[IMG]http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u79/SharpshooterJack/markerOlanfaded_zps63d2f0e2.png[/IMG]
[h3]The Duchy of Zerul, by a road in southwest[/h3]
[I]Oh... what is that?[/I] Olan thought as soon as he had gotten over the initial fright of the attacker’s battle-cry and had a chance to take a good look at her. Not only was that woman giving off some kind of aura that appeared to be capable of affecting people around her adversely, but she also looked weird... and not in the mundane kind of savage way, but in a not-entirely-mortal way. The experience was actually remarkable enough for the old explorer for it to revive some brief images of when he had looked at Annabelle, and later when he had looked at Black Thorn, only to at the same time witness their physical selves and their hidden true forms.
What he saw when he looked at the strange woman was not the fiery form of a hidden demon or a twisted, bloody abomination with no purpose but to inflict misery upon all beings of the planes, however... in fact he was fairly confident, even having lost his memories, that he had never seen anything quite like her before. There was something in her that was not in her, but [I]was[/I] her, yet different from what she was. It was a puzzlingly paradoxical conclusion, but some part of him was sure that there was some truth to it. She [I]was[/I] the mundane-looking sword-wielding woman, but she was also something else... something that was both a separate thing inside her [I]and[/I] an integral part of her, as if forcibly fused with her. It was two beings made one: a woman and something shapeless and undefinable, something that coiled around her like wispy smoke while at the same time filling her inside, flitting about like a swarm of niin eager to touch and feel everything.
[I]It is there, yet it is not there,[/I] he mused to himself as he stared at the woman in open-mouthed fascination. [I]Something just behind the veil that peeked through, only to get stuck on this side. This... there might not be another being like this in all the planes, and there might never have been another before it.[/I]

“And ye... Ye... could ye understan’ her?”
Olan blinked, momentarily confused from being stirred from his amazement at this unique creature when he was addressed by Domhnall, making the old man look at the scene before him in surprise as though he had only now just realized that a fight had taken place and been finished while he had not been paying attention. It had been a brief but fierce struggle, to be sure, and both the attacker and Thaler appeared to have received significant injuries, and he had just been standing there dazedly watching it all happen without even lifting a finger to help.
Ashamed and nervous he hurried forward – having automatically undone Thaler’s true word without even realizing that he had done so – to offer his assistance now, at least.
“Oh yes, I can,” he eagerly assured the man, taking a second to recall what the woman had said before continuing. “She’s pleading for mercy, you know? It’s like Devil’s Tongue, her language, just a very crude version of it...”
He looked at the woman and, having identified her language, began to say, “[I]Lahn-[/I]”
But he immediately stopped himself before he even got past the first syllable, eyes widening with the sheer stupidity of what he had just almost done. The true words did not allow him to reproduce dialects or accents, he knew, and only allowed him to speak the most basic version of every language... and he, in wanting to communicate with this woman, had just come dangerously close to start speaking in perfect Devil’s Tongue, which would have been a phenomenally bad idea. Who knew what kinds of devastation he could have wrought through accidentally invoked black magic? Besides, there was no guarantee that this woman would even understand “proper” Devil’s Tongue... he wondered how she had even learned that language in the first place, considering how great an effort most countries put into eradicating every record of the language they could get their hands on?
Instead of running the risk of killing them all with black magic, then, Olan opted a somewhat safer option that only posed an insignificant risk to his own health: actually speaking in true words, the language that could be understood by anyone and anything.
“We won’t kill you unless we have to,” he told her, deciding that he might as well speak on behalf of the group now rather than wait to hear what the others thought he should say. Besides, he was fairly sure that he was saying what they would have wanted him to say anyways. “Why did you attack us?” [I]And what are you?[/I] he wanted to ask, but decided against it for more reasons than it just not being appropriate for the severity of the situation; with how entwined the woman-and-other-thing was, he figured there was probably a fair chance that they did not even realize that they were not originally one being and would be unable to answer.