All but breathless, facing a grim inevitability, you loose a tiny gasp of hope as a glint of shimmering light dances off two objects strapped to your father’s back. From strategically concealed sheaths tucked up under his elf-spun tunic, Tyrriel draws two wicked looking blades, whisps of some oddly prismatic material you’ve never seen before. His instruments are so ethereally translucent, you’d swear they were phantasmal illusions.

The instant fear shimmering in the eyes of the maiden, however, is indicative that she’s just realized she may have bitten off a bit more than she can chew. With a quick step to her right, she drops through the long shadow of a tree, into the slip and out of sight.

Your heart races. Tyrriel turns to you, his eyes full of terror. He begins to sprint to you as your expression goes slack. You feel the lacerated flesh of your upper arm before you see the hand clawing up at you from the blackened center of the stand you were just sheltering in. You feel your body begin teetering backward, off-balance as you’re drawn down toward the darkness.

In a flash of inspiration, you project a flair of daylight through the hand now plunged into the slip. A cacophonous boom greets you with a wretched scream of pain and anger as the matron explodes back into existence, the sheer bodice of her gown now a tattered rag virtually shredded along with any dignity she’d otherwise had.

The scream that follows next is earsplitting, causing you to cover your ears reflexively. As you raise your hands, however, the long gashes in your arm alight with what feels like fire. You cry out in pain, rolling to the side, barely catching the “thwip, thwip,” of Tyrriel’s footfalls as he moves toward the matron to engage.

You hear grunts and bellows of frustration and rage as you fight to shake off the ringing dizziness and nausea. Pain stabs the backs of your eyes as you try to focus on the roiling battle, but you see enough to know Tyrriel was able to press your advantage and gain the upper hand. Finally, righting yourself to hands and knees, you take in full extent of the growing carnage.

Blood and viscera splatter the ground. Tyrriel has three deep claw marks across his face and one over his eye. At this speed, it is impossible to tell, but you wonder if he’s lost that eye. The matron is hunched over like some rabid animal. Her right arm hangs limp and lifeless from its socket. An open gash across her chest has scored through the top of her left breast, exposing bone and sinew down the ribs. The flayed fatty tissue under the surface of her skin tissue is a luminescent orange against the dark crimson of blood no longer pouring in gouts from the wound. With her withering left hand, she stabs her knife-like fingers into the earth, desperately drawing up briar vines to her aid.

In your mind’s eye, the sprint of actions slow to a crawl, each individual nuance of movement highlighted for microscopic scrutiny. As thorned snares climb and scramble, Tyrriel dashes forward like a whirlwind, blades lanced into the soil, negating the encumbering terrain as he chews up ground along the charge. The matron’s snarling grimace falls to a sneer as you watch her will to live fade with her drive to fight. It’s not until Tyrriel is upon her that you see a single snare catch the toecap of his boot. Hope alights in the matron’s eyes, the flame burning with fury as if fueling their rage from your depleting reserves.

With your eyes locked on your father as he tumbles forward, ghostly projections of his fall materialize and fade, materialize and fade as each possible outcome plays itself out in your mind. Every moment that passes launches new paths and potentialities. It isn’t until you see your father’s fist pound into the ground parallel to the grove maiden’s entrenched claw that your dilated perspective of time begins to warble at the edges as if time is not meant to be seen this way.

As Tyrriel’s rolling form begins to glide back-to-back over the matron’s hunched shoulders, your vision is drawn to the howl of pain forming around the matron’s mouth, her eyes wide with horror to see the end of her severed hand projecting a font of arterial spray. It’s only then that you realize how deadly a combatant your father truly is. It’s in that instant that your perspective of him also changes, quickly shifting from paternal protector to vengeful warrior. You’ve heard stories, though entirely out of context and only by eavesdropping on conversations you had no legitimate business to be a part of. You’re suddenly reminded of the shadow he cast across that room while facing off against your mother, and the fright that grips your soul is chilling.

You watch in stunned silence, utterly powerless, just as you were as a child. In swift succession, Tyrriel slips the death’s edge of his blades through vital ligature, dropping the matron down to her knees where she can do little more than vainly hold a useless arm over her head for protection. His movements were so quick, so precise, that even in this state of mental slippage, you were unable to follow the flow of eclipsing actions.

Right then, everything goes very still. One by one, the spectral outlines of your preclusions rapidly start to collapse in on themselves. Seeing potential futures fade in front of your eyes, the weight of what you’ve just done slowly begins to sink in. Unfortunately, time is done waiting for you as it violently whiplashes your perception back into the now. Shaken by the mental snap back into reality, you feel something burst inside your mind, your body giving out on you as you fall like a stone, face-first, into the dirt.

Your eyes fly open as you realize you’re gasping for air. The fall must have knocked the wind out of you. Your natural instinct to breathe hitches in your chest. Weak and desperate for air, you fight frantically against the mountain of gravity crushing you into the ground. Seconds feel like hours before you finally suck back that first lung full of air, breathing in a mouthful of earthy particulate in the process. As you begin to splutter and cough, you somehow find the strength to press yourself out of the dirt and onto all fours only to wretch from the effort. Whatever’s happened to you, you know it’s bad when the earth starts spinning round and round beneath you. Lurching forward, you heave everything you had in your stomach with a sploosh upon the forest floor before losing your balance and toppling over to your side back down to the continuously revolving forest floor.

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Still deafened from the maiden’s scream, you don’t hear your own whimpers of distress. You feel the sobs, and try to wail, but nothing but a breathy yawn seems to depart your lips. Suddenly, hands are all over you, searching, assessing. Peering up through a deluge of tears, you see Tyrriel’s face, manic and covered with blood. You feel the screech crack your throat as you fight to scramble away from the killer before you only to buckle under and dry vomit from all the pain and motion.

Like some strange pirouetting dance, you feel yourself get grabbed around the ribs and settled upright with your back firmly against your father’s chest. You feel his hand gentle and steady upon your forehead as your body becomes brutally racked by spasms. As you convulse, eyes no longer see as they roll up into your head, limbs twitching out of your control as they thrash about wildly. You feel chilled and foggy as every joule of warmth leaves you through every possible orifice.

Near catatonic, you barely register the tartness hit your tongue of something being poured down your throat. You hardly feel your father’s breath blow across your face with every rasping plosive of his intense and repetitive chants. You scarcely feel the arms clinging to your shivering body, desperate to hold your soul within it for a few moments longer. As you faintly begin to feel a shaking that is not your own jostling you from behind, you start to sense a warm wetness coating the bladed crest above your ear. The smell of salt, blood, and awful are everywhere, but as you venture to open your eyes, you see a pink hue glinting off the top of the trees. It’s sunset… and most importantly, the world around you has gone blessedly still.

When you finally do take that first true lungful of fresh air, the taste is so sweet, you turn your head and sob into your father’s forearm support, still cradling your head. You feel Tyrriel’s chest heave with a great sigh before he starts rooting around between you in the folds of his tunic. Pulling out a palm width piece of parchment, he unrolls the scroll revealing a prepared spell frame ready for you to use. “Go ahead,” he whispers in your ear. “Read it… read it out loud.”

You speak power into existence, almost singing as you say, “Iclumithae monthria legilysis gran,” prompting the spellframe to activate and consume the parchment whole. The clarity of mind that greets the restorative spellwork is more welcome respite than you were prepared to receive. Clutching your legs to yourself, you settle your chin on your knees and survey what must have happened in the lifetime you’ve just lived through in the last few moments

Yards away, the wilted frame of a dead woman kneels prostrated upon the ground. That doesn’t keep Tyrriel from stalking carefully toward her, both blades once more at the ready. Collecting yourself from the ground, you feel… raw, but renewed, sensitive… but functional. Taking your cue from Tyrriel, you approach the downed maiden slowly, only to catch the air of hatred still emanating from her with every slow, patient breath.

You whistle a light distant bird trill, a signal your father keens to reflexively. Sidestepping a path around the wounded matron, the warrior within your father once more comes to the fore. You watch with bated breath as Tyrriel moves in behind the prostrate maiden, feeling his mounting tension pool like bile in the pit of his stomach. The last few moments have obviously left him just as raw and unguarded. You begin to soak in Tyrriel’s undiluted temperament, unsure of what you’ll find there. It isn’t until you recognize the wide-eyed shock on his face that you realize something is wrong. Looking down, all you see is an endless plain of shadows with the matron nowhere in sight.

You tuck low, spinning wildly in place before you’re caught up around the leg. Knelt before you, the maiden breathes hard, her face peering up at you a grimacing mask of rage and pain. As you try to shuck her off, her hold is relentless as she froths, the anger and bitterness on her breath fill your nose with an acrid stench. Behind the depths of her eyes, you see something more at play in the shadows.

There’s almost a look of shock, surprise at her own audacity, to make this move knowing what’s at stake. Her joy at pulling it off seems only tempered by what you patently understand to be a depressing kind of relief. On her lips, you read the words, “Help me,” sensing her roiling urge for it all to be over slam into you, leaving you stunned and breathless yet again.

You try to take an involuntary step back, but she still has an arm wrapped around your thigh. Flailing as you fall to your back, you see Tyrriel In your periphery gaining ground quickly, his eyes hardened, resolved to end this threat with extreme prejudice. You sit up to watch a look of panic flee the matron’s face as she closes her eyes to you. In the slackening of her expression, you feel a tightening of your chest. Death, struggle, loss, vanity, jealousy, anger, loneliness, corruption, resignation… it all shoots through you in a single instant, like an arrow, fired straight through your soul. Most piercing is the matron's catharsis in the face of her own demise. Her silent prayer for death strikes a bleak, soul-rending chord in your gut, virtually flaying your emotional tethers to self-preservation ripping a single sobbing cry of desperation from your throat.

With fluid elven grace, Tyrriel plants to drive home his killing strike when you throw out a hand and roughly choke, “Wait! Please… No! Stop!!!”

Both pairs of eyes turn on you with vilified ire as if you’ve savagely broken some unspoken pact between them.

Shaking, you struggle to your feet, your eyes glistening with unbidden tears. You reach across the space between you and draw the matron closer. Without thought of the consequences, you embrace her and weep. The cascade of sorrow is unyielding as you clutch at her. You feel a boney forearm weakly fight to press you off, but you are relentless. Eventually, the push turns to pull as the fey maiden draws you toward herself with a sense of desperation you’ve never known of felt.

In conjoined despair, the two of you could have sat there for minutes, hours, or perhaps days before you finally pull away to look her in the eye. Her eyes are frantic, unsure, and yet, hopeful. You say nothing to one another, communicating only through expression and waves of empathic resonance. It isn’t until you feel Tyrriel’s tentative hand on your shoulder that you break eye contact. The break is overtly jarring, leaving you slightly confused as you look up to take in a stoic face bearing a mollifying smile.

The crestfallen look in his eyes still holds a rigidity, a resolve to see things through. You get the impression that if you move… if you let her go, this maiden will die. You recognize the coming coax to let go and allow this woman’s suffering to end. Seeing that piteous look in Tyrriel’s eyes, however, unbalances something inside of you, upsetting that well of rage. Eyes alight with reproach, you cut off anything your father would have to say to you, exclaiming, “I said, Stop! Whether you like it or not… you’re going to let her live. And we’re going… to help her!”