I am a disciple of Diogenes, an oath bearer of the Masque of the Second Death. Within the hearts of every man lies the desire to be the master of his own fate. Some would choose to seek glory for their own legacy, while others would rather sacrifice their own legacies for the greater glory of the community; though our own Lord Diogenes chose to while away his days fornicating in the various open air markets, he observed that, at the end of the day, both the servant and the glory seeker shared the same desire to choose the path of their fate. However, the thing about fate is that it is not simply a moment's decision, nor is it a narrow leyline carved in stone. Fate is like the boundless winds, billowing across the Vientien steppe; an ever changing and elusive force that knows neither love or hate, nor treaty or enmity. A galley crew of bow-legged sailors might outrun a wyvern by capturing the wind in their sails, while the flap of a single dove's wings a world away, may churn the sky into a raging storm that sinks an air fleet. 

  "Ah! Bring that ether over here, quick boy!" The wings of a cross stitched avalerion bulged on the back of the chemist's burlap ruck as he hurried down the steps of the chancel. Half a dozen old oak pews lined the walls on either side of the sanctuary while half a dozen more lay dismantled and discarded. Their frames having been hastily ripped apart to construct wooden cots for all the casualties they were taking in, and still there were not enough.

  "H-here!" The chemist gasped as he came to a halt in front of a leathery old man in the white and red trim of a white mage beckoning him from the bedside of a wooden cot. Fumbling with one of pouches on his bandolier, the chemist produces a cloudy glass vial of viscous green liquid, the old mage snatching it from his hands before he'd even reached out to him. Draining the contents of the vial in a single breath, the aged white mage feels the elixir be consumed by his body, cycling through his dantians in an instant. Clumsily resealing the pouch on his bandolier, the chemist turns his attention to the limp figure sprawled out on the cot. A young hedge knight, not much older than himself, lay unresponsive on thin wicker bedding. Cloaked in a faded red gambeson and a plain, round breastplate marred by scars and the sickly pink quill shrapnel that was tell-tale of a purobolos encounter having gone down the shitter, it was clear that the hedge knight was in critical condition.

  The veins under the old mage's hands began to glow with a faint blue aura and he struck out with a blur of motion slamming his palms into the bronze of the knight's breastplate and hissing in a gutteral whisper, "Esuna!" A surge of iridescent blue qi shoots out from under the old man's palms, washing over the knight's breastplate and engulfing his body in the blink of an eye. The hedge knight shudders but the moment passes just as quickly as it'd begun, the glow of spell silently dissipating from his body.

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

  "No good, he's going back into shock," a wide eyed squire yells from the opposite end of the bedside, grasping a phoenix down within his own bandolier and stabbing the quill end into a red sleeved arm. Easily piercing the fabric and sinking into the flesh below, all color drains from the feather as the knight's body spasms again, barely coming back from the brink.

  "H-he's still not stabilizing!" This time it was the chemist's turn, "T-there must be something we missed!" That's when the old man saw it. While once he would have caught it instantly, in his golden years his vision had slowly began to falter and the colors had begun to bleed together. Above the bottom of the left armhole between the breastplate and his gambeson, there was a tiny splotch where the fabric was darker than the faded color of the rest of the cloth. 

  At the exact same instant he began to reach forward the squire suddenly picked up on it too. "There!" Beating the wizened mage to the punch and grasping for the straps, the squire rushed to strip the breastplate. But in his haste the squire's resolve soon faltered, as his blood ran cold and his heart beat hot in his throat at the sight of the slough of entrails plastered against the insides of the armor. As it turned out, the breastplate hadn't caught all of the shrapnel from the purobolos. A single quill, no bigger than a rose thorn, had shot through the knight's right armpit, boring a hole the size of a rice ball through his ribcage, and catching on inside the left of the breastplate. Now stripped of his armor, a clotted mess of mottled organs began to spill out.

  The white mage slammed down the top of the breastplate back over the knight's body, struggling the straps back into place.

  "N-no, I-I… this can't-,"

  "Forget it!" The old mage rasps back, cutting off the squire's stammering. "There's nothing we can do for him now, but there's still others from the convoy. See to them."

  Walking off as if in a daze, the squire stumbles down the sanctuary toward an archer laying on a sick mat being rolled out by black mage. As the chemist feels his knees give out, he turns to vomit in the chamberpot near the knight's bedside, as the old white mage softly chants a prayer in the darlavon tongue over the hedge knight's body. As the warm void of sleep carries away the knight's mind, the last thing he hears is the white mage's song rising under the sounds of the parishioners calling out to each other as they tend to his comrades who'd also been injured in the allied ambush.