unfinishedlibrary | do you bare your fangs at us, sir? MOONLIT RIVALS LOG 2, SCENE 2

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do you bare your fangs at us, sir? MOONLIT RIVALS LOG 2, SCENE 2

Who: Readers and Actors
What: The werewolves who are not sneaking into the party cause a bit of mischief... and did anybody actually agree to keep the peace tonight?
When: The night of the ball itself. [ooc timeline: Feb 6th - 19th]
Where: The city of Montica.
Content warnings: Please include any warnings in headers.

Waxing Gibbous Moon

In Town

Above the city, the Umbra Mansion stands tall. Its grand doors and windows have been opened, spilling light like a beacon. Music lilts in the air, drifting so far as to be faintly heard even in the neutral centre of the city.

The streets have emptied, particularly in the vampiric half of town. Most of the vampire loyalists have joined the masquerade, leaving their homes and shops unattended. Tonight is a special night - a once in a century event, and they wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Even some werewolves and neutral citizens have been enticed to attend. Jadis the Mystic has created a lotion that will disguise the scent of a werewolf; an effect that is broken by shifting, breaking the skin, or the gradual passage of time. It is not widely distributed, but rumours travel fast. The lotion is only given to any Guildulf-aligned werewolves, but… well, there’s nothing wrong with a little trade here or there. Right?

For all of the wolves in town - with the moon so close to being full, it’s natural for them to feel a bit more excitable. Energetic. Ready to take on the world. And seeing as Montica is so empty, it’s like a playground has just been opened up. The young wolves in particular are eager to take advantage of the empty streets, the sound of not-quite-mature howls breaking through the air in their excitement. There are hardly any people around to be scared if they play too rough or run too fast, and they are taking advantage of this with great enthusiasm.

In the highly-debated 'neutral' zone, some small packs of adolescent werewolves are gathering. There's banter and roughhousing, the not-quite-adults playfully shoving each-other over the invisible line where the vampire territory begins.

Some of the bravest amongst them take the challenge to dart over and brush their fingers over silver doorhandles - their yelps spurring courage and adrenaline in the others. What starts harmlessly enough quickly escalates as they urge each-other on, teenage excitement and the thrill of the moon encouraging all sorts of bad choices. The longer they go without reprimand, the more bold they become; and somewhere along the way, bulbs of garlic start winding up in places they wouldn't normally be found. (There is at least one group who is excitedly challenging each-other to leave the garlic in more and more absurd places. If they happen to sting themselves on some silver ornamentation on the way, all the better.)

Not all homes are unoccupied, though - sooner or later someone’s going to disturb someone else’s peace, and tensions are already so high. Hopefully there are some Responsible Adults around to curtail the worst of the mischief before someone’s temper is sparked.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Roberte's fury fades as the fight bleeds from Appiene's body. The man is still breathing, hitching wet gurgles, but he's otherwise still.

Guildulf staggers back, panting heavily. Blinking slowly, sluggishly as he turns his head toward Jadis. His muzzle starts to sink back into his human face, still covered in blood and strings of flesh. A slurred half-canine warble escapes him, and he starts to step toward her... then collapses onto his face, as his macerated forearm folds underneath him.

Moaning with pain, he rolls over on his side, melting back into human form, his arm held against his chest. "Jh... nnnh. Jad. Jadis." He blinks up at her. "You're 'right?" he slurs.

When she tries thinking of this as a problem to solve, the insight shifts, and she can somewhat see what's actually in front of her, like looking through eyeholes in a mask, with spare information above and below. Why people bent on murder doesn't count as a problem is a mystery. Maybe it would have if she'd framed it that way.

When she sees Roberte more clearly she almost regrets it. That's not what an arm should look like! She almost trips over a body she hadn't seen in coming to his side, then drops to her knees and gathers up her skirt.

"I'm fine," she says, because she's not going to say anything else when he looks like that, and "You were magnificent," because he went so quickly from absolute rage to asking after her, and then, "Stop changing for a while and keep pressure on that, I have to stop the bleeding."

Tearing cloth with her bare hands isn't on the table usually and even less so now. Jadis hacks at it with the poisoned dagger, then remembers and switches to her belt knife. First: tourniquet, though her left hand isn't up to the kind of force she needs to do it properly and she has to lean in close and use her teeth. Second: stop her own heaviest bleeding by binding wads of fabric over the deeper of the tooth marks in her right arm and the gashed-open back of her left hand. She chafes at it but it's better than nobly passing out. Third: more fabric and she puts her hands on him, tries to decide which bite wounds need direct pressure right now and which are sluggish and can be left for a bit. She tries to get Roberte to turn over and lay on his back, hissing through her teeth here and there. He's in the kind of condition she's always feared the twins will return in, on nights when there's some territorial scuffle.

A number of blood vessels in her eyes have burst and colored her sclera irregular red, she has no eyebrows and less hair than usual, and flakes of ash have started moving through the room. Her fire creates its own air currents as it continues to render the dead wolf down. I love my mama, if she was the one who taught me Polaris, she thinks. She can feel the upset, but it's sectioned off, she can work.

Where can she even start with his arm. Bone injuries are best treated as soon as possible, isn't that right, but this is... how much magic can she still spend... She starts to chew on her lower lip and has to stop immediately.

Roberte huffs and clutches tighter at his upper forearm. Actually nodding seems like... a lot of effort right now. A lot. Hell, helping her roll him over on his back is a challenge he very nearly fails at, and is dimly aware he would have failed at without her help. Keeping pressure on his arm seems like all the physical effort he can currently expend, now that the rush of adrenaline is leaving him.

Once he's over on his back, at least, a little clarity comes back to him, the blood still in his body sloshing weakly up to his brain. Slow, struggling, he drags his legs up close to his body, and that helps too.

"Was someone," he manages to mutter. "Was'n there. For us. Heard us."

He closes his eyes. It hurts. It hurts, more than just physically. His heart in a vise, his head a roar of noise. After everything he's done, everything he's sacrificed, this is how they reward him? "We'll need to identify. Know the families. How bad are you?"

"That's the night heron," she says tightly, as a particularly shrill scream penetrates the wall of the study and makes her shudder. "I called for him, and he came. He's... there were some looters, too. He'll be back when he's - finished."

He'll leave the maids alone. Right? Little Siskin under the bed? Jadis's face crumples as that new dart of fear is briefly too much, she makes a gasping, strangled sob, and steadies as she leans back into dissociation. The night isn't over, she's not done. She cuts enough skirt and petticoat off of her dress that she'll be bare-legged below the knee and tells herself she doesn't have even a distant part of her caring about indecency at a time like this as she makes her preparation.

Jadis is not in the habit of carrying her most potent painkillers with her while in her own home, and she already took what she'd had on her before the rival families arrived. She regrets that now, though something strong enough to competently handle this would send him to sleep immediately. Maybe he'll accept that when the dust settles more and he's said what he needs to say - she hopes he will.

Stalling for just a moment, she wipes some of the gore and flaking ash off Roberte's face, lets her thumb trail through the short, soaked hair at his temple. Blood has soaked through the pad on the back of her hand. "I'm nothing like as chewed up as you, don't worry. We can do that soon. Now, I can keep us from having to amputate the arm." Even if repairing function of the hand to any degree... even if she was fresh, that would be a lot to ask. "I have to wrap it and do a working on it. It will hurt. Should I give you something to bite down on?"

"Ah. He kept his word." The vampire proves himself to be a more reliable ally than his own kind, who he's known for decades. That's... he has no clue how he feels about that. But the Night Heron did come, and it has made all the difference. He'll have to thank him. Somehow. What does a vampire want? What does this one want? To find -- someone, wasn't it? He can do that. He can pay his debts.

Roberte lets out a long sigh, turning toward Jadis's touch. His eyes flutter open, crescents of glassy blue among the drying red, and then he closes them again.

Don't bother, he thinks, let me bear my scars proudly, but the words stick in his mouth. If the hand can be saved, it can be saved; if it cannot, he will make them see what they have done, they will not be able to deny their treachery.

"Mmhm," he hums instead, "please. My girl. Thank you."

"Yes," she breathes, and doesn't give a word of why. Roberte thinks it's because she did the outsider some favor, doesn't he? Seeking him out, telling him, had been a good idea after all. She's wondered, after she spoiled that moment of fellow feeling.

Her heart turns over in her chest, not for the first time, and she tries to smile for him in the moment when his eyes are open. It's not that Jadis has never thought about it. She'd expected, when she came here, that he'd want some early compensation for his trouble. He never had. Eventually the idea became wistful, almost. Roberte doesn't see her like that. Being trusted is enough, better than she deserves.

"Don't thank me, it's my-" No, he should save his strength and not think he has to defend her just now. "I'm sorry."

A tightly rolled cylinder of fabric should do. He can probably bite through it, he'd have stronger jaws than a non-were anyway, but it will pad his teeth. She touches the corner of his mouth to tell him to open it and supplies the roll like a bit in the mouth of a horse, then gets him to lay his wounded arm down across the remainder of her severed skirt.

Jadis takes another moment just to glance at the burning wolf, brilliant enough to read by, the only light in the room. The fire is smaller now as it's consumed most of the body. Teeth are exposed in a muzzle that's flaking char over bone. It's in a crater of blackened wood, it's caused a reverse crater in the ceiling. She did that. She killed two of them earlier, and then this.

Amazing. Horrible, but amazing.

If she can do that, she can do something about this. That settles her. Taking a deep breath, she begins to sing in a rough, hoarse voice, using the names of stars to praise and call upon the secret inner parts of herself which have such power, and puts her hands on Roberte's mangled arm to begin aligning the bones, to make them at least start to knit in the right order. He could hurt her; she doesn't think of it.

There had always been rumours. Of course there had been. It should have been a sign of trouble, perhaps, that they could never be completely stamped out.

Hindsight, he thinks, as he opens his mouth, lets her place the gag between his teeth. Little to be done for it now.

He'd never considered it, despite those rumours. Too busy and too tired to ever think of seeking out companionship after Paulette left, not to mention their relative standing. Maybe he should have. She is the one who is still here, after everything. After everything is stable again, after... After. He'll at least review the terms of her employment, he starts to promise himself, as she begins to sing.

And then the power she commands begins to flow into him, and his bones and flesh begin to move on their own, and complex thought escapes him again, as -- now drained of numbing adrenaline -- his world explodes into pain again. He clenches his hand around his mangled wrist, and he bites down on the cloth held between clenched teeth, and he screams. Loud enough to carry through the violence-heavy night.

Jadis thinks of calling on herself as something like threading hooks up through the bottom of her ribcage, catching them on bone, and pulling. Not painful, exactly, and the 'damage' doesn't have anything to do with her actual bones and mends with rest, but it's a singular sensation. Some magic, like Polaris, needs a fishhook that can catch and hold for a long time and release leaving barely a mark. Others hook around a rib and shatter it when cast, tremendous energy expelled all at once. Antares pulled a whole rib away with it. Only a few good surfaces are left now.

Roberte's back arches as she starts. He screams full force, and she instantly sees that she can't be slow and careful about this. All right! All at once! The last metaphorical bones in her chest, her sternum, clavicles, shoulderblades. It's not going to be enough! Fine. Shouting verses that go from a plea to a demand, Jadis releases Polaris and drags the last lead-heavy hook into its place. There is a terrible, sucking weight that she strains against, like trying to fly with blackberry brambles around her neck-

It feels out of her control. Bones are yanked into alignment. Torn flesh is pressed together by a vice-tight grip, veins and nerve fibers are pulled as by a brisk seamstress. Healing comes, not as a gentle warmth but as pain and itch and maddening dull ache and weakness and tingling numbness all compressed into a few heartbeats. A great invisible pressure builds and eases. The tourniquet comes free and blood starts to make its way back along almost-correct passages.

Jadis slumps back and tries to make her eyes focus. She has not brought Roberte's arm back to the state it had been in before, nor is it entirely healed. It's rough and irregular, which isn't just the considerable swelling or the splits in the skin that show raw red tissue. The shattered bones, the nerves, all of those delicate pieces are almost in the right places. With patient repetition and training, it might bend at the wrist, he might have some use of his fingers. But she's worked past her capacity and base of knowledge. Unless there's a better healer about to revise her work - and no other mystic in Montica could have gotten this far - Roberte will never use a pen in this hand again, never have full sensation.

"You've got- you - I'm sorry," she whimpers, unable now to keep from trembling. Without Polaris it's hard to breathe, hard to think. Everything hurts and she can't put it aside. Is she about to laugh, or break down sobbing? Both? The best she can do isn't good enough, she thinks, which hits her with a slow impact. All she's sacrificed and studied and she's still not enough. She doesn't know enough, isn't strong enough.

She finds herself staring past him at a torn-open werewolf, mostly human. Deflated. Pitiful, the vital tissues deconstructed. Viscera gleams wetly in the waning wolflight. Then, from a strange distance, from closer than lips against her ear, the thought comes - do they count, by the rules? can I eat them? and she's... hungry... Oh, no. Not now. Not other-Jadis, library-Jadis, being some new kind of monster. She doesn't need this now. Her body rebels at this scrap of knowledge she shouldn't have, and she is in no condition to fight back. She draws her knees up to her chest and buries her face in her crossed arms. Don't ask anything of her for a bit.

It's gone silent elsewhere in the manor, no more muted sound of begging, no more shrill sounds of agony muffled by walls and distance, so when the lord of the house howls his pain, there's nothing to drown it out. When, exactly, Curze reappears is a bit uncertain, but when Jadis withdraws, shaking, perhaps overextending her power or perhaps overwhelmed by events, the hunched pale figure's once more in the room, silent and assessing.

The stench of fresh blood, torn bowels and vampiric ichor may be missed under the scent of burning fur and meat, vile things dripping from the metal crucifix clenched in one hand as a makeshift weapon snatched off a wall on some other floor.

He'd expected to find more attackers, based on the sound. But the only things still alive in the room is a wolf that wouldn't be for long, Jadis herself and Roberte.

Something else then.

He's not the sort of psyker that can recognize when such power has been used just by the feel of a room. Maybe such would always be beyond him. But with no immediate hostile in sight, the bloody blunt instrument is set aside on whatever convenient surface is found so he can rub his hands a bit on bloodsoaked pants in a vain effort to clean them a little. All of Magnus' work to keep him clean has been thoroughly undone. The only place blood doesn't stain is his mouth. "Now what was the yelling about?"

It's quiet, like he doesn't really expect an answer. He's going to have to investigate for himself, but nothing told him either was about to suddenly expire on him.

The sensation of bone and flesh moving underneath his skin is not, in and of itself, unfamiliar to Roberte. However, he's accustomed to that bone and flesh being intact, not jagged shards moving carelessly, not shredded fibres and tendons writhing as they reach to reconnect, driven by outside forces. His body screams with the unnatural pain, his whole nervous system on fire for -- he doesn't know how long. His awareness of time abandons him. The only thing that exists is the power forcing his body to repair itself.

Until it ends. He falls back to the floor, panting, chest heaving. His body is still a scoured, burning, aching thing, his arm intact? -- he thinks? There is no more fresh blood soaking his chest -- but twitching, cramped tight, curled tight against his chest.

The exsanguinated daze has receded, leaving him reeling, wrung out, but -- but able to think. Able to... "Fuck," he mutters. He's going to have to get up, get moving, start work to counter this. He's...

...there's someone in here with them. He startles, bloody face twisting into a grimace as another wave of pain goes through him. He looks up, over, and bless him, this mortal shell, he's fighting to push himself upright with his good hand, eyes locked, properly focused, on the vampire.

"Heron." He still sounds out of breath. Voice strained from overuse. "We owe your our lives." His eyes move over the man, taking in the state of him, the bloodied crucifix. It takes him another moment to remember that he was asked a question. Maybe he isn't thinking entirely clearly. Close enough. "...healing."

Demonstratively, he holds out his previously-ravaged arm, the limb shaking with the strain of the motion.

"I regret allowing that name," is the wistful response, drawing close enough to drop down, sitting on his heels, to examine the ravaged arm. Tabs are being kept on Jadis, but so long as her heart rate and breathing remain the same, he's not concerned she might suddenly run into further issues. "I am owed nothing. There was a debt. And you were doing well on your own." Was there anyone left alive except them?

Time would tell.

Some of the blood on him is his own; he's not as fast or as strong as he'd prefer to be, but he had experience, durability and a vicious streak little in this city can hope to match. Roberte's meanwhile, is entirely his own, and that of the savaged creature not far away. "...Her work, I take it." That didn't look like a fresh wound, the bite and break looks like it could have been days ago. A week perhaps. "Does it kill infection?"

The Night Haunter pauses, brow furrowing. "Do you know what infection even is, like this?"

"Is there another you'd prefer?" Roberte asks. Part of him still screams to flee this man, but the rest is reeling, dizzy with gratitude. He cannot quite explain the depth of that feeling, but it is there nonetheless. "I should not call you a name that is not yours."

How polite.

"There were others out there," he points out with a frown. Does he not care about taking credit? Receiving thanks? Repayment for this great service? "Unless all of that is yours. A limb for every two down is -- poor math. Respectfully. We would not have made it."

He shakes his head, clearly annoyed by what he sees as an unimportant question. "There may be fever. Later. As it heals fully. I'll see to it when it comes. As long as I have the next day to work. If I burn, so shall they."

His eyes catch on Appienne. The slow rise and fall of his chest. The wet gurgle of his labored breathing. The occasional tremor of his limbs, so weak it's hard to tell whether it's reflex or an attempt to move. His face is a defleshed horror, pieces of hair and skin still stuck to Roberte's own face.

"...would you mind helping me stand?" he asks Curze, his attention fixed on the dying man.

Nothing he does is for adulation or even gratitude. That was for others. Explaining that.. would be a headache he doesn't feel like dealing with. "My name is Night Haunter. She is close, but not.. quite." What kind of name is that??

Curze's, apparently. The only one he would answer to if he had his way, but an obnoxious number of people insisted on using the one in the Imperial archives. "Oh, I think you are more resourceful than you give yourselves credit for." Those sad creatures can't truly be a threat, can they? "None of them were worth much except some interesting teeth to work with."

Except Roboute is a mortal. Barely stronger than a baseline. To their own kind, mortals are regularly lethal. Such a bite would never have been enough to break a primarch's bones. But now? A fever was as likely to be lethal as a stab to the gut.

How strange to think about. Jadis herself, soft and yielding, no longer had a shield of metallic feathers to protect her. Would her sorcery?

The still-living attacker is studied with an equally measured gaze when Roberte's attention turns to Appienne. "They shall burn if you fall," he says eventually. "All of them. The entire city. So have a care. You can barely lift an arm without shaking, what will you do standing?" Faint, perhaps.

He does have other weapons than the bloody heavy crucifix he'd used to beat a few to death with, but they are finer implements. More delicate, for fine work, not harsh butchery. The skinning knife he withdraws is for his size, but someone Roberte's size can still use it; it's offered hilt-first, uncaring if the edge cuts him in the doing.

"Where I am from, we wear what we kill."

Edited 2026-02-12 22:33 (UTC)

"Night Haunter," he repeats, perfectly accepting of the name. "Very well."

Mortal he may be, but Roberte Guildulf is still an enormously proud man, clearly displeased at his request for assistance being denied, at his weakness being pointed out. He's gearing up for an argument (or maybe just a tantrum), until the Night Haunter offers him a skinning knife. His mouth snaps shut, and a very unpleasant, teeth-clenched smile pulls across his bloody face.

"It is not usually our custom," he says lowly, and takes the knife. He drags himself over to Appiene, eyes bright and murderous. "But this is a situation requiring a clear message."

It is kinder, really, than what he had been planning on doing. A neat cut across the throat, instead of a boot coming down on it repeatedly. And then he begins the rest of the necessary cuts. Slow, sore, occasionally clumsy -- lacking the strength that's really necessary, and the leverage of his other arm -- but focused, unhesitating.

It's not a strategically sound action. Not remotely. But in this moment of bloody rage, it feels right.

"The children are still well?" he asks, eyes still on his bloody work. "Do you know?"

It's better to offer an alternative when outright denial is unwise. "Little sends a better message, I've found." Except perhaps doing it while they still live and broadcasting the results. He's reluctant to irritate this mortal version of his brother too much and make keeping an eye on him more difficult. Relieved of the knife, Curze stays where he is, hands folded across his knees to do little else beyond observe, and continue to drip blood on the otherwise goresoaked floor. "It's such a lovely pelt, too. It'll make a fine wall hanging or rug, if a cloak doesn't suit you."

Not just watching Roberte's efforts with the knife, but the still-quiet Jadis, and any hint of movement from anywhere else. He'd not harmed anyone who smelled like they belonged here, but that didn't mean reinforcements wouldn't suddenly appear.

If the witch didn't recover her wits soon enough she'd have to be seen to as well. "They are, as of when I last left off observing them. Foolish youthful discretions are taking place, but they are not lethal." One's running around getting involved in the vandalizing and the other .. may have made a new vampirish friend. 'Friend'. "They will be shocked at this, I think. Perhaps angry they were not here to aid you."

Jadis emerges from some whirling internal pit with an inarticulate mutter to the effect of "I won't-" She raises her head, blinking furiously, and touches her left hand to her right forearm, which is about equivalent to reaching for a holster. Clearly she's had various degrees of facial bleeding - bitten lip, drying blood at both nostrils, some tint in her tears - which just blends right in, really. It's stopped for now.

The brothers - brothers!? - are here and Roberte is doing something very stupid and she should try and catch up but there's something she has to do first. Jadis heaves herself to her feet, stumbles towards the servants' stairs, and catches herself on the desk which, somehow, is still standing, if far worse for wear. She glowers at the mess she'd made. The pile of ash and crumbling bones with a low flame still clinging to them, barely identifiable as canid. "Bare-ass idiot," she hisses. "If you were so glad for my help you should have said no and gone anywhere else tonight! Better yet you could have warned me! I would have protected you! But no, you couldn't decide if you were actually grateful and am I supposed to be happy it let me kill you? What would your sister say? Now you can ask her yourself because you're both dead."

Anger is rare for her - she feels it, she just only expresses the fear or hurt that usually comes with it - so this low-voiced outburst is clumsy and leaves her panting. 'Bare-ass', meaning venereal disease so bad there's no pubic hair, is also, in this time and place, extremely strong language by the standards of anyone who is not a soldier. Supporting herself on the desk she turns.

Without Polaris she feels the influence of the night heron (if he insists on his actual name she'll try but she will get it wrong sometimes) unshielded. On the other hand, she's had a rough night and her adrenal system can only provide so much more terror without more prompting than him squatting there, dripping fresh gore into the mess that's spread everywhere now, beautiful in his awful way.

"I'm sorry," she manages, trying to use the unaccustomed anger to keep back the exhaustion without letting it in her voice. "I - Roberte. What are you doing."

"A cloak," he says, thoughtfully. Something prods at him, a ghost of a memory of a dream. A wolf's pelt across a man's shoulders. Beloved. Betrayer. As he grasps for it, it turns to mist. "...perhaps."

He sighs with relief, and nods at the Night Haunter's update. "I had expected that much. Sigwulf told me outright that he was going to the Masquerade." He smiles faintly. "Impressed me lately, that boy. I won't be surprised if Sigrid's done the same, or if she's just running with the other pups." He hrmphs, and sits back, giving himself a minute to stretch his back and to try, once more, to test his damaged hand.

"They shall. And the rest of the household. We'll have to gather the dead in the courtyard once this is done. Identify those we can. Announce the attempt in the morning, and those who wish to claim their traitors may do so to my face." He clicks his teeth together, thinking, thinking. "How to proceed will depend on the identities of the perpetrators. If this fool was the only head of house, that's one thing. If there were others..."

At Jadis's voice, Roberte perks up, abandoning his contemplations and his work on the idiot's stupid hide to sit back, twisting his head to look over at her.

"Jadis." Beneath the blood, and even with the vicious light in his eyes, he is pleased, relieved. "I'm making a statement. How are you feeling?"

Jadis is watched as she suddenly lurches to her feet, but Curze doesn't interrupt. She's moving .. .alright, for someone injured, nothing telling him she's likely to bleed out or lapse into a coma that isn't psyker-related. He was no medic. He knew how to take care of his own injuries, for what minimal care those tended to require, but someone else's? A mortal's? The principle was there, an innate knowledge, but no real experience. "From what I could tell, without disguising himself either. Forcing your foes to acknowledge him when they cannot move against him is a clever move." Sigrid he didn't know the scent of, couldn't tell where she was. But she should have been there.

The bridge that would end this Story was in theory to begin tonight. Would it still, with this mayhem?

"Information easily gained from these. Perhaps not that one." A gesture to the charred corpse; that one might not be good for much.

The grin that crosses his face at Jadis' questioning what Roberte is up to is utterly friendless and full of way too many teeth. What the Lord Wolf is doing seems terribly obvious to him, and Curze surely had nothing to do with this decision.

Jadis remembers, when Roberte looks at her, that her legs are half-bared by the cut apart remnants of her skirts. She flushes and really wants to get behind the desk, but that would call attention to her state. So would trying to pull the ragged new hem lower. She's going to pretend two men can't see her indecency.

It's a good look from her patron though. The malevolent intensity put aside a moment, his pale eyes in a mask of drying blood... he really is kin to the night heron. But there's more warmth in Roberte, for all that he keeps it tucked away. He's so-

-she's staring. Jadis shakes her head and regrets it as her skull protests the sudden movement. "I'll go to my stillroom in a minute. That is such an undertaking for a trophy. If you make that 'statement' the whole city will see us as completely unhinged and barbaric. Can't you take a paw, or his ears? His tail, even, he's the only pack leader with that russet band."

She may be the most regular person present in this regard but it's all relative. Trophies - most of them understated, when compared to a whole pelt - from the bodies of fallen pack leaders are rare and mostly passed down as heirlooms. Far more usual for the loser to survive and surrender a lock of hair, a tuft of fur.

Something she doesn't see with her eyes draws her attention past the vampire. Now that she's encountered SecUnit's drones and her insight has diagrammed them out, they're not really hidden to her. "Why do you have a- never mind." Not a conversation to have right now. She looks at the night heron with visible apprehension and bows her head. "Thank you. I'm sorry I gave insult the last time we spoke. Is there a way I can make it right?"

Not that she gets why he was angry when she asked him not to hurt Sigwulf again - she has a dim awareness that he'd done something, far away, when Sigwulf was a sky person. Jadis assumes it's that she all but told him what to do.

"The point," Curze interrupts, almost gently. Almost. "Is barbarism, humiliation and terror. To make it clear there is no honor in this defeat. There is no respect to a worthy foe on offering. Let them see the price of their cowardice and their crime, and think twice before ever doing it again, knowing their dead will be desecrated and their remains treated as a beast's." His admonishment has no hostility in it, no anger. He outlines it as if it's fact, with a strange calm persuasiveness that makes his chosen methods seem ... somehow perfectly reasonable. "The cost must be unbearably high, or it will reoccur, emboldened by civility when they have given none, and the next time there may not be a decadent party to lure away the young or vulnerable."

He gestures to the corpses with a blood-soaked hand. "Would you be still feeling so nobly inclined to these criminals if it was this pack's pups lying dead? No. I think not. An example made now prevents more from being needed later."

He ran a planet like this. it was in fact super effective up until he left, so much so that the average person genuinely wished him to return.

The price Curze exacts is high, but it .. is effective, if maintained.

His head tilts slightly, to the ever present drone. "It keeps me from killing what I do not wish to." A simple answer. The rest.. making things right, insults given, simply earns a slight, dismissive shake of the head. Not worth apologizing for, and not worth addressing - to him, anyway. His ongoing struggles with his kin are his problem.

Jadis's admonition sends a flash of hurt, then of anger, across Roberte's face.

He opens his mouth to retort, but is beat to it by the Night Haunter. His expression tightens, blue eyes cold as he listens to the great giant of a man talk, and nods. He tries so very hard to be civil and civilized. And most of the time, he succeeds. (...doesn't he?) But there is a vein of darkness that runs through him that agrees with this man. Especially when his family is at stake.

"What they have done is barbaric. No courage. No honour." He takes up the knife again. "I shall return the rest of him, if his family will claim him. But this is mine."

Jadis presses her lips together and keeps herself from a sharp response. There are a lot of points in that little speech that she disagrees with. Among other things, it works so well for the night heron because of what he is, someone who's never had to build a coalition, or make peace that isn't a wasteland, who can't hit the point where people have had enough and have the tables turned on him. That level of brutality only works as well as he's confident of in settings designed for it to work. But it's obvious neither is going to listen, so she may as well save her breath.

Additionally she is herself, at base, from a setting that has a long slow work towards justice and horror-as-deterrent. Of course people shouldn't get to lie about an honorable death, of course there should be examples that sit in the memory of those who'd try something similar and those should be dramatic. So there's a part of her that finds some sense in this. Just. Not to that degree.

She eyes the night heron, really wanting to say What, I wouldn't be cowed into thinking they're right? but she doesn't need the faint flickers in her peripheral vision to tell her that would be fruitless. He won't understand and she is trying not to antagonize him, because someone has to take that kind of position and apparently it's her.

"Don't be surprised by being put at a distance, then," Jadis says at last, with all the dignity she can pull together. Her eyes flick towards something unseeable. "Now the first of our people are coming back and I've work to do. I'll have some remedies for you so you don't get blood fever and will be able to sleep. Whenever that happens."

She's not saying she won't still support him or she doesn't understand or care, and her voice is gentler by the end of that statement than it was at the beginning. There are just places she won't go. Jadis crosses the room, trying very hard not to falter when she has to step into something particularly gruesome; she's not going to pick her way around it and look squeamish. On her way out she remembers a final thing: "And don't shift, your bones need time to set themselves. It will be worse if I have to redo it."

In another reality, Curze's methods aren't painfully effective. In other times and places, instead of learning the only way to get people to live to higher standards is viciously punish lower ones, he was taught compassion and kindness, and did not learn to bring worlds to heel with suffering and terror. That man is much different from the one crouched easily in Roberte's manor, grinning like the cat that ate the canary. He has no doubts about his methods, they've worked flawlessly for well over a century on hundreds of worlds, one mortal's protest over a lifetime of evidence wouldn't do much indeed.

But he's made his point, he's sure of it, and sees no reason to pursue it further. Retribution has been achieved, and what's left of that rival family isn't going to consider doing this again for a long, long time.

"..Mm. She is right about the medicae matters. Infection is a concern, neither human nor wolf mouths are particularly clean." He'll be fine, little was going to get past his immune system, but Roberte? "By the time you must make your show of solidarity and strength, it is best it not be an act. Rest will be important."

Practicality.

The dead werewolf, mostly minus its hide, is considered for a long moment. "If none will touch that, I know a thing or two about leatherworking. It will take.. three or four days to get something workable from it." Unfortunately not through his preferred method of brain tanning, given the mess..

Jadis reprimand stings, and then his pride bites back -- she is his servant, why should it matter? -- and that stings too. But he holds his tongue and his temper, only huffing softly as she takes her leave. (He knows why it matters, doesn't he?) After she is gone, he looks to the Night Haunter, shaking his head.

"She'll come around," he says, in a effort to convince himself. She will.

He looks down at the half-butchered werewolf, at his bloody hands... testing his mettle. But he still feels no guilt for what he is doing. In the depth of his heart, he doesn't feel that he's in the wrong.

"It is tempting. The tanners will be displeased. But I may need to show his hide to his family before it's done." There is a cold calm in the discussion of practicalities. It's comforting. "Your offer, though, is appreciated."

He continues. "I, in turn, would offer you a reward, should you desire." He isn't the type, though, Roberte suspects. "But if you do not, at least know that you may call upon me, should you need anything. That is only right."

"It is often ... uncomfortable for some to realize there is no moral high ground that doesn't empower an opponent, gratuitous force is often what is necessary to preserve order against those who have grown complacent." The still-burning wolf will go out in time, but may burn a hole in the floor. What's left of it is herded bit by bit across the bloodstained floor towards the hearth, where it can burn freely on granite instead of something more flammable. He doesn't need to stand to do it, there's no room to stand here anyway. "It is always the victim that is expected to 'be the bigger person' and 'have higher standards', to shame them into neglecting proportionate retaliation."

A lesson that might only be listened to for the duration of this Story. He knew every single one of his brothers save Mortarion abhorred his methods and reasoning. "..Hm. Well. Keep it salted, and once you are finished rubbing their noses in their mess, I'm sure I'll still be around." Somewhere. If the story's ongoing, he'll be there too.

"I have my reward already. This was a debt to be paid, remember." That's both true and not quite, but it serves his purposes. "As such, I will ask my brother to see to your wounds, and those of your household. Your witch risks damage if she continues to exert herself further."

Curze doesn't think infection is worth playing with. But it's also not an emergency.

It's easy to assume he means another vampire, and that it might not be til sunset that said brother might arrive.

Edited 2026-02-15 21:30 (UTC)

do you bare your fangs at us, sir? MOONLIT RIVALS LOG 2, SCENE 2

In Town

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