"You are bluffing," Alastor scoffs beside me, throwing his hands over himself with a canine smirk, but Valerian does not present the same feelings. Stepping down a bit, Valerian draws himself up to her, stretching out his staff to lift the tip of her chin. Deflated and obviously grasping on her last strings of hope, she lets him do so.
"She isn't lying, is she Tarquin?" he murmurs, tilting his head as he inspects her. Drawing back his staff, he dusts off the obsidian black stone at the tip, his expression drawn. I cannot tell what he is thinking in that moment, only that such an intensity exudes from his body that the whole room seems to blacken around him, swamped with a misty blackness that reeks of death. Whatever he is thinking, it surely can't mean any good.
