She opened her eyes. She was used to sleeping in the mud, always camping beside the road in bad weather, but not like this. She was wearing her armor. In the mud. That was bad for the steel. A battle, then? Oh, yes. That was it. There had been a club, a gnarled, knobbly twist of fire-hardened wood swinging through the air, and it had hit her in the head. Her helmet had saved her life, it seemed, but only for a moment. That moment of salvation would be worthless if she just lay there for what would come next.

She rolled to her back, and she saw the creature standing over her, the ugly club still in its fist. It grinned down at her with black eyes and a mouth full of teeth like broken tombstones. It raised the club above its misshapen head, ready to finish what it started with her. It's lips pulled back from it's ruin of a mouth and it squealed like a charging boar, bits of mud and ropes of pond scum drool erupting from the reeking hole.

God's teeth, she thought, if the club doesn't kill me, the breath will.

The weapon descended on her, the bulbous head of it fit to crack skulls, to crack steel helmets, even.

Her shield came up just in time. It caught the club as it fell, stopped it from splitting her head open. The steel shield rang like a gong, sending waves of buzzing pain through her fist and up her arm. In her other fist, she felt the reassuring weight of her mace. Steel. Reliable, predictable, dependable. She swung the mace sideways into the creature's knees, sweeping it off its feet and into the mud beside her with a howl of pain.

She was already lurching to her feet, the world reeling, a wave of throbbing dizziness making her want to puke, her head throbbing, her breastplate weighing her down. Armor. As hard and bright as the words of the Blessed Mother, as much a protection against evil as any prayer or miracle. It was a miracle. Her steel armor had saved her life. It had kept her alive. Her steel weapon had humbled her enemy and laid it at her feet.

Down in the mud, the creature writhed and retched like an injured pig, clawing pointlessly at her steel greaves with its filthy nails. Had her leg been unarmored, those jagged nails could have torn through her clothes and skin like cobwebs, but they were nothing against steel. The steel always wins.

She raised her shield high, and with a cry of fury and fear both, she brought the rim of it down onto her enemy. There was a crunch, and the thing went limp, it's flailing arms flopping into the mud, becoming mud that dissolved in the rain and mingled with the soggy earth under her feet. Soon there was little sign the creature had ever been there, just some broken stones, dead moss, and a patch of mud in a muddy field.

She breathed, feeling the icy mud drip from her sodden armor, and looked at the carnage around her.

She realized she might be the only one left alive. The ranger had been the first one to fall. In the narrow, twisting tunnels, his bow was worse than useless. When it was time to run, he'd tripped over it and fallen behind, soon swallowed up by the dark and the chittering creatures in the hungry shadows. The sorcerer went next. His spells and hexes had cleared a path for them to reach the outside, but magic soon proved weak protection against the claws and teeth and blades of their enemies. The bard died too, swinging his lute like a club at the end. And the swordsman fell trying to save him, his masterwork needle-like swords now lost among the marshy grass and the slurried earth. And the barbarian...what had happened to him? Something grabbed her and spun her around, and she brought up her shield on an instinct, her teeth bared in a fighting snarl.

"Whoa, girl! It's only me." It was the barbarian. Koth was his name? Or was it Groth? Or Grog? Or Kogoth? He stood with his hands open to her, like he was approaching a skittish horse.

"Best not hit me with that mace," he growled. She realized she'd raised the mace above her head to hit him when she turned, and it was still there. She relaxed her arm. It was shaking from the effort of gripping the haft so hard.

Satisfied she wouldn't hit him, he nodded and reached to the bearded ax leaning against his leg. He shrugged his round, wooden shield off his back and strapped it back onto his arm. She could see the painted wood had some new scars on it, so much of the paint gouged away she could scarcely make out the faded image of the phoenix anymore. The ax she saw was notched and caked in flaking mud.

"I'm surprised you're still alive," he grunted in a heavy northern accent.

She nodded. "The steel always wins," she recited, raising her shield. It was true, and she believed it to her very bones. Steel had kept her alive that day. Her companions had fallen one by one to the creatures, but her armor, her weapon, her shield had kept her safe. Unlike them, the steel had done its job. She would have some new bruises, for sure, but she was relatively unscathed.

The barbarian could not say as much for himself. He had a dozen fresh cuts along his arms and legs. There was a leaking cut along his graying scalp, and his chest was striped with claw marks that stained the rainwater pink as it ran off him. It was his own fault for going into battle without even a chain mail shirt. The barbarian had little trust in armor, trusting instead to his own rugged vigor to protect him. Nonsense, of course. Being as muscled as an ox is all well and good, but all that strength wouldn't stop a blade.

"You should take care of those," she said, waving her mace at his wounds. She realized she'd pretty much pointed at all of him.

"Can't you take care of it? Ain't you a healer?"

She shrugged. "I'm not a cleric." That wasn't entirely true. She was not so much a weeping nun as she was an armored killer who remembered to say her prayers, but she'd been taught the blessed miracles that knitted flesh and stopped the blood. Even so, she had no desire to waste the prayers on this fool. He didn't even wear armor. It was ridiculous, she thought, and even sacrilegious, to stride into a battle practically naked and then to beg the gods for their help when you got cut.

He scowled at her and looked as though he had something to say, but a sound rang out across the marsh, a sort of chortling squeal.

"There are more coming," he grunted, raising his ax so it rested on his shoulder.

She very well knew they were coming. She'd heard the things just as well as he did. Honestly, this barbarian fool made the most infuriating travel companion. He spent most of the time in brooding silence, staring off into lonesome hills and gray crags like a dead soul wandering purgatory, and then when he did speak, it was only to say things painfully obvious to everyone else.

"Yes," she sighed. "They are coming."

"We should leave, then, aye?" Again, the grim herald of the obvious.

She didn't bother answering. She turned and started jogging towards the pass.

The broken ground was riddled with twisting roots and cracked boulders half buried in mud and moss. She and Kogoth (or was it Korgan?) were nimble enough to not trap and twist an ankle, but it slowed them down. It was treacherous terrain for horses or footmen alike. But their pursuers were neither of those things.

She looked behind her, and through the drizzling gloom she could make out their phantom shapes in the darkness, misshapen, hunched, knotted with cruel muscle. They scrabbled over the broken stones and gnarled roots like horses across the grasslands, at home among the ankle-breaking forest floor.

On either side of her, the sheer cliffs loomed out of the haze, stony walls of such sheer slope they would prove a barrier even for such creatures as these. They only needed to make it a little further to where the cliffs nearly touched, a pass no wider than three men abreast, and they could hold their ground there, make the creatures' numbers count for nothing. The pass was so close, but these things moved so quickly. They were close already, so close she could hear them panting like dogs. She could smell them in the damp air, like old animal carcasses and mud.

Suddenly, the ground changed. The broken stones became gravel beneath her feet, and the stone walls loomed so close she could nearly touch them with both arms if she stretched out her mace. She turned and crouched behind her shield, her breath boiling out of her in clouds of steam in the chill. She tightened the muscles in her back leg, trying to become a pillar of steel behind her shield, bracing for the impact of the creatures' bodies against the metal...But the impact never came. Korgan (Gorgut, maybe?) was airborne. He'd reached the cliff wall, bounded off it, turning and leaping at the scuttling horde with his ax in the air. He was buying her time, if only a moment or two, by charging straight into them. It was damnably heroic, she had to admit.

She thought she could feel the earth tremble with his landing. He met the shuddering gravel in a fighter's crouch, sweeping his bearded ax in a deadly arc that nearly encircled him. The blade swept into the creatures, through them, like a farmer's scythe through wheat. And again. And again. Their bodies, which a moment before seemed nearly human, albeit with green skin, stringy, knotted sinews, and pointed faces, suddenly spattered against the crooked trees in clumps of root-tangled mud, dripping frogspawn, and rotten branches. They were born from the earth, and back unto the earth they returned with alarming speed, though it wasn't all that surprising if you considered the steel ax head cleaving them like undercooked pudding. That much sharp metal traveling that fast could send any man back to the mud double-quick.

But as fast as they died, they came on even faster. The barbarian dispatched a dozen of them in a blink, but he was surrounded by twice as many just as fast. Soon they were behind him, and though he moved that ax with impressive speed, it couldn't be everywhere at once. He was nimble enough to avoid most of their clubs, much like the one that had nearly brained her earlier, and those few blows that connected he shrugged off with a mild disdain. But the knives were different. Poorly forged from crude iron, more jagged than sharp, and many of them with a coating of rust, they still left a mark when thrust hard enough. They poked, slashed, gouged, and tore at him, leaving stringy webs of blood across his skin and their twisted hands.

She could have helped him. He'd done it for her, after all. She could have raised her shield and chanted the miracles of Saint Scythus as she charged into that tide of twisted flesh and fury. She could have died with Kalidan (no, that was a pie vendor in Ditch, the worst damn pies she ever had), but her death would have done little to serve the Blessed Mother, and no matter the barbarian's vigor, he was lost as memory. Heroism was useless here. The ranger and the sorcerer and the swordsman, even the stupid bard, were all heroes, and they proved the point.

The mace was heavy in her hand, but she summoned enough strength to raise it above her head until it pointed directly at the roiling sky. Her lips, cracked and rough from the thirst of long fighting, fluttered with the words of the miracle as she recited them. It was the psalm of Saint Viadris, the widow who prayed for divine light from heaven to split the rock that sealed the tomb of her martyred husband. She could feel the warmth of divine power filling her limbs as she wove the divine power into a weapon, a shining beacon of white fire on the head of her mace.

The barbarian gave up a final cry of pain, his bearded ax now forgotten on the stony ground beneath the feet of the misshapen creatures. She thought she could still see through the tangle of limbs and rusted iron weapons his face near the ground, a single eye rolling in up in pain as the creatures drew out their terrible work. Soon they would tire of him, and that tide of crooked teeth and knives would find her next.

It has to be now!

She thrust the head of her mace once more to the clouds above, which parted as though pushed by a lodestone. A shaft of golden fire fell through the parted sky and struck the ground where the barbarian fell, consuming flesh and iron and stone in blinding heat. Creatures died before they could scream.

When the light finally died, the hoard crouched and skittered around a crater of molten glass that completely blocked the narrow pass. Their armored prey was nowhere to be seen.

She watched from a weed infested hillside beyond the pass as the creatures lost interest of pursuit and disappeared once again into the boggy fields of Wastewater. Her travel companions were all still there, unburied and left to the mercy of things with lots of teeth and few scruples about the source of their meat. These were people with whom she'd traveled many leagues, shared meals, sat around campfires, and slept on the stony ground. She'd heard their jokes, their boasts, and their hopes for the future. They'd saved her life more than once. And now they were dead.

"Damn heroes." Her curse turned to pale fog in the cold air. It wasn't that she felt nothing for them, but she sure as all hells didn't have time to dwell on the dead.

Now she could not complete her mission. If she didn't want to return to Father Gilgameal empty-handed, she would need new companions. Faegate was a city teeming with blades-for-hire, a well-known drinking hole for champions in search for a worthy quest, but it was leagues away, and worse still, on the other side of Wastewater. She'd need to cross the bogs alone to reach it, so it might as well be on one of the moons.

The ghostly dawn cast the hills around in a gray light. A smudge on the landscape emerged as though from the mist as the morning seeped into the valleys, a small town. She knew it. Ditch, home of the most gods-awful pie vendor.

She hitched her mace onto her belt and slung her shield across her back. She wanted to reach that town before the sun braised her in her own breastplate. She wanted to clean her armor, eat a hot meal, trim her blisters, and sleep.

But what she needed was to complete her mission for Father Gilgameal, and that meant finding more heroes. As her feet tramped over weeds and thistles towards Ditch, she wondered if she might find anything there more helpful to her than soggy pies.

Probably not.