Chapter 1:
The survivor

Kisera went to a clearing and found what she was looking for. At last she saw the herb that she was supposed to get on behalf of the healer in her village.
It was an herb that was particularly effective in treating cuts and burns. It had purple-blue leaves, a purple stem, and a flower the same shade of light blue as her hair.
It had taken her several days to find everything she should get.
The roots for the production of antidotes, the leaves of a tree for a remedy for faster healing of broken bones, the purple-blue herb, huge leaves of a tree from which the healer made bandages and a special moss, which is best used to stop bleeding, if she should Bring healer.
She went to the place where the herb grew in abundance and bent down to carefully pull it and its roots out of the soft forest floor.
The girl picked it up and took off her rucksack, where the other herbs were already lying, and put them next to it.She saw that animals had tampered with their provisions. While Kisera cursed the little rodents, she perceived the smell of smoke. She was astonished because it was afternoon and not usual for this time, as in her village a fire was only made in the evening to prepare the food.
'What's going on?' she wondered.
She felt queasy in the stomach, she packed the herbs and ran as fast as she could, regardless of her exhaustion ...

The girl arrived in the early evening with a sharp stitch in the chest.
Kisera had already seen from a distance that something very bad had happened to her village, but from a distance she could not see anything more precise. But what she saw gave her such a violent shock that she did not notice how she ran into a huge thorn bush. She only noticed it when the thorns cut her skin and tore her clothes. But turning around at this point would probably have cost her life because the thorns she had just run through had grown back together behind her.Now she saw the full extent of the destruction. The tents had burned down and the animals had fled. But the worst was that the entire floor was soaked with blood and the motionless bodies of the villagers were lying around everywhere.
Full of horror, she carelessly dropped the herbs that she had so laboriously searched for together and drew her dagger, which looked completely ridiculous in the face of this destruction, and ran.
She ran through the sea of ​​corpses and pools of blood with tears in her eyes, looking for any sign of life, but was still cautious as those who raided her village could still be nearby. So she ran through the village. She searched and searched until only the area around her tent remained.
In contrast to the other tents that had burned down, the tents here were only overturned.
There were several corpses here, too, but not quite as many as in other places in the village.
Something rustled to the right in front of her.She turned around in a flash and just saw a tent that had been very wobbly fall over.
She breathed a sigh of relief. She had feared that a beast would suddenly jump at her.
Something stabbed the ground next to her. She was startled, but calmed down immediately when she saw that it was just the dagger that she had been holding in her hand. It must have fallen out of her hand from sheer powerlessness.
She bent down to pull him out of the ground and saw someone moving in the distance. It was only a short breath from the human being and yet a sign of life. She spun around so fast it hurt and ran, jumping over the still bodies.
She bent down and turned the villager so she could look in the face.
It was Sakuro. Like her, he was an orphan and 15 years old.
His raven-black hair had become very hard from crusted blood, his clothes were torn and his body was covered with cuts.She was overjoyed to have found someone alive, but she was surprised that he was still alive despite such severe wounds.
There was another rustling behind her, but she couldn't hear it.
The beast that stepped out silently was moderately wounded, but very exhausted. She only had a few, deep, wounds. She looked like a cross between a human and a bear. The arms, legs, and hips were those of a bear. The rest, however, is that of a person.
Sakuro opened his green-gray eyes slowly and saw the beast behind Kisera's back strike. He pushed her away so that the razor-sharp claws wouldn't hit her.
She landed on her back completely confused and just saw how he was wounded by the creature, but immediately jumped to his feet, grabbed a spear and rammed it into the neck of the animal. The beast fell to one side, dead.
He let go of the spear and fell, now more severely wounded.
Kisera jumped up, ran to Sakuro and just caught him.The tears ran down her cheeks, but she knew what to do.
She put his head on the floor and ran. First to a tent, put it up, put the fabric of a second tent in the first and pulled Sakuro onto it.
She got up and ran back to where she had dropped the remedies, took them and ran back to him. She sat down and began to stop the bleeding with the moss.
After she had done that, she ran to the healer's tent, which luckily hadn't burned down either. The girl put it back up, more badly than right, and went inside.
In the tent, most of the items fell from the tent and some bowls were broken. She gathered all the remedies she needed and put them in an intact bowl.
Now all she needed was water to be treated. That took them from the well in the center of the village, ran back to him and started to treat them.After taking a long time tending to Sakuro's wounds, she was so exhausted from her own injuries that she fell asleep right next to him.

A day and a half later, she woke up to the growling of her stomach. She sat up. Sakuro was still lying next to her unchanged, only that she saw that his breathing was regular. That calmed her down.
She got up, let out a choked cry of pain as the scab was torn open again and fell over again. She tried again and managed, more badly than right, to stop.
Kisera stepped out of the tent and was blinded by the glaring sunlight.
After a while her eyes got used to the brightness and she looked around.
Meanwhile the memories came up in her and she felt tears in her eyes again.
She stood in the fresh morning air and cried silently while the thought kept spitting in her head: 'Will I ever get over it?'
There was such a strong stench of putrefaction in the air that she felt sick.But since she had nothing in her stomach, she didn't care.
With one sleeve over her mouth and nose, she ran through the village in the direction of the storage tent.
Fortunately, the tent was only a bit charred at the edges and otherwise, apart from the fact that it had overturned, undamaged.
She walked around the charred tent and looked for a place where she could easily get into the tent, as she might need her last reserves of strength.
She found a suitable spot, cut a large piece of cloth out of the tent, and crawled inside.
Inside it smelled stuffy and stale, like a mixture of dead animal, burnt meat, and rotten fruit.
She crawled around in the tent and looked for enough food for 2 people, which should be enough for a while, and packed everything up.
Kisera crawled out from under the tent again and carried the food to the tent where Sakuro was lying.
She walked quickly and saw him from a distance, which was no great art in view of the fallen and burned tents and the body lying on the ground.He stood there, completely motionless. Mute tears ran down his cheeks. The boy was leaning on a spear. His gaze wandered over the burned, trampled and overturned tents and the filthy bodies of the former villagers. There was endless pain in his eyes and deep despair was written on his face.
The girl ran up to him, put the groceries aside, and stepped beside him.
"Sakuro?" She asked in a cautious voice.
He turned his face to her and said in a low, barely audible voice: "Please tell me that it only looks like this here ..."
She didn't answer and turned her face away. That gesture said more than a thousand words. She stood in front of Sakuro and hugged him. She wanted to give him support, tell him that everyone will be fine, comfort him, erase the pain and despair ..... but she couldn't find any words to say this.
They stood there for a long time until Kisera broke away from him and indicated that he should follow her into the tent.The girl pressed him gently on the makeshift bed and sat next to him.
"Here." She handed him a dry piece of meat from the rag filled with food. They ate in silence while everyone pondered their own thoughts.
"How should it go on now? How? How ...", both of them wondered the whole time until they both said it.
"We ..... we have to bury her.", He said after he had found his voice again.
She agreed with him. "But what then?"
"How then?"
"What should we do after that?"
"I'm sure a rearguard will arrive soon from the Slugos ....."
"We fled for so long and they caught up with us anyway ..." she said desperately.
"Why do they do that? Have you nothing to lose yourself? Do you just do something horrible out of lust for power or do you have other plans? I don't know. I just can't understand it.", Said the girl and again despair swung in her voice with."We have to go."
"FORT? But where should we go in your opinion? To the west, east or where?", She snapped at him.
"I don't know! Okay? I don't know any more than you what to do now, but I'm at least trying to find a solution!" Sakuro thundered back.
"I'm sorry ..... I just don't know what to do next."
"It's okay. Are we going?"
"Yes. But first we'll bury them all and .....", she broke off.
"..... and burn the rest so they don't find the graves."
"Exactly. But now we need a little sleep. It doesn't help if we worry our heads right now."
"You are right. Sleep well."
"You also."
But they didn't sleep well. Images of the dead and