Harsh winds whipped through the densely packed forest, rustling the underbrush and howling through the terrain. Monstrous thunder cracks echoed overhead accompanied by blinding flashes of lightning.

Rain pummelled the forest canopy mercilessly, its power occasionally creating gaps for dim slats of moonlight to burst through onto the sodden ground.

Night had fallen. It had fallen quite some time ago. The days had grown shorter as the caravan quietly travelled toward its destination, rolling onward to bring fresh meat for the Rangers.

At least it had been quiet until chaos broke loose. Most of it remained a blur to Art, everything happened so fast that didn’t have a chance to think until his legs had carried him far, far into the wilderness.

He was stationary now. Tucked into a small cave in one of the forest's many odd nooks, he was finally still.

The wet and the cold had soaked through his clothes hours ago, the storm had only begun just before darkness fell, and yet it took no less than a minute for him to be thoroughly drenched.

Art huddled himself up against the back wall of his pitiful shelter, tucked his knees to his chest and made his best effort to conserve some heat.

Weighed down by self-pity, he did something that he had not done in a very long time…

Drawing a deep breath, he held out a hand in front of him, palm facing upward toward the cave roof, and summoned his runes.

A swirl of luminescent mist began to materialise as he squeezed his eyes in concentration. It seemed to pull itself from nothingness, wrapping around his wrist and twirling through his fingertips.

The eery tendrils slowly moved back down from his fingers, they twisted and wound themselves into the skin on his forearm. Finally stationary, the mist settled and seeped in. It was an arduous process, painful too.

This was something Art had done only a handful of times throughout his adult life. Much to the anger of his father and the many tutors he had paid for, Art had been a near-complete failure at all things magical.

Even something as simple as the rune summoning was an arduous and drawn-out process for him. There was a simple reason for that though. Every time a person summoned their runes, the process would become a little easier and a little less painful.

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However, the initial difficulty of the summoning was determined by that person's magical ability. This was not usually a problem as practically every person in the empire had a moderate ability level, even when untrained.

That was where Art failed. He had almost zero innate magical ability and as such, had never bothered to push himself in practising even the simplest procedure of rune summoning.

So he remained stagnant. Perpetually stuck on an island of self-pity, he had watched for years as the currents had flowed around him and carried those who were once his peers far off into the distance.

He watched in desperation as the runes flickered in and out of existence and the pathetic misty strands struggled to materialise themselves further.

Finally, they flickered out.

He caught his head in his still-shaking hands and let out a sob.

Fuck. I’m going to die here. I am actually going to die, aren’t I?

The realisation came slowly at first, it had crept up on him as he ran through the forest with his life on the line. Escape had seemed plausible then, yet when stillness came, so did thought.

It worsened with every extra moment he spent in that cave. Fear seeped in behind the thought…

Where was the woman from the carriage? She must be pursuing him into the night, surely? Daylight had burned her, peeled her skin and sent her screaming back into the cover of the carriage. But daylight was gone, what if she could move just fine in the nighttime?

Recollections of being trapped in that carriage surfaced, pinned against the wall by her with no way out.

He thought of her teeth, how they had pierced through her gums so painfully slowly and grown into two jagged, horrible thorns. He remembered how they split the flesh in her mouth and dripped with her blood, yet she seemed so unfazed by the pain it should have caused her.

The feeling of her breath on his neck, having nowhere to go and no one to help. In that moment Art realised just how helpless he truly was without the power of the Beaumont family behind him.

There was no one coming to save him.

He lifted his head and stared out of his hideaway into the moonlit forest.

I… I should be dead. Maybe I already am.

An ear-splitting scream broke the silence of nighttime, indecipherable shouts echoed out in the distance. Art had never heard a man in the throes of death before, but the noise was unmistakable.

Someone out there had been thrust into indescribable pain, then had their life snuffed out in but a moment more.

Perhaps Morrigan had tired of her bewitched soldiers, or whatever spell she had put on them had started to wear off?

Maybe she had simply chosen another throat to tear out while she hunted him down.

Fear immediately coursed through him again. His muscles, underused from years of nothing but whoring and drinking were forced into action through nothing but adrenaline.

He scrambled to his feet and started to stumble, then ran farther into the night. He wanted to run as far away from those hair-raising screams as possible.

Art had never particularly had a reason to live, nor had he wanted to.

Even now, there was no desire to be alive. Only the fear of dying.