1. Reflections of the Hunted
Who can say why man dies? At the hand of evil things, or at the hand of good things? It all seems the same here, no difference in death, no difference in life.
"Be careful there," Celia says. "Here, let me help you."
There is a warm sensation in my limbs, and then the wound cauterizes. For a moment it stings, but the magic works, calling upon the stream of life that surrounds us, the water in the air and the sunlight radiated across the crystals shards of the cave to enter into my skin and close the wound left by the creatures here.
This is our first job together, although before this I did know Ironhand a little. We met in a distant town at a tavern between jobs. But the two girls I have never met before. Celia is headstrong and brave, while Anais is gentle - at least she seems. She seems weak, much weaker than what one could brave this cave, but she has surprised me, fighting with such ferocity as to surprise both Ironhand and myself.
The creatures here, for the moment, do not seem to notice our presence. Celia, nevertheless, urges us to slay them. She claims that caves like this, if the hunter does not hunt, eventually they will become the hunted. Once we take the crystal from this cave, the monsters are sure to be bent on destroying us, as Celia says, we will have taken their source of life.
I am not so sure. The littered bones around this cave are a testament to the hundreds of souls that went before us, trying to capture and discover the whereabouts of the crystal. But I am not sure the creatures are as tied to the cave as Celia believes. It is perhaps that the outside world became too inhospitable to them, and they found sanctuary here. Celia, though, is of the old order, and while she practices the white arts, beckons to a prior age when man was constantly pitted against everything else.
I, for one, wonder about a new order.