"No one person could fix all that was wrong with the world, but I strived to at least take care of those I ran into." - Saying attributed to the Silver Maiden.

Magda was apprehensive as she strode towards the female healer ahead of her. Part of her felt sorry for the woman - she had a pretty face, though Magda couldn't see much of her body under the loose clothes she wore - for what she knew was about to happen.

It was not the first time the guild had made her do something like this. She knew they would make her do more, or worse as time went on, but she had no other alternatives but to obey. Inwardly she intoned a silent apology to the other woman as she reached for her with one of her brawny arms.

Magda saw the woman smirk at her. She had just raised an eyebrow questioningly at that reaction when the woman's arms blurred in her sight, and she felt a hand grab her wrist even as a fist drove right into her solar plexus.

As Magda bent over from the hit, she felt a second hand grab onto her outstretched arm, then the world turned upside down.

She saw the ground, Despar's surprised face - wasn't he supposed to be behind her? - and then the cavern's lighted ceiling in quick succession, before she felt her back slam around the solid ground hard. The impact drove the breath from within her lungs and threw her into a momentary daze.

Magda vaguely heard screams of pain and grunts in her dazed state, as she slowly tried to recollect her bearings. She heard the familiar sound of bodies hitting the ground, frustrated shouts from Polanski, their dwarven bouncer, ones filled with impotent rage.

By the time Magda finally managed to leverage herself into a seated position and took a good look at the situation around her, all she saw was how the healer woman seemed to nonchalantly evade the cudgels in Polanski's hands by a hair's breadth.

Then she struck back. The heel of her palm struck from below right against the beardless dwarf's chin, hard enough to throw his head upwards. Polanski teetered there, unmoving for a moment, before he collapsed backwards like a sack of potatoes.

A glance to her other side showed Magda the other two male thugs. They were crumpled in a heap on the ground. One of them was clearly unconscious or worse. The features of the other man were locked, with his mouth wide open in a silent scream.

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It was an expression Magda had seen before, that of a man in so much pain that they couldn't even scream in agony. When she considered how every limb on both men's bodies were twisted and contorted in angles a human body was most definitely not designed for though, she understood why he was in such a state.

She saw Despar - the fat asshole the guild had sent to "deal" with this rogue healer - pale and turn to run, but he never made it. Just as he took a step, the healer woman in white hurled one of Polanski's cudgel at him. The cudgel struck his ankle hard enough to crack bone and Despar fell into a heap on the spot.

Magda watched enthralled - she even thought she was perhaps still in her bed, dreaming - as she watched how the woman in white very casually dislocated ever joint in Polanski's limbs, then did the same to Despar, which made the man emit a high-pitched squeal as she did so.

A squeal not unlike a fat pig being butchered, she thought.

Then Magda realized with dread that the woman in white turned and walked towards her. She closed her eyes and braced herself for the pain to come even as she mumbled an apology to her little sister, yet even after a while she felt no pain.

"Come on now… I'm not gonna bite your head off or something, you know," she heard the woman in white say in an amused tone when Magda finally gathered the courage to open her eyes. "You can get up now."

Magda took the woman's offered hand, and was about to ask why when the woman shushed her and told her to follow her out of the area first. The commotion had attracted some people and even as they left they heard hurried footsteps approaching from the other end of the alleyway.

"Why?" she finally asked after they stopped a distance away from the alleyway. The woman in white just looked at her straight in the eye, which made Magda flinch a bit. She knew her mangled, scarred face must be an unpleasant sight to look at.

"Because you were the only one there who looked like they were coerced into doing that sorta shit," said the other woman with a kind tone. "Which was a claim I wouldn't have ever made for the rest of the ones I left crippled back in the alley."

"You, on the other hand, looked like you got a story to tell," said the woman as she gently laid one of her hands on the ruined half of Magda's face. Her hand was eerily cold on her skin, which made the scarred woman gulp with nervousness. "So, spill it."

When later asked about it, Magda admitted that she had no idea why she had spilled her life's story and grievances so freely to a stranger she had met for the first time in her life.

Maybe part of it was intimidation, as the woman in white had just very casually crippled four people before her. Another part of her felt inexplicably at ease in the woman's presence for reasons she couldn't name.

Yet that one fortunate - some would say miraculous - encounter changed Magda's whole life, and remained something she would never, ever forget even until the day she departed from this world.

To her final day, she always prayed twice a day, in the mornings and the evenings, to thank the deities for having crossed her path, with the woman later known as the Silver Maiden on that fateful day.