The team gathers slowly around Syraleth as she sits up in the mud, black ichor oozing thick and slow from a dozen scorched, cracked wounds across her body, her mouth slick and bubbling with her own blood, one wing bent in a way no wing should ever bend.
And then, without warning, the baroness throws her head back and cackles. The sound comes out high and hysterical and completely unhinged, a sound with no business coming from someone who's just been dragged through the earth, her body shattered and blown into a crater.
It startles the whole battered, bruised group where they stand propping each other up, weapons still half-raised out of pure, exhausted instinct, staring down at the broken baroness as if she might combust at any second. A ring of Vexena's soldiers tightens instinctively around the scene, boots squelching through the churned mud, none of them quite willing to lower their spears even now.
