“Master, please,” the girl said. “I can’t feel my arms.”

“Then you need stronger arms.”

The man slapped the girl’s weapon out of her little hands with the flat of his blade, then swept her leg and shoved her off balance. There was no malice there, no cruelty – just a vague, detached sense of disappointment.

“On your feet,” he told her. “Again.”

She rose to her feet and picked up her blade from the ground. She wiped the sweat and dirt from her face, bit her already bloodied lip to prevent herself from bursting into tears, and assumed a fencing stance.

She was only eight or nine, small and slender. She had a smidgen of áeld blood running in her veins, just enough to give her hair the color of pale silver, but not enough to make her a worthy successor to the Path of the Gloam Blade.

That’s what her master needed – a successor.

What she needed, though, was a father.

In the end, they would both be disappointed.

Later that day, when Master Hight would finally let her collapse on the little pile of straw she called a bed, she’d swear she’d treat her disciple differently, should she ever take one.

Over the course of her long life, she would come to break many oaths.

That one, however?

That one she’d do her damnedest to keep.

***

Fawkes tore through the dark corridors like a maenad, looking for more low-dwellers to take her fury out on.

It didn’t take her long to find her quarry; there they were, three or four stragglers looking for corpses to chew on. Fawkes didn’t even slow down. She already had her blade in her hand and violence in her eyes.

The first one fell before it even had a chance to register her presence. She stepped out of a side corridor right next to it and stabbed it through the eye, plunging her saber deep enough into its skull to skewer its malformed brain.

It took a little more than that to kill the second and third ones. Too stupid to stay surprised for long, they pounced on Fawkes just as the light left the first one’s eyes. They bit and clawed at her, keeping her on the back foot as the fourth one circled around looking for an opening.

Fawkes pivoted away from the dead low-dweller and danced around the fiends, always staying just out of reach. Whenever one of them dared to come closer and claw at her, she punished it with a wicked slash across its gangly arms.

One of the two finally had enough. With half a dozen gashes on its limbs oozing black blood, it snarled at Fawkes and charged at her on all fours. She met it with a burst of sudden motion, side-stepping it and scoring a deep cut on the side of its thick neck as it barreled past her. It wasn’t a mortal wound, but it would be enough to slow the fiend down enough to let her deal with the other two.

The fourth one, the one that had been circling her, took its chance and jumped at her, its dirty, wicked claws reaching to tear her head from her body. It was a well-timed attack, too. She had to give the fiend that. She barely had enough time to raise her saber and block it.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Unfazed, the fiend reared for a second strike. The other two would probably be joining into the fray any second now. That’s how low-dwellers fought, hunting as a pack, looking for opportunities to swarm their foes.

Even blinded by fury, Fawkes wasn’t reckless enough to take those odds if she could help it. Just as the low-dweller was about to pounce again, she drew her pistol and shot it almost point-blank in its ugly face.

The gunshot resounded throughout the dark Halls, probably drawing the attention of every low-dweller that still roamed the place.

Good.

As the now-headless corpse of the low-dweller spasmed at her feet, Fawkes turned to meet the two remaining fiends.

The one she’d slashed was already groggy and half-dead from the blood loss, so she put her pistol away and set out to finish the job. Moving fast like a predator, she darted over the dead bodies of the two dead fiends and went for the jugular.

Heartbeats later, the bodies at her feet were three.

She made the fourth low-dweller last, slashing a hundred tiny cuts on its stinking hide, toying with it like a cat would do with a hapless mouse.

Normally, she’d never stoop down to such meaningless cruelty. Clean kills were more to her liking.

Normally.

All pretenses of normality, however, had withered the moment she’d laid eyes upon the dead body of Reiner, decomposing and strung up on a spear like a grim trophy.

Up until then she could pretend everything was alright, even though she knew it wasn’t. She could pretend Reiner was on another of his jaunts or benders or misadventures, sure to return with new tales to share and laugh about around the fire.

She could pretend there was no worry gnawing at her day and night, no tight feeling at the pit of her stomach. That was one of the reasons she initially had Hunter tag along with her, if she was to be honest with herself. She thought having him around would be a diversion that would keep her mind off her worrying.

Reiner had been more than just a disciple. More than a friend, even.

Reiner had been family, her only true connection to, well, anything.

Reiner had been the only thing that had kept her vaguely interested in going on with her sad old life–that was the long and short of it.

And now he was gone.

What was she to do now?

Grimnir’s beard, she had not the slightest of ideas.

The Lodge was scattered to the four winds and all but done for. She’d inherited her master’s dream of finding the guild’s ancient cradle. Reviving it, recruiting, rebuilding. Without Reiner to pass it on to, however, what would the point of that be?

She was old. She felt old. Too old.

As for hanging up her blades and guns and living a quiet life… Well, around civilized folk, she’d always been an outcast. She didn’t expect that to change now. She’d rather go out in a blaze than rot away in some hamlet. Lodge folk didn’t die in their beds. Never had, never would. That was the Creed.

She went on stalking the dark halls looking for low-dwellers to put to the blade, though she knew it to be an exercise in futility. No matter how many of the fiends she slew, it wouldn’t even begin to numb the rage and despair that was drowning her.

It was all she could do not to murder the two pelt-wearing fools. The Brethren had straight-up lied to her, the bastards, misled her, manipulated her into helping them doing their dirty work, all while knowing that Reiner was dead. She had every right to walk into the vault they were hiding in, licking their wounds, and tear them to bloody shreds.

It wasn’t her conscience that stopped her, either. Gods knew she’d killed out of pure vengeance before, and it hadn’t weighed on her one bit. No, it was the realization that their deaths would do no good to anyone. If anything, it would put an end to their own suffering.

There was another reason, too, one she’d been surprised to realize. Hunter. She didn’t want the lad to think ill of her. She didn’t want to set a bad example for him to follow, especially not after chastising him for his Transient nature. Despite him being big and strong and clever, in certain ways Hunter was still like a child.

Reiner had been like that too.

Maybe that was what had gotten him killed.

Maybe Fawkes had been too soft on him.

Maybe her own master had been right to push her as he had.

That thought caused a new wave of rage and despair overtake her. She gripped the hilt of her saber tighter and delved deeper into the Halls.

She had to find more fiends to kill.