𝐚 𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐥𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐬

𝐢.

𝐢. | 𝐜𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐝𝐨𝐰𝐬, 𝐡𝐮𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐬

The nightly roast of the campsite is auspiciously quiet.

Fire crackles against Elyra's ear as she rips down another side from a squirrel mottled with smoke-gray.

She hunches over the creature, skinning away the rest of its fur and revealing a soft, rose-colored layer swelling beneath. The flesh there is viscid, already as slippery as mucus, and she longs for the days where blood was simply blood.

Where it didn't require much more deliberation, where it wasn't imputed to anyone's appetites.

Where she needn't fret over a silver-tongued trickster and a warlock whose ambition had soared beyond him and laced an unknown evil to his call.

Where life itself was simpler.

Samaer would have screamed in humor if he saw her now, buckled over and doing men's work for a party of unappreciative fools. She considers leaving the meal preparations at that, knowing what good it would do her when the fools expect a cornucopia of unrivaled delights set before them. As though she's a fiend ready to divvy up a contract between the first course of garlic-roasted mutton and wine as red as one's tongue. She would think they've had enough of those. The fiends, that is.

No, she persuades herself. One squirrel would be ample, for it doesn't seem as though the others will join her in this sumptuous feast she's prepared.

A feast of squirrel and cloves. Goodly.

She wonders how well Samaer and the rest of the wood elves are faring without her talent. Elyra had been one of few who'd enjoyed searching for game, rooting it out, killing, quick, and one fewer still who was exceptionally proficient at stalking.

Enough for a woman, they would say, but she remembers how they'd hedged their coins when the wagers called her name. How they laughed. Nervous in the gullet.

Then they'd say, oh, Elyra, don't you know? Women can't bet—it'd jinx the fuckin' hunt.

"I see you've done well for yourself again. Call me impressed," Wyll's agreeable voice takes some edge off her mind.

She'd missed his advent, his ham-fisted manner of treading the greenwood, disturbing any living being from one acre over until she'd be assured of his noble, noble blood. Only good with hunting dogs, really.

Can't do much for practice on that one, she thinks. And if there was any supper at all to be had in the blasted, infernal fires of this perdition they're collectively sharing, she'd—oh.

His dead eye, a sending stone, he calls it, rolls over the blood streaked across her arms with something she can't quite seem to place. There was a moment between them, one would think vanquished, where Wyll had wiped the blood and mire off her cheeks after a particularly harrowing encounter with an ogre—much to the chagrin of Astarion.