sabcatt | Origfic: Terms of Defeat (Reply)

The old man seems insistent on dying. Ayuirei has had enough of death; the fortress is rotten with it, tomorrow's wet and putrid scent already cloying in her nose, laid over the stench of blood and burning that is real right now.

She lays a hand on Amiri's shoulder, casting a protective veil over her and hoping that the meaning—leave him to his own death—can cut through her battle-haze. Amiri, in turn, seems to understand, and moves to block Ditte from the still-prone druid's sight. Ayuirei walks—rushes, really—over to Upsmirk, and casts the same spell over them.

"He's not worth it," she says. Where is the man who seemed to understand sorrow, and patience? How and why did he turn so quickly to this embittered adversary—who clearly intends for them to be his executioners?

Ayuirei will not comply. Death is as inevitable as life, and if this man wishes to meet his tonight, she will not stop him; but she will not be made his killer. And she will not let him make her friends party to his death, either.

She's prepared to hear some new argument, when the man draws himself inwards and rises to his full, if stooped, height. She's not prepared for him to swing his wooden club with unexpected speed and force, catching her in the stomach, knocking the breath out of her chest and buckling her knees. Something at the bottom of her sternum crunches unpleasantly—where she'd taken a blow in the earlier fight, but not yet applied any supportive treatment or magical healing. Perhaps that was a mistake.

The club swings again and she throws up an arm to try to block it; for her effort, she feels one of the bones in her forearm snap and her vision whites out momentarily, a sudden blaze of not-flame that nonetheless shows her the future: this man will die, soon, at her companion's hand.

"Don't—" she manages to choke out before the club finishes its trajectory and collides with her chest, slamming her broken arm into her dislocated ribs and cutting off all capability for thought and speech. Instead, every inch of her attention is focused on the concentrated, nauseating pain.

Her head goes weightless for a moment, and her stomach (which is a relief), and then there's a jarring pain at the base of her spine, then the base of her skull, and then nothing but darkness and pain.

Don't kill him.

After a few seconds, Ayuirei's vision clears, blackness fading to somewhat more manageable spots at the center, remaining hazy at the edges. Her arm still throbs but her chest doesn't, and there's a warm hand resting against her chin, without the familiar barrier of her veil in the way. Another, tangled in her hair, props her head up. Then the bitter taste of a healing potion makes itself known to her.

More than a few seconds, she corrects her assessment. How long? She doesn't know.

Under the bitterness, there's blood, on her tongue but also in the air. Her throat spasms. She lowers her aching eyes from the vague figure above her (Amiri or Ditte? Her vision is still too spotty to tell) and she knows what her sight has landed on before she can truly process it. Another body.

Another person whose secrets she had received, lying dead a scant handful of feet away from her. She rolls out of the arms holding her and coughs to the side, choking out droplets of the healing potion, nearly collapsing when she puts weight on her injured arm, pressing down the nausea. Failing; she retches bile onto the blood-spattered dirt, and again. New tears run down her cheeks. Her entire torso aches, and so do her arm, her head, and her bottom. A slowly-growing warmth radiates from her core, dulling the worst, most central pains, but the outermost bruises remain tender.

She gathers herself together, half-prone in the mud, and casts the strongest healing spell she can still muster. A layer of magic settles on her skin, working its way inward; not quite as efficient as the potion, or as intense, but enough to stop her from wishing her arm would disappear and take all sensation with it.

Even as the pain fades to a bearable level, someone says something; she doesn't register it. Upsmirk responds. The person who was holding her—Amiri, that voice is Amiri—says, "Should we, uh, go try to find her? Ayuirei? Are you okay?"

Her? Must be Ditte, the only her not here. Or was it Amiri? Amiri was gone, she recalls. But no, Amiri is right here, her fur-lined boots scuffing anxiously at the ground next to where Ayuirei still lies, shaking.

"You should go," she says, low and certain as ever. That tone is an easy lie to drape over her words, even when she mostly feels like screaming. Leave me alone.

"Okay," Amiri says, and the boots vanish into the darkness; true dark, or just her head injury? Ayuirei can't tell. They'd started the first ambush with a spell-sun tethered to each of them, but after speaking with the old man to inform him of their success and his son's death, Ayuirei had glared at hers until it went out. Ditte—no, Amiri, who is searching for Ditte, not the other way 'round—should still have hers. Her head aches. This is useless.

"I'll stay here," Upsmirk says. "You look like you need it."

"I do not," Ayuirei grits out, an assertion perhaps undercut by the fact that she's struggling to rise from hands and knees. She catches a glimpse of the body—the newest body—out of the corner of her eye and retches again.

Upsmirk, thankfully, is quiet as she stands and stumbles four steps to the interior wall of the fort. She leans heavily against it, patting across her belt with her uninjured arm for her healing kit. A bandage, she thinks, large enough to stabilize her arm while the magic works; and a painkiller. Pulling out the large linen square from her hip-bag is easy; tying it around her neck, when one of her arms still aches in time with her heartbeat and the other shakes on the same rhythm, is not.

Eventually, she pulls the knot tight with her teeth and relaxes her arm completely into the sling. It holds, and it doesn't hurt more than it did when she started, which is good enough. Ayuirei pulls out a dried wad of medicine as well and starts chewing, its bitterness compounding with the bitter aftertaste of the potion Amiri fed her. Still, within moments her throat feels cooler, less swollen, and she welcomes the relief. More: she chews faster and swallows the herb-infused saliva desperately. Whatever it takes to diminish the pain.

Ayuirei can't see Upsmirk. Wherever they've gone, that's fine. They'll come back. She stumbles the other way, tracing the inner wall south, no destination inside the meager confines of the fort beyond away from here and somewhere with a flame. Finally, she stumbles past another body back into the Stag Lord's chamber—more of a hut—where an oil lantern gutters high on the wall.

She folds her body into a corner and permits herself to stare into the small flame. It dances, knowing and hypnotic, hiding secrets that could have stopped this, but remains impenetrable even to her acute sight.

There is a body in this room too: the Stag Lord himself. For him, Ayuirei feels no guilt nor anger. They'd come in knowing the terms of his defeat, and Ayuirei is satisfied with their achievement. Looking at the strangely burned skin of his half-bared face, skin she hadn't seen when they were fighting, she even feels a kinship to him, as she does all things touched by fire.

"You will burn again," she says, then lapses into calm silence, letting the healing magic wash through her body and watching the lamp-flame sway.