Hair clings to the slick damp of their skin. It lies in tendrils against their throats, tight against the swell of muscles there. They gleam and glow with each terrible flash of light and rip of thunder. The air pulses with the heart of the storm, throbbing in their ears and vibrating in their feet as the earth rattles, rattles, rattles.
 
The storm rolls in, a beast hunting across the plain. It snarls in every dimly lit corner. Trees become monsters, their gnarled arms reaching out like claws, thirsting for blood and flesh. They creak in the wind that howls and snatches.
 
Beneath the splitting skies the Crow turns his gaze upon his companion. She is shadow - an angular thing, lethal. The skull upon her spine laughs in the light and snarls in the dark. Its teeth are bathed ivory white, sharp as daggers that promise to rip and consume. Its sightless eyes watch the Crow, a lion surveying its feast. Yet the beast Avdotya wears is long dead, its head now a prize now placed upon her slender spine.
 
Raum turns away, his skin turning black as night, black as pitch. He douses himself with Caligo’s magic and is no longer silver. The Ghost is corvid now, all teeth and claws and coarse feathers. He prowls like a panther and watches like a hawk. Avdotya speaks and his skull tilts, avian and dangerous, toward her. He turns his electric eyes upon her too but when they reach her, they are blue no more. Those eyes are pearl and ink, black as the deepest reaches of the earth. He is a darkness that knows no light.
 
The thunder laughs and splits the sky.
 
“No.” He muses with a voice cuts like a knife through silk. There is coarseness too and it grates as sand and gravel might. Had the Mors left a token of sand and dust forever embedded within the Night Court soldier?
 
Through leonine eyes he looks upon her, setting gold to clash with serpentine red. Avdotya and Raum are blood and gold, splattered across the plain. They are the betrayers, the wreckers. Blood stains their souls as war scars their bodies. They have tasted the blood of Solterra.
 
The serpent’s scars are stark slashes pulled tight over the ridge and furrow of her ribs. The Crow wonders how it might feel to be split, as Avdotya once was, by wanton claws. In silence the Crow studies her, a predator carefully regarding a fellow hunter.
 
“Rather like a serpent that never suited climbing so high. Snakes are made to be on their belly in the dust and the dirt.” They were made to bite the ankles of their foe and bring them to their knees. Avdotya had done just that. If he were any other man he would have smiled for her then, but there is only a ghost of a smile left, haunting the corners of his quicksilver lips.
 
“Solterra was poison, even before you bit her.” He looks away, into the grey of the savage plain. He looks through the slanting rain, hard as needles and the winds that howl in his ears. He is aloof enough to contrast the congratulations that slip, surprisingly, past his lips. “Now she is crippled and poisoned. Well done, by the way.”

---

@Avdotya

 

Raum is a shadow beside Avdotya. Still they track across the plain, side by side as the the Serpent and the Crow. Crows were canny things and serpents sly, maybe that is why, as they walk upon common ground, ravaged by a storm, they find their own common ground too. And oh it is a place of blood and scars and both are easy here, both are welcome.
 
It was a grave day when Night and Day united through mutual darkness and despair.
 
Steam curls from his slick skin and still the rain beats down through the mist about him. His  body is not like lava, his soul as frigid as the deepest ice. The Crow is liquid beside Avdotya,. He is the shadow that swallows all – that moves in silence and strikes with nary a whisper. Only this girl, this creature beside him, he thinks, no, he knows now, could ever come close.
 
How long has it been since he saw his brother Acton? How long since they shared the flare of wings the bite of a crow’s beak? The warrior beside him dashes every thought of Crows and bothers from his mind. When did the lion become malleable? He thinks. With a corvid tilt of his skull, his eyes, black as pearl, draw upon her. They linger upon the glint of pallid teeth, sharp and ready of the skull resting upon her back. It maw is parted in an eternal laugh and Raum does not flinch with its ferocity.
 
Then those eyes, blue like sparks, are upon the curl of her lips. She moves to smile, but never does. Ah, just like him – for what is it to smile here? Slowly his gaze peels from her and he longs to take a piece of her soul, to know if it is as wretched as his own. Is it black with mould, red with shed blood and ragged as though claws had torn it apart. Raum thinks it might be.
 
His attention returns to her, slow, slow, slow. He regards her in silence, as sharp as daggers, as soft as wings. Does he have the knives to press against its throat? Her words ask him, prying like needles, slick like serpents coiling about his limbs, his throat. Through it all the Crow does not flinch, he does not cow away from the attentions of the serpent before him. He holds red in black and in will, he knows now, for an eternity. “If the time comes, maybe.”
 
Oh so easily he discards her question, so simply he dismisses it. There was not even room for a beat of his heart in the time it takes for him to answer her. Raum is too calm, he is to unfussed by her question. That, is answer alone. If the time comes, he would. Raum would never fear even to hold a dagger against the end of the world and then let the blood flow.
 
“But even you know, Avdotya, that it does not have to be a knife. It never has to be just that.” And then he looks over her with a pointed stare. Raum draws attention to her scars made by claws, the teeth of the skeleton upon her back, the gleaming blade of her spear. Avdotya is a weapon herself, forged from sand and slavery and wicked, wicked instruments of war.

---

@Avdotya

 

The rain does not relent and the storm prowls on overhead. Each rumble of thunder is a mighty beast whose roar rattles the stones of the earth and has the stems of the field trembling.
 
Each strike of the storm was a dramatic moment, filled with white light and then swallowing darkness. Trees become frightful with their looming shadows and fixed bodies, each one frozen by every illuminating flash of lightning.
 
Raum might afford a lone ear to twitch with a strike, enough to watch as all that is hidden becomes exposed for one brief moment. But then the rain drives ever harder and his skull lowers against the brunt of the wind.
 
Rain trickles as tears down his face, falling silver and bright from his muzzle, tangling his forelock into chaos. Their every stride, if they could hear it above the lupine winds that howl, begin to squelch as the sated earth begins to drown and weep.
 
The grasses are a sea of waves that roll wherever the wind takes them. They crash against Avdotya and Raum’s limbs, their stems sharp as whips in the fickle wind.
 
No longer does he watch the Day girl. No longer does he need to. Raum knows her weapons now, he knows the potential of her forked tongue, the blood red of her eyes and the roll of her muscles beneath slick, serpentine skin. He knows how her potent blood hums, its silent whispering to which he listens. He can even feel the bite of her skull’s leonine teeth upon his spine.
 
Avdotya talks of Crows and his mind fills with blood and betrayal. Ah! At last he smiles. But Raum is forever silver and those lips of his are wolfish and hungry. There is no ounce of joy in that rictus that splits his face. It is poison to behold: a dangerous, beautiful thing of ruin and rapture.
 
“A Crow is who I am.” Raum says as easily as the rain that pours from his spine. He casts the words away as if they were a mere comment upon the obviousness of the weather. The wind rattles the barley at their feet and laughs its roar in their ears. “Their betrayal does not change that.”
 
And which of his brethren Crows was not a sinner? “It turned our was brotherhood is not as tight as I once thought.” Such weakness he exposes so casually, before his voice lowers to silk – the rich warm of whisky enough to numb the nerves and incapacitate the mind. “Yet you know as well as I, that betrayals happen everywhere and Novus’ sin runs deeper than Rapax River.” Such blithe acceptance is a whip across Novus’ back and Raum does not smile as he holds its handle tight.

---

@Avdotya