Chrysalis

Sarah paced back and forth on the ramp as she strove to keep her bubbling anger from rising up. Though she put a brave face on it, she was still scared. Scared of this battle, scared of what the Colony was attempting to achieve, scared of being so high up on a ramp with no rails and scared of herself. The battle against the golgari back at the nest had taught her a lot about herself, about the kind of person she'd been when she first arrived in the Dungeon and the kind of person she was now.

Most importantly, she'd come to acknowledge that her fear was the source of her anger, not a by-product of it. Her rage was a reaction to how scared and hesitant she had been when she'd arrived in this world as a little cub, newly formed in the first stratum and forced to fight for her survival from the very first minute of her creation. It was strange how those memories remained so fresh, even now, decades later, she could still remember the terror she'd experienced during her first fight. A rat-toad had found her not five minutes after spawning, as she'd still been stumbling about the tunnel trying to understand how to move with her new legs, shocked and confused about what had happened to her and desperate to understand where she was.

They were ambush predators, the rat-toad, and this one had been holding onto the roof waiting for prey to wander under it, which she had foolishly done. If it hadn't been for her tough hide she might have been done for then and there. As it was, she lost a chunk out of her shoulder before she knew she was under attack, the sudden pain flooding her system with adrenaline as she'd lashed out in a panic. Luck more than anything else had kept her alive through that battle, and the fear that had bloomed in her heart at that time had never left her, even to this day.

And it never would. She was coming to accept that now, after so long. She wasn't like Anthony, who'd somehow embraced his new life with an innocent glee that she could never hope to replicate. She didn't belong here, in this place, in this world, but she was trapped with no way out. So all she could do was learn to control her fear, to experience it without letting it control her. Once she achieved that, once she had it within her grasp, then she would also control the rage.

into it, allowed herself to feel it, to acknowledge it and in that way, slow

magic, manipulating the stone with their minds from a distance rather than risk precious carvers stepping into the firing line where they couldn't protect themselves. There was nothing she could

Eat fireball! Wait… fireballs probably suck against these guys… Eat ice-explosion!

a centimetre and flinging spells directly into the faces of the demons. He never seemed to run out of energy, probably a mutation or organ, not that

she paced back and forth, but a low growl had begun to resonate in her throat, vibrating through the air and growing in volume all the time. As the ramp crept closer and closer to the lip of the plate, her rage grew ever more intense, a red filter fell over her vision as the Asura within began

not shun it, she sought instead to ride it. Her growl rose and rose and she rose

in one air shattering bellow before she dashed, rushing toward the edge and leaping off it. It was a bizarre feeling, as if she were a passenger within her own body, but unlike the previous times this had happened she wasn't banished to a little corner of her own mind, a locked box where she hid herself away, instead it was as if she clung to the back of a bucking bull, except that the bull