When Fenrir's body plummeted to the earth, the ground trembled and bucked at the monumental impact, screaming in protest, absorbing the death of a god and breaking beneath the weight. And as the remains of Ardgroom's ancient circle shuddered in a quake like no other known on the Emerald Isle, all Veti could do was wrap her body about Thad's, holding him to her tightly and shielding him from the terrible wrath of the fallen Fenris.

The onslaught subsided - or at least the furious assault on the earth itself found something like an end. But as Veti raised her tear-streaked face, dirt-caked now and wild with anguish, she heard Siya's scream for help. Her head twisted about, mouth falling open in shock at what the vile verdant light illuminated. It was a sight she would not forget to the end of her days, her tiny vampiric friend bent under the weight of that lethal ball of malignant green lightning like Prometheus beneath the weight of the Earth. 

No grief would keep Veti from her Siya's side. And she knew all too well that neither Thad - nor even the part of his soul she knew and loved as Max - would ever forgive her for not answering the tiny vampiress' cry. In the moments it took to lay Thad's fading body gently to the ground, kissing his forehead in a tender farewell before turning to sprint to Siya, Atticus had come to his lover's side as well. The incubus brought the infernal furies to bear, an image that would have driven any one of the Faithful to their knees in fervent, frightened prayer.

Shadow and Hell twisted and writhed beneath the emerald colored sphere that promised only death. A swift, slightly hysterical thought flashed through her head, the delicious irony that two forces whose essence was the very antithesis of life, had somehow managed to keep the wrath of a god from killing them all. Veti probably even laughed, deep and more than a little frantic, as she dashed to maw of the dead Fenrir, once again becoming the crimson wolf in the space of her long, loping strides.

There was no plan. Not really, not one she could have truly, properly called a strategy of any sort. All she knew, was that Aislinn's face flashed across her mind's eye, and then Reginald's, and then the all the faces that populated the strange dream she'd had, the werewolves meeting by firelight among the standing stones of Ardgroom - and she felt a sudden, confident and undeniable strength surge through her body like electricity, a power she simply [i]knew[/i] was not merely her own.

Veti's ebony-tipped claws wrapped about the canine tooth of the Fenris wolf, the very one she had seen small enough to be carried by Aislinn Hoyle, the talisman the white wolf use to break the chains that bound the god. Screaming to the green-tinted heavens above, the thick, coiled muscles roiling beneath the crimson-furred flesh, she ripped the fang from its moorings and vaulted up the Fenrir's body. 

Veti did not hesitate for a moment as she plunged into the frigid shadows and the sulfurous fumes of Hell and, with both hands, slammed the Fenrir's own fang like a spear into the sphere that carried the vengeance of a god. 

The pain was... [i]Indescribable[/i]. The rancor of a god was distilled agony, and a river of burning torment coursed down her fingers, her arms, searing its way down her spine and through her powerful legs. She could feel the flesh sloughing off her claws where the fang was buried, blazing down her forearms and even baking fur and skin from the top of her head and face. Not even the regenerative powers of the werewolf should have kept her there, standing and - somehow, miraculously even - still alive. 

But clinging to this mortal coil meant there was no end to the torturous scorching that blasted her again and again, waves of a relentless, emerald firestorm; nor the howling crescendo of a scream that was torn from the werewolf's throat and carried across the ruins of Ardgroom like a harrowing gale.