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taught her to run when confronted with a predator.
    “A bear is bad enough, Morigna,” he said one day, “but there are worse things in these hills. A grown wyvern can carry away a full-grown cow, and swamp drakes breathe fire. But they’re just animals. The dark elves’ monsters are worse. I saw an urdhracos once, flying overhead, and had to run from an urvaalg. If you see those things, you don’t fight them, you run. You run as fast as you can.” 
    So Morigna was prepared for the night her parents died. 

    ###

    The attack came with shocking speed.
    It was the middle of the night, and Morigna lay sleeping near the hearth, not far from her parents’ own bed. Morigna’s eyes popped open as she heard the noises outside. She saw the fading glow of the fire, the red-lit gloom throwing mad shadows over the cottage’s flagstone floor and rough stone walls.
    The door exploded, and figures of darkness stormed inside. 
    They stood about four and a half feet tall, broad in chest and shoulder, and wore armor fashioned from a peculiar black metal that seemed wet without reflecting any light. Their gray-skinned heads were hairless, and their eyes were black, utterly black, like pits into bottomless darkness. Shadows swirled around them, seeming to cling to their armored forms like cloaks. 
    They were dvargir from the Deeps, the vast maze of caverns beneath the skin of the world. Litavis had warned Morigna about the dvargir. Sometimes they came from the Deeps in search of human slaves. 
    “Though I doubt you will ever see one,” Litavis had said. “If they want slaves, they would go to Moraime. Hardly anyone lives in these hills.”
    Apparently he had been wrong.
    “Father!” screamed Morigna, but her mother and father were already moving.
    “Run!” shouted Litavis, seizing his axe. Morigna suddenly understood why he slept with it close at hand. “Go, both of you, run. Run!”
    He charged the dvargir, swinging the axe, while Morigna stood frozen with horror.  Litavis struck down one dvargir and then another, their crimson blood shocking against their gray skin.
    And then two black swords plunged into Litavis’s chest. Her father screamed as he fell to his knees, and Morigna heard herself screaming with him.
    “Go!” Maria’s hands closed around her shoulders, pushing her forward. An instant later a sword blade erupted from her chest, her nightshirt turning red with blood. “Go, go, run, run…”
    A dvargir loomed behind Maria as she fell, his grim face looking down at Morigna.
    She ran through the back door, ran as fast as her legs could carry her. Behind her orange-yellow light flared in the darkness as the dvargir set fire to the cottage. Morigna ran and ran, her lungs burning, her bare feet slipping and sliding over the ground. At last she could run no further, and she came to a stop, breathing hard. 
    Then she fell to her knees, sobbing as she watched the distant fire. For a long time she remained like that, weeping as she watched her home burn.
    A boot crunched against rock. 
    Four dvargir stepped out of the darkness.
    Morigna stared back at them, trembling, too exhausted to run any further. Yet through her sorrow a fierce rage burned inside her. They had killed her mother and father. They were going to kill her.
    How she hated them!
    The dvargir spoke to each other in low, grating voices. Morigna’s hands curled into fists. Some part of her mind insisted that she throw herself at them, that she hurt them for what they had done to Maria and Litavis. 
    “Come,” said one of the dvargir in accented Latin. “You will come with us.”
    “No,” spat Morigna. It felt as if molten fire rose from the earth, pouring through her legs and filling her with power and wrath. 
    “Come along,” said the dvargir, “or I will…”
    The fury within her overflowed, and purple fire crackled around her fingertips. It should have frightened her, but after everything she had seen, Morigna had no room left for fear.