Neve Nevergreen - Smallfolk Rogue
The seeing stone hummed at the edge of perception, a spark of fire tracing along her nerves and before finding rest in a smolder somewhere at the base of her skull and behind her eyes. Surveying the tower and the lizardfolk through gritted teeth, Neve swore under her breath when her boots sank into the muck - she had intended to settle onto haunches beneath an obscuring bough but now? Now she was rear-deep in clammy mud with a headache. Eyeing her companions and their lengthy strides and tall boots enviously and un-spattered, un-muddied everything, she swore again, quieter now, the fleeting jealousy barely louder than a thought.
The day had not gone well. The past two days, really.
It had started when she's let slip her affinity with thaumaturgical devices. It was why the stone sang at from it's pouch this very moment, sending her teeth grinding to some tempo she could barely hear. It was not, she kept telling herself, that she had meant to keep it a secret, but it was something that lacked easily explicable cause and that fact alone suggested she keep the knowledge close. This alliance had been foisted upon her by the oracle but by Basillea she was not such an ingénue so as to let spill secrets of the Duskdaughter's politics outside the Fell to newcomers. And, for better or worse Neve thought, her peculiarities were politics.
And it would have meant she didn't have to carry the blasted thing and suffer two days of tuneless noise at the edge of her perception.
She'd yelped when she touched the thing, for the Daughter's sake.
Ignoring the cold creeping up her backside, Neve focused on the tower, one hand reaching into the pouch and touching the stone, the smoldering sensation brightening to a illuminating fire in her minds eye at the brush of fingertips against it's smooth, polished surface.
Blinking away the illusion, Neve extracted the stone and passed it to the companion at her shoulder, nodding towards the tower.
"Our scaly friends are apt to be disappointed: mark the second story." flicked her eyes up toward the door and it's unblinking,seemingly unseeing eye standing watch on the horizon.
"Do we let them succumb to their own frustration or take more active measures? They outnumber us if it comes to a fight but they've seemingly fled this place before, we might be able to scare the away by ruse or bluff, if we play it right."