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.
She was one point from the floor when the floor finally took her. One. The party will carry that number for a while, the way you carry a splinter you can’t quite find — not debilitating, just present, a reminder that the wake she rode eventually catches everyone.