Crozius.
She had heard the name before the match, but never connected it with the maul. Yet, she knew. The 'how' was unimportant. She gripped the red leather hilt, and she just knew. Like a piece of empty lataro, it came into her hands, almost making her stumble off the wooden beam. Too light, she gasped. Her muscles seemed to move with more ease, as if some connection had formed between her mind and each individual limb, bypassing her physical frailty and just allowing her body to be what she needed it to be. She hefted the weapon's thick head skyward in both hands.
Astarelle breathed one word -a word she knew to be demonstrably false- as she grinned like a sand-blasted fool. “Impossible.”
The rubble under her exploded, far stronger than with Crozius' landing, as if a delayed aftershock had been waiting, brooding. The buffering sand that pooled around her feet was sent screaming to every corner, and her body was thrown skyward on a wave of force that made her bones howl. Wooden darts -formed from what had once been her perch- lanced into her bare legs.
Thrown and exploded. The two repeating steps of this dance. Thrown and exploded.
Sand and dust left her, falling low or blasted clear. She was still caked in the stuff, a child of the wreckage flailing airborne as her gritty mother disappeared. A man, no father, but caked just the same, reached up for her with a malicious grasp.
Enough!
She slung the maul in a high arc, feeling its pull. Though it granted her power, it did not grant her weight, so her center of gravity rested near her hands. It might have been a debilitating imbalance, were she not one who could ride and tame the spin of Farohtian dance. A dance that moved the very flesh of Fallien. In the wake of the maul's sweep, her descent swerved to the side, taking her clear of the hug. Just.
With a high-pitched scream, she landed on legs that still throbbed from the explosion, both due to the porcupine coat and internal fractures. Her muscles would not yield, though. They would not allow their supports to buckle. She felt her body burning with unreasonable heat, and her equilibrium was off-kilter.
~
A younger Astarelle danced upon a moonlit plateau after staggering days through the desert. Dehydration and hunger were her partners. Delirium, her music. Her steps were imprecise, but stable, as her toes drew a ring of flower petals around her spinning core. A moonlit Fallien blossom, tilting in the nocturnal wind.
~
And now she had a weight in her hands, a solid chunk of power and stability at the whim of her slim wrists.
Her abandoned dagger twanged down somewhere, heralding the abomination's next charge. She leaped back, maul once more swinging early to grant her speed. Her legs snapped into the space where her weapon had been, where the monster lunged, and she felt the shrapnel in her shins impound against the back of his hand. Sand swelled around her, no more than three handfuls returning through the settling dust. It wrapped her hands, sealing them to the hilt like a mentor shaping himself to her form, immaterial chest to her back.
She danced with Crozius in the now, and with Akashere in the memory.
The maul struck the ground first, anchoring her, spinning her behind it to crunch granite chips under her shoes. No pause, no breath. She push off with screaming legs, then let her partner lead.
Out of Character:
Leaving the angle of the attack up to you.