June had spent the night tracing her book with a fingernail line by line. Her reading wasn’t the mundane sort done for recreation or the record keeping of traders. When the words of the Order refracted through her eyes onto her Mind they opened doorways. Not to the planes; that was the realm of casters, sorcerers, enchantresses, et cetera. Her power was the self. The Soul. It had no capacity for evil. All manner of fae and trickster rode the millennia in the thousand upon thousand planes. The Mind may find corruption midcast.

“The Soul is incorruptible. The Soul is informed. For faith is the stronger steel with which to clad our wills. Stare into the planes long enough, and something other stares back through you. Believe in the Light.”

She repeated Archbishop Vulka’s teachings to herself every few minutes. It gave her comfort. It made the incessant voices of the passengers tolerable. Even now they still exchanged the most vile things about her. She had dared interrupt their business, that Order bitch. A few even speculated licentiously, violently, about how the softness between her thighs would feel if they were to break through her innocent resistance.

They’d never do that of course. It was just talk. The caravan companies would blacklist them as fast as a messenger Spell could fly if their fantasy became action. June still heard them as clearly as if she was beside them. That interrupted her studies, and she cried herself to sleep late into the night. In sleep, at least her powers were well abated, and she found some amount of peace. When she woke she was greeted by the crow of steel. Edge clashed with edge. Panic welled up and flooded her mind with past memories from before she was admitted into the Order.

“No no no no…” She grabbed her staff and stumbled out of her car. People were fighting. The Scoutrunners were exchanging blows with bandits. She immediately thought of Lisŗa. She imagined the young woman gutted and used by the uncivilized hordes between nations. And she began to lose her training to the fear.

The catwalks rattled. The owner, LaRein, rushed over with a cutlass in hand.

“We should’ve taken the long road,” he remarked. “Come, stay by me.”

She wordlessly followed him off the caravan. Familiar arcs of red flew through the air. The scene clawed at her spirit viciously.

“We need help, priestess, use your Rites,” LaRein said. He engaged a bandit, disarming the ruffian easily. Then with a swift kick to the weakspot behind one’s knee, LaRein forced the man to kneel and decapitated him. “Priestess!”

Spots of warm blood wet her clothes, staining her face. She tasted metal.

“Listen,” LaRein said as he grasped June by her shoulders, shaking her gently. “Nobody is prepared for this sort of thing. But we’re here now. And we need you.”

“O-okay. Okay,” June slowly returned to reality. She called from the Light within. Her staff tip glowed as brilliantly as the sun. Her senses marked all her allies in the area. Then she released. All around her in a nova of energy, the Scoutrunners felt their scrapes heal, their wounds mend, and their stamina resurge.

Two of the bandits surmised her function immediately. One broke off to tangle LaRein in battle. The other ran for her, broadsword at the ready. She raised a hand and recalled the simplest Rite she knew. A flash of light threw the bandit back.

“There you go!” LaRein exclaimed. He dispatched his opponent in the next two swings. Once to disarm the bandit in a literal fashion, the other to sever the crucial piping in their neck.

She smiled nervously, briefly, for in the next few moments she began to hear people die. Her people. She charged another nova and released prematurely. But that wasn’t enough. All around her, the bandits closed in. Some of the larger passengers had come out with pots, pans, and kitchen knives, but they were hardly fighters. They fell, making little contribution. The rest of them were being corralled.

“Don’t worry, just keep going,” LaRein said. He was lying. Terror made the cutlass shake in his hand. June heard it as loud as a knell.

She threw out pulses of light as fast as her addled nerves allowed her to. Rites weren’t killing tools. The bandits were thrown back, a few were even knocked unconscious. But most were getting back up. Her ears picked up the sound of rope and spring. A heavy crossbow.

“Watch out!” She shouted.

LaRein’s body flew past her, pinned against the side of a car. He made no further sounds. The crossbow was being wound again. She couldn’t tell from where other than it was somewhere in the trees. An ability was scattering her senses.

“Girl.” It was Captain Yavi. “Have faith in yourself. Help us!”

“I’m trying!”

The Scoutrunners have been pushed together.

“Whatever happens,” that was Lisŗa’s voice. The voice of the only person June could call a friend in the caravan. “I don’t blame you. Just try.”

Her jaws clenched. June drew all the Light she had from the depths of her Soul and recited her Rites. The blast lifted the cars a few degrees off the earth. The horses panicked and struggled. All the bandits were shoved back. The Scoutrunners felt their strength return and their fatigue gone.

June collapsed on the ground, hyperventilating, as the fighting resumed. The Scoutrunners gained a few feet of ground against the bandit horde. Falerian steel met highway metal.

“That’s it, my pupil. All it takes is faith. Believe in God. Believe in the Order. Believe in yourself.”

“Yes, Archbishop,” she whispered. “I will. I will…”

A body fell in front of her, gasping. Blood leaked profusely out of a spear wound in the abdomen. June felt her face pale as her eyes met fading green irises. Lisŗa struggled to breathe beside her. The young runner was beginning to go into shock.

“No! No, no no-” June looked around. She had bought them a few seconds. The numbers simply weren’t on their side. Yavi was backing off, hand clutched around his stomach. A tall bandit adorned with gold chains and rings twirled a spear around his neck. Deft fingers made the pole of death dance at his call. Then he thrust, and Yavi prepared to parry, but dagger was no match for a spear’s reach, and the spearman had feinted. Not once, but twice, the third thrust so fast it seemed to come out of nowhere. And Yavi fell as well.

June met the spearman’s eyes. She saw hate. Felt it like tidal waves washing over her, seeping into her Soul. His eyes were like green fire.

“Fucking Falerian trash!” The spearman spat. “I’ll do to you in inches what your country did to mine in miles.” The spear was raised and muscles tensed.

Time ground to a standstill. June’s mind had left this world. She had figured out why this scene was so familiar. Before she knew the Archbishop’s warmth, she was happy. Tucked away in a fertile valley, where a village of no more than a hundred families tended to a small patch of land. They baked fruit pies and made pigments. In the spring they built walls to cover with art using their own fingers as the brush. Their tools were the hoe, the stove, and the axe. Their fuel was oxen, wood fire, and coal. They were simple and innocent.

What came next had been predictable. When Vulka had fished a handful of survivors out of the rubble she realized she was alive. It had been pure luck. This girl of six looked back at the shattered murals, the wasted farmland, what remained of her mother once the roaming warlord’s voracious men were done with her, and she had felt… something the Archbishop had spent ten years trying to funnel into a love of the Light. The Light nurtured. The Light healed. The Light forgave. The Light saved.

She screamed. “The Light has betrayed me!”

--

Jorge had swung his axe casually to defend himself. It was still a blow that could fell a small tree. The bandit actually diverted it with a knuckle against the flat of his axe and attacked with a sword in the other hand. Jorge grabbed the sword by the blade and snapped it in half. It cut his palm, but no more seriously than a bad paper cut.

“So that’s my limit,” he said to himself. The other bandits were next. This time Jorge didn’t muck around. His axe shattered their weapons. Then he knocked them several feet back with the blunt side. He hoped they got the message.

Then the foliage parted and a man as large as he stepped out, sporting a fur coat and a hand-and-a-half sword. When the other bandits slowly picked themselves up, the coated man raised a hand. The others stepped away.

“I thought there was no honor among thieves,” Jorge said. He struck first. His opponent sidestepped, redirecting Jorge’s momentum elsewhere with his sword, then aimed a thrust beneath his ribs. Jorge’s axe dug into the dirt. He had seen this coming and used it as an anchor to pivot his shoulder into the opponent’s chest before the sword thrust gained speed. Jorge had put his all into that tackle, the kind that would’ve reduced a football player into a fine mist. His opponent stayed in one piece however, and fell against a tree. The tree shattered. The man smiled and readjusted his grip on his sword.

“Christ…” Jorge stopped underestimating them. He fought for his life. His heavy blows glanced the edge of the opponent’s steel. His ferocious swings against a practiced mixed of light and heavy slashes and jabs. He was soon covered in thin gashes. Jorge realized he was being toyed with. His techniques were self-taught, designed to fight the monstrous creatures of the forest. Against a human sized foe as strong as he, armed with training, swordsmanship, and human cognitive ability he didn’t know how to win.

The battle by the caravan didn’t seem to be going so well either. Jorge caught flashes of light on the edge of his vision. The fighting was dying down. He saw the man smirk. Jorge scowled then, angry enough to forget his wounds. He shifted his grip. His palms wrapped around the axe’s neck rather than the grip. The reduced length of the lever arm ought to make him fast enough versus a sword. And if not, at least he tried. They both assumed their stances again, and strode forward, weapons primed.

Jorge couldn’t see.

He fumbled about in a panic and fell onto his rear. His heart pounded like a drum. Suddenly, he was aware of every droplet of sweat crawling down his body, stinging the cuts he had sustained. His eyes adjusted. The bandits had dropped their weapons, they glanced all around them as if searching for their compatriots. The coated man retreated, his face was a disappointed one. He shouted something, and whatever was left of the highwaymen gathered their spilled wits and ran. Many of them wouldn’t make it.

Jorge remembered being a toddler. That primal fear of a closed wardrobe. The unseen beneath one’s bed. The black curtain over an unlit kitchen. Where every cell in his body screamed danger. He saw men with wet spots on their crotches trip and shuffle back, crying out. He presumed they were pleading, but he couldn’t hear them talk. In fact, he heard nothing at all. Something had muffled his ears. When he looked up he couldn’t see the sun. It was the afternoon last time he remembered. Now it was the witching hour.

He saw one of the enemies run towards him, forgetting that they were going to kill him. He saw the curtain of primal black envelop the man. It was then the man screamed. A vacuous cry that sounded as though they were submerged beneath oil. He saw the poor bastard’s skin evaporate, not through heat but through force. Torn away like bits of paper. Then came the fat, which was rendered away. The muscles stripped like cheese. The blood into vapor. The shadows were the darkest in the skull’s twin hollows. Then even those bones were gone. Into dust.

Jorge braced for when that would happen to him. He closed his eyes, shaking, begging, even praying for the first time in years. He saw red beneath his eyelids. The birds chirped. The sun shone. It was late afternoon on a warm summer day. The only cloud in the sky was from the volcanic eruption, which had stopped. Jorge looked around him with wide eyes. He was still shaking. He didn’t even remember where and when he had dropped his axe.

“Wh-what the fuck…?” He whispered.