Rosalyn awoke to a world of noise and pain. She sat up slowly and distantly noticed that the church was on fire. She shook her head trying to clear the fuzz in her brain, but the fact that her everything hurt was putting a kibosh on her efforts to pay more attention to her surroundings. Rosalyn did manage to note that at some point she had been dragged out of the building and laid on a sheet that had once been drying in the afternoon sun. Staring stupidly at the floral pattern of the sheet, her focus slammed into place as she heard the screams of children and the sounds of metal clashing. She swiveled her head around to fully take in the carnage for the first time. She saw Mother Cham who was missing an arm, fighting with the power of the Divine against a dozen skeleton and zombie attackers. She started to stand up to run to help Mother Cham when she saw Hobert running toward her carrying burnt and crying children. She turned and waved him over, but was shocked when Hobert fell face forward with an arrow sticking out of his neck. He didn’t move. The children in his arms wailed. Death had come to their world. She fell into despair.
Except… she knew the children needed her. She had to get them to safety. Only then would she allow herself to grieve. She took a step toward the crying children with a reassuring smile on her face when they exploded in a blue fireball. A mad cackle sounded in the distance and Rosalyn was blown off of her feet as her world shrunk down to nothing but more pain. When Rosalyn came to her sense once more she was unsure how much time had passed, but she was aware of an arm forcibly lifting her to her knees. It was Mother Cham. She looked awful, her left arm was missing at the elbow and her teeth were visible through a cut in her cheek. One of her eyes was swollen shut and she was absolutely covered in blood. Bright red hair stuck out of the ruined habit at odd angles. Rosalyn’s heart ached. Why was this happening?
“Child, I need you to do something for me.” Mother Cham handed Rosalyn a small black box wrapped in silver bands. She was unsure about what Mother Cham was about to ask, but anything to help. “I need you to take this box and flee. It cannot fall into the hands of the lich.” Rosalyn was shocked. A lich? Those existed? Also, flee? What about her family? Her home? “I cannot do that Ma’am! I cannot abandon you and the rest of our family!” Mother Cham hugged Rosalyn, “My foolish daughter. You have to flee, you are the only one left. Now go, I will hold them off as long as I am able to. You have to live Rose. You have a promise to keep and dreams to chase.” She placed a gentle kiss on Rosalyn’s cheek before letting out a grimace.
Mother Cham stood up shakily and turned. Rosalyn hadn’t noticed before, but there was a lot of undead bearing down on them. She saw the battered forms of several of the other kids mixed in the crowd. Rosalyn choked back a sob as she saw their tiny bodies, twisted and broken but still moving with dead, hungry eyes. Mother Cham let out an undulating war cry and leapt toward the advancing horde, dodging and weaving in the combat art of the Sisters of the Divine, dealing devastating blow after devastating blow to the zombies and skeletons despite her wounds and small frame. Arrows pinged off of her divine aura and just for a moment… Rosalyn thought she would win. Then she froze for a long moment and a sword erupted from her back and with that sight Rosalyn was freed from her trance and turned to ran into the mountains. She heard one more feral battle cry from the tiny nun and an explosion. Tears streaming down her face and shame burning heart she dared not look back. So she ran with the hordes of undead surely in pursuit, clutching a mysterious box.
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Cham was lost in sadness and rage. Her kids were all dead. She was supposed to protect them and she failed. What is worse is that she about to follow them and the box would fall into the hands of the lich that killed all of her kids. So she did the only thing she could do. She fought. She punched, kicked, and headbutted her way across the battlefield looking for any survivors, looking for a way to keep the box from hands that would misuse its secret. The undead were everywhere, and what was worse is that she could clearly recognize faces from the village in the crowd. Unsure of any other course of action she just fought on. She could use her escape talisman, but that would require her to be still while she channeled power into the item and the undead were not going to let her do that. Besides, even if she did manage to pull it she was pretty sure that her injuries would mean she would be incapacitated and probably unconscious if she used all of her Divine power to activate the talisman. It all looked so hopeless.
Then she saw Rosalyn stir. Her eldest kid was still alive! Maybe all hope wasn’t lost afterall. Cham fought her way to the prone form, ripping and tearing zombies with her one remaining arm. She decapitated the baker’s wife with a blade of light, then extended the energy into a whip that took out the local smith and his apprentice. Finally reaching Rosalyn, she set up a wall of Divine power that would hold the horde at bay for a few minutes at least. She tiredly lifted Rosalyn up to her knees and looked for a sign the girl was lucid. They didn’t have much time so even though she had a thousand things she wanted to tell the girl, when her kid looked into her eyes with recognition she said “Child, I need you to do something for me.” Cham handed Rosalyn the awful cursed thing, and regret filled her heart at doing something so vile to one of her kids.“I need you to take this box and flee. It cannot fall into the hands of the lich.” Rosalyn looked lost to Cham, but she knew how strong she was. “I cannot do that Ma’am! I cannot abandon you and the rest of our family!” Cham was suddenly overcome with emotion and hugged Rosalyn, “My foolish daughter. You have to flee, you are the only one left. Now go, I will hold them off as long as I am able to. You have to live Rose. You have a promise to keep and dreams to chase.” She placed a kiss on Rosalyn’s cheek before letting out a grimace, she was bleeding pretty badly under her habit. She used a bit of her divine power to stem the bleeding.
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Cham stood up shakily and turned to face the army she could feel amassing at her barrier. It was a Divine miracle they hadn’t already broken through. Cham silently thanked the heavens for the chance to save at least one of her kids as she sadly glimpsed the forms of several of her other kids mixed in the crowd. Sudden fury gripped Cham’s heart as she let out a holy battle cry, dropping the shield and leaping toward the advancing horde to buy Rosalyn time. So it was that this time she fought not with despair, but with hope in the future of her biggest dreamer. She utilized the combat art of the Sisters of the Divine to devastating effect as she destroyed dozens of undead with large sweeping uses of her power. She crushed a group of skeletons flat with an overhead swing. She sliced an advancing group of of former villagers in half with a roundhouse kick. With fury in her heart she turned to face a group of smaller undead and she froze. They were the twisted forms of her kids. She faltered and just for a moment lost her concentration. That was all it took as a nearby skeleton got under her guard and ran a sword through her side. Gasping in pain Cham punched the skeleton’s spine in two and ripped the blade from her abdomen. She stared at her kids one last time as they shambled forward and then she looked at the sky, stained red with the light of the fire. She screamed and let out all of her power at once. The world exploded into white as everything around Cham was blown away.
Several minutes later Cham lay on the ground. She was alive, but absolutely everything about her was injured and she couldn’t move if her life depended on it. Which sadly, it more than likely did. She was bleeding from at least a dozen gashes and cuts, had been run through by a sword, was missing an arm, and possibly an eye. In short, it wasn’t fun to be her at the moment, but she could tell that none of her wounds were going to end her life in the next few minutes. That was the great thing about fighting with Divine power, it healed you as you fought and allowed the warriors who used to to go far beyond the limits of any normal warrior. Unfortunately, it was a finite resource and her rage induced explosion used up everything she had left. She currently didn’t have enough left to heal her wounds enough to keep on fighting. However...
“Ehehehehehehe!” A mad cackle erupted above Cham’s head. She couldn’t see the owner of the voice, but she had her suspicions that it was the lich. “I am impressed! I expected at least this much from the legendary Justicar of Light. Scourge of the unholy and Hero of the Battle of the Deadfield. Bravo!” Cham could hear a slow mocking clap from outside of her field of vision. Cham only hoped whoever was speaking liked to monologue.
“You know, it wasn’t easy to find it. It took me more than fifteen years to track it down and it was really only due to dumb luck that one of our spies saw the courier’s bag when he stopped in an inn. After that it was trivial to track his movements, and imagine my surprise when it turns out that you had our prize! It was almost like a divine message from our Master.” Cham noted that indeed, this guy was a monologuer and started to draw in all the power she could gather. “While you stagnated here, thinking that our Master’s forces were defeated, we only grew stronger.” That is when the lich came into Cham’s view. He was dressed in a fine silk robe that covered everything from his feet to his neck and held a gnarled black staff in the crook of his arm. She took a good look at his face her blood ran cold as she recognized him despite the stretched and unnatural features of his face. It was Geroth the Unclean, a necromancer from the crusade that she had personally fought and killed in the final push. Surprise must have shown on Cham’s face because the lich said “Surprised? Please, this level of preparation is a given for a disciple of the Master.” HIs twisted features upturned into a mockery of a smile, showing black teeth sharpened to points. “Now where is it?”
Cham laughed. “I don’t have it fool. You came all this way for nothing! You walk away empty handed!” The unsettling smile grew even larger, “Oh, I know you gave it to the girl. I can feel its presence this close. I just wanted to give you your moment of defiance before I kill you and animate your corpse into the service of the one true Master. I wanted to see the look of utter despair on your features. I want you to know who it was that beat you and took away that which was precious to you.”
“So oh vaunted Justicar of Light, what do you have to say to that?” Cham smiled broadly as she activated her escape charm, “I say… goodbye!” and then Cham was gone, leaving a very angry lich behind.
Cham hit the circle burnt into the hardwood floor that she had prepared many years previously in the small fishing cabin in the mountains that she sometimes took her kids to ice fish during the winter. Feeling glad that she had not dismissed the idea of setting an escape circle here she blinked the stars out of her eyes. Reaching over she grunted once, looking around blearily with her one working eye and activated the emergency healing ward built into the circle. Unable to keep up with the physical strain any longer she passed into dark oblivion.
“Rose… be safe.”