Ragashingo

Childhood's End

“Are you ready for this, uh… miss?” whispered the late thirty-something year old very tall, very thin human man dressed in stealthy blacks.  

“I already told you, my name is Kathrri,” Kathrricallia, a dark-haired elf maybe half his age, whispered back. She made sure to properly roll the double r-sound near the end of what most might consider her first name. Hers was a proud, resourceful name derived partially from Drudic of the fey wilds and from that of her large, widespread family. She had only met the man, Edgeer, a handful of minutes before and he’d already forgotten it… This latest night time raid was starting out just great. 

“Shh. Another guard. Everyone ‘gainst the wall again!” That young half-elven woman outfitted for stealth like her two companions was Stel. Kathrri had know her ever since they’d played during their childhood together a good ten years or more ago. The fiery red-haired Stel had volunteered for this dangerous mission even though she, unlike the other two, still called a house inside the walls of Aireden, the town they were about to slip back into, her home. For a long moment the three of them pressed up into deep the shadows casts by the damp, chilly stone wall as a guard holding a torch walked across the ramparts overhead. “Ok… he’s clear,” Stel whispered a minute later. “It’s now or never… can you do it Kathrri?” 

Kathrri nodded then reached first into one small pouch strapped to her hip, and then another. Burnt mistletoe and a sprig of spruce. She clasped her hands and rubbed the two components together as she said a small, quiet prayer. After a moment she, and the two others with her, each gave the tiniest of starts when something around them almost imperceptibly changed. There was still the sounds of the wind, of distant bird calls, of closer nighttime bugs, but when Kathrri clasped her hands together a second time they made no sound at all. That same silence was true for the usual quiet rustle of her form-fitting, dark colored, hooded leather armor and even her cautious, experimental footfalls. The others were under the effects, as well. Not only was her spell dampening their sounds, it was doing something similar for their visibility and hers. It was like an odd camouflage or trick of the light powerful enough to make them hard to spot at a distance even if they’d been standing in full daylight. 

A light grip and tug on her shoulder from Edgeer—speech and visual cues were much less effective now that the spell had been cast— signaled it was time to move. The three of them were free to walk a little faster and a little less cautiously, now, than they had when they were making their way from the woods, through the ever expanding clear-cut zone that boarded the city, and to the town wall an hour earlier. They rounded a bend in the wall then stopped near what looked to be a solid, heavy metal grate maybe three feet by three feet wide set almost five feet above the ground. Edgeer had to reach up to get his hand on it and then ever so carefully rock the center section of it back and forth until almost the whole thing popped seamlessly free. With a little more work, all three of them pulled themselves up and squeezed through the tight opening before returning the compromised grate to its previous, seemingly intact position. 

They were inside the upper floor of a small, unlit storehouse, now. There was nothing around but a lot of cobwebs and a few dusty boxes. It was Kathrri turn to lead the way. She slowly led the way downstairs and out onto the dimly lit cobblestone streets, careful to check for anyone they might run into each step of the way. Although she’d grown up in the nearby wild expanse of the fey woods, Kathrri had explored the city streets with Stel and a few others so often back when they were kids that she knew her way around just as well here as she did in her own home section of the forest. 

After a few uninterrupted minutes of travel slipping past more warehouses and the occasional storefront Kathrri froze and gently pushed back on Stel, the next in line. With quiet gestures and touches the three quickly pressed themselves into the a dark nook once more as a patrolling guard came marching by. His torch sent long shadows stretching every which way as he neared and then passed by. If not for their dark outfits, and Kathrri’s concealing spell, the three would have almost surely have been spotted. The small gang of three began moving again once the guard turned a corner and his torchlight faded from view. Down two blocks. Left. Then right and squeeze through a tight alley. Cross the street and circle around left… and then they were there. At one of Aireden’s smallest armories. 

The town’s primary armory was a well-lit and well-guarded affair, but this structure was closer to a brick-built warehouse half-filled with old weapons and armor used to train new city guardsmen than it was a proper armory. There really was no other use for the worn out gear…  unless you were a bunch of forest dwellers on the verge of losing your homes to the steady, murderous advance of progress and had no blacksmithing capability to speak of. Kathrri and her two companions were here to steal those weapons, as many as they could. With things headed in the direction they were, several dozens live might soon depend on their success this night. 

Kathrri moved to the armory’s rear door only to find it padlocked. She moved back and gave a light touch to Edgeer. He was, supposedly, the best lock picker in the city’s small but thriving thieve’s guild. Now was his time to prove it. Kathrri had to huff and pout at just how little time it took the man to swing the newly unlocked door open. She’d been practicing on locks of all shapes and sizes for a couple years now, but there was no way she could have disabled that padlock so quickly. Edgeer returned to her side and his touch meant it was her time to lead again. He may have had more practiced nimble hands, but her senses were still a good bit better. She slipped into the armory and was instantly aware that they were not alone. Flickering lamp light and a distant, unguarded conversation were both coming from around a corner and down the hallway connecting the rear of the armory to the front. There were probably guards stationed in the armory’s front foyer. But that meant that the rows and rows of weapons back here were theirs for the taking. 

Normally, a team of three consisting of a tall thin man and two even leaner young women could hardly hope to sneak off with much armament at all. A few swords and maybe three crossbows each if they filled both hands and arranged the rest just right. But that was the beauty of the plan Kathrri had come up with. She’d be able to easily carry ten times that amount, and making her way out would be far easier for her than it had been sneaking her way in.

It felt almost comical to Kathrri just how many crossbows and quivers full of crossbow bolts her companions were able to drape across her body even as she worked to clip a dozen swords in their scabbards to her waist and belt. By the time they were finished, she was so weighed down by her new myriad arsenal of arms she could barely move. Being stealthy like this was completely out of the question! And yet, she still had a big smug grin on her face.

At least until it happened. 

Neither Kathrri nor her companions had noticed that the conversations coming from the front of the armory had stopped until an imposing, green-skinned guard holding a lantern stepped around the corner. He had them dead to rights, and not even Kathrri’s concealing spell could hide them from his direct view. 

“Jellay! Get back here! We’re being robbed!” the guard yelled even as he lunged for Kathrri. As tangled up and bogged down as she was with weapons, there was really no chance of her getting away. She’d barely made it a couple of steps before the guard’s strong hand caught her thin wrist then wrenched her right arm around and pinned it painfully to her back. 

“Go! Run!” Kathrri yelled even as she was being pulled sideways pressed into a nearby wall. Edgeer was gone in an instant, professional thief that he was. But Kathrri could just see Stel hesitating in the doorway out of the corner of her eye. And the second guard was coming fast! “I’ll catch up!” Kathrri promised.  

With that, much to Kathrri’s relief, Stel ran, too. 

“I’ve got this one, you get the other!” the guard crushing Kathrri to the wall said. Did he not see how many there were? The other guard ran out the back seemingly to give chance, and then all was quiet once more. And yet… something about the way her guard said those words was rattling around in Kathrri’s head. 

She found herself roughly treated once again as the guard gripped both her shoulders tightly then spun her to face him. “Don’t move, don’t struggle!” The man… no, young man… no, his face was green, which would make him a half-orc. One very near her own age. And then the realization that had been working its way through her skull struck her at the same moment a similar insight struck him.

“Genki?!”“Kathrri?!”

The two had called out each other’s name in the exact same instant. There, standing in front of Kathrri, holding her painfully in place, was the now grown up half-orc named ‘Genki’ who had once, long ago, been her very best friend!

Like with Stel, she had first met Genki years and years ago when they were just children. One day he’d come crying from inside the city walls, a half-orc who’d caught more than his fair share of scorn for the mixed blood and angular features he could not control. She’d come from the fey woods and brought her own shame with her: An unquenchable thirst to know what lay inside the closed off town that the hunters and woodsmen flowed out from year after year to inflict incalculable harm on the very forest she called home. It had been her and Genki’s shared fascinations with styles of life not their own that had seen them and, over time, a handful of others, romp through the trees of her jungle and explore the back alleys of his city together. Just some odd kids making mischief when most anyone around them wouldn’t offer so much as a kind word. She and Genki had grown up together and gotten into all kinds of trouble together, despite both their parents’ protests. But that had been then. This was now. And things had clearly changed. 

“What are you doing here, Kathrri?” Genki asked. His voice was deeper than she remember it and split between anger and disappointment. “No, I know what you are doing here. What I want to know is why?” 

Kathrri tsked at him, then sighed. She was feeling quite a bit of disappointment of her own. “Why did you join the guard, Genki? It’s not the Hunter’s Lodge or the Logging Guild, but still… We… you… saw what they were doing to my home. And that was years ago. It’s so much worse now!” 

“So bad that you’re here now stealing weapons so you can arm yourselves and kill?” Genki asked in reply. “…And you, you have killed, haven’t you?!” he added. There was sadness and a touch of true anger in his voice now. 

“How did?” was all Kathrri could mumble. How could he know that? Why was he so angry at her? 

“The four men last week they briefed us all on… Dead in an uptown market alley…” Genki was recounting things with an almost hollow voice of realization now. “One had his throat slit almost side to side… Another was in armor but had half his skill almost burnt clean off… And the other two had been stabbed to death. And three of them had been slashed with… with tiger claws… That was you, wasn’t it, Kathrri?” he asked dumbfounded. 

Kathrri couldn’t help but shiver at her friend’s revelation. “Panther claws…” was all that slipped out of her at first as she looked away her face flushed with shame of her best friend having learned what she’d done. But then she took a breath, got her wits back together, and explained.

“I was leading someone through the markets,” she said, slowly. Careful not to reveal too much to the guard who was holding her in place. “Three men from the Hunter’s Lodge surprised us. And I did what I had to do.”

“I never though you’d commit…”

“…murder?!” she interrupted. “It wasn’t…” She tried to push back her rage and find the right words to say. “The only one murdered there was the forth young man. Stabbed to death, but no panther marks or magic on him. You know why? Because that was Bobbit!” she all but yelled now. “You remember Bobbit, right? From when we were kids? Fat. Friendly. Always let us back through the gate. Always knew where to scavenge something delicious to eat even when we had no money. He was one of the four you were briefed about. He was killed because they wanted to send us a further message.” 

“Bobbit? They’d taken the bodies away. There’s no way I could have known…” Genki protested. 

“You didn’t know about Stel, either,” Kathrri continued. “They didn’t kill her. They carried her back to their ‘Lodge’. I found her myself. They’d beaten her bloody and broken and then chained her to a cot. She wouldn’t have lasted two days if I hadn’t come to get her that night. I killed two more doing it. Are you going to complain about them, too?!” 

“You can’t justify…”

“That was her just now. The girl who fled out that door? That was Stel. Miss Wild Magic, we used to call her. Mended up well enough in the last week so we could come here and ready ourselves to fight back against what they did. What they’ve long been doing.” 

“Genki,” Kathrri surmised, though her emotion-drenched words were coming out more like a plea, now, than a statement of fact, “you’re the only one of us from when we were kids who is still here behind the walls. Here helping them tear down my home, and over hunt our animals, and kill my people.”

Genki’s face, which had been twisting with tearful, pent up emotion, suddenly hardened. 

“No,” he said sternly. “I guard the places within the walls they tell me to guard. I break up fights and help people and patrol the town. And people thank me for it! I’m not that shunned little half-orc anymore. And I’m not out there cutting down your forest, or poisoning your river, or… or… whatever your people have accused us of. But you are in here stealing and killing in my home…” 

Kathrri, too, clenched her jaw, but she said nothing. There had been no hesitation in Genki’s voice once he’d started. And there was nothing to say in response. Lines had just been drawn, and they were not on the same side. Kathrri had hoped against hope that maybe he’d come with her. That maybe he was stuck and looking for a way out. That maybe… no. Her task was too important to get caught up in endless maybes. 

“Let me go, Genki,” she said slowly. Threateningly. Giving him one last chance. “Or I’m going to let myself go.”

He reached for her arm and moved to put his sword to her throat as he replied with, “The only place you’re going is…” 

Kathrri didn’t let him finish.

It only took a moment for all the clothing and armor and weapons and weight she’d been saddled with to magically merge into her black-as-the-night panther form. She sprang forward then rebounded off the nearby armory wall and came back towards Genki before he could even raise his sword. Kathrri stuck hard and fast and without mercy. A swipe of her claws to this leg sent him toppling to the ground. A vicious bite to his sword arm saw it rendered useless. Another rake of her claws across his abdomen and belly saw him very nearly out cold with his blood spilling off him and pooling around him on the floor.

But then Kathrri was her elven self again. Kneeling by his side. With a short prayer she opened her connection to the spirits of nature and called forth a regal horse of recovery that sported only a single horn. She then cast a well-worn spell and summoned a cloud of her healing butterflies. The ethereal glowing insects gently landed on Genki and worked to close his wounds. A minute later his eyes fluttered open and she gently gripped his hand in hers. 

“It seems we’ve crossed into two different worlds now, you and I. Or maybe we’ve just returned to our own,” she said, a tear or two now actually falling from her eyes. “I want you to stay here and guard your world. I’m going to return home and do the same for mine. You really… were…my best friend…” 

And with that, she shifted into a feline form once more. 

Kathrri exited the back door of the armory with all her stolen weapons in tow. But she departed not as a terrifying panther who had, out of necessity, attacked and nearly killed her best friend, but as the black-haired kitten she used change into back when they’d played during their childhood.

It was a shame that that, too, like so many precious things, had truly come to an end.

by Ragashingo

It's This Way

Meeting a contact in the sewers would seem like a quiet affair, but it never is. In fact, it is often downright noisy. There is, of course, the flow of sewage water. A mixture of slushes, slurps, drips, and gurgles that echo off the maze of subterranean brick-laid tunnelways that help keep the city clean. And then there’s the various creatures that live among the sewage. Rats and bats and far worse things. Plus there’s the people. An series of underground passages leading to almost anywhere in the city safe from easy viewing? They may not be clean, but the sewers are handy. 

Speaking of not clean, there is the man before you. He’s a little too fat. Has a little too much unkempt facial hair. His voice would be echoing off the walls of his little lantern-lit hidey-hole office, if he weren’t smart enough to keep his words to a whisper. 

“All righ’, I says you done righ’ by us. Earned you'self a proper meetin’,” he tells you standing on the other side of a beat up desk after inspecting the thing he sent you to obtain. 

The man glances behind him, toward the doorway and pops his neck in agitation upon not seeing what he had hoped to see. “Kathrri!” He yells angrily, his tongue giving a little roll to the “r’s” in her name. His voice certainly echoes now… 

It takes a few moments, but then the young woman you briefly saw crouched and waiting among the shadows of the nearby passage you came from slinks in. She’s not cowed or frightened in the least. If anything, she looks defiant. Annoyed. A rebellious teenager with eyes that gleam slightly in the lantern light. She’s fitted out with high quality blackened leather gear. Has a hood pulled up over her head that just about fully hides her dark hair, an oddly pretty face and… pointy ears? You spot a bevy of matte-black k nives strapped to her person anda dark colored shortbow strapped across her back.

“This ‘ere is Kathrricallia…”

“…I told you not to give ‘way my full name.” the girl interrupted. Her manner of speech is different. Not of the city and certainly not of the numerous thieves that do their business in the sewers. She almost sounds like she belongs elsewhere. In the wilds, maybe? That said, she does seem to have picked up a few bad habits. Dropped syllables, shortened words. Or is she trying to hide her original accent? Like the hood hides her ears and face?  

“…She’ll show you to th’ meetin’ point,” your contact tells you and her. For a second nobody moves. Not your contact. Nor your new escort. It takes a violent grimacing head gesture from your contact aimed back at the open doorway for thing to progress again. 

“Fine…,” the girl says. “But then I am headin’…”

“No! Then you’re comin’ back ‘ere.  

The girl gives a little ‘tsk’, more like a hiss really, and meets the larger man’s stare. You notice her back straighten just a little. He does too. 

“We have work to’nite…” he says, but this time there’s something else beyond just anger and command in his voice. A bit of fear? Pleading? 

The girl ‘tsks’ again and nods. Still not cowed, but… resigned to her fate? Hard to tell. 

“Come on. It’s this way,” she tells you before heading towards the exit. “And, for the record: To you I am ‘Kathrri’,” she too lightly rolls the ‘rii’ portion of her name, “or just ‘Kat’ if you can’t say it right.” 

You nod, not about to argue how to pronounce someone’s else’s name, and soon you’re back alongside the noisy flowing sewage. You take a moment to check the opposite way and when you turn back the girl is… nowhere in sight. No… wait… there she is. Twenty, maybe thirty feet ahead crouched and peering around at the next right angled junction. 

She really is a cat, you think. She’s quick and quiet as one, at least. Those traits hold true as she guides you further along the various passages of the sewer. Twice she stops you to let others pass at the far end of a tunnel or visible across the sewage going the opposite way. Busy place, the sewers, but she’s got good awareness and instinct, too, and she leads you onward undetected.

Eventually, you reach your destination: A kind of access shaft, a large circular hole, really, built into the ceiling some twenty feet above you. 

‘Tssk’, Kathrri hisses again, a little longer and louder this time sounding even more like a pissed off cat as she paces back and forth beneath the opening. 

“Oooh, when I get my claws on them I am gonna’…” she begins, talking to herself. 

“Do we need to find another way?” you ask. 

She turns and you can just barely make out the roll of her eyes before she answers saying, “No. But you are twice blessed lucky I am the one leading you and not Bobbit or Shel. Just… stand back a second,” she says, gesturing you away. 

You do as she says even as you are curious what her plan is. There’s no hand holds. No rope. Not even a wall near by to jump kick off of. There are no athletics or acrobatics you know of that will get her up there. But then she just very slightly tilts her head and… 

Nostalgia. Happiness. And a cool breeze and golden red sunset wash over you. Leaves: bright reds and yellows on the many surrounding trees. And beneath your feet are as many more dried brown leaves. You can feel them crunch as you step. Smell their dusty fragrant odor as they crumble. 

… in an instant she is out of the sewer and looking down on you from above even as you start slightly at whatever just happened. 

“Hold tight. I’ll be right back,” she yells down to you. She ducks away and a few moments later you can just barely make out a series of grunts. Something being dragged along the ground? Then she is back and attaching some kind of bundle of rope and wood to two hooks spaced maybe a couple feet apart at the top of the circular exit. She lets go of the large bundle and it falls and unfurls into wood-planked rope ladder long enough to stretch from the surface to a foot or two above the bottom of the sewer. 

“We normally keep the ladder rolled up and balanced just right up here at the top,” she explains with a smile on her face almost like she is relaying gossip to you as you climb. “Shel just hits it with one of her little fire blasts. Bobbit? He throws one of those big rocks set up along the wall and knocks it loose. I just…” 

She doesn’t just pause, Kathrricallia suddenly jerks her head to look behind her and then literally jumps to her feet. 

“Trouble up here… sorry,” she whispers. “Might as well come up. They will just chase you if you run,” she says before turning and facing whoever else is up there. 

With only a half dozen more wooden steps to go, you hurry up top and climb to your feet only to find yourself in a partially closed off back alley with three men facing down your escort and now you. Two of them are just thugs. One dressed more or less in street clothes with a simple club in hand. The other, fitted with a old, rusted breastplate. He holds a spiked club in one hand and a lantern in the other. The two are big, but none too bright looking. The third, however… 

“What do you have there, Kathri?” asks the well-armed, fit looking man standing a decent distance from you crossbow in hand. He didn’t roll his ‘r.’ “I thought we’d agreed, you and I, that this side was ours and that you’d stay clear. Maybe if you’d heeded my warnings, your friend would still be alive.” You follow the man’s look back and see the larger of the two thugs move his lantern to reveal a burly young man slumped bloody in the shadows against the far wall. 

“Bobbit?!” Kathrricallia yells as she runs past the men to her friend and grips his shoulder. She shakes him as if trying to wake him, but he is quite dead. 

“Burge…” she says slowly, her voice low and angry.

“What? Oh! Of course! You’re wondering where Stel is? She is alive. For now. But I can change that if you continue to make things difficult for me.” 

“We were just passing through, Burge. No looking. No takin’. You know that. You didn’t have to…” Kathrricallia answers. She looks up to him with tears in her eyes and a barely restrained quiver in her voice. 

“I’m sure you were, Kitty Kath,” the newcomer leader teases, intentionally mispronouncing her name a second time. You take a step back at the dark look taking over the young woman’s face. This man has clearly mistaken her anger for anguish. “But you knew the rules I set. And you and your friends continued to defy them. So… You go run along. Now.” He says, pointing his weapon at her with a smile on his face.  Kathrri holds up her hands and slowly moves away from her murdered friend. She pushes past you, seemingly intent on going back down her rope ladder, but she gently touches your side with her hand so as to get your attention. 

“Be ready…” she whispers, her voice barely more than an enraged hiss, as she moves past. The look she gives you makes the annoyed, defiant glare she gave her boss down in the sewer seem daintily polite in comparison. She is going to do something. What? You are not sure. But she is not going to defer to this man any longer. You are sure of that.

“Now that we’re alone,” Burge says as your assigned companion begins down the rope ladder, “I want you to tell me just who it was she was taking you to meet.” 

“I don’t know where we were going,” you answer.

“Oh, I know that. But it’s not what I asked you, is it?” Burge replies. He again readies his crossbow. “Who?” he asks, as he points the dangerous bolt directly at you.

Kathrri’s eyes are just about to disappear from view when it happens again… 

A clear blue sky arcs high overhead obscured by the many trees. There’s just enough leaves left on them to provide comfortable shade. A chill wind sees all the shadows cast on the ground move and dance in time to each other.

…and in an instant she is behind the more lightly armored of the two thugs. Both you, Burge, and the man in heavy armor recover quickly from the flash of Autumn, but the other thug is just standing there. Confused? Or maybe still trapped within that vision? An instant more and Kathrri’s dagger is plunged in the side of his neck. With less effort than you’d expect, she cuts his throat open clean left to right in a sneak attack he had no ability to defend against. She gives his body a solid shove and it topples forward without any resistance. 

Then, she does something else you’ve never seen. Thrusting her arms out towards you she makes some kind of full-handed gesture and speaks in a powerful, magical language you’ve never heard before. A wispy shape of a great bear made from a unending flow of rustling leaves and blowing winds gusts into existence and lopes towards you and Burge. To say the both of you are completely taken aback at this development is a vast understatement! 

“Fight!” Kathrri yells to you from across the way. 

Many things happen quickly now. Burge raises his hand crossbow at you and fires. There’s nowhere for you to dodge to and the bolt strikes you mid chest. A fatal shot. Or… it should have been. Instead, while the impact hurts, the bolt fails to penetrate when it should have and falls to the ground, rebuffed by some unseen forces as the illusory bear roars. Emboldened, you draw your weapon and Burge draws his and the two of you advance on each other and clash only for you to find yourself outmatched. 

Past you, Kathrri is in much the same predicament. The thug she attacked is down and dead. But the other one is twice her size, much more heavily armored, and fully aware of her. It seems to be all she can do is stay nimble and dodge the swings of his spiked club scrambling to keep her distance as best she can. Her dagger doesn’t have near enough reach to strike back, and there’s not enough space for her to grab and use her shortbow. You block another one of Burge’s attacks then catch view of Kathrri lunging for her opponent. Not with her agile dagger, but with… animalistic clawed paws?! She connects with the man’s arm and blood goes flying. But he’s merely hurt, not dead. He counter attacks and lands one vicious hit to her head. Then another. The two grapple and plunge out of view into the shadows. 

Burge seems to have you, as well. After a couple of his attacks are magically rebuffed, his sword beings to lands solid hits. First one. And then another. The wispy bear made of forest magic prowls nearby, but it’s temporary armoring effect seems spent for now as Burge’s stabs and slashes are bitting deep. And you’ve not done nearly so much damage to him in return. You’d contemplate your poor luck, but your feet are closer to the large opening in the ground than you’d like, and he is pressing his advantage knowing you are nearly out of room to maneuver.

But then something else happens.

The armored thug you though had gotten the better of Kathrri goes running past you both screaming while frantically pulling at his chest plate which is now glowing a bright heated red. He trips and falls and screams a few seconds more before his voice quiets into near silent whimpers. Both you and Burge look towards the inky shadows where the man ran from and you see them: Two gleaming eyes looking back. 

But these eyes are not at the correct height for an angry young woman. No, they are much lower to the ground and a moment later you see why. A long, black-furred panther comes slinking out of the darkness. It bears its fangs, lets out a long low growl, then charges Burge. The thug leader turns to face it, but the panther topples him with a slash of its claws then lunges for his neck, grasping him in a mighty, bloody bite. He gets a solid stab in between the panther’s ribs, this attack is not deflected like his crossbow bolt was for you, and the large cat yelps in pain but goes for another vicious bite. Seeing an opportunity, you move in for the finishing blow on Burge and he falls still. 

The panther falls, too. Weakly onto its side before shifting back into the shape of the leather-clad young woman who was ordered to escort you to a secretive meeting. She’s hurt. Bad. A gash on her leg. Another stream of blood flowing from her head. Kathrri holds her side, too, where she was most recently injured. But then she clenches her eyes shut and cries out in that same unfamiliar language and suddenly the air is thick with hundreds of glowing butterflies that appear out of nowhere. They flutter all around you both lighting up the dark spaces where you lay. Most of the bright glowing insects disperse and vanish in all directions leaving just one to land on Kathrri’s leg. You watch intently as her wounds close and her tense muscles begin to relax. Soon, she releases her side and pulls herself shakily to a sitting position before turning to you. 

“He got you pretty good, I see,” she says. She reaches out her hand and her butterfly briefly moves to land on it before it crosses the short gap between the two of you and lands near where you were hit by the crossbow bolt during your fight with Burge. You feel a slight chill and the burning pain of your wounds soon cool in kind as the healing spirit mends your injuries like it did for her. She helps you to your feet, and you to hers. 

“I know this is asking a lot, but they… they have my friend. My only friend. I’ll get you to your meeting, I swear it on my life, but first… will you help me save her?” Kathrricallia’s words are, for the first time, simple and honest. No anger. No slyness or defiance. Just a request from a mysterious contradiction of a young woman to the only person she thinks will listen. 

You nod. 

“Ok. Thank you. Come on, I think I know where they have her hidden. It’s this way.” 

by Ragashingo