[hr] [center][h1][color=92278f]The Mad, the Blind, and the Mute[/color][/h1][/center] [hr] [indent]Amid her rage, Devlin had misjudged this Hechin’s state of mind. He cast his glare upon her like somebody spotting a cockroach in their meal. Then, in what was clearly an instinctual response, the golem alerted her of a wound when the fingers of his massive hand wrapped about her torso. She’d been injured in battle. The blood spilled over Foeldar’s fingers from the gash below her ribs. The pain was like that of cold knives stabbing at her innards and causing the static shield of electricity surrounding them to flicker and fail. Withal, the grip Foeldar had on her loosened as he, strangely enough, uttered words about a flower. A lily, in fact? He was obviously lost in a world of delusion. “I’m not going to watch you die!” She shrieked through the pain in an attempt to reach in at his sanity, yet her words seemed to fall on deaf ears. The beast replied once more in a maddening, thunderous raving about the lily before taking several bewildered steps back and proceeded to refasten his grip. Devlin gnashed her teeth in agony as yet more blood squeezed from her wound, spilling over his hand while now her own grip on him loosened. Her nails scraped at his vines, her fingers grasping in an attempt to hold on, but her feeble efforts were of no use at all. Her strength had been spent. Her vision blurred. The beast plucked her effortlessly from his body and discarded her like an insect. Propelled by great force through the air, the world seemed to spin in a slowing of time while her mind was set adrift to random scenes from her past. Fleeting images of her childhood hechin friend, the town of Despiun, the mangled corpse of her mother, the dead gaze of her father, the emerald orbs of Mada, the army of undead soldiers, and then lastly the scarred face of Ren eclipsed her thoughts before her body crashed down at its destination. Her limbs flailed limp as her petite frame contorted in an undignified tumble across the ground, eventually coming to rest with face pressed against the cold cobblestone street of Nadska. She laid still for a moment before a shaking of the ground and the crumbling of church walls caused her eyes to spring open. The young warrior raised to her feet in an instant, swaying for a time, vision blurred, then turned to start her journey away from the clamor of destruction. She was dazed, staggering blindly with no weapon in hand through the crowd of undead, and although she was unaware of it happening, forks of electricity speared out from her person like bolts of frenzied lightning from a storm and striking down anything that dare to draw near. Soon, however, her skewing path became that of bumbling steps as the lightning from her body desisted in the dying of a storm. With arms outstretched, she grasped at the amorphous shapes that surrounded her like a blind man seeking support from a crowd of strangers. “…Ren….” The name exhaled from her paling lips, while in the same moment she felt a sharp, biting sting to her shoulder – it was an arrow shot from one of the horde – while at last her grasping hands touched down on the garment of a closing darkness in front of her. With all the strength she had left, she gripped to the fabric and pulled herself in, resting her weight on the warmth of their body and, be it just long enough to lay eyes upon the scarred features of her friend, her vision cleared. “Help me….” The words slipped from her mouth as the cooling pulp of her lips fell against his.[/indent]