your friend is in rough shape

He knows this is beyond him when he runs her through the stomach. His is a blade of bright, white light - and he knows it to have hit its mark in the way it casts gory shadows on the wall behind them. The end of his rapier catches on false flesh as it exits her body and, rather than tearing, the skin stretches like puddy with the point. When he pulls it free, strings of viscera ( macabre silk, red strings - like fate ) connect dhampir and hag. The witch rounds on him, and it’s the first time he’s been afraid in a long while. He cannot tell if it is bile or terror that he chokes on, but it is a name that spills from him when he opens his mouth to release it.

“Medallion!”

Near the end, he’s in denial. He thinks Luka’s hand will clamp around his shirt and pull him through the doorway, to safety. He thinks Solomon will keep him from harm, deflect as he has always done. He thinks Medallion will power through, all gnashing teeth and feral eyes.

He thinks his willpower, his refusal, will be enough.

And in the end ( and truly in it, the lightning bolt searing a hole through his middle and arcing up his ribcage ), he still refuses his reality. His mind puts him elsewhere for his last moments. It puts him in a cart, riding through thick fog. It sits him across a filthy paladin, and beside the closest thing to a friend he has. Instead of the sound of bone splintering, it plays back a dead man’s voice.

“Nice weather.”

Caius looks up, into a dim lit sky. A spiderweb of faint lightning stretches across the sky, but it is outshined by the nine stars that burn bright across a backdrop of inky black. They burn so brilliantly, in fact, that Caius smells scorched flesh. Shock allows him to ignore it.

He smiles.

"It is, isn't it?"