The pale girl walked along the road, her bare feet sinking into the pressed dirt as she strolled. Her thin white sundress and her long hair blew in the wind as she strolled east. Two men and a woman had been watching her for several miles, concealed by an invisibility spell and skulking about in the tall grass that ran alongside the road. She could hear their heartbeats, smell their sweat, and taste their mana on the wind. They were no more hidden than children playing in the open road. She heard one whisper to another, as quiet as the squeak of a field mouse.

“She’s just walking,” the larger of the two men said.

“She doesn’t even have any gear, Meryn,” the lither of the two added.

“Shut up you idiots. Three caravans on this road and everyone at the first and second watchtowers just vanished. Did you see her tracks when we cross the road back there? She has to weigh five hundred stone,” the woman shook her head.

“There’s no way. Look at her. She’s the size of my five-summers niece,” the big one said.

“You damn well know size doesn’t matter, Graul,” the woman cut him off. “I could kill both of you before you could blink.”

The men shot a look at each other, then just shrugged. The guard captain was well into in the fifth weave, and the strongest mortal they’d ever met. Neither Graul nor Alden were slouches themselves, as sergeants in the guard were required to have surpassed the first wall and passed into the third weave. If the girl up the road was responsible for the disappearances, she’d have to have bested a sergeant at each tower and a dozen professional soldiers, not to mention whatever hunters were employed by the merchants that ran the caravans.

Her strange appearance played into their suspicions, as no one walked this stretch of road unguarded. A variety of beasts stalked the grasslands, and wild goblins were common throughout the territory. Most of the goblin tribes did trade with the town and kept their absurdly long noses clean, but a minority of them still stalked the roads and outlying towns for what their tongue called argruchagh, or “bald meat”. Elves, dwarves, humans, any humanoid without fur fell under that grouping, and the savage tribes targeted anyone that looked unarmed and unarmored. Their most common victims were unattended children and the young or elderly working the fields of the farms surrounding the city.

A while back, the attacks had grown so brazen, the Hunter’s Guild put a general bounty out for the creatures. Once the more agreeable tribes had gotten wind of the storm on the horizon, they banded together and culled most of the savages from the territory. There was quite the panic when the chieftains and shamans of each tribe came tromping into town, caked in rust-colored goblin blood and entrails to turn in hundreds of hacked-off ears for the bounty.

After that, the savages cut their hunting for bald meat back to a minimum. The widespread raids all but disappeared, but they’d still snatch lone travelers from the road, and it was best not to let the children play too close to the woods or too deep in the tall grass.

Which is why it was terribly odd that this pale slip of an unarmed girl in a summer dress was wandering down this stretch of road as though it were a lovely Dawning day stroll.

“Mery, we’ve been following this girl for two days. Just arrest her if you’re that curious,” Alden groaned.

“I want to know why,” the half-elf replied.

“Why what?” Graul asked.

“Why she keeps walking, since she knows we’re following her,” the captain stared straight ahead.

The two men started simultaneously, the larger snapping his gaze back to the road, the other slowly turning to his captain.

“How do you know she knows we’re following her?” Graul whispered.

“You two idiots. You never did manage to pick up Mystic Sight, did you?” she shook her head.

“Don’t keep us in suspense then,” Alden prodded her.

“See that tree back there?” the captain replied. “That’s how far her mantle stretches.”

Alden turned to look behind them, then turned as pale as milk, eyes wide, “The one about fifty stride back? That’s impossible. Even you don’t have that much mana.”

“No, the big one,” the captain continued to stare at the girl’s back.

The elven scout looked further down the road behind them, where a massive tree stretched out against the clear blue sky, some three hundred yards in the distance.

“Mery, that’s impossible,” despair warred with disbelief in the elf’s heart.

“Graul, what are you doing?” the woman whispered fiercely.

When the scout turned back to look at his captain, he saw his partner had stood, giving away their position, and had begun to walk toward the road.

“GRAUL!”

Alden’s half-whisper, half-shout seemed to snap the big orc out of his reverie for a moment, and he turned back to look at his companions with wide eyes.

“She’s singing, Alden. Can you hear it? It’s beautiful,” the warrior turned back to the road.

Alden and Meryn strained to listen, their inhuman perception bringing the babbling of a brook across the fields, the call of a hawk on the wind, the rutting of tall bucks in the wood. But the music of nature was the only song they could hear.

Until it wasn’t.

“And if you don’t love me now. You will never love me again. I can still hear you sayin’…”

“What language is that? Almost sounds like an imperial dialect?” Meryn turned, but Alden had already risen to his feet.

She kicked him in the knee, driving him to the ground. She saw the pain override whatever had crawled behind his eyes as he hissed at her and gripped his leg.

“Eyes fucking up, guardsman,” she growled.

“Yes ma’am…” he grunted. “But the knee? Really Mery?”

He uncorked one of the healing potions in his kit and drank it down. Meryn grabbed his ankle, and when he gave her the signal, jerked his knee back into place. He sighed in relief as the potion restored the abused ligaments and relieved the pain.

“Where’s Graul?” he whispered.

“He’s… fuck. He’s gone. Shit, where’s the girl?” Meryn scanned the road.

“Right here, mijita.”

The pale girl appeared between them and reached out a delicate hand with so much speed that her movement wasn’t even a blur. She gripped the back of Alden’s head with that single hand, a nauseating crunch echoing from his skull. Meryn watched as the fluid surrounding the elf’s brain leaked from the corners of his eyes, out his nose, and down his ears.

The half-elf captain sprung backward with inhuman speed, opening nearly sixty feet between herself and the girl that had just slaughtered her companion. With the same monstrous speed, she threw her hands above her head and conjured a ball of fire the size of a wagon.

“Time for you to learn why the guardsmen call me ‘Captain Hellcat’ behind my back, bitch!”

“No, it isn’t, mijita.”

The girl was suddenly standing in front of Meryn. She hadn’t seen the human move, even the telltale blur of a martial art or the disturbance of mana left by powerful bladedancers using speed magic. She just… appeared.

As Meryn dropped the swirling ball of flame on the girl, she knew the technique’s explosion would mean her own death. Volcanic Mercy was the summation of her entire life, a combination technique that devoured two-thirds of her mana in a single second and could level a small village with its shockwave. To stand inside the ten stride of its immediate blast was death. Nothing had ever survived.

The girl reached up a pale hand and touched the sphere of annihilation as it descended.

Meryn watched with Mystic Sight as… something… erupted from the girl’s body and devoured the pyroclastic spell. The cascade of invisible force ripped her technique apart, shredding it into more of whatever it was that had flooded out of the girl’s body, then rushed back to her, filling her with a golden light, shot through with streamers of brilliant white and cerulean blue.

Meryn dropped to her knees.

“So strong. Come to me. I will take your pain away.”

As the girl drew close, Meryn rose with a burst of speed that cracked like thunder and planted a dagger in the girl’s chest. Her eyes burned with rage and a fierce joy as the blade sunk in up to the hilt, the girl’s hand rising to take hold of her wrist in a feeble grip that could not dislodge the blade. Meryn twisted the dagger in the wound with a savage cry of triumph.

The girl simply looked down at the blade, and her grip tightened on the half-elf’s wrist until the bones began to crack. Meryn’s teeth gritted together as she tried to yank the blade out and stab the girl again.

“That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die…”

“But today is not your day, mijita.”