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I was beginning to feel delirious So much ti down on iven oing

Keep going…

Night fell again, and I transforister in hts left if I did not reach solid ground soon

But, as if the heavens had finally sht, I spied land Land! A rush of excitey I’d thought I had lost I took in the sight hungrily, greedily, like the starving ht was that it must be The Woodlands

But then reality dawned on h trees, for one thing But, still, it was land A land I could maybe find water and food on, and rest until I could stand to reenter the water again to continue s, I swam as fast as I could toward the shore The distance was deceptive, however When I had first spotted the land, it seeh and powerful, which slowed li closer, slowly but surely

My right foot kicked down hard against so slimy I barely had time to look down and check what it was before an explosion of pain rocketed up

I cried out, iant pair of jaws had closed aroundIt was some kind of black, rubbery-skinned water beast, with teeth about twice the size of a olf’s It had a strange flap of cartilage poking out the top of its back, a long, jagged tail, and two fins at its front I had never seen anything like it before I had not spent enough tiat its sli but shreds of flesh Theaway into the depths of the ocean

ButI wondered if the animal had punctured an artery I had never experienced such acute pain in allinpace

I looked desperately toward the land If there werethese waters, surely they would all sense th I’d recovered on sighting the shore was ebbing out ofonly three legs at my disposal

I was half blind by the ti was heavy and belabored, every ed myself across the sand, even as I left a trail of blood behind ht And do what, I did not knoas not a warlock I could not heal this kind of wound I tried not to think too much about it Maybe the heavens would smile down on me once le that bordered the beach and drew roheezing and panting

The ground beneath me quickly becaet up and move to a dry patch I just sat where I was, es of the past teeks flashed in ht of es of Victoria…

My brain felt like it was slowly shutting down, less wired to the agony inthe pain

Derek

We spent h The Woodlands

They first took us to the northern sure that there were adequate dragons, witches and jinn a each Then we embarked on a hunt forthe ho agreed to join our search party And together we discovered several h none of them were as well set up as the first one we had destroyed These were all makeshift bases, set up within the raided lairs of olves We stor every hunter present Once we reached the southernmost tip of The Woodlands, ere fairly confident that we had disinfected this realm of the tyrants

Now the matter remained of Bastien’s traitorous cousin and uncle We had decided to leave that until last Although this was a job that the olves had already agreed to undertake alone, still, we accompanied them to the Blackhalls’ mountain just in case soroup of fifty olves swept through thetsunarand court itself, where they had been sitting at the time we had stormed in Detrius never knehat hit hi aloft on his throne, the next he was on the floor, his crown ripped fro down into his chest They were no less h he was blind

As for the rest of the mountain castle’s inhabitants, the only people we knew for certain were allied with the hunters were Detrius and his uncle Thus, unlike the IBSI, the olves were noble enough to decide that the best course of action would be to hold an investigation to discover as innocent and as not… rather than go on a ra them all Children, of course, would be excluded