“Get back, you bastards!” she yelled, throwing more fiery spheres at the approaching Serpents, flanked on both sides by warriors. The carnage on the river bank hadn’t yet reached the camp’s perimeter, but burnt Serpents littered the ground just beyond the spiked fence.
If we fell, this was our last defense–and we couldn’t fall.
I swooped between the blockade, only stopping when I reached the camp.
“Healer!” I roared. “Get me a healer!”
Three white-coated figures rushed forward. I lowered a muttering, bleeding Krynn into their outstretched arms and didn’t linger long enough to even remember their faces.
I became a blur once more, sending a quick prayer to his ancestors.
I burst through the blockade, felling three Serpents in my unrelenting path.
They still squirmed, but Elysia’s spheres shook and slowed them.
“Why won’t you die?” she yelled.
As I delved back in the shadow of the trees, the smell of burnt flesh behind me, my mind flitted back to Allie.
I should have been there right now, protecting my home.
Protectingher.
Yet I knew she would have cursed my name for all eternity if I had abandoned the battlefield.
I gritted my teeth. I couldn’t think about that.
I was already pulled in every possible direction and one wrong choice would end in my people’s death.
We were getting annihilated.
I prayed to every god–old, new, forgotten, it didn't matter–that I’d made the right decision.
Perhaps the gods would be merciful today, because they let me sense a quiet flutter in my mind and recognized it as Allie’s. Or my mind had conjured it to help me face this battlefield.
I shielded it as much as I could from the horrors around me, only allowing myself to check it to make sure her emotions weren’t trembling with fear or exertion.
I didn’t know what I’d do if I felt her in danger again right now.
My thoughts caressed that small flutter once more, before I swerved them away and back to the massacre.
At this speed, I cut through Serpent soldiers, leaving a bloody trail behind me.
Yet the screams still followed.
The sickening crunch of bones.
The pleas and prayers whispered with last breaths, never to be answered.
I heard it all.
I had to fight through it all.
My daggers hit both jade armours and veins alike.
Yet the Serpent soldiers kept coming.
They waddled through the deep river currents like they were nothing.
