The flames licked his skin, the smoke suffocating. Her screams pierced his ears, but he bowled through with the stubbornness of an ox, his every thought in saving her life. He kicked aside a blazing chair and shouldered through the doorway, clutching the small child in his arms as the very flames gave way from his momentum. Beren hit the ground rolling, mud caking his skin as the building collapsed behind him in a dry, earth shattering roar. After a brief moment, he stood up, and the little one began crying again.

"Thank you!" A tearful mother wailed as she took her son into her arms. Beren had no time to spare other than granting her a nod, watching an elderly man get hacked to pieces across the path, his limbs happily lifted by the group of tar-fiends in a sick parody of celebration. Anger filled him, and though it was against the tenants of his faith to fight aggressively, he believed his God would allow an exception for daemons. 

Beren landed among them as if he had dropped out of the sky. His staff whirred in a blur, the blessed odari wood ripping through tainted flesh as if it were steel blades. The first two tar-fiends died without a sound, and the third managed to give an off-centered gurgling giggle. The last two leaped at him, and a khopesh managed to cut a long line across Beren's calf, but he moved in time to keep it from being a deep wound. He jumped and kicked back, knocking the first fiend away before he hit the ground, the other khopesh flying over him harmlessly. Beren caught himself in the fall, and twisted the staff like a pendulum, breaking through the center of the tar-fiend and destroying it. Arrows whizzed above him, and Beren sprinted, nearly stumbling from the myriad of wounds. He impaled the remaining fiend of the group as he ran, arrows thudding into the ground just behind him. 

He saw townsfolk sprint out of the space between the houses to flank the archers, cutting them down with axes and swords and maces with heads of bronze. They attacked with the fury of men defending their homes, hacking the monsters to pieces even after they are dead in superstitious fear they might rise again. Their fear was well founded, Beren knew. Without a blessed weapon or magic, they were notoriously hard to kill. 

He turned the corner, and nearly lost his head as a larger tar-fiend, more cunning than most, was waiting for a fool to stumble by. Beren ducked just in time, and blocked the backstroke with his staff, kicking the fat thing in the midsection. It let out a screech and flew through the air, before it was struck by a streak of silver and disippated into nothingness. As it died, Beren looked for the source of the magic, and he saw Jocasta. She was naked, like him, covered in mud and blood, but  as beautiful as anyone he had ever seen. She looked as relieved to see him as he of her, but after their eyes said everything, she crossed her arms derisively.

"Thought I couldn't handle myself, huh?" She asked, blowing a bit of hair out of her eyes. 

"I just didn't want you to get hurt." Beren said, honesty as palpable as the smoke that lingered above them. 

"Oh, and you think I would let you get hurt?" She asked, walking up to him. 

"Look..." He gestured, his palms parallel with one another. "-we're both warrior scholars. I'm just the warrior part first and you're the scholar part first." 

Jocasta gave him a lopsided smile. "If that's the case..." She said, before raising up and knocking on his head like a door. "Then leave the thinking to me, dunderhead!" 

He laughed and wrapped her into a hug, and she could not help but reciprocate. At last, a man with skin like burnished wood and tan robes walked up, holding one of the fiend's khopesh's in his own, his labored breathing ending in a wheeze. "They have been routed, for now." He informed them, and the two untangled from one another as their elation for one another was replaced by the severity of the attack. "But we have lost much..."