"Strange fruit on strange trees"
"What was that?"
"Nothing. Echoes of another world."
"It's late, we're tired unto death, how do you keep going?"
The odd figure smiled faintly across her vulpine visage, short of showing the teeth in that muzzle a bit shorter than the wild foxes long driven from the forest below the shadowy stone balcony. "Sleep and I have a… complicated relationship."
"Still, it's not every day you depose a tyrant." A soft voice from behind her spoke, the aging canine greyed nearly to white in the torchlight, moved slowly to the fitted stone rail.
Lynn turned toward him, chuffing him gently on the shoulder, "It was merely a real estate transaction, old friend."
"Speaking of property," the younger canine stepped close to his father, though the old canine stood straight, even if he did move slow, "I will send some soldiers to put out the fires."
The fox turned back toward the forest below. "Are the Rodentians out of the forest?"
"The living, Ma'am."
"Take the dead to the pit, inter them with the rest. We will move the chapel there." She turned back toward the canines, "Let the manor burn."
"But Ma'am-"
"And throw some of the dead trees against it, make it a proper blaze. In fact," she swept an arm across the gnarled forest, "burn it all. To the ground. Ridge to ridge, and to the steps of this old castle. All of it. We will stay with the brown ones in the village below." Lynn gazed into the gloom behind the balcony, into the overgrown ruins of the ancient castle, seeing, as she so often did, shadows of things long gone and yet to be. "A wine cellar, I think…the stones may yet be cool enough for wine."