Gabrielle was running. The ground rushed beneath her feet as she forced herself to bolt faster and faster down the abandoned track. She could hear the dogs behind her, they were getting closer. Not good, girl, not good. This was ridiculous, if Michael simply shifted the rules:let her fight these creatures instead of playing this redundant evasion game! She wasn't a child anymore! This training exercise might have been useful for a six year old, but seven years later it was old. It didn't matter that she was faster, more able to hone her God-given power now than she had been when she had been little.
As if summoned by her thought, Michael materialised, hovering beside her as she ran.
"Faster, Gabrielle."
She knew better than to snap at him, so she gritted her teeth and pushed harder.
To anyone who might have seen her there would be perhaps a blur of movement as she streaked through the forest, leaping over or sliding under. The hounds were closing in, however, faint shadows of physical shapes themselves.
She was the last of the First Wiches, sure, it made sense to push her, to train her to whatever limits she had - limits they had not yet discovered - but Michael made a sorry surrogate parent, especially when her mother was out on a hunt.
Something up ahead caught her attention, a sign of some sort, with red letters. She did not bother to read it and leapt over it instead, clearing the several feet that it took to get that high. Landing in a roll she kept going, pushing, always pushing. Faster and faster. Her muscles began to scream their protests but she ignored them, knowing that whatever it was in her blood that made her so damn powerful would kick in and propel her past the pain.
"You can push harder, child," Michael's voice sounded in her ear and she spared him a half-glance. His strange almost violet black hair streaked against his face as he ran beside her, or perhaps flew, it was difficult to tell.
A cliff up ahead, she knew it was there from the way the land felt beneath her booted feet. A cliff and below it the beach.
"Jump," Michael instructed when she started to slow, trying to gain some space to think.
She could feel the heat of the hounds' breath on the back of her legs. The cliff materialised in front her, she took a breath, and jumped. The air rushed up around her, her tangled hair beating her face as the ground rushed up to meet her.
"And...land," Michael's voice breathed.
She curled, hit the ground with enough force that would have killed any normal human, and rolled out, back to running at full speed. Above, on the cliff, the dogs dissipated.
"Well done," Michael told her as she rounded the beach.
He was sitting by their campfire, her two swords crossed by his knee.
"You know you need to come up with a new training routines, Arc," she told him flatly as she came to stand before him.
"And you need to come up with new lines."
Obviously set in Fith Fathing, from a time before the actual story. A training session of Michael's devising to get Uriel's FirstWitch into shape.
