rix_scaedu

This is in response to aldersprig's first prompt

“Are you finished yet?”  Kelb was looming over her as he spoke, his body language would have told her that he was getting angry if his tone had not.

She finished pulling the thread through for the final stitch and neatly ended the reinforcing seam she had been sewing, then cut the thread.  “Now I am.”  She held out his trousers with a smile.

He snatched them back with a snarl and stumped to his room.  “Stupid woman,” he grumbled loud enough for the whole house to hear.  “She decides to mend my pants when we’re getting ready to go out on patrol?!  What sort of timing is that?  Staz’ll kill me if I keep everyone waiting.”

She smiled to herself as she put her sewing box away.  He would grumble along, at least until they left, and if he held up the beginning of the patrol, then Staz would speak his stinging, short, sharp words to her as the root cause when they returned.

But that was alright.  The scene of future memory was already fading.

The ripping sound as an overstretched seam gave way, followed by the shock of blade biting into a thigh no longer covered by protective cloth.  The momentary, involuntary shock of injured flesh leaving an opening that let a spear plunge through his chest.  Already hard pressed and now one man down, the patrol falls to the enemies’ blades.

Unwarned, less protected, the walled village is overrun by enemies that arrive with the noonday heat.  There is slaughter, mayhem and by nightfall nothing stirs within its walls.  The village’s destruction leaves a hole in the defensive line meant to guard the heartlands of the human world from its enemies.  The enemies pour through that hole and in a few seasons, the human world is no more and will never flower into something greater.

All for want of a few stitches.

She smiled to herself.  Even one of Staz’ scoldings would be a price worth paying for the loss of those memories.