They swung open the cage door, cattle prods at full power, humming with electricity. The man lazily lifted his hands in surrender. "Now, now." He said softly. His voice was like velvet. "No need. I'll do as you please." The man in the cage said, his...
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Theophania felt mud between her toes and the heat of the blazing sun on her skin. The water she stood in rippled with the thunderous beat of a thousand men's feet, and every one of them, she knew, was coming for her.
Her eyes sprang open to face the onslaught, but before she turned to the men on their horses, she studied herself in the water, her breath slowing as the wind picked up and stirred her hair.
The face that stared back was pale as porcelain, and not her own. The hair she felt brushing against her bare shoulders was straight as a reed and black as night. The woman that was her had the look of some ancient beauty- something wild. Something that couldn't be tamed.
But her eyes were the same rich brown as Theo's, save for the lycan gold that streaked through them. A name whispered through her mind in a tongue tinged with the old English of the past.
Adelaide.
'The first.' Dancer snarled as the human presence within her grew, 'she who would harness the sun within me.' There was a tinge of respect in Dancers voice, even as there was deep resentment.
Theo felt Adelaide's hands tighten around long pointed blades as the men circled her, the breasts of their horses creating an impenetrable wall before her. One hefted a spear behind her, its point glinting off the reflective water before her eyes.
He launched it with a fury that only man could possess.
Adelaide whirled and slammed the spear out of the air with a blade, snapping the haft in half with a speed and strength that befitted no true human. Her shape shifted; took on that jet black skin and the claws that Theo had repressed for so long.
Horses whinnied in fear, rearing and fleeing even as their riders leapt from their saddles and pressed in with spears. The shift between skins wasn't painful despite the heat that emanated from Adelaide's core. It was smooth- like silken water slipping over her frame.
The woman twirled and spun, turning here into the woman beneath and there into the Dancer within. The lycan did not fight her, even as she took wound after wound and the water grew red around them.
Countless men she felled. An army of them. But no woman can stand alone, and so she fell, but not to her knees. She crouched on the balls of her feet, panting, half lycan, half woman, before the inquisitor's gaze.
No words passed between them. There was nothing to be said of such agony. Such grief.
Her eyes blazed open even as the man before her drove his silver blade through her breastbone and into her beating heart.
Theo was cast from the body, her own chest hurting even from deep within her mind. A ghostly pale hand pressed against her chest in this world of nightmare.
Theo squeezed her eyes shut, and when she reopened them she was elsewhere, in another skin.
This time her hands were small, and in place of blades and bloodshed she held a white flower smelling of wind and pollen. The cottage around her was ramshackle and old, the hayweed roof falling in to let the golden light of the sun without filter through. Behind her, a woman she knew inexplicably to be her mother hummed behind her.
