My frown deepened as thunder once again boomed overhead. I was crouched in the mud and shivering as the heavy rain continued to dampen both my worn-out cloak and my spirits. It had been obvious when I first awoke to the sound of thunder this morning that it would be a miserable day for hunting, but at least it made tracking easier. So far, I had not had much luck to speak of though. All of the game birds seemed to be staying out of the rain, probably somewhere warm and reasonably dry, oh how I envied them.

“It looks like my fortune may be changing for the better,” I muttered as I knelt down to examine the deer tracks in the mud. The tracks were less than an hour old and there were three sets of them, two adults and a fawn. “Please, Narrisse, let one be a stag,” I pleaded in silent prayer to the Goddess of beasts and the hunt.

Once, long ago, I could have prayed and made an offering to the Goddess at the holy circle of the Gods. That time was long gone though, along with the holy circle, destroyed by the Church of One and a great temple to their God had been built in its place. The church was established over fifty years ago, after an ancient ruin was discovered in the Duke’s forest, and now it ruled the city of Greendell and the lands surrounding it.

Now, the church’s influence over Duke Garen and his people was near absolute, and it was quickly spreading to other nearby towns and villages under Duke Garen’s rule. Not many in Greendell followed the Old Gods or the old ways anymore, and none did so in public for fear of ending up in the church dungeons, a place from which nobody returned from alive. It was almost as dangerous as being exposed as one of the Touched.

The priests of the church said that the Touched were cursed and the consorts of demons, that they needed to be cleansed. However, they also disapproved of music, theatre, or anything else remotely entertaining, claiming that they were frivolous and took people’s attention away from where it should be focused, on their God. Sometimes, I sometimes felt that they feared the magic of the Touched, gifts given by the Old Gods to their favored mortals.

Five years ago a man from the church had come to my family’s home to search it and then murdered my parents for being Touched after my father had healed a friend who had been injured in a fall. My mother’s gift was minor and harmless but they had killed her too, claiming that my parents were both consorting with demons and plotting against the church and the Duke, and using my mother’s favorite brooch as evidence. This left me, a girl of only twelve summers, to try to survive in a city that seemed hostile to everything that I was.

I could still remember that night in vivid detail. The man and the priests with him had made me watch as he killed my parents and the men of the city guard had just stood by and watched. Then he had warned me that he would come for me one day as well, if I did not give up the old ways or if I turned out to be Touched. The church had of course offered to take me in and place me in a church-run orphanage until I could learn the skills of a ‘proper wife’ so I be married off. I would not have taken that offer even if they had not been the ones to murder my parents though. So, I gathered some of my belongings and some keepsakes from my parents, such as my mother’s instruments, and fled the city proper.

I shivered again, but this time not from the cold. This time it was from the thought of what would have happened had I been in the care of the church when I had become Touched less than a year later. My gifts were meager, I could sense magic and manipulate metal to a small degree, but it would not have mattered to them. Indeed, it was best to keep a safe distance from the Church of One.

So now, I lived in an abandoned hunting shack in the forest, little more than a shed really, with a small hearth and barely enough room for me to sleep and keep what meager possessions that I had. I survived on what food that I could grow, hunt, or forage; mostly a few vegetables, berries, truffles, quail, and deer on rare occasions. I truly hoped that today would be one of those times, the winter had been a long and lean one, expending most of the money that I had saved, and it would be at least a month before my small garden produced anything worth eating.

On those rare occasions that I managed to kill a deer, I would disguise myself as a boy by binding my chest tightly and covering my long hair with a hunting hood. I was fairly short, but that, along with my rather plain appearance, lean figure, and some well-placed dirt gave me the appearance of a boy of maybe thirteen or fourteen summers. Dressed like that, I could usually blend into the crowds fairly easily and somewhat safely take the hide and some of the venison into the city to barter in the marketplace for eggs, bread, and anything else that I could get.

Of course, I would need to be cautious around the priests in their black and red robes though. I did not often venture into Greendell, and usually I would try to avoid the sickening feeling of the magic coming from the Church but if I killed a deer today, it would be worth it to barter or make some coin. I had not eaten much more than dried meat, thin soup, and bakery castoffs for months.

I attempted to shake off my grim thoughts as I rose and followed the tracks southward, my bow held at the ready and each step carefully measured to make as little noise as possible. The rain began to fall harder beating a steady staccato on the ground, the leaves of the trees, and my cloak. The sound of occasional thunder seemed to shake my very bones as I followed the tracks for what felt like an eternity. Finally, I heard a rustling in the bushes ahead. Swiftly, I reached behind my shoulder, slipped an arrow from my quiver, and was ready to put it to the drawstring. Then it all happened at once.

I felt it first; an unfamiliar type of magic not far ahead and moving toward me quickly, though rather than becoming stronger as it approached, it seemed to be fading. Not far behind it, there was a second, stronger source of magic. That magic was dark, chaotic, and disturbingly familiar. Not even a second later, there was a distant shouting, I thought it to be a man’s voice, but I couldn’t make out the words over another boom of thunder. Then the three deer that I had been tracking; a stag, a doe, and a fawn burst from the bushes bleating in terror, the stag snorting and knocking me into the mud as they fled back along the game trail that I had been following.

“Torr’s balls!” The curse fled my lips silently; my heart beating rapidly as I hurriedly snatched my fallen bow and arrow and dove into the cover of some thick brush at the side of the trail. Once I was somewhat shielded from sight, I rose into a crouch and again nocked my arrow. Deliberately, I slowed my breathing in an attempt to remain calm and ease the wild racing of my heart as I watched the trail and tracked the pair of magical presences with my mind’s eye. They were almost on top of me and my heart leaped into my throat as I heard the rustling of the same bushes that the deer had burst through only moments before.

A woman, or perhaps a slender man, wearing a dark grey robe limped through the foliage and stumbled, falling with an audible splat into the mud, mere inches away from the spot that I had so recently vacated. The person wore a dark green cloak over their long grey wool robe, had three black arrows protruding from their back, and cried out in pain as they hit the ground. They tried to get to their knees; shaking, their breathing haggard, and groaning in pain, but they fell back to the ground, succeeding only in falling to their side this time instead of on their face. It was that face, desperate eyes looking imploringly at me through the foliage, which caused me to let slip a gasp of surprise and nearly drop both bow and arrow.

The woman, for it surely was a woman, was not human. Long and muddied locks of silver hair half-covered a pale face distorted in agony, and those pained and pleading amber eyes continued to stare at me as though the brush between us did not exist. Beneath her cloak, near-transparent iridescent wings twitched in pain. “A Faerie!” The thought caused my heart to race once again. I had heard the stories, of course. Everyone had heard stories about the Fae but I had never thought that in all my life I would see one in the flesh. Yet now there was one right in front of me, not ten hands away… dying.

“Who would do such a thing?” I wondered as my heart clenched in revulsion and fear. The Fae might be mischievous at times, but generally, they were helpful to those who respected them and the woods they cared for. The wrath of the Fae on those who had wronged them could be terrible indeed; foul curses if they could not physically find you, but if they did, they never forgot a debt owed and had powerful magic at their disposal to catch their prey. Not many eluded them for long and once they caught you, you would suffer an eternity of the worst tortures that the fair folk could dream up. What kind of fool or monster would risk such a fate?

My question was answered as a man with a bow stepped through the brush. Long dark hair hung wetly where it fell from beneath his helm, framing a scarred and clean-shaven face with dark hard eyes. He wore dark leather armor and boots, a sleeveless black and red tabard bearing the crimson nine-pointed star of the Church of One, and a cruel smile as he stopped to look down upon his prey. His smile was joined by a laugh as the Faerie in the mud tried to crawl away. “You led me on a merry chase, I’ll give you that,” he said with a sneer, “but it’s time that I finish the job.” He tossed his bow casually to the side and licked his lips as his hand erupted in black flames.

A Touched working for the church? No, I recognized this man; his face had been forever carved into my memory five years ago, the night that my parents were murdered. A sudden urge to run as far and as fast as I could nearly overwhelmed me in that moment. Hate and fear warred within me and my hand turned white-knuckled as I gripped my bow tightly enough for the wood to creak in protest. The man did not seem to sense my presence, I could slip away, run to safety, and he would be none the wiser. And the Faerie would die.

The pleading eyes of the Faerie burned themselves into my mind’s eye as that thought assailed my mind, as surely as the face of my parents’ murderer had been burned into it on the day that my parents had died. Now he stood in front of me, threatening one of the forest folk, and I knew in my heart that leaving the Faerie there to die at his hands would be wrong. I could not do anything when my parents were killed, but I could now. In the same instance that my decision was made, I took aim through the brush, pulled back the drawstring, and let the arrow fly.

A child could not have missed at that range and I had been hunting with my father since I could walk and carry a bow. The arrow pierced the man’s neck with enough force that the arrowhead came bursting out the other side in a spray of blood. My parents’ murderer just stared ahead in shock for several seconds before the black flames in his hand vanished, then he made a gurgling sound, began coughing up blood, and fell to his knees. A moment later, he collapsed to the ground in a lifeless heap beside his intended victim as a foul black smoke rose from his corpse.

I rushed from my cover to the fallen Faerie. “Hold still,” I told her, trying to sound reassuring, “I am going to try to get those arrows out.” The silver-haired woman nodded tiredly but said nothing as I pushed her cloak aside to examine the wounds. Two of them had pierced her gossamer wings before burying themselves in her back, and the third had penetrated fairly deeply.

My focus shifted to the arrows as I carefully inspected them before attempting to pull the first one free. The shaft came free, but it seemed to have snapped just shy of the arrowhead, causing me to grimace. My frown only deepened as the same thing happened with the other two. While it had made it easier to extract them from her wings without doing further damage to them, each had snapped in the exact same spot, it was as if the arrows had been designed to leave their heads inside the victim.

I took the woman’s hand gently, telling her, “I think that I can remove the arrowheads, but it will probably be very painful.” The Faerie nodded again, her eyes pleading and her face a mask of pain as I closed my eyes and used my mind’s eye to search for the metal of the arrowheads within the wounds. I found the first one easily enough, it had not gone in too deeply, so I reached out with my power to slowly pull it out, trying to be as gentle as possible. The second was similar to the first and came out easily enough, but the third had penetrated deeply and it was near her heart, or at least where the heart would be on a human.

I knew that I could not leave it inside though; the previous two arrowheads had been fashioned from cold iron, toxic to the Fae. I had to be careful not to physically touch them since my mother had warned me that some touched could be sensitive to cold iron was well, so once again I reached out with my power. The Faerie had managed to stay silent while I had removed the first two arrowheads, but it was not so this time. The screams of pain as I removed the final arrowhead made me cringe in sympathy and nearly stop altogether from loss of concentration before I finally removed it and used my gift to hurl the arrowhead into the woods as I had its predecessors.

With the arrowheads removed and far away, the wounds were now bleeding even worse than before. I was not sure how the Faerie was still alive, but I knew that if I did not act quickly that the ethereal creature would not be alive for long. Quickly, I cut strips from the hem of my tunic, shortening it to just above my hips before I felt that I had enough. The thick linen was damp, but I hoped that it would be enough to staunch the bleeding as I proceeded to bind the wounds as best I could.

With the arrow wounds taken care of, I took a moment to take mental stock of the creature that I was tending to. There were many types of Fae in the stories that I had heard from my parents as a child, but this particular Fae looked to be one of the Faerie since she resembled a Pixie and had similar wings while being similar in size to a human. She was perhaps a little taller than me, slightly pale, and inhumanly beautiful, even while covered in mud and blood. She was slender and fragile-looking, especially in her current condition, but what really made her stand out, other than the wings, were her long and pointed ears and her amber eyes with their slit pupils.

She also had a sword that I had not noticed earlier. The sheath that housed it hung from a sturdy leather belt and it looked to be a long and slender blade with a slight curve to it, if the sheath was any indication. It was the Faerie’s pained golden eyes that had my attention though, and I found it difficult to look away. “Are you injured anywhere else,” I finally asked.

“M… my ankle,” the Faerie replied in a near whisper. Even in pain, her voice had a musical quality to it, as if she was singing. I moved to inspect the ankle in question but I was stopped when the Fae suddenly grabbed my wrist firmly. Despite her frail appearance, her grip was like iron as she shook her head and said, “Please, the Demon will come here to attempt to finish its work once it has taken another willing host, and it will not come alone this time. We must hurry, child, you must help me get to Tarin’dol.”