"Not till you have avenged me." The face of Queen Calca said from the sword, and then vanished as if she had never been there in the first place. Remedios stared into the faceless voiceless sword, waiting for her to come back, waiting for her to speak again. Remedios however did not want her to go. She shook the sword back and forth, "Come back! Come back!" she whimpered.

But she did not come back, she did not speak. Remedios pulled at her own hair in frustration and rage, her sense of direction was pulling her left and right, front and back, she was uncertain of what to do next. She clenched her fists in frustration. "Damnit Gustav, where are you when I need you?" She said under her breath. Remedios was smart enough to know she wasn't that smart, she needed someone else to do her thinking for her, she was a sword to be wielded, an arrow to be launched, she was not a strategist, she was not a planner.

She did know enough to know she couldn't give the appearance of ineptitude, she couldn't lose the confidence of her subordinates. So she forced herself to keep it together, she washed her face in a basin of water, dried it off, then spread a map on the table and bent over it, placing her palms down flat, she gazed intently as if deep in thought. However her only thought was, "I'll be nobody else has to fake it like this." She let out a sigh, and then called out, "Yuri, I need you!" A young woman promptly entered, she was a squire, and bore an unpleasant similarity to Neia Baraja, except for the eyes. The eyes of Neia Baraja had rubbed Remedios wrong from the first moment they'd met. In them Remedios saw danger, threat, and despite her relative weakness with a sword, her skill as a tracker and an archer had been worth remarking upon, too, she had an independent spirit that spoke of indiscipline to the order conscious Paladin.

As the woman stood there waiting for Remedios to acknowledge her, Remedios herself was busy keeping up her act, tracing her finger randomly over roads and terrain as if she were thinking carefully about what they should do.

"OK, I'm ready for your report. What did our contact say." She said, and listened quietly as the woman spoke, relaying the information she'd learned in town with her Southern connections.

"South?" Remedios asked with surprise.

"This...heteromorphic infestation is here in the North, it has to be exterminated here, why should we go South?" She asked, her eyes narrowed angrily, but she allowed her subordinate to explain, and when she'd relayed her information, the woman chose to elaborate.

"Commander, are we fighting to die gloriously or are we fighting to win?" She asked bluntly.

"To win." Remedios replied firmly.

"Then we need to go South, we need to rearm, we need to reequip, we need to increase our numbers, would you rather face tens of thousands of heretics with a few dozen paladins and a few hundred squires, or with tens of thousands of each? Our patron is there, and with Gustav moving around looking for us here, best case we avoid him, worst case we end up fighting and even if we win, all that means is more dead Paladins."

It was a convincing case. "Alright...we'll go South." She said, tell everyone to get ready. Dismissed." She said firmly.

Inside her mind Yuri was sighing with relief, she'd managed to convince Remedios to make the right choice. As she walked out, she rolled her eyes, that map Remedios had been pouring over was obviously the wrong one for their location, it depicted areas in the far South of the Southern Holy Kingdom, and she'd actually had to be convinced to go there. A part of her wanted to laugh, if she'd been lucky enough to have at least had the right map out, Yuri might have been fooled into thinking that Remedios was an intelligent forward thinker. She shrugged mentally, lucky or not, forward thinking or not, she was the symbol they needed to push the fight against heretics, she was the one who would draw support and patronage from nobles. All she needed was someone to tell her what ideas she needed to have.

Yuri was under no illusions that Remedios liked her, though she wondered idly why her dislike seemed to be so thorough, but Yuri could do what others before her had done, think for her. Yuri knew Gustav had done that before her, and Calca had done so before him. Now it was Yuri's turn to aim the arrow that was the former Paladin Commander.

The whole thing made Yuri furious, she called the various squad leaders together and told them to pack for a journey South, an anouncement that was greeted with a mix of emotions from surprise to mild anger, but even those were calmed and set at ease when told they'd be recovering supplies and gaining fresh forces to carry the fight forward again. They went about their tasks with enthusiasm after that, and Yuri stroked her short blonde hair in exasperation.

"How could anyone in the North have fallen so far as to follow the undead? In the South...we would never do that." She said softly under her breath so as to not have her implied criticism of her northern counterparts be overheard, as one of the few southern squires to have come north, she had a unique position in the little group, and Remedios for some reason, had equal parts latched on to her and treated her harshly, but despite that harsh treatment, Remedios had also come to depend on her, as Yuri was good at adjusting her behavior to match that of the people around her so she didn't stand it, it made her useful for meeting contacts from the South and sympathizers in the North, and her skill with a bow was not unremarkable, too, she displayed keen tactical senses, if she hadn't been around for the massacres, Yuri was sure that Remedios would have just charged in without a plan and much of the population could have escaped, while Yuri instead has masterminded the assaults that had maximized dead heretics. It made Yuri as important to Remedios as any of her small number of Paladins.

The small number of people meant little time was needed to prepare to move, but waiting on the small resupply meant that nobody had to rush, and Yuri used that time to practice with her bow. She nocked an arrow and fired at a sapling, not at the trunk, but at a small branch shooting off of it, the branch was severed and began to fall to the ground, she drew two more arrows and fired them in quick succession at the falling branch, striking it once, but only embedding the other arrow into the soft soil without striking her target with the other. It was very good shooting, but it was not in her mind, good enough.

She pictured Neia Baraja's head in the position where the arrow stood upright, moved back twenty paces more, and then fired several more arrows at the one that had dared to miss it's target. Snap...snap...snap...snap...was all she heard as one by one the arrows she unleashed cut that arrow apart into fragments that fell to the ground. Neia's archery had become nearly legendary among survivors of the resistance, her bow, a gift from her dark master, let her obliterate numerous foes, and rumor said that she had personally killed the Grand King Busar and taken his armor as a trophy, stories said that she could make her arrows chase her targets, and that she was more widely feared by demihumans as 'The mad eyed archer' than Remedios was feared as a heroic paladin.

Yuri snorted at the stories, rumors could grow like weeds, and those who were defeated often exaggerated the power they lost to so that they would not seem as weak. At the core of the story, Yuri was sure that Neia must have been a competent enough archer, she must have been unusually skilled if even Remedios, who hated her, praised it, let alone if an undead monster saw fit to let her live to serve him rather than slaying her as the undead usually did with the living...but an arrow in the brain would end all that, no matter how good she really was.

A few hours later and some green clad figures stepped into the clearing bearing large heavy backpacks, there were around two dozen of them, and the backpacks looked heavy and tightly packed. Remedios and Yuri approached them as they set down their loads. "Supplies from the south, as promised." A burly dark bearded figure said. "Good." Remedios said, and after taking out a pouch, she handed it over to him, "The heretics show their thanks." She said, as she used the money from the dead, to pay for the equipment and resources that killed them, and would kill more.

As Yuri thought about it, it was every bit as grim a moment as the destruction of the villagers themselves. Still, it merited only a shrug, who cared what heretics thought?

AN: I know this is a relatively short chapter, but picking where to cut things off can be tricky sometimes and I don't want to push this one to far ahead of where it should be relative to the other ongoing arcs. Yes you'll see more of 'God Rising' today and you may see more of 'Memory & a Message', it depends on how far I get in 'God Rising' because the retrospectives could accidentally provide spoilers for details I don't want to give away yet.

This overarching arc with all stories together is about 50 chapters long, and I'm not even 1/3 through, so just be patient and enjoy the ride. And as always, reviews welcome. :)