on the borderlands [tacetferrum]
It is a quiet night, and the ranger-knight stalks her prey. The borderlands are a lawless land, overrun by bandits too close to homes of innocent people, which are being burned to the ground. Not by magic, end-of-summer brush fires, or Noxian forces pushing west.
These aren't acts of war. It would necessitate these people to have an organized government or nation to declare war on Demacia.
These may as well be glorified bandits, the way they carry on, looting and destroying everything in their path. Vultures that pick around the remnants of people's lives. A lone goat brays in a lane, where Quinn once had seen children play. She's thankful; she'd met the family that lived in the thatched daube and stone cottage, which lit up like kindling in a stove with the dry season fully upon them. The children had gotten out okay. As did the mother. The father...
She trails her eyes along the charred wood structure which used to be the barn in which this clever goat lived. Among the scorched remnants of his livelyhood, a charred corpse was the only remains left.
"Almighty Kindred, spirit him away to safer places in Wolf's jaws," she whispers, knelt by the body. "That much he deserves."
A crack alerts her: she's not alone. Her eagle only verifies this: his cry chuckles from the sky, ready, more ready than her. Slow, she rises, creeps around the edge of the barn, and lays her eyes on Valor's targets. They'd not been trying to be stealthy, not much, at least. There's four of them, each as tough as the last, scarred and pocked, skin like old, sunkissed leather hide. But they also haven't noticed her yet.
And she hasn't noticed the other one Valor saw, either.
