Soul Protector

Gallina Region '“ 1299 A.D.
Within the eerie dance between dusk and dark they came, swarming over the Earth like giant ants. Terror filled screams reached crevices and open sky. Body parts littered catacombed cliff homes and dotted the parched, sun-ravaged ground below. The '˜demon men' scaled vertical escarpments to the hollowed out abodes, some sauntering up the sheer vertical incline as if out for a moonlit stroll. The cliffs held no refuge now except to house the spirit of the Anasazi for all time.
Slowly Sarkinda crept, working her way further into the blue Halgaito shale chasms, hoping against hope to escape the carnage that foretold the end of an entire people. Tears burned her eyes which she frantically blinked away. Her sight must be clear or the demons would not claim her life but the cliffs, themselves. Stealthily, skillfully, methodically, she descended, the still-baking-hot rock, scraping and scorching her fingers and any place her bare skin touched for more than a few seconds.
Sarkinda, small and lithe, had covered her sunlit hair and donned a dark shift in an effort to blend seamlessly into the mountains. The giant beasts, however, must have caught her movements for like jackals sniffing out a further treat, they swerved in her direction. Their glowing orbs tracked her progress as they loped toward her, confidently. She leapt the remaining distance to the ground and ran, knowing her time drew to an end. She clearly posed no match in speed and preternatural powers compared to the abominations pursuing her. She glanced back, gauging how many seconds she had before they reached her, when she collided with warm molten rock that banded around her, shifting to align itself to her body even as a cylinder of light drizzle encased her. Since no rain had fallen on the pueblo in three seasons, she knew the mist to be a dying vision. Darkness took her.
Elicean cradled the small body tightly, materializing in his chambers deep beneath the earth. Her hair had lost its covering and he buried his face in the unbound mass breathing deeply, drowning himself in her scent, the scent he had only caught whiffs of from sibilant winds, until this moment. She had come so close to perishing in the massacre that his entire being shook. They would have torn her to shreds, draining her bodily fluids until nothing remained of her delicate frame and pure heart but dust.
Two seasons before, he had traveled to the surface and chanced to observe her tending a young cougar. Her gentleness in the face of a creature that could probably kill her with one careless swipe of its paw terrified him to a degree nothing had before. Since that day, he'd returned to the surface regularly to observe her playfulness when far enough from her tribe to safely run and tumble with her giant pet.