Dust: An Elysian Tail

Before The Storm

Written by WildSnivy

Chapter 11

To Dust

"Jin! Come on, Jin. Wake up!"

I'm beyond groggy. My eyes downright refuse to open, and when they finally do, they do everything in their power to pretend they're still sleeping. Everything's a grey and dark blue blur, except for a small blotch of orange and white grappling the collar of my shirt and shaking it rigorously.

"What happened to you?" it demands as it bats my face with a small, furred paw. "Get up, Jin!"

I blink twice, and my vision finally starts to focus up. "F..Fidget?"

Her eyes light up and she immediately jumps onto my neck, hugging it with both of her front paws. "Don't do that to me again, you big dumb...dumb...dummy dumb-dumb!" she scolds me, her face buried into my shirt.

I'd reach over to pet her a bit, but my arms are stuck above and behind my head. I lean back a bit and notice my wrists are tied off to what looks like a vacated bunk bed. I'm in a tent again, much larger and far less decorated than Cassius'. Likely the rest of the division's living space. The entire tent is dark, but some faint illumination from outside, probably the moon sneaking a few rays past the otherwise impenetrable cloud cover, provides just enough light to see the surroundings.

"How did you find me here?" I ask the nimbat as she hovers over to the bunk. I start to feel the rope binding me gain a little bit of slack.

"I'd ask you the same thing!" she bats the back of my head.

"I asked you first."

"And I rescued you first."

"Fidget..."

"Nope!" she argues. "Standard rescuing procedures, buddy! You tell me why I'm untying you from a bunk bed before I tell you how I found you."

"I'm certain that isn't a thing."

"C'mon. Cough it up."

I need a second. For some reason I can't bring myself around to say his name. "That...bastard tricked me, Fidget."

"What?"

"He told me he wanted to solve my parents' murder. And then he gets called out of the tent, and I find out he got his evidence, and it just went to crap from there."

"How did he do that?" Fidget asks as my arms are finally liberated and fall to my sides.

I just look down at my hands. I can't even begin to explain. How Marcia was coerced into helping him. How he didn't hold up his end of the deal.

How she finally met her end...

Fidget flutters around to my front again and sits down on my shoulder for a second. "It's okay. If you don't want to tell me, I mean."

I yield anyways. "Marcia's cousin was taken ransom for evidence on a job I took. She didn't have a choice. Cassius got the receipt and..."

She blinks curiously but fortunately doesn't probe the issue any further. "Did you at least find out about them? What happened to your parents?"

The question alone almost makes me lose it, and I take a staggered breath in out of reflex. "It was him," I softly reply, choking the words out with hesitance. "Cassius killed them, Fidget."

She puts her paws over her mouth. "Oh, Jin..."

I can feel my breathing get heavier by the second. "And I couldn't do anything. I thought I could avenge them. Cassius was right in range of my sword, and..."

My throat performs some strange hybrid of clearing itself and swallowing. "He...just beat me. And I can't do anything to stop him now."

I feel my head involuntarily droop. I'm free, but far from liberated. He won. He got me. And now everything I've worked for, everything everyone's worked for, is finished. I feel my mind starting to loop, begging the same question over and over again: that I could have stopped this. That I could have done something differently.

"You didn't do anything wrong, Jin," Fidget's voice softly speaks up.

I can't even get myself to turn to her now. My head feels heavy enough to indent the floor if I fall over.

"Jin? You heard me, right?"

I heard her. But I'm not sure if I listened at all.

A soft punch hits the lower part of my jaw, and I whirl around, glaring at Fidget. Only she's leering back at me as well, teeth bared and eyes shimmering as they start to well up a bit.

"Stop blaming yourself for things you didn't do, you lug!" she shouts at me. "You can't control what anybody does except yourself, so why do you keep taking responsibility for them?"

"I never said..." is as far as my defense goes before the nimbat interrupts me again.

"It isn't your fault Marcia got blackmailed, it isn't your fault your town got occupied, and it really isn't your fault you lost your parents!"

She grabs my shirt again and yanks it towards her. "You're too nice and too brave to do those horrible things, so stop telling yourself you had a part in them, because you didn't!"

She leers at me one more time, then pounces onto my neck again. "You had nothing to do with it, okay? And there isn't anything you can do in the past to fix it. Please..."

She shuts her eyes and squeezes me more. I just stare at the nimbat as she lies down on my shoulder, refusing to let me go. A couple seconds pass, and then I involuntarily sigh and put a hand onto her back and gently stroke her.

"Fidget..." I start to say, then stop myself for a second.

"You're good, Jin. You're a good friend, you're a good brother, and you're...just a good person."

We sit there in silence for a few more seconds.

"Jin?" Fidget finally asks again.

"What's up?"

She pauses for a second, and then rolls herself over onto her back, paws in the air. "If...you don't have a problem with it."

I laugh a bit as I put my hand to her belly and start scratching it gently. I see her smile slightly as her back foot starts rapidly shaking up and down. Frankly I don't care if anyone walks in on us. If they notice I broke free and threaten to kill me.

I needed to hear that.

"Alright, now it's your turn," I remind her as I stand up and rotate my arms, checking to see if they were hurt while I was out. It doesn't feel like they were.

Fidget's a bit startled that I stood up without telling her first, but she quickly recovers and starts hovering next to me again. "My turn for what?" she asks. "To give you a back scratch?"

"To tell me how you found me, Fidget," I reply after rolling my eyes. Though to her credit, that doesn't sound bad either.

"Oh, yeah!" Fidget immediately interjects. "I was at Nikolai's house helping him close up for the evening a few minutes ago, right? We're just about finished, and then we see the army patrol in from out the window."

Already I don't like the way this story is going. "What are they doing?"

"I'm...not sure," Fidget sheepishly replies. "But a couple minutes later I'm in the kitchen for a snack. Nik's in the other room, and then the door's kicked in and someone starts asking him if he's seen you at all."

Somehow I completely forgot about Ginger. "Was it my sister?"

"Maybe. But I heard that last she heard from you, you were coming down here, and you should have been back a while ago. She sounded really worried, too. So I took initiative, went out the window to look for you, and voilà, here were are!"

I think that's what she said, at least. My mind isn't paying any particular attention to what she's saying right now. The army just marched into Zeplich again, and Ginger's all alone at the house. I don't like that. Especially considering...

A dark thought creeps into my mind, sinisterly but swiftly, like a bite from a viper. The operation Cassius was talking about before he put me out. Is this the plan? Is he going to destroy the village? No, no he couldn't. That's completely unlike him. It's too audacious. News would spread across Falana faster than he'd be able to explain it away. It'd only hurt him in the long run.

Wouldn't it?

The thought alone, though, is enough for me start marching out of the tent. Even if it didn't make sense, even if I'm not sure he'd do something like this without some sort of cover, I'm not going to put her in danger.

I brush right past Fidget and almost spin her out. "Hey, hey! Where you going?"

"How long did it take you to find me?" I demand as I start to make towards the barracks' exit.

"Um, not too long, really," she vaguely answers. "Twenty minutes, maybe? Jin, what's going on?"

"I think Cassius is going to attack the village, Fidget," I tell her as I peer out into the main plaza of the camp. There's nobody around that I can see or hear. Cassius probably went all hands for this march. And for good reason.

"That's what they were there for?" Fidget replies, with audible shock in her voice.

"We need to go," I inform her as I rush out of the tent. "Everyone's in danger right now."

"Jin, wait up!" the nimbat calls after me. Even though urgency is pushing me forward, I somehow manage to get my body to stop itself and wait just long enough for Fidget to flutter out of the tent, carrying something in her hands.

"I found this knife next to you. Do you want it?" she tells me as she drops it into my hands. Except it isn't a knife; the hilt and jagged cut on the blade are evidence enough that this used to be my sword.

"It's not a knife, Fidget. It's..." But I can't bring myself to finish that correction. I feel like a piece of me was lost when Cassius sliced the sword in half. Even if I haven't owned it for much more than a week, there was something special about it. Just seeing it in tatters like this is...depressing, at the lack of a better word.

But it obviously isn't done yet. Wounded, but still fighting. I grip the hilt again, determinedly, and slip it between my belt and my pants. "Thanks, Fidget," I quietly, contemplatively reply.

She gives a brief smile back before zipping ahead of me, towards the trail to the village. A small raindrop falls onto my nose, and I slowly glance upward. Above me, a massive squall of storm clouds are gathering. The air feels a slight bit chillier than it did a few moments ago, and there's a small breeze abounding the camp that I didn't feel when I first arrived.

"Jin! Are we going to save the town or what?"

Another drop smacks me in the eye, and I take that as the queue to look back at Fidget and start running back towards my home.

Somehow, the trail feels longer than I remember it. I feel like I'm running through a tunnel. I know where the exit is. I know how to get there. And I'm trying to get there as fast as I can. But each step forward feels like two steps backward, and the trail just seems to lengthen itself more and more and more, almost out of spite. My legs are on the verge of just sputtering out like a faulty piece of machinery, and I've run out of breath at least a half-mile ago. No question about it, between the ruggedness of the trail, the gigantic slash across my chest, and the near hurricane bearing down on me and Fidget at the moment, my body is all but ready to give up.

I have to stop. I place my hands on my knees and try my best to take slow, deep breaths. The deep part isn't as much of a problem as the slow part is, and I'm out of ideas to fix that.

I watch Fidget as she swoops past me, then immediately doubles back and comes to my side. "Jin!" she coaxes me, tugging on my jacket again. "We can't be that far out now!"

"Says you," I pant back with frustration. "You haven't...had to walk...a single bit."

"Hey, flying takes more energy than you think!" she barks as she jumps onto my back and points a paw off to the side of my head. "Now onward! Mush! Yip..." She's interrupted by a sudden coughing fit, and I feel the back of my shirt collar jump up as she buries her face into it.

"Fidget, if you give me a cold..." I start to growl as I force my body to take another shaky step down the muddy path. A flash of lightning lights up the forest backdrop for a brief second as my foot comes down.

"I'm not sick," she grumbles. "But something smells. Really, really bad."

Funny, apart from the rain I'm not getting anything. "I don't follow."

"Well, get back to me once you have my sense of smell and tell me that you don't smell that smoky stench from over the ridge!"

My breath immediately escapes me. Another sharp, penetrating thought hits me like a crossbow bolt. "Oh, no..."

"Jin? Are you..."

"We need to go!" I yell at the nimbat. I'm not sure what comes over me, but suddenly my body's running at full sprint, like whatever exhaustion I was experiencing just before evaporated. I'm now rushing along the mud path, with Fidget's paws clamped onto my jacket, probably in an attempt to keep up with me from her current position.

All the while, I keep mentally repeating the same sentence to myself. I want to be wrong. I want to be so wrong Ginger makes fun of me for it for the rest of my life.

He wouldn't have. There isn't a reason for him to. But he's proved me wrong before.

Don't. Please don't. I don't want to...

And as I finally reach the end of the path, all I can do is stare. Just stare at the source of Fidget's coughing spasm. At the dank, disgusting smoke blowing right in front of my eyes.

At the raging inferno that is engulfing my town. The conflagration has devoured everything; I can't see one building that isn't being turned to cinders before me.

And on the ground, littered across the streets like sheets of wastepaper, I can see bodies. They've been cut. Stabbed. Eviscerated. Executed.

My knees finally give. I splash into the cold mud, helpless to do anything but just gawk at the spectacle, and the sheer destruction that came with it.

"Dammit..." I whisper.

I feel a tear sneak out of my eye and splash onto the ground.

I slam a fist into the mud.

"DAMMIT!"

The thunder booms back at me.

My head falls onto my arms. I'm not even trying to hide my emotions. I don't care. I just lay there for now.

I feel the weight of Fidget move around on my back. She's not going to say anything.

Whatever I have left to care for is gone. Nikolai, Marcia...

My head snaps back up, and through the orange haze of the smoke and the blur of the tears I force myself back onto my feet and start sprinting towards the flames.

"Ginger!" I yell into it. She has to be alive. She has to.

"Jin! Wait!" Fidget calls after me, flapping her wings as hard as she can manage.

I viciously whirl around and glare at the nimbat as she promptly brings herself to a hover. "Fidget, scout around the area! Maybe she got out with someone else!"

"But I..."

"Don't argue! I have to make sure she's alright!"

"Where would she have gone?"

"I don't know, just look for her! Meet me back on the trail in an hour. Got it?"

She looks at me with uncertainty for a few moments. She's hesitating, and I can't tell if she's doing it on purpose or not.

She zips over to me and hugs my neck again. "Please be safe, Jin," she softly responds before momentarily staring up at me with those deep green eyes of hers then flying away as fast as she can into the foggy storm before me.

I don't linger, and instead turn into the blowing rain, the blinding smoke, the blazing heat. I have to put a hand up to keep my eyes clear.

"Ginger!"

I cough into my elbow as the brown-grey vapors start to clog up my lungs. The heat is a nice reprieve from the bone-chilling cold that is the rain, but only marginally.

"Ginger!"

I think I'm on the main street. Without the familiarity of my surroundings it's impossible to tell.

The charred outline of a two-story building fades in from my right, with a slowly crumbling chimney on the roof and an exploded bellows off to the side.

That's Nik's forge!

My legs are practically begging me to stop. I refuse to give them a break. Not now. Frantically, I sprint further down the street, praying she's okay.

Not like this. I've lost too much family like this.

"GINGER!" I wail again. Suddenly my foot catches on a rock and I helplessly tumble onto the street, sliding for a few feet in the mud before I skid to a halt.

For a moment, I just want to lie in the mud. Let the village burn me along with everyone else. Just let the flames wash over me like a wave on a beach.

Ginger is gone. I don't want to admit to myself that she is. But she's probably gone.

Weakly, I barely lift my head up from the grey mess I wallow in. There's another house burning on my right. I know whose it is just from the crackling architecture, the collapsing design.

It's my home.

My vision blurs up again. I blink forcefully to clear it, and I stagger back onto my feet again. Physically, I can't think of one good reason Ginger should still be in there. How she could still be in there. But for some reason I keep telling myself to check. I wheeze for air as my legs struggle and buckle under my weight, and force myself forward, one slow, almost painful step at a time.

I don't take more than two before the front of the house finally gives in to the weakened structure and falls onto itself. The front door is now blockaded, and once more my spirit falls apart.

She's gone, Jin. You can't do anything about it now.

"Hey," comes a voice from behind the house. My mind keeps telling me it's Ginger's, except it's definitely male.

The voice is extremely weak, and it's only after a good amount of focus that I can hear the next call. "Hey, Jin...that you?"

I dash around the burning house and round the corner haphazardly, skidding as I reach the backside. There is someone there, lying down in the moist dirt, slowly and desperately crawling away to the forest.

And I recognize the form and the armor it's wearing immediately. "Fuse!" I exclaim, then cough immediately after a strong inhale of smoke.

I start to run up to him, but as he looks up at me I almost collapse again. His face is burnt. Horribly. Whatever familiarity I remembered with his features is completely stripped, ripped away with the multiple burn scars mangling his face and whatever areas of his body the armor did not cover. I'm certain the voice is his, however. As much as I can't believe it's Fuse just by looking at him.

"Jin..." he rasps, reaching an arm out to me. Promptly, I grab it and start dragging the Moonblood into the forest. I don't take him far, just back enough to ensure the fire doesn't spread over to us, and that there's clear air for us to finally breathe. The village fire is still burning fiercely behind us, and I don't dare look back at it now.

"What are you doing here?" I demand as I set him down against the base of a tree.

"The camp..." Fuse whispers back. The burn scars are keeping him from speaking too loudly. I can't begin to imagine what he's feeling right now.

"The camp...is gone," he says.

My gaze narrows. "What do you mean, it's gone, Fuse?"

"Cassius..." He has to pause for the most unstable breath in I've heard. "Cassius assaulted us...full ambush."

"What happened to everyone?"

"Elders escaped...Sereth got out too I think. Twitch...had to stay behind..."

I think I know what that means, but I ask anyways. "Did anyone..."

I can see him grimace and shake his head no. "I...saw the bastards march towards your village next. I...I tried to stop them, but their numbers were too great."

"Did you see anybody get out? Where's my sister?" I quickly demand, like he would know.

"I'd tell you if I knew, brother," he wheezes back. "I...I'm so sorry, Jin. So sorry..."

No. I'm done feeling sorrow. I'm done feeling regret. I'm done feeling sentiment. Whatever shards of those feelings I had before have been burned away, along with everything I had and held dear.

And there is exactly one man responsible for making me like this. And I want justice more than anything else. For my friends. For my parents.

For Ginger.

"Did you see where Cassius went?" I solemnly ask the Moonblood.

Fuse eyes me suspiciously as I ask that, like I might be having a lapse in sanity.

He notices after a second I'm not. "I think...he retreated south. There's a...clearing there. May be regrouping his men."

I look over my shoulder at the direction. The rain sweeps into my face again, but I know exactly what he's talking about. "Alright. But what about you? You need to be moved."

"I...have a solution," he slowly responds. Weakly, I see him raise his arm to the sky, the one with the fire-stamped bracer on it. Suddenly, his arm recoils as a bright green light shoots out of the bracer and soars into the sky, hanging there like a lantern, a single light trying to protest the darkness around it.

"They will find me," he gravelly whispers as I stand up from him. It's a signal. Whoever survived the attack on his camp will know who put it up.

I start to turn to the south and march towards the clearing, but Fuse's rough hand jumps to my wrist before I can go anywhere.

I turn back to him, leering at him. He replies with his own, the eyes broken but far from failing.

"Now you...find him."

The clouds flash again, twice in quick succession, as I slowly pace into the clearing. It's completely vacated. No signs of the Royal Army or their leader. Just one large, open patch of grass in the middle of the forest. Completely devoid of any life.

I draw the fragment of my sword out from my belt. The slick sound of the steel rubbing against the leather reverberates along with the rolling thunder in the distance. I refuse to let myself believe Fuse would be wrong about this.

I know he's here. Somewhere.

"Cassius!" I call for him, furiously.

The grumbling thunder is my only reply.

I feel the raindrops roll off of my hair and hear them splash onto the grass beneath me.

"Cassius!" I shout again. "Where are you?"

Another flash of lightning.

The coward's hiding.

I stomp into the center of the clearing.

"Where are you, you son of a..."

The rambunctious thunder booms over my voice as I yell that, and I'm forced to yield to its superiority. He heard me, though. He knows what I'm here for.

The thunder quiets itself again.

Then comes the static. Not from the lightning. But from behind me it sounds like. It's an electric sound, and I quickly whirl around, semi-hoping that it's only some weird thunderous echo.

No. The electricity I hear is coming from the ground. It's arcing off the grass, sizzling and crackling with every slender blue bolt it emits.

Then it dies for a second.

And I take a sharp breath in.

Cassius fades into view in front of me, charging, his sword raised for a strike.

Reflex pushes my blade into its path. Whatever attack he was about to deliver, parried away. I'm not sure how I avoided that, and I don't know when I learned it.

Instinct takes over again as I take the initiative and use the riposte to swing at him myself. My weapon has no reach, but I swing it anyways, hoping to do something to defend myself. Any sort of counter would work for me now.

I shut my eyes. Nikolai would have my neck for doing something like that, but I do it anyways.

The sounds that followed: a small clang, like someone threw a rock at a metal box, then the sharp snap and crackle of electricity, then Cassius' snarling as I hear him take a few steps backward.

Both of us are short of breath, and I slowly open my eyes back up as I put myself onto a knee to recuperate. A few feet in front of me, Cassius has removed a small circuit box from the front of his chest, near the shoulder, and is inspecting it carefully, meticulously.

I hear him sigh after a second as he tosses the circuit off to the side of the clearing. "Worthless," he flatly comments.

He swings his blade around in the rain a bit. "Though I'll give you credit. You not only saw past the cloaking field but also destroyed the mechanism powering it. Nicely done."

I glare at him. "Why did you leave me alive?"

He lifts his head a bit, probably to look at me better from under his hat. The rain runs down it in small rivulets and splatters onto the blade. "You must mean that little incident at my camp."

I don't answer him. He doesn't move. For a second, only the whistling wind and rain are making any noise in the forest now.

"I've always been a man of my word, Jin. You know this for a fact."

"You're a liar," I growl at him.

"When I killed your parents that night, their deaths did not come swiftly. They were lying against that cart they were transporting that day, on their last breath as my team searched their belongings.

"They had but seconds to live, but they called me over to them. They were ready to accept their fates. Even if I had turned my medics to them they could not have been saved. But they did not ask me for their lives. They did not want mercy or anything of the sort. They wanted safety. Not for them. But for you."

Another lightning bolt rattles across the sky, and it feels like one penetrates my brain as well. My eyes fall to the ground. I start to hallucinate my parents, downed, ready to pass to the Life Thread... I tightly shut my eyes. I don't want to think about them.

"They begged me that, no matter what may come to pass after, you and your sister would not be harmed. One final request for me, their killer."

He peers down at his hand for a second. "How could I deny them that? I leave you alive, Jin, because I don't intend to breach that promise. This, my friend, is how I show compassion."

"How would you know?!" I wildly interject. Cassius' attention turns back to me, like I'm a triviality.

My breathing has gone heavy, and my eyes feel like they're ready to shoot fire. "You...you're a killer. That's all you've done since you came here. You just take families and rip them to shreds. You don't care a bit about what happens after, as long as you're just following orders!"

I leer up at him, through his hat and directly into his eyes. "So why would you know the first thing about what compassion is?!"

I feel my eyes tearing up. Or it might be the rain. I put a sleeve to them anyways, and renew my glare at the commander. "You...you murderer! My parents did nothing wrong!"

There's a pause, then, just barely over the wild rain, I hear him sigh. "You have been deceived, little one," comes the cold, heartless response. "Your parents turned against their king, an act of pure treason. What resistance there was, was led by your family alone. And both them, and all of their accomplices, were extinguished in turn."

Guilty.

"You destroyed my town...murdered my friends and family..." I inhale awkwardly. More mental images flood my head. Nikolai. Marcia. The Moonbloods. Fidget. The parents.

"Even my sister..."

Cassius raises his head a bit. "I know nothing about..."

"SHUT UP!" My breathing becomes heavier still. "You will answer for what you've done to us! You will not survive this day!"

The whirling rain responds in his place once more, until I see him pull out the black cloth from his uniform and wipe his blade off with it in one slick, controlled motion. "I take no joy in slaughtering one as young as you, child," he finally speaks. "And I had every intention of leaving you and your sister alone."

He then tosses the cloth to the side and points the sword at me. "But you have forced my hand."

I glare furiously at him. He stoically glances at me. Both of us wait for the other to move first. Quickly, I try to compile something. Some sort of attack strategy. What did Nik...?

He doesn't permit me, and instead lunges at me, his sword under his arm, blade running parallel to his body.

Lateral slash.

Again, reflex yanks my arm upward. There's a clash of lightning and steel not an instant later, and I toss my opponent's attack upwards, over my head.

You can't just flail at yer enemy, Jin. It's all in the timin'. Look for windows and make the most of 'em.

Between the reduced weight of my blade and the increased mobility Sereth's augment gave it, I try for a counter to his chest. I feel the recoil in the hilt as the blow connects, and I feel the commander's uniform tear underneath the sharp, jagged edge.

He staggers backwards a bit, pushing his off-hand to his chest, and I charge forward. Press the advantage. Keep the pressure. He can't attack me if he's always on the defensive.

I don't care that he's knocking away all of my blows by this point. I don't care that I haven't touched him at all since I first started attacking. As long as he can't get a return in. That's all that matters.

I try not to give him that chance. All my blows are short, not overextending to the point where any parries could open myself up. Just a flurry of quick, conservative blows. I'd have to outlast him.

He knocks away what must be the fifteenth one in a row if not more. I'm not going to give up. Not going to let him get back. Meanwhile, my mind starts to formulate what needs to happen next. Maybe, if I can keep him on his back foot, eventually, I'll open him up. At the rate he's blocking everything, he's sure to be exhausted at some...

A weight falls onto the arch of my foot, and I holler in pain. My arm inadvertently freezes in place, midway through the blow, as Cassius' heel digging into my foot overrides everything. I have to get him off me...

The backside of his empty hand slams my jawbone. My body reels to the right, still trying to cope with the physical onslaught. He's coming back. There has to...

Then I feel his blade sting me. He skewers me. My breathing goes unstable, and my eyes hesitantly peer down. My body has engulfed the blade, all the way to the hilt. I feel the tip of it probing the underside of my jacket.

The commander forces the blade more. The pain doesn't even register with my brain. The magnitude is simply too high for it to comprehend. I want to cry my pain, but my mouth won't let me. Instead it just rests agape. Stunned. Bloodied. Completely lost.

How did this happen?

He responds by slowly, methodically slipping the sword out of me. I watch the red-stained steel gradually work its way from my abdomen, and only when it's fully removed do I finally succumb to my wounds. I go to my knees, my lower arm tightly hugging the stab. It doesn't do much for the profuse bleeding.

I try telling my body to steady out. Calm. Relax. It does none of those things. It's too battered to carry on.

My head hangs. It's become too heavy for my neck.

My hands gradually open up. It's become too much work for them to hold anything.

I know I'm dying.

Cassius huffs, and I faintly hear the sound of his sword slip back into its sheath.

All I can see are his feet. They're facing me right now, and for the next few seconds they don't move at all. They finally turn around and start to walk away from me.

"Farewell. Jin."

He's...getting away...

I want to stop him. I'm not finished yet. But he knows I'm helpless...

Another flash of lightning.

Something reflects on the ground next to my hand. Weakly, I peer over at it...

The sword fragment.

I try to steady my breathing as much as I can. Enough to focus. Enough to concentrate.

I force my hand onto the hilt. I force it to grip it as tightly as I can manage.

I force my head to pull itself up. I force my eyes to focus on Cassius. His cape flutters in the rainstorm like a flag as he slowly continues to pace away.

I hear myself growl again. He won't get away. I won't let him.

I force my arm up and raise it over my shoulder. Shakily, it obeys.

I force my lungs to hold themselves for just one second. With uncertainty, they calm themselves momentarily.

The rain stings my eyes, but I refuse to take them off of Cassius. I feel the drowsiness come, that sweet black blanket of oblivion beckoning me closer and closer to the Life Thread.

No. Not yet.

He takes one more step.

The blade flies out of my hand.

A perfectly silent moment passes.

Cassius howls as my sword buries itself into his back. He staggers, grimacing and snarling in pain as he clumsily turns himself around to face me.

He takes one stomp towards me. A second. He lifts his leg for a third, but doesn't complete it. He collapses. First to his knees, then his chest. The ground flips his hat off his head, and it rolls on its brim for a moment before finally falling over as well.

My breath finally returns, but not in any sort of good condition. My head snaps back down to the ground immediately.

I have just enough energy to move my arm off of where Cassius got me. It didn't help much. The discolored splotch on my shirt grows wider by the second.

My body wants rest. My eyes start to shut involuntarily, as the Life Thread continues to call my name.

It's okay, Ginger. I'll be there soon, is my final thought as my world fades to black.