The meeting was more an information dispersal than question and answer. Most people must already have known or the people here took bad news calmly.

Red Lightning confirmed that the village of White Fork had been destroyed. The dead were left where they lay, the town was looted.

The good news, at least according to Red was that he didn’t believe the gang had the legendary beam card, since it was not used in any other attack. Still no one was going to risk a confrontation.

Nightfyre was now occupied. The gang had moved from it’s previous fortifications at a corporate outpost in the shallows near a waterfall, to Nightfyre.

They had almost several hundred people, both Tal and Sendi combined, and that was only what was visible moving around. How many they had shackled and in the mines was unknown.

Another group confirmed there were enchanters making shackles, their family members held as hostages. There were lumberjacks that confirmed that their own families were being held hostage and while they were willing to speak with a few of the scouts, they were not willing to cause issues.

Most of the meeting was a recounting of a discussion that had already happened where the choice of a new village had been decided.

It would require ten weeks of travel. I glanced around at that, wondering why no one seemed surprised or outraged. That seemed like a huge amount of time. But there were fears that if they remained close enough the gang would still come for them. Ten weeks wasn’t really that far. Not if they warned the towns and villages they passed of the danger behind them.

An attacking force sprinting or on horses could still reach out and cause problems. They offered to let us look at the maps so I went over after we were told to pack and be ready to travel the next morning to look at the maps.

Red stayed, I assumed they were maps, and answered questions people had.

I studied the maps and even had an ah-ha moment when I realized the route we had taken to reach Nightfyre was inked on one of the maps.

We had little and were ready in the morning. We were with the first group that exited the tunnels which saved us from dying in a tunnel collapse twenty minutes later as an explosion expelled dust and debris out the mouth of the tunnel.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The arrow went in my back and poked out just above my hip. The arrowhead didn’t look real. It had no blood on it, and, at first, there was no blood from the wound either.

We tried to run as the attacking men surrounded us.

Mrs. Kine made it to a washed out area with loose rocks. I might have been okay before that, but the slip, fall, and slide down the washout didn’t help.

I landed on the arrow, snapping it and doing more damage. By the time I was getting help to stand I was unable to, the pain in my ribs was so great.

That’s when I saw the second arrowhead. This one too was poking out past my flesh and clothing. This one too had very little blood on it.

I didn’t get the chance to tell Mrs. Kine to run, or do anything heroic. The crowd of survivors was still moving either taking her with them forcibly, or she hadn’t noticed I was missing yet.

The men doing the shooting looked at me as they passed but no one wasted another arrow on me.

I spent my time bleeding out panicking that I was going to die.

For real.

No more loops.

It wasn’t all selfish and self-centered thoughts, but only because it was taking so long.

I should have told Mrs. Kine I loved her more often. I said it to her on the occasions she said it to me, or when it struck me as important.

I wondered if I’d keep my memories in the next simulation or not.

There was still that deep huge hole of fear that nothingness was coming. It’s that fear you see on the faces of others just before they die, religious or not.

Hell even Jesus knew called out, “Father, father, why have you forsaken me,” on the cross.

Suddenly I was cold and felt small.

I was never religious but it would have been nice to die to with the possibility that religions were real.

It made sense now that all the religious people lost their minds when the simulation told them none of the gods were real.

Except here they were.

My hand was sticky with blood as I shifted my body a bit.

The groan that was pulled out of my from the pain educated me. The idea that I might get up, might still get away dissolved and dissipated.

The gods were real here weren’t they? They awakened everyone? Had divine magics.

I stared at the planetary rings and considered prayer.

“To-” I began but it turned into a bought of coughing which shook me and disturbed the wound more. That pain built so much I couldn’t breathe from it. Which caused me to suck in air, which caused me to cough up a great gout of blood.

I was breathing, maybe, my head on the ground as black crept in from the edges of my vision.

I didn’t want my last moments to be filled with self-pity and fear.

I tried to force my thoughts to change, but the blackness robbed me of my sight.

Then I felt my chest shudder, and my breathing stop.

One of the memories I’d done my best to suppress was staring at my own heart after they cut it out of me during one of the loops when I was tortured.

I hadn’t died immediately. It’s something Hollywood got wrong.

I had what, ten, fifteen seconds before I lost consciousness.

I didn’t know if prayer worked but I focused the best I could hoping that Mrs. Kine got away from the men. That she lived a long and fruitful life. Satisfied I got the thoughts out, I waited for the end, fear seeping back into my thoughts.