>Kiretha's fingers found her bow even before her vision had cleared. Her digits closed around the wooden shaft — then recoiled as splinters sliced her skin. It shocked her to wakefulness; she jolted upwards, gasping. She knelt amongst a field of the dead, her face coated in blood. Her aelven kin lay in mangled heaps alongside the ghouls they had fought, smoking sunmetal arrows still sticking from the creatures' hides.
>‘Llota,’ Kiretha gasped. Panic, a kind she had not experienced since childhood, saw the archer glance around, eyes narrowing as she searched for her beloved scryhawk companion. No feathered body lay among the dead. ‘Llota!’
>‘Ah, then that be thy name, my little friend?’
>The crooning voice sent a shiver rocking through the aelf. A figure squatted amid the carnage in the shadow of a twisted tree. It was clad in rags of flayed meat that it had hung across itself with a grotesque deliberateness. Upon an extended talon, Llota perched. Her wings twitched in erratic bursts of motion.
>‘Ay, sweetling, 'tis assuredly a strange and misshapen brute that doth think to address us,’ the vampire nodded, a filthy claw scratching beneath the scryhawk's beak. ‘Forsooth, a thing possessed of no loveliness at all. Even Lord Ushoran would not wish to break bread with them, I should wager. not like thee, my dear, oh no no. Thou art a handsome thing, like dear Grype. Let us see what old Felgryn has for thee...’