"Lass, there's no need to—"
"SHUT UP!" she screamed then, coming up to her feet. "Just shut up! You don't know me! You don't have the RIGHT to say that!"
"Know what?" He turned, voice calm but unswerving. "That ye suffered a loss? I know that, child, it's written on yer face as plain as the abuse ye took was written on yer body. I may not know exactly what ye lost, but I know that look."
She was shivering then, from anger rather than fear, as she faced him in the gaudy shirt and blue pants he'd given her. Her fists were balled up, knuckles white, and he knew that she was riding right on the border of control.
The young, he thought. So easy to push.
"And all I'm sayin’," he went on, "is that ye'll be alright."
The motion started with her hips, and he saw it coming a mile away. Her minimal control snapped and she pivoted on one leg, kicking off the ground with more strength then he'd have guessed she had. The swelling from the burns made it hard to tell what sort of muscle tone the girl carried, after all.
Even so, he was waiting for her when she arrived and caught her punch on the outside of his arm without any change in his expression. There was no strength to the blow, and he was surprised it landed at all; her legs were quivering with the effort to keep her upright.
She screamed then, only after the first blow had landed, and a small corner of his mind was impressed. Most would have yelled as they charged, warning their target. She'd kept quiet until her actions gave her away, and only then let out the rage.
He stepped into her next blow, easily taking it on his upper arm. It was powerful enough to bruise him, which surprised and told him that she was no featherweight, but nowhere near the strength she'd need to be any sort of threat to him.
Her swings became wild then, what little control she had gone, and he let them rain down on him without retaliating. Her screams were raw in her throat, and she was wracked with sobs as she kept hitting him, so he just stepped into her and robbed her strikes of all their power.
As she hammered against him, far more at risk to harming herself than him, he caught her wrists and held them in place as she kept on sobbing.
"They're dead," she said, wracking sobs shaking her body. "They’re dead."
"I know, lass," he told her. "I know."
"They're dead," she whispered, falling to her knees.
He caught her, keeping her from hurting herself as she fell.
"Tell me, lass," he said softly. "Tell me what happened."
She shook and she sobbed, but she didn't refuse, so he let her go on until she gained enough control to start.
"I...it was just eight days ago," she whispered, head down, voice tight and barely audible. "They came eight days ago."
"The demons," he said.
She stiffened at the very word, eyes flickering around in search of her nightmares, but she didn't suffer another attack and managed to nod.
"Tell me," Kaern said firmly.
Elanthielle swallowed, then began to speak.
She spoke quietly, she spoke softly, and sometimes he had to strain to hear her, but she kept speaking and Kaern kept listening.
*****
Youth, thought Kaern as he, once more, watched the girl rest.
Resilient and stupid, it was a peculiar combination. No experienced person would have fallen for the blatant manipulation of her emotions the way this girl had, but on the other hand, an experienced person would know better than to let their emotions bottle up like that. It wasn't always necessary to talk, of course, but there had to be an outlet, a way to process the events that occurred. Without that, one would shortly go mad.
It was too early to think that she'd be in the latter category. Some people, perhaps even most, could process their own traumas enough to continue living as they must. Likely she would be one of those, he decided. She had the sense of someone with an inner strength.
The problem was that people with inner strength often survived their first traumas a little too well, leading to a sense of invulnerability that was illusory. They threw themselves into the flames again and again, until their strength, their foundation, was cracked and splintered and waiting for the final push over into the abyss.
After hearing her story, Kaern thought that she was such a person. She'd thrown herself into the furnace in her rage, but she had the intent to do so long before she understood what it truly meant. She had only fulfilled her earlier intent when she met these demons and their human lackey in doomed conflict.
Which left him with a more complicated question than what he had previously. When he first met her, this Elanth was little more than a child in distress. One did not walk past such a person, not if one valued their honor. Her escapade into the Overmind was curious, even promising for one so young, but it meant little in the overall scope of things.
Things were different now.
She wasn't the child he'd thought, not entirely. Certainly she wasn't yet an adult, but she was no longer a child either. She had suffered too much for that. Her passage into adulthood had perhaps begun too fast, too strongly, but it was begun and he had a feeling that she'd already marked her path.
Which, unfortunately, was going to get her killed if she had the nerve to follow it.
Waging a one-woman war against demons was just the sort of pointless cause that youth would embrace, a noble cause to tantalize the imagination and no wisdom to see the inherent impossibility in it. From what she had told him, her father had done much the same thing, only to return home when he realized just how futile it was.
It was his misfortune that he didn't understand that, once you walked a path like that, there was no escaping it. It would follow you to the end of time to extract its price.
In any case, she would be hale and strong in a few more days, strong enough for him to leave her to her own devices.
It wasn't his fight; it had never been his war. Unlike many others of his kind, Kaern had not joined the battle when the invasion commenced. He had little love for humanity and none for the demons, so he had no vested interest in either side. Both were too arrogant, too self-centered, too fundamentally destructive for his liking.
Of course, since the wars began, he'd learned to use the term “destructive” with a little more care.
Humans, at least, tended to try to avoid collateral damage, if only because they might want to once again use the area they were fighting on. Demons had few such compunctions, and their wars had razed so much of the land.
Kaern shook his head, pushing the thoughts aside.
The past was the past for good reason, and little to nothing could be done to affect it once it had come to pass. The future was unknown and unknowable, also for good reason, so all one had was the present.
And his present was unfortunately tied up with a sixteen-year-old human child who had an unfortunate hatred coupled with a brand new phobia for the same things.
They used to say that life was what happened when you weren't paying attention.
Kaern really had to learn to pay better attention.
*****
Elan was moving around a lot easier than she had been in the past few days. The blisters from her burns were mostly gone, though the badly peeling skin still marred her features. She'd woken up about an hour earlier to find the place empty and Kaern gone. A quick step to the outside told her that it was night and he was probably checking the deadfalls he'd set, so he should be back soon enough.
In the meantime, she had to admit that she was feeling stronger than she had since being beaten by the demons.
She closed her eyes as the thoughts and memories returned, but only for a moment. The emotions were beginning to die out now, and she wasn't losing control whenever she thought of the events of the past two weeks.