#Debt Settlement Companies near me

[infinitelifeassurance]

Infinite Life Assurance | Insurance Agency | Life Insurance Companies in Missouri City TX

Ours is a well-reputed Insurance Agency in Houston TX; we provide a wide range of coverage options to help you reduce financial uncertainty and make accidental loss manageable. Our team of experienced agents is committed to helping you find the right insurance coverage that fits your specific needs and budget. Moreover, when it comes to protecting and securing the financial future of your loved ones, ours is among the top-rated Life Insurance Companies in Missouri City TX. With us on hire, you can surely plan right for the unexpected. For your convenience, we have also kept our service charges at the lowest possible scale. So, if you need our expert assistance, call or visit us today.

[thorgoodlaw]

Payroll Tax Attorney: Failing to Remit Payroll Tax Could Lead to Criminal Liabilities

Managing payroll taxes is a critical responsibility for businesses of all sizes, but errors or disputes related to payroll taxes can lead to significant financial penalties. That’s where a payroll tax attorney comes into play. These professionals specialize in handling payroll tax matters, ensuring that your business complies with all tax regulations and avoiding any legal complications. Whether it’s correcting mistakes, negotiating settlements with the IRS, or representing your interests in court, a payroll tax attorney is essential in navigating the complexities of payroll tax law.

What Makes a Payroll Tax Attorney the Premier Choice?

Until recently, the IRS have generally pursued unpaid payroll tax attorney through civil enforcement against the company and by assessing the responsible individuals for the unpaid portion of the taxes that was withheld from the employee’s pay. The IRS would assign a revenue officer who would investigate to determine the extent of the liability and who was responsible. The revenue officer would propose the trust fund assessments against the responsible owner and/or key employees.

Working with a payroll tax attorney offers the following benefits:

Legal protection: The attorney will handle all communications with the IRS or state agencies, protecting you from potential legal issues.

In-depth knowledge: They bring expert knowledge of payroll tax laws, ensuring compliance and avoiding costly mistakes.

Stress reduction: You can focus on running your business while the attorney deals with all payroll tax matters.

Choosing a payroll tax attorney ensures peace of mind and prevents financial penalties.

If you have or have been notified by the IRS that you may have payroll tax liabilities, contact experienced tax attorneys at the Thorgood Law Firm. Tax debts do not get better with time. The later you address your tax debt, the more exposure you have and the less your options.

Why You Need a Payroll Tax Attorney Near Me

When you encounter issues with payroll taxes, whether it’s related to unpaid taxes, incorrect deductions, or audits, it’s crucial to have a skilled professional by your side. A payroll tax attorney near me will have a deep understanding of local, state, and federal tax laws. They can provide you with personalized guidance, ensuring your business complies with all payroll tax obligations.

By hiring a local attorney, you benefit from their knowledge of the specific tax rules and regulations that apply in your area. This can make a huge difference, especially if you are facing an IRS audit or need assistance with resolving payroll tax disputes.

Attorney for Payroll Issues: How They Can Help

An attorney for payroll issues is your go-to expert when navigating through the complexities of payroll tax problems. Payroll tax law can be intricate, involving various forms of taxes like federal income tax withholding, Social Security, Medicare, and state taxes. A payroll tax attorney will help ensure that your business is complying with all payroll tax requirements, avoid costly mistakes, and minimize your risk of legal troubles.

The main benefits of hiring an attorney for payroll issues include:

Expert advice and analysis of your payroll tax situation.

Help with resolving disputes with the IRS or state tax agencies.

Assistance with correcting payroll errors and minimizing penalties.

Representation in case of audits or other legal proceedings.

Having an attorney for payroll issues ensures your business remains compliant and protected.

Conclusion

Payroll tax issues should not be taken lightly, and it’s important to seek the help of a qualified professional who can protect your business. Whether you’re facing an audit, correcting payroll mistakes, or needing guidance on complex tax laws, hiring a payroll tax attorney near me is a smart decision. These experts have the knowledge and experience to resolve issues quickly and efficiently, saving your business time, money, and potential legal headaches.

[delawarecounty]

Divorce Lawyers Near Me - What Every Individual Should Look Into

Divorce cases are frequently very emotional and fraught with emotion when it comes to legal dispute. If a marriage is at an impasse and the parties involved may require the assistance of a combative divorce attorney--someone who will make the effort of ensuring that their clients obtain a just settlement. A lawyer with experience successfully and effectively managing the intricate divorce proceedings is known as an aggressive divorce attorney. Their primary goal is to protect their customers' rights and stand up for them during this tense period. With an intense focus on each detail and an in-depth understanding regarding family law adamant divorce lawyer thoroughly examines every aspect of every case, making sure there is no doubt. To determine a fair division of debts and assets, they look into the financial history of assets, liabilities, and other obligations of their clients as well as their spouses. Attorneys work to ensure a just division of assets, including vehicles, homes, investment and companies, using skilled negotiation. They strive to make sure their clients get their fair share since they know the worth of these possessions. Are you hunting for delaware county pa divorce lawyer? Look at the previously discussed website.

Another important aspect of divorce proceedings is child custody, and a combative divorce attorney is adept at defending the best interests of their clients' children. They compile information and make convincing arguments to demonstrate that their clients can create a safe and secure atmosphere. Their goal is to advance the stability and well being of the children who are involved, as well as protect the rights of parents for their client. Additionally, a litigious divorce attorney fights for alimony or spousal support. To ensure that their clients receive an equitable and reasonable amount of support, they advocate for their client's interests through bringing up issues like income inequality, earning capacity, and the length of the marriage. They seek to build an enduring foundation by expertly communicating the financial realities. The active divorce lawyer is always a dependable ally who can provide assistance and direction throughout the legal procedure. They are a source of support during these trying times because they are aware of the emotional toll divorce may affect their clients.

They know the stress their customers go through and are focused on the legal details. A divorce lawyer who is combative exhibits their legal prowess in the courtroom. In order to get the best result for their clients, they put together powerful arguments, make evidence, and cross examine witnesses. Their determination to fight for what is fair and right is the reason for their ferocious manner of speaking. The divorce lawyer who is combative works behind the scenes outside from the courts. They review documents, look over the law, and map their next step. Their unwavering focus is on getting their clients the best possible outcomes. When it comes to divorce, an assertive divorce lawyer is crucial to ensure that their clients receive what is right. They fight for fair distribution of assets, the child's custody arrangement, and spouse support, while navigating the complexity of legal system with skill, tenacity and a steadfast commitment. They offer assistance throughout an emotional time and serve as the client's loyal all-arounder.

[chinmay54321]

If you are finally having a hard time with your credit, it is now time to find the local credit repair near me and ask for the best solution to come up with the best results. 

[bkdebtrelief]

Moving to a new country is an exciting adventure, but it can also come with its fair share of challenges. One of the biggest challenges that expats face is managing their credit card debt. If you're an expat who's struggling with unpaid credit card debt, you're not alone. Many expats find themselves in a similar situation, and it can be overwhelming to figure out how to handle it. In this article, we'll cover the top 7 mistakes people make when looking for credit card debt relief for expats and how to avoid them.

Mistake Not researching debt settlement services for international moves. When moving abroad with unpaid credit card debt, it's important to research debt settlement services that specialize in international moves. Many debt relief companies only operate within the United States, which can make it difficult to resolve your debt if you're living overseas.

How to avoid this mistake: Look for debt relief companies that have experience working with expats and offer debt settlement services for international moves.

Mistake Ignoring options for paying off credit card debt before moving abroad. If you're planning to move abroad, it's a good idea to explore options for paying off your credit card debt before you leave. This can include debt consolidation loans or credit card debt repayment plans.

How to avoid this mistake: Talk to a financial advisor or debt relief specialist to explore your options for paying off your credit card debt before you move.

Mistake Failing to negotiate credit card debt before moving overseas. If you're struggling with credit card debt, it's important to try to negotiate with your credit card company before you move overseas. This can help you reduce your debt and avoid defaulting on your payments.

How to avoid this mistake: Contact your credit card company and explain your situation. They may be willing to work with you to create a repayment plan or reduce your interest rates.

Mistake Not considering credit card debt consolidation for overseas moves. Consolidating your credit card debt can be a great option for expats who are moving overseas. This can help you simplify your payments and reduce your interest rates.

How to avoid this mistake: Look for debt consolidation options that are available to expats and compare the interest rates and fees.

Mistake Forgetting to explore debt relief solutions for moving abroad with credit card debt. There are many debt relief solutions available to expats who are struggling with credit card debt. These can include debt management plans, debt settlement, and credit counseling.

How to avoid this mistake: Research debt relief solutions that are available to expats and talk to a debt relief specialist to explore your options.

Mistake Defaulting on credit card debt when moving abroad. Defaulting on your credit card debt can have serious consequences, including damage to your credit score and legal action from your creditors.

How to avoid this mistake: Stay in communication with your creditors and explore debt relief solutions before defaulting on your payments.

Mistake Not seeking professional help for credit card debt management for overseas relocation.

Managing your credit card debt when moving overseas can be overwhelming, and it's important to seek professional help if you're struggling to make payments.

How to avoid this mistake: Talk to a debt relief specialist or financial advisor who has experience working with expats to help you manage your credit card debt.

https://debt-attorneys.s3.amazonaws.com/debt-settlement-lawyer-near-me/index.html

Top 5 Frequently Asked Questions for Credit Card Debt Relief for Expats:

Q What happens to unpaid credit card debt if you move abroad? A: Unpaid credit card debt doesn't disappear if you move abroad. Your creditors can still take legal action to collect the debt, and it can damage your credit score.

Q Can I negotiate my credit card debt before moving overseas? A: Yes, it's possible to negotiate your credit card debt before moving overseas. Contact your credit card company to discuss your options.

Q What are the best debt relief solutions for expats with credit card debt? A: The best debt relief solutions for expats with credit card debt depend on your individual situation. Talk to a debt relief specialist to explore your options.

Q How can I avoid defaulting on my credit card debt when moving abroad? A: You can avoid defaulting on your credit card debt by exploring debt relief solutions and staying in communication with your creditors.

Q What should I do if I'm struggling with credit card debt while living overseas? A: If you're struggling with credit card debt while living overseas, seek professional help from a debt relief specialist or financial advisor.

CALL NOW! (877) 706-2008

Contact Active Debt Relief at https://activedebtrelief.com/blog/active-debt-relief-blog-posts/ to explore your options for credit card debt relief as an expat. Our team of debt relief specialists has experience working with expats and can help you find the best solution for your situation.

[sgcpainc]

𝐃𝐨 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐍𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐈𝐑𝐒 𝐃𝐞𝐛𝐭 𝐒𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐬?𝐖𝐞 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐅𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐓𝐨 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐋𝐢𝐟𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐇𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐫

Do you owe taxes to the IRS? Are you worried how you will pay it back without declaring bankruptcy? You need the help of qualified and experienced Licensed Tax Professionals.

IRS is one of the most well known and vicious government agencies in the United States. You need to work with them, instead of against them, if you wish for any form of resolution in Tax Debts. SG INC CPA is the best Tax and Accounting Agency in Texas to offer you the services of IRS Debt Settlement. We have the experience, the drive and motivation to see your debt fulfilled.

𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐓𝐀𝐂𝐓 𝐔𝐒 𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐌𝐎𝐑𝐄

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[himbodjarin]

LUNAR; CH14

18+ EXPLICIT Content: Gore, general violence, Din/Third person POV. MANDO'A TRANSLATIONS AT THE BOTTOM Word count: 16,019 Pairing: Din Djarin/F!Reader - no y/n

The Mandalorian is a driven warrior — traversing the galaxy in search of the ancient Jedi — but everyone has their weaknesses, and he’s no different. The Bounty Hunter possessed three in fact. One he’s discovered—The Child. The remaining two, though, he wasn’t aware of their existence. At least, not until he meets a valorous Sharpshooter underneath a moonless night sky; then he’s plummeting down a dark mission of self-discovery, questioning his morals and his Creed while the moon taunts him, the phases of the satellite corresponding to his personal revelations. However, the Girl has a dark past that may come to inflict hardships on the Mandalorian and the Child; it's up to the Bounty Hunter to decide her fate. Read on AO3 / Series Masterlist / Playlist

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THIS IS THE WAY

The Sun stands off to Din’s side, silent in a comforting way, a placidness he’s unable to recover within himself, and he savours the company with a gloved hand roosting on a curve. She twists to face him, bestowing a grand smile of rays that encapsulate inside and furnaces his figure until he’s blanketed in a toasty buzz, a swelling in his internal organs that he’ll just never become accustomed to. Din reacts to the sensations the only way he knows how and drags her into his side, a hand slithering to her hip to steady her there; little engagements that he’d never considered partaking in before the Girl.

Hands carved of dormant radiation fuss with the makeshift strap slung across her shoulder; one of the more unfortunate after-effects of her victory. Din had to utilise his craftsmanship to gift her with a lash capable of taking the weight of the disruptor rifle—the harness he relied on was built into his bandolier with a small metal clasp. He cares for the Girl but she is no charity case; the rifle against her back is plenty more than he would’ve ever thought of parting with.

The meddling persists, tinking the steel of the barrel against his vambrace.

“What’s the matter?”

Her head shakes and sinks to indolently survey the turf beneath their feet.

He glances at her hand. “I thought you wanted it?”

She buckles into submission from his queries, not that it took much effort on his part, and drags a hand down the front of her face. “I did - I do but it doesn’t feel right. It’s not mine… With your religion and all this feels awry. I shouldn’t have this.”

“I want you to have it.”

It’s the truth. He wants to be endowed with the ability to watch her manipulate something that’s been with him for so long. He wants to bookmark how it frames her body—he doesn’t know how but it does and he’s eternally grateful for that—but most of all, he wants a part of him to be forever touching her.

Nonetheless, it still doesn’t satisfy her scepticism and she scratches into the leather strap until it weathers and flakes.

“It’s just—”

“What?”

A relieving puff of stale carbon dioxide dispels from her slim parted lips. “I don’t want you to think I’m using you for your rifles, for your protection.”

Helmet inclines enough for the tip of his T to connect with her eyes; a small shake of his head as if to enquire what she’s talking about. She’s more than capable of protecting herself. She’s demonstrated it time and time again and Din is the last person who’d assume such things from her.

“I mean it’s the only reason I hitched a ride from you in the first place. I felt like I deserved compensation for my rifle and I needed a way off that damned planet.” She stiffly eases her eyes to the ground and scrunches a stone beneath the toes of her boot. “I never could’ve anticipated all of what’s happened...happening to—to happen…”

Jumbled and stuttering as if she’d downed six flasks of spotchka is a new look on her. It spawns a bounce in his lungs but he stifles the deep chuckle in the interest of not distressing her more than she obviously already is.

Serrated seams etch into the ridges of her eyebrows laced with insecurity, as though peering through a distorted mirror; one concerned expression switching with the other.

She elaborates, with such a hushed volume he almost activates his sonic detectors to register the mumbling, “It just feels as though if this is in my possession there’s no need for me to stick around. You’ve cleared your debt. I’m of no use to a reinforced Mandalorian like yourself. I appreciate the offer, I do, but…”

“What about…” he suggests, two fingers tilting her chin upwards, “you just keep it warm for me.”

It’ll technically remain hers—radioactive fingers having tagged the trigger with her insignia, the rifle imprinting its framework into the soft flesh of her back whereas it never could nestle into his beskar—even if Din is the only one who believes so. His proposal appears to hit the nail on the head of her insecurities and she allows that pesky hand to cease its unjustified carnage on the strap once and for all.

He’s entrusted with a significant smile that he cradles in his palms gently, nurturing it to ensure its growth and progression—a curve of her lips he’s not worthy of possessing but she donates it nonetheless.

“I can do that.”

It’s a witless justification to continue this worldless pact they’ve got going on and they couldn’t give a damn whether it was a phony excuse or not. She’s deciding to stay as opposed to leaving the parsec with pieces of himself attached to her back and around her neck; she wants to stay. Peradventure, it’ll only be for a little while—Din wasn’t accommodating enough for people’s liking and they’d always leave eventually—but maybe she’ll outride his past acquaintances and remain.

Din silently sighs and glances down the path they’re idled along. Caben and Stoke should’ve returned by now, though he suspects they did and that they might have been accidentally exposed to his fixation on the Girl. They weren’t exactly being quiet in the Crest after all.

Still, it provokes an irresistible grin; she’s his and only he could arouse those sounds from deep in her stomach.

“Sweet girl.” His finger pets the peak of her cheekbone. “I think we’re going to have to walk back.”

She groans. “So much for an easy-going day.”

With their intended excursion back to the settlement coming up empty-handed, the two set out from the Crest and follow the path they’d been adhered to for the past hour.

It’s nearing dusk; vibrant blues and greens numbing to darkened blends of orange and purples. The Eclipse formally so highly spoken of from their taxi service approaches as the moon makes its tiresome journey above.

“D’you think we’ll get to see it?” The Girl’s questioning disrupts the flow of crunching gravel underneath their synchronized feet.

The sky is victimised by a leering tinted slit of transparisteel, analysing the steadiness of thick clouds rolling across the surface of the dual spheres. It scales inwards to observe the shadows of craters beneath the puffs. Sorgan’s secondary moon, much smaller in size or perhaps simply further away, is smothered in the overcast and lags behind its twin, silent and colourless.

“Clouds are moving fast. It should be okay.”

She nods. “Never had the pleasure of seeing one before. Heard they’re real pretty, though. What about you?”

“No. I don’t frequent a planet long enough.”

There’s a fork in the road, diverging off into three different paths but he’s got it all memorised in the back of his mind and continues onwards without a falter in his steps, the Girl to his side with a bounce in her step as she mulls over his candour approach.

“That’s too bad. Not one for settling down, huh?”

It’s a rhetorical question but Din doesn’t want to leave her hanging regardless, “No.”

“Yet here you are—” She prods a finger at his unarmoured side prompting a light swat to her hand. “—settling.”

“...I’m not settling.”

“No?”

His shoulders broaden and he hooks a thumb in the front of his belt. “No.”

She chuckles at him but mercifully leaves it at that, well aware what he says isn’t true but she’s none the wiser to what he’s settling down for—and it’s not Sorgan.

Leather clings to her hip for dear life, refusing to surrender its residency even when they drift from one another to avoid a dip in the path; fingers merely burrow into the cloth and drag the warmth straight back once they’ve passed. Din exploits the absence of inquisitive glances and looming queries to dedicate cloying touches and he’s not afraid to demonstrate it. Where, even a week ago, he couldn’t express these emotions without the adrenaline coursing through his veins, the arousal pulsing in his core, but circumstances have changed—evolved into something fresh.

Something untouched that he wants to corrupt with his obscene hands.

It’s short-lived. Snooping eyes return.

Lanterns emitting orange hues reflect off the waters of the emerging krill ponds, softly rounded fluorescents mirroring against his polished beskar as he sweeps through the troughs. The majority of the inhabitants surround the central campfire, its flames a worthy competitor to the lanterns mellow gingers. They lick and lick and lick at the sky, the scorching embers puffing into the fading purples upwards; laughter and the tinking of spotchka-filled flasks circling the bonfire.

Leather collapses resembling the Crest plummeting through the atmosphere. Heavy, fast, and everything in slow motion while he processes he’s losing traction, a small hitch in his chest upon striking his own thigh. She’s right beside him, an inch away from brushing elbows, yet she’s still too far.

It’s not in his nature to act so possessively in front of people—out in the open for whoever to gauge thoughts, to probe his emotions—and he won’t start parading around now, in spite of the fact she’s accumulated fresh bruises that haven’t been fortunate enough to receive time to heal; or even grant the red inking to mollify into something a little less salient.

They’re the one factor he can pardon from his public displays of affection regulation. It’s simple and clean. An honest indication of what’s between them without needing to flaunt it, simply a demonstration to not infringe on their relations.

Din is accustomed to the turned heads, the watchful gazes as they make way to the midpoint, but the Girl still finds it intolerant; the exposure too confining and she slinks back a few steps. He continues onwards not wanting to draw further attention to her and they pass the spectators, eyes stooping and communication commencing after they’ve had a gander of their guests—their clothes and the Girl’s dishevelled hair evidence enough.

They’re really not as discreet as they pass themselves off to be.

Omera interrupts his motion with a sidestep onto their path. She offers a courteous smile. “Did you have an eventful day?”

“Yes.”

“Can we expect your participation tonight? It should only be a few more hours before the eclipse commences.”

Din nods, somewhat reluctant to agree. Social settings weren’t in his favour but there’s a persistent woman on the heels of his boots who longs to see the phenomenon, and whatever she wishes he will grant with a simple please Din.

Omera gleams at his accepted invitation and gestures past the campfire to a stationed bench compiled of dishes and brimming glasses of various liquids. “Help yourself to our delicacies. It’s all traditional for the celebration.”

He softly sighs, not enough for anybody to hear him over the uproar but it’s sufficient in getting his unimpressed thoughts regarding the taunting dishes—at least, the Girl notices. His helmet pans to the heft on his pauldron, caf-coloured eyes trailing along the limb and jumping to its partner gesturing in the direction of the hut.

“I’ll get you something to eat, all right?”

She doesn’t entitle him the opportunity to oppose her proposition before bounding through the crowd to collect a platter of high-grade Sorgan nourishments. He scouts for a moment, considering her with a slender tilt of his helmet; riveting, how enthusiastic and adaptable she is to the liability of his Creed.

The Way had forcibly distanced him from so many potentials, pulverised them before his very visor, and here she was, dirtying her faultless hands with the soot of his decisions simply to cater to him.

It wasn’t all that long ago he’d be seated up in the Crest’s cockpit, a helmet on his lap, a bowl of nutrients in his hands, a deadpan expression etched into his face as the stars skim past the viewport. Silence, he so often told himself he favours, accompanying him like a prodding rod at the back of his ears; loud and exhausting despite its very name.

It has been quite a while since he’s succumbed to the silence with the Child and all. While he wished the kid would actually comply with his requests, Din has a preference for the cooing and squealing of a baby than the hum and buzz of his haven.

Perhaps it won’t last long—the Child will be returned to wherever he originated and the Girl will journey on after some time—but at least he can savour the atmosphere until then; anything ranging from the snarky remarks to the comfortable quiet in contrast to the loud, resonating one he’s been inflicted by all these years.

“I’ll leave you to eat,” Omera announces, “I’m sure your boy would like to see you when you’re done.”

Another nod on behalf of him, another burden on his pauldron from her; a fleeting touch of her hand but it’s cold and sharp and Din yearns for the Girl’s radiation to cleanse him of the hypothermia.

He sighs and makes his way to their hut.

Their quarters are overfamiliar. The littered blankets untouched, the way Din liked it, lasting evidence of what occurred. The flimsy dress she despised neglected and long forgotten, though it resurges the crisp memories regarding Din’s Honour; how he nonchalantly stripped himself of what he’s constructed himself around simply to feel a smidge of liberation with the Girl—to highlight their connections in the cracks of their implicit relationship.

To show he’s more than just a rusting Creed.

Din exhales through his filters and sinks to the cot’s mattress. It’s not nearly as comfortable with all the beskar on but it’s not as though he’ll be inside long.

“Oh yeah, you just relax there why don’t you?” The Girl grumbles from the doorway, balancing an assortment of bowls and plates in either hand and the crooks of her elbows—she would’ve made for a poor waitress in another life.

He makes no attempt to aid her. “That’s too much.”

“It’s not all for you. Other people eat, too, you know.”

Oh, he knows all too well. The sugary goodness of a thick syrup running down her fingers and onto his tongue never strays far from his mind.

She tries for a bend of her knees to ease the dishes onto a surface but they more or less topple out of her grip, scattering pieces of fried foods across the burnished wood. “Shit...ah, it’s just yours.”

“Funny.”

“I like to think so,” she cracks.

Din strains from his position to observe the variety of consumables she’d pinched from the community; bone broth, assorted krill, an unidentified pastry of some sort—Din crosses it off his list, far too dry looking for his taste—among snacking foods.

They’re not worthy of the title ‘appetising’ but Din’s acquainted with tasteless stock; he only ever eats it for the nutrients anyways.

She hoards a bowl of bone broth to her chest. “I’ll be outside. If you want seconds just call me, yeah?”

Leather wraps around her wrist before he properly registers her words. “No—you can stay. It’s not like I haven’t taken this off around you before.”

“I thought you might’ve wanted to eat in peace.”

Din exhales a laugh out of his nose. “A girl of your build should be smarter than that, no?”

It rises a simper out of her, a roll of her eyes and a shake of her head. Din retrieves the extended plate of krill prepared in a vast abundance of methods—fried, broiled, roasted, sauteed—he unenthusiastically considers a crustacean between two gloved digits.

Vibrant cobalt had grown to a dim grey underneath the golden breading, a fine sheet of oil coating leather skin and a drop of grease slipping down the curve of his thumb. Reluctance and dissatisfaction are apparent in his mannerisms and vocoder, emitting an exhaust laden sigh that crackles into the quiet lodge.

The mattress dips with her weight, the press of her back against his beskar. “Not one for krill?”

“I think I’ve had my fair dose,” Din broods.

“Still pent up about getting a little bit of water in your circuits?”

Another cheesy droid joke that pushes his eyes into the back of his skull but he lets it slide. Din’s famished. It’d been a while since he ate; well, not exactly but the Girl wasn’t much of a meal more than a treat. If he could draw out sustenance from her he’d never have to endure another stale dessert or salty meats from who knows where.

Their backs are pressed firmly together, practically leaning on each other for support, and Din doesn’t need to verify whether she’s looking away for him to unlatch his helmet. Its casual hiss signals for her to keep her eyes trained forwards and he lays the steel to rest beside him.

It’s the first time her eyes are open while the helmet is detached. Well, maybe not the first—he had lifted it the slightest back on Tatooine, in the cockpit while she busied herself with his Crest’s maintenance. The circumstances don’t much differ from now; both scenarios involve food of some sort and resolute trust.

Cobalt of the sweet dessert transferred to a chewy crustacean that’s comparable to grinding tar in his mouth, tough and fudgy but in all the worst ways. Din isn’t a selective person; he can consume the coarse flavourless product without a second’s worth of hesitance but he’s had the best of the best—jatnese be te jatnese, he’d said so himself—a gluttonous intake of the Girl’s taste and nothing will ever equate to that.

The mound of unchewable meat slips down his pipes, buttery and peppery but overall bland. Nutritional enough. He crams another cluster of the crescents into his gullet to appease his appetite.

The Girl sips on the pale cream broth behind him, head tilted against his as the liquid leaks from the carved bowl and between her lips. Din can’t imagine the taste is much better than the krill with the colours being so dull—as though they were eating the incarnation of unstimulating hues of greys and blacks.

“Do you want to try some?” she asks, extending the half-empty bowl to their side.

Din retrieves the grub with a low hum in his throat, uncertain, but ultimately decides it can’t hurt to give it a try. It’s obviously edible if it’s a Sorgan delicacy—how wrong he was. It’s saltier than the oceans with chunks in it; he doesn’t even want to think what they could be. He refrains from spitting the soup back into the bowl or onto the cot and feebly swallows the lukewarm puddle, a nubby leather wrist wiping the residue from his lips with disgust.

She bellows at his reaction, the back of her shoulders bouncing against his pauldrons as she struggles to contain herself.

The base of the bowl knocks against the closest surface available, a flimsy stool that accompanies the table, and he scowls with his arms crossed against the hump of his chest. “You’re wicked.”

“Seemed like you wanted a taste with the way you were looking at me.” Din’s head slightly tilts as he watches from the corner of the visor. “I can feel your eyes. Not sure how you ever catch bounties when all you do is stare.”

Bounties are intimidated by my staring, they’re smart, he wants to retort but saying bounties and smart in the same sentence is comical.

Appetite long gone, by consequence of broth that would serve a better purpose as blurrg feed, Din clips the rim of his beskar between two fingers and considers it among his lap. There’s no intent to lift it up and over his face. No intent to distance himself from the Girl just yet. It gawks at him; captivating in its own methods but still so ransacked of life. The black void of his false eyes darker than that of Space’s vacuum.

Din’s eyes ricochet from the slit to the back of the Girl’s head like a blaster bolt within a room of reflective duralloy and nowhere to go; pondering the morals of his very character as he aligns the crown of her head with the vacancy in his clutch.

She noticeably stiffens as his helmet envelopes her, the rim slack around her neck with nothing to latch onto. Fingers dismiss the fried krill she’s been feasting on and orbits the surface; Din amicably smacks them away and lays his hands on her shoulders to loosen the knots.

“Greasy,” he simply explains his reaction.

One would think such a valuable material as beskar could be cleaned with a small wipe of a damp cloth. One would be wrong. It’s a nuisance to maintain its condition and he’d been lagging behind with its upkeep as of recent—he couldn’t afford greasy fingerprints.

Soft vocals are replaced with a crunchy crackle, an unnatural graininess as if she digested a bucket’s worth of Arvala-7 terrain; sand and grit forming lumps in her ducts and spluttering into the internals of beskar, “What are you doing?”

His fingers rub into the base of her neck, the deepness of his unaffected tone eliciting a hum within the helm. “The rifle won’t be used to its full potential without the helmet.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Don’t worry, I’m not giving you the helmet. I just want to show you what it can do.”

“Is this...allowed?” She goes to scratch the back of her head but knocks against the steel and limply drops her hand. “It doesn’t feel like this is allowed. I’m sure there’s a rule in that big ol’ Manual for Mandalorians you’ve got hiding around.”

He scoffs. “Do you want to see it or not?”

It dips to a dainty nod.

“Gods, this is heavy. Don’t you get a sore neck?”

Din neglects her questioning and extends his vambrace before her, his other arm reaching around to point at the buttons—effectively sandwiching her between his gauntlets—and his finger focuses on one in particular. It’s a small circular button, a clone to all the others, but more weathered from the abrasive leather. “Click this,” he instructs.

She complies, her digit dainty beside the stocky hide, helmet perking up once the thermal activates and submerging her vision in cool hues of blues. Her curiosity matches that of the Child’s as she twists and turns her head side to side, surely discovering the warm tones of candlelight and heat signals radiating from their hands before her.

“Wait a damn minute—” The Girl aims to toss a suspectful glare in his direction but quickly dismisses the desire, his exposure never far from the forefront of her mind, “you cheating-”

“I told you, Cyar’ika,” Din coos against the side of the helmet. “Not a gentleman.”

“I...I demand a rematch.”

Din chuckles into her, the leaps of his laughter ricocheting against her back but he pays her decree no attention. There’s no way she’d reign successfully in a no holds barred condition, not when his visor contributes half of the rifle's potential of force. Then again, if things were to pan out the same way it did earlier perhaps he’ll take her up on it—just for fun.

“Good for calculating how many threats there are--”

“Yeah, that, or being a little-”

“Next,” he navigates her hand to a second preset.

The thermal deactivates with one push and the sonic detectors engage with another.

It must be disorienting for her to focus on all the surrounding sounds of the settlement, the steel swallowing her senses, Din remembers the first time he donned a helmet—one much smaller and lighter than his current but all the same in terms of abilities and desensitising him from the outside world. Pair that with the power to be able to hear a whisper from over a hundred metres away, it can turn situations sticky and muddled if not appropriately centred.

“What do you hear?”

She’s mute and motionless, suspended in the limbo of space and time.

Din presses a kiss to the nape of her neck in an attempt to declutter her mind but it does very little; sharp claws of concern grasping at the back of his head and scampering upwards until the pressure against his temples is unbearable and it finally conquers him.

He shouldn’t have imposed this on her. He of all people should’ve known better. It takes years of getting accustomed to it.

“Hey. Hey, okay, no more.”

It’s eased up halfway before she interrupts and pulls it back down. “I’m fine. Just trying to focus. There are too many conversations, it’s distracting.” She chuckles. “Good thing I didn’t have it this morning. You snore, you know. Would’ve rendered me deaf.”

Din grumbles beneath his breath—something even the detectors can’t distinguish with the crackles in his vocal cords—and sharply flicks the back of the steel with his forefinger, grinning when she compresses a hand against the side where her ear resides.

“Ow,” she whines. “Okay, okay, turn it off. I’m sick of hearing you breathe down my neck.”

It disables with a final push of his vambrace.

The Girl explores the surface of the beskar with either hand and Din subconsciously annotates how dilatory she is with it—her fingers dipping from the cheek ridges to the face and around the ear caps before resting against the sealed cooling vents at the back—solely dedicating the time to recognise the only face she can put a name to but from his perspective.

Combine that with being endowed with the pleasure of seeing her in his shirt and helmet provokes Din’s heart to stammer against the bones, his jaw to tighten and he seizes the beskar by the edge and twists it to face him. He enables virtually no time for her to comprehend what he’s planning and it’s undetermined whether she managed to shut her eyes before his face is frontwards, but he trusts they are.

It’s outlandish to gaze into the cold dark visor when there’s another lifeform beneath it. Sure, he’s encountered incalculable Mandalorians in his lifetime but never has anybody worn his helmet—it’s a fragment of his Creed, of Him, and he’d rather fall victim to a sarlacc and endure the agony of being digested for millennia than to witness another being wield his persona.

Omitting the Girl from the equation, naturally.

She could carve out his heart with his vibro-knife and he wouldn’t complain one bit. It’s incomprehensible what she does to him. Just a touch of her finger on his face and he’s primed to brandish a blaster and confront her greatest enemy even if he’s incapable of victory.

Nonetheless, it astonishes him how she can gaze into the nullity of a slit and not request—demand��for more. She’s more than deserving of it and yet she doesn’t wish for it.

Perhaps she sees a mirrored image of what’s before him. Not a slab of shiny steel nor a devout Creed but merely the living tissue, the pumping blood, beneath it.

Din trails a digit along the steel jawline and lifts as he reaches the transparisteel visor connecting to the curve at the bottom. It lifts only a little, just enough for her lips and the point of her nose to peek beneath. The soft hills separate instinctively and he wastes no time slotting his own in their place, cupping the back of her neck with his free hand to drag her in close.

Those damned words. They utterly refuse to vacate his mind—duplicating by the dozen and submerging his thoughts and sensations with foreign statements. It links together into a lengthy chain made of high-grade alloy, fortified greater than freshly smelted beskar, and packages his consciousness into overburdened disarray.

Ni kar’tayl gar darasuum.

Ni kar’tayl gar darasuum. Ni kar’tayl gar darasuum.

Din needs her to know; needs her to hear those words tumble out of his vocal cords.

He needs to enunciate them—to listen to himself admit the feelings hidden within him aren't pseudo.

But he can’t; his lips cease their endeavours against hers yet he still can’t discover the courage to say three little fucking words. Thank the stars he disabled the sonic detectors because he wouldn’t be able to take the speculative questioning upon hearing the thumping in his chest, deep and muffled pulses of his heart struggling to compete with his nerves.

“Din,” she whispers. “You’re overthinking again, aren’t you?”

“No…”

“Come on, you need to get some fresh air. Let’s go see the kid.”

No, not yet, he thinks. Please, just a little while longer.

She hoists the beskar from her head slowly, inches of her impeccable face unmasking at a time. He cups her jaw and tilts her head to peck at her chin, her cheeks, and forehead as the helmet is relieved from each section.

Din records the movement of flesh underneath his lips as she smiles against his intimacy and it urges something intense and unexplored in his centre, his core, and the helmet bounces off the cot and crashes to the floor below with a small push of his three fingers; his lips refusing to curb their hunger for cushiony skin and his weight slowly applies against her until she inclines onto her back with him above.

“Din.”

“Mmm,” he hums, leathers stroking the strands of hair out of her face before reconnecting his lips to her cheekbones.

“We—we can’t. The kid is waiting for you.” Her actions overpower her words; a hand slides down his cape feebly, her fingers catching on the folds to thrust him closer.

“You’re addictive.”

“Not so bad yourself.”

Din emits a gravelly groan and slides a knee between her legs, the edge of his cuisse brushing against the peak of her groin. “Can I have a taste, Cyar—sweetheart, please?”

They don’t have the privilege of time on their side, Din’s more than aware of this fact and yet he can’t stop the glove from slithering down her neck and the curve of her chest to idle at the hem of her pants.

“You’re insatiable,” she says, fingers firmly rooted within the scratchy cloak.

She’s hitting the nail on the head with that proclamation; he’s utterly unsated and deprived of her sweetness. Din requires it like sustenance—like medicine.

“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

“Never.”

The aftertaste of her slick is on his tongue and he needs more. He wants to binge on her for eternity and, maybe, then he’ll finally be content; a belly full of her translucent flavours, the gums of his throat and mouth coated in the thickness to the brink of suffocation.

Din’s fingers toy with her buckle loosely, queuing for approval.

“Can’t,” she whines pitifully. “We’ve already made our presence known. They’ll be expecting us out there. Besides, you should spend time with the kid. I’m not going anywhere.”

“No?”

She grins. “Well—maybe back to the Crest. Has that offer got an expiry date?”

“Offer?”

“Already forgotten, huh? If I remember correctly, you said you’ll fuck me in your bunk whenever I want.” She mimics his words, “Name the time.”

Shit—it wasn’t just pillow-talk.

“Why didn’t you mention it while we were there?”

“Oh no, Din.” He’s dragged inwards, his lips brushing the tip of her ear as she diabolically whispers into his, “I got something special planned for that.”

A chill runs beneath his beskar, brandishing his flesh with a bumpiness the dunes of Tatooine would envy. There are endless possibilities for what she’s got in mind but Din’s been excluded from her brainstorming. It doesn’t cease his imagination to run wild with disgusting thoughts of deviancy; ones involving her bent over on that shitty cot of his, the familiar manacles capturing her wrists, shameful noises slipping past those beautiful lips as he takes her night long and into the rise of the sun.

It had to be bigger than that. Don’t get him wrong, he wants to give her all of that, badly, but she could’ve done it earlier. They would’ve had the equipment on hand, no preparation necessary. No, she’s suggesting something else. Something bigger.

But she won’t indicate anything further, won’t give him a little taste of what’s to come, and cruelly urges him back onto his feet to recollect his helmet with a heavy hand.

She observes him upon hearing the click of his locking system inside the helm, either hand on his hip with an inclined head that just reads don’t leave me hanging.

“Suspense makes it all that much better,” she sweetly says.

He’s beginning to realise that sweetness is all exterior, a disguise for all the hot and heaviness she possesses within. A decoy that he’s fallen victim to. He’s like that of a fish foolishly nipping at a too good to be true enticement, the Girl laying in wait for him to latch on and reel him into his doom.

But she’s inexperienced. Unsuspecting of his abilities. Oblivious to his attachment to her lure.

She’s sweet but she’s also sour.

Salty in the heat of the moment.

Bitter in times of hurt.

Saliva constructed of pure savoury goodness.

She’s got all the nourishments he requires and there’s an endless supply; flavours he can taste straight from the source.

So, one can assume the agony, the clenched fists in his gloves, as they saunter through the chatty crowd, her hips swaying ahead of him a little too provocatively. She knows what she does to him, he’s demonstrated his need in various positions, and she’ll go above and beyond to find one way or another to fuck with him—to poke and prod to test his self-control before he drags her behind a hut and fucks her against the walls, whether it was outside or not he couldn’t care.

To fuse her fingers with the puppet strings attached to his pauldrons.

“This should be quiet enough,” she announces and throws herself onto the handcrafted bench, tossing a leg over the other and patting the empty space beside her. “I know you like quiet.”

Din plops down with the Child on his lap, a slothful hand massaging the green wrinkles at the summit of his head. There’s a handful of farmers in their own respective groups scattered around them, producing enough noise that allows thoughts to wander without concerning themselves with maintaining a conversation.

Sorgan’s moons are at their pinnacles, puffy grey plumes illuminated into off-whites from their luminescence. One sphere perches in the vast black, performing as a repellent to the swarms of haze, while the other is blinded by the thickness of the clouds; a circular radiance perceived through the fluffiness the only indication the planet possessed more than one.

A vague shadow surmounts the moon’s edge, the dawdling process of the eclipse having commenced but it’ll be quite some time before anything worthwhile transpires—Din sullenly groans at the missed opportunity to give her his tongue back on the cot. It’s not as though they were missing out on anything. It would’ve only taken him a couple of minutes to work her up to the brink, a couple more to—

“I never asked,” she says. “What’s the deal with you and the kid?”

“What do you mean?”

She shifts in search of a comfortable position among the splinters. “He’s a bounty and you’re a bounty hunter; please don’t make me explain further.”

Din sighs and swipes a finger across the leafy brim of his ear, provoking a gentle burble into the Crest’s gear knob. “I handed him over but they were doing experiments on him and I couldn’t leave him there. Things didn’t go to plan--”

“Because you don’t plan.”

“--and there was a shootout with the Guild.”

“So,” She ponders, “you’ve got a bounty of your own now.”

He scoffs. “Don’t get any ideas.”

“Too late.”

Din entertains her amusement with a quiet huff of air through his filters, soft enough for her to register it’s not an annoyance. The subject of the Guild raises some questions he’s not wanting to voice—they’ll only ruin the mood and he doesn’t want to admit defeat—but he’s to play the hand he’s been dealt.

“We need to discuss where we’re heading next,” he says.

“So soon? It’s only been two days.”

“Should consider ourselves lucky we’ve managed to survive this long here. There could be hunters stationed from the last time I was here.”

“Right—and the Crest would’ve got their attention,” she agrees. “Okay. Where are you thinking?”

Somewhere reclusive. An isolated backwater planet much like Sorgan but one where nobody knows their names or reputation. Although discovering a planet with the aforementioned qualities is easier said than done, especially with the threats of audacious bounty hunters on their thrusters. Idling in space until they stumble across a safe-enough planet—or if pirates picked them off—was always an option.

Din sighs.

The Girl was right; he doesn’t plan. He’d just been traversing from parsec to parsec all his life, picking up commissions for fuel and a bite to eat, partaking in activities that simply aided his survival. Now with the Child, he’s expected to have a procedure—to shield him from the dangers Din automatically puts him in upon rescuing him from the client. But he doesn’t have the scheme to save their lives, literally.

“I don’t know,” he admits.

“Nothing wrong with not knowing. With my skills behind a rifle and your—uh… Point is, we’ll figure it out. Lighten up a little, you’ll wrinkle that pretty face of yours.”

With a roll of his eyes behind the visor, he settles for her words of reassurance and heeds her suggestion to relax his forehead.

“Mandalorian—Mando,” Omera’s abrupt panic-stricken tone is plenty for both of them to straighten their posture and bury the quips. Din twists his helmet to where she stands behind him, noting the fumbling hands before her lap, the twitch in her eyebrow ridges.

Din deposits the Child into the Girl’s arms and stands. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“Caben and Stoke...they—they weren’t with you?”

“No, they never returned for us.”

The Girl interjects, “We assumed they headed back before us.”

“No, no. Nobody has seen them.”

Shit—he should’ve realised something was wrong when they failed to show up. Raiders? There was no sign of them on that trail—but Din wasn’t exactly in the right mindset, being too haunted by the Girl’s temptations.

“I’m sorry to ask this of you...at an unfortunate time, no less, but-”

“I’ll go trace their route and see if I pick anything up,” Din says.

“Thank you, thank you.” Omera clasps his hands in gratitude, her thumbs brushing along the stitching.

“It’s not a problem. If I don’t come across them on the trail, I’ll question the neighbouring settlement. They should have some information.”

“I’m coming with you,” the Girl pipes up.

“No. Stay with the kid here.”

She shoots him a curved eyebrow and places a hand on her hip, her other cradling the Child into her side. “I hardly think watching the moon is of importance right now. I won’t let you go out there alone and it’ll be quicker if there’s two of us looking.”

“I don’t want-”

“Don’t want, what, to drag me into this? I think we’re far past all that, no?”

Din sighs. “Fine.”

No use arguing with someone so cocksure like her. Besides, when push comes to shove she’ll be resourceful with the rifle.

The Child isn’t happy at the circumstances, to say the least. He finally finds serenity wrapped in cold beskar edges and has been stripped away so soon—he glares at his guardian in the warmth of poncho-clad arms while Din and the Girl retreat into the woods once more. He’ll make it up to the kid when he gets back; Din’s certain he’ll face the wrath of a foot-long baby if he doesn’t.

“I think you should take the rifle. Just in case.”

“No. You need something to protect yourself.” Din brushes her suggestion off and activates the thermals on his vambrace.

“I’ve got my blaster.”

“That’s not enough. Here, hold it up. Press that. Be careful with the bayonet.”

She glances at him with questioning eyes and rests the rifle against her hip. “What’d you do?”

“It’ll administer electricity to anybody who touches it. There're only so many cartridges—” Din presents a cluster of steel cylinders in his glove and she shoves them in a pocket in her pants, “Pair your blaster with the bayonet and use the ammunition sparingly.”

“You think we’ll need them?”

“Just be prepared.”

They fall into a sharply cold silence, Din utilising his sonic detectors as they trudge through the bush to discern any commotion that may be of use. The Girl retains a pace a few steps behind his own, purposefully slotting her boots into his prints to avoid a stray twig snap here or a tumble there. It’s wordlessly recognised if there are raiders in these parts it’s best not to disclose their presence, especially not when there’s two of them. It supplies them with a lead on their opponent, at least until they identify how many there are.

The thermals are nothing but counterproductive. If they had passed through recently the track would surely be lit in fire-orange but it’s all blues and greys; Din thumbs the button to restore his vision, relieving the burden of having to focus on where he steps and clicks another for his sonic detectors. His vambrace was really getting put to the test today.

“Where——or….hurt you.”

Din freezes, the Girl sharp in his guide, and adjusts his helmet to pinpoint the muffling in his sensors. It’s quiet. Shallow. It could be flooded with a singular flask of water.

“Does….Child,” It’s speech tears.

East, about ninety metres out. The forest is thickened around these parts—too dense to trace any campfires or shadows—but there’s somebody there and they’re referencing a child; there’s not a doubt in his mind it’s The Child.

They’re not raiders. They’re not people who’ll go down without a fight.

“Guild members,” Din slips.

“Any clue how many?”

He hones in on the vocals, isolating each individual muffle or change of tone that could indicate there’s more than just the one. Even if he’s wrong, it’s best to be over-prepared. “Two. No, wait...three. I think.” She quietly mulls the possibility over, the strap of the rifle flinging over her shoulder as she makes way inwards. Din seizes her wrist and suspends her movements. “What are you doing?”

“I’ll get the high ground and see if I can spot Caben and Stoke. There’s no point starting something if they’re not there.”

“High ground?” Din questions.

She grins and breaks his grasp. “How’d you think I got those targets up in the trees?”

The Girl cracks her knuckles, the clicks and pops of joints puncturing his eardrums through the detectors like a bubble underneath a needlepoint. Either of her hands sprawls on the sides of a trunk, fingers dig into the bark for traction, and she hoists her feet up—she’s like the Crest in its ascent, agile and coordinated as she frog-kicks herself up into the branches.

Din’s eyebrows raise in dismay; he didn’t know what he was expecting but it wasn’t that.

The potential one possesses outside a suit of steel is still an astonishing concept to Din even after all these years of branding himself to the insides of his helmet. There’s an endless list of skills he’ll never be able to master—untapped aptitudes that have greyed into a colourless nothing.

Steel platings obstruct his movements, the helmet an obstacle to his sensations; his birthrights.

Brittle tree arms creak and whine above him, the leaves rustling as she navigates the long-arm’s lens to her sight. He’ll be left in amazement if she can distinguish the bodies from the swaying of blunted foliage. The land is too compact with trunks reaching the clouds, even with the magnified scope it’ll be near impossible to identify how many there are or whether the missing duo is being held captive.

His thermals would come in handy right about now for her; with her height advantage and his helmet, she’d assuredly recognise their precise positioning. Hell, she’d be an unstoppable force—a marksman even the greatest of bounty hunters would shake in their armour witnessing.

The Girl’s low tone sails through the treetops, gliding with the bitter night edge, and into his sonic detectors, “I see them—they’ve got them in the middle of the camp. Minimum six hostiles. All equipped with blasters. I can take two of them out from here.”

Well, he’s definitely left in amazement.

That’ll leave him with the remaining four, so long as there’s not more concealed within the shadows.

A lack of communication between them serves as nothing but an impediment, but time isn’t on their side and Din can’t waste any more of it to collect the comm units from the Crest. Weapons locker, second drawer, to the left.

If only he had thought of it earlier.

Din’s helmet inclines skywards, his visor scaling in and outlining her frame.

They’ve got each other's credibility and that, strictly, is sufficient for Din to jump into action; cutting through the undergrowth and stealthing between pillars of wood, each succeeding stride premeditated.

His scanners crackle against his ears, a gruff voice laced with croaks and coughs slipping through the beskar, “Where is he? Look at me! You’ll tell me where he is, boy, otherwise I’ll gut you right here. Perhaps watching you die will encourage your friend to speak, yeah?”

Caben and Stoke quake ahead of the lambent light illuminating their features; previously happy expressions replaced with terror, identical to when the AT-ST had broken through a dozen sturdy trees to gaze upon its victims with hollow eyes.

A burly Weequay paces before them, twin thumbs hooked on the hoops of his trousers in an attempt to appear stockier.

Fuckin’ Weequays.

Din’s blaster will come up short in a confrontation with that layered flesh of his and, with the lack of communication between them, he can’t depend on the Girl on being able to snipe him—he may not be one of the two she can manage. Another Guild member sits off to the side of the farmers, intimidatingly polishing a small vibro-knife in his fist. The remaining four she spoke of patrol their encampment; all either human or made with skin he can puncture.

It won’t be easy and the Weequay has the advantage; Din will need to take him out first and foremost.

He’ll put his faith in the Girl’s abilities that she can ward off the other’s long enough.

Din shovels a cluster of rocks into his hand and hurls them overhead and into the copse recesses, the rustling effectively tearing the hunters’ focus from their posts—Din springs to action and leaps from behind the greenery boscage, blaster pistol in his dominant hand and vibro-knife in the other.

The Weequay’s back faces Din and he exploits the factor, pouncing like a predatory loth-cat onto him and slicing a gash into the leathery hide of his neck. It does minimal damage, a small notch for a dribble of blood to meet with the neck of his shirt. He’s thrown off of the hunter and stumbles backwards into a tree, grunting and raising his blaster outwards; the trigger snaps against the alloy hold, a burning beam of cherry drilling into a fleshy build. It drops to the dirt, blaster bouncing astray.

“Mandalorian!” Caben exclaims into his detectors.

Din doesn’t reply nor impart his eyes to analyse their condition - they’re alive and that’s all that mattered while in the midst of battle.

The Weequay restores his attention to his surroundings, scowling at the Mandalorian before him and dipping calloused fingers into the wound of his neck. He snarls at the amassed blood on his tips. “You’ll pay for that, Mando, just as soon as you tell me where the bounty is.”

Child--bounty.

Any doubt that he had about them being after the kid is shattered, obliterated entirely.

Din’s vibro-knife pulses in his fist, his finger planted against the trigger in his other. The four scrawnier minions gather around his position against the tree, brandishing arrogant smirks as they languidly handle their blasters.

“I said-” The Weequay spits between his boots. “-tell me where the bounty is. You may have taken one of us but there are plenty more. There’s only one of you—your friends here aren’t much fighters.”

One. He scoffs.

A henchman, typically made of flesh and bones and blood, pops beside the Weequay; organic matter dissolving to flaky dust onto the forest floor. It leaves nothing behind that proves it was once a humanoid, barring the hunter’s blaster which plummets to the soil and knocks against the boot of his partner.

“What the pfassk!” One of them cries.

His detectors pick up the familiar whistle of a rifle pellet.

The Weequay raids his surroundings, concluding Din’s ally to be the in the only place that’d see them from this distance: “In the trees! Go!”

The hunters follow their orders but abruptly stop; a second member obliterating the moment his boot sole leaves the ground. Particles scatter with the breeze through the leafy canopies. They lie in wait, suspecting of another incoming granule but Din knows it won’t come—they’re well out of her sight.

But he can’t let them head in her direction; Din flicks the point of his blade between two fingers and slings the knife through the air and into the Weequay’s gullet once more—deeper and thrumming out splotches of plasma, an unnerving outcome of the intensity the knife is throbbing.

He staggers backwards in shock but Din focuses on the others, administering two perfectly aligned bolts into either of their unsuspecting chests; they nosedive into snapped twigs and gravel where sticky liquid accumulates underneath their bodies.

One to go.

Din didn’t act in accordance with his plan—the Weequay winding up as the last he’s to tend to—but this works, too.

The blade is ripped from his gullet, a spurt of hot blood following its dislodging, and the Weequay balefully boasts the dagger in his clutch. “Come now, Mandalorian. It’s going to take more than that,” he snarls.

He scoffs to himself in response and edges closer to one of the hunters drift melee weapons, footsteps precariously slow to ensure he doesn’t allude to his intentions—the bushes swish, a deep crack of a stick, and they freeze as one.

Visor and darkened pools of black sharpen against the lightless forest, apparently having forgotten about each other’s threat to concentrate on their snooping bystander.

The Girl steps out from the dusk, amban rifle hoisted forehead level with the Weequay. She stands stout on her feet, the wooden stock butting into her shoulder, eyes perfectly trained on her target before her. She doesn’t shoot, she won’t without his expressed permission.

The hunter recognises defeat and tosses the Mandalorian’s vibro-knife before his boots.

Din decompresses somewhat, allowing a sigh to flee from his filters and swoops up the knife and creeps past the defeated frame to shred through the rope bindings around Caben and Stoke’s wrists. “Thank—thank you,” Caben hisses and rubs the rash they’ve left in their wake.

Stoke imparts a gratified nod and smoothes out his clothing. “We’re sorry. They ambushed us on our way back---wanted to use us as leverage to draw you out. We’re just glad they didn’t track us back to the settlement.”

“Are you okay?” Din asks and quickly glances over their appearance. Some creased clothing and maturing bruises but for the most part untouched - no blood, no wounds.

They nod their heads in unison.

“He’s--” Caben glares at his captor warily. “He’s after the kid—your kid.”

Din suspected as much. “We’ll deal with him. Where’s the speeder?”

“Destroyed!”

He sighs and contemplates his options as if he had any. No speeder, no ride. “Follow the trail back to the village. We’ll be right behind you.”

They share a concerned look between each other but heed Din’s instructions, slipping past the growling figure and bounding through the bushland towards their escape route without glancing back.

“Quit wasting moonlight, boy. Get your hands dirty,” the Weequay sneers.

Judging by the bravado performance he puts on, he reckons he won’t suffer at the hands of an irritated Mandalorian tonight—he couldn’t be more incorrect even if he were to claim Din was of another species underneath his armour. A nettlesome Gungan. A hard-headed Klatoonian. An emotionless droid. He’s heard it all and they’re all closer to being more correct than he assumes of his safety.

There could be a message to send; violate every bone in his body to signify not to challenge the wrath of a well-equipped storm.

He’ll be in pain, Din’s sure of it, only, it’s undecided to what extent.

The Weequay grins, a sharp menacing clenched-teeth smile that puts Din back in his place, a guffaw that transmits a surge of electricity down the bumps of his spine; sounds of self-assuredness he shouldn’t possess in his perspective, unless...

No—he’s laughing at their idiocy. He’s pending for the upper hand.

Din spins on the heels of his boots, blaster pistol scanning the thicket. There’s more. There’s fucking more of the bastards and they’re smart about it; they laid in wait and let Din kill their teammates, let Din think he had the advantage, and only to fucking swoop in once they’ve noted all of his abilities—his sonic detectors. They’re too quiet for him to sense.

He thumbs his vambrace to activate his thermal but he doesn’t get the opportunity before he’s kicked in the back, staggering a few steps before crashing to the ground in a heap of steel. Grunting and groaning, he surveys behind him for the abruptness. The Girl is preoccupied in a feud of her own with three ambushers, applying his previously described strategy of paralysing with the bayonet before finishing them with her pistol.

She’s tossed around a bit; slammed into the trunks of trees and thrown onto the ground but she recovers and snaps the trigger of her sidearm with such ease. She’s capable, she’ll be fine.

Din needs to focus on this fucker—he needs to kill the scumbag.

Who knows how many of these guys there are. They literally came out of the fucking woodworks; the Girl wasn’t the only one who thought of taking the high ground and with it being so dark out Din hadn’t even thought to assess the treetops.

But they still didn’t know the extent of his capabilities. The hidden gems implanted in his vambraces. They weren’t just for show, after all.

The lurkers are dismissed for the time being—they’re distant, patient until he makes a miscalculation, and he can work with that—his attention focuses on the leathery neck oozing taunting blood. Din’s fingers curl around the vibrating hilt of his blade and lunges while the Weequay is empty-handed, delivering another slash across an arm this time.

It’s too protective, too tough for him to pierce and really leave some damage.

If Din can get one good stab in his throat, he could fucking skin him alive.

But he’s being surrounded. Hunters making their debut from behind bushes and circling him as if he were a fire in the midst of a snowstorm. It just doesn’t end; this was supposed to be a calming few days away from combat and here they were. Din anticipated this happening—tranquillity scarcely presenting itself to him—but he didn’t expect it so soon. The last he was on this planet, he’d been endowed with a few weeks at the least.

A shrill scream erupts, resonating through the forest and waking the creatures dormant in their hides, but it’s so much louder within his helmet on the account of his detectors. His ears pulse with frigid blood. His windpipe snaps closed, lungs thumping against his ribs.

He doesn’t want to look, he doesn’t. But he needs to - needs to reassure himself that it wasn't the shriek of a girl who’d just obtained something severe, something that makes her screams force time to fall dead.

It’s blurry and hazy, his cloddish eyes simply refusing to cooperate, like observing the scene unfold through a brimming glass of steaming caf. Din manages to discern a pillar, mobile with a rifle in its arms, but it’s not the Girl. Din’s learnt her figure greater than the Creed he wears. He’s felt all of its curves and bumps underneath his callouses. He’s dedicated the inches of his tongue to its sweat.

Din could sculpt her physique out of a slab of concrete with nothing but his fingernails.

That pillar isn’t the Girl—so why does it have her rifle?

Eyes stoop lower, the haze clearing and the Girl becoming so clear-cut it aches his retinas. She’s on the ground—the dirty fucking ground—being suppressed with a boot on her midsection; her hands claw at what little shin she can reach but her efforts are depleted, slowed and weak.

The knife thrums intensively and numbs the tips of his fingers, complementing the tingling billowing through his veins, his organs, wrapping around his bones and urging his legs towards her but a hunter steps before him to block his view.

His heart stutters inside his ribs. Stopping and starting. Leaping and dropping.

Pull your head in and kill these assholes, Din demands himself the willpower to snap his scrutiny around the four hunters caging him in a circle. He’s not in the mood to entertain their wishes for a brawl and triggers the flamethrower in his gauntlet, swirling on his feet to enkindle them with orange heat that’ll leave a mark if not end them.

Clothes of two of them ignite, hastily engulfing their frames and biting its brand into their flesh.

Din relishes in their screams, their desperate tries to distinguish the unforgiving flames, and, in his foolish stupor, he’s forced onto the ground—two thickset weights on either of his arms, the front of his helmet slamming against the dirt and knocking against his nose with a vengeance.

He struggles underneath their grip but hardly moves an inch.

The Girl whimpers, faint but oh-so lively with his detectors. Din’s helmet scrapes across the ground as he cranes his neck to peer at her—the hand that’d been working at a shin now flat against the ground, her writhing the only indication she’s still conscious.

Din wants to look away, wants to shut off his sonic detectors and close his eyes.

It hurts to look at her; that pain he’d receive the day after a tussle with a high-end bounty but intensified by a dozen and stripping away at his internal organs as opposed to muscle tissue.

She’s being brutalised. A boot on her abdominals milking her of pained mewling.

“You’re impudent, Mandalorian,” the Weequay gurgles. “Should teach you some manners. Oi, bring her ‘ere.”

Din’s muscles tense. No armour can conceal the visible discomfort those words bring to him but he tries for his voice anyways, “What is it you want? To take me back to the Guild? I’ll go--leave her alone, she’s not a part of this.”

“She killed my men.” Leather-face huffs a breath. “Bring her ‘ere.”

The lackey complies, rugged gloves tearing into her skin and thrusting her in their general direction. Din scans her body for injuries, the spotlight of his eyes staring at the dark vermillion patch seeping through the black of his shirt at her belly. He struggles for a breath. Struggles to swallow the rising liquids that burn the back of his throat. Struggles to not implode with cusses that’ll only edge their retaliation over the brink.

Fucking vermillion.

A colour that looked fantastic on his foes but so fucking unsettling on His Girl.

Her competitor wears the same colour as her, a circular bolt wound in his shoulder and it doesn’t take a genius to piece them together. She must’ve been fooled. She must’ve been attacked with the knife in his hand while tending to the other hunters that now lay dead among the bark.

She can’t stand upright without the arm fisting her shirt and she drops to her knees and successively her stomach before him. They’re both a quivering mess, though for wholly different circumstances, and Din can’t fucking take the look she gives him. So painful. So devoid of that sweetness.

“Sorry, Me’suum’ika,” she whispers.

She feels as though she failed him—that somehow her getting injured resulted in him immobile, anchored to the forest floors and staring at his companion face-to-face while she bleeds out unattended to. Not the fact he can’t control the emotions that overwhelm him. Not the fact that it’s his own incompetence.

“No—pretty girl, look at me. Look at me.” Din trashes his weight against their hold but the position is awkward and his legs are unable to administer any power into his core. He’s as hopeless as captured krill, simply flailing about in hopes it’ll get him somewhere.

The Weequay wipes blood from his neck and nudges a foot into her side, squirming it underneath her stomach and flipping her onto her back to expose that hellish colour tainting her midsection. It melts through the shirt and adheres the fabric against the invisible wound beneath; Din’s eyes refuse to cut away.

It’s painful. Identical to those atrocious holodramas that’d screen late at night in the sketchy areas of town—it’s a shootout of a mess and he just can’t look away.

“She’s dying,” the Weequay announces. “There ain’t no medicine out in these parts. She’ll be gone before you can even lift her off the ground.”

Din’s stunned into silence. What’s he to do? His Girl is an arms-length away from him, bleeding out and moaning in pain, and he can’t do so much as stroke the hair out of her face and reassure her that she’ll be okay.

The Weequay snatches her rifle from his men, twisting the framework in his arms and hovering the prongs directly over her forehead—barely an inch of space between beautiful soft skin and a fatally paralysing influx of electricity.

“Don’t,” Din warns, tone more emotional than he wants to display. “Touch her and I will never stop looking for you.”

“I can end it all for her right now. Turn her to dust. Take mercy on her. Look at her, she’s in agony.”

The Girl’s mouth opens and closes rhythmically, an arm strewn across her front to stop the gush of blood—it’s fucking bad. It worsens when she looks at him, the angle causing tension to find a path along her neck and down to her belly but she shuns the idea of glancing away. Din’s throat tightens.

“All you need to do is point me in the direction of the bounty.”

The fucking choobies on this guy.

“Get her assistance and we’ll talk,” he bluffs.

They’re not impressed by his demands, a singular knee from either of the hunters digging into his forearm. The vambraces support a majority of the weight but it’s still hefty, still——

Vambraces. He’s exhausted what little fuel remains for his flamethrowers but there are still a few tricks in wait up there—techniques that they’ll never anticipate.

Din strains his arm beneath the hunter, flicking his fist as best as he can manage for specks of bright blue to ignite within the cavities of his wrist. A handful of the explosive tips dispense into the still air above him. The birds sing their tune as they coordinate their attacks, dedicating themselves to targeting each individual quarry. One dives into the side of a hunter to Din’s left followed by another to his right, the muscles pinning him down becoming limp, the third impact into the chest of the Girl’s half-defeated foe.

They lay lifeless among the forest; scorch marks where they’d been touched with his beskar sparrows.

Two birds remain circling overhead.

Two?

One dips through the air targeting the Weequay like a missile with his name written on it but Din conducts a staredown with the last, his eyes swiftly tracing the projectile. It makes its move—identifying the bleeding woman coiled on the floor as a threat to his safety, but Din matches its tempo and hurtles himself atop of her body.

His weight stimulates a displeased groan from her throat.

“Sorry. I’m sorry,” he says.

Din cages her head in with his arms and tucks her face into his cowl before caving in on himself, a poor attempt to cover every inch of soft flesh with reverberating beskar and it works.

He feels the menacing tink through his spine as it bounces off the steel and into a tree.

He peels himself from her, cherry liquid having been smeared across his beskar platings, and examines her condition—the shirt drags up and tracks the blood to her ribs, a wide three-inch chamber in her stomach that convulses with each unsteady exhale.

She grunts incoherently and latches her fingers onto the perimeter of his vambraces, beseeching eyes demolishing the resolve within him. “We’ll get you fixed up, all right?” Din examines the incision with trained eyes, plush grey-purple tissue beneath all the vermillion causing his heart to drop.

It’s not that she was trying to stop the bleeding; she’s trying to prevent her fucking intestines from spilling out.

They’re still tucked away inside, where they belong, but if she moves too much they’ll slip out with ease.

His glove compresses around the fabric, wringing out the garment of her insides. His helmet sharply tosses in the direction of a small explosion by his final whistling bird. Weequay remains upright. Din’s insides boil.

This fucker. This son of a bitch.

This is his fault.

His Girl lays beneath the stars, her essence draining from her disoriented body, all because a handful of good for nothing guild members needed to get their hands dirty for a lousy couple thousand credits.

Din’s knees crack as he raises to his feet, his shoulders contracting and fingers crunching around a blade’s hilt. She sputters for a breath, her lungs failing to cooperate with her demands; the distressing audio flourishes the growing rage within him and he scowls under his visor.

He wishes it wasn’t there—wishes he could pluck the damned steel from around his face to burn the Weequay’s leather hide with stewing caf; a tribute of his ire. To permit the one who attributed so much agony on his beloved to gaze into his eyes as he snips his vocal cords through the wound in his gullet; darkened eyes that haven’t touched daylight in decades to swallow him whole in their shadows.

Like a hibernating beast longing for its first meal upon awakening.

Din cocks his vambrace controls and fires out his grappling cord, cleanly winding it around the maimed throat of his opponent, jerking forwards and concurrently rushing into his physique so they tumble to the turf and fend off each other’s clamouring.

That message he had been planning on distributing for the galaxy’s eyes is burnt to ash, much like that of the Weequay’s comrades. Din simply wants to murder the bastard—murder. An act far worse than killing. Killing somebody had always implied his survival, a requirement to take matters into his own hands so that he returns to the Crest with a beating heart.

This wasn’t survival.

This is harsh tidal waves crashing against the foundations of a lighthouse.

This is the crack of lightning in the sky in an unstoppable catastrophe.

This is a whole new side to Din that he’s never witnessed before. Anger that drowns him from the inside out. A bitterness that prods his taste buds. Overheating caf scorching holes through the visor.

Din registers the whipcord and how his fingers hook around the thread.

Din registers the dire clawing at his helmet, the Weequay’s desperation urging him on.

But what Din can’t register is anything in between; his consciousness, usually so clouded with his own grievances, is utterly blank as if he were a wiped droid. All circuitry and no sentiments.

“Ash’amur,” Din spits and applies every pound in his build.

The whipcord is constructed of refined shivs that slice through the thick neck and into Din’s gloves, drawing blood from his palms and fingertips.

It’s the gurgling that does it for him. That vile bubbling of blood and saliva in his pipes as it rises upwards and leaks from clenched teeth down his frilled jowls. It’s too horrendous to sustain—Din cringes and seizes his vibro-knife, only to be punched in the side of his neck the moment he removes a hand from that rubbery fucking throat.

Din groans and slams the cord-entangled hand into his jaw, roughhousing his cranium into the dirt and presenting the vulnerable wound like the perfect target to practice his precision. The blade dips through the seams and excavates deeper through the muscles, intensifying his suffering and crackled spluttering. Coriaceous hands fumble at slippery beskar, mouth belching and spraying ruby drops across the surface of his Creed.

He digs his knee into the fleshy stomach beneath him, extracts his knife and plunges it directly through the crevice once more.

The appendages slink down his torso and thighs, accumulating in a motionless mound atop of twigs and stones—dull eyes rolling into the back of his skull.

That filthy noise pollution continues—fluids frothing and popping in the oceanic limbo of fucking somewhere. Din’s mouth reshapes into a sneer and he impales the blade through the muscle again and again, but the ruckus persists; striking his eardrums with more zeal than his efforts to numb it.

It’s too loud, too distracting, his senses simmering down to solely auditory perception as it spikes in volume. It needs to be stopped, he needs to vanquish it.

Din white-knuckles the rubber hilt and repeatedly thrusts the blade in and out of the wound with rigid movements, his chest heaving with floundering breaths as he falls into a mania of knife-plungings.

The Weequay is long-lifeless but its body rocks with each frantic stab, the blood squelching within the open wound, and Din doesn’t realise the chilling mass beneath him isn’t the cause of the carnage on his sonic detectors until it’s splintered and calling his name between cracks and coughs.

He visibly recoils.

That agonised suffocating on blood wasn’t him at all.

The Girl coughs again, liquid gargling in the deep of her throat.

Vibro-knife rips through the skin as he withdraws the blade and reverts back to the Girl’s aid, flipping her onto her side and smoothing out the hair. “Spit it up, Sweetheart,” he instructs. Vermillion amasses into a puddle beneath her mouth and floods the forest floors. “That’s it, keep going.”

She mewls, incapable of urging up the last swish of metallic liquid—Din intervenes and slips his hand free of his glove to wedge two fingers into her mouth, sweeping out the remainder of accrued blood and clearing her airways.

“Breathe in, there we go, and out.”

She exhales and nods to her wound. “Didn’t—didn’t see the knife in time. Thought I-I killed him.”

“It’s okay. You’re going to be okay, all right?”

There’s disbelief written on her face, her eyebrows and teeth tense as she chews on soft gums, but she gives him the faintest of smiles and a nod that’s more to reassure him than it is her.

She’s lost too much blood and the volume is only ballooning with time. Din acts fast and slashes a load of his cloak with his knife, again, the woollen trimmings serving as a tourniquet around her midsection; it’s a shitty solution and functions more to irritate the wound than anything—the fibres of the garment eating away at the uncovered pulsing muscle—but it’s all he’s got. They’ve got nothing going for them here and the Crest had to be a decent twenty minute trek outwards on a good day which this is fucking not, maybe thirty with her condition.

It has to last until then. It needs to.

If he can make it to the Crest in time and without dumping her guts out she has a chance—a chance, not a high one, but a fucking chance—of survival but he needs to go now.

“I’m gonna pick you up, okay?”

She’s light. All that weight sitting on his shoulders mere hours ago is replaced with a floatiness that makes her feel non-existent, like a figment of his imagination. She compresses against the beskar while he zips through the forest like the pellets she’d administered to the hunters; agile, coordinated, but his concentration bounces from his path to her face every few leaps.

“Hey! Hey. Open your eyes. Show me your pretty eyes, sweet girl...there they are. Keep them open for me.”

She strains, “Sorry.”

The syrupy goodness of her tone he starved for—binged on—has boiled over to a sticky mess that only drags him in closer at the touch of his heart. It coats the organ like tar and hardens until it struggles to continue beating, slinking downwards and catching along the walls of his lungs to harass his breathing.

Din chews on his lower lip, his teeth burrowing into the pillows with each step of his boots and shredding them with his enamel until he tastes his blood at the back of his tongue.

She hums and allows her head to roll into the soft bicep beside it, situating her lips against the flight suit to commit a forceless kiss onto the only part of him that she can reach.

“Guess - guess I won’t be taking you up on that offer.” She smiles and exhales a breath—a laugh but she’s too weak to give anything more.

“Don’t… Stop acting like you’re--”

“Dying?” She scoffs. “Well, I-I am, aren’t I?”

No, you can’t Din thinks, you can’t fucking leave me here.

The urge to vomit creeps upon him; disguises itself among the churning of his stomach and the soreness in his throat. Perhaps he would empty his stomach right here and now, discount the concealing of his identity before the Girl just to have the opportunity to bend over and heave until there’s nothing but saliva expelling, but he doesn’t have the luxury of slowing down. In fact, he needs to pick up his pace.

He does just that—albeit not by much but every difference counts.

Din risks another glimpse at her; skin all pale and face scrunched to not let the pain escape from her throat or eyes. She struggles to restrain herself from allowing her eyelids to snap close, to let that twinge in her retinas finally rest—because Din asked to see those pretty eyes and what Din asks, Din receives.

She takes notice of his lack of reassuring words, the shortage of comforting glances, the cold absence of her Mandalorian as he distances himself from his emotions.

“Me’suum’ika.”

He regrets teaching her that word. It sounds so pleasing coming from her vocals, all soft and bouncy like a mattress he wishes to rest on, but currently, it’s pained. It’s croaky and poorly pronounced. It sounds dreadful—tainting the beautiful memory of exchanging nicknames.

She tries for his attention again, “Me’suum’ika…”

No. No, no. Don’t say it. Do not fucking say it.

“Din.”

Their motion suspends as fast as a string snaps. Boots kick pebbles ahead of their path. They’re in a wide clearing, the firs having been repelled at least a twenty-metre radius around them. Quiet. Open. Peaceful.

Forearms quiver with her maturing weight, mysteriously so fucking heavy like he was supporting a thruster of his Crest. The helmet is inert on his shoulders, staring off into the distance where the path narrows between rows of evergreen. Fingers on her waist and the underside of her thigh tunnels into the flesh, his one ungloved hand perceiving her dwindling warmth.

Despair overcomes him like an explosion. No ticking to warn him, no preparation. Just one big fucking detonation that blasts against his calves, staggering his stance and plugging his lungs and helmet with clotted smoke particles that stings his eyes and throat. His tongue liquefies and slips down his pipe where he gags on his own muscle.

“Put me down.”

“No,” he chokes. “I can do it, we can make it. I just—”

His vocals fissure. They crack and pop and it’s not on the account of his vocoder.

The hook underneath the rim of his helmet drags it downwards and every bone in his body tenses at the sight. The sight of His Girl so emptied of expression that she can barely hold eye contact with his black slit. The colour deficiency in her face leaves a sharp taste of salt on his lips, streaks on his cheeks.

Din she says softly, no—not softly but so devoid of strength that it comes out oh-so weak and quiet, put me down Din.

His knees buckle. His arms quake. He sinks to the gravel brutally.

The stones poke and prod against his caps, sharp edges cutting through his garment but he’s completely numb except for his hands and face—enduring the physical touch of a falling star versus the tides that roll beneath the steel.

He doesn’t want to drop her.

He doesn’t want to let her touch the planet's crust because he knows she won’t get back up.

“Me’suum’ika.” She wipes at his armoured chest with her sleeve. “You’re all bloody.”

Din shakes, scrambling not to cave into the overwhelming itch in his forearms—to not permit her perfect figure to be tainted with more grime than it already has been subjected to—except she’s made of duracrete, weighing him down like an anchor on a flimsy rowboat and he can’t come out victorious.

It’s a sluggish descent, all slowed to record each millimetre until she’s flat on the ground. A vermillion reservoir spawns beneath her and trails to seep into his flight suit, his ungloved hand gently laying rest on her concealed wound—the cloak lumpy and outlining something soft, squishy.

He retracts his hand as if it were in the mouth of a rancor.

There’s an unspoken statement that floats above them, circles them and weighs their shoulders down.

She’s dying.

Din knows it. He can see it. He can see her life vacuuming out of a three-inch slit in her abdominals and there’s nothing he can do to delay the inevitable. There’s nothing he can do to save her life. He’s never felt more incompetent but there’s a flicker of hope that she’ll make it. That she’ll just reabsorb the sticky liquid and suture her tissue back together—denial. He’s in utter fucking denial.

“Come here,” she breathes, fingertips stroking the scruff of his jaw underneath his cowl.

His teeth clench. “No, Cyar’ika. Sweetheart, please. I can make it. Just hold on for a little longer.”

“I can’t.”

Eyelids pinch together behind the tint but it doesn’t stop the nipping at his retinas. Gloved hand remains at the rear of her skull, cushioning it from stray rubble but he clenches around air when she hoists herself onto her elbows—approaching him since he’s too shaken to go to her—and knocks against the front of his helmet.

Din forces his eyelids to peel back and it’s a huge mistake.

All he can see is the bottom of her chin, the curve of her jaw, but he’s clever enough to string the clues together; the diminishing heat of her breath warming him on the inside.

The gentle press of her lips against the summit of beskar.

She doesn’t allow him to think, to speak, she does it all for him. But they’re not words he wishes to hear. They’re not I’ll be okay or let’s go home.

“Look.” She nods upwards. “Me’suum’ika.”

She’s not referring to him, but the real moon; its silver-white glow snuffed out and overtaken with oranges as warm as the sunrises that’d rebound off his beskar as he strides back to the Crest, a bounty in hand and dark crescents forming underneath his eyes. Reds as deep as the blood besmirching her gorgeous soft skin.

“Pretty, ain’t it?”

Pretty?

It’s obscene. It’s nauseating. It’s not fucking pretty.

It’s mocking them—mirroring the scene laid underneath it reminding Din of his foolish missteps; she’s all red and bloody because of you; she looks like me because you allowed her to tag along.

Din wants to pilot his Crest all the way up there and put an end to the disrespectful satellite.

How dare it look so full, so complete, while he’s disintegrating before it.

The Girl said he was one and the same with the moon—she fucking said that—so how can it be so unaffected by the loss of life beneath it?

The loss of their Girl.

Din isn’t the moon. He’s the abyssal milky ways that attract eyes at first impression only to exploit that and drag unsuspecting victims into the black holes in the galactic centre of his chest—he’s destruction and chaos and unrelenting, his gravitational pull too great for escape and it only ever ends one way.

“Don’t...don’t look like that.”

“Like what?” he snaps.

It’s unintentional. An overload of emotions that’s been festering for too long and shows its ugly face in the form of a pitch curated with venom and tears.

“You can’t even see me.”

He’s going about it all wrong except he’s right—she can’t see him nor can she feel his warmth but that never intimidated her. She’d found ways to adapt; ways to read his mannerisms and speech rather than facial expressions.

Din has the opportunity to seize that from her; to show rather than tell.

Explosion smoke splutters from his lungs and his fingertips ache as they fumble for the switch beneath the rim, the Girl’s blood soiling his clothed throat and the insides of his Creed. It unclasps, detectors maximizing its violent hiss. He has it maybe below his lips before she pulls and pins it down.

“You’re not ready.”

Din’s heart fractures; the beskar steel of his organ—that’s made to withstand a lightsaber—cracking and creaking at her words.

“No! No, no. You told me you weren’t going anywhere—you said that. You said you would look if I wanted you to see and, Mesh’la, I want you to fucking see.” Din’s fingers tremble against the back of her hands. “Sweetheart, please look at me. Let me do this...I don’t have anything else to offer.”

“Din…no.”

“Let me,” he demands but all the authority is suppressed with a heartache that chews him up and spits him back out.

There’s an attempt to conceal the groans and hisses—an attempt—as she breathes in deep, gathering as much fresh oxygen in her lungs as possible.

Din tries for his helmet again, employing her hands beneath the rim to lift, but she overexerts herself to stop him; tight fingers latched on the insides, knuckles brushing against a sharp jawline and collecting the wetness that streams directly into her grasp.

“This is the Way,” she says it as a reminder and a reassurance that she’s content with never seeing his face because This is the Way, but it only frustrates him; boils the tears on his face until they convert into vapour that attacks his visor, leaving only the crust of salt residue on his cheeks.

You’re dying in my fucking arms he thinks the least I can do is desecrate my Creed.

It wouldn’t even be a desecration, not really. That would imply a disrespectful act was to occur and this was anything but. It’d be an honour, a homage of an unspoken pledge uttered in the dead of the Crest that outweighs the one he took among tinted visors and enkindled torches.

Din’s taut. Rigid muscle constructed of resolute alloy.

It’s not comfortable to rest among sharp edges that prod into her sore skin but rather than peel away—rather than let her breathe without the weight of steel to her side—Din cradles her against his chest, transferring the most minuscule amount of body heat that slips through his seams into her.

His hand is glazed with sticky deep vermillion that oozes from his fingertips, the gravity magnetising droplets onto the beautiful cheek it hovers above. Din wants to touch her, wants to feel the sun warm his flesh and blood, but he’s scared that if he touches her he’ll ruin her iconic softness with coarse fingers.

Blood smears onto her face and fills her sinuses with metallic scents to match those flavours in her mouth, her cheek gluing itself to his hand for him. She offers him a weak smile and entitles herself to a moment to browse his solid face, following the edges of his cheeks and swiping a thumb across the chin’s rim.

“Kiss me,” Din requests. “Just—just once.”

“Just once?”

He nods. “Just once. Do—can you manage one?”

The Girl chuffs out a laugh but cringes at the disturbance in her core. “I might have one in the bank for you.”

She elevates the beskar to the dip in his nose, scenic eyes securely held shut to preserve the Creed he’s already decided he would renounce for her if she would just let him. She deserves to see him, to gaze into his simmering caf. His thoughts range from disloyal alternatives that scour against the sincerity of his mind, wiping him clean of the trust he’s built around himself, all the way to options where he doesn’t go against her words—thoughts where the beskar lifts no higher than his mouth.

He condemns both of the options; either tricking her into seeing him for his own greediness or listening to her pleas despite how much it fucking hurts.

It’s not fair.

Din’s lips hurtle themselves into her; hungry and distraught, a false hope that if he engorges on her taste alone it’ll dispel those macabre thoughts from his consciousness. All he can fucking taste is salt and metal that’s been left in the rain. Her zest, her sweetness, the flavours that taste of her, is gone.

It doesn’t stop him.

He compiles it in the back of his throat simply to have something of her inside him. He’s indulged in her tasteless saliva, the saltiness of her sweat, the syrup of her slick, and now the rancid warmth of her blood.

He can’t hear. He can’t see. He can only feel and touch.

She’s hardly lukewarm, the sun’s rays disappearing over her horizon.

“Ni kar’tayl gar darasuum.” Din brushes the hair out of her face. “Not a minute passes where you’re not in the forefront of my mind, Sweetheart. I’ve never encountered somebody so...extraordinary as you. I just need you to know before—before…”

“Din…” Her voice pops, tears of her own brewing.

“I love you,” he confesses, wet beads plummeting from his jawline to her neck. “You taught me how to love; you are my love and that will never change. I love you, ner Cyare—my beloved.”

Din recoils like he’s poked in the chest. The snuffling and mewling that erupts from her vocal cords upon his confession burn him—singe his lungs until they’re tender with each inhale. Nothing could have prepared him for this reaction; the unmasked sobs and vulnerability she’s never shown, not to this extent.

Fingers that dig into his flight suit feel like minuscule vibro-knifes in his biceps. Statements that gush out of her mouth and landslide his heart into submission—I love you, Din. I love you. I love you.

A star and a satellite falling in love; it’s an implausible outcome bound for disaster.

The sun manipulates its flames that allows colourful flowers to bloom or for lively forests to ignite. The moon pushes and pulls the tides fit for a gentle roll across a beach or to capsize rigs with a single flick.

The Sun and the Moon.

Fire and Water.

They’re polar opposites and, despite everything in the universe working against them, they’ve merged as one. Two equally fractured vases exchanging their missing pieces for compensation; a bright orange that’s warm to the touch in Din’s heart and within her lies a sparkly silver shard, a piece of his beskar residing within her to ward off onslaught.

He’s trawled inwards, naked cheek against naked cheek; scruff pricking against the bone of her jaw. Their tears fuse as one and wedge between their pressed flesh. She sobs against him, the hand on his helmet dipping underneath the silver to tangle her fingers within his knotty locks.

I’m fucking scared Din she breaks, I don’t want to go.

Din’s lip trembles. He can’t paralyse the pain that brings forth the donning of a brave face when confronted—that crinkle in her brow isn’t fooling anybody—but, perhaps, he can distract her. Draw her attention away from the gnawing of her intestines against scratchy wool.

“I know, Darling, I know.” Voice so soft and comforting it encourages her fraught muscles to slack and abandon her awareness. “Focus on me, okay?”

Her lips part when he nudges against them, accepting the tongue that requests entrance. It’s one final deliverance on both sides; a diversion for the Girl and a concluding act of love for Din—something to burn into his lips for decades to come, something to remind him he’s deserving of love.

He takes it slow for her sake, concerned that his usual greed would be too overstimulating. They’re lackadaisical; movements so weakened they’re hardly moving, simply holding each other as they quietly sob into the others mouth.

His scalp is heavy with her fingers and he synchronises his own to the nape of her neck, dirtying her pretty hair with sticky plasma. Pretty hair he’ll never be able to touch again—he’ll never be able to feel the strands between his knuckles as he tilts her head back and deepens their devout kisses. Kisses he’ll never be blessed with again.

Fuck.

He can’t stomach it, can’t bear the thought that he’s going to be abandoned all over again.

First, his parents and now his beloved girl—everybody he cared for is slipping through the gaps of his fingers.

It’s not even a gradual process; there’s not enough time for him to tell her how much he loves her, how he’ll never love another lifeform a fraction as much as he does her.

It’s as rapid as a waterfall, a suffocating surge that’s stern against his protests; his silent pleas of please don’t take her away from me.

Din feels the pulsing in her tongue fade; acknowledges how her fingers lax against his scalp, registers how he’s been deserted despite their tongues intertwined. Beskar slips down the slope of his dewy face as he recedes within himself.

The Girl is static, still, silent.

She’s not got a fingernail’s worth of oxygen in her lungs, not a twitch in her eyebrows.

Din’s beloved Girl is gone.

The sun’s solace warmth has been wiped from the face of the galaxy, leaving residual liquid flames that paste in thick layers to his armour. Only an odious sphere of blended carmines remains perched in the celestials—a blood-red lunar eclipse that penetrates through the solid of his heartplate and devours his internal organs.

Din remains idle for what feels like a century, his consciousness paralysed with a stab of her amban rifle’s bayonet. Deprived of sensation—drained of emotion and thoughts—the tears have stopped and left behind an ache beneath his eyes.

When he does eventually move it’s wearisome. The momentum of a dawdling crawl; a by-product of the corpse in his arms and bedrock in his boots.

It takes him longer than it should to reach the Crest.

It takes him longer than it should to lay her body to rest atop the hold’s crates.

Din tries to tell himself she looks peaceful, that she’s somewhere better, that's what people said to others in times of grief, but what could be better than roosting between his arms in the comfort of a secure body of beskar?

The Razor Crest’s lethargic humdrum probes his sockets, the absence of a thumping heartbeat so fucking apparent that it’s harrowing and Din can’t tolerate it for another second. His Creed rips from his head and hurtles through the air to slam into the duralloy walls of his supposed sanctuary, denting a dome where the summit of beskar impacts but it’ll never be enough to damage that fucking helmet.

His trademark steely stoic persona is substituted for tan mien; his inability to conceal his expressions from years of never needing to palpable at the faintest indication of an eyebrow twinge.

Din presses his lips against her forehead, a frigid and stiffness that transfers to his mouth. He luxuriates on her, delivering docile pecks across her face that burns his lips. Din surrenders the last of his breath to her but he’ll never receive any equivalent ever again.

Memories are all that remains—reminiscences that tug on his lungs. They obscure his mind's eye with dull images of the individual circumstances he’d separated the man from the religion.

He wasn’t to ever remove his helmet. His heart sinks. Din had never contemplated the impact of the decree—the implicit statement that it included whether one’s eyes were shut or not.

His heart’s arteries melt into the muscle and flood it until it capsizes within itself.

Din had been subconsciously unearthing methods and plot holes to eliminate beskar from the equation to indulge in the Girl’s temptations—to permit him the opportunity of a lifetime and experience affairs that scarcely presented themselves to him—but it had backfired.

The helmet was removed, whether her eyes were shut or not it didn’t matter.

His Creed was tarnished the moment he even thought about being with the Girl and it only continued downhill from then on—a terminal illness that burrows its relentless claws into his core and carefully conquers each inch of his body without ever drawing attention to itself.

“Cyare.” His vocals crack and pop. “Open your eyes.”

Look at me. I’ve dishonoured my vows for you. Open your eyes and look into mine—savour the caf you were so curious about. You have to look at me. You need to. Please don’t let my sacrilege go undervalued.

They’d been wasting precious moments this entire fucking time. Din’s Honour was non-existent and he could’ve bestowed her with the knowledge of how his eyes brightened whenever she glanced his way, how indentations of shallow dimples formed in his cheeks when he’d smile at her snarky remarks.

His fist slams against the crate beside her. “Stubborn girl.”

Why couldn’t she be like the no-good schemers that yearned to see beneath the steel?

Why did she have to be so protective of his oath?

She died never knowing what the man who loved her looked like.

A sparkle beneath her shirt catches his eyes, solid alloy beckoning his hands. Beskar is still warm to the touch from her sternum. Din rubs the face of the pendant's skull raw, dried blood flaking off onto the steel, his thumb heating with the friction. It’s not much, hardly anything actually, but it’s something that she claimed ownership of—something physical that he can touch and hold that was once pressed against the beat of her heart. With nothing else in her possession of her own, it’s all Din’s got.

It’s knotted around his neck, the thread weighing like a bantha and the pendant torching a permanent mark into his chest. He welcomes it, remains stoic and unflinching as it intensifies and scars over—he wasn’t afraid of being burnt, after all.

Din wipes away the scarlet meadow of clumped hair adhered to her cheek and sets the hem of her shirt as low as it'll reach, concealing the hump of soaked wool. He believed himself to be incapable of shedding more salty liquid from his ducts but tonight is full of surprises. Their foreheads pin against each other, wetness streaming down the curve of his cheekbones and into her hair.

He’s uncertain where he stands with his Creed—it’s not of importance right now—but he was raised on their culture, their words so beautiful that it only felt right to say a final remembrance.

My Sun, Ni su’cuyi, gar kyr’adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum.

----

jatnese be te jatnese - the best of the best ni kar'tayl gar darasuum - i love you me'suum'ika - moon choobies - testicles ash'amur - die ner cyare - my beloved ni su'cuyi, gar kyr'adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum - i'm still alive, but you are dead. I remember you, so you are eternal.

A/N: i'm so sorry. there might be an epilogue if you guys are interested in that.

taglist: @ohhersheybars, @greatcircle79, @northernpunk, @tanzthompson, @djarrex, @omgreally, @spideysimpossiblegirl

[marvelhead17]

The Tale of Eossimar (Original Female Character x Bofur Fic)

Chapter 9

Word Count: 7.8k

Warnings to cover the whole fic: Fake relationships, half-blood children, mild violence, fight scenes, male/male relationships, Dwarf gender concepts, battle of five armies fix-it, pre-battle of five armies, near death incidents, talking to dead people, mentions of paradise/heaven.

As the sun rose that morning, Bofur and the others began to gear up without argument in the dimly lit rooms deep inside Erebor, fixing their braiding to ensure it was tight for the battle to come and securing their armour properly.

Out of habit Bofur scanned over his shoulder for Bilbo, for a moment he had worried but he relaxed when he found him standing with Thorin, he was being handed chain armour. Bofur swallowed as he understood that Thorin was meaning that the poor hobbit was to fight alongside them, even though he had no personal ties to Erebor.

They approached the rampart only to discover that they were faced with hundreds upon hundreds of Elves at their gate, King Thranduil rode confidently on his stag followed closely by Bard on his horse, and they easily passed in the middle of them.

Bofur was amazed by how uniform the soldiers were, as they stepped aside to let their King pass through without even turning their heads, before they fell back into place once again. As the two stopped in front of their armies Thorin raised his bow and arrow in hand, firing a quick warning shot at the feet of Thranduil’s stag.

“I will put the next one between your eyes,” he warned and the company laughed confidently, even Bofur found himself laughing at the sudden surprise in the Elf King’s eyes.

He felt his laughter die as soon as he recalled Nari saying the same threat to Prince Legolas not so long ago and his amusement quickly became dampened.

King Thranduil barely bobbed his head when his troops moved in synchronisation, and all readied their arrows at the dwarves, the company ducked down behind the ridges of the wall in panic, while their leader remained standing as he stared at Thranduil. The dwarves remained silent as they held their breaths, Thranduil raised his hand in the air and his men lowered their weapons.

“We have come to tell you, payment of your debt has been offered, and accepted.” Thranduil informed him, and the members slowly raised their heads over the wall in confusion.

“What payment? I gave you nothing, you have nothing.” He still held his next arrow at the ready.

Thranduil’s brows pricked up and he swept his gaze to Bard on his left briefly, the man dug into his inner coat and pulled out something that glistened in the sunlight, before raising it in the air for them to see it clearly.

“We have this,” Bard said, Thorin’s eyes widened and he lowered his weapon.

“They have the Arkenstone, thieves!” Kíli shouted, “How came you by the heirloom of our house? That belongs to the King!”

“And the King may have it,” he tossed the precious stone in the air playfully as it had no value to him, “With our good will,” and then tucked it back safely in his pocket. “But first, he must honour his word.”

Thorin shook his head as he whispered, “They are taking us for fools. This is a ruse, a filthy lie,” he spoke louder in spite of the dwarves’ disbelief, “The Arkenstone is in this Mountain! It is a trick!”

“It’s no trick, the stone is real, I gave it to them,” Bilbo informed him; the King froze for a moment and then faced the hobbit with a mad look in his eyes.

“You?” he questioned in disbelief.

“I took it as my fourteenth share,” Bilbo blinked several times as he tried to maintain his eye contact.

“You would steal from me?” His voice was harsh as he spoke.

“Steal from you? No, no,” he shook his head, “I may be a burglar, but I like to think I’m an honest one.” He stifled a little laugh through his nose, rocking nervously on the balls of his feet. “I’m willing to let it stand against my claim,”

“Against your claim? Your claim.” He gave Bilbo a mocking smile, “You have no claim over me, you miserable rat!” he threw down the bow and arrow, stepping closer to Bilbo as he did.

“I was going to tell you. Many times I wanted to, but-”

“But what, thief?” he growled.

“You are changed,Thorin.” He spoke sternly, “The dwarf I met in Bag-End would never have gone back on his word, would never have doubted the loyalty of his kin!”

“Do not speak to me of loyalty,” Thorin’s eyes began to well up, and he edged even closer to Bilbo, making Bofur’s heart pound relentlessly. “Throw him from the rampart!” he pointed at him, his eyes roamed over the rest of the group as nobody made to move to the fearful hobbit.

Thorin frowned back at them, grabbing Fíli by his chest plate, “Did you not hear me?!” he yelled and was taken aback when Fíli fought against him and pushed away, stepping back next to Balin. He looked around desperately, and then turned to face Bilbo, “I will do it myself. Curse you!” he seized him and forced him towards the edge of the wall.

Fíli, Bifur and Bofur all reached out in an attempt to rescue the hobbit as he struggled against the King’s grasp. “Cursed be the Wizard that forced you on this company!” he shoved Bilbo against the wall and the hobbit let out a scream.

“If you don’t like my burglar then please, don’t damage him.” Gandalf’s voice boomed over the panic and they all looked down, “Return him to me,” Thorin only stared blankly at the wizard who settled next to Bard and Thranduil, while Bilbo panted anxiously away. “You’re not making a very splendid figure as King under the Mountain are you, Thorin, son of Thráin?”

Thorin released the hobbit from his grasp and he nearly dropped face first into the ground, had it not been for Fíli and Bofur helping him, Bofur took him by the arm and guided him away while the King was distracted.

“Never again will I have dealings with Wizards!”

“Go,” Bofur whispered, encouraging Bilbo to leave with a gentle nudge.

“Or Shire rats!”

Bilbo tossed the rope that was attached to the wall over the edge, hastily climbing over and making a quick escape down the rope.

“Are we resolved, the return of the Arkenstone, for what was promised?” Bard asked, Thorin took uneven breaths as he stared out to the hills on the left, which were empty as far as Bofur could tell. “Give us your answer, will you have peace, or war?”

A raven landed in front of Thorin, cawing away as it eyed him, he faced them and without hesitation said, “I will have war.”

The guard had already bid their families goodbye as the sun shone over the mountain and cast a glow down on them, Callon led them through the tunnel that had once been abandoned and Nari watched as they walked on, she nodded at the more familiar faces that passed her way.

As the last of them went through Nari looked behind to ensure that no villager strayed their way, and she placed the warning sign back down where it had been for many years before, and then followed behind them. She raised her hand to cover her eyes as the sun was much brighter once they reached the opening of the tunnel. They gathered formally and she walked around to stand in front of them, a little surprised by the sheer number that were among them for a small village.

She was about to address them when a shadow flew over her head, she squinted up and raised her arm to let the owl land. She nipped at her owner’s ear and chirped; Nari listened carefully and smiled at Screech, raising her arm to let the owl roam free, and then facing her people once more.

“It’s good to see so many of us are here this morning, in actual fact I’m quite surprised by the number of ye,” some let out a little chuckle, “Those of ye who know of my little pet will know that she often brings me news from the outside, and I’ve just learned that the people of Lake-Town have made settlement within the old City of Dale,” a few people now muttered and she cleared her throat.

“And for many of ye, it was once the home to previous generations of yer families, and for others it was where yer parents were able to make a living from their craft.” They nodded their agreements, “Since there are so many of us, I’d like at least half of ye to go to Dale, the people there have suffered enough grievances these past days and they are essentially defenceless.”

Callon walked up next to his sister, “Now we have no idea what we may be facing out there today, it could be the usual orc scum or something much worse. What we do know is, we must protect the line of Durin so that the Kingdom may be opened and thrive once again. Now who’s with me?” he raised his fist in the air and they cheered enthusiastically.

Nari couldn’t help the grin that grew on her face as she looked to the Eossimarians, she walked down to a familiar face and placed a hand on the elf’s shoulder, and she turned around in surprise, smiling at Nari when she caught sight of her.

“Elanor, I’d like ye to lead the troop to Dale, if ye don’t mind,”

Her mouth fell open slightly, “Are you certain Nari?”

“Very, ye’re our best archer, and a good leader, take the archers and others to Dale,” she nodded, “I know they’ll be safe in yer hands,” she patted her on the arm lightly and smiled, and Elanor returned the gesture, Nari looked around, “I want the archers to follow Elanor, and I’ll need a few who can fight on the ground to go with her as well,” she instructed.

After a few moments of indecision they split into two groups, with Elanor waving her half on to head towards Dale, she gave a final nod to Nari before they vanished into the trees.

“What about the rest of us?”

“We are going to defend Erebor,” Nari moved to brush some low-hanging branches out of the way, “Callon, lead on,” they followed immediately after him as he moved hurriedly, and Nari made sure the last people were through before she ran around to catch up with her brother.

She turned to face the guard while walking backward continuously, “I want ye to be on high alert, look out for each other, ye all have families that want yer safe return. Are we understood?”

“Aye!” they chanted and marched forward steadily upon catching the Mountain in their line of sight.

There was clanking and stomping resonating suddenly on the hills to the left as a new army made an approach to the scene, Dwalin noticed Bofur’s puzzlement and he leaned over, speaking quietly, “Dáin, of the Iron Hills, Thorin’s cousin,” the dwarf nodded in understanding and stared at the army, his cousin Bifur roared triumphantly just behind him with a few other members.

The Elves immediately turned their stance away from Erebor, and marched right on to meet the Dwarven army, before bringing themselves to a standstill as the Dwarves also made their stop behind their leader.

“Good morning, how are we all?” A fiery red headed dwarf, Dáin, Bofur assumed addressed the masses rather sarcastically. “I have a wee proposition, if ye wouldn’t mind giving me a few moments of yer time.” He leaned forward on his war pig, “Would ye consider, just… sodding off?!” he yelled the last words out, unsettling the Men so much that they stepped back in fear.

“All of ye! Right now!” he barked.

“Stand fast!” Bard ordered his men.

“Come now, Lord Dáin,” Gandalf approached the Dwarves through the crowds.

“Gandalf the Grey,” Dáin greeted coldly, “Tell this rabble to leave, or I’ll water the ground with their blood!”

“There is no need for war between Dwarves, Men and Elves,” Gandalf insisted as he moved closer, in hopes of reasoning with the dwarf, “A legion of Orcs march on the Mountain. Stand your army down.”

“I will not stand down before any Elf, not least this faithless Woodland sprite,” he glared as he pointed to the King Thranduil with his large hammer, “He wishes nothing but ill upon my people, if he chooses to stand between me and my kin… I’ll split his pretty head open! See if he’s still smirking then!”

Bofur looked over and confirmed that Thranduil was indeed smirking at the dwarf Lord, the other members cheered on their kin defending them, and Bofur looked to his brother and saw that he too looked uneasy about it all.

“He’s clearly mad, like his cousin,” the elf king responded coolly.

“Ye hear that, lads? We’re on!” Dáin turned around on his pig to face his army, waving his hammer as he moved along, “Let’s give these bastards a good hammering!” His commander gave orders in Khuzdul and the army yelled out their response, raising their weapons to prepare themselves.

A rumbling echoed from underground near another mountain range, the cracking of breaking earth sounded thunderous as the ground burst open, enormous Earth-eaters roared as they crushed the chunks of land in their mouths.

“Oh, come on!” Dáin yelled.

Bofur couldn’t believe his eyes as the worms receded into the ground from whence they came, a horn drew his attention away as his eyes fell upon Azog on top of an abandoned watch tower; his arms were raised as he yelled out his commands and his armies marched forward.

“The hordes of Hell are upon us. To battle! To battle, sons of Durin!” Dáin yelled as he led his army forward to the swells of orcs.

“I’m going over the wall, who’s coming with me?” Fíli asked as he raised his sword in the air.

“Aye!”

“Yes!”

“Come on, let’s go!” Dwalin yelled eagerly.

“Stand down.” Thorin ordered.

“What? Are we to do nothing?” Fíli questioned his Uncle.

“I said, stand down!” he yelled at his nephew, and then he moved down the stairs without looking back at them, Fíli looked over to Balin whose gaze grew anxious as he looked at the dwarves charging forward. “I want all of you inside, now!”

They moved slowly down from the rampart, Bofur decidedly taking his time as best as he could, he stopped when he realised that the Elves had not moved from their position and watched Gandalf move to the Elf King.

“Thranduil, this is madness!” he insisted, as the Dwarves formed a barricade with their shields while the orcs stormed forward without fear.

Their commander announced that their duties were to Erebor and the King, and that they were to hold their positions, the soldiers reaffirmed their pledges with a cry. Bofur swore that he had barely blinked when he realised that the Elven army had used the Dwarves as a ramp to glide over them weightlessly, and even before they landed on the ground had begun slaying some of the orc army down.

The dwarves stood up soon after and the two races fought side by side against the orcs, the figures all swarmed together into one chaotic mess, had it not been for the golden coloured armour it would have been impossible to set the Elves apart from the Dwarves.

“Bofur,” a rough voice called and he cleared his head with a shake, rushing down the stairs quickly, he came to a standstill as he came face to face with Thorin; the King glared daggers at him. “You think I have not seen how distracted you’ve become? Your little friend Nari has left long ago, I would not expect her to be returning any time soon,” he growled.

“It would be best for you not to pursue whatever interests you think you have with her, if you wish to stay in these grounds, am I being clear?”

“A-Aye, Thorin, very,” he swallowed nervously, walking carefully around him to join the others as they gathered further away.

“What was that about?” Bombur asked, Bofur shook his head and avoided looking at him.

“It’s nothing; don’t worry yerself about it,”

Nari and the guard arrived in time to see the Elves and Dwarves merge together in battle, much to her surprise, and she faced her people as she raised her sword in the air. “[For Erebor!]”

“Erebor!” they yelled, and sprinted forward to the battle, they easily blended in amongst the chaos and began aiding in the killing of the orcs with the rest.

Nari and Callon fought side by side, watching each other’s backs and killing off orcs easily as a team, it seemed to be going well so far and yet, something was nagging her in the back of her mind.

Another section of Thranduil’s army moved into position and fired arrows at the orcs to the back on their King’s command; she briefly lost her focus when a horn sounded in the distance; she traced the noise to its origin and spotted Azog standing high above the battle almost cockily. A flag pole changed its signal, and the orc leader belted out his orders, the cries of another army sounded not too far away and they marched in the direction of Dale.

Her brother slayed an orc that had been approaching her from behind and moved to her line of vision, “Good thing ye sent half the guard to Dale,” he remarked and she nodded as she saw the people of Lake-Town back away from the battle slowly.

She hadn’t even realised that they were fighting between all the soldiers, “All of you, fall back to Dale. Now!” Bard ordered and she smiled to herself, knowing he was making good decisions for his people already; she killed a few more orcs and looked over her shoulder every so often to see what was happening near the ruined city.

Giant trolls with catapults strapped to their backsides raced towards Dale, stopping not too far off and launched boulders that crumbled the walls beneath them, and an even larger one with a stone tied down to his head ran straight into a solid wall and fell dead into the ground. The orcs charged into the city as the citizens screamed in terror, and Nari silently thanked Mahal that she had made the right decision by sending some of her people there.

“Ye buggers!” a dwarf cursed behind them as he leaped off of his war pig which had been stabbed, “I’ll show ye!” he used his head to knock down several orcs with ease, attacking with even more fury than he had before, “Where’s Thorin? We need him, where is he?”

She looked at her brother, “Seems the King has become cowardly in the face of war,”

“What do ye mean?” Callon asked as he took down another orc next to him.

“I think they’re all still pent up inside Erebor, I have yet to see any of the company out here,” she kicked down an orc that tried to approach and stabbed it in the back of its head.

“That’s a relief, they’ve not been found then,” he quickly sliced the throat of an orc that snuck up behind him.

“They’ll be trapped if they find a way in though,” Nari informed him.

“Should we go in then?”

“Aye,” she moved forward through the mess and took down a few more orcs as she went along, her brother following closely behind.

Dwalin approached Thorin angrily while he was brooding on his throne. “Since when do we forsake our own people? Thorin, they are dying out there.” But Thorin seemed distracted as his eyes wandered around the room.

“There are halls beneath halls within this Mountain. Places we can fortify… shore up make safe. Yes,” he stood from his throne and reached out to Dwalin as he walked forward a little unsteadily. “Yes, that is it. We must move the gold further underground to safety.”

He turned away to look down to where the gold was down below in the caverns, and Dwalin found that his eyes were tearing up as his anger only grew, he grabbed Thorin by the shoulder.

“Did ye not hear me? Dáin is surrounded. They’re being slaughtered, Thorin.” He stepped back as Thorin searched his face, as if almost looking at a stranger.

“Many die in war, life is cheap. But a treasure such as this, cannot be counted in lives lost,” he waved his friends' concerns away, “It is worth all the blood we can spend.”

Dwalin scoffed, “Ye sit here in these vast halls with a crown upon yer head, and yet ye are lesser now than ye have ever been.”

“Do not speak to me as if I were some lowly Dwarf Lord, as if,” his voice quivered as he spoke, “I were still, Thorin Oakenshield,” his voice cracked as he turned away and he bent over to the side, Dwalin remained at a distance and stepped back when Thorin swung out his sword haphazardly and missed his target. “I am your King!”

“Ye were always my King, ye used to know that once. Ye cannot see what ye have become. Nari was right, ye’re sick Thorin.”

“Go. Get out. Before I kill you.” His voice remained steady as he spoke this time; they locked eyes for a moment before Dwalin walked away in disappointment.

He reached the others and they looked up in hope but Dwalin’s face made it clear to them, “I fear that we’ve lost him for good, he threatened my life.”

“That is not the sign we needed,” Balin shook his head.

“Can’t we do something, anything, to make him see?” Fíli stood.

“No laddie, I’m afraid not,” Balin placed his hand on the young dwarf’s shoulder.

The group sat in silence, staring at the ground as the screams from the battle ensued; Bofur remained on the rampart as he tried to scan the scene to ease the twisting in his gut. He was soon joined by Dwalin and Balin who stood on either side of him, they all nodded at one another.

Kíli pricked his head as he noticed movement ahead of them, he recognised his Uncle’s form and stood up from his spot, the fury boiling in his blood encouraged him to approach Thorin fearlessly.

“I will not hide behind a wall of stone while others fight our battles for us!” he yelled, though Thorin moved forward wordlessly. “It is not in my blood, Thorin.”

“No. It is not,” Thorin agreed, stopping before his nephew, “We are sons of Durin, and Durin’s Folk do not flee from a fight.” He smiled slowly as he met Kíli’s gaze, his lip was twitching beyond his control.

They pressed their foreheads together before Thorin patted him on the shoulder and moved to stand in front of the others, and his nephew raised his fist in success behind his back.

“I have no right to ask this of any of you. But will you follow me, one last time?” he asked them, and they all smiled and raised their weapons wordlessly.

The Eossimarian guard fell in between Dain and his troops, for the Elves had left for Dale, and they now realised that they were severely outnumbered. Dain’s dwarves began chanting in unison and the guard joined in while the orc army began to line up in front of them, even larger orcs made their way to the frontlines with clubs in hand, unmistakably weaponised to clear buildings.

Just as Azog gave the order a trumpet sounded clearly above them, Nari glanced up and saw Bombur blowing into the instrument and felt a laugh bubble up inside with a mix of relief, a bell rang out and she frowned before the enormous object burst through the barricade and collapsed it.

The company emerged from wreckage crying out as they ran directly towards the orcs, and Dain’s army moved aside to let them pass through.

“To the King, to the King!” the dwarf they had seen earlier cried out, rallying his troops forward.

Nari and Callon looked at each other and smiled, before joining in the attack against the orcs and really giving their all as they swung their blades. She managed to get close enough to Thorin in time before they were surrounded.

“Thorin, it’s good to see ye!” she called out and he killed off an orc before turning around to speak with her.

“You came back, after everything I said to you?”

“Course I did, I was keeping my word,”

“Thank you.” He placed a hand on her shoulder, and the two of them bowed their heads briefly before returning to the fight. “Dáin!” Thorin yelled out.

“Thorin! Hold on, I’m coming!” He rode on the backside of an orc while killing others, they hugged for a moment and he frowned for a moment when his eyes landed on Nari, but he decided it wasn’t the time to question it. “Hey Cousin, what took ye so long?”

“Admittedly I was under duress,”

“No matter, there’s too many of these buggers, Thorin,” he gestured around them, “I hope ye’ve got a plan…”

Nari and Callon had drifted further down into the fight, working alongside members of the company as they struggled against what seemed to be an endless wave of the creatures.

“Aye, we’re going to take out their leader.” He stared up to where Azog stood proudly on the old tower.

“Azog?” Dáin’s jaw slackened as he stared wide-eyed at his cousin, who managed to get hold of a war ram and sat confidently.

“I’m going to kill that piece of filth,” he promised, and then rode towards the rocky hillside, taking off the heads of orcs along the path with him.

As if Dwalin, Fíli and Kíli had read their King’s mind, they followed him on their own rams. “Lead on!” Dwalin said as they raced on with speed.

“Callon, let’s go!” Nari called.

“Where?”

“That peak,” she pointed to where Azog stood, “Azog must have planned for every move we’ve made here so far, and I don’t like that they’ll be isolated up there.”

He agreed and they ran on, quickly passing behind Bofur and his brother, Nari took out an orc that had tried to attack Bofur from behind, and the dwarf turned just in time to see her vanish before he could thank or even question her. He grunted as he swung another deadly blow to an enemy.

They ran up the rocky hills as fast as they could on foot, Thorin and the others were already at the top for some time before them and she worried that they may be in danger.

“I’ll bet my life that he’s set something up there.”

“Ye’re probably right, but on a day like this, I would not be wagering my life about as if it were nothing sister,”

“Don’t fret brother, we both know I can take care of myself,” they reached the top and were assaulted by hordes of goblins, and had to fight their way through.

“We must hurry!”

“These goblins won’t kill themselves ye know!” she grunted as she killed off a few more of the creatures.

“Something is wrong, I feel it,” he helped to kill off more of them, and then grabbed her hand and pulled her along after him.

They reached a broken down tower that curved slightly over the frozen river, giving them quicker access across the way if they needed it, Callon climbed further up to get a better view as the area was covered.

“Damn this fog, I can’t see much of anything,”

“Do ye hear that?” she raised a hand to silence him, “Below somewhere… I think reinforcements are coming,”

Callon nodded, reaching behind his back and readying his bow and arrow, slowly raising it to the buildings across the way, “I see the others, but not the princes, and… Bilbo?”

“Bilbo?” She looked passed him curiously, and realised that they were staring across the frozen river to where Azog had stood not long ago.

There was a sudden thumping of drums and the fog dissipated to reveal Azog dragging Fíli by the scruff alongside himself, his feet dangling in the air as the orc leader was much larger than him; Callon stiffened as he raised the prince higher up.

“This one dies first, then the brother.” Azog smirked.

The others stepped forward to the rocky edges nervously as Fíli stared back at them in absolute fear, Callon aimed his arrow at the orc’s weaponised arm, and Nari observed her brother.

“Ye should aim for his head,” she suggested, but Callon disagreed.

“I want him to face a slow death,”

“Then you, Oakenshield… You will die last.” Azog grinned, raising his arm to strike.

“Go!” Fíli yelled to them but Thorin shook his head, “Run!”

“On my life,” Callon whispered as he released his arrow, it whizzed through the air quickly and struck the orc leader in his arm as he had intended.

The orc dropped Fíli with the unexpected attack, and the poor dwarf hit the ground at an awkward angle, causing him to roll towards the edge of the cliff they were on. As he reached the edge his body fell upright, and he managed to reach out and grab hold of the edge to keep himself from plummeting to his death.

Azog backed away, “Finish them,” he ordered, then disappeared from sight, not realising that the dwarf was still clinging on for his life.

The others assessed the area and were surprised to see the siblings already sprinting across the frozen water to the other side, and Thorin called out for his nephews as Kíli roared in outrage, not knowing his brother was still alive as he ran out from his hiding space and made after them. Thorin made no hesitation in chasing after him.

“Thorin,” Dwalin reached out, “Thorin, no!” he ran after his King, leaving Bilbo behind.

Nari worked at fighting off the goblin armies that had now circled the area to let her brother get to Fíli, he bent down on his knee and held his hand out for him.

“Take my hand,” the prince gladly took hold of it and was lifted to his feet, for a moment they seemed to forget the surroundings as their eyes met.

“Cal, a little assistance if ye would be so kind-” she called out and he jerked his head in surprise, before quickly taking out a dagger and handing it to Fíli, who took it with a smile; and they both moved out into the fight to aid Nari.

EEEEEEEEH!

They ducked down for a moment, covering their ears as they looked to the sky which was now filled with hefty bats flying overhead. They passed over the river and swooped over Dwalin and Bilbo who were being swarmed by another goblin army.

She stood up, “I’m going to help them,” she told Callon as she moved away, he gave a quick nod and worked side by side with Fíli at killing the goblins that still tried to attack them. As she darted across the ice she noticed Kíli not too far off, slaying a few orcs on his own but she realised that he would soon be overwhelmed, as the number of orcs never seemed to be wavering no matter how many kills they all made.

Nari jumped in and slayed an orc just as a larger one travelled passed Bilbo, knocking him down with the handle of his weapon, she stabbed another orc in the chest and watched the leading orc disappear, wondering if that was the infamous Bolg of the North, spawn of Azog.

She knelt over the hobbit in concern, and her shoulders slumped as she saw the rise and fall of his chest, “Thank Mahal, brave Master Baggins,” she breathed out.

“Kíli!”

Nari stood on her feet and frowned, somewhat recognising the voice that called his name.

“Kíli!”

It called again and she squinted to where she had last seen the prince.

“Tauriel!” he cried out, making Nari bolt to where their voices came from, only to find Bolg was attacking Tauriel and it seemed she was not winning.

She had no time to try and help the elf-maid as she became surrounded by more enemies herself, leaving her no choice but to defend herself against their constant attacks.

“Ah!” Tauriel grunted as Bolg raised her into the air by the throat, she kicked him swiftly in the gut and he dropped her immediately, only to return the gesture and force her against the wall with a thud.

Kíli leapt out from Nari’s right with his sword raised high into the air, landing promptly on the orc’s shoulders and sinking his weapon down, just missing his head by a whisker as the orc raised his own to block the attack. He launched Kíli over his head and into the nearby stone stairs, with a grunt the prince was on his feet again, and he charged at the orc; both went at each other relentlessly evading and striking where they could.

Nari finished off the hordes on her side and soared down, just at the orc held Kíli in place to strike him in the chest, with her dagger already drawn she came down on his exposed backside and Bolg dropped Kíli as he staggered sideways and distracting him from his kill; she buried it deep into his shoulder and neck as she was also thrown off her target.

Tauriel screamed as she grabbed the orc’s arm, making him lose grip of his sword, Nari hopped off and stood on the ground as Tauriel then rushed over to Kíli. Bolg reached down for his sword and faced Nari with a grunt; her breathing was heavy as she addressed the orc.

“I will see yer head mounted as a trophy before ye lay another hand on him,” the orc grinned, raising his sword and charging at her, she ducked as he narrowly missed her head. “Kíli, Tauriel, go!” she insisted, drawing her sword and facing the orc as the elf-maid struggled to help Kíli to his feet.

She managed to stab him in the leg and avoided another attack, moving further away from the two, “Are ye deaf?” she asked as she saw them watching her, “Run!” They seemed startled by her words and moved along as quickly as they could; it seemed that he had been disorientated from his fight against Bolg.

In her moment of distraction she had barely faced the orc when her head struck against something hard, causing her to gasp out and close her eyes for a second, when she opened them she froze in place, and Bolg’s sword impaled her torso firmly. She choked as she glanced down, the sword holding her in place against the stone; she looked over to the stairs and knew they were headed to safety.

Nari’s ears were ringing with the deafening scream that escaped her as the orc leaned over her and pressed the blade further in, but she fought against every nerve in her body telling her to give in, instead focusing on the heat that she felt coursing through her. Something in the back of her mind told her to grab Bolg by the wrists and she clasped them firmly, holding her gaze as he leaned back in surprise; the heat centred to her palms and a horrible odour wafted to her nose.

Bolg jerked back roaring in agony, taking his weapon with him and stepping backwards, and Nari gasped as she collapsed onto the ground, she closed her eyes for a moment as she pressed her burning hands into the bleeding wound, tears falling out her eyes as the skin seemed to bubble and scorch under the pressure. She opened her eyes glancing above her, and saw Kíli peering over the edge and then a hand swiftly pulling him away; she struggled to turn her attention back to Bolg.

Her vision started growing dark, but there was one last relief as she saw her brother approaching the orc, her breathing was shaky as Fíli leaned over her, and she watched as his mouth moved but she could not hear what he was saying.

His hands touched her shoulders to get her attention back on him as her head rolled back and her eyes seemed to glaze over steadily, he moved the lower edge of her tunic to examine her wound and frowned deeply as he saw the damage done by a sword, but also burned flesh that seemed to seal it somehow. Despite this, there was still a lot of blood slowly pooling underneath her, and he discovered the smaller opening on her backside.

“Nari, can you hear me?” he asked in concern, she met his eyes with a blank stare as her head rolled heavily.

She whispered hoarsely, “Keep my Callon safe for me,”

“Don’t you talk like that, you’ll be alright,” Fíli insisted, taking her hand and squeezing it hard, at least she assumed as she couldn’t feel her fingers; there was a grunt not far off as Bolg fell to his knees, and Callon removed the dagger from the orc’s head with satisfaction. “He’s right here Nari, right here,”

Her brother kneeled down next to Fíli, “Sister- what happened?” his eyes widened as he looked her over, her breathing was becoming even slower and her eyes barely remained open.

“Thorin… Kíli,” she mumbled out before her eyes shut, and she fell into the darkness; Fíli pressed his ear to her chest and heard her heart beat sluggishly.

“Nari?” Callon’s voice broke as he spoke her name.

“She is still with us,” Fíli assured him and Callon let out a shaky breath as a tear fell across his cheek, “I’ll stay with her, go find them,” he insisted, Callon nodded and took one last uncertain look at his sister as he left them.

He did not venture too far when he found Tauriel sitting with Kíli on a rock, “Thank Mahal, ye’re alive Kíli!”

“Is she alright?” Kíli spoke heavily, as if he had a lump in his throat.

“For now,” he bowed his head slightly, ignoring the burning of his eyes, “Where is Thorin?” he asked.

“Azog.” Kíli whispered and shot to his feet, he walked passed Callon who then followed him; they stood on another wall above the others and saw Dwalin down below battling some orcs.

They moved hurriedly when they saw more heading his way until they stumbled upon Bilbo laying between rubble, Kíli leaned over the hobbit immediately and gave him a once over, he moved back when Bilbo’s eyes suddenly flicked open and he stared at the skies above.

“The Eagles… they’ve come,” he said almost dreamily; Callon and Kíli both glanced up and realised that he wasn’t imagining things, the prince then helped Bilbo to his feet.

Callon ran over to aid Dwalin in his burst of hope, Kíli joined them and Bilbo did his best at fighting at a distance by throwing rocks at the assailants as they approached them, Dwalin moved further up the frozen river to kill off the smaller troop, and with the Eagles now helping their side the numbers seemed to begin to dwindle and as they killed the last of their enemies they could finally rest for a moment.

Callon breathed deeply, still feeling uncertain that all was right, and his eyes landed on Thorin who stood facing Azog on the ice just across from them.

The King picked up the stone that had slammed in front of him seconds ago, quickly tossing it over to Azog who caught it in his grasp, Thorin stepped back carefully as he kept his eyes on the orc, the cracked ice underneath Azog’s feet tilted into the air. He dropped the stone next to him and it slid into the water, it dragged the chain still attached and pulled the pale orc down with it despite his screams, and he slipped underneath the ice.

Silence.

“He’s done it,” Callon muttered, “He’s done it!” he cheered as he looked at the others; they smiled in relief before laughing.

He frowned when Thorin walked slowly along the ice, looking down with a wary gaze at something below, and his blade still firmly held in his hand. Callon started as the King cried out suddenly, the tip of a blade piercing through his foot from underneath, it vanished and Azog erupted out with a roar.

They all froze as he swung his sword at Thorin, knocking him down onto his backside, he was barely able to deflect the pale orc’s tireless blows against him; he stabbed his sword down and Thorin was lucky enough to raise his sword across his chest in time to protect himself.

Callon reached behind himself to retrieve his bow and arrow, aiming it at the Orc leader’s head, Kíli swallowed nervously and glanced down to Bilbo, only to find the hobbit had disappeared entirely.

The unique fork in Azog’s weapon was now the only thing keeping him from death, he grunted as the orc forced his sword further down upon him; it was a breath away from his heart now.

Callon shot his arrow and cursed as it moved off course with the breeze, hitting the orc in the shoulder and distracting him from his task at hand for a moment, he snorted at them and pushed his sword further down. It pricked Thorin’s chest and the dwarf King yelled out, Azog smirked with satisfaction and made to push further, when out of thin air Bilbo leapt down onto his backside; he plunged his little sword deep into the neck of the orc, Azog staggered to the side, giving Bilbo the opportunity to hop off.

The sword remained in his neck as he collapsed onto the ice with a final grunt, and Thorin, having gotten to his feet in seconds, grabbed the hobbit by the shoulders, moving them both away in fear. Callon lowered his bow and nodded at Bilbo, though he seemed too shaken to respond in the moment.

Kíli heard Dwalin shouting incoherently about an orc as he approached them at speed, he frowned and tried to ask him to be clear when there was a loud thud next to him, he turned to see Callon laying on the icy ground unconscious, a small boulder planted next to him that had not been there earlier and he quickly grabbed the bow and an arrow from the dwarf.

He scanned the area just behind them and spotted his target, one orc that was preparing to throw another stone, he swiftly shot him dead and kept his eyes peeled for any more signs of movement; he threw down the weapon and kneeled down to examine the injury to Callon’s head. He was bleeding a bit from the roughness of the stone, but seemed otherwise unharmed, Kíli moved his hand in front of Callon’s face and felt the warm breath against it.

He looked across the river and saw that Azog’s body lay still, his black blood seeping into the icy water, Thorin was leaning over him and then he walked away, Bilbo took to his side; he put an arm over the hobbit’s shoulder and held him tightly, Bilbo chuckled a little nervously until he saw the others.

They approached worriedly and Kíli spoke to his uncle, “He’s still breathing, only just, I think,”

Dwalin was panting loudly as he finally reached them, his exhaustion was evident as he approached tiredly, and his eyes welled up as he inspected Callon.

“Is he-?”

“What’s happened here?” Fíli’s voice spoke softer than usual and they diverted their attention to him, he carried Nari in his arms and she hung limply, still unconscious.

“He’s alive,” Kíli assured him.

“Mahal,” Dwalin whispered when his eyes fell onto Nari and darted back to Callon.

“She’s worse for wear I admit, but she’s fighting,” Fíli promised him.

“We must get them to the healers, quickly,” Thorin ordered, the princes agreed and Kíli moved to lift Callon from the ground but Dwalin raised a hand to stop him, picking his nephew up into his arms instead.

Once they were ready they moved down along the old paths as fast as they could, at some point along the way Kíli had taken Nari from his brother as his arms grew tired, and they continued without much fuss. Tauriel fell in step behind them, not wanting to invade in what felt like a very personal matter to the dwarves. A sense of guilt overwhelmed her as she registered that Nari had saved Kíli, and she swallowed the lump in her throat down at the concept of a life without him.

Thorin was the first to break the long silence they had fallen into, “Azog is finally dead, had it not been for these two… it could’ve been all of us,” his nephews only looked at him, “I was foolish for sending you there alone, it was clearly a trap, I hope you can forgive me, my nephews,”

“Of course Uncle,” they said together.

“You couldn’t have known Thorin, you know that.” Bilbo placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder.

“Aye,” Dwalin agreed, “We were ambushed and outnumbered by the bastards,” he gritted his teeth angrily.

To their relief the battle seemed to have ended, the Eagles flew away as the sun started to dip into the horizon, and they arrived at a gathering of those who had survived. Dwarves from the Iron Hills and the company, among the guards of Eossimar, were all mixed together; some were already tending to the injuries of their comrades, while others sat in silence as they mourned their losses.

From the left they saw more of the guard come out from the direction of Dale, with a large man walking somewhat alongside them, when Thorin met his gaze he bowed his head as a gesture of thanks, and Beorn returned it.

Bofur had just finished covering his brother’s leg wound when he looked around and saw Thorin and the others making their return, at first he was relieved as he stood up and made his way to them, but his smile faded as he saw how sombre they were. His eyes hovered over them and his heart pounded heavily in his chest as he saw Nari being carried in Kíli’s arms, he felt the air in his chest leave and he couldn’t breathe as they stilled in front of them.

Thorin waved Óin over to them and he examined them immediately, Bofur’s knees felt as though they were about to crumple under the sudden weight he felt as watched the healer look them over, a hand clapping down on his shoulder startled him and he turned to see Bombur trying to comfort him.

____________________________________________________________

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>> Chapter Index <<

[thorgoodlaw]

Navigating Legal Complexities: How the Right Tax and Wage Attorney Can Protect Your Finances

In this blog, we’ll break down how a tax defense attorney can help in working with wage garnishment, payroll tax issues, and even criminal tax cases. We’ll also offer guidance on finding the best tax attorney NYC or criminal tax attorney near you, depending on your specific needs.

The Role of a Wage Garnishment Lawyer

Wage garnishment may seem to be a daunting experience for you. If your employer has been told to take out a specific part of your money due to a debt or tax situation, you really should not wait. A wage garnishment lawyer near you can:

First of all, carefully explore your financial condition and also check the legality of the garnishment.

Assist in talking to creditors and tax authorities to lessen or remove the garnishment.

Represent you in court to defend your wages.

When to Call a Payroll Tax Attorney

Many employers with payroll tax problems need attorneys that deal with these kinds of issues. Businesses that are noncompliant with payroll tax rules can face heavy fallout, even criminal charges. A payroll tax attorney will:

Assist in resolving tax discrepancies with the IRS or state tax agencies.

Avoiding payroll tax-related legal actions, for example, audits or wage garnishment are things that you can get help with.

To ensure you are compliant with the rules, which will curtail any problems in future, is the last way that we can help.

Defending Against Criminal Tax Charges

Facing criminal tax charges? It’s essential to get a criminal tax attorney near you involved immediately. Criminal tax issues can arise from:

Teeth issue

Shady or missing tax returns

Wrongly filed tax payments to payroll

A criminal tax lawyer is not easy to do, but through our support, you can fight back, get settlements, or we can even represent you in court to minimize the penalties, let alone the possibility of jail time.

Finding the Best Tax Attorney in NYC

If you’re in New York and need tax-related legal help, the search for the best tax lawyer NYC or best tax attorney NYC is vital. A top-notch lawyer will provide:

Legal help that includes advice, actions, or many other services covering the issue of wage garnishment of payroll tax collection or criminal tax issues.

On the one hand, with an attack over the institutions such as the IRS and state tax authorities, the attorney would make the suit as severe as possible, which would be quite a well-thought-out subtle move.

Utilize legal tactics that take into account the specific issues you would like to be addressed.

How a Tax Defense Lawyer Can Help

Hiring a tax defense lawyer can help give you peace of mind when you have to deal with the IRS. An attorney for tax defense can then advise you, for instance:

Protect your assets and income from aggressive IRS actions.

Negotiate favorable settlements and payment plans.

Represent you in court if necessary.

FAQs

1. When should I hire a payroll tax lawyer?

If you are a business person with some issue or in some way subjected to some penalty relating to payroll taxes then it is high time you sought a payroll tax lawyer to ensure compliance and avoid further penalties.

2. What are the consequences of not hiring a criminal tax lawyer?

If you’re facing criminal tax charges, failing to hire a criminal tax attorney may lead to fines, penalties and even imprisonment and should therefore not be encouraged by any company.

3. How can a tax defense attorney protect me?

A tax defense attorney can negotiate settlements, appear in court on your behalf and shield wages or assets from legal seizure by the IRS.

4. Who is the best tax attorney in NYC?

The best tax attorney NYC will have experience, expertise in local tax laws, and a strong track record of defending clients against IRS actions.

There is usually nothing wrong in knowing that one cannot be outwitted in court especially in period when ones financial or legal standing remains rather uncertain. This can range from wage garnishment, payroll taxes issue or a criminal tax case, thus the need to seek legal assistance from an tax defense lawyer can protect your finances and your future.

[nestfield3]

The Price Of Arbitration.

Arbitration Matters.

Content

Keep It About The Youngsters: Informing Your Children Regarding Divorce 1

Welcome To Kids First Arbitration.

Do Not Be Reluctant To Contact Us.

Supervised Or Sustained Contact.

At Mediate UK 90% of customers that go on to joint mediation have the ability to reach an agreement with arbitration. The conciliator will certainly ask you to check out all the options that you have, they will certainly assist you discover possibilities of concession and look for a means to move you both ahead. Mediation centres on arrangement as well as compromise and if those 2 aspects show up, there is every hope of an arrangement. For you to be able to get to a contract, you must both have a will and a wish to reach an arrangement. In such circumstances, the mediator will certainly look for the trick that unlocks a means forward.

If you are a solicitor as well as wants to refer clients for Household Mediation in Portsmouth or South East Hampshire please contact us. " In my view the debates for the proposition that the 1995 Act does not apply to mediations about cross-border kidnappings have the side". 11.35 The option of embracing a MIAM style technique in Scotland has the advantage of making parties knowledgeable about the schedule of ADR as an alternative to court. Nonetheless, study by the UK Government published in 2015 recommended that the applicant just went to a MIAM in 19% of situations. 11.32 The benefit of utilizing ADR is that as discussed in the introduction to this component, it may be quicker, more affordable, extra versatile and less stressful than litigating.

Keep It Regarding The Youngsters: Telling Your Kids About Divorce 1

The well-being of the child must be the court's top priority when choosing. Restricted actions order-- stops a person doing something with or to a youngster, for instance to stop a parent taking a kid abroad, or from picking a kid up from institution. The court will certainly encourage you to reach a contract, yet if you can not it might be essential for the court to release an order.

Investor-State Mediation - Developments, Opportunities & Challenges - Lexology

Investor-State Mediation - Developments, Opportunities & Challenges.

Posted: Tue, 05 Jan 2021 15:17:20 GMT [source]

To benefit one of the most from mediation, you must assemble an agenda, which details the points you desire to talk about during the arbitration process. If https://mediationeurope.net/germany/areas/ is tight, or you are on a reduced earnings, there might be neighborhood law groups near to where you live. Lots of have regular lawful surgeries, where you can review your situation with a qualified solicitor. If this happens, the conciliator will sign the required court type as well as the instance can then be heard by a judge or a magistrate. If you are not qualified for lawfully assisted mediation you will certainly be expected to pay ahead of time before each arbitration session. Payments can be made in cash money at the office, by card over the telephone or online. Please do not quit me having contact with expanded member of the family who are very important to me.

Welcome To Youngsters 1st Mediation.

The moderator will be independent, even if they run from a solicitor's workplace, as well as won't take sides. Mediation can assist you and the various other moms and dad resolve problems without going to court. Requesting a court order typically takes longer and also might be more expensive and also difficult. Arbitration might just be a chance to talk with somebody independent about your parenting circumstance.

In some cases arbitration is not effective and also in such situations, the moderator will certainly discuss what other choices are readily available to solve the conflict, such as settlement. During the preliminary arbitration session with your ex-partner, the moderator will certainly discuss the guideline and what is expected of everyone in the mediation space. This info is documented completely in a paper called Contract to Moderate. After having experienced the file, you and also your ex lover will be asked to sign it, if you accept the terms. In the previous four months you attempted arbitration but it had not succeeded. An approved mediator has to validate this and also validate that mediation is not the very best method for you to resolve your conflict.

Do Not Be Reluctant To Contact Us.

Make it easy for me to take things I need when I hang around with my other parent, such as institution work, PE sets, garments, publications, video games, phone etc . Don't make me feel guilty regarding hanging out with my various other moms and dad. Child assessment supplies children the opportunity to place their sights onward within a neutral environment in a way which ensures they do not really feel responsible for making decisions. If you are represented by a solicitor at court it will certainly be more costly, with most household solicitor firms pricing estimate upwards of ₤ 5,000 for your situation.

Monitored contact can be through a kid contact centre or at the home of an additional person, or under the supervision of one more person. Education i.e. which school the child will go to, gain access to for the other parent to info concerning efficiency, moms and dad's evenings, participation and so on . Presently any individual who intends to claimLegal Aid, will just be able to get access to Legal Aid if they attend a MIAM, with an approved family mediator, unless there are extraordinary cases of evidenced domestic physical violence. At Children 1st Arbitration Plymouth we believe that most people, if provided the best assistance as well as possibility, can reach their own remedies to the issues as well as or difficulties that they are encountering. Family members mediation is a way of fixing conflicts which arise in the past, throughout or after separation or separation. Required to sort Monetary concerns consisting of Home, Pensions, assets, financial debts? Helping you reach arrangements that serve to both of you and will certainly permit each of you to proceed with your life.

Monitored Or Sustained Contact.

This is done by speaking through and exercising all concerns surrounding your divorce or separation, whether it be before, during or after the occasion. Now that you have actually acquired a much better understanding of the expenses involved in the separation/divorce process in regard to arbitration, you may be feeling unclear and overwhelmed. This area lays out the complying with steps that you need to currently require to aid you in going ahead with separation and also mediation. If you do not certify, nonetheless, our trained moderators will be able to help you in working out how to pay these costs in a manner that is best for you. We are an award-winning company with seasoned arbitrators approved by the Family members Mediation Council.

If you concern an arrangement, your mediator will certainly need to create this up, and there is normally a charge for this. You probably have actually thought this, yet divorces are constantly less expensive if you can avoid court. If the proposals are approved by you both, these are then written up by the family members arbitrator right into a Parenting Plan or a Memorandum of Understanding with an Open Financial Declaration. Family members arbitration is very organized as well as adheres to a specified process. By going to arbitration, it can aid you and your ex-partner get a divorce quicker. This is generally since you are communicating, whether it be in shuttle bus or in person. Your separation schedule quite depends upon just how you as well as your ex-partner work together.

The Length Of Time Does A Collective Separation Take?

There are most likely to be expenses included, as you can not get legal help for household issues unless you have suffered domestic physical violence, or very hardly ever-- your situation is "extraordinary". Mediation relies on 2 individuals intending to solve their disagreement, despite the fact that they have extremely various perspectives at the beginning of the procedure. Some programmes are created to aid you gain abilities that will assist you negotiate in a calm as well as favorable way. Figure out as long as feasible regarding each kind of service so you can choose the one that finest fits you as well as your situation. If you continue with arbitration, it typically accompanies the other parent over a number of sessions.

What is an example of mediation?

The definition of mediation is a process of negotiation in a relationship to resolve differences. When a couple is divorcing and they work with a neutral third party that helps them resolve divorce issues and divide up assets and property, this is an example of mediation.

If there is a threat to life or the safety of the person making the court application, or their family or their residence is at danger. If the court application you are making, is linked to a matter which is already in the household courts and also in which you are entailed. Household mediation is a completely voluntary procedure, so no person is mosting likely to make you participate in.

You or your wife, partner or ex-partner can not access an arbitrator's office, because among you has a special needs. Nonetheless, it needs to be remembered that if the arbitrator can give the appropriate lodging, after that you will certainly both still be called for to participate in the conference.

If you make an application to court, you will require to have had a MIAM for an approved arbitrator to be able to sign the relevant certificate to allow your situation to be listened to. Depending upon the scenario as well as ages of the kids, the Cafcass Officer might talk directly to the youngsters to get their sights and input. The plan should work for both moms and dads-- if it doesn't, there is little motivation for both moms and dads to either consent to the plan or apply it consistently. mediators Ireland ex pats is versatile to cover anything that you desire covered as moms and dads. There are particular things that a court takes into consideration when deciding what's in a child's benefits. The court considers all the scenarios of the situation and not simply the checklist, yet it's the starting point. When choosing whether to make an order, the court must think about whether it would certainly be much better for the welfare of the youngster to make an order than not make an order.

The arbitrator will certainly likewise review with you what you wish to achieve and also address any type of inquiries that you may have regarding the process. We after that established totally free initial individual meetings which will certainly last about half a hr for both of you to learn even more regarding mediation without incurring any significant costs. We generally write out and after that talk with your ex-partner to engage them in the mediation process. If you are just talking about youngsters's matters then 2-3 joint sessions is typically enough to deal with matters.

New mediation program for landlords and tenants, emergency aid to renters, to be provided by Housing Initiatives of Princeton - - Planet Princeton

New mediation program for landlords and tenants, emergency aid to renters, to be provided by Housing Initiatives of Princeton -.

Posted: Wed, 16 Dec 2020 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Nonetheless, if a joint arbitration session has happened then there is a ₤ 45 cost including VAT for the solution to finish the kind. The arbitrator will certainly after that prepare a written agreement tape-recording the decisions that you have made together.

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A Beautiful Mistake Chapter 17.

Smut ahead.

Your body felt weak, your mind was racing at an alarming pace, and every tiny twinge of pain caused you to panic as you wondered if your time would come now. Your thoughts drift back to being on the ship from England and one of the crew having to have a fishing hook dug out of their abdomen; the screams from the man were deafening even though the men shoved old rags between his teeth and there was no escape from the sound in such an enclosed space, then all went quiet when he eventually passed out from the pain, never to wake again. That was only trying to retrieve something that was just underneath the skin, so surely to have to delve so far into the body for kidney stones you stood no chance at all. You turn away from Samuel in bed as you cry quietly into your pillow at the thought of leaving him behind, but you’re determined to at least give birth before anything has to be done, you refuse to put your baby’s life at risk.

“My love, what is wrong?” Samuel gasps quietly as he wakes to find you sobbing next to him.

He wraps an arm around you immediately and pulls you against his strong and comforting body as you continue to let your fears overwhelm you.

“Please, (Y/N), tell me what is on your mind,” he pleads as he presses a long kiss to your head.

“Oh Samuel, we should not have acted upon our feelings, you should have stayed with Jocelyn and I with James then maybe we would have escaped this wretched punishment God has put upon us for defying the laws of the settlement.”

“Do not say such things!” Samuel frowns as he holds you close, “I would have been unable to live if I had to see you and James together every day, it would have torn me apart. This is no punishment, this is a test my love, a test that we shall face and conquer together to prove our love for one another and show everyone this was the right thing to do.”

“Samuel,” you begin with a sigh, turning around in his embrace so you can face him, “will you promise me one thing?”

“Anything.”

“If something happens after our baby is born, please tell them about me and how much I loved and wanted them.”

Samuel opens his mouth to protest against your dark thoughts but a sob escapes instead and his mouth closes as his lips turn down while tears spill from his enchanting eyes, and you rest your forehead against his as you cup one of his cheeks gently. After a few minutes together in a sombre silence Samuel’s lips find yours for a kiss that takes your breath away as one of his hands travels down your body to pull your nightdress up, and he begins to comfort you in a way only he could. You both manage to slip out of your clothes trying not to break the kiss for too long, then Samuel gently pushes you down onto your back before settling his lower body between your open legs and carefully sliding inside your slick opening.

His name falls softly from your lips as he leaves a trail of kisses along your jaw and down your neck while his hips move in unison with yours, burying himself deep inside you with every thrust, and Samuel’s touch is much more delicate than when you’d made love before announcing you were with child. The sound of deep breathing fills the small space around the bed and the air soon turns thick and heavy as the sweat beads across both your bodies, and you wrap your legs around Samuel’s hips so your heels can aid him by pressing against his buttocks. Your hands glide along his back then up to his shoulders so you can hold him close to you as his hot breath stutters out onto your neck between chaotic kisses, and he soon calls your name out repeatedly while you brace yourself for your own high; lifting your hips off of the bed as much as you can to ride out the pleasurable pulses that take over inside.

“I love you,” Samuel whispers as he pulls out and strokes your stomach with both hands while kneeling between your legs, “and this little one.”

“I love you too Samuel, so very much.”

He moves to lay beside you once more and his broad chest is far too inviting for you to resist draping yourself across it, then you hear Mercy pottering around in the next room as your eyes finally shut after spending most of the night awake. When Samuel knows you’ve drifted off to sleep he carefully moves from beneath you to get to the meeting that was being held this morning between the Governor, Redwick and Farlow about the situation with James.

“Good morning Mercy,” he smiles as he emerges from the bedroom once fully presentable, “(Y/N) is still asleep after having a bad night. Could you check in on her every now and again please?”

“Of course Master Castell,” she nods willingly, “do you need me to fetch the doctor?”

“No, not necessary Mercy, but thank you. Just keep an eye on her while I’m out and that will be enough. I’ll be back soon.”

“Bye Master Castell.”

Samuel takes his seat as company recorder but keeps his head down as he takes the notes from the meeting, too worried to look up as the three men discuss what to do with James Read.

“Punishment should be the same for him as it was for the attacker, should it not? This was a planned event,” Farlow suggests.

“I agree,” Yeardley nods.

Samuel’s eyes dart to Redwick, silently urging him to defend James after his agreement with you, and he smirks as he allows a longer pause than Samuel would like.

“I disagree. If he admits to it, then I see no harm in a simple whipping. The length of which should be decided by Master Castell of course,” Redwick sneers, “one or two days should do it.”

Samuel’s gaze widens in horror at such an offer, he was not a violent man in the slightest and it was something he chose not to witness either if he could help it, and now here he was, possibly in charge of someone’s length of punishment.

“Hmm, would that be suitable, recorder?” Yeardley questions.

“I… Yes of course it would. An afternoon should suffice.”

“Just an afternoon, Castell?” Redwick pushes.

“A day then,” Samuel replies hurriedly, moving his quill along the parchment to try and keep up with what had been said.

“Excellent, I shall look forward to the spectacle tomorrow!” Redwick grins.

Samuel walks home with a heavy heart as he prepares to tell you what had happened during the meeting but is quickly interrupted by James as he leaps from his shack to stop the recorder in his path.

“What is my fate?” he asks quietly.

“One day of whipping,” Samuel sighs, “I did suggest an afternoon but Redwick has a particularly nasty vendetta against you and soon changed it.”

“Thank you,” James nods, “you are a kind man Master Castell, and I am forever in your debt.”

Samuel gives the man a curt smile before continuing to the house and opening the door with a forced smile only to find Mercy worrying in a chair at the fact that you had gone missing.

“What’s happened Mercy?” Samuel asks as he studies her shaking frame.

“Mistress Castell… I turned away for only a moment after she dressed and when I turned back she had gone! I don’t know what to do! I ran outside but there was no sign of her Sir.”

“How odd. Do you think she has gone to get some food or maybe some medicine?”

“I told her I would do that for her with her being in such a fragile state, I promise I did Master Castell!” Mercy says as tears prick her eyes for fear of him not believing her.

“I know, I know,” he soothes, “did you hear a knock at the door maybe?”

“I don’t think so… Oh, I can’t remember, I’m so mixed up with worry inside Sir, I’m ever so sorry!”

“It’s okay Mercy, it’s not your fault. Have some water and calm down while I go out and see if I can find her, okay?”

“Yes Master Castell, thank you,” she nods as her shaking hands reach for the arms of the chair to help her stand.

Samuel stands outside the front door with a perplexed look upon his face as his eyes scan the settlement for any sign of you but of course there is none in such close proximity to the house, so he begins to walk towards the gates of Jamestown, being sure to study any path that he passed on his way. Several people greet him along his short journey and he makes sure to maintain his polite nature, but he can’t help the trepidation that rises inside him as he walks increasingly further from the safety of the colony.

“It’s unusual to see you so far from Jamestown Master Castell,” Pepper frowns as he walks towards the worried man.

“I am unable to fin my wife, have you seen her on your travels?”

“Of course,” Pepper laughs, “Mistress Castell is with Alice at our land!”

“Goodness, thank you!”

Samuel picks up his pace until he’s almost running up to the Sharrow land, then when you finally come into view he stops to catch his breath before taking a slow walk over to where you and Alice stand talking, and his eyes are drawn to the large bump that protrudes from Alice’s dress.

“Samuel!” you cheer as he gets near enough for you to notice, “I’m so sorry I left without telling you were I was going, but once I heard the good news I could not resist coming to give my well wishes to Alice in person!”

You link your arm through his as he presses a kiss to your hair then he grins at Alice as he realises you were here to see how far along she was and whether it would be her that was to give birth to the first child of Jamestown.

“Our very best wishes on your joyous news,” Samuel nods, “it will be wonderful to begin to see children around the settlement!”

“That it will,” Alice agrees, “I shan’t keep your wife any longer, I must get back to helping Silas myself! Good day to you both.”

“And to you too Alice,” you smile.

You both turn away ready to walk back to Jamestown, and your hand runs up and down Samuel’s arm happily.

“Our news can be kept a secret for a little longer my love,” you whisper excitedly.

“I’m so very relieved,” Samuel sighs, “after this morning I need some good news.”

“What was the verdict?” you ask, stopping in your tracks to face him.

“A days whipping.”

“Oh my goodness,” you gasp, bringing up a hand to cover your mouth.

“Redwick gave me the choice of length for the punishment and I did try for an afternoon but…”

“No, no, I know you would have done your best Samuel, you always do.”

You stand on tiptoe to kiss him, then stroke his cheek to help ease his troubled mind.

“We should get back, poor Mercy was shaking with worry over you!” he chuckles.

“The poor thing! I must apologise to her!” you say before lifting your dress a little so you could walk quicker.

“Hey!” Samuel laughs from behind as he jogs to catch up with you.

You turn and give him a sly smile before picking up your pace and the two of you end up laughing all the way back to the settlement as he chases you through the dense woods; the light relief something you both so desperately needed.

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[adventuresofninnaly]

Helgen.

The carriage creaked slightly when it began to move, the driver hummed on ‘Ragnar the Red’ and steered away from the stables of Whiterun.

“So, what are we going to do in Helgen?” Lucien asked. “Is there a cave nearby, or some ruins?” “There is only one cave. But it’s inhabited by a bear. And I have no intentions to disturb it.” Ninnaly chuckled. “We are going to visit an old friend of mine, Vilod. He runs the inn in Helgen. I think he may have some equipment for us. Those fancy clothes you wear wont do any good if we get attacked by... anything.” Ninnaly grinned towards Lucien. “Well. Maybe not Lily. I suppose you are more experienced in that area. But I’ll gladly take something more protective than this.” Lucien responded with a smile.

Ninnaly just hoped Vilod still had her old equipment lying around in a chest. It was a light armor, that could withstand a blow from a bear. At least before she modified it to fit her fighting style better. Not that she was particularly interested in testing if she could take on a bear in the first place.

They discussed what spells Lucien had learned, and how to properly use them in combat. “How come you are so well versed in spell-combat, Lily?” Lucien asked. “My father was a battlemage for the Imperial Legion before he met my mother. He trained me and my brother at a young age.” “So you have a brother? You didn’t mention him.” Lucien said. “Does he live here in Skyrim too?” “My brother, Orman, is.. is..” Ninnaly felt the tears swelling up. “He was a Vigilant of Stendarr, and had been on a vampire hunt with his companion Livie near the Gold Coast. Apparently the vampires knew they were coming.” “Ninnaly, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to..” Lucien said sympathetically. “Livie managed to escape with only a few scratches. Orman was taken, never to be seen again.” she continued. “The worst part is that there’s no telling if he’s dead or worse.. if he have become the very thing he was sent to destroy. Livie was devastated. Almost jumped of a cliff with grief. But we managed to calm him down.” “What happened after that, if I may ask?” Lucien said. Ninnaly shook her head “Livie now works for my father. To ‘pay his debt’.” She smiled. “Livie doesn’t owe us anything, it’s not his fault that the Vigilantes of Stendarr leads a risky life.” “I’m... terribly sorry for you loss, Lily. Orman sounds like a good man.” Lucien said after a moments silence. He opened his bag and pulled up a bottle and two cups. He poured a small amount of the content into the cups and handed her one of them. “For Orman.” He said and raised his cup. “For Orman.” Ninnaly joined, and took a sip. “Oh, that’s kinda good. What is it?” “It’s called ‘White-Gold Tower’. I bought a flask from an Argonian, Talen-Jei, who happened to stay at the Dead Man’s Drink about a week ago! He owns the inn over in Riften, and from what I know, he’s the only one who sells it.” “Then I guess we need to go to Riften when we get the chance.” Ninnaly said with smile. Feeling a lot better already. By the time they arrived in Riverwood, it was almost dark. The driver asked if they wanted to stay the night which would be safer, or if they wanted to continue. Lucien responded “It’s your call, it would probably be better to stay here for the night.” “Alright, then we do that.” The driver responded. “Let’s head for the ‘Sleeping Giant’, Orgnar and Delphine usually has some warm food by now.”

The inn was crowded for such a small settlement, and it smelled heavily of grilled leek and roast goat. The driver was greeted by someone near the fireplace, so Ninnaly and Lucien sat down by a table and a young woman approached. “Would the company like some warm food and a cold drink? We got some already roast goat.” She said happily. “Yes, please. And a mead, thank you” Lucien said. “My treat tonight, Lily.” he smiled. “I can take some roast and some grilled leek, if you have any. And water, thanks.” Ninnaly said. “Coming right up.” The girl said and scurried off. “Only water?” Lucien asked. “Yes, I’m not much for the mead. I prefer water in that case. Also it quenches the thirst better.” Ninnaly responded. Eyeing the young woman who took their order. Lucian noticed and said “Ah, now I understand why you said that if I was flirting, I could go away.” and laughed. Ninnaly blushed a little and shrugged. “Females are more interesting.” she said, giggling a bit.

After the food they went to their rooms. Ninnaly crawled under the cold blanket and drifted of to sleep.

She awoke, sitting at a table, with Vilod that was talking about his Juniper Berry mead. She was in Helgen. “Vilod, how.. how am I already here?” She asked. “What do you mean ‘already here’? You came here five years ago, you crazy woman. And you still haven’t left!” Vilod laughed. “Not that I care. I like the company, and you make the place more pleasant!” Ninnaly started to zone out. What did he mean with five years ago? She only stayed a year in Helgen, and after that she went to Whiterun. “Vilod, are you sure I have been here for FIVE years?” She almost screamed. She began losing herself. Was it all a dream? No, it couldn’t possibly be a dream. “What about Lucien, is he here? Are you two setting me up for some kind of joke?” “Who is Lucien?” Vilod replied with a look of concern on his face. “Something is.. weird. What year is it?” Ninnaly asked. “It’s Morndas, the 17th of Last Seed, 4E201. Ninnaly, what is going on?” She felt sick to her stomach. She wanted to puke, she wanted to cry. Was it all just a day dream? clang clang Her sword. it clattered to the ground. She didn’t own this sword when she lived in Helgen. She got it from Adrianne, as a welcoming gift to Whiterun. “This is a dream.” Ninnaly said. “This is just a dream. What is going on. Answer me.” Vilod grinned. “Yes, Lily. This is just a dream. Or maybe it’s not a dream?” The room started to feel bigger. “But how would you tell. You might just a crazy person.” Vilod started to bleed from his nose. “Stop. This isn’t real.” Ninnaly hissed between her teeth. Vilod suddenly grabbed her arm, or whatever it was. “You should hurry to Helgen Lily. Ulfric and his band of Stormcloaks are about to be executed here. And. EVERYTHING. WILL. BURN!” Vilod laughed manically. His skin started to glow like embers. The table began charring, like it was on fire. “EVERYTHING WILL BURN LILY, AND NOTHING CAN STOP HIM! THE WORLD EATER IS COMING! HA-HA-HA! THE BLACK DRAGON IS HERE” he screamed, as the roof torn apart and a black revealed it self and was getting ready to engulf them both in it’s flames.

Ninnaly woke up from Lucien shaking her awake. “What is it Lily? You started screaming, so I came to check on you. Are you alright?” he said with concern. Ninnaly just sat horrified and cried. “I don’t know, Lucien. I don’t know. Something bad is about to happen. I just feel it.” Ninnaly grabbed her clothes. “What time is it?” She asked. “It’s almost time for breakfast.” Lucien said, still worried about his friend. “Good, we leave for Helgen. Now!” “If you say so.” Lucien hurried away to grab his things. They hurried the carriage as fast as they could. As they started to get near Helgen, they heard a roar, of something large. Far larger than a giant. The roar made the driver hurry the horses as fast as he could towards Helgen. He had family there, so he was just as worried as Ninnaly. Just as they rounded the corner of the mountain, they saw the smoke rising above the wall, and the terrible roar growing louder. “What is going on?!” Lucien cried out. Just as he finished. A giant black dragon flew up, and locked it’s eyes on it. Ninnaly could’ve sworn the dragon looked her straight into her soul. He roared once more and flew away. “What was that?! Was that a dragon!?” Lucien yelled tried to grasp what he just had witnessed. “The World Eater.” Ninnaly said, like she was about to fall over. “The World Eater is here.”. -> Be sure to join in on the adventures of Ninnaly over at twitch to take part in her development, and decide her future!

[sgcpainc]

𝗦𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗹𝗲 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝘂𝗺𝘂𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗕𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗧𝗮𝘅𝗲𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗣𝗲𝗻𝗻𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗿 𝗪𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗢𝘂𝗿 𝗜𝗥𝗦 𝗗𝗲𝗯𝘁 𝗦𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗹𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗦𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗰𝗲𝘀

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