Damn the gods. Damn them all.

“Milady. You can stop now. Otto’s dead.” The dour words of the last remaining member of my fellowship shook me from my stupor. “Utterly dead.”

So he won't be coming back a mindless undead. At least that’s some distant form of relief.

It was raining unnaturally and without end as our sight turned particularly poor. My companion's hand on my shoulder was cold and earthy, slick with mud, blood and general wetness of the unknown sort. We were so close. Five we were yesterday, and it had barely been a month since we set out with thirty. As far as months counted for anything when the sun was dead. As far as anything did in the darkest of ages, or at world’s end.

“Fuck! Will you ever call me by my actual name, Hans?” I yelled, shrugging his hand off as mine still stuck to the cold and unmoving body of Otto, the most loyal of us thirty. Felled not by the dozens of bolts sticking out from his mail, but by the single ghastly wound from a misguided arrow to the leg.

“Honor demands I do not, Milady.” He said.

I sighed.

What use is honor now? At least he’s predictable, and genuinely keeps to that belief of old dead chivalry. An authentic knight to the bone. If only he weren’t so stubborn.

“Then Miss. Miss, for Ruthe’s sake!”

“I shall settle for Madam.”

No, not madam. Anything but madam.

“Ma’am.” I said.

We sat there at the forgotten keep we had mistakenly thought was safe for a few more rain-soaked moments. The warm red glow in my hand continued to fail to bring at least one of my lost companions back. I knew the limits of my soul’s strength, of my godly boon best of everyone. He was dead for minutes already and the poison had quickly spread from the leg, liquefying most of what was still left of him beneath his metal carapace.

“We ought to get going, Ma’am. Our pursuers won’t be cowed forever.”

“Just… just a moment. To mourn.” I reached for Otto’s hand and undid his gauntlet, the rest of his arm quickly detaching and flopping to the ground in a pile of filth. There, we carried our rings. I slipped off the one that held no value beyond marking us sisters and brothers all.

I have forgotten so many of you. Not this one. Not today.

“’Twas the poison.” Hans astutely remarked. As if I didn’t notice the body refusing to beat and budge.

“No shit!” It always was something. Poison, disease, monstrous strength that bordered on the unfair as it rent you in two, invisible limbs to do the same, burning sweat or breath that flayed your muscles thin. There were any number of horrors that stemmed from the unholy mixture of bestial strength and the death of the old world order.

At least a stab to the heart could be healed. Or a particularly clean decapitation. A missing limb? As long as you found the leg or arm in question, it was possible. But even with a magical boon, with my boon, just as many things were not.

Damn the gods.

His gaze swept the battlefield, running easily through the hundred feet of bright light all around, then breaking and diffusing on the thousand feet or so of dim light beyond. The dozen or so corpses, man, monster, and human dreg like so many lifeless splotches on the painted earth. Thereafter, only pitch and black darkness greeted our sorry souls.

And there was movement at the edge of night. Yet in the face of only two souls’ worth of light, many things remained unrevealed.

Such as the giant spider, which came out of nowhere and barreled me over.

“Ma’am! Get away! Encircle!”

Easy for him to say when he wasn’t the one lying under the two-thousand-pound bristle-fiend.

A stinger came to mate with my skin. Lucky for me, I was wearing protection. It glanced off of my curved tassets at the hip as I rolled to the side and instead bored into the earth. The wet ground greedily swallowed all two feet of its poison-covered length, yet with a smack, it wrenched back out to thrust once more.

I knew this dance and before it could strike, I buried a dagger in its abdomen. Its body quivered and convulsed as I yanked the blade to the side and acidic blood met my armor, turning to a steam that burnt in my eyes and lungs.

Half blinded and coughing blood, it noticed my weakness and prepared to finish me off with a thrust to my unarmored squishy bits.

Before it could, a wash of flame lit up its side and it screeched something terrible. Hairs long as swords caught fire like dry underbrush and the creature made to flee beyond both our reach. Hans kept after it, another gout of liquid flame spraying from his face.

“Back! Back you fiend! Back to the forest with thee!” He couldn’t wear a visor because of it, but he saw it as a worthy sacrifice. It wasn't too bad, as curses came.

I breathed in deeply, yet there was no sign of the creature’s demise. The burning figure only went some distance before disappearing as if swallowed by the ground. It happened from time to time that the ground would do such a thing, yet a simple hole was much more likely.

“Any wounds?” I asked as I got to my feet. Besides the obvious ones all over my face. Though I wouldn’t be able to heal away those myself. That was my curse.

I didn’t bother to wait for his answer and searched him up and down for pierced armor and punctured skin. Every one of my companions had gotten used to being fussed over as if by their mother, even if Hans still protested it to this day.

“I, d-don’t just touch me up and down. Think about your honor.”

I smiled. Even if he was somewhat of a fool, at least he was a genuine one.

"I never had any honor. I-"

His head quickly perked up, turned and twisting on a swivel.

“Hail!” he yelled, but it was too late. Arrows pelted at my armor and fell all around. I desperately wrenched my shield up and the steady impacts on my armor were replaced with muted tock-tock-tocks on its oakwood circle.

I peeked over its brim as the rain briefly stopped. A slick, oily substance streaked from a few of the missiles.

Poison. Same as before.

“We have to go. We must reach the temple before they do. We’re almost there, we must find the keeper, we must reveal it all, all we have learned. About the lords, about Loften, about our gods, about-“

“Yes.” Hans finally said. “Though it appears you will have to go on without me ma’am.”

I looked at him and to my horror, he had an arrow sticking out of his eye.

“Go.” He said and plucked it out. “GO! I will keep them.”

It took me a moment before I could cull my fear. I looked him in the face one last time as he made for his final stand. Ten years effort of building our bodies and souls, of endless trials and tribulations, built upon the sacrifice of countless others. Gone in the blink of an eye.

“For kin.” I said.

“For kin.” He replied. And then he was off, spouting flame and hellfire upon the approaching pack of shaded figures and lurking horrors.

I turned to run and bounded high over the first and second wall. I went beyond far and further yet. Up the holey hill and past the distant castle, aside the tepid swamp and along the old road until it reached land’s end. I knew the path, I had braved it ten years before. Though my mind forgot, my body remembered. I took one look over my shoulder and saw Hans surrounded by dreadfully few blazing and half-lit figures.

Then, his light winked out and I looked no more.

I need to go.

Across open roads and under intermittent arrow fire I ran.

I need to go.

Past first graves, through bramble wood forest and further ahead.

I need to go.

Down a ravine and up a hill.

Go back, go to the place where it all began. They need to know. The keeper, the newly awoken, whoever’s left. They need to see.

Or else, nothing will ever change.