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At first it seemed that instead of a fortress Hazel had conjured a city. No, had she teleported them? Since when could she—no, of course it had not been her. She snapped her book shut and lowered her hand. There was a warmth on her face that wasn’t the blood and she looked up to see the sun as her eyes readjusted from the sandstorm. A gentle breeze rustled her hair as she looked around her, mouth going slightly slack as she took in the structures around her, alien in appearance due to how pristine they looked. Where was the rotting woods and burnt out landscape? Where were the hard faces and broken bodies? Where was the death and misery? Gone, all of it. 

Hazel lowered her head and smiled to herself. So, she had actually made it to Exusia. She looked back up at the people encircling their little band of fighters, with their soft skin and ornamental armor. Many Ember Makers, especially when whiskey added fuel to their zealous fire, boasted about how they one day dreamed of making it to Exusia so they could liberate the people from the evil magicians that kept them oppressed. Hazel clutched her book to her chest. These people lacked the coarseness to them caused by the friction of being forced against the ground by a tyrant’s boot. Perhaps it was an actual utopia after all. Hazel huffed. She knew better than most that appearances often only ever existed just to deceive. 

Take, for example, the knights surrounding them with weapons drawn. Not a single blade had a nick on the edge, not a single piece of armor had a scratch. Hazel would find it hard to believe that they’d seen any action outside of the training ground, and even then she doubted the difficulty of their regimand—for example, how quickly the tent guards had been bested by a wild pack of raiders. The knights demanded they hand over their weapons, but what could they do if they didn’t? Hazel saw images of the spearmaiden pushing her weapon through the paper armor of the scroll reader, of the crossbow bolts bouncing harmless off of the golem, of the short man gleefully pointing to the next victim as his animated construct ribbons the first knight foolish enough to lift a sword against him. 

She felt herself tense as Nakala didn’t hand over her spear, and the breeze grew cold as visions of a slaughter continued playing out in her mind. The magicians would quickly fall to the arrows of the sun elf and the superstitious hunter, while the crafty Kaimerian and her sneaky human friend would unleash some ploy to distract the rest. She could hear the mad man laughing in harmony with the bug as he jumped into the fray, and she could feel the heat on her skin as the citizens surrounding them revealed themselves to be the true mages of Exusia with an explosive fireball that consumed them all. 

Hazel drifted back to reality and suspiciously eyed the crowd. Hazel met the eye of a child in the crowd that stared at her with something more than curiosity.  An invitation to a bunch of opportunists to be granted an audience before an insane Queen who’d harbored a bunch of magic users before tearing her city away from the world; they’d have to be crazier than the Queen to believe that the only dangerous ones around were the ones with fancy swords and flowing robes. She stared at the child and smiled, who was quick to turn and tug on her mother’s sleeve. [i]I see you.[/i] The mother glared at Hazel, picked up the girl, and walked away. Only then did she remember that she was drenched in the blood of a dead clansman and they were probably the first killers that child had ever seen.

Hazel felt her eyes water and looked nervously at Nakala. [i]Please, hand your weapon over.[/i] Instead, the elf who’d snuck in past the clansmen was the first to do it, setting off a chain reaction of others giving in to the demands of the knight. Hazel jumped in line as she returned her book to her bag before handing it and her weapons over to the Exusians. She stepped to the side, glanced back at her compatriots that were still wiping the blood from their blades, and folded her hands behind her back.

[color=f26522]“Sorry, I’m sure this is a stupid question, but we aren’t truly expected to meet before anyone, let alone the Queen, looking like...this?”[/color] she asked the knight, meeting his eyes as she gestured to her sand-covered, blood-soaked companions. [color=f26522]“It’s just that we've had a bit of a day and I do want this meeting to go well—not just because I am fond of my stuff, either. I think we'd all do better with a moment to recuperate. Just..."[/color] She picked a red globule of viscera out of a loose strand of hair that had fallen in front of her eyes and stared at it as she grew quiet, her gaze growing distant as the howling of wind and flames deafened her hearing. [color=f26522]"...I, I need a moment..."[/color]