Race Through Time:
The Chase
"Watch out!" Dwight shouted. He jumped off his cart and began tackling down several goblins with his eight arms. It was quite a sight: while four arms were busy strangling the beasts, the other four were impaling other beasts with knives right into the stomach. If nobody knew that Dwight was a tapiser, then he could have easily been mistaken for a human-sized spider ninja.
The other pilgrims tried to get into battle stances while others tried to protect their equipment from the goblins. Aaron, quite surprisingly for an old parson his age, used his shepherd's crook as a bo staff to knock goblins away from his sheep. Isaac and Maurice had grabbed crossbows and began hitting the bull's-eye, which was located right in the center of the goblins' foreheads. Anaïs' butt was literally crushing goblins into goblin purée, Harry provoked the mules to kick goblins with their hooves, and Tristan was busy slaying most of the aggressors with his sword.
"MUST CAPTURE BATRISHAN! EVIL ONE WANT BATRISHAN!" lots of them hissed.
"Charmed, but no thanks," Tristan muttered as he decapitated one of the goblins.
Meanwhile, Eglantine had pulled Rosetta off the cart and tried to pull her away from the bloodshed. Five goblins noticed the two of them trying to escape and proceeded to surround them. Eglantine grabbed a nearby stick and held it out in a threatening way, although it was clear that the swan prioress was not a fighter.
"Swan hand over Death's puppy to goblins!" one of them hissed at Eglantine. "Evil One wants Death's puppy dead!"
"Why does your master want Rosetta dead?" demanded Eglantine. "She's only a child!" The goblins hissed in frustration as they got closer.
"Death's puppy has old Batrishan stench on her," another goblin hissed. "Death's puppy has kept a Batrishan out of Evil One's anger. Death's puppy must pay for defying Evil One!"
"How on Earth can I be defying a god that I don't even know?" Rosetta asked speechlessly.
"Maurice! Is there any way to get rid of this freaks?" Isaac demanded as he shot at another goblin. "There's too many of them!"
"Well, if I remember correctly from my research, goblins are fatally allergic to anything that's holy," Maurice shouted back.
"That's it!" Eglantine pulled out something from her grey cloak: a golden crucifix. She held it out in front of the goblins, who hissed furiously and slightly backed off. Eglantine stepped towards them, prompting the goblins to back away even further. The more Eglantine walked and held out her crucifix, more goblins began to crowd against one another as if they were turning into a big pile of withered skin trying to back away from God.
"Be gone, you foul creatures!" Eglantine shouted.
"Even if we can force them away from us, how can we force them to leave?" pointed out Anaïs.
A fair point: they could prevent the goblins from getting near them, but it's not like they could just walk all the way out of the highlands while Eglantine was holding out her crucifix. That would be too much.
While it seemed like everyone was running out of ideas, Rosetta instantly placed a hand on her forehead when she felt the usual headache she received whenever a vision came to her. And this time, it wasn't a pleasant one: it showed her goblins burning into ashes while standing by the edges of a river located in a way too familiar green environment.
Realization hit her and her eyes darted down the green plain they were in and saw the river down ahead. This is crazy, she thought. But her only option left her no choice.
Rosetta began running away down the plain and straight towards the river.
"Rosetta! Where are you going?" Aaron called out when he saw the little girl running away. The crowded goblins noticed the same thing and ignored the crucifix, proceeding to chase Rosetta as she ran towards the river.
Despite her small legs weakening after every five minutes, Rosetta didn't stop running. The grass was tickling the skin unprotected by her Mary Jane shoes with morning dew, but she ignored that as well. While even ignoring the wind blowing through her hair, she saw the river getting closer and closer and noticed that the river was actually located at the center of a six-feet high rocky ravine, which would make the situation quite similar to a diver jumping from a diving board before hitting the waters of a pool. And not to mention that Rosetta, like her father, couldn't swim...
"DADDY, HELP ME!" she screamed at the top of her lungs as she jumped off the ravine and into the cold, brown-colored waters. The goblins hissed furiously as they stopped by the edge of the ravine, watching Rosetta struggling to keep her head out of the water and her legs barely capable of swimming. Most of them were conflicted by whether or not they should just let the demigoddess drown or get them herself at the expense of risking their lives by getting near the water.
"Hey! Freaks of nature!" a voice called out. The goblins turned their heads to see too late that Tristan, flying in the air with the use of tanned bat-wings, was holding Dwight by the collar while the spider held out buckets full of water, one in each hand. "Time for a shower!"
He tossed all of the eight buckets contents over the goblins the same way firefighting planes would unleash water over a burning fire. Contacting the water made the goblins' skin burn into dark red flames. The creatures wailed in pain from the burning torture while Tristan dropped off Dwight near them and flew down to grab Rosetta, who was nearly on the verge of drowning. By the time they reached the main land, Dwight had managed to push all the weakened goblins down the ravine and into the river, condemning the blasted creatures to burst into ashes that dissolved into the river's flow.
"Goblins," Dwight shook his head in disgust. "Freaks of nature that will always disgust me."
The rest of the pilgrims rushed to the scene along with their supplies. Meanwhile, Tristan's wings disappeared from his back while he gently placed Rosetta on a rock. The young girl spat water out of her mouth.
"You can't swim and yet you still jump in a river in order to lead away a bunch of goblins?" Tristan scolded her. "Exactly how crazy are you?"
"I...I don't know," Rosetta stammered. "All I know is that for some reason, my instincts told me that getting near the river would be fatal to the goblins." She began sneezing and shivering. Noticing this, Tristan took off his shirt and had Rosetta put it on. This made her wonder what made her the warmest: the shirt's thick, warm woolen fabric or her cheeks blushing at the sight of Tristan's well-built and bare torso.
"Looks like Rosetta hit a jackpot," Aaron said as his fingers examined the remaining river water that formed puddles on the ground. "The river is full of holy water."
"Since when are rivers full of holy water?" Isaac frowned.
"Since the era when clergymen and saints began to go on pilgrimages to diverse sanctuaries, monasteries, and holy places," Eglantine answered. She looked at the river disappearing into the horizon. "Many of them have chosen to go to these places by following a river's flow. Back in my convent, the nuns told stories and lessons about how the saints drinking from the rivers and the holy places inadvertently spilling offerings to God into these waterworks provoked the waters to be filled with holy water. That's why the goblins were destroyed once they were touched by it."
"So it's a holy river?" Rosetta asked. "Like the River Styx?"
"It's nothing like the River Styx, my child," Aaron said while giving a serious look at Rosetta. "The River Styx flows through the dark underworlds, and whenever people swear by it, they fear being affected by the darkness, death, and prices to pay that fill its waters. That's why people avoid breaking vows made by the river."
"Speaking of death, why did they call Rosetta 'Death's puppy'?" Anaïs suddenly asked. Her question got every pilgrim's attention and they turned to face Rosetta, demanding an explanation.
"I didn't mean for any of this to happen!" she said while tears began to fill her eyes. "I didn't mean to be accidently dragged here and disturb your pilgrimage to Canterbury! I'm just a child of Anubis who was just trying to enjoy my school holiday in Storybrooke by reading while my parents were off at work until I had to pick the Land Without Magic's story version of your adventures, and right when I read the first two lines, the book's words disappeared and were replaced by other golden words that just appeared..."
"Time out," Maurice cut her off. "What did the golden words say?"
"They said 'the race through time you must take; to when the fate of balance must have begun!' Believe me, I..."
"Uh-oh," Tristan gasped.
"What is it, Tristan?" Harry asked. "Do you know what this is about?"
"Just the part about the race through time," the squire said in a freaked out tone.
"So what is it?"
The words barely came out of the Batrishan's mouth until ten seconds later.
"A prophecy about the end of the world."