Almost as soon as she’d heard the rumbling crashing monster that was Tankita Bananas, Alma leapt to her feet and sprinted across the clearing, her pain, wounds, and ointment all forgotten in emergency. She swooped in to protect the blonde woman, even as her newfound brother lay dumbstruck in the flowers. There was little she could do against such a beast, to be sure, but even so, she pulled the woman to her feet even as Tankita’s cannon swiveled around to the three of them.
Then she heard it again, the ringing in her skull, shaped into word-like things. It clattered around in her head painfully, echoing to and fro before the message it bore began to come clear. One arm holding back her charge, she clutched her brow with the other. ”…rescue you…answers…seeing myself?”
”Why am I seeing myself?”
The witch’s eyes opened wide, staring at the steel creature, and then back at the blonde woman in her protection, and finally back at the barrel of the cannon. “This woman…is you?”
“Was, past tense. I died and became the thing you see today because of Pode's mercy. That girl, Tamara is the woman I used to be before all this happened to me.”
“By the gods,” breathed the witch. There was a way to test this claim, but… Screw it, she thought, grasping with each hand on the soft, flushed flesh of the blonde’s cheek and the hard, cold steel of the cannon’s muzzle, respectively. Reaching with her mind into the pair, drawing in mere tastes of their auras, she touched on their souls and felt the scars for the truth.
All at once, she felt the blood chilling fear of final death, as monstrous creatures tore at her flesh, and worried her bones. She felt her lifeblood spill onto cold soil, drank into the Red Forest’s roots. She felt herself die. Dagon, the Reaper, severed her bonds to mortal form, and she could all but taste the black approach of Mot, the Swallower of Souls, seeking yet another meal to cleanse from existence. As her oblivion approached, her soul was overcome by waves of relief at her coming fate and absolution, fear and anger stripped away by surety and peace.
But a woman’s voice, huskily singing in the distance, pulled slowly at first, and then more insistently, on her soul, tearing her away from her final rest. She was called more and more forcefully away from the site of her death, deeper into the forest, and finally thrust and bound into cold, inert, lifeless metal.
As Alma’s sense of self reasserted itself, reorienting herself, she released her hold on the young woman to hold Tankita’s cannon in both hands, stroking the muzzle softly. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered to the lost soul bound within. “I’m so sorry for what she did to you, familiar.”
She didn’t have the heart to tell her the full truth. Tankita Bananas was crude practice.