Runner-ups Continued

Given the crawling, quivering, hungry feeling the sand beneath her revealed to her more eldritch senses, however, one could certainly think of other reasons they might be reluctant to step ashore themselves. Beside her, the wand her gaolers had allowed her. Not much more than a twisted talisman of vine and driftwood to the Artless eye, but they’d been wary enough when they gave it to her. Her home, her Sisters, had burned; she might have as well had the sentence not been exile, had she displayed even a fraction of the fury roused when the mob had put its torches to her hut, ignorant of her absence, ignorant of the presence inside of a lonely, frightened, would-be mother. That memory of fire drew her eye to an iridescent, gilded jewel, flickering in the cradling palm of the fellow exile slumped against a log. The poor fool no doubt thought the Virtue of that gem proof against the weather, unaware of the toll it extracted from the wielder. No Sister of the Art would be so naive… though on closer inspection, he did appear to be impaled by that same log. The blood had ebbed to a mere trickle by now, the rest washed away by the rain and the tide. The gem likely was all that kept him alive by now. So much the worse for him, then. She stirred - and so, unnoticed by her companion of circumstance, did the corpse of a less able swimmer. He spoke, his voice haggard, harrowed from the struggle to shore, but she wasn’t listening. No, she mustered the will to stand, to reach down and take her makeshift wand - and to channel three shards of lethal force through it to finish what the log had started. Too late, at that: the corpse had already torn out his throat, and the bolts had in turn severed its spine. She plucked the gem from where it had spilled onto the sand; and a smile ghosted across her lips as she nestled it into a carefully-selected crevice of her instrument, the promise of fire whispering into her mind.