Tiny trickles of a surprising silver found their cursed ways down her fingers as she endeavored to still the river issuing forth from her breast. Her eyes, mere panic-filled slits against the pall of her sweat-caressed face, flickered about in the slowly growing haze in desperation. Fate would soon come down upon her. Resolve consumed her fear, and slowly her thin, delicately boned hands slid from her wound and up the blade of cold steel that had her effectively pinned to the ground.
As her fingers reflexively clung to the blade end and attempted to pull it free, she found herself logically reviewing her entire life. Her initial mistake was in becoming a mage; surely a life of relative normalcy could have been more fulfilling and less painful than hers had been. She almost drunkenly dreamt of a humble white home undisturbed by war, injustice… and pain.
The removal was slow going, but the sheer amount of blood facilitated the blade’s sliding. Pain was no longer a factor as survival quickly made itself paramount. Her struggle was laughable; sitting among the various dirty corpses of burnt and mangled villagers ate away at her resolve. Her fingers continued to grip and pull at the hilt of the sword, ignorant to the tears which, running unchecked down the sides of the woman’s face, created scribbles of cold, salty trails across her temples.
She met her second regret then, seemingly out of nowhere; she had never had a child to hold and love. Two thousand years had given her ample time to mate, but she had been picky, and, even then, bad in choosing. Her first child had been a boy, with a face like an angel… stillborn. She had died giving birth to twins after that, and was resurrected eighteen years later to find that both children had gone off on their own. For a woman with motherly instincts as weighty as her own, having never been able to cradle her very own child was a perpetual heartbreak.
The sword in her grip wavered, and suddenly she heard a barely audible ‘shlick,’ accompanied by the feeling of the full weight of the sword being held up only by her hands. Instantly, she threw the horrid steel aside. This sapped more of her energy than she had intended it to, so she continued to lie on the ground, making no effort to open her eyes, and barely one to breath.
Her death was inevitable; there was no question in her mind concerning that. Her efforts, however, came to meet relentless interrogation. She wondered if it was really so valiant for her to be using her last reserves of energy attempting to free herself from a death on a battlefield. She asked herself if she should simply lie there on the ground and continue to ask herself questions. She felt something relatively cool upon her cheekbone, and realized that a raindrop had fallen from the sky. Despite her want to conserve energy, it soon became apparent that it was going to rain heavily, and she lacked the conviction to die in the middle of a muddy battleground.
Hours and a trail of silver blood later, Pristine had managed to prop herself up under an aged oak. True, the rain – now falling as though it sought to cover the entire world – still managed to drip down through the layers of leaves, which left Pristine with wet robes and a chill that dug into her bones like tiny crystals of ice. Hunched over, her face shadowed by her unusually straight bangs, it was not any longer obvious that she was wounded. She had pulled her knees up to her chest, but she had little strength left to do anything more than breathe and think.
Centuries had passed since the last time she had passed away, and that resurrection had taken a whole of eighteen years. She wondered if this time she would be resurrected at all, and she hoped she wouldn’t be. There had been times during which she had the role of a savior to people, cities, races, and even whole worlds. Now, she figured, the worlds would need to start fighting for themselves, or find someone to fight for them, because she had long since tired of taking in the breath of life.
It would be no hard task for her various apprentices to deem her daughter worthy of carrying on the duties Pristine was burdened with. Her daughter was a capable young woman in her hundreds, with a thousand years ahead of her, if she was lucky. As a matter of fact, ever since her daughter had become magically apt, Pristine’s apprentices had been urging her to go on a vacation, ask for a leave of absence, and ‘take a break.’ Her work, however, consisted of simply being in certain places at certain times, thereby making her ‘work’ the very act of living itself. Now, she decided, it was time for a ‘break.’
She silently listened to the drumming of drops on the umbrage above her as she felt her limbs going numb. It was a fuzzy sensation worthy of only minimal amounts of attention. Pristine smiled as she glanced down at the chest of her robes. Now released from its position between her body and clothing, a golden compass hung almost pensively. Its hands moved naught, for it had been partially shattered when Pristine was run through. Now, covered in silver blood and broken beyond all repair, it was an object of grim and nostalgic hope. Pristine raised one hand to caress the metal before gripping it tightly.
Her eyes finally fluttered open to find that she was in her own room. Outside, a storm was raging, angry in contrast to the coziness that hid in every nook and cranny of the darkness that consumed her lodgings in the Castle of Fahbrehallen. Patiently, she lifted herself into a sitting position, and wiped a bit of sweat from her brow with her left hand. Her eyes, ebon throughout, adjusted quickly to the darkness, and flitted about questioningly.
It was, indeed, her room, as proven by the racks in each corner littered with archetypes and arcane treasures, most of them magical. Her closet lay open, revealing seventeen neatly pressed lavender robes, one white, one blue, and a bit of casual wear. She glanced down at herself, in her equally lavender silken nightgown, and gave a soft, self-scolding sigh. Gathering her nerves and wits, Pristine struggled to find a new position to lie in for a moment. She then closed her ivory-white eyelids, pressed her wolf ears back against her head, adjusted her lengths of lavender-gray hair, and went to sleep… her right hand all the while safely gripping the brightly polished golden compass that hung from her neck.
