#// brom being difficult even while dying? sounds about right rofl

[of-forossa]

"How many times have I burned you?" The inquiry came suddenly, sharp and to the point, "How many times have I left you freezing to the core, or eaten by rot and stopped dead in your tracks? My dear, adamant hunter mine, you are not my eager Hawk, and I linger not in your way? Why hunt me so? What was promised to you if anything of true value?" She steps around him in half, circle-- every word spoken with a rolling coo, every last one carefully expressed in that sing-song and melodious way of hers. The one that welcomes answers as readily as it taunts, "You pursue a phantom-- something you cannot touch." Her words settled, simmering out on a low note as blackened finger tips move from neck, to shoulder to the shape of his powerful jaw urging him to look upward with a turn of her wrist. His gaze meant with the frigid silver glint or her own, not permitting him even a second to glance away. Lush lips pressing into the shape of a thin and fatigued frown.

"That is exactly why you are snared in my thorns now, run through. Is there no other way to get you to speak truly rather than in your bouts to capture me? Must I send you to the hereafter time and again? Why do you still come for me?"

@hexenjagd // chance encounters on a journey without rest.

“...” How difficult it was to speak, stretched out and spread as an effigy of misery and pain upon the death blighted thorns she had grown from within his flesh and bone. To speak, to breathe or even think at all seemed impossible as the hideous growths continued to work their way under his skin, coiling beneath plate and maille only to puncture through it as if it were mere sodden paper. Gnarled branches sprung through the gaps of the armor along his broad arms, wrenching them apart and thwarting any attempt to pry himself free from their hideous embrace even if he’d wanted to. Likewise they’d punched through his knees and out his back, suspending him off the ground and keeping him from gaining any leverage.

Yet even as he struggles to speak he too denies her the luxury of a scream, a shout or plea for this torture to end and his suffering along with it. Knowing full and well the witch before him would take some satisfaction in her dogged pursuer’s pain, if not indulge in the brutality her power over death had wrought of him, Brom keeps his jaw clenched against the pain to the point the bone creaked in protest even as it wormed ever deeper through his body. Rivulets of blood dripped from hundreds of thorns, running down the blackened brambles and splattering in so many drops of uneven red rain onto the ground below. Every flex and tense of his muscles against the intrusive growths only spilled more blood, and his eventual death from blood loss was assured even without the sheer destruction done within.

His head hung, helmet long since fallen from his head in the sudden rush of violence from the blight’s emergence, revealing a head of sweat-matted hair and an expression likewise soaked with sweat and blood. His brown eyes were clouded, seemingly unseeing, and his mouth was pressed into thin white lines against the pain. At her inquiry there is the smallest jerk of the head towards her, though nothing is forthcoming even as his mouth parts...

Finally a single thought climbed through the haze of pain within his mind. Rogier, forgive me. I could never have imagined what you endured for so long.

“... prophecy.” He manages after such a long, long wait. It’s accompanied by a mouthful of blood and bile, staining his beard and painting his lips darkly. Those eyes fixate on something just past her, his gaze piercing yet already fading. Yet another denial of her desires no matter how she crooked or tugged with those fingers of hers. “I chase a... prophecy.” An admittance made with seemingly little fanfare given the circumstances of this death along with so many of the ones before it. “One I won’t... allow your Hawk to... hear. Only the woman... mentioned in it...”

Darkness fills the edges of his sight. Weakly he jerks his head to no avail, likewise his entwined appendages. Blood pours all the faster, and he’s slipping away from his flesh and her company with a dying whisper. “... find me then... witch... prove... self...”