that dared probe at her skin. The rotten air in her lungs trembled, and she focused her eyes on the centaur in time to see her draw her bow once more. Fire an arrow, for her heart, for her heart,

Which she caught in her hand with viper accuracy.

At that moment, Raheerah's massive wing unfolded and slid in front of her, receiving the twelfth arrow which sunk past his leather wing and hung suspended where it had broke through, that gleaming stone she could see on its tip--once the core of a beast Lord Dhracia might have commanded.

The pain blossomed like a flower. Something loosed from its chamber in her chest sputtered up her throat. Was this... blood?

The Chaos Beast wrenched his head back, his maw dripping fire, preparing to unleash his inferno upon the traitor before he suddenly stopped; in the next second that elapsed, neither his wing nor Lord Dhracia moved.

She could feel the magic of the Spire eating away her flesh, peeling back her already sickly skin and consuming her like it consumed so many others—but she pushed through, standing on near-bones as she waited for the consequences of her attack to obliterate her.

As Raheerah reared his head back, molten fire dripping from the corners of his maw, she sucked in a breath and waited...

But there was nothing.

She remained where she was on the Spire, waiting, watching; what had happened? She couldn't see Dhracia, shielded by the giant dragon's wing, but she could only hope this lapse of action was because she had hit her. Unfortunately, Her magic was still thick in the air, Her very being a pulsating Spire itself.

Jupiter missed her mark—the Heart.

She seethed and clenched her fists, hissing at the area the two of them stood.

Damn it! Damn it all!

TW: gore/violence

White knuckles surrounded the shaft of that arrow. Her wrath in tight, quivering muscles, unwilling to yet peel open again; she had to steal a moment's reprieve to make sense of what happened. Down she peered at the object of deceit which pointed hungrily for her one proneness; it gleamed at its sharpened head, and glimmered under the tufted and familiar pale fletching, designed specifically for shattering creatures like her. Lord Dhracia was powerful, almost infinitely, but not infallibly; she could have fallen had one of those arrows chipped the heart that lay within her ribs, not beating but surging and dripping. This, too, was deliberate. Dare she say contrived.

Pinching back pain, she flourished with fresh anger. The gall. Not of ungratefulness, which Lord Dhracia could have argued for too, but that this peon would consider that she was enough to overthrow her. That Lord Dhracia could even be pricked by the claws of her slaughter. Her anger doubled in the lurking revelation that it was even possible--the two arrows had impaled her. That this had even happened at all was unacceptable. Her throat tickled, unwilling to yield to the leak of blood from her wound until it came coughing up, spotting her lip. No. She would not be insulted. She snapped the thin bone shaft of the arrow, discarding it while she dabbed the blood from her mouth with the back of her hand. Dawa's stone was tucked safely away. It was time to make an example of those who squandered what her House of Chaos had provided them.

A single current of intention swept through Lord Dhracia and the Chaos Beast. Raheerah's great wing pointed, folding like a curtain guided away from the spectacle it concealed, and his body twisted around her and away. She was once more under the light of these caves, under all eyes--but Raheerah hissed and spat fire at any creature he saw move, reserving the center stage for Her. Her vengeance. Her power.

The centaur became the target of all her fury focused into a blinding, burning point. A magnificent ripple of energy sheared the air, accompanied by that distant and concentrated drone of things displaced; like the crack of a thundercloud, it sparked and bruised under her skin, blooming onyx contusions. The solar flare of void magic, bolstering within its vessel. The arrows stuck in her skin trembled, and from their burrows they bled black; oily, poisonous and viscous, until the points ejected and clattered to the stone. It stung, feeling air on her rended flesh, but that just strengthened the clench of her jaw. A shine of holographic silver flared underneath her scarred brow, no--luminous green--

The ground groaned, and from inky cracks in the stone, a thick sheet of shadow rapidly encroached. It vaulted up from the dust and crawled disgustingly along the faces of the spire's vibrant blue, racing, throbbing at first as waves, crashing, until from their froth sprouted hands and palms and fingers, grasping. Vying. They made the centaur their greatest ambition to ensnare, to twist, to suffocate. The darkness curled possessively around each limb it could climb, swelling at each contact made, like a virus, a disease--grabbing and pulling at Jupiter, wrangling her struggles like they were idle squirms. One by one, giant, glassy bulbs of chartreuse eyes peeled open, blinking intrusively as they lolled over the writhing cocoon of the seized Master.

“A pity such finely matured biomass is wasted on such a witless, withered brainstem,” she spoke without any such indication of sympathy, observing the show. “Your next iteration will surely be an improvement.”

Lord Dhracia need only wait for the servant to deliver her spider's meal. She soaked in the resonance of Jupiter's furious howls, shrieks of resistance and despair; like sweet honey to her ears. It was ice upon the burn of her ruptured flesh. Jupiter was left pinned to the ground between Lord Dhracia and the spire. She merely watched as her servant--a pleasant surprise to find one so robust here, a sign that some of these things could be salvaged--razed the Master with vile radiation, stripping her skin in violence and hunger. Things scattered in the mayhem; a pouch full of stones, sharpened arrowheads, scraps. Their gleam caught Lord Dhracia's eye, but she did not bid Senka to stop quite yet.

Worse--the ceiling above shuddered and gasped. An infinite echo of curious chatters began to swell out of the darkness. And with it, long mucus strings of black. The same ooze that coursed through Lord Dhracia's veins, the same that lie strewn through this nest in puddles. The same which made the aqueous, mutable bodies of Batcat's progeny. The dozens of them which had been lying in wait, unseen, tunneling endlessly through the substrate between the nest and what lie beyond in search of more and more to consume. She called them and they arrived, hungry, wild and blind.

“And Jupiter,” she hummed innocuously, “I will have you remember this moment.”

Of the perverted kinship Jupiter made with the erroneous Batcat, Lord Dhracia was unaware. It only served her to have access to the results of such unmonitored proliferation; the flood that Jupiter had fostered. She harnessed them, a tidal wave of darkness and corruption, and watched with utmost satisfaction as they descended onto Jupiter as well. The scene became reminiscent of a feeding frenzy, wild sharks with gnashing jaws thrashing in crimson water. Lashing, whipping darkness, screeching jaws and maddened wings. She caught glimpses of the gaping eyes before they rolled into themselves and blinked into darkness and reappeared in flickering, pupil-screaming brightness, feral with feeding. It was an explosion of carnage as they ripped Jupiter into chunk after chunk of twitching meat. Blood and gore in fresh, throbbing slumps. Her screams ebbed into the howl of the inferno.

Lord Dhracia was satisfied, but she was not pleased.

When the body had become no longer a body, it was Senka who detached first, ripping and recompiling into the hairless, mutated effigy of creation. Skulking closer, a growling and seething hound, with a cleft of flesh in her jaw. The beast presented it, the scuffed and sullied stone of the Master swaddled in muscle and fat. Lord Dhracia claimed the gift. Jupiter joined Dawa.

Her focus on the tide of hounds had thinned. They were beginning to break apart from the feeding site, now that their prey was shredded. Some of them took off with pieces of Jupiter in their teeth. Others snarled and snapped at one another, fighting for a haggard cut. Lord Dhracia released them, severing them from the well of her magic, and walked toward the remains. Some of the hounds salivated at her, only for Raheerah to loom overhead, clipping his great maw and splitting their dark liquid bodies. She didn't care. They would be replenished. Senka coiled around her feet too, in loyal wisps, in shrill and cackling echoes, and warded off what of Batcat's spawn remained while Dhracia poured over the mess.

Bones. Thick puddles of blood. Shards of skull, scraps of cloth, the shattered remains of the Master's bow. And that pouch of stones that spilled. Something powerful emanated from among them, too. If it was strong enough for Jupiter to covet, then it was worth assessment; and so, if only to slight Jupiter and her noble goal, she plucked the stone--a point of jagged pink morganite--and added it to her collection.

Jupiter would serve Chaos again. Perhaps with a more focused drive, next time; perhaps mindless, she hadn't yet decided. The rest of this--beautiful rot--she would make a note to revive later on.

The Lord hailed her Chaos Beast with an idle hand. “Go. Meditate on the advent of your next death,” she said, and dismissed him. The dragon--his body convulsed in a way it never had before. On her command, he turned slick, shining, illusory. His body congealed and loosened, until it fell to gobs. He had not ever been reduced to his primordial soup before, and it sounded of as much pain as it looked. The dragon shrieked while the entirety of his volume degraded into shadows similar to Senka, only his was a tar that was boiling, bubbling as it slid into the cracks of the earth and vanished.

With the servant surging behind her, Lord Dhracia turned away from the spire. It pained her to have to leave it here; but she was already pushing boundaries with how much she had expended today. She would not withstand that explosive aftermath if she were to remove it like she should.

She walked, and paused to pluck one of Jupiter's arrows from the floor.

Seems she has one last subject to discuss with the bird.

Exit Lord Dhracia, Raheerah, Senka, and Batcat JR's. Characters are now free to post in this thread reacting to the death of Jupiter and what they have just witnessed.

Pride had forgotten to breathe.

He realized only when his vision swam, when his magicka flickered, and he gasped a sharp breath and hastened to pour his power back into the link.

Much of it he had been unable to hear, purely from distance. But he had seen, and that--that was enough.

Raheerah, who had come, who had tormented and killed them, who had bellowed for someone unknown, seemed to have bowed before this strange, powerful, pricklingly-unsettling being. And then, in the distance: a figure, falling from above, barely-spotted before it launched a series of attacks--its figure half-blocked from his vision by the dragon's vast wings.

Shadows. Bats. Death-..? Pride could not be certain. He didn't know Jupiter; he had never met her, and did not recognize her. Nor did he recognize the sleek, furless thing wearing cloth and pelts draped around it. But the power--that he recognized. The shadows, the oily slickness, the toxic green glow--these he had seen, here and there, throughout his life.

But what did they mean-? The screaming, the bat swarm, these left him in shock, but he could not know what had happened. From his perspective, this stranger, this powerful being that had appeared and taken Raheerah in hand--surely she must be some sort of guardian, a protector in the caves? And when she reduced Raheerah to nothing but screaming (horribly screaming, and even Pride had to fight back horror) goop, this further reinforced his belief.

He decided to catch up, if he could--but he had quite a way to come. He would, he decided, send his double this way--and loop around, himself, toward the other entrance to Polaris from Orion. It would be quite the run, but the stag was swift and he knew the way well, for Orion--decimated though it was--was his home.

He wished that he knew where Nassir was, and whether the leopard was all right--but he wished to find this stranger, to speak with her, to ask her who she was--and what that power had been. To ask where Raheerah had come from, and whether there were more where he had come from.

But dread lurked in the white stag's heart. Again, even from a distance, even viewed through magic's eyes, there was something fundamentally terrible about this stranger. Reluctance gripped him--but logic pushed him on.

This presence... oh, it commanded power! Respect, admiration - and omnipotent dread. Hargrave continued to cower behind her pitiful little stone, watching wide-eyed as there was an arrival from above. A hellstorm of arrows lanced through the air, piercing flesh and wing alike. The assailant stood upon a part of the Spire, unheeding of the destruction of her very being: the spitting image of rage and hatred. Every one of her motions were... had been rancorous, even as she was cast to the earth and pure chaos and fury fell from the roof.

The shadows descended upon her, and the ravenous sound was enough to set a thick weight crawling up her throat. The Gray Hare swallowed harshly, trying to keep it down - to keep her presence from growing any louder than it already could be. Not a sound came from her as the feeding frenzy raged and this attacker was completely ravaged. When the black shapes dispersed in snarling masses, little but blood remained.

Her horn-like ears pinned back as a hideous shriek filled the air, the Black Dragon's entire being reduced to mere shadow clinging to the - ah, what was She to Hargrave? The Pale Goddess didn't hold the sheer power Her single pinkie held. It'd have to work for now, she thought, shuffling back to hide fully in the rock's cover. The manifestation of Destruction had been broken into nothing, and she was wise enough to know that she didn't want to be next.

Hargrave did not want to ever witness the Pale Goddess again.

She waited until all had fallen quiet - until all that remained was the faintly tangible hum of the Spire. Her nose prodded out from behind the boulder first, and then the rest of her wide-eyed face. Pupils darting back and forth nervously, Hargrave sulked out from the dark, into an almost heavy feeling air. An existential sort of dread clung to her shoulders, nearly rooting her to the spot and keeping her from moving any closer.

But, the dog sighed to herself, quietly whispering without sound, I must know. I must see. Was there even a trace of the Black Dragon? The attacker? Were they both simply gone without a trace, challengers to life itself?

The Gray Hare steeled her resolve with gritted teeth, plodding forwards, eyes nervously dancing side to side (and above, do not forget the above!) as she approached. Blood's coppery tang started to fill her nostrils, and she immediately retched, upchucking then and there. Nothing left in her gut, Hargrave pressed on, staring down at the bloody mass of gore and viscera on the floor, and all that remained of the Pale Goddess's attacker. Some strange part of her fixated upon the pouch of stones, upturned by all of the chaos. She nosed through them, a distant pang of I shouldn't be doing that flooding through her as she investigated.

Her fur crackled and rose due to the proximity to the Spire, and her tail flagged immediately. There - beneath the glowing blue gemstones, lay something darker, more wretched-looking. The sight of it reminded her of the dread she did looking at the Pale Goddess. But, she broke through her own hang-ups, stretching out a single paw - just to touch it for only a second. No longer. A brief, glancing contact.

The instant Hargrave makes contact with the ominous, mercurial black material between the cracks, something seems to change in the air. It is a heavy resonance that trembles, a single strike which rearranges the fundamental order of all things in, and around, and about Hargrave. Something calls out to her in all directions, not a voice but an innate urge toward change. Constant, roiling change; the impulse to scatter, and rebuild, and divide, and merge. If she were to look down into the material, she would see a figure reflected in its viscous surface. An indiscernible mass, and at first still, until she notices the churning of its texture. Then the thing passes out of the reflection, and the narrow pits groan with warning to flee.

Hargrave is afflicted with a dreadful, chaotic impulse that lies dormant until a high emotional response provokes the desire for her to destroy.