#dw01

Dan Wilds’ Instagram

Behind him was a girl Neil recognized as the team’s current captain: Danielle ‘Dan’ Wilds. She had short hair and a posture that left no room for argument and Neil knew he would have no problem listening to her.

“You must be Neil,” Dan smiled and walked over to Neil to shake his hand. “I’m Dan, your new captain. It’s a pleasure to meet you, welcome to our little family,”

Cody came to in an unfamiliar bed.  He remembered getting into the cab to go to the hotel and playing with his phone... then nothing.  He slowly got up and made his way out of what appeared to be a bedroom.  “Hello?”  He didn’t realize that this was the apartment that he shared with his brother.  He didn’t realize that this wasn’t the world that he was expecting.  

The 2UUL DW01 Mobi Desoldering Wick comes in a practical pack of five rolls, each measuring 2.0mm in width and 1.5 meters in length. This size is ideal for maneuvering around tight spaces on PCBs (Printed Circuit Boards) without compromising efficiency. The wick’s width strikes a perfect balance between precision and broad coverage, allowing it to absorb molten solder effectively from various joint sizes.

Crafted from premium-quality fine copper strands, the braid offers superior heat conduction and thermal stability. The copper is specially treated to resist oxidation, which ensures consistent performance over time, even with prolonged storage or multiple uses.

     Her waking is not gentle. It is not the gradual rise through layers and layers of sleep that comes with every dawn. It is a battle between survival instincts and forced unconsciousness, waged from the moment she’d succumbed to the darkness of that living nightmare. Green eyes snap open, an addled mind urging an exhausted body to move. But she can’t quite do anything just yet. Her chest cavity is full to the brim with smoke and shadows, flashes of fire and steel and blood brokenly replaying themselves behind her eyelids.

The sky is alight above, peaceful and beautiful despite the wreckage beneath it. In her ears, all she can hear still is the loud crackling of the fire, echoes of screaming and shouting. Despite the taste of ashes filling up her throat, burning all the way down to her lungs, Alice suddenly finds herself on her feet, taking in the aftermath of the devastation.

She senses movement more than she does life, eyes following the unnatural motions of the people whose smiles she’d treasured so. They are all gone, now. Pulled along by an energy that does not belong to them. Her own magic has retreated deep within herself after the overexertion of keeping her alive, to the point where she feels numb. Unsure if she is another puppet doing someone else’s bidding, the words escape her lips without her meaning to.

The answer cuts through the fog of trauma and she turns her head to seek the voice. Golden lashes flutter a few times to know for sure if her tired eyes are actually seeing the strings between the only living man in that scorched ground to the corpses moving about. No, he says. And yet. The hiss of water meeting fire pulls her focus and she resumes watching the shells of the villagers doing his bidding to put out the fires and... burying themselves.

There is a marked disconnect inside her; body, mind, soul and heart suddenly separate entities, all independently vying for their own survival. She finds that she has no tears to shed even as the bodies disappear into the ground. No anger to direct at the bandits working side by side with the people she’d grown up with. They are dead, she tells herself again. Whoever they’d been in life, they are now unable to care. Does she care? Is she alive? 

Survivors. That word sparks something inside her. Something that disturbs the indifference that seems to coat her. She turns to face him fully, gaze still shifting between shades of charred wood and forest green. In the back of her mind, where whoever she used to be before all of this had retreated to, her curious nature asks a thousand questions for the stranger. Questions she has no voice to express just yet.

But he’s giving her an answer regardless. A direction to follow. There are survivors. And she can make herself useful by helping them. That’s enough to have her attempting to move forward. Her fingers twitch. She flexes them slowly, draws them closed to regain feeling in her hands. She has to keep going. 

The crow catches her attention. In that semblance of a safe haven within the recesses of her mind, she thinks it cute. Normally, the sight of one would make her smile, but neither the feeling nor the gesture breaks through this time. She acknowledges the kindness, knows she should follow the expecting bird. But she wants to say something, ask his name, ask his reasons, ask where he’s heading next. The questions form one after the other, louder and louder in her head, but the copper in her mouth seems to have wired her jaw shut.

She does not startle even as the bone-crunching noise of corpses meeting hard earth fills her ears. He reminds her of the reality she’s trapped in and casts her out. Her heart is already too fractured to be bothered by the harshness of his words, regardless of how truthful they are. But it will remember the kindness. Tightening her fist until her nails bite into her palm, she forces herself to take the first step. Then the next. And the next.

Walking past the Necromancer, she swallows the embers down just enough to let something else slide out. “Thank you. For burying them.” Her gratitude for him saving the survivors is expected. He didn’t have to bother with the bodies, but he did. And she’s doubly thankful. 

Once her body feels like her own again, Alice follows the crow into the forest she’d grown up in, the forest that had always felt like a second home. It’s just trees, now. It has to be. As she keeps walking, she cuts off her seared roots and sets herself free. 

Gathering a few horses that had escaped the battle and the fire on the way, she finds the survivors slumbering peacefully under the shade of an ancient tree. She doesn’t want to wake them, but she has to. Alice thanks the crow with a bow, throat still burning with swallowed screams and sobs, and sighs quietly as it flies back to its master.