Imp lay in the same place once again. It was the bed in the backroom of the chapel: the same slightly sagging ceiling overhead, the same dresser, table, and chair. The only difference was that this time she was alone. The priest was nowhere to be seen.

A surge of pain flared from her heart; Imp sat up as quickly as she could. It felt like her heart was trying to leap out of her throat. Something was trying to escape. Rising to the surface, a pressure in the core of her being blotted out the sight she had just recovered.

One moment she was sitting up in the bed in the back of the chapel, the next moment she was listlessly falling through nothingness. Her fingers sparked with pain, and a tingling sensation rose up her arms and around her shoulders. It felt like every fiber of her being was being unmade in those moments.

Then stillness came to the nothingness. Imp floated backward, away from her own consciousness, and into something else. Light slowly came into view, smoke tainted every breath, and if Imp could have moved, she would have lost more than half a lung in a coughing fit.

Dmitri. That was the name of the arborist.

It suddenly rushed back to her as her hands became not her own. The light and the smoke grew until she could see out of Dmitri’s eyes. He was running from Delden Town, up the hill toward the Morosia family home. The path was heavy beneath his feet.

Loud death filled the air. Futile screams and violent laughter. Dmitri looked back to see chaos swirling through Delden Town. A bolt of lightning struck upward toward the sky. A blast of fire shattered the wall of a building just a few hundred feet back. Metal clashed against stone. Bandits laughed loudly as townsfolk screamed.

Madness. The entire town was filled with madness. There was no shelter left in Delden Town. There was no safety from the chaos. Dmitri had no idea where the bandits had come from, but he knew that he had to get to safety.

Imp expected him to run for the family home at the top of the hill. She expected Dmitri to get her parents and siblings to help fight back against the bandits. Even if the Morosia family was not the proper ruling clan of Delden Town, they still watched over the idyllic spice town from the hill. From what she could remember, her father had been a powerful knight who married into the family. Even after two decades, surely, he would be able to defeat a handful of bandits.

Yet, as Imp was carried along by Dmitri’s feet, she felt that his destination was elsewhere. To drive the matter home like a dagger in her ethereal heart, Imp saw a trio of bandits strolling down the hill from the Morosia home. Their swords dripped blood; their faces plastered with smiles even though two of them were bleeding from fresh wounds.

Dmitri sped at the sight of the bandits. He would get to shelter. If there was any shelter left in Delden Town, it would not be in the halls of a mortal. He aimed for the spiritual to protect him. Imp felt the flicker of hope in Dmitri’s mind as he moved off the path and toward the graveyard. He was not here to summon ghosts to protect him, Dmitri was not an occultist of any kind.

He was nothing but a simple arborist. A man who had spent his lifetime nurturing the flora of Delden Town. Over the years, he had come to befriend and know by name every wood spirit that lived in the town’s trees, shrubs, and hedges. The graveyard, due to its peaceful nature, had the highest density of them.

Imp had never seen a wood spirit before. She had seen regular spirits like ghosts. She had seen malevolent spirits like wraiths. Yet, in all her adventuring, she had never seen a nature spirit. Dmitri’s mind was filled with images of small leafy beings. Mentally, he was hoping they would survive the bandit’s attack and be able to help him survive as well.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

The power that greeted Dmitri as he entered the graveyard felt like fleeting comfort. It was the warm blanket of a sunbeam in late fall. The musty smell of dying leaves filled Imp’s mind as Dmitri moved through the gravestones, looking for a specific spot.

Just a few weeks ago, a sapling had been planted in the graveyard in honor of a recent death. When he had planted it, Dmitri had called on the wood spirits to help the tree take careful root. It was not a spell or a charm, but a conversation. One that Dmitri had relied on in the past. It was how the hedges of the graveyard were perfect and how the tree roots in Delden Town had never broken through the cobbles and roads. The arborist worked with the wood spirits to protect the town in the same way that the arborist protected and cared for the plants.

As Dmitri knelt behind the recent tombstone, he set his hands on the soil near the sapling. It was a withered-looking sprig of stick and leaf. To anyone else, it would have looked half-dead. Dmitri knew that this was just the tree’s natural shade. In a few years, it would stand three times as tall as the tombstone and cast a thin line of shade over the grave. That was if it, or anything in Delden Town, would live that long.

With his hands in the soil, Dmitri could feel the panic of the wood spirits. The fire in the distance, the noise of the battle, and the fear in Dmitri’s own heart had set them on edge. He tried to quell his racing thoughts and slow his thundering heart, but the wood spirits only seemed to make it worse. They were in no place to protect themselves, let alone shelter him. Dmitri was not sure what he had been expecting. The wood spirits were not arcane beings, they could not summon mystical protections for him.

As he leaned back and looked toward the graveyard’s entrance, he saw that the three bandits had followed him. They were laughing and pushing each other like childhood bullies as blood dripped from their wounds as well as their weapons. Dmitri grabbed the only thing he could, a shovel.

It was the same shovel that Imp had thrown at the reaper. It felt familiar and useless in Dmitri’s hands as Imp watched the arborist stand up to face the bandits. The simple action brought a new round of laughter from the bandits. They were enjoying every moment of this.

It was then that Dmitri realized why he had run to the graveyard. It was not to find shelter. Part of his being knew that he would not survive this attack. He wanted to be with the wood spirits and make sure that they survived even as everything else in Delden Town was destroyed.

Imp felt her heart lurch inside of Dmitri’s chest. A simple realization that there was nothing left. Yet, the arborist refused to be cut down. Imp thought she heard the bandits yell something at Dmitri, but it was lost in the sudden rush of blood in the arborist’s veins.

He was not weak, but he was not a fighter. The muscles in his arms were from hauling fertilizer, shoveling dirt, and carrying trimmed branches away. He had never turned a tool into a weapon or turned a weapon on another living being. Two of the bandits threw up their hands like they had lost a bet. They turned back and marched off for what was left of Delden Town.

One bandit, half-dead, remained. To Imp the bandit had no discernable features except for a glint on the sword, a smirk across his face, and blood that soaked the ground with every step forward. At the last moment, when the bandit was just a few feet from Dmitri, they both broke into motion.

Dmitri tried to stab the shovel forward like he was driving it into a hillside. The bandit dodged to the side, but the blade of the shovel followed. Dmitri felt a rush as it bit into the bandit’s side. Fresh blood sprayed onto the grave dirt, but it was a superficial wound. With a curse, the bandit spun off the cut and smacked Dmitri upside the head with the flat of his sword.

Imp’s vision swirled as Dmitri fell to the blow. Something broke under Dmitri’s fall, it felt like a distant and hollow fracture to Imp but she could tell it was something lethal to Dmitri. The arborist would die soon, even if the bandit left.

The bandit did not leave, though. Imp caught the swirls of Dmitri’s sight as they came into focus looking upward. The bandit sneered down. The edge of the sword plunged downward in a swift. The arborist let out a soft breath and prayed that the wood spirits would be spared.

Then the blade cut and pain blossomed from Dmitri’s neck.

The bandit pulled back, tearing something from Dmitri’s core as the sword rose and fell again. This time, the world went black. Imp was wreathed in nothingness once more.