As a child, Cas had been quick to outgrow her fear of the dark.
Mom had, at the time, been frustrated at how quickly the brand new night-light became obsolete, and at how quickly her daughter seemed to be growing out of all the cutest phases of childhood.
Cas, on the contrary, had been quite proud of her accomplishment. After all, only little babies were afraid of a little dark, she’d boasted.
Although, Cas had lied, just a bit, in service of her ego. Because, even after they’d thrown away her nightlight, and she’d been congratulated on her accomplishment, and all her friends on the playground had been sufficiently impressed, Cas still found that – on some particularly cloudy nights, when the darkness was so blinding that she could only see the monsters conjured by her imagination – she became afraid again… just a little.
At times like these, when she missed her nightlight, and the darkness seeped into her psyche, and she wanted to run to her parents bedroom and admit her deceit, Cas consoled herself with pleasant mantras – the one’s her mother had taught her.
“The only thing I have to fear was fear itself.”
“There’s nothing in the dark. There’s nothing in the dark.”
“The scariest thing in this room is my imagination.”
“It’s silly to be scared of a light switch.”
These four, often worked, but whenever they failed her, Cas resorted to a mantra she had made up for herself, and which she repeated incessantly when her heart started thumping.
“There’s no such thing as monsters…
“There’s no such thing as monsters…
“There’s no such thing as monsters!”
…
Cas found that all of those statements failed her, today.
The sun became blotted out, and a vast shadow fell over everything.
It was unfortunate, in a way, the fact that Cas had night vision enough to see through the darkness. Because what she saw there crippled every brave word and positive affirmation she and her mother had come up with.
There were such things as monsters, and they smelled of blood, and Cas could see them in such horrid detail, and they could see her, too. Cas knew this because they were staring at her, with gleaming eyes set deeply into shadowy sockets.
Schreeheheheh!
Schaahahhahahah!
Eghahhahahah!
KghaaaaKgggggg!
A pandemonium of sound filled the world, all around her the flying creatures swirled in a mass of stretched skin-wings and braying heads..
Item Equipped:
Rusty Spearhead
+4 Slashing. +7 Stabbing
Cas suddenly found that her hand was in a death grip around the socket of her blade. She held onto the worn metal like it was a cross, pulling it close to her as if afraid to lose it.
Cas didn’t remember pulling it out, but was glad enough to have it as she looked around her, trying to get her bearings. That was a task easier said than done, however. The air was infested with monsters. A haze of skin and flesh that made the space grow hot.
Cas would’ve called it a fog, but it was worse than that. With a natural fog, Cas could at least sense other creature’s auras through the haze. The fog of monsters was more opaque, however. It was made up of living bodies, and each body had its own aura that flashed in her senses, making it impossible to see anything beyond.
Most of the creatures were harmless, if disturbing. Small, hand-sized pterosaur-like things, barely large enough to peck at things.
By themselves, they posed little danger, but the whole mass of them served as adequate concealment for the siren, such that Cas didn’t even see it coming, until it’s neck struck out at her, too close to dodge.
…
“Loose!”
The Sergeants command went in through one ear and out through the psychic links Sara had set up.
Instantly, the order was received, and hundreds of arrows, all miles apart, twanged in unison. A deadly barrage of steel shot in powerful arcs into the great mass of monsters which now demarcated the center of everything, and a hundreds of monsters shed like dog hairs from the circling mass.
Sara had been worried, at first, that the monsters might spread out to attack them when they fell, now she was worried at how much unnatural patience they seemed to be showing, as they circled the Trinket, and she was even more worried at how little Cas was moving within the great mass of beings.
Sara felt the terrible urge to reach out, to say some words of encouragement to the woman, but cool logic clamped down on such thoughts.
Cas would need her sense more than some kind words, and Sara resolved not to interrupt her.
With that settled she focused once again on the communications network she’d set up, relaying the Sergeant’s orders, and slipping in a few of her own along the way.
Still, hoped Cas was doing ok.
…
Cas was, decidedly, not doing ok.
Sirens were low level trash in Siablo. The sort of thing you killed in the tutorial to learn how to deal with flying enemies.
They were, however, a lot bigger in real life, and a bit like a bear-trap.
The siren had the stature of a giraffe, with folding wing bones that curved up into dangerous knife-tips on the forelegs, and a head larger than Cas’s torso.
It moved with surprising agility for a creature so large, striking out like a snake, and shaking Cas’s body with the force of its bite before lifting her clear off her feet and violently shaking.
Cas’s right arm was pinned against her torso by the creature’s upper beak. Taking the spearhead into her free hand anyway, Cas swung clumsily down at the creature's face, aiming for its eye and hitting rock-tough skin instead. The creature seemed aware of her tricks, and merely shook harder, the world went wild with speed blurs.
Valiantly, Cas forced more aura into her blade and tried stabbing again, but was helpless to do any real damage. Left handed, her strikes were weak, and her aim was what could be expected of a person getting the dog-toy treatment. Her body seared with pain as the creature clamped and sawed and shook, pressing its horrid beak through her torso and prying her apart.
Cas’s head hinged away from her torso as a curtain of blood spurted up to block her vision of the rest of her body, and she felt her legs doing the same on the other side before the siren, with a final, vigorous, shake tore Cas into thirds.
HP Reduced: -254 HP
Cas’s head landed face up with a thud. The creature juggled her bloody chest like a pelican, lifting its head up as it began to swallow. The living fog reacted with horrid excitement to the development, dense lines of scavengers coalescing in the area as they smelled the blood and dove straight for her remains, and Cas saw, once again, the dark light of the Black Flag in the distant horizon, as if death were calling to her.
The vision of death was quickly washed out, however, by a dazzling string of red.
The immediate space became suddenly clear of monsters, a silent, empty bubble of ash hovering where the hundreds of tiny pterosaurs had just moments ago been flying.
The siren remind, but it no longer had a head.
A large creature, with metabolism enough to power flight, its blood geysered loudly into the air like some grotesque fountain, black blood raining up into the air, not even managing to land before the ravenous scavengers filled the space to catch the liquid.
This distraction gave Cas a reprieve from the scavengers, and she used it well. Melting her head back into a slime form, she transformed into [Crawler] as she ran toward where the pieces of her human lay forgotten on bloody patches of grass, all but ignored by the scavengers as the creatures fought and pecked at one another for rights to the siren’s headless body;
The body of the siren stood shock still, through all this, as if it had been too surprised to fall.
its neck slumped forward to dribble a faucet of blood. A circle of batty figures hooked onto its blasted neck like leathery flower petals, jostling for position as they lapped at the blood faucet and pecked at its naked wound.
Cas took a brief moment to point her eye up at the dead figure, almost unable to believe the sudden transformation that had overtaken it before hastily reminding herself to get back on task.
Rushing forward, she leapt onto the sawed off body that had formerly been hers, and reconstituted it.
HP Increased: +223
Cas was back in human form again, looking no worse for wear. Her clothes were torn, but the majority of the damage had cut through the junction between her torso and legs, leaving her outfit mostly in tact, save for some peripheral tears and massive blood-stains. She’d seen worse ensembles on the runway.
Instinctively, Cas’s hand reached down to her side pouch, passing through empty space where there should have been a weapon.
Panicked, Cas patted herself, looking around for the rusty spearhead, hardly able to see even the ground through the haze of bodies and aura that flitted about her.
Abandoning the project as useless, Cas instead focused on sensing danger. The dagger hadn’t been much help against the siren anyway, and the smaller creatures were even less of a threat, now that the body was there to occupy their attention.
The prince was easy enough to find. The red banner’s glow cut through the aura-haze like a light-house. Even without the Trinket, however, his resting place stood out. It was the one corner of calm in the screaming cloud. Cas could hear the almost unnatural pocket of calm which had formed around the prince, the shadow of silence it created by occluding the mountain of noise that went on behind it.
In addition to the quiet, it also became easier and easier to see as Cas approached his location. The air was clear around the Trinket, for it was the one place no monster dared approach.
It was easy to pick her next move, under the circumstances.
----------------------------------------
The Trinket hung high, snaking through the air on an invisible wind.
It had no flag-staff, and no guards to lower it; it seemed to stay standing simply for lack of any other option.
Underneath all of this – reclining against a pile of rubble Cas recognized to be a collapsed tent – was the prince. He was cast in a red light which seemed to touch only him, highlighting his figure in red.
Around him, a thin, red line marked a circle into the ground.
Despite all their slavering impatience and hunger, the monsters seemed to have a measure of respect for the boundary, and a generous berth was given to the space around the red banner.
The larger beasts had grounded themselves, and the smaller pterosaurs either perched on the bodies of their larger brethren or simply circled around the glowing Trinket.
Twelve sirens stood at the border of the circle, first in line among the monsters – lanky beasts that stood like prison bars around the prince.
Unlike the chipper chattering of their brethren, those larger monsters were silent, standing like a funeral party as glimmering eyes brimming with careful considerations observed the prince.
This air of mourning was a deceiving one. Looking closer at their eyes, it would have been easy to discern an intense, single-pointed focus, as one might see in a hunting dog that had spotted its prey.
All of them had come here with the object of seeing a dead prince, and some were impatient to see that fact through.
A puff of dirt blasted up behind one of the titans, as it lunged forward towards the center.
It barely took half a stride before a red beam flashed forward from the prince. The siren’s foreleg landed, and it collapsed into a mound of cubed meat.
The other sirens shifted, their hungry eyes getting a bit less hungry, as wisdom replaced malice and they all took a collective half-step back.
The prince, still sitting with his back against that pile of rubble, seemed relaxed, even taking a moment to draw a pocket watch, fiddling with the gleaming contraption’s time setter.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
The pocket watch was freshly shined but worn with markers of repeated use, and the way the prince adjusted the time hinted at a familiarity, considering how he managed to change the time by feel alone, his eyes maintaining a casual glance at the horde that stood around him.
Despite his apparent ease, there was a hardness in his eyes. it seemed a very clear line had been drawn in the grass, which no monster was to cross.
Cas decided to risk the danger, gingerly slipping past the front line of sirens, which paid her no heed, and stepping forward before pausing suddenly, toeing the thin, red border which cut dangerously through her otherwise colorless visual space.
“Prince?” she called out, looking up from the line and for the first time getting a good look at the man of the hour.
The prince looked to be an older man. Older than Cas had expected to still bear the title, in any case. He had wide features complemented by a rough, black beard that curled over olive skin, and eyes so dark they seemed to lack irises.
He somehow seemed older than his years when he saw Cas, however, greeting her with a smile that was perfectly at ease. “Lady Cassandria!”
Cas didn’t even try to hide her surprise, and he laughed.
“Mathalthazar told me a woman by that name, and by your description, would be coming to my aid,” he explained. That seemed to ease Cas’s worries on the matter, but she made no move to progress. Seeing that Cas was still hesitating about the edge of the circle, he made a consoling gesture. “And… you needn’t worry about the border, Lady Cassandria. Trinket Ember is as discerning a marksman as it is a judge of character. It managed to keep you alive, during that earlier carnage, after all, didn’t it?”
Cas remembered the siren, as well as the red lines which had managed to behead it while missing her entirely. If that had been intentional, did that mean the Trinket had been able to see Cas when transformed into a slime and reformed herself?
Did the prince know she was a monster?
Shelving that bit of paranoia until a more useful occasion, Cas – looking behind her and seeing that the Sirens had grown bolder – decided to simply trust the process and take a step into the circle.
The gleeful, rock-concert chittering of the monsters immediately quietened. The sound of crunching grass beneath her boots crunched serenely against Cas’s raw and overworked ears. If you ignored the almost complete darkness and streaming mass of monsters, it almost felt like a completely different world.
Her emotions had hit a different high, too.
Stepping over a red-line was a simple action. Cas had done it hundreds of times as a child in the hopscotch corner of her school playground. But, this red line had been different, and Cas as if she’d just hopped off the bottom step of a Lunar lander. Relishing in her accomplishment, Cas rubbed her sweat-slicked hands down her blood soaked coat, tingling with excitement at the sheer fact that she was still in one piece!
The same, however, could not be said of the prince.
He laughed when she approached closer, and walked around enough of the obscuring rubble to see his whole body. Evidently he found her shocked expression funny.
Cas for her part, tried to hide her horror, but a wide-eyed expression took purchase on her features despite her most valiant attempt at a politely neutral expression.
On earth, during her college days, Cas had roommates of many different persuasions.
There had been overly religious girls, party animals, honest ‘ta-gawd’ strippers and even a few morticians.
Of all her myriad acquaintances, none were so blithe about the horrors of the human body as the medical degrees.
Cas, in her line of work, had to handle dead animals, organ samples, and all sorts of icky things on a regular basis, so she was somewhat desensitized to the prospect of seeing a little blood. Her fortitude was quick to fail her, however, in the face of a man who’s entire midsection was missing.
Red guts were splattered across the ground, intestines wiggling like worms against the blood-stained grass alongside skin, facia and a confetti of body parts too mangled to identify. The worst part was that the prince was still alive.
His insides were so exposed Cas could see the white of his spine where it bridged across the gap between his torso and his hips, and through it all he was still laughing, as if her shocked expression was the funniest thing in the world until a wince of pain made him stop.
Cas moved automatically, kneeling down at an angle beside his body like all her first-aid training had taught her to do, and finding her reaction ludicrous once she got a good look at what she was dealing with.
The prince stopped laughing to take a deeper breath, his diaphragm expanded into view as a fresh trickle of blood seeped over his white insides.
“My sincerest apologies, Lady Cas, for laughing so freely. It’s one of the few liberties I’m allowed in this situation, you understand.”
“I…” Cas tried to swallow through a dry mouth. “I think I can slow down the bleeding,” she offered.
The prince looked less surprised than she’d expected, and – seeing no objection from him – she continued.
“... but, you have to close your eyes, and you have to promise the Trinket won’t attack me.”
She threw the demands hastily like hot coals, but the prince seemed to think little of them, closing his eyes without question.
Cas paused for a moment, surprised at the compliance.
A cursory double check of the prince’s eyes to make sure they were truly shut, and she transformed into herself and set about her work.
----------------------------------------
The guts were… a superfluous organ, when it came to questions of immediate survival. They were the first thing to be denied blood flow, whenever danger called upon an animal’s body to start prioritizing.
Still, having them replaced with a gaping wound was less than ideal.
Cas’s body ate everything organic by its nature, and was naturally sterile. Forming a bandage from it was the most natural thing for her. She’d done it twice before on instinct.
This bit of intensive care, however, required a bit more imagination, and skill.
Not that Cas was worried. She could have done it with her eyes closed. And, in fact, she did.
Once again, Cas relied on her sense of touch. And, she detected that the prince was human – as Sara had been, when Cas set her bandage. Whereas Sara’s wound required a simple pressure bandage, the prince’s condition required a bit more thought.
Spreading a tendril out, Cas painted all the exposed flesh with a soft-gel that stifled the bleeding. After that, she reached out a new tendril and created a pressure capsule filled with air and over-wrapped with hardened tension-strings.
Her experience creating gas canisters for her tear gas had well prepared her for this, and this bit was completed in seconds.
Cas manipulated the stiff tire-bubble of slime material into a new shape, which ballooned up in the prince’s abdomen, anchoring itself against his hips and lower ribs to create a hydraulic support that would replace all the stabilizing muscles that had been in the area. and conforming quite neatly around the still in-tact psoas muscles which cut through the empty space there.
In all, it ended up looking quite superficially like a real medical device rather than the child’s doodle Cas had feared it would turn out, with the molded-plastic aesthetic and round corners and all.
As a final touch, she separated the support bubble like a polyp, reaching out with her aura and giving it coded instructions to stabilize the Prince’s body in an upward direction.
It wouldn’t be a replacement for human balance, but it would do.
Once this was set, a fresh coat or three of tension strings covered over the whole abdomen and lower back, and everything was packaged neatly behind a smooth wall which hid all the terrible gore inside.
Hp Reduced: -23
“There!” Cas answered, fully human again, and relieved to see that the prince hadn’t opened his eyes.
Opening his eyes, large hands rapped against the new skin of his gut. Shifting his weight forward, he nodded approvingly as the bubble allowed the motion, reacting to his motion like a balancing pendulum to keep his upright stance.
“How is it,” Cas asked, surprising herself with how much anxiety she felt at his judgement.
“It’s good,” he said, hardly stopping to acknowledge the change in circumstance before moving onto the next most dire fact: “now, about those monsters..”
Cas was surprised at how much the prince was able to take in stride. In his place, Cas expected she, or anyone else for that matter, would be stopping the presses to ask a thousand irrelevant questions… or at least screaming in pain. The man’s eyes held the focus of a target cross, however, as he looked up at the swirling mass that howled above them, scowling as if he could see straight through their bodies and their auras.
“Lady Cassandria,” he said.
“Yes?” Cas answered.
“I… am not normally the kind of man who makes a bad first impression. Statesmanship grants that one useful skill, at least. Neither am I the kind of man who begs pardon twice to the same person, but –” he raised a hand to gesture to the maelstrom around them, and at the surrounding pack of sirens who drew closer on clodding wingsteps – “I’m afraid the situation forces my hand, and I must ask your forgiveness again, for I have a rather rude question to ask you.”
Cas, heart in her throat, prepared a thousand explanations about why she was a slime, wondering if he’d seen her when she was healing him. ‘Stupid!’ she thought. ‘Of course he’d open his eyes, he’s injured and surrounded by monsters!’
Her face and her words were all cool, however, as she answered: “What did you want to ask?”
“Glory or Honor?” the prince said.
“Huh?”
“It’s a subject I’ve been wrestling with for some time now,” the prince Admitted. “Events like this have a way of forcing you to confront such things, I suppose, and – given that you’re here – I thought I’d ask for your council on the matter.”
“Me?” Cas gestured to herself, looking around as if expecting to find someone else more suitable. “Why?”
“Like I said, because you’re here. Sometimes that’s all you need to be. Besides,” he continued, “I can well imagine the peril you undertook to come to my aid. I’m rather unable to repay your valor with deed, and unwilling to repay you with words, so why shouldn’t I allow you the honor of counseling a prince? I’m about to make an important decision, and I’d like to hear your advice before I make it.”
Cas understood the words, but the timing of it all left her scratching her head. Looking round, the giant cloud of monsters was still around them.
But the demeanor of the prince somehow made the situation seem normal, and seeing nothing to lose by it, she answered him. “I.. I suppose it depends on what you mean? For what purpose?”
The prince sighed, deflating a bit. Cas noticed the perpetually pained expression that had been the hallmark of his features returned.
“That is exactly the issue. We are told nothing has worth except for the purpose it serves, but… can that possibly be false, do you think?”
Cas succeeded, for once, in hiding her emotions, burying confusion with honesty as she answered: “I think… things often have a value that humans can’t appreciate, even if they should.”
A sad smile escaped the prince.
Cas, worried, “you don’t seem to have liked my answer.”
“No,” he answered. “I suppose I knew the answer all along. One can’t help dallying when things are at an end however. The day is never so beautiful as when the sun is setting. My grandfather used to say that.” Looking over at Cas, and her frustrated attempts at comprehension, the prince cut off, a sober expression replacing his jolly sentiments.
“My brother,” he said finally.
Following his gaze, out of the corner of her eye, Cas saw an unremarkable pile of tent-cloth nearby, covered with wooden pillars.
Cas moved to the pile. Discovering surprising strength in her arms, she threw aside the tent-poles with a heavy thud and lifted aside tent flap to reveal.
“A child?” she couldn’t help the exclamation, surprised to find the unconscious figure. It was a boy, of about age nine, lying curled up in the grass. He looked unharmed, almost as if he were sleeping peacefully.
“Can you bring him here?” the prince asked her.
Cas obliged and cradled the boy up to the prince's reach.
There, the prince held out a hand, and a red glow enveloped the boy, and – before Cas’s increasingly astounded features – the boy began to shrink.
Cas almost dropped him in surprise, finding her arms collapsing together around the diminishing body until both her hands were clasped together to cradle a sleeping boy the size of a lima bean.
Before Cas could say anything, the prince opened his palm above hers and filled her hands with lightning.
“Ahh!” Cas screamed, jerking her hands away from the fireworks. “Are you crazy!” she yelled at the man, taking her hands in a protective posture and bringing her palms to her nose to check on the boy.
Her hands were unburnt. And resting on them was a translucent, red capsule with a silhouette of a boy inside.
“There,” the prince said proudly. “That should make him easier to carry.” the prince held out a rejecting hand when Cas instinctively tried to hand his brother to him. “I’ll have my hands full, I’m afraid. You hold onto him for now.”
Cas, surprised to still be holding such a thing, and having trouble catching up with the surreal event that just took place, looked down at the amulet again, as if to make sure it hadn’t dissolved into a fever dream.
Finding her mind running blanks, and feeling the pressure to say something coherent, Cas blurted out: “impressive magic.”
The prince shrugged boredly. “Shrinking is a simple enough spell, if the subject trusts you.”
Cas raised an eyebrow. “You’re saying there are more complex spells?” trying to hide her jealousy.
“Indeed,” the prince nodded. “I’m sorry that I can’t show you any truly impressive magic. I would do more but…” he nodded his head in a certain direction, towards the dark aura on the horizon, “I don’t imagine Trinket Sable will be happy to let me do anything too impressive.”
Cas, reminded of the Black Flag, cringed a bit at the weight of death she’d so far been successfully ignoring. The trinkets had an energy that cut straight through the opaque cloud of aura the monsters formed. It was discomforting to feel the trinket’s energy through so much shielding, much less to be reminded of it.
“It’s… not going to do anything to us, is it?” she asked, chancing a quick glance back at the dark light.
Again, another laugh from the prince, one perfectly designed to inspire confidence in the face of danger. “No,” he promised, “I don’t think dear Sable will be acting too freely, not so long as Trinket Ember stands.” He pointed a reverent look up at the red flag which waved up above him. “So far, we’ve managed to work out a truce. Do you see that line?” he pointed to the red circle which had cut a hole in the formation of monsters. So long as I don’t cross this boundary, Sable has promised to let the monsters take care of me.” He shifted his pointer finger to the line monsters that were once again encroaching closer.
Cas, almost afraid to hear the answer to her question, asked: “what’s going to happen when you cross it?”
The prince answered dryly, with an almost obscene sense of ease. “Well, that’s when we start fighting again.”
The blood flushed from Cas’ face at that. Dragging herself into the woodchipper had been intense enough an ordeal. Now she was in the thick of it, and his words had the same ring as the cranking of the engine.
Mouth dry, she tried to say something, but found nothing useful in her mind to express.
For once, the prince didn’t find her terror funny, and he spoke with a serious demeanor.
“It’s something that has to happen,” he consoled. “I can’t stay here forever, and even Sable knows that these monsters aren’t enough to kill me.”
“Then why are you guys waiting?” Cas sniped. “Why not just get it over with?” The anticipation was painful to bear,, and Cas was becoming too well aware that she wouldn’t have ever gotten herself into this situation if not for their stalling.
“Why wait?” The prince mulled over her question. “I suppose, it’s because Trinkets understand that in a battle, the last mover always wins. Anyway,” he said, bracing a hand on his knee. Cas could see the muscles in his torso flexing as he leant forward and, with a grunt of exertion, threw him into a stiff, standing posture.
The monsters took this as a sign to start their eager, booming caws, howling in unison like a wrathful crowd as they reared back and trampled the grass in a temperamental war-dance.
One even attempted a surprise charge.
The prince, face tensed with controlled pain, roared: “Shut up!” he yelled, raising a hand to the north.
A million red beams flashed into a momentary existence.
Thereafter a moment of pause followed, before all the gathered beasts there fell apart, dribbling into a carpet of carrion that stretched for half a mile. For an instant, before the flying mass had filled in the suddenly empty space above the carpet, Cas saw a clear line out to the daylight. And there she saw a fresh unit of men had been organized around a medical tent.
“The safe house!” Cas yelled, pointing at the direction the prince had cut.
“Yes,” the prince answered. “If you follow the trail of meat, you should be in range to reach the medical tent. Shouldn’t take more than two minutes, by my estimation. Give my brother to the head doctor once you arrive. They’ll know what to do with him.” He pointed to the red gem in Cas’s hand as he said this, prompting her to grip the precious object tighter.
He didn’t sound as happy as one might expect, but Cas wasn’t one to critique the attitude of a man with half his guts missing.
Walking stiffly, the man stepped to the edge of the red circle. There he paused, taking a deep breath.
The monsters, now especially weary after that last show, had given the border quite a wide berth.
“What now?” Cas said, stepping next to him, looking down at the red line as if it were a cliffside precipice.
“Well,” the prince said, “now I step over this line and break the truce with Sable.”
“Then what?” Cas said nervously.
The prince answered with generous simplicity. “Then the Black Flag will attack me.”
Cas didn’t try to bargain him into another course.
“What should I do?”
“Just get to the medical station and give my brother over to the head doctor. I understand you had your own reasons for coming here, but that is the only thing I ask you to do.”
“I mean, where should I go?” Cas said. She was speaking more quickly, now, and bouncing on her toes in anticipation. “Should I stick close to you? Should I stay far away? It’s not going to blast your location, is it?” Cas said, glancing fearfully over her shoulder, at where she knew the Black Flag to be.
The prince only mustered one last smile. “I think I’m well beyond giving orders, but… if you’ll have my final words of advice I can tell you this: If you want an easy life, take two steps to your left. If you want the strength to endure a hard one, stay exactly where you are. Otherwise…”
“Otherwise?” Cas prompted.
“Otherwise… well, just do whatever you want!” he advised, lifting a leg up and planting his foot firmly on the other side of the red line.