Netherkin

Chapter Five

After running for what feels like forever, Rain and Stella slow down, now deep in a forest. The Sun starts setting so they decide to make camp for the night. "I can't believe we left him behind... this day has just been too long." Stella sounds very drained, even to her own ears as she sits down on a long she had dragged over.

" It certainly was. I nearly died and I would have if not for your heroics, the Coven got annihilated and Ender did too. Just too much death and destruction." Rain recounts. " Also I'm now part of an Ender group or something apparently even though I have had basically no affiliation to them, ever."

"I'm honestly kind of jealous. I've been working so hard all these years to be noticed by my home dimension and then you show up and suddenly you're promoted to being the last Ender Watcher. The last protector of the dimensions.* sigh* . I'm not gonna let something like that get in the way of our friendship though. I just am not in the best frame of mind right now. "

"Yeah, that makes sense, I don't even understand why I was chosen either. I just hope things get better from here. "

After that there's a peaceful silence as rain and Stella both enjoy a meal of pre-packed travel rations, not wanting to say much else. Afterwards, Stella starts reading the Wither book more closely. there's so much information and spell knowledge densely packed here and she wants to know it all!

She is concentrating so hard in fact, she doesn't notice Rain coming up from behind her.

"Humanity restoration spell? What's that for? " He asks.

Stella flinches and nearly falls off her log.

" I didn't mean to scare you so bad. " Rain apologizes.

"It's okay. What were you asking about? "

"I saw a spell in your book that has a rather interesting name. What's a Humanity restoration spell? Is it for curing zombies or something? "

"it may be used in the process of curing zombies, but if it is, it's likely not the only part. In all honesty, I don't really know how zombie curing works. From what it says here, this spell is used to restore humanity to Netherkin. You know, the people who used to be human but got turned into violent, animalistic demons, horns and all? Yeah. "

"Well, That sounds useful! I've fought a few Netherkin before, they definitely weren't themselves anymore. Why isn't this used more often? "

"It is very useful! But the reason it isn't used very often is because of the very rare components needed to use it. Unicorn hair and starflower. Surprisingly, it's only an intermediate difficulty spell, so if the needed items weren't so dang rare, it could be used more often! "

"Would you happen to have the ingredients for this spell?"

"Why?"

"What if we meet one? It would be really nice to be able to help them without just killing them. Plus, we are in a war. If we can get back some of the people we have lost, that could be monumental! "

"You are right, it could be. And yes, I do have them. I got the Unicorn hair as a parting gift when I left the Coven. I somehow managed to get lucky enough to find a starflower when I decided to explore around the large forest near Frostbourne about a month ago. " She pulls out a small vial of unicorn hair and a dried starflower to show.

" Wow. That is so cool! I guess you're pretty lucky to have items that rare then. "

"It is pretty cool, but honestly I don't feel very lucky right now. " She admits. "I think I'm going to finish that section on Humanity restoration then go to sleep. I am exhausted. "

She moves to put her components away but then suddenly two red-tipped daggers come flying towards them from out of the forest. Rain manages to deflect the dagger coming his way and yells " We've got an assassin! "

Sadly Stella isn't so lucky, she doesn't notice the dagger fast enough and it hits her, lodging itself in her chest. She gasps in surprise and pain as she drops her spell components and looks down at the dagger sticking out of her chest.

She sees Rain's widen in terror as he takes a look at her, and then another dagger narrowly misses his head. The pain from her injury keeps getting worse and worse until she blacks out.

(We are finally getting to the whole reason why I wrote this story in the first place now that all the necessary worldbuilding is out of the way!)