The monster towered over him, its maw hanging wide open as it regarded Florian with blazing orange eyes. Florian held his focus tightly, burying all his concern and fear behind a layer of will. He summoned a blade of wind, the turbulent arc sailing through the air with hardly a noise.

It collided with the Hellwolf, drawing a thin line of black blood on the thing’s neck. It failed to penetrate any further. The Hellwolf howled in pain, turning its head to the waning Moon as a regular wolf might. Ignoring the headache that was building by the second, Florian willed another windblade into existence.

The wolf dodged it, leaping over the almost invisible projectile and towards Florian. He dared not show his back to his enemy, so Florian held his ground. Colliding with him with the force of a bus, the wolf tried to decapitate Florian with a quick bite. It was his fortune that the impact caused him to trip, unable to support himself properly off of his wooden pegleg. The bite whiffed over him, the hot air of the wolf’s breath washing over him.

Had Bludgeon been anything other than a blunt weapon, Florian might have taken the chance to do what Anna had shown him so many times before and try to impale it through where it was most vulnerable. Instead, Florian mustered what momentum he could get from his position on the ground and sent Bludgeon on a collision course with the beast’s head. Florian encased the weapon in a faint veil of mana, the effort sending needles through his brain.

Bludgeon hit true. His enemy howled into the night, the sound loud enough to make the stones around them bounce. But it did not die. It looked down on him with its single remaining eye, the other buried underneath shards of broken golden scales and gore. As his death drew near, Florian thought he saw a familiar sight in the throat of the beast. For whatever reason, it appeared as if the Hellwolf had a furnace buried within it.

It reminded him of Dover, of his time spent learning his new craft with George. The old man had practically adopted Florian, speaking up for him whenever Taylor had tried to assign Florian to the defense of the wall, a suicide mission for someone bearing his recent injuries and inexperience. Florian recalled smithing weapons and armor, his hammer beating metal into submission as he struggled to live. He recalled taking his weapons to the testing dummy, teaching himself to swing a sword, a spear, a mace, and countless others. In these last moments, Florian wondered if everything he’d done had been for naught, if he should’ve tried to find a way back to Dover.

The scene changed. George hovered over him, teaching him to quench a blade for the first time. Florian dipped the hot metal into the liquid, setting the blade and hardening it. Handing the tongs to George, George picked up the blade and examined it. He turned to Florian. “When you quench a blade too early, you risk making it too brittle,” he said, demonstrating the fact by holding it over the side of the workbench and snapping it. “You need a blade to be strong so that it can withstand use.”

“How do I know when I can quench it? That’s impossible,” Florian had asked, disappointment written all over his face.

George laughed, his powerful hands ruffling Florian’s hair. “Practice, Florian. You’ll figure it out soon enough. Every failure is but one step of many on the staircase to success. This was your first step, and no matter how impossible it may seem, you just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other and trying your damnedest.”

The memory ended, and Florian found that no time had passed at all. Nothing had changed, save for a new wellspring of determination. He didn’t have much more to give, he knew. But what little focus he had left went to summoning an orb of water, pulling the moisture from the air to lessen how much the spell interfered with the normal state of reality. As the ball formed, Florian’s mind protested greatly, and his vision began to darken until he could see nothing but that orange glow.

Florian’s last thought was to send the orb down the wolf’s throat, hoping that maybe, just maybe, there really was some kind of fire in there that he could extinguish. It was a Hail Mary, but he could think of nothing else. Oblivion claimed him.

When he woke again, he was sitting in the middle of a large tent filled to the brim with people groaning in pain. His head pounded, synchronizing with his heartbeat. Squinting to darken the already dark space even more, Florian examined the people around him. Almost all of them were Warriors, their armor giving them away more quickly than their wounds – and their wounds were telling. A man was missing his hand, the stump wrapped in bloody bandages. Another was pressing his palm to his left eye and wailing, likely to never see from it ever again. A woman further away cried in pain, missing a large chunk of her right ear. Their misery was only compounded by their accommodations of rough straw mattresses atop equally rough wooden beds.

One doctor flitted from bed to bed, taking mental notes of her patients’ conditions before hastening to the next. It wasn’t long before she arrived at Florian, her voice upbeat and happy despite the conditions they found themselves in. “How are you feeling?” she asked with genuine concern.

“My head is killing me, but it’s nothing I shouldn’t be able to sleep off,” Florian replied, knowing full well that he had been one of the lucky ones the previous night.

“One would think you’d have had plenty of time to sleep it off. You’ve been out for a day already!” she joked, her laughter dying when she noticed Florian wince. “Sorry, too soon?”

Florian slipped his legs off the bed, gathering his strength and summoning his determination once more. The doctor fussed over him, telling him to sit back down and rest.

“I didn’t mean it! Sit down!” she cried, trying to tackle him back onto the bed in the strangest and most oxymoronic medical care he’d ever received.

Florian sighed. “Can’t really. I’ve got to go to teach,” he explained, the effort of talking bringing a fresh wave of pain. He wished that he could take the doctor up on her offer, but he knew that Theo would not tolerate any deviances from their agreement. And that wouldn’t do. How he’d find a way to teach, though… that was the real question.