It was dark when I awoke, staring up at the starlight skies. It took several minutes for me to remember what had happened, and I bolted up into a sitting position, frantically looking around. The tree line was to my left, and I turned to look to my right, towards where the homestead was.
My view was blocked by the woman with blue skin, her glowing eyes casting strange shadows upon her face. She was sitting beside me, watching and waiting, and her presence meant that it was not a nightmare. I did not fall asleep while on patrol. I was not waking up from some horrible dream.
I pushed myself to my feet, and began running towards where my home had stood. Instead of the familiar walls of my house, or the familiar rows of crops stretching out behind it, there was nothing but ash and smouldering timbers. Frantically, I began digging through the rubble, trying to find my family while clinging to the false hope that they were still alive.
Strong, clawed hands pulled me away. I struggled for a moment, turning to attack whoever owned those hands, and found myself face to face with those glowing eyes again. For a moment or two, I pushed against her shoulders, struck at her arms and hands, then finally collapsed against her, crying.
"You do not want to see them," she stated.
It took several minutes to regain the ability to speak. All the while, this strange woman held me in much the same way I held her while she convulsed and suffered.
"This is my fault. If I hadn't gone so far off the patrol path," I started to say.
The woman interrupted me, finishing the sentence for me with a truth I didn't want to hear. "Then you would be dead as well."
I wanted to argue with her, to claim I was a more powerful Embermage than I actually was, but I knew that it would be obvious that I was lying. I couldn't even douse the flames while using every last ounce of power I had, something I was sure she had witnessed.
"You're right," I finally said.
She let go of me, and took a step back, tail swaying gently. She brushed her clawed hands through her hair, pushing it all over her shoulders as she watched me. I was slowly getting used to the way her glowing eyes looked.
"Who are you?" I finally asked.
She paused, and lowered her hands as she spoke. "You may call me Malia. What should I call you?"
There was an odd tone to that question, as if she had left out a word or something. I shrugged it off as some sort of difference in dialects, as I assumed Estherian wasn't her native language.
"Anezka," I replied.
"We are both alone now," she said, cryptically, "and so we shall be alone together."
I paused before saying, "That would mean we weren't alone."
"Precisely."
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