[center][img]https://67.media.tumblr.com/d85404396cd920ea481c9dd2a3d8d632/tumblr_o8rjgeiPvk1u5gf80o1_400.png[/img][/center]

[center][color=613c3c][i]Though patient days may ease the rot
And sleep remove its sting,
The traitor winds have not forgot
That one regretted sin.

It is a mortal I betray
His flesh was once my own,
And though I beg and though I pray
My burden's only grown.

I will not lie or plead with him
I will not preach my cause.
This blood is shed for Horror's whim-
I cannot stay my claws.[/i][/color]

* * *[/center]

Whisper reached the foothills of the mountains where Grot had once walked.

The earth was covered in shallow lakes marking his footsteps. Flowers grew there now, ferns and water-lilies, and animals grazed at their side. She heard it all, the song of nature with no words, every nurtured stroke and blade of grass. Aihtiraq's gift followed her still.

She passed through a thin passage where a Matriarch once stood, along with a girl named Tira and a monk named Dancer. She flowed into the Valley of Peace.

She was told that it would burn. She had not expected this.

The wrath of betrayal and pain and justice and suffering dug into her, the claws of a thousand lost children given a place to tear. Every righteous word ever whispered by an angel sickened her, shredded her brain and made her weak.

And yet she did not die.

Whisper stalled for a moment and travelled on. She saw the great sigils before she stood between, disguised though they were. She opened her eyes and stared down their scribe as she entered them, and gold flashed, one on each side of the valley, to snare her with its magic.

The stone uncurled and stood before her, a half-blind urtelem aged by a hundred years of rain and still bearing the scars of that long-gone day. Whisper billowed in her cage. She dwarved the stoneman. Her face signed.

[color=613c3c][i]'You broke formation, didn't you?'[/i][/color] The urtelem nodded. [color=613c3c][i]'Why?'[/i][/color]

The stoneman signed, [i]'Because once there was a girl I could not save on a battlefield, and that pained me all my days.'[/i]

[color=613c3c][i]'So you grew strong.'[/i][/color]

He nodded.

[color=613c3c][i]'Nothing will save you.'[/i][/color] said Whisper the cursed. [color=613c3c][i]'If you do not flee, you will die.'[/i][/color]

He shook his head. He smiled.

Whisper flared her sepia blood and screamed in the narrow alley. Her body swung like a coat of iron chains and slammed the ground and walls, shattering the sigils, shattering the walls, bringing down the stone, shattering everything.

Golden glyphs exploded above her and she emerged from the rockfall like the dark dust it had raised. The urt put his fists to the ground and squared himself. Whisper adopted no stance.

The lines shone from his fists to the sigil below her and there was a blur. The ground exploded towards him. Whisper stood in the shattered wake and watched rocks fall into the huge gouge she had torn into the earth. She saw the stoneman standing in the chaos and did not hesitate. She somersaulted her tail upon him.

Then he was broken, and nought but cracked stone remained, still bearing his moving face.

Whisper did not mourn. She travelled on.