// BEFORE //

The night wasn't the worst. The night was just a muddle of darkness and wild eyes and torchlight on metal, and the rough wooden haft of her spear, and jarring impact and sudden release, again and again and again.

The night was about desperation, and necessity, and exhaustion.

It was the dawn that brought despair.

Shallow warmth filtered through mist, the feeble light of an outmatched sun shining—if you could call it that—on a filthy bloodied thirteen year old girl. She was not the sole survivor of the attack, but she might as well have been. There was a boy who hid, and an old man who escaped with nothing more serious than a gash in his side. He'd had a wife, two daughters, a brother, a nephew. All dead. He soon joined them. He survived his wound, but not his guilt. As for the boy, he had perhaps hidden too well. The raiders ferreted out his brothers and his sister, but not him. He alone had been unfound, and even after the attack still so he remained. Perhaps he had a discovered a place of safety, deep within himself, and was now too scared to leave. Eventually he was taken in by a monastery, to sweep and to exist.

As for the girl, she'd had only her father. He raised her alone, talk in the village was that they shared no blood but what did that matter. He was the one who fed her every day, who taught her to defend herself and to spit in the eye of anyone who said 'you can't'. He had stood tall against the raiders, when they crashed upon the village like some stinking bloody tide. He had put an arrow through the eye of one and his spear through the throat of another. And then he turned, to look at his daughter, and he shat himself. The girl's last memory of her proud self-reliant father was of him grasping feebly at bundles of his own innards before collapsing in the mud and the muck.

It wasn't then that she made the realisation. It wasn't until long after this moment that she found the clarity of heart necessary to think at all. Nevertheless, this was the image burnt into her mind and the instant her world sharpened to a single point: nothing means anything. There's only this breath and the next one. And so the girl decided to take her father's advice. The last thing he ever said to her, seconds before the battle began:

"You survive, Briya Thorn. You live."