Their new queen was mad.
It’s all he could think as he watched her go out beneath that dark and foreboding sky and that glass-looking lake over ground still marred by blood and gouge-marks and bodies. It was not, he thought, so very different than the seafloor once all the water had retreated, which was to say it was wrong.
But they were all a little mad, anyway - maybe they always had been, in Denocte. A touch of derangement like a shimmer of starlight over all of them. And besides, Caligo was standing right there, and surely she would let nothing happen to the queen she had so recently chosen to lead her people. (Not that he knows, lately, just what to think of their goddess - not that he ever has thought much of her at all).
Still he watched the unicorn walk out to the midst of that battleground with something strange, something like worry, twisting in his gut. He did not care for the feeling, foreign and sour like a stranger’s wine, and the buckskin took a few steps out after her, until he stood between the queen and the rest of the group, waiting for whatever would come next.
Half of him is attuned to her story, one ear twisting, almost wistful, toward her - but his match-light eyes are watching the sky, wondering what the hell he’ll do when/if the birds came, and when/if they struck.
All he had were his illusions and a pocketful of magic tricks, and those had never done much when it came to real trouble. Acton would use them if he must -
but first he’d see how this bizarre evening began to unspool, like one of Isra’s stories made real.
He licked his teeth and wondered if this one would have a happy ending.
we have a flair for the shade and in-between
he's useless but he's here
