Obviously she should have known better than to stand at full height in the middle of what was supposed to be the remnants of a deserted battlefield. One might claim that as some kind of common sense. Unfortunately it seems that Tanitha is a few coins short today. Grunting, the woman snaps the end of the arrow off, just barely managing to keep her scream trapped behind her teeth. She’ll have to take care of pulling the rest of it out later.

Coughing, she looks around from her position on the ground. About half a mile from where she lays, the air has gone blurry with blue fog. This isn’t good. This fog is the equivalent of a wolf hacking at the backs of her feet. If it reaches her, she’ll be blinded and defenseless and dead.

The battle must have been fought close to a Velish camp. She should have known better. She should have scouted the area.

Not seeing many other choices, the woman curses. It looks like she’s going to have to hightail it back to her home. Hopefully, the underground traveling will slow them down if they do pursue, and if that doesn’t work, the speckling of people around should keep the soldiers occupied long enough for her to escape.

Tanitha rolls onto her stomach, preparing to rise. She’s seconds away from popping up when she hears, “Wait! Don’t leave me!” Confused, her eyes dart around. The only person in range is the smazer.

He should be laughing in her face and telling her that she’s about to die a horrible and painful death at the hands of his friends, not begging her to help him. Her brows draw close, but she immediately shakes her head.

Now isn’t the time for logical thinking. She should be scurrying like a roach. The smazer won’t do anything but slow her down anyway. Even with her arm out of commission, she’s almost certain that she can outrun him.

And she’s close to doing so, until a word begins to bounce around in her head.

Hostage.

She immediately perks up at the thought. He could be worth quite a sum of money. If not selling him on the train, then she could at least try to negotiate a payment with some kind of blood farmer. If he’s strong, which isn’t likely given that she had just beaten him down, he could be worth quite a bit.

Just imagine how much quicker I can buy-

Tanitha lunges for the man and rolls him close. He groans as his wound stretches, but she ignores it, opting to pull his head near her mouth. “On the count of three, stand and follow me. If you fall behind, that’s on you, beetle.” The man nods through his grimace, and something akin to gratitude lights up his face. Her own scrunches up.

Her teeth rub together painfully as she twists her body in a way that pulls at the skin around her own wound. The shift nearly causes her eyes to roll back, but she pushes through it, forcing the pain into the recesses of her mind, just as she was taught. Looking up at the fog, she starts counting, “One... two...” She can hear the man’s breath pause. Tanitha swallows. “Three!” Vaulting from the ground and landing heavily on her left foot, she falls easily into a sprint.

The sound of footsteps behind her tickles her ears, so she assumes the smazer is keeping up. All they have to do is make it down this poor excuse for a hill, and then they’ll come across the tunnel that she used to get here. The crawling will be difficult for them both, but after they get through that, the camp won’t be too far off in the forest near the exit.

Tanitha pumps her uninjured arm harder, her eyes going dry, the only thing on her mind is making it over the hill.

Surprisingly, they make it to the tunnel. When Tanitha rolls over the pile of decaying bodies that she had put atop the entrance, the smazer gags. The woman rolls her eyes. For someone that legitimately smashed his hand through a corpse while searching for her, he has an incredibly weak stomach when it comes to the dead. “Come on, we have about two miles of crawling to do.”

Blinking to clear the rapidly approaching darkness, she crawls forward. With the arrow still stuck in her arm, she shouldn’t be losing enough blood to nearly black out, but she can feel the need to sleep pulling at the edges of her brain. She can barely focus on moving her legs.

“Two miles?!” The man’s voice holds a level of astonishment that seems unnecessary given the topic of conversation.

Tanitha wonders for a moment if he can’t hear her through her mask. Looking back at him, she watches as he raises one arm in surrender, seemingly seeing something in the exposed parts of her face that signal him to go on the defensive. She turns back around and enters the tunnel on her one hand and her knees. Crawling forward a few feet, she waits for him to follow.

When he does, she instructs him to cover the entrance back up with the bodies. “Pardon?” He blinks at her in the dark.

Rapidly growing more irritated, the woman sucks her teeth. “Cover the hole, beetle. If they see it, they’ll have a path straight to my camp.”

“I-I-” Her travel companion stutters.

His hesitance is going to get them killed.

Barreling over him, she does the task herself. While he lays flat against the dusty ground, she mutters obscenities under her breath. Even in the face of danger this smazer can’t even pull a couple of bodies over a hole? Maybe everything she had heard of the ashen-haired abominations was wrong. Maybe they were just slightly improved versions of moonys.

And that isn’t saying much. Seeing as just about any trait could make a moony better, given that they were all sniveling weak creatures as it is.

Turning around, she begins to lead the way home. She has to admit that she was hesitant to have him at her back at first, but she then remembered that she could kick him in the face fairly easily if he thought to try anything suspicious.

So their journey began.

They traveled as their stab wounds ached and the skin on their knees tore. Throughout the whole ordeal, Tanitha swears she tried her best to keep her temper in check. But the smazer just kept on whining.

“My hands hurt.”

“We’ve been crawling for an hour with no break.”

“There’s a bug trying to climb into my cut.”

Gods! She had never met a weaker moony, let alone a smazer this soft. He might as well be made entirely of jelly with how easily he broke.

Just the sound of his whiny little voice is enough to cause the woman’s head to begin swimming irritatingly. She can feel pressure floating up. Somehow is becomes entrapped in her head, pushing painfully against the backs of her eyes. The man has bumped into her numerous times, ran his throat dry with his millions of questions, and even taken quite a few jabs at her when he thought that she was zoned out.

But none of that was what caused her to snap. Tanitha had been going strong, her usually terribly limited patience holding steady, then the thread holding the last of her sanity was cut. The last straw falls when his fat hand lands on the back of her foot. Habit dictates that she brace herself with both of her hand. She’s left with a shocking pain shooting up her leg and that dreaded pulsing rippling up her arm before she can blink.

A sound, worthy of both fear and concern, rips from her throat as her fingers curl. The tiny hairs located along every inch of her skin raise as a wave of energy rolls along her flesh. Blood fills her mouth as her teeth elongate unexpectedly.

But as much as Tanitha longs to let this transformation take over her, she knows that as soon as it does, those that hunt her will know exactly where she is. So, she’s left to crawl back to old vices.

She halts, causing the idiot smazer to bump into her back yet again. She can barely cage the instinct to snarl and swipe at him as she grabs her pack. She digs around for a moment before she finally comes across a familiar friend. Pulling it out, she unwraps the jelly like substance, pulls down her mask, and bites into it. Its taste is bitter, but the texture causes it to slide right down her throat. She takes no more than one bite, because she’s running low on supplies now.

That was the whole purpose of this excursion in the first place.

A nasty and sour flavor envelops her tongue, but it’s so familiar that she doesn’t even pull a face. After taking a moment to make sure all of it is swallowed, she sucks at her teeth, thankful that they’ve returned to their humanoid state. She then packs up, all the while, the smazer just stares at her. His face is now closed off, and he had officially shut up for the first time since they had started traveling. Thank the Gods.

Tanitha sniffles as she licks her lips. “We’re close. No more than five minutes to go,” Is all that she says.

Then they continue crawling, and this time, he keeps his mouth shut.

By the time they make it to the exit, Tanitha is starting to feel woozy. Her head is swimming and her hands are starting to feel clammy trapped beneath her gloves. But the heavy feeling that had been building in her head had receded and the waves of energy were gone. Smiling, she shoots a hand out of the exit and waves it around.

When nothing happens, she pops out of the hole, happy to finally have more than a foot of space between her and the imbecile that’s hot on her trail. She laughs as she falls forward onto the grassy floor. The feeling of life under her does well to soothe the burning behind her eyelids.

Rising, she tugs on one of the strings of her pack so that it lays more securely against her back, then she turns to her hostage. The amono smiles as she stares at him, for when she looks into his eyes now, she sees that his ghosts no longer linger. She has the drugs to thank for that. Licking her lips, she cocks her head to the right. “So, this is where we part ways, I guess. Thank you for helping me.” Tanitha’s eyes narrow as he speaks.

His words conflict with her own agenda, but that’s not the only thing that she’s now noticing. Maybe it was because the tunnel was so dark, or maybe it was because her head had been swimming as she attempted to focus on more important things. But when she looks at his face now, underneath the ash and the dirt, she sees that his skin has a strange absence of blood.

She had beaten his face in, and she had seen him bleed red. How is it that he now has not a drop of blood on him? Startled, she looks to his arm. Where her dagger had ripped through his clothes, she can see unblemished skin. Her eyes suddenly shoot back to his, as she pulls her pack around to her front. Never taking her eyes off of his own, she opens it and grasps what she needs.

“So...” She starts. Pulling her weapon out, her face falls into a scowl as she says, “You’re a druid.” His brows raise, and he attempts to retreat a little. Tanitha just shakes her head at him. She had heard of the men born of disease, able to heal themselves and those around them with nothing but a single thought. She must have him. Normally, she’d say that she’d have him down and incapacitated before he reached the hole, but given her slightly dizzy state, that might not be as true in this moment.

The druid swallows. “I’m of no use to you,” He tries to tell her.

“I’d fetch a pretty piece of silver for you. Quite likely that you’d even earn me quite a bit of gold.” She smiles, and it’s a nasty-crooked thing. She supposes it’s a good thing that he can’t see beneath her mask. “A Velsh smazer; a druid no less. Yes, people would pay handsomely for you, even if it’s for just a small part.” She licks her lips again.

If they can figure out how to rip his false magic from him, she’d have enough coin to purchase everything that she needs and more. And if they can’t, pints of his blood would still sell like potions of pure magic. There’s something in the blood of a Moakn born druid that heals all. I wonder what the blood of a druid made from disease could do.

The man’s nose twitches and his eyes dart.

That’s all the indication that she needs.

Right as he’s turning to run, she pulls to trigger of her weapon and watches hungrily as the tip of the dart pierces the skin on his neck. He slips, stumbles, falls, grumbles, then he’s out like a wind soaked candle.