Scint River
HE SAYS "OH BABY GIRL, DON'T GET CUT ON MY EDGES I'M THE KING OF EVERYTHING AND MY TONGUE IS A WEAPON" She speaks, and is it his imagination or is she speaking to him and him alone? Despite what he's said, despite his desire to keep his children safe, he finds himself entranced, a slave to her words. "Kis hollo," he says again, a murmur. She says his name back to him and it is music to his ears, as though it's the first time he's hearing it all over again - his eyes shut, blissful, and he listens. For the first time, he truly believes that it is her. Nobody else - no foul spectre, no cheap imitation - could sound so like her. Love them. He doesn't need to ask who, what, she means. "I do," he replies, his voice so earnest that it's almost boyish. He is a boy again stood before her in all her vast wisdom - he's back in the forest, a newly-hatched dragon at his side and a raven-filly in front of him. His eyes are stinging; sand, he assumes, or a speck of dirt, although it's hard to carry on denying the fact that tears are now rolling down his face, sticking to the harsh contours until they fall to the ground. It's hard to fight the urge to move closer, to embrace her fully, to hold her and never let her go - instead he stands, making no attempt to fight the string of tears, and returns her words. "I love you - always." It's the first time they've both said it. He never thought that it would happen like this - in the middle of a battlefield, with her dead and him grieving, with just the spectre of her fallen body to give the words to him. It is better than never getting to say it, though. At last, Volterra feels that he has some sort of closure, and the knowledge that she didn't go to her grave not knowing how much he loved her, that instead she can fall into her eternal sleep knowing that his heart died with her, and will never belong to another. It's as though a veil closes across his face, then. Emotion is wiped from it, the tears dry upon his cheeks, and Volterra the Indomitable rises from the ashes of Volterra the Broken. He stands upon the corpse of his former self and he surveys his battlefield; he has children to protect, demons to destroy. There's demons for sure now; spectres erupted from the earth itself, come to attack the foals that find themselves beneath Volterra's protection. Oh, no. Not a chance. Not now he's emboldened with the thought of her, not now he's wearing her memory like armour against all the blackness of this world. She told him that he has more battles still to win - she told him to fight. So he fights. Pain wracks his body as he reaches for his magic as soon as he sees the ghost begin to appear; he's still for a moment, the seconds dragging by like hours, until he emerges from the husk of himself as a monstrous three-headed dog. A roar explodes from triple heads, demonic claws gripping the earth as he places his colossal, terrifying canine bulk in front of the children behind him. With thick muscles rippling beneath damp, reeking fur, three dog heads dribbling saliva and menace and four stout legs that each end in paws the size of dinnerplates, he is a beast born of nightmares. "STAY BEHIND ME," he roars to the foals, and three heads echo the words; he is a monster now, and it is a monster that is required to slay these hellish creatures. He lunges forward, seeking to slam his bulk into the stallion's spectre (Silverline) before it can reach the foals under his protection. One of the foals is not his own, but appears to be a friend of Otem and that means she falls under his protection too - he seeks to slam his gigantic, three-headed weight into the side of the spectre, trying to knock it away from the children whilst his triple razor-fanged snouts reach for its throat. Ghosts cannot be killed, but dog-Volterra is going to do everything in his power to disprove that. He can feel slices being torn from his skin as the particles slash against him like glass, but the pain is nothing but a distraction from the raw animal instinct that has taken him over in this form. Vadir attempts to usher Varuna closer to the other children so she may protect them all; she circles them with her great golden bulk, seeking to place her body in front of any ghosts that approach, as her scales resist the sharp edges better than soft horseflesh. |
THANKS ODD I'LL JUST BE OVER HERE CRYING.
Attacks the Silverline spectre in his cerberus form to protect @"Otem @"Castiella" and Vulkan ; tries to tackle Silverline out of the way before he can attack the children. Vadir circles them to protect them from other ghosts.
