Oberon came over to him when he waved, and Dainin hugged the war horse with his left arm and just leaned on him. I am so grateful for you, he thought, holding onto the patient animal for a minute or two while he tried to ground himself. He couldn’t even lift his right arm with the armor on it bent in as it was.

So, it was not the most glorious arrival into a farm village he had ever done, not even on his horse, stumbling and leaning against it, blood and mud all over him.

“What am I even looking at?” a short, stout woman dressed in green and brown robes. “A knight of Mysteera? Those exist?”

He looked up, his magic supply so low that even his divine vision was struggling to give him information. It looked almost fuzzy around the edges. Elene, Independent Healer. The purple aura swirling about her was gentle, and she was a bit more of a heather-purple, so a little stronger than he was.

“Yes, that’s me,” he said putting on his best smile through the exhaustion. It was a question he had been asked probably hundreds of times. “Trained at the Goddess of Justice’s temple,” he said, cutting off the next question. Most combat-oriented service agents of his Goddess were… well, spies in the employ of high-ranking nobles.

“I had no idea that those two Goddesses ever get along,” said the healer as she put a hand on her hip and looked him up and down. “You’re a wreck…” and then trailed off. “Wait, what? You rejected an order to evacuate the town?” she put her head back and laughed.

He frowned, “You can see an awful lot about me.”

“Ah, well, Mysteera and Rayake are getting along for now; it could change tomorrow or next week or in a hundred years. When you look less like something a big cat played with, you will probably be able to see more. Uh… let’s get you patched up, yeah?”

He nodded gratefully and handed off Oberon’s reins to a kid that had been following the woman around. “Get his saddle off of him, yeah?” Elena prompted the young man. He nodded. “Good, get him brushed. I think he saved you from an angry demon, eh Nature-God Slayer?”

This was more sass than he could handle. He was too tired for this. The horse, as good a boy as he is, did not do anything except carry me there, he thought, but he couldn’t even put words to it. He just watched the preteen boy get starry-eyed and promise to pamper the gelding.

She then called out to some farmers that were bringing salvage from where the earlier landslides had destroyed some homes, and asked, “Please bring a bunch of clean water!” He stood there, waiting patiently as buckets were dumped over him and most of the worst mud washed off. Then, the healer guided him into a home that had hastily been emptied so she could use it, and he sat on a rickety chair that could barely hold him up in his armor.

Elena, as delicately as she could, pulled away the armor dented around his shoulder. Her magic glowed bronze in her fingers as she enhanced them to be able to bend the metal away, but it still snagged against his flesh and tore at it. Dainin had clenched the hand that he hadn’t punched the forest god with tightly, held his breath, and clenched his teeth to keep the pain inside. “You were not supposed to go by yourself to fight a mystic, uh, forest god,” she chastised as the pauldron came free. “What would you have done if I had not also been assigned a quest to help the injured from the town you were supposed to be evacuating?”

Color came to his cheeks as he realized that there had been coordination between the two Gods and he had defied Mysteera. He looked up toward the corner of the room, where the quest was still hovering that he had waved away. When he looked at it, it came to the center of his vision. Evacuate the town. Status: Rejected. As he looked at it, the status changed, Failed, but successfully. It disappeared, and he gained a new icon, an upside-down triangle with a spiral in it.

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He gave her a flat look, “I just knew that if I tried evacuating everyone, they would not all make it. The monster would have reached us, and I would have been in a fight anyways, I think.”

“You think?” she smirked. “Now I understand how you got your Lucky Contrarian title, Dainin Suris.”

He huffed. “You have Independent Healer, what’s that mean?”

“Means I don’t wanna work in a temple, lucky for you. Look at your hand,” she said as she pulled the gauntlet off of his hand. “See this purple swelling? You broke it. You have dozens of bruises, and you are lucky you didn’t get a concussion. It is probably going to take all my magical energy to heal you. It’s a good thing you worship Mysteera; you were lucky you didn’t just die.”

She had him there, so he nodded mutely. She was right. He had definitely thought he would die. He hadn’t even realized that he had punched that monster hard enough to hurt himself. He thought a quick prayer to Mysteera to thank her for her help even though he had defied her.

Bit by bit, the armor came off of him, and she healed as he went, and he felt better. Tired, but better. “I have just received a new quest,” she said once his armor was off. “I was supposed to deliver a letter to Corian, but I am being instructed to give it to you.”

Dainin waited to see if Mysteera would give him a quest to deliver the letter, but nothing came.

Since it was silent, the healer continued. “You should take a few days to recover; the ride will be quiet, and there is a lot of forest. A dragon guards it, so they say.”

He sighed. “Look, just because I am part elven doesn’t mean I love the forest.”

She took a dab of salve and smeared it over his ear, “You look all elf to me,” she said as she rubbed it into his ears and all along his cheek where the ground had scratched his face. “But I guess to be fair, based on how you have these faint patterns on your skin, I would guess that you’re half savanna elf, and they love the wide open grass and heat, right?”

He gave her a flat look as she jabbed some of the faint spots over his chest that looked a little like leopard print. “I have never once been to the desert or the savanna either. I quite like towns full to the brim of people.”

She had him turn his head again, and she did the scratches on the other side of his face after shoving thick black strands of hair out of her way. “Now I get it. That’s why the Mischief Goddess likes ya, obviously you are a freak to your heritage.”

He raised a brow as she continued to tease him, “I’m half a hundred percent like you,” he observed to the human. “Don’t you like the people?”

“Nope! Me ‘n’ Madge love the wilds and outside.” On the floor, in the corner of the room, the bobcat looked up, and Dainin jumped. He had not even seen her there. The bob cat, like the wolf, was much bigger than any ordinary examples of her species: she was much closer in size to a cougar than to her own kind. The now dead forest god had been much closer to the size of his warhorse than a wolf. After turning her tufted ears toward the two of them and listening, the big bobcat familiar put her head down again and returned to looking sleepy and bored.

“Then you can take the letter to Corian, and you can enjoy the trees,” Dainin said, “and I will stay here and help repair the damage done by the landslide that probably displaced the forest god in the first place.”

She smirked. “You ever think about cutting this?” she asked as she bundled up his hair to lift it away from his neck and pinned it with a hair stick. “It’s currently full of dirt and leaves and mud.”

He shrugged at her. He liked his hair. So what if sometimes it got dirty and in the way? He could wash it. After a moment, she continued, “It’s a letter for the priest of Aurell there. You should really take the letter. Aurell and Rayale have always gotten along well, so it is an offer from our main temple in Myraduil to send volunteer gardeners and masons to help with the temple recently dedicated to Aurell in Corian. I was diverted from that purpose to come rescue you. I can do more good here with the farmers than you can, though. I think you should also know, that an artifact of Mysteera was recently moved from Panopoly to Corian to show friendship between Aurell, your Goddess, and the city. Don’t you want to see it?”

Dainin breathed in deeply and then out slowly, “Yes. I will take the letter.” He felt a little odd that Mysteera did not give him a mirroring quest, and so he hoped he had not fallen out of favor.

“See, I knew you would be logical at some point today,” she jabbed a salve-slick finger at his nose, making him wrinkle it.

He was offered a bed in an older couple’s house to recover. He was asleep as soon as he laid down.