It is quiet.

The sky is a giant, gaping wound, bleeding ink and infested with stars. Wind rustles by.

The camp is asleep. It's only Minthara that has yet to follow suit, a lonely watchman knelt at an altar to no goddess.

She doesn't notice nor care: her mind is elsewhere.

It is quiet. Too quiet.

She can't sleep.

It's not the weather to blame, though. Nor even the Surface, though she has no love for it.

Oh, no. That's all on you. Jhaelothssi.

~~The mere thought of your name makes something twist in her chest, warm and sickly. She smothers it.~~

It's all been on you, ever since you brought her to this motley crew.

Ever since you'd saved her, without cause or benefit: first when you'd let her keep her life all the way back in Moonhaven, and now when you'd saved her mind from crumbling under Absolutist yoke.

And Minthara?

Oh, she despises you for it.

She cannot get a read on you, here. Her life had fallen apart completely, utterly - her goddess, Lolth, had abandoned her in time of her need. Her other 'goddess', Absolute, amounted to no more than the worm burrowed into her skull, whispering in her ear.

And her most recent lover - Orin, the woman she'd exalted as a goddess unto herself, the one for whom she fell to her knees for, obedient and pliant like a mutt..

..Oh, but she turned out worse still. A shudder creeps down her spine at the memories, neither wanted nor bidden.

And now, here come you, making her battered heart beat and her stomach flutter. It's sickening, the treachery from her own body; from her fragmented mind, which she still cannot piece quite exactly, the shards are but cutting her hands.

It's clumps of sugar in her throat, these strange sensations she does not wish to dwell on - it is a jarring, harsh, unfamiliar flavour, 'sweet' yet too saccharine to be enjoyable. She feels her teeth ache in protest, as though a taste would be enough to rot out her fangs and claws and all those other weapons with which she naturally rended all who'd come too close.

She cannot stand for it. She won't. Not again.

Minthara had finally learned the steep price of feeling. She has naught to pay it with, this time.

Which is why when the moonlight reflects off the sharpened edge of her blade, she does not dare breathe, looming over you like the shadow of your impending fate.

It'll be a kindness to herself to end you quickly.