Fate & Modesty

The shadows were dark. Modesty sat, slouched against the cold, dank wall, dreaming.
That she could even still dream scared her. Everything about this scared her.

She had sat here for days now, barely moving. Just another corpse in a city full of them. That most of these corpses walked and talked and acted like they were alive scared her. She couldn't bring herself to join them, to converse or try to make a new life.
They mostly ignored her, she was just another corpse frightened by her situation. This scared her too; the locals were so used to this, to corpses like her, they could just ignore them.

She shivered. There was no need to shiver as she no longer felt the cold, not truly. She was aware of it, but it did not make her suffer. She shivered anyway, almost desperate to keep hold of a semblance of her previous life.

She sat shivering. Watching the other corpses pretending to be alive.

Something odd walked past her, something odd enough to make her head twitch up and take notice. Something alive. A strange creature, long nose, long ears, tusks. An odd rolling gait, long arms dangling at its sides. A strange, living blue-skinned creature.
Modesty blinked. A troll.

She shivered again. Not from the vague and dull sensation of cold this time but from fear. She crawled, unwilling to stand and draw attention to herself. She crawled forwards, craning her neck to get a closer look at the troll.
A dry and dusty groan escaped her lips. This troll was known to her.

This was the troll who had done this to her. This troll had slain her.

Her eyes closed and she slumped, dreaming again. Remembering.

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It was cold and it was raining. Again. She was ill, she knew. Her brother and his friends had bundled her up in all the spare clothing they had and tied her tightly. Her fever racked her and on occasion her delirium overtook her and she wriggled and thrashed.
Her brother Marty had apologised profusely.
"Sis... its for your own good. Can't have you hurting yourself can we?" He'd had the cheek to smile.
She'd been feverish for days now, ever since they had bumped into two of those damned walking corpses.

A dozen of them had escaped Gilneas' burning. There were five of them left now, the others slain by plague and by the Forsaken. The little band of renegade Gilnean refugees had no idea where they were going, only that they had to escape.
Gilneas had gone to shit, they all agreed. The wolf-curse had run rampant through the country, then the Forsaken and their green-skinned friends had invaded.
They had been lucky enough to avoid the wolf-curse, and even luckier in making it this far through the Forsaken lines.

Still... The last encounter with the Forsaken had ended badly. There were eight of them by that point, and before they knew what was happening one of them, Francine, the only other girl in the group, had dropped to the floor, blood bubbling from a slit throat.
They'd all drawn their weapons, mostly crude clubs and hand-made spears and looked around in panic. Two Forsaken emerged from... somewhere. Their affinity with the shadows was terrifying at times.
The group of Gilneans had pounced on them, clubbing and stabbing.

After a few minutes they had stood back. Two Forsaken lay in bits and pieces on the floor. As well as Francine and two others of their own.
And so the survivors had escaped again, rushing through the forest, sticking close to the coastline. It was only when the adrenaline from the fight had worn off that Modesty noticed she was injured. A thin cut along the flesh of her thigh, barely bleeding. She hadn't thought much of it.
A day or so later she had begun to limp, but she ignored it. Too intent on survival to pay attention to the ache in her leg.
It was Bryan who had noticed, the pair of them naked and bundled up in one of the sleeping bags.
He'd always liked her, she'd always pretended she didn't know. It was only in this situation she had finally relented. Any comfort was good now. Marty wasn't happy about it, but sod him.
Bryan had stroked her thigh, causing her to yelp in pain. He'd recoiled and brought his hand up into the moonlight. Greenish, sticky blood coated his fingers.
He'd almost vomited on her, assuming the gloop was... from somewhere other than her thigh. He'd jumped up, sworn and headed naked back to his own sleeping bag.
So she checked, the cut on her thigh was now angry and leaking greenish goo. Infected.
By the next evening she was too ill to move, Bryan and Marty had convinced the others not to leave her behind.

Her thoughts burnt in her mind, the fever wracked her body. She lay on the beach while the rest of the Gilnean survivors rummaged around. They'd found a shipwreck, full of bodies of Horde soldiers wearing burgundy tabards edged in gold and with a shattered skull emblazoned on them.
Good loot. Proper weapons, armour and even dried rations and medical supplies.

Then Gordon twisted round and fell over, his face turned from merely ugly to a red ruin with an arrow stuck in it. The rest scattered, drawing their new weapons.
Four figures emerged from the forest.
A female troll with a bow, notching another arrow. A huge bull-man in robes. A male troll, also in robes, dark energy crackling around his finger tips. And an orc, one of the greenskinned demons, limping but clad from head to foot in armour.
A brief fight ensued and she watched in mute and helpless horror as her friends and her brother were slaughtered. Bryan went down to the orc's claws, disembowelled and weeping as he tried to hold his guts in.
Her brother died screaming, his eyes popping in his skull as the male troll poured horrific magicks into his body. The last of her group, a man she had never known well called Renny was the last to die. He had stabbed the orc in the arm and got his head ripped off in return when the bull-man changed form into a bear and swiped at him.

She couldn't move, couldn't make a sound. She could only watch in horror as these monsters looted the corpses of her friends and brother, discussing something in a gutteral language she couldn't understand.
Then, to her terror they noticed her. The orc pointed at her and uttered some harsh sounding words. The male troll loped over, looming over her prone form. She had looked up, her eyes wide with fear and shame as her bladder released itself.
The troll raised a dagger and then pain exploded in her chest. She looked down in horror. The dagger was... was inside her. Its hilt sticking out, blood oozing around it and then...

The pain ended.

She awoke some time later. A huge and frightening blue winged figure stood above her. She gasped for breath that wouldn't come and was picked up roughly by two rotting but mobile corpses.
This was how she had became the thing she was fleeing from. She was Forsaken.
It was this troll's fault.
This was the troll who had hurt her, ended her life.

Modesty opened her eyes, staring at the hated figure in front of her.
He would feel her pain, her horror.

For the first time in months she smiled.