Burning through the shadow wraith felt good, but her encounters with the eclipse beasts had taught Imogen that it wasn't often a productive use of one's time or power. The nova-fire, or the storied dawnfire of Iselya's blade, were quite capable of tearing apart a legion of umbral horrors... but the darkness contained not just a legion of such wraiths, but the potentiality for them, ad nauseum, ad infinitium. No, one had to deal with the source directly, and quickly, because light could best shadow in every single battle and still lose by sheer force of attrition.
To that end, she took some inspiration from Jac as he leapt from the ship and struck Exathun's shoulder. Her travels in the jungles of Ecith had taught her not to engage titanic foes, but that was no option here. If she wanted to prevent Exathun from rampage, from demolishing the refugee-swollen towns throughout the region, they would have to go on the offensive.
It was tempting to follow Jac's lead and simply jump down after the dragon, but the first idea which presented itself was seldom the best. If they were going to... well, disable Exathun (given the dragon's great size, she had some doubts about Anton's suggested purification, but that was a concern for future Imogen) they ought to bring as much force to bear against the dragon as possible, and quickly. Give it no opportunity to compose a proper defense, or counterattack.
In a matter of seconds, Imogen pondered all of these exigencies and angles, and determined her next move.
"Lord Raxen," Imogen's quiet voice returned to her ears as the fly-head defense melted away, her Runes focused to new purposes, "I don't ask you for a lot, but it would be really great if this worked."
Seemed like a decent prayer. As she spoke, Imogen materialized her first Pact weapon; a zweihander, as long as she was tall. The weapon blinked into being without fanfare, a utilitarian sword with no decoration save the short Ecitharese prayer engraved on the hilt: "Do noe confuo'uv eh'uvn vonaieh di'uvan."
"Oh damnsh," Imogen realized, speech slurring slightly as her mouth began to melt and re-form beneath the light of Animus, "That'sh actually relevanch. First time ever."
A pointless observation, but it did make her feel a little bit better about the whole situation, somehow.
The mage grimaced as she felt her coat start to strain as her flesh expanded and distorted, and she spent a second to frantically push herself out of as much clothing as possible. The eternal bane of Animus, it seemed, was the constant need to transform quickly, and the total refusal of modern apparel to adapt to a range of body shapes between a marmoset and a horse. She got most of the outer layers off, but she refused to slow the pace of transformation to save her second-best shirt. It was her birthday soon, she could get Carina to buy another one.
The Ork dropped to the deck, leaning heavily against the side railing as her center of gravity shifted dramatically. New extremities sprouted from her back, which arched upwards, tearing her own flesh in a painful act of Chrysalistry. It didn't bother her. Putting up with pain while doing magic was something like half of what her training prior to acquiring the Rune of Reaving had been for, after all.
Imogen stumbled towards the other side of the bow, towards the Stiltori Dawnmartyr. By the time she reached it, she had essentially meshed the totems as well as she could, and her stride was much steadier. If there was a shake in the chimeric form's gait, it was mostly due to her own uncertainty that the form would work.
She'd spent some time in the past month devising chimerae from her totems, and this had been one of the ones she'd been most keen to actually get right. There were a lot of stories about winged steeds in myth and legend, enough that she'd initially assumed that the shape had to work surprisingly well. This mistake had caused her to run directly into trees and gullies several times, and she now suspected that most stories of "pegasi" were actually some bullshit involving summoned spirits and not really material horses with actual wings.
...but the advantages of the chimera were too obvious to pass on, so she'd continued trying until she had fashioned a mix of totems which gave her the basic combination she was looking for: a horse which could fly. Her horse totem was something of a mess; a chestnut stallion, patchy with Orkish scales, and bearing the wings of a great sea-bird. For the purpose of lifting an entire horse (and, theoretically, rider), the wingspan had to be enormous, and the ordinary horse's tail swapped out for equally ungainly tailfeathers.
It cost a lot of power, to transform like that, but the Ork-turned-horse wasn't finished. "Iselya," she croaked, talking being quite difficult no matter how she juggled the manifestations of her totems here, "Get on, I'm gonna charge him."
Stealth wasn't easy, in the air, but Exathun's deadly blasts of shadow and frost were enormous. Her sword rose into the air in front of Horseagen as she prepared to charge directly into the blast. She would cut through it... directly into the dragon's stupid fucking face.