Tinder tended to her bloodstained hands in the shallows section of her stream.

  The water was cold but clean, save for the scarlet tint diffusing with the current.

  In the four days that Tinder spent in the woods, the lonesome fairy became better acquainted with the babbling rapids.

  She took out a small amber vial formed from hardened sap and pulled out its wooden cork.

  The bottle bubbled as the fairy began to fill it with water.

  After quenching her thirst and corking a bottle for later, the fairy felt ready to carry on with her chores.

  With a backpack stitched from a rat Tinder found poking around her den at night, the fairy felt more confident than ever in recent history.

  Tinder carried her seasoned spear in her dominant hand.

  Nevertheless, her stay wasn’t quite idyllic.

  “The meat will rot if I don’t start drying it soon…” she thought, already reluctant to store meat near her ground-level home at all.

  “I will have to do the same for the rest of the rat hide…” Her shoulder slumped with the realisation.

  “That’s not a one-woman job…” she muttered, sagging her elf-like ears.

  Her streamside stroll brought her to a hollow fall log tilted up a steep little hillside overtaken by nettles.

  It was overgrown on the outside, a forest of ivy in a crowd of colourful mushroom caps.

  Tinder poked her head inside the sparsely lit tunnel.

  Where the bark broke, light was able to seep in, illuminating a safe, if musty, passage.

  Soon, she emerged unscathed on the other side of the dense swath of stinging nettle.

  This was the very edge of her territory.

  From here, Tinder could see the fields of swaying grass. No matter where she looked, nowhere seemed gouged by dwarven artillery or scorched by elven magic.

  Then there was also the town. Tinder saw its irregular silhouette lit faintly in the early morning light.

  She crept cautiously, dashing from cover to cover, from bush to leaf.

  As she scanned her surroundings, her eyes snagged on the scorch mark left in the spot where she set a rune down the day before.

  “Looks like I chased off another giant!” the fairy grinned victoriously as she carefully snuck towards it.

  With a simple stick, Tinder began to scribble a series of concentric discs at various offsets and ratios.

  She finished the design with a few expertly placed dots and notches.

  The run gave a diagnostic flash signalling success.

  The fairy nodded to herself and tried once more to tweak the rune into striking targets with electricity instead of flames.

  It began blinking continuously in a low-energy colour exclusive to the eyes of elves and fairies.

  The light couldn’t even diagnose one single condition.

  It felt as if her magic was no longer compatible with the world she was still in.

  With a flustered groan, Tinder changed the rune back.

  “I don’t get it…” she sighed, carefully camouflaging her trap with a freshly fallen leaf.

  A menagerie of birds gathered to spectate – and likely bet on – Tinder’s efforts.

  The day before, a fight broke out in the branches when a raven deliberately led a man to the trap, winning a stolen trinket with which it could taunt the original owners.

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  After resetting all her traps, Tinder decided to head back home and get started on processing all her excess rat.

  She decided to take the long way home, the one that had her meandering through the dim jungle beneath a canopy of thorny briars.

  The bare earth here was cooler than that warmed – however briefly – by the rising sun outside.

  Suddenly, Tinder heard a slight commotion from overhead.

  Up through the breezy web of barbed tendril, Tinder saw a squawking flock of fleeing plumage.

  Her lip curved into a slight smirk. “I wonder if somebody set a trap off already?”

  “I hope they last until tomorrow…”

  “Maybe I’ll have to go out in the afternoon and-…” She stopped as soon as she saw it.

  A rune of hers.

  Not its aftermath.

  Not an operational trap.

  It was disarmed.

  The rings were crossed and the dots joined in exactly the right way to disqualify the first bit of logic from ever even running.

  When Tinder remembered to breathe, she had to gasp.

  She looked around in every direction, growing panicked and paranoid as she imagined a gloved hand reaching out to snatch her away.

  She hurried to her mutilated spell and inspected the damage up close.

  This rune was carved into a fallen chunk of bark.

  Compared to her crooked lines, the amendments were sleek and precise, carried out with an unnecessarily sharp instrument.

  “They’re here… they found me!” Tinder realised with a sinking feeling of dread.

  As the fairy ran home, she spotted more deactivated runes.

  Cautiously, Tinder poked her head out from beneath a wrinkled fern concealing her presence.

  Giant footsteps explored the area around Tinder’s secluded magnolia tree.

  Some of her larger belongings lay strewn outside her ransacked den.

  After waiting a long time and making sure that there were no giants hiding behind anything, Tinder bolted across the exposed stretch of soil between the bushes and her home.

  The inside was completely wrecked.

  Her little improvised table was shattered; her moss bed smeared across the floor.

  She clutched her spear tight as she began hurriedly packing what little supplies she could still scavenge inside her backpack.

  She wrapped a puck of fairy bread in a waxy leaf and packed it away alongside some similarly stored cooked meat.

  “They found me… they found me…!” she repeated neurotically as she searched the scattered debris for her missing spare spearheads.

  Then came a loud thud, like something dropping to the ground from a tree.

  Tinder froze, her throat constricted in tandem with her chest, resulting in a horrified squeak.

  After the initial thud, two more followed. One soft and cautious, the other rough and uncoordinated.

  Voices followed.

  Tinder’s heart felt like it was going to give out, potentially sparing her from the horrors to come.

  It wasn’t until a gloveless hand blocked the sun that Tinder found her voice and began to shriek in utter dread.

  There were voices outside her home, large, muffled, and entirely unintelligible against the backdrop of the fairy’s frantic screaming.

  Horrified, furious tears swamped her shaky eyes.

  The hand belonged to an elf, but it wasn’t the trained viper of a fairy catcher; it felt too cautious, too insistent on not injuring her.

  Tinder didn’t question the slight inconsistency in her waking nightmare.

  She pulled back her spear and began stabbing the hand repeatedly, never stopping her cries for more than a gasp of air.

  Outside, Edward had the fairy cornered in its tree home.

  The elf was crouching down on his knees, one arm deep inside the fairy’s den.

  His face contorted painfully; suddenly he pulled his arm back out.

  “I should have worn gloves…” he winced.

  Chloe gasped as she took in Edward’s bloody hand.

  It looked like a dozen angry insect bites.

  As the plague-seeker and elf both evaluated the damage, Simon spotted a desperate bit of movement on the ground.

  “It’s out!” he called out.

  Edward’s arm shot out to snatch the fairy up with practiced speed.

  He almost had her until his crushing muscle memory caused him to stumble and left the fairy slip between his fingers.

  “Oh no, you don't!" Simon hissed and threw himself into the bushes after the fairy.

  Surprisingly, the bush had more than enough structural strength to keep the alchemist tangled in its branches as the fairy disappeared into the underbrush.

  “So NOW you’re going to be quiet!?” Simon called out into the silent forest impotently.

  Chloe sighed and hurried to Edward’s side with a flask of disinfectant and a roll of gauze.