There is some dreaming moment in the midst of this, during which the world is frozen over, and pallid frost creeps from the fingers which clutch her throat, infecting the flesh with cold certainty. Some heartbeat's measure, and the gaze fixed upon her is an ocean of milky jade, beautiful and furious and achingly vulnerable.
... my girl, my girl, are you afraid of me...
And perhaps some name is spoken, perhaps some meaningless syllable, but it's over like blinking: something heavy has struck her chest with tremendous force, and iron creaks dull protests beneath it. So do the shelves, when she collides with them,
that being the force of Ashfiend's blow, so that wood is snapping like tinder and showering tongs and bowls and files down upon her struggling body. There's an interval of abject confusion here: the world is a blackened, burning place, filled with showering sparks and the percussion of iron upon plate; the swordswoman is
fallen, a hand clawing strings of quicksilver away from her naked throat, fighting for breath as if she'd near died for true. This lunacy devours valuable time: Ashfiend has been driven gradually past her, Calomel's back is a nightmare of dim-lit flesh and smouldering coals (
he cannot survive this, he cannot cannot cannot -- ), and when she rises at last, it is in haste and and with a shower of scrap and chains.
The first step staggers. The second delivers the schiavona back into a grasp that only slightly wavers. The third has a chisel in her hand to replace the lost dagger, and the whole of darting for the pair and their murderous embrace, with a trajectory that slightly ... wavers. This sprint takes her hard past them, delivers the woman to her destination just rear of Ashfiend's shoulder, where she means to deliver that chisel to the back of his neck. And quickly now, because time has begun to direly matter: the chestplate's hammered concave, severely constricting her lungs; Calomel's a mess of burning coal -- they are surely
dying here. And that's nothing new at all.
The trick is just to make sure that Ashfiend does first.