Paradisi Gloria
Joy could hear them, both of them, even through all the noise. She wasn’t about to respond in any way they could interpret, though. Her focus was elsewhere, on keeping her step, on the pain in her shoulder, on the end of her spear. As she neared her destination in mind, her traps thinned out -- not every step was a new patch of light waiting to explode. Instead, she varied it up. Her light shifted until it was emanating from her fingertips. The next tree she touched didn’t laugh, it started to glow, and with certainly more intensity than the grasses and dirt had before it. In fact, the light seemed to have a weight to it; the tree, even with its sturdy trunk, lurched over ever so slightly. Woe betide anyone who stumbled into that, she thought.
They would circumvent it or otherwise dodge out of the way. She knew that. They, and she, were watchdogs of the gods, after all. The only reason the island itself hadn’t been torn apart was because they collectively willed it, they could notice an unnatural tint in a place surrounded by nature. Of course, they were also all still human. She was relying on that. They could all still make mistakes.
Was this her mistake? While they had seemed quite keen to kill her that morning with or without her prompting, she certainly had been the one escalating things. Then again, at least when she and Mor’s watchdog had been travelling around, there had been a reason for it. They had been expected together. What were Hinder and Taros doing? There really was only one reason she could think of: They were together because they were who the gods could send.
So yes, while she’d never directly answered Hinder’s question, she’d always known. As soon as she’d met them both, she had this possibility in mind.
Her destination was just ahead. There was a small clearing in the forest, and the sun was creeping up high enough to illuminate it. When she reached it, she wheeled around, not to check for where her opponents might be (though she certainly had to make sure that her traps were still going off -- they were) but to start tracing a line of light with her spear, creating a boundary encircling her person. It hung oddly in the air, shifting and flexing in seeming response to minute air currents, yet never straying too far or drifting too close to Joy herself. When she brushed it with her spear, it went rigid, and started to hum.
Good, Joy thought. There was still a lot of power stored in it. She removed her spear from the line and the line returned to its drifting state. “Come and get me,” she said. OOC