rattle the cage

ASHE I'm not a girl.    Something new passed between them with the smile that found Kiada's face, and Ashe raised her brows. "Some of us have to fight harder for it than others," Ashe said on survival, nodding in agreement. Everything she had become, she became to survive.    As Ashe listened to the other woman explain, Soot scuttled forward to the lowered head of the luxere. The wine spider paused at his nose, reaching a leg tentatively forward to tap against Auni's nose. He hiccuped, and then clambered forward to make his way into the glowing antlers. To spin a web, perhaps?    Ashe shook her head and approached her satchel - the same messenger bag she'd had when she fell through - and slung it over her shoulder. "The gods where I'm from were long dead, or never existed in the first place. We didn't have monsters or ghouls. Northaven had some strange beasts, but Northwind?" Ashe returned to stand before Kiada, her arm resting over her bag. "I've never known a greater evil than human kind."    She pulled her lower lip between her teeth, squinting up at the sun through the broken roof before looking back down Kiada. She... was not what she seemed to be. Her smiles were warm, but there was a sharpness beneath that piqued her interest. "What is it you normally do?" she asked abruptly. "I mean - what is it you're normally doing now, when you're not gifting knives to assassins?" I'm a storm with skin.