“This has been a very bad day, but I’ll never say the Source is unkind. At least it delivered the traitor right to me.” Valree approached slowly, but with so much unfiltered aggression that Mason was frozen in place.

“Back off, Valree. The council and Lady Sorynel both vouch for Mason. You can’t harm him without their approval!” Faynel shouted as she placed herself between Mason and the warrior.

She threw her head back and laughed, “The council? They hardly deserved their seats in this world, and now most of them are most likely dead. As for Lady Sorynel, well, she didn’t do much to defend the city now, did she? Look around, little girl. New Marra has fallen. And it’s oh-so-convenient that it happened on the day we chased out that soul eating little coward.”

“What are you even doing here? Shouldn’t you be escorting the survivors somewhere safe?”

She shrugged and replied, “We came back to see who else could be saved once the majority of the enemy forces retreated. And to be frank, I was hoping to stumble upon the humen’s corpse in the wreckage. Now step aside. If you keep your mouth shut, nobody but him needs to get hurt and nobody will know he didn’t die in the fighting.”

“I’m not dying here today,” Mason finally spoke up, stepping next to Faynel and brandishing his sword. An itch on his neck was demanding his attention, and he so badly wanted to reach for his staff but… not now.

“You are. Unless you plan to run away and let Torysen fight your battles for you again? You can’t hope to take me on.”

The rest of her defense force had formed up in a semi-circle around them, pinning the two survivors against a wall. Neither of them could believe they were actually hoping for a surprise attack from a Corrosi. Or better, another magic portal. Mason wished he had a way to contact Artorias.

When no magical escape routes were forthcoming, the two backed up a space and began to look around hoping to find something to help them. They couldn’t possibly fight a full defense team at once. Possibly together they could defeat Valree, but even that would be a challenge, and individually each of the defense team was probably worth the same as the survivors.

One of Valree’s men, a stout but pinched-faced man, sneered at them, “For our family, for our city. You had better pray for quick deaths, both of you.”

The captain shot him a look, but steadied her gaze on her prey almost immediately after. She walked slowly toward them, battleaxe poised in her hands like a mobile guillotine. It was a march slowed by a vindictive hatred. Each of them felt the need to draw out the violence, to savor their misplaced vendetta.

Faynel grabbed Mason’s hand tightly and squeezed as if she were in labor. He fought the urge to cry out, but that initial pain was drowned by the shock of her pulling mana out of his body. It felt much like what he suspected being drained of his blood would be like; a pinching, pulling sensation where his nerves were dull.

He trusted her though, and he held his breath and waited patiently to see what she would do. Part of him suspected a Force spell great enough to pin them all in place. If she could activate the gravity spells, perhaps making them float into the air, they could escape for sure. She raised her spare hand straight into the air and Mason could see the burst of color as mana shot from her hands.

Like a firework, she launched a series of runes into the air. Mason couldn’t read it, but all else present could, and anyone with line of vision on the sky above them would be able to see it. She signed, Danger, Friend, Enemy, Friend, Enemy, Danger and then a symbol which represented her well-known family’s crest.

Two of Valree’s men began swearing, but the captain herself looked around confused as the group began to lose their formation. “What are you hoping to accomplish you little bitch? There’s nobody nearby who can save you.”

For all her bravado, she didn’t step forward. Her motions were stalled, and she looked overwhelmed with uncertainty. Some of her men looked less uncertain, and were already backing away from the fight, while others were shouting insults at the ones moving away.

“You should leave now,” Faynel hissed, though the confidence in her voice barely hid the trembling of fear she felt.

“I will not. I won’t leave this unsettled!”

“Captain, we should go. You saw what she did, right? The sign for traitor. If their bodies are found under that questions are going to be raised.”

“I’m not against still killing the mana-starved but a Lady Nel?” one of the retreating men jittered, “They’ll execute us. Sorynel might pull us apart herself.”

“We have an opportunity here to protect our people!”

“Not our people if we’re dead!”

They fell to bickering amongst themselves, but the captain roared and they fell silent. “There may be nobody nearby, and if there is someone, we can tell them the truth, that these two colluded with Corrosi and fed them our location and weaknesses!”

“What weaknesses?” Mason shouted, “Your city fell because they blasted it to hell. What do you think I had anything to do with that if I’m backed against a corner because of an untidy group like yourselves?”

“All of you are missing the point,” Faynel stepped forward, almost close enough for Valree to strike at her. Almost. “If Marrans can see that sign, so can the Corrosi. I did feed them your location. Now do you want to be here when a full tribe of them show up?”

Nobody was quite certain over the sound of their own blood pumping, but it did begin to seem as if they heard movement in the distance. Were those roars? If Valree’s band was nervous before, that devolved to pure panic then. They scattered like a pack of dogs on the Fourth of July, and Valree’s shouting was barely enough to encourage them to cluster in a single direction as they retreated.

The captain glowered at the two, “You will receive justice.”

“Fuck off,” Mason replied to a squeeze of Faynel’s hand.

As the band began to back off, Faynel immediately turned to Mason and indicated the opposite direction, “We have to go, quickly.”

They made good time as they ran despite the difficult terrain. Rather than making for one of the obvious exits to the city, Faynel aimed simply to get to the nearest of the city walls. They stumbled upon small clusters of goblins, but most were too preoccupied with looting to care about them, and the few that did take note of them only did so long enough to realize the fight wasn’t worth it.

“Source, I can’t believe this happened,” Faynel said as they moved over piles of splintered wood and shattered black stone. “The goblins and Corrosi hardly work well with themselves, let alone each other. What could have united them?”

“I’m not really an expert on either group, to be honest. But they’re both tribal, right? Couldn’t a strong leader have organized them?”

“So effectively though? They must have started the siege and gotten through the walls in only a few hours. The attack hadn’t even started by the time we left. And we only stumbled upon a small force, too. Where did they come from?”

“Faynel, what about your grandmother?” Mason asked, stopping his companion in her tracks.

She turned on him, “What do you mean, what about my grandmother?”

“She’s so… strong. Couldn’t she have repelled the attack herself? I mean, maybe not against all of them alone but- I just don’t see how she couldn’t cast a few spells and keep them from breaking through the walls.”

“You’re not suggesting she was involved, or she abandoned the city,” Faynel insisted, with a curl to her lips that suggested a snarl.

“No, I’m wondering if the threat isn’t worse than we think. I would have asked Valree if she hadn’t been so eager to kill me. But something would have had to have had the strength to subdue Sorynel to do this kind of damage, right? And you saw those marks on the ground. It was like a monster clawed at the city.”

“Perhaps Valree didn’t even know what really had happened. In all the chaos, someone would have given her the orders to try to save as many lives as she could, but who would have been able to get close to something so dangerous and still get away?”

Mason shivered, “Torysen would be able to.”

They exchanged a look, and then Faynel turned back to the wall, “You’re right. She’ll be okay, and so will the rest of the band. We’ll meet up with them on the road to the Biord.”

In time they finally made it to the wall, and like Sentir and Torysen had done before, she began investigating the wall carefully looking for something Mason couldn’t see at all. When she found it, she didn’t express any excitement. She just began clearing a space in front of the wall and trying to make a complex sigil mark in the ground.

Mason waited quietly, but after every contradictory thing he had learned about magic so far, this made the least sense. She had marked two sigils on the wall, and one on the ground, before she even began channeling mana.

Slowly though, the sigils began to glow, and Mason could see a spell activating. Stone tendrils, much less decorated and hasty than Torysen’s, began to wiggle out between a crack in the wall, and with a tremendous amount of effort, they pulled a small gap open wide enough for the two thin fighters to squeeze through.

Mana sight was essential in the narrow corridor within the wall after the gap had been shut behind them. Faynel led the way shortly down the passage, breathing heavy all the while, and before they had gone more than a hundred yards down its length, Faynel smashed her foot into something and began swearing up a storm.

She stomped and swatted at the wall before sitting down and pressing her fists against her face, and Mason stared on awkwardly, uncertain of what had sparked the sudden change in temperament. He shuffled closer and squatted down, and when he leaned close to ask what was wrong, he heard the girl sniff.

That was enough to convince him to still his tongue, and instead he patted her twice on the shoulder to let her know he was there. By the second pat he could tell she was crying, and he wondered how thick the walls were around them and whether or not they might be heard if she began to cry noisily.

It wasn’t an issue though. Faynel was a fighter now, even if she hadn’t always been that way, and that brought with it a certain dignified strength, however forced upon herself that might be. Tears streamed down her face, and she stared down past her knees, curled into a tight ball against the wall in that dark corridor, but she kept quiet.

And for that matter, Mason did too. A voice nagged in his head that he had spent a great deal of time fairly intimately with this girl lately, and that he owed it to her to offer words of comfort, but he couldn’t bring himself to try and justify anything as the right words to say. Sorry your city was destroyed and almost everyone you know might be dead. Sorry that while those people were fighting for their lives you were distracted saving my dumb ass. Sorry you were abducted from your home world and that you’re most likely stuck in this shitty plane for as long as you can keep yourself alive. He thought each of these things, and several lines more cliche and poetic, but sometimes tragedy deserved to be dealt with silently.

It didn’t help that he didn’t know how he felt himself. There was no love lost between him and New Marra. His time there had been short and turbulent, and felt more like a stay at a hotel filled with assassins and very poor turn-down service than a new home. And as for the Marrans, well- he trusted Torysen and her band to take care of themselves properly. Shayjol and his parents were used to living beyond the city too, and probably would have escaped as soon as they heard the city was breached.

No, honestly, everyone he cared about stood a good chance of being perfectly fine. But even if that were true, Faynel still stood to lose a great deal. Her second home, her grandmother, her mother, and Mason assumed she had other friends and acquaintances he’d never considered before.

Should he offer her vengeance? False hope? None of that was worth anything with as little information as they had.

As she continued to cry, Mason offered her the one thing he knew for certain he had to give. His company. He leaned back against the wall next to her, pressed his shoulder against hers, and waited.