[P] a precipice so delicately posed;

[Shrike]

like a fresh cut flower promises sure to wither up Like her brethren from Ravos, Shrike had not hesitated long after seeing the god’s messenger before making her way toward the gods’ peak. Mount Corenth, Veneror Peak – always the gods sought the high ground, though nothing she had seen here suggested that these were real enough to bleed.   But she could not be kept from the promise of magic, not when she had little else tying her to the desert. After the Davke attack, in the heat of the Solterran summer, there had been nothing for her but to stay and learn what she could. Now, though, the dog-hot days were over and each autumn breeze swept in the promise of change. Her passage through the canyons was uneventful but strange; they reminded her too much of the place of her birth, wind-carved buttes and rock striated red. Never had the riftlands created such an echo and Shrike passed through them as quickly as she could, glancing up only to be sure the shadows she saw belonged to hawks and vultures and nothing more. When at last the world turned from sand to dirt, from scrub-brush to grass and trees, Shrike tried to tamp down the anticipation that built in her blood. It had so often led to disappointment. But there was no denying of the magic of the place, a dense, electric quality to the air that did nothing to fill the now-hollow places of her where once something similar had lived. The paint was not often given to fanciful thought, but she wondered now what places magic occupied in a body – was it the bones, was it the blood? How was it gained, how lost? But all such thoughts were forgotten when she comes upon the half-circle of stones and trees. Even the familiar scent of foliage was bitter on her tongue as she examined them, describing a slow circle from one point of the arc to the other. It was no magic that made her at last fall still. Even her breath held as first the scent and then the sound of the black unicorn reached her, and the only thing that moved was her lips as they shaped a slow smile. No beast, no battle, could make her heart beat as it now did, and even the gods were forgotten for this moment. Slowly she stepped further into the open, her head high and her eyes hungry to devour the sight of her sister. “It’s close enough for me,” she said. @Calliope @Raymond SHRIKE