Crash groped mindlessly for his phone, hidden somewhere in the sweaty knot of blankets, as the colorful lights from the fireworks shone through his window. Squinting at the screen, he pulled up the airline’s app to change his ticket.
He should’ve never come, and he didn’t intend to spend another hour in the wretched city if he didn’t have to. He wanted his own damn bed in his own damn apartment in his own damn city, where he didn’t feel like his brain was being squeezed in a vice and memories of his ex came up as regularly as vomit.
Heartbreak, it turned out, couldn’t be fixed with a party. Even if the party was legendary.
Sugar and Snow
It was Burden’s Moon,a time for peace and clan, when he spotted her from across the battlefield approximately three seconds before a grenade blew up in his face.
It wasn’t the first time it’d happened to Henrik. After seventy years on the Orclind’s front lines, he’d been blown up, sliced, shot, and beaten in just about every way a person could imagine and most ways they couldn’t. A grenade didn’t faze him much.
And it sure didn’t knock the sight of her out of his head. Although he did question whether she was real or not for a moment, because that sort of thing had happened to him once or twice.
Henrik pushed himself out of the blood-soaked mud and grit, his ears ringing, and tried to focus his doubled vision on the woman in white. They’d ambushed the shifter battalion just before sunrise, sending the camp into bloody chaos as men ran for their guns and animals exploded from skin.
It was a large camp meant to act as a command center for several other smaller units, which made it a juicy target for an orcish raiding party like Henrik’s. Not only could they loot the supplies sitting nice and pretty in crates, but they could takemen out when they thought they were safe surrounded by so many others.
It made sense that they’d have a healer — or it did once, back when the war was still new. Henrik couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen one on the battlefield. He’d even heard whispers among his men that they were all dead.
That was how they knew the world was coming to an end. When there were no more healers, the gods would abandon them — if they hadn’t already.
His stomach lurched as he focused his swimming vision on the white figure knelt in the mud several yards away from him. For a moment, she didn’t look human. She looked like Grim herself, dressed all in white, come to bring mercy to the wretched souls caught in the war.
Snow had begun to fall, veiling her in a pale glow. It softened the world between bomb blasts. Even from several yards away, he could make out the way snowflakes settled on her, as soft and gentle as a touch from the goddess she so resembled.
Mercy,he thought, something in him moving with tectonic force. The goddess of death and mercy knelt before him, wreathed in pure white snow, and whispered in his ear again,“Mercy.”
And then she twisted her upper body, turning to face him as she tried to save her patient. A flash of red broke the illusion of divinity and brought her back to the battlefield.
Her apron was soaked with blood, nearly obscuring the Healer’s Hand emblazoned on her chest.
That symbol should’ve protected her. It should’ve protected all the healers, no matter what side of the war they fell on, but it’d become a target instead. Everyone knew that the quickest way to knock out a battalion was to take out their healer, and as the war dragged on, their numbers dwindled.
Officially, their orders were to capture any healers found in battle and conscript them into service, but in the heat of a firefight, the chances of being able to do that successfully were low.
And if capture wasn’t an option…
“Healer!” someone to Henrik’s left bellowed. His head swivelled just in time to see a rifle lift.
Instinct roared in furious denial. He’d seen too many innocent healers murdered, and this one could not,wouldnot join their numbers.
Without thinking, he sprang to his feet. His hammer, a bloodied weapon that’d seen more battles than it should’ve, swung in a wide arc through the smoky air. The impossibly heavy weapon slammed into his fellow soldier with a sickening crunch. The rifle flew out of the orc’s hand and landed in the snow-topped muck that’d once been a field.
Henrik didn’t wait for the soldier to hit the ground before he swung the hammer back toward his side and tucked it close, making running easier. His vision still wasn’t quite right, but it didn’t stop him from sprinting toward the healer.
Bullets whizzed by his ears as he made his huge body a target for every shifter on the battlefield. Several grazed him, but none managed to stop him. His hammer was a heavy weight in one hand as his boots sank into the churned soil, made thick and sticky by slush and freshly spilled viscera.
Despite the dust and smoke and snow in the air, his vision narrowed to that slim white figure knelt in the filth like a glowing beacon. He saw and heard nothing around him even as he swept aside a rugged, blond-haired shifter with a vicious blow of his hammer. The bite of bullets didn’t slow him down, and neither did the percussive blasts of explosives pockmarking the landscape in all directions.
For as long as he lived, Henrik would never forget the moment she looked up at him.
Mercy.
The war disappeared. The blood, the pain, the misery of decades of fighting for nothing — all of it vanished when she finally looked up from her work to see the storm bearing down on her.
Large eyes set in a moon-shaped face met his own with neither fear nor resignation. She stared him down, her chin set and her hands still pressed into the flesh of her mangled patient.
She didn’t try to run. She didn’t flinch or scream.
