Something in my shoulder had popped when I hit the tree. It occurred to me that I had almost always seen someone hit a tree directly aligned—their back straight, perfect posture, almost entirely upright. I had hit at more of a rakish angle, my shoulder taking the brunt of it and the upper parts of my spine taking the rest. It hurt.

The moment I hit, my vision blurred noticeably, much as it does when you rub your fingers in your eyes constantly for a few seconds so that all you see is black and white dots. What happened to me was like that, only it was instant and it was accompanied by what felt like a pair of jolts of lightning working their way into my mind, one from between my shoulders and one from the socket of my left arm. Once the initial sharp, throbbing pain had receded, it only got a bit worse. My head started pounding at a steady rhythm, my arm gathered a pronounced ache and twitched involuntarily at least three times, and I had trouble standing up straight.

I was moderately impressed that I had even been able to stay on my feet. Most of what I thought after that was limited to swear words and choice phrases to describe the relationship between Zorlo's mother and my father's long-dead plow animals, so I refrained from speaking. Not that I could have if I wanted to, since breathing out was almost as painful as breathing in, which was an excruciating pain roughly equivalent to shoving a rusty shard of iron into my lung.

Somehow I managed to straighten my back and twist a few times, and was rewarded by a series of very loud, angry-sounding pops from the bones all along my back. The throb in my shoulder became more pronounced, but it stopped hurting to breathe. I had traded one bad pain for a small increase in an already-bad pain. That was good enough.

"Test," I grimaced, realizing for the first time how much I took for granted the ability to formulate words, "failed. Try again."

He was close enough that I felt comfortable lunging forward, throwing my weight out of proportion to make up for the lapse of control I was having in the left side of my body. If I had tried to move normally, I would have ended up looking—and falling down—like a drunken sailor. As it was, I missed by just a hair's breadth, though more from my opponent deciding that he would move slowly than from my own amazing speed. He rapped me on the back of the hand with his sword, sending a pulse of irritated pain through my arm.

I retaliated by spitting in his eye.

Never let it be said that I will not take advantage of the element of surprise. He reeled back for a moment, one hand going instinctively to wipe the ‘disgusting' foreign substance from his vision, and I reacted by moving forward. The blade of my sword swept forward, just under the field of his vision, and lashed towards his kneecap.

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[Graphics by Me.]

"Get your facts first, and then you can
distort 'em as much as you please." ~ Mark Twain