Lima raced through the forest, heart and footsteps pounding in time. The bandage on her leg had started to come loose, but there was no time to fix it. She glanced down and grimaced at the dark stain blossoming across the already filthy cloth. Her wound had reopened.

The mighty oaks surrounding Lima blocked her from the view of her attackers, but they also kept her from seeing where she was going. It was because of this that she rounded a bend and found herself suddenly floating in midair, weightless as a bird. She was flying.

But then she was falling: spinning and crashing back to earth in a painful heap. The hill she then rolled down ended in a dense swamp, and it was into this that Lima somersaulted now; landing with a gross squelch in shin-deep mud.

She groaned, pressing grimy hands to the gash on her leg and a new one across her forehead.

She would have sat there in the mud for longer, (and may have even begun to cry) but a shout from somewhere behind and above the girl had her scrambling back up to her feet and heading off through the maze of marsh and inescapable sludge.

Just as the sounds of her pursuers had begun to fade and Lima thought she might be losing them, an arrow whizzed past her head. She threw herself onto the ground and cried out in frustration- and no small amount of pain- certain that after everything she’d been through to get here, it was over. To die like this; filthy and bleeding and crawling like an animal through a swamp was not how Lima used to dream of meeting her heroic end.

But dreams were for children and Lima was no longer the innocent daughter of the village overseer. Now she was a criminal, being tracked through the shadowlands by her father’s own men. What her mother would think Lima didn’t like to imagine. She never dwelt on those thoughts for too long- she couldn’t bear the ache that rose in her chest at the image of her parents’ faces. The grief she had brought them.

The rest of Lima’s ragtag team had long since abandoned her, leaving the girl for whatever fate would befall her in their haste to loot the neighboring town. Which….Lima had set on fire.

Now she gritted her teeth, clenching her fingers into tight fists in the mud and lowering her forehead to the earth, eyes shut tight. She wouldn’t give her father’s general the satisfaction of seeing the fear in her eyes before he shot her.

Slowly the sound of footsteps drew nearer, and Lima felt sure that he could hear the pounding in her chest. She waited. And waited. Annnnnnd waited.

But no arrow came. No slice of a sword or sting of a dagger. No, what came instead had Lima jerking her head up in surprise, eyes flying open.

A gentle hand on her shoulder. A canteen of water pressed to her lips. A whispered: “Shhh. I’m not going to hurt you. Drink quickly and raise yourself onto your elbows. Can you stand?”

Lima blinked away the dirt that had assaulted her eyes when she fell, trying to calm the panic rising within her.

Then she looked up, not into the face of her father’s personal guard, but a young man. He was covered in almost as much dirt as she was, and there was a dark bruise forming over his left eye. And his _eyes_. Lima had never seen the ocean, but she dazedly, almost deliriously wondered if it compared to the bright blue reflected there.

She considered briefly that she could be hallucinating and maybe there was no one there after all, but then darkness swirled at the corners of her vision and she passed out.