[Cursed Crone] Counterattack

Despite her very best effort, Arianwyn could not beat the Cursed Crone to the crowd of gathered people. Though her legs carried her as fast as they possibly could, she had simply run too far and too fast already. She was beginning to slow; even the adrenaline that pulsed through her veins was not enough to compensate for her poor athleticism due to her silvered blood. She was forced to watch in terrified, abject horror as she just waited to see what the accursed mage would do to the poor, gathered crowd. If she weren't still running, desperately running, she would have held her breath in terrified anticipation.

The beast closed in, the hulking shadowed form hovering in the air above the earth, propelled by wings and lit by dark stars. With its back to Arianwyn, the silvered mage could not easily make out its actions, the lash of the monster's tendrils and the flash of toxic green eyes enough to hide whatever terrible things it was doing. Squinting, she peered around the beast, hoping to see the crowd's trance broken and their forms running from the monster bearing down upon them, but no. They were still hypnotized, whether enthralled or paralyzed by their approaching doom, she could not tell. It was all she could just to see silhouettes in the darkness, and though she continued to shout panicked, rambling warnings, her words remained unheeded. Though she could not see it, she could only assume they were being ripped apart. Devoured maybe, or crushed under sharpened talons, or buffeted by meteors. Mentally, the Silverweaver prepared herself for carnage, to see the deaths of many, deaths she had failed to stop. Already, she could picture the bloodshed.

That was, until she noticed a stillness from the hulking form of the cursed mage. A pause. Though it still pulsed with eerie and otherworldly magic, it had largely stilled. Wings beat, though slowly, and tendrils swirled in the air with an almost hesitant stillness. The Cursed Crone bore an almost crushing sadness, an air of utter despair around it that Arianwyn managed to withstand but these poor villages seemed unable to escape. It seemed desperate to chase down the people in this valley, the bystanders to its suffering—the people weren't just in its path, but its target. Yet, Arianwyn saw now that, for all its desperation, it did not seem as though it actually knew what to do when it reached its victims. Judging by its pause, violence may not have been its goal.

Or perhaps she was reading too much into it. For all she knew, the accursed monster could only see movement, and the people it had entranced were just standing too still. Either way, she was going to take advantage of this moment, her own exhaustion be damned.

Mere minutes before, a meteor had sped too close to Arianwyn's magical awareness, and she had found herself able to react to it in an instant, shielding herself from the incoming blow. That had to be because the meteors contained traces of silver; enough that her connection with elemental argentum had saved her life by making her aware of the incoming attack. At the moment, she was too far from the beast to unleash her silver daggers; even if she was able to telekinetically throw her weapon, she never could have hit from this distance. Still, watching the orbiting meteors flash by her vision, she had another idea.

Arianwyn let herself focus on her magic, on her connection to silver, stretching the limits of her awareness to try and find the meteors in her proximity. It was not simple—though she could feel them, just a bit, they moved far too fast for her to really locate them with her innate sense of silver. They whizzed by before she could even realize they were there, and she only truly sensed them leaving her vicinity. Frustrated, she let out a groan, and closed her eyes. She had to find one, had to capitalize on the dense metal chunks. She couldn't fail these people.

Finally. A meteor entered her awareness; she could sense it moving just to her left, following a path adjacent to her—not destined to hit her body, but to come uncomfortably close. This time, she acted instinctively, focusing both her telekinetic abilities and argentum connection towards the dense metallic object. With both simultaneous, she pushed at the path of the object, desperately working to recall the astrophysics course she had taken in Namarast. In her mind's eye, she could trace the meteor's path, its circle around the Cursed Crone in the distance: how its momentum kept its velocity perpendicular to the beast, orbiting the monster's form but never colliding with its body. Arianwyn saw this, and lashed out with magic and ability combined, wrestling the meteor from its path and on to a new way, a new trajectory. Taking advantage of the monster's innate gravity, she unbalanced the delicate orbit, and repositioned the meteor's path—and, with the momentum it already had, redirected it directly at the Cursed Crone. Hours studying physics had paid off, for once—her meteor was on target. She just hoped it would make impact, and that the monster would not be able to dodge the incoming attack.

Whether the monster had a physical form to be hit was one question, and one Arianwyn simply could now answer—but whether her move got the monster's attention was another. Its own meteor used against it, impacting somewhere on its back, certainly distracted the raven-skulled mage from its original target. It whirled around and turned to face down Arianwyn once again. She had succeeded. Against all odds, she had managed to get the monsters attention.

Though her heart leapt in her chest, the Silverweaver stood firm. If she could pull off that trick a few more times, perhaps she could distract whatever powers the Cursed Crone was using to entrance the people and give them an opportunity to escape its clutches. She had to try.