Frost 19, 122
Kegumu Rekaka tumbled out of slipspace and back into reality, the notional movement between planes sufficient to tear Imogen’s arms away from the primal and send her bouncing against the packed earth below.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck." she swore as she bounced, scrabbling for her feet. She succeeded only just in time to hurl herself forward, diving away from the primal’s follow-up strike.
There was a great CLANG! as the Silent Fisher’s next deadly strike was stopped by her greatshield, sending, as ever, a sudden pang of agony through her soul from whatever had happened to her in that tower. The shield had bought her a few seconds once, confounding the primal, but she didn’t think it would work a second time.
Kegumu Rekaka proved her right a moment later, as it slid the cruel talons of one foot underneath her floating shield. It was fast, faster than she could react- physically, anyway. Shifting just her underside through dimensions, the witch phased slightly back into slipspace and the limb swept through her leg without harm rather than severing the limb completely.
Imogen still wasn’t sure how smart the primal really was, but it plainly learned. She’d made much use of Reaving in their last fight, and it had begun to adapt, but it seemed to have only a thin understanding of Traversion. That was an advantage, but…
…well, stacking up advantages didn’t get you far if you couldn’t actually hurt your opponent, did it? The Ork had a whole bevy of tricks she’d learned over her life of fighting and smuggling and adventure, but none of them would do anything but buy her more time, which she could use to buy more time.
Still, time was time. The ork lunged through her own shield, phasing through the metal to avoid giving the primal a moment’s notice, then stabbed it with her shortsword. The Silent Fisher showed no regard at all for the weapon, but this was something of a mistake.
Days ago, to pierce the dragon’s scale, Imogen had recast the sword out of the same metal of which Kegumu Rekaka itself was made. As the sword met metal hide, she triggered the blessing of fire and summer, superheating the weapon’s tip and releasing a burst of golden fire and molten metal strong enough to blow a hole in a castle wall.
The attack didn’t so much as scratch the primal, but it did phase it, driving it backwards towards the line of trees ahead. The Sunsinger followed up with an underhanded strike, then another stab, unleashing a flurry of blows.
Imogen felt a sense of elation as she finally sent Kegumu Rekaka stumbling into the forest. Her limbs shook with strain; each of these explosive blows was drawing aether from her body at an alarming rate, but she couldn’t rest yet. She still needed to somehow get away from the primal.
As she’d already proven, she could make herself faster than the primal- but only for a bit. Running like one of the blinding-fast cats exhausted stamina in moments. A horse, she thought, might be as fast as the primal, but it still wouldn’t last her long.
But there was one long-distance endurance runner in her repertoire, and the primal’s legs did not seem designed for the same. And although it could fly, the Silent Fisher had shown no preference for hunting that way. If she could get ahead of it, she might just be able to stay ahead.
Well, nothing for it but to try.
The witch invoked Traversion for the last time, draining most of her remaining power to Blink a thousand meters deeper into the forest. She landed amidst the jungle, on one knee, and immediately keeled over.
Imogen had overstepped many times in her life, mostly in minor ways. She understood that each mage experienced it somewhat differently. Timeon had always told her that he usually felt nauseous, like his stomach was simultaneously too full and a gaping void. Master Gerhard described the sensation as one of paralyzing dizziness, like he was disconnected from the world and any movement might send him careening through the ground and into the infinite beyond.
She, on the other hand, mostly felt it as a dull ache throughout her entire body, a draining of body and senses. Her muscles gave way as she tripped, her face plowing into the dirt. She was overcome with a powerful desire to simply lie there, maybe take a nap.
But she hadn’t the luxury. The ork pushed herself to her feet with trembling arms, permitting herself a few seconds of leaning against the mossy bough of a tree before she began to press forward into the forest.
At first, she stumbled, her walk slow and unsteady- but she couldn’t afford to walk. Imogen forced herself into a jog, staggering just a bit, and began to move with a slow, loping run. Her legs burned at first, but natural painkillers soon suffused her muscles, helping to deaden the aftereffects of her teleport.
She kept running for a few minutes, hearing nothing behind her- but did that matter? It was the Silent Fisher, after all. She’d never once heard the damn thing move in all the times it had pursued her.
"Kitty." she hissed, heavy breathing muffling the word somewhat. A golden eye opened in the depths of her shadow.
"Keep to the shadows, but go back and see if that thing is still chasing me."
The eye blinked out of existence, her familiar gliding into the darkness. The cat wasn’t just stealthy- his ability to sink into shade made him effectively impossible to spot in the gloom of the jungle. Still, she didn’t trust the primal not to kill Kitty if he was spotted.
A few moments later, she felt a sudden heaviness on her shoulders as the little jaguar returned. She turned to look at the worried feline face, carefully considered his subsonic growl.
"That close? And still headed right for me?"
She grimaced at the sounds of Kitty’s affirmation. Even though she’d left no spoor in her initial jump, it seemed Kegumu Rekaka had little trouble tracking her. She had no idea how such a thing was possible, but it was really the only explanation; otherwise, how had it known to come all the way to Ailos for her? It could not have been tracking her trips through Slipspace.
The witch took inventory of her situation. She was well and truly out of aether, now; whatever drips and dribbles were left she had to let lay, lest the mysterious drain begin killing her in earnest. She had Kitty with her to keep track of the primal’s progress, but no way to tell how it was tracking her in turn. She couldn’t hope to kill it like this, even if that were a real option. She could keep ahead of it for now, but when the time came to rest…
Did the Silent Fisher need to sleep? She gave Syren and Raxen and Galetira a silent prayer that it did.
As the sun set and night arrived, Kitty confirmed that the beast was still stalking.
Under better circumstances, Imogen would simply have used her power to give herself night vision. Such an invocation cost so little power that she would hardly notice the loss… but she couldn’t risk anything that might cause her to faint. If she passed out, she would wake in Wraeden’s realm for certain.
So she relied upon her cat’s guidance, following as he darted from tree to tree and gave her little yrowls to call paths safe to tread.
As she ran, a plan began to come together in her mind.
She had no aether, true, but that was not the same as having no magic. She just needed an external source of power, and she could… well, that would come then. And where was that aether? The Mountain of Light.
The Dawnstone deposits there were vast, legendary. The light from them could be seen across the whole isle. A bare fraction of the light slumbering there dwarfed her own reserves, however full. That would be enough to… to…
…hit it with a lot of daggers? Would that work?
Imogen’s scatterbrained planning was interrupted as the trees suddenly thinned out, exposing a broad stretch of field. Shit. She’d need to get across that before the Silent Fisher got here and spotted her; she had no doubt it would pounce in that case, whatever it had to do to go fast enough.
She picked up the pace, beginning to cross the field, when she she felt a sharp pain on her ankle and looked down to see Kitty grasping her foot.
"What are you doing?" she hissed, panicked, ”This isn’t the time for games, little guy."
Kitty released her leg and hissed at the ground in front of her, practically spitting. Anxious though she was, that strange behavior set off warning bells in the back of her mind. Imogen lowered herself to rest on her haunches, squinting at the ground.
It was… oddly lumpy. The field was too dark to make out any color, but the reddish mud had a strangely rusty scent. And there was a gleam, as though it was…
"Metallic?"
The witch wasn’t personally familiar with the warfare waged against Ailos by the powers of the Imperium, but this particular innovation had made its way to Zaichaer. It took her only a few moments of thinking to realize it.
"Mines." she said, blood draining from her face.
She had, frankly, no idea how the devices worked, but she knew the aftereffects. Men with limbs blown off, practically torn in two by shrapnel. Nothing compared to the horrors a determined mage could inflict, sure, but deeply impersonal. A mined field could rip a hundred men to bloody flinders in the blink of an eye, a moment after it had been set up or decades later.
Could that harm the primal? Part of her wondered, but not for long. She’d hit it with as much force as any mine carried and it had ignored her- it would walk right through this field without concern. She, on the other hand…
"I need a way through…" she muttered. She hadn’t time to go around. If she had her power, then Elementalism could have torn the mines up and disposed of them in record time, but she didn’t dare try that. Nothing that used her own power.
"But you can use yours." the answer came to her suddenly, and she grabbed the sword she’d bound at her waist (she carried no sheathe in ordinary circumstances, for the obvious reasons).
Imogen held the sword out, lightly, pointing across the field. "Friends, guide me here. Where can I walk?"
There was no response for a moment, and she feared that the metal spirits did not understand her. She didn’t speak whatever strange tongue Norani had, after all. But then, almost imperceptibly, she felt a tug on her sword, pushing it around the mine in front of her.
The Sunsinger walked through the minefield, carefully following the motions of the invisible force tugging on her sword. She went slowly at first, cautiously, then began to move more quickly as she gained confidence in this method.
By the time The Silent Fisher arrived at the edge of the minefield, its quarry had fled once more.
The next day found Imogen still on her feet. She hoped that Kegumu Rekaka would rest, perhaps when noon approached; it seemed like a candidate for nocturnal nature.If it did not, then she would keep running until exhaustion claimed her, and she would be dead soon thereafter.
It was raining now, and hard. Kegumu probably wouldn’t care, it was adapted for fishing, after all, and didn’t mind water, but the exposure was no small risk for an ork. Still, she’d just have to abide it. She had to keep going.
The jungle surrounding her was broken up by mountains on both sides, but she opted to remain among the trees. The tall canopies broke the rainfall, for one, and she still suspected that if the primal actually spotted her it would take to the air.
Unfortunately, the sight of an exhausted and wet ork was interesting to more than just primals.
As Imogen ran, she began to notice motion among the upper branches.
The creatures leapt from branch to branch like the lemurs with which she had grown so familiar, but they were plainly not. They struck her as almost like the raptors she’d fought off in service of the bees of Ecith years prior, but patterned more like birds, and bearing strange, almost vestigial wings upon their limbs.
"That’s not good." she muttered. Whatever those things were, she doubted they were following out of mere curiosity.
"Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off-"
Imogen panted, practically chanting her new mantra as the swarm of tiny lizards pursued her, both on the ground and jumping off trees to glide. She took a few swings, using the flat of her blade like a baseball bat to knock a handful out of the air as she ran.
She was sprinting now, trying to get away from the tide of tiny, ravening, jewellike lizards nipping at her heels. They were quite beautiful, in their way, but she had no time to admire the artistry of Nature as it drove her through the woods.
"Fuuuuck-" she swore, too distracted to even come up with a more novel curse.
It was sort of ironic, actually. She’d just proven that a determined ork could escape a primal for an entire day with only the natural blessings of their kind, but these rat-sized dinosaurs were going to overwhelm her.
One of the little blighters got close enough to leap onto her arm, biting down. Its tiny, needlelike fangs pierced her skin, but couldn’t quite tear through thick Orkhan hide. Scales proliferated across her body in response to the threat, thwarting two more attacks.
But that just meant she had a little time before they overwhelmed her body’s armor and she suffered death by a thousand cuts. Unless she could somehow dist-
"That’s it!" she shouted, an idea finally breaking through the incredulous terror. She flung her blade aside (it would come back by itself, after all) and grabbed the air, hurling open…
…the wardrobe she’d banished to Slipspace a few months prior. It was a large piece of furniture, but a small space, all things considered. There were no weapons inside. Just a couple changes of clothes for her exploits in animus and…
Imogen grabbed the bag of jerky she kept as treats for Kitty and ripped it apart with her bare hands, scattering smoked meats across the jungle floor.
At once, the microraptors changed course, turning away from the fleeing ork to focus on the delightfully-scented and helpless dainties adorning the febrile earth. They descended into a feeding frenzy, feathers and gorges extended as the witch raced away, hooting at the top of her lungs in triumph.
As she fled, Kitty climbed up onto her shoulder, looking sadly at the treats lost forever to the jungle behind them.
In her dream, she tumbled through a featureless void which was at once smaller than a grain of sand and so all-pervasive as to shame the sky. She gripped the indestructible pinions of the monster, and they cut her hands, but she only grasped tighter.
A valiant effort, but ultimately a delaying tactic. Her power was like an erupting volcano, sputtering and roaring and occasionally eclipsing the sky itself with great noisome explosions- but these were triumphal moments only. Every great exertion led only to exhaustion, to power which would not come back.
The Silent Fisher would win.
Kegumu Rekaka tumbled out of slipspace and back into reality, the notional movement between planes sufficient to tear Imogen’s arms away from the primal and send her bouncing against the packed earth below.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck." she swore as she bounced, scrabbling for her feet. She succeeded only just in time to hurl herself forward, diving away from the primal’s follow-up strike.
There was a great CLANG! as the Silent Fisher’s next deadly strike was stopped by her greatshield, sending, as ever, a sudden pang of agony through her soul from whatever had happened to her in that tower. The shield had bought her a few seconds once, confounding the primal, but she didn’t think it would work a second time.
Kegumu Rekaka proved her right a moment later, as it slid the cruel talons of one foot underneath her floating shield. It was fast, faster than she could react- physically, anyway. Shifting just her underside through dimensions, the witch phased slightly back into slipspace and the limb swept through her leg without harm rather than severing the limb completely.
Imogen still wasn’t sure how smart the primal really was, but it plainly learned. She’d made much use of Reaving in their last fight, and it had begun to adapt, but it seemed to have only a thin understanding of Traversion. That was an advantage, but…
…well, stacking up advantages didn’t get you far if you couldn’t actually hurt your opponent, did it? The Ork had a whole bevy of tricks she’d learned over her life of fighting and smuggling and adventure, but none of them would do anything but buy her more time, which she could use to buy more time.
Still, time was time. The ork lunged through her own shield, phasing through the metal to avoid giving the primal a moment’s notice, then stabbed it with her shortsword. The Silent Fisher showed no regard at all for the weapon, but this was something of a mistake.
Days ago, to pierce the dragon’s scale, Imogen had recast the sword out of the same metal of which Kegumu Rekaka itself was made. As the sword met metal hide, she triggered the blessing of fire and summer, superheating the weapon’s tip and releasing a burst of golden fire and molten metal strong enough to blow a hole in a castle wall.
The attack didn’t so much as scratch the primal, but it did phase it, driving it backwards towards the line of trees ahead. The Sunsinger followed up with an underhanded strike, then another stab, unleashing a flurry of blows.
The strategy was simple, if desperate. If the Silent Fisher was intent on killing her, it would forget about the people of Ailos once it could no longer see them. Why was that important?
Because this fight was doomed. Half of her aether was gone already, and more would be before they reached the forest. If you couldn’t kill your foe, you couldn’t win the battle. No, her only hope was to flee.
Sensible in concept, but as the dueling figures got closer to the treeline, it became obvious that she was going to end up losing even that option. By the time the stones of the Citadel were well and truly hidden behind the boughs, she’d lost the aether she would need to leap through slipspace and escape these shores.
She was trapped now on Ailos, with an invincible monster who only wanted her dead.
Imogen felt a sense of elation as she finally sent Kegumu Rekaka stumbling into the forest. Her limbs shook with strain; each of these explosive blows was drawing aether from her body at an alarming rate, but she couldn’t rest yet. She still needed to somehow get away from the primal.
As she’d already proven, she could make herself faster than the primal- but only for a bit. Running like one of the blinding-fast cats exhausted stamina in moments. A horse, she thought, might be as fast as the primal, but it still wouldn’t last her long.
But there was one long-distance endurance runner in her repertoire, and the primal’s legs did not seem designed for the same. And although it could fly, the Silent Fisher had shown no preference for hunting that way. If she could get ahead of it, she might just be able to stay ahead.
Well, nothing for it but to try.
The witch invoked Traversion for the last time, draining most of her remaining power to Blink a thousand meters deeper into the forest. She landed amidst the jungle, on one knee, and immediately keeled over.
~~~
Imogen had overstepped many times in her life, mostly in minor ways. She understood that each mage experienced it somewhat differently. Timeon had always told her that he usually felt nauseous, like his stomach was simultaneously too full and a gaping void. Master Gerhard described the sensation as one of paralyzing dizziness, like he was disconnected from the world and any movement might send him careening through the ground and into the infinite beyond.
She, on the other hand, mostly felt it as a dull ache throughout her entire body, a draining of body and senses. Her muscles gave way as she tripped, her face plowing into the dirt. She was overcome with a powerful desire to simply lie there, maybe take a nap.
But she hadn’t the luxury. The ork pushed herself to her feet with trembling arms, permitting herself a few seconds of leaning against the mossy bough of a tree before she began to press forward into the forest.
At first, she stumbled, her walk slow and unsteady- but she couldn’t afford to walk. Imogen forced herself into a jog, staggering just a bit, and began to move with a slow, loping run. Her legs burned at first, but natural painkillers soon suffused her muscles, helping to deaden the aftereffects of her teleport.
She kept running for a few minutes, hearing nothing behind her- but did that matter? It was the Silent Fisher, after all. She’d never once heard the damn thing move in all the times it had pursued her.
"Kitty." she hissed, heavy breathing muffling the word somewhat. A golden eye opened in the depths of her shadow.
"Keep to the shadows, but go back and see if that thing is still chasing me."
The eye blinked out of existence, her familiar gliding into the darkness. The cat wasn’t just stealthy- his ability to sink into shade made him effectively impossible to spot in the gloom of the jungle. Still, she didn’t trust the primal not to kill Kitty if he was spotted.
A few moments later, she felt a sudden heaviness on her shoulders as the little jaguar returned. She turned to look at the worried feline face, carefully considered his subsonic growl.
"That close? And still headed right for me?"
She grimaced at the sounds of Kitty’s affirmation. Even though she’d left no spoor in her initial jump, it seemed Kegumu Rekaka had little trouble tracking her. She had no idea how such a thing was possible, but it was really the only explanation; otherwise, how had it known to come all the way to Ailos for her? It could not have been tracking her trips through Slipspace.
The witch took inventory of her situation. She was well and truly out of aether, now; whatever drips and dribbles were left she had to let lay, lest the mysterious drain begin killing her in earnest. She had Kitty with her to keep track of the primal’s progress, but no way to tell how it was tracking her in turn. She couldn’t hope to kill it like this, even if that were a real option. She could keep ahead of it for now, but when the time came to rest…
Did the Silent Fisher need to sleep? She gave Syren and Raxen and Galetira a silent prayer that it did.
She continued to jog through the day, and the onset of night. It wasn’t a run, really, but that was sensible. If The Silent Fisher could track her, it might take to flight if she was too far away; only by keeping close could it be enticed to stalk on the ground.
A valiant effort, but useless if she had no way to ultimately confront the primal.
~~~
As the sun set and night arrived, Kitty confirmed that the beast was still stalking.
Under better circumstances, Imogen would simply have used her power to give herself night vision. Such an invocation cost so little power that she would hardly notice the loss… but she couldn’t risk anything that might cause her to faint. If she passed out, she would wake in Wraeden’s realm for certain.
So she relied upon her cat’s guidance, following as he darted from tree to tree and gave her little yrowls to call paths safe to tread.
As she ran, a plan began to come together in her mind.
She had no aether, true, but that was not the same as having no magic. She just needed an external source of power, and she could… well, that would come then. And where was that aether? The Mountain of Light.
The Dawnstone deposits there were vast, legendary. The light from them could be seen across the whole isle. A bare fraction of the light slumbering there dwarfed her own reserves, however full. That would be enough to… to…
…hit it with a lot of daggers? Would that work?
Imogen’s scatterbrained planning was interrupted as the trees suddenly thinned out, exposing a broad stretch of field. Shit. She’d need to get across that before the Silent Fisher got here and spotted her; she had no doubt it would pounce in that case, whatever it had to do to go fast enough.
She picked up the pace, beginning to cross the field, when she she felt a sharp pain on her ankle and looked down to see Kitty grasping her foot.
"What are you doing?" she hissed, panicked, ”This isn’t the time for games, little guy."
Kitty released her leg and hissed at the ground in front of her, practically spitting. Anxious though she was, that strange behavior set off warning bells in the back of her mind. Imogen lowered herself to rest on her haunches, squinting at the ground.
It was… oddly lumpy. The field was too dark to make out any color, but the reddish mud had a strangely rusty scent. And there was a gleam, as though it was…
"Metallic?"
The witch wasn’t personally familiar with the warfare waged against Ailos by the powers of the Imperium, but this particular innovation had made its way to Zaichaer. It took her only a few moments of thinking to realize it.
"Mines." she said, blood draining from her face.
She had, frankly, no idea how the devices worked, but she knew the aftereffects. Men with limbs blown off, practically torn in two by shrapnel. Nothing compared to the horrors a determined mage could inflict, sure, but deeply impersonal. A mined field could rip a hundred men to bloody flinders in the blink of an eye, a moment after it had been set up or decades later.
Could that harm the primal? Part of her wondered, but not for long. She’d hit it with as much force as any mine carried and it had ignored her- it would walk right through this field without concern. She, on the other hand…
"I need a way through…" she muttered. She hadn’t time to go around. If she had her power, then Elementalism could have torn the mines up and disposed of them in record time, but she didn’t dare try that. Nothing that used her own power.
"But you can use yours." the answer came to her suddenly, and she grabbed the sword she’d bound at her waist (she carried no sheathe in ordinary circumstances, for the obvious reasons).
Imogen held the sword out, lightly, pointing across the field. "Friends, guide me here. Where can I walk?"
There was no response for a moment, and she feared that the metal spirits did not understand her. She didn’t speak whatever strange tongue Norani had, after all. But then, almost imperceptibly, she felt a tug on her sword, pushing it around the mine in front of her.
The Sunsinger walked through the minefield, carefully following the motions of the invisible force tugging on her sword. She went slowly at first, cautiously, then began to move more quickly as she gained confidence in this method.
By the time The Silent Fisher arrived at the edge of the minefield, its quarry had fled once more.
A quick thought in the moment, to be sure, but that was simply luck. It was very strange to dream of a mortal so blessed by the spirits of any element, let alone one as aloof and disinterested as metal, but such a blessing was hardly likely to prove so useful again.
Mines… well, the value in battle was obvious, but the thought of spiting the land like that, of rendering it uninhabitable thereafter? It was a cost she would have condoned, perhaps, but none of her lords of old.
And yet she had survived, and they had not. What did that say?
~~~
The next day found Imogen still on her feet. She hoped that Kegumu Rekaka would rest, perhaps when noon approached; it seemed like a candidate for nocturnal nature.If it did not, then she would keep running until exhaustion claimed her, and she would be dead soon thereafter.
It was raining now, and hard. Kegumu probably wouldn’t care, it was adapted for fishing, after all, and didn’t mind water, but the exposure was no small risk for an ork. Still, she’d just have to abide it. She had to keep going.
The jungle surrounding her was broken up by mountains on both sides, but she opted to remain among the trees. The tall canopies broke the rainfall, for one, and she still suspected that if the primal actually spotted her it would take to the air.
Unfortunately, the sight of an exhausted and wet ork was interesting to more than just primals.
As Imogen ran, she began to notice motion among the upper branches.
The creatures leapt from branch to branch like the lemurs with which she had grown so familiar, but they were plainly not. They struck her as almost like the raptors she’d fought off in service of the bees of Ecith years prior, but patterned more like birds, and bearing strange, almost vestigial wings upon their limbs.
"That’s not good." she muttered. Whatever those things were, she doubted they were following out of mere curiosity.
Microraptors in this dream; apparently some things did not change. The little creatures had been nuisances since long before her birth. The weak might fall prey to them, the elderly, travelers alone in the jungle, but even swarms were only a mild inconvenience to a well-armed ork. No heroic journey was going to be ended by the tiny terror-lizards.
"Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off-"
Imogen panted, practically chanting her new mantra as the swarm of tiny lizards pursued her, both on the ground and jumping off trees to glide. She took a few swings, using the flat of her blade like a baseball bat to knock a handful out of the air as she ran.
She was sprinting now, trying to get away from the tide of tiny, ravening, jewellike lizards nipping at her heels. They were quite beautiful, in their way, but she had no time to admire the artistry of Nature as it drove her through the woods.
"Fuuuuck-" she swore, too distracted to even come up with a more novel curse.
It was sort of ironic, actually. She’d just proven that a determined ork could escape a primal for an entire day with only the natural blessings of their kind, but these rat-sized dinosaurs were going to overwhelm her.
One of the little blighters got close enough to leap onto her arm, biting down. Its tiny, needlelike fangs pierced her skin, but couldn’t quite tear through thick Orkhan hide. Scales proliferated across her body in response to the threat, thwarting two more attacks.
But that just meant she had a little time before they overwhelmed her body’s armor and she suffered death by a thousand cuts. Unless she could somehow dist-
"That’s it!" she shouted, an idea finally breaking through the incredulous terror. She flung her blade aside (it would come back by itself, after all) and grabbed the air, hurling open…
…the wardrobe she’d banished to Slipspace a few months prior. It was a large piece of furniture, but a small space, all things considered. There were no weapons inside. Just a couple changes of clothes for her exploits in animus and…
Imogen grabbed the bag of jerky she kept as treats for Kitty and ripped it apart with her bare hands, scattering smoked meats across the jungle floor.
At once, the microraptors changed course, turning away from the fleeing ork to focus on the delightfully-scented and helpless dainties adorning the febrile earth. They descended into a feeding frenzy, feathers and gorges extended as the witch raced away, hooting at the top of her lungs in triumph.
As she fled, Kitty climbed up onto her shoulder, looking sadly at the treats lost forever to the jungle behind them.
Luck again, it seemed. Saved by, of all things, her cat treats. It was almost enough to make her laugh, if she’d not left off laughing long ago.
