The butcher of Iahn gate scanned the field and saw only death. Two score and eight. The creatures had fallen upon them in a mad fury only to soon be outmatched and outclassed. Now all that remained of their vaguely humanoid bodies was chopped and charred and torn remains.
'Curious creatures though.' he thought, poking his knife at one pretending to be dead. It sprang up and made for his throat. He leaned back, dodging its clawed hands, before decapitating it in one swift swing of his gleaming alchemical steel knife.
He kicked it's torso off and picked up its head. It was almost artful how ugly it was. A dagger nose upon a face even a mother wouldn't love, not that he should be one to talk himself. Its sickly green skin and bulging muddled red eyes and pitch black sclera, reflecting his own starkingly brown ones, painted a surprisingly haunting image.
He threw it aside and stood up, looking around to see if any others had survived.
'Nope. All dead. Good.' he thought.
He walked around the corpses, pouring incendiaries, piling them in one corner of the field, away from the trees.
As he placed the last of the foul creatures, or its thrice parted corpse onto the pile, he brought out the accompanying salts. Mixing the relevant two, Girin and Vesa to be exact, flung the mixture onto the pile. Within two breaths, the blood soaked mound was engulfed in an eerie silver, characteristic of alchemical fire.
He walked to the other edge of the clearing, towards where his friend lay. He picked up Rima's head and gave it a good shake.
"Wake up. And pull yourself together." He ordered.
" .. ummmu..Two more keals Ja." He mumbled.
"If you don't wake up and get to it right now, I am going to kiss you...." He said, bringing his mouth by Rima's ear before continuing in the deepest voice he could, "..on the lips!"
Rima's eyes shot open as in panic, as his severed head started to struggle, as much as it could with what little was left of his neck.
He chuckled in delight and placed it on what was left of his half eaten body and took seat beside him on the forest floor. The bloody savages had torn him to pieces like a fresh basted turkey in a feast.
Rima's eyes shone an unearthly shade of blue and grey as the rest of his body started to pull itself together. His intestines wriggled back in followed by his liver and the good half of his stomach. At last his blood flew off the ground in a hundred hundred arcs of crimson, as flesh reknit and, skin and bone reformed into the rough visage of a human body. It was almost as if time had turned its flow right on. For all he knew, it very well could have. It had to be known that few even knew what The Severing was, much less what it entailed. For most, it was profane witchcraft. An utter heresy to the doctrine of life espoused by the Abode of the Sun. And most would be forgiven for thinking so. NanRima Shinal was, after all, a heathen Northman. Who knew what foul magicks they practiced up in that there horrid peninsula?
But for Farian of Pinti, it was a phenomenon that would haunt his dreams till his dying day. He still remembered it, as vividly as if it had happened just yesterday: the man manifest in flames, the smell of burnt flesh, and Rima laying on the floor of the academy courtyard,  with the rest of the academy students looking on, more in disdain than concern, his own pleading , the fear in their eyes as Rima awakened to the Severing.  It was his fault after all, his burden to bear. He had made Rima such. A creature beyond words and meaning itself.
One permanently stuck in the present that was the past.
As Rima recovered in full, he lay his head on Farian's lap.
"I am so tired, Farian." He said, his voice laced with a sadness that seemed more like a companion than a momentary indulgence.
Farian channeled his force into him, soothing the poor man.
"It's going to be ok. Soon. Very soon." He replied, caressing his friend's head as the two of them drifted into peaceful slumber, exhausted beyond belief and unwilling to try their luck with the forest at twilight.