the darkest nights produce the brightest stars
Amalia has not yet come to love the mountains.
Perhaps if they had been introduced in a different way: less fraught, less bloodshed, less responsibility and deepening conflict thrust upon them all. She ought to love them, wants to, if not for herself than for those she loves. She wants to share Deimos and Kiada's enthusiasm for the towering peaks and frigid cold, the endless ice, the blanketing white.
She wants to, yet she can't.
She's too distracted by the future it might lead to. Portals and blights, death and decay, tasks from gods old and new- it is enough to keep her anxious mind occupied, too busy to delight in this vast open world. Her forays into Halo, then, are less about a sense of adventure and more a sense of duty. It is for this reason she is here today, clothed in fur and padded feet built for traversing just such terrain. She had intended not to stay long, not to go far, not to do much more than linger.
Then she caught the scent.
She recognizes it easily. She has been around Sam her entire life, even if only peripherally, and the predator in her has no issue distinguishing his aroma in this barren place. Still there is something in her that lurches and shifts as he wafts into her nares, desperately scrambling to escape, to avoid the inevitability of this poorly wrought encounter. There is no world in which her following him results in anything but hostility, no way to reconcile their ever widening differences. She does not want to fight, not today, not ever... and yet there is a brightness in her, too, hot and jagged, tempered steel, as she thinks back to the blight. To the role he had in spreading it then.
She sets out on his trail.
Perhaps if they had been introduced in a different way: less fraught, less bloodshed, less responsibility and deepening conflict thrust upon them all. She ought to love them, wants to, if not for herself than for those she loves. She wants to share Deimos and Kiada's enthusiasm for the towering peaks and frigid cold, the endless ice, the blanketing white.
She wants to, yet she can't.
She's too distracted by the future it might lead to. Portals and blights, death and decay, tasks from gods old and new- it is enough to keep her anxious mind occupied, too busy to delight in this vast open world. Her forays into Halo, then, are less about a sense of adventure and more a sense of duty. It is for this reason she is here today, clothed in fur and padded feet built for traversing just such terrain. She had intended not to stay long, not to go far, not to do much more than linger.
Then she caught the scent.
She recognizes it easily. She has been around Sam her entire life, even if only peripherally, and the predator in her has no issue distinguishing his aroma in this barren place. Still there is something in her that lurches and shifts as he wafts into her nares, desperately scrambling to escape, to avoid the inevitability of this poorly wrought encounter. There is no world in which her following him results in anything but hostility, no way to reconcile their ever widening differences. She does not want to fight, not today, not ever... and yet there is a brightness in her, too, hot and jagged, tempered steel, as she thinks back to the blight. To the role he had in spreading it then.
She sets out on his trail.
