[horngeek]

Life and Death
Iliya- Withered Thorns

Spoiler

They say your life flashes before your eyes before you die. It's utterly cliche, but for me, it's true.

Green Meadows, the town I grew up in, named for the name of the greenfields it's right next to. One of the only places this far North you could get viable farmland- the rest is just ice fields. A small town... but it's been a good home for me the past fifteen years.

My parents, laughing over a joke Dad made. He's a guardsman. Been teaching me how to use a sword. And when we found out raiders were coming... he didn't want me to come, but we needed everyone who could fight to protect the ones that couldn't.

My friends. Us playing around with sticks-

The spear shifts in my gut, interrupting my chain of thought because it hurts. I vaguely wonder why it hasn't been taken out yet...

I'm dying. I know it. And... I don't want to. Please... someone...

Are you afraid, child?

Yes.

If I could save you, would you do anything for me?

...yes.

Even kill the world, if it was commanded by me?

He... just must be checking. He wouldn't really do that.
Yes.

Then, child... arise.

...pain.

----

The battlefield was deserted, the bodies of the defenders lying where they had been slain. In the end, their fight had been in vain, the village they had fought to protect burning in the cold night.

Suddenly, a wave of necrotic Essence sprang up around one of the corpses, a fifteen year old girl screaming as her hair turned white... and a black sunburst appeared on her forehead, bleeding. "Haaah..."

She grabbed the spear sticking out of her gut, pulling it out and throwing it away, the wound healing as if it had never happened in the first place.

Iliya looked around, desperately looking for survivors, even as the landscape around her subtly shifted, her Exaltation the last straw pushing the area of the massacre into a shadowland. "No... dad? Dad!"

...not completely happy with this, to be honest. May not have gotten across the circumstances of her Exaltation across properly... anyway. Review, please.

In case it isn't obvious- the character in question does not go by either name mentioned at the start anymore.