still.
Nothing can slake my thirst for vengeance in that moment as a berserker rage overtakes me.
I stride right up to the monster and look straight into its pale green eye.
“I’m going to come for you,” I seethe at Vogel, scoured out by my fury, nothing but rage inside me now, “and I’m going to be your worst nightmare.”
There’s no way for the thing to have an expression, but I can feel the cold, vicious spite that flickers in that one eye.
“Go straight to hell, Vogel,” I hiss, then bring my blade down to impale his eye.
I dig into the creature, gouging out the Vogel eye and all the other eyes. Driving my knife into its head again and again and again. Then I straighten and pull in a quavering breath, bloodlust still strafing through my lines as I blink at what’s before me, reality warping as I survey the wreckage I’ve wrought.
The two smaller scorpios are splayed out, their charred heads still smoking and bent back at odd angles where my blades impaled their necks, black ichor staining the surrounding lavender grass. The Vogel scorpio’s head is a mound of gore.
Magefire whips through my tangled lines, hot and furious. But there’s something more. Another line of fire, golden-hot and mounting in strength. A spike of grief hits me as I realize it’s an echo of Yvan’s Wyvernfire.
In a disbelieving daze, I lean to wipe the black mucous coating my blade on the pale lilac grass, then rise and resheathe my weapon as my Wyvernfire ripples through my lines.
I hold up my hands and press the retrieval runes on my palms with my thumbs.
The two other blades embedded in the Vogel scorpio’s neck fly toward me with such force that they almost sever the beast’s head, their hilts slapping into my palms.
I wipe them on the grass as well, straighten, and calmly resheathe them both.
The woman, the teenage girl, and the child are all clinging to each other and eyeing me with looks of pure shock. They’re sick, the woman and the young child, I swiftly realize. Quite sick. With bloodshot eyes and red sores thick around their mouths. There’s a feverish, strung-out look about them, and they’re skeletally thin.
The Red Grippe.
The final stages of it, from the looks of them both.
The Gardnerian girl sets herself staunchly before them, her green-eyed glare fixed on me, her blade still in hand. Her whole self seems tightly strung, like a violin string wound to the near breaking point. I notice that they all have similar heart-shaped faces.
I look closer.
My eyes linger on the ears that are poking through the Gardnerian girl’s long, unwashed black hair. Her ears are jagged—scarred—and I realize, in a horrified flash, that they’ve been cropped. Like Olilly’s were, that horrible night when Gardnerian mobs attacked Urisk all over Verpacia.
Which means they were once pointed.
I set my eyes on the little Urisk girl and note the emerald flecks in her amethyst eyes, the strands of Gardnerian black mingled in with her violet hair.
In a burst of comprehension, I realize that both of these children are part Gardnerian and part Urisk and would not be looked at kindly in the Western Realm by practically anyone.
It all comes together in my mind—the myriad reasons these three are likely fleeing East.
Concerned, I lift a hand toward them, palm out. “Don’t be alarmed,” I say, not sure if I’m talking to them or myself, astonished by what I’ve just done. I turn and blink at the decimated scorpio carcasses, the image surreal.
I took down three scorpios.
Three.
Tears blur my vision as Lukas’s and Chi Nam’s and Valasca’s unwavering belief in me fills my mind.
You were right, I tell them, my heart aching. I can fight back. I can be a warrior.
“Who...who are you?” the Urisk woman asks me waveringly in the Common Tongue, her heavily accented voice stitched tight.
I turn toward her and take in the stark fear in her reddened amethyst eyes.
The Black Witch, I almost say.
“I’m...” I begin then pause, struggling to quickly assemble my thoughts, remembering the false Elfhollen name I’m supposed to use in the Eastern Realm, the Elfhollen identity that Valasca and Lukas and Chi Nam drilled into me.
“My name is Ny’laea Shizoryn,” I tell them as my voice breaks around another painful wave of grief.
Their wide-eyed stares remain fixed on me.
I step toward them but stop when they collectively flinch, the little girl whimpering and coughing up thick phlegm as she clings to who I assume is her mother.