"Thank you," says Atreia quietly, a little in awe. The words seem pathetically insufficient. She only has a vague idea of how difficult that must have been, but that's more than enough to get by with.

She pauses briefly, almost like she's going to glance back, but keeps going instead.

"Well," he says, turning back to the bleeding heap of feathers. "Isn't today just full of surprises. I'm Serik. Pleased to meet you."

"Pleased to meet you, too." He's better than being dragged off to Hell to be tortured to death. Probably. "So far, anyway."

"As lovely as you are at the moment, would you like some help with," vague gesture to her current state, "that?"

"I suppose that depends on how you'd help. I'll be fine given time, but I don't know how I'd interact with anything you'd do."

"I can go by the old capital and pick up some healing water. It heals things."

"Sure. I'd appreciate that."

He shrugs, and vanishes.

There is a flash of lightning, high in the sky.

About five minutes later, there is another flash of lightning, and he rematerializes shortly afterward with a beautiful glass bottle, which he crouches to offer to her.

She has healed a little in the time he was away, but not very much. It's hard to heal from damage caused by unholy weapons and hellfire.

"Thank you." She accepts the bottle, peers at it briefly to assess it for any hidden dangers, then cautiously sips. Her damaged body begins to knit itself back together, noticeably slower than what the healing water usually provides. It takes the rest of the bottle to heal her completely, but she does heal.

"That's amazing, even with proper healing it'd usually take me a week to be back to normal," she says with a smile, standing with much less trouble than before.

(She's very lovely when she's not bleeding, too.)

"Substantially less amazing than usual, actually, it should've been done with you in less than half a minute and that was more like two. What happened to you?"

"Demons. Some of their weapons cause injuries that resist healing of all kinds. Some of their magic, too, but not as well."

"And what's a demon?"

"Creatures of highly varying intelligence but meagerly varying moral outlook, that as a whole want to slowly torture everything that isn't demonic to eventual death or insanity. Sometimes they like to mix it up and drag unfortunate victims off for breeding purposes so they can make more varied demons."

"Well, I'm hardly in a position to judge anybody's hobbies, but that's pretty fucked up."

"Yep. I uh. Kill them. With a flaming sword." She coughs, awkwardly. "It was really not working out for me that time."

"I noticed."

Snort.

"So I tried an experimental plane shift to dodge the inevitable drawn out death, and here I am."

"Lucky for you that Luar found you first, or we'd be having a very different conversation."

"Probably not one I'd be enjoying," she agrees.

"So what now? Planning to run back to your losing battle?"

"That sounds like a terrible idea. I only know how to get back to right where I was, which would be, ah. Suicide. I can figure out how to get somewhere safer given time, but leaving immediately would just be throwing my life away."

"And that would be a shame. If you need somewhere to stay in the meantime, I have this lovely castle full of until-now-totally-useless guest rooms."

She assesses him.

"And my proximity wouldn't tempt you to do anything I'd regret?"

"Oh, you're much less tempting when you're not lying on the ground in a bleeding heap," he assures her. "And I told Luar I'd be polite. I'm not one of those people who'll move mountains to keep their word, but I don't make false promises either, I wouldn't have said that if I thought managing not to rape one pretty girl was beyond me."