
Well, the trip had been going pleasantly.
Ash'Kir'lin Ist'Aven Val'Sullisinrune had spent the vast majority of the journey up until this point seated on the back deck of one of the koa'naka cabins, multi-tasking herself with the double affairs of reading and writing. The reading was of a rather extravagantly detailed guide to the more...lively parts of Val'Raveran, written by a merchant who apparently had a taste for the ribald. Unable to read the words herself due to her condition it was her Golem doing the reading, the small scarab-like device scuttling over the pages and issuing forth a complex and chiming series of chirps, a code Kir'lin had developed for herself and knew now by heart. As she listened to that she had also been writing in a stack of parchments, making slow, careful strokes with a quill pen. Unable to actually see she had to mentally visualize her words and make each movement of the quill precise. It was one of her latest attempts and fiction and she froze and instinctively covered the pages whenever she sensed someone approach nearby, ready to shove the parchments away in an instant lest someone see. So far she'd only ever let her mother see her writings and was a little mortified by the thought of anyone else reading what she felt was still fairly amateurish work.
Regardless she'd stopped both the Golem reading and her own writing when the caravan had encountered the collapsed passage. Even before word had spread down the caravan she'd felt the shift in emotions in the air, like tasting a sour scent. Nervousness mixed with keen alertness and a heady feeling of fear. She'd gone into the cabin proper and retrieved her sword and thrown on her sleeveless blue coat by the time the first explosions hit.
"Curse it all, it would have to be thrice damned dvergar of all things!" she swore as she rushed out of the cabin and nimbly jumped down to the ground amid the chaos and confusion.
In a situation like this she knew she'd be near next to useless. Dvergar lacked auras so her own Aura Vision would be utterly unusable for pinpointing them, and they were a race that favored the use of their queer explosive weapons anyway, so closing into proper melee range would be problematic. It irked her to no end that the first true chance to prove herself in a real battle had arrived and she was more likely to be a burden than a help. Still, help she would and immediately looked for the best way to do that. As far as she could guess the most sensible thing to do would be to shield those who were either dazed or too weak or untrained to form mana shields themselves. Picking through the tapestry of swirling emotions around her, at once both guarding against the surge on her mind and sifting through it to sense who was who, she felt a strong sense of dazed confusion just a few paces away.
Unaware that it was actually Suru'sunduiri that she was sensing Kir'lin rushed over and put herself between the Illhar'dro and incoming shoots from the dvergar, immediately forming a mana shield. By herself she was unsure of how effective the shield would hold but it would buy a few moments at least for Suru'sunduiri to recover. She wondered where her clanmates might be, but didn't have time now to focus on searching out their emotions amid the rest of the caravan.