Rides the Wake carries herself like someone accustomed to moving through rough water — patient in stillness, overwhelming in motion.
She is not reckless in the way people imagine barbarians to be. There is a current of deliberate purpose beneath the fury, a sense that the rage, when it comes, has been earned. Those who travel with her describe a quiet confidence that borders on the serene, right up until it doesn’t. The name fits: she goes where the force has been and holds the line in the turbulence that follows.
Shard C claimed her. The same relentless arithmetic that had found her before found her again — piercing and poison stacking faster than anyone could answer — and this time there was no Healing Word quick enough, no margin left to borrow against. She went down fighting, which is the only way she knew how to go down. The others called her name in the aftermath, and the silence that answered was a different kind of water entirely. Someone — perhaps it was Leonard, a name spoken with bitter recognition at the end — landed the killing blow. The party noted it, the way parties note the things they cannot take back.
What she leaves behind is a particular shape of absence. The kind of fighter who absorbs the worst of it so others can function does not get replaced; they get remembered in the moments when the line almost breaks. Rides the Wake went down with enough fury left to demand one more round. It wasn’t enough, but the demanding of it was entirely her.