A flurry of screams and growls rang through the air as arrow after arrow struck the cockatrice one after another. His men had been shouting at the prince to get out of the way, but Oliver wasn’t going to turn and run now, not with the beast just right before his very eyes, just within arm’s reach. The arrows have found their marks, and the cockatrice was already howling in agony. Standing up, Oliver grabbed a couple of arrows from his quiver, and drove the final blow. Waiting for the right moment as the cockatrice continue to move and writhe about, Oliver’s arrows pierced the lizard right between its eyes, and sent it with one loud thump right to the ground where it finally lay dead.
Panting heavily, his friends ran to him and to the fallen creature, huge smiles written across their faces. Oliver felt a pat on his back, and nodded with a small smile. He knew the cockatrice was finally dead, but it didn’t feel like much of a victory at all. He felt like something was amiss, that something was definitely wrong somewhere, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. The nagging that he had felt earlier before releasing his first arrow was back again, more incessant now than before.
“Prince Oliver!” The worried shout came from Sir Siegfried, the knight, and Oliver turned to find him hunched over something behind some undergrowth. Something clicked at the back of his head, and Oliver dropped his bow to run towards where Sir Siegfried was.
Sure enough, lying there all unconscious was a young woman in plain and dusty traveler’s clothes. And his arrow protruding right against her left shoulder! Oliver felt all blood drain from his face as he realized what he had done. This was the first arrow that he had unnecessarily released. This was the arrow that he thought had hit the cockatrice first. In all his years hunting, Oliver had accidentally struck a person only once, and that was when he was just learning. Somehow, he couldn’t quite accept that he had done it again, not when he had been hunting for almost a decade now.
“We can’t move her nor can we pull the arrow out,” Oliver muttered more to himself than to the others. It was moments like this that he wished he listened to his mother’s words and brought a healer with them. Trying to focus his mind to think clearly, Oliver sank onto the ground and inspected the wound. He was mortified to see that the arrow had pierced her shoulder quite deeply, and blood was oozing profusely out of her shoulder.
“Get me water! And some bandages, clothes! Anything to staunch the bleeding!” He was shouting now, panic starting to slowly rise inside him. He took off his coat and draped it over the young woman’s chest. He could feel beads of sweat starting to run down his forehead as he sat there feeling totally useless. His servant Lot had returned with their bag of water, and Oliver opened the lid, not really confident if pouring water over the wound would be a good idea. He placed the bag of water on the ground beside him, and reached his hands out to cup the lady’s cheek instead. She was still feeling all warm against the palm of his hand, and he hoped he could get her to stir back to consciousness. “Wake up,” he spoke softly as he gently patted her cheeks. “Please wake up.”
* * *
Her faint gladly enough was only momentary, born out of pain and a simply overwhelming clashing and cummulating of events. Had Yassia been a trained fighter, she might have been able to deal with the new danger, even when injured, but as she wasn’t her mind simply refused to cooperate and rather gave in, gracious enough to spare her the conscious experiemce of being teared to shreds by a cockatrice.
But even though blackness was wafting all around her in a time- and spaceless place – a place she recognized to have been before, a few months ago now – Yassia heard a voice. Several voices to be exact, but one in particular, very close to her. At first she couldn’t decipher the meaning of the words spoken, but then slowly she started to comprehend. Wake up… please wake up. The words were tugging at her mind, bringing it more and more to the surface, until she finally passed the veil that seperated the conscious from the unconscious world.
Her eyelids fluttered, and slowly she opened them, blurry schemes slowly forming into a face that leaned over her. And then the pain kicked in, catching her again quite off guard. Yassia gasped and tried to rear up, but something heavy was holding her down. Tears started to sting in her eyes, but she blinked them back, forcing her breath to come as levelled as possible as she tried to make her mind function properly.
Time for the inventory taking, Yassia Dyfrène de Ailantha! You’ve been hit. By an arrow. In the left shoulder. Close to but not life threateningly close to the heart. Her head felt woozy, she must be losing a lot of blood. Stop the bleeding… first step: ”Stop the bleeding…” she whispered to no one in particular.
Her visual field had widened slightly and so for the first time she took notice of her immediate surroundings. She could see the legs of a few men, busily running around. A large heap a little to her left. The cockatrice… dead. And then there was this man still leaning over her. He looked desperate, panicked even, and Yassia could only understand him too well. She would panic too… but she couldn’t allow herself! She knew what had to be done, she only needed to make her mind focus on it, like it was not her bleeding like a fountain, but someone else she needed to cure. At least that was what her mother had always told her. How she was going to deal with it after all, would have to be seen. But she needed to stay strong now, time was wasting! How could she know if any of these men knew anything about healing? They might try to pull the shaft out and that would be disastrous! At least right now. She would bleed to death if they did! ”Don’t… don’t… pull it out…” it was a desperate plea, and one she hoped would not go unnoticed.
Why did such things always happen to her? It was truly ironic, and in any other circumstances Yassia would have laughed. There she was, running from a cockatrice and of course she had to be the one being hit by and arrow that had been meant for the very same beast. At least it seemed to be dead now, but really, she soon would follow unless they weren’t doing exactly as she said. And even that was not a given. She might lose consciousness again from bloodloss, already she felt the darkness tugging at her mind again, wanting to pull her under into the fathomless sea of oblivion.
