Flash.

Sixteen year old Rita, sitting on her bed, chatting to a friend on her cellphone.

Flash

A sudden noise from down the hall startled her, the phone falling out of her hand.

Flash

A man, lying half in and out of the bathroom shower, hand clasped to his chest.

Flash.

His head cradled in her arms, tears streaking down her face.

Flash.

Cramped, inside an ambulance. Two faceless paramedics doing things with tubes and gloves while she sat helpless.

Flash.

Rushing through white-tiled halls, following the clicky-clack of a hospital bed.

Flash.

A waiting room, with sterile, hard little seats and magazines dating back years, feeling helpless.

Flash.

The wait. A time outside of time. Gone in the blink of an eye, yet at the same time lasting an eternity.

Flash.

The news. The anticipation. The look on the doctor’s face.

Knowing he was not coming back.

Flash.

When Rita came to, she was lying on her back, her ears still ringing. She opened her eyes, blinking away the afterimages of the bright flash of lightning that had been seared onto her retinas.

Well, fuck. If this had permanently damaged her eyes, she was going to throttle that cat for not warning her to look away from the pretty arc.

She rubbed her eyes and tried to look around… BUG LEGS! Oh right, they were hers, curled up like a dead spider. Wiggle wiggle. Okay, good. Nothing seemed broken, though plenty of her hurt.

She rolled over and with the help of her spear that she had somehow managed to hold onto, clambered to shaky feet and surveyed the damage that the crazy cat had wrought.

The rest of the team had been hit pretty hard. Bob was down, blown off his feet by his own spell, lying in a heap and groaning with Zaxier on top of him, paws still pressed over his eyes. Ava had thrown herself protectively over Samual and seemed relatively fine, if a bit shaky. She’d been further away and had been smart enough not to look at the bolt directly. Unlike some people who shall remain nameless.

Gora and the Inquisitor were both smoking. He’d tried diving behind her to dodge the spell and must have made it at least part of the way. Gora’s entire left arm was a charred wreck. If she’d been human, she would have been dead for sure. As for the Inquisitor… to say he was as badly off as they were would be a blatant lie. He had it much, much worse.

Rita stumbled with eight wobbly legs past the vaguely human shaped, half-molten pile of slag. Where his glove had touched the ground, the sand had formed a small crater of jagged, crumbly glass. Somehow, his sword had made it through untouched, except where it had previously blazed like a torch, it had diminished to the faintest flickers of candle flames dancing across the blade.

Fuck, what had that been? When you saw characters in fantasy movies throw around lightning, it just sorta electrocuted people! It didn’t do… this! Had that stupid cat thrown an actual lightning bolt at them?

Rita did some rough mental math as she hobbled over to Gora. Sticking your finger in a wall socket was about hundred-twenty volts and fifteen amps, plenty enough to kill you. A lightning strike was hundreds of millions of volts and tens of thousands of ampere. That was… ugh, her head hurt too much for math. It was a lot, though. But if it had been that strong, the Inquisitor wouldn’t have been half-melted. Either lightning in this world was different compared to what she remembered or what Zaxier and Bob had conjured was was something else entirely. Still, it packed a bit a of a whallop. She made a mental note not to try and strangle the cat after all.

“Gora? Gora are you okay?” she asked as she leaned over the powerful demoness.

“…” Gora replied.

What? She could see her lips move, but she couldn’t… oh!

“I can’t hear you! I think I’m a bit deaf!” she shouted back. She couldn’t even hear her own voice, just a high-pitched keening sound and a static hiss, like an untuned television.

Still, if Gora was talking and moving around, she was probably fine. She had that crazy demon regeneration, or whatever it was. Rita was more worried about Samual. He’d looked like he was in a pretty bad way before the bolt had struck, and it surely wouldn’t have done him any favours. Plus, he’d been wearing full metal plate… was that good or bad? She couldn’t remember. Certainly hadn’t helped the Inquisitor.

Just as she turned to go check on him and Ava, she noticed the Inquisitor’s sword flicker to life out of the corner of eye.

No, surely not…? Surely there was no way…

With a mounting sense of dread she slowly closed on the Inquisitor’s body. His metal gauntlet appeared to have melted shut around the hilt of his sword and resembled a lump of fused metal more than an articulated gauntlet. The other gauntlet, the one that had touched the ground, was completely missing. Nothing but a charred stump remained.

And yet he moved. The sword dragged slowly across glass-sand surface and to Rita’s horror, she realized he was trying to get up onto elbows that refused to bend!

How? How was he still alive!? He should be dead! Nothing should have been able to survive that! Gora almost hadn’t and she’d just been caught in the edge of it! This guy had been struck dead centre! What kind of monster was he?

Desperately, Rita raised her spear to stab him before he could lever his half-molten bulk off the ground. She aimed for one of the largest gaps in the armour that she could see, a joint in the back of his neck that had been exposed as the armour had warped under a combination of Samual’s blows and the incredible heat of the lightning bolt. She could just barely make out what looked like burnt flesh underneath.

Her spear still sucked at stabbing, however. The tip barely managed to penetrate before the blades bent as they always did, absorbing all of the impact. The Inquisitor didn’t even seem to notice it. He kept slowly levering himself up and onto his knees. Rita started to panic. She tried to push him down with her two front legs, but only managed to burn her feet. His armour was still hot!

“Why won’t you stay down!” she shouted, barely able to hear it as the ringing in her ears slowly faded.

Why did she get such a useless weapon? Who put a spear tip on a shock absorbing coil? What kind of idiot made such a stupid design? She was so close to the spine. If only she could get the damn thing in a bit deeper…

Suddenly, it felt like something was drawn out of her and into the spear. The entire bladed tip suddenly folded together into a single long, hardened point. With a lurch, it punctured right through the armour, straight through the Inquisitor’s spine, and impaled itself in his frontal armour. The Inquisitor collapsed to the ground, limp, and his sword guttered out entirely.

What…? How…? What had she…? Had she killed him? She’d been twisting her spear, trying to work it in deeper when suddenly it had…

Slowly, she twisted her spear the other way as she pulled it out and watched in fascination as the tip unfurled into its normal configuration. A drop of some kind of colourless ooze dripped from the tip. Woah… maybe her spear wasn’t so useless after all?

Then a cold chill settled in her stomach as she realized that she’d just murdered someone.

Before this, all she had killed had been a few monsters, and while it had upset her, she’d been able to convince herself that they were nothing but unnatural things birthed by an insane god-tree. Mad things, likely glad to be put out of their misery. But this… this young man, probably no older than Ava, was a human. He’d had a childhood, a life, parents, hopes and dreams… and she’d just snuffed them out out of fear.

Well, honestly, she hadn’t expected to actually be able to kill him! She just wanted him to stop getting up and killing Gora! He’d just face-tanked a lightning bolt for goodness sakes! How was she supposed to know her shitty spear was going to be the thing that finally kills him?

Her hearing was sufficiently recovered that she jumped when she suddenly heard someone shouting in barely restrained anger.

“What have you done to Davaad!?”

The cold chill in her stomach transitioned to crawling up her spine, turning downright icy, as she slowly turned around.

Two more Inquisitors had landed nearby, wings extended and swords blazing.

One of them was the one that had watched them from the building. The helmet visor had the same vertical guards. The other… his armor was even more intricate, with every inch of it engraved and etched with symbols and runes, even the tiniest gap. It looked like someone had started decorating a suit of armor and then just hadn’t known how to stop.

He lifted his sword, sweeping blue flames engulfing it and wafting off in a haze. “You have slain my apprentice, Monster! May Mitla have mercy on your soul, for I will not!”

Ah shit. So they’d been fighting the apprentice all this time. THIS was the real Inquisitor.

High Inquisitor Patrus was incensed.

He had told them his apprentices weren’t ready. That just because they had received their Blessings did not mean that they were ready to be sent into the corrupt, sinful wasteland outside the boundaries of Mitla’s Blessed Land. Especially not to one of these so-called “Nightmare Domains” that swallowed Inquisitors far more experienced than they.

But when the Archpope, Voice of Mitla, Most Blessed of the Faithful and Holiest amongst all Men asks you personally to take your charges and investigate some Mitla-forsaken patch of heathen magic that was acting up, you didn’t refuse.

And now his apprentice, Inquisitor-in-Training Davaad, lay dead. There was a clear hole in the armor on his back and the culprit still stood over him with the murder weapon in her hand. Some kind of spider-monster, with half the body of a particularly ragged, filthy woman and half the body of a giant, disgusting, milky-white spider.

Three more individuals lay on the ground. He shuddered with revulsion when he saw that one of them was a demon. Mitla had a special hatred for demons.

Had the spider slain them all? No, the demon and the boy were moving, they were not dead. And the other, the knight, had a woman in a robe kneeling protectively over him. Most likely a healer of some kind. Or a friend. She seemed unconcerned by the spider, so likely they were allies.

Davaad’s armor was half melted and the sand around him had been partially turned into glass. So that had been the unnatural flash of lightning that they had followed here. Therefore, magic. From the spider? Possible. But equally possible was that it had been the demon or the healer woman. He would have to be careful.

But as the only combatant on her feet, the spider would die first, regardless.

“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to do it!” the spider-woman pleaded, hands outstretched in supplication. “He just kept coming and all my friends were hurt… oh, god, this is such a mess…”

He hesitated, his fury paused. In his anger he had spoken in the Mitlan language, known only as Divine, not truly expecting anyone here other than Tomaas to understand. Yet the creature had replied in not only perfect Divine, her accent had been straight from his home canton!

This puzzled him. A canton’s dialect was unique. Had she learnt it from a teacher from there? He tried racking his brain to think of any he knew of that had left from there that this monster could have gotten her hands on and tortured for the knowledge, for surely no true child of Mitla would have taught such a vile creature willingly.

“How do you speak Divine?” he demanded in the same language, lowering his blade slightly.

“It was an accident, I swear! We’ve spent like the last week surrounded by monsters and… what?” she asked, confused.

“How do you speak this language, creature?” he demanded. It wasn’t forbidden for outsiders to speak it, it was just rare. Those who volunteered to perform as missionaries to heathen lands always expended great effort to teach the barbarians their superior tongue, and convince them of its self-evident superiority, but heathens often simply lacked the necessary refinement and purity of spirit to be able to master it. And when they tried, they usually butchered many of the more delicate pronunciations, their heathen accents coming through thickly.

“Oh! The language!” She seemed relieved as she dug through one of the… were those socks?… she wore on her legs, and fished out a small, greenish plate. “I have an elec… er… I mean a tronic! It translates for me! See? It’s like a magic thingy that runs on this essence stuff except I’m not sure why this one is still running since I kinda forgot to put more essence on it since I left the Tree…”

As if to illustrate, she gripped the plate just by its edges and spoke several words in some sickening, alien language.

Patrus nearly exploded on the spot.

“It’s not enough for you to slay my charge here on unsanctified soil, you mock the Divine tongue by mimicking it with your vile magics!?” he roared in the heathen common tongue, disgusted that he had disgraced the purity of his native tongue by speaking it around this… this… tongue-stealer!

He would have to do penance later for his sins. Fifty lashes for losing his apprentice and another fifty for defiling the holy language of Mitla, delivered by his own hand, as was prescribed. But only after he had reduced this blasphemous, sorcerous creature to a scorched smear in the dust. And returned Davaad’s body to the holy sanctum for resurrection before it was too late to bring him back from death’s clutches.

“What? No! No I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…!” the creature stammered, backing away from him as his sword roared with the blue fire of Mitla’s Wrath.

He tensed his legs, ready to leap, to strike the foul beast down where she stood, when an arrow suddenly struck him in the side of the helmet with incredible force. He stumbled and just barely managed to catch himself before he fell.

“THA’ WAS YER ONLY WARNIN’ SHOT, NOW GET THE FOCK AWAY FROM MY PEOPLE!” a thickly accented voice shouted from the direction of Triskellion Outpost.

Patrus cursed his lack of awareness. He had let the spider creature distract him, and now the Delvers had begun streaming from a door set into the base of their fortress. About two dozen of them. A motley lot, armed with an incredible variety of weapons.

Leading them was a thickset man with a massive, bushy, red beard that covered his chest and a ruddy, veined complexion. He wielded a bow almost as large as he was, patterned like the scales of a snake, and wore a hastily donned leather jerkin over rumpled sleeping clothes and a pair of fuzzy brown slippers.

Patrus grimaced underneath his armour. He could fight them. He could probably defeat them, Mitla willing, even all of them together. But would he be able to do so and still bring Davaad’s body back in time to be able to restore him to life? Unlikely. They were far from home, and he would have to hurry to make it in time as it was.

Only the Archpope, Voice of Mitla, Most Blessed of the Faithful and Holiest amongst all Men had been blessed by Mitla to be able to perform this miracle and the longer he waited, the more traumatic the experience would be for poor Davaad. Until, eventually, it would simply be too much for him to bear and Mitla would refuse to grant the boon out of mercy for the poor lad’s sanity.

“Alright! We are taking our slain companion and leaving!” he shouted at the oncoming group of Delvers. Then, with one quick beat of his wings, he hopped over to where Davaad lay, sending the spider skittering away in terror.

Good. By Mitla, he wished he could incinerate her in passing, but then the Delvers would likely attack. That could delay his return and saving Davaad’s life was the highest priority now.

“Tomaas!” he called back as he hefted the Davaad’s body. “Grab the sword and… what are you doing, Boy? Leave him!”

His other charge was kneeling next to the fallen knight, healing him for Mitla-only-knows-what reason. At his master’s admonishment he leapt to his feet and ran over to collect his fellow apprentice’s sword.

“Sorry, Sir!” he called back.

They both took off in clouds of dust, their blessed wings sending them shooting through the sky at speed.

“Why were you laying hands on that heathen, Boy?” Patrus asked as they flew back.

“Sir, he was dying and I couldn’t just leave him. It… it was my brother, Samual,” Tomaas stammered.

“Your brother?” Patrus replied, surprised. “Are you sure? What is he doing here among the heathens?”

“I wish I knew, Sir,” Tomaas replied, emotion in his voice. “He left home five years ago and we hadn’t seen him since. I… we thought he was dead. Mother will… she…”

“Don’t worry, boy,” Patrus tried to ease his apprentice’s mind. “Once Davaad has been safely snatched from the clutches of death, we will return to these lands. You and I both have unfinished business here.”

“Thank you, Sir.”

Indeed. A certain spider was owed a reckoning.