My Warden (COMPLETED)

Griffins

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She shouldn't be alive - that fact resonated through her veins, across her aching fingertips, and over every inch of skin coated in spider ichor. The spiders -- or demons pretending to be spiders -- were endless, a bottomless cavalcade marching to destroy the only mortal in their vicinity. Lana refused to go down without a fight, her wards flaring almost the moment they activated, her fire hot enough to scorch back against her mutilated hair. And still, it was a drop in the bucket against the armies forming against her.

Why was she yet drawing breath?

Rather than face death by venomous pincher, she dipped beyond her mana ration - a dangerous tactic that on occasion paid off. In this case it didn't, the blood in her ears pooling as her head thundered and oblivion enveloped her. She should have died there, passed out while a continual march of spiders chewed her apart. When she woke, the spiders were gone, only the corpses of the one's she'd obliterated remained - their legs twitching from the crackling fires fueled by hair across their blistered bodies. Staggering to her hands, Lana stared out at the horizon but it no longer wobbled, as if something or someone patched up the gap that allowed the multitude to attack. This was wrong. She was missing a slot in the puzzle, guessed the riddle wrong, or barely spotted the hidden rune.

While Lana chewed on that thought, she scissored her obsidian blade back and forth across her hair, chopping it back to clear out a knot wound around a spider's ripped off leg. There was no chance she'd get it free without help, as with most of the snarled knots she'd gained over the years she took to chopping them off. Her hair was the least of her problems. What she needed was...

"You have been rather busy," Wynne's voice echoed through the fetid battleground.

Lana finished off sawing through the ends and sat up off the rock she pressed her cheek to. "I need to talk to you. Actually, I thought you'd be the other one."

"Yes, that one. Interesting that it has taken no form. A curious question." Wynne wasn't dressed in her usual robes of the circle, clean and pressed in fabrics that'd tear in the wild. She wore armor crafted for the battlemages of old, metal gleamed off her shoulders, elbows, knees, across her thighs, and down her arms. A sheet of chainmail glinted below the fade touched wool enchanted to shake off a blade better than any leather could. She came dressed for war, the question was against who.

"Where is it?" Lana struggled to her feet. She'd anticipated being exhausted having drained every inch of her magic to slay the spiders, but she'd slept while in her faint. Unable to keep out of the faint, her body chose death in sleep. It should have revived her, even momentarily, but her thoughts drew sluggish across her brain, her limbs aching to drag her back down to the ground. Sleep no longer seemed to work upon her.

"Off somewhere doing whatever it does," Wynne gestured with her sword, the blade sizzling in blue energy. "But that isn't why you called me to you. You have a question."

Called? Was that what Lana did? She knew the spirits popped up at the more inopportune times, but... Jowan was there whenever her heart dug through her past faults, Nathaniel when she roused herself to keep going because it was expected of her, and Wynne when she found a question that needed an answer. Then what inside of her called the other one, the dangerously powerful spirit?

Squaring her shoulders, Lana looked over at Wynne, "Why did I survive?"

"I believe it has to do with the balance of your humors," Wynne answered without answering.

"You know that is not what I... What took down the rest of the spiders? What killed them when I became incapacitated?"

The spirit's shrewd eyes glanced over at the woman nearing the end. She felt it dangling in her heart, something beyond her ken pressed harder and harder against her body, wringing it out until nothing remained. Lana couldn't explain it, but she knew she had little time left.