Gren post 3

Gren awoke to the dry bitter taste of blue astrid. It was quite dark, but she heard nothing. No, not nothing. Silence. Creaking branches, high overhead. Leaves settling.
Had she stopped some of the bleeding before she passed out? The flesh of her thigh had been very pale. She had been sure she must be bleeding inside. She risked a small movement and regretted it, as massive grating pain wracked her body.
She looked down to the hole punched in her armour by one of the great thorny black spikes of the creature's shoulder. There was blood caked all round and below it, some of it still wet. The wound had been fairly deep, a puncture in the abdomen. Someone could survive a wound like that for a long time before they died, but then it had put that gigantic hoof into her. She pulled off her gauntlet and put a finger into the hole gingerly, but only felt clotted blood and solid flesh. Of course, the puncture might be off to the side of the armour breach now.
She began the process of removing her upper armour, made difficult by the seven or eight broken ribs she could feel. The padding inside her back plate was sodden with blood, but for now she would have to continue to lay in it. Letting the heavy pieces rustle down into a cushion of leaves, she conjured up a spark of blue-white light to work by.
After splitting open her heavy tunic, already badly slashed, she could see she had indeed closed the puncture before she lost consciousness. Her colour was much improved, so she must have sealed up the internal bleeding as well, though she had no memory of working either of these magics.
Her first task was to sink her awareness down into her own body, so she might see her wounds as they were from within. The pain in moving was coming not only from her broken ribs. The last blow from the thing's sword had broken her pelvis and her right shoulder blade. Not to wonder her legs hadn't responded well. Still concentrating within herself, she wove her left hand in and out of the air and upon her shoulder in an all-too-familiar pattern, carefully incanting the words. The flesh of her shoulder glowed from within for a moment, like a bright light seen through one's hand.
The rest became easier. After her pelvis was rejoined, she could finally move her legs properly. The ribs eased away the last of the grating pain, and within half an hour the last of the cuts and slashes were closed, though still tender.
She rose up and began to stride out through the leaves, beckoning the light spark to follow beside her. It cast its dim, blue-white light all about upon the leaves below and gnarling limbs above, the shadows shifting eeriely as she walked to the site of the last blows she traded with the thing.
Bringing the spark down with her, she kneeled and studied the prints and leavings. After several moments of searching, she lifted up a brown-red mass smaller than her hand, a few glints of viscous damp reflecting in the light. Two vertebrae. Neck bones from the creature's latest trophy, and the goal of her next-to-last attack.
She stood, hoping the two vertebrae and the connective tissue in her hand belonged to a filing clerk named Finghus Bent. Gren had been tracking this thin man with short grey hair for eight days. His cleaning lady had said Finghus Bent was lean not only of form, but of face as well. Large green-grey eyes. Thin nose. The freshest looking severed head on the creature's belt had shared these features, though its large eyes had been closed and sunken.
Her first desire had been to dispel the dried blood, dirt, and sweat, and then to repair the rents in her armour, but divining the path to the rest of Finghus's body would have to take precedence. She sat down amidst the leaves, her boots meeting sole to sole in front of her, and quickly made a small bed of leaves in the cradle of her arches. She laid the bones upon it and raised her hands palm upward to the gnarling branches overhead which had cradled her earlier. Soft and quiet, almost seeming to come to her ears from within the dark narrow chasms in the thicket-columns, behind the sound of settling leaves, she began intoning the words.
After several minutes of the tiny spark slowly orbiting her, it began to fade. The bones at her feet began to glow faintly from within, a golden-red luminance which slowly gained intensity. Very gradually rising from the bed of brown leaves, the vertebrae rotated slightly. Suddenly, the intensity of the glow flashed, a bright blue-white light igniting from one end of the bones, as though the remaining section of spinal cord had burst into light. After a moment, as the chanting stopped, the light gradually faded to a manageable brilliance. A barely perceptible spider-thread of light continued from it, off into the dark labyrinth of thickets.
Gren rose again and gazed off in the direction of the light thread for a moment. Plucking the bones from the air at her waist, she put them in a pocket of her torn tunic. It was utter blackness around her.
She let the darkness sink into her, relaxing, stretching outward, extending herself into the wood. No branches creaking overhead. Eventually there was dim pale light far above, beyond the tangle of branch and twig, in tiny spaces. The moon, not quite at half yet, was free of clouds away up there.
To find her way back to the little rift of leaves, where she had lain in the thicket, would be perhaps the wisest course of action. She was tired, and though her wounds were sealed and her bones knitted together, they ached terribly and the fatigue from them, the drain on her system, was still there. She needed sleep. Food. Water. It was certainly the course of action she would prefer.
How far was the body though? The longer it proceeded on its path of decay, the more difficult it would be to garner any information from it. There was also the matter of the other one who had been following the lean clerk. There had been two, she was almost certain, though they had been quite skilled at concealing themselves. The one who had just defeated her was one of them. Defeated.
She quickly conjured up another spark of light by which to work, and then dispelled the blood from the sodden lining of her backplate. That was all the strength she dared to spare for comfort, but when she had her armour back on it gave her a familiar comfort of its own. Having transferred the vertebrae to a pouch on her armour, she removed it now and hung it in the air. It spun slightly and burst forth into light, then calmed to a faint blue-white thread. She plucked it from the air, and Gren and her spark trailed off through the thigh deep leaves.