Victor’s body was shot with pain; his head was assaulted by a loud ringing, and his arms and legs stung with cuts and bruises. Dirt bathed him, and he tasted earth in his mouth, and blood from his nose. In the wake of the troll’s attack he lay motionless, staring up through a gap in the trees at the calm purple sky.
Something warm and pleasant grasped him, and he rolled his head to find Sam leaning over him. She held his hand with her left, and her right was tucked close to her chest. A deep graze streaked across her check, but did not mar the beauty of her eyes as they shined brightly among the devastation. She smiled in a way that convinced him that everything was going to be fine, even if he didn’t know it himself. “We sure do get knocked around,” she laughed. “We must be made of pretty stern stuff.”
Victor didn’t have the strength to sit up, but he reached for Sam and lay beside her. For a moment, the rest of the world seemed non-existent. “Not stern enough,” he replied. “What happened?”
“I heard Rodrick’s call and saw the troll coming after you. I ran and tried to stop him, but I wasn’t strong enough. If it weren’t for Astrid we’d be as flat as pancakes right now.”
There they laid in silence as the fighting around them came to a sad and bitter end. Rodrick had lopped three fingers from the troll’s hand so that it could no longer wield its club, but as Victor watched in dismay, Rodrick charged the vile creature with a spear and was thrown against a building by the troll’s swinging hand. Hansel and Gretel stood back to back in a ring of gnarling war Goblyns, and around them was great mounds of the fallen, from both sides. Ling stood alone upon the wall, her two daggers flashing like lightning against the endless stream. Caesar was beneath her, hewing down enemy after enemy as they stormed through the fallen gate. Fire was all around.
“I don’t think we’re going to make it this time,” Victor whispered. He stifled a groan as a terrible pain loomed in his chest – the wound slowly sapping the life from him.
Sam had not seen it. “Victor, I hope you know that if we are to die, there is no one else I’d rather be with.”
Victor squeezed her hand. “It’s been a hell of a journey, Sam. I have no regrets, only, so much for living forever.”
Her laugh was the sweetest sound he had ever heard.
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