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They took her home
They took her people
They took her mother
They TOOK
And KEPT TAKING
A scream split the sky. Hundreds of heads jerked upwards, eyes wide, faces stunned. Thunder boomed as the world turned dark, roiling clouds conjured from her hands to fill the air. Her tail lashed, and lightning followed the sharp movement, striking and blasting and tearing away recently built fortifications. Her wings snapped, forward and back, and howling winds swept down to seize anything light enough to be stolen aloft. Her eyes burned, and emerald flames exploded, engulfing those who held their ground or fled screaming alike.
Nentanuk left no Arriv soldier alive.
Shan found her a day later, collapsed in the center of the outpost’s blackened ruins.
A single green eye slit open at the elf’s approach. The other, thankfully, remained covered by bandages. Dirty bandages, yes, but so long as the cloth was dirty and not the injury beneath, Shan would take what she could get.
The rest of Tanu’s dressings were in significantly worse states of disrepair, to say nothing of how her aura had dimmed almost down to nothing. And yet, the girl still bared her sharp teeth at a reaching hand.
So. Shan simply settled in to sit beside her, and wait.
Fate would twist one way or the other without her input, this time.
“...I want to kill them all,” the young goddess eventually rasped. Shan said nothing. “...I want to kill him.”
Absul.
Shan’s eldest boy.
The one who’d spent the better part of a century befriending Nentanuk Magicborn, Dragon Queen’s Daughter, and slowly fell in love with her. The one who’d stood at the front of the movement for the Arriv races to be given their own chance at divinity, and stealing it instead when he and his brothers grew impatient.
The one who’d nearly killed Tanu.
By mistake, whispered a voice that came from Shan’s own power. A mistake he regrets. Even now, he grieves, and others open darker doors while he pays no attention.
One option. One path. One thread.
Shan could speak up. She could give voice to her son’s misery, the seclusion Absul insisted for himself thinking he’d unintentionally murdered the love of his life, unaware of the things his youngest brother unleashed in the meantime. Further warmongering against the Amkyn peoples; slave towns popping up along the borders. Perhaps Nentanuk would be moved by the truth, and seek reconciliation, a softer path the world could tread. Or perhaps she’d merely pretend to be moved, and seek a meeting with Absul, but intending murder rather than peace.
Two possibilities. One more likely than the other.
More threads tangled together and drifted apart, other schemes in play and distant solutions glinting like hidden needles. Shan took a long moment to consider them all in her mind’s eye, sitting beside a wounded girl who might yet become- a monster. A mother. A martyr.
A mage.
Shan considered.
And said nothing.
In time, Nentanuk will regain enough strength to dig her claws into scorched soil. To snarl and shove, pushing herself upright. In time, she will allow Shan to take her back to a hidden workshop, for fresh bandages and healing potions. In time, witnesses of further attacks will title her Mage of the Broken Flame, partly for her one damaged horn, partly for the grief-fueled fury screaming from her broken heart.
In time.
In the moment, Shan strokes a hand over tangled dark hair, and lets the orphan rest in silence.