“We’re all going to die!”

[i]How redundant.[/i] Catarina opened her eyes, but of course there was nothing to see in the darkness of the makeshift quarters. She’d fallen into such an exhausted slumber it’d taken one of the women screaming at the top of her lungs to wake the fae up, and honestly, she was more annoyed than frightened. Outside the whining and heavy breathing around her there were gunshots and… was that cannon fire? It had to be a full-out pirate attack or something of the like.

“Do you want them to hear you and come for you next?” Catarina growled, not bothering to get up with how the ship was pitching against stomach churning waves. “Hide yourselves, all of you! And be quiet!”

The screaming stopped. It was followed by a string of hurried prayers as the women and children fumbled about, but they took whatever cover could be had between hammocks, blankets, and intrusive cargo. It wouldn’t actually do much if the crew failed to keep the ship, but at least one of the children might be overlooked. While they did so, Catarina crawled her way through the dark, making her way towards the slit of light under the door.

“C-Catarina! What are you—”

“Quiet!” Catarina leaned against the door and listened for a moment. Footsteps were clamoring nonstop on the upper deck, and beyond that, shouting and gunfire continued almost ceaselessly. There was no point in throwing herself into such chaos, but she couldn’t quite remain still, either. When she turned around, the faint light from the door illuminated a few fearful faces staring back at her, and just like that, she knew exactly why she had to move. “Barricade the door with whatever you can, Sophia. I’m going to see what’s going o—”

“You’ll be killed out there!” 

Catarina rolled her eyes at Sophia’s hoarse response. “I’m not stupid—I’m not going out to be a hero. We can’t all hide in here, you know. You’re going to run out of hiding places blocking the door up and all that.”

There was, of course, a chorus of rebuttals, but it wasn’t as if they could do anything about it. Catarina stepped out and shut the door behind her, promptly ordering the poor creatures left inside to make sure nothing could get back in. Apparently no one had seen fit to stand guard over the women and children, so she had the privacy needed to gather the faerie ether of her own body about herself and disappeared to the mortal eye. Again, she wasn’t certain of anything she could do, but at the very least, she could slow down whatever attacker tried to come down first.

Her hand traced against the ship’s hull as she stumbled about in the lantern light, her body leaving nary a shadow. It wasn’t easy to move with so much tossing about of the ship, but faerie feet have always had a way of gliding across the most unkind of surfaces and Catarina’s were no exception. She eventually made it up to yet another lower deck, and fortunately, things were hardly bad there. Most of the men had emptied out of the corridors to get out on the deck and what few were left seemed to be tending to the wounded. Horrified mumblings of a “Satanic suit of armor” and “tearing the ship to pieces” were the most prominent of the news she heard.

[i]Well that’s just disappointing after a dragon. It can’t be so bad if they have time to take care of the injured.[/i] Catarina smirked at the unconscious body of the church man as she passed, finding his horrible wound almost ironic. Hadn’t men like him just thrown away the innocence of hundreds of Sintrans by accusing their deaths of having been caused by sin? To further add irony on top of the cake, it seemed the troubadour lady had followed him in, drenched like a sewer rat. Exactly what had happened there?

If the injured man wasn’t being crowded by the doctor and others assisting, she would have considered using a trick or two in helping him out. Why help a miserly church man? She didn’t really have anything better to do. At least, such was the case until something flickered within her peripheral vision. A flash of black hair, a wiry teen frame—was that a [i]boy[/i] going up to get himself killed?

She was in motion before her brain processed moving, her body a breeze between men and broken boards and everything else littering her path. Somewhere between going up onto the deck and moving behind the boy, her body  flashed back into existence. There was a brief moment where time seemed to slow, where the freezing rain hitting her skin, the flashes of gunfire, and the shadow of a great, smoking set of armor were swallowed up in her senses all at once. She heard the boy shout, saw the briefest flick of metal leave his hand, and then her own fingers wrapped around the back of his collar, jerking him back.

“Idiot! This is not your fight!” Her Portuguese didn’t tremble in the slightest as she gazed at the scene ahead of him. Let the liar captain take responsibility for the situation, not the children and townspeople he’d brought for a shield!