#though stelle is barely present

[goldom]

A muse smacked my consciousness with this story, fully formed; I just wrote it down.

#stellefly #though stelle is barely present #firefly #honkai star rail #hsr #afolis

[descendinginto-madness]

awake.

word count: 1073

content warnings: mentions of injury, medication & hospital(ish) setting

summary: after being seriously injured during a mission, march finally wakes up.

author's notes: ermmm hi :3 this is a sequel for the thing i wrote for day 2 and i kiinda feel like i'm cheating because today's prompt is barely in here but,,, for the sake of continuity it's gonna be this way LOL also march didn't deserve this tbh. i'll admit i'm evil

When March wakes up, she's confused. 

She registers a few things all at once, too, and it's not really helping: she's lying down on something soft, there's something else covering her body, her chest feels weird, and the light in this… place, wherever she is… It isn't very strong, but still too bright for her eyes, and she has to squint for a moment. Once they adjust, though, she can finally look around - and what she sees is the Astral Express's infirmary. She's lying in bed, and there's someone sleeping on the chair next to it.

Dan Heng.

…Right.

It's when she recognizes him that she also remembers what happened. The fight, the injury… Then Stelle and Dan Heng's worried faces above her, Dan Heng picking her up, asking her to stay awake?... 

Maybe.

She isn't entirely sure about these last few things, they're all blurry in her mind, as if engulfed in thick fog. She remembers that she was in pain and shock and scared, though, so it's probably because of that - but even when she knows the reason, it's still a little frustrating. She doesn't like not being able to remember things. Even when it comes to a situation like this, she's pretty sure she would've preferred the details, no matter how terrifying all of that was for her at the moment.

She doesn't want any more black holes in her memory.

Now that she's awake, though, she will surely be able to fill in the blanks with the help of her friends…. If they want to talk about this, of course, and she has a feeling they won't. Not like she can't really blame them for that - it must've been quite scary for them as well… Especially if she has been unconscious long enough for someone else to fall asleep waiting for her to wake up.

“Dan Heng?” she says, and her voice is so weak it almost scares her. She doesn't really feel this weak - sure, she's still tired, and sleepy, but that might also be due to some medicine she might be under the influence of right now. To prove to herself that it’s really not that bad more than anything else, she attempts to pull herself up - and immediately fails.

Oh.

That's… Not ideal. 

She waits for a moment, but nothing happens; either Dan Heng's sleep is too deep, or she was too quiet, even with her attempts to move. She tries to speak again, this time a bit louder.

“Dan Heng?”

…

Still nothing.

Alright, third time's the charm.

“Dan Heng!”

It's still not loud, and almost makes her cough, but it does the job; her friend flinches, suddenly awake, and for a moment looks startled - it almost makes her giggle. His eyes finally land on her, though, and then his expression instantly changes into a mix of… everything, really; worry and relief, surprise and happiness, before he manages to somewhat compose himself. Only his voice isn't quite as serious and steady as usual, the relief clearly present in there.

“March.” The way he says her name is so soft that makes her feel oddly warm inside. “March,” he repeats. He seems… Unsure; about what to do, what to say, and clearly struggling to find the right words, and she smiles. 

“That’s my name alright,” she says, but it only takes a few seconds for her to remember something and for that smile of hers to fade. 

“Dan Heng?” This time it's her who's hesitating. “I’m sorry.” She looks away from him, suddenly a heavy feeling in her heart. It's… Not very nice, obviously, but it's best to apologize as soon as she can.

At the very least, Dan Heng seems to be genuinely surprised by her apology, and it makes her feel a little better.

“What for?” he asks.

“I… must’ve made you terribly worried, right?” she replies, letting out a quiet sigh. “If I was more careful—” She doesn’t even manage to finish the second sentence and he's already shaking his head.

“No,” he says, and his voice is slightly more firm, but still gentle. Reassuring. “You didn’t do anything— if anything, I should apologize. If I was more careful nothing would’ve happened either, and now, if I got here even slightly too late…” His voice trails off, and March's expression softens when she hears that, her eyes filled with worry. Of course he feels responsible for that. Of course he feels like he should have protected her better. Dan Heng, who treats her like his younger sister and who would give his life for her without a second of hesitation.

But the most she can do right now is smile reassuringly - at the very least, she hopes it’s reassuring and not mostly tired.

“It’s not your fault either,” she disagrees and he nods, but still doesn’t look convinced, and… Ah. Maybe it's not the most appropriate thought at the moment, but March already knows that in a while, when all the emotions caused by this incident are dull, she’s going to tease him about how worried he was, even if just so slightly. 

Not right now, though; especially since something else catches his attention - for the best for him, probably. 

“You look tired,” he notices, and she can't help but feel like he's so glad to change the topic because he's afraid she might be about to try and start blaming herself for everything again. “You should rest more.” 

Normally, she would’ve argued with him about that, but right now, she really does feel tired, she too can hear just how quiet her voice is, and… honestly, all this talking is draining her much more than it should.

“It’s alright.” Because it really is, even despite all that; in the end, she doesn't mind talking to Dan Heng at all, but by the time he says these two words, he has already stood up from his chair.

“I’ll— let the others know you're alright,” he says. “And I can get you something if you need anything.”

She thinks for a moment and shakes her head gently.

“I don't.”

“Okay. I'll be back soon, but please rest.” He gives her one more worried look before heading towards the door.

In a slightly different situation, right now it would've hit her how lonely this room is about to get, but it doesn't happen right now.

She falls asleep before Dan Heng even leaves the room.

divider by @/cafekitsune

#angstpril2024 #honkai star rail #fanfiction #day12 #a little too late #hsr #march 7th #dan heng #dim writing ☁️

[onmykneesforhotdilfs]

jealous

guess who is back, that’s right, ME. anyway, this was not a request or anything but i needed to do this in order to get back on track. there are bunch of requests sitting in my box over there but i am working on them, i promise. if not in august, then you will get them all in september. k? now that this is out of the way, i hope you enjoy and as always, if you guys wanna talk about my fics or anything really, feel free to message me, i’m always available.

“Are you absolutely sure you want to go?

Bloom sighed and winced as Stella pulled a strand of her fiery hair too hard, sharp pain from the tug settling in her temple lobe making her regret her decision to have her blonde friend help her get ready for, yet another, Eraklyon ball.

“Well it seemed like a good idea to me at the beginning… but judging by the number of times I have been asked that question, I am starting to think it is not such a good idea after all.” Bloom responded sarcastically.

“Look Bloom,” Stella began as she took another strand of Bloom’s hair and curled it around the curling iron, “I get it. You guys broke up on friendly terms, but no one is going to blame you if you choose not to go.” Bloom frowned and she was about to open her mouth to protest, but Stella paid her no mind as she continued to curl her hair. “It’s his engagement party at the end of the day and the one that could turn rather messy considering who the bride-to-be is.”

“I know this might seem slightly unorthodox Stell, but I honestly have no hard feelings towards Sky.” Bloom shrugged one of her shoulders. “Besides, I’ve moved on.”

Stella snorted and tried to cover the sound (not befitting of a royal) with a cough but Bloom saw right through it as she leveled her best friend with a flat look. “Sorry Bloom. But you’ve got to admit that the situation is slightly absurd.”

Bloom sighed, her shoulders slouching forward in a clear sign of defeat. “Well, yes, I admit that the situation might seem weird-“

“Weird?” Stella laughed. “Sweetie, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but the situation ceased to be weird when you decided to spare the bastard.” Bloom saw Stella raise one of her perfectly shaped eyebrows in the mirror but an amused smile full of mirth was present on her lips. “This right now, this is insanity at it’s finest.”

Bloom rolled her eyes. “Okay now you’re exaggerating. Besides, the two of you are getting along quite well. With the way the two of you strive to get on my nerves, I’ll even say, you get along better than him and I do.”

“Okay, that’s just hurtful.” Stella pouted, her bottom lip sticking out and Bloom laughed at the puppy dog look her friend was giving her.

“I’m just kidding Stell.”

“I don’t know Bloom. I now might have to tell your boyfriend you find him annoying.” Bloom never quite considered Stella as a snitch, but the devils dancing in blonde’s eyes reminded her that she needed to thread carefully unless she wanted to be eaten alive by the devil himself and his accomplice.

“Now, don’t be twisting my words. I never said I find you or him annoying…” She stopped for a second to debate whether or not she should say the next sentence. “No matter how true that statement might be.” She mumbled at the end.

Stella burst out laughing and hugged Bloom from behind. “That’s ok Bloom, you annoy us too.” At the red head’s confused look, Stella continued. “Between your constant rushing into danger without thinking and doing the exact opposite of what you’re told, it’s a miracle neither of us has a set of gray hair from worrying too much.”

Bloom felt the heat rushing to her cheeks and she lowered her head to conceal the blush that was climbing up her neck. “I’m not that bad.”

“No, you’re not.” Bloom’s eyes met Stella’s in the mirror. “You’re even worse.”

“Thanks a lot.” Bloom mumbled but she had to bite her lip to stifle a laugh as Stella’s sharp elbow stabbed her in the back making her bend forward slightly.

“Speaking of the devil, how is Valtor?” Stella asked as she started tucking delicate curls into a bun with an elaborate pattern. “I mean, you did leave him with your parents, your real parents, after all. Aren’t you worried that there will be nothing left of him when you come back?”

Bloom grinned. “I’m sure he’ll be fine. He knows he should stay away from the throne room when I’m not there… He had to learn that the hard way though.”

“That hard way wouldn’t happen to be an angry king of Domino with a magic sword?” Stella asked through her giggles as the mental picture of an aristocratic wizard being chased across the hall by Bloom’s father popped up in her head.

“Who blabbed?” Bloom asked with genuine interest painted across her features.

Stella shrugged. “One of the maids that has a cousin working in Solaria’s palace happened to be at the right place and at the right time.” She pinned the final curl to the right place and stepped back to admire her work. “And I happened to be at the right place and at the right time to hear it being passed directly from one person to another.”

“Well, aren’t you lucky?” Bloom mumbled as she stood up from her chair and stretched her stiff muscles.

“Yeah, I guess I am. I never had the misfortune of being chased by your dad with a sword after all.”

Stella laughed as Bloom pushed her slightly, slight grimace present on her face. “Thank you for your help.” She leaned in to give Stella a hug. “I’ll see you tonight?”

“Of course. Wouldn’t miss the show for anything.” Stella smiled and wiggled her eyebrows.

Bloom laughed. “You know, it is not nice to rejoice in someone else's misfortune. Dragon knows I would rather jump off the bridge than marry Diaspro.”

Stella waved her arm dismissively. “Each to it’s own. He should’ve sucked it up and come clean right away instead of preventing you from moving on and just prolonging the misery. A bit of suffering might be good for his soul.” She stopped for a second. “Though I’ll admit, marrying Diaspro might be too cruel of a punishment, even for him.”

“Well I am certainly not going to pull a Diaspro card tonight. I just hope he will live to see himself get married. After that, he is beyond my care.”

“Honey, he was beyond your care the moment you ended things, don’t pay too much attention to him.” Stella wiggled her eyebrows playfully. “Valtor might get jealous if you do.”

Bloom shook her head. “He’s not necessarily the jealous type Stell.” When Stella raised an eyebrow and her face morphed into an expression of disbelief, Bloom frowned. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Are you completely blind or something?” When Bloom’s face continued to show nothing but plain confusion, Stella continued. “Are you seriously telling me that you do not see the glares he is sending to other people who look at you for two seconds too long?” Bloom shook her head negative but a stunned expression tensed her facial muscles and if Stella focused, she could probably see the cogs turning in Bloom’s brain.

“I’ve… honestly never noticed.”

Stella smirked. “I’m not sure why I’m even surprised. The two of you separately could conquer the world, but apparently when you’re together your brain cells eat each other or something because you are stupid for anything and everything besides for each other.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Bloom, honey, if there was a picture for ‘crazy in love’ in the dictionary, it would be a picture of the two of you.”

Bloom rolled her eyes. “I’ll have you know that we actually talk quite a lot.”

“I’m sure you do… when you’re not too busy getting lost in each other’s eyes from across the room.”

Bloom exhaled and pinched a bridge of her nose. “Okay I think that’s enough of that. Don’t injure that fashionable brain of yours by thinking too hard about me and Valtor. I’ll see you tonight.” She gave Stella another quick hug, ignoring the ‘Hey!’ she got and opened a portal to Domino. She threw a quick ‘I love you’ to Stella before stepping into the portal.

Shining rays of sun almost blinded her and she had to squint her eyes as she stepped into the throne room, making the people in it stop what they were doing to greet the princess. Bloom dismissed them all with a wave of her hand and a friendly smile as she climbed the steps to greet her parents.

“You look gorgeous honey.” Her mother said as she kept Bloom at an arm’s length to examine the hairstyle. Marion brought her hand to Bloom’s face and twirled a lock of fiery strand that framed her face.

“It’s all Stella mom. But thank you.” Bloom laughed cheerfully and tucked the lock behind her ear. “Have you seen Valtor by any chance?” She ignored a dangerous growl that sounded next to her, courtesy of her father, and continued. “We should get going soon.”

Just as Marion opened her mouth to answer, the door to the room opened and Valtor, wearing classic black pants and white shirt, strode in. Oritel jumped from his chair and Bloom saw, in her peripheral vision, how Marion gripped his forearm when Valtor came closer and started to climb the steps. He acknowledged no one as his eyes locked onto hers and Bloom got a flashback of Stella gushing about him having eyes only for her. Bloom felt the heat rushing to her head but paid it no mind as Valtor’s hands finally wrapped around her waist and he leaned down to kiss her forehead in greeting. She collapsed onto him, feeling almost boneless, her knees barely supporting her. The dragon fire connection burned pleasantly in her veins, carrying even more heat into her cheeks but Bloom was too busy basking in the euphoria that their connection provided to care. His thumb was drawing lazy patterns on her waist and Bloom had to resist the urge to giggle quite childishly. Instead she distanced herself from his embrace slightly, only now realizing they were not in private, and looked up at his face that had the beginning of a genuine smile tugging at the corners of his lips. Someone (Oritel) cleared their throat and Bloom broke eye contact with Valtor as unkind lights flashed in his eyes, his hand tightening around her waist, a clear sign of sheer annoyance on his part.

“So…” Bloom began rather awkwardly, clearing her throat as Valtor and Oritel continued to shoot each other unkind looks from across her head. “I trust the day has passed without any incidents involving swords and other sharp objects.”

“That only happened once.” Both of them spoke at the same time, a similar grimace painted at both Oritel’s and Valtor’s face.

“And once was enough, thank you very much.” Bloom said as she looked between the two men, trying to suppress her laughter.

“He started it.” Both men mumbled at once and turned an evil eye to each other.

“Very mature.” Sarcasm was dripping from every word Bloom spoke, her teeth nibbling at the bottom lip as she felt that exploding argument was about to commence and she really had no time for such shenanigans.

“If I remember correctly, your majesty,” Valtor began, sugar coating his voice but his face frozen in a sour expression, “you were the one that chased me with a sword, not the other way around.”

Bloom mumbled an ‘Oh no.’ and pinched Valtor’s side warningly. She squeezed her eyes together as dull pain began thumping against the walls of her skull. Her eyes met the worried but slightly amused eyes of her mother, and the queen shook her head clearly referring to the childish argument between the two grown men.

“Next time I’m simply going to break one of the hardwood chairs against your back then.” Oritel continued with a sheer, his frame slowly molding into one ready for an attack. The men leaned towards each other dangerously, and Bloom was afraid that sooner or later lightning will shoot from their eyes.

“There won’t be a next time. Your luck is that I chose not to defend myself, because otherwise, the outcome of that meeting would’ve been very different.”

“We can test that theory right now!”

“Bring it!”

The two were about to rush at each other, Oritel’s hand reaching for his sword and Valtor’s hand already lit with a spell, but an explosive spell rushed between their faces and forced the two to close their eyes and turn in the opposite direction. When the searing white finally retreated from their retinas and they were able to see clearly again, they turned to the women standing on the side, Marion’s hand raised as remains of the spell still sparked at her fingertips.

“Gentlemen. Please, behave.” The queen’s tone bore no traces of jest and Valtor and Oritel straightened their clothes in an effort to compose themselves, both coming to a conclusion that the continuation of a quarrel could result in serious bodily injury provided by none other than Marion.

Oritel cleared his throat and looked across Valtor’s shoulder towards the open hall. The servants were frozen in surprise, some were even huddled together as numerous whispers passed through the room. He looked towards his wife who was shaking her head in disbelief as if to say ‘Look at what you’ve done now.’ He once again cleared his throat and turned towards the people in the room. “Go back to your duties, there is nothing to see here.” The servants scattered across the room, fearing the wrath of their king, but amused chuckles still broke through some mouth.

“If you’re quite done,” the queen began, “maybe it would be for the best to go separate ways for today.”

“But Marion he-“ what was undoubtedly about to be another epic rant about whose fault it is was put on hold by a simple hand gesture. Marion crossed her lips in an universal ‘Zip it.’ motion and king’s mouth snapped shut. Seeing such scene, Valtor opened his mouth to say something but a sharp elbow to his ribs made him rethink his decision. He cleared his throat and grabbed the owner of the said elbow, a girl who was red in the face and almost had steam coming from her ears, and pulled her towards himself. Bloom struggled against his hold for a second but relaxed fairly quickly when Valtor sneaked his arm across her waist.

“I agree with mom.” She looked at Valtor and the hard look she gave him indicated that there was no room for refusal. “We should go get ready.”

As soon as the door to their room closed, Bloom snatched the shirt she was wearing over her head (weary of her hairstyle) and flopped face first onto the mattress. The dull ache in her head was turning into a full fledged migraine and she had to resist the urge to rip out all the bobby pins Stella placed into her hair. A sigh sounded somewhere next to her and a bed dipped slightly to the side due to the added weight. Bloom reached across the surface of the cool bed sheets blindly until her fingers wrapped around a gloved hand. She tugged on the hand slightly, a chuckle sounding in the room, as Valtor leaned above her to place another kiss at her forehead.

“Are you sure you want to go?”

“If another person asks me that today, I am going to scream.” Was her muffled response as she rubbed her face into the pillow she found laying around on the bed. “I’ve sat in the chair for hours, Stella practically tortured me with how much she pulled and tugged on my hair. There is no way, and I cannot stress this enough, no way in hell that I will miss Sky’s engagement ball just because I’d rather stay in bed.”

“If you say so.” He ran his thumb over her knuckles. “But in that case, we should probably start getting ready.”

Bloom groaned and pressed her face harder into a pillow. “Five more minutes.”

Valtor huffed a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sigh but moved towards the middle of the bed, one of his arms planting in between the bed and Bloom’s head replacing her pillow, while the other arm rested at the curve of her hip, his fingers drawing patterns at the soft skin. Bloom shuffled quietly on the bed as well, her head settling at the space where his neck met his collarbone, while one of her legs settled across his stomach. The hand that was mapping out the skin of her hip trailed teasingly upwards and Bloom twitched when his fingers ghosted over her ribs.

“That tickles.” She whispered against the skin of his neck, her lips brushing over the sensitive nerves with every letter.

“All the more reason for me to keep doing it.” Bloom pouted and lifted herself up on her forearms, her weight supported by her arms placed at his chest. Valtor huffed jokingly when she shifted her weight and he was rewarded for it with a slight punch to his shoulder. She ignored the fake ‘Ouch.’ from his side and moved to straddle his legs. He moved to meet her halfway when she leaned down for a kiss, the movements slow and gentle but no less passionate.

“Maybe we should just stay in.” He murmured when she broke the kiss only to descend down with short pecks to his neck. His hands took hold of her hips, fingers squeezing the tender flesh harder than necessary in a fit of passion.

“Mmmmm no. No. No, we don’t have time for that.” She groaned when his hands reached for the clasp of her bra.

“We can make it quick.” He huffed, annoyed and frustrated, when Bloom reached around to grab his hands and stop his movements. He fell back onto the bed as she moved up towards his face, his hands still held captive by her small fingers.

“No, we can’t.” She giggled and kissed his cheek quickly before swinging her legs off his lap and walking to her closet to pick up her dress.

“You always have to spoil my fun, don’t you?” He groaned and sat sup in bed, his fingers threading through his hair.

“Don’t sulk, we’ll have time to play later.” She didn’t even look at him as she continued rummaging through her stuff, but a teasing note and a promise was very much present in her voice. She let out a victorious ‘Aha!’ when she found the dress. “Besides, as my partner, I want you there.” The dress was tossed carelessly across the chair as she moved to stand in front of him at the foot of the bed. “Are you telling me you’d let me go all alone?” Her voice took on a slightly higher pitch and her lower lip wobbled slightly with every word. “You’d let someone else dance with me, put his hands on me?” She was playing a dangerous game and that was evident by the low growl that escaped from deep within his throat and by the darkening of his eyes.

She squeaked, slightly startled by the sudden movement, as his hands took a firm hold of her thighs and pulled her to him, his mouth attaching to her left hip, his sharp teeth leaving a bruised bite in the area as she wiggled in his hold, the pain from the bite sharp but not unpleasant. He soothed the tender spot by placing gentle, barely there kisses, no more than a brush of lips against the flesh. She hummed and ran her fingers through his hair, making him look up at her mischievous eyes. “You’re jealous.” It was not a question, but a statement and he groaned as he buried his face in her stomach, his arms circling her hips, hands resting on her behind. Bloom chuckled and tapped his shoulder twice before she pushed slightly on them, a clear sign he should let go, and grabbed her dress before she retreated to the bathroom, locking the door behind her.

She emerged ten minutes later, silky turquoise dress sitting on her frame perfectly, loose curls placed behind her ear. Valtor, in the process of buttoning up his vest, stopped what he was doing and smiled at her. She mimicked his movements and stood right in front of him as her hands smoothed out wrinkles on his sleeves before straightening the collar of his shirt. No words were spoken as his large palms took hold of her delicate ones and brought them to his lips. The intimate moment was broken with the loud blaring of a cellphone and Bloom moved to answer it, Valtor’s hands letting go of her.

“Hello Stella.”

“Hey, where are you guys? We just landed. Are you going to be here soon?” Before Bloom even had the chance to answer either of the two questions, Stella continued. “Please say you will, because Bloom, I cannot promise I will not do anything if I see Diaspro.”

Bloom laughed, her hands rummaging through her makeup bag in search for lipstick. “We’ll be there shortly Stell, don’t worry.”

“You’re teleporting, right?”

“Mhm.” Bloom hummed absentmindedly as she continued looking for the lipstick.

“Okay, I’ll see you soon then. I love you.”

“I love you too Stell. Don’t do anything stupid.”

Stella laughed. “No promises. Ciao.”

Bloom threw her phone to the bed as she finally dug out a lipstick from a black hole that is her makeup bag. She leaned over the desk to apply it and she was about to turn around to ask Valtor if he could carry it in his pocket but gasped in surprise when two hands came up from behind and something cold was placed on her neck. Bloom bit her lip when she noticed that the cold object was a beautiful sapphire necklace, the color of the precious stone matching her eyes almost perfectly. Valtor’s hands moved from her neck, following the line of her spine, before settling on her hips. His lips ghosted over her hairline, down the line of her jaw before they settled in the junction of her neck and he placed a proper kiss there.

“You look stunning.” He whispered in her ear, his lips barely touching the shell of her ear, but the hot breath washing over her face made the goosebumps erupt across her skin.

“Thank you.” She spoke, her voice shaky, her fingers twirling the necklace resting at her sternum.

Colder breeze passed over her the very next second as he moved away from her to look at the mirror, spell words already on his lips and his appearance morphed back into perfection, not a hair out of place and no wrinkle on his clothes. He cleared his throat and turned to Bloom, who was still quite red in the face, and offered her his hand.

“Shall we?”

Bloom took his hand as his other one was already busy creating a portal, she moved closer to him, one of her hands searching for a pocket in his blazer. She smiled when she found it and looked up at him with a twinkle in her eye. “We shall, good sir.”

Valtor smirked as his free hand landed on Bloom’s left hip, his thumb tracing the bruise he left there, before the two stepped into a portal and disappeared with a flash.

#sparxshipping #valtor x bloom #bloom x baltor #bloom x valtor #baltor x bloom #winx club #winx valtor #winx baltor #winx bloom

[nerdyfangirl67]

Everywhere But On - Criminal Minds Reader Insert

Pairing: Spencer x reader

Warning: Angst (so sorry guys but I’ve been riding the angst train lately and this one doesn’t have a fluff ending), language

Word count: 2028

The reader comes to realize that despite the way Spencer acts around her, he doesn’t feel for her any more than as a friend. She can’t move on, so she finds herself traveling, where she realizes that she will always love him.

A/N: Okay you guys, this one just came to me after listening to Everywhere But On by Matt Stell. I am sorry for the angst ending but I just couldn’t bring myself to write another fluff ending because sometimes shit happens and it doesn’t work out the way we want. Also, I did a little crossover, you have to really squint, so I hope ya’ll are okay with it. As always, I love requests and would gladly write something you guys want to see!

“I love you but I’m not in love with you.” The words float around in your head on constant repeat, relentless in their torment, just as they have been for the past three months. Those words would hurt coming from anyone, but they hurt all the more coming from your best friend, with whom you had been quietly in love with for the last year.

It wasn’t something that happened all of a sudden, your love for Spencer. But it was something that you had identified one casual Saturday while binge-watching Doctor Who with Spencer at his apartment. Sure, you knew you loved him as a friend; that much was obvious and had been for quite some time. What you hadn’t realized, at least until that Saturday in February, was that you had gone from loving him to being in love with him.

And if someone had asked you what it was that you loved about him, you would struggle to find specific things you loved about him. Because truthfully, you loved him for all that he was, is, and could be. You loved each part of him separately and you loved him as a whole. You had never loved someone so deeply and wholly before, and despite the fact that this should scare you, you couldn’t find yourself anxious for any reason when you had realized you were in love with Spencer. 

You weren’t scared about being in love with Spencer Reid because you had never once felt as though he didn’t already love you.  Sure the two of you would goofily sign ‘I love you’ to each other at random moments, but neither of you had ever said that you were in love with the other. Everything you did for each other echoed the feelings you shared for the other. Yet, despite knowing all this, you couldn’t be sure if he loved you the same way you loved him. Because of that, and an increasing, irrational fear that you might actually lose Spencer, you decided to tell him, a decision you would come to regret for a long time.

You had naively thought if you told him, he would be excited, maybe even pull you in for a hug (which he never did outside of either your apartment or his) or a kiss (if you were really lucky) and tell you he felt the same way. Instead, he responded with ten little words you would never forget. 

“I love you but I’m not in love with you.” Simple words really. Yet you hadn’t been expecting, nor prepared, for them and they left you reeling. You hadn’t known how to respond so you had nodded your head quickly, already feeling the tears forming in your eyes, and ran. You barely stopped to grab your purse from your desk, completely forgetting about your jacket, before dashing out of the building. You hadn’t gone home, for fear that Spencer might have decided to explain himself, which you were sure he would try to do and was waiting for you at your apartment as a result. So you had waited until you knew Spencer would be at work, having already called Hotch and requested your vacation time, before you returned to your apartment. You didn’t stay long, just long enough to pack a suitcase, before you were back in your car, driving without a destination. 

——-

You hadn’t planned on being gone a long time, just enough to clear your head and figure out how to get over your very unfriendlike feelings for Spencer. But a week quickly turned into two, which soon became three weeks, and then a month which soon became three. 

You spent your time putting space between you and home, or more specifically you and Spencer, going to all the places you had bookmarked on the Internet and pinned on Pinterest as “someday” activities. You saw the Grand Canyon and Niagra Falls. You visited Yellowstone National Park and the Everglades. You stopped on the east coast and the west coast. Yet, anywhere you went, all you could see or think of was Spencer.

You saw him in the enthusiastic way the guide told you about the history of The Alamo. You thought of him when you visited, and viewed impressive books, at the Phillips Exeter Academy Library in New Hampshire. You felt him when an episode of Doctor Who came on TV late one evening in your deteriorated motel room.

It didn’t take you long to realize that no matter where you went, the memory of Spencer and your feelings for him would be close behind. You knew that you could travel anywhere but you couldn’t move on from him. You had never loved someone in the way you loved Spencer and you didn’t know how you would move forward from him, or even if you wanted to.

——

After three months of trying to find an escape from reality, you realize it's time. Time for you to go home and face the music. Time for you to push aside your one-sided feelings and move on. And as much as you recognized this, you knew it was far easier said than done. Because moving on meant leaving him, your best friend and the true love of your life, behind. It meant watching him move on and find that perfect girl, a girl who wasn’t you.

You had come to the realization that you would never be able to work side by side with Spencer, knowing that he didn’t feel for you as you felt for him. With that in mind, you knew the only thing you could do was ask for a transfer. You didn’t want to leave the area, but if it wasn’t possible for you to get placed with another division, like the White-Collar Crime task force, then you would have to. You had texted Hotch earlier in the day, asking if he was available for you to come in to talk to him. He has replied with a simple, “I’m here doing paperwork for the foreseeable future.”

You notice it’s just after five and figure there’s no time like the present to talk to Hotch. It’s a twenty-minute drive to the office from where you are and you spend the entire drive wondering what you’d do if you run into Spencer. 

By the time you park in the garage attached to the FBI building, you still are no closer to knowing how to act if you see Spencer. You choose to take the stairs, to avoid any possible run-ins, and hurriedly make your way to Hotch’s office. A soft knock and a stiff “Come in” later and you are sitting across from Hotch.

In usual Hotch fashion, he is quick to get straight to the point. “Am I correct in assuming this conversation has something to do with your three-month absence?”

His words are like a slap in the face, although you are sure that is not how he meant for them to sound. You hadn’t realized how truly juvenile your disappearing act had been until now. You dip your head as you respond. “I would like to start by apologizing. I let you and the team down and that was never my intention.” Your voice is soft as you feel a wave of guilt wash over you.

His eyes soften as he gives you a tight nod and asks, “And what was your intention?”

You clear your throat as you weigh the negatives of telling Hotch the truth. But in the end, you choose to tell him everything, in hopes that he will be able to better understand your decision to transfer. “As you probably know, Spencer and I are close. But I, uh, came to the realization that I felt for him more than a best friend would. And I wrongly thought that it was two-sided. I poorly decided to tell him, only to have him tell me he didn’t feel that way, and it was devastating. I figured the best way to move on was to be away from him. And three months later, I realize that it will never happen, me moving on.” You pause, taking a deep breath as you feel dejection rise in your chest and tears threatening to fall. “I can’t work beside him knowing that I not only lost my best friend, but I also will never have him in the way I truly want to. So that is why I’m here. I would like to request a transfer, preferably one that takes place immediately. I don’t care about the division I’m put in, I just can’t stay in the BAU Hotch.” You finish brokenly, your heart squeezing at the thought that you would have to leave behind those who you consider family, for a fresh start somewhere else. 

Hotch stares at you for a long time after you finish your improvised speech. You can feel him profiling you, but you don’t say anything because you feel as though you aren’t in the position to. Finally, he nods his head and says, “As much as I hate to lose you from the team, I can understand why you are asking for this request. I will get started on the paperwork tonight and you will hopefully have a new position by tomorrow midday.”

As you stand to leave, Hotch stands as well. You think he is going to shake your hand so you stick yours out. What you didn’t expect was for him to pull you into a gentle hug. After a moment, you hug him back. “It doesn’t get better, but each day makes the pain a little less.” He whispers into your ear. You squeeze him a little tighter in response before pulling back. You give him a sad smile before offering your thanks and leave.

You decide to visit a pub three blocks from your apartment for a much-needed drink. It had been a lot harder than you thought to ask for that transfer and the realization that you were leaving behind your family left you swimming in guilt and sorrow. 

The pub was dark and smelled of stale beer. There were a few people sitting at the bar, but more were spread out at the tables. It was later than when you usually came, as you had stopped at your apartment and unloaded your suitcase, changed, and then walked here.

You choose an empty seat at the less populated side of the bar and order your favorite drink. It went down quickly and before you knew it you were ordering another. By the time you were on your third drink, you were starting to forget why you felt the way you did in the first place. 

A deep, sensual voice sounds next to you. “Hey doll, what’s a pretty little thing like you doing drinking alone?” You turn to see a tall man with smoothed down brown hair and emerald green eyes standing beside you. He had on dress pants and a simple button down that fit him in all the right places, with a brown corduroy suit jacket. You grin stupidly, thanks to the alcohol coursing through your system, at his pick up line before answering, “Drowning my sorrows, I guess.” 

“Well, someone as fine as you shouldn’t have sorrows to drown.” He smoothly answers, causing you to smile again.

“Maybe you can help me then handsome.” You respond, truly shocking yourself with your wonton answer.

He takes a seat beside you, extending a hand. “Tony DiNozzo. What’s your name doll?”

And with that, you find someone who truly helps you forget the lack of one Spencer Reid in your life, at least for the night. Because you knew, no matter how hard you tried, Spencer Reid would always be the one you couldn’t move on from.

#criminal minds #criminal minds imagine #criminal minds fandom #criminal minds fanfiction #criminal minds reader #reader #reader insert #criminal minds reader insert #imagine #fandom #fanfiction #spencer reid #spencer x you #spencer x reader #reid x reader #reid x you

[beebrainedstudios]

For the Salty Asks Game thing... Number 16: "If you could change anything in the (book), what would you change?" For Vicious/Vengeful and The Illuminae Files? I adore your art!

Hi, first of all, thank you for the compliment and the ask! I’m glad you like my art! As for the question (Spoiler Warning for both series!):

For Vicious/Vengeful:

- Serena needed a little more time to shine, especially in her scenes with Sydney. She went from caring sister to willing to kill a little too quickly for me, there needed to be a bit more development on why she subscribed to Eli’s philosophy. Perhaps some rumination on her thoughts on religion, IDK. This one isn’t huge, but it is a thought.

- DON’T KILL DOMINIC. The Villains series is one of the few I can say doesn’t need to have too many character deaths, as it’s pace and tone are plenty dark enough on their own, especially in Vengeful. Keeping him alive would also ensure there’s plenty of characters in Sydney’s group in Book 3.

- Honestly Marcella needs some work too- she was very compelling but didn’t have enough time to grow. Same with Stell (although his arc and death was timed well enough). I’d have either removed June from the story to give Marcella more time or kept her around for Book 3. You know what, removing June as a whole would do wonders. I like her fine, but she doesn’t contribute much to the plot to me. Maybe bringing her around in Book 3 would have been better.

- Really all of my problems in the Villains series just boils down to too many characters. You have two main leads who are extremely developed and compelling, with their own cast of allegiances; this is enough for such a close, obsessive narrative; trying to shove excess antagonists or side characters into that bogs down the story. Keeping the EON cast is good because it keeps Victor and Eli’s arcs interlocked while also allowing Eli to get his development going (which is a huge part of Vengeful), but Marcella, June, and all of the mob guys are given a huge disservice by being expected to seem as equally complex as two deeply disturbed individuals who are the foundation the story is based on. The first book’s cast gets enough development, with room for characters with no/little backstory like Eli, Mitch, and Dominic to get backstory development in Vengeful while characters like Victor and Sydney develop in the present. Marcella and June (though mostly Marcella- she’s more interesting to me) could have been teased in Vengeful and used primarily in Book 3, which would space things out better. 

- Also, sort of a comment here. I know some people didn’t like how Angie was handled? Personally it didn’t bother me since it made sense that she wouldn’t be focused on by the two POV characters after she died, since they barely can pay attention to anything but their own powers and each other. BUT, keeping her around as an EO to be revealed later could have been really interesting, especially as a sort of play on the classic superhero “Dead hero returns as a villain” trope. Maybe replace June- who comes out of nowhere- with her and have both Eli and Victor confront their feelings and how genuine they were when she sides with Marcella or somebody. That could lead to some really neat plotlines considering she is one of the few things Eli and Victor share in common in their past.

Now for the Illuminae Files:

- The first book is great and I wouldn’t change much- maybe we could spend some more time with Ezra talking about his mom (not much, just a pinch) as she is the driving force behind the files that make up the series, but it isn’t necessary since the book makes it pretty clear she is a horrible woman.

- I honestly need to reread Gemina since I barely remember most of it (I read it a long time ago and alternate reality plots are not my strong suit), but I do remember having trouble reading through the beginning. Illuminae’s cast was so good that I can remember being hesitant to get attached to the new cast, as I didn’t think they would be as interesting (Note; I was wrong). They all were introduced too quickly for me to keep up with, so starting out with a few single POV chapters for both Nik and Hannah instead of a conversation that referenced multiple new people might have been better. That’s purely a matter of personal preference, though. Also, I wanted to know more about the aliens- if the little worm guys exist, do other aliens that are fully sentient exist too, or is it just animalian species? If the answer to either of those is yes, that changes a lot about how I visualize the universe, so a little clarity on that would have been appreciated.

- The third book was fine, as was the new cast, but I knew Asha and Rhys would struggle as new protagonists; there’s no way they could be half as compelling as Kady and Ezra or Nik and Hanna without a bit more room to grow on the pages. Are they fine on their own? Sure. Does it drag down the book? Not really, but it does mean when they were on-page a tiny part of my heart was screaming “get back to the other guys!” The characters aren’t bad at all, but at this point I was hopelessly attached to the cast of the previous two books and I wanted to spend time with them, especially with all the AIDAN drama going on. Asha and Rhys are still a necessary part of the book as perspectives from both Beitech and post-attack Kerenza, but they stood no chance at capturing the audience’s heart as well as the former cast.

- Also, killing the Duke was just mean. That guy was hilarious and his death combined with AIDAN’s pseudo one hurt so much. Give me a break authors, give me a break.

#the illuminae files #illuminae #obsidio #gemina #vicious #vengeful #ve schwab #bee asks

[julesnjd]

rēˈbərth -- Mason

Aurora, Stella, and Mason left the Conway University area around eight in the morning with the following in the trunk of Stella’s Chevy Chevelle: ten deer bones sitting in a bag of water, a large Taco Bell cup taped shut and full of blood from a pregnant dog, one plastic tupperware container of freshwater pearl oysters, a bottle of red wine, and a bottle of olive oil, three plastic bags full of herb sprigs they’d tied last night, and various sizes of metal bowls and multiple different kinds of knives. It was like they were going to record the weirdest outdoor cooking video ever. Aurora Yamamoto, a Japanese trickster demon with an air of casual indifference sat in the passenger seat. Stella, a vampire, drove while tapping her toes against the gas pedal in time with the classic rock blaring from the radio. Mason, the witch, hid herself in a hoodie in the backseat like she didn’t want to be there despite this whole thing being her idea. 

Two weeks ago, Juliet Hill, Mason’s roommate-slash-almost-girlfriend and everyone’s friend, was found face up in the lake on their college campus. It had been ruled a suicide. Her death had left Mason a mess. She’d gone so deep into her grief that she could hardly even say Juliet’s name. It still took a second to get it out from between her teeth.

Mason had sprayed the hoodie, the one Juliet loved most of all her clothes that represented some numetal band she loved, with some of Juliet’s lavender perfume before they left Stella’s apartment. It smelled like her. She couldn’t stop holding the sleeves against her nose. There were still a few blonde hairs strewn around on the hoodie that Mason couldn’t bring herself to remove either. She was also wearing the Saint Monica College sweatpants Juliet always stole from her. Both of these things would go on Juliet’s body as soon as she was back with them. If she was back with them.

She hoped to have Juliet back by dawn. 

A week ago, Mason had been visited in a dream by her patron goddess, Bast. She could still hear Bast’s voice in her mind when she thought about it: “This is an imbalance, my child. I will lead you to right it.” It hadn’t been the first time Mason thought that Juliet didn’t deserve to die. She’d been thinking it from the moment it happened. Juliet was too young. She was in the middle of her redemption arc, for lack of a better term. She was turning into a better person. Of course, those had been Juliet’s own words, but it still applied. She hadn’t wanted to die anymore. She’d gone through eighteen years of being the unwanted trouble child, of ruining relationships, of suicidal thoughts, of doing other things that she had only alluded to Mason about yet, but had finally made it to a good place in her life. Of course, that was when he took her. 

So Mason was going to bring her back. Well, Stella and Aurora were helping, and so was some human they hadn’t found yet. She didn’t understand why Juliet couldn’t just be friends with a human for once, still. Maybe it had something to do with the repressed siren magic that had to be in her blood, since her twin was a siren. Mason blinked and stared at the back of the car seat in front of her. What if that complicated things? What if they needed siren blood, not human blood? The spell wasn’t for a siren. What if this didn’t work because of that? 

“Turn left.” The GPS voice snapped Mason back into the present. Stella and Aurora were talking back and forth in the front seat. Their voices melded with the radio commercials in Mason’s ears as soon as her eyes landed on the clay dolls in her lap. She was keeping them as close to her person as possible to continue the flow of life into the dolls. One represented Juliet. The other represented Mason. If-- After Juliet took her first breath, Mason would have to tie the dolls together and burn them in order to bind their souls. It was the only way to keep Juliet on Earth, an aspect Aurora had advised her was missing from the spell. 

Mason had made the dolls by hand. They’d taken over an hour to make. She’d mixed the clay in a pot in Stella’s cheap apartment kitchen, transferred the clay to two mixing bowls, and formed each doll while thinking about the person they would represent. Juliet’s doll had hairs picked off the same sweatshirt Mason was wearing massaged into it, but otherwise it hardly represented Juliet. It was necessary for Mason to think about Juliet while forming the doll. She hadn’t given her this much thought since two weeks ago when Juliet died. 

She really missed her. She missed the goofy, toothy grin Juliet would give her when she almost got caught doing something she shouldn’t be. She missed Juliet’s lavender and honey perfumes, or the scent of the green apple shampoo and conditioner Jules used in her tangled mess of curly hair. She missed trying to figure out the best way to describe the color of Juliet’s eyes. The closest she’d come was seafoam, but even that wasn’t right. They were more blue than green. She missed trying to count the freckles on Juliet’s cheeks (106 was the highest she’d gotten) while Jules rambled about something Mason didn’t know much about, like her art classes or things she’d learned in her psychology classes. She missed the tone of her voice when she was talking like that. Her ridiculous laugh that Mason had to coax out of her on the first day they met. Juliet’s hand in hers, even if their palms grew sweaty while they walked together. Juliet’s snoring and sleep talking waking Mason up at night, turned into sleepwalking the night before an exam. Singing in the car together. Everything, every moment Mason had with Juliet was flashing through her mind like she was reliving the last moments of her own life… Which she very well could have been. Nothing felt right without Juliet there too. 

She looked down at the formed and dried doll in her hand, trying to hold back her tears. It was lumpy and brown, and to make it even worse it hardly even looked like a person. Her own wasn’t much better off, with her own saliva mixed into it. It looked even less like a person than Juliet’s.

They arrived in Traverse City, a tourist city on the edge of Lake Michigan, about two hours after leaving. The entire drive had seen them surrounded by trees, water, and other cars along the highway. Traverse City was Juliet’s hometown. As soon as they hit downtown, it made sense. Stella’s car coasted through the streets downtown, passing local shops, restaurants, and glimpses of the lake. People lined the sidewalks, excited to take in the summer day, some of them dressed in swimsuits and sheer cover-ups, others a bit more modest. It was easy to picture Juliet wandering these streets with her sister or friends, laughing loud, excusing herself when she inevitably bumped into someone while walking backwards. Hopefully, she’d be able to take Mason shopping there soon. Mason tried going over the Greek for the spell incantations in her head. Fuck if she knew what it meant. Aurora had translated it for her, but she could barely remember. Something about giving Juliet’s soul back. 

They stopped at the rundown motel they’d booked and set everything they could need up in the room. They had lunch at a place Juliet had talked about multiple times before, where Mason ordered Juliet’s favorite burger. They went to visit her gravesite afterward.

The walk along the path from the parking spaces of the graveyard was hard. Last time Mason had been here was the funeral, where Juliet’s mother complained about how sad she was having lost her daughter all while smiling and chatting on the phone, even during the eulogy. It had disgusted even Rosaline, Juliet’s twin and their mother’s perfect daughter, to the point of shouting. Juliet would have both hated it and loved it. 

The day was comfortably hot in a hoodie and sweats, which was the average of a day in late April. Mason walked alone right now, having left the others at the car after asking for some alone time with Juliet. It would help her feel closer. 

When she arrived at the grave, Mason sat on the grass in front of the stone. It was already showing signs of wear. There were new flowers set in front of it, on the grass. They’d been knocked over. White roses were scattered sideways, looking just a little trampled, and the vase they’d been in was pink and black. Rosaline probably left them. They were Jules’ favorite flower and the vase was Rosa and Juliet’s favorite colors. Mason picked them up as carefully as she could, swearing softly when thorns on the first two stung her. Once the vase was upright again and all six flowers were looking better, she traced Juliet’s name with her pinky fingertip. 

“You’ll be okay,” Mason whispered. “We’re going to make sure of that. I already told Mama that Stella’s coming home with me after a couple more days around Conway. She’s excited to see Stell, since they used to be friends too. Apparently they went to college together, back when Stella was in college for the first time. That’s something I’ve got to tell you about. It was weird seeing them all buddy-buddy at the funeral.” She laughed weakly. “I think Mama’ll be excited to see you. And she’ll definitely take you in. There’s no way she wouldn’t, especially after how your mom acted at your funeral. You won’t ever have to see your mom again. We’ll take care of you. My family’ll just get even bigger.” She tapped the headstone with splayed fingers. “I can’t wait to see you again, see you breathing and shit. Even if it’s weird. Even if you’re weird. I can’t tell you how many laws I’m breaking to get you here, Julesy. Supernatural and human laws. We’re getting you back tonight. No matter what. I’ll have my best friend back. We can bring more new flowers here tomorrow, too. And get you some to have for yourself.

“I’m doing the right thing by bringing you back, though, right? Stella and Aurora seem to think I’m fucked in the head. They’re indulging me and miss you, so they’re helping, but it feels weird. It feels like they’re-- They already said they’re prepping for the worst. They said they talked about how they’d take care of it if you came back wrong in some way. I didn’t even know that was a possibility. I thought you either came back or you didn’t.” She rubbed her hands together, then started plucking lightly at the tips of the grass, snapping them off with her fingernails. “I just… I wish I knew where you are. Are you in Heaven or Hell? Do those places even exist? What makes one better or worse than the other? I wish I knew so I could know if I need to help you or if I could leave you alone and you’d be happy. I feel like everything’s a fucking wish without you though. I miss you. I want you back.” She sighed weakly, staring at the gravestone and rubbing a blade of grass between her fingers. “I’m so selfish.”

Mason rubbed the headstone one more time for good luck. As she approached the lot, she caught a glimpse of someone standing in the distance, leaning against the car. He was at the car. He killed Juliet. He was going to hurt Stella and Aurora. “Hey!” Mason shouted, starting toward the car. “Get the fuck away from them!”

Andrew Roberts was standing by the car, looking at Mason like she was some bird waddling toward them instead of a powerful witch running at the guy who killed her best friend. She shoved hard at his chest, taking him to the ground and slamming her foot down on his chest hard enough to make him cough. “What the fuck is your issue?” she snapped. “I told you I didn’t need your help. I told you to fuck off. You caused this.”

The last time Mason saw Andrew, he was handing her sheets of paper he’d ripped from a book in the Conway library restricted section. He had threatened to turn her in for attempting an illegal spell if she turned him in for killing Juliet. It was the moment she’d realized Juliet was more important than getting legal justice. Mason could turn him in later, after she had Juliet back. She didn’t want him anywhere near them right now, though. He was the one who killed her for some demon named Kalos. For all she knew, he was going to fuck up their spell so Juliet was required to stay wherever she was. 

“Mason!” Aurora hissed, shoes slapping the pavement of the sidewalk as she hopped off the trunk of the car. “Leave him alone. He’s helping us. Andrew, tell her.”

“Like fuck he is! We don’t need him.”

“We do!” Aurora shouted. Her voice was shrill and loud now. “Shut up and listen for once in your life!” 

Mason shut up, glaring at Andrew as hard as she could. She wished she could rip his head off already. With her bare hands. They were in a cemetery. It’d be easy to bury him. 

Andrew spoke, his voice quiet and trembling. He sat up now that Mason’s foot was off his chest, rubbing at his arms and pushing his long, greasy dark hair off his face. “I didn’t want to kill her. Kalos was going to kill me if I didn’t, though.” He got to his feet, carefully keeping his eyes away from everyone else’s. “I left the watcher he has on me and Aurora is keeping me hidden. I want to help. You need human blood, they just told me. I want to give it. I can spot him easier, too. And I-- She wasn’t a bad person. She doesn’t deserve his f-”

“We need him,” Aurora explained, interrupting him. “He’s the only human we have who’s willing to give the spell blood. We need him. I don’t care what vengeance you have against him right now. Isn’t bringing Juliet back a thousand times more important to you than this?”

Mason’s fingers curled into fists. Her nails dug into her palm hard enough to sting. “A million times more. This piece of shit doesn’t matter to me at all.” She looked away from him, lips pursed. “I don’t want him anywhere near any of the stuff we have prepped. He waits in the car while we get the body tonight. I don’t want him alone unless he’s in the bathroom, and even that’s got a time limit. Got it?” She looked at him. “Got it?” 

Andrew nodded and Mason got in the car without another word. He sat in the backseat on the passenger side. Mason glared at him briefly, then settled for looking out the window instead. Hopefully they’d need enough human blood to bleed him out. She really hoped so. 

☥☥

The night air was cool and crisp, as it usually was during the summer. It smelled like soil and decay in the cemetery. The moon was full. Mason’s power felt strong, which was astounding for the night. It was necessary. She was invoking every deity she could tonight. She was bringing life back into a corpse tonight.

Mason stopped to scratch at her neck. Mosquitoes were rampant right now, and the dirt flying up as she dug toward the casket was not helping the itch. She swore softly and kept digging. Her hands hurt at this point. The shovel they’d brought was not meant to be used for so long.  

Aurora had already started her illusion. Apparently it seemed to others that they were doing a prayer circle around the grave or having a picnic, an activity that screamed "leave us alone.” Stella brought out the pry bar and sledgehammer from her trunk once Mason hit the concrete burial vault.

Everything was real. They were going to rob Juliet from her grave. Mason got out of the

grave with Stella’s help. 

Mason leaned against the car, trying to ignore the pain in her hands as she watched Aurora and Stella use the sledgehammer to break the liner open, then wedge the pry bar between the nailed edges of the coffin. She held her palms out flat, facing the stars, and breathed out slowly. She started praying softly to Bast, asking her to make sure this pain didn’t cause an issue in the spell she was meant to complete. She didn’t know what else to do right now. It was pain from digging combined with pain from the thorn pricks earlier. She hadn’t told anyone yet, but the thorns had apparently embedded in her skin. They’d broken off from the roses and were painful as hell, but Mason had to work around them. Massaging them out from her skin earlier had proven a difficult but fruitful task, albeit one that left behind red marks and a dull ache spreading from her fingers to her palms.

Now that doubt was planted in her mind again. She’d doubted this entire thing two days ago, when Aurora revealed to her that she’d seen a resurrection only once before and no one had come out alive. There was a risk that Juliet wouldn’t come back normal no matter what, demon thorns involved or not. It wasn’t like resurrection spells were listed in a book of 10 Things Every Witch Should Know! or anything. They were illegal as hell and involved some illegal things, both human and supernatural. It went against everything Mason was for, yet here she was, doing this. 

Juliet’s death had really fucked with her head, huh? 

It took them a minute, but soon enough Mason heard a loud, “Holy fuck, that reeks!” from Stella, followed by Aurora’s high pitched giggling. 

Things were going to be alright. They had to be. 

She wandered away from the car after they lifted Juliet’s body out of the hole wrapped in a sheet. They needed to be careful with her and keep her as still as possible. They didn’t want to risk hurting her too much. It wasn’t like Mason couldn’t heal whatever broken limbs or whatever happened, but it wouldn’t work on a dead body. She’d have to bring Juliet back, bind their souls, then use her remaining energy to heal whatever happened to her. It wouldn’t be pretty. That much energy, actually, could kill Mason, and that would ruin the whole plan. It was beyond risky. 

Andrew got out of the car to open the trunk when Stella and Aurora gathered up the ends of the sheet Juliet was wrapped in and lifted her. They settled her in the trunk and Aurora and Stella drove her back to the motel alone, leaving Andrew and Mason to fill the grave and replace the sod. 

While they were gone, Andrew filled the grave again for Mason. She couldn’t move her hands very well. He’d definitely noticed her stiffness, because he immediately started on it without question. She watched him quietly at first, then sighed and sat down on the edge of the grave. Her feet dangled just a little down toward the cracked concrete burial vault and coffin. He glanced up at her for a second as he pushed greasy hair out of his eyes, then looked back at the dirt he was pushing into the empty grave. Mason watched him for a minute, then sighed. Silence was awkward. “Why would you kill all those people? If I were you, I’d’ve killed myself before killing them.”

Andrew stared at her for a second. The shovel in his hand was steady as he stared, then he nodded once. “I want to stay alive,” he admitted. “It’s a better life than the one I was living before.”

Mason stared at him. “I’d rather be dead than know I’m putting someone through this pain.”

“The only people close to me who’ve died deserved it.” Andrew shoved some more dirt into the hole, then stuck the tip of the shovel into the grass. He looked up to meet her eyes. His gaze was always so emotionless. “I didn’t know Juliet was so close to all of you until it was too late. This is the first time I’m dealing with this.”

“Does it make you want to stop?”

Andrew was silent. 

Maybe it was just something Mason would never be able to understand.

Mason stared at the dirt as he tossed it into the grave. It made her think of Juliet’s funeral, when her dad had tossed the first handful of dirt into the grave after the vault containing the coffin was lowered. It was tradition. Death was a weird process for the living. She opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again to say, “I don’t know if I should be bringing her back.”

Andrew stopped transferring dirt for a minute, then sighed. “I didn’t want to tell you. The spell I gave you takes her out of a spell I completed for Kalos.” He met Mason’s eyes. His didn’t waver as he spoke. “She’s not in a good place. She needs saved.”

Mason stared right back at him, then sucked in a shaking, crisp breath once she remembered to. “Really?”

He nodded once, then went right back to placing dirt without a single word. 

For some reason, Mason started thinking about how, a couple months ago Juliet had told Mason something that someone in her psychology course had told her about people lying. “Liars look into your eyes dead on when lying because society told them shifty eyes are a sign of a liar. Eyes shift around when you’re telling the truth.” 

“Help me with the sod.”

☥☥☥

On their way into the motel room, Mason watched Andrew squash a pearly white maggot into the fibres of the carpet. It had probably fallen from Juliet’s body. Was she full of maggots? Mason really didn’t want to picture that. She didn’t even want to picture Juliet’s corpse at all.

Luckily, she didn’t have to. The sight was right in front of her when she followed Stella and Aurora into the bathroom, Andrew trailing between them. He stared at the body, then looked at Mason, who was slowly losing her composure. Juliet’s body was right in front of her, in a bathtub, looking worse than she’d ever even considered it could look. 

Mason hadn’t expected her to look so dead. Her skin was starting to turn yellow, and there were bugs crawling across her face. Whatever makeup the mortician had put on her was caked into her face and dried out, making her lips a weird bright matte red and her eyelids a greenish-black. The dress she was buried in was covered in dirt, but had held up pretty well. It was a shame she couldn’t be wearing it. Her legs looked normal, and so did everything else. She just looked like she was sleeping in a weird position with makeup on and… Mason exhaled slowly, trying not to breathe in the stench. It was awful, like Mason’s bedroom that time she’d hidden weeks of uneaten food from her mama, but somehow worse. 

“Andrew, get out,” she said quietly. 

He obliged, standing within view of the bathroom door so Mason could keep an eye on him. It was a wonder how good of a sport he was being about this. It made her feel even more uneasy about believing what he’d told her at the grave. 

Mason licked her lips, then looked at Stella and Aurora. “Who’s doing this? She needs to be as clean as possible.” 

“Stell, you’re the one with the undead expertise,” Aurora said happily, smacking her on the shoulder. 

Stella scoffed. “Maybe Mason should! She’s the one who has to spend all this time with Juliet. Plus it feels weird, I’m almost seventy and Juliet’s only, like, a couple months into eighteen. Gross. Plus Mason’s seen her like this before.”

Mason looked at Stella. “Do you want me to throw up? I can’t do it anyway, I have to be as pure as possible. Touching her would be like dying or something. It’s weird.”

Stella groaned and then sank to her knees by the tub. “Fine.” 

Mason did hang out in the bathroom, though, watching Stella carefully run her hands over Juliet’s skin after using scissors to cut into the dress. Stella was doing it all with care. She rubbed water gently over Juliet’s stomach, cleaning out the autopsy scar along her chest and between her ribs. She tried to run her hands through Juliet’s hair, but the second Mason saw a clump of curls break out into Stella’s hands, she stopped her. Stella cleaned under Juliet’s fingernails gently with a dollar store toothbrush. 

Mason watched her, having moved closer at this point. She stared at the dirt coming out from under the nails into the toothbrush. The dull ache in her own hands increased every time she thought about it. She could deal with the pain. It didn't matter. 

Her eyes lifted up to Juliet’s face. The makeup was running down it now. Stella couldn’t rub hard enough to take it off without risking harm. What mattered was Juliet, and this wasn't going to slow her down. Nothing could slow her down now. 

Andrew and Stella moved Juliet’s body back into the center of the room. While Stella cleaned Juliet’s body with Mason’s supervision, Andrew and Aurora had pushed the bed into the corner and stacked the nightstand and whatever else they could on top of it to get as much room as possible. It was a mess, and the carpet would definitely be stained, but they could hide it with the bed again. It would work out. Everything would work out. 

Stella climbed up on the bed carefully to take down the smoke alarm. She knocked the batteries out of it and dropped it into the drawer of the nightstand to keep it safe. Andrew locked the door and tugged the curtains closed. Mason took out all of the sheets of paper they’d copied, scrawled all over, and drawn on. They had every single note she needed, the timing for everything. Aurora set the fire pit on the floor not too far from Mason or Juliet’s body, filled it with fire wood, and lit it. 

The fire sparked to life. Mason shivered. 

It was time.

Eyes closed, Mason took a deep breath, then reached forward to cut the stitches holding Juliet’s lips closed as carefully as she could with a small paring knife. Juliet’s lips parted gradually, her jaw falling slack without the pressure of the stitching keeping it tight. She followed that with the same action on the stitches holding her eyelids closed. Her eyelids fell open, exposing pink muscle, ruptured seafoam blue, and gray-white. Her eyeballs were sunken, deflated sacs of some kind of liquid. Mason’s grip on the knife handle tightened. She pried Juliet’s lips apart gently, making sure her mouth hung open wide. 

After that came the hard part. Mason gestured for Stella to come close. Stella helped her break up the deer bones, using her vampire strength to snap them. They scraped out as much bone marrow as possible into one of the metal bowls they’d brought. It was hard not to think about how weird it looked. It was like a weird pink hummus. It smelled awful, though. She followed that with a generous pour of the dog blood. She then mixed the two slowly with her fingers, thinking of Juliet. She had to bring her back. This was to bring her back. Juliet’s soul mattered most of anyone’s. She finished mixing the two and reached into the container Stella had opened for her to grab an oyster. She smacked it hard on the floor, then pried open the crack she’d made with her knife. She sliced into the meat of the oyster. She cut the meat up further into pieces as small as she could, then scooped it into the mixture. The pearl fell last. Mason plucked it out and set it gently in the dip of Juliet’s collarbone. She pressed the mixture together with her fingers. 

Once she was done with that, she scooped a gentle handful out of the bowl and whispered to herself as she gently smeared some of the mixture along Juliet’s sternum, between her bare breasts, between her ribs, to her navel, along the stitching of her autopsy cut. Her finger bumped along the uneven stitching as she whispered her prayer. Prayers went to Anubis, to Osiris, to Ra, to Bast, to Iris, to Zeus, to Hades, Enki, Nergal, and in general anyone who would help them purely, to bring them life, rebirth, rejuvenation, revival, resuscitation, resurrection, life, life, life. It was all Mason focused on. What she told the others to focus on. 

The energy of the room amped up gradually with every prayer. Mason’s fingers glided over Juliet’s limbs with the mixture. She followed the covering of Juliet’s body with her own, smearing the paste down her forehead, along her nose, over her lips, and down to her heart. She was in one of Juliet’s bras and a pair of her sweatpants. Mason placed her entire hand into the mixture, then placed her bloody palm on her ribs over her heart as she sent out the last prayer, a repeat to Bast, begging her to give her the energy necessary to restore life. 

Next came the offerings. While Mason was busy with her prayer and the mixture, Aurora poured generous amounts of wine and olive oil into cups and handed them around to everyone. Mason received hers last. She took the plastic cup in her hands, one wrapped around the curve of the cup, the other covering the opening. She was quiet for a breath before she turned the cup to the side and slowly let the mixture pour out onto the carpet of the motel. Her eyes remained closed. When the cup became weightless in her hand, she opened her eyes. There was no stain. There was no stain in front of any of them. She reached up to her ears and removed her authentic gold earrings, holding them in her palms, a piece of lavender infused chocolate between them. She stayed with them extended, palms flat, until the chocolate had melted into her palms. When she opened her eyes again, the contents of her palms were gone. 

Mason stood when she was done with that. She moved to the fire, burning larger in the metal pit now. She picked up the Snoopy, holding it gently in her hands. She pressed her lips to its forehead. When she pulled away, there was a bloody lip mark on the white fur. It pained her to do this. It really did. She held the plush toy over the flames. “Juliet has kept this safe since birth. She has slept with it every night for the past eighteen years. I offer this to you, gods, as a sacrifice. Her most precious possession, for your taking.” She lowered it into the flames, setting it gently on the pile of wood. “She’s going to kill me for doing this.” She smiled slightly as she said it. She leaned over the fire and inhaled the smoke produced from burning the fabric, then breathed it out as she spoke the sacrificial incantation. Her eyes lingered briefly on Andrew, who was standing near the door, entranced as he watched the events of the spell unfold. She made herself look away from him. She couldn’t afford malice. 

She turned away and grabbed a clean knife. This one was larger than the paring knife. This one was for the living. 

Mason started with Stella. She held her hand out to take Stella’s. Her fingers wrapped around Stella’s wrist to hold her in place, her hand straight, palm angled down over Juliet’s gaping mouth. Mason sliced into the flesh of Stella’s palm slowly and methodically. She curled Stella’s fingers in, ignoring the pained hisses, and squeezed her hand as tightly together as she could. Blood poured out from her palm into Juliet’s mouth, onto her teeth, onto her tongue. Once she had enough, Mason let go of Stella’s hand and helped her stand. She gestured for Andrew to step forward. 

Mason would be lying if she said she didn’t get some satisfaction from the ritualistic slicing into Andrew’s palm. She pushed the knife as deep as she could, slower than she had for Stella. She pushed it, tearing through his skin, his fat, his muscle, until she hit bone. He didn’t make a single sound. She curled his hand in the way she had Stella’s, holding it over Juliet’s mouth. His blood came out much faster, as he was human and his wound was deeper. She moved his wrist slowly, dragging it up to drip just slightly into Juliet’s eye sockets, then down to pour into her autopsy cut. When she was done, she helped him stand. 

Now for herself. She stopped to take a breath to steel herself, then dug the blade into her palm. It sliced easily into her skin, past her own fat and muscle. She could feel the tearing. She let her blood pour into Juliet’s mouth, mixing with the human blood and vampire blood. She followed this by placing small sprigs of sage, ivy, and aloe vertically over her mouth and horizontally over her ribs. When she was done, she turned her hand so her palm hovered over Juliet’s mouth. She spoke.

“O theoí iketévoume gia ti voítheiá sas to éleós sou kai tous epaínous sou. Epistrofí psychís sto sóma kai to aíma…”

O gods we beg for your aid, your mercy and your praise. Return soul to body and blood. With life let this cavity flood.

The more Mason spoke, the more exhaustion threatened. Despite this, she could feel the energy taking over the room. The air rippled like sound waves. Her fingers prickled like they were asleep. The fire burned brighter. Mason wasn't sure if it was herself, the gods, or something else. The fire began to burn at a higher speed, crackling loud and increasing in size by the second. 

Then it was gone. All that remained were crumbling white clumps of ashed out wood. 

The fire grew out of control, not widening but spreading upwards, almost touching the ceiling. The windows clattered. The ground shook like there was a low-intensity earthquake happening right there in their room. 

The stuff of horror movies.

This wasn't a horror movie, though.

This was going to bring Juliet back. 

Mason was more sure of that than she ever had been.

She cradled Juliet's face in her palms, pulling her closer as the cheap coffee maker crashed to the floor. The glass decanter shattered. The lamp threatened to do the same, but it stayed on the dresser. The painting above the beds swung wildly on one wire, connected to the ceiling by a flimsy nail that threatened to fall out with the movement.

Mason wasn't focused on any of it at all. She was looking at Juliet. Her Juliet. The girl she loved. The one who took Mason out of her shell, brought light and life out of her. Brought life out of everyone. The one Mason felt like she'd known all her life, who deserved a life. This was an imbalance.

She was righting a wrong. That counted. She was doing it. She could feel it. She could. She felt like she was going to pass out. The pain in her palm spread to her chest. She couldn’t…

She took a deep breath, focusing on Juliet's face, ignoring everything else. One hand on her chest, over her heart. The other on her cheek. Fighting to keep chanting, the words known to heart already. 

She was going to wake up. She was going to be okay. She could feel her energy.

And Aurora's energy. She hadn't realized she'd been chanting with her for the past couple minutes, reading from the pages. 

She could almost see it already, Juliet’s eyes opening. Those blue eyes. Those lips turning up in a smile, dimpling in the corners. She needed to see that smile. 

"Come on, Juliet. Wake up," Mason paused her chanting to whisper desperately. She wasn't sure how much longer she could keep going, but she would. Until she passed out. Until.... whatever happened. She wasn't stopping. "Wake up!"

Everything stopped. The lamp finally fell onto the carpet, the light going out. The sound of glass and porcelain shattering went unnoticed. Everyone’s chests heaved as they stared at Juliet's body. Her body, lying still on the white and brown-stained bedsheet, curls spread out around her head in a blonde halo. Mason wished Juliet was on a bed of grass, not some shitty scratchy green carpet in an equally shitty motel, the moonlight shining in through the now open curtains, onto Juliet’s pale skin. Mason needed to take her tanning this summer, or else.

Movement. All they needed was one tiny movement. Miniscule. A finger lifting. A heartbeat. A flutter of eyelashes. A shoulder lifting. A muscle flexing. 

A breath.

For the love of every god and goddess in existence, breathe. 

That was the only thing Mason could think as she stared at Juliet’s face. It was a horrific image, the woman she loved laying there dead, mouth gaping open and full of blood, face slack, eyeless. Her eyelashes were clipped where the paring knife had knocked against them. Her hair was patchy from where Stella had pulled a clump out while cleaning her body. She was naked, covered in blood marrow, and laid out on a stained bedsheet. She looked so sad. 

Maybe Mason wasn’t doing the right thing. Maybe Juliet was in Heaven and Andrew had lied to her. Maybe Mason was playing into Kalos’s wishes by bringing Juliet back. It didn’t make sense for Juliet to be in Hell, anyway. She was too perfect. She was funny, loud, confident, passionate, creative, strong, crazy out-going, and so much more that Mason could hardly think about without crying. Juliet’s soul was bright and perfect and Mason was ruining it with all her worry and need. 

All she needed was for Juliet to come back. She couldn’t stop now, even though she wanted to now. Exhaustion was taking over. Doubt was taking over. She didn’t know where Juliet was. She didn’t know anything other than the fact that she needed to complete this spell, so Juliet had to breathe. If she didn’t, they could all die. It was something she’d talked about with Aurora before, when they’d discussed the one other form of the spell Aurora had seen over two hundred years ago. If they didn’t complete it, they’d all be killed.

☥☥

“Wake up!”

Mason’s fist slammed against Juliet’s chest for the third time. “Wake up!” she screamed, then shook her body. “Wake up! Breathe!” 

They’d finished the spell. Everything had gone silent and still. 

It had stayed that way. 

It had taken around three minutes for Mason to start screaming. She’d been screaming at Juliet for the past five minutes. Her throat hurt. Tears and snot were salty in her mouth, combining themselves with the disgusting mixture of raw oyster, dog blood, and bone marrow that had been settling in on her tongue. No one else had moved yet. 

She hit Juliet again. Her head lolled to the side, a stupid bowling ball of useless matter. Blood spilled from her mouth onto the sheet, as useless as her head. As useless as her corpse. As useless as the spell. It was all useless. 

Stella’s hand rested on Mason’s shoulder when she went to hit Juliet’s chest again. “Mason,” she whispered.

Mason felt like her chest had been ripped open. She sucked in a shaking breath. She whispered, voice trembling as she continued the incantation again. Aurora hadn’t stopped. Stella kneeled next to her, hand tight on her shoulder. 

“She’s gone, Mason.” 

“No,” Mason whispered. She shook her head, then placed her hands palm down on Juliet’s chest. She pressed down on her. She went into the incantation again, pressing against Juliet’s chest. She imagined her energy flowing, seeping into Juliet’s skin. She could almost imagine filling Juliet with everything she had for her, all the memories and life Mason saw in her, all the perfection and imperfection Mason had seen from Juliet when she was alive, and even after she had died.

Pressure pressed up against Mason’s palms. Her palms rose and fell with Juliet’s chest, second by second, as air filled her lungs all over again. Hope flooded through Mason, extending from her palms. Mason kept breathing out the incantation, nails digging gently into Juliet’s skin. She could feel blood flowing. There was a heartbeat under there. There was another breath on its way.

Everything went silent again as really did she suck in another breath, even slower than the first. 

Her eyes had closed. They opened just enough for Mason to see blue irises, shockingly blue compared to the black makeup still caked around them. Mason leaned over her more, grinning so wide her cheeks hurt. 

“You’re alive.”

“Mason, the bond--” Aurora piped up. 

Mason’s eyes widened and she nodded, grabbing the two clay dolls. She tied them together, then threw them into the burning fire pit with a loud crack, followed by a crackle as they lit up. She started removing the sprigs of herbs from Juliet’s mouth and chest. She helped her sit up, amazed by the chill of Juliet’s skin and the emotion swelling to the surface in her own. Arms flung around Juliet’s shoulders, Mason buried her head in Juliet’s neck and breathed in deep. She smelled like dirt and decay, but she had a heartbeat. She had some semblance of warmth. Why wasn’t she super warm like usual though?

Mason wrote it off fast, because she suddenly felt something flooding down her back and then wriggling. Her entire body stiffened. “What was that?” she asked. 

Juliet’s voice was low, scratchy and quiet as she replied, “I threw up.” 

Mason made a face of disgust. “What did you throw up?”

Stella sounded like she was trying not to laugh. “The blood. And some maggots.”

Mason whined loudly. “Gross! Gross, gross, gross!” She didn’t pull away from Juliet, though. 

Juliet was alive. She was breathing, and she was smiling, and she seemed like she was laughing a little at having thrown up on Mason. She was standing in front of Mason after they got to their feet. She was showering with Mason. She was scrubbing her face clean, scrubbing everything clean… Mason couldn’t stop watching her. She was beautiful. She was alive.

 They laid down together once Mason started yawning every three seconds. Stella and Aurora seemed exhausted too. Aurora left the room with Andrew, though, claiming that she didn’t want to stress Juliet out any further. Coming back to life was stressful enough without the man who killed you sleeping in the same room as you. It didn’t help that Juliet kept staring at Andrew wordlessly while everyone moved the room back to normal.

Actually, she was pretty wordless. She’d hardly spoken since coming back, which was really out of character. Mason watched her. Blonde curls were just starting to poke out of the neck of the sweatshirt by the time Mason spoke. “How are you feeling?”

“Like shit,” Juliet replied. She left it at that as she sat down on the bed next to Mason. She looked over Mason’s face. Mason stared back, then smiled at her. She smiled back, but it was tight and closed. Jules didn’t smile like that. Her smile was supposed to be loose and dorky and toothy. It was always a grin, not a tight, closed-lipped thing. 

Mason let it go, though. She was too tired to fret too much yet. She could do that tomorrow. Stella had turned out the light already. They pushed back the covers on the bed together, which made Mason giggle. They laid together, Mason’s legs wrapped around one of Juliet’s. Practically the second Mason’s eyes closed, she was asleep. 

She didn’t know what time it was when she woke, but the moonlight was still coming through the curtains, so she couldn’t have been asleep that long. Mason’s hand was under Juliet’s sweatshirt, though, on her chest. The stitching was still there in Juliet’s skin. It was scratchy against the thorn pricks in Mason’s palm. She’d forgotten about those until now. She could feel Juliet’s chest rising and falling. It was insane to know she’d done this. She’d brought life back into a corpse. Into her best friend. Into the girl she loved. Juliet owed her, like, the best sex ever when they finally did that.

 If they did that. If Juliet was normal. Gods, she hoped Juliet was normal. She seemed mostly normal, just missing some of that spark Mason was accustomed to. Her smile wasn’t the same toothy grin. Her voice wasn’t the same emotional voice. Her eyes didn’t have the same shine. Even her freckles didn’t seem like they were in the right spots at the right intensity. Was there even still more than 106 of them? She’d have to count later.

The shoulder under Mason’s temple shifted. She lifted her head to look at Juliet. Jules was restless. Her head tossed a bit, then her entire body went still. She wasn’t even breathing. Mason felt panic start to set in, but Juliet whispered. 

                            “Juliet Hill is no more.” AUTHOR’S NOTE: Part 2, Juliet, is located HERE. It will provide more insight to what has happened at the end of this piece and in Juliet’s absence! 

#rebirth #rēˈbərth #senior comprehensive writing #juliet hill #mason hill #rebirth pt 1 #my writing #writing #fiction #short story #these characters are my babies #i will have more of them soon! #i have them in a lot of instances... #portfolio

[written-on-the-trees]

Strawberry Necklace Part 3 - Yungblud Fan Fiction

Word Count: 2425 words

Warnings: None, for this part. Smut, fem-dom, and prostitution for the whole story.

Summary: Despite being a grown woman, Nova still needs to get her arse kicked into gear by her family - and visiting her sister usually does the trick. It doesn’t always work, though.

Where else can you find this:  Ao3  |  Wattpad

Part Two  |  Part Four

Nova sighed as she shut the door of the cab behind her, running a hand through her hair as the cabbie drove off into the night.

 The woman had been nice enough - asking Nova how her week had been, if she had any plans this evening, all the usual small-talk cabbies made, but she'd been very chatty. Normally, Nova would be cool with that, but after the night she'd just had with Dom...she just hadn't been feeling up to being chatty. It had been draining enough telling Robert to cancel all her appointments over the weekend, and having to ignore his subtle attempts to ask how she was doing (since she never cancelled weekend appointments on a Friday unless something was very, very wrong) by the time the cabbie had gotten across London to Nova's sister Stella's house, Nova had been exhausted. She was beyond exhausted.

 She'd been tired and numb when Dom had told her she was gorgeous when she wasn't 'acting' - read: lying - she'd been weary when she spoke to Robert, and now she was just about done. But before she could go to bed and get some rest...Nova knew her sister was going to have questions.

   Best to get it over with.

   Of course, Stella was too nice to just ask her questions when Nova dropped her holdall at the bottom of the stairs, or even as she went to sit at the kitchen table while Stella made them both a mug of tea. It just wasn't in her sister's nature to be pushy - it never had been, not even when they were younger. Instead Stella waited calmly until they were both sitting opposite each other at the table, their hands wrapped around steaming mugs of tea.

   "So...what happened?"

 Nova smiled bitterly: "I fucked up. I've been really fucking stupid."

 Stella tilted her head to the side: "Worse than your geography exams?"

 "Way worse." Nova laughed, even though the sound was half-hearted at best: "Remember James?"

 "Nova, you haven't..." Stella asked, her face abruptly turning serious: "Please tell me you haven't been seeing him again."

 "No! God, no."

 Stella looked relieved, even though she tried to lighten the mood by smirking: "Well, how bad can it be if it's not James?"

 Nova sighed: "Because I'm basically creating another James situation for myself, and I'm really afraid that everything's going to go tits up again."

 "Tell me everything."

   Nova sighed again...but she told Stella about what had happened with Dom, right from the beginning.

 She didn't name names, but she did tell her sister how the nervous twenty-one year old had walked into the house, clearly having had someone fuck him over in the past when it came to sex...and how he'd kept coming back. Then she told Stella how not only did Dom keep coming back, but he started being...nice. The bits and pieces of chit-chat before they went upstairs, the cute little gifts, the general...niceness.

 Dom was a sweetheart: that was the fact Nova kept circling back to. The fact that Dom was sweet, and that sweetness was really hard for Nova to resist, even though she should know better than to get sucked in. The only thing Nova left out was the sex - because she really didn't want to have those chats with her baby sister - until she had to bring it up in the context of what had happened earlier tonight: when Dom had told her she looked at her best when she wasn't 'acting'.

 By which he meant lying.

   "How can he know I'm not lying, Stel? I'm always lying when I'm in that house - always; it's always and act." Nova insisted: "And then, even after I didn't say anything to him - even when he looked like I'd punched him in the stomach the whole time he was getting ready to leave - he gave me this."

   She pulled the little yellow tissue paper package from the pocket of her jeans, handing it to Stella, still sealed the way it had been when Dom had given it to her, because Nova hadn't been able to even bring herself to even look at it, let alone open it.

 Whatever it was, it was only going to make her feel more guilty for acting so rashly last night.

   Stell turned the little parcel of yellow, heart-patterned tissue paper in her hands before looking back up at Nova: "You haven't opened it?"

 "I'm too scared."

 "Stop being a pussy." Stella replied sternly, not giving in to Nova's self-pitying tone and handing the package back to her: "Open it."

   Nova accepted the present, gently sliding a nail under the sticker that was keeping the yellow and pink tissue paper closed, unsticking it from one of the edges so she could start to unfold the paper with Stella's eyes boring into her face the whole time.

 She paid her sister no mind, focusing on carefully pulling free the gold chain that was peeking free of the tissue paper. It was a fine gold chain, so slender and light-weight Nova could barely feel its heaviness of it - the same as the small pendant on the end of it, which was so light Nova wasn't sure he hadn't just given her a plain chain until she saw it.

 A small enamel strawberry.

 A bright lacquered red strawberry with cheery green leaves metallic golden seeds that glinted even in the low light of Stella's kitchen, around the size of her fingernail, and hanging on a chain long enough to leave the strawberry pendant hanging just below the line of her collar bones.

 It was beautiful.

 Utterly beautiful. Bright and colourful and her favourite fruit. It was very cute, immensely thoughtful, and utterly beautiful.

   Just like Dom.

   "It's cute." Stella said softly, looking at the necklace where it was resting in Nova's palm: "Does he know that strawberries are your favourite?"

 "Yeah, he does."

 Her sister looked up, eyes gentle and her voice even more so: "Nova...I don't think this guy is the same as James."

   Nova didn't, either.

 But that didn't stop here from being scared.

 Nova had known Dom for, at most, five months - and had seen him about eighteen times over that period, sometimes for as little as an hour, and never for more than three hours. It wasn't like they'd never spoken: he knew bits and pieces about her, just like she knew bits and pieces about him, but that wasn't enough to base a relationship on.

   "I mean," Nova protested: "I barely know the man."

 "Nova...I fell in love with John in the space of one night. Now we have two amazing daughters and a beautiful baby boy..."

 "No, now the two of you are divorced and despise each other."

 Stella waved a hand dismissively, the sore spot that used to be her husband long since healed - except for when he was being a prick. Which was pretty much always, but that only ever induced anger in Stella, not sadness: "Whatever. The point is, sometimes...you know when you know."

 "Even if that's true...what is it that I'm supposed to know?"

 "That you like him."

   Unfortunately...Nova did.

 She did like Dom. She really, really did. But she knew that liking someone wasn't the be all and end all. Relationships were hard work, and even if two people liked each other, that didn't mean that it wouldn't end in tears by the end of it all. She'd liked Edward, once - he'd liked her, too, or at least he thought he had: and their relationship had crashed and burned.

 It wasn't that Nova didn't believe in love...she just didn't believe it was as simple as just having an attraction to someone or being able to get along with someone. Those weren't enough. Love was highs and lows, fights and making up, the ability to weather not just the calm but the storm as well. And that people could do that? With ease? That was what Nova wasn't sure she believed in. Especially when it applied to herself.

   "I might like him, Stel, but I don't know if...I don't know if that's enough."

 Stella sighed, and got up to round the table and wrap Nova up in a hug: "Only you can answer that, Nova. But you're the smartest woman I know: you'll work it out."

 Nova buried her face in her sister's shoulder, nodding: "Thank you, Stella."

 "It's nothing. And you don't have to work it out right now - I've made up the spare room for you. Stay for a little while, get your head straight."

   Nova snorted; relieved to be back on a normal topic for her and Stella.

 Anything to move away from the previous topic.

   "You just want me to baby-sit the kids." she raised an eyebrow.

 Stella smiled at her, the picture of innocence: "They just love their auntie Nova so much."

 "Just remember why. Because I hype them up on sugar and e-numbers, like any good aunt should." Nova smirked: "And then I give them back to you."

 Stella raised a finger to point at Nova accusingly, her warning expression doing nothing but make Nova's smirk wider: "Just remember - you have to live with them too while you're staying here."

   Nova just smiled at her sister, her face a picture of innocence.

 They both knew she was going to spoil the kids; she always did, because spoiling them was her job as their favourite aunt...and to stop Stella's ex from making them hate her. It worked like a charm, every time she saw them.

   If only everything was as easy as bribing children...

   Unfortunately, it wasn't. But the thought alone was enough to let her know she was done for the night. If she couldn't be happy when thinking about ruining her sister's day by making her children hyperactive, then there really was no hope for her. It was time for her to go to bed.

 Stella was graceful when Nova made her excuses, giving her a hug and kissing her on the forehead before sending her up to the guest room. Sometimes Nova wondered how her baby sister was the one she always turned to for comfort, and how Stella always managed to take it so easily in her stride...but then she just remembered to be grateful that her sister was a saint. A saint who had made up a bed for her, with extra pillows just like she liked. Because it came naturally to Stella to look after people.

 When all that came naturally to Nova was fucking things up.

   Stop wallowing.

   Swinging her holdall onto the bed, Nova pulled out the black camisole and lemon-printed sleep-shorts she'd brought to sleep in: changing into them and running a brush through her hair before throwing it into a ponytail. She was almost ready to crawl into bed...only to find her eyes going to the bedside table, where she'd left the necklace Dom had given her, shining gently in the moonlight coming through the window.

   Just leave it.

   There was no reason to pay any attention to it.

 It was just Nova in the room, no-one to impress or pretend she was okay about the necklace. She was hurting and she was tired: it would be perfectly fine to just leave it for tonight. She should just leave the necklace on the bedside table and go to bed, deal with it all in the morning. There was no reason for her to pick it up, or carefully run the chain through her fingers, letting the strawberry pendant twist and spin in the moonlight.

 But that was exactly what she did: sat on the edge of the bed and let the colourful little strawberry twist and turn and glint softly.

 It really was beautiful. Not her usual style, admittedly, but then Dom would probably be surprised at her tastes when she wasn't playing 'Madam'. Besides, it didn't need to be her style for her to like it.

   Because I like him.

   To a pathetic degree.

 Despite herself, Nova put the necklace on. She did it quickly - because it felt wrong to be doing it herself. It should be Dom doing it, and if Nova hadn't let her feelings get away from her, it would've been...

 ...But she had. And there was nothing to be done about it now, except try to make it right.

 With that exact goal in mind, Nova opened her phone, went to her contacts, looked at the number she'd saved there under DH.

 She didn't know what - if anything - she should say to him, but if nothing else, she should thank him for the necklace. She could always block the number afterwards, so there was nothing to be afraid of. It was just a message saying thank you. When she thought about it, she didn't even have to do that: she could just take a picture of it around her neck and follow it up with a simple thank you. Easy-peasy.

 It was cowardly...but it would work, at least was a way to say thank you.

 Pulling the camera up on her phone, Nova took a picture of the necklace, and then immediately deleted it. It was far too suggestive for a thank you photo. She put the phone down and adjusted her camisole so there was no hint of cleavage, flicked her hair off of her shoulders, and adjusted the necklace so it was straight, before picking the phone again. This time the photo was a lot more modest: the line of camisole coming up just under the strawberry necklace, which was clearly on display without any of her hair getting in the way. It also didn't include anything above her tits or below her mouth, the little square image anonymous to anyone who didn't recognise the necklace.

 It was...actually pretty perfect, in terms of what she could want to send. Not at all suggestive, anonymous to anyone but the intended recipient, and very clearly about the necklace.

 But she still didn't send it.

 She just...couldn't bring herself to do it. Her finger froze over the send button, before Nova gave up, locked the phone, and dropped it onto the mattress beside her. It was late, it would be rude to send a message now, in case she woke him up. That was why she wasn't messaging him - no other reason.

 And she kept telling herself that until she fell asleep.

 She'd deal with it all in the morning.

#The Trees Writes #Yungblud #Yungblud imagine #Yungblud fanfic #Yungblud fan fic #Yungblud fan fiction

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©2020FILM™! Hello Again - Ein Tag für immer Stream Deutsch

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Filmhandlung und Hintergrund Weil seine Mutter Marion (Alwara Höfels) eine neue Stelle als Altenpflegerin antritt, zieht der neunjährige Max (Jona Eisenblätter) mit ihr auf die zum Altenheim umgewandelte Burg Geroldseck. Der vom plötzlichen Verschwinden seines Vaters und dem Mobbing an seiner alten Schule schwer mitgenommene Max findet auch in seiner neuen Klasse keinen ...

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Definition and definition of film / film While the players who play a role in the film are referred to as actors (men) or actresses (women). There is also the term extras that are used as minor characters with few roles in the film. This differs from the main actors, who have larger and more roles. As an actor and actress, good acting talent must be required that corresponds to the subject of the film in which he plays the leading role. In certain scenes, the role of the actor can be replaced by a stunt man or a stunt man. The existence of a stuntman is important to replace the actors who play difficult and extreme scenes that are usually found in action-action films. Movies can also be used to deliver certain messages from the filmmaker. Some industries also use film to convey and represent their symbols and culture. Filmmaking is also a form of expression, thoughts, ideas, concepts, feelings and moods of a person that are visualized in the film. The film itself is mostly fictional, though some are based on actual stories or on a true story. There are also documentaries with original and real images or biographical films that tell the story of a character. There are many other popular genre films, from action films, horror films, comedy films, romantic films, fantasy films, thriller films, drama films, science fiction films, crime films, documentaries and others. This is some information about the definition of film or film. The information has been cited from various sources and references. Hope it can be useful.

❍❍❍ TV FILM ❍❍❍ The first television shows were experimental, sporadic programs that from the 1930s could only be seen at a very short distance from the mast. TV events such as the 1936 Summer Olympics in Germany, the crowning of King George VI. In Britain in 19340 and the famous launch of David Sarnoff at the 1939 New York World’s Fair in the United States, the medium grew, but World War II brought development to a halt after the war. The 19440 World MOVIE inspired many Americans to buy their first television, and in 1948 the popular Texaco Star Theater radio moved to become the first weekly television variety show that hosted Milton Berle and earned the name “Mr Television” demonstrated The medium was a stable, modern form of entertainment that could attract advertisers. The first national live television broadcast in the United States took place on September 4, 1951, when President Harry Truman’s speech at the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San Francisco on AT & T’s transcontinental cable and microwave relay system was broadcasting to broadcasters in local markets has been. The first national color show (the 1954 Rose Parade tournament) in the United States took place on January 1, 1954. For the next ten years, most network broadcasts and almost all local broadcasts continued to be broadcast in black and white. A color transition was announced for autumn 1965, in which more than half of all network prime time programs were broadcast in color. The first all-color peak season came just a year later. In 19402, the last holdout of daytime network shows was converted to the first full color network season.

❍❍❍ formats and genres ❍❍❍ See also: List of genres § Film and television formats and genres TV shows are more diverse than most other media due to the variety of formats and genres that can be presented. A show can be fictional (as in comedies and dramas) or non-fictional (as in documentary, news, and reality television). It can be current (as in the case of a local news program and some television films) or historical (as in the case of many documentaries and fictional films). They can be educational or educational in the first place, or entertaining, as is the case with situation comedies and game shows. [Citation required] A drama program usually consists of a series of actors who play characters in a historical or contemporary setting. The program follows their lives and adventures. Before the 1980s, shows (with the exception of soap opera series) generally remained static without storylines, and the main characters and premise barely changed. [Citation required] If the characters’ lives changed a bit during the episode, it was usually reversed in the end. For this reason, the episodes can be broadcast in any order. [Citation required] Since the 1980s, many FILMS have had a progressive change in the plot, characters, or both. For example, Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere were two of the first American prime time drama television films to have this kind of dramatic structure [4] [better source required], while the later MOVIE Babylon 5 further illustrated such a structure had a predetermined story about the planned five season run. [Citation required] In 2020, it was reported that television became a larger part of the revenue of large media companies than the film. Some also noticed the quality improvement of some television programs. In 2020, Oscar-winning film director Steven Soderbergh declared the ambiguity and complexity of character and narrative: “I think these qualities are now being seen on television and people who want to see stories with such qualities are watching TV.

❍❍❍ Thanks for everything and have fun watching❍❍❍ Here you will find all the films that you can stream online, including the films that were shown this week. If you’re wondering what to see on this website, you should know that it covers genres that include crime, science, fi-fi, action, romance, thriller, comedy, drama, and anime film. Thanks a lot. We inform everyone who is happy to receive news or information about this year’s film program and how to watch your favorite films. Hopefully we can be the best partner for you to find recommendations for your favorite films. That’s all from us, greetings!

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Of Wolves And Ravens: As Told By Three Letters Sent From Cloudfall Fort

For those of you have been following gay murder elf bachelorette campaign (In Their Footsteps We Shall Follow), we recently finished Book 2: Of Wolves And Ravens, and I have A Lot Of Feelings about it. Because I am Extremely Extra, I tend to write in-character letters to NPCs that I then send to my DM. The three letters written for this book tell a complete and self-contained story--at this point, nearly a novella--and it’s not quite fanfiction, as it is canon in-universe; certainly not my own work, as all of the brilliance behind it was written by Jeremy, I just lived it and was moving around one little pawn; but together these letters been far more than just a game to me. so after checking with Jeremy, I decided to post them here. If you are a fan of my writing and want a window into the world that is right now one of the stories that I care about the most, well, here is what I have been doing with my heart and with my time. No prior knowledge is necessary and actually I’m not sure how you would have prior knowledge what are you doing listening to my skype calls?

Iria Stell, the author of the letters, is a 17-year-old soldier of the Caedic army; writing first to a scientist Vennikus Callo whom she had encountered a few months prior who gave her a potion to test with only the instructions of “it will be useful in a fight, just like the previous one”; second to Maldai Varricon, her mentor and commanding officer since she joined the army at age 14; and third to Arcadia Dominus, her rival-turned-crush-turned-maybe-girlfriend, whom she left behind at the Surrian front when Varricon sent her and Talvus back to the Capital to take the Trials in the hopes that they would climb to higher military or public office. It is perhaps significant to mention that Talvus is also barely more than a kid, being only about 22 himself, and became Iria’s first and arguably only friend, ever since she arrived in Varricon’s unit, he was delighted he was no longer the youngest, and immediately nicknamed her ‘Stoneface Junior’, and thus began their unbreakable friendship. All other characters are new to this book, and will be introduced as they appear. Iria Strell is played by me. Corporal Dante Maxim is played by my brother, Eddie, who was a guest PC in this arc. Everyone else is played by Jeremy. A number of the cool descriptions are Jeremy. And all the gorgeous battle descriptions are all Jeremy. He’s really damn good at fight choreography. 

It is worth noting: this is a story about war. Told from the side of the bad guys, who are kind of brutal. Trigger warnings of violence and death. There is not really any gore outright described in detail, although there are a few times that rather nasty wounds are received and reported clinically. If that sort of thing bothers you, I would not recommend reading!

Otherwise, with no further ado, presenting, Of Wolves And Ravens: As Told By Three Letters Sent From Cloudfall Fort.

____________________

To Vennikus Callo, Black Lotus Labs, Insul

I have made use of the potion that you left me with, and am writing to report the results.

I took it at the beginning of a fight against Highland Rat Clan orcs. The potion kicked in instantaneously, and it lasted a substantial amount of time: the entire duration of the fight, and a few minutes afterwards as well. I would estimate about four minutes total.

The effect to my vision was by far the most noticeable. I immediately began to see lines in the periphery of my sight, patterns of footwork from weight distribution and momentum of my enemies, which allowed me to move more quickly than I would normally in a fight, and allowed me to perform maneuvers that I would not otherwise attempt, as I could instinctively predict—literally see faster than I could have calculated on my own—the locations in which their stances were weak. Secondly, there was a dramatic increase in my strength. I would say that easily under the influence of the potion my strength doubled, and when I concentrated to push to fight at my full capacity, I was striking at thrice what my normal abilities would allow. I was able to kill three Rat Clan orcs and one Salamander Clan elf, holding off an ambush party of over a dozen with only one companion, before Caedic reinforcements arrived.

However, when I took it, I felt hunger beyond any hunger I have felt before in my life; I would describe it as starving to the point of pain equal to that of taking an indirect but substantial wound. Past the initial shock and blow of it, it did not affect my ability to fight nor was it a severe distraction; however, I would caution you that I have trained to ignore pain and exhaustion during a fight, and if you hope to eventually release this potion for wide-scale consumption, this might be a considerable drawback. The hunger did not go away as the other effects of the potion wore off, and it took rations equal to about two and a half standard meals, eaten in under five minutes, before I felt normal again. There were no other persisting effects to the best of my knowledge in the hours or days that followed.

I am sixty-seven inches tall and a little over nine stone, and seventeen years seven months aged, so I do not have the proportions of an adult soldier; you can discard this if the information is useless to you, but perhaps the relative body mass to the potency of the potion could have caused the side effects to emerge. I did not take it on an empty stomach; I had eaten standard issue hard biscuit rations but ten minutes before. I believe the composition of those is primarily flour and water; the exact recipe should not be hard to look up if mundane chemical interactions are a consideration. I had no active spells or enchantments on me at the time of consumption, nor do I make regular use of such things; I have not been poisoned or sickened recently, nor have I taken a potion, either magical or alchemical, since a standard issue healing potion during a battle at the Surrian front a month ago, and the one you gave me at the Fae font before that.

If there is any information that I have unwittingly omitted, please write immediately that I might rectify this. I am currently en route to the Capital to take the Trials and attempt to join the clergy, so any letter addressed to me ought to be sent to the Strell family estate there.

With sincerity, Iria Strell

____________________

Sergeant Major Maldai Varricon, Specialist Unit c.Varricon The 3rd Legion, Serae

Dear Maldai,

I am writing, as a friend, because I could gravely use your guidance right now. It has been a trying week; I have nearly died multiple times, I have watched a unit of good Caedic soldiers slaughtered before my eyes, helpless, and I am full of doubts about things I had previously considered certain. Second Lieutenant Vitan of the 8th has submitted a full official report about the incidents that transpired, but I am not sure that any report could capture…could capture what I am to write below.

The journey to the Capital was fairly uneventful until about half a day’s march from Cloudfall fort. We had made good time in the prior month; I’d kept up practicing my forms every morning and evening, which meant that Talvus and I tired at about the same time every day, and I managed to persuade him to teach me basic arcane theory as we walked so that if I am ever consulted for tactical planning, I might have more insight into what a single mage or an arcane unit can and cannot do.

(Managed to persuade. More like we ran out of conversation topics about banal matters by the end of the third day, and Talvus leapt at the opportunity to talk about something even marginally related to his research projects. I think I’ve picked up the basics acceptably; I was able to keep up with him. He is a fine teacher, although he spoke very fast, and I only had so much time at night to write down notes and attempt to memorize the shapes of needles. Ample practical demonstrations, though. Including one in particular with exploding biscuits. He lost biscuit privileges after that. Regardless, I hope to reach the level where I can actually contribute to the things he is trying to do someday, as I appreciate it all the more now that I know some of the theory behind it.)

We were ambushed by a group of Rat Clan orcs, and an Owl Clan elf, who had been waiting off the main road, presumably for Caedic troops to pass. The two of us were vastly outnumbered—there must have been at least a dozen of them—and I managed to strike down four before they were in turn ambushed by a Caedic patrol that had been tracking them. I suppose that was the first time my life was saved by the pure luck of coincidence, although I did not consider this at the time, as I had not taken any overly threatening wounds during the fight.

Second Lieutenant Venus Tarquin, who had led the patrol, informed us of the situation as we made our way back towards the camp of the 8th—the Unbroken. In recent months, rebel activity in Altae had increased dramatically, to the point in which our journey would be interrupted by more than just an ambush. Shortly past Cloudfall, there was a pass spanned by a single bridge, which had recently been destroyed by Salamander Clan rebels. The journey around the pass would take more than a week, and repairs would be about finished in that timeframe. We were welcome to spend our time waiting at Cloudfall, or we could speak with Captain Piso about whether or not the 8th could use two extra pairs of hands for the interim. I was eager to volunteer my services, and Talvus agreed, and so we settled in with the Unbroken in the converted Raven village in which they had made their camp.

I delivered the papers that you had left us with to Captain Piso, and Second Lieutenant Tarquin informed him of our situation. Talvus and I offered our services, and Captain Piso said that the unit could always use another two good soldiers, especially a mage. Then he dismissed Talvus, but asked me to stay. He looked at the papers again. Then he said: “Strell. Your family had some sort of connection to the recent heresy, is that correct?”

I told him yes, that I had been close friends with one of the daughters of the main family.

He said that he had very little access to information, to that sort of news from the Capital, and that he would like to know any details, if I had them. There was not much I could say; I told him that I did not know any details until the night that the Tandus family planned to escape.

“To break out the one that was imprisoned, is that correct?” he said.

It was, yet I knew only where to find Peia because we’d hidden in alleyways together all throughout our childhood. I told him such.

“Do you know anything more about the original heresy that initiated the situation?” he asked. “Anything more about what was actually found to incriminate Scaevola Tandus? Before the whole…breakout situation?”

“I knew that he was convicted of necromancy,” I said.

And there Captain Piso’s interest seemed to end. “I imagine you’ve had to deal with quite an uphill climb with that mark on your record,” he said.

“I am loyal to the Empire and I have always been willing to spill the blood of our enemies to prove it,” I told him. “I have spent the last two and a half years fighting beside those who have understood that.”

He dismissed me.

I was immediately folded into the roster of watches and patrols, and had patrol with Corporal Dante Maxim and Corporal Specialist Marcus Tyrol the next morning. Corporal Maxim was also fairly new to the 8th, being the sole survivor of an ambush by the Heretic Raven that wiped out the 22nd only a few months prior, but he and Corporal Tyrol were already fast friends, so I followed behind them and did not interject myself in their banter. The patrol proceeded uneventfully until we stumbled across the still-warm corpse of a Caedic guard. Corporal Maxim was the one who put it together in the moments that followed: the wounds of the guard were too eccentric to belong to warriors of any one clan, and we were near the route of a supply wagon that was expected to arrive today. In fact, the route had been changed, in secret, at the last minute, as prior supply trains had been ambushed, yet somehow the Heretic Raven and their company had no trouble finding it.

Fearing the numbers of the enemy, we sent Corporal Tyrol to run to the nearby Stag Clan warcamp to muster the Stag Clan loyalists, while Maxim and I vaulted over the slope and into the battle to buy time. Sure enough, the Caedic guards were outnumbered: eight of them to ten of the Heretic Raven’s warriors. It was not just numbers determining this battle; the guards were vastly outclassed, from what could be gathered of the smoke and screams. Corporal Maxim and I charged towards the fray. A woman-elf with pale skin, dark hair, and a large scythe, Anye the Huntress of the Wolf Clan, called out something to alert the others of our presence, then disappeared into the smoke. Another elf, blonde, his face covered in black warpaint—the Black Stag, a traitor of the Stag Clan—turned to hold us off while Anye tried to attack us from behind. Their mage was throwing fireballs around; one of which hit me, another that I dodged. Corporal Maxim and I held the two warriors with relative ease. Then the moment the fight seemed to be turning, the Anye the Huntress disappeared back into the smoke, and the Heretic Raven themselves, distinguished by the scar across their forehead and the left arm of a Caedic uniform jacket sewn into their Highland war garb, stepped forward to take her place.

They were a formidable foe; combining both Caedic footwork with Highland two-bladed style. Corporal Maxim and I fought them together, as Corporal Tyrol and the Stag Clan forces appeared over the hill and charged into the melee. The Heretic Raven wasn’t fighting to kill, they were fighting defensively, covering the retreat of their people. The Stag Clan loyalists turned the tide of the engagement, as the rebels were then vastly outnumbered; although they focused on the traitor of their tribe, killing him and allowing the others to escape. The Heretic Raven slit Corporal Maxim’s throat before retreating, and I stayed back to stop the bleeding and stabilize him rather than continue the fight into the woods. The supply train was not damaged, so we loaded the wounded onto the wagon and proceeded as quickly as possible back to camp, where proper healing could be distributed. Corporal Tyrol and I delivered the report, as Maxim was mostly unconscious, and then I spent the rest of the afternoon with the Stag Clan warriors, attempting to learn more about their fighting style and seeing what I could pick up of their language. The question of how the Heretic Raven managed to find the new supply route was unanswered and thus somewhat upsetting to the camp, but the supplies had been properly delivered, so it was not dwelled upon.

Next came the animal attacks. A patrol came back attacked by wolves; and a bear wandered into the center of our camp during breakfast and attacked myself, Corporal Maxim, and Lieutenant Sorus as we exited the dining building. Upon killing the bear, its conjured nature was revealed. Recalling ravens that I had seen both during the initial ambush along the road as well as at the outskirts of camp two days prior, I suggested that conjured animals might be spying on us, which could perhaps explain how the new supply route was known to the Heretic Raven. As such, Corporal Tyrol, Corporal Maxim, and I decided to stop during our patrol at the Stag Clan camp, to  ask War-Leader Tairn of the Stag Clan if Highland Shamans had such abilities. Tairn was neither able to confirm nor refute my theory, so we decided to bring it up to the arcanists when we returned to Unbroken, as this was still the best explanation we had for the increasing ambushes. We continued on the patrol. Tyrol spotted some rabbits, and proposed we pause for some fun: he’d been taught basic augury before he dropped out of the academy, and offered to read our fortunes. He read mine first: in the entrails, a troubled event from my childhood, and death in the past; nothing that I didn’t already know. In the heart, fragile, which turned frustratingly accurate, as I ended up unconscious for one reason or another (most often that reason the injury from the foundry acting up) in or after every fight I engaged in since. Success, power, and upward climb for the future, not that I put much stake in it. For Maxim: in the past, humble origins, high ambitions; in the present, strong, powerful, respected among peers, and oh, owes Tyrol twelve silvers from when he lost that bet; and then the rabbit had no liver. There was no future. Maybe you just found a fucked up rabbit, Dante said.

We did not have much time to dwell, as we were immediately attacked by wolves. Luckily, I had been fighting wolves of the conjured variety for nearly a month, as I had grown bored with merely repeating my forms, and had convinced Talvus to materialize various fighting companions in the evenings of our travels. We found most interesting the fact that the corpses of these wolves did not disappear, which meant that if this was a planned attack and not unfortunate happenstance, it was by those who could control animals, not merely create magical constructs of them. We hurried back to camp to report the incident.

That had been the first clue. The biggest one. And I missed it.

When we returned, the camp was abuzz with the news that Caedic forces had discovered the hideaway of Rat Clan, one of the largest remaining holdouts of rebels. Captain Piso, with knowledge of my prior experience, engaged me to design the plan of assault; Corporal Maxim was to assist with the planning and the assignment of men; and Second Lieutenant Tarquin was to oversee the both of us and provide guidance if necessary, and make all final calls. I immediately had the following idea, for I had been working with Talvus to reverse-engineer the arcanum cannons from the battle at the Surrian front: he had been stuck upon the fact that the the burned out cartridges with a repeating rune pattern would have contained more magical energy than is stable to force into an object, and I suggested that perhaps the design was not to contain then release the energy into a spell, but only to contain, then a physical destruction of the runic pattern could release all of the energy at once, as an explosive. As such, Talvus was able to develop a delayed explosive stick, one which contained power comparable to the fireballs that had been shot, which would be released within about six or seven seconds of the destruction of the runes. The plan that I submitted to Second Lieutenant Tarquin was the tactical usage of these delayed explosives, sent in on invisible runners to the barracks of the hideaway as the Rat Clan warriors slept, then with our Caedic forces waiting by the entranceways to slaughter the disoriented survivors as they were smoked out.

Our planning was cut short by an attack on the camp of animals of many shapes and sizes; this time, both controlled and conjured. Corporal Maxim and I handily took care of a boar, then I began picking off wolves with arrows as Maxim rushed to the aid of Captain Piso, who was on the ground, poisoned by a giant scorpion. When Maxim went to summon Second Lieutenant Vitan, he saw that the back of the medical building had been blown out, and Second Lieutenant Vitan was nowhere to be seen. He sought the assistance of myself, as I was a known tracker in the camp, and Second Lieutenant Tarquin, to follow the trail that we might return with Vitan before the Captain died. The tracks of the attackers were not particularly hidden, and there were marks as if someone struggling had been dragged off, which indicated that Second Lieutenant Vitan had been taken alive. We began pursuit, first encountering a blindfolded Wolf Clan orc with two bestial wolves, whom we dispatched of, then further along the main road a blindfolded Wolf Clan druid dragging the bound Second Lieutenant away. We were also able to prevail in this fight, although it was far more severe: a summoned leopard bit a sizable chunk from my side and nearly took down Second Lieutenant Tarquin, and Corporal Maxim had trouble piecing the druid’s defensive spells until he thought to free Second Lieutenant Vitan, who stared at the orc directly, rage in her eyes, then brought a dagger across her own throat; and the same cut opened up on his neck, blood pouring down in sheets, as Corporal Maxim dealt the final blow.

We were able to return to the camp in time for Second Lieutenant Vitan to treat Captain Piso. The rest of the animals had been fended off, upon their deaths revealing about of half of them conjured and half of them real. The entire setup—from the fact that Lieutenant Vitan was just dragged off, not killed, and her attackers did not cover their tracks, to how there were no casualties on our end, to how both the warrior-orc and the druid were blindfolded—I could not make sense of it. As we were still preparing in earnest for the assault on the Rat Clan hideaway, I’m not sure if anyone bothered to make sense of it.

Development of the delayed explosives proceeded faster and more successfully than expected; Talvus spearheaded the project, and I helped where I could, mostly just checking his diagrams in places. He and Lieutenant Sorus were able to make the first prototype within two days, and we carefully warded a field against any divination and ensured that there were no small animals nearby before we set up the delayed explosive stick on one side, and from forty feet away, Second Lieutenant Tarquin speared it with an arrow. The explosion was a bit sooner than planned—five seconds, not seven—but its size and intensity were as desired. Talvus and Lieutenant Sorus turned to producing the explosives that we planned to use in the attack, and Second Lieutenant Tarquin and I returned to planning a scouting mission, that we might better know where to deploy these explosives.

The scouting mission was to proceed as follows: Second Lieutenant Tarquin, Lieutenant Sorus, Talvus, Corporal Tyrol, and another scout of the Unbroken, Private Specialist First Class Kia Passienus, and myself were to make our way to the edge of the woods in the heart of night under the cover of mist, to the hideaway of the Rat Clan. There Lieutenant Sorus would prepare four focus-stones for Corporal Tyrol and I to take, and Talvus would cast invisibility on myself, Tyrol, and Private Passienus. We would have a little more than five minutes to run to the tunnels of the hideaway, Tyrol taking the northern side and myself to enter on the southern side, while Private Passienus stayed closer to the outskirts both to keep watch and to investigate lightly the entrances on the upper levels of the hill. If we did not find the barracks ourselves, the focus-stones would allow Lieutenant Sorus a direct line to scry within the hideaway. The night came. The six of us left. Lieutenant Sorus gave us the foci, and Talvus turned us invisible.

I encountered no one until I found what appeared to be their main war room, with a number of orcs, including War-Chief Black Eye Sadbh, gathered around a map on a central table and discussing plans. I debated whether or not to sneak through to room to one of the adjacent tunnels, as I had not yet found any sleep-chambers, or to go back are try some of the side passageways that had been barred with closed doors; I decided that I was both quiet enough, and the room was large enough, for me to drop a scrying stone in the room then sneak through to one of the open passageways.

The moment I set foot into the room, an orc mage who had been watching the door shouted and yanked a rope, a large wooden cover fell across the entrance to the passageway I had come through, and Rat Clan warriors leapt into action, closing and barring all of the doors. I was unarmed, save for a single dagger; I decided to make best use of my remaining time of invisibility by hiding the dagger in my boot then making an appropriate scuffle such as to seem that I had nothing up my sleeve. I tried to open the doors to no avail; there were simply too many warriors in the room, blocking the passageways bodily, and before long I was pinned. I saved my breath rather than struggle as the invisibility wore off.

I was beaten, which was expected; bound, which was expected; then I was taken to a small room, tied to a post, and rubble and stones were carefully piled around me. Black Eye Sadbh watched, smiling, the entire time. Small piles of tinder were built up around the room. I was prepared to be tortured: I was prepared first not to crack, then second, that my final acts might be more useful if I fed the Rat Clan misinformation instead of just defiance. No questioning came. I tried whispering it was a trap, that they knew we were coming, over and over—so that if Talvus were to try to scry me, the Unbroken would be warned—and I was gagged for my trouble.

They lit the fires a little before dawn.

Captain Piso, leading the same team that he had been allocated in the original plan, burst into the room where I had been left just as the heat was enough to threaten me with unconsciousness. I was freed, despite the precious time it wasted, and given a spare scimitar, and we moved as a unit to cut off a tunnel where Black-Eye Sadbh was escaping with her warriors. She put up a significant fight, single-handedly holding the tunnel while her warriors ran from sight. I maneuvered such that I was behind her, cutting off her own escape, but when she deemed she had stalled long enough, she turned to me and brought first her fist, then the hilt of her weapon, to strike me directly in my old injury. She met my eyes and smiled as she did, for she knew something that we—that I—did not. I awoke to a combat medic standing over me, and the news that a chase had occurred. I ran as fast as I could to the end of the tunnel; and Captain Piso was fighting against Black-Eye Sadbh as his men cut down her remaining warriors. I was able to strike Black-Eye Sadbh from behind her flank, still angry that I had previously allowed her to escape, and I struck true: she spat blood then she died.

Corporal Maxim and I reported to Captain Piso the final results of the attack, as a combat medic saw to his wounds; and I learned that Private Passienus had been buried similarly to myself in a small storage room to the top of the hideaway, and Corporal Maxim had put out the fires around her and left her with a potion before continuing past to the shrine of the Rat Clan, where he had killed all four of the clan shamans before they could make their escape. Corporal Tyrol had been bound to a post rigged to trigger a cave-in, and Second Lieutenant Vitan and her team had been trapped trying to release him. Some of the Rat Clan warriors had been killed, but many had escaped, as had all the noncombatants. All boxes in the storerooms that might have contained supplies were decoys, filled with dust.

Captain Piso said that killing the war-chief and shamans of the Rat Clan was like cutting off the head of a snake; that we had severely crippled all resistance that the Rat Clan might be able to put up in the future; that this was a major victory. It did not feel like one. Then we found a letter on Black-Eye Sadbh’s body. It was written in orcish, of a dialect Tairn did not know, but one thing was abundantly clear: there was an exact replication of the runes of the delayed explosives in the letter, the ones that Talvus and I had developed. We had done all of our research inside, under Divination wards; and the only ones who had seen those runes were myself, Talvus, Corporal Maxim, Second Lieutenant Tarquin, Lieutenant Sorus, and Captain Piso.

I could think of no means or motive of any of those listed above to have betrayed the Caedic forces; but worse, while the repeating pattern in the middle was fairly simple, the capping runes were complex and subtle. I could produce them exactly. Talvus and Lieutenant Sorus, who had manufactured the explosives, would also have been able to draw them in the detail that they were depicted. As for the others, I heavily suspected that they would not have been able to freehand the runes as such they had appeared, but would have needed to copy them down. At that point, it seemed more likely that the Highland orcs had the same idea of sending invisible runners as we had to copy the runes in the dead of night, than any of those officers might betray us.

In order to better understand the situation unfolding around us, the command at Cloudfall deigned to send the Traitor, a Bear Clan orc loyal to the Caedic forces who served as a linguist for them, to translate the letter. Captain Piso was about as happy with this decision as you were when Captain Galseii summoned us to fight in the battle of the guns, as the Highland rebels had been trying to kill the Traitor for years, and recent ambushes had been increasing in frequency and efficacy: there was little chance that the Heretic Raven and their allies would not attempt to kill the Traitor. Captain Piso ordered the 8th to begin march immediately, and split us into three groups: one to search for ambushes to the left of the road, the other to the right, and the final to reinforce the Caedic soldiers from Cloudfall who would be escorting the Traitor. I was assigned to the group to the right, led by Second Lieutenant Tarquin, as was Corporal Maxim. I suggested that we not leave the four delayed explosives sitting around in our empty camp, and Captain Piso agreed, distributing them to myself, Corporal Maxim, Talvus, and Second Lieutenant Tarquin.

We indeed found the expected ambush—in a thickly wooded area, with the slope leading up to the road, all in all a fairly terrible place to wait in ambush. The enemy forces appeared surprised at our presence, but the Heretic Raven, amongst them, let out a war cry to which they rallied, and the fighting began in earnest. I moved to kill the Heretic Raven’s Rat Clan shaman, but was diverted as Anye the Huntress dropped from a tree and brought her scythe down on my shoulder, shattering my collarbone. I exchanged blows back and forth with her until I noticed that the Heretic Raven had stepped forward to fill break in the rebel line, and was fighting Corporal Maxim. I moved forward to support Maxim, but my wounds were severe enough that I was knocked out of the fight. While I was unconscious, the Caedic soldiers successfully cut down the Wolf Clan orcs, and the majority of the Heretic Raven’s warriors fled. Yet the Heretic Raven and one more remained, and made towards the slope, just as the Traitor and two Caedic soldiers burst panicked through the trees from the road. Corporal Maxim rushed to the Traitor’s defense, and tackled the Heretic Raven to the ground. I awoke to a combat medic patching me back together, and to see the Heretic Raven break free from the convergence of Caedic soldiers, sprinting past everyone else into the woods.

I knew that in all the years that the Heretic Raven had been fighting, the Caedic Empire had never come so close to bringing them down. So I sprinted after them.

I was able to keep pace with the Heretic Raven, but it was several hundred feet, well out of sight of the rest of the unit, before they stumbled and I was able to make my move. I leapt forward but they sidestepped, pivoting on one leg to throw me over their hip.

What followed, I am not proud of.

“You made the wrong call, chasing me alone with those injuries,” they said.

“I was prepared to die for the Caedic Empire since the day I joined,” I said, and I cracked the delayed explosive. They recognized it instantly, and they kicked it from my hand.

“Then do,” they said, and their blade stabbed downwards.

I rolled out of the way, but not fast enough; the blade grazed my good shoulder, opening up a wound that, while it would not slow me, still bled heavily. I forced myself to my feet, and drew my blades, for the Heretic Raven was injured as well, and I had prevailed in fights with similar odds; and even if I were the fool, even if I were to die, I would not go down without making them pay for their victory.

The Heretic Raven met my eyes as I glared at them. Something unreadable passed across their face. Then faster than I could move, they brought their knee to my gut and as I doubled over, their elbow to the back of my head, and all went black.

I awoke to Second Lieutenant Vitan standing over me. The moment she determined I was in no immediate danger of dying, she hastened to return I assume to treat injuries amongst the rest of the 8th, leaving me alone on the ground.

I still do not know why the Heretic Raven did not simply kill me then and there, or what—if anything—they realized when they saw my face that gave them pause. Whatever it was, it did not hold them back in our subsequent encounters. I have very little doubt that they would come to regret it, considering that I would be directly involved in both their death, the death of two of their companions, and the downfall of the Wolf Clan. I owe my life to some passing fancy they were struck by, and I do not know what it was. I realize now, of course, that I was perhaps overzealous in chasing them, that such a risk would have only been worth it if I had been in slightly better fighting shape at the start instead of injured and barely clinging to consciousness, I had just—I had wanted to do something, to make up for my failures during the assault on the Rat Clan hideaway.

The Caedic forces had taken heavy losses during this ambush. While our company has killed Cú, the Heretic Raven’s warrior who had remained, and a number of Wolf Clan orcs, the group that had gone to the left had been ambushed by Wolf Clan forces waiting even further left and had taken many casualties, and those along the road had also been ambushed. Lieutenant Vindix, the leader of the 10th, had been killed, along with all remaining members of the 10th who had joined us. Talvus told me of another of the blindfolded Wolf Clan warrior; this one managed to take down eight Caedic soldiers alone, and retreated without taking a single blow. We had walked straight into a trap, one that Second Lieutenant Tarquin’s squadron alone was able to avoid.

The Traitor translated the letter, as was the ultimate goal of this whole endeavor. And it was far, far worse than we had imagined.

As suspected, the letter warned that Caedic forces would be attacking, and that we had developed a new weapon, a stick of wind and fire that would detonate when cracked. It warned that we planned to use the delayed explosives to collapse tunnels in on them in their sleep, but that if they captured our spies, we would fear to send more in the same fashion. They knew we were coming twice—first magically concealed from sight on the second night of the new moon. That was why they were waiting for us. They knew what tunnels our forces had knowledge of, and which ones they could escape from. The letter predicted, rightly, that Captain Piso would order to assault to be pushed up immediately to the morning after the scouts were captured. It described all of the notable warriors and their assignments in detail: Tyrol’s ability to transform partially into a snake, and the difficulties they would face holding him, that Captain Piso was quick and agile, Second Lieutenant Vitan could draw rivers of blood from foes just as easily as she could heal, that Talvus was skilled well beyond his years in magic and that they would know him by his unbuttoned coat, it spoke of the spells favored by Lieutenant Sorus, and the ambush planned by Second Lieutenant Tarquin over the tunnels to the west, so their best chance of escape was to head to the eastern side of the hideaway to exits which we did not know. Of myself, ‘the woman spy with the two blades will fight with great fierceness, enough to rival any Highland warrior: Strike her just right of the center of her chest and she will fall to an old injury,’ which was how Black-Eye Sadbh escaped past me through the tunnel.

They knew everything of any worth pertaining to the assault in nauseating detail. It was signed by The Wolf of Ears Eyes and Hands.

My collarbone had been shattered severely enough that it required surgery before any magical healing could be applied. It was not pleasant to lie still on the table while Second Lieutenant Vitan cut open my upper chest and shoulder to dig out the bits of bone, but I did not break. The pain was irrelevant, there was too much else on my mind; the only thing that mattered was discovering how the Wolf of Ears Eyes and Hands had stolen the information from us. I cannot emphasize enough how upset the fact that they had the runes of our delayed explosives made me: if Highland casters could make such delayed explosives themselves, Talvus and I in our brief tenure here would have handed the insurgent forces on a silver platter a weapon they could use to cause great devastation to supply trains or patrols with minimum danger to their own warriors. I did not know how I would live with myself, if my greatest contribution in the Highlands had been supplying enemies of the Empire with a tool that could expedite the deaths of many good Caedic soldiers. I asked Talvus whether or not he thought one might be able to recreate the delayed explosives with just the runes, if they were unfamiliar with Caedic casting, and he said he did not know. I did not sleep easy that night.

The next day, Talvus caught me in a private corner of camp. “Do you know how you look?” he demanded, and I knew that I was still bruised from the fight and healing from the surgery, but I did not think I looked so beat-up as to justify the intensity with which he spoke, and told him such. “No,” he said. “You do realize—if there’s a spy within our ranks, it’s you.”

His words sunk in even as he began to explain. “We’re the two outsiders. You were involved in all the planning, and you knew how to make the explosives. They’re—“ He gestured, scratching out a needle that exploded into white sparks that floated around us before fading. “I don’t like being watched. Captain Piso’s been having Sleepy” (Lieutenant Sorus, and for once this was not a flattering nickname that Talvus had bestowed upon a superior officer, but rather what Lieutenant Sorus was colloquially known as around camp) “keep tabs on us, but there’s no Divination magic around us now.”

The purpose of the sparks, I realized.

“There’s something else,” he said. “I’m pretty sure that Sleepy is higher-ranked in the clergy than he’s been letting on.” Which, in conjunction with the fact that Captain Piso was, well, a Captain, yet only in command of a single unit, was strange.

“Why are we even still here, if they think we are spies?” I asked.

“Probably because the ambushes were going on long before we got here, that’s the only thing we’ve got going for us,” Talvus said. “And we are being watched.”

Then an even more chilling thought struck me. “Could I be the spy?” I asked. “Could—could the Rat Clan or the Wolf Clan have put some sort of spell on me that allows them to see through my eyes? Hear through my ears?”

Talvus shook his head. “It would have shown up in my Divination detection,” he said, and he appeared confident, but I was not convinced, as the enemy clearly had some method of knowing our every move that was beyond our ability to detect, and perhaps there was a deeper magic, some sort of Highland spirit magic, at play. After all, at the center of the camp of the Unbroken was a sealed Raven shrine, from before the clan joined the Empire and was sent to the west as Raven Legion. As I was not particularly inclined to go marching around camp spouting far-fetched theories that contradicted the conclusions of our arcanists, when I was already suspected of treason, I deemed that the best thing I could do was to stay as much out of the way as I could, so that if they were seeing through my eyes, I would cause no more harm than I already had. I am aware now that this course of action was not spurred by logic, and I know this is no excuse, but I was—I was hurt, and exhausted, and shaken by how disastrously my plans for the assault on Rat Clan had fallen apart, unsure as to why I was alive, and frustrated over how perfectly the events of the past week had framed me for a treason I would never willingly commit.

There was another ambush by the Heretic Raven.

It was on a larger supply train, near Cloudfall, and while the Heretic Raven was long gone by the time the news reached us, Captain Piso saw it as his chance. There were three trackers in the unit and at his disposal—myself, Tyrol, and Second Lieutenant Tarquin—and working together, we might finally be able to find the Heretic Raven’s hideaway where any one of us could not, and gain the upper hand. The trail was not easy to follow; it doubled back on itself, went through streams, across rocks, and it took all of our skills combined to follow it to its end. The sun was setting over a gathering mist as we reached a hillside with a large opening, perhaps twenty feet wide, with a fairly shallow overhang. Within it there was a large pair of doors, carved from stone, worn down but the images of wolves and ravens evident upon it. The trail led through the doors, which appeared to have been opened recently, and Second Lieutenant Tarquin gathered us to return to Captain Piso with the news that we believed we had found the hideaway of the Heretic Raven.

We returned and reported, and Captain Piso ordered the entirety of the Unbroken to prepare to move out first thing the next morning; and I did not voice my concerns, that we still did not know how they were getting their information on us, we could be walking into just as much of a trap as we had—as I had—in the assault we had planned against the Rat Clan; but everyone except me had viewed the assault against Rat Clan as a rousing victory, and I was alone in my doubts. I was nothing, just a Private, and one under suspicion of treason at that, and no one wanted to lose the chance of ending the threat presented by the Heretic Raven for once and for all, so I did not speak.

We marched to what we assumed to be the hideaway of the Heretic Raven. There was no one guard posted outside the entrance of the cave. Captain Piso sent a few soldiers in advance to check the doors, and they opened inwards and were not locked. Beyond the doors was a long hallway with writing on the walls, iconography, carved stone ravens and wolves both. We came to a spiraled staircase that we could only climb one by one, and we did, carefully, but the antechamber above was empty. Here natural light shone in through windows cut from thin stone walls on one side of what must have been a hill we were beneath, and huge stone doors with intricate carvings barred our way further into what was now clear to be an old temple of the Wolf and Raven Clans. Captain Piso, Lieutenant Sorus, and Talvus began discussions on whether or not the six delayed explosives we had would get us through the stone doors. Our other option would be to send a team through a side passage, who would have to navigate a series of challenges devised to test the worthiness of Wolf and Raven Clan warriors in a coming-of-age ceremony. I was called over by Talvus to offer my opinion, as I had seen the delayed explosives detonate twice. I was utterly useless in this task, as I could not deduce the thickness of the doors nor had I seen the explosives act against stone, and I did not wish to give a false answer solely to appear more intelligent. Unable to offer anything else, I suggested that a team be sent through the smaller door, then if the team failed to prove themselves capable of the same feats as worthy Wolf-or-Raven Clan warriors, the explosives be used as a second resort.

Captain Piso agreed, and appointed Corporal Tyrol to lead the team for his knowledge of traps, Corporal Maxim for his cleverness and the strength of his shield, Talvus for his expertise and arcane mastery, and myself I suspect because I am small, fast, and good at climbing things, despite my status within the unit. He gave us explicit instructions to turn around if we encountered any dangers severe enough to threaten our lives. I was rather grateful that the composition of the group was one with a rather narrow definition of ‘severe enough to threaten our lives,’ thus we proceeded through the door and down a small, roughly stone-hewn corridor to face the challenges.

The first room was a corridor perhaps thirty feet long with tiled floor, the tiles about a foot square, with orcish writing in black and white on each of them. Corporal Tyrol carefully put pressure on one in the first row, and a spear shot out of a hole in the wall. Upon closer inspection, the walls were covered in these holes. As none of us spoke or read orcish, there was little hope of us solving the puzzle in a reasonable amount of time, so Corporal Tyrol took off running across the floor, dodging what traps he triggered. I ran after him, using as much as I could from his run to plot my own path. Corporal Maxim made use of the strength of his shield. Talvus cast a protecting spell on himself, closed his eyes, and ran as fast as he could straight down the center.

The second room contained a single ornate set of scales aligned against the back wall, which Talvus identified as having some sort of magic on them, and an inscription in orcish above them, which once more did us no good. There was a locked door beside the scales. Talvus noted that he had a delayed explosive on him, and suggested it as a way to get through the door and circumvent the puzzle entirely, but I cautioned against this plan, as if we failed the challenges, Captain Piso may have had need of all six explosives to get through the stone doors. After a moment’s inspection of the scales, Talvus said that he could remove the magic, but that there was a mechanical aspect to the contraption; so Corporal Maxim and I smashed through the wall behind and I fiddled with some of the gears there, grateful for my experience fixing the mill of Stonemill Keep as you had assigned me to for familiarizing me with such workings, and Corporal Tyrol and Corporal Maxim were able to pry open the door.

The third room consisted of a giant pit, with spiked stone at the bottom, perhaps forty feet across, thirty feet wide, and a little more than thirty feet to the bottom. I threw down a rock, but it triggered no traps. We had a single rope between all of us, just long enough to reach the floor of the pit, and started arguing as to whether or not we should simply climb down and up the sides, trusting the ability of one to stand and hold the rope each way, or if we should turn back and admit defeat. This argument was just starting to get heated when I asked Talvus whether or not he knew the needle for the feather-fall effect, and he said something along the lines of “huh, I do,” and cast it on all of us, and we jumped down safely.

We indeed triggered no traps and picked our way across the floor without difficulty, as the stone spikes were only particularly dangerous to anyone falling. On the other side, Corporal Maxim pointed out a handhold that he spotted—perhaps a remnant of the mechanism meant to solve this challenge instead of literally resorting to scaling the walls—but lo and behold, I had absolutely no trouble literally scaling the wall. Supporting Corporal Maxim’s weight on the rope was a bit more of a challenge, but after a failed attempt I asked Talvus if he might be able to make me heavier, that I could be a better counterbalance, and he summoned me an ape. This worked to get Corporal Maxim up. It did not work to get Talvus up, although the problem was not on our end, to phrase it generously. I asked Talvus if he would like to simply tie himself to the rope and have Dante and I haul him up, and he readily agreed to this offer; he was quite lucky that while this had been a joke, it had not been a bluff about the combined strength of Corporal Maxim and myself. Tyrol climbed the rope like a normal person.

We proceeded through the door at the end of the room and discovered that we had completed all of the challenges, we were officially worthy adult warriors or whatever that was supposed to be a test of for the Wolf and Raven clans, and more importantly, we could now open the barred stone doors from within. Before making our way into what was clear now to be a second antechamber, I requested that the others wait out of sight and Talvus turn me invisible first, lest the Heretic Raven had set anyone to watch the entrance of their hideaway. None stopped me as I lifted the thick stone bars from the doors. Captain Piso and the rest of the Unbroken filed into the room, then there was a final set of doors before what I assumed had to be the ancient temple proper. Talvus and Lieutenant Sorus checked the doors for magical traps and found none; then I volunteered to open the doors in case there was an ambush waiting on the other side, as I was still invisible.

No ambush awaited us, at least none that I could see, although the chamber was large, cavernous even, and the only lighting was what spilled through the doors from behind me. The darkness towards the edges and to where the ceiling tapered in the back could not have hidden any significant force, which I reported back to Captain Piso. “Then we move,” he said.

As the Unbroken filtered into the room, they brought torches, and light revealed what the darkness had hidden. There were large pillars in what was indeed the back of the cavern, perhaps twenty-five feet tall, with great statues of a wolf and a raven perched atop them. There were religious ornamentations upon the walls, some metal and silverwork instead of just stone. There was a figure sitting at the foot of the two pillars, and she turned and pushed to her feet with slow movements that bespoke a confidence: Anye the Huntress, the foster child of the Raven Clan raised within the Wolf Clan, and daughter of both, covered in warpaint across her face and her bared arms and holding the scythe which had caused me such injury.

The moment she saw us she charged us, screaming; and she targeted Captain Piso in particular. I sidestepped her charge and took a flanking position behind her as the one last advantage my invisibility could offer, then in the resulting melee I delivered first a blow to the base of her spine which brought her to her knees, her back sliced open to the point in which bone was showing, yet she did not let up in her assault on Captain Piso.

So I beheaded her, screaming, as she knelt before me. Then there was silence.

We turned back to the rest of the room to see if perhaps there were any more members of the Heretic Raven’s company that might have an opinion on what had just transpired, but we were alone in the room. I caught it first, a glint of light, a faint greenish blue that flickered to red, from the eyes of the statue of the Raven, then of the Wolf. Then there was a surge of light and motion, a torrent of glowing blue-gray from burst like a waterfall from each of the pillars and wove around one another before striking the ground. I had just enough time to realize that this was perhaps the most obvious trap we could have walked into, that there was almost certainly some sort of spirit-curse on this place against spilling Wolf or Raven Clan blood in the temple of the Wolf and the Raven, when the ancient spirit-curse on the temple of the Wolf and the Raven roared fully to life, a strong wind began to blow seemingly from nowhere, mist poured from the back wall, and a massive Wolf, seven feet to the shoulder composed of the mist and the glowing gray light, stepped forward, and a Raven of similar form, perhaps three times the size of a normal bird, landed next to it.

The Unbroken readied their blades as the mist steadily advanced across the room towards us, some holding their positions defensively, and some (Dante. Just Dante.) already leaping forward into a charge. I caught Talvus’s eye. “Let’s see if they burn,” I shouted. He understood immediately, and cracked one of the delayed explosives, and threw it deep into the mist. Heat and sound rolled over us as it detonated, and the mist was pushed back, and with it the Wolf, bits of smoke whipping from it as the force rolled over it. There was a growl, seemingly emanating from the entirety of the mist and echoing across the high-ceilinged chamber, and I buckled at the knees. Then the Raven took flight, and the mist pushed forward again, continuing to spread until it filled the room.

I ignored the manifestations of the Wolf and the Raven, and ran straight for the pillars across the temple. I tried to climb one, and got about halfway up before the stone was too smooth to continue. I shimmied down and shouted for Talvus, then the Raven cawed and the world went black. I could still feel the pillar behind me, and hear the clashing of weapons against stone and metal and the screams of Caedic soldiers echoing throughout the room, so I held my position and waited. In a few moments, I blinked and could suddenly see again, not that it did me much good: the entire room was so full of mist that I could not perceive anything more than six or seven feet ahead of me. Talvus must have heard my shouts, because he appeared, and I asked him to cast the same spell he had prepared for Salo and Corporal Laenas to scale the walls during the assault on Stonemill Keep. With the help of his magic, I was able to reach the top of the pillar easily, and found myself face to face with a stone carving of a raven. There were no gemstones in its eyes, as I had initially assumed when I had seen the gleam of light from across the room, but I nonetheless brought the hilt of my dagger down across it. The Raven-spirit screeched, and I could feel the wind of its wings across my back, the press of its mind into my own, then I could only think one thing, my body moving in obedience of its own accord: to fall.

I landed on my back and it knocked the wind out of me, but nothing seemed to be broken. I shouted for Talvus, because it was clear that the Raven did not want me to harm its effigy, and Talvus had delayed explosives on him that would do a bit more damage than the hilt of a dagger; but he did not appear from the mist. Captain Piso shouted for all of the Unbroken to retreat, but I could not give up, I scaled the pillar a second time and I smashed my dagger one more time into the crack, widening it. This time teeth materialized from the mist and latched around one of my ankles and I was pulled from the pillar, hurled once more to the ground. As it was evident that I would not be able to destroy the thing with my dagger alone before the spirits in the mist killed me, I retreated, joining the rest of the Unbroken in the second antechamber.

The mist was nowhere near as strong, and I caught sight of Captain Piso immediately. I rushed over to him, and begged him to give me a delayed explosive, to let me run back and destroy the pillars and end this. He told me not to make assumptions that would cause troops to die. I protested that none of his troops would be at risk, that only I need return, but with fury in his voice he snapped “Yes,” then pushed past me in clear dismissal.

I was—I had been right, we would later see the Raven’s eye was cracked just as I had cracked the stone, we were right there, we could have destroyed those statues, and then—it doesn’t matter, it didn’t matter, I would have never made it to the statues or even if I had it wouldn’t have helped what came next because if anything I did could have mattered we wouldn’t have been in the situation in the first place, but—but I had been right. I could have ended them. I can run fast and I’m good at climbing and that’s all we needed. I could have tried.

There were teeth within the mist, snapping at us as we retreated to the first antechamber, then I could see nothing at all as the Raven-spirit pushed once more into my mind. First I was suspended in a memory of you shouting at me for losing my head in a fight, then it shifted, and I was suspended in the moment of my—in the moment I received my injury, back at the foundry, except instead of blacking out as I did then, the pain stretched on as I stared at the blade sticking out of my torso, burning through my back and my lungs as did the knowledge that I had failed our mission, failed Arcadia—but it snapped me back to something closer to myself, as I knew you had trained me to be stronger than this, better than this, and with pain came clarity. I pushed through the pressure of the false despair to open my eyes once more. The mist was pouring closer to the second antechamber, and the line of soldiers to my left and right covering the retreat of the rest were doing little better than I had been moments prior. In a burst of both inspiration and strength, I leapt forward and pulled the massive stone doors closed. My injury flared from the exertion, and I blacked out.

When I came to perhaps a few seconds later, it was to shouts from the single spiral staircase that one by one the 8th had begun evacuating down: there were enemy troops lying in wait, cutting off our only exit. In the desperation, I forgot my rank, and shouted out of turn at Talvus to throw one of the delayed explosives down the stairwell, cutting off our enemies below, and another on the wall of sheet-thin stone, to give us a new method of escape—but I suppose protocol was not on Captain Piso’s mind as he helped the last of the soldiers clear the stairwell, then motioned at Talvus to do as I said. We gathered as far from the opposite wall as we could, set up another near the thinnest stone, and it detonated, but it was not quite enough to open a route of escape. Lieutenant Sorus did not hesitate, he cracked and threw another, and with that the entire wall blew out. The mist was starting to breach through the stone doors, so the moment that the smoke cleared to reveal a gaping hole into the ravine outside, the entire unit sprang forward, and ran out.

They descended on us like a jaguar from its perch onto its prey, they were waiting for us in the hills above, forty Wolf Clan orcs, perhaps more, and the Heretic Raven and their entire remaining crew of warriors. It all happened so fast, we were outnumbered, outflanked. I could barely see what befell the others, as I was cornered against one of the stony walls by two Wolf Clan orcs, both blindfolded. They slipped past my initial blows, dodging almost as if by accident, as their footing was uncertain from the charge down the hillside, then one buried their axe in my shoulder and the other swung past me, embedding his axe in a chunk of rock behind me; and when pulling it loose, slammed the rock into my other shoulder, opening a gash and jolting the bone that had been shattered mere days prior, nearly causing me to drop my weapon. I swung once more, but I could not for the life of me hit them, and despite employing the best defenses I knew, one after another after another their blows hit me.

The rest of the Unbroken were doing little better. It was chaos, but I caught what little was happening near me. Tyrol was frozen in place by magical means, trembling as the Heretic Raven’s Rat Clan shaman held a single hand to his chest, slowly rotting his very flesh. Lieutenant Sorus was sketching one needle after another into the air, but every time he would try to thread it, the Heretic Raven’s Salamander Clan mage would snap her fingers, and the needle would collapse. Second Lieutenant Vitan was being buried in vines by the Heretic Raven’s witch. And Talvus—the Heretic Raven’s Bear Clan orc, called just the Bear, as in his war-garb, there seemed to be very little difference—was holding him up, several feet off the ground, by his throat alone. He had ceased struggling.

It all—it all happened so fast. Corporal Maxim charged the Rat Clan shaman, who lost his concentration, freeing Tyrol. Tyrol threw a knife, which hit one of the blindfolded orcs, who let out a shout, then like a spell had been broken, all of my attacks were hitting. They both blindly swung, and blindly missed.

I didn’t pause to think, I didn’t—I tore through them, straight towards Talvus. I know that I—I threw myself at the Bear, I think that Tyrol was attacking him too somewhere in there, I don’t—I think I might have gotten hit, I remember blacking out for a few moments, I think that I was on the ground, I have the vaguest memory of a medic standing over me, or maybe I got back up on my own, I just know that I threw myself at the Bear again and this time caught him under the arm, ripping open and up through his side and forcing him to drop Talvus, I slipped under the blow that he returned, and as he turned to—Tyrol must have been there, because he turned to hit Tyrol, I cut once through his gut, another across the back of both of his legs, ripping tendons, dropping him to his knees, and a final slash across his throat, and he collapsed.

Talvus was breathing. He was still breathing. He had no wounds on his person, it had just been—he had only been choked, but he was still breathing. I reached into his pocket, the one on the left side, because he always keeps a healing potion on his person, and sure enough it was there. I hesitated for perhaps half a second—across the field, Second Lieutenant Tarquin was bleeding from a severe wound to the gut, cornered by three heavily armed Wolf Clan orcs, her bow snapped in two; Lieutenant Sorus was trapped in a cage of the Salamander Clan mage’s fire, burning alive; Captain Piso was holding off the spirits of the Wolf and the Raven alone behind us all, and he was bleeding heavily—to any one of them, it could have been the difference between life and death, or I could have taken the potion myself and re-entered the fight—but they were far from me, and to leave Talvus’s side would have been to risk his life, and all I could think of was not here, not today, I could not lose Talvus, not like this, no, no no.

I poured the potion into his mouth, and he coughed himself awake. The battle was practically over, Wolf Clan forces were mopping up the last of us. Lieutenant Sorus was still alive, although barely, Second Lieutenant Tarquin was still alive, Captain Piso was still alive, and Corporal Maxim, Corporal Tyrol, Corporal Doraius, and Second Lieutenant Vitan had rallied and were fighting still—but Talvus was—there was a weak point in the chaos, as even as Talvus indicated it to me, I was running forward, clearing the way as he kept close behind me. I caught sight of one or two other Caedic soldiers ahead of us fleeing as well, but they were cut down by Wolf Clan warriors waiting past the treeline. Still, we ran.

Perhaps twenty feet from the battle, and into the woods, Corporal Maxim, Corporal Tyrol, Corporal Doraius, and Second Lieutenant Vitan had begun their own retreat, and we attached ourselves to their party. We ran, we all ran, with no direction in mind but the single directive: to get as far from the battle as possible. To run was to survive. And even when we could run no longer we kept going, as fast as we could, we kept going until our wounds caught up with us and we were forced to stop in a clearing for breath.

I…I think I must have been babbling at that point, to Talvus, that we needed—we needed to keep moving, we needed to cover our tracks, we needed to go back to the camp of the Unbroken because Talvus had left his research there, and I know I said at least that part out loud because Talvus tapped his forehead, said his research was all in there, but it wasn’t enough because he had written notes that could have fallen into enemy hands, or if—if Captain Piso kept notes or orders from Cloudfall or just—I didn’t—I couldn’t think. I think I fell silent eventually, or maybe none of this had been happening out loud, but I know that—I’ll never forget how we all just sat there, speechless, staring blankly into space, as it all sunk in. We were the last of the Unbroken. We were all that was left.

Eventually, Second Lieutenant Vitan addressed the rest of us: “Alright. The Private’s right. We need to keep moving, cover our tracks. Right now, it doesn’t matter where we’re going, we need to get further away from here. They’re going to be looking for us.”

I…I spoke again, even though it was out of turn, that if we were looking for a place to spend the night, the two obvious places we would head to would be to Cloudfall, because it was safe, we could find shelter and food and medical supplies and other Caedic forces, or our own abandoned camp if only because we still had the food and medical supplies there as well as the Stag Clan war camp nearby, which means that those are the two places that they would search for us along the trails out so perhaps we’d want to head in some other direction.

We would travel over land, we’ll head for Cloudfall, Second Lieutenant Vitan said. That we needed to make a report as soon as possible, although for the moment, the most important thing was putting more distance between us and them.

In which I…I didn’t stop talking, I said I still thought that Cloudfall was a bad idea, that it was the logical place for Wolf Clan to go to cut us off, and even as Vitan said that there were too many routes through the woods, nowhere reliable that they could could cut us off as long as we kept away from the main roads, that it didn’t matter, we needed to start moving—I tried to say that we didn’t know how they’d been tracking us and it took her shouting “PRIVATE, SHUT UP” for me to finally….to finally just stop and do my job.

Tyrol and I looped back and covered the tracks leading up to the clearing where we’d been sitting, while everyone else gathered themselves; Corporal Maxim had been bleeding fairly severely to a wound to his foot, and it was bound so that he could both keep walking, and would travel without leaving a trail. Then we all set out, Tyrol in the lead and plotting the path as I obscured what evidence we left from behind.

Talvus lingered towards the back of the party, and after a minute of collecting his thoughts, spoke: that he did not understand, although he was down for most of the fight, how the enemy forces were able to bring down Lieutenant Sorus.

Their Salamander Clan mage was counterspelling him, I told Talvus, spell for spell, he would drawn the needle and she would snap her fingers and destroy it, which is—which should have been impossible, from what Talvus had taught me so far about arcane interactions, and I expressed such. Talvus confirmed that counterspelling was exactly as difficult as I had assumed it to be: either she would have to know exactly the needle that Lieutenant Sorus was casting as he was casting it to know where it was most vulnerable to disruption, or she could have been trying to employ more general counterspelling tactics, but against a caster of the caliber of Lieutenant Sorus they would have failed entirely.

And she was doing it from across the hill, I said.

And she doesn’t know Caedic casting, Talvus said.

We both paused in silence for a minute.

Then Talvus realized what we all should have realized days prior, as all the little details had been adding up: they had not been spying on us. They had not needed to, they had never needed to, they did not merely know our actions, but knew the decisions that we had not yet even known—in the assault on the Rat Clan hideaway, that Piso would move the attack to the next morning; in the ambush against the Traitor, that Piso would bring the 8th to flank on both sides of the road, and precisely where the Traitor would flee down the hill, that the Heretic Raven might lie properly in wait; and in the fight we had just fled from, that we would think to blow out the thinnest wall and escape through the hillside. There was prophecy at play, not divination; true foresight of the future, the sort of thing beyond mere spellcasting. An exception to the rule. Even the blindfolded warriors—everything went exactly their way, Talvus said, that if someone had perfect foreknowledge, if they could arrange the situation down to the second, down to every last blow, they could just run the chances. Adjust it to precisely the one they wanted, just put on the trajectory such that everything goes exactly their way.

I know that this all sounds so—far fetched, like the madness of desperation, but it—it made sense, so much sense, as Talvus and I went back and forth, listing the growing evidence, filling in bits and pieces and gaps that had frustrated us so much but this—this could actually explain what—what had befallen us. The only question that remained was how were we alive, how did we make it out when no one else did? The other Caedic soldiers, the ones that made it away from the battle, they were cut down by Wolf Clan orcs, waiting in the woods for precisely where they would run. And when Talvus didn’t speak immediately, I continued, that I had fought two of those blindfolded orcs before I got over to him, and it was impossible to hit them, and they kept—that one of them, their weapon, went past my head, embedded itself in rock, and then the rock hit me, how readily they should have taken me down. To strike and not be struck, kill and not be killed, yet I was still standing.

“What did stop it?” Talvus asked. “You were fighting them, you said—“

Tyrol’s knife, I told him, and Tyrol had been in a sticky situation of his own, the Rat shaman of the Heretic Raven’s group had him in magical hold until…until Dante rushed over. And then I realized, again too late. These attacks on the Highland Caedic units that have been going on for the last six or so months, the final one would usually wipe down the unit to the very last man.

It sounds like it’s happened a couple of times, Talvus said.

Except for the ambush on Dante’s unit, in which, they were wiped down to Dante, I said. That the first patrol, on the first day, Dante, Tyrol, and myself had gone out, the supply train had just changed routes and we found a dead Caedic guard and Tyrol and for Stag Clan backup and Dante and I held the Heretic Raven and their warriors off long enough but it was—

“If you hadn’t been there,” Talvus said.

“Not only would the supply train wouldn’t have arrived — but also when Piso split us up into three groups, it was just the group that I was in, which was the group that Dante was in, that surprised the waiting orcs, and Dante wasn’t in the translation of the letter from the Rat Clan. Every single one of the leaders of the groups, every single notable warrior was listed out, as well as what group they were going to be in and their positioning, but Dante wasn’t in that letter.”

“Dante, what… when that fight started, the ambush, just now, what happened? Where were you?” Talvus said, as Dante had started to lag behind towards us.

“I was behind everyone, I came out of the hideout and saw everyone in their various struggles,” the Corporal said.

“But there was nothing waiting for you,” Talvus pressed.

And then I realized the final thing, the first thing, that I had missed. “The augury. With Tyrol, remember? The liver was missing from the rabbit.”

“I thought that was just a fucked-up rabbit,” Dante said, true to his original observation.

“Or, there’s something about your future that makes it impossible to see,” I said.

“Why me?” Dante asked.

“I don’t know,” Talvus said, “and right now, I don’t know if it matters, but it means that we might have a chance to do something about this. We can’t go back to Cloudfall.”

“It doesn’t work when there are big enough groups of people,” I said, echoing Talvus’s logic. “You couldn’t have shielded an entire unit—“

“But if there’s just a few people—“ Talvus said.

I quickly did the math. “There were thirteen soldiers besides you in the ambush where we surprised the Heretic Raven,” I said. “That has to be it, this has to be some kind of actual prophecy, and Dante can protect the people around him as long as it’s a small enough group of people.”

“Then why didn’t I protect my unit? The 22nd?” Dante asked.

I decided to excuse him for not keeping up, as Talvus and I had been speaking very fast, and over one another in our excitement. “Too many people,” we said simultaneously.

“Just like the ambush on the Unbroken,” Talvus finished.

“So why did you survive?” Dante asked.

“It would have been just you, except that then you interfered, with all of their perfect plans,” Talvus said.

“You helped Tyrol,” I said. “Who helped me, and it started a domino effect, because the things that are disrupted can disrupt further things. The effect has to stop somewhere and somewhen, or else we all would have been safe—but the people directly around you are shielded by it. Which means that even if we make it back safely to Cloudfall, they’d be able to see us there.”

“We have an opportunity here,” Talvus said. “We need to take it while they’re still dark, before they—it’s only a matter of time before they come to understand all this as well.”

“The Heretic Raven was there for both of the times Dante messed up their plans,” I pointed out. “The second one, the ambush against the Traitor, Dante grappled with them for nearly a minute before they got away, they certainly know his face.”

“They’re starting to figure it out then,” Talvus said.

“They would be stupid not to,” I said.

At this point, Second Lieutenant Vitan stopped walking, although she did not turn towards us. “Prophet, huh,” she said.

“Sounds like it might be,” Talvus said.

“Corporal Maxim, do you have any idea why they might not be able to see you? Anything that might have happened, anything that has—anything about your existence that might render you hidden?” she asked.

“I’m just a soldier in the Highlands, there’s nothing special about me,” Dante said.  

“Then we use the tool that we have,” the Second Lieutenant said. “Sergeant Zhale, I agree with you. We go back to Cloudfall, we may be giving up the small advantage that we’ve managed to gain for ourselves out of this disaster. We need to regroup, by ourselves, find a place to stay, and figure out what we’re going to do next. The worst case scenario is that they find us, they figure out what is going on, that they can locate us using conventional methods before we can take advantage of the situation. That means, Private, I agree with your earlier assessment, we need to prioritize keeping away from locations where they might be looking for us.”

The Rat Clan hideaway, I suggested. It was empty, there were beds there, it was defensible, and there were traps that we had disabled that we could set up again to make it safer.

Easy to stay hidden on the approach, too, Second Lieutenant Vitan said, and so we changed our course.  

It was less than an hour’s hike to the abandoned Rat Clan hideaway. Tyrol and I continued to cover our tracks most carefully, and prayed that would be enough. We found a room that was defensible. We set up what we could for a funeral. Stones, marking what would be graves for all who fell. Fires lit over tapers. Second Lieutenant Vitan spoke the prayer, then we cleaned it up, moved the stones back to where they were, so that no one would know we were there. We set a watch schedule. Second Lieutenant Vitan and Corporal Doraius healed what they could of the more critical wounds, then we went to sleep.

I dreamed. I only report it here because the ending was noteworthy. It was a familiar scene. From when I was fourteen, in the weeks after—after Peia. I was holed up in my room, it was late, but—but neither my parents nor my grandmother were worried about keeping their voices lowered, so I could overhear it all. The shouting that had become so much of a staple in my house, my grandmother that I should be sent to the army, and my parents that I wasn’t old enough. Except then—mist began to pour under my door, interrupting the memory, and I was woken for my watch just before it overtook me.

There was nothing of note in the hours I stood watch, and I fell into a dreamless sleep afterwards, then a little before dawn, Corporal Tyrol shook us awake: for he had seen a scout of the Wolf Clan nearby, and though they had not approached the hill directly, it was clear that we were no longer safe here. We arranged the room such that no trace of us remained, then we set out.

A low mist hung in the air as we made our way away from the Rat Clan hideaway and through the woods, once more moving just to be moving; and while the mist itself was not abnormal, as the climate in the Highlands lent itself to morning fog, the sun did not burn it away. There was a strange whistling of the wind, then solid smoke jaws manifested in thin air and clamped down on Dante’s arm, as the Wolf-spirit and Raven-spirit had found us, and the fighting began in full. I shouted to Talvus that he might try to dispel the mist with wind, but it was too heavy, so we resorted to hitting them with swords until they went away. Towards the very end, the Raven-spirit once more entered my mind and moved my arms and my body, took from my pouch one of the two remaining delayed explosives that Talvus had trusted me with, and forced me to detonate it. Dante rushed over and kicked it from me before it could injure any of us, but the explosion was large enough to undoubtedly attract attention. We rallied together and finished off the Wolf and Raven spirits both, and the mist dissipated—at least temporarily. We were not so foolish to think that it would be so easy to break a blood-vengeance curse.

We started moving immediately; between the explosion and the howling of the Wolf, any scouts nearby would be alerted of our position. But the fight had given me hope: for across the Raven’s eye had been a large crack, the precise crack I had made in the stone of the statue, which indicated that there was a way to strike them at their core. I relayed this to the others, even as it was evident that it would be sure death to return to the original temple, as they were at their greatest power there. Corporal Doraius spoke, for he had studied Highland spirits, that they were all one, so that any effigy powerful enough of a Wolf and a Raven would do to destroy. We would need to locate alternative effigies; and we knew, at the very least, where we might find our first one.

It took us but an hour to get back to the camp of the Unbroken. We entered it somberly, as it was silent, untouched, everything precisely where it had been left the day prior by those who would never return. As the camp was situated in an abandoned Raven Clan village, there was a small building in the center, their shrine, which had remained sealed for the duration that the Unbroken had occupied the area. Talvus had one delayed explosive left; there was a brief discussion as to whether or not the speed of using such a device was worth the potential attention an explosion would draw, if Wolf Clan warriors were combing the woods nearby searching for us. As we had little other in alternatives for getting the door open, we placed the explosive at its foot, and piled rubble from the blown-out back of the medical building atop it to muffle the sound and flash, then Talvus triggered the explosive remotely. It worked as planned: the explosion was neither loud nor bright, yet the door was blasted open.

The building was fifteen, perhaps twenty feet across, and it was octagonal. The walls were decorated with small woodcarven objects, and there was a light breeze whirling throughout the room. There was a chain hanging down from the ceiling connected to what seemed fairly obviously to be a trap door, and Tyrol but walked to it and grabbed it before he started shaking and spasming, fell to the ground screaming, and scurried to the corner, pupils dilated and knife out. Talvus examined the chain without touching it and determined that there was a curse or spell of sorts, and that the more people who grabbed the chain at once, the more the load would be distributed and more likely all would be to resist it. Knowing that we could not risk Dante, the other four of us grabbed the chain and pulled together, and were able to successfully open the trapdoor and pull down the rope ladder without being effected so. We left Tyrol cowering in the corner, and we climbed.

The next chamber once more octagonal, but larger than the first, though it should not have been, as the building had tapered from outside. There was a heavy wind whirling throughout it, another hatch in the ceiling, six rectangular holes surrounding the hatch, and six stone ravens precisely the size necessary to be placed in the holes. Putting two and two together, we moved to place the statuettes in the holes above. Some provided more trouble than others: one started flying, although Corporal Maxim quickly stopped it from flying by throwing an axe at it. Corporal Doraius picked up what turned out to be an unnaturally heavy one. I spent a while chasing around one which had turned invisible, tossing sand in the wind until I could catch hints of where it was. Talvus worked steadily on one that had fallen to pieces on the ground, fitting the bits together as a puzzle. Second Lieutenant Vital held one up unflinchingly, even as her hand turned to stone. We finally had five of the six in the ceiling, despite a few mishaps along the way, but the sixth would invoke the one who picked it up to attack their nearest companion, as Corporal Doraius had discovered at the hands of Corporal Maxim the hard way. So I placed all of my weapons on the other side of the room, picked it up, and ignoring the telltale push into my brain as it had nothing to latch onto, placed it in the final slot.

The third room was the largest, it must have been twenty-five feet across, impossibly sized for the building we were in, and the wind here roared in nearly a cyclone. Small ritual objects had been lifted from their shelves in the windstorm, dangerous at the speed with which they could pelt us. There was a detailed carving in wood, perhaps two feet high, against one wall, and we knew that this was the effigy we sought. It was confirmed as the Raven-spirit screeched and dug into our minds; I saw blood trailing from Dante’s ears, and reached to feel a similar wetness along my own. Dante and I fought against the wind to make it to the statue. Corporal Doraius had instructed us precisely what to do: first, the effigy would need to be anointed with the blood of three Caedists, then cut with eleven strokes from ritual knives, and finally destroyed in a cleansing fire. Dante managed to get his blood on the effigy, then I mine; Talvus was pushed up against another wall, unable to make his way through the wind; as Second Lieutenant Vitan entered the room, the Raven-spirit manifested and swooped at her, cutting into her face, but she pushed past it, reached the wooden statue, and wiped one hand across her forehead then smeared it on the thing, completing the first step. We began to cut at it with ritual knives, and the manifestation of the Raven, seeing as it was not foiling our efforts, dove into the statue, and at once, the thing began to move. Talvus, having finally made his way across the room despite the wind, was standing nearest to it with his ritual knife; it mauled his back as it took off and began flying. I took the knife from Talvus and through the combined efforts of Dante and myself, we began to strike the thing, over and over, until Dante delivered the final blow and Talvus immediately shot a fire-spell from across the room saying, “alright, we’re doing this the fast way,” and as promised, the thing exploded into chunks of charcoal. The wind vanished instantly, the ritual objects that had been flying through the air clattered to the ground, and there was ringing silence.

The Raven was gone.

When we came down, Corporal Tyrol had recovered. We knew we had to leave quickly, as the original explosion, despite its muffling, had made noise. Upon my suggestion,  as it would already be clear that we had entered this camp from the lack of door on the Raven’s temple, we grabbed water, and rations, for we had not eaten since the morning of the day prior, and bandaged the worst of the injuries we had sustained with supplies from the medical building. We ate as we walked. Second Lieutenant Vitan knew of an abandoned Wolf Clan settlement, one of their initial homes before the Caedic Empire began expanding into the Highlands, and directed us, as we had no other places to start, that we begin to march towards it. We checked carefully upon entering the village for scouts, and found none, a sign that the Wolf Clan had not yet caught wind of what we were doing; a sign that we might still have a chance. There was a shrine in the center which appeared small enough that the Wolf’s manifestation inside might not kill us immediately, but large enough to contain an effigy suited to our purposes. We paused a moment as we realized that we did not have any more delayed explosives for the door; then Second Lieutenant Vitan simply wrenched them open, discovering that they were not locked. The shrine was one story, squat, and square. Inside, small carved objects lined the walls once more, and in the center, there was an intricately carved wolf’s mouth with sharp teeth and hinges and joints upon the thing, placed directly over a trap door. Having learned from our previous attempt in the Raven’s shrine, Talvus checked it for magic, and found none: this test was entirely physical in nature. I attempted to jam the mechanisms while Corporal Doraius reached into its mouth to pull the handle, and yet he could not budge it against the locked gears. I determined that the contraption would open only if the jaws were allowed to snap closed; so we tied a rope to the handle, and pulled upwards, sparing any of our party from being forced to sacrifice a hand that we might go forwards.

The second chamber I assumed was larger, although we could not quite make out the walls in the slowly drifting mist. In the center, there was another rectangular hatch, this one with four large levers built into its base, each perhaps two feet tall and with large metal rings looped through the top. We explored the room and quickly found the walls: at the center were large hooks attached to a chain that disappeared into the base of platforms atop which were life-sized stone statues of wolves. Considering the prior challenges we had faced, and the fact that we were not fighting the stone wolves right then, I hypothesized aloud that the statues would come alive and attack us when the levers were pulled, and the entrance to the next chamber would only open when all four were down. Second Lieutenant Vitan agreed, and asked Corporal Doraius to stand guard by the furthest statue while Corporal Maxim and I together hauled the hook next to it. It took us significant effort to drag the hook across the room, and the moment we attached it to the lever, the lever was pulled down by the pressure, and the stone wolf indeed came to life. Talvus and Second Lieutenant Vitan attempted to pull one of the other chains, and it became evident that they did not have the strength to do so, so Corporal Maxim and I took care of the remaining three chains together as fast as we could rather than waste time engaging with the wolves, while the others protected themselves. As soon as the fourth lever was pulled, the wolves froze, and the trapdoor opened, and so we descended.

The third chamber was filled with a mist so thick we could not see but a few inches from our faces. The floor was dirt, and there was a howl that echoed through the air almost as if we were outside. I suggested that we split into three groups, walk until we hit a wall, and proceed to all walk sunwise, that we might methodically search our surroundings. As the attacks of the Wolf so far had been physically skewed, we broke such that one heavy warrior was in each of the three teams: Corporal Doraius with Talvus, Corporal Maxim with Corporal Tyrol, and myself with Second Lieutenant Vitan, with the three ritual daggers distributed evenly amongst us. Then we all set out in our separate directions to search the room. Second Lieutenant Vitan and I reached a wall after perhaps thirty feet, and even as we began to walk along it, we heard a resounding howl and a shout. We circled faster, and soon enough, we came across Corporal Maxim and Corporal Tyrol, fighting a manifestation of the Wolf, and behind them was a statue of a wolf carved out of bones that had been bound together, and on it already stains of both Corporal Maxim’s and Corporal Tyrol’s blood. I ran forward, dagger in hand, to add my own blood to the mix. We began to cut the thing as quickly as we could, even as Corporal Maxim stood strong to hold off the Wolf, but it did not leap into the statue, and as we were not forced to chase a moving target, we were able to swiftly finish delivering the final blows. Yet Talvus and Corporal Doraius did not appear from the mist, leaving us no sorcerous manner to set the thing on fire. Corporal Tyrol was trying to get at it with flint and steel, but it would not light; I suggested he pull out his rope, wrap it around the base, and see if he could get that to catch. The manifestation of the Wolf had pinned Corporal Maxim to the ground, and Second Lieutenant Vitan was trying desperately to get it off one him; I threw myself into the fight, protecting Corporal Tyrol’s actions, and the Wolf bit deeply into my leg for my trouble. It roared and we all fell prone to the ground, but I forced myself up once more, as Corporal Tyrol had not get gotten the thing to catch.

We fought, and we fought, and we fought, Second Lieutenant Vitan barely keeping us all standing, until there was the light of fire from behind us. I turned, and the effigy was burning, then the Wolf lunged at the Second Lieutenant and brought her to the ground and I could wait no longer, I swung both my blades into the bone and it splintered beneath my blow, a great howl echoed across the expanse and dozens of jaws and teeth erupted out of the mist at all of us, and then it all abruptly disappeared. We were in a small underground chamber, and Corporal Doraius and Talvus were wandering, confused, at the other end of it. They quickly hurried over, Corporal Doraius to offer us all his healing abilities, as the fight with the Wolf had gone long and bloody. I am not sure how we all remained standing at that point, just that desperation had long since sharpened the pain into something that could keep me on my feet.

We climbed back to the ground floor, and Dante and I immediately caught sight of movement before we exited the temple. There was an orc, in Wolf Clan shaman garb, walking across the village with scrolls in his arms, who appeared the be alone. We had not yet been seen. We quietly pointed him out to Second Lieutenant Vitan, and she told us “Take him, keep him alive.” We needed no more direction to spring into action, and we moved, two as one: I swept out the orc’s legs with one of my blades, Dante slammed the flat of his axe’s blade across his face, I brought the hilt of my other scimitar up to break his nose, and Dante slammed him with his shield directly in the face, undoubtedly breaking his cheekbone and knocking him from his knees to the ground, unconscious. Second Lieutenant Vitan stalked forward, radiating a combination of fury and satisfaction. Dante and I moved to each shoulder of the fallen shaman, pinning him, as Second Lieutenant Vitan took Corporal Doraius’s waterskin and splashed its contents across his face, forcing him back into consciousness. The Second Lieutenant grinned. “I have something I would like to try, that I’ve been working on,” she said. And then brought both hands down, glowing with a dark red energy, one to his forehead and another over his heart, and they began to sink within the skin, the energy gathering and shifting and shapes began to flicker in the red mist that had formed above where she had reached into him, shapes that Second Lieutenant Vitan’s eyes followed even as ours could not. Then she released both of her hands, pulled her ritual knife, and sunk it straight into his heart, and he sputtered and died.

She turned and stood, facing the woods. “We have them. This way. The current Wolf Clan camp,” she said.

“Do we want to get Stag Clan backup? Or Caedic backup?” I asked. After all, we knew Dante could shield up to thirteen besides himself, and there were only five of us.

“No, too big of a group,” Second Lieutenant Vitan said. “We press our advantage. We’re ending this.”

We began to walk, swiftly, quietly, and I was grateful for it, grateful that we were not going to seek help, because I was clinging to the last dregs of my own energy, and I needed to move to stay on my feet. Talvus moved next to me. “She—she ripped his bloodline out of his blood and looked at it,” he said. “She found his next of kin.” He looked equal parts impressed and terrified.

Another game-changer for the war in the Highlands, if we were to survive.

We kept walking.

The location that Second Lieutenant Vitan had discerned was not terribly far away, and we reached it close to when the sun was falling, the deep orange illuminating everything and the shadows cast long. There was a wooded ridge looking down upon it, and we remained hidden within the treeline, looking down. It was clearly a nomadic camp, consisting mostly of tents, although there were some other constructed temporary structures. The most notable of these structures was a sod building, with a pair of orcs standing guard outside its doors. There were three other orcs visible sitting around a campfire on the other end of the camp, although undoubtedly more within. Considering that we had but one chance, and this building seemed most likely to hold what we sought, we moved with speed and with silence: Corporal Tyrol and myself approached the two guards from behind, and killed them before they could make noise. We dragged their bodies from sight, and entered the building.

The first room appeared to be some sort of antechamber, or perhaps a waiting room, with a small hallway and door that opened on the other side. We had gotten but a foot into the room when the door opposite to us opened, and for a moment I caught sight of greens and browns and perhaps what looked like a person sitting inside, before the Heretic Raven stepped out, looking just as surprised as we were to suddenly run into them, before their face schooled into a deadly determination. They kicked the door closed behind them even as I was leaping into action, desperately trying to get to them before they could make a noise, but they let forth a great whooping battle cry that must have rang like an alarm through the entire camp, dropped the cloth covering their double-ended sword, and planted their feet. When they spoke, they spoke in Caedic,

“I won’t let you through.”

“Then die,” I spat back at them. Corporal Doraius, Corporal Tyrol, Second Lieutenant Vitan, and Talvus took to the door to hold off what would now be the entire camp of Wolf Clan warriors, and Dante and I stepped forward to face the Heretic Raven for the last time.

I drew first blood, drawing my blade down their left arm, through the remnant stolen Caedic sleeve that they still wore in spite. Dante followed quickly behind me with his axe. The Heretic Raven swung at both of us, but we held our ground. There were two of us, one of them, we could win this fight if we fought carefully, smartly. And then their footwork changed, their grip on their blade changed, they threw their arms open and snarled, “Come and get me,” leaving themselves fully undefended as they launched the most ferocious offense I have ever witnessed.

I slipped behind them, opening huge cuts across their front and their back as I secured myself in a flanking position, but took a deep cut into my side from their suicidal counterattack. Dante slammed into them with his shield and must have broken one of their ribs from the force of the blow, following it by driving his axe into their gut, and took a sharp strike as well for his trouble. It was clear at this point that the Heretic Raven was not fighting to win, they were fighting to take us down with them by any means necessary.

From behind us, Talvus wove something into the air, and pushed power through the needle and into our weapons. Never once did our concentration falter, as the stakes of what we were fighting for was ever apparent: those behind us would only be able to hold off Wolf Clan for so long, and if we could not prevail and kill the Wolf of Ears Eyes and Hands before they fell, all would be lost. I launched myself forward into an attack, and one of ends of their blade caught me in the side, cutting through deeply. Dante swung down with his axe, cutting their off-arm through clearly at the elbow, but they were already driving the other end of their blade through the center of his torso, impaling him, and ripping it out. Blood and viscera began to spill from the wound, and I alone remained standing even as I screamed, whipped one scimitar across their upper torso, and drove the other straight through their heart.

I kicked them to the ground as I drew my sword from their chest, and they laid there, in a pool of their own blood.

Thus fell Thrang, deserter of Raven Legion, traitor to the Empire and bane of the Highlands. They fought relentlessly and furiously to the very end; never once did they hesitate, never once did the fear of death enter their eyes. I feel a great respect for them, for that; that I do not feel shame of. They fought as I would have fought, they died as I would have died, had our places been reversed. Their blood has been spilled for glory of Empire, and so they are gone.

I shouted for healing, and Corporal Doraius ran towards us, pressing his hands against Dante’s wound even as exhausted as he was, and warned us that he may not be able to cast again. Still, Dante began to stir, then he stood. We had both survived. “Let’s see if we can end this,” I said.  

Talvus, Dante and I pushed through the door and into the next room. It was furnished like a bedroom, a small cot, a table, cloth in dark greens and browns. There was velum scattered across the table and pinned to the wall above it, and drawings in charcoal, and a woman-orc sitting calmly, facing us. She was young, or at least she wasn’t old, in her thirties, perhaps her early forties. She crossed her arms and stood as she looked at us, and her eyes focused in on Dante first.

“You,” she said. “You’re the hole, the piece that is missing. I—I see now, you are the one who will bring it down on us, the servant of the servant, born from death, born from death!”

Then she looked at myself and Talvus, and her expression shifted from disgust to pity to horror.

“Y—you,” she said. “What is this future that…you—you want it? You seek it? What kind of—no, no, get away!”

She pulled out a small knife. I pulled forth my scimitars and leapt forward. “Get away, anyone but you,” she said, her last words as I drew both blades across her throat and blood rained down, soaking through the entire top of her shirt. The knife slipped from her hand, and she collapsed to the floor.

I turned to Talvus, and I told him to grab the papers on the walls and on her desk. If we survived this, they could be useful to the Caedic forces, so I believed. Then I returned through the door to support the others, and fight to the death if we so needed to, for at least our mission had been accomplished and the prophetess was dead. I was met with the sight: Second Lieutenant Vitan, knife in hand, fell upon a Wolf Clan orc, and stabbed them over, and over, and over, blood splattering against her face. Corporal Doraius was frantically bandaging Corporal Tyrol in a corner. And then there were just—eight corpses of Wolf Clan warriors on the ground, and none standing.

“Is it done?” Second Lieutenant Vitan asked.

“Whatever prophet they had, we killed her,” I told her. “Talvus is gathering all the pages with writing on them now.”

She nodded. “Then it’s done. Let’s get back to Cloudfall, and report what happened.”

I saluted and then I passed out face first on the ground.

I came to not much longer afterwards, as Corporal Doraius was still bandaging Tyrol on the ground, and I pushed myself up, despite what strain fighting had placed on my injury that I had not realized, or the new injuries that still bled. It was not an easy march back to Cloudfall, not when Tyrol could barely walk. We arrived well past when the sun had set. Second Lieutenant Vitan gave her report immediately. Talvus, Dante, and I gave a short report of finding the orc prophetess and killing her. We received medical attention from the infirmary at Cloudfall. And then it was over, we were given cots, and told to try to sleep.

There are many thoughts—too many thoughts—that tear through my mind. What the prophetess said, what she saw—Talvus and I had the chance to glance over the papers what we gathered before we handed them in at Cloudfall. There were many to be expected—of blindfolded orcs; of the large wooden cover of the door and trap that I walked into in the Rat Clan hideaway; the runes of the delayed explosive; the animals attacking the camp of the Unbroken; and of the Traitor fleeing down the hill from the road directly into the ambush. Some that I didn’t understand: a woman with a tattoo on her jaw; a severed finger and three severed ears, two human and one elf, on a string; a head that looked like a circle had been cut clean through and around it, then stitched back together; a strange symbol almost like an eye, but abstractified; cockroaches crawling everywhere, one top of one another, in a great pile; someone in full armor with flames emanating from behind them; three hearts woven together in the veins above, dripping blood. There was one of—it looked like a map of the Caedic Empire, but as if a good portion of Serae was swallowed by the sea. Then there was—another symbol, this one like a triangle, but it curled inwards, or perhaps outwards. It was in four of the charcoal drawings total, some of them—darker, like the implement was driven into the paper, one in shadow and smudged such that it almost looked like a great serpent rising from the mist. I have attached a sketch of the original symbol, and it—I had seen it a single place before in her drawings. After the death of Black-Eye Sadbh, Captain Piso had taken a fairly severe cut to his back, and was being seen to by a medic, and I noticed upon his left shoulder what was…not a tattoo, but certainly not a scar or a brand, of precisely the same symbol, such that its outermost edge and point was directed towards his spine. I don’t know what it means, I don’t—I don’t know who to ask. I do not wish to disrespect one who lived and died in service of the Empire as Captain Piso did. We handed the papers over with no comment on any of this.

There is more. More that I almost fear to write. Four drawings in particular that were amongst those that we collected. One was of a cup, of carefully burnished gold with mosaic-like patterns carved into it, filled nearly to the brim with—with what I knew was supposed to be blood, bright and glowing; and two of a man, the same man, with sharp but wide features, dark hair, and burning golden eyes—the only color in any of the drawings was the gold of his eyes. I had seen both the chalice and the man before, in a dream, months ago. I did not—I do not believe that these drawings need be specific to me, it was—the dream was a strange one, one that I had when I was very near death, and I am not sure if it was meant for me to see at all. The final picture was unmistakable, though. An explosion, a column of fire through the sharp shadows of the trees cast, the last and only thing I had caught sight of between being struck down at the foundry, as I was being dragged off by the Surrian guards, before I fell fully unconscious. Arcadia was already unconscious at the time, and the four Surrian guards are dead, I am the only one left alive who could have seen that sight, and perhaps the only one who saw it in the first place, as its perspective matched exactly that of my memories. That vision was mine, and mine alone, yet it was pinned to the prophetess’s wall with all the rest.

I do not know that these images mean, or why, amongst all the things the prophetess could have seen and drawn, there were four that would pertain directly to me. I can only feel, considering both the pictures and her reaction to me when we faced her, that if she had known who I was, that I had been in the Highlands from the beginning, this—this is one more reason that I should have been dead. I have not spoken to anyone of any of this, for I have a—a feeling, one that I cannot shake. I do not know what I fear, only that I fear it. I do not want to—I do not know what series of events speaking of the dreams or images might bring, or if it might trigger such a thing at all, but there are forces well beyond my present comprehension at play here and I hesitate to make a move in a game in which I understand neither the rules nor the consequences. I—I sound as if I have gone mad, I know I sound as if I have gone mad, but we have spent the last week and a half fighting against an enemy who knew our every move before we made it, before we even thought it, and I cannot stop looking over my shoulder, I cannot—I cannot convince myself it is over. I cannot—I cannot sleep, I keep seeing mist, and the faces of the Unbroken, of Anye’s head hitting the ground before I called down the curse on all of us, of Talvus hanging in the air, choking, of—of the bodies lying lifeless on the ground as we just ran. The Wolf of Ears Eyes and Hands is dead, the Heretic Raven is dead, the spirits are gone, Rat Clan and Wolf Clan are scattered and still I cannot sleep.

The question of what the orc prophetess said also plagues me, although to a lesser degree than the drawings on her walls. I worry for Dante, ‘the one who will bring it down upon us’; perhaps she spoke of the destruction of the Wolf Clan and Caedic victory in the Highlands, but what would that have to do with ‘servant of the servant, born from Death’? And when she faced myself and Talvus, what did she see that disgusted her so thoroughly? We want what future, that we seek it out? I know that there are—there are plans that Talvus and I have discussed, weapons that could be designed both arcane and otherwise that I will not document here, ones that take advantage of inherent Caedic strengths and could be used against all of our enemies, but they are simply thought experiments, nothing has come of them as yet. I do not know if she spoke of one of these—perhaps one going right, and raining wretchedness and destruction to enemies of the Empire, or perhaps one going wrong, backfiring on us, and bringing down the rest of the world with us. I do not know whether Talvus and I should stop pursuing these avenues of thought—why would you seek it—or if to allow ourselves to be struck with fear and hesitance would be the last great act of resistance that the prophetess could cripple the Empire with. Or maybe she wasn’t speaking of that which Talvus and I have been developing at all, maybe there is something else that we will encounter, some new idea that will take root in our heads and I know that I’m thinking circles around myself but I cannot stop the torrent, what if this means that—could it have been related to the drawings, the symbol, the man with the golden eyes and the foundry, or it—what if what we’ll do, what we’ll seek, is heresy?  

I have—more unanswered questions, concrete ones, ones that might actually have answers. Directly after I gave him our papers, as I have written, Captain Piso recognized my name. That he would so immediately associate Strell with the Tandus heresy, I—I wondered at first if it was a bigger incident than I had known when I had left for the front, but I now am not so sure. Salo had a conversation with me shortly before the assault on Stonemill Keep that indicated that he only learned of my involvement after he submitted and requested reports about the ghoul and the sickness during our two weeks with the 33rd. Perhaps as Altae is closer to the Capital, Captain Piso was more informed of the day-to-day news, but he said he had little access to that when he was asking me for anything that I knew of the heresy. And he did not seem to care about my connection to it; the moment that he learned that I knew nothing of Scaevola, he dismissed me. He never brought it up again, nor did he treat me unfavorably for it; in fact, he allowed me to take point in planning the assault on the Rat Clan hideaway, and he both watched and advised Dante and myself sparring, and demonstrated practically what he meant against us, just as you might have.

I’m not sure what it could mean, that he was interested in Scaevola Tandus. There were rumors amongst the troops that the reason why he led only a single unit as a Captain was because he had been adjacent to some heresy scandal himself, but I find that so difficult to believe, they were just rumors passed around by bored soldiers and they speak so contrary to everything that I saw and that I knew of the Captain. Corporal Doraius said that Captain Piso remained a unit commander because he refused transfer, even after his promotion. I worry that somehow—combined with Talvus’s suspicions about Lieutenant Sorus being of far greater rank in the Church and far more powerful than would be expected for a unit’s arcanist—perhaps there was something important in this area in particular that required close attention. I cannot help but wonder if it had anything to do with the mark on his back, or if the mark is connected to any of the other drawings of the prophetess, or the dreams. Or if the knowledge of what was of such utmost importance that he stay there be lost with his death.      

Second Lieutenant Vitan put in a recommendation for both myself and Corporal Maxim to receive promotion at the end of all of it. I feel as if of all those who survived, I am the one who deserves it the least, because she—she saw the moments when I was of use, perhaps, the observations I was able to voice that helped Talvus figure out we were dealing with prophecy, or how when all else failed, your blades did not fail me; but she did not see how quickly—how quickly I left her and all of my other superior officers to die the moment that I saw that orc’s hand around Talvus’s throat, how—Corporal Maxim went back for Captain Piso. If I had gone back as well, instead of immediately running with Talvus, perhaps seven would have survived that battle instead of six. But I did not. I did not even look back. She could not have seen, she could not know, because how could she see me as worthy of the stripes on my shoulders if she had.

I do not think that I will pass the Trials, not after this. I am not—I am not nearly the soldier nor the strategist that I thought I was. Perhaps there was never a chance of doing anything different than exactly what I did, that everything was so perfectly orchestrated that I would never have done better than the manner with which I conducted myself, but that responsibility must remain solely on my shoulders. I fundamentally failed, and if left to my own devices, I would have failed everyone. I do not know what to expect in the Trials, if there are tests of strength or of knowledge, perhaps I could bluff my way through those, but if there is a test of character, I know that I will be found lacking. I doubt that my family would want me to remain with them in the Capital if I do not pass, they made their position on that clear enough three years ago. Besides, my blades never failed me, only my heart; I can always re-enlist. Even with my injury, I’m still good for fighting. If you will have me back at the Surrian front, or think that I could contribute there, I would gladly return; but there is a hole within me that sings that I have unfinished business in the Highlands, that even with the blow that we struck against Wolf Clan and the Heretic Raven, we still bleed from the blow they struck first, that I owe it to those I left behind to hunt down every last one of the Heretic Raven’s fighters and the Wolf Clan orcs and the Rat Clan warriors we let escape and every other rebel—every other rebel that there are now thirty less good Caedic soldiers to stand against.

If this at all appears disordered or if my thoughts seem contradictory, I apologize sincerely; I began writing immediately after we returned to Cloudfall. I fear that if I had not said everything now, I would be too conflicted to speak it; too ashamed to disclose any of the parts which testify of my failures to adhere to the standards you taught me. I know the importance of presenting myself with confidence and showing not my throat bare when I reach the Capital; for I know the world that I am returning to. These words, the trust of my doubts, are for you and you alone.

May that you be well, and until we meet next, Iria

____________________

Private Arcadia Dominus, Specialist Unit c.Varricon The 3rd Legion, Serae

Dear Arcadia,

There has been a lot of excitement since the last letter I've managed to send. Probably too much excitement, but I made it out alive, and that's what counts. I know I said I'd write when I reached Cloudfall, and that was supposed to be a week ago, but Talvus and I were ambushed by Rat Clan orcs on the road, enlisted into the 8th for a week while the main bridge just past Cloudfall was being fixed, and then inadvertently took part in a series of escalating battles until we finally managed to help kill The Heretic Raven and destroy the means that Wolf Clan was using to gain advantage in ambushes, which means that hopefully we've done our part for the war effort in the Highlands.

If you ever have a chance to come here, Altae is a very interesting place. I would warn you about fighting the Highland Clan rebels—they are remarkably good at completely ignoring all wounds they might take, and fighting just as fiercely even with fatal injuries until they draw their last breath—but you tend to deal the sort of devastating blows that your enemies can't get up from, so perhaps you wouldn't have that problem. It's cold here, and always wet, so not a particularly fun place to make camp in the woods. The trees are different, darker green than the ones at home. I think perhaps I’ve finally gotten used to it all, which is a pity, as Talvus and I will be leaving as soon as the bridge is fixed.

Joining the Unbroken for a week—it was nothing like our time with 33rd. There were all the usual watches and patrols and a couple of wolf ambushes, both by the animals and the Wolf Clan orcs, which I suppose either way was better than being ambushed by a ghoul or any of that getting sick nonsense. A few days in we got word of where the Rat Clan’s hideaway was, and Captain Piso let me help plan the assault. It was a thorough success, we took out their warchief, Black Eye Sadbh, a number of their warriors, and Corporal Dante Maxim—you’d love him, he has a shield and he uses it to charge people more than he does for blocking things—he killed all four of their shamans. If I must be entirely honest, there was a slight blip in the plan where I got caught behind enemy lines. Again. This one really wasn’t my fault, it was a scouting mission because we were going to plant explosives before the assault and it shouldn’t have been able to go wrong, I was literally invisible courtesy of Talvus, but they’d been tipped off invisible scouts were coming so I got to twiddle my thumbs for a night waiting for rescue in the form of the assault still happening as planned, sans the exploding part. I had a dagger hidden in my boot and everything and they buried me in a pile of rocks, so little use that was to me. Still, the attack went perfectly without me and I did get to kill Black Eye Sadbh myself, so I wasn’t entirely useless.

It got a bit rough. The Unbroken, only about thirty of us, ended up in an all-out battle against the Heretic Raven’s whole band—the Heretic Raven being a rather famous nuisance in these parts, the single defector from Raven Legion far out to the west, who had returned to their home in the Highlands and pulled together an assorted group of rebel fighters—as well as upwards of thirty, maybe forty Wolf Clan orcs. We took heavy casualties, although Talvus and I are still kicking. In the end, I killed Anye the Huntress, and the Bear of the Heretic Raven’s warriors, Dante and I killed the Heretic Raven together, then I killed the strategist of the Wolf Clan that they were protecting; and a number of other warriors fell beneath my blades or arrows in that and other conflicts, perhaps half a dozen in the week and a half I’ve been here. It’s hard to say that we won, because so many of the Unbroken died, but the tide of the war has turned against our enemies. At the end of it all, they have been scattered, and their leaders are dead, and we survived. So all in all, everything has been far more exciting than the letter I was expecting to send you on our great adventures hiking every day, in which the height of the dangers we faced was Talvus managing to set water on fire on his first and only turn to cook.

I've had time to give a bit of thought to what might happen if I don't make it through the Trials; I know I want to return to the army, but now I have unfinished business in the Highlands as much as I do on the Surrian front. You'd love it here. Every fight is a worthy contest, it's not just plowing through mountains of soldiers who aren't worth the skill that went into the forging of their blades. The Highland Clans are strong, and they have spirit. They could use a soldier like you here; there's been a bit of a dearth of soldiers recently, as a lot of good units were killed trying to take down the Wolf Clan and their strategist. Even after our victories, even without their leaders, the Highland warriors are tenacious, and I know you would kill many for glory and for Empire. There are five more left alive from the Heretic Raven's group who are particularly troublesome—a witch, a Rat shaman, a pair of twin rogue fighters, and a Salamander Clan mage—and Bear Clan, Owl Clan, Salamander Clan, and some scattered Wolf Clan and Rat Clan warriors still await you, so it's not like the hobgoblins, there are plenty of fierce enemies to go around. Perhaps we can avenge the fallen and secure the power of the Empire in this province together, if I do not remain in the Capital.

Pass my regards to Varricon and Gorai, and the hopes that they are healing well. I hope for you that your blade remains sharp. I would love to hear how life has been going for you, although I do not think I will receive any letters before I reach home.

Until I can write next, Iria Stell

#my writing #my life #gay murder elf bachelorette #in their footsteps we shall follow #Iria Strell #the heretic raven chose not to kill Iria Strell because uh they were one of the good guys #what they saw in her face was that she was fuckin seventeen #a *child* #and they could not bring themselves to kill a child in cold blood #not that it did them much good #welcome to all of my feelings all of them #even though I'm pretty sure approximately two of you are going to read this #I really hope that you enjoy

[streamingroguecb01]

▪▫☼ ~[STREAMING] Rogue (FILM ITA 2020) Altadefinizione

Rogue Film Completo Altadefinizione

Rilasciato: Aug 20, 2020 Runtime: 106 minutes Genere: Azione, Avventura, Dramma, Thriller Stelle: Megan Fox, Philip Winchester, Greg Kriek, Brandon Auret, Jessica Sutton, Kenneth Fok, Isabel Bassett, Adam Deacon, Sisanda Henna, Tamer Burjaq, Ashish Gangapersad Società di produzione: Mannequin Pictures, The Electric Shadow Company, Lionsgate, Grindstone Entertainment Group, Hassell Free Production

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While the players who play a role in the film are referred to as actors (men) or actresses (women). There is also the term extras that are used as minor characters with few roles in the film. This differs from the main actors, who have larger and more roles. As an actor and actress, good acting talent must be required that corresponds to the subject of the film in which he plays the leading role. In certain scenes, the role of the actor can be replaced by a stunt man or a stunt man. The existence of a stuntman is important to replace the actors who play difficult and extreme scenes that are usually found in action-action films. Movies can also be used to deliver certain messages from the filmmaker. Some industries also use film to convey and represent their symbols and culture. Filmmaking is also a form of expression, thoughts, ideas, concepts, feelings and moods of a person that are visualized in the film. The film itself is mostly fictional, though some are based on actual stories or on a true story. There are also documentaries with original and real images or biographical films that tell the story of a character. There are many other popular genre films, from action films, horror films, comedy films, romantic films, fantasy films, thriller films, drama films, science fiction films, crime films, documentaries and others. This is some information about the definition of film or film. The information has been cited from various sources and references. Hope it can be useful. ❍❍❍ TV FILM ❍❍❍The first television shows were experimental, sporadic programs that from the 1930s could only be seen at a very short distance from the mast. TV events such as the 1936 Summer Olympics in Germany, the crowning of King George VI. In Britain in 19340 and the famous launch of David Sarnoff at the 1939 New York World’s Fair in the United States, the medium grew, but World War II brought development to a halt after the war. The 19440 World MOVIE inspired many Americans to buy their first television, and in 1948 the popular Texaco Star Theater radio moved to become the first weekly television variety show that hosted Milton Berle and earned the name “Mr Television” demonstrated The medium was a stable, modern form of entertainment that could attract advertisers. The first national live television broadcast in the United States took place on September 4, 1951, when President Harry Truman’s speech at the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San Francisco on AT & T’s transcontinental cable and microwave relay system was broadcasting to broadcasters in local markets has been. The first national color show (the 1954 Rose Parade tournament) in the United States took place on January 1, 1954. For the next ten years, most network broadcasts and almost all local broadcasts continued to be broadcast in black and white. A color transition was announced for autumn 1965, in which more than half of all network prime time programs were broadcast in color. The first all-color peak season came just a year later. In 19402, the last holdout of daytime network shows was converted to the first full color network season. ❍❍❍ formats and genres ❍❍❍ See also: List of genres § Film and television formats and genres TV shows are more diverse than most other media due to the variety of formats and genres that can be presented. A show can be fictional (as in comedies and dramas) or non-fictional (as in documentary, news, and reality television). It can be current (as in the case of a local news program and some television films) or historical (as in the case of many documentaries and fictional films). They can be educational or educational in the first place, or entertaining, as is the case with situation comedies and game shows. [Citation required] A drama program usually consists of a series of actors who play characters in a historical or contemporary setting. The program follows their lives and adventures. Before the 1980s, shows (with the exception of soap opera series) generally remained static without storylines, and the main characters and premise barely changed. [Citation required] If the characters’ lives changed a bit during the episode, it was usually reversed in the end. For this reason, the episodes can be broadcast in any order. [Citation required] Since the 1980s, many FILMS have had a progressive change in the plot, characters, or both. For example, Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere were two of the first American prime time drama television films to have this kind of dramatic structure [4] [better source required], while the later MOVIE Babylon 5 further illustrated such a structure had a predetermined story about the planned five season run. [Citation required] In 2010, it was reported that television became a larger part of the revenue of large media companies than the film. Some also noticed the quality improvement of some television programs. In 2010, Oscar-winning film director Steven Soderbergh declared the ambiguity and complexity of character and narrative: “I think these qualities are now being seen on television and people who want to see stories with such qualities are watching TV. ❍❍❍ Thanks for everything and have fun watching❍❍❍ Here you will find all the films that you can stream online, including the films that were shown this week. If you’re wondering what to see on this website, you should know that it covers genres that include crime, science, fi-fi, action, romance, thriller, comedy, drama, and anime film. Thanks a lot. We inform everyone who is happy to receive news or information about this year’s film program and how to watch your favorite films. Hopefully we can be the best partner for you to find recommendations for your favorite films. That’s all from us, greetings! Thank you for watching The Video Today. I hope you like the videos I share. Give a thumbs up, like or share if you like what we shared so we are more excited. Scatter a happy smile so that the world returns in a variety of colors.

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Day Two of Newport Folk Blows Fans Away

Or was that just the wind? No, it was definitely the festival; but surely not due to a lack of trying on the wind’s part. Saturday found the Newport Folk Festival faced with weather conditions that were as different from Friday’s as possible. Instead of sweltering heat and stagnant, humid air, fans were met with unrelenting winds, cloudy skies and the ever-present (yet thankfully unrealized) threat of rain. But again, this was the Newport Folk Festival we’re talking about, so the weather’s u-turn really just made things more interesting. Here’s what the wind-worn folk were rewarded with last Saturday.

Museum Stage

While my schedule kept me away from the Museum Stage for most of the day, one thing was clear just by walking past: this was the place to be early Saturday afternoon. It didn’t matter who was playing, there was always a significant line of festival-goers waiting to escape the wind inside the Museum. I was able to make it in for Christopher Paul Stelling, though. And thankfully so, as his impassioned performance quickly became the best set of the weekend (and would only be beaten twice, both times the following day); his ferocious delivery exploded into the crowd with such force that it felt like the walls were moments away from collapsing around us. It was an act nobody should ever have to follow. Sadly for Kitty Amaral & Cosmic Coalition, however, they had to follow it. They didn’t let it phase them, though, and delivered an impressive set.

Harbor Stage

After housing the best lineup on Friday, the Harbor Stage was home another impressive lineup on Saturday. While I would go on to miss the headlining act, Billy Bragg & Joe Henry, the rest of the day’s performances saw fans facing some serious talent. Newcomers Mt. Joy opened the stage with a set whose sound seemed handcrafted for the festival. Following them, Jalen N’Gonda introduced himself to the crowd the way you do at Newport Folk, by completely knocking them out with his raw, subdued talent. Then, after J.P. Harris & Chance McCoy and Robert Ellis both took the stage by storm, it was time for Joseph. The three sisters mesmerized the crowd through a bare set full of breathtaking harmonies, and even treated the crowd to a gorgeous cover of Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me”, with special guest Zach Williams (of The Lone Bellow).

Quad Stage

After two forgettable sets from Julia Jacklin and Marlon Williams (though to be fair, I only caught a little more than a song each) and a missed set from Mandolin Orange, Nikki Lane took to the Quad Stage fully equipped with her unique presence, fashion sense and approach to country music. Following her was the most special set that would grace the Quad all weekend, a solo acoustic set from My Morning Jacket’s Jim James. While it wasn’t exactly what I hoped I’d be getting when I saw James on the lineup, it was one of those intimate moments Newport Folk is so perfect at creating. Closing out the Quad was Drive-By Truckers, a band I’ve personally tried and failed at liking in the past, but who took the stage with such force that it was impossible to not get caught up in their set. It was one of few major highlights the Quad would see all weekend.

Fort Stage

The winner of the day by a mile, Saturday’s Fort Stage lineup was damn near perfect. It was also the stage most affected by the wind, making for some interesting wardrobe choices and wonderfully unruly hair throughout the day. Kicking things off was Chicano Batman, who woke and warmed the crowd up with a killer set that taking to the crowd in both English and Spanish. Next up was Grandma’s Hands Band, a celebration of Bill Withers featuring Hiss Golden Messenger and friends (including, but not necessarily limited to, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood). It was probably the best executed ‘mystery set’ of the weekend. Offa Rex (The Decemberists with Olivia Chaney) then delivered the crowd their beautiful take on psychedelic-folk, which brought us to Angel Olsen, who surprised with a much more upbeat set than her last visit to the fort back in 2015. When The Avett Brothers took to the stage, it was clear they were there to give it their all. Their intense energy and impeccable musicianship made up for an occasionally questionable setlist, and their set marked a turning point in the day, leading us to clearing skies and setting us up perfectly for what was coming. By the time Wilco took to the stage, the sun was shining. They then proceeded to play the sun down with a packed set, all leading up to a gorgeous sunset version of ‘California Stars’ with special guest Billy Bragg.

Despite Mother Nature’s efforts, Saturday managed to be the best overall day of this year’s Newport Folk Festival.

Check Out My Coverage of Day One HERE.

CLICK HERE for More Photos from Day Two of the 2017 Newport Folk Festival.

Photos ©Timothy Patrick Boyer, 2017.

#music #music festival #newport folk fest #wilco #the avett brothers #concert #concert photography #concert review #concert recap #newport folk festival #newport folk #etc.