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All was darkness. He had fallen through the dull, senseless shadow that eclipsed him so. It was then, just as he had collapsed down to the ground, with his armour nearly shredded, that he felt the hand of a god, pressing down upon him. He felt pressure almost like a physical weight crushing him downwards into the ground. His back itched, but he did not have the strength to scratch it. It was then that he felt something else grab him and pull him upwards.
He opened his eyes, nearly blinded by the light that came from everywhere, and he saw a blurred figure holding him up by the collar of his chainmail jerkin under his armour. Sventar blinked, and the figure cleared. It was Rosseau. Sventar heard nothing, but he saw Rosseau turn, and gesture to two other figures - his own Honor guard, Sventar realised with a jolt of memory, and the other two walked over and picked up his Liegelady and they went out of his sight. The sound of something soft depressing was heard, and just as a black-robed figure walked over, his Liegelady's light armour started hitting the floor.
The warrior looked with dazed eyes at his subordinate. Rosseau was thinking, in the midst of the hectic remains of a battle, and the bloody chaos of the killing field. Killing and fighting in any battle was easy, but thinking... Sventar was laid against a wall, and he could see his Liegelady being de-armoured by the black-robed figure and the light of healing magics flash against limestone walls. He closed his eyes and drifted off into a light slumber.

Sanli flared her magic again and again, trying to heal the battered body of the de-armoured woman on the infirmary bed. This was the lady Sarae, Consul of the Rosenbridge coliseum and the one that had admittedly saved their village. What she was thinking to come here randomly and casually fend off an undead attack on a relatively insignificant village, the nursemaid had no idea. But she was wounded and in relative safety, so she could be healed.
It was then that Lady Sarae awoke, with a gasp and a jolt upwards. The figure named Rosseau entered the room, and now he was sitting with his back to the wall on a chair nearby.
Rubbing feeling back into her tingling legs, Sarae tried to blink the darkness from her eyes. Deep inside her chest something felt wrong, hurting her when she moved. It didn't matter. Focusing on Sventar's second-in-command, she snapped out a question. "What's the status of the village at the moment?"
Rosseau smiled at the Consul's awakening. "The wall is stable, and the undead hordes have been fended off for the day. We were just in time, it seems." said the old veteran, re-sharpening one of his knives.
"Good. Now that we've got that under control, go get everyone to make proper defenses. The work is understandably shoddy."
"To be fair, they are only farmers and craftsmen of small hand-tools. Not trench-diggers. And with all due respect, neither you or Sir Sventar are going anywhere." he said, standing up with a rustle of leather armour and walked out the door. "I'll handle it!" he called back into the room as he left down the hallway.

Deciding not to bother fighting with her own forces, the cleric got up off the cot they'd placed her on. Rubbing her head, she shook the last lingering fuzz from her mind. Sarae turned to inspect the room. She let out a soft gasp, eyes lingering on the still, bleeding form of Sventar. Hurrying to his side, she took a look at what remained of his armour. Most of it had been bashed beyond what could be repaired by even the best smiths she knew. Massive lacerations covered his body, embedded with dirt and fragments of steel.
Magic failed to respond to her summons, the white glow of healing fizzling at the edge of her fingers. Stilling her mind as best she could, she began looking around for supplies. Whatever this village had before the attack, all of it had vanished by this time.

Sventar blinked, breathing in and out. He was asleep, feeling things run down his body. It was a small time before he realised that he was losing blood. Damn and blast it, he thought. He had heard voices, and someone said that they'll be back... He simply continued to breathe in and out. He was tired. Sleep would be good. A far deeper sleep than this...
He felt heat and light against his face, and he screwed his eyes. "Gah, that stings like a mother's bitch. Put it out." he had spoken before he realised that it had gone out long before he spoke.
The cleric frowned. She'd never known Sventar to curse before. Her frown deepened as she thought on it more. He had to be losing too much blood. The fact that he could talk at all was a miracle, but something had to change soon. Swallowing down her anxiety, Sarae slowly calmed down, and began to meditate on the Light. Almost instinctively, her hand reached out and grabed Sventar's. Just in case.
He felt something grab at his dried blood-crusted hand. Something warm. He decided not to go against it. Instead, in the tired state he was in, he turned his bleary thoughts to the undead. He felt his own head drop forward, and a tightening of the muscle across his face informed him that a deep-set scowl was in place. As if that facial expression was wrong. He had every right to make the worst expressions he could. If he would be up and about without these blasted injuries, he would be immediately going to where they would strike next.
He silently fumed. Blasted skeletal wretches got through his armour too many times. Sventar hoped his Honor Guard had survived the night. And the rest of the survivors.

Slowly, far too slowly for the cleric's taste, her magic power began to return to her. It felt like liquid gold filling up in her chest, some hallowed light to stave off the darkness of the undead around the desecrated village of Gerra's Vale.
Sventar lay on the ground, mumbling in the darkness of his sleep. The whole time, that small and seemingly fragile warmth clasped around his hand the whole time. Why did it feel so warm? Why was he simply sitting there? He blearily opened his eyes, and jammed them shut once the light glared down and into his eyes. Muttering a few choice curses, he lifted up the arm that the small warmth wasn't clasping and buried his face in it, attempting to shield his face from the light.
Using her body as a conduit for healing, Sarae forced her energy into Sventar's battered body. As minutes passed, his massive wounds slowly closed, leaving bright, angry-looking scars in their place. Renewed blood flowed through the drained veins, and his fatigue burned away. Keeping herself firmly centred, the cleric did not falter from her task. Assured that the defense of Gerra's Vale was being handled by the current Captain and Sventar's Honour Guard, her focus remained sharp.
Sventar felt tingling all over his body. But it wasn't a bad one. The heat spreading in lines through his flesh was a reassuring one. And slowly he felt a dull ache settle through him. One that echoed and rebounded off all of him, that reminded him again and again of his wounds. Beneath the gauntlet he had pressed against his face, he slowly opened his eyes. It was still all darkness, but as he moved his hand more and more light streamed in. Accompanying the change in his sight was intense pain. He blinked, and it was gone.
Dropping his hand down, metal armour not his own caught his eye. He looked at it, and saw that it was a slight but dented metal gauntlet, and it was the thing that was holding his hand. Sventar's eyes trailed up to see the white energy of healing magics swirling about, and with the energy swirling about her he saw his Liegelady Sarae. Healing him.
She finished in her task, the white healing energies dissipating and leaving the two sitting and kneeling in the room they were in. He reached up with his free hand and grabbed at his helmet, pulling it up and off his head, and with a clank and a clatter it bounced once off the stone of the floor and rolled to a halt. He turned his head to see his Liegelady looking at him with concerned and worried eyes. It was then which the warrior remembered the foul language that he had used in his unwakefulness.
"Milady, I apologise for any foul-mannered words that have passed out of my mouth." he said quickly, breaking the silence.
Though her armour made it awkward, she hugged Sventar as best she could. The fact that he'd made it to fight another day was all that mattered to her. "Don't apologize, Sventar." After a moment longer, she stood back up, and helped bring the warrior back to his feet. Sarae shook the fatigue from her mind one more time, and pointed to the door. "We should go see how the defenses are coming."

"Very well, milady." he said, twisting and clicking his back underneath his armour. He followed his lady on through the damaged halls of the school, and out into the wrecked courtyard. The sounds of the undead were gone, in its place only a mournful and bloody silence.
Sventar glanced around, looking at the place where he had destroyed so much. Briefly he wondered how an area so large could seem so small. Then again, it was easy to overlook distance from behind a pile of corpses. He looked to the botchedly repaired section of the wall, 'repaired' being him pushing a rock into position to block the hole, and briefly he wondered how the undead masses were so weak and disorganised.
Dismissing the massive pile of the undead put back to rest, the cleric walked closer to where they'd entered the village. Gerra's Vale had been small before, but the damage left by the undead would impact the town for years. Sarae eventually reached the town proper, where a massive barricade of sharpened wood impaled with sharp iron blocked their path. Rosseau poked his head above the barrier, and made some gesture to the people behind it. With a great deal of wheezing and grunting, he and a few of the townspeople pushed the barricade aside, allowing Sarae and Sventar entrance.
"Rosseau. How are the defenses coming on all sides?"

He puffed out his cheeks and made a gesture. "Slowly but surely, they're being patched up. Our arrival really boosted morale among these sods. Oh, and sir." he said, turning to Sventar. "I've found some potential recruits out of the survivors. Just stable and farm boys, but they took to blades quite well. We may consider signing this place up for a potential recruiting ground." he said, in businesslike tones, disregarding the knife he was sharpening in his hand, and making a small cut into his finger for it.
"Ow! But in all seriousness, I've had them strengthening the walls, and any able-bodied man, woman and child are taking up arms. I've had the elderly and the craftsmen making weapons, and the farmhands strengthening the wall. Your Honor Guard have been running raids into clusters of them. If we let them regroup and raise more corpses, they'll be swarming all over us. We need your holy fire, Lady Sarae." he said, looking up from his hand to her.

Sarae paused uncomfortably. "I cannot bring up any more of it. Not now. I used it in the defense earlier." Though her tone remained mtter-of-fact, it bothered her more than she let on. Deciding to move on from the subject, she asked another question. "Has anyone located a source of these Undead?"
Rosseau wet his lips to speak just as an authoritive-looking person walked up to the three, with two armed villagers beside him. "Mayor Kowarig. And I believe you just asked for the source?" Sarae nodded, and gestured for him to continue.
"The source of this blasted attack is the old burial site. A War that happened long ago, it's one of the subjects we teach at the school. My gratitude for defending it as well as you did. But that crypt held thousands of fallen soldiers. That's where they got all these-" he kicked a bone on the ground, and it clattered away. "That's most likely where all these skeletons are coming from. The ones that have rotted for a while have been here for some time, freshly dug up from the graveyard no doubt."
Kowarig kept on speaking about the town and the state of its defense until the Honor guard showed up. They were wounded slightly, and their armour scratched and dented, but they were still good for combat. Sventar nodded to them, noting no casualties among them and turned back to Rosseau.
"You stay here and keep organising the defence. We'll be going to assault this crypt." Sventar ordered, and Rosseau clashed a hand against his cuirass before getting up and turning to go to the defences.
Sventar strode forth past the wall being rebuilt, raising his shield and took up his longsword again, dented and battle-damaged though they both were. With his comrades and his Liegelady, he advanced forward into the corpse and bone-strewn ruins.

Eyes darting to every side as they advanced, they Cleric know that this was far from an opprotune time to engage the enemy. Battered and worn, none of them were in any shape to take the fight to the undead. As the path slowly muddied under their feet, miring their boots, she tried not to think of how badly they could fare. Sarae, with little to none of her magic, could only lend the strength of her arm. Sventar still didn't seem to know his limits, and that worried her more. Whatever necromancer could raise this many undead at once must be powerful indeed.

Far ahead, twisted trees, bare of limb or leaf, shook in the forlorn breeze. A small, wrought-iron fence, no doubt smithed by some man long dead, outlined the small area. That had to be the entrance to the crypt. The further along they walked, the more Sarae could feel the pressure of corruption pressing down on her. Things could only get worse.

Sventar walked on, tired from his wounds, tired from the previous fight, tired from the fatigue one acquired travelling unprepared and already exhausted, and the sheer ungodly rotting decay of the place which hammered at him almost like a physical force. He barely could lift up a shield-wielding hand to push the gate open gently, instead his hand smacked into it, and the wrought iron bars clanged against the edges of their railings before shaking themselves free of the rotting moss that had grown upon them. Sventar noted that there was even more rot, all over the place. Perhaps his Liegelady would purge this place with holy flame once the summoner of these undead was disposed of.

Sventar walked in, and Zombies, this time enarmoured with chainmail and rags charged at them from the gray and cracked tombstones that lay in row around the iron-topped limestone walls of the cemetery. He walked forward, out into the space so that his companions could move into the courtyard as well. Taking up a battle stance again, to say nothing of shaking off fatigue, he got down to a stable position and got as ready for combat as he could be.

Fending off a sudden blow from a jawless monstrosity, the cleric realized that she had no weapon suitable for this. With no flesh to bleed from, what skeleton would die by her sword? Shoving the thoughts aside, she threw herself into the foray. Her small shield blocked slow, heavy-handed blows from the silent, creaking abberations. Using her sword as a bone-breaker, Sarae snapped ribs and severed legs, cutting through their old sinew as easily as any blooded creature.

Piles of bone littered the ground as more of the undead were laid to rest. Bone and rusted sword fragments crunched and snapped underfoot as the warriors pushed even further into the heart of the building. A sepulchral stench carried on the breeze, sweeping over them as they grew closer to inner chambers of the crypt. Though it sucked the strength from her limbs, Sarae knew they were getting closer. Once they killed whatever foul master had brought these wretches back to unlife, they would return to dust.

Sventar advanced into the stinking crypt and further into a small room almost like an entrance hall. Surprisingly, there were no more undead, only an increase in the foul stench that emanated from wherever it had come from. The warrior walked on through a hall draped with rotting grey and brown banners, and the walls splattered with bloodstains, but no bodies were to be seen. The warrior presumed that the Necromancers had harvested all fresh corpses of whichever poor souls were here before the attack. Sventar could only pray for their souls' safety in the afterlife.
They walked through a hallway lined with a bloodied red rug, and came up to a chapel in which multiple statues for the Pantheons of the Gods and Godesses lay broken and when they were not, on their sides or defaced and graffitied. Not surprisingly, the statue to Urgathoa remained spotless. Sventar hurriedly placed the remains of the statuette to Sarenrae up better in it position, and touched his head to the top of the statue. For luck, for faith, he knew not. Sventar simply did. And five sounds behind him as he advanced past it indicated that his companions had in some way made their small actions unto the remains of the statue.
Sventar continued on, lowered slightly and shield raised, leading the way down a narrow side-corridor with his shoulderplates' edges barely an inch from the walls.

They moved on through a series of tunnels and hallways, until they came to a spacious room, a dirt-floored and bone-strewn tunnel entrance in the floor guarded by a group of skeletons. Sventar charged, crushing apart two and from the sounds of metal on metal and eventually metal on bone showed that his companions moved and eliminated the rest of the undead abominations within the room. Sventar took steps forward over the broken skeletons and stood at the rim of the pit. Briefly he paused, blanching under his helmet at the appaling stench coming from the tunnel. Then the Grandmaster walked down into the pit with shield raised, longsword ready and once more leading the way through a tunnel, although this time instead of the blood-splattered hallways of the crypt's chapel it was along the earthen walls of the tunnel. And omnipresent was that damned stench. Sventar ignored it and kept walking.

The tunnel led them to a small cavern dug out by no doubt skeletal hands. The air within was quite unlike that of the tunnel and the crypt; this one was damp and earthen, and with a nearly distinct sense of sorrow and misery. This was the upturning of a whole burial site. A burial site composed of the hundreds of these old spirits that made every shadow a bottomless chasm, every breeze the hiss of an arrow or spell flying at them. Even as Sventar advanced forward into dark fog, and his companions followed, hobbling in, out and over ditches no doubt filled by corpses in a group towards the center of the cavern.
They advanced, and as they got to the point where none of them could see the edges of the cavern due to the thick fog, they all felt the ground drop out from underneath them. As they hit the dirt floor, their armour clattered and rang. Just as the mist dissipated, and the warriors looked up to the rim of the pit to see ethereal purple lights spring up into existence, illuminating the pit, the cavern and the caster.
Sventar studied the necromancer in the blink of an eye. Black robes, tome in hand, necromancy magics swirling about his free hand. Fit the description of a Necromancer perfectly. Even as clatters sounded from around the warriors, and thirteen skulls brimming with purple and black necromantic energy rose from the piles, and sunk themselves into the walls. The piles clattered some more, and it was when Skeletons started to rise from them that the warriors noticed that the piles were all bone. And their summoner was right above them. Sventar quietly cursed, and his foul language was missed amongst the creaks and groans of the skeletons' bones.

The warriors launched into the fight, and unlike previously they fought while conserving their energy. None of the gladiators knew how long they may be fighting for. Although the first few skeletons were cleaved or broken apart, some did manage to get through and tie down the two of his Honor Guard that had wielded warhammers. Sventar bashed with his shield sparingly, knowing that while the skeleton hordes were unarmed and relatively weak, he couldn't let them get an opening. By no means would they find him wanting.
More arose even as Sventar smacked them back into fragments. It did no good that their summoner was standing right above them, at the lip of the very pit.

"You, the sources of my troubles, have driven me too far." he began to say, in between phrases in some Necromantic tongue which rose more skeletons from the dwindling mass of bones that circled the warriors inside the pit. "That village was mine for the taking!"
Sventar smacked apart another skeleton before looking up at the rim. "Why would you do this? Who are you to cause such destruction?"
The Necromancer hit Sventar with a cold glance. "I am the solution."
Then he heard a clatter of bone behind him, and the last of the skeletons was smashed into fragments. "Whatever solution you hope to apply, It is worth the destruction of that village?"
"What is it to you?" The necromancer asked, seeming to be dismissively curious.
Sventar lifted up his visor and spat out acidic-tasting saliva before slamming it back into place with a crash. "It is another place which is under attack which I must defend!" he said, idly backhanding a skeleton into pieces, then looking back up to the rim of the pit.
The necromancer chuckled, before forming the purple and black energy into a blade of some kind, and with his free hand wrapping that same energy around Sventar and yanking him up from the pit and hurling him off into the empty cavern floor. "You have amused me. Come, test this flesh!"

Sventar fell on the other side of the pit, and after righting himself and regaining breath in his lungs the warrior noted that the weight of his tower shield was gone. Though he clasped his right hand, and within he felt the familiar grip of his longsword's handle. Blearily he opened his eyes and sat up, the remnants of his armour creaking, and with weakened legs he got back up and raised himself for combat once again.
The Necromancer stood, with that blade of dark energy in hand and waited for Sventar to get ready. The warrior squared off with the necromancer, and as their blades met, Sventar's longsword ignited with flame, combatting the swirling and arcing darkness that rose from the Necromancer's blade. Then the two pushed off against one another and landed some distance apart. The Grandmaster decided to take the initiative, and charged. A surprise attack was seemingly expected by the robed combatant, but to face it in the brutal yet organised manner that Sventar attacked was an entirely different matter. Their blades clashed and clanged, with Sventar more often than not pressing the assault.
Finally, with the robed wizard suffering a slash to his unguarded hand, and while the man's guard was dropped Sventar brought up his mailed gauntlet and delivered a heavy blow with his free left hand into the aged necromancer's face. A disgusting crack was heard, and as the Necromancer's blade of energy dissipated, Sventar advanced and placed his boot on the wizened sorcerer's chest and the tip of his blade to the man's forehead.

Then, with a final effort, Sventar pushed downwards, and sunk the blade in through the Necromancer's head. With a squelch, the man stopped breathing, life fading from his eyes, and the swirling purple and black energy dissipated. Just for good measure, the warrior drew back his blade and beheaded the necromancer. As the man died and Sventar wiped his dirtied blade on the black robes, the sounds of battle inside the pit quietened, then with one final smack stopped. It seemed like the battle here was over. For the short term, at least.
Sventar walked to the edge, then glanced down into the pit where the sound of battle had once resounded from. Now, however, he saw his Honor Guard and his Liegelady knee deep in bone fragments and the few broken fragments of the weak swords the undead masses had somehow acquired. Just as he knelt down to inspect the distance between the edge and the floor of the pit, it started to rise up and soon his warriors were brought up to the floor of the cavern once more.
He nodded to his companions. "I think... I think we had best return to the village. We can fight little more this day." And with that, they turned and left the cavern, and went
out through the stinking tunnel, up and through the crypt until they finally came out and into the murky afternoon air. He guessed that he acclimated to the stench of the crypt.

They moved out and through the gate, and eventually they reached the village and then after a short walk along the forested path, they arrived back in the ruins of the village. The skeletons they encountered now seemed to fight among one another as often as they would co-operate to take down roving groups of the townspeoples' militia. Soon they once again arrived at the defensive walls, which seemed to have been heavily reinforced with converging layers of heavy brick and now looked like they could withstand a great deal of punishment. The warriors followed the path that went around the new, guarded section of the village and went through the metal portcullis and heavy wooden gate. Within there were craftsmen and soldiers bustling everywhere. But as soon as Sventar and Sarae with their Honor Guard walked on through, the various groups present at the gate noticed them and cheered. They walked up the cobbled road to a courtyard where they spotted Rosseau around a central table with Mayor Kowarig, as well as several other important-looking folk. Catching sight of the six warriors advancing, he dismissed the people and walked forward.

"Greetings Sir, Lady Consul." he made a salute that encompassed them both before resuming his usual stance. "I've got the defences well and truly sorted. We've repelled about half a dozen small assaults since you left. Whatever you did, it worked." The man then paused in his statement to smile at the two in congratulations.
"Go get some rest. You've earned it. I've got everything well in order here." With that, he waved in a direction, and the warrior and the cleric's heads turned, following the Captain's direction to the sight of a bunch of buildings that had been hastily erected for the civilian survivors which couldn't help with the defense.

Sventar nodded, and turned to his Guards. "Go and rest as best you can, then when you are fully rested rejoin under the Captain's command. Dismissed." he said to the four, and they clashed hands over the remains of their cuirasses before turning and leaving in their separate directions. Just as a wave of tiredness hit him, he saw Sarae go forth, tugging at his arm to follow. He did his best, and eventually he made it up the stairs to the huts. Sarae kept dragging him on by the arm, and Sventar swore that he saw some of the schoolchildren from that ruined place amongst all the other villagers. All of them were staring as he tried and somewhat failed to let his fatigue and wounds show, to say nothing of the state of his armour.
The Cleric opened a door for him, and the Warrior barely managed to stumble inside with both tiredness and his wounds sapping at his legs' integrity, and it was when she closed the door that he lost all semblance of strength and collapsed do the ground, and a few fragments of metal from the remains of his armour clinked to the floor. He let the gut-links take all of his upper body weight, even as they creaked ever so slightly. He sat there, with his head bowed and barely holding himself up with one arm off the ground, and his knee an inch away from being on a level height with his forehead. Sventar drew in pained gasps, the full pain of his wounds hitting him now with the fury of the gods. He bent his head downwards, and his helmet dropped and clattered to the floor, leather straps worn and steel dented and scratched all over.

Though her own remaining strength began to flag, the cleric took a deep breath and centred herself. Grabbing Sventar's pauldrons, she heaved with all her might, slowly dragging him to the wall. Sarae's muscles burned with the effort, and the wood floor of the temporary shelter bore scars of his passage, but she managed to prop Sventar against the wall. Her hands fumbled the many buckles and fastenings of the nearly destroyed breastplate, slipping it off after a few minutes of tearing at it.
Placing a hand on Sventar's chest, Sarae dragged a spell from her mind. One so old she'd never thought to use it before. One so dangerous, it could have killed her if she tried. Forcing her will to do her bidding, she focused it on the many wounds inflicted on Sventar. Some were only blunt force trauma, but others were massive laceration and re-opened wounds from his earlier fight.
Weariness infused Sarae's very bones. The usual white glow of her magic had been replaced with a deep, sanguine light. Sventar's wounds began to heal, while underneath her breastplate they were inflicted on Sarae. By taking his injuries unto herself, she could help him. Sarae's hands trembled and her vision grew pitch-dark. Only the thud of wood against her head told her she could take no more.
Pain blotted out anything else she might have thought. Mouth clenched shut, she refused to utter a noise. This had been her choice, her action, and she would see it, and its consequences through to the end.
    The warrior opened his eyes, to see his wounds healed and his Liegelady collapsed on the floor, and blood leaking from under her armour told him what he feared. He stepped forward, features frozen in shock. She couldn't, she wouldn't have done such a thing. But his dreaded suspicious became all too true as he unclasped and unbuckled her armour plates, and when the bloodied chain mail and the shirt she wore underneath was laid aside, he saw what he had feared. By some kind of sorcery, she had taken his wounds and transplanted them onto her own body. He knelt down to try and inspect the wounds better.
    To him and his bulk, a gash three inches across and half an inch deep was near nothing. He had more than enough to compensate for any wounds suffered to his own body, but to the slighter woman they were quite severe. He leant down, and placed a hand to the side of her head, calling her name a few times. When she did not respond, he shook her by the head lightly and tried again.
    On his third attempt, and with a now-panicked calling of her name, her eyelids fluttered open, in and her eyes betrayed the great pain she was in. Sventar lost himself despite his instincts and training, and dropped his head to rest on her shoulder.
    "Milady... why would you do such a thing..." he asked of nothing, slight amounts of tears escaping his eyes. "Fool. Hopeless, pitiful fool." He said, cradling her head in his hand.
    Some time passed, and she gained the strength to murmur somehow. It then hit how stupid he had been, simply kneeling by his Liegelady while she bled out. He got up, strapped his chestplate back on and walked outside, looking around for a healer. Once he was outside, he saw a group of them working on a few rows of the wounded. He walked over, and asked for anyone who would take a slight detour from their work here. A lady by name of Roseanna, who had healing ointments, and thread and needle in hand, and Sventar showed her over to the hut in which his Liegelady lay.
    Roseanna clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. By no stretch did this look good. Carefully pulling thicker thread from a small pouch on her hip, the healer threaded her needle. Hands steady from years of practise on foolish hunters caught by something stronger than prey, the woman began sealing up the massive wounds on the cleric's body. Slowly, the bloodflow stemmed from each of the large wounds. Smearing yellow-tinged ointments across the raw flesh, Roseanna inspected her work. With luck, and maybe a bit of magic, Sarae would live. Bowing to her companion, the healer left the two. She had others to tend to.
    Sarae felt no pain from her damage. Whatever herbs had been in those ointments, they had leeched feeling from every part of her. Exhaustion she'd stolen from Sventar stilled her limbs and glued her eyelids shut. She would live. She would not fall here. With that thought, she let out a contented sigh. In a day, she could use her holy magic to help herself, then the rest of Gerra's Vale.
    The healer left, and Sventar closed the door. Immediately he turned and walked back over to the wounded lady on the floor. He knelt, scooped up Sarae by her back and her knees, lifted her partially unconscious body and placed her down on the dingy bed in the shack. Pulling at the straps, clasps and buckles, he soon disengaged her armour and placed it to the side. Collapsing in the chair beside her bed, he placed his hand over hers and leant back, pressing his chin into his chest and falling into light sleep.
    Hours passed, and when the Cleric woke fully, a pale, wan moon hung low on the horizon. Stretching her jaws with a yawn, she flexed her muscles, testing which ones still worked properly, and those that still needed time to heal. Sarae pushed herself into a sitting position, and yawned once more. Her stomach growled quietly, empty from the day without food. Putting that out of her mind, Sarae turned and gently shook Sventar from his sleep. "Wake up."
    He felt a hand shake him, and he jolted awake, just as pain flared up again. Opening his eyes, he saw his Liegelady sitting up. Lifting himself up from his seated position and stretching cramped and tired muscles, he turned to face his Liegelady once more. "I am awake, milady. How may I serve?"
    Taking a hold of Sventar's hand, Sarae thought back to Gerra's Vale.  With the new defenses the townspeople helped build, and with the desctruction of the necromancer, there was little left to do with direct defense of the village. "Is there anything else that needs to be done? We still never found out exactly why that Necromancer was here, did we?"
    Sventar shook his head. "No, we did not. But he is disposed of now. And that is all I think matters. I suggest that we get Rosseau and the Guard and get back to Rosenbridge. He may have found some new recruits among these villagers." he added the last phrase, almost as an afterthought. Seeing the Cleric slightly frowning in dissappointment, no doubt, he elaborated, trying to make his thinking sound better than the grim light his words cast.
"Put it this way. We have found a stable recruiting ground. However, it is a pity that there are no wilder beasts or threats to this place. Not that I wish any harm upon the innocents, but potential recruits would be better if they had to fight for their survival." he mused, glancing at his battle-scratched and dented Longsword.
    Though it made sense, Sarae didn't agree with it. Swinging her legs to the side, she wobbled out of her sickbed. Regardless of her own personal state, all of the Gladiators had business back in Rosenbridge. "We should leave, Sventar."
    He snapped his head back up and sheathed his longsword, and the disturbing fact that his shield was missing was more apparent than ever. Sventar tried to shrug off the feeling, but it came back up and gnawed at his conscience. That shield had preserved him through most of his fighting life. And now, facing the undead, it was gone. With a great effort, he tried to shove it to the back of his mind.
    "Very well. Lead on, I shall follow. Rosseau should be around somewhere." he said and as Sarae sat down to slip on her greaves again, an old idea came to his head again. He leant down, picked up her chest and back plates and walked back over. Just as she leant down to fasten on the straps on the pieces of leg-armour, he placed the backplate on her again, and just as she leant up he handed her the chestplate, unable to keep a small grin off his face.
    Shaking her head, the cleric couldn't supress a grin of her own. Fastening the steel plates together, Sarae stretched once more. The stinging in her side flared up. Hands glowing with the soft white light of healing magic, she closed the wounds in her body, bringing what pain she had left to nothing more than a dull throb. Tapping Sventar on the shoulder to make sure he was ready to go, she exited the small room.
    Outside, a chill night wind whispered through the remnants of Gerra's Vale. The few people about looked exhausted. Turning to Sventar, Sarae gestured around. "Well. Where do you think the rest of the Honour Guard would be?"
    Sventar looked around, the wind flowing under his ruined armour and cutting away at the heat and the pain of his wounds. Disregarding the red-hot throb, he looked to his Liegelady and answered "Knowing them and Rosseau, he's likely posted them in the place which has the highest possibility of attack. That would likely be on the north-" Sventar broke off, seeing the few villagers congregating around the square. He glanced at his Liegelady, jerking his head down at the sight, and the two of them saw that the Honor Guard, as well as Rosseau, were being helped to the square, with a mule being led along. From what he could see, the mule was loaded with sacks and bags, and the villagers were filling said bags with the pitiful few things they had as a reward. Sventar glanced over, and saw that his Liegelady was already making his way down to the plaza. Shrugging, he decided to follow on.
    Jogging up to the throng, Sarae looked over everything. The mule's bulging backs had been stuffed to the brim with whatever supplies or rewards they could spare after the attack. Though accepting such a thing from them made Sarae feel dirty, she wouldn't refuse. For as much damage as had been done to the town, the Gladiators still needed to finish other things back in Rosenbridge. Waving to get Rosseau's attention, Sarae spoke over the low murmur coming from the villagers. "We're leaving. Get whatever you need and be back on the road to Rosenbridge in five minutes."
    Leaving them all to their preparations, the cleric headed towards the reinforced exit from Gerra's Vale. Whatever distance she gained on them by leaving first could no doubt be made up. She planned to be back in Rosenbridge by dawn. After leaving the confines of the barriers, Sarae slowly drew her scimitar. These roads would be dubious, even in daylight, this far away from anywhere else. At night, they were an accident waiting to happen.
    The warrior glanced at the form of the cleric passing through the barriers, and then back to his Guards and also Rosseau, who was playfully fending off a dreamy-eyed woman. Once each of them had made eye contact with their Grandmaster, they nodded and turned, taking up their shields and swords once again. Rosseau gave a kiss to his admirer, and as they advanced forth from the gate in the stone wall and forward out into the ruins of the city.
    The Captain himself had the reins of their mule, and the Honor Guard advanced in a box formation around the ladened animal while Sventar led the group along the wrecked road, kicking debris out of the way as the group advanced. They moved on, and with the setting sun gently toasting them in their armour they left the ruins of Gerra's Vale and advanced out along the cobble road.
    Later afterwards, when the sun had disappeared beneath the horizon and yet still illuminating the clouds above with a golden orange hue the soldiers kept on walking along a dust-ridden cobble road. As they advanced with their armour cooling off from its earlier toasting, the warrior heard a trundling and the clattering of mules' hooves on cobblestone. Just as they came up to a torch-lit signpost, an aged man leading on a snorting and whinnying mule, trailing a cart piled high with junk, made his way into the torch's light.
    The old peddler dropped to his knees, gasping for breath. When he stopped and recovered, his bones creaking as the old man straightened up.
    "Sirs, I have seen a terrible monstrosity! It was going that way, and it was unlike anything I have ever seen!" he said, in a slight eastern accent.
    Sventar narrowed his eyes behind his helmet. "Was there an armoured woman heading in that direction?" To his shock, the peddler nodded. Without preamble, Sventar began running, in full armour. The crashing of his Honor Guard running to keep pace reached him, before Rosseau's hand clapped his shoulder and pulled him back a little.
    "What the hell are you doing, sir?" Rosseau had asked, with the tired mule snorting and whining in pain from the sudden exertion. The warrior shook himself, and common sense returned, with tactical thinking and stratagem accompanying it.
    "Guards, advance and flank the road in the brush. Ambush tactics. A priority target is ahead, and hopefully the Lady Consul has managed to stall it, at least. Move out, be silent. Rosseau, leave that mule somewhere and join the right flank. I'll move to the left. Gladiators, let's move. Our Liegelady needs assistance. Let none find us wanting."

    Far ahead, the Arena Consul lived up to none of those expectations. Back flush up against a tree, scimitar shattered, a twisted, malformed creature poked at her with a falchion. Long, thick mats of hair tangled over his face, shadowing his features. From between the few spaces that showed, a red and yellow eye glowed with some sick, inner light. Hard spines jutted up from his misshapen spine at odd angles, shining silver in the soft moonlight. Twisting the falchion underneath Sarae's armour plates, a grumbling laugh tore from his throat, sounding more like gravel rolling down a hill than anything else. His other, scaled arm tapped the bark on the tree by Sarae's head, black talons sinking into the soft tree-flesh easily.
    "Well, well. I knew you were gullible, Sarae. But I didn't think you were stupid enough to fall for the same sort of trick twice. Who thought you'd travel alone more than once?" Swapping the falchion to his black-scaled arm, the freakish creature wrapped his other hand around the cleric's throat, slowly choking the life from her. Eyes glowing brighter as he watched the light begin to fade from her eyes, he laughed again. "Oh, yes. And this time I can promise you," he leaned close enough for Sarae to smell his putrid breath. A too-sweet stench of rotting meat and the stomach-turning scent of fresh bodies. His face grew even closer, breath tickling the cleric's ear. "We will not be interrupted." The mad creature's tongue darted out, slurping across his captive's face.
    Releasing her windpipe, the monstrosity's visage lit up with a sick smile. Sarae coughed, forcing as much air into her lungs as she could. "You will pay for this, Daral." Daral laughed again, backhanding the cleric with a furred arm. She spun to the ground with a sharp crack. Though the force hadn't broken her neck, she lay stunned. Straddling the prone form, his doglike leg on one side, and his carapaced leg on the other, Daral wriggled his taloned left hand. The woman's armour parted easily around the black claws, peeling away with a few tugs on the shattered edges. Tracking down his property after she had been liberated last time deserved punishment. The scars from his last visit still stood out lividly on her flesh. Apparently, they hadn't taught her the lesson intended.
    "I won't pay for anything. Who will stop me, sister?"
    "Me." Just as the monstrosity jerked its head around, Sventar powered his gauntleted fist forward, and into and through the spot where its head had been before the impact sent the thing flying with a sickening crack of metal gauntlet breaking whatever kind of jaw the thing had. It was airborne for around a second before it landed on the ground, and quickly sprung to its feet, various limbs flailing about as it turned, drawing its face back into a snarl as it registered its new opponent. Sventar strode forth, drawing his longsword with both hands over the body of the cleric, and settled into a low stance, ready for combat. It turned, still keeping its head locked on the warrior, but just as it took one step forward, one of the warhammer-wielding Honor Guard drove the great weapon into its gut, and just as it bent over, screaming in pain, the other Guard brought his weapon down onto the monstrosity's back.
    As the second hammer was brought down, the thud of metal on flesh sounded, and as the second scream sounded, Sventar saw the two warhammer-wielders draw back into the brush, dragging their weapons with them, and as he moved forward to engage the thing the other two Honor Guards leapt from the bush and locking their shields, they charged and pushed the thing towards Sventar.
    "So this is the monstrosity you have been hunting. Despicable thing." Sventar muttered, walking forward as his Guards moved and encircled the thing and himself inside the clearing they were in.
    It attempted to turn and run, and even though the two Guards that faced it moved to block its escape route with warhammer and sword and shield, an arrow flew out from the brush and ripped through the backwards-facing knee on his doglike leg, stopping with a sizeable distance between the head and the back of the leg-joint. The thing almost gave a howl, and actually did when the sword and shield-bearing Guard bashed it forward, and before it could right itself, the hammer-toting Guard brought his weapon up and to the monster, and as it was flung back Sventar stepped forward as his Honor Guard, with Rosseau stowing his bow and drawing trench knives moving to encircle the two of them.
    "What did you say this thing's name was? Daral?" Sventar asked casually, glancing at the figure of Sarae who pulled herself up to watch the battle. Just as his gaze returned to the monster, its furred paw came at him in an upwards strike.
    Sventar turned to the side, the blow passing harmlessly by him, and took the opportunity to make a stab at Daral's arm. The monster yelped in pain as it swung its arm sideways, clobbering him in the head, and a infernal stinging started up on his cheek as the moonlight illuminated blood on Daral's lionlike paw. Sventar brought up his mailed fist once more and struck his foe in the throat, and as Daral broke into a couging fit Sventar seized the moment and kicked at his chest, forcing him back more and the warrior brought up a great sideways swing which saw the tip of Sventar's longsword slice into Daral's chest. Just then, the Lamashtu worshipper drew up his head in a snarl.
    "Ha, you weakling! You think you can defeat me with just that weak scrap of metal? You've found a poor, deluded fool for a servant, sister!" called out Daral. Sventar was unimpressed with the veiled insult, and remained silent. Just then, his longsword's enchantment sparked back into life.
    "Hm. Seems there's some charge left after all." Sventar mused as the flames of his blade sprang and roared up into life. Within him, he felt the blade's enchantment feeding off him. It began to eat away at the remnants of the reserves where his energy used to reside, before he threw emotions at it. The lesser, useless and unsavory emotions like greed, lust, bigotry and pride were thrown at the enchantment, before his mind threw hate and rage into the hungry sink that the blade and its wreath of flames had become. Hate and Rage were useless. They burned idly, for no reason and no purpose. Now? All the warrior felt was contempt, and cold determination to see this thing, this monstrosity that called itself Daral laid low.
    He sprang forward, and as Daral brought up his falchion the blades met with the flame-encoating enchantment of Sventar's blade spilling upwards into the air. After a brief struggle, Sventar disengaged, using Daral's own strength to send the falchion swinging upwards. While their blades were up and to the right, Sventar drew back slightly, and recovered with a pirouette and a slash from the side, landing a second cut along Daral's ribcage. The brown-red blood of the monster sprayed out as it screamed and charged while the warrior drew back into a defensive state.
    Daral's strikes were wild and unpracticed, a stark contrast to Sventar's fluid defense which dispersed the force the monstrosity put into the blows into empty air. Daral's rage increased, before the monster let loose a feral howl, leaping straight at the warrior through the air with all the weight he carried. Sventar's hands darted at his foe, one hand grabbing at his collar and his closed fist coming up saw the stinking monstrosity flying over his head and into the ground. Sventar stood back and watched Daral stumble and wince his way up and to his feet. Sventar noted that the thing looked quite dazed.
    He decided to press this, and brought his fist up and again into its face with tremendous force. Daral stumbled backwards, hitting a tree, and then with a final shake of his scraggly head, the worshipper of Lamashtu again roared and charged at Sventar. The warrior dodged and ducked under swings and blows from the falchion and the furred paw alike, but though the warrior passed these blows aside, the worshipper of Lamashtu seemed only slightly tired from their fight.
    "WHY WON'T YOU DIE?" screamed the monstrosity, simply lunging forward at Sventar. The warrior dodged, and as the monstrosity lumbered forward, Sventar made two slashes to the silvery spines on his back and though they each did little to no damage, they no doubt hit nerves along the thing's back and Daral screamed in agony, turning around again to bring Sventar into his sight.
    The monster then made a swing at the warrior, and as the blades met and the two combatants' struggle pressed on at a much smaller scale, with muscle heaving on both sides, the battle was eventually won by the armoured warrior, and slowly the flaming longsword overpowered the falchion, sending it flying away and embedding itself in a tree.
    That was when Sventar pushed his foe back with brute force and slashed twice, leaving a deep cross-gash in his gut, and then he grabbed at Daral's neck, plunging his longsword into the Lamashtu worshipper's chest, and he felt his blade break through the man's body even as the flames along the blade burned and sizzled the flesh.
    As the monster howled, the warrior pushed the flame-wreathed flame down, cutting the wound larger and leaving Daral screaming, his limbs jerking and shuddering. And then Sventar ripped his longsword out, and felt plinks and splatters of murky, tainted ichor splatter the remnants of his armour.
    Sventar stepped back, and as Daral painfully muttered "That's much too big a hole to be in a man like me...".
    "A twisted 'man' you are. Milady," he said glancing at the figure of Sarae, who was still sitting over at the tree. "Do you wish me to end him, or does the goddess require his death to be by your hand?"
    "The Goddess has less to do with it than those in the ecclesiarchy. But I must kill him." Drawing a knife from a secondary sheath on her hip. Sarae walked forwards. Daral stared at her, eyes glowing malignantly. Pressing the blade into the flesh of Daral's throat, Sarae's eyes glared back coldly. "For your crimes against Sarenrae, you have been sentenced to death. Do you have anything to say?"
    "Choke on a thick one, sister. I hope you rot in Nerull's realm." The blade sliced across the creature's throat. His black ichor spewed through the air, splashing across Sarae's face. Falling to her knees with a pained cry, she tried her best to wipe the disguisting liquid from her eyes. Daral's body gurgled at her, a final strike back.
    Standing back up, Sarae stumbled from side to side. Everything looked black. Panic began to take hold of her. Passing a hand in front of her face, the cleric's stomach dropped.
    Though she could push past the pain in her face, her new blindness was more important. Sventar kicked the body onto its back as she slit his throat, but when she cried out in pain he whipped around to face his Liegelady. When she tried and failed to wipe away the ichor, and when she stared around blankly he moved forward. "Milady, are you alright?"
    Cupping her hand over her eyes, Sarae tried her best to follow Sventar's voice. "I... I cannot see." Her voice wavered a bit. Taking another step, the cleric tripped over something, falling face-first into the leaf-strewn ground. Sventar winced at his Liegelady's humiliation and walked forward, helping her up and wrapping his free arm around her shoulder. When it became abundantly clear that there was near no way that she could walk, he sheathed his sword and put his now-free right arm to the back of her legs, and as her knees crumpled he lifted her up to a comfortable hold for him.
    His Honor Guard did an admirable job of remaining silent, even if the humour of the small accident was seemingly multiplied by the release of the stress that the battle with that monstrosity had been. Sventar kept walking on with Sarae in his arms, and with his Honor Guard boxing him around, and with Rosseau at his side he walked on.
    They soon found a merchant on the road, his cart stuffed full. Sventar caught up to it, and as the brown-bearded and fez-wearing merchant turned around, stopping the oxen that pulled his cart.
    "Excuse me, will you carry this lady in your cart? She is tired from battle and injured in the eyes." he said, to which the merchant sneered.
    "And who are you to ask?" he asked. Sventar smirked behind his helmet.
    "I am Sventar, Grandmaster of the Rosenbridge Coliseum." Barely as soon as Sventar had finished saying that, the merchant blanched in shock, before his eyes lit up and a grin appeared on the merchant's face.
    "Sir, I will be most happy to comply with your request. Take what you wish from my humble stock, and I will happily transport you to the city!" he said, and as the Honor guard flanked the cart, Sventar set her down in the small amount of free space in the back. Rosseau hopped up, and started rummaging through the sacks. Eventually he found some medicinal ointment and with the help of his own cleaning-rag he began to clean away the mess in the Cleric's eyes.
    As his Captain tended to his Liegelady, Sventar advanced on as his Honor Guard marched on to Rosenbridge. Eventually, as Rosseau finished wiping away the irritating blood, Sarae reported that she could see once more, but everything was a great blur. Sventar nodded to himself at the revelation, and asking the merchant, the warrior learned that there were several alchemists and craftsmen which the merchant knew were more than capable of fashioning a set of glasses for the blinded woman.
    "I can do very well without glasses." said the cleric, ever-slight tones of hurt and offense creeping into Sventar's trained ears. Others may not have found the emotion hidden within her usual stoic deadpannings, but Sventar knew his Liegelady well.
    "The choice is not yours to make, milady. As soon as we arrive, I am commissioning a craftsman to make you a set of glasses." Sventar said absentmindedly, though not without steel.
    Trying carefully to sit still in the shaking caravan carriage, Sarae strained to see the approaching walls of Rosenbridge. With her impared vision, she felt naked, unprotected from the threats of the world. The closer the strange procession drew to the city proper, the louder the sounds of the city became. Closing her nearly useless eyes, the cleric paid attention to the noises. Children playing just outside the gates. Merchants hawking wares loudly in the streets. Sometimes, the sounds of druken brawls.
    In the back of her mind, the thoughts of her fight with Daral stewed. A part of herself knew it had to be done. The man had been a danger to everyone he came into contact. But every time she thought about how the battle went, her blood boiled. Though Daral had been a monster, she didn't want his death to be painful. Without Sventar's help, Sarae would have been taken again, but the agony they'd put Daral through angered her. The other part of her hated every single one of them.
    Changes in the wheel's rattles and a drop in the noise told her that the merchant's vehicle had entered the inner sections of the city. Following the roads with her mind's eye, Sarae knew when they neared the Coliseum. As it drew to a stop, the cleric hopped from the cart. Carefully balancing herself, she opened her eyes. Moving towards where she thought the doors were, the dark outline slowly solidified. Entering the building, she navigated the hallways more by memory than sight. Sarae found herself in her chambers soon enough. Stripping off the ruined remains of her armour, she sat down on her bed.
    Sventar walked around the side of the cart, dismissed the Honor Guard, letting them go off into the Coliseum's Gladiator Quarters, and he went up into the main building of it, and through into the Consul's chambers, where he saw Sarae sitting on the bed with her face twisted in a scowl. He made to walk forward and as he slipped off the scraps of beaten slag that was once his armour, and turned in his dirty, bloodied and generally ragged clothes to the cleric. Just as he faced her, he saw a blur of motion, and his head jerked back from the force of her punch.
Sventar dropped to one knee, more out of shock than from the pain of the actual blow. The thought of his Liegelady just hitting him like that was if anything, unbelievable. He got to his feet, quite slowly, to see Sarae almost glaring at him. Silently, he pleaded what he had done to deserve that.
    Fist trembling, Sarae tried to sort through the emotions muddling her mind. At this moment, she hated her companion. Without a shadow of a doubt, she knew that he could have broken Daral without hurting him that badly. What they had done was torture, and nothing less. Twisted though Daral had been, Sarae still loved him. Loved him in only the way that a sister can. And now, by her own hand, he was dead. Winding her fist back again, she hammered her fist forward into Sventar's chest, feeling the tiny, delicate bones in her hand crunch on contact.
    "Why... why would you... w-why would you..." Collapsing, Sarae wept into her hands. "I'm sorry," she whispered between sobs.
    "It was your mission, milady. I assisted in the only way I knew how. If you think I deserve punishment-" he paused, and as he drew his longsword from its sheath he knelt, offering the blade to her with his head bowed. He felt the blade lifted, then a small ting of wood on metal told him that his blade had been placed down on the small table at the foot of their bed. His head was lifted up, and briefly Sarae planted a kiss on his lips, before that degraded to simply the two of them, locking foreheads while Sarae tried to compose herself.
    Sventar broke it off, bringing his arms up and around to wrap her in a hug. She gladly accepted, diving into his chest and slightly wetting his shirt with her tears.
    "Put it this way, milady. Your task is complete. Our fight is over." with that, she nodded a little as the warrior put a hand to her leg to lift her up. As she was lifted up to Sventar's height, she raised her head to look up into his eyes. Through the open window in the room, the evening sun cast a golden light into the room and upon the two.
    "My task is complete. Our fight is over." she echoed, and the two shared a passionate kiss, at the heart of the base of the new world they would make for themselves.

Description
All was darkness. He had fallen through the dull, senseless shadow that eclipsed him so. It was then, just as he had collapsed down to the ground, with his armour nearly shredded, that he felt the hand of a god, pressing down upon him. He felt pressure almost like a physical weight crushing him downwards into the ground. His back itched, but he did not have the strength to scratch it. It was then that he felt something else grab him and pull him upwards.
He opened his eyes, nearly blinded by the light that came from everywhere, and he saw a blurred figure holding him up by the collar of his chainmail jerkin under his armour. Sventar blinked, and the figure cleared. It was Rosseau. Sventar heard nothing, but he saw Rosseau turn, and gesture to two other figures - his own Honor guard, Sventar realised with a jolt of memory, and the other two walked over and picked up his Liegelady and they went out of his sight. The sound of something soft depressing was heard, and just as a black-robed figure walked over, his Liegelady's light armour started hitting the floor.
The warrior looked with dazed eyes at his subordinate. Rosseau was thinking, in the midst of the hectic remains of a battle, and the bloody chaos of the killing field. Killing and fighting in any battle was easy, but thinking... Sventar was laid against a wall, and he could see his Liegelady being de-armoured by the black-robed figure and the light of healing magics flash against limestone walls. He closed his eyes and drifted off into a light slumber.

Sanli flared her magic again and again, trying to heal the battered body of the de-armoured woman on the infirmary bed. This was the lady Sarae, Consul of the Rosenbridge coliseum and the one that had admittedly saved their village. What she was thinking to come here randomly and casually fend off an undead attack on a relatively insignificant village, the nursemaid had no idea. But she was wounded and in relative safety, so she could be healed.
It was then that Lady Sarae awoke, with a gasp and a jolt upwards. The figure named Rosseau entered the room, and now he was sitting with his back to the wall on a chair nearby.
Rubbing feeling back into her tingling legs, Sarae tried to blink the darkness from her eyes. Deep inside her chest something felt wrong, hurting her when she moved. It didn't matter. Focusing on Sventar's second-in-command, she snapped out a question. "What's the status of the village at the moment?"
Rosseau smiled at the Consul's awakening. "The wall is stable, and the undead hordes have been fended off for the day. We were just in time, it seems." said the old veteran, re-sharpening one of his knives.
"Good. Now that we've got that under control, go get everyone to make proper defenses. The work is understandably shoddy."
"To be fair, they are only farmers and craftsmen of small hand-tools. Not trench-diggers. And with all due respect, neither you or Sir Sventar are going anywhere." he said, standing up with a rustle of leather armour and walked out the door. "I'll handle it!" he called back into the room as he left down the hallway.

Deciding not to bother fighting with her own forces, the cleric got up off the cot they'd placed her on. Rubbing her head, she shook the last lingering fuzz from her mind. Sarae turned to inspect the room. She let out a soft gasp, eyes lingering on the still, bleeding form of Sventar. Hurrying to his side, she took a look at what remained of his armour. Most of it had been bashed beyond what could be repaired by even the best smiths she knew. Massive lacerations covered his body, embedded with dirt and fragments of steel.
Magic failed to respond to her summons, the white glow of healing fizzling at the edge of her fingers. Stilling her mind as best she could, she began looking around for supplies. Whatever this village had before the attack, all of it had vanished by this time.

Sventar blinked, breathing in and out. He was asleep, feeling things run down his body. It was a small time before he realised that he was losing blood. Damn and blast it, he thought. He had heard voices, and someone said that they'll be back... He simply continued to breathe in and out. He was tired. Sleep would be good. A far deeper sleep than this...
He felt heat and light against his face, and he screwed his eyes. "Gah, that stings like a mother's bitch. Put it out." he had spoken before he realised that it had gone out long before he spoke.
The cleric frowned. She'd never known Sventar to curse before. Her frown deepened as she thought on it more. He had to be losing too much blood. The fact that he could talk at all was a miracle, but something had to change soon. Swallowing down her anxiety, Sarae slowly calmed down, and began to meditate on the Light. Almost instinctively, her hand reached out and grabed Sventar's. Just in case.
He felt something grab at his dried blood-crusted hand. Something warm. He decided not to go against it. Instead, in the tired state he was in, he turned his bleary thoughts to the undead. He felt his own head drop forward, and a tightening of the muscle across his face informed him that a deep-set scowl was in place. As if that facial expression was wrong. He had every right to make the worst expressions he could. If he would be up and about without these blasted injuries, he would be immediately going to where they would strike next.
He silently fumed. Blasted skeletal wretches got through his armour too many times. Sventar hoped his Honor Guard had survived the night. And the rest of the survivors.

Slowly, far too slowly for the cleric's taste, her magic power began to return to her. It felt like liquid gold filling up in her chest, some hallowed light to stave off the darkness of the undead around the desecrated village of Gerra's Vale.
Sventar lay on the ground, mumbling in the darkness of his sleep. The whole time, that small and seemingly fragile warmth clasped around his hand the whole time. Why did it feel so warm? Why was he simply sitting there? He blearily opened his eyes, and jammed them shut once the light glared down and into his eyes. Muttering a few choice curses, he lifted up the arm that the small warmth wasn't clasping and buried his face in it, attempting to shield his face from the light.
Using her body as a conduit for healing, Sarae forced her energy into Sventar's battered body. As minutes passed, his massive wounds slowly closed, leaving bright, angry-looking scars in their place. Renewed blood flowed through the drained veins, and his fatigue burned away. Keeping herself firmly centred, the cleric did not falter from her task. Assured that the defense of Gerra's Vale was being handled by the current Captain and Sventar's Honour Guard, her focus remained sharp.
Sventar felt tingling all over his body. But it wasn't a bad one. The heat spreading in lines through his flesh was a reassuring one. And slowly he felt a dull ache settle through him. One that echoed and rebounded off all of him, that reminded him again and again of his wounds. Beneath the gauntlet he had pressed against his face, he slowly opened his eyes. It was still all darkness, but as he moved his hand more and more light streamed in. Accompanying the change in his sight was intense pain. He blinked, and it was gone.
Dropping his hand down, metal armour not his own caught his eye. He looked at it, and saw that it was a slight but dented metal gauntlet, and it was the thing that was holding his hand. Sventar's eyes trailed up to see the white energy of healing magics swirling about, and with the energy swirling about her he saw his Liegelady Sarae. Healing him.
She finished in her task, the white healing energies dissipating and leaving the two sitting and kneeling in the room they were in. He reached up with his free hand and grabbed at his helmet, pulling it up and off his head, and with a clank and a clatter it bounced once off the stone of the floor and rolled to a halt. He turned his head to see his Liegelady looking at him with concerned and worried eyes. It was then which the warrior remembered the foul language that he had used in his unwakefulness.
"Milady, I apologise for any foul-mannered words that have passed out of my mouth." he said quickly, breaking the silence.
Though her armour made it awkward, she hugged Sventar as best she could. The fact that he'd made it to fight another day was all that mattered to her. "Don't apologize, Sventar." After a moment longer, she stood back up, and helped bring the warrior back to his feet. Sarae shook the fatigue from her mind one more time, and pointed to the door. "We should go see how the defenses are coming."

"Very well, milady." he said, twisting and clicking his back underneath his armour. He followed his lady on through the damaged halls of the school, and out into the wrecked courtyard. The sounds of the undead were gone, in its place only a mournful and bloody silence.
Sventar glanced around, looking at the place where he had destroyed so much. Briefly he wondered how an area so large could seem so small. Then again, it was easy to overlook distance from behind a pile of corpses. He looked to the botchedly repaired section of the wall, 'repaired' being him pushing a rock into position to block the hole, and briefly he wondered how the undead masses were so weak and disorganised.
Dismissing the massive pile of the undead put back to rest, the cleric walked closer to where they'd entered the village. Gerra's Vale had been small before, but the damage left by the undead would impact the town for years. Sarae eventually reached the town proper, where a massive barricade of sharpened wood impaled with sharp iron blocked their path. Rosseau poked his head above the barrier, and made some gesture to the people behind it. With a great deal of wheezing and grunting, he and a few of the townspeople pushed the barricade aside, allowing Sarae and Sventar entrance.
"Rosseau. How are the defenses coming on all sides?"

He puffed out his cheeks and made a gesture. "Slowly but surely, they're being patched up. Our arrival really boosted morale among these sods. Oh, and sir." he said, turning to Sventar. "I've found some potential recruits out of the survivors. Just stable and farm boys, but they took to blades quite well. We may consider signing this place up for a potential recruiting ground." he said, in businesslike tones, disregarding the knife he was sharpening in his hand, and making a small cut into his finger for it.
"Ow! But in all seriousness, I've had them strengthening the walls, and any able-bodied man, woman and child are taking up arms. I've had the elderly and the craftsmen making weapons, and the farmhands strengthening the wall. Your Honor Guard have been running raids into clusters of them. If we let them regroup and raise more corpses, they'll be swarming all over us. We need your holy fire, Lady Sarae." he said, looking up from his hand to her.

Sarae paused uncomfortably. "I cannot bring up any more of it. Not now. I used it in the defense earlier." Though her tone remained mtter-of-fact, it bothered her more than she let on. Deciding to move on from the subject, she asked another question. "Has anyone located a source of these Undead?"
Rosseau wet his lips to speak just as an authoritive-looking person walked up to the three, with two armed villagers beside him. "Mayor Kowarig. And I believe you just asked for the source?" Sarae nodded, and gestured for him to continue.
"The source of this blasted attack is the old burial site. A War that happened long ago, it's one of the subjects we teach at the school. My gratitude for defending it as well as you did. But that crypt held thousands of fallen soldiers. That's where they got all these-" he kicked a bone on the ground, and it clattered away. "That's most likely where all these skeletons are coming from. The ones that have rotted for a while have been here for some time, freshly dug up from the graveyard no doubt."
Kowarig kept on speaking about the town and the state of its defense until the Honor guard showed up. They were wounded slightly, and their armour scratched and dented, but they were still good for combat. Sventar nodded to them, noting no casualties among them and turned back to Rosseau.
"You stay here and keep organising the defence. We'll be going to assault this crypt." Sventar ordered, and Rosseau clashed a hand against his cuirass before getting up and turning to go to the defences.
Sventar strode forth past the wall being rebuilt, raising his shield and took up his longsword again, dented and battle-damaged though they both were. With his comrades and his Liegelady, he advanced forward into the corpse and bone-strewn ruins.

Eyes darting to every side as they advanced, they Cleric know that this was far from an opprotune time to engage the enemy. Battered and worn, none of them were in any shape to take the fight to the undead. As the path slowly muddied under their feet, miring their boots, she tried not to think of how badly they could fare. Sarae, with little to none of her magic, could only lend the strength of her arm. Sventar still didn't seem to know his limits, and that worried her more. Whatever necromancer could raise this many undead at once must be powerful indeed.

Far ahead, twisted trees, bare of limb or leaf, shook in the forlorn breeze. A small, wrought-iron fence, no doubt smithed by some man long dead, outlined the small area. That had to be the entrance to the crypt. The further along they walked, the more Sarae could feel the pressure of corruption pressing down on her. Things could only get worse.

Sventar walked on, tired from his wounds, tired from the previous fight, tired from the fatigue one acquired travelling unprepared and already exhausted, and the sheer ungodly rotting decay of the place which hammered at him almost like a physical force. He barely could lift up a shield-wielding hand to push the gate open gently, instead his hand smacked into it, and the wrought iron bars clanged against the edges of their railings before shaking themselves free of the rotting moss that had grown upon them. Sventar noted that there was even more rot, all over the place. Perhaps his Liegelady would purge this place with holy flame once the summoner of these undead was disposed of.

Sventar walked in, and Zombies, this time enarmoured with chainmail and rags charged at them from the gray and cracked tombstones that lay in row around the iron-topped limestone walls of the cemetery. He walked forward, out into the space so that his companions could move into the courtyard as well. Taking up a battle stance again, to say nothing of shaking off fatigue, he got down to a stable position and got as ready for combat as he could be.

Fending off a sudden blow from a jawless monstrosity, the cleric realized that she had no weapon suitable for this. With no flesh to bleed from, what skeleton would die by her sword? Shoving the thoughts aside, she threw herself into the foray. Her small shield blocked slow, heavy-handed blows from the silent, creaking abberations. Using her sword as a bone-breaker, Sarae snapped ribs and severed legs, cutting through their old sinew as easily as any blooded creature.

Piles of bone littered the ground as more of the undead were laid to rest. Bone and rusted sword fragments crunched and snapped underfoot as the warriors pushed even further into the heart of the building. A sepulchral stench carried on the breeze, sweeping over them as they grew closer to inner chambers of the crypt. Though it sucked the strength from her limbs, Sarae knew they were getting closer. Once they killed whatever foul master had brought these wretches back to unlife, they would return to dust.

Sventar advanced into the stinking crypt and further into a small room almost like an entrance hall. Surprisingly, there were no more undead, only an increase in the foul stench that emanated from wherever it had come from. The warrior walked on through a hall draped with rotting grey and brown banners, and the walls splattered with bloodstains, but no bodies were to be seen. The warrior presumed that the Necromancers had harvested all fresh corpses of whichever poor souls were here before the attack. Sventar could only pray for their souls' safety in the afterlife.
They walked through a hallway lined with a bloodied red rug, and came up to a chapel in which multiple statues for the Pantheons of the Gods and Godesses lay broken and when they were not, on their sides or defaced and graffitied. Not surprisingly, the statue to Urgathoa remained spotless. Sventar hurriedly placed the remains of the statuette to Sarenrae up better in it position, and touched his head to the top of the statue. For luck, for faith, he knew not. Sventar simply did. And five sounds behind him as he advanced past it indicated that his companions had in some way made their small actions unto the remains of the statue.
Sventar continued on, lowered slightly and shield raised, leading the way down a narrow side-corridor with his shoulderplates' edges barely an inch from the walls.

They moved on through a series of tunnels and hallways, until they came to a spacious room, a dirt-floored and bone-strewn tunnel entrance in the floor guarded by a group of skeletons. Sventar charged, crushing apart two and from the sounds of metal on metal and eventually metal on bone showed that his companions moved and eliminated the rest of the undead abominations within the room. Sventar took steps forward over the broken skeletons and stood at the rim of the pit. Briefly he paused, blanching under his helmet at the appaling stench coming from the tunnel. Then the Grandmaster walked down into the pit with shield raised, longsword ready and once more leading the way through a tunnel, although this time instead of the blood-splattered hallways of the crypt's chapel it was along the earthen walls of the tunnel. And omnipresent was that damned stench. Sventar ignored it and kept walking.

The tunnel led them to a small cavern dug out by no doubt skeletal hands. The air within was quite unlike that of the tunnel and the crypt; this one was damp and earthen, and with a nearly distinct sense of sorrow and misery. This was the upturning of a whole burial site. A burial site composed of the hundreds of these old spirits that made every shadow a bottomless chasm, every breeze the hiss of an arrow or spell flying at them. Even as Sventar advanced forward into dark fog, and his companions followed, hobbling in, out and over ditches no doubt filled by corpses in a group towards the center of the cavern.
They advanced, and as they got to the point where none of them could see the edges of the cavern due to the thick fog, they all felt the ground drop out from underneath them. As they hit the dirt floor, their armour clattered and rang. Just as the mist dissipated, and the warriors looked up to the rim of the pit to see ethereal purple lights spring up into existence, illuminating the pit, the cavern and the caster.
Sventar studied the necromancer in the blink of an eye. Black robes, tome in hand, necromancy magics swirling about his free hand. Fit the description of a Necromancer perfectly. Even as clatters sounded from around the warriors, and thirteen skulls brimming with purple and black necromantic energy rose from the piles, and sunk themselves into the walls. The piles clattered some more, and it was when Skeletons started to rise from them that the warriors noticed that the piles were all bone. And their summoner was right above them. Sventar quietly cursed, and his foul language was missed amongst the creaks and groans of the skeletons' bones.

The warriors launched into the fight, and unlike previously they fought while conserving their energy. None of the gladiators knew how long they may be fighting for. Although the first few skeletons were cleaved or broken apart, some did manage to get through and tie down the two of his Honor Guard that had wielded warhammers. Sventar bashed with his shield sparingly, knowing that while the skeleton hordes were unarmed and relatively weak, he couldn't let them get an opening. By no means would they find him wanting.
More arose even as Sventar smacked them back into fragments. It did no good that their summoner was standing right above them, at the lip of the very pit.

"You, the sources of my troubles, have driven me too far." he began to say, in between phrases in some Necromantic tongue which rose more skeletons from the dwindling mass of bones that circled the warriors inside the pit. "That village was mine for the taking!"
Sventar smacked apart another skeleton before looking up at the rim. "Why would you do this? Who are you to cause such destruction?"
The Necromancer hit Sventar with a cold glance. "I am the solution."
Then he heard a clatter of bone behind him, and the last of the skeletons was smashed into fragments. "Whatever solution you hope to apply, It is worth the destruction of that village?"
"What is it to you?" The necromancer asked, seeming to be dismissively curious.
Sventar lifted up his visor and spat out acidic-tasting saliva before slamming it back into place with a crash. "It is another place which is under attack which I must defend!" he said, idly backhanding a skeleton into pieces, then looking back up to the rim of the pit.
The necromancer chuckled, before forming the purple and black energy into a blade of some kind, and with his free hand wrapping that same energy around Sventar and yanking him up from the pit and hurling him off into the empty cavern floor. "You have amused me. Come, test this flesh!"

Sventar fell on the other side of the pit, and after righting himself and regaining breath in his lungs the warrior noted that the weight of his tower shield was gone. Though he clasped his right hand, and within he felt the familiar grip of his longsword's handle. Blearily he opened his eyes and sat up, the remnants of his armour creaking, and with weakened legs he got back up and raised himself for combat once again.
The Necromancer stood, with that blade of dark energy in hand and waited for Sventar to get ready. The warrior squared off with the necromancer, and as their blades met, Sventar's longsword ignited with flame, combatting the swirling and arcing darkness that rose from the Necromancer's blade. Then the two pushed off against one another and landed some distance apart. The Grandmaster decided to take the initiative, and charged. A surprise attack was seemingly expected by the robed combatant, but to face it in the brutal yet organised manner that Sventar attacked was an entirely different matter. Their blades clashed and clanged, with Sventar more often than not pressing the assault.
Finally, with the robed wizard suffering a slash to his unguarded hand, and while the man's guard was dropped Sventar brought up his mailed gauntlet and delivered a heavy blow with his free left hand into the aged necromancer's face. A disgusting crack was heard, and as the Necromancer's blade of energy dissipated, Sventar advanced and placed his boot on the wizened sorcerer's chest and the tip of his blade to the man's forehead.

Then, with a final effort, Sventar pushed downwards, and sunk the blade in through the Necromancer's head. With a squelch, the man stopped breathing, life fading from his eyes, and the swirling purple and black energy dissipated. Just for good measure, the warrior drew back his blade and beheaded the necromancer. As the man died and Sventar wiped his dirtied blade on the black robes, the sounds of battle inside the pit quietened, then with one final smack stopped. It seemed like the battle here was over. For the short term, at least.
Sventar walked to the edge, then glanced down into the pit where the sound of battle had once resounded from. Now, however, he saw his Honor Guard and his Liegelady knee deep in bone fragments and the few broken fragments of the weak swords the undead masses had somehow acquired. Just as he knelt down to inspect the distance between the edge and the floor of the pit, it started to rise up and soon his warriors were brought up to the floor of the cavern once more.
He nodded to his companions. "I think... I think we had best return to the village. We can fight little more this day." And with that, they turned and left the cavern, and went
out through the stinking tunnel, up and through the crypt until they finally came out and into the murky afternoon air. He guessed that he acclimated to the stench of the crypt.

They moved out and through the gate, and eventually they reached the village and then after a short walk along the forested path, they arrived back in the ruins of the village. The skeletons they encountered now seemed to fight among one another as often as they would co-operate to take down roving groups of the townspeoples' militia. Soon they once again arrived at the defensive walls, which seemed to have been heavily reinforced with converging layers of heavy brick and now looked like they could withstand a great deal of punishment. The warriors followed the path that went around the new, guarded section of the village and went through the metal portcullis and heavy wooden gate. Within there were craftsmen and soldiers bustling everywhere. But as soon as Sventar and Sarae with their Honor Guard walked on through, the various groups present at the gate noticed them and cheered. They walked up the cobbled road to a courtyard where they spotted Rosseau around a central table with Mayor Kowarig, as well as several other important-looking folk. Catching sight of the six warriors advancing, he dismissed the people and walked forward.

"Greetings Sir, Lady Consul." he made a salute that encompassed them both before resuming his usual stance. "I've got the defences well and truly sorted. We've repelled about half a dozen small assaults since you left. Whatever you did, it worked." The man then paused in his statement to smile at the two in congratulations.
"Go get some rest. You've earned it. I've got everything well in order here." With that, he waved in a direction, and the warrior and the cleric's heads turned, following the Captain's direction to the sight of a bunch of buildings that had been hastily erected for the civilian survivors which couldn't help with the defense.

Sventar nodded, and turned to his Guards. "Go and rest as best you can, then when you are fully rested rejoin under the Captain's command. Dismissed." he said to the four, and they clashed hands over the remains of their cuirasses before turning and leaving in their separate directions. Just as a wave of tiredness hit him, he saw Sarae go forth, tugging at his arm to follow. He did his best, and eventually he made it up the stairs to the huts. Sarae kept dragging him on by the arm, and Sventar swore that he saw some of the schoolchildren from that ruined place amongst all the other villagers. All of them were staring as he tried and somewhat failed to let his fatigue and wounds show, to say nothing of the state of his armour.
The Cleric opened a door for him, and the Warrior barely managed to stumble inside with both tiredness and his wounds sapping at his legs' integrity, and it was when she closed the door that he lost all semblance of strength and collapsed do the ground, and a few fragments of metal from the remains of his armour clinked to the floor. He let the gut-links take all of his upper body weight, even as they creaked ever so slightly. He sat there, with his head bowed and barely holding himself up with one arm off the ground, and his knee an inch away from being on a level height with his forehead. Sventar drew in pained gasps, the full pain of his wounds hitting him now with the fury of the gods. He bent his head downwards, and his helmet dropped and clattered to the floor, leather straps worn and steel dented and scratched all over.

Though her own remaining strength began to flag, the cleric took a deep breath and centred herself. Grabbing Sventar's pauldrons, she heaved with all her might, slowly dragging him to the wall. Sarae's muscles burned with the effort, and the wood floor of the temporary shelter bore scars of his passage, but she managed to prop Sventar against the wall. Her hands fumbled the many buckles and fastenings of the nearly destroyed breastplate, slipping it off after a few minutes of tearing at it.
Placing a hand on Sventar's chest, Sarae dragged a spell from her mind. One so old she'd never thought to use it before. One so dangerous, it could have killed her if she tried. Forcing her will to do her bidding, she focused it on the many wounds inflicted on Sventar. Some were only blunt force trauma, but others were massive laceration and re-opened wounds from his earlier fight.
Weariness infused Sarae's very bones. The usual white glow of her magic had been replaced with a deep, sanguine light. Sventar's wounds began to heal, while underneath her breastplate they were inflicted on Sarae. By taking his injuries unto herself, she could help him. Sarae's hands trembled and her vision grew pitch-dark. Only the thud of wood against her head told her she could take no more.
Pain blotted out anything else she might have thought. Mouth clenched shut, she refused to utter a noise. This had been her choice, her action, and she would see it, and its consequences through to the end.
    The warrior opened his eyes, to see his wounds healed and his Liegelady collapsed on the floor, and blood leaking from under her armour told him what he feared. He stepped forward, features frozen in shock. She couldn't, she wouldn't have done such a thing. But his dreaded suspicious became all too true as he unclasped and unbuckled her armour plates, and when the bloodied chain mail and the shirt she wore underneath was laid aside, he saw what he had feared. By some kind of sorcery, she had taken his wounds and transplanted them onto her own body. He knelt down to try and inspect the wounds better.
    To him and his bulk, a gash three inches across and half an inch deep was near nothing. He had more than enough to compensate for any wounds suffered to his own body, but to the slighter woman they were quite severe. He leant down, and placed a hand to the side of her head, calling her name a few times. When she did not respond, he shook her by the head lightly and tried again.
    On his third attempt, and with a now-panicked calling of her name, her eyelids fluttered open, in and her eyes betrayed the great pain she was in. Sventar lost himself despite his instincts and training, and dropped his head to rest on her shoulder.
    "Milady... why would you do such a thing..." he asked of nothing, slight amounts of tears escaping his eyes. "Fool. Hopeless, pitiful fool." He said, cradling her head in his hand.
    Some time passed, and she gained the strength to murmur somehow. It then hit how stupid he had been, simply kneeling by his Liegelady while she bled out. He got up, strapped his chestplate back on and walked outside, looking around for a healer. Once he was outside, he saw a group of them working on a few rows of the wounded. He walked over, and asked for anyone who would take a slight detour from their work here. A lady by name of Roseanna, who had healing ointments, and thread and needle in hand, and Sventar showed her over to the hut in which his Liegelady lay.
    Roseanna clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. By no stretch did this look good. Carefully pulling thicker thread from a small pouch on her hip, the healer threaded her needle. Hands steady from years of practise on foolish hunters caught by something stronger than prey, the woman began sealing up the massive wounds on the cleric's body. Slowly, the bloodflow stemmed from each of the large wounds. Smearing yellow-tinged ointments across the raw flesh, Roseanna inspected her work. With luck, and maybe a bit of magic, Sarae would live. Bowing to her companion, the healer left the two. She had others to tend to.
    Sarae felt no pain from her damage. Whatever herbs had been in those ointments, they had leeched feeling from every part of her. Exhaustion she'd stolen from Sventar stilled her limbs and glued her eyelids shut. She would live. She would not fall here. With that thought, she let out a contented sigh. In a day, she could use her holy magic to help herself, then the rest of Gerra's Vale.
    The healer left, and Sventar closed the door. Immediately he turned and walked back over to the wounded lady on the floor. He knelt, scooped up Sarae by her back and her knees, lifted her partially unconscious body and placed her down on the dingy bed in the shack. Pulling at the straps, clasps and buckles, he soon disengaged her armour and placed it to the side. Collapsing in the chair beside her bed, he placed his hand over hers and leant back, pressing his chin into his chest and falling into light sleep.
    Hours passed, and when the Cleric woke fully, a pale, wan moon hung low on the horizon. Stretching her jaws with a yawn, she flexed her muscles, testing which ones still worked properly, and those that still needed time to heal. Sarae pushed herself into a sitting position, and yawned once more. Her stomach growled quietly, empty from the day without food. Putting that out of her mind, Sarae turned and gently shook Sventar from his sleep. "Wake up."
    He felt a hand shake him, and he jolted awake, just as pain flared up again. Opening his eyes, he saw his Liegelady sitting up. Lifting himself up from his seated position and stretching cramped and tired muscles, he turned to face his Liegelady once more. "I am awake, milady. How may I serve?"
    Taking a hold of Sventar's hand, Sarae thought back to Gerra's Vale.  With the new defenses the townspeople helped build, and with the desctruction of the necromancer, there was little left to do with direct defense of the village. "Is there anything else that needs to be done? We still never found out exactly why that Necromancer was here, did we?"
    Sventar shook his head. "No, we did not. But he is disposed of now. And that is all I think matters. I suggest that we get Rosseau and the Guard and get back to Rosenbridge. He may have found some new recruits among these villagers." he added the last phrase, almost as an afterthought. Seeing the Cleric slightly frowning in dissappointment, no doubt, he elaborated, trying to make his thinking sound better than the grim light his words cast.
"Put it this way. We have found a stable recruiting ground. However, it is a pity that there are no wilder beasts or threats to this place. Not that I wish any harm upon the innocents, but potential recruits would be better if they had to fight for their survival." he mused, glancing at his battle-scratched and dented Longsword.
    Though it made sense, Sarae didn't agree with it. Swinging her legs to the side, she wobbled out of her sickbed. Regardless of her own personal state, all of the Gladiators had business back in Rosenbridge. "We should leave, Sventar."
    He snapped his head back up and sheathed his longsword, and the disturbing fact that his shield was missing was more apparent than ever. Sventar tried to shrug off the feeling, but it came back up and gnawed at his conscience. That shield had preserved him through most of his fighting life. And now, facing the undead, it was gone. With a great effort, he tried to shove it to the back of his mind.
    "Very well. Lead on, I shall follow. Rosseau should be around somewhere." he said and as Sarae sat down to slip on her greaves again, an old idea came to his head again. He leant down, picked up her chest and back plates and walked back over. Just as she leant down to fasten on the straps on the pieces of leg-armour, he placed the backplate on her again, and just as she leant up he handed her the chestplate, unable to keep a small grin off his face.
    Shaking her head, the cleric couldn't supress a grin of her own. Fastening the steel plates together, Sarae stretched once more. The stinging in her side flared up. Hands glowing with the soft white light of healing magic, she closed the wounds in her body, bringing what pain she had left to nothing more than a dull throb. Tapping Sventar on the shoulder to make sure he was ready to go, she exited the small room.
    Outside, a chill night wind whispered through the remnants of Gerra's Vale. The few people about looked exhausted. Turning to Sventar, Sarae gestured around. "Well. Where do you think the rest of the Honour Guard would be?"
    Sventar looked around, the wind flowing under his ruined armour and cutting away at the heat and the pain of his wounds. Disregarding the red-hot throb, he looked to his Liegelady and answered "Knowing them and Rosseau, he's likely posted them in the place which has the highest possibility of attack. That would likely be on the north-" Sventar broke off, seeing the few villagers congregating around the square. He glanced at his Liegelady, jerking his head down at the sight, and the two of them saw that the Honor Guard, as well as Rosseau, were being helped to the square, with a mule being led along. From what he could see, the mule was loaded with sacks and bags, and the villagers were filling said bags with the pitiful few things they had as a reward. Sventar glanced over, and saw that his Liegelady was already making his way down to the plaza. Shrugging, he decided to follow on.
    Jogging up to the throng, Sarae looked over everything. The mule's bulging backs had been stuffed to the brim with whatever supplies or rewards they could spare after the attack. Though accepting such a thing from them made Sarae feel dirty, she wouldn't refuse. For as much damage as had been done to the town, the Gladiators still needed to finish other things back in Rosenbridge. Waving to get Rosseau's attention, Sarae spoke over the low murmur coming from the villagers. "We're leaving. Get whatever you need and be back on the road to Rosenbridge in five minutes."
    Leaving them all to their preparations, the cleric headed towards the reinforced exit from Gerra's Vale. Whatever distance she gained on them by leaving first could no doubt be made up. She planned to be back in Rosenbridge by dawn. After leaving the confines of the barriers, Sarae slowly drew her scimitar. These roads would be dubious, even in daylight, this far away from anywhere else. At night, they were an accident waiting to happen.
    The warrior glanced at the form of the cleric passing through the barriers, and then back to his Guards and also Rosseau, who was playfully fending off a dreamy-eyed woman. Once each of them had made eye contact with their Grandmaster, they nodded and turned, taking up their shields and swords once again. Rosseau gave a kiss to his admirer, and as they advanced forth from the gate in the stone wall and forward out into the ruins of the city.
    The Captain himself had the reins of their mule, and the Honor Guard advanced in a box formation around the ladened animal while Sventar led the group along the wrecked road, kicking debris out of the way as the group advanced. They moved on, and with the setting sun gently toasting them in their armour they left the ruins of Gerra's Vale and advanced out along the cobble road.
    Later afterwards, when the sun had disappeared beneath the horizon and yet still illuminating the clouds above with a golden orange hue the soldiers kept on walking along a dust-ridden cobble road. As they advanced with their armour cooling off from its earlier toasting, the warrior heard a trundling and the clattering of mules' hooves on cobblestone. Just as they came up to a torch-lit signpost, an aged man leading on a snorting and whinnying mule, trailing a cart piled high with junk, made his way into the torch's light.
    The old peddler dropped to his knees, gasping for breath. When he stopped and recovered, his bones creaking as the old man straightened up.
    "Sirs, I have seen a terrible monstrosity! It was going that way, and it was unlike anything I have ever seen!" he said, in a slight eastern accent.
    Sventar narrowed his eyes behind his helmet. "Was there an armoured woman heading in that direction?" To his shock, the peddler nodded. Without preamble, Sventar began running, in full armour. The crashing of his Honor Guard running to keep pace reached him, before Rosseau's hand clapped his shoulder and pulled him back a little.
    "What the hell are you doing, sir?" Rosseau had asked, with the tired mule snorting and whining in pain from the sudden exertion. The warrior shook himself, and common sense returned, with tactical thinking and stratagem accompanying it.
    "Guards, advance and flank the road in the brush. Ambush tactics. A priority target is ahead, and hopefully the Lady Consul has managed to stall it, at least. Move out, be silent. Rosseau, leave that mule somewhere and join the right flank. I'll move to the left. Gladiators, let's move. Our Liegelady needs assistance. Let none find us wanting."

    Far ahead, the Arena Consul lived up to none of those expectations. Back flush up against a tree, scimitar shattered, a twisted, malformed creature poked at her with a falchion. Long, thick mats of hair tangled over his face, shadowing his features. From between the few spaces that showed, a red and yellow eye glowed with some sick, inner light. Hard spines jutted up from his misshapen spine at odd angles, shining silver in the soft moonlight. Twisting the falchion underneath Sarae's armour plates, a grumbling laugh tore from his throat, sounding more like gravel rolling down a hill than anything else. His other, scaled arm tapped the bark on the tree by Sarae's head, black talons sinking into the soft tree-flesh easily.
    "Well, well. I knew you were gullible, Sarae. But I didn't think you were stupid enough to fall for the same sort of trick twice. Who thought you'd travel alone more than once?" Swapping the falchion to his black-scaled arm, the freakish creature wrapped his other hand around the cleric's throat, slowly choking the life from her. Eyes glowing brighter as he watched the light begin to fade from her eyes, he laughed again. "Oh, yes. And this time I can promise you," he leaned close enough for Sarae to smell his putrid breath. A too-sweet stench of rotting meat and the stomach-turning scent of fresh bodies. His face grew even closer, breath tickling the cleric's ear. "We will not be interrupted." The mad creature's tongue darted out, slurping across his captive's face.
    Releasing her windpipe, the monstrosity's visage lit up with a sick smile. Sarae coughed, forcing as much air into her lungs as she could. "You will pay for this, Daral." Daral laughed again, backhanding the cleric with a furred arm. She spun to the ground with a sharp crack. Though the force hadn't broken her neck, she lay stunned. Straddling the prone form, his doglike leg on one side, and his carapaced leg on the other, Daral wriggled his taloned left hand. The woman's armour parted easily around the black claws, peeling away with a few tugs on the shattered edges. Tracking down his property after she had been liberated last time deserved punishment. The scars from his last visit still stood out lividly on her flesh. Apparently, they hadn't taught her the lesson intended.
    "I won't pay for anything. Who will stop me, sister?"
    "Me." Just as the monstrosity jerked its head around, Sventar powered his gauntleted fist forward, and into and through the spot where its head had been before the impact sent the thing flying with a sickening crack of metal gauntlet breaking whatever kind of jaw the thing had. It was airborne for around a second before it landed on the ground, and quickly sprung to its feet, various limbs flailing about as it turned, drawing its face back into a snarl as it registered its new opponent. Sventar strode forth, drawing his longsword with both hands over the body of the cleric, and settled into a low stance, ready for combat. It turned, still keeping its head locked on the warrior, but just as it took one step forward, one of the warhammer-wielding Honor Guard drove the great weapon into its gut, and just as it bent over, screaming in pain, the other Guard brought his weapon down onto the monstrosity's back.
    As the second hammer was brought down, the thud of metal on flesh sounded, and as the second scream sounded, Sventar saw the two warhammer-wielders draw back into the brush, dragging their weapons with them, and as he moved forward to engage the thing the other two Honor Guards leapt from the bush and locking their shields, they charged and pushed the thing towards Sventar.
    "So this is the monstrosity you have been hunting. Despicable thing." Sventar muttered, walking forward as his Guards moved and encircled the thing and himself inside the clearing they were in.
    It attempted to turn and run, and even though the two Guards that faced it moved to block its escape route with warhammer and sword and shield, an arrow flew out from the brush and ripped through the backwards-facing knee on his doglike leg, stopping with a sizeable distance between the head and the back of the leg-joint. The thing almost gave a howl, and actually did when the sword and shield-bearing Guard bashed it forward, and before it could right itself, the hammer-toting Guard brought his weapon up and to the monster, and as it was flung back Sventar stepped forward as his Honor Guard, with Rosseau stowing his bow and drawing trench knives moving to encircle the two of them.
    "What did you say this thing's name was? Daral?" Sventar asked casually, glancing at the figure of Sarae who pulled herself up to watch the battle. Just as his gaze returned to the monster, its furred paw came at him in an upwards strike.
    Sventar turned to the side, the blow passing harmlessly by him, and took the opportunity to make a stab at Daral's arm. The monster yelped in pain as it swung its arm sideways, clobbering him in the head, and a infernal stinging started up on his cheek as the moonlight illuminated blood on Daral's lionlike paw. Sventar brought up his mailed fist once more and struck his foe in the throat, and as Daral broke into a couging fit Sventar seized the moment and kicked at his chest, forcing him back more and the warrior brought up a great sideways swing which saw the tip of Sventar's longsword slice into Daral's chest. Just then, the Lamashtu worshipper drew up his head in a snarl.
    "Ha, you weakling! You think you can defeat me with just that weak scrap of metal? You've found a poor, deluded fool for a servant, sister!" called out Daral. Sventar was unimpressed with the veiled insult, and remained silent. Just then, his longsword's enchantment sparked back into life.
    "Hm. Seems there's some charge left after all." Sventar mused as the flames of his blade sprang and roared up into life. Within him, he felt the blade's enchantment feeding off him. It began to eat away at the remnants of the reserves where his energy used to reside, before he threw emotions at it. The lesser, useless and unsavory emotions like greed, lust, bigotry and pride were thrown at the enchantment, before his mind threw hate and rage into the hungry sink that the blade and its wreath of flames had become. Hate and Rage were useless. They burned idly, for no reason and no purpose. Now? All the warrior felt was contempt, and cold determination to see this thing, this monstrosity that called itself Daral laid low.
    He sprang forward, and as Daral brought up his falchion the blades met with the flame-encoating enchantment of Sventar's blade spilling upwards into the air. After a brief struggle, Sventar disengaged, using Daral's own strength to send the falchion swinging upwards. While their blades were up and to the right, Sventar drew back slightly, and recovered with a pirouette and a slash from the side, landing a second cut along Daral's ribcage. The brown-red blood of the monster sprayed out as it screamed and charged while the warrior drew back into a defensive state.
    Daral's strikes were wild and unpracticed, a stark contrast to Sventar's fluid defense which dispersed the force the monstrosity put into the blows into empty air. Daral's rage increased, before the monster let loose a feral howl, leaping straight at the warrior through the air with all the weight he carried. Sventar's hands darted at his foe, one hand grabbing at his collar and his closed fist coming up saw the stinking monstrosity flying over his head and into the ground. Sventar stood back and watched Daral stumble and wince his way up and to his feet. Sventar noted that the thing looked quite dazed.
    He decided to press this, and brought his fist up and again into its face with tremendous force. Daral stumbled backwards, hitting a tree, and then with a final shake of his scraggly head, the worshipper of Lamashtu again roared and charged at Sventar. The warrior dodged and ducked under swings and blows from the falchion and the furred paw alike, but though the warrior passed these blows aside, the worshipper of Lamashtu seemed only slightly tired from their fight.
    "WHY WON'T YOU DIE?" screamed the monstrosity, simply lunging forward at Sventar. The warrior dodged, and as the monstrosity lumbered forward, Sventar made two slashes to the silvery spines on his back and though they each did little to no damage, they no doubt hit nerves along the thing's back and Daral screamed in agony, turning around again to bring Sventar into his sight.
    The monster then made a swing at the warrior, and as the blades met and the two combatants' struggle pressed on at a much smaller scale, with muscle heaving on both sides, the battle was eventually won by the armoured warrior, and slowly the flaming longsword overpowered the falchion, sending it flying away and embedding itself in a tree.
    That was when Sventar pushed his foe back with brute force and slashed twice, leaving a deep cross-gash in his gut, and then he grabbed at Daral's neck, plunging his longsword into the Lamashtu worshipper's chest, and he felt his blade break through the man's body even as the flames along the blade burned and sizzled the flesh.
    As the monster howled, the warrior pushed the flame-wreathed flame down, cutting the wound larger and leaving Daral screaming, his limbs jerking and shuddering. And then Sventar ripped his longsword out, and felt plinks and splatters of murky, tainted ichor splatter the remnants of his armour.
    Sventar stepped back, and as Daral painfully muttered "That's much too big a hole to be in a man like me...".
    "A twisted 'man' you are. Milady," he said glancing at the figure of Sarae, who was still sitting over at the tree. "Do you wish me to end him, or does the goddess require his death to be by your hand?"
    "The Goddess has less to do with it than those in the ecclesiarchy. But I must kill him." Drawing a knife from a secondary sheath on her hip. Sarae walked forwards. Daral stared at her, eyes glowing malignantly. Pressing the blade into the flesh of Daral's throat, Sarae's eyes glared back coldly. "For your crimes against Sarenrae, you have been sentenced to death. Do you have anything to say?"
    "Choke on a thick one, sister. I hope you rot in Nerull's realm." The blade sliced across the creature's throat. His black ichor spewed through the air, splashing across Sarae's face. Falling to her knees with a pained cry, she tried her best to wipe the disguisting liquid from her eyes. Daral's body gurgled at her, a final strike back.
    Standing back up, Sarae stumbled from side to side. Everything looked black. Panic began to take hold of her. Passing a hand in front of her face, the cleric's stomach dropped.
    Though she could push past the pain in her face, her new blindness was more important. Sventar kicked the body onto its back as she slit his throat, but when she cried out in pain he whipped around to face his Liegelady. When she tried and failed to wipe away the ichor, and when she stared around blankly he moved forward. "Milady, are you alright?"
    Cupping her hand over her eyes, Sarae tried her best to follow Sventar's voice. "I... I cannot see." Her voice wavered a bit. Taking another step, the cleric tripped over something, falling face-first into the leaf-strewn ground. Sventar winced at his Liegelady's humiliation and walked forward, helping her up and wrapping his free arm around her shoulder. When it became abundantly clear that there was near no way that she could walk, he sheathed his sword and put his now-free right arm to the back of her legs, and as her knees crumpled he lifted her up to a comfortable hold for him.
    His Honor Guard did an admirable job of remaining silent, even if the humour of the small accident was seemingly multiplied by the release of the stress that the battle with that monstrosity had been. Sventar kept walking on with Sarae in his arms, and with his Honor Guard boxing him around, and with Rosseau at his side he walked on.
    They soon found a merchant on the road, his cart stuffed full. Sventar caught up to it, and as the brown-bearded and fez-wearing merchant turned around, stopping the oxen that pulled his cart.
    "Excuse me, will you carry this lady in your cart? She is tired from battle and injured in the eyes." he said, to which the merchant sneered.
    "And who are you to ask?" he asked. Sventar smirked behind his helmet.
    "I am Sventar, Grandmaster of the Rosenbridge Coliseum." Barely as soon as Sventar had finished saying that, the merchant blanched in shock, before his eyes lit up and a grin appeared on the merchant's face.
    "Sir, I will be most happy to comply with your request. Take what you wish from my humble stock, and I will happily transport you to the city!" he said, and as the Honor guard flanked the cart, Sventar set her down in the small amount of free space in the back. Rosseau hopped up, and started rummaging through the sacks. Eventually he found some medicinal ointment and with the help of his own cleaning-rag he began to clean away the mess in the Cleric's eyes.
    As his Captain tended to his Liegelady, Sventar advanced on as his Honor Guard marched on to Rosenbridge. Eventually, as Rosseau finished wiping away the irritating blood, Sarae reported that she could see once more, but everything was a great blur. Sventar nodded to himself at the revelation, and asking the merchant, the warrior learned that there were several alchemists and craftsmen which the merchant knew were more than capable of fashioning a set of glasses for the blinded woman.
    "I can do very well without glasses." said the cleric, ever-slight tones of hurt and offense creeping into Sventar's trained ears. Others may not have found the emotion hidden within her usual stoic deadpannings, but Sventar knew his Liegelady well.
    "The choice is not yours to make, milady. As soon as we arrive, I am commissioning a craftsman to make you a set of glasses." Sventar said absentmindedly, though not without steel.
    Trying carefully to sit still in the shaking caravan carriage, Sarae strained to see the approaching walls of Rosenbridge. With her impared vision, she felt naked, unprotected from the threats of the world. The closer the strange procession drew to the city proper, the louder the sounds of the city became. Closing her nearly useless eyes, the cleric paid attention to the noises. Children playing just outside the gates. Merchants hawking wares loudly in the streets. Sometimes, the sounds of druken brawls.
    In the back of her mind, the thoughts of her fight with Daral stewed. A part of herself knew it had to be done. The man had been a danger to everyone he came into contact. But every time she thought about how the battle went, her blood boiled. Though Daral had been a monster, she didn't want his death to be painful. Without Sventar's help, Sarae would have been taken again, but the agony they'd put Daral through angered her. The other part of her hated every single one of them.
    Changes in the wheel's rattles and a drop in the noise told her that the merchant's vehicle had entered the inner sections of the city. Following the roads with her mind's eye, Sarae knew when they neared the Coliseum. As it drew to a stop, the cleric hopped from the cart. Carefully balancing herself, she opened her eyes. Moving towards where she thought the doors were, the dark outline slowly solidified. Entering the building, she navigated the hallways more by memory than sight. Sarae found herself in her chambers soon enough. Stripping off the ruined remains of her armour, she sat down on her bed.
    Sventar walked around the side of the cart, dismissed the Honor Guard, letting them go off into the Coliseum's Gladiator Quarters, and he went up into the main building of it, and through into the Consul's chambers, where he saw Sarae sitting on the bed with her face twisted in a scowl. He made to walk forward and as he slipped off the scraps of beaten slag that was once his armour, and turned in his dirty, bloodied and generally ragged clothes to the cleric. Just as he faced her, he saw a blur of motion, and his head jerked back from the force of her punch.
Sventar dropped to one knee, more out of shock than from the pain of the actual blow. The thought of his Liegelady just hitting him like that was if anything, unbelievable. He got to his feet, quite slowly, to see Sarae almost glaring at him. Silently, he pleaded what he had done to deserve that.
    Fist trembling, Sarae tried to sort through the emotions muddling her mind. At this moment, she hated her companion. Without a shadow of a doubt, she knew that he could have broken Daral without hurting him that badly. What they had done was torture, and nothing less. Twisted though Daral had been, Sarae still loved him. Loved him in only the way that a sister can. And now, by her own hand, he was dead. Winding her fist back again, she hammered her fist forward into Sventar's chest, feeling the tiny, delicate bones in her hand crunch on contact.
    "Why... why would you... w-why would you..." Collapsing, Sarae wept into her hands. "I'm sorry," she whispered between sobs.
    "It was your mission, milady. I assisted in the only way I knew how. If you think I deserve punishment-" he paused, and as he drew his longsword from its sheath he knelt, offering the blade to her with his head bowed. He felt the blade lifted, then a small ting of wood on metal told him that his blade had been placed down on the small table at the foot of their bed. His head was lifted up, and briefly Sarae planted a kiss on his lips, before that degraded to simply the two of them, locking foreheads while Sarae tried to compose herself.
    Sventar broke it off, bringing his arms up and around to wrap her in a hug. She gladly accepted, diving into his chest and slightly wetting his shirt with her tears.
    "Put it this way, milady. Your task is complete. Our fight is over." with that, she nodded a little as the warrior put a hand to her leg to lift her up. As she was lifted up to Sventar's height, she raised her head to look up into his eyes. Through the open window in the room, the evening sun cast a golden light into the room and upon the two.
    "My task is complete. Our fight is over." she echoed, and the two shared a passionate kiss, at the heart of the base of the new world they would make for themselves.