Fate - First Reply Caught in the middle of it all?!

The transition had been absolute - one heartbeat she was drawing the final sacred sigil down the initiate's spine, the warm camwood paste catching the glow of ritual candles, the next...this. The stench hit her first - rotting vegetation and something metallic, like a butcher's block left uncleaned. Cold mud seeped through her wrap skirt, the chill biting through to her aged bones.

Monifa's hands, still stained red with ritual pigments, trembled against the damp earth. Not from fear - though that coiled in her belly like a viper - but from the sudden absence of the initiate's warmth beneath her fingers, the missing chorus of women's voices that should have been chanting the final blessing.

The white-haired stranger lay crumpled nearby, her breathing shallow. Blood had crusted along her hairline in a dark crescent, the wound beneath still seeping sluggishly. Too young, Monifa thought with a midwife's instant assessment. Younger even than the girl whose rite she'd been conducting.

"Child," Her voice emerged as a dry rasp, the same steady tone she'd used to guide countless women through their most vulnerable moments. The stranger's pulse fluttered beneath her fingertips, rapid but strong. "We need to—"

A shriek tore through the mist, the sound wet and guttural. Close. Too close. Monifa's throat tightened around unfinished words. She'd attended births in plague houses and battlefields, but this...this was something else entirely.

Her joints protested as she hooked her hands beneath the stranger's arms, the weight nearly too much for her aged frame. The drag through the bog left her breathless, each gasp filling her mouth with the taste of decay. The gnarled roots of a dead tree offered meager shelter, the hollow beneath barely large enough for them both.

"Easy now," she murmured, peeling strands of moss from the bark to weave across the opening. The sword at the stranger's hip gleamed dully in the half-light, its edge nicked from recent use. Monifa pressed a handful of damp sphagnum to the head wound instead, the cool moisture beading on her wrinkled fingers.

The last of her ewe àtàrẹ leaves crumbled as she tucked them into the stranger's palm, their once-vibrant green faded to brown. She hesitated before closing the unconscious fingers around the sword's hilt. The leather grip felt alien against her work-worn hands - so different from the smooth wood of her ritual tools.

A branch snapped nearby. Monifa froze, the drumming of her own pulse loud in her ears. The leaves at her waist rustled - not from movement, but from the tremor in her hands that she couldn't quite suppress.

"I have guided souls into this world for longer than you've drawn breath," she whispered to the unconscious woman, her voice barely stirring the stale air between them. "Do not make this the first life I fail to protect."

The moss curtain trembled. Something was coming.

Monifa exhaled slowly through her nose. The scent of crushed ewe àtàrẹ clung to her fingers, stubborn even against the bog’s stench. The young woman—Seraphine—spoke of decades like seasons, yet her face still held the softness of youth. A dragon’s lifespan, then. Monifa had delivered half-elven babes in Lazular’s sun-cracked alleys—children who would one day outlive her by centuries—but this felt different.

“My name is Monifa, child,” she said gently, deliberately. Not condescension—grounding. A midwife’s trick. “I know less than you think. Soldiers’ tales are like birth pains—loud, dramatic, and rarely true.” Her camwood-stained fingers brushed the moss packed into Seraphine’s wound. “But yes. Pandemonium.”

A low drumbeat pulsed through the earth—dull, distant, dreadful. Monifa’s tusks pressed into her lower lip.

“In Lazular, mercenaries whisper of a place where lost battles go to rot. Where the angry dead march without rest.” Her eyes lifted to the skeletal branches jutting from the mire, pale moss clinging to them like dried umbilical cords. “They say this is not Arethil. Not fully. The sun hides here, cloaked in mist. And the air…”

She drew a slow breath through her teeth.

“…tugs at blood. At memory.”

A shimmer crawled briefly under her skin—veins glowing faintly green, like vines straining through stone. Then it vanished.

“This place feels it,” she murmured. “My mother’s blood snarls at it like a she-wolf. My father’s…” Her voice cracked. “My father’s calls it home.”

She looked toward the red-skinned figure—still as a nightmare, blade glinting like a butcher’s promise.

“We do not face that,” she said flatly. “Not if we value what’s left of ourselves.” Her tone was the same she’d used with mothers who refused to push during a final contraction—firm, calm, inescapable. “Too many? Yes. But that’s not the only danger.”

Her gaze lingered on the figure. Her jaw tightened.

“This place bends things. Warps what you carry inside.” Her voice lowered, thick with something feral. “It presses on my bones. On blood that isn’t all mine.”

The moss beneath her hand blackened, curling inward as if in pain. Her breath slowed through flared nostrils, steadying the rhythm hammering in her chest.

“If we strike, we wake what’s watching.”

She turned to Seraphine again, her voice quiet and edged. “Do you—did you understand what it said? Its voice clawed at something buried in me. My father’s tongue. My mother’s shadow. Words they feared but never taught.”

She faced the red figure again, the rot thick in her lungs.

“I’m no warrior,” she said. “But I know when the womb clenches before a storm.”

Monifa’s eyes shifted to Seraphine. “We need to find a way out of this barren land.”

From the folds of her sash, she drew a small clay vial, tilting it to show the shimmering powder inside. “Crushed moonpetal and drowsbane. For mothers birthing in the grain-fields, hunted by noble steel. It masks heat, breath, even footfalls. But not forever.”

Her gaze locked with Seraphine’s, unflinching.

“My hands are for life, not death. But today…” Her voice dropped to a whisper—earthy, old, touched by something ancestral. “Today, we move like blood. Quiet. Necessary. Alive.”