Something is wrong.<br/><br/>I get that feeling very seldom.  I believe that is, in part, because so much of leadership depends on believing you are doing things right:  Plans go accordingly.  Your cause is just.  We will be victorious.<br/><br/>And right now, the bodies are stacking up in chopped piles of leaking meat around Amara and Marius.  Right now, I can hear the human raiders doing a stutter-step, like bad dancers trying to find their balance, no longer confident in their charge.  Right now, I can see that the<strong>It</strong>is shuddering back the way it came, tucking its tree-trunk musculature in on itself like a beaten puppy, hiding under the blanket of the mist.  Right now, I feel their plan coming apart.<br/><br/>Right now, I feel like we're winning.<br/><br/>I feel well fed.  The belly of my senses is swollen with blood stink and man sobs and fear faces and air electric with accumulated shock.<br/><br/>I feel balletic.  My legs and arms are still tingling from where artful sweeps conducted my blade into the stomachs and throats and thighs of men who would do me murder, spinning from one slaughter to the next and back to the moaning monstrosity in a choreography of interstellar violence.<br/><br/>I feel luminous.  The bog is just so much smoke around the flame of this battle.<br/><br/>I feel erotic.  The adrenaline and endorphin in my blood could fill a King's mead stein; oxygen screams from flush to famine; every moment is pure magnesium under my skin, pre-orgasmic.<br/><br/>I feel invincible.  I feel twelve feet tall.  I feel the face of every Emperor under my boot.  I feel loved by all good people.  I feel evil licking my skin with bloody, penitent, pleading tongues.  I feel cosmic.<br/><br/>I feel we are winning, but all the same, I feel something is wrong.<br/><br/>I run a quick inventory of the situation, going through the current events like screens at a shadowplay:<br/><br/>I have been guarding Marius and Amara's flank from the pathetic, trudging charges against it that this dozen raiders tried to execute.  In this, we are victorious.  Only three raiders remain, and their leader - a rat-faced, scruffy lout with a lewd scene on his breastplate, is already waving his flail back in the signal to retreat.<br/><br/>I went after the Thing, coring its acidic sphincters and snuffing out its eyes - I cut a piece of its tongue out, I gouged out a tooth - to drive it back or kill it.  In driving it back, we are victorious.  The beast is melting back into the mist, making all haste to a place free of sunlight's blemish where it might drag its many tongues over its many, many more wounds.<br/><br/>I am unharmed.  Amazingly, I do not have so much as a bruise or a scratch.  I feel like marble.  I feel like sun on snow.  I feel divine.<br/><br/>Then it strikes me, as I look to my companions:  I see Marius, notched up but still as solid as ever.  And then I see Amara.<br/><br/>Anissa.<br/><br/>I knew something was wrong.<br/><br/>I look at my sword, caked with layer upon chunky layer of human gore and indescribable, alien fluids.  We were victorious, in a way that, I would hazard to say, no other human beings have been.  I appreciate the crushed cake on the sword a moment longer, savoring the celebration.<br/><br/><strong>"They have surely rushed the girl past us by now."</strong><br/><br/>There's always something wrong.  It falls to leaders and other heroes to right it.  I clean the sword, to keep it sharp for the next battle.