The first creature reaches me.
My reflexes fire.
My hammer sweeps the air, connecting with feathers and fur as I use it, not to crush or hit, but to push and pull and pin so that I can slash instead with the dagger in my right hand.
Within seconds, the dagger’s blade is covered in dark blood.
Every move I make is a blur. A spin, a kick, another slash. I ram my hammer down on a neck so I can cut it. I use it to shove a creature’s wings back so I can stab its heart.
But with every dead beast, another creature takes its place.
For long minutes, I fight and still they keep coming, and even though I try to use my hammer defensively, now it’s biting back.
It doesn’t like what I’m doing.
Idon’t like what I’m doing.
When I jab my hammer into the next creature, a sharp energy strikes back at me. And after that, with every swing of my hammer, pain travels up my left arm.
It only grows worse with every death, until I’m screaming.
I tell myself to hold on. Erik will fight his way through the swarm that has remained in the sky. He will reach me any second now, and I won’t be alone.
He will remind me that I have no choice.
He will tell me that I have to live.
When a group of snake-skinned creatures races toward me, I leap upward, trying to upset their formation, trying to get them to scatter, only to swing my hammer into a smaller beast with acrunch.
Terrible pain strikes through me. It’s so sharp that I double over midair. A deadly loss of concentration.
A second later, talons tear across my left hand, a furred body rams into my right side, and a tusk impales my left thigh.
For a horrifying moment, I’m crushed between multiple bodies, my own pinned in midair.
I can’t breathe. Can’t think.
And then the monsters separate and I’m falling, only becoming aware while I plummet to the ground that my left hand has opened and my hammer is tumbling away from me.
Every bone in my body crunches as I hit the ash. Worse, I land on the side of the toolbox because the satchel slipped to my right during the fight, and pain strikes through my ribs before it slips out from under me.
My left leg is bent at an odd angle. My black pants are ripped across my thigh, and hot blood gushes from the wound in my upper leg.
I scream at myself to get up, but my body won’t obey me. I must be going into shock, but there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it.
The flying creatures seem to be re-grouping and closing in once more, but for a few moments, there is a gap of clear air above me.
My heartbeats slow as multiple things seem to happen at once.
Fresh lightning flickers softly in the boiling clouds overhead, and I’m confused by the golden color of it since the lightning before now has been crimson red. Thunder rumbles, and my heartbeats seem to thrum with it, and then?—
Crack!
A new bolt of lightning, a thick cord of it, bursts from the clouds directly down into the ground somewhere near my feet.
I don’t see exactly where it hits. I only know that it has lit up the air around me so clearly that I can make out every detail of the attacking creatures, whose claws and talons are striking toward me.
Their eyes are filled with anger and confusion. They’re screeching and crying. They came into existence fully grown and with nothing but a tumult of predatorial impulses to drive their behavior.
