In retrospect, Katarina decided as smoldering bits of wood bounced off of her, she probably shouldn't have ducked behind a tree when her foe was someone that could cast lightning spells. Her protection against magic shielded her from the strike itself, but she was wholly unprepared to handle the tree exploding.

Rain pattered down from the sky in an unceasing torrent, filtered only by the cover of the forest canopy. The shattered remains of the tree trunk she'd crouched behind still burned in strange patterns. Burning sap sizzled and flowed.

Katarina stayed prone where she'd landed, steadfastly ignoring the dripping rain running across her face, hoping for a clue to the identity of her assailant. Her eyes scanned the hazy gloom of the forest, looking for a sign, a hint of movement. Her ears were next to useless; they hurt and rang from the blast. Even if they didn't, she would be hard pressed to hear anything over the roar of the downpour. Her nose was filled with the sharp smell of ozone, burning wood, and the fragrant musk of pine needles that pressed against her face.

So she lay there, letting the rain patter on her face, eyes carefully probing between trees, one hand near her holster in case she needed to make a quick draw, idly grateful her hair was in a braid and hadn't fallen across her face, obscuring her vision.

A couple of days ago she'd been attacked with lightning as she traveled through the trackless woods, but the spell had fizzled out against her defenses impotently. Katarina had given chase, and this was the result.

She was a Witch Hunter, a unique class of warrior trained by the Great Church to fight the menace of unlicensed mages. She was trained to hunt them down, so it came as no surprise that they would at some point try and hunt her.

Since her ears were ringing, she couldn't hear, and through the haze of rain she couldn't see very far, Katarina closed her eyes and focused on her breathing. In her mind, she pictured her position, feeling the crinkling of pine needles that had been shed by the trees around her. She concentrated on the cold, soggy earth, the scent of pine and mud, the feeling of rain pattering down, the dull ache from her saber's basket pressing uncomfortably into her hip beneath her.. In her minds' eye she reconstructed her surroundings. There were several trees around. There was a dull vibration in the earth; likely that was her horse. It shouldn't have gone far. It was a fine warhorse from the best stables in Darnell, the capital city of the Anglish Empire, and Katarina's sole companion for the past ten years.

There was a vague sense of something directly behind her; Katarina ignored the reflex to turn over. The first response from your body when you shut off your senses was the looming feeling that something horrific was creeping up on you unawares. Her hearing had returned, but Katarina kept her eyes closed.

She used her ears to help build her mental image of her surroundings. The wind and rain revealed the locations of more trees. This forest was mostly pine, though there were strands of boarswood here and there.

Boarswood was prized by the Anglish empire; it was fibrous and dense, nearly strong as steel. It was used in everything, from construction to armor. When turned by a skilled woodsmith, boarswood armor was almost as effective as plate steel. She replayed her memory; there weren't any nearby boarswood trees.

She focused her concentration. Pines, with gnarled branches and dense with tiny needles. The layers of branches and needles interlocking to block out most of the rain. The ground she lay on was fragrant with pine needles. Here and there, ferns and small bushes growing where the soil wasn't leeched of nutrients by the trees.

As she navigated the area in her mind, there was a sense of obfuscation, a null area she couldn't put together in her mind. It seemed to shift around. A jolt adrenaline stabbed into her heart and she struggled for control. Whatever it was, it was concealing its presence and moving closer, carefully shifting from tree to tree. Crouching behind a bush, parting fern leaves.

An odor wafted across Katarina's nose, a smell of old sweat and wet clothes. Katarina steadied her breathing. Katarina had been trained to fight witchcraft and hunt down those that practiced it. She was a hunter, a predator, and sometimes, the prey came directly to her. All she had to do was wait. Carefully, patiently. Ten years ago patience would have been impossible; she would have bounded to her feet and given chase.

The presence moved closer. Katarina kept her eyes closed, kept her breathing slow and shallow so they couldn't tell. In her mind, she weighed her possible movements. She'd have to pull her coat to the side to pull her gun from the holster. She'd have to completely roll over to free her saber. She kept a knife in her boot, but she'd have to move to a sitting position to draw it. She also kept a knife in her bracer, but she would have to free her arm to do that, too.

She suddenly realized she could hear them, now. The slight sound of feet shuffling on the wet ground. A muffled sniffle. Still, she waited.

The presence shuffled closer, and Katarina began laying plans. She tensed and relaxed the muscles in her arms and legs, checking for any injuries. She wasn't in the best of positions to move decisively.

The smell of old sweat and wet, filthy clothes filled her nostrils, at the same time the feeling of approaching footsteps stopped near her. The feet shuffled, and approached her head. There was the dry, explosive pop of knee joints as the person squatted down.

Witch Hunters were trained in a variety of different ways, but their primary strength was their natural resistance to magic and magical effects. Because Katarina was a veteran with long years of experience, she was able to project that resistance out from herself in various ways. Katarina could project it out as a barrier, as a projectile to interrupt spellcasting, or, more recently, she could extend that magical resistance out from her in field around her, negating all magic in a set radius around her.

"What is this?" the man's voice creaked above her. "A woman, wearing trousers? Unthinkable."

"Wiiiitch Hunter?" a tiny voice gurgled, and Katarina felt adrenaline splash her heart with ice. She hadn't expected two people.

"No woman of the Anglish Empire would be caught dead wearing trousers." The man reasoned and snuffled. "The Witch Hunter is somewhere else."

"Womaaaaaaan." the tiny voice burbled. "Womaaan." and followed this up with a few heavy breaths.

She couldn't wait any longer. She pushed out her antimagic field out as far as she could and bounded up, fist arcing like a comet, catching a bearded man off-guard. A spike of adrenaline settled in her heart as she realized he carried a knife in one hand.

He fell backward from her strike with a startled yelp, but Katarina leapt on him in a flash, one hand closing around his throat, the other knocking away the man's knife with her fist, her foot tangling with his, shoving his back into the wet ground and straddling his chest to pin his arms. He gurgled around her chokehold.

"Witch... Hunter!" He gasped around her grip, trying to break her hold. Katarina struggled with him, trying to immobilize him long enough to draw her gun. He thrashed and bucked, trying to get her off of him. She saw his eyes unfocus several times as he tried to use his magical talent. Suddenly he opened his mouth, and his tongue, a disgusting trifurcated thing easily a foot long and covered with suckers like the tentacle of an octopus slithered around her wrist.

Katarina's gorge heaved with shock and horror and she vomited directly into the man's upturned face. He let out a gasping wheeze of a scream, cut off with strangled choking and sputtering.

She jerked the knife from her boot with her free hand. "By the Blessed name of the Golden Lady!" She screamed, adjusting her position, "For the crimes of heresy, mutation, and witchcraft, I condemn you as guilty." She growled, and rammed the blade into his heart up to the hilt. She twisted the knife, feeling it catch on ribs and rose to her feet and drew her gun.

Her gun was a pistol in the old style, with three revolving barrels. The metal was intricately carved and embellished with gothic script and holy symbols.

"In the name of the Goddess of the Dawn, the Golden Lady, I sentence you to die." Katarina intoned formally, and pulled the trigger on her gun.

She glanced around, looking for the other person that spoke. The forest was deathly quiet, all the creatures of the forest shocked into silence from the gunshot.

"Wo- womaaaan". The liquid voice burbled behind her, and Katarina whirled, gun raised threateningly. There was nothing there. Katarina expanded the anti-magic field to its utmost limits, but if they were hiding, they weren't doing it with magic.

"Show yourself." Katarina commanded, and the voice chuckled from the man's body.

"Womaaan." followed by an obscene liquid smacking sound.

She eyed the body, and noticed an unnatural bulge under the man's robes, high up on his chest. Grimacing with revulsion, Katarina gingerly nudged aside the man's robes with her knife. Below the collarbone, roughly where a knight might couch his lance or a rifleman might shoulder his weapon, a bulge roughly the size of a grapefruit thrust itself out of his flesh. A single eye erupted from this tumorous growth, rolling and blinking, while a tiny mouth, replete with teeth and a tongue no bigger than Katarina's fingernail panted heavily. Katarina struggled with her gorge again. It wasn't often she saw mutations this foul.

The eye spotted her, and the tiny mouth writhed. "No kill I." it burbled, and Katarina's face twisted in revulsion. She drove her knife through the hideous face growing out of the man's chest over and over. It was disgusting, hideous, and offensive to her core.

Katarina took a long moment to clean herself off and compose herself. Despite the mutant mages' violent end, there was very little blood on her clothes, though her coat was splattered. Mutation was a very real danger when using magic, and the results spoke for themselves.

No matter what, before Katarina could move on, she needed to destroy the mages' body. By Divine Decree by the Goddess of the Anglish Empire, the Golden Lady Herself, no mutant or abomination would be suffered to live, and their remains were to be destroyed as quickly as possible. First though, she took proof of her kill, the mages' right hand. With this, a specially trained and Church-sanctioned mage would be able to scry the mutants' last moments, proving Katarina killed it and guaranteeing her pay.

She whistled for her horse, and grimaced in memory as she remembered that her hatchet, like most of her gear, was lost. A mere two weeks prior, she had been camping near a stream when her campsite was washed away in a flash flood. Cutting wood for the necessary pyre would be difficult.

Katarina stripped the corpse, raked together pine needles, branches and twigs, and then went hunting for fallen trees to use as fuel for the fire. She returned shortly, and set up an impromptu pyre for the body. After she heaved the corpse onto the pyre and got the kindling started, she sorted through the mages' goods.

There was a few things of interest: a carved stick of wood that was as long as her forearm and as thick as her thumb; Katarina immediately recognized it as a firestick, a magically created tool that was used to light fires. There was a wooden token that looked like it had been prepared to take some form of magical enchantment; Katarina indifferently tossed this into the fire. There was a small coin pouch that carried a few blackened coppers of indeterminate origin, a long-bladed knife, and a medallion that identified him as from the magical school of Innsmouth in Westharbor.

She examined the knife, which was much more interesting than any of the other bits and baubles. It resembled nothing else but a simple triangular kitchen knife, though the blade was as long as her forearm, more of a short sword or a long dagger than a knife. The additional senses that were granted to her by being a Witch Hunter let her know that the blade was magically reinforced. The blade was stronger, and the edge would never dull.

Her eyes narrowed shrewdly. This knife was incongruous with the rest of his things, suggesting he didn't make this himself.

"Where did you come from?" She mused, eyeing the blade. "Did he make you... or were you given to him? By whom?" She wondered, and then raised an eyebrow in thought, as something else occurred to her: "Who did he steal you from?"

With no answers, Katarina rose to her feet and whistled for her horse.

"I suppose you'll have to do until I can replace my hatchet." She decided, and bemoaned the loss of her leatherworking and sewing kits. If she'd had either, she could make a sheath for it. Instead, she folded some leather around it, and tucked it in her saddlebag for later. A tinny voice froze her in place, hand on her sword.

"Oglethorpe! Oglethorpe, you piece of shit, fucking pick up!" Katarina turned with a frown, and glanced around for the sound of the voice. "Fuck."

She zeroed in on the voice; it was coming from the mages' medallion that she'd discarded after a cursory inspection.

She picked it up, and the voice spoke up. "Ah, finally. Listen, worm: We got everything we need but the sacrifice. Go to Higgenfal. You'll know who we need."

Katarina raised her eyebrow at this.

"I'm sure I have no idea who you need." She replied with a crafty grin.

"Who is this?!" the gruff male voice immediately snarled in shock. Her grin widened predatorily. "My name is Katarina." She replied. "I'm a Witch Hunter in service to the Golden Lady."

The man's voice dissolved into inarticulate screams intermixed with bouts of blasphemy and profanity. Katarina herself chuckled at his discomfiture, but sobered up when his screams stopped.

"Well, Witch Hunter, you're powerless to stop me. You don't know me, or what powers I represent. You can't find me with that trinket, either." the voice declared self-importantly.

"You're wrong." Katarina replied patiently. "I will find you, and I will judge you with the same crimes I judged your lackey with: Heresy and Witchcraft. I don't need magic to find you. The Goddess will lead me right to you." She replied with the simple faith of the devout.

"Heresy implies dogma that has clearly defined boundaries, Witch Hunter. Magic in itself surpasses most human intellectual boundaries and limitations. You cannot judge me." The man's voice was crisp and authoritarian.

A dozen counterarguments flickered through her mind, but Katarina shook her head. Debate with a mage was useless.

"Oglethorpe learned the truth of judgement; you will, too." With that she tossed the medallion into the funeral pyre.

After the cremation of the mutant's remains, Katarina mounted her horse, checked her orientation, and began heading north. The Witch she was hunting had been heading north before Katarina had been sidetracked by that mutant.

As she rode, she considered the facts she'd gathered.

Mages, working together. That was a rarity; rogue mages usually couldn't stand working together for very long. There were all sorts of suspicions and resentments that cropped up. The were inherently selfish and covetous people. Not only did they hoard power for themselves, they were suspicious of other mages and their motives. Working together revealed their weaknesses, or gaps in knowledge that the other mage could exploit. Clearly the one she'd spoken with had no fear of Oglethorpe, the mage she'd killed.

"Speaking of which," Katarina muttered to herself, unaware she'd spoken aloud. Oglethorpe had been hunting someone before Katarina had ran across him. Hunting at that others' bidding. Who he was hunting was a mystery, only that they were in some place known as Higgenfal.

"Hmm. Higgenfal." She mused, again unaware she'd spoken aloud. She had only the vaguest idea where she was; the forests spread for hundreds of miles in every direction and the name didn't mean anything to her, either. It wasn't the name of a major city, she was certain of that. Likely that was the name of a frontier village or hamlet, a tiny place with maybe a dozen or so families and a pastor. Likely was a lumber or a mining town. Unless she came across it by complete accident or coincidence, there was nothing she could do.

She set it to the back of her mind and focused on picking up the trail of the mage she'd been assigned to hunt down; a slip of a girl that had her magical awakening and instead of going to the church like she should have, she'd bolted for the forest.