Dread Mage

Other bandits wanted to jump in and help the orc, but she yelled at them to stand back.

"This is my fight, not yours."

"I ask all of thee. Does a child murderer not deserve to die?" Vell asked everyone around him, and he looked to Sonder, "What do you think? You are, after all, the victim of the crime."

She looked around her and saw the faces of the bandits—the faces of the companions of her killer.

Many of them were either very young or very old. They weren't the ones who did the raiding, but they depended on those who did.

They were sad faces, faces of the poor and starving, faces of despair, and those who just wanted to survive another day, even if they hated how it was achieved.

Even though she was the victim, the one who died, and stood here now to see the ones who were guilty, she didn't want revenge or vengeance.

Those ideas were far from what she was thinking about. She wanted to see her parents and her brother. She wanted peace and closure.

She did understand what the she-elf did was wrong, but in a distorted matter, it was understandable.

The Garrions just wanted to survive, and their survival was traded for the survival of Sonder's village. Was it right? Was it fair? No, of course not. But in life, nothing was.

She rested in death, all the troubles of mortal life were washed away, but now she was raised again.

"I don't think it was right to kill her," Sonder blurted out.

And in the moment after, Vell relented against the orc and took a step back from their fight.

The orc picked herself up but was still in a fighting stance.

"Do you truly think so?" Vell asked her.

"I don't know. I think so." She answered.

Vell turned to the orc and asked, "Do you think she would have ever done anything so gruesome again?"

The orc looked at him with honest eyes and said, "No. She would never, I would have made sure of that."

"But now that you know, what would you do if she were still alive?"

"We would have judged her sentence and then kept a much closer eye on her," the orc said.

"The promises of a bandit..." Vell said. "Unprecedented." He looked around and yelled. "Do you all think she deserves to live?"

And there was a roar of agreement. The consensus was clear.

He thought it all very strange, but if he made a mistake, in their eyes, he should fix it.

"I will give her back to you, for a small fee." He said, or rather, offered. "She shouldn't get away with something like this completely unharmed."