<span style="font-weight: bold">LILLY</span><br/><br/>As Lilly approached the forest's edge, she glanced back once more, sweating heavily, panicking. They where still following, sill catching up. If only she could make it to the treeline... there was nothing that could move faster than her in the forest, surrounded by those calming leaves, those high branches... but no, they gained too quickly... Father Anderson... Reverend Mikhael... and most terrifying of all, making leaps and bounds despite being encased in steel plates, the Knight. Oh, Emperor, the Knight.<br/><br/><span style="font-style: italic">'No, no, please no... I'm almost there... I'm so... close...'</span><br/><br/>How? How had they caught up so quickly? It had been a week since she had left... she had brought the chapel down on them... stolen the Knight's horse, ran it until it dropped, and had never stopped running since. How where they that fast? How was she this slow? Lilly pushed her tired legs into a sprint, bursting forward, reaching out, trying, stretching, to try and grasp a branch... a leaf... but then... her foot caught... caught on the dress, and she tumbled down into the cold, wet mud.<br/><br/>"Help me! Someone, help!" She screamed it out, almost incoherent, scrabbling through the muck, crawling forward, hoping... praying.<br/><br/>And then, there they where- leaping out of the forest with teeth bared and voices raised in anger, a pack of lizards flowing towards the Knight as inexorably as the ocean.<br/><br/>Yet... they where not warriors, and the Knight most certainly was one. They may have been like the ocean, breaking against a cliff- if they had had years, they might have worn him down... but they had only moments, and the Knight was not a cliff. The Knight was a hurricane.<br/><br/>The moments that followed... where a nightmare. A dream that Lilly could not wake up from, surreal and harsh. A hurricane tears drops of the ocean away from its embrace, but though the waves are thrown into froth, it cannot harm the sky.<br/><br/>Tears blur the bloody scene, and Lilly... pushed the world away. The air rushed out, then came back with crushing force before rushing away again- the Knight is thrown off his feet, but Lilly does not see this. Her eyes are squeezed shut. The Redakka are flung away, screaming for her to stop, but this she does not notice. Her ears are filled with the silence of nothingness and the thunderclap of air in cycles as she is thrown by her power, flung against midden and stone and root in turn. Again the air is blasted away, and again it crashes back. The world begins to fade... The air tears itself in twain...<br/>-------------------<br/>Lilly awoke on some kind of thin bit of stone.<br/><br/>When she awoke, she kept her eyes shut, trying to tell where she was. It did not feel like she had been captured again- there where no ties, no binds, no chains... and it didn't sound like she was in one of the Human's buildings; there where no booming voices echoing off of the harsh stone. Yet, she wasn't in the forest... there where none of the sounds she recognized, only... wind.<br/><br/>She opens her eyes to see the open sky, and slowly turns to look to her left, staring down into a ruined building of some sort, where a... a humanoid salamander was waking amongst a pile of bodies. To Lilly the creature, whose name she did not know but which called itself Om, looked a little like how Krssk had described the river Fae. As far as Lilly could tell, and to her slight confusion, she was on a wall.<br/><br/>If she had been an architect, she may have reflected that, as walls go, this one was quite shoddily constructed. Pitted and worn, a sharp edge stabs into her lower back, possibly making the wall a candidate for fourth place in her theoretical 'Top 10 least comfortable places I have slept' list.<br/><br/>As it was, Lilly stared down at the dusting of dead with horror. Many of the bodies showed signs of mutilation and horrible wounds, some even showed signs of being suffocated, like a fish out of water- these where people and animals that did not die quickly.<span style="font-style: italic">'Who could do something like this?'</span>she wonders, a sob wrenching itself from her throat.<br/><br/>Wiping the tears from her eyes, she notices the Fae moving towards a raised portion of land near the center of the collapsed building, where from her vantage point Lilly could see what appeared to be an injured person standing. Carefully, she leans forward to sit straddling the wall, then lifts her bare feet to the stone and stands, crouching low.<br/><br/>As she stands, her skirt catches on a bit of rough stone and tears, reminding Lilly of its presence. Tears fill her eyes again as she reaches down to tear the hateful garment.<span style="font-style: italic">'If it wasn't for this...!</span>but then she stops, thinks. What would Krssk say... To keep the dress. The farmer took pity on her, but he wouldn't have if she had been dressed in hides. Humans put a lot of importance on how people are dressed; the injured man might not thank her for helping if he thinks she's poor, might even think she was trying to rob him, and tell the church guard.<br/><br/>She wipes her face clear of tears again.<span style="font-style: italic">'I should have some kind of weapon... just in case.'</span><br/><br/>Reaching down, she touches the stone of the wall with one hand, and reaches her power down into it, focusing hard on an exact shape- the handle, the blade- and carefully forces that shape away from the rest of the stone. There is a loud<span style="font-style: italic">crack</span>as the stone splits, the stone knife she had coaxed out following her hand up as if it had been glued to her hand. She grasps the handle and feels a slight rush of comfort.<br/><br/>Crouched low, she runs quickly along the wall towards the raised platform, then after she gets as close as she can without leaving the wall, stops to try and figure out what is going on, and if it is safe to approach the Fae and the injured man.