“Jax, I’m sorry,” she whispered, and I gazed down at her, a smile briefly lifting my lips as she moved back so that I could see her. The gentle light that she emitted was enough to change my vision from the greens and blacks of DarkVision to actually seeing her properly. She rested there on the palm of my hand, drawing her knees up to her chest and staring into my eyes. Her perfect face was a tear-streaked mess, her hair looked like she’d been dragged through a hedge backwards, and her clothes were simply weird. She always summoned them on a whim anyway, and she’d clearly not put any thought into make them, so her body was covered in a mixture of the outfits she normally wore, a yoga pants leg, a jeans leg, a low cut top that abruptly transitioned into a fully decent shirt halfway across her chest. I stared at her, and I couldn’t help but smile fully.
“Why?” I asked her quietly, trying not to move too much, even as another point of my health dropped away.
“This was all my fault. I saw them, the Drow, and I remembered. I remembered them taking me before, capturing me and taking me from my family, selling me to the Empire, to be bound to the Great Tower, I hated them so much, and I tried to get closer to them, to see what they were doing. The next thing I knew, I was trapped. They were laughing at me, they…they…!” Tears streamed down her face, and she seemed to suddenly realize where we were, and the condition I was in. “No! No, you’re not leaving me!” she snarled, and she blurred away from me, leaving me in darkness.
My DarkVision slowly reactivated, though my exhaustion and injuries were impacting even that, as I heard her voice somewhere beyond me.
“…inside! He’s bleeding out, move it!” she snarled, before diving back down to me, slipping and flitting through gaps in the stone.
“Oracle…” I whispered, and she was there, one tiny hand reaching out to stroke my cheek. “Is it dead?” I asked her, and she frowned, her expression changing to one dominated by hatred as she flashed away. She sank deeper into the rubble as she searched, twisting around the enormous form I could dimly see part of, though most of its bulk was covered by the stone nearby.
Oracle returned to me a few seconds later, fear on her face.
“She’s alive. She’s injured, badly, but she’s alive, and conscious. We have to hurry.” She slipped around the rubble, vanishing up to the surface to warn the others, before returning and disappearing down toward my waist. I couldn’t twist around to see her, trapped as I was, so I whispered to her, a grin on my face as I pictured her face.
“Really, Oracle? Now? Can’t you control yourself?”
I heard her snort, and I groaned as half of my slowly regenerating mana was used up again. A second later, she was there flitting back into view before me.
“I’m sorry, Jax. I know how much it hurts, but I need to use your mana to move things, I’ve got a potion out of your pouch, can you move your right hand down?”
I shifted slightly, pushing my hand downwards, only to shift one of the rocks I was pressed against, causing those above me to shift and press in against my chest tighter. I groaned, huffing out a breath; then I thought about the creature that was slowly shifting above me, testing the stability of the wreckage nearby, and I growled in fury at the thought of that fucker surviving all of this and capturing Oracle again, not to mention harming my friends.
I drew as deep a breath as I could, then I twisted, feeling the rocks shifting over me, and their weight increasing as things moved. I forced my hand down, and I felt my potion pouch being pressed into my hands. The world was white with the flaring mana migraine as I yanked the pouch up, my left hand being trapped and fingers being clearly broken only drove me to greater effort, as I yanked the first potion out with my teeth.
“Drink it!” Oracles voice came to me, and I felt a flare as she used my mana to pop the cork. I guzzled it down, the headache dying in seconds as my vision cleared. Oracle blazed with power as I saw my mana bar jumping, thirty points appeared in seconds, then vanished as she started to heal me, I tugged out another potion, seeing the red I needed, and I chugged that as well, groaning as I felt bones shifting, realigning, and healing at tremendous speed.
“Again!” Oracle said, and I obeyed, tugging another potion out, only to have it slapped from my hand.
“No!” she cried, “This one.” And I did as I was told, my heart beating faster as I heard the Drider shifting nearby.
My mana jumped again, and I pulled out my final health potion, Oracle popping the cork and grinning as I felt the improvement to my health flooding me.
I saw my mana and health were both over fifty and I shook my head at Oracle as she went to heal me again.
“No.” I said to her. “Get back and get the others back; this isn’t over yet.” She started to argue, then saw the look in my eyes, and decided to trust me, flitting back up through the mess of stonework to tell the others to fall back. Then, because she knew me so well, she also told them to search the corpses for anything I could use for healing, because I was going to need it.
I braced myself,
