Awesome / Hope for the Heartless

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• When one of The Prankster duo of the Invisibles finds Avalina barely alive after she's been in the dungeon about a fortnight, it immediately rushes to scream at the Horned King's face for not taking up his only chance to free himself from the Black Cauldron. It outright orders him to go and see Avalina. The lich does that (though he claims that it's not because of the Invisible) and lets the Invisibles nurture the girl back to health.
• While the Invisibles' various antics on the Horned King count mostly as funny, they're often ludicrously awesome as well. Despite the fact that the lich can't physically hurt them, they are still pretty brave to irritate him continuously. One of those instances has them throwing a cream pie in his face!
• The Horned King killing the wolves of the Mad Pack. He proves himself to be quite a Lightning Bruiser. He's strong enough to swing a massive log over his head like a club and throw the mass of wolves off of him. He hits the wolves with the speed of a snake, wasting not a single move anyhow. He looses much of his black substitute for blood, but he keeps fighting and passes out only after all the wolves are dead.
  • It should be also noted that he wasn't exactly at his peak condition at the time. He received water on his face earlier and had to use his draining teleportation spell twice to get there in time.
  • Before that, Avalina and Mitternacht manage to outrun the wolves for a while, using the environment to kill several of them. Two wolves fall over a cliff and one is crushed between the horse and a tree. At one point, Mitternacht jumps over a fallen tree that's five feet high and has spear-like branches that make it seven feet total. Two wolves are impaled by those branches.
  • While most of the wolves turn their attention toward the Horned King, several attack a trapped Mitternacht. He and Avalina manage to hold them off and kill one of them.
  • After the battle, Avalina manages to get the unwilling Mitternacht to carry the unconscious Horned King back to the castle.
• Mitternacht is the first known horse to have managed to remain sane after being near the Horned King for so long. After Avalina makes him come in front of the lich, the Horned King feels something similar to submission.
  • It's unfortunately an Offscreen Moment of Awesome and told by the Invisibles to the Horned King, but when Avalina falls asleep while she's tending her garden, Arawn attempts to mess with her dreams again. Before he can do anything, Mitternacht's presence sends the dead warlord running away scared! That horse must have quite a hardcore soul for someone like the Death Lord of Annuvin to flee from him.
• Avalina riding Addie for the first time.
• When the Horned King's No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on Taran is interrupted by a sudden earthquake, Avalina nearly falls into a chasm. The badly injured (a dislocated left shoulder, broken ribs and everything) Taran wakes from his unconsciousness and saves her.
  • When the Horned King intends to finish what he started, Avalina comes between him and Taran, begging him to stop. Eventually her pleading works and the Horned King leaves with her.
• The Horned King dives into freezing water — fully aware of the dangers to himself — to save Avalina from drowning.
  • As the lich has to break ice in order to get the girl and himself to the shore and he's close to giving up, Creeper yells him to continue. When the lich gets to the shore and is about to fall back into the water, the goblin grabs his robe and pulls him back.
  • After her near-drowning experience (coupled with her weakened stamina due to her weeks-lasting Heroic BSoD), Avalina nearly immediately refuses to remain in bed and goes to the library to fetch the pain transference prayer and goes to cast it in order to take the Horned King's internal pain for herself. While foolish, it was daring.
• Avalina tends a garden in the Horned King's lands despite being told the effort is wasted. She gets some green to grow during the fall. By the spring, the green spreads, some worms appear in the soil, some birds arrive to eat them and the sun shines a bit through the permanently cloudy sky. These efforts are remarkable already, but then a full healthy forest grows there in one night. It was because Avalina wanted the trees to grow. While the Invisibles made Creeper to pour magical treedust from Addie's back on the ground and speed up the growth, the forest started growing in the first place because Avalina wanted that.
  • Eventually her efforts cause the Horned King to apparently lose the deadliness of his aura and his inability to sleep.

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