Lucarz leaned towards the sound of crunching snow underfoot. Its pitch and pattern made triangulation easy: approaching from northeast, 110 yards. Yet, he remained calm. He took three deep breaths and with meditative focus slowed his heart. The blood pooling on the rocks beneath him grew less quickly.

He concentrated on the festering gash down his leg next, commanding his body to hasten healing. It was an ancient practice passed through generations and studied over years. But something was wrong. As soon as the reparative cells touched the luminescent green microbiomes covering the wound, they were destroyed. 

Becalmed, he reassessed. 

A doe and its fowl’s paw falls caught his attention. In front of the outcropping where he hid, they nuzzled their noses in the snow, before the curious fowl abruptly turned to him. Its warm eyes asked, predator or play? Lucarz could smell their blood. Pickly-sweet, it flooded him with a seductive rush that drew open his mouth in gorging preparation. The fowl’s ears went taught. Mother and child leapt away.

His pleasurable fantasy evaporated when the slow stomp of heavier feet stopped directly above the crevice opening. Lucarz invoked his training. His heartbeat slowed to near nothing. He silently invoked the complex transfiguration incantation  and his body collapsed into itself. Shriveling and compacting, he slithered a further foot into the crack. No human hand could reach him now. But the opening was still large enough for other…inconveniences.

A pillow of snow, obviously kicked, fluttered down from the overhang. It was an insulting introduction, Lucarz thought, quickly followed by the dropped tip of a crimson red bullwhip. His blood was still wet along its shaft. Seeing the gift that delivered his unsealing gash, he tried summoning further power to recede into nothing but the fissure had no more space in which to hide.

“If only the deer’d arrived a few minutes sooner,” said a soft female voice with subtle mockery and utter assuredness.

The whip swayed as she added with bite, “I’d be watching you bleed as a bat, flying away to Brailla.”

She went silent and the motion stopped. The ancestral weapon was making her point now. It mocked him. Her brazen confidence roiled Lucarz’s practiced discipline. He couldn’t escape prideful memories of holding court inside the walls of his holdfast at the head of his coven table and the generations of his name before him. Now, here.

“It must be terribly uncomfortable.”

The poshness of her English accent brought more sting to her sarcasm, “I imagine it can’t be more than…twenty centimeters you’ve squeezed into. Shame though. Not quite deep enough is it?”

Silence. The whip calmly retreated back to its master.

“What shall it be Lucarz?” She offered. “A most difficult choice. Let me add some clarity.”

The definitive zhing of a blade unsheathed sung out.

Her voice commanded, “AVS VILABA IN KASA!”

A burst of green light flashed across the snow followed by a thunderous crack as her blade pierced the rock above Lucarz’s head. The rocky outcropping splintered under its own massive weight and the gap that was his cover compressed around him. The shards of rock pierced his already thinned figure and he wailed in agony as they crushed close to his heart.

Zhing. Her blade re-sheathed with an authoritative thunk and forced Lucarz into desperate rumination. He could release the transformation and allow the rocks to kill him. Death by his own hand. Or?

He flung himself free and shouted the spell mid-air. “Saladytch!” His body metamorphosed from its compressed shrivel as he twisted his torso to land not on his feet as a man, but as a wolf.

Amidst his transformation he could see her hand draw back. The lightning fast weapon was rounding her head with its piercing green eyes, filled with purpose and fury. Form change completed, his paws landed upon the snow just as the tip of the whip struck his back hind quarter. Its awesome force ripped a gash from hip to shoulder and sent his limp body skidding across the snow until it fell to a lump at the foot of a cherry blossom tree.

Zhing.

Her footsteps approached and the last thing Lucarz heard was the huff of her breath and the slice of metal through the air.