"I'll hold you to that." He warned. "Will you make it?"

"I'll be fine." She assured him. "... thank you. Stay safe, keep to the shadows, and in a pinch, weave around trees. They have trouble following."

"Sounds like you deal with these often."

"We don't have time." she urged again, stepping away, unto the dark. "Don't let anyone see you."

He nodded curtly, watching her as she turned to go and making like he was going to leave... except his intention was anything but.

Roo turned and skittered away as quickly as possible, joining paths with the deer, who approached quietly and snuffed around her ankles. "Thank you for waiting," she said in a murmur, eyes flickering up fearfully as another howl sounded in the forest, closer than ever. The crow above them cawed in response, wheeling through the air. Roo looked around until her gaze settled upon a flat rock, which she used to boost herself onto the doe's back. It was surprisingly tolerant of her treatment, simply bowing its head and staring into the distance.

Once she'd made her way up, they twisted around in the direction of the responding flash of light from earlier and set off at a steady pace. Above them, the crow continued to shriek.

Giovanni tracked them through the forest, keen to avoid the attention of any more Nightriders. At least he knew exactly where they were headed-- the flickering blue light that seemed to call out from just beyond the trees.

The trees beneath them began to fall as a familiar thunder sounded around them, but faster and with so much more force than before. In response, Roo lowered her head to the doe's shoulder as they picked up speed, hair lashing about her face like a thousand tiny whips.

The air grew even colder, heavier, until Giovanni's breath crystallized before his face. Roo was fleeing with a band of Nightriders baying and snarling as they chased after her, forming a loose line. They closest one was on a hairsbreadth away from the doe's galloping hooves.

The grass beneath them crunched with frost that eventually turned into a flat plain of ice, absent of the towering trees that hid so much from view amidst the forest enclave. Roo's doe leapt across with relative ease, but the Nightriders' mounts slipped upon the floor, their legs sliding wayside and sending them sprawling across the plain.

The doctor stood a stone's throw away, glowing as brightly as the bottled storm in the dark. Flurries drifted down around them to join the ice floor. Three of the riders scrabbled to find footing in front of her, rolling in agony as their steers' hooves splayed in every direction, but then the copse of trees behind them burst with a flurry of movement. Two of the riders came charging forward, swords raised and poised to fall upon her head. They moved too quickly to track and when they opened their mouths, a dissonant scream split the air. But Rhea didn't move, and then they brought down their swords.

Giovanni had stopped at the tree line, not eager to give away his position. He lamented internally the plight of these two, severely outnumbered and seemingly quite endangered. It clearly hadn't been their first encounter with these Nightriders, but even so they weren't an enemy to scoff at. If they did pick off a Lumanlisc or two, it certainly wouldn't be the worst thing, especially since he suffered no implication at all from it. Not to mention his cover with Roo was shaky at best if not totally blown, and if she never took that knowledge outside this forest, well, that worked out in his favor.

Roo stared at the space around her sister, brow pinched in frustrated concentration.
Everything in their world had a name, be it a cup, a door, a lake, a cliff. Sentient things monikered themselves (Roo, Rhea) and each other (Moira, Mina). But all those things without voices had names, too. Ancient ones. Be it a cup, a door, a lake, a cliff.

Prototypical Altirian wasn't commonly known among their people. There were scholars, of course, and language enthusiasts and culture enthusiasts and all sorts of other enthusiasts, but no one else had a handle on Prototypical Altirian like she did. No one could quite make the language their own.

All those enthusiasts might accuse her of butchering what was original and true, but their language was different in that it arose from Altair's constituents themselves. The sentient creatures of Ancient Altair hadn't called a cup "a cup". The cup had named itself. She wasn't quite sure how it all worked or who had discovered that such a thing had even arisen, but then, maybe it didn't matter beyond her own curiosity. The most important thing was that Prototypical Altirian was the language of the land, and with knowledge of the language, the land could be changed. At least, Roo found that it could.

And so the ground beneath the riders was no long grass and soil and minerals and little bugs; it was sand. Quickly sinking sand that swallowed the glass that coated it and the hooves of great steeds that stood upon it. The steeds whinnied and reared in anger; the riders wobbled, their blades crashing far from their intended mark, though one of them managed to slice Rhea neatly across the face. She still did not move.
Rhea's focus was concentrated on the slowly building slabs of ice that were circling the plane, growing larger and glassier and so much faster each time whizzed by. The ice moved in circles, accompanied by a high pitched ringing, pinwheeling through grass and tormenting the warhorses that struggled to stand in the snow.

The two blocks of ice passed once, only about as high as Rhea's knee. Three riders were sprawled in front of her. The second time they passed, it towered above her head and two more riders had joined the fray. By the third pass, the last rider had finally stumbled into the clearing and his horse had promptly toppled over, shattering its legs against the floor. By now the ice blocks were as tall as glaciers, and this time they didn't pass at all. Instead they slammed into each other with a gut-wrenching crash, obliterating the incapacitated creatures and their horses, followed by a residual boom that echoed through the trees and a spray of snow that turned the world white and red.