Desreal: -- Accendare.

“Accendare–!”

He searches wild-eyed for her, moving through the bramble with desperate clumsiness; he does not know that Severus is the last of them, that through the very air he breathes he takes in malevolence, but he does not need to. The Severus he met once, briefly – the haunted, pale-eyed ghost with a strange understanding of power (and how he wondered what would have happened, if Severus had not gone away, or Hawthorne had not been killed! – would he have grown to be a minion, and nothing more?) worried him enough; he daren’t think what the ex-King would do to once of his gentled Wolves. A breath catches the edge of his lip, which he hurries in then hiccups out fearfully. He is a creature of bravado, of strange and bold drama, but he is none the stronger for it.

He finds her there in the grove of trees where once he found another broken child, whose name he nearly forgets but her place in his heart and his life – she, the soft, subtle child whose life led to his sister’s death – he will always remember. She bleeds and breaks there, and it is not hard for him to find the source of his pain, and breathe in harshly. “Accendare!” he calls, stronger now, as he steps through the clawing trees, unmindful of the branches that scrape against his skin and bleed him dry; his heart cries out for her, for the blood lost and the scar on her shoulder, and the legacy she now carries in her mind.

Broken, he reaches her in mere steps, but he does not touch her – not her, Dragonet, broken and, he wonders, tainted and dark and betraying as the others have been; he fears to touch her, so he does not. But it cannot stop the soft, somber gaze and the crooning of his throat, hoping, perhaps in vain, that she rose above – that she fought; that even if she was useless in body, she was not in mind.

“How?” he asks for it is all he can think and all he can say; his nose lingers near hers but he cannot touch her, he will not; “Accendare, Dragonet – what happened?”