no subject

[Seeing her expression and the death contained within it, Equius found himself clinging just a bit to the wall. But then she sunk to the floor with the sort of pose that a younger troll might use when they had lost their lusus; it was not unfamiliar to him. And this brought just as much a shock as anything else in this whole exchange had; somehow it never occurred to him until now that Maryam was even capable of thinking and worrying as he did, much less pulling a scarily similar body shape when excrement hit the blade-whirling temperature regulation device.]

[And so, against his screaming better judgement and just about every written rule in Alternian history, he stepped off the staircase and onto the floor proper, stars bursting to blackness under his feet.]