The five captive outworlder faeries stared at their own now freed wrists. Their faces displayed a range of different emotions, running from wonder to fear and disgust.

“What was that stuff made of?” Jeff, the man in the middle of the group, asked.

“Trust me, you don’t want to know.” Terri said, holding the wooden bottle his living wood weapon had transformed into. Next to him, Tiaren was holding her weapon which had transformed into a sword, and was covered in thick blood.

The small girl was looking at the now limp vines that had once held the wrists, glaring at them with a concerned expression.

“I did not like how that all happened one bit.” She said. “Their old limbs disappeared almost immediately after I cut them off. These vines are absorbing both mana and spirit energy at a very fast pace.”

“This is insane! What the hell is that kid?!” Cristie half shouted. “Mat, this is fucked up! What the god-damn hell is happening? What the hell was that potion! That girl just said something about getting the bodies of the men you killed before, didn’t she? Was that blood you just made us drink or something? That was some kind of demonic blood magic or something I bet! Is that girl a demon? I bet she is! She’s definitely a demon to just go hacking people’s arms off like that!”

“Cristie, are you going to be quiet a second and let him answer you?” The man at the end asked.

“Shut the fuck up David! That kid is a psychopath, and so is that damn ni…”

“Cristie!” David slapped the woman across the face with his now freed up hand, just barely able to reach her with how close they were to each other.

“I’ve listened to your complaining long enough! Mathew came back to free us from this damn prison!”

“They just cut off our hands! You expect me to just accept that?!”

“Yeah, and they grew back when they gave us that magic potion of theirs! You heard them talking, this is their last-resort drastic measures. You think they did it for the fun of it? Grow up already and stop being a spoiled bitch all the time!”

“Yeah, and then how do you think they are supposed to get us out of the rest of this? Our whole legs are covered up to our waists! Can a potion regrow the entire lower half of our bodies?”

“They can.” The child, who had been standing there silently up until now, suddenly spoke up. “Your bodies are comprised almost entirely of spiritual energy at this time. I do not know how this potion would work for a human or elf, but it will have no problem growing back any missing parts from a fairy.”

“Seriously?” James, the man in the center of the group asked.

“She’s lying! There’s no way she can know something like that!” Cristie said. “How can we even trust any of this?”

[Has she always been like this?] The small girl turned to Terri and began speaking in elven.

[I think the stress is just getting to her, but I guess she’s always been a little bit of a “Karen”.] The former soldier answered.

[A what?]

[Nothing]

“What the hell are you two talking about?!” Cristie demanded. “Listen to them! They go off talking in another language as soon as we start trying to push them for answers!”

Nobody responded to the woman’s ramblings this time. The other four all had expressions that showed very clear annoyance to what was being said.

[Alright. Terri. I am going to cut the other woman out. There is some potential for death from this, but most of it comes from fear and panic. Their chances of survival will be a lot higher if we do not tell them it is coming and do it suddenly. You are going to need to give her the potion fast though, before her mind can register what has just happened.]

[Serious? Right. Of course you are.] Terri replied.

[You ready?]

[Yeah.]

The very second the words left the man’s mouth, the ground where the 5 year old girl used to be standing suddenly exploded with kicked up dirt. It took Terri a second to realize she had moved, but as soon as he did he immediately exploded into action as well.

Tiaren had moved fast. The top half of the now very stunned looking woman was floating, her lower torso rotating backward slightly as a result of the force of the blow that had just cut her in half. The one who had cut her was already on the other side.

Terrie caught the woman under the arms and shoved the wooden bottle into her mouth.

“Drink. Quick, drink.” He encouraged.

The woman did as she was told, and a moment later, her lower half quickly started to re-form itself from light particles that seemed to coalesce out of the air. She did not have any clothing to go with her newly regenerated lower half, but that was a small matter in light of the reality of what was going on.

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Just as quickly as the woman’s lower half had regenerated, the original limbs that had been cut off vanished as though they were never there, and the wooden casing that had once wrapped them sagged as it became a hollow shell.

“What? What happened?!” Cristie asked with a shaken voice.

“Ms. Veronica!” Evan, the one closest to what had just happened, was the first to notice.

“Did you just…?” Cristie stammered in a stunned tone.

“I apologize.” Tiaren said. “The thing that has the highest risk of death for a spiritual entity is the fear and shock that goes with a brutal injury, not the blood-loss or the injury itself. I thought maybe your minds would be able to take it more easily if you saw someone from your group easily survive the process.”

“Seriously! The fuck is wrong with this girl!” Cristie demanded.

[Terri. I’m going to get the boy next to you now.] She said.

“What? That… damn it!” Terri cursed as Tiaren had already moved. At this point, he had no choice but to act quickly and go along with the plan.

It was while they had gone on down the line and Terrie was feeding Jeff some of the potion that something changed. There was suddenly a huge earthquake.

“What was that?!” The still very shaken Veronica asked as she was kneeling down in the dirt and hiding the nakedness of her lower body.

“Is that the barriers?” Terri asked, looking out toward the giant walls of light in the distance.

“Wait, is it suddenly getting hotter here?” Daren asked.

“Terri, he’s done! Keep going!” Tiaren shouted and leapt into another sword swing, this time freeing the now not-so-noisy Cristie. Terri shoved the bottle into her mouth, the same as everyone before her. He tilted the bottle all the way back into the woman’s mouth, and he looked at Tiaren with a look of dread.

“We’re out!” He said.

“Arm!” She shouted.

Terri carefully laid the woman on the ground as soon as her legs started to regenerate, and then obediently offered his arm. The little girl then ran straight over to him and then sunk her teeth right into his arm.

The earth shook again, and large cracks began forming in the ground. A wave of heat and fire erupted from the cracks.

“Are we on top of a volcano?!” Evan shouted as the young man started to scramble to his feet.

Tiaren, apparently having enough, leapt to free the final captive in the line. After cutting him free, she jumped on top of him and pressed her lips directly to his in what, from an outside perspective, looked like a deep kiss between the upper half of a grown man and a 5 year old child. The man gulped down something that was forced into his mouth, and then the child’s mouth separated from his, dripping large quantities of blood. What a second before had looked like a suspect scene had intensified into something that looked like it was straight out of a horror movie, but then suddenly the man’s legs began to regenerate just like all the others.

“Come on! Get out of here!” Terri shouted as he pulled Cristie and Jeff both up onto his shoulders. Tiaren did the same, slinging one shoulder from the adult man over her neck and then leaping into the air with enough force that it nearly ripped the man’s arm right out of the socket. However, a moment later, the sudden violent force was shown to be quite justified as an explosion of heat and rocks erupted straight into the air.

A red column of scales attached to a serpentine body shot straight into the air, carrying a great deal of heat and force with it. The terrible eruption shockwaves that caused the fleeing people to feel like they had just been kicked by a massive creature. Trees lit on fire just from the proximity to the source of these enormous waves of heat that turned the crater of the former fey capital into a hellscape of stone and fire.

Terri and Tiaren dropped the people they were carrying at the edge of the now burning forest and looked back the way they came. A person, one of the two who they hadn’t carried, was still in the crater and very obviously engulfed in flames. Tiaren jumped into action, wiping the blood from her chin and spitting into her hand in the motion. She closed her fist just as the fabric of her own clothing caught fire.

She ran right into the person as she thrust her hand at their mouth, tackling them to the trembling ground before she jumped away with them in her arms. At a distance, it had been impossible to tell who it was she was rescuing through the flames that had engulfed them. But, now that she felt the fleshy bags on the woman’s chest, it was clear it was the first one they had rescued.

Tiaren got the woman to the edge of the forest and then kept going. She ripped off what remained of the woman’s clothing, but the fat in her body had already ignited. So, Tiaren did the only thing she could do. She bit deeply into her own hand and repeated what she’d done with Daren earlier, forcing the blood into the engulfed woman’s mouth as would a mother bird to it’s child.

The fire sizzled to a stop as the woman’s flesh rapidly regenerated. The first blood she had fed her earlier had been the only thing to keep the poor woman alive this long, but they were still in the middle of the hottest fire at that time. Her injuries at that time may have healed, but her body had only re-ignited as they were fleeing the conflagration.

This time, the healing was complete. The woman was whole again. Even the incinerated hair was growing back.

When she saw this, Tiaren raised her hand to run it over her own now bald head, groaning slightly in jealous frustration at the spirit bodies of the fairies. Oh well, hair can grow back.

The woman was breathing, but she seemed to have gone unconscious from all the stress of what had happened.

Fantastic. Well, it’s good she is alive at least. The woman is going to need new clothes. Same for her, for that matter. Well, they can just go to one of the abandoned elven villages near the world boarder. It is where they had gotten her previous dress anyway, and she knew there were adult sized clothes as well.

“Tiaren!” Terri’s voice called out through the woods.

“Over here!” She shouted back.

At her words, four people began trudging toward her through the woods. It was not them who arrived first though. It was the youngest of the group they had rescued, Evan. The boy had somehow made it out on his own, and judging by the fact that at least the upper part of his robes were still intact, it seemed he had somehow made it out far ahead of everyone else.

“You’re alright?” He asked. “Hey, over here!” He called back to the approaching people. Then, as he was waiting for them to arrive, the boy's eyes wandered up to the sky. “Jeez! What was that? A dragon?” He asked, looking after the thing that had just erupted from the ground and was now flying away like some kind of reverse meteor.

“Whatever it was, I’m sure that’s the real reason you five were imprisoned there.” Tiaren said. “Those plants you were bound up in were sucking away power from you five. It must have been being used to keep that thing sealed.”

The rest of the group emerged from the forest at this point, attracting the attention of the two. “We are going to have to move.” Tiaren said as soon as she made eye contact with Terri. “I don’t know for sure, but there is a chance that dragon may have been the reason the world boarders have not collapsed yet.”

Terri took a glance into the sky at the flaming red dragon, now flying toward the south. Then, he nodded and looked down at the unconscious woman.

“Right. I’ll take her. Everyone else who can still walk, we’re moving out.” He said. There was no room for argument, and even the woman who would have been the most likely to complain was shocked into silence from the recent events.