Al

I desperately made my way over towards the fallen Maegar chief as the shelter started to crumble. Fortunately, the Harai surrounding him had already begun to scatter after my explosives and the onset of the disaster. The enemy leader was nowhere in sight as I approached Goran’s fallen form. His lanky figure was disturbing still, and I noticed a very nasty cut across his chest. The ground began to rumble as the shelter came crashing down to earth, and I knew that we had no time to treat him here. Fortunately, the chief warrior didn’t seem like he was about to bleed out, and that contingent of warriors that I had seen earlier soon arrived at my side.

I could see that many of these warriors were now looking down at the laid-out figure of their chief warrior with a tangible mix of fear and grief. They seemed temporarily paralyzed by their emotions before I started yelling at them:

“Help me with him! We need to move!”

I had already moved around to the other side of his body and picked up his legs. My yelling seemed to shock them out of their fear and two of them stooped down to pick up the old warrior’s torso, with a third gathering up Goran’s sword. We immediately began making our way away from the shelter and towards the relative safety of the mountain pass from whence we came. The rumbling noise was only getting louder as the shelter began to fall apart even further, the noise bringing down further avalanches from the mountain the shelter had been built into. This created a vicious cycle of more and more cascading snow which our little group hustled away from as quickly as possible.

Several of the Snowwraiths, not buried in the initial collapse, were now sprinting towards us and away from the emerging natural disaster. The growing cloud of snow and debris had swallowed up most of the enemy force, but our fighters still clashed with a significant remnant. A knife whistled through the air and just past my head as one of the enemies tried his luck on the fleeing enemy commander. The rush of terror made my legs move faster than I ever thought possible, and the ranks of our escorting warriors closed even further in an attempt to intercept any further projectiles.

We fortunately managed to avoid being buried, but the chaos of the disaster we were fleeing blew an icy veil over the whole of the battlefield. It was in these deteriorating conditions that we trundled onward, spurred on with the vigor and energy enjoyed by the terrified. The subsequent minutes went by in a milky white haze, my legs and lungs burning with an agony that I defied for as long as I was able. Eventually, one of the warriors noticed my stark exhaustion and took my place in carrying our fallen commander. I still didn’t slow down, even when we entered the mountain pass and continued our frantic retreat.

I managed another 20 minutes of hectic sprinting before I reached my limit. Gasping, I felt an immense pain in my legs and began to fall. A muscle cramp had caused them to seize up. But before I even hit the snow, one of the warriors beside me scooped up my relatively tiny form and put me on his back. Embarrassed but otherwise unharmed, I allowed him to carry me for a while as I caught my breath.

We continued our retreat for a couple hours before our troop decided to rest. We set down in a tiny clearing in between two mountains, heaving like a blacksmith’s bellows. I didn’t pause in making my way over to Goran as the other warriors collapsed around me. I felt a bolt of relief when I realized that the old Maegar was still breathing, though his rasps were shallow and unhealthy. The cut in his chest wasn’t bleeding, but it had turned an unhealthy black and his whole body had begun to shiver violently. I couldn’t believe that no one was moving to treat the man and reached into my pouch to try and save his life.

I spent the berries lavishly, pouring a treatment of 5 down his throat at first, then steadily feeding him three separate berries one at a time as the old man flitted in and out of consciousness when he began to respond to that treatment. When his breathing finally evened out and the wound began to close, I finally sat back and allowed myself to relax. I was a little concerned about spending so much of our healing stock, but we should have little issue replenishing our stores. After helping the Maegar with this fiasco, they owed us a reimbursement on healing supplies at the very least.

Other warriors in our original party began to trickle into our makeshift camp, primarily the archers that we had left behind up on the ridge above. Even so, our force within the clearing was significantly smaller than the one we had left with. We had definitely lost some fighters in the battle, but this should be nowhere near the total number of survivors from our relief party. There weren’t more than 80 Maegar in this group. When I asked one of the warriors about it, he simply responded:

“Some of us were definitely buried. Others just went down different paths in their haste to escape. They should make their way back to Mahria independently without rejoining us. Our buried kin should be able to make their way out of the snow using their abilities and come back on their own as well. Do not worry, little human. I am certain that most of our brothers will make their way back to us. We could try to help them, of course, but we would risk ambush by the Harai, who are also doubtless digging themselves out of the avalanche as well. As we are now, we stand a better chance of survival scattered rather than together and presenting a large target.

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I worry the most for the scavenger group. If they were caught up in the collapse, then they may have perished in the disaster, or they will be killed when the Harai get re-organized and hunt them down. We can only hope that your friends got to them quickly enough and that they evacuated through the back exit in time.”

My concerns allayed, if not forgotten, I went back to resting and watching Goran, hoping he would wake up soon. My hopes were in vain, and he remained passed as I sat there. Eventually, our group seemed to collectively decide that we had rested for long enough and that we needed to hit the road again. My legs were so sore that I limped more than ran as I tried to keep pace with my long-legged allies, and I was soon forced to suffer the indignity of being carried again. No one seemed to resent me for being a burden, however, and I actually heard a small debate carry on over who would get the honor of carrying the “hero who saved our leader”. I wasn’t supposed to hear that, of course, but there was little I couldn’t hear. My ears ached a bit from all the rumbling from the great collapse, but they were more than good enough in this case to ensure that I blushed an even deeper crimson.

We made a steady pace through the mountains for the next few hours before Goran finally woke up. The warriors around him let out a cry of joy when their leader woke up for good this time, and the whole party was soon chattering at him excitedly in Maegarish. They soon singled me out to him, and the old warrior’s intense gaze fixed on my own brown eyed stare. He dropped to one knee, rumbling:

“I owe you my life, young Al. This debt will not be forgotten, as long as I live.”

I accepted his statement as graciously as I could. I stood up straight, sucked in my stomach, and tried to look as dignified as I was able:

“It was my pleasure to be of aide, mighty Goran. May my people and yours always be allied.”

I held out my hand, which he clasped as he stood up, a shadow of amusement flickering across his face before a more serious look reasserted itself:

“Indeed.” He responded simply.

This interaction caused another round of hearty cheers from the pack of warriors all around us. As we got on the road again, the Maegar warband started up a hearty chant. I couldn’t understand a word of it, but that didn’t stop my spirits from soaring as we made our way back home, the song of the survivors echoing across the mountainside.

…

Stephen

It took us more than four days to make it back to Mahria. We needed to take a more circuitous route than usual, to shake off any pursuers, and the march of the tired civilians was much slower than the warrior’s trot. Even marching both day and night, with only sporadic breaks taken for food, water, and a couple hours of sleep, it took us more than twice as long to make it back as it did to get here. That didn’t bother me too much, though. The girls and I needed to lick our wounds after the beating that we had taken at the hands of the collapse and the Wraiths, and the slow pace that we were holding was nothing for us. I almost felt bad, as we seemed to be in outstanding health in comparison to the beaten and fatigued people we were travelling with.

Not that they seemed to resent us for it. The Maegar civilians seemed to whisper in awe and interest whenever they looked at us. Gone was the suspicion naturally oriented towards outsiders, as word got around that we played a pivotal role in rescuing them from the clutches of the Harai horde. Warriors nodded to us in respect and male and female civilians alike smiled nervously when they met our eyes. The adults seemed unwilling to get close to us out of a healthy sense of distance, but the youth that they had brought with them seemed less inhibited. Teenage Maegar, gangly and awkward, would often come up to us during one of our breaks and try to thank us and speak to us in broken and halting human-tongue. They would often be called back by their parents, but not without a lot of mutual smiling and a couple of handshakes.

When the Maegar’s home mountain finally came into sight, a shout of relief went out throughout the whole group. Exhaustion forgotten for a few moments, people raced giddily over the last leg of the journey, scrambling to return to warm firesides and anxious families. A ruckus broke out when we reached the doors of the mountain city, everyone anxious to finally make their way back home. No one was hurt, but there was a good amount of good-natured jostling and shouting as everyone eagerly made their way into the mountain’s tunnel.

When Ann, Julia and I finally made our way into the city, a small crowd had already gathered to offer a warm welcome to their long-lost kin. A party had already broken out by the time we made our way onto the city’s streets, warrior and civilian alike crooning out a simple tune of gratitude. Al managed to find us in the midst of all of the chaos, and he offered us fistfuls of skewers of hot Arthus meat, likely some of the last of our supply. The warm meat was heavenly as it passed through my throat and began to restore me in ways I had never thought possible. Even though we had recovered a bit on the journey home, I still felt a week’s worth of fatigue start to leave my body, my muscles healing and fortifying from the hearty meal. Al chattered away at us as we gulped the meat down ravenously, a huge stupid grin on his face as his scattered brain recounted everything he had done and seen since we had been separated. As Ann interrupted him and messed with him for being such a chatterbox, I noticed Victor and Lynn making their way through the crowds and towards our position, Hope and Eithan in tow.

When I came up for air and saw them, I broke out in a grin that eclipsed even Al’s enthusiastic smile. I looked over at Julia and saw the same expression reflected right back at me, both of us feeding off one another’s joy. In a moment like that, love and happiness become a palpable thing, a vivacious buzz that filled the air with a kind of warmth that was almost another person unto itself. That type of moment has an eternal quality to it, as though time and space itself pauses and kneels at the coming of its lord and master.

It was perfect.