Marchioness Deleraine trembled as she stared at the silhouette of her savior in the doorway of the carriage, blood dripping from the head of the shovel in his hands. The goblin who had been clawing at her legs lay limp on the carriage floor, a deep split in the back of his head. Deleraine lifted a shaky hand, wiping the warmth from her cheek, before looking down at her white glove stained with red.

“Ya might want to run,” Arvel said as he hopped off the step of the carriage, turning to take a swing at another goblin that raced toward him, clubbing it across the face with the heavy iron head of his shovel.

“Run where?!” Deleraine asked as she crawled toward the doorway of the carriage.

“I don’t know!” said Arvel, “Ain’t nowhere safe. Just get somewhere other than here!”

Deleraine looked around as she stumbled out of the carriage. There was nothing but a wasteland for as far as the eye could see, except a single, verdant patch at the base of the mountain. Arvel’s farm was the sole beacon on the horizon, and Deleraine broke into a run toward it, before a handful of goblins scrambled into her path.

“No!” Deleraine shouted, backing away from them and stumbling on the gravel.

“Hold on!” Arvel shouted, running to place himself between the marchioness and the raiders. He lifted his shovel up into the air, before he doubled over with a grunt, dropping the makeshift weapon on the ground behind him. A splatter of red arced across the gravel, trailing the swing of one of the goblins’ swords.

Deleraine stared in shock as Arvel slumped to his knees, before falling face-first on the ground. She stumbled backward, before falling onto her backside, and averting her gaze; Deleraine didn’t want to witness that pathetic sight, of one born under the Warrior Star shriveling into a weakened husk. She had seen it happen far too many times.

A heavy shadow fell across her, and Deleraine looked up to see a goblin looming over her, with blood dripping from his sword. A warm red aura glowed around him as his muscles bulged, throbbing with veins. The goblin’s body was almost overwhelmed with the surge of vitality it sapped from Arvel’s corpse, and with one hand, he reached down and grabbed Deleraine’s wrist, dragging her off of the ground to pull behind him.

The goblins gave Arvel’s farm a wide berth. It was possible they didn’t know that they had killed the farm’s sole inhabitant. They forced Deleraine to march over the hills and up the steep mountainous paths to their caves, and when she could walk no further, they bound her wrists with strips of leather and carried her on their shoulders. Once they had retreated into the cave, they threw her into a corner behind a rock, and they circled around the warmth and light of a single burning bonfire.

“Big payday!” one of the goblins kept saying, “Big payday!”

“You idiot!” another said, “There’s nobody with gold left around here!”

“We could sacrifice her,” a scratchy female voice chimed in.

“No gods ever do anything good for us!” snapped one nasally goblin, “We had better just eat her! I think she’s got a few fatty parts if we look for them!”

“No cannibalism!”

“She’s not a goblin! It’s fine!”

Deleraine began to sob.

“Shut up over there!”

She wept harder, burying her face against her bound arms. Though the guards from her keep would surely come when she didn’t return, she wouldn’t have been expected back for days. Even if Arvel revived, he would be too feeble to even make the climb. Arvel’s harsh words still rang in her mind.

‘There’s just a whole lot of things I’d rather do than fight for a lost cause.’

‘You being stubborn… …is gonna get your people killed.’

‘We lost.’

Deleraine didn’t know how much time had passed as she lay curled up in the corner of the cave, staring at the flickering light of the bonfire on the stone ceiling. The chatter of the goblins had turned into a meaningless din of noise, their threats and plots bearing less weight than her self-loathing.

Then, a loud clank shocked her out of her own thoughts. The sounds of goblins shrieking, sounding alarms, and gathering up their weapons. Deleraine pushed herself to sit up, and peeked around the rock, before ducking back down to hide as a pair of goblins ran by.

“The farmer!” one of the goblins cried, “The farmer!”

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“There’s no way,” Deleraine whispered, before risking another peek from behind the rock.

There he was. Arvel swung his shovel with the strength and precision that a knight might swing a glaive, bludgeoning and chopping at the goblins who raced toward him. The top of his blue overalls was let down to hang around his waist, and a mixture of sweat and goblin blood dripped down his muscular chest muscles. He was far from the ‘feeble husk of a man’ that Deleraine had expected, as though he had never fallen in combat at all.

“Back again?” a gravelly voice hissed.

From beside the fire, a goblin rose, with a cleaver in each of his hands. He stood a foot taller than each of his yard-high brethren around him, and his short arms rippled with newly forged muscles. A faint shimmer of red coursed through his veins, shining even through his green skin, of vital energy still not yet fully absorbed.

“You got somethin’ of mine,” Arvel said, pointing his bloodied, dented shovel at the goblin, “and I want it back.”

Deleraine’s heart leapt in her chest, as she clutched the edge of the rock. She felt a blush rise to her cheeks as she watched Arvel leap into battle. Though his line was arguably corny, even cliched, she’d never dreamt that a man would call her ‘his’ like one of those rugged heroes from a romance novel.

Though the goblin was shorter than him, his bulging, sinewy form tensed as lifted his hatchets to block Arvel’s swing, not even staggering from the force of the blow. But Arvel was unfazed, continuing to press the attack against the goblin brute. Every swing of the unwieldy shovel was deflected, and splinters of wood were beginning to chip away from the makeshift weapon’s shaft, whittling away at Arvel’s offensive.

“Besides, it doesn’t suit you,” Arvel said with a cocky grin, “You look stupid with all that power, like an overstuffed pillow.”

Deleraine’s shoulders sank as she realized what Arvel was there to claim, before her eye began to twitch, anger brewing up from deep inside. She leapt up from behind the rock and shouted, “You absolute cad! You’re no hero! You’re a boor! A selfish, egocentric boor!”

The goblin’s eyes darted toward Deleraine only briefly, but the instant was enough. The jagged tip of the shovel head stabbed upward beneath the goblin’s throat, separating his chin from his throat as a great gush of blood poured down his body, and his arms fell limp, dropping both his hatchets to the ground with a noisy clatter.

As the once imposing goblin dangled at the end of Arvel’s shovel, a red aura began to pulse around him, before wisps of that vermillion energy began to crawl down the shaft of the shovel, before flowing into Arvel’s hands. Glimmers of red pulsed through his veins as the farmboy’s muscles swelled ever so faintly.

Deleraine stared in shock at Arvel as he swung the shovel, tossing the withered husk of the goblin aside as if it were nearly weightless. Standing amidst the carnage, and dripping with goblin blood, Arvel turned to Deleraine and shined a big toothy grin, saying, “I appreciate the distraction. That bugger was gonna take a while.”

“H-How…” Deleraine stammered as she stepped from behind the rock fully, “I watched you die… How did you make it up here? You should be…”

“Crawling my way back up the hill to the house?” Arvel asked, rubbing the back of his neck, “Guess I’m just made of sturdy stuff.”

“No,” Deleraine said as she slowly approached him, “It’s not that. You’re not just ‘made of sturdy stuff’. Any other person born under the Warrior Star would rise again, barely strong enough to stand on their own two feet. But you returned to the world, whole… You’re the Immortal Knight. You truly are.”

Though Deleraine looked at Arvel with those eyes full of hope once more, he just looked down at her leather binds. He took one of her arms to hold it carefully in his hand and used the jagged edge of the mangled shovel head to slice the bindings apart.

“That was my pa,” Arvel said, “I’m just a farmer. Now let’s get you back down the mountain.”

Deleraine’s shoes were destroyed from her trip up the mountainside, and her legs ached, so Arvel carried her on his back, with his arms looped under her legs at his sides, and her arms wrapped around his shoulders. He tried his best to not think about her bare legs that he looped his arms under, or her skirt hiked up behind him, but it was difficult not to feel the press of her chest to his bare back, or her breath by his ear as he carried her. After all, the fact he was caked in blood was surely a detriment to any intimate mood that might build. That is, until a faint drizzle of rain began to fall as they made their way down the steeply winding mountain path.

“Just our luck,” Arvel muttered, “Well, you can dry off at my place, Lady Deleraine.”

Deleraine was quiet for a moment, before saying, “I never… asked your name.”

Arvel was quiet.

“I made demands of you,” Deleraine said softly, “I demanded to be taken to your father, I wept in front of you, I pleaded with you and spoke to you of responsibility to my province, and… I never even asked for your name. I am sorry.”

“It’s Arvel,” he replied, “My pa said he wanted to name me something like ‘marvel’ but… not.”

“Arvel,” Deleraine said softly, “It’s a nice name.”

“You got any nicknames?” Arvel asked, “Deleraine’s a real pretty name but it don’t exactly roll off the tongue.”

“Nicknames?” she asked, “Well, my grandmother used to call me Della…”

“I’m gonna call you Rain,” Arvel said firmly.

“What?” she asked, “You can’t just decide that!”

“Sure I can!” Arvel said, “That’s how nicknames work. You don’t get to decide ‘em.”

“But I told you my nickname was Della,” Deleraine argued.

“And I’m changing it to Rain,” said Arvel, grinning as he continued his descent down the mountainside.

By the time they made it back to the farmhouse, the rain was falling too heavily for them to see ‘Rain’s’ broken carriage in the distance. It was just as well, because it meant not seeing the corpses of any of the goblins or knights not lucky enough to be born beneath the Warrior Star. The pouring rain had washed Arvel clean, but the two of them were soaked to the bone by the time they made it inside, and the marchioness was shivering so hard her teeth were nearly chattering.

Arvel fished some of his pa’s old clothes out of the back of a trunk and sent Rain off to his room to change, while he changed into a pair of tan britches and hung his overalls up on a line to dry. While he was getting the fireplace lit, he heard the bedroom door open.

Rain stood in the doorway, wearing naught but a long brown shirt, its hem falling a few inches above her scraped-up knees and the sleeves draping past the ends of her fingertips. The worn old garment was nearly large enough to swallow her whole, and the collar sagged off one of her shoulders loosely.

“The trousers hurt my legs,” she said quietly, fidgeting in the doorway, “I hope you don’t mind...”