Snippet #1581247

Talae actively tried to avoid situations in which she was completely out of her element and without much use to anyone. Shame, that, because it seemed that they found her rather easily. Either her self-directed avoidance of these things was curiously off-target, or she and the people around her were simply unlucky. Well, perhaps not quite. Unlucky would mean dead, she was fairly certain.

She hadn’t been planning on heeding Pel’s advice. The assault on the town proper didn’t need her, and her absence was not bound to be significant in any way. Besides, fighting alone when you were used to someone being at your back was bound to get her killed. That seemed a viable enough reason to remain, even if the logic did ring a little hollow. If she’d bothered to engage in a little introspection, she would have known that she was simply worried.

As it was, she didn’t need to. The situation took a turn for the strange when her sister appeared. The sight of Faera, blood spattered over the bridge of her nose and running down one of her cheeks to her jaw, jarred her greatly. Somehow, in the intervening time and when she had not been watching, her younger sibling had morphed into this, a grim-faced soldier with the baptismal marks of a professional killer smeared over sweet-tempered innocence.

Dead gods above and below, what had she done? Talae was responsible for bringing her sibling into this world of violence and death. Had she herself really been at it so long that she’d forgotten what it made of the blameless? She’d only ever seen one other truly innocent person on a battlefield, and what had happened to him… he hadn’t died, not at first. He’d just… grown into it, and the result was horrifying for its contrast. In the end, they’d slain his wife, and he’d taken down no less than thirty Children in the ensuing rage before his wounds became too much and he died.

He’d had no magic, no special skills, and he was less fast or strong even than she, and battle had made him into that. Just what would it make of Fae? If her words were anything to go by, manipulation was part of it, and Tala bristled when her own words were thrown back at her. Gritting her teeth, she nevertheless dipped her head in acquiescence. “It seems I hardly have a choice, do I?” Her face set itself into a grim smile, and she looked over at the prone Kisikoni. “Don’t die. Because if you do, I’m making Darenthi bring you back just so I can kill you again.” The dark elf met Pel’s eyes and nodded before jogging off after her sister.

Helping Fae down the wall was no more difficult than placing the rope in her hands, and Talae sighed through her nose. This had better not be a mistake.

When they reached the main conflict and her sister used fire to funnel the Children through, Talae took advantage of their predicament and swung, severing an arm from one with a gravity-aided vertical slice. He dropped his weapon to clutch at his stump, and she ran him through without hesitation. The body would now be yet another obstacle to his fellows, and she fully intended to make a mountain of them. Melee combat may not have always been her strong point, but she could duel with the best of them, and Fae had given her the opportunity to do just that.

The wind shifted, and Talae’s eyes narrowed. Now would be an excellent time for Lily to make use of that smoke bomb. With both their vision and senses of smell obstructed, the Children here would have to blindly charge through the smog blowing in their direction. All the Legion would have to do was wait, and pick them off as soon as they emerged. Of course, whether the airborne elf knew that or not was another matter.

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Alistair joined Sid and the surrounding troops when the gate was raised, back to firing in on the opposing army (if it could truly be called that) since he’d picked up another near-full quiver from a battlement-mounted elven Child he’d killed a few minutes prior. He narrowly missed the head of a halfling, his eyes somewhat confounded when the one meshed with a group of her brethren. “I dislike it when they do that,” he murmured to himself in the flat tone that was characteristic of fighting-Alistair.

He noted a few of his fellows had engaged already, having chosen to repel down the wall rather than wait for the gate to open. They seemed to be doing fairly well, apparently aided by the narrow construction of the streets here, made worse by the oddly-contained burn of a few fires in the area. He spotted the Shanir sisters, and then a few other mages he knew.

The Black Guard and the Legion were doing well, but he was not terribly fond of some of the things he was hearing. A young man next to him was speaking in excited tones to the orc next to him, apparently eager to be done with the whole thing and have a drink. “Last time I checked, the battle is not over until the enemies have died, retreated, or surrendered,” he informed the boy in clipped tones. “Do they look dead to you?” The twang of his bowstring and the subsequent collapse of a deep human only served to underscore his point, and the youth coughed awkwardly and shifted away.

The harpy glared sharply from the corner of his eye, but did not comment further. He at least knew to keep his focus. While a tolerant individual probably more often than he should be, one did not grow up amidst constant warfare to coddle soldiers. Kindness and softness were very different things, and it was a greater kindness to remind someone of something like that than refrain out of a lack of discipline and watch them die for forgetting.

Still, the young human had a certain kind of point: for a dragon stronghold, this was not nearly defended enough. “Captain,” he asked, close enough to Sid to ask this audibly without needing to raise his voice. “Is there any intelligence on possible reinforcements?”