Welcome to Gaia! ::

After her trip out to track down Brightheart and the other Ascended who had resurrected the bone crushers, Cinder had returned to Homewood feeling perturbed. Before this, there had been predators and dangers, sure, but never before had there been such a large species of sentient predators. Not only were they bloodthirsty and dangerous, their size meant they had the potential to leave lasting changes to the ecosystems on Vykeli.

There was no time to waste. She needed to better herself, to improve her own abilities and skills to help counteract these creatures' arrival as best as she could. Although her desire for power had always been a part of her, she felt the need to chase it now with more urgency than she had in the past. Otherwise, how could she do her part to make sure Homewood was safe?

As she walked toward the Grandfather tree, Cinder thought of the party that had gone to rescue Brightheart and her companions. Two adepts in the group, a handful of apprentices, a handful of giftless. They had been a motley crew that had, quite frankly, gotten lucky, and Cinder never wanted to feel a similar level of ineptitude again.

No, she would need to get stronger and to better her own grasp on magic in order to make her mark.

The doe came to a halt at the base of the Grandfather Tree. "Here I am," she said politely to the tree. "I don't know what you meant to do by compelling the Ascended to bring those bone crushers back, but I fear that there will be some bloodshed in the near future, as these creatures figure out how to fit back into our world. I need to be able to do everything I can to help when that happens."

Cinder had thought she'd felt an inexplicable tension when she'd woken up, and now she knew why. Now, there was chaos. The bone crushers that haunted her nightmares had come to Homewood, and panicked screams rang in her ears - the sounds of the ones too slow to outrun them.

The ones who could had packed into the center of Homewood, confused, terrified, buzzing about what would happen to their home. The smell of fear hung in the air. And that... was weakness. They were sitting here waiting for their doom by bunching up like this, smelling scared. The predators could feel it.

Cinder turned to the noulicorns around her. "We have to do something," she said urgently to any whose attention she could catch. "We can't just stand here being afraid."

"But what are we going to do? Our leaders aren't around, we've never seen these before."

"I have," Cinder said, doing her best not to remember her last encounter with the creatures. "We can fight them. We have superiority in numbers. If we fight back, they will realize it's not worth the effort, and they will either leave or be willing to negotiate."

At least, that was what had happened in the past. She looked around. Nobody seemed inclined to move.

"Listen up!" she said, raising her voice. "We have to make a stand, we have to show them we won't just roll over and submit if they try to attack us. This could be a test strike, to see if we'll respond. We cannot afford to look weak!"

"And what do you suggest?" A voice piped up.

"We need warriors, fighters, guards, anyone who knows anything about fighting. We need to put those on the outside and form a defensive wall. Then we need to send out attack parties to harass them until they understand we're not going to stand for this," Cinder said, sounding more confident than she felt.

"And you? Aren't you a healer? It's easy for you to say when you'll just be tending injuries."

Cinder set her brow. "I will not be hanging back," she hissed in the direction of the dissenting voice. "How dare you assume that I would send my fellow noulicorns to potential injury and death while cowering behind the front lines of defense." She pulled herself up to her full height. "I will be fighting, and any of you who wants to protect out home, you will fight with me."

She shoved her way out of the crowd and over to the fringes. The murmurs seemed to follow her as noulicorns discussed amongst themselves. And slowly, she began to see movement. Creatures reluctantly shuffling away from the young and the weak, pushing their way out to the edges of the crowd where they would soon form a wall of resistance.

"That wasn't so hard, was it?" she said to the gathered crowd. "Let's get to work."