"Prepare yourself," Lilian said again, steadier this time. "To face the Great Witch."
The jester tilted their head, the mask catching the light, the smile beneath it unhidden by anything.
"What sort of joke is this?"
"It's not a joke."
"The Great Witch." They said it slowly, savoring the syllables, the amusement in their voice genuine and unrushed. "Truly?"
"That's what I said."
The jester laughed — that high, real laugh that seemed to have no bottom to it — and spun the sickle once in their hand.
"Well." They straightened. "Since we're doing introductions." A small, theatrical bow, the asymmetrical sleeves catching the smoke-tinted air. "My master calls me Quipster. I don't have anything more official than that. Seemed rude not to offer something in return for Great Witch."
"Quipster," Lilian repeated.
"Quipster."
He moved.
There was no buildup to it — one moment he was standing eight feet away with the sickle loose in his hand, and the next he was directly in front of her, the blade already arcing toward her side.
Lilian threw herself backward.
The cut missed by inches.
She raised her hands — wind gathering between her fingers, the current building toward something — and Quipster was already past her guard, one boot sweeping her legs out from under her.
She hit the ground.
He was on her before she could recover, the sickle pressed flat against her shoulder, not cutting, just present, the weight of him pinning her down with the casual ease of someone handling something far less threatening than they had expected.
"Oh," he said. "This is disappointing."
She shoved against him. Nothing moved.
He stood, almost bored, and kicked her — not hard, not designed to hurt, just enough to send her rolling several feet across the dirt.
She came up gasping.
Useless.
The word arrived from somewhere she did not invite it from.
Useless. A disgrace to her family. Always last. Always the one who couldn't.
She shook her head, trying to clear it, but the voices kept coming — old ones, half-remembered, the particular cruelty of people from a life she had left far behind but apparently had not fully escaped.
You'll never amount to anything.
Why do you even try.
She tried to gather the wind again. It slipped from her grip, scattered, useless.
Quipster watched her struggle with open delight.
"Oh, this really is sad," he said. "I was hoping for more from a Great Witch."
The voices kept piling.
She was on her knees in the dirt. Smoke drifting overhead. Shiri's still form visible at the edge of her vision, his chest barely moving. The dark elves hidden behind her, depending on a fight she was currently losing badly.
Useless.
She closed her eyes.
No.
The word arrived clean and total, cutting through everything else.
No. I am not useless.
She opened her eyes.
"I don't care about them anymore," she said. Quietly. Then louder, standing, her legs shaking but holding. "I don't care what any of you ever said about me."
Quipster paused, tilting his head with genuine curiosity.
"I have people," Lilian said, "who I need to protect."
She raised both hands.
A symbol bloomed in the air in front of her palms — a circle, wind curling through it in visible spiraling lines, the shape of something building toward release.
"And I will not let them down."
She released it.
The arc of wind that left her hands was unlike anything she had cast before — wide, fast, the air itself given an edge sharp enough to cut, the whole force of everything she had tearing across the yard toward Quipster with a roar that drowned out the fighting at the breach.
For one second, it looked like it would land.
Then Quipster simply stopped laughing and stepped sideways.
The arc passed him by less than a foot.
It continued past him, tore through the eastern wall, and the stone there split open with a sound like something enormous breaking.
Quipster looked at the destroyed wall.
Then at Lilian.
"You're going to need a lot more of those," he said pleasantly, "to actually hit me."
He moved.
The distance between them disappeared in an instant, and his hand closed around her face — not the sickle, just his palm, pressing her down and back until she hit the ground near Shiri, her cheek crushed against the dirt, her vision filled with his still, barely-breathing form a few feet away.
"Shiri—"
Her hand stretched toward him, fingers grasping at air, the distance impossibly small and impossibly far.
Shiri's eyes opened.
Just barely.
His lips moved.
"...Get away..." The words came out in fragments, each one costing him something. "...from her..."
His eyes found Quipster.
"...you..."
"...bastard—"
He made a sound — not quite a scream, something smaller and worse, the sound of a body that had nothing left telling him so.
Then he went still again.
Lilian's face was still pinned to the dirt.
Tears ran sideways across her cheek into the ground.
In the storage shed, the gap in the wall showed everything.
"We're done for," one of the dark elves whispered, watching Lilian pinned beneath that hand, watching Shiri motionless. "We should run. While they're— while everyone's distracted—"
"Run where?" another voice answered, bitter.
Chloe was at the gap.
She had been watching the whole thing — the wind arc, the wall breaking, Lilian hitting the ground, Shiri's hand reaching nowhere. Her own hands were pressed flat against the wood, her knuckles white.
"I'm going out," she said.
The shed went still.
"What?" Someone grabbed her arm. "Chloe, no — you'll die out there—"
"Then I'll die out there." She turned, and her voice carried something none of them had heard from her before — steady, certain, the particular calm of someone who had finished deliberating. "You all should be ashamed."
The dark elf holding her arm stared.
"Lord Kairo," she said, "saved us. Lilian helped free us. Shiri built us a house this morning." Her voice cracked slightly and she pushed through it. "And we're going to sit in here while they die for us?"
No one answered.
"I won't."
She pulled her arm free.
She found a length of plank near the door — broken off from something, splintered at one end, heavier than it looked — and gripped it with both hands.
She opened the door.
The yard outside was chaos in every direction.
The kobold line at the breach had thinned considerably — fewer shields than there had been minutes ago, the spaces between them filling with bodies that did not move again once they fell. One kobold broke from the formation, charging Quipster with a spear lowered, shouting something that didn't survive past the first syllable.
Quipster turned, almost lazily, the sickle catching the kobold across the middle in a single clean motion.
The kobold came apart.
Quipster didn't even watch it fall. His attention was already back on Lilian beneath his hand.
Chloe walked into the yard.
The plank was heavy in her grip. Her legs were not entirely steady. The smoke stung her eye and the sounds of fighting filled every direction and she kept walking anyway, straight toward the man with the sickle and the mask, straight toward the hand pressing her friend into the dirt.
"Let her go."
Quipster looked up.
He looked at her for a long moment — really looked, the particular assessing attention he had given everyone since arriving — and then his face split into something delighted.
"Oh," he said. "Oh. I know you."
Chloe's grip tightened on the plank.
"A slave." He tilted his head, studying her. "A traitor slave." He laughed — short, genuine. "What's the matter, did the lord here treat you better than your old masters? Made you forget which side you're supposed to be on?"
"I'm not a traitor."
"You're definitely something." He pointed the sickle at her throat — bare, uncollared. "How did you even get that off, hm? Slave stones don't just fall off." He tapped his own throat with the flat of the blade, a mocking gesture. "Did Daddy Lord give you a present?"
Chloe said nothing.
Quipster shrugged, the gesture loose and unbothered.
"Doesn't matter to me," he said. "Slaves don't get to pick sides anyway — that's the whole point of a collar. Funny that you think you have a choice now." He smiled. "I just want to have fun. You, that one—" he tilted the sickle toward Lilian without releasing her— "the snake. Whoever else comes out to play."
Chloe's hands were shaking on the plank.
Tears ran down her face — not from fear, or not only fear, something more complicated than that, grief and rage tangled together in a way that had nowhere clean to go.
"You think," she said, her voice breaking, "that just because we were slaves— that we don't—"
"Aww." Quipster's voice dripped with mock sympathy. "Look at that. So brave." He laughed again, the sound bouncing off the broken walls. "You've got a lot of courage for someone so weak."
"I'm not weak."
"You're really not strong enough to be saying that."
"I'M NOT WEAK!"
Quipster's smile vanished.
Something flickered behind the mask's lower edge — not anger exactly, something colder and faster, the amusement curdling into something with teeth.
"Let's see, then."
He released Lilian.
He moved.
The sickle came around in a single, total arc, and Chloe barely had time to raise the plank before the blade tore through it, through her guard, through everything between her and the strike—
Blood hit the dirt.
To be continued.....