Anger. The bitter aftertaste coats her mouth and for the rest of the afternoon she had taken turns from licking her lips to slipping away to the freshest water in Iromar to bath and lap up cleansing liquid. How dare he, Kaius, come past her borders and assault one of her own. It felt like a violation of her own soul - like the violation of her body once before. The memory had begun to fade, overrun as it was by the constant need for vigilance and Empress duties, and she had fallen into a sort of pattern here in Molodian. Found wolves she had come to care for despite how strange such a thing was. Yet as she stands at the edge of the water with her fur drying and a chill setting in with the darkness, she remembers the way he felt tearing through her body and soul and the fury that had consumed her then. The way he had died beneath her teeth and then the way she had chewed in Kaius, the fury in both instances so fierce that she had been overcome with blood lust. The satisfying pop! as his jaw had come unhinged beneath her assault.

Aithne's face now bore the marks of her battle. A scratch down between her eyes that had bled like wildfire for what felt like ages and the gash on her right jawline from Kaius's teeth. It would leave a prominent scar once healed but she didn't care about such matters anyways. The wind shifts and sighs through the boughs, a familiar song of the bogs that sings through her heart, when a sound and scent draw her attention away from the shadowed pool.

Dark emerald eyes snap up immediately, the pale glimmer of light from the moon piercing the red ring around her right pupil once more, and her nostrils flare. The scent... it was familiar to her. Aithne. The voice is whispered and sibilant and her body tenses, fur slowly rising along the ridge of her spine while her tail lifts and hackles rise. Malikye. She knows it is him and yet she cannot quite believe it as her broad paws carry her slowly towards the border, her body moving in that same aggressive manner that she had always asserted with him, her fur on end and lips twitching. It is both from shock and the by-product of the adrenaline from todays events.

She sees him coiled into the darkness of night, her eyes sliding down his body and then resting on his bloodstained muzzle, and her own canines flash as she moves up to him. As familiar as she had once been with him, the crazed cannibal, she still does not like being pressed close to another wolf. Does not like sharing breath with a male, although Praetor was slowly pushing past all those barriers. So she stops with two feet between them, poised as if ready to strike.

"That blood on your lips, Malikye, better not be from one of my wolves. It would be a shame to put you down. I almost missed you, you know," she threatens, and it is both serious and shocked. "I knew that was where you went. Relapsed."