Henya stood before the Foyada, a closed expression on her delicate Altmer features as she stared at the lava vent as though she could see beyond it. Behind her and to her left stood Kailos, her companion and sometime lover, his eyes flickered over her carefully, imprinted her image in his mind as she stood there. Henya's long, straw coloured hair was coiled inexpertly into braids beneath a shabby helm of nordic fur, a tattered red shirt of cotton and tan suede breeches lay beneath a well oiled and smelly set of bonemold armour. Mismatched bracers lay on her wrists and her greaves were tied on with fraying leather ties. She looked lost, tired and his heart went out to her as a single tear flowed from her cornflower blue eyes to trickle down her dust streaked and dirty face.
"Hen?" He called softly, pulling the woman from her dark thoughts as the first flakes of an ash storm drifted across his face. "We're going to have to move!" Henya turned back from the bubbling lava and looked at him, seeing the compassion in his eyes as she reached down to pull Emma's sword from the ground before her. Even as she walked back to the track and Kailos' side, she could still see her fall, see the panic in her eyes as failed to levitate, failed to keep her from the red pool.
"You did all you could!" She could hear his words, yet they made no sense, she hadn't done all she could. She could have listened at Eight Plates, taken Emma's offer and helped her, if she had done so... she bowed her head against the onslaught of ash, she would have saved her from those mercenaries who had taken her money and betrayed her.
"It wasn't enough!" Henya spoke for the first time, a soft yet bitter voice that rasped slightly in the dust filled air. "I should have been here!" She looked up at the reddened landscape and felt that it matched her mood.
"But you weren't, you can't bring her back!"
"No!" She turned to face him, raw agony on her face. "But I can avenge her.." She unlimbered her sword and strode into the ash storm, ignoring the sting of the dust in her face. They had hung her friend naked and bleeding above the pit that she died in, they would have gone on, following the map that Emma had found in the Llethan Ancestral tomb. The treasure hunt that she had been too busy to join. She set her teeth and sped up, not caring if he followed; only focused on one thing, her enemy and their deaths at her hands.