Aerosolized blood mists the last section of forest, wetting Elia’s cheeks with an ever increasing film of sticky red. From a distance and in a vacuum away from the reality of the horror around her, the wet crimson blush on her cheekbones might have been a hint to a former period of her life where it could have been mistaken for a lovely damask rouge, and when the only red she’d ever seen flowing was that of her family’s vineyard back home in the Wines.

Elia rides hard.

Past the thick trees clotted together she can see the twin-tailed dove fluttering in the breeze some distance away, signaling the edge of camp ahead. At the sight of it her knees press more firmly into the sides of her horse, urging it to go faster with the sharp kneading of her legs in absence of the reins she had lost hours prior. At that moment she couldn’t quite recall how it was that she had lost them - she remembered that a sword had swung at her in passing as she fled one of the many skirmishes that had broken out all around what was left of the island. Had the blade cut through the straps? Had she let go herself?

For the horse, whose flanks are covered in the bloodied lather of an animal that is being ridden to death, her knees feel like knives being slipped into its skin.

Elia’s hand tightens even further along the horse’s mane and she flattens herself across the curvature of the saddle, trying to ignore the alternating sounds of squelching and crunching happening beneath the galloping of her horse’s hooves across the carpet of meat that covered the forest floor.

Her brothers.

Elia closes her eyes and swallows the taste on the tip of her tongue.

For a moment she can taste the richness of home, the previous year’s grapes ripened to perfection on the vine and plucked at their plumpest prime to make the sweetest, sweetest of wines. A swallow later and the relish sours all the way to the back of her throat, to the bitter taste of copper and iron, and gives rise to a growing bile from somewhere down her gullet.

Her eyes snap open to shouts of alarm ahead.

She sees men - men she recognizes, men she knows - tighten themselves in a kneel-and-fire formation at the sight of her approach on harrowed horse aquiver, gunpowder being primed and muskets being loaded. Behind them, the torched building-bones of the army encampment she and her companions had left some weeks ago now left towering in smoldering ruin. She could hear one of the men in what was left of a torn captain’s uniform - Matrei? - shout to the others to take aim. The captain’s hand comes up controlled, readying a signal for a volley to fire. He shouts a word of warning.

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As if in primal reply to the threat the strained horseflesh beneath Elia pulses, already urged to quickness, ready to crash into the motley crew of surviving soldiers some few dozen feet away now. For the horse, to stop is to die, a fact it knows and understands somewhere within its mind. Despite this, when it feels its mane being pulled backwards and to the side as a signal to stop, it can but obey.

The inertia of twenty-one hours of uninterrupted exerted riding finally catches up to the animal’s heart - the engorged and panicky organ pumps dramatically for a few moments more as it comes to a stop that has come too forceful and too sudden, as veins contract and squeeze every last ounce of oxygenated blood they can for those final few moments before the lungs collapse in on themselves.

Horse and rider both crumple under the swaying banner of the twin-tailed dove, the animal collapsed unto death, its rider - rent by exhaustion and blood loss - likely on the heels of its hooves.

Words of warning give way to words of worry as the captain and what remains of his men move to inspect the pair, muskets still raised. Within moments the weapons are lowered and words of worry give way to words of wonder as cries of recognition set in.

Elia’s eyes flutter open - she can feel fingers wet on her lips, someone trying to force open her mouth. She struggles momentarily, bringing up a hand to try and swat them away - to her horror she sees a bloodied stump ending from somewhere halfway down the length of her forearm flailing at nothing but air.

Ah, she thinks. I didn’t let go of the reins after all.

“Drink,” says captain Matrei. “Drink, or you’ll die for certain.”

Elia’s eyes find the captain’s, blearily blinking his face into focus. His firm hands - one around the back of her neck, the other holding a waterskin to her lips - were large, but gentle. His curvy blonde hair reminds Elia of someone - a friend. Well, more than a friend.

Her heart aches.

Elia blinks away dry tears, opening her mouth. Water, warm but never more welcoming, washes away the sweet taste on the tip of her tongue. She gulps greedily and in the periphery of her vision, past the captain’s face so close to hers as she lay there abreast on her dead mount, she sees the faces of the rest of the men looking down at her in amazement and something else she was well-versed in its recognition of.

Fear.

“Well,” began one of the soldiers, a raw gap where an eye had once been. He pauses, sharing a glance with his comrades.

“Did it work?” finished another man, an open slash wound festering across the diagonal of his face.

There was a silence. Elia could feel the captain’s gentle hands tense into talons and she comes to the realization that it’s not just her heart that’s aching.

When her broken voice breaks the silence, it breaks the world.

“Yes,” Elia rasps. “They’re dead.”

She swallows, washing away the bitterness of the bile at the back of her throat. Her weak voice wavers on the first few words and strengthens on the last.

“The gods are all dead.”