Tonight, as she has been told she should not, she walks alone.
Prying herself out of slumber -- where nightmares and Golden Cities abounded, all a half-remembered blur -- had been the hardest task. Donning her bonnet and knotting its ribbon was a chore she relished for its frustration; slipping into her muddy-hemmed dress, with its array of patches strewn across the skirts, was a challenge in the muted darkness of midnight. And she waited patiently for her own cowardice: that one button, one clasp alone might baffle her clumsy fingers, and she'd fall back into bed and wholly ignore this chore upon which she prepared to embark--
But dressing had become easy for the one-handed seamstress.
A silhouette, she swishes through the dew-wet grass of the Broken Dagger's lawn, her hems bobbing up, down, up, down with every stride of her trembling feet. A tin lantern casts wide sprawls of light in front of her. With every step, her spine chills, her feet threaten to turn back, and her mind screams, screams at her: You should have told somebody you wanted to come. Ailova, surely. Mekarie, perhaps. Anyone...
But this is a chore she does alone.
The woods consume her, leaning in all around her with their dark, knotted fingers. Her pores fill and overflow with the vile sulfur of her tarsweat. Her heels crunch and shuffle through great lumps of unmelted snow. The minute the Broken Dagger is out of sight, the forest's presence ebbs and swells like a confusing prison around her, telling her its unspoken secrets: this was no longer her domain, no more a place of reclusive serenity or safety. This, her mind reminds her, is a place where men and women come to die.
A trembling fist lifts her lantern's ring, spreading dull light in a circle around her.
The stink of fear falls off her in waves. Blows out of her nose and mouth in gasping bursts of breath. She spins, trying to gain some sense of bearing while her spine dances, chuckles, laughs at her under her own skin...
"Woodsbeast," she hisses into the cold night. "Red Creature. Show yourself; I come to call.
"I come to -- to speak to you. About your Guardian."
And if those moments proved to be Gloria Wynsee's last, she prays -- she hadn't prayed in what seems like forever -- for the creature's strike to be true.