[center][h3]The Hideout at Dalawakz[/h3][/center]
Imperious as the sandstone Pillars of Vor’zat marking the divide between the River Zeczieb’s headwaters and floodgates, her chin ascends. Behind her veil a scheme glints metallic: an expression belying a sharp intake of breath, a hiss absorbing the appositional silence. Stillness yet dominates the interlude, grasping and strangling the chamber’s cold, veiled margins. The moment lingers, trembling on the verge of motion, a memory, a spell wherein neither figure acts, one hesitating while the other imprisons time, making of it her captive.

Motion transcends the moment, her long, strong arm ascending from her voluptuous flank. Serpentine, it seeks the table’s brim. Triangular patterns chime, exalting her lissome gesture, rippling, trembling, evoking conceits of a tundra cataract tintinnabulating through an icy, sleeted gorge. 

For shadow skulking errants, her manner appears deliberate, ritualistic, yet imbued with raw ferocity, with grace, with intensity building towards an inevitable disunion, a breaking of order.

From a recess in the table, she plucks a shard. Glowing soft, pale, and aureate, it hums before her examination, occluding the cusps of her darkly iridescent talons. With a flick of her thumb, it ascends, sedate above her open palm. Another arm lifts, and she claws a sign—talon striking, as if dashing a burr from a thread. Dispersing, it floats, luminous motes drifting and tracing after her movements, as if under the thrall of an ultramundane compulsion. Her fingers seize and pattern, attenuating the golden nebula to a lambent filament that coils gently in the hollow of her hand.

Fingers snap, her arm drops. It hangs like a dead, wind-sheared branch. No more is there a radiant weave. That is absent, in its place a translucent, golden gem rooting its essence in sixfold titanium prongs shimmering along a procession of simulacra sweeping from her nostril in a downward arc, then rising, at last uniting with the veil at the curve of her jaw.

Aloof, alien, yet unmistakably female, she splinters her voice into trifold echoes, to audible shapes. Crystalizing into three languages common to the region, to Dalawakz, she reveals:

[i]“Nictating Gloam Snitch, what is it you seek? Do you know? I doubt it. If you yearn for this world’s truth, emerge from your cowardice and stand beside me as a man!”[/i]

Abandoning her stronghold at the decanter, she takes three long paces. Nearer him, her intruder, she swells to something immense. She stops, formidable and decisive, her gown sweeping across the arc of a circular pattern etched in the stone floor. Within, it can attend three forms in tolerable propinquity. Glancing in her interlocutor’s direction, two of her arms extend in an imperious invitation and point down at the circle on the floor.