There was a moment there, when she felt with a true and sickening desire to seize the youngster, grab a hold with teeth and shake her until she came apart at the seams. It boiled inside her, feeling although her energy might just take her on that part regardless. The moment subsides, the sensation settles as the one who had greeted her and gave her the answers she sought, spoke up.

And Maraigh did not miss the way that she responded. She was disturbed for a different reason, but she was after all, a newcomer and faces she did not know at all did not deserve more than a passing thought. She didn’t even know who it was that they spoke of, and so she dismissed it.

The scarred snake peels her lips from her teeth and gives a strange guttural sound in her throat, almost a snarl, “Pathetic,” she says plainly, hissing. There had been no proper introduction, and so no understanding for Maraigh that this child was a piece of the Peak.

And Maraigh’s gaze returns to Adelhaid. It was fierce, challenging.

As far as she was concerned, if a child went missing then it could die wherever it was fallen, wherever it was lost. The survival of the fittest as her entire world, and the snake fought it tooth and nail and would until the day it killed her. She wouldn’t be looking for a child that got itself lost in the first place.

Maraigh would defend those who needed it from fighting, but not from the way of nature itself. She would strike flesh and rip those who threatened those she deemed her kin asunder. First, she had to determine those who were kindred here, and that would take time.

“I am Maraigh. I will become a warrior for the Peak and take a hearth for myself. If you wish to hone your skills in fighting, I will gladly do so,” she says with a maddening grin. “But I will not waste my energy searching for a lost child. Let them find their way, or die trying,” the words are harsh, but this was the life Maraigh had grown up in. She’d been forced to learn or die trying.

“Why is such a thing worth your time?” Maraigh wonders.