Marina

Role: Seeker
Familiar: Wintermane Bowman (Erde)

- Familiar bonded over mutual oops-accidentally-hunting-you. She decided a dragon was a very good, very warm bedroll, lol.

Marina has hunted most things that can hunt you, of course. But this game is unprecedented, not in its danger but in its strangeness. She eases past the icy pines, relishing the scent of their oils sprung by another creature's carelessness. No, not careless. This is deliberate, she reminds herself. I am being baited.

She scarcely knows her prey from the villagers' colorful but confusing tirade, and "fox" is purely metaphorical. Unless she tracked a kitsune, no fox could equal her in size and strength. Another pine drips ahead, gashed like a bear's marker. Her ears flare, straining, then flatten when the not-fox barks again in the distance.

What sort of fox called to a hound for want of the chase?

She pushes the pad of one toe against her throat to modulate her own call and offset its echo from her physical location - a trick her mother taught her, though she hoped it might elevate her voice to a different sort of art. But singing was as much a sport as hunting; one as old and as wild as the other.

Now, another bark in reply - it hiccups into hyena-laughter, clanging like icy chimes through the winter woods. The snow falls faster and she feels her blood thrill at the prospect of a snowblind duel. With practiced fluidity, she notches an arrow and points it into the storm-swirl.

A low mage she might be aside her fellow drakes, but any might earn a reputation for heathen sorcery with a skill sharpened to the breadth of an eyelash. Marina releases the arrow, trusting the keenness she nurtured both in it and in herself, then she measures its flight and the tenor of its impact. The warm, round thunk of tree bark? The piercing whisper of a snowbank? ...The wet grudge of unwilling flesh?

She hears instead the sound of her arrow snap, the laughter accompanying it now darkened with something somehow sympathetic. Warden's Chains, she curses. Was it... A second arrow flies instinctively to her, but she remains lashed by disbelief that relaxes into an unpleasant acceptance. Was it disappointed...?

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