Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It had not been so long since the fight ended that the cart rolling its way back to Shadycreek Run could not still be heard in the distance. They were in that crucial, breathless few seconds in the aftermath of a horrific event where the mourning hadn’t come and the shock was still fresh. It was in this moment that a dark shape slipped in, unregarded, and knelt down next to the lifeless body on the road, murmuring spare the dying over it before digging into her component pouch for a diamond.

She tried not to stare at the lifeless red eyes, tried not to remember the last time she’d seen his corpse go cold. There had been no blood. He had almost looked peaceful. This time, he was just staring straight ahead with a gaping wound in his chest, leaving no doubt that he was gone, but, once more, she hadn't heard the dirge that was his blood crying out before being silenced. If she had just been a bit quicker...

She laid a furry hand on his chest and felt the tackiness of the blood pooling there stick to the pads of her paw-like fingers. She choked back a tiny sob. How dare fate decide that I get you back, only to lose you so quickly all over again, she hissed, mentally.

No matter. He had clearly found subpar traveling companions. She would take him away from it as soon as he was up again.

“Shit! Hey, hey!” A woman’s voice, rough and unfamiliar, shouted, making her flick her ears, but she stuck to her task without looking up. “Get the fuck away from him! Shoo! Scat!”

She hissed audibly. The dwarf woman making all the fuss recoiled a bit and then hissed back with less effect.

The man she knew to be the wizard of the party Lucien had been with turned to see what the dwarf was making such a fuss about and she felt his eyes light on her. She met his, her golden eyes leveled against his blue. “....It was Cree, was it not?” He asked. His voice had a waver to it.

“Indeed.” Cree Deeproots, formerly of the Gentleman’s troupe, now a rogue agent in pursuit of her friend and the destiny he had started for them so long ago, turned away and produced a diamond from her bag. “You are a careless lot. To think an unlucky encounter on the road would be what takes his life.”

The dwarf began to fumble to light a cigarette in an act triggered by sudden on-set anxiety, while the monk began a rapid-pace approach. Instinctively, her hand went to her war pick with her free hand with the intent to threaten with it, but she stopped five feet from where Cree knelt, breathing heavily in and out through her nose in some attempt at cooling her clear temper. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Fixing your mistake,” Cree snapped, laying the diamond flat on Lucien’s still, mangled chest.

The monk’s hands balled into fists and she looked like she was on the verge of saying something, but the wizard gripped her arm.

“Beauregard… Bitte. Do not-”

“If she brings him back and he’s not-” She lowered her voice, thinking Cree couldn’t hear, but she could. People always underestimated the perceptiveness of a cat.

“Is it any worse than leaving him dead on the road?”

“I dunno, Caleb. It might be for him.”

Her fur bristled. “What the fuck are you two talking about?”

Neither offered an explanation and she was running out of time. As if sensing the rapidly dwindling window, herself, the dwarf woman tossed down and then stomped out her cigarette as if she had taken no comfort for it and was punishing it for that fact. “Hey! Princess Fuzzytits. Can you get him up or not?”

No one tried to stop her and before they could distract her further, she began to plead with the Somnovem to return her Lucien to her, to make right what was wrong and let him dream for them once more. It had been so long since she prayed to them and her magic had waned significantly in the years distanced from the Nonagon, but surely this much they could do for her. Surely, they wanted him back as much as she did.

The diamond shattered. A tense moment passed. And then Lucien sucked in a panicked, desperate breath and began coughing as he sat bolt upright, the savage gash on his chest healing slowly and promising an ugly scar. “Fuck!” He snapped, whipping his head around and flailing his hands out to his sides to snatch up those stupid, impractical blades he'd taken up. “Where are they?”

She opened her mouth to speak, thinking he meant the other Tombtakers, but the monk woman beat her to the punch. “…Molly?”

Molly?

Lucien’s eyes snapped to the monk. “Yeah? As opposed to…” and then they skated back to her and she saw a new panic in his eyes, one that brought her hackles up in light of the new information she’d been receiving inadvertently through this dance with these strangers.

“…..Cree. Fancy seeing you here.”

Molly’s lungs were on fire. Every breath felt like the air was made of needles, and yet he obviously couldn’t stop breathing. That would be bad. His only concession was that he wasn’t going to hyperventilate, and gods how he wanted to. Everything was even worse than it had started out being and curling up into a panicked ball seemed preferable to the alternative.

And Cree wouldn’t stop staring at him, expectantly, waiting for an explanation, and the worst part was he knew he owed her one. She had saved his life- sure, she hadn’t meant to get him when she did it, but she was still the one who’d brought him back when he could have just been left on the side of the road, another tragedy in this endless cycle of them. He would have failed Jester, Fjord, and Yasha. The world would have course-corrected around him because he wasn't supposed to be in it anyway, and he did nothing to make it better, because the people who mattered didn't make it out. (But Beau did- that would have been worth it, right? Yeah. That would have been worth it.)

But he was grateful- gods, he was ever so grateful- that it hadn't come to that brutal, tragic finality. Accepting that his life was never guaranteed to remain was not the same as inviting death with open arms- no matter how deep he cut and how badly that plan went, given a choice he would very much like the opportunity to not die stupid.

He couldn't look at her and that was finally what broke her and made her try to reach out to him again when there had been nothing but silence between them for far too long. “Lucien.” She wasn’t angry- gods, he wished she could just be angry at him. It would make this so much easier on him. He could understand anger, but this desperate hope, the utter devotion in her golden eyes… That was wrong and awful and he wanted it to stop, like he wanted everything to stop. “I need you to explain this to me. Please.”

Molly dug the heels of his hands into his eyes and hissed. “Gods, where to begin. It’s so complicated.”

“You keep saying that.” She reached over and laid a hand on his knee. “I promise I will understand.”

He laughed, uncomfortably. “You can’t promise that.”

“Tell me.” If he put this off any longer, he was in danger of her losing her patience with him, which might be pushing it- she didn’t seem like someone who would lose her patience with someone she revered so much, but he didn’t want her to bring down her frustration on everyone else should it come to that. She seemed the type to start swinging at everyone for brainwashing him, rather than assume that he just wasn't who she wanted him to be.

He hated telling the truth, though. It only cut people. She was better off with a lie, but he was better off living, rather then dying in a pauper’s grave on the side of the road. He owed her this. “I’m not Lucien.”

She blinked at him, and then scoffed. “That is impossible.”

“Not that impossible,” Caleb interjected, and Molly felt his heart do a somersault. Cree shot him a look, and her hand went immediately to the amulet around her neck- a red stone full of a liquid that shifted, but didn’t quite slosh around, every time she moved, implying that it was something thick and viscous.

Molly swallowed and averted his gaze from it. He couldn't help but notice that she hadn't been wearing that when he met her in the pub. “It’s the truth.”

“No. Spellspitter illusions can lie. Blood does not lie, and this right here is the same blood as the blood you gave me in the Evening Nip. It sings the exact same song as it always has. I- I should never have laid it aside. Had I not, I would have known you have been alive this entire time. I would have come to find you. We could have been spared this nonsense." She bowed her head, simultaneously reverent and guilty. "And even if the blood could somehow lie to me, there is no denying the other irrefutable truths here. You are the Nonagon. You bear the fucking marks, no matter what those silly tattoos try to hide. You could not be anyone else.”

His hand went immediately to his neck, hissing at the reminder of those horrible raised eyes, like permanent welts, that would never take ink. He didn’t want to think about those. He didn’t want to think about anything regarding Lucien.

“What marks?” Beau squinted over at her, ignoring his discomfort.

“Don’t encourage this,” Molly hissed under his breath, and Beau relented. Cree didn’t seem all that interested in explaining herself anyway. She was nodding along to some mental theorizing she'd come up with on her own without anyone's input.

“So it is amnesia, then? That is fine. That is curable." She threw her hands up, relieved. "Oh, Lucien, you should have just said as much. You need not have...” She seemed to be struggling with that theory now, but once committed, she could do nothing but double down. “...spared my feelings.”

Why wasn’t she hurt? She was out here rationalizing his decision to lie to her, as if she had rationalized a dozen decisions that should have hurt her that came before this, even when she clearly knew in her heart that it made no sense. Not for the first time, he wished he could punch Lucien in his godsdamned face, but that would require the bastard to be physically present and he wanted that even less than he wanted satisfaction.

“It was a con. I was trying to save my arse. I didn’t want to hurt you, but you were so happy, and I was worried about what you might do if you thought I wasn’t him. We were in a bit of a tight spot just waltzin’ into the Gentleman’s, you know?”

Cree’s expression didn’t waver. “It is all right. You do not have to explain anything." She heaved a sigh through her nose and nodded firmly, a decision made and fuck anyone who might want to offer input on it. We will just go to Tyffial in Nogvurot right now. She can help.”

There were a dozen reasons why they couldn’t do that, starting with the obvious ones. “We can’t. In case you haven't noticed- which I doubt given everything- I just got killed. I was trying to get the rest of my friends back.” He gestured to the still-shocked faces of his remaining friends- and Keg, who was just smoking her confusion away with what must have been her third cigarette. Molly very much wanted to borrow another one from her, himself, but he’d save it for later when he could actually enjoy it.

She screwed her face up in confusion, struggling with his protests. “Lucien, this is pointless. Come home. Surely, none of this will matter when you are yourself again. Why waste time on it?”

Molly wanted to scream, but Beau did it for him. Bless her. “Hey! Leave him alone. He just fucking died for those people, all right? Who cares who he is- Molly or Lucien. We’re not letting you just cart him off to Nogvurot to try and-and trigger memories he doesn’t even want when we've got people to get back.”

Cree’s golden eyes shifted to Beau. Flashing her long panther-like teeth, she scowled as she began to finally stand after so long kneeling beside where Molly fell. At her full height, her shadow alone swallowed Beau whole. “You have no idea what you are talking about. I buried Lucien. I brought back a stranger, but as I have already said- blood doesn’t lie. He is Lucien, and I can get him back. It is what he would want.”

“And what about what Mollymauk wants?” Nott finally piped up, having been silent throughout this entire conversation, drinking away the tension without even stopping for breath.

“Mollymauk does not exist,” Cree shot back.

“I’m literally right here.” Molly was indignant and also being ignored, judging by how no one was looking at him anymore. Beau had her hands clenched and Caleb reached down to keep her from hauling off and punching Cree in the face. Seeing the situation was exploding, he took a deep breath, scrambled onto his feet with a pained wince, and tried again to shift eyes to him and appeal to some sense of reason that Cree must have possessed. “Look… I understand you’re hurting… and this is a terrible situation. But I’m Mollymauk Tealeaf and I like who I am. There’s no getting around that.”

Cree hissed, but backed down, which he liked even less than her not backing down. He didn't like that kind of power when it didn't come laced with a spell- spells wore off. This was something else, something deep and horrible and broken inside of her that reminded him of the uncomfortable way she talked about Lucien that had set his teeth on edge. “Then I wasted my time. Perhaps I should have left well enough alone. It was too much to hope.” She began to stand, and Molly felt his heart break for her. She didn’t deserve this. She seemed like a nice person, if not a bit of an overly dedicated one. Everything about her screamed that she had no other way to be.

And, more to the point, it occurred to him that they were still outgunned and outmanned versus Lorenzo. They couldn’t afford to continue on without a cleric on board. Gods, but that was a risky idea. She might push a door open he didn’t want opened. And then there was the matter of her constantly denying his personhood...

Nothing like being desperate to make you make some grade-A decisions. “Cree, wait…” He stood up with her, catching her arm before she could pull away. She went rigid under his touch. “Just… Give us a minute. Keg?”

“Hm?” She blew a smoke ring and then pressed a hand to her battered platemail, over her heart. “Oh, am I still here? Am I invited into the conversation? Is someone gonna fuckin' explain what the shit you're all on about?”

Molly rolled his eyes and gently steered Cree in her direction, which was no mean feat. She was as big as Yasha. “Cree, this is Keg. She’s a delight. You two should talk. We’ll be over here.”

Both Keg and Cree looked like this was the last thing either of them wanted to do, but somehow Cree didn’t argue (Molly didn’t like that one fucking bit either), and Keg just accepted this was her lot in life now. “You’re tall,” she said, succinctly, as Molly waved Beau, Nott, and Caleb over out of earshot. “Like… Really tall.”

“I think Keg is aroused again,” Nott muttered, and then joined the huddle Molly initiated.

“Molly, why didn’t you just let her go?” Beau demanded, immediately. “She’s a fucking bitch.”

“She’s not a-” Molly hissed between his teeth. “Yes, she’s being a bit of a bitch, but would you be any nicer if you were in her position? You’re not even nice now.”

“Fuck you,” she snapped, but the bite was lost. She had just watched him die, he realized- die to protect her, even. It was going to take some adjustment to get used to the idea that it had happened, and that it was something other people were fucked up by, while he just brushed it off and moved on.

Well. Mostly. The trauma was there, but he wasn't going to acknowledge that he had it.

“If it weren’t for her, I’d be dead. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.”

“So killing her is off the table?” Nott glanced over her shoulder, hand going to her crossbow. “Because just say the word and I’ll pop her.”

“You’re not popping her.” The idea of killing Cree for the crime of loving the person who used to own this body didn't sit well- and gods, she did love him, didn’t she? He could see it in her eyes. That poor woman had shite taste.

Caleb finally spoke up, “You are considering taking advantage of this, are you not, Mollymauk?”

Molly made a face. “Is it that obvious?”

“I know you would not consider indulging whatever lies in…" His eyes fell on one of the red eyes- the one staring out of the peacock head on his neck, "... that body’s past if you did not have a good reason.”

Once more, Molly’s heart did a little vault. Fuck. Why did that dirt wizard always have to say the exact right thing? “She could help us get them back. We need her.”

“Ja, she is… quite powerful.”

“And she knows Shadycreek Run. She said her people had a hideout there.”

“She’s not gonna fucking do that unless we give her something,” Beau growled. “She’s gonna try to get you to go to Nogvurot to see her stupid friend the second we’re done.”

There was the cost, and it was unimaginably high… But for Yasha. For Jester. For Fjord. Yes, he could pay it. He had faith in his ability to withstand whatever Lucien’s people tried to throw at him. Maybe.

Well, he didn’t have a choice, now did he? He couldn’t lose anyone else. He couldn’t die again and leave them alone. Cree could prevent that… And hell, it would probably do to get her some better friends. He tried to leave every place better than he found it- or every person. Why not her? She probably deserved it.

“Then we go to Nogvurot. It’ll be fine. I came back as Molly despite her asking for Lucien when she..." He couldn't quite bring himself to say revived me. "Maybe Lucien’s just completely gone.” He didn’t buy that for a second. Too much bled through for him to believe that, but a con is a con is a con, and sometimes you had to con yourself, just as much as you conned others. The art of the snow job was just as effective in acts of self-delusion as it was in anything else.

Beau still didn’t look convinced, but she didn’t see another argument available, so she backed down with a sour lemon expression. “Fine, but if she tries anything shitty, I’m gonna punch her.”

Molly arched a brow. “How’s that different from any other day?”

She flipped him off, and they broke apart, returning to Keg, who was smashing her latest cigarette under her heel (how that woman still had functioning lungs was beyond him), still talking to Cree. The tabaxi seemed to be just taking the one-sided conversation in stride, but with the slightest edge of impatience to her demeanor. “I only met one tabaxi. We kinda dated for awhile. She tried to clothesline me in a barfight, but I was too short, and we kinda hit it off. It was mostly physical… Like really physical. I feel like most people don’t hit each other that much- not in domestic violence way. Just… We were punchy people. I think she ended up getting with this weird bard. Fuckin’ bards, man.”

Molly cleared his throat, having waited until Keg had fully shoved her foot so far in her mouth that it couldn’t go any further to interject, because he would take whatever delight he could get out of this fucking day, Moonweaver help him. Cree’s ears perked up as she turned to the sound, and Keg just huffed out a “thank god” and turned away like she couldn’t bear to keep staring at Cree after babbling like that.

“All right, so...” Molly clapped his hands together. “I’m willing to go to Nogvurot with you, but we do have this mission from the Gentleman to bring Ophelia to him… And also the far more pressing matter of our friends being in the hands of slavers.”

Cree’s ears flattened to her skull and she bared her teeth. “You did not say it was slavers that killed you.”

“To be fair, you didn’t really ask.” Her reaction was something to be noted. Molly continued, leaning into fast-talk to hopefully sell his offer. “You seem to be pretty against them- that’s good. Maybe you can help us get them back, complete our objective for your boss, and then we can go see... Tyffial, was it? Everyone wins.

Her ears were still flattened to her skull. “Do you know who the slavers are?”

“The Iron Shepherds,” Beau supplied. She crossed her arms over her chest and studied Cree like she was hunting for a weakness. “You know ‘em?”

Cree growled, panther-like. “They are the Jagentoth’s dogs. Of course it would be them. Lucien dodged those bastards his entire life, after all. I am shocked they did not recognize you.”

That hadn’t occurred to Molly, even though he knew that Lucien was from Shadycreek Run from their last conversation, much as he would have liked to forget it and every other tidbit of information she had dropped at their last meeting. He put a hand over his chest where his new starburst-shaped scar sat, still tacky with blood, puzzling over this new fact. Maybe Lorenzo had. Maybe that’s why he had made sure it hurt when he drove the glaive home. But whether he had or he hadn't wasn’t the point. He was about to be a very, very vengeful ghost in that fucker's history no matter what name he wanted to call it. “So you’re more than willing to tear them apart, right?”

He really, really hated the way she looked at him- with reverence, even knowing he wasn’t Lucien, as if she was still hoping, as if she had rationalized even this as proof that Lucien was still in him and wanted her at his side. “For what they did to you and for what they have done to others, yes. I will help.”

She eyed up Beau, Nott, and Caleb and then shifted her focus to Keg, who coughed and looked away. “After all, it seems your traveling companions are subpar at keeping you safe. That is my job.”

Beau cracked her knuckles, and Molly just gently forced her hands down. This was going to be a long fucking trip.

But absolutely worth it, if it got them their friends back. He could handle some discomfort if it meant they could hope again.

Chapter Text

When Cree joined the Gentleman’s troupe, she had no idea he sold anyone who betrayed his trust into slavery, which, admittedly, wasn’t necessarily the sort of question a woman down on her luck and desperate for work someplace that didn’t involve lying on her back would ask. Once she learned, she wasn’t in any position to argue, and it was clear that he took no real pleasure in it. It was something that made money and was a threat to be wielded against people who deserted on him (which she had, admittedly, done, but she supposed the sheer amount of blackmail material she had would keep her off the market if it came to that). Just business.

Regardless , he did not enslave children or innocents, which Cree would have taken enough issue with to take her chances on running as far as she could get if she'd heard otherwise. The Jagentoths, however, held no such qualms. They could sell children for higher prices, some to creatures with discerning palettes who were too cautious to hunt, some with… certain other proclivities. Lucien had wanted to dismantle them for years, but then his mind sought greater ambitions, until the Jagentoth family were infinitesimally small in comparison.

To ruin the Iron Shepherds… to cut off the limb of a vile dragon that lurked on the edges of her life and breathed its poison into her mind when she found herself fraught with the nightmares of the child she had once been… that would be something worthwhile, indeed. Worth traveling with these strange folk, worth walking alongside this stranger who was Lucien but wasn’t...

Gods, she didn’t know how she was meant to act around him now. She had realized the discrepancies in his demeanor sometime after he left, but had justified it in her head as two years in hiding. Now she knew all of that was a lie, which was partially a relief and partially a source of great sorrow. She hadn’t decided which narrative she preferred- the one where Lucien, motivated to protect, left them alone for two years and only found her by accident or the one where he stayed dead, his flesh haunted by something else.

Perhaps she preferred neither. They were all sad tales and she was the victim of grief in all of them.

And still she followed, as silent as a shadow, knowing this path well- by cart, by horse, by foot, she knew it. The Nein would not rest until they gained a bit more ground on the Shepherds, she knew this, but she also knew they needed to rest after such a difficult fight, and as the only one not beset by their particular grief, she sighed and accepted her lot in life as the sole voice of reason.

“You cannot push on like this. It will serve you better to wait until they are back in their nest and strike them there.”

Keg arched an eyebrow at her from atop the horse she shared with Beau. “That’s pretty risky, lady.”

“They will not touch a hair on their heads until the Jagentoth family surveys them and determines where their value lies. You are still…” she did a mental calculation. “… two days from The Run. And they are only marginally ahead.”

“And you think we could take them out in their fucking home?” Beau snapped. “We couldn’t take them out on the road!”

“You did not have me, then. And you did not have Otis.” She looked down at Lucien, sitting astride the same horse as her with his back against her chest- no matter what he called himself, he was Lucien to her, even when he shot her a deeply aggrieved look that didn’t quite look right on his face. “Otis is a powerful caster. An eccentric, yes, but powerful. They will help. Any of us would be willing to do this for the Nonagon.”

“Too bad we don’t have a Nonagon,” Nott drawled sardonically, and Lucien brought the horse a little closer to Caleb’s so he could flick her on one of her bat-like ears.

“Will Otis take the truth as well as you did?” He asked her.

Cree stood up straighter, proud and haughty. “They will take it however way I encourage them to take it.”

“Okay, that sounds a little culty, actually.” Keg squinted.”

“You think?” Beau scoffed.

Lucien sighed this time, and it was so much like him that her heart stuttered. How many times had he sighed like that when the other Tombtakers argued? More times than she could count. It was a safe harbor of normalcy in an ocean of calamity. “Cree has a point. I’m… not in the best shape, to be honest. We got a decent lead they didn’t expect us to get, and that’s not nothing.”

“Well, whatever the Nonagon says, right?” Nott bared her teeth in a shit-eating grin and Lucien pinched her ear even harder until she shrieked.

Well. That wasn’t quite Lucien. He tried to avoid coming off as childish. The urge to tell him to stop came unbidden but she pushed it down and instead laid her hands on his shoulders and righted him in the saddle. “Ah. Please be careful. If you fall off the horse and die, I do not have another diamond.”

The gentle joke landed wrong the minute she said it- for both of them. Lucien stiffened and she made a frustrated sound. “I did not mean-”

But Lucien was already pulling the horse into a trot towards the edge of the road to seek a suitable place to bed down, and, once more, Cree was hit with the realization that she had no idea how to speak with her old friend. Lucien as she knew him would have shrugged off death. He would have been indignant at the idea that he could die by a horse, but would have laughed anyway at the idiocy of the suggestion.

Maybe the others didn’t see it, but she did. Lucien was not coping with what had happened well- not her presence even if he had decided he wanted her here, but especially not dying, and knowing no way to bridge it without making things even more frustratingly awkward, she stayed silent.

Caleb was down spell slots and exhausted from the fight, but he was too wired to sleep, so when Cree offered to take first watch, he decided he would join her. Molly was willing to extend an olive branch to this woman and, pragmatically, he knew she was their best hope at bringing the others home, so that made him want to extend that branch just a bit farther to ensure peaceful co-existence, instead of the tension that permeated the air around them. He put so much work into this group to throw it away- to throw them away- and they had almost lost Molly for good. Had Cree not followed them…

No, he wouldn’t consider that. He wouldn’t think about a world where they laid Molly to rest in a barely marked grave on the side of the fucking road. That didn’t happen, so it didn’t have a place in his thoughts.

Beau and Nott didn’t trust Cree, and they were right not to. Molly was afraid of her, and that was also valid. It was on Caleb, because no one else was there to do it for him (because it would have fallen to Jester if she were here and that hurt to think about, the anguish of her loss already feeling like a missing limb with only weeks in her company to their name), to reach out to her. It was the last thing he wanted to do, but someone had to if they didn’t want her to change her mind, gut them all in their sleep, and run away with Molly.

“You were close to your old friend, were you not?” The silence between them had dragged out for half their watch. Cree had been staring, as still as a predator, into the darkness, seeing farther than Caleb could ever hope to see without Frumpkin, who was perched nearby as an owl, preening his feathers and waiting to be called over.

She was still staring when she said, “He and I are as close as two people can be.” She paused. “Were.”

There was such a finality in that were that Caleb suspected the past-tense came long before the incident that yanked him from her, but lacking context, he didn’t dare presume. “I will not ask you not to mourn your friend… to not hope to see him in our Mollymauk, but bitte- please- Ms. Cree. He is a good person. Insufferable, loud… Unnecessarily vibrant, but good.”

Cree was silent for a beat. “You do not know if Lucien wasn’t also all of those things.”

“Was he?” Caleb raised a brow.

“Insufferable, yes.” Her chuckle was dry, mirthless. “Not good, perhaps. He was cruel often, but so charismatic.”

Caleb felt his skin crawl with the familiarity of that sentiment- and the familiar look on Cree’s face. For the good of the Empire, Astrid had said with that same look, as she dropped arsenic into the wine she gave her parents that fateful night. Master Ikithon said, she would say with that same glassy-eyed expression of wonder and respect, even when he hurt her; even after she spent nights locked in a tower, huddling for warmth with him and Wulf; even when she broke her knuckles trying to put her hand through a wall after a bad assessment.

What towers had Cree been locked inside and what had he given her in return to make her love the man who built them around her? What parts of herself had she broken when she couldn't please him that made her call him cruel without condemnation?

That was a road he couldn’t afford to go down, because roads went both ways. He could see it in her eyes that she was clever, saw too much, knew too much. He wanted to even her out, make her appreciate this lot so they all stayed safe and alive on this fucking road of unexpected carnage, but he didn’t want those golden eyes staring into him and seeing more than he wanted to reveal to anyone, least of all a stranger he couldn't trust.

So he exhaled, his breath making fog clouds, and he changed tactics. “We are all not so bad. We are assholes, but I am sure you are used to them. I would not imagine that if Lucien is a thing like our Mollymauk, he would not suffer anyone who wasn't for very long.”

Cree swallowed and finally tore her eyes away from the road to look at him. “You are not so different from the Tombtakers, no. We were a family.”

Those words caught him in the stomach. “I would not go quite that far. It’s only been- gods, how long has it been? A month or two?”

Cree blinked. “And you would risk your life for people you have only just met?” She turned behind her to where Molly was curled up with his back against Beau’s, his tail entwined around her ankle. “He would die for them?”

“As I said…” Caleb was still reeling from the family bit, and shaking it off was proving a bit fruitless. He was hazardous to families. Calling this group a family was like inviting more trouble so long as he was involved. He pushed it down, but it still clung, like bile stuck in his throat. “Molly is a good person.”

Cree tore her eyes away again, and Caleb watched as her hands curled into fists in her lap. “It does not matter what Lucien was or is. He was mine. Mine to protect. And I could not save him before, and if I cannot save him now, then what good was I to him, in the end?”

Relationships are transactional, said every part of Caleb’s mind. After all, he was only here offering her this olive branch because he wanted to use her, and he was only still here because he wanted to use these people. He had no right to judge her addiction to a love that had clearly been all take and no give. If it had suited her, that was her right. Sometimes a bad love was better than no love at all. Sometimes you have no choice but to love the hand that guts you.

And yet, “What good are you to yourself if you judge your worth based on what a dead man thinks of you?”

Cree didn’t have an answer to that, which was good, because Caleb didn’t know where that had even come from, only that it needed to be said.

Beau would have normally yanked on Molly’s tail when she found it curled around her ankle after Caleb tapped her for second watch, but instead she just stared at it for a second while Keg gathered up her armor just in case of an ambush. And then with a gentleness she wasn’t even aware she possessed, she unwound it. She didn’t know enough about tieflings to really get what that meant, but she had been a kid with a stupid stuffed animal once. You take comfort from whatever you got during the shit times. Not knowing what else to do, she just pushed his tail closer to his body and watched as it unconsciously curled around his own ankle.

He curled in on himself, a little fitfully, his expression contorted as if in bad dreams. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Molly shouldn’t have died. They shouldn’t have had to rely on some weird culty bitch who just wanted her dead friend back to bring him back to life. Jester, Fjord, and Yasha shouldn’t have been taken. Shouldn’t, shouldn’t, shouldn’t…

But it had happened, and there was nothing she could do about it.

Keg had stalked to the edge of the camp so her cigarette smoke and the clanging of her platemail wouldn’t disturb anyone, and Beau walked after her, itching to take a swing at something. “Why didn’t you fucking tell us Lorenzo used magic that powerful?”

Keg grimaced. “I didn’t know, okay? He’s never done that before. He’s always just used the fucking glaive and let Ruzza and Dwelma do the magic shit.”

“What was shit was your information. You worked with these people. How did you not know everything? Did you even pay attention?” Beau sat cross-legged on the ground and shoved her goggles over her face to see into the darkness. She half wished there was something out there. Something she could really hurt. Something she could win against.

“I’m sorry that no one fucking details all of their powers to some new hire.” Keg crushed out her cigarette. “Look, I get it. I’m fucking pissed too. And I’m sorry Molly died, and I can’t help but think it was my fault. That’s why I jumped in like that. If I hadn’t been so godsdamned freaked out…”

Beau’s anger dissipated. Everything had happened all at once that she had almost forgotten Keg had tried to give herself up to save them. In the end, the gambit had paid off and she had escaped with her life, and Molly was fine now.

Sort of.

She wasn’t good at apologies, so she tried to awkwardly squeeze in a compliment the way Fjord had suggested, like that would somehow make up for her temper. “It was real good of you to do that… try and sacrifice yourself for us, I mean. You could have just run.”

“No more running.” Keg shook her head. The compliment didn’t backfire. Will wonders ever cease? “I’ll see you guys through this to the end.” There was a beat as that settled over Beau, allowing her to, at least, forgive Keg for her hand in this bullshit, before she spoke again. “So what’s the deal with Molly and the tabaxi babe?”

Beau groaned. “Okay, so like… Fuck. This is Molly’s story, so maybe he should tell it, but he probably won’t. He seems really fucked up by this. But apparently two years ago he crawled out of a grave with no memories and he just… built himself a new life in the circus. But apparently before that he was some guy named Lucien who ran some weird cult. And Cree is, like, his most dedicated fangirl.”

“Yeah, I got the culty vibe.” Keg looked thoughtful for a moment. “I’d heard there was some weird group in the Run who everyone just kinda avoided and that the leader was some punkass tiefling, but I never met 'em. You’d have to be pretty shady that people in Shadycreek Run avoid you. It ain’t a big town. They used to call him all sorts of shit- The Shadow Over Molaesmyr. The Fey-Bane. Shit like that.”

That hadn’t occurred to her and she filed all those nicknames away, just in case. “So you think there are people in town who might recognize Molly as Lucien?”

“I dunno. I didn’t. It didn’t look like Lorenzo or the others did either.”

Great. One more problem that might not be a problem, but also might be a huge problem. Like they needed that in their lives right now. They already had a six foot tall furry problem in their midst pushing on Molly’s bruises and he wasn't the sort of person who took anger well. Beau glanced behind her to check on what Cree was doing and found that she had curled up in a ball like Frumpkin (when he was a cat anyway) to sleep.

She kinda looked cute like that. Innocent. Not like a walking threat to everything Molly built, who might turn on them in a second to get her friend back.

“Aw fuck, look at her.” Keg had followed her gaze, and then turned away, blushing.

“You into her?” Beau felt a little bang of jealousy. She’d liked Keg’s attention when it was on her, but she was certain the connection was just physical. Still, she wasn’t really big on sharing that attention with someone she kinda still wanted to sock in the jaw.

Keg waved her off. “She’s hot is all. And that accent! She doesn’t sound like she’s from Shadycreek Run. Nobody from the Run talks like that.”

“Yeah, it’s, like… Marquesian, I think?” Beau frowned. “D’you think she’s lying?”

“What? Fuck no. No one from anywhere else would say they were from the Run. She probably picked it up somewhere to make herself sound less like trash. People with any kind of power around there do it all the time so they sound smarter. Most of ‘em talk like me.”

There was a lot they didn’t know about Cree and where she came from and how she came to be part of Lucien's weird Nonagon shit, but it wasn't fair to hold that against her. There was a lot they didn’t know about each other either, and Beau couldn’t say much at all to protest that, because she was one of the worst offenders of holding her cards close to her chest. This crew didn’t even know her last name yet, and she loved them all, despite her best efforts to avoid it. It had crept up on her.

It could creep up on anyone, which she figured Molly was gambling on.

“All I know is she better be as much help as she says she’s gonna be,” she finally said, huffing. “I’m not losing anyone else, not even for a minute.”

She’d rip the next person who tried apart with her bare hands, if she had to, and that included Cree.

Molly slept fitfully, plagued by dreams that mercifully evaporated into mist when he was shaken awake by Beau to trade off watch, but enough lingered to unsettle him. The sound of screaming and red eyes on him, watching him, seeking something within him as if looking for that locked door within his head so they could throw it open.

He barely exchanged words or barbs with Beau as he walked, still sore and weary, to take watch position, and he felt her eyes on him as well, also seeking locked doors. He was clever enough to know that even if the Nein didn’t say as much, they were observing him as if he were glass that would break at the slightest touch. Between Cree and his devil’s bargain with her and dying and everything else… Yes, maybe another person would break. But not him. He couldn’t afford to.

Sehanine preserve him, but he wished he could. Break into pieces and then rebuild and then forget that it all happened and start new again, but he was loyal to a fault, and to do that would be to abandon this family as he’d been forced to abandon the circus as they scattered. No chance of that. He was in it for the long haul now.

Nott came up behind him, paused like she was going to say something, and then sighed and sat down next to him, pressed as close as she dared, her knobby goblin knees grazing his. “How’re you feeling?”

“Wonderful,” he drawled, sardonically. “You know, being brought back from the dead by a woman who wants you to be her cult leader-slash-lover-gods-only-know does wonders for a person’s perspective.”

Nott shot him a look. “You absolutely could’ve just said ‘not well.’” When Molly didn’t give her a response to that, she moved on. “I feel like… I owe you an apology.”

That got his attention. His ears actually perked at that. “For?”

“For what I said before… About you needing to face your past. Now that you might actually have to… Maybe that was a little bit fucked up.”

He made a mock-scandalized noise. “Oh no, you think?”

“Do you know how hard it is to apologize for something like this?” Nott squawked, indignantly. She steadied herself, and then went on, “There’s… Reasons why I felt that way, and maybe I was projecting a bit too much, and that wasn’t fair to you.”

Molly blinked slowly at her. “You’re telling me this because you know I won’t ask, aren’t you?”

“Oh, absolutely. One hundred percent. You said you don’t care where any of us came from, and I am holding you to that.”

He eyed her. “So long as it’s not dangerous.”

She considered it. “I don’t think it is. It’s just…” She trailed off.

“Complicated?”

“Deeply complicated.”

They sat in silence for a good hour, just watching the horizon. Molly took out some of his blank cardstock and sought inspiration for a new card. He’d managed to create cards for all of the Nein in the weeks since they came together and even added some inspired by their battles and experiences. He was going to do something for the Tinkertops once they left Hupperdook; the automaton they had fought. Maybe one for Kiri, too, despite his hesitation around the little bird girl. All of these ideas were pushed off to the side when Jester, Fjord, and Yasha were taken, but he needed this moment of peace to get his head on straight. The moons were still out, but soon dawn would come to claim their shine, and he felt most comfortable drawing by moonlight when the Moonweaver was at her strongest.

He couldn’t draw Kiri or the Tinkertops or even the clockwork warden. There was only one thing still on his mind, so, instead, he drew Lorenzo locked in combat with Keg. He labeled it Cruelty and Mercy.

It occurred to him as Nott watched that he had never done this in front of anyone before. “You… You drew all of those cards?”

“That’s why they’re not bullshit,” he said, proudly, as he began the process of coloring in the finer details. “They’re everything I know and everything I’ve experienced. They’re me.” Maybe he ought to show them to Cree sometime. Do a read for her, let her wonder if anyone who could create like this could be considered a non-entity.

Maybe Nott was also thinking the same thing, because she said, “I… Get where Cree is coming from, you know? I think she’s being a bitch about it, but those things aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“Look at Beau,” Molly gestured behind him with his ink brush.

“Exactly.” A beat, as she collected her thoughts again. She was treading far more carefully around this subject than she had ever had before. He wished he could believe the reason was something other than the fact that he had died, but he wasn’t stupid. She wouldn’t be like this otherwise. “If someone I loved came back from the dead and didn’t remember me… I don’t think I could just stand back and leave it like that. I think I would try to get them back.”

“Even if they seemed better off as they were?” He tensed a bit, waiting for the response.

“I would need to see proof of it, but…" She flinched and uncapped her flask. "Maybe you're right. It would be selfish to assume they would be happier if they remembered me than they are not remembering me. You can build new memories. You can’t get back that kind of happiness once it’s taken away. It’s gone forever, and you’re just…”

“Someone else,” Molly finished for her.

“Yeah… Yeah, exactly.” She looked up at him. “I don’t want you to be someone else. I think you’re a fine weirdo as you are.”

Fuck if that didn’t get the first real smile out of him since he was brought back. He laughed- genuinely laughed! And it was wonderful to know that he still could, that he didn’t actually come back broken and hiding behind an even bigger mask than the one he already wore. “C’mere.” He didn’t even let go of his ink brush as he pulled her closer to his side.

“You’re dripping ink on my cloak,” she muttered, but she didn’t squirm away.

“I don’t care.”

Dawn began to break in the distance and with it a new day. He wouldn’t tell Nott this to her face- he had to keep her ego in check- but he had an idea now, thanks to her. An idea that he’d already been playing around with, but one he would take to with intent, rather than merely hoping it happened incidentally.

Cree was going to accept Mollymauk Tealeaf. She didn’t have a choice.

By her estimation, judging their pace and their unwillingness to rest any more than they had to to stay hale and hearty, they would arrive at the Quannah Breach by mid-morning the next day. Despite this, the mood of the group had not improved much with sleep. They still looked to Cree with wariness and Beau offered to switch off with Keg and ride with Mollymauk- Mollymauk! What a silly name, and she had been corrected so many times now that it was now stuck there, replacing Lucien’s own. Molly had declined, however, and she didn’t know how to take that.

She didn’t know how to take him talking to her either as he guided his horse- all three remaining horses seemed to have been named with toilet humor in mind and she found it best not to even bother recalling their names- along the road. Of all of them, he was the one who suddenly woke up in a decent mood, despite having died the day previously.

She could tell it was an act, that he was burying his hurt and working around it. Whatever Mollymauk was, separate entity from Lucien, as he claimed, or just Lucien without his memories, he was a con artist with a silver tongue just as Lucien had been. Perhaps that gave her too much hope, to see that the differences were not nearly as stark as he claimed.

But she continued to not know how to speak to him, and now that he was actively engaging her, it was painfully obvious.

“How long since you’ve been back in Shadycreek Run?” He asked.

“Ah. Not since… The ritual, honestly. I saw no reason to go back. When Jurrell died, I went to see Tyffial in Nogvurot, but that is as far as I ever got.” She paused, realizing Molly wouldn’t know the significance, and lowered her voice. “He was her twin brother.”

He winced at that, like he felt something for the pain of a woman he couldn't remember. That wasn't an act. It wasn't really Lucien's style, however, so it just left her confused. “But beyond that, you haven’t seen any of them?”

She shook her head. “As I said, you- Lucien, I mean… He told us to scatter if anything happened. He was worried someone from the Capitol would come for us.”

Caleb suddenly brought his horse closer. “Why would someone from the Capitol come after you?”

Instinctively, Cree looked down at Molly, who tilted his head up to regard her, but didn’t give her an order to answer or not. She broke contact first and went silent.

“If we are going to be working together, we need to know as much as possible about what you lot were involved with,” Caleb went on, and every hair on her body puffed up instinctively at the condescending way he spoke to her. Just like a spellspitter.

Molly must have felt her fur bristle because he reached over and patted her hand, and she hated him for that. How dare he have a gentler touch than Lucien, whose gentleness came so infrequently and always in private. “Don’t get prickly, dear. We’re just trying to keep everyone’s arses out of the fire. You don’t have to tell us anything you don’t want to- frankly, I don’t care to know most of it- but if something might bite us…”

“If I feel it is relevant, I will tell you. I am a good reader of situations.” If she had the tome, then perhaps Molly might understand how dangerous this was to share openly, and how important the work was, but she would have to convince him all on her own. And she couldn’t do that with the rest of them breathing down her neck.

No, it was fine. She could continue this farce until they reached Nogvurot. Tyffial would know what to do.

“So you’re just gonna keep quiet about all of the culty shit?” Beau said, coming up on Molly’s horse’s other side.

“Beau, can you not?” Molly protested. “Be decent for five minutes. You won’t sprain anything, I promise.”

Beau flipped him off, but fell back, and Cree could feel her blue eyes burning holes into the back of her skull.

"Your friends are not fond of me,” she said, after a moment, as huffy and as exasperated as a petulant child.

“As far as I can tell, it’s mutual.” She stiffened and he caught it- hard not to with so little distance between them on this bloody horse. “They grow on you- Beau’s more like a mold, but you get used to her. She adds character.”

“I can fuckin’ hear you, you shithead!” Beau yelled.

“Good!” Molly yelled back. “I was checkin’ to see if your ears were workin’ after all that snorin’ you did last night.”

“I don’t snore!”

“No, you absolutely snore,” Nott chimed in. “Everyone’s been too polite to say it, but if Molly is going to put it out there, then yes.”

“Oh fuck you both! I know you’re the one who chews on my staff at night, Nott.”

“You can’t prove that!”

“Fuck if I can’t! I’d know those misshapen little razor teeth marks anywhere.”

Nott gasped. “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to talk shit about a lady’s appearance if she can’t fix it in five minutes?”

“I could fix your teeth in five minutes.” Cree could hear Beau’s knuckles cracking.

“Caleb, as the leader, I feel you should do something about this hostile work environment,” Nott protested.

Caleb sing-songed, “I am not getting involved in this.”

“Oh my god, shut up,” Keg moaned. “You’re all fuckin’ irritating.”

Cree didn’t know at what point it had started- the deep rumble in her chest signifying the beginning of a chuckle- but at some point it had transformed into a full laugh that brought everyone to stunned silence.

She hadn’t meant for it to happen, had tried to contain it- they were such idiots and they grated on every one of her nerves- but it burst from her, unrestrained, and left her shoulders shaking and her breath coming in wheezes.

Molly bumped her in the chin with his horns as she doubled over him, still laughing. “ See? They grow on you.”

“Shut up.” She tried to shake it off, but giggles still came in waves. “You are all just so ridiculous. What am I expected to do?”

Not get attached. This was fleeting. Never you mind that she hadn’t laughed like that since before the Tombtakers split paths- it was not something meant to stay, just like Mollymauk’s gentle hands and his easy smile that didn’t have so many teeth behind it.

She needed none of it. She needed Lucien back.

And nothing could distract her from that.

You only have to solve this problem and make it to Nogvurot, she chastised mentally, as she pulled herself together. Do what you have to do, but do not forget what needs to be done.

But gods, did it feel good to laugh like that again.

Chapter Text

Beau paced restlessly, unable to keep still. They would reach the divide between the Greying Wildlands and the Empire tomorrow and take their first steps into unknown territory and everything within her itched. The absence of Fjord and Jester was starting to fester in the air like an amputated limb that hadn’t been treated properly. Yasha, at the very least, swanned in and out, but Fjord and Jester had been there with her since the beginning. She was their first real taste of Empire people, however crazy that was. Obviously, she wasn’t the finest representation but she did all right.

But they were gone and she didn’t buy for a second that Cree knew what she was talking about when she said that they wouldn’t immediately start trying to break them in. Jester was so sweet, so kind... Fuckers like that would take one look at her and immediately want to dim the light in her eyes, and it wouldn’t take much. Jester was strong, but she was also a sheltered little thing. She’d shatter like cheap pottery if they probed her the wrong way.

“Beauregard,” Caleb said softly, reminding her that she was supposed to be on watch. “Sit down.”

“I can’t. Ever since the fight, I just feel so… so-” She didn’t want to say the word. Helpless. Molly had died because he had dragged the heat off of her and that put him in this devil’s bargain with Cree. Trace it back far enough and maybe all of this was her fault.

“You are spiraling. Do you think I cannot recognize it?” He tilted his head to the side, his blue eyes catching the smoldering, gentle embers of the fire. He looked haunted in that moment. “I know a few things about guilt.”

Beau finally slumped to the ground, defeated, and dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. She fucking hated being vulnerable, but if she was going to do it with anyone, at least Caleb was better than most. “I’m scared we’re gonna lose someone else, okay? Fuck. We got lucky with Molly. But Jester, Fjord, and Yasha? What if we get there and Cree’s wrong and they’ve just been torturing the shit out of them or they got sent off the second they hit the place. Or, hell, what if she’s a fucking crazy person who doesn’t know what she’s talking about- siege their lair? Like yeah, I want to, but we couldn’t even take down their cart.”

Caleb let her rant and when she finished, he sighed. “Ja... That is all a very big big matzah ball, I know. I think her word is good. I think she is not going to jeopardize Mollymauk’s life in any way, and he won’t back down from this, because his sense of honor won't allow him to, much less his sense of pragmatism. And he is not wrong about the latter- we are gaining at least two additional people, including her. We might find more in Shadycreek Run. Perhaps these Iron Shepherds have made a lot of people angry- like Keg, like Cree and her friend.”

“That’s a big perhaps, Caleb.” She dropped her hands into her lap. “Not used to you being the optimistic one.

“I am being pragmatic, myself- there is a difference. We want those three back and keep our people alive? We use what we have.”

Beau’s jaw twitched perceptively. “Trust people where you can and don’t trust people where you can’t?”

Caleb chuckled, drily. “Even a clown can make a few good points on occasion. And as for Cree, she is just as lost as we are. She does not seem all that bad.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re totally just saying that because you’re obsessed with cats. That’s like your entire aesthetic.”

“That woman is not a house pet. She is a predator.” He paused, allowing that to sit. “But we have all killed and will kill again. There is little softness in us. But who can really blame anyone for being what they are and using it?”

She wondered how deep that went. Caleb had a darkness in him that she felt needed to be held in check. Honestly, the fact that he was willing to support Cree when he had been so distrusting of Cali was strange to her- it was either growth or he considered Cree’s threat to be lesser than what Cali represented, and she couldn’t fucking tell. Maybe they were meant to always be on opposite sides of the argument. If they agreed, then who was gonna be the one to hold the tether that pulled them back into line? “You don’t, until the claws and teeth turn on you.”

Caleb stared into the fire. There was a hollow look in his eyes as the flames danced within, burning the blue and only leaving the orange and yellow flickers. “Ja, there is always that.”

“Have you ever had your fortune read?”

Beau and Caleb had traded off first watch, leaving Molly with Cree. Talking to her with everyone else around was difficult. She was shy. She clammed up a bit. Too many people poked at her for questions she wasn’t comfortable answering- he could relate. But alone… Well, alone was dangerous, but she had made some progress today towards maybe accepting them as more than just ‘Lucien’s new friends who were preventing her from taking him away.’ She just needed a few more nudges.

It couldn’t be that hard… Could it?

Cards were a good icebreaker, regardless. He’d made plenty of connections, albeit mostly brief ones, over a good cold reading or a manipulated hand. He’d met Jester this way, though that memory now stabbed him in the chest, tracing the same patterns as Lorenzo’s glaive. He looked earnestly at Cree while he shuffled the deck between his hands, and she blinked herself out of a state of brief dissociation where she must have been somewhere else, losing herself in the rhythmic patterns of the cards.

“...No. I have not. I have seen many fortunetellers in-” She paused, and seemed to start considering her words more carefully. “Where I grew up, I was not allowed to have my fortune told.”

There was a story there, hidden in the vagueness and specificity, but she was allowed her stories. What saddened him was that Lucien probably would have understood the unspoken, but would he have cared? He didn’t seem like the kind of person who would.

Maybe he was being unfair, but he wanted Lucien to be decent like he wanted to tear open the scar on his chest and feel his ribs crack under the weight of the glaive a second time. He needed to be the worst, because if he wasn’t, then he might have to feel like shit about his attachment to this body, and that wasn’t happening. This was his. Lucien fucked off this mortal plane and he could adopt orphans and rescue kittens and he still wouldn’t deserve to take what Mollymauk Tealeaf had built out of this.

Getting Cree to see that was the whole point of this exercise, and it started with a fortune. “Today’s your lucky day, then. I usually charge for this, but for you, dear? On the house. I think you could use a little guidance from the higher powers.”

Her hand went to that amulet around her neck and she very cautiously tucked it back underneath her robes. “I have plenty of guidance from higher powers, but… I suppose I am a bit curious.”

He shuffled closer to her and laid the deck between them. “Draw a card. This one is your past.”

She carefully picked up the top card and flipped it over. The Hierophant. He couldn’t have slid that one in there with more precision. “Well, look at that. You’re a holy woman, driven by divine need. Your entire life has been dedicated to a singular cause.”

He watched Cree swallow very hard, her eyes glued to the card which displayed a woman in cleric vestments of Avandra. On the opposite side of the card, locked in combat with the other cleric, was a cleric of Asmodeus, a woman with brown hair and green eyes and pointed half-elven ears, and Cree seemed to be more focused on that than she was the half of the card she’d pulled.

“The Usurper,” she read, tilting her head, trying to get a closer look.

Molly cleared his throat, determined to hold her attention, and maybe loving the concept of having something to be superior about. “The cards have two different sides. How you draw it- how it ends up facing you- that is your card. The other half means nothing to the read, except for maybe telling you how much worse or better it could be. Each card has a title or a theme to it to help guide the readings- this is the Card of Faith.”

Cree shook herself out of whatever it was that had captivated her. “Sorry. It is… I just thought I recognized that woman.”

He opened his mouth to say that he drew a lot of inspiration from people he had seen and met in his time, but he remembered that one, in particular, had simply come to him, along with the word usurper, and he quickly clammed up. He did not need to encourage whatever it was in his head that crept in without permission, and he didn’t need to encourage her obsession with bringing more of it out. Sometimes the cards served as a form of therapy to get those images out and that was all it needed to be.

“Go ahead. Draw another card. This one’s for your present.”

She pulled another card and he was grateful for the sight of the Traveler card- not the Traveler, which had made Jester elated until she frowned at the absence of any cloaks or arches and dicks. Maybe, if they got her back, he would remake this card for her. As it stood, there were no people in either that one or it's matching side Home. The Card of the Journey. “You’re at the start of a long, important journey, being carried to strange new places, tossed about by the wheels of fate.”

She eyed him. She had no actual eyebrows to speak of, but somehow she could convey the same amount of skepticism as someone who had them. “You are a con man,” she remarked drily.

“I am an interpreter, thank you.” As he said it, he was working to try and get a very specific card to the top of the deck. The random pulls were good, but he needed to cap this off correctly, put Cree on the right path. She needed one. Gods, how she needed one. One that wasn’t based solely on something he could never be.

She caught his wrist. “Are you?” She rumbled, sizing him up like prey. It occurred to him how many times she must have done this at the Gentleman’s, keeping those golden eyes on cards and leaning on everyone who thought they were clever. Maybe he shouldn’t have tried to trick someone who probably watched people count cards for a living, and reacted on instinct when she saw it. The impulse even overrode her subservience to the person she thought he was. Terrifying, but ultimately a good sign that there were things in her bones that went deeper than blind loyalty to that which suffocated her. “And is it fair to interpret from the bottom of the deck?”

He lifted his hand away from the deck with hers still attached to his wrist, and, very carefully, reshuffled once she released him. This time her eyes were locked on the cards. Well. So much for that. Sehanine help him, but maybe she’d get one he could spin properly into a good end.

He laid down The Empire. That one was recent- he’d made it after the assault on the Zauber Spire and that was what the card depicted. The Tower and the Empire. A single tower struck by lightning with circling mages on the other end- The Card of Disaster, small and large. The mages were facing Cree. “If you continue the path you're on,” he said slowly, “then you will only meet with disaster.”

Cree had watched him. He hadn’t fudged that one. If he had fudged it, then he would have given her a far more optimistic one than that, but he could work with that. He didn’t have to like it though- Cree looked devastated.

“A devoted woman on a journey that will end in disaster,” she said, leaning back from the cards. “I cannot say I am surprised by such a fortune.”

Molly swept up the cards and shuffled them back into the deck. “Fortunes aren’t set in stone. They’re a path if you need one, but they can also tell you when it’s time to step off the path you’re already on.”

Cree pulled her cloak tighter around herself. “Perhaps. Regardless, I thank you.”

“You should have let me give you a better read.” His gentle tone didn’t pierce whatever hollow sadness was now wrapped around her as tightly that red cape she wore.

“A lie would not change it.” She exhaled. “I will go wake the next watch.”

Molly watched her walk away with a heaviness bearing down on him. Leave places better than you found them, right? What if no matter what you do, you just keep making it worse?

He looked up at the sky and shook that off immediately, as if both moons were silently judging him for his lack of resolve. No. Fuck that. He couldn’t give up on her.

If that fortune was a sign from the Moonweaver, then both of their lives might depend on it now.

It had been two years since Cree had traversed this path into the place of her birth, the place that had made her before the Orders unmade that person, only to have the Wildlands remake her anew. And then the Somnovem came. She had been undone more times than a person only midway through her second decade should be, and here was Lucien- Molly- having been undone one step farther. Bringing him here in this state was dangerous.

She shuddered a bit. Had he lived on the road and had she not followed… The Run would surely have shredded him and Lucien’s legacy along with it, and she, miserably, could not say which option upset her more- letting him go into this alone or watching him fail to react to anything that should have been familiar.

“You cold, Cree?” Molly must have felt her shiver against his back and she covered it up as best as she could.

“The howling winds always sound as if something is haunted and crying. There is a legend that the sound comes from the countless dead, unmourned and unloved, that have fallen in this area.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Keg muttered. “Shadycreek Run- come for the booze, stay ‘cause somebody stabbed you in the gut and left your body to rot in the ditch.”

“I hope you propose that for the ‘welcome’ sign at the next town meeting,” Nott piped up.

Their horses wound through the natural labyrinth and Cree wracked her mind to remember precisely where the gate was, hunting for familiar markers. Once she lit on something that seemed familiar, she called for everyone to stop. “There is a toll that the Uttolot family will expect to be paid and there is a chance that the Shepherds have warned them of you, but they think Lu-Mollymauk is dead and they never saw me with you. And, more importantly, a Tombtaker does not have to pay.”

Keg balked. “The fuck?! Who were you guys that you could scare one of the families so bad that they wouldn’t make you pay up?”

“Dangerous.” A vague response, but an accurate one. At the height of their power before it was too quickly extinguished by the absence of their Nonagon, not a soul in the Run could have challenged them, and yet the Tribes remained unchallenged. She could not say exactly why- Lucien simply said it wasn't worth his time. We'll get it all in one go, Cree-my-Love, he'd told her when he explained his path with the Somnovem, as if he had spent all that time waiting on a miracle.

“Yeah… Sure.” Keg shook it off and there was a brief, complicated dance of disguising and covering up as much as they could. Molly pulled his hood up over his head at Cree’s behest, and then guided his horse to the front of the pack.

Not a mile through the twisting ravine, as she had guessed, stood the gates with their blood-stained spikes and warning skulls. She heard Beau swear behind her while Keg just muttered “See? What did I tell you?” under her breath. Cree shushed them both and straightened up, affecting a regal and powerful stance.

The burly half-orc manning the front of the gate, idly picking his teeth with a shard of small animal bone, took one look at Cree, swore and then yelled for his partner. “Fuckin’ Tombtakers are back.”

“So you do remember,” Cree purred, sweetly. The half-orc was joined by a human man with half of his face a nasty mass of scar tissue. “And how is your tribe?”

The human clenched his teeth. “Your creepy little halfling friend owes money all over town. I hope you’re coming to collect her.”

“Perhaps. Will you let me pass?”

The half-orc stepped forwards. “You gonna pay the toll?”

“As I recall, Tombtakers do not pay the toll.”

The two men exchanged looks and then turned back to her, sneering. The human spoke up again, “I heard your boss died a couple years back. No one has seen his damned shadow around here to prove otherwise. And since he’s the one with all the-”

Cree reached up and yanked Molly’s hood down and both men immediately backed up so far and so quickly, they narrowly avoided impaling themselves on those very same spikes that they used to intimidate their would-be prey. She dug her fist gently into Molly’s back, urging him to sit up straighter. “Look haughty,” she whispered in his ear.

He must have done so successfully or else the Uttolot guardsmen were too terrified to question anything he might be doing with his face. “Fuck,” the human swore. “Our mistake, Lucien. You know how rumors spread.” He shoved the half-orc. “Well, don’t just stand there. Open the gate.”

The pair scrambled over themselves to open the gate as quickly as possible, as if the mere idea of being in Lucien’s presence for longer than necessary was pants-wettingly horrifying. The very moment it was safe to do so, Molly coaxed his horse through, and the rest followed. Even after they had gotten far enough down the road that the gate was no longer visible, Cree could still hear the men arguing.

“Why did you say he was dead, Gunther?”

“You were the one who had the bright idea to threaten his partner!”

Once she could no longer hear them, she allowed herself to breathe freely and indicated that the rest could drop their disguises. Beau was the first to speak.

“Who the fuck are you people?” She demanded. “What kind of maniac was Lucien that those guys were scared of him? I mean… Look at Molly. He’s scrawny.”

“I’m lithe, thank you,” Molly snapped. This close Cree could feel his tension. Nothing about that had sit well with him. She imagined it wouldn’t. He wasn’t like Lucien in that way- he wasn’t cruel that she could see. He didn’t want people to respect at best or at worst fear him.

But Molly also had no reason to justify being that way. Of course he wouldn’t. He had no memories of what this town had done to Lucien to make him cruel and dark and prone to throwing his power around to take advantage before he was taken advantage of.

Once more, she answered the question with what effectively a non-answer. “You do not survive in Shadycreek Run without being bigger and scarier than those around you, friends.”

Keg exhaled. “Yeah, she’s got a point. And, uh… Hey. Nobody had to drop any gold to get in. That toll’s usually a fuckin’ bitch.”

Cree glanced Beau’s way to see that she was chewing on the inside of her cheek. “Yeah, all right. Free shit is always a good thing. But is it gonna cause a fucking town-wide panic to bring Molly in?”

Ah yes. Of course. She was dreading this part, knowing it would cause a fight. “Mollymauk and I will be staying behind to wait for you in the woods.”

“Molly? Alone with you?” Nott squawked, breaking up the immediate stunned silence her words had prompted, as expected. “Are you just going to carry him off??”

“We had an arrangement.” Cree narrowed her eyes. “I keep my bargains. I will not take Mollymauk anywhere against his will, nor could I.”

“Maybe Mollymauk would like an opinion on this?” Molly spoke up. Cree immediately cowed- constantly caught in the uncomfortable position of being subservient to Lucien but considering Mollymauk something other to be protected and cautiously and gently tolerated as the one keeping Lucien’s vessel warm and no longer rotting in the ground.

“I think she’s right. I don’t…” He sighed like he already regretted the words. “That was a lot back there. And if there’s going to be a whole town of people doing that- I’ve conned people. I like conning people. Conning entire towns can be a delight, but not like that. I don’t want a bunch of people looking at me like I’m something great and terrible.”

Oh, but you are something great and terrible. And beautiful to behold. She kept that to herself. It wouldn’t help.

“It does seem like that would invite more trouble and notice than we need right now,” Caleb offered. Her disdain for spellspitters aside, the wizard had struck her as the most pragmatic of the lot, and she found him more tolerable than the disagreeable monk, the awkward fighter, and the accusatory goblin girl.

She huffed. “I assure you that no harm will come to Mollymauk under my care.”

“You realize you are, at the very least, one of the top five threats to his safety, right?” Beau, continuing to be the ever disagreeable one, pointed out. Cree growled at her, but Molly cut in before it could proceed into a tongue-lashing that led to fists getting involved.

“Beau, I love this newfound instinct to defend my honor. It’s so refreshing and maybe someday I can mock you properly about it, but I actually really, really don’t want to go into that town. Period. And if I can stay in the woods and process all of that-” again he gestured to the gate, “- that’s a good thing.”

Caleb snapped his fingers and his owl familiar appeared, perched on the curve of Molly’s horns. “There you go. I can look in on you in case you get into trouble.” He looked between Beau and Cree. “Compromise is key.”

“Thank you.” Cree gave him a polite nod. “The town is built into the wood. Mollymauk and I will wait for you on the other side of the creek. And I will Send a message to Otis to let them know you are coming to collect them.” She cleared her throat and spoke into the air, addressing something beyond her companions. “Otis, it is Cree. I am back in the Run and I have brought friends. Tell me where you are so they might collect you.” She waited a moment and then Otis’s familiar rasp voice spoke up, “‘Bout fuckin’ time, Cree. Landlocked Lady. Hope your friends brought enough gold to pay off my tab.”

She rolled her eyes at their gall, and then shook herself out of the remnants of the spell to turn to the rest. “You will find them in the Landlocked Lady. A pale halfling with curly blonde hair. They will be the one answering to every gender, every pronoun, and every curse and insult.”

Nott looked genuinely skeptical. “Sounds like a real charmer…”

“I assure you that they very much are not.” She recognized the sarcasm, but rolled with it, anyway. Otis was no one’s favorite of the Tombtakers and they were aware of it, but what they lacked in interpersonal skills, they made up for in utility and loyalty. “But you will be thankful for them once we begin our assault.”

They continued down the road, weighted silence prevailing, and when Cree indicated they should stop and let the others continue on and into the town, she urged Molly to tie the horse up just a little ways into the wood. “May I show you something?”

Molly eyed her, still wary, despite how much he had been trying so very hard to be kind to her- and it hurt so much that he was kind. She wanted it, yet she wanted to jerk away from it at the same time, because it wasn’t right. It wasn’t Lucien. The man she loved was never given to kindness so freely, and it was a strange disconnect to see the face of her beloved, the other half of her soul, with a personality that was wonderful and sweet but vaguely repulsed her at the same time.

“I promise I am not trying to trick you,” she pleaded. “It is just… I need you to see it. Please?”

His shoulders slumped. “I’m trusting you with this.”

He had said those very words when she believed he was Lucien, back when she was too blinded by relief to see the cracks in the glass. Now everything about him was spider-webbed with imperfections, but still she was determined to try and press her hand through and get cut on the jagged edges for but a glimpse of something that probably, truly, didn’t exist behind his eyes any longer.

And yet, she would try anything. “Come. Let me…” She paused, careful in how she worded this, “...show you where you were born.”

He froze just at the edge of the wood where the path sloped off and they would lose the road when they stepped further inwards into the blight, and for a moment, she thought he wouldn’t follow her, but he did, eventually. Cautiously, but he followed.

It had been two years but she had walked this path in every nightmare since. She knew it by heart.

Nothing good ever came of splitting up, which was a strange thing to think when you’ve been on your own for awhile and the idea of having a group to split from that was worth sticking with was something new, but whatever. Keg was thinking it. Splitting up in the Run was not a good call.

But she also couldn’t argue with it- they were on a deadline. Beau and Caleb looked like they were probably way better suited to talking to the godsdamned head of the fucking Mardoon Tribe and Keg and Nott were better for going on a fucking halfling hunt. That didn’t mean she liked it. That didn’t mean she wasn’t anticipating it blowing up in their faces.

She and Nott walked into the Landlocked Lady and she immediately felt underdressed when the doors swung closed behind them. “Fuck, I almost forgot this place was a brothel,” Keg murmured under her breath, a flush creeping across her cheeks as several lounging men and women spread about the balcony with sleepy, drug-addled gazes suddenly looked down at her and Nott with curious interest.

“How could you forget that?” Nott balked, and Keg gave her a little nudge with her boot, which was the nicest reaction she could have had, all things considered. Maybe she was going soft. A few days ago, Nott would have been eating the floor planks.

“Fuck you, Nott. Ugh.” She scanned the room, which had a few patrons, but none that seemed to match Cree’s description of a pale halfling. She so did not enjoy the idea of having to trawl this place while sweating bullets under her plate. Some of those whores- er persons of the evening? what was the polite term fuck- were giving her once-overs that were making her flush, and her purse couldn’t afford what they were offering, nor could her time accommodate it. “How’re we supposed to find them?”

“Molly has this tactic that usually works.” Nott cleared her throat and hollered: “Hey! Anyone seen an Otis around here?”

There was an audible, disdainful sound from both patron and sex worker. A human man in his thirties had just shuffled up to the front desk to properly greet them, heard who they were after, and then shuffled back. “One moment,” he muttered.

He vanished up the stairs towards what Keg assumed were the rooms and returned a moment later, hauling a gaunt halfling by the back of their leathers, who squirmed and cussed at him.

“Come on, Champ,” the halfling wheezed. “I’m good for it. Cree’s got people on her way.”

“You’ve been droppin’ the names of your people for months, Brunkel. There’s only so far a Tombtakers’ clout goes, and I’ve got a business to run.” Champ all but tossed the halfling on their ass before Nott and Keg, and went back to whatever he was doing before, tossing over his shoulder a “he’s all yours.”

Otis looked sickly and underfed, so scrawny that their curves were nonexistent and only the vaguest of bumps under the armor hinted at maybe a more feminine-leaning form, but beyond that they seemed to be avoiding any pretext of gender identity in a way that felt effortless. The leathers were neutral, the hair more like a mop of tangled dishwater blonde curls that covered their sunken green eyes, and their voice was gravelly and hoarse when they spoke up again. “So what d’you lot want, eh?”

“Well, um… We’re the people Cree sent to get you,” Nott offered slowly, as her yellow eyes tracked every bit of Otis- either she was sizing them up for threat potential or was just trying to grasp what their fucking deal was. Both were valid. “She didn’t… She didn’t give us a password or a secret handshake or anything.”

Otis blew some of their errant curls out of their face. “That’s good enough for me. You gonna pay my tab here?”

“Fuck no!” Keg snapped. “Look at this place. How’d you end up running up a bill in the nicest place in the Run without getting gutted?” She was starting to get really apprehensive about the Tombtakers’ reputation. How was it that she had never even heard of them except in passing if this many people were scared of them?

“Trade secret,” Otis smiled with teeth nearly as yellow as their hair. “And if you’re not gonna pay, I suggest we make a quick exit before Champ catches on.”

They picked themselves off the ground and strolled out, and lacking a desire to get into a fight over a bill in an establishment run by one of the families (especially the one who was supposed to be their ally), Keg followed at a quick pace with Nott at her heels. As they made their way back onto the Clover Plaza, Otis pulled a pipe out of their bag and began to fill it with a spicy-smelling tobacco that burned her nostrils.

“So Cree has a new gang, eh? Knew she was working with someone out in Zadash, accordin’ to Tyffial but she never said who. We’ve been keepin’ that shit to ourselves since everything went down. After what happened to Jurrell, we gotta keep our noses clean or else there ain’t gonna be a family to call home when the time comes.” They took a puff from the pipe, wistfully. “‘Bout time she finally did call us home, actually. Two years is a hell of a long time to be bored.”

“Right… Right,” Nott nodded, enthusiastically. “We know everything about all of that. We know about the, um… The ritual. And Lucien-”

Otis froze and Keg looked down at Nott like she had to be the stupidest person in the history of stupid people, which was impressive given she, herself, was barely literate. This goblin woman had the street smarts of a toad. “Can you not, Nott?”

That might have turned into a whole bit- she could see the start of it building behind Nott’s cat-like eyes- but Otis had turned to face them to cut in. “And what do you ladies know about the ritual? And Lucien?”

“Oh you know, just-” Nott started, but Keg quickly spoke over her to save herself from further grief.

“We’re not gonna take this from Cree. She’s real excited to tell you everything.” Please, please buy into that.

Otis narrowed their bloodshot green eyes, took both Keg and Nott in like they were actively studying the contents of their souls (an uncomfortable shock wave tore its way down Keg's spine), and then asked a question that she really didn’t know how to answer exactly without spilling the beans about Molly too soon. “Where is she, anyway?”

The old cottage in the blackberry bramble that had once been the Tombtaker hideout hadn’t fared well in two years. She had expected it to be fodder for squatters and perhaps it had, at one point, but now it looked as if it had been the unwitting collateral damage in a dozen confrontations occurring out in the woods beyond the eyes of the Taskers. Cree couldn’t bring herself to enter it- there was nothing in there that would be familiar and everything that would hurt her.

Instead, she watched Molly stand in the shade of the corrupted woods beyond it, frowning, his tail lashing. The owl Caleb had left behind sat in the trees and observed everything, but she couldn't tell if the wizard was peering through its eyes. She found she didn't particularly care, either. Let him see this. She had nothing to hide. “Do you remember… waking up here?” She asked tentatively.

A shudder violently tore its way through him. If he had fur as she did, it would be standing on end, but the gooseflesh dotting his scarred lavender skin told the same story. Something about this place haunted him.

“No,” he said, and she didn’t perceive it as a lie. “It was… I only remember I didn’t feel good coming out of it. I wasn’t all there. I was catatonic. They… the circus… they told me I only said ‘empty’ over and over for the first week, and then things started to come back. Speech. Fine motor skills beyond eating and drinking and sleeping and other things.”

“But no memories?”

Another shudder. “Nothing I was comfortable with.”

Empty… She mulled that over. Empty, as in the vessel was empty? Then what was piloting it? A wayward phantom seeking a new host? Or perhaps, more hopefully, a tiny sliver of Lucien’s soul that had stayed behind after death? That was unprecedented! She had been disconnected from the Somnovem since Lucien's death and lost a chunk of her divine ability as a result, so she couldn't even ask them. Were she still in the Matron’s favor, perhaps she could beseech her for an answer, but alas. She was no closer to an explanation than she started and all this place did was stir her own memories in unpleasant ways.

“I have not been back here since…. Since the ritual. It feels like such a haunted place now, but once it was home. Our home. The only home we ever truly felt could never be taken from us.” And yet here it stood, ravaged by only two years of time, abandoned, with an empty grave out back that had been covered so thoroughly that she couldn’t recall where it was exactly, only the vague notion of where it should be. “It is difficult to be here.”

Molly turned to her, then, rather than face the dirt where his unmarked grave might have been once. “Then why did you want to come here?”

She swallowed. “I thought-“

“You thought I would remember something?” He hissed between his sharp teeth. “I agreed to go to Tyffial, but you can’t…. It isn’t going to work, all right? You’re just hurting yourself.”

She noted that he didn’t speak to his own discomfort, though it was evident he had a significant amount of it. Being here was a double-edged sword, but it didn’t matter how much blood was drawn- from her, from Molly- if blood called Lucien home. She would offer as much as she had to.

She just wanted him back.

And Molly wasn’t angry at her for that. He was just… disappointed, which, in kind, made her angry. “Do not pity me,” she snapped.

“You make it difficult not to,” he snapped back, and then recoiled a bit, like the cruel cold snap of his words startled him. He sounded like Lucien then- accent tangling prettily around nastiness, like a rose with too many thorns.

“Lucien-“ she didn’t mean to call him that, but once said, it couldn’t be unsaid and she held her ground. Molly went rigid again.

And then, abruptly, began to walk away, leaving her shocked and sputtering, rather than on the defensive. “Wait- Hnnngh.” She growled low and took off after him. They really were exactly alike. Lucien wouldn’t answer to his actual name half the time after becoming the Nonagon, but where Molly extricated himself, Lucien had just stared into her soul until she corrected herself.

She wasn’t sure which was preferable.

“Mollymauk!” She said, finally, and just like that, Molly pivoted to face her, all smiles. “Yes, dear?”

She could have killed him right then and there if he wasn’t wearing Lucien’s body like that stupid coat and she didn’t have another diamond to try again to bring him back correctly. Instead, she cooled her temper with deep breaths. “Do not wander off on your own. These woods are dangerous.”

Molly blinked at her. “You don’t have to babysit me. I’m perfectly capable of takin’ care of myself.”

Somehow that confidence irked her, given everything. “You do not need my protection? Tell me, how was it that you died?”

He sighed. His tail was back to lashing, stirring up dead leaves as it dragged the ground. “I was injured and I tried to blind Lorenzo with my… blood thing, and I guess I cut too deep.”

This time, it was her turn to blink. “…. You knocked yourself out with a Blood Maledict?”

There was no sound save for the swish-swish of his tail in the leaves for a moment. “...Yes?”

Cree dragged a hand down the length of her panther-like face and bit her tongue to keep from digging her hole even deeper with more frustrated scolding that would get her nowhere. Lucien did that. Lucien always gambled on his blood as if he had a limitless supply, reckless fool that he was. He claimed it was because he knew she would be there to get him up again and he was right, but Molly didn’t have her- he was lucky this time that she had a diamond and a sense for keeping revivify handy. Had she not followed…

She bared her teeth. “You are a Bloodhunter. Blood is your gift and your curse. You must be careful, Mollymauk. That is why you need a blood cleric. We are attuned to vitals. We know when you have spent more than you can afford to pay back since you clearly lack the discipline to do it yourself.”

Molly sputtered for a moment. “I’m sorry. I’m a what now?”

She blinked then, caught off-guard. That’s right. He had no memories. He couldn’t possibly know. “Your blood does not need your memories to know what it sings for. You do not have to… Consider yourself a part of Lucien-” he winced, but he seemed to find this particular terminology better than her previous ones so she stuck with it, “- for his curse to be a part of you. The blood is the same.”

He was processing that, slowly but surely. He pressed his hands together and held them up to his nose, sucking in a deep breath and then lowered his hands again. “I don’t really want to unpack all of that right now. Maybe later you can explain some of that to me just so I don’t die again, but we’re gonna put a pin in that.”

Cree opened her mouth to speak, but the second she did, something close by let out a feral growl. Molly jumped back. “...That wasn’t you, was it?”

Her heart stuttered into her throat from the shock. “No…”

Heavy footfalls and the sound of splintering wood cut through any further conversation. Molly snatched her hand and began to drag her in a direction. “Run.”

She obeyed for lack of a better choice, daring to look back as a massive white-furred bear with jagged bone spurs sticking out at odd angles on its body tore its way through the trees and began to charge at them.

Outside the Estate Sybaritic, Caleb retched into the bushes, while Beau politely stood aside and waved at guards who were concerned about why this dirty ginger human was ruining the daffodils with the contents of his stomach.

“‘Sup?” She nodded, tilting her chin. The look in her eyes must have told them, in no uncertain terms, that she wasn’t to be messed with while under Ophelia's protection, because they moved aside and went back to their business without pressing the issue.

Caleb gagged and dry heaved a bit more and then straightened, wiping his mouth on the corner of his sleeve- ugh, so gross. “Es tut mir leid- sorry. It has been awhile.”

“Since you seduced a crime lord?” Beau lifted an eyebrow. “Wow Caleb, you’re wilder than I thought.”

His response was a nervous laugh. “Yooooou have no idea,” he drawled. He gave a pathetic little sniff. “Regardless, we now have the blessing to burn the Sour Nest to ashes. What a lovely coincidence that is.”

He staggered away from Ophelia’s wrecked flowerbed and she followed, keeping eyes on the guards the whole time. The gate opened for them far more quickly than it had when they arrived, and they were back out on the path that wound back towards the Run and out of the Savalirwood. Beau was grateful for that- the entire place gave her the creeps. Something about that forest just pressed on her monk-brain a little too weirdly. “Kinda crazy, huh?”

“Was?” Caleb blinked at her. His eyes were still a bit watery from the aftereffects of the vomiting.

“The coincidence. We come here to kill these guys for taking our friends and it turns out the lady we were actually here for wants them dead too.”

“If Keg is correct about her assessment of this place- and it seems she is- that isn’t a coincidence. That is just how life here works.”

Beau rolled her shoulders. Of course Caleb would be logical about this, but there was more bothering her than just the Savalirwood. She had been nosing in Ophelia’s business while Caleb flirted, seeking secrets like Dairon had taught her. Anything useful. Anything of note.

And she had found something. A deeper coincidence.

And Caleb had, apparently, not noticed. Fuck. Why did she have to be the one to point this out? If it were anything else, she’d keep it to herself and just wait and see if it became a whole thing, but it wasn’t anything else. It was relevant to everything that was currently fucking with them.

“So I noticed there was a picture on her mantle- a little oil painting. I mean, it might not mean anything. Maybe it was just some random art.”

“Beauregard,” Caleb drawled, his impatience clear. “What are you on about?”

“It was a painting of a baby tiefling,” she spat out, quickly. “Purple.”

Caleb stopped right in the middle of the road, sucking a breath between his teeth. “You think there is a connection between Mollymauk and the Mardoons?”

“At least Lucien, but it might be nothing. Maybe it’s just something she thought was cool and bought at one of those fancy art shows. I don’t fucking know, but coincidences, like you said.”

He blew out the breath he was holding. “That is… another complication for Mollymauk I do not think he is prepared to deal with.”

Beau shook her head. “Yeah, I know he’s gonna… have to be warned before we go back into this, but maybe we wait until after we deal with the Iron Shepherds. I don’t want this to fuck with him and then it turn out to be nothing. Like I said, maybe she collects tiefling baby art. I knew an old lady in Kamordah who collected these naked aasimar baby statues. They were creepy as fuck, but it was a whole thing.”

“Maybe… But, regardless, ah, one problem at a time, Beauregard,” Caleb sighed. “Let us... go find the others.”

Molly knew that if they were to turn around and fight, they would probably be able to take one fucking bear, but the fact of the matter was that Molly didn’t want to fight a bear today. He wanted to save his fucking strength to face the Iron Shepherds today, and that meant running and dragging Cree along with him. The scenery flew by in a rush of twisted and gnarled trees and the occasional flash of purple and gray that stood stark in the otherwise dead winter landscape.

“Where are you going?!” Cree snapped as he dragged her along.

“Somewhere that bear isn’t!” He snapped back. He hated this forest. He hated that spot where his so-called birthplace would have been if it hadn’t been claimed by time and whatever the hells had turned this place into a nightmare- he hated that too, by the way. Everything about this forest pressed on his senses wrong, either spiritually or through something deeper.

His lungs were on fire and he could still hear the bear tearing through the trees after them. They were quicker, but it was plowing through terrain that they had to try to step gingerly around and lost speed to do it every time. They just needed to find the road that led to town, but he didn’t know the area and Cree was offering no assistance- evidently they had gotten themselves onto an unfamiliar trail in this forest.

“There is a fence!” Cree suddenly yelped and Molly pulled up short before he crashed into it. It was nearly covered in the gray-purple vegetation and difficult to see at a distance, having clearly failed in its purpose somehow if it was meant to keep the horrific cursed-feeling plants at bay.

Seeing no alternative, Molly vaulted over it, and Cree balked. “What are you doing?” She hissed. “The bear will not be deterred by a fence, and there are hags all throughout this Wood!”

“It might! And maybe the hags will eat the bear- I don't fucking know!” Molly kept going until he reached a second fence and that, too, he vaulted over. He turned around to see if Cree was following and found that she was but the bear had broken through the woods as well. He braced himself to run back to help her fend it off, but the moment it reached the very edge of the fence, mere feet from where Cree stood, it snuffled, roared, and then turned away.

“Huh.” Molly watched, half-expecting it to come back and charge. The pause allowed him to take in the shift in temperature, the scent of fresh vegetation as opposed to the corruption and rot-stench of whatever this forest’s damage was. He breathed in deep. “What is this place?” He murmured. "It doesn't feel very... Haggish.

Cree climbed over the second fence and dropped down beside him, clutching the amulet around her neck. “Ah, no... I think I know what this is, though I have only heard of it in passing. It is a holy place that they call it the Bone Orchard.”

“The Bone Orchard?”

What a name. Intriguing, though.

Cree pointed behind him, out beyond the rings of three more fences. “Do you see? It is a graveyard”

He followed her pointing finger to see the stone tablets spaced neatly and yet at random, all of them nearly covered in healthy vegetation. Beyond the graves, beyond the fences, sat a temple, and Molly, ever curious, began to climb over the next fence to get to it.

“We should go back- the others will think I made off with you!” Cree sputtered, but she followed close behind and jumped the third fence at almost the same time he did.

“You can Send them a message can’t you? And Frumpkin's around...somewhere.” Probably. He wasn't sure if the owl had followed them as they ran or had peeled off towards Caleb and searching the trees didn't yield any results. He shrugged and took the next fence and then the last one until he was right in the midst of the graves. He spun in place, breathing in that warm, humid almost-summer air. After the cold snap claiming the Empire as their journey pressed northward, this was a welcome change. “Yasha would love it here. I’ve never seen some of these flowers.”

Cree dropped down off the last fence, exasperated. “Mollymauk, this is not a game. Or have you forgotten?”

He tensed. “I haven’t.” Of course he hadn’t. Getting to the Sour Nest and saving Yasha, Jester, and Fjord occupied his entire existence, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it right this second. He was going to get them back- that wasn’t the issue. He was so confident in that fact that he couldn’t help but think that Yasha would love it if he took a few of these blossoms and pressed them into her book to surprise her…

As soon as he reached out, a soft-spoken, pleasant voice drawled, “Oh I wouldn’t do that. Not unless you ask first. They can be pretty touchy.”

Molly spun so fast he ended up on his ass in the dirt, and Cree was at his side in a moment, her claws out. He held his hand out and patted her on the leg to steady her as his eyes trailed up, up,up to a tall, lanky firbolg with a shock of pink mohawk and the kindest eyes Molly had ever seen. He smiled brightly, unbothered that two strangers were just poking around this graveyard.

“Hey,” he said, lightly. “Come on in. You’re just in time. I actually just finished making some tea.”

Cree helped Molly to his feet and clung to his arm to keep him from following. “We do not have time.”

He hissed back: “The others are coming. It’s probably safer here than it is with the bear.”

Cree couldn’t argue that and released him. The firbolg, who had already started walking, turned back and called, “Oh you’ve got other people coming? I probably don’t have enough cups, but we’ll figure something out.”

Sharp ears, Molly thought, and then shrugged and followed, ignoring Cree’s wary hiss of protest.

The temple was beautiful close up, wrapped in vines as if it were being hugged by nature, itself. Open windows let all that fresh air into the cozy interior that Molly could just see peeking through. “What is this place?” He asked, catching up to the firbolg by making longer, excitable strides while the taller creature seemed to move at a relaxed pace. Cree might have told him, but it was always better to hear what the people who lived there called it and why they called it that.

“Oh this? This is the Blooming Grove.” He cocked his head again. “Most people don’t come here unless they have someone to bury. I just assumed…” He looked from Molly to Cree, trailing behind. “You said you ran into a bear?”

“A bear with… strange protrusions,” Cree nodded. "I did not realize that dark magic lingered so close to the town."

He winced. ”Yeah… Yeah, that happens a lot these days. The corruption of the Savalirwood is spreading to everything. Even here.” He waved a hand at the fences being overtaken by the grey-purple vines. “Even the Wildmother’s magic can’t hold it back.”

The firbolg stepped through the door and busied himself with a teapot in the corner of the kitchen. “Go ahead and make yourselves at home.” He nodded at Cree. ”Your tiefling friend is right- probably safer here than out there. Kinda curious what you were doing out there in the first place, if that’s not too invasive.”

“Our friends went into the Run-” Molly noted that Cree winced and looked away when he said friends, but went on without correcting himself. “We’ve got people who were taken by the Iron Shepherds. You know them?”

The firbolg placed two well-worn and likely well-loved teacups in front of them as they settled at the spacious table. “I don’t really get out much. My family all left, one by one, to try and find some way to stave off the corruption. It’s just me left to hold the temple, so the only time I ever hear about anything is when someone is being buried and when the Tribes are involved... Most people aren't coming to me, I guess.”

Molly's tail flicked eagerly and he grinned, all cheek- a con artist's smile he wore well. “Well, if you’re any good in a fight and would like a change of scenery, we wouldn’t mind an additional ally.”

“Mollymauk!” Cree protested indignantly, nearly choking on her tea, and Molly just shrugged.

“Never hurts to ask.”

“Mollymauk,” the firbolg chuckled, settling down to join them. “That’s a good name. Like the albatross and the sea captain. My older sister loves that story- she always likes the violent ones. I’m Mr. Clay, by the way. Caduceus Clay. Sorry I didn’t introduce myself before. I got stuck on new faces and tea. Hasn’t been anyone here in awhile.”

“Cree Deeproots,” Cree said, as politely as she could with all the tension in her body. The tea seemed to be calming her at least.

“Mollymauk Tealeaf,” Molly said, with far more flamboyance, toasting with his teacup.

Caduceus lowered his own teacup, blinking. “Deeproots and Tealeaf. And an albatross, too. Huh. That's nice.”

Molly and Cree exchanged looks as the firbolg processed this for a moment, seeming to turn it over in his head, and when they looked back, he was beaming like a man who had just reached true enlightenment. “I think you might be the sign I’ve been looking for.”

Chapter Text

“What do you mean we’re not getting paid?!”

An hour or so later, the remainder of the Mighty Nein (plus one halfling) found themselves in the Blooming Grove taking tea with Caduceus Clay. He was explaining his situation to the lot of them as he had explained it to Molly and her- destiny and signs and a willingness to help if they would help him in kind. A story not unlike her own, honestly.

She supposed Caduceus’s goals- to save his home from this encroaching blight- were nobler in the minds of the others than her own, but Cree was past the point of caring. Her goals were perfectly fine. They were Lucien’s dreams and they deserved to be realized. He just needed to come home.

It was as simple as that… It was also as complicated as that.

Now she stood outside the temple with Otis, close to a pond that Caduceus had said was where the progenitors of his family left the skull of some unnamed champion years ago or something or other- honestly, he said that so casually that the words didn’t settle exactly right until she was five feet from the door and by then she had pushed them out of her head. The itch of being this close to an object of great emotional and religious significance to her former patron goddess still itched, however.

She was an expert at ignoring things that bothered her, fortunately.

“We’re getting paid in their cooperation towards getting Lucien back,” Cree explained to the discontent halfling staring up at her through dishwater blonde curls.

Otis snorted. “I dunno how you get Lucien back outta that. I poked into his head and it’s just panic non-stop. Whatever that is in his body, it ain’t him.”

Cree stiffened, immediately. “No… No, it is him. Or at least it is a bit of him.” She growled, low and threatening, “You did not know him as long as I did Otis. You never saw him when he was…”

“A fucking mess? ‘Cause that’s what that peacock in there is.” Otis jerked their thumb in the direction of the temple.

She didn’t know where her instinct to defend Molly came from- after all, she found him absolutely irritating, herself- but it came quickly and without mercy. “Do not test me, Otis. You know who and what I am to him. I know who Lucien is deeper than anyone else. Or have you forgotten?” She pulled her amulet out of her cloak and let it catch the light peeking through the trees. Even the glimmers of sunlight felt like they came on the heels of midsummer, instead of the dull vague impression of warmth of the sun during early Empire winter.

Otis followed the shift of the blood in the light and sighed, defeated. “Still think we should be gettin’ paid for it.”

“Your concern is noted.” She scoffed and tucked her amulet back within her cloak. “If there is something valuable to be had within the Nest after we burn it to the ground, I will be certain to ensure you have your share of it.”

“And him?” He pointed to the temple again. “Lucien-but-not-Lucien?”

“You best get used to calling him Mollymauk. He will not answer to anything else.” She sighed and Otis barked a hideous little laugh.

“Now that sounds like Lucien.”

“Indeed.” She glanced away “I am… trying to humor his belief that he is an individual entity, while… perhaps encouraging him to see things as Lucien does. It is not working so well so far, but perhaps by the time we get to Tyffial…”

“And you think Tyffial will… what? Poison it out of him?” Otis raised a brow.

“I do not know, but she is clever. If there is an alchemical way to extract lost memories, I am certain that she knows it.” She hoped. If not Tyffial, then who?

Otis crossed their arms over their chest. “And what about the others?”

Ah yes. The others. The Mighty Nein. Molly’s diligent protectors who he protected, in turn, but who got him killed and let three of their own get captured. They weren’t a threat to all of the Tombtakers together under one unified banner- she was certain of that.

“We are finally getting the family back together, Otis. Whoever stood in our way before Lucien died fell before our feet. It will be that way again, soon enough.” A tiny bit of guilt tugged on her mind, like a toddler trying to grab her tail, and she batted it away. She couldn’t afford to waver.

Lucien needed her to do this. This was what she was meant to do, even if it led to disaster. And besides, what did a bunch of Tarot Cards, a sliver of a soul left in a body that belonged to a soon-to-be god and needed to be returned to him, and a wizard know about what was best for her?

Caduceus had waited for a sign for longer than he really cared to count. He wasn’t that great with numbers anyway, and, honestly, putting anything in exact terms made the whole thing even sadder and there was plenty of that to go around as is. Ultimately, it was a long time, just waiting and watching the blight creep up on him while his family were out and scattered to the winds. Even little Clarabelle, who wouldn’t have abided being left behind forever, but whose absence hurt more than the others. Only Caduceus was strong enough to carry the title of Keeper, because he was the one who stayed behind. He didn’t want or expect a destiny. Staying here and keeping watch- that was his duty. That was his mission.

But now the last son had his sign. The Wildmother had sent him an albatross, like the captain in the tale, and he would follow it, because he knew how the tale ended otherwise. That was his new mission. Woe betide anyone who ignored a sign like that. It was just asking for suffering.

He couldn’t stop chuckling to himself as he gathered things into his bag he would need for a long journey. Deeproots and Tealeaf- two things that the Blooming Grove had in abundance, driven here by a bear in the Savalirwood. Melora must have been desperate to get him moving to make such heavy-handed gestures. He appreciated that.

Maybe she was worried about him fasting and chewing on lilies so often to receive her visions. That would be nice of her. He could believe that.

It didn’t feel right to not tell these new people about his dream- the butterflies and the red eyes. That was an important part of his need to go, even if he didn’t know when or how until Molly and Cree landed in his lap. He could see those eyes staring back at him from Molly’s skin, like a threat and a reminder, but Molly was scared underneath that happy facade. Anyone with eyes could sense that, surely. He didn’t want to scare away his sign- his new friend- so even if it didn’t feel right, he stuck to his decision to keep mum for now.

Friend. Wow. He’d never had friends outside of his siblings and the plants- not really. A Gravekeeper was friend to all, but close to no one. Such was the way of things.

This was going to be an interesting shift.

He stepped out, armor in place and staff in hand, and took in the gathering of people crowded around his kitchen- Cree and her halfling friend had just returned, both looking awkward and set apart from the rest. Eight individuals, including himself, all told. One more would be nine.

Maybe that would be too much all at once. “All right,” he said, giving them all a polite, firm nod. “I hope you know the way to this place, because… I don’t, actually.”

“I do,” Keg murmured. “If you can steer us away from any fucking bone bears.”

“I mean… I’ll do my best.” He shrugged.

Caleb pushed himself up, bone-weary and looking like someone who most definitely needed more than tea. Caduceus would have to watch that one. “Well. We are almost the Mighty Nein again.”

Caduceus blinked and then counted again. Huh. Maybe it wasn’t too much for an indicator of the way things were shifting.

Poor Wildmother. This must really be eating at her.

Too many coincidences.

Caleb walked through the Savalirwood with Keg and their new firbolg ally leading the charge, mind rent with threads tangled and connected, instead of leading nowhere as they should have. Every step they had taken since the Glory Run Road felt like it was guided by some hand of fate and that hand was centered directly on Mollymauk- the rest of them were just caught up in it, like a snare. The urge to leave tugged at him- don’t get involved with this, Widogast. It was more than just lost friends and a need for protection from the things that haunted him now. There was something here that threatened to smash Fate into them like a hammer- inescapable, damning, and painful. And the Fate-Touched part of it was not yet on him. Best to run before the disease spread. Best to run before the gods had their say with his miserable life.

The memory of the Archeart cleric with her brief clarity and then sudden return to madness, as if she had taken his into herself, stirred and he dismissed it.

He walked forwards with more deliberate strides, ignoring his invasive urges to bolt, with his eyes on Molly, instead. That colorful lunatic had dimmed since his death and subsequent rebirth. His light didn’t shine quite as brightly as it used to, like death had stolen something from him.

No, not death. It wasn’t death that stole that brightness- it was Cree and what she represented. It was whatever this fucking Fate was that seemed to weave around him and choke him. He didn’t know where the urge to tear at that thread came from, but it came, unbidden, and he pushed it down with everything else he didn't want to deal with. Gods, but the idea of Fate disgusted him viscerally- that would mean he had to accept that what happened to his parents was somehow part of some design, that it was not preventable, that it could not be changed, and that he would not believe for a second.

Was Molly fated to return to being Lucien and die and they were just prolonging the inevitable or was there something else to all these threads sliding into place? He couldn’t know. It only irritated him to think too hard about it.

And suddenly Molly was at his shoulder and all of his thoughts flew away entirely. “You’ve got a stink-face to rival Beau’s. Something wrong?”

He didn’t realize how hard he’d been thinking. Or how hard he'd been cursing the gods for their obsession with playing with mortals even after sealing themselves away so not to get involved any longer. Some people just couldn't help themselves- perhaps gods were not so different. It gave him little comfort. “Ah… No. Nothing besides the obvious. We are going into a lion’s den, after all.” He eyed Molly. “Are you all right?”

He laughed, the sound reedy, yet utterly fake. “Oh absolutely. The most excitable walking corpse you’ll ever meet.”

“You do not have to lie to me.” Caleb looked away, so he didn’t have to see the tragic look in Molly’s eyes, like almond-shaped drops of blood that ought to be empty, but conveyed so much with just one solid color- no not one solid color. If Caleb looked closely, he could see that his eyes were multiple shades of red.

But why would he be looking closely?

“I’m fine, Caleb,” Molly sighed. “It’s just… a lot right now. I’ll be better once we’ve got our people back.”

“That will not solve the problem with Cree,” Caleb lowered his voice. The tabaxi woman was farther ahead with Keg and Caduceus and her strange and unnerving little halfling friend. “Are you prepared to take this as far as she wants it to go?”

Molly swallowed so hard Caleb could hear it. “Do you think it’ll change me?”

Gott, he wanted an answer to that, didn’t he? Honest advice from him, the sadsack dirt wizard, so very clever and so very not at the same time. “I do not think it can change you if you do not want to be changed. She called for Lucien when she revived you, but you came back, instead. Maybe there is no Lucien anymore.”

“You don’t believe that, though.” Now it was Molly’s turn to call him on his pretty lies. Fair is fair, he supposed.

Caleb turned his thoughts inward, pretending to be focused on navigating the increasingly more complicated wooded terrain as they made their way to the Sour Nest. This forest felt like a deathtrap, like a living thing that could swallow them whole and spit them out, tooth and bone. “You are Mollymauk Tealeaf, circus man. And the people who know you thus outnumber the people who know you as Lucien. I do not think you have anything to worry about.”

He didn’t expect that breathless sound of relief, nor did he expect Molly to gently knock his horns against the side of his head as he leaned against him. What he expected least was the flush that crept to his cheek. Oh, that’s cute. “Thank you… Mr. Caleb.”

Caleb swallowed around his suddenly very dry mouth. “Ja. You are very welcome. Mr. Mollymauk.”

If there was one thing that Nott was certain of in all of this bullshit it was this:

She hated Otis.

Her time with them numbered in the hours and she was already absolutely, irrevocably done with their everything. They were a disgrace to halflings. They were just- they were awful. She didn’t need a specific reason. And, honestly, how dare they use a crossbow and arcane magic? Didn’t they know that was her thing?

And, of course, they were sneaky, too. Or at least Cree labeled them sneaky enough to insist they accompany her as they scouted out the battlements of the Sour Nest in the hopes of quietly dispatching the guards. Nott had enough time to be deeply pissed about that before it hit her that she was being left alone to scout with Otis.

Really, forget the tragedies of the last week. This was the true misery right here. She was the victim of the worst crimes concocted by gods and men. She didn't deserve any of this. She was a... okay person. Certainly not the sort who deserved punishment. Is this because of the fucking baby? I didn't even know it was a baby! It was a stew!

And of course, just to make it worse and stick the blade under her nails even deeper, Otis insisted on chatting.

“So what is your deal?” Nott asked, oblivious to her own hypocrisy (in reality, Otis hadn’t actually said a word thus far unless it was in answer to her questions) as they moved through the creepy, blighted wood.

“What’s yours? Never seen a goblin minglin’ about with folk like this unless they were someone’s pet or servant or somethin’.”

Nott’s giant ears twitched. Her hatred was only growing by the minute. “I am a valued member of this group, thank you.”

“Didn’t say you weren’t. Just wonderin’ how a cute little goblin girl ends up with Empire kids.”

“I’m a-” She stopped herself before she could say Empire kid. No… No, she wasn’t, was she? She cleared her throat. She wasn’t thinking about that or that Otis called her cute. Nope. “Caleb and I go way back. We’ve been through a lot together. Probably many of the same things you and, uh… Lucien and Cree and Tyffeel-”

Otis barked a laugh. “Ty-fell,” they corrected. “Don’t mispronounce her name. She’s a real nasty one when she gets pissed and most things piss her off.”

“Oh. How... delightful,” Nott drawled. “Did you, uh… Grow up with them here in the Run?”

She was information gathering. That was it. It wasn’t that the fucking death forest creeped her out and Otis was all she had to hide her nervousness behind when she wasn't stealing sips from her flask (no you can't have a sip- I don't want your eternal backwash). She was a detective, godsdammit! She would learn all she could about the Tombtakers and use it against them. Yes. That. Absolutely.

Once more, Otis chuckled, raspy and breathy and too creepy. Seriously, when you creep out a goblin, you’re reaching for the stars. “Nah, I’m from Trostenwald.”

“....Really? That’s where we all- that is Mollymauk, Caleb, Beau, and our friends that were taken- all met.” Something about that made her ears itch. Caleb had mentioned something about the number of coincidences and now she was starting to see it.

“That a fact?” Otis mulled that over. “Baumbauch, Husseldorf, or von Brandt?”

“Von Brandt.” Nott squinted.

They snorted, derisively. “Tastes like piss. I prefer Baumbauch.”

Oh, she was definitely gonna kill this asshole.

Beyond the gnarled and unsettling trees, a fort was beginning to come into view, which distracted her from her goal of just ever so gently putting a bolt in Otis’s back. The walls rose taller than she thought she could conceivably climb and guards milled about on the battlements, eyes scanning the treeline, weapons drawn, looking just as unsettled as she felt.

Apparently, even awful slavers hated this fucking forest.

She took a deep breath and began a series of elaborate hand signals in Otis’s general direction. They watched her, seeming to be following her gestures, and then once she’d finished, they lifted their middle finger at her, and took off to position themselves at the edge of the treeline in line of sight of one of the guards who was looking a little tired and leaning precariously against the stones. A flash of veiny red light emanated from Otis’s hand and Nott had time to hiss before it struck the guard in the back and then dragged him off the wall and onto the ground. His spine snapped as he made contact, his mouth hanging open in a voiceless scream, cut off before it could form.

“Did fucking Phil fall off the wall again?” One of the guards snapped from far enough away that they must not have seen a thing except “Phil” plummeting. “That drunk motherfucker. Go get ‘em, Ned.”

“Why do I gotta do it?” Another guard whined. “I’m always picking his drunk ass up.”

“‘Cause I’m shift captain.”

“I don’t think that’s a real thing…”

Nott followed the sound of the voice, sneaking through the shadows until she found a ladder located just off to the side of the guardpost by the closed gates. One of the guards was climbing down, still grumbling about how shift captain wasn’t a real thing. The second his feet made contact with the ground, Nott fired two crossbow bolts into his back, darted forward to reclaim them from his unmoving body and then began to circle while the other two guards were bitching about Ned and Phil.

Otis, because they were the worst, had circled around to join her. They sized each other up, nodded, and both angled their crossbows at the same time. In perfect synchronicity, their targets fell over the wall and dropped to the ground in front of him with heavy thuds.

They exchanged smug looks. “Not bad.” Otis gave her an appraising look. “Not bad at all.”

Nott shuddered and unwound her copper thread. “Caleb, the guards are dead, and also tell Cree that Otis is objectifying me and it’s creeping me out.”

Otis chuckled as they meandered away from her with a flirty swivel of their hips, somehow making themselves even more creepy in the process.

No one would know if I killed them, she thought, trigger finger itching on the crossbow as she raised it to Otis's retreating back. No one would have to know.

She swore, lowered the weapon, and waited for Caleb.

Maybe later.

Four guards killed before anyone inside was the wiser. Maybe Beau was wrong and Cree was right the whole time- maybe this wouldn’t be the unmitigated disaster that the assault on the cart was. Then again, it was thinking shit like that that invited problems later. They had thought that damn cart plan was perfect and- well. Fuck. That about summed it up.

She knelt beside one of the smaller guards who seemed like his clothes were close enough to her size and slipped them on over her monk vestments, rubbing dirt on her face to obscure her features. When she looked up, she had to swallow a scream as the dead guard beside the one she had just stripped was just standing there.

“Oh… Sorry.” Caduceus’s voice came from the unfamiliar- and definitely still laying next to her dude dead- form. “I think I stand out too much without a disguise.”

“No…. That’s fuckin’ awesome, dude,” Beau stammered, shaking herself out of her fear. “Just thought the creepy forest brought the dead to life or you put something in that tea or... whatever. It’s been one of those days, you know?”

Caduceus let out a low chuckle that sounded like a warm hug. Dammit. She liked this guy already. Who sanctioned that? She didn’t like people that quickly. Usually.

Well, she liked Jester that quickly.

Gods. Jester. She pulled her gaze from Caduceus and back towards the wall. With any luck, Jester, Fjord, and Yasha would be right inside. Please be safe. Please don’t let them have already been broken.

She forced herself to think of the plan, instead. No sense praying for divine intervention (if she were even really the type to pray) when she could make things happen right now. The idea was for her and Caduceus to take point as guards on either side of the stronghold to keep anyone from suspecting a situation while the rest made their way in. Only once the path was clear, would she and Caduceus follow and bring Hell- well she'd bring Hell. Caduceus would bring whatever he was supposed to be bringing besides extra healing.

She cracked her knuckles. Not being in the thick of things irritated her, but she was better suited for clean-up. If something went pear-shaped or an ambush happened, they were going to need her speed and skill and Caduceus’s healing to get them out.

She gave him a nod and they split the group- one in the back and one in the front now that Nott had unlocked the gate to let them in- with her taking Molly, Cree, and Otis and Caduceus taking Caleb, Nott, and Keg. She doubted it had been accidental that it had fallen out that way, but Cree and Otis laying out the tactics had made sense- a cleric to each team, a stealthy person, a spellcaster on deck, and a martial fighter. And here was Beau as the last line of defense in case Cree decided to just take Molly and fucking bolt.

She caught Molly by the shoulder before she could start to climb up the ladder and leave him to get into position. “If they do something shitty, just leave them to die. Don’t let them take you.”

“For fuck’s sake, Beau, they’re not gonna take me. I'm not a delicate flower.” He gave her a pat on the cheek. “But your concern is adorable.”

She growled and swatted at his hand. “Fuck you.”

He chuckled and went to join Cree and Otis, tucked among the crates, leaving her to watch Caleb, Nott, Caduceus, and Keg vanish around the corner to go in the back entrance.

“Showtime,” she muttered, and began her ascent up the ladder to take her place on the wall.

“All I’m saying is we could have divided it up better,” Nott complained as she checked the back door for traps. “Keep Otis with you two and that way if she dies, she dies, and you can easily say you did everything you could. Such a shame, really.”

“Is this really the time for your hate-boner, Nott?” Keg was fidgeting in place, watching the goblin go through the motions while Caleb gave orders to a fucking tarantula and meanwhile, she was having the beginnings of a panic attack. The last time she had been in this place, Raleigh was in a fucking oversized birdcage getting a hot poker in his ribs and she-

No. Fucking focus. Her hesitation and fear had gotten Molly killed before and it lost her Raleigh ages ago. She had to keep her shit together or someone else might die (or worse) and there’d be no stroke of luck to get them back. She’d just be left with another consequence of her shitty, shitty actions.

Fuck. She needed a cigarette.

Nott pushed the door open and Caleb dropped spider-Frumpkin down onto the ground to let him slip on through. “He is going to map the layout for us,” he explained, clapping a hand on Keg’s shoulder. “I am going to go blind and deaf for a tic, ja? So if anything tries to kill us, shake me really hard.”

“But don’t punch him,” Nott nodded, firmly. “You’ll break his arm.”

Now that they were here within the stronghold, Molly was starting to feel the panic fluttering against his ribcage like a trapped butterfly. They had done the impossible to get here this quickly with everyone safe and sound and ready to fight and they gained three allies they didn’t expect to have before their failed ambush. Surely, it would turn out all right this time.

Except they had thought that about the ambush too- that fucking tree they worked so hard to yank down to block the path, and gods if Molly hadn't insisted on Nott getting the captives out, then she wouldn't have been out of the fight. A dozen things they should have done and none of it probably would have changed anything. Combat could turn so quickly and they were dealing with unknown terrain where the enemy had all the advantages. Molly’s only solace was that he had been left with the most powerful practitioners of magic they had available to them while Caleb had Frumpkin and Nott to scout for him.

He was more worried about everyone else, honestly. If he had his druthers, he would rather have Cree and Otis with the squishy wizard than here with him, and not just because being alone with two members of Lucien’s party made him twitchy. He didn’t have enough room in his head for that to bother him, for the most part.

But this was how it shook out. The idea was that they would clear the first floor, meet in the middle, and then take the second floor and kill everyone in their beds, which maybe a kinder person would find distasteful, but even Molly found a quick death in their sleep to be a more merciful end than what they were inflicting on their… merchandise. Once everyone upstairs was dead, they would be free to tackle the basement and release the captives.

That was the idea, anyway.

Cree pulled her cloak tighter around herself. “Stay close to me,” she urged. “If anything goes wrong, I can put a significant amount of distance between us and them.” She hesitated and then tapped Molly on the shoulder. The pulse of friendly magic spread across his skin in a comforting, warm wave- not familiar like Caleb’s, but still pleasant. Safe.

“What was that?” He asked. He didn’t feel faster or anything, like he normally felt when Caleb put a spell on him. If it felt like anything, it was like a shield had gone up around his veins somehow, too deep within him to be perceptible unless he went looking.

“Death Ward,” she explained, a look of immeasurable pride on her catlike face. “You will not be falling again on my watch.”

Otis grumbled and pushed past them. “Two years I haven’t had to watch you two flirt. I miss it already.”

Molly balked, and Cree looked so horrified he expected her to snap Otis up in her teeth and fling them into a corner. “Were you and Lucien-?”

Gods, he was an idiot. He should have known with the way she behaved- that was just an uncomfortable amount of being into someone. He didn’t want to think it, but fuck.

“Not now,” she snapped in a hissing whisper and began to creep stealthily ahead, leaving Molly to shake the new information out of his mind. Later. He would deal with Cree’s abysmal taste in men later. Now was for killing slavers.

But really fuck this situation. It just kept getting worse.

Frumpkin suddenly bamfed back onto Caleb’s shoulders, three of his spider legs broken, but, mercifully, still alive. “Two guards in the dining hall,” he gasped out. “They saw him.”

“Well, he’s just a spider, right?” Keg shrugged. “Spiders happen.”

All Caleb could do was grunt noncommittally and gently pet spider!Frumpkin, as if he were back in cat form, and coo at him. “You are all right. You did good.” And then, to Nott and Keg, “There is a, ah, trap door in a different room. Frumpkin cannot get it open, but perhaps you can, Nott. We can send him down to investigate while we clear the floor. Just be wary of the guards for now- spiders might happen, as Keg puts it, but goblins do not.”

“You don’t know much about goblins,” Nott chuckled, darkly. “We can be quite the infestation.”

That did nothing to assuage his worries. “Just be careful. If anything happens-”

“If anything happens, you’ll hear me scream,” Nott cut him off, and then slipped in through the door, leaving Caleb to wait, blind this time.

Off Keg eyeing him, he looked down at her, ”Was?”

She blew out a breath. “Stop petting the spider, man. It’s creepy.”

He pet Frumpkin more pointedly. "This is my cat."

At that flat response, Keg pressed a gauntleted hand to her forehead and keened in abject misery.

Pacing the wall was boring, Beau found, and she couldn’t see in the fucking dark. Putting her goggles on might make her stand out since those dudes they’d just dealt with definitely didn’t have cool googles and didn't have hoods on their nondescript clothing to hide them, so she was stuck blind for the moment.

In more ways than one. Moments ago, Cree, Molly, and Otis had vanished in the front door and she had no way of knowing what was going on unless Cree Sent her a message, and she probably wasn’t eager to waste the spells. Caleb or Nott would send her the signal when they had the floor secure and there hadn't been so much as a chirp of an anxious update from Nott's copper wire. So she was stuck here, biding her time.

She might be blind, but she wasn’t deaf. The sound of breaking pottery could be heard even at this distance, followed by the sound of indistinct chatter. Suddenly, Caleb’s voice was in her head. “We have been made. Cause a distraction and get down here.”

Cause a fucking distraction- that was more like it. Beau stuck a hand in her pouch and came up with a handful of firecrackers from Hupperdook, grinning with maniacal glee. Finally. “I knew these would come in handy.”

Things escalated quickly in the middle of an already bad situation.

But for a brief moment things were calm and Cree was just creeping alongside Otis and Molly, shivering at how normal the Sour Nest was- just a manor house built in the middle of the woods. It used to be the Jagentoths' original home, as memory served, before they expanded their empire, before they found how much they could truly make on the backs of slaves. Back in the day, slave labor was an idle interest. They didn’t have nearly this level of… industry when she was a child. Perhaps if they had, things could have turned out far worse for-

No. No, fuck that. She was not going to be lost in that mire, not when she had to keep an eye on Mollymauk, who might recall things from deep within his subconscious. Her own anxiety was little compared to how nervously she watched him for any sign of fear or recognition, but it was hard to tell. He was scared enough as it was for innumerable other reasons.

And then everything went to shit, and none of that mattered.

The clatter of breaking pottery made her fur stand on end and Molly went rigid, hands flying to his swords. “Fuck,” he swore.”

“What if someone in here’s just butterfingers?” Otis offered, but their observation was followed up by Nott’s pained yelp. "Never mind. It's the goblin."

Molly didn’t bother to swear again. He just lunged forward in the direction of Nott’s scream. Cree tried to grab for his coat, but he slipped out of her grip like an eel, leaving her with only the faintest brush of cloth between her claws that didn't snag. “Mollymauk! I told you to stay close”

Otis jerked his thumb towards him as he ignored her. “See? Lucien would never do that.”

“Shut the fuck up, Otis,” she snarled, and pursued him, leaving the halfling to follow in her wake or be left behind.

“Everything is popping off,” Caleb nervously sing-songed as he heard the sound of firecrackers exploding from the front of the manor- pun unintended, but ah, doesn't that make it funnier? He had already sent a message to Caduceus who was on his way down and there was nothing left but to head in and hope that between everyone present, they could pincer the Shepherds and turn this into a killbox. He had so wanted to get the lay of the land first, but that hadn’t technically been the plan- murder first, then scope out the rest- but his mind kept sticking on the idea that perhaps torturers didn’t sleep. Perhaps Jester, Fjord, and Yasha were being tortured right now and they could be wasting time.

His mind kept flashing back to Jester picking him up off the ground when he nearly blacked out in Hupperdook. Who was going to pick her up if he didn’t get to her- no. Stay on task, Widogast.

He looked to Keg who was vibrating with the same nervous energy he was exuding, her hands on her weapons- there's an idea. He slapped one hand down on her shoulder, startling her, and rifled around in his pockets with the other. If she was going to vibrate, ready for the fight, best to utilize it in the best possible way. “Let’s make this quick.” Pun intended.

He bit into a piece of licorice and cast haste on her. Keg, now amped up, rushed in and not six seconds later he heard the sound of human screams and the dwarf woman yelling holy fuck.

He chewed on his licorice anxiously, counted to ten in Zemnian, and then followed her inside.

Molly was aware of the firecrackers going off behind him, of Cree yelling at him to slow down, but he had zeroed in on Nott’s yell. No one else was going to die if he could help it, which meant he was going to run straight towards any suggestion of danger that might yield someone's unexpected demise. He made it halfway across the first floor before a familiar woman with greasy blonde hair and tattered leathers stepped into his path, bedraggled and pissed. Keg had called her Wohn, if he remembered correctly.

Dead Woman might be a more accurate name for her. Her anger had nothing on Molly’s when he saw what she had in her hand- a familiar sword.

The Magician’s Judge.

His eyes narrowed to bloody slits and he drew his own swords, sliding one across his shoulder and splattering blood on the floor in a way that made even this savage barbarian woman flinch back. Despite the heat from the fresh blood, the air grew colder as the scimitar became encased with ice. “That doesn’t belong to you, dear,” he snarled and then lunged, locking the heavy sword between both his scimitars. She was bigger and stronger than he was, but he was lithe and agile and he danced away from most of her blows. Her eyes flashed with a familiar glow that he’d seen in Yasha’s eyes time and time again and no matter how many times he landed hits, it felt like she was just shrugging off the damage. Death by a thousand cuts was a hell of a way to go, but too slow.

And then there were flames suddenly- blood red and unnatural and unlike any fire he had ever seen. Wohn screamed in agony as the flames consumed her, the sword clattering uselessly to the ground and Molly sheathed his own swords, despite knowing how dangerous that was, to grab the Judge and hold onto it like it was the world’s sharpest security blanket.

Cree was at his side in an instant. She must have been the one to cast the spell. “Mollymauk, keep it together.”

“This is Yasha’s,” he protested. “They took it from her. We got this together and they just took it from her.” Logically, that happened. People steal. People loot corpses. Having something in your possession doesn’t mean you’ll always get to keep it. Yes, logically he knew that, but something about this, in particular, niggled at him. The idea that Yasha’s property hadn’t been stolen or taken from her body, but had been claimed because she was a trophy- property, herself, and property didn't own property. It was stark proof of what he was saving her from.

“Mollymauk…” Cree grasped his face in her hands, trying to ground him. “There will be others. We need to go. We need to kill them.”

Molly blinked out of his own personal hell, but the rage didn’t dwindle. It continued to burn, wholly not unlike him, but somehow familiar at the same time. He shoved the Judge into Jester’s haversack- it poked out of one corner awkwardly- and stood, taking up his own swords again. “That’s the first thing you’ve said that I’ve actually agreed with.”

Nott was pressed against the door she’d failed to unlock right before she’d tripped and upended some haphazardly stacked pottery- seriously, who the fuck stacks pottery in a godsdamned hall? And in a torture mansion? Before her stood Keg, shifting rapidly in place, back and forth, her weapons bloodied, guards strewn at her feet.

“Who else wants some?!” She snarled.

Nott didn’t know what to think of any of that and the moment Caleb, creeping cautiously within the chamber (followed by a still-disguised Caduceus), arrived, she turned to give him a wide-eyed look. “What did you give her?”

She noted he was still chewing on licorice. “Oh, you know… Some people respond to spells differently.”

“Is this gonna be forever?!” Keg choked out, somewhere between elated and terrified. “I feel like I just bathed in black coffee.”

Nott shook her head and turned to the door, remembering the reason why things were escalating before they were ready to escalate them. Her ears drooped down below her shoulders as she flinched. That was on her. “I’m so sorry, Caleb. This is a really complicated lock and I tripped and-”

“Do not fret, my friend. It is all taken care of.” He rapped his knuckles on the door and instantly the lock clicked and it could be pulled open. He dropped spider-Frumpkin on her shoulder. “Try to resist the urge to eat him.”

“He looks so tasty though…” She shook her head. Focus, Nott. Casting a look at Keg who suddenly barreled forward in the direction of more conflict to get maximum usage out of the spell and burn off her excess energy, she maneuvered into the room and paced a circle around the trapdoor. “It’s trapped,” she declared, and stepped back, gesturing for Caleb to do the same.

All right, Nott, time to prove you’re not the shittiest rogue. Using mage hand, she was able to disarm the trap on the underside and as she felt it give way under the magic and fail, she breathed a sigh of relief and removed Frumpkin from her shoulder.

Gods, he really did look delicious. Those crunchy legs- especially with a couple of them broken from him being injured earlier.

Fuck. Stupid goblin brain. She inhaled, exhaled, and then placed Frumpkin on the ground and lifted the trapdoor. “In you go, fella.”

“Ceiling please, Frumpkin. Remember- stay out of sight.” With that said, Caleb dropped a hand on Nott’s shoulder and she clutched at it while he went blind.

Elsewhere, the battle continued.

Caduceus hovered outside the trapdoor room, uncertain of what to do in this situation. So this was what adventure was like. Huh. It was a lot more tense than he would have preferred- Colton and Calliope would have been all over this kind of thing, but they weren’t here. They were elsewhere, and this was his sign to follow, no matter how dangerous it got. No destiny was ever built without tension and hardship.

At least he was among people who really seemed to grasp what they were doing. He was fine playing support. Left alone with the corpses, and only here to make sure no one slipped past the door to bother Caleb and Nott, he gently tapped the dead guards with the crystal on his staff and watched as the decomposition process began to speed up, producing fungus and the faint, haunting smell of carrion blooms.

That was about when Beau showed up, skidding to a stop before she landed right in the middle of the Sour Nest's new corpse garden. “...What the fuck, Caduceus?”

He blinked slowly. “I mean… They were gonna end up like that, anyway.”

Beau looked at the freshly mulched bodies, to Caduceus, and then back to the bodies. “...Yeah… Yeah, that’s fair. Where’s Caleb and Nott? I just saw Keg heading upstairs with Molly and the Tombtakers. They look like they’re out for blood.”

Caduceus noted that she looked like she very much wanted to have joined them, but felt her talents were needed elsewhere, much to her trepidation. That was nice. She gave off the aura of a caustic, hot-headed individual, but she seemed to be willing to put that aside for the greater good.

He inclined his head to the door behind him. “There’s a trapdoor in there. They’re, uh… Sending the spider in to check out what’s down there. I’m keeping an eye out.”

Beau nodded, glanced behind her and then reached up- way up (she was tiny)- to touch his shoulder and steer him through the door. “I got an idea. Come on.”

“Aw her haste faded,” Otis chuckled as Keg suddenly went still and then began to vomit on the floor of the second upstairs sleeping chamber. “You hate to see it.”

While Otis seemed as relaxed as a person could be, even in a den of murderers, Molly was tense, coiled tight as a spring. He had headed in this direction, hoping to catch as many of the Iron Shepherds struggling to wake and put their armor on and gather their weapons, but the first two rooms had yielded very little beyond unfamiliar guards. At least Keg’s haste hadn’t worn off in the middle of a fight. Small mercies.

His eyes narrowed on the master bedroom and he moved towards it with violent purpose, both swords glowing now, despite the risk bleeding that much posed. Cree followed, leaving Otis to stay with Keg to make sure she pulled herself together. For once, Cree didn’t protest his willingness to run into danger. Maybe she knew the truth before he did- when he kicked open the door, bellowing “LORENZO!” at the top of his voice, there was no one within the chamber at all.

He felt instantly robbed of something. His hands shook as his knuckles went pale from holding the swords too tightly. Cree at his shoulder, tried to pull him back, only to stop, her eyes widening.

“Oh no, no… No.”

Molly blinked at her, his rage ebbing, because the one thing consistent about him was that nothing seemed to outweigh concern for other people’s well-being. Cree, usually very put together from what he’d seen of her thus far, had never shown horror like what was currently on her face before. “Cree?”

She shook her head, unable to verbalize anything other than minimal syllables as she stepped into the room, moving towards a bedside table. Molly had been so focused on his agitation that Lorenzo wasn’t where he had hoped he would be (and what would he have done if he was- died again, probably, even with Cree, Otis, and Keg right there, because he wasn’t thinking clearly through his anger) that he hadn’t noticed the pile of small bones left picked clean on cracked porcelain.

Molly’s stomach dropped into his boots as Cree lifted the tiny skull in her own shaking hands. “This belonged to a child.”

Molly felt everything in his vision go red. “He…” He couldn’t say the words at first. That was a platter those bones were on, like the meat had been prepared for him. Even from this distance, he could see the faint scraping of teeth marks, broken pieces where someone had cracked the little bones to suck out the marrow, and the remains of untouched vegetables beneath already starting to turn. Not only had the fucker eaten it, but someone had prepared and plated it with all the care of a high-end restaurant. Everything he already hated about Lorenzo and everyone underneath him intensified, waking up a sleeping dragon inside of him that he hadn't even known was there. “Are you telling me this son of a whore eats babies?” He finally said, voice barely prevented from becoming a shriek by a need for some kind of discretion. He was shocked that every breath he took in heaving, livid pants didn't spit smoke.

Cree dropped the skull and covered her mouth, backing away. Again, it was the only thing that stayed his own anger- someone else’s clear trauma. She was murmuring under her breath, too fast, too tangled in her thick accent as to be only barely perceptible. “He told me that if I wasn’t good, he would sell me to someone who eats kittens- I was a little girl. I didn’t know any better. But I thought surely it was a lie as I got older. Surely he was only trying to scare me. No one but hags and monsters are that cruel.”

He is a monster and sometimes those monsters live in society like everyone else. He didn't say that- couldn't, because he was losing his voice to the tumult of his own rage. He had to pick and choose his battles and the one he chose was one of comfort, while he still could be soft. There was a distinct feeling clawing at his ribs, wrapping around his spine and using it as a ladder to nest in his brain that told him he would not be soft for much longer. He had to sheathe one of his swords to grab her shoulder and gently shake her, which meant sacrificing a rite- the things he did out of affection. Even with that kindness, he wasn’t going to examine any of what she was saying closely. Not right now. Maybe not ever. It didn’t matter. Her damage, not his. They needed to move on. “Cree, he’s somewhere in this building, still. We have to warn everyone else.”

She swallowed, breath coming out shaky, but her nerves began to steady and she stopped shaking underneath his grip. “...Indeed. It seems we are going to be pulling each other out of hell this entire siege.” An awkward, half-mad laugh burbled out of her. She paused and looked down like she was trying to blink back tears and didn't want him to see. “Be lucky you do not remember certain things in Lucien’s past. This could be so much worse.”

“It’s already pretty fucking bad.” His palm itched suddenly and he reached up to rub it against the ridges of his horns, turning to go. “Let’s get moving, then.”

“...Mollymauk?” Cree called, just as he was about to reenter the hall. He turned back to look at her. “You are very angry right now, yes?”

That was a stupid question- even if he could drop it and pick up sympathy and decency to hold onto for a minute, it still burned through his entire body like his veins were on fire. “More than I’ve ever been.”

She seemed to be struggling with something. “Just… Focus on it. It can be useful.”

He squinted at her, but he didn’t have time to fight her on whatever the hell she was talking about, and just shook his head, and pressed on. They had to get back downstairs before Lorenzo found everyone else.

He had to put that fucker in the ground.

Ira’s eye was starting to glow.

Cree had seen it when Molly lifted his palm for just a moment to scratch at it. It was a faint, barely visible glow, but if you knew to look, it was so obvious. And if Ira was waking up… Could all of them be awoken in time? Was that the key to bringing back Lucien?

All of that she pushed aside, still shaking from the sight of the child’s skeleton, reminding her of her youth here in the Run where orphans and unattended children were nothing but property to be claimed or sold or used up or, apparently, devoured. Her only solace was Molly’s kindness- his willingness to even lay his anger aside to speak gently to her in a way Lucien never had. He would have been rougher and just as upset as she was. He would have pushed her because he was angry at himself for being affected by his own traumas. They would have scraped each other raw as they navigated this situation and then found solace and peace after when there was nothing left to hurt them. There would have been no moment of calm in this storm.

But Molly was unfettered, unchained. He didn’t have what Lucien had that made him so angry, and yet here he was, gentleness aside, so livid that even Ira could find him. Lucien had always joked that Ira could find him in the Hells, themselves, because his anger was so distinct, so utterly bright.

”Lucien means ‘light’ in the language of the Age of Arcanum,” she remembered him saying, as excited as a babe on Winter's Crest. ”I’m their light. Their herald. Their guiding star.”

If they were reaching out to Molly now, after two years of apparent silence, then perhaps Lucien’s light was shining through again, spurred on by the intensity of this moment, pressed against the very traumas that had built him and made him so desperate to be special, so desperate to fix the broken world that tried to break him. Maybe dying had reminded them there was a fragment of soul that they missed and they were called to it now by the burning brightness of his emotions.

But as much as she wanted to roll that about in her head and dare to hope, they were still in combat, still in danger. Molly swept back downstairs with Otis and a deeply hungover-looking Keg following, and she brought up the rear, as her training dictated- years out of practice and the old lessons still stuck. Clerics always in the back. They never rush ahead. They never showboat. They are invisible until they are needed to support.

Worry about Lucien and the Somovem later. It wouldn’t mean anything if they didn’t make it out alive, and she was the healer. If anyone fell, it would be on her head.

Chapter Text

In the basement of the Sour Nest, a group of slavers had just begun their evening ritual of polishing off some of the new merchandise when the sound of heavy footfalls and combat rang out from above them- unexpected, and, honestly, distracting as hell.

Rachelle, a female Goliath, tossed down her pliers in an agitated huff. She was just about to go fetch that pretty boy half half-orc and pry out one of those sanded down baby tusks for the boss, too. Would’ve been the fucking highlight of her night, but nooo. Shit was popping off somewhere. She blamed Ned and Phil. “Something’s goin’ on upstairs.”

“Wohn’s got it,” Terrence, a scrawny human prodding a hot poker into a cage and making the child inside scream, muttered. Terrence loved torturing the kids. Creepy, but someone had to be the one to do it, and why not someone who really got a kick out of it? Nothing wrong with loving your work.

Rachelle squinted as she heard footsteps on the stairs. Phil and Ned from the wall were coming down, right on time to get dogged. “Weren’t you two supposed to be on the wall? What the fuck’s happening up there?”

“It’s fuckin’ Keg,” Ned said, sounding a little hoarser than he usually did. He looked like he faceplanted into the mud again- drunk bastard. “She must’ve found a secret entrance or something. We’ve got her upstairs, but we could use a little help.”

Terrence prodded the child again. Ned and Phil’s heads shifted immediately in that direction. “Can you put that on pause or something?” Ned snapped with a little more force than he usually put behind his words. Maybe he was growing a pair. About time.

“Whatever.” Terrence threw down his poker and he and Rachelle began to make their way upstairs, following the two guards. “I’ve been kinda wantin’ to take a whack at Keg, anyway, eh, Rachelle?”

Rachelle cracked her knuckles. “Yeah, I could stand to take a whack at her.”

The two slavers emerged from the trapdoor and took in the sight laid out before them- not Keg in chains, but Keg with both weapons drawn, splattered with blood and all around her were a group of deeply pissed individuals with equally bloodied weapons.

“Go ahead,” Keg grinned. “Take a whack at me.”

Neither Rachelle nor Terrence had time to yell before they were assaulted on two sides by spells and fell into mangled, charred heaps, their remains slipping and landing with meaty thuds at the bottom of the stairs.

Caleb sat on the floor in front of the trapdoor, knowing that Frumpkin was waiting for the signal to move again. Molly was crouched beside him, breathing heavily, but offering a shoulder for him to grasp while he focused on checking the rest of the basement. Where there were two people at work, there were likely more.

They were supposed to be asleep. Leave it to a group of assholes to operate nocturnally. Probably to throw off the circadian rhythm of their victims- make them unable to tell night from day and disorient them. He had seen that tactic in other types of men.

Not the fucking time to venture down that rabbit hole. The foxes might mistake him for one of the rabbits if he started to tremble now.

With Molly to hold onto, Caleb flicked back into Frumpkin’s vision and began to scout from the ceiling. He could see a person-sized birdcage down there, the shaking child that they had heard scream before locked within, alone and scared. Caleb’s heart broke for them but there was nothing he could do at this moment. While lingering on the chain that held the cage suspended from the ceiling and lamenting not being strong enough to pull the anchor free, he- through Frumpkin’s eyes- picked up on something else strange and shadowy anchored up there as well. Frumpkin tilted his many eyes downwards following a rope to a half-invisible cable, lying taut across the path- oh.

“There is a trap down there- a net of bricks with a trip wire, I think” he explained as Frumpkin shifted around the obstacle, avoiding even delicately touching it as if even the slightest bit of motion might drop the heavy load. It wouldn’t hurt anyone too terribly, but it would make a noise, and it could be useful as is. He kept going, through the open door out into the hallway, currently empty, and through an archway into a second room.

This one was not empty- the halfling and the half-elf from the fight on the road were both lurking, weapons drawn and whispering under their breaths.

“There are two of them in the second room- the rogue and the spellcaster,” Caleb murmured, and brought Frumpkin in closer to see if he could hear what they were saying. All of a sudden, the halfling locked eyes on the spider on the ceiling and Caleb didn’t have time to snap his fingers before the crossbow hit his cat-spider dead-on and Frumpkin returned to his home plane.

Caleb’s vision clarified as he rejoined the group, shaking with anger and the shock of Frumpkin being killed while he was still seeing through his eyes. “They killed my cat.”

They waited for a moment, but Protto and Ruzza showed no sign of following up on the spider situation. Keg took a moment to have a smoke break, while everyone discussed the best way of dispatching them. Protto deserved what was coming and Ruzza was kind of a bitch, but it was still weird to be plotting their murders after everything. They hadn't been the ones to take Raleigh and they probably hadn't put hands on him either. They liked him, inasmuch as anyone liked anyone here. Liked her more than anyone else- that was why it had hurt when one of Lorenzo's clients out in the Hespet asked him to get an elf of a certain description that had matched Raleigh enough that he decided he was a better investment in a cage, rather than someone to go out hunting for another of his own kind. No one had said a goddamned word about one of their own being boxed up with a bow- Ruzza and Protto, included.

Well, such was fucking life in Shadycreek Run. The only person here she actually liked was Wohn (who had expressed her condolences about Raleigh even if she didn't run with her), and Molly and Cree had taken care of her. At least it hadn’t been her being forced to make that call. She wasn't sure she could stomach that.

She flicked her used-up cigarette to the side. “What if we figured out how to lure them underneath that trap and someone could trip it. Someone who can fuckin’ hide.”

“How’re we going to lure them away?” Beau raised an eyebrow and Keg’s eyes flicked to Caduceus.

“Hey, Caddyshack, you still look like one of the guards. Maybe you could, I dunno, pull a con.”

“A what now?” Caduceus blinked.

“A c-” Oh shit. She paused, scrunched up her face. It wasn't often that she had to be the one to explain things. “It’s like when you lie to people so they’ll-”

“No, I know what a con is- I’m just messing with you.” Keg turned red both in frustration and embarrassment, but Caduceus went on before she could get properly indignant about it. “I’m not really much of a liar. I don’t, um… Put much thought into deceit. It's not really my thing.”

Cree stepped forward. “Perhaps now is the time to learn, my friend. Deceit is a boon companion to adventurers.” She lifted a hand and placed it on Caduceus’s disguised forehead- fuck she had big hands- and murmured a spell. “There now. That will make you more convincing. You can just tell them about the corpses and they will come running to investigate.”

Caduceus gave her a lopsided smirk that would probably be cute when he was a firbolg properly and not a snaggletoothed disheveled human guard. “Aw. Thanks, Ms. Cree.”

“And as for stealth…” Caleb winced, and pulled a scroll out of his bag. “I was saving this for when I could add it to my spellbook, but no time like the present.” He looked over at Nott. “Ah, Nott. Bitte kommen Sie her.” He cleared his throat- probably realizing he’d switched languages. Guy must be pretty fucked about his dead spider to forget Common like that. Sometimes that happened to her when she got knocked on the head too hard. “Come. I am going to use Calianna’s scroll on you.”

Nott’s ears stood straight up. “But Caleb- if you need that for your spellbook-”

“Nein, this is more important. We need you to not be seen until it’s absolutely necessary for you to be.” He cleared his throat and began to recite the spell and in a flash, Nott vanished.

Keg startled, whipping her head back and forth to try and find the shape of the goblin the shadows. “Oh my god, where did she go? Is Nott just gone forever now? What the fuck, man?”

Caduceus certainly… felt more charismatic. A little more confident. He was no stranger to enhance ability, but it was the first time anyone had used it on him before. The confidence boost, at least, meant he didn’t immediately argue that maybe Beau was better for the job- nah, he had this covered. He could get this plan moving.

He crept down the stairs into the basement, eyes forward because he’d been warned about a trip wire and he had to absolutely keep an eye on that. He caught sight of it and carefully stepped over it.

Perfect. He was great at this. A natural, really. He was going to rub it in Colton's face so much.

He followed the hall that Caleb had laid out (not that he was listening to much of the finer details) and approached carefully, as one would expect a guard to do, pausing just outside the room. Keg had drilled the names of the pair into his head before he left, and he was pretty good with names, thankfully. It came with the territory of having to bury a lot of people. Lots of names to remember.

Anyway. “Ruzza? Protto?”

There was a pause, a shuffling around. And then, “Ned?”

“Yeah… Yeah, it’s me. There’s some crazy stuff going on up there. A couple of people are dead at the foot of the stairs. The, um… The boss says he needs your help.”

That sounded right, didn’t it? He caught footsteps moving closer to the archway and Ruzza poked her head out, examining him. “Hang on a minute,” she said. “We need to show you something first.”

The spell came so suddenly and so unexpectedly that Caduceus didn’t register it at all. Suddenly, the only thing that mattered was Ruzza had something to show him and Ruzza definitely knew what she was talking about. “...Yeah. That sounds like a good idea.”

Nott saw the entire thing, lurking invisibly and ready to spring the trap the second Ruzza and Protto stepped within its range, and then, as plans concocted by the Mighty Nein so often did, it went off-script. She darted back up the stairs the second Caduceus began following the two Shepherds to alert the others.

“Caduceus has been made… Or he’s turned traitor. We might have to kill him.”

“Oh my god, I can hear Nott, but I can’t see her. Is this from that haste spell shit? Am I broken?” Keg moaned. Nott was going to take advantage of that total lack of object permanence later, but for now, they needed a secondary plan.

“D’you think she charmed him?” Molly asked, kneeling down to be on eye level with where he thought she was- he was off by a foot. She let him talk to the air without correcting him. “You’ve seen me and Jester do it- did it look like that?”

Nott inhaled, pressed her fingers together, pointed them in his direction, and then exhaled. Molly was very stupid (and very condescending- ugh don't crouch like that to talk to short people, you leggy fuck) and that meant she needed to speak plainly and calmly. “You’re putting a lot of faith on my ability to not immediately rewrite everything I see to suit my own narrative, Molly.”

“Yeah, that’s fair. You do that a lot.” Molly straightened. “Let’s just… Assume he’s charmed and that plan failed. It was a good plan, though.”

“Waste of a fucking spell,” Cree muttered, pawing at her muzzle. “But that is how it goes sometimes.”

“So we just gonna go straight down there and trounce ‘em?” Beau cracked her knuckles.

Nott, despite knowing he couldn’t see her, turned to Caleb. “What does our leader have to say?”

Caleb sighed. “You should probably stealth ahead to make certain they don’t gut him where he stands before we get there.”

Nott swallowed. Right. Stealth ahead invisibly in this horrible torture hellhole. She could do this.

She took a swig from her flask, invisibly.

“Why is she drinking?” Cree whispered at Molly.

“It’s better to ask why isn’t she drinking. You might have to worry about her, then.” Molly paused. “How did you know she was drinking?”

She stared at him, blinking. He couldn’t see her, then? Ira’s eye had glowed before but only faintly, and her connection to the Somnovem was still as weak as it ever was, so perhaps he didn’t have Mirumus’s blessing. He had been talking a foot to her left before, but she assumed he was just being an ass. These Mighty Nein played such strange games with one another. (Not unlike the Tombtakers, which hurt more than she expected it to. Gods how she missed them.) “I could hear her swigging from her flask. I have very good ears.”

He eyed her and she thought for certain that he would call her on such a blatant lie, but he shrugged it off and moved to shift people around for the best possible descent down the stairs. He claimed to not be a leader, to just be a clown, and yet he thought so tactically…

She shook her head. It is dangerous to hope right now, Cree, she chastised herself. For every little glimpse of Lucien’s light, there were other shadows come to choke it, and she was in a place that made her feel like a helpless child, regardless of her strength. She could not afford to let her mind wander idly to anything beyond the plan. Get their people out, burn this place, and then leave to go to Tyffial. Only then could she be allowed to hope again.

She brought up the rear as she always did, instinctively, stepping deceptively light and graceful despite her size. She paused at the foot of the stairs to take in the space and then made a fatal error- she looked left.

A large cage, almost like a birdcage, dangled from the ceiling, and from within a little boy- a firbolg by the looks of him- was curled in on himself and crying, his fur singed and bloody. For a moment, her entire world tilted on its axis and she was thrust, disoriented, into another time.

She was held in arms so strong that her baby teeth couldn’t pierce the muscle and draw anything other than the faintest drops of blood. She dangled, helplessly, in the headlock as Lady Sulia Jagentoth’s youngest son asked for a whip.

Lucien was on the ground, and he wouldn’t stay down- even when he was kicked and she heard the snap of a rib. She screamed for him to stop, to just lie still, but he kept trying…

The whip came down. Again. Again. Again.

“Cree,” Lucien said, still trying to get up, even when his scrawny little body was just so many bleeding gashes. He was more red than lavender-

“Stay still,” she whispered. “Please lie still, Lucien.”

“CREE?!”

Cree’s vision clarified suddenly. She was back in the Sour Nest, not the Savalirwood years ago, back when… Back when all of that happened. And Lucien…

The expression was all wrong. The hair was all wrong. The tattoos were all wrong. Lucien had finally stayed still, and then had never gotten up again, and here in his place was this stranger, holding her head in his hands, and staring at her like she was something to be pitied.

She swallowed down bile. “I am- I am all right.”

Molly seemed even less convinced by that than he was her lying about Mirumus’s sight, but he nodded. “We’ll take care of this,” he said, running his fingers through the fur on her face to soothe her, sending a shudder through her when he accidentally touched her whiskers. How dare he- how dare he have gentler hands and a kinder tone than Lucien ever did, even when he so often did this same thing to her. It wasn’t fair. “But we’ve got to keep moving. Caduceus needs us.”

She nodded. “Yes… Yes, of course.” She pulled away, crushed her eyes shut and put some distance between herself and the whimpering child. Soon, child. I will come back to free you soon.

She would end these monsters. She would free these captives. That would put her demons back to sleep now that they were stirred up again.

That hadn’t been good. Molly had watched Cree go catatonic the same way Caleb did when he burned someone alive. There were times when not knowing a lot about someone’s past and blatantly refusing to learn it to avoid complications was a little more difficult than it was easier. Trauma was, unfortunately, a messy, clinging thing.

He had plenty of his own that he refused to admit. He tried to run from them, but they always caught up to bat him about the head.

It was catching up now, and the worst part of it was that it didn’t all feel like his. There was a lot in the back of his skull rattling at the chains he placed there to keep the worst of the shadows at bay, and they were stronger and hungrier than they had ever been.

He breathed in. Eyes forward. Goal in sight. Their original plan had failed, so they needed to get Caduceus back before the Iron Shepherds ripped into him, and then take care of this. They just needed to be sneaky. They needed something to actually go right.

Beau (leaping between shadows), Nott (invisible), and Otis (on the ceiling somehow) took the lead, moving carefully down the halls (leaving the trap behind them- untripped and useless to them at this second), following the path that Caleb had laid out in whispers when he sent Frumpkin down. Molly kept stealing glances at Cree, bringing up the rear, but she didn’t waver at anything the way she had at the child they had to leave behind. Good. Maybe they could pull this together without any more setbacks.

Keg suddenly tripped over something in the next room, her armor clanging, and the setbacks began anew, as per usual. Molly heard Beau swear and his attention jerked immediately to the doorway where he saw Ruzza, Protto, and a dazed-looking Caduceus (no longer in his disguise) standing beyond two archways, out into another hallway.

“Fuck!” Keg snapped and lunged forward to catch up with Beau who was mere feet from the pair of Shepherds- Nott and Otis were impossible to track from this angle.

It hit Molly then that Ruzza had her hand on something, but he reacted too late as she yanked whatever it was down and dropped two portcullises, effectively splitting the party three ways- Ruzza, Protto, and Caduceus in the hall; Beau, Keg, Nott and Otis (he assumed) in the middle section, and himself, Cree, and Caleb stuck back in the first room with their backs to the door, ready to be assailed if someone they missed upstairs somehow happened to come down.

“Thanks for giftwrapping your pink friend!” Ruzza yelled. “Don’t worry. We’ll make sure he gets treated to the same hospitality as your other friends.”

Cree let out a snarl of bestial fury and flung herself at the portcullis, trying to lift it. “Otis! Stop them!”

“On it.” Otis’s voice came from somewhere in that middle room. They dropped down at the exact same time Ruzza, with her hand on Caduceus’s arm, snapped. “Don’t kill them. The boss says to bleed ‘em and bring ‘em in chains.”

The boss says… Molly’s eyes widened. Lorenzo was down here. Lorenzo was here somewhere, close enough to be giving orders.

Protto must have started firing his crossbow, because he heard Keg cry out as she went to help Cree move the portcullis, the bolt sticking in between the gaps in her armor and forcing her to drop it nearly on Cree’s fingers. Cree recoiled and hissed.

“Otis?!” Cree snapped again. “Stop fucking around.”

“I was waiting for them to get into position. Fuckin’ hell, Cree. Give me a second.” The halfling blew dishwater curls out of their face and closed their fist. “This is gonna hurt, mate.” Red light emanated from their small hand- veiny and orb-like (like an eye and for a moment Molly could only see red eyes lighting up a dark space before his vision returned to normal again)- and each orb struck home on Protto’s body, which would have been messy enough, but the red light kept trying to yank Protto through the gaps in the bars each time he was struck with sickening crunches until his small body was practically threaded, limply, through them, mangled and bloody.

From somewhere else in that chamber, Molly heard Nott yell, “WHAT THE FUCK?”

Ruzza seemed to be realizing she’d made a grave tactical error in waiting to see if Protto had this under control. She started to drag Caduceus back, but Cree, still furious and somehow the only one not stunned that Otis had just mangled a guy on purpose, thrust her hand out. “Mr. Clay, we have no time for this!”

Molly saw the charm fade out of Caduceus’s eyes. He blinked, looked down at Ruzza, and then looked back at the others. “....So is now a good time to remind you that I'm really not a good liar?”

Ruzza dropped Caduceus’s arm like it had burned her and backed away from him. “Shit!”

Seeing her about to bolt, Molly rushed at the bars and let devil’s tongue color his words, ”Now, dear, I think what’s best for everyone right now is for you to open these doors and let us through. We’re all friends, right? We just want to keep our friends together.”

The spell yanked Ruzza up by her mental bootstraps and about-faced her. She nodded, entranced, and reached for the lever again. “Right. Yeah," she mumbled dreamily. "That’s all you wanna do. You gotta keep your friends together.”

With the lever now yanked back into place, the portcullises began to retract and the second they were up enough to duck under, everyone rushed through, trying not to look at the crunched up body of Protto as it slipped from the bars and landed in a broken heap on the floor. Only Beau hung back and popped Ruzza right in the face, eliminating the charm, but stunning her, judging by the shift from dazed to enraged to dazed again.

“How’s this for lettin’ someone bleed, you fuckin’ bitch!” Beau snapped as she pummeled her repeatedly until she dropped to the floor, bloody and battered and never to move again.

Keg made a keening noise.

“Nott!” Molly shouted. “Run ahead!”

“So we’re not going to talk about how Otis just mangled that guy to death at all, are we?”

“Yeah, it was pretty awesome, right?” Otis chuckled, creepily, and Molly felt his skin crawl with a sense of deja vu he didn’t like.

He shook his head like a dog. “Maybe later. Look for more traps now. She said Lorenzo is down here somewhere.”

Keg made a different sort of keening sound and Molly looked her way. She could only briefly meet his gaze before she jerked her head to the left and refused to look up. They’d have to talk about how he didn’t blame her for what happened at some point, but not now. They had to survive round two first. Then all debts could be cleared, if there were debts that people decided were owed all around.

The group pressed onward until they came to another door and more cages with trapped people within. Molly longed to let them free, but if they did, where would they go? At least within their confines, nothing would hurt them because nothing was left alive to torture them. He hoped. Gods, he hoped.

It was safer if they weren’t in the way and running around in a panicked stupor to turn the whole place into a killing floor it didn't need to be. Despite the need to leave them all be, Molly noted Cree stepping up to one of the occupied cages and, very gently, pressing her hand to the bars. The person inside- a dark-furred firbolg with haunted eyes- grasped her hand in his and she didn't pull away. “We have come to save you. Just hold on a bit longer,” she whispered.

Fuck. She was so nice. What was she doing with someone who seemed as awful as Lucien? Molly shook that away. Also not important. Later, it would be, not now.

“The door was trapped, but it’s not now,” Nott crowed proudly as they got closer. Keg threw it open and rather than an empty hall, they found another room with three more guards working on opening a gate that blocked off a set of stairs. Their presence had not yet been noticed.

“Boss said to meet him down there,” one was muttering right before Keg's armor creaked from a single misstep and he realized that he and his buddies were no longer alone. “Shit! They got through Ruzza and Protto already?!”

Molly saw red again. Lorenzo was down those stairs. He was close by. He could get to him if he could just get through these idiots, but fighting them would be too slow. What if he hurt the others while they were tied up fighting their way down? He didn’t deserve another ten seconds of breath, much less another minute of it- wasted on this constant, endless string of fights.

Something inside of his mind, the little twitch that told him certain things his blood knows how to do in fights, whispered, but you can slip past them easily. And not quite memory, but instinct flooded him, and he closed his eyes and simply stepped forward.

Everything changed. Had he not taken that drug with Beau in Zadash, perhaps he would have been frightened, but he recognized the strange ethereal patterns and strange creatures that floated in front of his eyes. What he didn’t recognize was the freezing cold that cut through his bones, and yet it was still familiar somehow, like an old friend. Everything was still as it was when he'd stepped through- the thugs, the gated door, his friends- but it felt hazy and intangible, like he existed beyond it.

He heard warbled voices calling his name, incomprehensibly, but he had only a short window he could be here. He ran as fast as he could, leapt through the guards, through the gate, and landed on the steps, tumbling back into normal reality with only a headrush and a gasp of normal air.

He’ll have a panic attack about that later. Right now that was extremely useful.

I’m coming for you, Lorenzo, he snarled, barreling the rest of the way down the stairs and into the next chamber.

Almost in answer to his thought, he heard a familiar voice that seemed to come from the walls, themselves, sourceless and without form, turning his blood colder than the ethereal plane he just bolted through.

“Well, well, well. It's rare that the meat carries itself right to your table. It’s even rarer that it does so after it’s already been slaughtered.”

“What the hell did he do?!” Beau snapped at Cree- of course, they always turned to her to explain things like this. It was the only time she was useful to them. They had overturned one of the leather-covered torture tables and were using it for cover while two of the thugs harried them with heavy crossbows and they threw back spells, and all the while Mollymauk was getting farther away. “Can he just do that? Go fuckin’ invisible or whatever?”

“It is called Aether Walk,” she explained through gritted teeth. “A Bloodhunter of Lu- of Mollymauk’s ilk can use it to step into the Ethereal Plane and become intangible and pass through solid matter as if it were nothing.” She growled. “This is pointless. We cannot leave him alone down there.”

She poked her head out from behind the table and set her sights on the guard with the axe who was just waiting for one of them to try and come out and play. She zeroed in on him, since he seemed so eager to wet his blade, her focus narrowing to only his blood, singing to her. She sang back to it, a low hum that seemed to vibrate within the man’s veins until his limbs locked up. They would not move again until she asked them to.

She dropped back onto her knees and closed her eyes, just as Beau caught a crossbow bolt meant for her head. (“Cree, what the fuck?!” she yelled, but then everything went quiet except for the blood.) She lifted her hands and flexed her thick fingers as if working invisible strings. Without having to see it, she knew the man and his axe would be moving, stiffly towards his closest ally. Her fingers danced across the air. “Take his head,” she whispered.

She heard the last dirge of a dying man’s spilled blood before she heard the scream of shock from the guard who’d just caused it by her command. Cree snapped back to reality to the sound of yelling and the shocked stares of her compatriots. Across the way, she saw the results of her handiwork- the guard with the axe had, indeed, beheaded one of the crossbow-wielding guards with one heavy swing.

She blinked her golden eyes at them- that was the least she could do with her powers when they were at full capacity (one day they would be again). It was hardly noteworthy to her. “Well. Take care of the other two. Get to it.”

“Oh my god,” she heard the invisible- except not to her eyes- goblin whisper. “We’re trapped in this shithole with actual psychopaths.”

“Really hot psychopaths,” Keg mumbled. Cree was certain she wasn't meant to hear that.

There were still two more guards. Caleb dug through his components and stared at the bat guano and sulfur he’d managed to gather when he knew he was just on the cusp of relearning this particular spell. He had ideally wanted to save it for Lorenzo to strike him fast and hard and wear him down to ashes, but Molly was missing and there were too many variables here to account for- too many people who might get burned if he misjudged.

He swallowed. “No time like the present.”

The guards were still reeling over the shock of Cree’s work and Caleb stood, slapping the bat guano and sulfur together. His voice wavered, awkwardly, when he gave his command, “Everyone, get down. It is about to get very hot in here.”

The Fireball blossomed from his hands striking the two guards hard and fast. For a brief moment, he only saw their dark silhouettes- two figures screaming in agony, burned alive. The flames tried to consume his mind, drawing him back, back… And then suddenly, a phantom slap, and Molly’s voice in his ear, his lips ghosting over his forehead.

Time for that later…

He shook it off. These men were not good or clean or just. They deserved to burn… And burn they did. Their charred corpses collapsed into heaps next to their headless friend, and the world was quiet once more.

“...Good job, Caleb,” Nott piped up, reverently.

Caleb just laughed, awkwardly, as he wiped the remains of his spell components on his already filthy coat. “Stay on task. We have to get to Mollymauk.”

Keg clambered to her feet, her plate rattling as she began to walk towards the door, only for another gout of fire to suddenly strike her. She screamed and backed away, shaking flames off her arm. “The fuck, Caleb? Was that a delayed reaction?”

“N-no… That was not me.” Caleb’s eyes began scanning the room. “There must be a trap in here that does not react to the Shepherds. Nott…?”

“Right here, Cay-Cay.” Nott brushed against his leg, but he couldn’t see where she went beyond that. After a second, she called, “It’s this thing right here.”

“...Nott, we can’t see where you’re pointing,” Beau groaned.

“It is the brazier.” Cree pointed, indicating it with a gesture. Caleb eyed her, but he had assumed as much, himself. It was the only thing in the room that looked like it was capable of producing fire- not that it meant much when dealing with magic.

Caduceus stepped up beside her, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Let me. I figure I owe you.” He lifted his staff and Caleb felt the familiar unraveling of arcane magics as the Dispel took effect. He breathed a little easier, then.

“Ah. Thank you, Mr. Clay.” Cree gave him a polite nod and then looked to Caleb. He saw his own desperation mirrored in her eyes. “We cannot leave him alone down there.”

Keg and Beau were at the open door, waiting- Nott must have run down the stairs ahead and then came back, because when Caleb heard her speak again, she was breathless. “I don’t see him,” she gasped out. “There’s more rooms and the hallway goes on for a bit, so I didn’t look closely, but he’s not waiting down there.”

This time Caleb looked to Beau. He didn’t need to say anything- she was already tearing down the steps, and the rest of them followed.

Molly had ducked into a room, swords drawn, hunting for where Lorenzo’s voice was coming from, but he couldn’t see him. Maybe he’s in the walls... Secret tunnels in a slaver’s den sounded about right. If that were so, then he just needed to find an opening or… or something.

And all the while, Lorenzo was still speaking, “You should have stayed an example. That would have been a mercy.”

“Where are you?” Molly hissed. “Stop hiding, you motherfucker.”

Lorenzo’s chuckle felt like it was right behind him, close enough to raise the hairs on the back of his neck. He felt something brush past his tail and he startled, whirling, swords slashing at the air and striking nothing.

“Aim true. Bring him in chains, but bring him bloody. I want to see how long the fire in his belly lasts this time.”

“Who’re you talking to?” Molly got the words out and was answered almost immediately by the sharp icy pain of someone stabbing him in the side, just below what would have been instantly fatal. There was someone else in the room- he’d been so focused on finding Lorenzo, he hadn’t seen the person in the shadows, now currently pressed to his back, their knife below his ribs.

“Nothing personal, pretty one,” a man’s voice crooned in his ear. The knife came free with a sickening squelch and Molly’s knees gave out from the sudden pain and the quick, hot agony of blood that gushed between his fingers. He’d dropped his swords again, godsdammit. He was unarmed and focused entirely on his wound and when he dared to glance up, the shadowed rogue, clothed head to toe in black was holding manacles.

No, no, no... He was never ever going to say he liked manacles after this. He didn’t have time to get captured. Jester, Fjord, and Yasha were counting on him. Everyone was counting on him. He was not going to lose to Lorenzo again. He couldn’t.

The anger returned, hot as the blood on his hands. He flailed a hand to grab for Summer’s Dance, hoping to utilize Misty Step to get out of range, but the sword must have fallen just out of his reach and his fingers were too slick to gain purchase. He groped at it pathetically and only succeeded in leaving bloody fingerprints on the pommel.

The rogue slammed a knee into his stomach, pinning him to the ground and he dug his claws into the dirt floor like a desperate animal, teeth biting down on a scream. “None of that now,” he tsked, and reached for Molly's useless, outstretched arm, unable to grab a blade to save himself.

Even knowing it was useless, Molly writhed and bucked and kicked, but nothing could dislodge the rogue, whose heel felt like it was trying to squeeze his organs out of the hole in his side as he bent down and pressed into his stomach harder in the process. Lorenzo was laughing- somewhere in this fucking room, Lorenzo was laughing, and all he could think about was those last precious seconds on the Glory Run Road before Cree came and fixed everything. Was he just always meant to fall to these people?

A voice that wasn’t his own snarled in his head. No. Tear them apart.

Something possessed him, then- the anger burning through his very soul or something else- but he knew what he had to do. The rogue was seconds away from closing that manacle around his wrist and if that happened it was all over. With sudden intensity, he found the strength to wrench free and grab the rogue’s wrists instead. The rogue twisted and dug his foot even harder into Molly’s stomach, and he gasped through the explosions of pain and the urge to vomit up the remains of a ruptured spleen, but he held firm. He reached deep beyond his conscious self to wherever that anger was and something reached back, and then reached beyond him, all the way into the rogue.

His mind couldn’t process what exactly he did- it happened so fast and was just a chaotic mess of searing white light with faint traces of fractals and the dissonant sound of screams and then the screams became more solid, more grounded in reality and as he blinked away the lights, it hit him that it was the rogue screaming.

His eyes, nose, mouth, and ears leaked blood, his mouth twisted into eternal agony, as the sound of his scream cut off abruptly, leaving him caught in that painful moment forever. When Molly released his wrists, he tipped sideways and fell limply into a bloody heap.

Molly rolled over to the side and vomited until the growing bruises on his stomach ached and his nose and throat burned with acid. Lorenzo’s voice didn’t taunt him again, but that was a small comfort. There was something inside of him, something angry and feral and capable of using his body to do things like that, and the worst part was he liked it. That was the kind of power that could win him this fight.

That was the kind of power that belonged to someone else, someone he didn’t want to be. It was great and terrifying in equal measure. Whimpering, his mouth tasting of blood and bile, he forced himself to his feet, and collected his swords.

Add it to the list of things he could have a panic attack about later. He was going to need about ten massages and a lot of cuddles when this was over. For now, he still had to kill Lorenzo and save his friends.

So for now, he hobbled out of the room and then collapsed against a wall almost immediately. Right. He’d almost forgotten about the wound in his side, still spitting blood as if he was a stuck pig. Not fatal. Just annoying. He’d bleed a little and hurt and they’d put him in chains and let him watch the others get taken one by one before they broke him over their knees, but he’d gone and mucked that up by melting that guy’s brain. He’d take sick satisfaction in the fact that he was apparently really good at ruining Lorenzo’s plans for him. Won't die, won't get captured. Won't do anything but kill him.

“Molly!”

He blinked. The rest of the Nein- actual members and honorary members on a technicality- were coming down the steps towards him. Cree beat them all there so she could start prodding at his wound, and he tensed a bit, worried that she might know what he did, that she might tell everyone else, but she gave no indication of it. Mentally, he willed no one to go into that room and see the corpse of that rogue.

He seemed to be the absolute target of everyone’s attention, at least, (though Nott could be exploring that room now for all he knew- at least she had the decency not to scream at the sight of the corpse). “We heard a scream. I thought it was you… You should not have run off like that all on your own,” Cree chastised. She pressed her hands against the wound, and more blood oozed out to stick to her fur. He winced. “They wanted to bleed you, not kill you.”

“Yeah,” he mumbled. “They mentioned that. I can hear Lorenzo. He’s down here somewhere… In the walls or something.”

“In the walls?!” Keg balked. “There’s no way.”

“I know what I heard.” The bite in Molly’s voice was lost when Cree began to heal him, a sharp smell like coppers dunked in rose water filling his nostrils to replace the vomit-in-your-sinuses reek. The relief was instant, though it didn’t help enough to get him back to full, and that seemed to disappoint Cree as much as it did him.

“Be more careful, Mollymauk,” she said, and backed away without lingering too long in his space. She was learning boundaries. How nice of her- nice and also miserably sad, judging by her expression. For a second, she looked like she had wanted to kiss him stupid just then to show her relief.

Were it anyone else, he would have welcomed a kiss- from Cree, it would have felt hollow and perverse. She would be kissing someone else. Someone he must have tapped into just a moment ago.

He swallowed hard, his raw throat protesting. “We just… We need to keep going,” he finally said. “And stay on alert. Lorenzo lured me right into a fuckin’ trap. That’s how I-” he nodded towards his mostly-healed wound.

Caleb was looking at him, expression unreadable. He hoped he believed him. Caleb was smart. Caleb would treat his fear about Lorenzo stalking them without being seen somehow seriously. After a second, he just nodded. “Stay on alert, everyone.”

Molly pushed off the wall and sucked in a breath, bloodied fists clutched around the hilts of his swords. After a second of consideration, he lit them both up again- both radiant. (Cree made a pained noise, but said nothing aloud.) If Lorenzo wanted him to bleed, he would bleed. And he would use the power it gave him to finally put him in the ground.

Now if only he knew where he was…

A new voice popped into his head. Too many of them today. His head ached from it all. At least this one was pleasant, if not a bit dull and laconic- a little like Beau's, to be honest, but only if she was nicer. I can help.

Molly hissed and shut his eyes. Go away. At the same time, the same part of him that invited the other gift that saved his damn life longed for the additional bit of help.

Somehow that part was the one that the voice answered to. Not shocking at all. Open your eyes. He’s here.

He opened his eyes. The first thing he noticed was Nott stalking ahead down the hall while the rest stood around, trying to get their bearings, taking stock of injuries. When did she drop her invisibility, he wondered? And more to the point, why wasn’t she hiding better than that? He turned to ask Caleb and his breath immediately caught in his throat.

Beau was a bit off to the side of everyone else, her eyes tracking everyone but Nott, keeping tabs, shifting her weight from one foot to the other like she was itching to go into a sprint. Her knuckles were a shade paler than her darker skin as she gripped her staff in both hands. She had the look of someone who believed that nothing could get past her vision.

But she didn’t see the massive demonic blue form looming over her. No one did- most were faced away from it, but Keg and Caleb surely should have had it in their periphery. Molly would have thought he was hallucinating were it not for the cruel glaive clutched in the creature’s meaty fists. He remembered that weapon as it drove down, pinning him to the ground. The crack of his ribs, the bursting of his heart, and then darkness until Cree brought him back, coughing up the rest of the blood in his lungs.

He couldn’t be hallucinating. That was Lorenzo in whatever his true colors were- an oni, something in his head told him. He really had heard him, stalking them invisibly, and now he could see him. Oh Keg, you were so wrong about so much. He didn’t even tell you, did he?

The glaive flashed in the torchlight as Lorenzo raised it towards Beau. No one moved. No one reacted. He was the only one who could see him. “Beau!” He shouted. “Behind you!”

Beau whirled, but her eyes fell past Lorenzo, unseeing. Cree followed his gaze, however, and locked on, hissing. “There you are, you monster.” She spared a quick glance at Molly. “You see him true, then?”

Molly could only nod, dumbly, his heart clenching at the pride and relief in her expression. Anything that made her that happy was bad for him overall, but right now it was a good thing, because if he hadn’t noticed… Gods, no. No, fuck that. He had noticed. He didn’t need to know why. Not now.

Lorenzo must have dropped the invisibility when he realized the game was up, because now everyone was looking directly at him. Keg let out a strangled gasp and backed up. “Oh my god. Oh fuck.”

“Never got to see this side of me, didja, Keg?” The creature crowed, rolling his massive, muscular shoulders. “Most don’t.” He looked over each of them in kind. “Nice of you to get in a neat little line for me.”

Oh no. Oh fuck.

None of them could react fast enough. Lorenzo raised his hand and suddenly that familiar rush of cold air tore through them. Molly dropped to his knees as he took every bit of it, feeling the chill seep into his bones and freeze the remaining blood in his veins, but he kept his fists clenched around his swords, refusing to let the pain force him to drop them. He only had one chance. He couldn’t afford to light them up again if they slipped from his grasp.

That one attack tore them to shreds once more- a horrible callback to the first doomed fight. Lorenzo seemed to realize this, himself, and chuckled. “This feels familiar.”

Beau wore the frost coating her like a second skin, seemingly shrugging off most of the damage as she slammed into the monster. He blocked her first blow with his glaive, but the second she cracked across his skull, jerking his neck painfully to the side. No stun. He kept moving forwards, even when Beau slammed into him twice more.

Nott shot a crossbow bolt straight through the line to hit its mark in Lorenzo’s muscular chest. He growled and tore it free, tossing it aside. “The same old tricks,” he laughed. “Do you think they’ll serve you better this time?”

“How is this for the same trick?” Cree snapped. She lifted her hands and placed them around that amulet around her neck and a blood red bolt of energy tore from it and struck Lorenzo. Tendrils of something bloody, almost muscle-like, wrapped around the oni’s body, not restraining him so much as holding him steady and in place for the next attack to aim true. Molly felt something in the back of his mind, a little itch that said that her work was for his benefit, and he leapt in, slamming Summer’s Dance into the opening Cree left for him. He spun, yanked it free as he went and sliced upwards with his second blade, a gout of blood rising upwards in an arc that splattered the walls, and then Molly activated misty step and vanished out of range before Lorenzo could have his chance to retaliate. Not this time. Not again.

Caleb was wobbling- the cone of cold must have nearly done him in. One more hit and he would be out and Lorenzo held no mercy for the fallen- there would be no chance to get him back up. He limped back towards the staircase and collapsed, firing off a firebolt as he tried to edge himself into cover. Good. That was the best place for him. Molly shot him a worried look and shifted his position a bit to provide additional cover. No one was going after that wizard on his watch.

Otis was using their crossbow in lieu of their spells, the bolts sparking with blackened energy that ate at Lorenzo’s flesh (somewhere Nott huffed indignantly). Caduceus, seeing this, whispered into his staff: “Suppertime.” Beetles flew out of every little notch in the wood and converged on Lorenzo, biting and tearing at him while he tried futilely to crush every one of them.

(Yeah, Caduceus was definitely a good investment.)

“Cad!” Molly said, jerking his head towards Caleb. Caduceus nodded and took advantage of not being properly engaged with Lorenzo to run to the wizard and get out of the fray. He wasn’t looking too good either from all that cold damage- they were both better off out of the way.

That left Keg, coming in hard and fast. “You know, you’re a lot less scary like this somehow,” she growled, slamming her weapons into him with heavy, precise hits. “Or maybe I’m just over your fucking bullshit.”

He was bleeding. He was taking hits, but Molly saw, in absolute horror, that some of his wounds were healing as he shrugged off the last of their assault. They were doing so well, but if they weren’t precise about this, he might crush them all..

The angry voice roared up again, Rend him to pieces. Rip apart his mind. Reach into him and feed him his own sins until he chokes on them.

Okay, that voice was not his favorite. He liked the other one better, even if it did sound like Nice Beau and that was weird. “No,” he growled, and it fell into frustrated, seething silence. He wasn’t going to do that again- not in front of people who might be terrified or worse by having to bear witness to it.

Beau was still trying to stun him, but most of her attacks failed as Lorenzo blocked her and pushed her staggering back with his glaive before nearly taking her head off. She crumpled, her face a bloody mess, and Molly couldn’t tell if she was still breathing. He barely registered Nott’s crossbow bolts or whatever it was that Cree did next. His ears were ringing.

That wasn’t a ringing sound. That was a scream. A cacophony of multiple screams. Do you see? The angry, feral voice snarled again. Do you understand why you must tear them asunder before they do it to you?

No. But he understood that people who hurt people like this needed to be put down. That much he and Mr. Angry Voice could definitely agree on, but he didn’t need him or the power he’d tapped into while desperate. He could do it on his own.

He lunged forwards, leaped, and slammed his swords one at a time into Lorenzo’s shoulders, uncovered by anything but the natural armor of his blue skin. When he settled, he was attached to his mountain of a back, his feet not even touching the floor, hitting just slightly behind his kneecap. The monster roared to the ceiling in anguish and tried to shake him free.

Molly braced his foot against the small of Lorenzo’s back, prepared to kick off. “I don’t need your respect, by the way,” he snarled.” He kicked, his swords yanking free of the thick muscle and he backflipped in mid air and landed on the blood-coated stones in a crouch, swords thrust out to the side, glowing with radiance and leaking blood. He panted, waiting. Please fall, please fall...

The giant fell, as if something answered Molly’s prayer, with a thud that shook the walls and stirred up dust. When everything stilled again, the only sound was Molly breathing heavily, in and out. He choked out a gasp, sheathed his swords, and ran to Beau, scrambling over the mound of flesh that used to be the devil, himself, if only just to him and his friends. “Beau? Beau, are you all right?”

Beau groaned and blinked. Lorenzo had sliced her across the forehead, leaving a gash that bled profusely and was going to leave a nasty scar, but she was alive. “Yeah… Yeah, ‘m okay. I’d be better if I could’ve stunned that fucker.” She swiped her hand across her bloodied face. “Glad you killed him though. That was honestly pretty cool.”

For a moment Molly didn’t care that it was a hit to their dynamic, he wrapped his arms around her and clung while she squawked and slapped at his arm. He thought for a second, struggling to figure out what to say, and then blurted out, “I’m not saving you again.” (What a lie, but his pride required it.) “So you better fuckin’ watch it.”

“Fuck you, Molly.” Her voice was muffled against his chest. Her blood was soaking his shirt and he couldn’t bring himself to care. This shirt had been done in for awhile now.

“Fuck you, Beau.” He finally released her and stood, taking in the rest of the group. Caduceus was working on decomposing Lorenzo’s corpse, turning him into an array of blue fungus that were far prettier than one would expect from such a hideous, black-hearted beast. Apparently, death could make a work of art out of everything.

But no one else was food for the fungus- just the deserving. They had made good on their promise and ripped this place down to the foundation. Now all that was left was...

Nott suddenly shrieked, “I FOUND THEM.” And that was the end of their brief, shaken aftermath. They were still reeling from the fight, injured and in need of healing, but Molly, Beau, and Caleb, no longer limping, tore off in the direction of her voice with the other four following close behind.

Nott was tearing open a freshly unlocked cell containing Jester and Fjord when they arrived. She threw herself into it, wrapping her arms around Jester and murmured, “Case closed.”

Molly breathed a sigh of relief at seeing them, but then immediately began to hunt the cells for Yasha. He found her- battered and broken and manacled- behind another locked door, but one hit from Keg’s hammer smashed the lock and Molly dove right in, pulling her slumbering form as much into his lap as he could. “Yasha… Yasha, love. It’s me. It’s Mollymauk. I’m here. I’m right here.” He raked his hands through her blood-matted hair, but she didn’t react- that was okay. She was alive. Tears burned his eyes and he couldn’t hold them back. She was alive and she was breathing and they did it. They fucking did it.

Gods, he loved these people so much. If he did nothing else with this borrowed life that he claimed for himself because the asshole who had it originally failed to do anything of value with it, then he was going to keep them safe. This wasn’t going to happen again. Not on his watch.

Outside the cell, Cree and Otis watched as Molly cradled and wept over the aasimar woman, rocking back and forth like he still had too much nervous energy and nowhere to go with it.

“Mirumus is up,” Otis said, casually.

“Ira, too,” Cree nodded, but that wasn't all. Otis must not have noticed, but her keen cat’s eyes could see the faint glow of the eye on his neck, tucked into that extravagant tattoo and nearly hidden behind the collar of his coat. From an angle, it looked like the peacock was observing the situation and taking joy in it.

And Gaudius just woke up as well.

Three eyes awake and no sign of Lucien in this stranger who loved so strongly and without condition or exception.

And she would kill this person to have someone back who loved in fits and starts and inconsistencies? Who was cruel more often than he was kind. She would take from these people as was taken from her, would she?

You do this because you must. She clutched her amulet, willing her resolve to remain. That is your purpose.

Chapter Text

Jester had been in and out of consciousness for most of her time in this horrible place. It was a mercy to not be awake. She couldn’t hear any of the screaming. She couldn’t think about how the Traveler wasn’t coming to save her. She couldn’t think about the vague recollections of being in the cart and hearing her friends, hearing Molly, cry out in pain.

Couldn’t think about how she swore she heard Lorenzo say they could have brought another devil-blood with them if he hadn’t been so uppity and needed to be put in his place. What a loss that it had been, on top of the other merchandise they had to drop in the scuffle when the ice claimed them.

What a loss…

She blinked awake again as she felt her wrists freed for the first time in days. The gag came away next and she coughed and retched and tried to work saliva back into her mouth to cure the persistent dryness and rid herself of the sour taste. She blinked a few times, half-expecting to see angry, terrifying people hovering over her, ready to take her away and hurt her, but what she saw instead was something more like a dream. Nott was beside her, tossing the manacles away, and Beau was kneeling in front of her, holding the gag in one hand and a waterskin in the other.

“Hey, Jes,” she said. Jester couldn’t recall the last time she saw Beau look gentle like that- maybe never. Maybe it really was a dream. She shied away a bit.

“Am I dreaming?” She asked, lips trembling.

“Nah, there’d be more unicorns if you were.” That sounded like Beau. She relaxed a bit and took the offered water. She drank slowly, savoring it, and then quickly pulled it from her lips in a panic as more clarity began to come to her as the addled clouds in her mind parted. “Fjord and Yasha? Yasha- they were hurting her. I could hear her screaming-”

“Hey, hey, easy-” Nott laid a hand on her arm. “Caleb and Keg already got Fjord up. And Molly’s with Yasha.”

Jester almost asked who’s Keg, but Molly’s name stunned her into changing tactics, immediately. Her legs were as wobbly as a newborn deer when she leapt to her feet, and she staggered when she tried to take a step, but she had to get to him. She had to see for herself.

Nott and Beau tried to stop her, but she was stronger than both. She pushed past them, nearly fell over (Fjord shouted and she was grateful he could, but later) and caught herself on the wall before she toppled, and then kept going until she heard Molly’s voice. He was singing one of Toya’s songs under his breath in the cadence of a lullaby.

She gripped the edge of the cell door and stood, breathless, just watching him sit with Yasha’s head in his lap, stroking her hair while she slept. Her manacles had been removed too, but she hadn’t woken up yet- too injured, probably. They had hurt her pretty badly when she kept fighting them.

Jester’s eyes watered. She was so sure. She was so sure she had heard him die. She was so certain Lorenzo even confirmed it. But here he was.

He looked up from tending to Yasha and met her eyes. His own breath caught in his throat, thick with tears. She could see the tracks on his face. She had never once seen Molly cry and she hoped she never had to again. “Jester?”

She choked on a sob and propelled herself forward, dropping to her knees so hard on the stone beside him that it hurt, but what was one more pain? She had plenty of hurts to contend with, but Molly's continued existence in her world was one less. “Molly,” she sobbed. “Molly, it’s really you. I thought- I heard you.”

“Shhh shhh. It’s okay, dear.” He removed one hand from Yasha’s hair to stroke hers. “I’m okay. It got a little weird there for a bit, but… It was taken care of. You don’t have to worry. I’m not goin’ anywhere.”

Not able to contain her emotions anymore, Jester threw her arms around his neck and just clung to him. “Thank you for coming to get us.”

He kissed the side of her head and bumped his horns against hers. “We don’t leave each other behind. That’s the deal. We’re a group, right?”

Jester sniffled. Her laugh came out strangled, but it was a laugh and that proved she still could. “We’re a group.”

Cree stood apart from the reunion, wandering back into the hall where Lorenzo’s corpse was currently mulching. She couldn’t take her eyes off the bright blue mushrooms blossoming in the decomposing flesh, bursting from the monster’s massive ribs. Such beauty in decay. Even the smell was… strangely lacking in the usual corpse reek. It was pungent, but earthy. A smell of creation, not rot.

“He looks better like this, huh?” Caduceus had come to join her, leaning on his staff. Frost still clung to his fur, slow to melt, and he was bloody from where the ice had torn him open, but he was smiling at the work they had done here. She could only imagine what he must be feeling- that first taste of a successful mission was intoxicating. She only wished hers hadn't been tainted with association to the Orders and after that nothing the Tombtakers had ever done had ever felt... Like this. It felt wrong for her to linger on it.

So she didn't- like everything else she didn't like about this situation, she brushed it to the side to focus on something else. “I have never seen such a thing,” she murmured. “You accelerated his decomposition?”

“Mmmhmm,” he nodded. “It was gonna happen anyway, but if you can speed the process up, get it started… You see results a little faster. People like that… Who just consume and consume and consume- maybe they need to be consumed a little faster than most. Put something back into the world after taking so much from it.”

She thought of the bones in Lorenzo’s room and shuddered. “These were vile people. It has been a long time since I’ve known wickedness like this.”

Lucien could be cruel- all of the Tombtakers could be. Their goals weren’t what these people would call noble, because they couldn’t understand, couldn’t see with eyes unclouded. They couldn’t heed the Pattern, so how could they?

But the Tombtakers were not slavers who built their empires on the backs of the weak. They were trying to fix the world and destroy people like that by making sure everyone was equal. Lucien would make a fine leader for that new world- he knew what it was like to suffer, so he would not let anyone suffer the same way he had. It was good.

“We did a good thing here,” Caduceus nodded, mercifully not asking her to clarify. His use of the word good right on the tail end of her thought made her feel as if he could read her mind and was telling her what real good looked like. “A really good thing.”

“It will be better when we free the rest, I suppose,” she mused, carefully, trying to put the hackles that had come up at his accidental contradiction of her beliefs. “Though I... do not yet know where they will go.”

“We’ll see that they get somewhere safe somehow.”

She hummed her agreement, eyes scanning the ground to avoid looking at him. She found Lorenzo’s glaive, fallen mere feet from the body, and that gripped her for some reason. Carefully, she picked it up and stared at it, taking in every inch of it. Behind her, Caduceus had continued to speak, but she wasn’t listening anymore. This weapon… It had slain the Nonagon- Molly being the current occupant of the body didn’t matter. The blood in her amulet was still the blood that flowed in his veins. The blood that had coated this blade was that same blood.

She could feel it- the remnants of the death blow, even though all that blood had been cleaned away. Echoes remained, however. A blood cleric prodigy like herself could sense them. This blade hummed with those echoes.

She was meant for this weapon.

“Ms. Cree?” Caduceus spoke up a little louder.

She blinked out of her trance. “...Apologies, Mr. Clay.” She stared at the glaive in her hands. “I think… Perhaps I should keep this.”

He smiled at her, somehow not finding that unsettling at all, like he had known the look in her eyes even without knowing the dark place it came from. “Always good to go with your gut on these things.”

There was a lot to do in this place and it was late enough that no one particularly wanted to venture back into the Savalirwood when they had a perfectly fine building here, and once everyone, including the captive strangers, had been removed from their cages and confines, they were able to relax somewhat. Caduceus took over the kitchen to make food for everyone, while Caleb, Beau, and Nott explained everything to Jester and Fjord.

Molly had not left Yasha’s side. Cree had proven strong enough to lift her dead weight and carry her to one of the bedrooms while she slept off the spell that had been on her manacles, and that was where he had stayed, keeping constant vigil on her. It meant he wasn't here to weigh in on the topic at hand, despite the fact that it concerned him. No one brought that fact up.

“So,” Fjord drawled, taking all of this new information in, “you mean to tell me that after we finish this objective for the Gentleman, we’re gonna go to Nogvurot next to find out more about Molly’s past?”

“That could be fun, though. Wasn’t there something about missing kids? Ooh! Maybe we can solve another mystery.” Jester looked over at Nott and grinned- she was trying way too hard to be cheerful. Everyone could see it, but no one could begrudge her- not even Nott, who just smiled, toothily back.

“I don’t know that it will be a, ah… pleasant trip,” Caleb murmured, rubbing his forehead. “Molly made a devil’s bargain with that woman, and I do not know what exactly we're to expect, but I know she expects to get something out of it.”

“And we can’t just-” Fjord mimed breaking a neck.

“Molly vetoed the shit out of that from night one,” Beau sighed.

“I dunno why we'd wanna do that anyway.” Jester frowned, trying to see where Cree had wandered off to, so as to ensure she wasn’t in earshot. “She doesn’t really seem that bad, guys. I mean sure, she stalked us all the way from Zadash and she only brought Molly back ‘cause she thought he was Lucien, but she doesn’t seem like a bad person.”

“She works for a criminal,” Nott pointed out.

“So do we.” Beau leaned back in her chair. “I think Jester might have a point, though. She’s kinda like us, y’know? Like… I don’t wanna like her. And I don’t like her, but there were times when I didn’t like a lot of you, either.”

“But never me, right?” Jester’s eyes went wide as saucers.

Nott snorted and took a swig from her flask. “No one can dislike you, Jester. If they do, then they deserve to die and we deserve to kill them.”

That seemed to satisfy her and she primly settled back into her chair. “Awww. Thank you, Nott.”

“Regardless,” Fjord cut in, before the conversation could derail further, “we have to look after our own before we do anything else. Now Molly was pretty fucked up when he first met Cree and especially later when he told us the truth about everything. I don’t know if I could live with myself if he lost himself just 'cause he wanted to get us back that badly. That’s not a fair trade.”

“Molly thought it was.” Beau’s shoulders tensed. “You don’t get to decide what he thinks his own life is worth, Fjord. He died to get you back and he probably would have died again and again, as many times as he could, because it was worth it to him. I’m glad he’s still alive thanks to Cree. I don’t have to like her to appreciate her bringin’ him back to us, but I also know that whatever happens next… It’s what Molly chose. Might not be what he wants, but he still chose it, and we gotta respect that.”

Everyone was staring at her now. She scowled and sank deeper into her chair. “Oh fuck you all. Quit lookin’ at me like that. I don’t have to be selfish and bitchy all the time.”

“You’re growing as a person.” Nott gave a faux sniff, and Beau retaliated by swiping her flask and taking a long swig from it and then handed it back. “I backwashed in that. I dunno how that works with an endless flask, but I fuckin’ did it..”

“Oh… Beau.” Nott tsked. “I always backwash in this flask.”

Off Beau’s exaggerated hrk sound, the tension dissolved a bit- at least for the moment. They had a long way to go before they could go to Nogvurot, and as this traumatic detour proved, a lot could change in one night, much less several.

They would deal with it. 

Molly had Cree put Yasha in Lorenzo’s bed. He’d immediately taken care of the baby bones by throwing them out the window (and wondered if that was heartless- should he bury them?) and then (once he'd convinced himself there was really no conceivable reason to bury those bones since they could no longer even be conceived of as a baby and it wasn't like he could tell what sort of baby they belonged to so good luck finding out who might be missing one) tore the room apart for anything useful and had come up with a fancy, but empty, bag that had been hidden under the bed. He’d kicked it aside for later. It wasn’t his style, but maybe someone else might like it. They could always use an extra bag.

From there, there was nothing left to do but pull up a chair and watch Yasha sleep. He’d begged Cree to spare a healing spell for her to close up some of the uglier wounds before they got infected and she had obliged without question or complaint. Molly was far, far too tired to be uncomfortable with the way she jumped on that- he just needed to see Yasha wake up. He needed her to be okay and unbroken and fundamentally Yasha and fit the last piece into place that proved this was all worth it. He did the right thing risking his identity by bringing Cree into the fold and promising to follow where she led.

“Yasha,” he pleaded. “Tell me I did the right thing.”

She didn’t answer. Didn’t stir. He made a choked sound and headbutted her gently in the ribs with his horns as he folded his arms and laid his head down on the bed beside her.

He didn’t realize he fell asleep until it became clear he was dreaming. He was floating in an ocean of stars, with gaseous clouds in pink and purple scattered about, glowing faintly and out of reach. Beyond that, there was nothing. Just a peaceful blanket of stars, and a feeling of incomprehensible potential thrumming underneath his skin. He relaxed into it and began to drift.

Just as he closed his eyes, he heard a buzzing sound- no, more of a droning, a sound that could only be formed by too much of a singular noise blurring together into something new. Slowly, the drone began to settle out and press against his brain until he felt hot blood seep from his left nostril, snapping his eyes open again. He whimpered and curled in on himself, still spinning like a comet through the starry sea.

Screaming. He was hearing screaming.

Pull it back, Ira. It’s not ready. That voice. That was the voice that he heard before. The dry, laconic one that reminded him a little of Beau.

A familiar low growl came in response but the screaming stopped. Slowly, Molly uncurled, searching the star-scattered space for the source of those voices. He swiped his fingers under his nose and watched little droplets of blood float away. They warped and shifted and pulled until they were a pair of almond-shapes- eyes made of blood that looked identical to his own.

His heart seized up, but the bloody eyes didn't linger. They dissolved, leaving Molly frantically searching for the voices that seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere, but mostly from his own head.

“This is my head, you know,” he snapped, tugging on his horns like he could rattle them out. “I didn’t invite you in. I appreciate your help back there, but if you could go back to not being here like before, I’d appreciate it.”

There was a pause. And then:

Laughter.

Three unique sets- deep and bassy, dry, and a third that was high- pitched and airy. The dry voice chimed in, speaking to another as if Molly wasn’t there. ”It has such a strong will, Gaudius. However did you miss it?

”Our Nonagon was just so full of love that love stayed behind when nothing else did, and what a strong being it left! Surely you see it, Mirumus?”

”I do, I do, but I fear this is a complication. We must investigate this further as a group, but it fights us. It will not let the others in.”

“I’m right here!” Molly felt his frustration rise. This must be what being a child in a room full of adults was like- he didn't have to have experienced it to feel a sense of revulsion towards the mere idea and if he stopped to think about that, it might have scared him. “And I’m not a thing. I’m Molly. I’m my own person, not a placeholder for your bloody Nonagon.”

The voices went silent for a moment. Molly had the distinct feeling they were whispering about him where he couldn’t hear. He strained his ears, hoping to catch something being said, but all he could hear was a hoarse Molly? coming from somewhere far away.

Yasha. That was Yasha.

He didn’t know when the dream began, but he knew when it ended- thrown bodily out of the sea of stars and back into Lorenzo’s bedroom with a sharp gasp and the taste of blood in his mouth- the nosebleed in his dream was reflected in reality, the lines between both blurred.

He would think about that later. He dragged a hand across his nose and smeared more of the blood away, tasting the salty copper tang on his lips, and stared at Yasha who was sitting up now and looking at him like he was the one who had been in chains.

“You’re bleeding… and you kept saying ‘I’m Molly’ over and over.”

“I’m fine, love,” he laughed, a little brokenly. The sight of her bright jewel-colored eyes, confused, but not dull and lifeless, nearly brought tears to his own eyes and pushed everything else out of his head. “Humidity or something. And you were the one in the manacles. How’re you feeling?”

Yasha reached over and trailed her fingers through his hair. Either she bought the lie or knew him well enough to understand why he felt the need to give her one. “I’m…. I’m okay. You came to rescue me?”

Molly’s expression was incredulous. “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

Her cheeks flushed crimson, stark against the pale of her skin. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just… I’m not used to any of this yet. I suppose I should have expected it after you fought tooth and nail for the circus and I just-“ she bit the words off.

“Yasha, no. Don’t do that again. We talked about this. You’re not a coward.”

Now it was her turn to laugh like a broken thing. “I am though. I ran and left you to deal with the circus. And Zuala-“

Molly climbed up into the bed with her, edging her over, so he could curl up next to her. “Yasha Nydoorin. Love. You do what you need to do to survive. You can’t solve a problem if everyone, including you, is dead. When it truly matters, you come through. If it were me, no one could have stopped you.”

She kept carding her fingers through his violet curls, and began to calm and pull back from the trembling, lost thing she had been when he first found her some time ago, that she had to fight not to become again. He made a vow that first day she wandered into his life that he would find any way to make her world bright eternally, and often that meant gently tugging her back from the edge that led to darkness.

“I thought I heard you die,” she whispered and Molly went rigid. “Was that real?”

He swallowed and nodded against her chest, trying to tuck himself against her like a cat curling up. “We can discuss that in the morning. I could use the sleep.”

“You can stay right here, then. I don’t really want to be alone, anyway.” She snuggled against him, entwining her arms around him like he was a bony stuffed animal for her to cuddle. Bless her. She preferred to be alone when she was miserable, but she knew he didn’t want to be alone without him having to say it.

Maybe the dreams wouldn’t come for him with this scary barbarian lady holding him.

Caleb had a new spell he wanted to try out for camping, but found the situation wasn’t ideal for the night- too many strangers, too much going on. Still, Beau found herself wondering about it as she sat on the wall and kept first watch on the Savalirwood to make sure no other Shepherds slunk back in the wee hours of the morning. By the time they dealt with everything, the sun was almost up.

Going to bed at the crack of dawn. The spellcasters were going to be pissed tomorrow when their sleep schedules were out of whack.

But the spell- Caleb was excited about it. He’d been working on it before Fjord, Jester, and Yasha had been taken and finally got it just right. It would protect them from the elements and, most importantly, protect them from enemies.

No one was going to be taken or attacked while they slept again. Never you mind that what happened happened because they wandered off. Caleb wasn’t thinking about that. He was desperate to produce a solution and Beau was grateful for it.

Her solution was watching the horizon, looking for more threats to neutralize.

She was keyed up and anxious. No dead people tea was going to fix that, and it pissed her off that she couldn’t just be happy and relieved that they’d done it. They saved everyone. Molly was alive. No one else died.

And there was a corpse in one of the rooms with blood pouring out of every orifice. No one had said a word about it, but they were all thinking it- Molly had been the only one down there. He was the only one who could have done it, and he didn’t say a word. Likely because he was scared of it. Why wouldn’t he be? He didn’t want Lucien’s shit or his baggage and now it was dumped in his lap and maybe even affecting him in gods only knew what ways.

And he was going to waltz into Nogvurot and maybe make it worse because of a personal code, and all she could do was support his decision and make sure he stayed Molly. That was all any of them could do, Cree’s persistent presence be damned.

The sound of plate scraping against plate shifted her attention from the wood back to the courtyard. She grabbed her staff and moved closer to the edge of the wall to see Keg trying to exit out of the Sour Nest in what was probably meant to be a stealthy manner, but she must have missed a step or tripped over something and her armor gave her away.

“Hey,” Beau called down to her.

Keg froze. “Fuck.”

It didn’t take a genius to figure out why she’d react that way to being spotted. Beau narrowed her eyes and vaulted down off the wall, sticking the landing with precision, but it still rang her bones like a bell. She grunted and pulled herself to standing, shaking it off. She looked cool and she was now blocking Keg’s exit. That was all that mattered.

(Keg, shocking no one, was wide-eyed and red-faced.)

“Were you gonna just leave without sayin’ anything?”

“No!” Keg blurted out. It was so clearly a lie that Beau didn’t even feel compelled to lean on her monk training to mine her words for the validity. Insight was great, but dealing with people who couldn’t lie for shit was better. Off her raised eyebrow, the dwarf woman stammered harder and went to dig out a cigarette. “Fuck. Yeah, I was. Okay? We did the thing. Got your people back. Happy fuckin’ endings all around. That’s all I signed up for.”

“And we didn't deserve a goodbye ‘cause...?” She narrowed her eyes, expecting to be supplied with a damn good answer. She thought Keg was their friend and she was starting to get stupidly attached to the idea of having friends who might actually stick with her and not bolt the second they were done with her.

Keg lit her smoke and then offered one to Beau (she declined- drugs were great but cigarettes might fuck up her lungs and wreck this badass temple she built to kick ass with. Also they tasted like licking the aftermath of a bonfire). “I ain’t good with goodbyes. And you guys have got a good thing goin’ here. I don’t wanna muck it up.”

“Yeah, well, Cree and Otis and the shitton of randos we just saved are muckin’ it up and no one’s complain’ about them. Well, Nott’s complaining about Otis, but she’s been doin’ that for awhile.” She sighed. “What’s the real reason, Keg?”

Seeing herself well and truly backed into a corner, Keg blew smoke rings for a moment just to stall for time. “My friend- his name is... or was Raleigh- he ain’t in there. I kinda knew he wouldn’t be. It’s been too long. I thought maybe I could find ‘em. Hunt through the records an’ shit, but fuck. I dunno. I guess I didn’t think too far ahead beyond savin’ him. So maybe now I just... go out and try to do what you guys do.”

“What do we do?” That much caught her off-guard. Right now, the Nein were just… People. People who were ride or die for each other, apparently. People who did some mild crime on the side to make some money. People just being people in a crazy fucked up world.

Now it was Keg’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “You help people. Duh.”

Beau blinked. Did they? She thought about the Schusters, about Kiri, about Dolan, about these people who had been trapped here, ready to be tortured and sold off like merchandise. Those fucking bandits Molly kept trying to domesticate. The people in Alfield. The circus. So many people they’ve helped, and sure a lot of it had been for coin or an advantage, but not all of it. Some of it had just been because it was the right thing to do.

“Fuck,” she breathed as the revelation hit her like one of Dairon's punches. “We help people.”

Keg blew another smoke ring. “Wow. You really are just figurin’ that out, huh?”

She shook herself out of that realization just so she could be indignant in Keg’s general direction. It was a nice distraction from the crisis she was going to have later about the whole hero thing. “Look, you’ve met us. We’re assholes.”

“Yeah, but not the biggest. And, apparently, bein’ an asshole and bein’ a good person ain’t, uh… What’s the word?”

“Mutually exclusive?”

Keg snapped her fingers- or tried to, since her gauntlets didn’t really allow for it. “Yeah! That one. That thing that is definitely one word.” She waved that off, moving on. “And if that’s true, maybe I can… Be good.”

“You could just stay with us, y’know?” Beau shifted her weight, awkwardly.

“Yeah, no thanks. You’re great and your new tabaxi tag-a-long is hot, but it’s a little too crowded for me.” She jerked her thumb to the mansion behind her.

“Yeah, that’s fair.” Beau blew her hair out of her face. “Maybe just… come with us as far as Zadash?” She didn’t know why it mattered so much that Keg not wander out into oblivion without them. You go through shit with people, you kinda wanna keep them close. Also maybe she was a little attracted to her. Maybe she’d feel differently if they had actually banged and she was ready to put some distance between herself and her latest fuck.

Maybe she hated that Keg was going out there bittersweet and not entirely helped. Shit. Was this what it was like to be a hero? Not wanting things left unfinished, even if there was literally nothing she could do to get Keg her friend back?

But someone could. The least she could do was point Keg in his direction. “The Gentleman knows Ophelia really well and they’re close allies. Maybe they can find your friend for you. You might have to do him some favors, but the dude pays good and he’s pretty cool for a crime boss. We could put in a good word, too.”

Keg blinked slowly, just absorbing all of this. “Shit. That’s… actually not a bad idea.” She swallowed and then stomped her cigarette out underneath her heel, suddenly unable to look Beau directly in the eye. “You’d do that? Uh… Give me a recommendation or whatever?”

“Yeah,” Beau shrugged. “Why not? He’s got a spot open if Cree’s coming with us. And you could probably give him some info on shit in the Run he might like to have.”

“‘Cause my info’s been so useful.” (Beau snorted at that) Keg continued to grind her cigarette into the dirt, determined to reduce it to nothing before she could bring herself to look up. “I guess I could do that, yeah. Since you’re bein’ so nice about it. Gods know why. I kinda expected you’d just tell me to get the fuck out and don’t let the door hit me on the ass on the way out.”

Beau had a good chuckle at that, and leaned against the wall a bit, the very image of smooth (in her own head). “Eh. Maybe I wouldn’t let the door hit you on the ass. That’d keep me from enjoying it.”

Keg shut down completely. “...Wait. What?”

Having expected that, she provided a translation, “I said you had a nice ass.”

Once again, she shut down. Beau could see the total lack of comprehension in her wide, unfocused eyes, and she let her fight the losing battle against lust and logic for a few minutes before she snapped her fingers. “You okay?”

“I, uh… Maybe. Fuck. Words.”

“Fuck words, indeed,” Beau nodded, sagely. She almost asked her to spend the night with her- almost- but her base fuckboy instincts didn’t enjoy the idea of traveling with someone she had a tumble with. Maybe hold that thought until Zadash. “You wanna take next watch if you’re not gonna bolt?”

Keg blew out a breath. “Yeah… Yeah, I think I need to think about that one. Fuck. That was really smooth.”

Fuck yeah. Nailed it. “I know right? It just came to me.”

Flirting with Keg was like easy mode, but, hey, if she ever needed to practice her cheesy pick-up lines, she knew where to go to get validation. She patted her on the back and swanned past her to head into the mansion and maybe finally sleep, her restless energy put to bed somewhat now. No solutions were found, but she could worry about that tomorrow. She had something to feel good about now- the whole helping people thing.

She could still hear the clang of Keg’s armor and her sexually frustrated swearing once she was inside, and it put a delighted, shit-eating smile on her face.

Maybe the whole 'being a sex god to at least one person' thing kinda helped her out a bit too.

It was mid-afternoon when the Nein were pulled from their collapse within the Sour Nest by the sound of a furious animal howl. Across the manor, scattered as they were, they leapt from their beds, grabbed for weapons and headed out through the front door, while the captives in their own corners cowered and whispered among themselves. The only one to move with them was a large and impressive firbolg- the one Cree had consoled in his cage when they were tearing their way through the basement.

“It might not be safe,” Cree murmured, catching him before he could fully join the ranks. She had spent most of her time checking in on the captives alongside Caduceus, while keeping herself separate from him, at the same time. Not only had he been the one she had spoken to and, apparently, given him the first taste of hope in weeks, he was also the father of the child they had found in the cage and gods willing she would not be so cruel as to send him out to face an onslaught while his traumatized child slept. “Think of your boy, Kitor.”

Kitor shook his head. “I know that sound. I don’t want them to hurt her.” He pulled out of her grip and began to push forwards, leaving Cree confused, but even more determined to follow. If he was too trusting or too foolish, that boy could end up an orphan in the Run and having been one and been among them, there were few worse things to be.

The Nein fanned out around the courtyard, staring down a large direwolf in shades of brown that had apparently slammed through the front gates. The wolf raised its head and howled to the heavens, revealing a patch of red fur along its throat, almost like it had been patterned to emulate jewelry of some kind.

“Hey, Cad…” Beau looked up at him, standing tall to her right. “They get a lot of wolves that size in this area?”

Caduceus shrugged. “Sometimes this size or a little bigger. They’re usually, uh… a little weirder looking.”

Kitor pushed through the crowd before anyone could verbalize a strategy, shouting. “Wait! Don’t hurt her! That’s my Nila!”

“Nila?” Nott balked. “Is that your, uh… Mount?”

“My mate,” Kitor corrected without looking back as he approached the direwolf, who had gone still and wide-eyed, a low whine escaping her in place of her furious howls.

Nott blinked her golden eyes owlishly, and then blew out a long breath. “...That’s cool. You have a very progressive relationship. I respect that.”

“Nila, Nila…” Kitor cooed, softly, taking the large beast’s head in his hands. “You came to get us, my love? All by yourself, too. That was so dangerous.” He buried his face in her fur. “Impressive, but so dangerous.”

The direwolf whined and then the spell dissipated in a shimmer of druidic magic, leaving a faint smell of berries behind. Where the beast had been now stood a firbolg woman with the same dark-colored fur and a necklace of red feathers. She wrapped her arms around Kitor and headbutted him. “I was going to call lightning from the sky and burn this place to ashes and tear apart everyone who got in my way.”

“And you would have done it so brilliantly, my love, but as your worried husband, I am glad you didn’t have to.” He waved a hand to indicate the deeply confused Mighty Nein behind him. “These people rescued us.”

Nila blinked large watery eyes. “Asar?”

Almost as if he could hear his name even from a distance, the little firbolg boy tore out of the building and pushed between the legs of the assembled (and confused) warriors, desperate to get to his family. “Mama! Mama!”

The sound Nila made was heart-wrenching, relief and joy and tear-choked all at once. She released her husband and caught her boy in her arms and spun him around and smothered him with kisses. “Asar!”

Watching this, Cree felt her heart clench. Down below her, at her ankles, she heard Nott gasp and then immediately look away. The rest of the Nein seemed to be equally overwhelmed by the scene before them- they had all known they had done a good thing here, but seeing the proof- a family reunited- was something else entirely.

Maybe they had all felt this before- Cree couldn’t say. All she knew was she had never felt this, herself. All that power Lucien had and he had never thought to crush the people who had burned their childhoods to ash, claiming it was too small a goal for too little yield. Strike the head of a snake, and three more grow in its place. It would be undone in a week every time.

And even if three more serpents did emerge to fill the vacuum left by the Iron Shepherds, even if it would be undone in a week when the Jagentoths realizes what had happened, didn’t it mean something that these people were fine for one day? Was it truly not enough for him that just a handful of other people not experience the horrors they felt, even if it would never end it, even if there would always be more suffering?

Lucien always thought in terms of the big picture. It wasn’t enough to fix small problems- fix the whole thing or it wasn’t even worth it. He couldn’t abide by work that would just get torn down in time, even if to the individuals that work meant everything. And she had agreed, because it sounded reasonable at the time.

Now she wasn’t sure. Instinctively, she looked to Molly who was all she had of Lucien, and she counted on him to tell her what to do, because her entire life had been built on orders upon orders. She barely knew how to decide anything for herself.

Molly was smiling with tears stuck in his eyes, overwhelmed by emotion, and she knew that he would never make the same calls Lucien would. Lucien believed in the scope of grand dreams that would rewrite the world as he saw it, but Molly believed in the individual, in saving as many as you could in the hopes that it would make the world better for a little while, even if it didn’t change it. You just had to make it bearable.

Cree felt her feet slip off the ledge and only just barely yanked herself back before she fell into the void of doubting, and then turned and walked back inside of the manor, so no one could see her on the verge of a breakdown.

It was almost nightfall again by the time they gathered everything together and left for Ophelia’s estate. Caduceus had spent a lengthy time talking to the firbolgs and had returned to the Nein ecstatic that they had agreed to keep an eye on the Grove for him, which had apparently removed a weight from his skinny shoulders.

Cree had vanished sometime between Nila’s arrival and their decision to head out now that the captives had been taken care of (Nila and Kitor had agreed to lead them out of the Wood, as well, as it was the least Nila could offer to do for them, having missed destroying the Iron Shepherds with her lightning) and they were all awake and healed up. She emerged at the last minute, the picture of tabaxi misery, and carrying Lorenzo’s glaive on her back, held in place by what looked like an abandoned scarf, until she could have something better made (Molly would unpack that later).

For now, all Molly remembered was the way she had looked when she saw the kid in that cage, but he couldn’t tell if that was the crux of her problems or if there was something deeper than that. He didn’t know how to help her without probing, however, and on top of not wanting to mine other people’s baggage for details, he had enough baggage now without adding hers to it- it was too entwined with his own- well, Lucien's, which was rapidly becoming his problem. He didn’t trust himself to be able to separate it. Not right now. Not with those strange voices in his head talking about investigating and calling him their Nonagon when he very clearly wasn't.

He still hadn’t told anyone about them. Or that weird power that had obliterated the rogue. He had good reasons to avoid it far beyond just not wanting to talk about it- his attention had been entirely focused on Yasha and then Jester and Fjord. There wasn’t room for anything else at the moment, but now that they were walking away from that, it was going to get harder and harder to justify not informing the others.

And then Beau had to go and lay another complication on his shoulders as they walked through the Savalirwood to reach the estate. She jogged up beside him and wasted no time in getting to the point. Tragic, actually. He could have stood to just bantered around it for awhile. “Hey, so… Before we meet Ophelia, there’s something you need to know.”

Molly’s throat went dry. “I’m gonna hate this, aren’t I?”

“Probably.” Beau blew out a long breath. “Okay, so when Caleb and I were at Ophelia’s I saw this painting on her mantle. It was, uh… A baby tiefling. Lavender.”

Molly froze. The dead leaves crunching underfoot were suddenly louder than gnoll war yips as the rest of the group continued onward, unaware of the noise they were making. He seemed to have come untethered entirely, a being who could absorb the sounds of life around him, but had no life of his own.

And then Beau grabbed his shoulder and he remembered how to be physical again. “Molly… C’mon, man. It might be nothing. But I need you to know that she might freak the fuck out if she sees you and I don’t know how you want to deal with that.”

He wanted to run. He wanted to run far, far away, but he couldn’t. He’d made a promise- multiple promises. He couldn’t leave them- couldn’t break his deal with Cree either. Whatever happened, he had to endure it. “We’re gonna be traveling together for a bit, so there's no hiding me forever,” he said, the words coming out as a pained hiss. “Might as well get it over with.”

Beau pressed her tongue to the back of her teeth. “Yeah…. Yeah, probably. You okay?”

No. But gods forbid Molly let anyone know he felt anything negative. He was supposed to be the warm center of chaos (alongside Jester) that this party circled around. He couldn’t afford to sink and risk taking them all with him. He had to be blissful and free of anything that might weigh him down, and if he was currently weighed down, then he had to pretend he wasn’t, even though his knees wanted to buckle. Eventually, he would get his head above water again. “I’m good.”

She didn’t buy it for a second, but she also didn’t challenge him. He suspected that storm was building on the horizon, but for now, the skies were allowed to stay clear and she moved on to go and talk to Fjord.

To combat the agony churning within him, Molly walked the rest of the way to the estate with a spring in his step and an eagerness to talk to everyone that belied his anxiety. He was overcompensating, but as far as he knew, only Beau seemed to realize it and said nothing about it. It was distracting for awhile, just allowing himself to be happy and delighted by having everyone back together again. It felt normal, and that normalcy was like a bandage hastily applied to his new wounds, covering them up, while underneath they continued to bleed through. It might be awhile before they soaked through completely, but until then he was content to ignore it.

Caleb remembered where the back gate to the estate was- even with the entire forest being creepy and unnervingly samey- after Caduceus led them through the bulk of it. It was growing darker now due to their late start and even with what Beau had told him, Molly was overwhelmed with relief when he saw the gates of the estate looming large and trying to cut a hole in the wood for itself that the wood seemed fully content to just encroach on anyway. The guards went on high alert at the sight of a large group of bedraggled adventurers and raised their weapons.

Instantly, every member of their party froze and held up their hands. Beau and Caleb stepped forward. It was Beau, against everyone’s best interests probably, who spoke, “Hey! Remember us. We’re the guys who wrecked the Iron Shepherds for your boss.”

The guards exchanged looks. One broke off from the rest and retreated into the stark white building, leaving them standing there, frozen with weapons pointed at them for an uncomfortable series of moments before a partially hidden hatch to their right opened and the guard who had just left sourly gestured them to follow him.

“I don’t like the idea of going in through a mob boss’s murder basement,” Molly muttered. He looked over at the still poised and ready to fire guards. “Couldn’t we just come in through the front like civilized people?”

One of the guards methodically fingered the trigger mechanism for his heavy crossbow. “...Right. Fair enough.” He followed the single file line of his friends and newfound allies down into the hatch and into a basement that smelled of must, grain, and the pungent sweet aroma of spilled wine, alongside the damp of something underground built too close to water. There was a slight tang of old blood in the air as well- probably from whatever arsehole had spilled the wine. It was nearly pitch black, but Molly’s darkvision could see that the walls were lined with bottles, and barrels were scattered this way and that, forming a maze that the guard wound them through to keep them from veering off the path and wandering (the humans and Caduceus had to hold onto the people who could see to keep from tripping). Nott tried to dart off, but Molly caught her by the collar before she could get too far and deposited her right back where she was supposed to be.

(She grumbled, took a hit from her flask, and then kept moving forwards, even though her faintly glowing golden eyes still flashed with need for whatever shiny thing drew her attention.)

The guard finally led them up a set of stairs and out of the darkness and into the brighter arcane lamplights of the main foyer. Molly blinked a few times to readjust to the brightness and then blinked a few more times when he saw the woman he knew must be Ophelia Mardoon.

She didn’t… look like him, which was a mercy. When Beau had warned him, he expected a woman who matched him horn for tail, but there was barely anything to suggest a relationship between them except maybe that their eyes were both a singular color- that wasn’t uncommon, though. From the few tieflings that Molly had met, that was the norm and Jester’s more humanoid eyes were the strange ones.

More importantly when her eyes glanced at each of them in kind, taking them all in, she didn’t linger on him or pause or gasp or react at all. She met his eyes and then went to the next person until she’d made significant, dominant eye contact with every single person present.

“I apologize for the theater,” Ophelia drawled, her accent clipped and Zemnian, thicker than even Caleb’s. “But… Large groups attract attention. And yours is quite a bit larger than it was when we first spoke.” Her golden eyes fell on Beau and Caleb- mostly on Caleb, who tried to stand up taller under her scrutiny.

With a certain aplomb, like leadership came naturally to him and wasn't something he stumbled into, he said: “We’ve achieved your goals and our own. The Sour Nest is emptied, their leader slain, and their captives freed."

Ophelia flicked an errant hair off of her left epaulet. “And you have proof of this?”

Everyone looked to Cree, who shifted Lorenzo's glaive from her back so it could be seen in full. She breathed in, impatiently, and stepped forward. “I imagine you will recognize this, Lady Mardoon?”

Ophelia studied it. “...Yes, that is adequate proof. I have never known that beast to go anywhere without that weapon.” She started to reach for it, but Cree clenched her hands around it tighter and there was a momentary standstill before Fjord stepped up.

“Ah… If at all possible, Lady Mardoon, that weapon took the life of one of our own. I believe Ms. Cree has a bit of a sentimental attachment to it for that reason.”

“An odd sentiment.” Ophelia eyed Cree and the two women locked eyes formidably until Molly was certain that one of them would claw the others’ out to end the staring contest. Eventually, Ophelia broke first with no shortage of distaste. “I did not realize that one of your own was slain by the Shepherds.”

“He got better,” Beau muttered. She gestured to Molly, who slapped her across the back of her leg with his tail (she winced and glared in a way that promised retribution later). He was doing so well not being recognized by her- he didn’t want that to change.

But Ophelia only spared him another brief, indifferent look, before Cree’s voice drew her back. “I brought him back to life.” There was a haughtiness in her tone that made Molly wonder what she knew about Ophelia’s connection to Lucien- if there even was one.

“You must be quite the priestess, then.” Off Cree’s answering rumble of agreement, Ophelia waved her hand and went on, “Regardless, I thank you. You have done well, but it is far too late to start a journey. I will secure you free room and board and whatever amenities and… dalliances-" here she grinned wickedly, "-you might require at the Landlocked Lady. We will leave at first light.”

The group exchanged looks. Not a one of them wanted to stay another moment in this place- least of all Molly who feared the history that lurked behind every corner, waiting to swallow him up, but there was no argument that could be had. The mob boss had spoken.

Fjord, once more, stepped up to take Caleb’s place as the negotiator. (Molly had missed this so much- watching that easy charisma. It was amusing that a man who flustered so easily could turn on the charm like that.) He gave a polite little bow and even held out his hand, which Ophelia took and then expected it to be kissed. “Thank you for that. You’re too kind.”

He stared at her gloved hand, waiting expectantly for his lips, and gave it a quick peck, his cheeks burning.

Ophelia scoffed lightly, examining her glove as if she expected to find traces of Fjord's spit on it. “It is not a kindness. It is an additional reward for a job well done. I imagine the Gentleman’s payment is far from paltry, but, nevertheless, this is the least I can offer for the stress of this adventure. Your losses, your… imprisonment.” She clicked her tongue. “Now, if you’ll excuse me. I have business to attend to before we can leave tomorrow. Kerrigan will take you through the back again.”

The guard, who had been standing to the side with an expression of abject boredom, waved them back towards the staircase and Ophelia turned away from them, seeing the conversation finished and having no more reason to acknowledge them. Beau caught Molly by the shoulder as they headed back down. “She didn’t recognize me,” he whispered.

“Maybe she just collects weird baby tiefling paintings,” she shrugged, but the relief in her voice was as palpable as his own.

“Maybe.” He didn’t feel that lucky, but it didn’t really matter either way, did it? No reaction was a good reaction, regardless of intent behind it.

Cree stayed behind when the rest had vanished down the stairs. Ophelia picked up on her lingering presence long before she addressed it, almost content to wait her out until her patience thinned. “As I said, I have work to do. What is it?”

“I was curious about the painting on your mantle.” She had zeroed in on that little flash of purple when she’d stepped into the foyer, her eyes somehow always finding lavender like she had been hunting for a glimpse of it for two years. “The child.”

Ophelia laughed and finally turned to face Cree. “How strange it is you questioning that and not him.”

“I do not know that he saw what I saw, nor do I think he cares.” Lucien would have. Lucien would have choked the life out of this woman right here in her own home if he had even the slightest suspicion. But Molly was not Lucien and since he ran from his past, and it was up to Cree to dig out the secrets. “So you admit it, then?”

“You wield the weapon that killed him, likely to protect him. You saved his life. You defend his honor when he doesn’t ask for it.” Ophelia canted her head. “You’re too young to act his mother.”

Cree bristled. “And you’re a poor mother to not even blink when she sees her son in her presence for the first time in years.” The accusation dripped from her tongue like venom. She was daring her to deny it.

Ophelia Mardoon didn’t. “I gave birth to a child twenty-five years ago. I doubt that makes me a mother, and he doesn’t seem to be in need of one, anyway. What is your angle, katzchen?”

The condescending pet name turned her tail from sleek to a bottlebrush in an instant. “You were here the whole time. You knew he was on the streets, suffering and bleeding and being hunted by the very men you sent them to kill.” She jerked her arm towards the staircase. “And you did nothing.”

There was a moment when Cree thought that Ophelia would slap her. She advanced, hand raised, and then- at the last moment- she raked her fingers down the fur of her face, stroking her whiskers until she shivered.

She would have preferred to be slapped. She stepped away with a disgruntled, animal yowl- a cat being petted the wrong way.

That only seemed to amuse the tiefling woman. “You’re the Gentleman’s Bloodspeaker, aren’t you? It would be in such poor form if I were to slit the throat of his most valuable asset because she made demands to me as if I was one of her blood vials.”

Cree tensed but said nothing, and Ophelia backed away, turning her gaze to the mantle, as if it had personally affronted her. She stepped towards it, picked up the small hand-sized painting, and only then did her expression soften. As an expression of guilt or sorrow, it was lacking. If anything, it was resignation.

“I will tell you this, out of respect for your employer and my friend.” She frowned and laid the painting aside. “No… I will tell you this, because you strike me as a woman who believes she knows what’s best for everyone when she doesn’t even know what’s best for herself. You cannot know a book, katzchen, by the pages you have decided to read out of order.”

When Cree only narrowed her eyes and waited for her to get on with it, Ophelia continued, “When I was a younger woman- younger than you are now- I fell in love with a nobleman in Zemni Fields. I believed for a time that he loved me, as well. He showered me with gifts, promised to leave his wife so that I may be lady of the manor, but… rich men make idle promises. He gave me a necklace of his wife’s and told me he had sent her away and asked me to come to the manor late one evening to finally take my place at his side. When I arrived, his wife answered the door, saw me wearing her jewels and declared me a thief.” She bared her teeth in a grimace. “And you know… no one in Zemni Fields would believe the word of a devil-blood, even one who had lived there her entire life and had even served in the Dawnfather's own temple. Facing arrest and probable execution, I fled from my home, pursued like a dog. I crawled on my belly through the gates into the Greying Wildlands, paying with more than just the meager gold I had on me. By the time I reached Shadycreek Run, I was a broken beggar.”

She paused, releasing a breath. “But, unlike many, I was fortunate. I was taken in by a couple who lived decently and were kind at heart. They did not cast me out or try to sell me to the highest bidder, even when it became clear I was with child- whether by the bastard who’d betrayed me or the Uttolot guardsmen who took advantage of me, I cannot say. I believe I hoped it was the nobleman’s bastard, so that I might raise a child to carry my vengeance and that is why I carried him to term, rather than swallow poisons to rid myself of him.”

(Cree winced visibly, but her reaction was ignored.)

“In deciding to keep him, my original intention was not to abandon the child at all, but when the head of the Mardoon family saw me in the plaza and thought I had an eye the family could use, I took the offer. I gave up the mantle of mother for being one of the tribe and left my son in the hands of another. Not five years later, I heard the kind souls who had taken me and the child- Lucien, gods, the only thing I ever gave him was his name- in had died. I assumed the boy died with them until years later, I heard of a purple tiefling child running amok. By then, I was close to becoming the head of the family. Nothing could jeopardize that. And besides… you do not simply give up being a mother, only to pick it up again on a whim.”

Nothing she said made Cree feel any better- she rather suspected that was the point. “So why do you keep that painting?”

Ophelia leveled her with a look of deep contempt. “Love and ambition can co-exist, but for many if it comes down to one or the other, it is love that is easily sacrificed. You can find love anywhere. You cannot always find an opportunity. I keep that painting because while I never asked to be a mother nor wanted to be, I did love that child for a moment, but he passed from my hands to another so that I could become this. I do not regret what I did. I do not look back on what might have been. I merely acknowledge the love that was there and that it was not enough. I needed more to be satisfied.”

Every word hit like a knife. She shook her head, violently. “That’s barely love at all. How can you even call it such?”

The tiefling woman waved a hand, unconcerned with her fits of passion. Cree had never hated anyone quite this much. At least the monsters in her past had never justified their monstrous natures. “Love can be selfish. You can love something and never choose it, because once you do, you must give up on so many other things to keep it, and if love alone does not satisfy then why would you bother? Perhaps one day you will understand. Perhaps not. You seem to be a woman driven purely by love. It is not a wrong way to live your life, but it is not the way I live mine. Your fits and disdain will not persuade me otherwise.”

They stared each other down for a moment longer. “You have your answers, cold comfort though they might be. I do not care if you write me as the villain in his history, but at least you have the story. I did what I did and that is that. There is no forgiveness I need and no closure he can get from me. I sincerely doubt, if you are here and he is not, that he wants it anyway.” She clicked her teeth as she grit them. “So leave me be and let us not speak of this any more today or any other day. I will not have my trip to Zadash be fraught with such unnecessary grievances. Let the past be what it is.”

She stepped away. There were men lurking barely in view, daring her to retaliate with the weapon in her hand. She would be dead before the glaive struck true and she would have accomplished nothing, gained nothing. Ophelia was far, far from important. She was minuscule, just like the men and their whips and cages- Lucien would want her to solve the big picture, and leave the smaller things alone. And Molly would want none of this, so she could not use him to rationalize her rage and eagerness to use it.

This was all her, and, uselessly, her anger burned true, old memories, old traumas threatening to turn her to cinders in their wake. She would be hollowed out and left with nothing if she allowed herself to stoke this fire in her belly.

She forced herself to turn and walk down the stairs, only vaguely aware of the guard who had joined her to make sure she didn’t change her mind and choose to lunge.

She only considered it for a moment, before she crossed the basement and came back up into the cold night air of the Savalirwood to rejoin the party and make excuses for her absence.

Chapter Text

“Cleric meeting!” Jester chirped, linking her arms through Cree and Caduceus’s arms as they entered the Landlocked Lady. The proprietor's expression had lit up until he realized that Ophelia had ordered everything to be on the house for them and muttered something about tips being encouraged. (Molly had shot back, gleefully, that he had that covered. And then asked for whoever on his payroll had the best hands and could he see them immediately.)

Almost everyone had scattered again- it was an awkward, uneasy scattering given everything, but some things couldn’t be helped. Everyone agreed that they would not leave this building for the entire night and with it being Ophelia’s brothel, no one would dare harm them here. They were safe as houses. Houses with a lot of really pretty people to tend to their needs.

Jester didn’t know enough about Cree or Caduceus to know if they had needs that needed to be tended to by the nice ladies and gentleman of the night, but that was all the more reason to pull them aside before they could get acquainted with any.

Caduceus was thrilled at being pulled off into some grand secret meeting, but Cree was stiff and irritated about it. She only seemed to agree because Molly had given her a shrug and a wink before he fled upstairs, hand in hand with an androgynous elf with very nimble-looking fingers, indeed. That was a little weird to think she was still following Molly's lead even knowing he wasn't Lucien, but whatever. The important thing was that she got both of them to a table without losing either of them to the late afternoon crowd.

Champ didn’t have any milk or tea available, but Cree drank whiskey and that he had plenty of, so only she ended up nursing a drink while Jester looked her and Caduceus both over with her eyes wide and gleeful.

“Soooo you’re both gonna be traveling with us, huh?”

“It felt like the thing to do,” Caduceus murmured. “Ms. Cree and Mr. Mollymauk wandered into my garden and it seemed like the sign I needed to get moving towards something.”

“Something?” Jester canted her head. “What sort of something?”

The firbolg only shrugged and beamed brightly, as if not knowing was half the fun. He had a good smile- serene and nonthreatening. Just looking at him was like getting a nice comfy hug. “Dunno yet. I’m gonna let you lot lead me along for a little while, see what else I can do for you, and then maybe we’ll see about what I need.” He nodded towards Cree. “I think Ms. Cree has a clearer path than I do.”

Cree, lapping at her whiskey, froze. “...And what makes you say that, Mr. Clay?”

Once more, he shrugged- he did that a lot, Jester noticed. A little raise of his bony, way-too-thin (seriously she had to feed this poor guy and soon) shoulders and that good, relaxing easy smile. “Just a hunch. You have the look of a woman who knows exactly what she wants and how she’s going to get it.”

Jester squinted, trying to see if she could see what Caduceus saw- all she saw was a tabaxi with drops of whiskey clinging to her whiskers that she licked away with a roll of her long tongue, confused and a bit defensive. But that was getting a bit off topic. She mimed backing up with her hands. “Okay, but this means we’re gonna have three clerics, and lemme tell you, you guys, it’s really stressful being the only one who can heal, especially when you also want to hit things.”

Cree blinked. “Ah… You mean your instinct is not to just support? You would prefer to do damage?”

“...Is that not what you wanna do?” Jester squinted. She so didn’t want to think that she was the only cleric in the world who just wanted to ring murder bells or slap people with spectral lollipops.

“I was not trained to do as such.” Cree returned to her whiskey. “If I have already supported my team as much as I can, then, of course, doing significant amounts of damage can be rewarding, but I would prefer to hang back and observe the fight and see who needs to be taken care of.”

She pointed at the glaive leaning against the table beside Caduceus’s staff. “But you took Lorenzo’s big stick thing. I figured you were all about the-” she mimed stabbing now.

Cree eyed the glaive and nudged it a bit closer to her, almost possessively. “I prefer to think of it as more of a focus for my magic than a true weapon. A focus that draws blood is suitable for a blood cleric such as myself.”

Caduceus, who had been watching the pair of them discuss, found a spot to jump in. “A blood cleric! That’s nice. I thought that might be what you were with the… puppeting thing.”

Jester’s eyes went suddenly even wider- as wide as saucers, even. She could imagine them taking up half her face as she succumbed to the wonder of a new kind of magic. Anything new and strange and special felt overwhelming to her where she was fighting for normalcy and joy. “Puppeting thing?”

For a moment, Cree looked startled. “I… I am surprised you recognized it, Mr. Clay. Hemocraft is not a common art.”

“Heh.” Caduceus blushed a bit underneath his pale fur. “Hemocraft was invented by the Raven Queen, and my ancestors were Raven Queen followers back before they came to follow the Wildmother. I wouldn’t claim to be an expert, but I know what it looks like. It’s not my thing, but it’s close enough to my thing.”

While they were talking, Jester had put two and two together on her own terms. “Whoa, so you can control people with their blood? Could you do it to me right now?”

Cree almost choked on her drink. “Why would you want me to do that?”

That was a good question. Curiosity, probably, though she imagined once it was done, it might prove to be not worth it. She was hurting for one of every kind of distraction she could find. “I dunno. I wanna know what it feels like.”

“You would not enjoy it.” She flicked her ears a bit and then went back to her whiskey. Jester blew out a frustrated breath- boy, this one was a tough nut to crack. She’d been pretty distracted when they first went to the Gentleman’s and met her properly, so all she really knew about her was that she knew Molly from Before He Was Molly and did weird shit with blood.

And she wasn’t really offering up a whole lot else. “Anywaaaaay,” she drawled. “It’s gonna be really cool having three of us. We can coordinate our spells and if one of us wants to hurt things, someone else can heal, and the stress won’t be all on one person to do everything!”

“Huh.” Caduceus mulled that over. “I’ve never really been in a situation where that’d be the case. That might be neat.”

“I have operated fine as the sole cleric,” Cree murmured. Jester felt like she was just actively trying to be contrary and leaned over a bit.

“Yeah, but now you don’t have to.” She paused, suddenly turning over a new concept in her head and finding it crawling with the biting insects of less pleasant thoughts. Cree was the only cleric the Nein had for a hot minute before they found Caduceus. Without her, Molly would be…

A petty surge of envy and regret welled up inside of her. It was messy, inconvenient, and made her stomach hurt. She knew the rest of the Nein had reservations about Cree, but Jester felt strangely jealous of her- that she could do what she couldn’t. But she was also very, very grateful.

And gratitude won out, in the end. “...I didn’t get to say it before, Cree, but I’m really glad you brought Molly back. You didn’t have to do that.”

The look Cree gave her was surprised, then stern, and then she just dropped her gaze to the table. “I thought I was bringing Lucien back. That it was Mollymauk was only luck. I sincerely doubt you would have thanked me if I obliterated your friend to bring mine back.”

Jester plopped back onto her seat and threaded her fingers together. “Maybe, but I guess I’d get it. Molly’s our friend, but Lucien’s yours. And he seems to mean a lot to you…”

“More than you know,” Cree responded, softly.

“But maybe… Molly can be your friend. And we could be your friends, too.” She looked over at Caduceus, who seemed to be studying Cree like she was a book he couldn't quite understand. She withered under their gazes, a shudder of some emotion making her fur bristle- frustration. Jester could recognize it from the way her tail moved, not unlike a tiefling's. Or like Frumpkin when he didn't like the way she was petting him.

“You are kind,” she said, through gritted teeth. “But this is an alliance of convenience that may not end the way you wish it will. Only one of us can get what they want.” The and I intend it to be me was implied. She downed the last of her drink and pushed her chair aside, collected her glaive and satchel, and gave them both a polite, if not curt nod. “Be pleased. I am going to bed.”

As soon as she had vanished up the stairs, Jester sighed loudly. “She doesn’t have to be so bitchy.”

“I think that was her being polite.” Caduceus’s eyes hadn’t left the staircase. “She’s going through some stuff, I think. This is why bringing people back from the dead tends to get pretty complicated.”

For a moment, she looked horrified. “You don’t think she should have brought him back?”

“I didn’t say that, exactly.” He turned his head back to her. “But mourning the dead is a lot easier than mourning the living.”

That was a weird way to look at it. Jester would rather not mourn anyone at all, but he did have a point- Molly was alive, but she was well versed in sadness hidden behind smiles. He was struggling, stressed, and hurting, and he was keeping it close to his chest just like she was her own trauma. If he had died for real, he wouldn’t be hurting like this. Part of her was worried he would take Yasha and just run away from all of them and they’d never see him again, and then she really would have something to mourn.

No… No fuck that. He could get better now that he was still alive. He couldn’t get better if he was in the ground. And he promised he wasn’t going anywhere, so she pushed that aside. “I think we can win her over, make her change her mind.”

Caduceus just smiled warmly, yet with a spark of mischief that she was definitely delighted by. “I think so, too.”

Caleb was in the process of setting the silver thread when there was a knock on the door to his and Nott’s room. Sighing, he wound it back around his hand and opened the door, expecting one of the sex workers trying to entice him for tips. He'd already refused three as it was. “Was?”

It was Molly, which surprised him. He didn’t expect to see him until dawn given how fast he ran off with one of those very same workers here. He was wearing a light robe, open at the chest and showing off the new starburst shaped scar in the middle of his sternum, which drew the eye. Seeing Caleb staring at it, Molly quickly closed the robe, which really just meant that Caleb wound up staring at everything else- his long legs that the silk hugged every curve of, his tail peeking out from underneath and lashing in evident anxiety.

His mouth was suddenly very dry and he almost forgot Nott was sitting on the bed, so when she spoke, he jolted. “Done already? You’re losing your touch, Mollymauk.”

Molly flipped her off over Caleb’s shoulder. “It was just a massage. Fuck you.” He paused, winced, and then, gently. “Can you give us a minute?”

She must have seen something that tugged her heartstrings in the pleading look in his red eyes, because she hopped off the bed and pushed past them. “If you hear someone scream and it sounds like Otis… You should just ignore it.”

Molly waited a few more moments, lingering in the doorway, checking over his shoulder to make sure Nott was gone, but finally gave up- if Nott didn’t want to be seen, she wouldn’t be. He walked a bit farther into the room, seemingly at a loss, and out of respect for the need for privacy he clearly wanted, Caleb shut the door.

“Is something wrong?” What a stupid question. Molly’s lavender skin was paler than he’d ever seen it, which made those red eyes blossoming out of his tattoos stand out even starker. He could swear a couple of them were an even darker red than they were originally, noteworthy in comparison to the rest. He hadn't noticed before now that they were raised like welts, rather than simply lying flush against his skin. He should have noticed that. It would have reminded him of-

His mouth went dry for a completely different reason.

“No,” Molly responded, keeping him from clawing at the raised scars on his own skin. A terrible lie- and he realized it. “Yes. Probably. I dunno.” He dropped onto the bed, misery settling over him like a shroud. “I think there’s something wrong with me.”

Caleb froze, remembering what he and Beau had found, what they hadn’t spoken of. “How do you mean?”

He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. “This is gonna sound crazy.”

“Then you are talking to the right person, ja?” Caleb dared to venture closer, but didn’t join Molly on the bed.

Molly chuckled, darkly. “I’m… Hearing voices.”

Oh. Well, that was certainly a big matzoh ball, wasn’t it? He blinked. “Voices?”

“I… Think it’s something connected to Lucien. They treat me like I’m a thing, like I’m a placeholder for the- that Nonagon thing. I guess it’s a title, not a name. I know at least two of them helped me in that fight. I couldn’t see Lorenzo, but then I could.”

Caleb, ever the observant one, remembered that Cree reacted to Lorenzo’s presence before he appeared as well. Whatever that power was, she could do it too. What that meant, he couldn’t say without delving too deeply into shared delusions of power at the cost of your humanity and why he knew so much about them. “And the other?”

He knew what Molly would say before he said it. “I… May have made a man bleed through every hole in his face?”

He looked terrified, Caleb realized. He looked up at him with wide eyes, like he was searching his face for any sign that he would be angry or repulsed or afraid of him. Little did he know that there wasn’t anything Molly could do that could be weighed and measured and found worse than his own sins. He just nodded, carefully, leaving his face inscrutable. “That is quite the trick.”

“Very useful, in the end, except for the part where before I did it, I kept feeling this anger, like I just wanted to tear everything in that place apart. And they deserved it- I don’t regret it. But what if it happens again to people who don’t deserve it." Molly pressed his knuckles to his forehead and pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth. "What if we run into those bandits again and they’re still fucking… banditing and I just slaughter them?”

Now Caleb joined him on the bed, just as Molly pulled his robe tighter around himself, like it was a security blanket. “You wouldn’t do that.”

“Iwouldn’t, but the Nonagon might.” He blew out a breath. “I just… I need someone to watch me, make sure I don’t…. Turn. Like Kylre did. And if I do, I know you’re… pragmatic.”

Pragmatic. What a word. Trent Ikithon would have called it that- after all, for the good of the Empire was a practical thing. For a moment, Caleb wanted to clam up and his hand hovered over his bandaged arms, poised to scratch again. When he talked himself down from that, he considered asking Molly to leave point blank so he could scream into a pillow, instead.

He talked himself down from that, too. Molly was staring at him with the saddest eyes Caleb had ever seen outside of a mirror, and Caleb found himself wondering if he could really choose practicality and what’s best for everyone over Molly, even if he did turn. His memory of Kylre’s head, carved from his massive body for the assessment of the Lawmaster, was suddenly replaced with Molly’s head, eyes open and staring forever, another monster to lay before the law and be rewarded for it.

No. Molly wouldn’t turn. Molly couldn’t turn. This promise (one that he had no right to make) would be unnecessary. “You are stronger than this, Mollymauk. You don’t need me to watch you.”

If at all possible, Molly’s expression grew even more tragic. “What if Beau makes me angry and I just-” He hissed. “There are things I can do and I use them punitively. I don’t know where it comes from. I’d never hurt anyone with it, but I don’t think about it. I just do it. And those things… They don’t do any damage, except to myself sometimes. This could kill someone if I’m not careful. So please. Just… Keep an eye on things. Don’t let me hurt anyone... or at least anyone who doesn't have it coming. That’s all I need you to do.”

Just watch. Caleb turned away so he could bite his lip without Molly seeing it. Like he was always watching? Watching this colorful fool dance about, free in every way Caleb wasn’t? And here he was now, on the cusp of breaking, the world still determined to steal that shine. If he cared for that shine so much, perhaps he ought to be trying to maintain it.

(You’re not a candle, Caleb Widogast. You’re a wildfire. Nothing shines in your hands- it only burns to ash.)

Molly was waiting for an answer and Caleb was no stranger to lying. “All right. If it comes to that- and it won’t- I will take care of it.”

Molly swept onto his feet, his robe falling open to reveal his scarred up chest again and Caleb felt his knees buckle when he pressed in close to kiss him on the cheek, his tail twining around his wrist like he wanted to keep him from jerking away from the affection. “I hope it doesn’t, but… It makes me feel better. To have a plan.”

His tail loosened and fell away and Caleb felt the loss of it in his soul. The loss of Molly’s warmth as he moved towards the door was even worse. “I’m glad,” he said, pushing those thoughts aside. “Goodnight, Mr. Mollymauk.”

“Goodnight, Mr. Caleb.” Molly’s smile was radiant, if only for a moment, and it took Caleb a moment to realize that he had done that. That little bit of reassurance meant everything to him, even if it was like a dagger in his own heart

He swallowed down the bile of self-loathing, but it persisted long after Molly had left him sitting there, staring at his shaking, traitorous hands. “That still doesn’t make you a candle, Widogast.”

Molly’s good feelings lasted the length of the walk to the room he’d planned to share with Fjord after his “tryst” which was never meant to be a tryst. He couldn’t trust himself with his own friends right now, least of all with a stranger. And if he couldn’t trust himself with anything, he would rather have comfort and familiarity, and just hope for the best.

He missed having Fjord as his roommate. It felt like normalcy was returning, even if there was too much at play here for anything to be normal again. He was hearing voices. Cree was here. They had a firbolg now. Jester was most definitely hiding her sadness, but could Molly blame her? He was hiding his too. Every one of those thoughts weighed on him, dragging him down with every step.

But when he opened the door, Fjord was sitting on his bed in the middle of summoning the falchion, and everything was right in the world. “Is that a sword in your hand or are you just happy to see me?” He drawled as he sashayed in.

(No, he definitely couldn’t blame Jester for her coping mechanisms.)

Fjord turned red and the falchion vanished again. “Fuck, Molly. Warn a man before you just waltz into the room like that.”

“In case you have your sword out?” His grin was catlike and Fjord’s embarrassment came off of him in waves. “I’ve got a million of these. When you use blades in your not-quite-an-act in the circus, you pick up a lot of sword innuendos.”

Fjord dragged a hand down his face. “You know, I actually missed this?”

“Of course you did.” Molly settled primly onto his bed. The robe slipped off his shoulders and he didn't correct it, but Fjord was apparently so used to that kind of behavior, he simply ignored it. With that tactic to escalate something a miserable failure, there was nothing left but for the silence to get terrifyingly loud. Before he could break it with something new to tease him with, Fjord cut in, abruptly.

“Are you okay?”

“Why does everyone ask me that?” Molly rolled his eyes. “I wasn’t the one kidnapped by slavers.”

Fjord raised an eyebrow. “Molly, you fuckin’ died. That new scar on your chest ain’t no joke.”

He jerked the robe back onto his shoulder to cover it. “It only lasted less than a minute and I was back. It isn’t that big a deal.” And strangely, dying really was the least worst thing of all the shit that had happened to him lately. It was just the catalyst that started it all off.

Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe this was always going to happen, eventually, and he wouldn’t have known shit about it when it finally did- at least Cree had given him some context, vague as it was, because he didn’t want more than that. She would explain it all if he asked.

He definitely didn’t want to ask.

Fjord worked his jaw, tonguing the ground down tusks at the edge of his lip. “It could have been worse, you know? Wasn’t no picnic, all told, but aside from the manhandling and the verbal abuse, Jes and I got out all right. Yasha took a lot for us.”

Molly swallowed. “Yasha can take a lot. I wish she didn’t have to…” She’d suffered so much already, but Molly couldn’t blame her for what she did to protect others. If he were in her position, he’d tank every hit, too. He was used to blood. He could be unbreakable.

Right. Of course he could. That’s why he was one more fracture away from shattering into fucking pieces over all this Nonagon bullshit. He shoved that aside. “I’m worried about Jester.”

That turned Fjord’s eyes from worried to hollow in an instant. “She’s never seen anyone be that cruel before, I don’t think. Not to her, especially. She’s makin’ a show of brushin’ it off, but even I know she’s cut to shreds on the inside.”

Molly kneaded his fingers into his knees. “We’ll get back to Zadash, buy her all the doughnuts and sweets she could want. Take a hot bath. Make a whole day of it.”

“Molly,” Fjord said, gently, “you know that won’t fix it.”

“I don’t know how to fix it!” He blurted out, suddenly. Was he talking about Jester or himself? Talking it out was supposed to help, but that would mean letting more people know he was scared. It was the same for Jester. They had to maintain their fronts. They had to carry this group through their shit.

Fjord seemed to realize this. “I think you should be the one to talk to her. You two… You have a connection. Tiefling thing, maybe.”

Or we’re both just phenomenal bullshitters. Molly stuck his tongue into the corner of his mouth. “I think she’d rather have a big sweeping, romantic gesture from you, if I’m honest.”

Fjord choked, turned red again, and grabbed his pillow and threw it at him. “Fuck you, Molly.”

Molly caught the pillow against his chest and then added it to his bed. “Well, now you’ve lost yourself a pillow. You’re not gettin’ it back either. Live with your choices.” Off Fjord’s grunt of irritation, he added, “I’ll talk to her. Can’t promise either of us will open up and it’ll be healing, but… Maybe I can make her feel better.”

Fjord rolled his eyes and yanked the covers over his head pillowing his head under his arm. “Don’t forget to take care of yourself too, Molly.”

“I’m fine,” he lied through his teeth, fruitless though it might be. Fjord already saw through him. He gave his new pillow a good fluffing and then collapsed against it without even bothering to remove the robe.

I have to be fine. I can’t afford to not be. Or else Caleb will have to…

He clenched his eyes shut tightly and forced his mind to think of literally anything else but that conversation and his increasingly desperate fears of what might happen if he was left unchecked.

It was strange to be sharing a room with one of the Tombtakers again, even if it was Otis, the family “unfavorite.” But they were her fellow caster and she tolerated their presence better than Tyffial did, but not as much as Zoran. Zoran and Otis had been the outliers when they formed their group, picked up at the Orders. They grouped together while Lucien, Tyffial, Jurrell, and herself were all but glued to each others’ sides due to having grown up together, though it had been Jurrell who had lured them in. The three of them were their own little immature cabal, while she, Lucien, and Tyffial had been the practical, mature ones.

But despite the wide chasm of differences between them, they were all family once. They had only split because Lucien had asked them to if anything went wrong. He had wanted them safe, in the end. That was undeniable. He loved them. He didn’t love the world, but he loved them.

He loved her.

“You’re thinking too loud,” Otis chuckled from over on the opposite bed from hers. They rubbed their forehead, lips curled in a half-disgusted snarl, as they stared up at the ceiling.

“Stop reading my thoughts, then.” Fucking Otis. That detect thoughts ability granted to them by their patron was an absolute hassle when used on one of them. When Lucien was around, they never dared.

Otis pushed themselves up on their elbows. “So you’re really gonna continue this, are you?”

Her shoulders stiffened. “This?”

“Trying to get Nonagon back out of that thing.” Hearing Otis refer to Mollymauk as a thing got her hackles up, but she couldn’t say anything. Hadn’t she referred to him as such? Was it any different if Otis did it? “He’s not in there. It’s just wall to wall panic in his head.”

“And what would you have me do, then?” She turned to face them, teeth bared. “Leave him to whatever his fate is? After everything?”

They stared one another down, but Otis broke first. “You’ll be doin’ it alone, then. I have to watch my back and that fuckin’ goblin wants to kill me.”

“So you would leave me to them? Did two years dry up all of your loyalty, Otis?” Her fur bristled. Had she the diamond to waste, she might have skewered them then and there and brought them back just to hear an apology.

“Lucien wanted us alive. You know that better ‘n any of us. They’re clearly attached to you. I don’t think I can afford to be so lucky.”

All of a sudden, her hackles went back down, fur righting itself. “Attached to me?”

Otis affected a high-pitched impression of Jester’s voice, “‘Cleric meeting!’”

She could feel a blush forming underneath her fur. “They’re only fools. I... I do not know what they want except to turn me from my intended path to preserve their shard.”

“And we both know you won’t do that.” Otis cackled. “No one’s more devoted than you, Cree.”

She touched the amulet around her neck. Even after all these years, it was still warm. The blood hadn’t gone cold- now she understood. So long as Lucien’s body was out roving the world, the blood would still sing to her. She just hadn’t thought to listen to it, believing it to be falsehood conjured by her grief. What piss-poor devotion she had. Perhaps if she had ever followed it, she might have saved him before this…

“I’ll do it alone, then,” she murmured, gripping the amulet. After all, it seems it was my fault he came to this.

Molly was back in the sea of stars, floating aimlessly. His eyes opened to clouds of deep purple and cotton candy pink and for a moment, he felt strangely at peace. Maybe it was fine this time. Maybe he wouldn’t-

The droning came back again, separating into screams just when it became unbearable and then turned unbearable in a different way. Molly wrenched himself around, trying to find the source, expecting there not to be one, just the same as before, but instead of more empty space freckled with stars he saw something massive moving towards him, black tendrils snaking out like a sea creature combing the bottom for food among the grit.

The screams came from it.

He moved, too slowly, but fast enough to get out of the way of the reaching tentacles. This put him over the top of the massive shape where he could see a city. It might have been glorious once, all stone towers and elegant spires, but something about it was unnatural. Buildings tilted and breathed. Eyes opened and then closed and reappeared elsewhere. The stone seemed to flex like muscle. It looked like something dying in agony, sounded like something screaming out its last pained breath over and over.

He blinked and he saw that horrifying, writhing pattern he saw when he killed Lorenzo's rogue flashing behind his eyes. The fractals collapsed in on themselves and tangled and nine nine nine nine. Everything was nine. He gripped his horns and shook his head and tried to curl up in a fetal ball, floating in endless space hoping it would carry him somewhere else, somewhere safer.

He chanted a mantra of “stop it” over and over until his voice rose in octave and cracked and the words blended together into nonsense, just like the drone before it separated out into screaming.

”Open your eyes.” The voice that spoke was so loving, so full of joy, that he couldn’t resist it. It filled him with warmth and he chased that warmth, opening his eyes to behold the city again.

There was a figure standing below him, a hundred feet straight down, staring up with contemptuous red eyes. His hair was short and cut unevenly, as if by a knife, his horns unornamented save for simple caps, and he was wearing a red coat that whipped in an astral breeze that seemed to exist for no other purpose than to accentuate the dramatics.

Molly had seen his face before.

In a mirror.

”Timorei. Luctus. Elatis. Vigilan. Fastidan. Culpasi. Invite them in, little shard. Become one with us and one with your true self. Only then can you be truly whole.”

Molly choked and floated backwards, desperately shaking his head. No one had to tell him what he was staring at below him and he didn't want to hear it- or even look at it. “I’m whole. I’m already whole. I don’t need you. I don’t need him. I’m me. I’m Mollymauk Tealeaf. I’m not your Nonagon. I’m not Lucien. Just leave me alone.”

Once more the shift from dream to reality was seamless as if there was no distinction. Molly woke up screaming in an echo of the city, catapulting upwards and clutching at his head like he could tear the voices out. Fjord was up in an instant, running to the bed to catch him by the shoulders. “Molly? Molly?! It’s okay. It’s just a dream.”

Not knowing what else to do, Molly clung, desperately, to Fjord. Fuck. This was the last thing he wanted. He should be able to bury this deeper, not let anyone see, but it was eating at him, infecting everything. “I don’t think it is.”

There was a mirror on the vanity just across from Molly’s bed. He could see it over Fjord’s shoulder as he clung to him. He blinked and for the briefest of moments, he saw the figure standing on the stones of that cursed city, staring back with that lofty, contemptuous air.

He blinked again, and it was just him again.

But for how long?

Chapter Text

Molly slept fine the rest of the night, even when Fjord disengaged out of politeness and general awkwardness on how best to handle that sort of situation, especially when the situation was very, very naked underneath that thin robe (which was practically off of him from all the thrashing). If it had been Yasha, he could have had someone to hold him for the whole night again, but, in the end, he couldn’t blame Fjord for not knowing exactly what to do and not wanting to be the one to do it if he did. He had a certain aesthetic to maintain.

One of these days Molly would break it out of him, but right now the term break held more weight than it should. They needed to heal before he could resume his personal project of undoing every bit of unpleasant edges in this group.

Meanwhile, his unpleasant edges were growing like the fungus on Caduceus’s corpses. There was nothing wrong with him before all of this and now it felt like everything was wrong.

But the sun rose and he greeted the day determined to be in better spirits. It was a long road to Zadash, but once they were there, he had plans. Drinks at the Evening Nip, a hot bath, shopping with all that coin the Gentleman was going to pay them. He agreed to go to Nogvurot with Cree, but he never said how long it might take to get them there.

The Landlocked Lady wasn’t much of a cozy bed-and-breakfast tavern, but, apparently, Champ had been encouraged by Ophelia to find something suitable for her entourage to eat before the journey. The rough looking patrons who were up at this hour scowled at them over their breakfast ales and slimy, undercooked sausages as the Nein came down off the stairs to a few tables smashed together and an awkward smorgasbord laid out before them.

“It looks like a potluck,” Beau muttered. “Did, like, half the town contribute to this?”

Champ gave her a grievously intimidated look that seemed to see beyond her, like he was remembering a threat long past. “Some of this came from Lady Mardoon’s personal cooks. Others… I had to get creative. She wanted to make sure everything was to your liking due to…” He coughed.

“Due to all the murder we did, yes,” Nott nodded and Champ hissed through gritted teeth.

“Yes. Anyway. Eat up. Lady Mardoon expects you at the estate in an hour.”

The Nein didn’t need to be told twice. Fjord and Beau kept stealing glances at the other patrons, still leering, but Caduceus waved them off. “I’ll bring them over some of mine. Don’t worry about it. We can all share here and no one has to feel left out..”

(If Molly hadn’t already decided to like Caduceus, that would have done it. Were it not for that suggestion, he would have been concerned this was all a calculated effort for Ophelia to murder them all and get away with it by using angry, hungry thugs.)

“But Caduceus, don’t you need to eat something?” Jester was pouring herself a tall glass of the freshest milk Molly had seen in ages. “You’ve barely got anything on your plate.”

Indeed, the firbolg had selected mostly the grain products and some questionable-looking fruits, not a bit of meat to be seen. “Oh, I’m a vegetarian,” he explained. “Hope that’s not gonna be a problem.”

“Wait so you don’t eat any meat?” Yasha had bacon dangling out of her mouth. “Not even bugs?”

Caduceus thought about it. “I mean… I guess not. My little sister used to try to eat the bugs in my staff, but I’ve never really gotten the urge.”

“I like your sister.” Yasha nodded sagely, finished her bacon, and then laughed when Molly bumped shoulders with her affectionately.

“That does bring up an interesting question, though,” Caduceus began to gingerly fill a plate with his share of the meat. “Who usually does the cooking for you? I don’t wanna step on any toes.”

The Nein shared looks across the table. “Uh…” Beau started. “We kinda subsist on pocket bacon, stale pastries, and jerky.”

From down at the end of the table, Otis and Cree both choked. “What is… pocket bacon?” Cree asked, blinking in confusion and mild concern, while Otis covered their mouth to keep from guffawing.

“It’s bacon that you steal from the table and shove in your pocket for later,” Molly gleefully explained. As he said it, he nodded to Beau and Keg who were both shoving bacon in their pockets, trying to sneak some away from Caduceus’s peace offering plate.

Cree blinked a few more times and then returned to her sausages. “I suppose that is economical if you do not know if you are going to get another meal.”

The candor of her statement seemed to shock Beau- though not Keg, who nodded along. Jester actively winced and looked at Caleb, who flicked his gaze to his own plate to avoid meeting her eyes. Evidently food insecurity was a hot button issue for everyone. Caduceus just breezed by it with a light, airy chuckle. “I guess that means no one will mind if I do the cooking, then. The kitchen’s kinda where I thrive.”

“It will be nice to have food that isn’t stale, molded, or dried,” Caleb murmured. He poured a bit of milk for Frumpkin and laid it on the floor. The cat took to lapping at it like it was a chore, not a treat. “Who usually does the cooking in your group, Cree?”

Molly had plenty of reasons to want to kiss Caleb, but the fact that he, the king of social anxiety, was trying to pull Cree into the fold certainly soared to the top of the list. She cocked her head, deeply confused by the question or at least confused as to why it was asked of her, and while she tried to fumble for an answer, Otis supplied it for her.

“Zoran. ‘Course everything he makes has got meat in it. And potatoes. A lot of protein heavy stews. Good for energy and keepin’ you warm and movin’.”

Caduceus made a soft sound of acknowledgment. “If you like stews, I can do that easy. I know plenty of vegetable stew recipes from my mother. It’s, uh... I mean, it's basically like tea you eat, I guess.”

Jester laughed, suddenly. “Oh my god, you’re right.”

“I’m gonna be thinking about that one for awhile,” Molly joined in. That was going to be a deep thought carried with him on the road- stew is just tea you eat. “I’m glad we’re keepin’ you.”

“Awww. Thanks. I’m glad to be kept.” Caduceus stood and took his offered meats over to the next table. Molly kept an eye on him, making sure he didn’t get stabbed, and only looked away when Cree spoke up again.

“Otis will not be traveling with us.”

Nott gasped out loud, “Whaaaaat? No! But you’re so amazing, Otis. We could really use someone of your, um… Strength. And character.”

Otis leveled Nott with a unnerving look and held it until she started to sweat from her clear desire to not blink first and the sheer discomfort of the situation. After an uncomfortable amount of time, they laughed creepily and then went back to their breakfast as if none of that had happened.

Molly felt a sense of relief that another Tombtaker wouldn’t be pressing in on him, but the loss of whatever the fuck Nott had going on with them would be mourned on the road ahead. It was entertaining in its utter ridiculousness. Someone would end up dead in that conflict eventually and he'd put money on the shitty halfling, but only after the whole thing had been dragged out a ludicrously long time.

Caduceus returned, mercifully unstabbed and looking satisfied. “That was nice. I feel good about that.”

“So about Nogvurot…” Fjord cut in, suddenly. He’d pulled the map out somewhere during their conversation and was balancing it in one hand while trying to eat his breakfast with the other. It kept bending inwards, forcing him to swat it away to straighten it, until finally Jester leaned over and held the other end. “Thanks, Jessie.” He cleared his throat and went back to that commanding leadership voice he so often used when he wanted to get people’s attention. “It’s right here on the way back to Zadash. Couldn’t we just stop there and save ourselves a journey along the same path?”

“And bring the woman we’re supposed to be escorting on a surprise field trip?” Beau raised an eyebrow. And then she immediately looked to Molly, who shied away from her and dug his fingernails into the woodgrain. Fjord was just trying to save time, but Molly was counting on having an extra week to process what might happen there.

Fortunately, Cree, very brusquely cut in, “That was not your arrangement with the Gentleman nor Ophelia and you would be wise not to tempt trouble.” And then, her contralto voice lowered to an even more grim rasp, “And I do not want to be with that woman any longer than I must.”

That got the entire table to eye her suspiciously, but she ignored their looks and continued with her meal, very pointedly showing her panther-sized fangs as she bit into her sausage. It popped unpleasantly the same way Molly imagined a skull might in the same mouth.

He breathed a sigh of relief and uncurled his fingers from the table, and willed his spark of life to return. Mild threats and Cree's quiet, righteous fury aside, that meant they were getting their time for respite.“So we get a little time in Zadash before we trace the same path back again. Maybe we can go back to Hupperdook. Have you ever been, Cree?”

“Oh fuck yeah,” Otis laughed. “It was great, but Cree’s terrified of-”

Cree kicked the chair Otis was sitting on and they fell straight out of it and never finished that sentence.

Jester sent a message to Ophelia (using way more words than necessary) asking if they were meant to go around the front or the back this time, and the response came back simply “the front,” apparently. She wrinkled her nose. “Wow. Two words. What a waste.”

Their ten-person group (now that they had left Otis behind) cut an imposing shape moving through the Clover Plaza and Molly felt eyes on him. He’d forgotten to put his hood up when they left the Landlocked Lady and he was regretting it now, but it was too late to yank it up over his horns and hope the whispers ceased- they already saw him. As far as they knew, Lucien walked the streets of Shadycreek Run again, and the general reaction was one of shock and fear and occasionally menace. The Shadow's back, he heard some say. Look at that, the wily little brat-king has graced us with his presence again. Thought the Fey-Bane was dead. Don't look him in the eye and not just the ones in his skull.

Cree was at his shoulder in a moment, as if sensing his discomfort. She could only block the view from one side with her larger frame, but Yasha quickly came to Molly’s rescue- whether to block him from the opposite side of the street or to make sure she could hear every word Cree might have to say- likely the latter, judging by her very clear wariness of Cree’s presence, but regardless of intent, it served the former purpose anyway.

Bless her.

Even if the damage had been done, two large women with equally large weapons were a deterrent from anyone confronting him and the rest of the Nein fanning out around him were a first line of defense, anyway. He could feel safe without worrying about anyone trying to drag something out of him or pick a fight or worse- fall down at his knees and beg for mercy or a weird cultish miracle or something.

But he was determined to find something else to focus on, so he zeroed in on Keg who kept stealing surreptitious glances Yasha’s way, her cheeks ruddy as she chewed on her cigarette in lieu of smoking it. Oh… This could be fun. “Keg, have you met Yasha yet?”

Beau, further ahead, immediately snapped to attention and looked between Keg and Yasha and then looked at Molly with narrowed eyes. He flashed her a winning smile and then turned back to Keg- somewhere between looking away and looking back, her cigarette had slipped from her mouth.

“I haven’t really met any of the ones we rescued 'cept the blue one and that’s because she got right in my face.” She pointed at Jester, who looked extremely unapologetic. “...Which I guess was rude. Look, I’m not used to bein’ polite ‘n shit.”

Yasha canted her head. “It’s not that hard. You, uh… You introduce yourself. You say ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ You don’t ignore people.You, uh, don’t chew with your mouth open.”

Keg squinted hard and Molly could have sworn he heard Caleb chuckle. “...I dunno if you’re fuckin’ with me or not.”

“She is not fuckin’ with you,” Molly beamed. “She’s a charmer, this one. Back in the circus we planned to introduce her to polite society as a baroness.”

Keg looked at Beau and then Caleb. “Is he fuckin’ with me?”

It was Caduceus who chirped, as amused as if he was the one who had been asked, “Yeah.”

Molly pouted, wondering if he was going to lose all of his best lies to this guy. Seeing his clear disapproval and not being able to tease Keg the way he wanted, Yasha reached down and ruffled his hair. He leaned into her touch like a needy cat.

To his right, the actual needy cat in their presence observed this and then looked away, quickly. Poor dear- he hated it for her. Her lover-slash-friend might be a dick who was jeopardizing Molly’s place in this world with his weird bullshit, but he was still hers. He could try and tame her fickle ways all he wanted, but the loss would still be there. That was, as Caleb sometimes said, a big matzoh ball- whatever that was. Zemnian thing, he supposed.

He’d worry about how to handle that another time. He had enough on his plate as it was and Cree was reticent about all of it right now. Trying to sort out what sort of help she might be less disinclined to reject openly was an easier task than wondering what exactly one does about Lucien. For now, the Estate Sybaritic, as pale as a ghost against the wall of dark trees loomed large ahead of them with a carriage and a wagon waiting outside of the gate.

“It looks a lot nicer from the front entrance,” Jester noted.

Ophelia was standing next to the carriage, looking as indifferent and regal as a queen, her arms crossed. She assessed the group and then gestured to the wagon. “I discreetly hired members of the Grudge Gang to look into the Sour Nest and they returned with this. I thought it might be useful to keep our trek moving at an even pace. You have your own horses as well, ja?”

“....Oh right. We have horses,” Beau murmured. “We took care of those, right?”

“Definitely,” Molly nodded.

Fjord had wandered over to the cart to investigate it and when he swore, Molly’s attention drifted away from where exactly they had left the remaining horses and if they were even still alive back to him. “What is it?”

“This was the cart they put us in. It’s got that spell on it, still.” He stuck his hand in and watched as it vanished into the confines of the enchantment, looking at Jester and Yasha to check their reactions, and while Yasha just looked grim, Jester just puffed up her cheeks. “Well, it can be our cart now. We can hide in it and then I dunno, jump out and scare people if they fuck with us.”

Molly didn’t particularly enjoy the thought of riding in a slaver’s cart and looked to Ophelia, who just sighed. “I assure you it has been cleaned and is a very fancy and expensive cart for whatever you wish to make use of it for. Your group is large and the ride to Zadash is long. I do not wish to make it longer than it needs to be.” She eyed them all up again and then retreated into her carriage. “When you are ready.”

“Can any of us ride with you?” Jester asked before she’d fully closed the door, her tail lashing in hopeful exuberance.

Ophelia clicked her tongue. “I prefer my privacy, thank you.” She slammed the door in her face.

In the wake of that, the ten current members of the Mighty Nein exchanged looks and, finally, Beau said, deeply awkward, “So we should probably buy some more horses before we leave.”

Within the carriage, Ophelia sighed loudly.

No one protested Jester’s decision to ride within the cart, even if they did eye her strangely for wanting to. She just thought it was cool that she could sit there and see out but no one could see her. She could make funny faces to her heart’s content and just enjoy the steady rhythm, free of chains and stress and fear.

She’d convinced Molly to ride with her, both because she wanted ‘tiefling time’ and also because she wanted another card reading. She’d been struggling to cope with the Traveler’s absence during her imprisonment and thought perhaps he could ask the cards to explain why he hadn’t come to save her.

When she explained this, Molly chewed on the inside of his cheek. “Gods are complicated, dear. The Stormlord didn’t come and get Yasha, either, you know?”

Jester stuck out her bottom lip in a furious pout before she pulled it back. She couldn’t expect Molly to understand- he and Yasha were religious in different ways. They’d never met their gods or saw them walking around among other people. “Yeah, but the Traveler doesn’t follow their stupid rules. He’s different.” She leaned forward a bit more, eyes wide and earnest. She needed to know and she trusted Molly’s cards would give her a good answer. “Just ask them for me?”

He shuffled his deck and let out a resigned exhale. “You might not get the answer you want.”

“But the cards don’t lie,” she said. She believed that, truly. Molly had a spark of magic that let him read those cards properly. Maybe something from the Moonweaver. It didn’t matter what he said during the Zone of Truth, he’d also said that his cards weren’t bullshit and that he gets feelings sometimes. Real ones.

“Ask what you wanna know,” he said as he held the cards out to her, “and pull a card.”

Jester laid her hands on her knees and looked up at the clear blue sky overhead. “Why didn’t the Traveler come for me?” She let the question hang in the air and then wiggled her fingers and selected a card.

The Eye card, again. She’d seen it before- unlike some of Molly’s other cards, it wasn’t split into two separate cards with one side reflecting the other as an opposite. Both sides were the eye, but one was open and the other was closed. The one facing her was the eye that stared back, as it had been when she drew it the first time.

She frowned and held it out to Molly. “What does that mean?”

He studied the card for a moment. “The open eye can mean that someone was watching, but was incapable of interfering.”

That wasn’t quite the answer she was hoping for, but it meant the Traveler still liked her- probably. There could be a worse answer in that deck somewhere that she hadn't drawn instead. Still, her shoulders slumped and she stared at the card like she was trying to take comfort in it, which allowed her to really take in the details. It provided something of a distraction. “Huh. There’s a lot of smaller eyes on the sides of this card. Kinda like your tattoos. That’s cool.”

Molly was absently shuffling his cards again, only to stop abruptly at her word. “What?”

She handed the card back to him. “See? There’s nine of them.”

His hand was shaking when he took the card and she noted how horrified he looked for a moment. Her own troubles were forgotten in favor of his and she scooted closer. “Molly? Are you okay?”

He shook his head and began to frantically search through his cards as if looking for something specific, his gaze trance-like. She gripped his shoulder. “Hey- Molly, look at me.”

He didn’t listen and kept hunting until eventually he had pulled out three cards she hadn’t seen before, though they were faded enough that they had to be older. One depicted a city on one side and the same city as a twisted reflection. Another, like the Eye, was only labeled once but depicted a closed book and an open book- the Tome, it was called. The final one was just full of stars but one side was darker with purple clouds like a strange, fantastical sky that gave way to the normal midnight blue on the other side.

“The Stars and the Sky,” she read. “That’s a really weird sky, though.”

“It’s the… the astral sea,” Molly explained, and he looked a little confused how he knew that. He pulled one more card- this one depicting a warrior of some kind, viewed from behind, his blade dripping blood onto the other side of the card. The Hunter and Blood.

“The cards are blank until I fill them in,” Molly murmured. “I never thought about where my ideas come from. Some of them… I swear I’ve heard them mentioned- probably from Gustav. He gets lots of ideas from old stories from the Calamity and before. Others…”

Jester worried her bottom lip with her teeth. “Do you think they have to do with your past?” Off his pained look, she winced and amended, “Lucien’s past?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, letting the cards fall onto the floor of the cart. “How long has this been happening? It didn't even start with Cree at all, did it?”

“Molly, Molly… It’s okay.” Jester took his wrists and pulled them down, forcing him to look at her. “We’re not gonna let anything bad happen to you, okay? You came to save me, so I’ll save you, if I have to. I’ll make sure no one ever hurts you again, especially not… Whatever this shit is.” She gestured at the cards. “You’re gonna be safe and sound and Molly forever.”

She couldn’t promise that, but she was going to anyway. Molly had died trying to get back to her. She wasn’t going to let him fall again in any way. Seeing the look in his eyes- mixed fear and overwhelming love, she pulled him into a hug and carded her fingers through his hair like her mama did for her when she was sad.

She missed her mama so much. She needed her now, more than ever. Maybe Molly could use her mama, too. Without pulling away, she said, practically in his ear: “Hey… Maybe after we get done in Nogvurot, we can go to Nicodranas? You could meet the Ruby of the Sea and see the actual ocean, not the weird starry one.”

He gently headbutted her. “That sounds nice. I’d settle for a bath in Zadash and some shopping first, though.”

“Oh, that we can definitely do.” She pulled back and whispered conspiratorially. “Maybe you can help me with a cool trick?”

His expression faltered, but for a different reason this time. Wariness. “What are you planning?”

She bopped her horns against his. “It’s a surprise!”

He didn’t seem to like that answer, but at least it was a less upsetting dislike, and it gave way to amusement in the end. She could handle that.

Yasha offered to take first watch with Cree, and barely processed Beau’s clear disappointment. She had wanted to talk to the tabaxi in private since she came back around, but she’d also been glued to Molly and disinclined to let him out of her sight. For now, he was curled in the cart in a sleepy pile with most of the rest of the Nein who didn’t mind sharing a space to sleep in. He was close by and nothing was going to happen to him.

Nothing was going to happen to her either. She didn’t like the idea of putting the Stormlord second, but she hoped he would understand that she needed to be here. Molly needed her to stay in sight so he didn’t fear losing her again. He needed her for other reasons too- one of the main ones being the woman sitting right beside her.

She hadn’t formed much of an opinion on Cree in the short time she’d seen her. She was someone from Molly’s past and then, come to find out, Molly didn’t have a past and Cree was an interloper from something else that he wanted no part of. Evidently, she had other ideas, other plans. That was enough to make Yasha wary of her and would probably be enough to slit her throat and be done with it, but Molly wanted her alive.

So her only choice was to be nice and hope she didn’t force her hand. Threatening her would be easier, but… Molly probably wouldn’t like that, and they had to travel with her and she had their blood.

All in all, not a real ideal situation.

“So, um… I’m Yasha. I dunno if anyone told you. Molly and I go way back… From the circus. Did he tell you about the circus?”

Cree stiffened. “I imagine he feels I care as much about his experiences as he does about Lucien’s.”

“Is that how you feel?” She raised an eyebrow.

For a long time, she didn’t speak, and then: “I will admit I am… faintly curious of what sort of life Lucien would decide to lead if he had nothing at all to scar him and make him the way he was when I first met him.”

Yasha’s hackles rose. “Molly is more than just Lucien without his memories.”

“But that is precisely what he is.” Cree turned to her, and Yasha suddenly felt the weight of her misery. “You don’t understand. You are attached to him. You don't know Lucien. You wouldn’t dream of wishing to keep some stranger when you could have your friend back if you did. All you have is Mollymauk. To you, he is a person. To me, he is the best parts of my Lucien, taken to an extreme that I cannot bear because he no longer has most of what made him Lucien.” She jerked her head away and for a moment, it almost seemed like her eyes were getting watery before she ran a massive paw-like hand over her nose, like a cat grooming itself, and they looked normal again. “But my perspective is cruel, as far as you are concerned. I would kill your friend to get mine back, but I do not see it as killing him. Molly is a piece of Lucien. I would just be making him whole again. I would be setting it right.”

Despite feeling bad for her, Yasha still set her jaw sternly. “Maybe he started that way, but that’s not what he’s grown into. You could, at least, try to learn to love him for who he is and not who he should be.”

Cree scoffed. “And abandon Lucien? Could you do that, if you were in my position?”

She could have slapped her and it wouldn’t have stunned her as much as those words did. What if Zuala had crawled out of a grave and became someone new? Someone with a different perspective, different interests, who didn’t remember her own wife and had no inclination to find out. Could Yasha really just gather up the pieces of her broken heart and let her go?

Yes, because she’d be alive and safer without you, anyway.

Maybe Cree didn’t have that certainty or that self-loathing. What she did have was something that Yasha could relate to. “You loved him, didn’t you?”

Her hand went to the amulet around her neck and now she could see the sudden dampness around the fur underneath her eyes. “As I am, as I will be... He was everything and I lost him and had I only waited a little longer before leaving, I would have been there when he came from the grave. I could have brought him back properly and there would not be so many complications. Instead, I fled with my grief and never looked back.”

Yasha’s heart clenched in her chest. She hadn’t come into this conversation expecting to empathize with this woman, and now that she did, she didn’t know where to go from there. She didn't want to talk about, didn't want to explain herself, but the emotions choked her all the same and demanded something from her. She swallowed it all down with a gulp. “I… I understand that. You probably don’t believe me, but I do.”

Cree eyed her up and down, very carefully. “I think you do understand, but I also know that does not mean you are on my side.”

“I won’t let you take Molly away,” she nodded, her voice gentle, yet very grave and very serious. “I’ll kill you if you try.”

Once more, Cree stiffened and lifted her chin, trying to look lofty, but with the tears clinging to her fur, it was a bit difficult. “I believe you would try. So we are at an impasse, then?”

“One of us might change our mind, but I don’t think it’s going to be me.” Yasha shook her head. “Who fucking knows, honestly?”

Cree scoffed and turned away, “Who, indeed?”

Molly took second watch and had mixed feelings about Caduceus taking it with him. At first blush, he was excited. The firbolg was warm and was bringing his teapot and crystals along with him, but on the other hand, he was also extremely keen-eyed and Molly felt he could see straight through a lot of his bullshit.

He didn’t wait very long to prove it, either. He was tapping the crystals underneath the pot to get some sleepy tea brewing so they could wind down after watch for the rest of the night when he said, “So are you gonna tell anyone?”

Molly froze, his tail going straight up. “Tell anyone what?”

Caduceus chuckled. “Guess that’s a ‘no.’ I guess if I did something like what you did, I wouldn’t wanna tell anyone either. People might expect me to do it all the time, and, honestly, it sounds taxing.” He looked up from his work. “We saw the body, Mr. Mollymauk. It’s not hard to figure out what happened there.”

“Well, you’d have a keener mind than me, then, ‘cause I sure as fuck don’t know what happened there.” His tail dropped back into the grass, miserably. “I don’t like it and I don’t trust it, so… I don’t really know how to bring it up.”

“That’s understandable. Like I said, I don’t blame you, but if it’s gonna be a problem-”

“Oh I handled that part.” Molly tried not to wince, but Caduceus raised an eyebrow, so he must have done it, anyway. He didn’t pry into that, however, and he was grateful for it. The last thing Caleb needed was people trying to stop him from doing what might be necessary. After a second or two of tense silent, he spoke again, weirdly tentative: “Did anyone tell you… what my deal is?”

“Your deal?” Another chuckle. “They’ve told me enough that I understand the picture, yeah. Not too many details. Those are yours to share, if you want.”

Molly swallowed. Well, if he had to talk to someone, at the very least Caduceus was a safe option. He didn’t have any real emotional stakes- not yet anyway. And he might have a different perspective. “Has anyone in your graveyard ever… come back?”

He blinked, confused, and then shook his head. “Not after I buried them… That would be pretty terrible, if I’m honest.”

He laughed, noting how broken the sound was. “Well, I crawled out of a grave. Just… Not all there. I kept saying ‘empty’ over and over again. I had to sort of rebuild myself. I don’t remember anything, but there’s… instincts, muscle memory. Everything I’d need to function as a person.”

Caduceus turned back to his brewing tea. The smell of lavender wafting in the night breeze calmed Molly somewhat. “But no memories?”

“None.” Molly shook his head. “And, come to find out, before there was me, there was someone named Lucien, and he sounds like an arsehole, if I’m honest. I don’t like the sound of him. I don’t like… what’s left of him that’s in me.” He scratched at his neck where one of the eyes was, drawing Caduceus's eyes directly to it. “But anyone connected to Lucien- Cree included- thinks that I’m… not a real person. I’m just a piece of him that stuck to this body and started propelling it forward, waiting until the rest of it came home.” He looked up at Caduceus, desperate and hopeful. “You seem fairly spiritual, given everything. Have you ever heard of anything like that?”

Caduceus blew some of his hair out of his face. “That sounds… really complicated, Mr. Mollymauk. When a soul leaves the body in death, a part of it shouldn’t stay behind, not unless something devastating happened to that soul.”

Molly clutched at his shirt like he was trying to reach in and grasp his own soul and check for breaks or signs of trauma. “All I know is there was a ritual to get to some- some city and it didn’t work and Lucien died and I’m here.” Not just some city, now. That horrible thing in the Astral Sea.

“And your memories of being Lucien aren’t just… locked away?” Off Molly’s glare, Caduceus held up a hand. “It’s a simple question. People get amnesia all the time.”

“It’s not like that… It never felt like that before, but now I think I know for sure it’s not. He’s out there, waiting to get this back.” He dug his fingers even tighter into his shirt.

Caduceus handed him a cup of the lavender tea and he was deeply grateful for it. He was on the verge of some sort of attack or another if he wasn’t careful. This was all a nightmare to talk about and he hadn’t even gotten to the worst of it. He probably wouldn’t- not tonight, anyway. He needed to think on those cards he found with Jester a bit.

This had been going on before he met Cree- since the beginning. There was no doubting that.

“I just want to exist. I want to live,” he sighed, slumping a bit. “I don’t think that’s such a big thing to ask.”

“No one asks to exist. We just do.” Caduceus raised his teacup to him. “And if you are a broken piece of a whole soul, then there was probably a reason you stayed behind. I can’t say I know what that reason is, but I know from experience that things like that tend to present themselves in time.”

It was just poetic enough to make him feel better and sounded enough like bullshit designed to be what he wanted to hear to make him comfortable. He was certain of Caduceus’s sincerity, but somehow he couldn’t help but sound a little too on the nose. For now, it was enough and that’s all that mattered.“Thanks, Caduceus.”

They drank the rest of their tea in silence, and then traded off with the next watch when they finished. Molly slept deeply and without dreams of cities or voices or doppelgangers watching from afar, waiting for a moment to strike

Molly slept through the night without incident, whether due to sleepy tea or Caduceus reassuring him, and he didn’t care enough to wonder which when the effect was all that mattered. He woke back in decent spirits, once more determined to put some of the past few days' horrors behind him, and simply intended to plow ahead as he always had with positivity and a head for finding pleasures to distract. Caduceus was right that he needed to explain what was going on to the Nein, but not now, not while they had other eyes on them- Ophelia’s guards, the woman herself, and Cree. There would be, as he'd said to Caleb once (and gods that memory hung in his head the way simple memories shouldn't), time for that later.

He would have to tell Cree too, eventually, but he had a feeling she already knew, and was just waiting for him to speak first. Ever since they left the Run, she had kept herself close without speaking a single word to him unless he asked her, and that unnerved him. The way she’d reacted to the Sour Nest painted a pretty clear picture of her baggage. The way she reacted to him suggested that Lucien hadn’t exactly done much to improve it, either.

It almost made him want to dream of him again just so he could float down into that accursed city and punch him. Almost.

Breakfast was eaten and horse and wagon assignments were doled out, and they were back on the road before the sun had gotten very far overhead. Ophelia didn’t want this trip to last longer than it needed to and had her guards keep them on a strict schedule, but beyond that, she only left her carriage to stretch her legs during rests and then returned before anyone could ask anything of her. If not for the carriage and full entourage of guards that refused to engage either (Jester certainly tried), it would have been like she wasn't even there.

So it came as a surprise during one (woefully brief) moment of rest that she approached Molly while he was in the middle of sketching out a few new card ideas before he lost the inspiration. Her shadow blocked his light, forcing him to look up before she’d even spoken, his expression going from irritated to shocked in the space between breaths. She cut an imposing figure, Ophelia, and aside from maybe the chin, they didn’t look a thing alike. He and Beau had just silently agreed that since she hadn’t reacted to his presence with so much as a twitch the baby tiefling painting was just a creepy coincidence, and they had moved on from it. Cree, however, bristled every time she saw her.

(From across the camp, he could see her bristling now.)

He laid aside his sketches and affected the look of casual carnie bullshit he was known for. He even fluttered his lashes a bit. “Can I help you, Lady Mardoon?”

“I would like you to ride in my carriage for a bit, if you would indulge me.” Somehow the request still sounded like an order, and she didn’t even blink at his charm offensive. He very much doubted that he could say no under those circumstances, and while part of him desperately wanted to, the other part of him was curious. That part could fuck off.

Not seeing a way out of it, however, he collected his work, meticulously put it back among his things, and pushed himself to his feet. By now, the entire camp was watching him and the internal pendulum within him that swung rapidly between “all eyes on me” and “please don’t acknowledge me” depending on the circumstances was lingering for an extended period on oh god stop looking at me, but he grinned his way through it. “Well, that’s quite the honor!” He swept into a bow, which was suitably dramatic and also hid the anxious sweat starting to bead its way across his brow. He subtly brushed it away, making it look like he was only trying to swipe at that one curl that always crept down over his forehead in an attempt to migrate into his eyeline, and straightened up.

Beau and Cree were both staring at him, still. Caleb, too, was looking surreptitiously his way while he worked on remounting his horse. He knew that Beau and Caleb were aware of the possibility of Ophelia being Lucien’s mother, and they hadn’t exactly informed anyone else, just in case, but Cree was a surprise.

He’d write it off as her being protective, but she was scowling too much for that.

“Step lively,” Ophelia said, curtly, as she stepped back into her carriage. “I do not have time to waste.”

He shrugged at the three of them observing and went around to the other side of the carriage, hoping that if Cree was planning to flense Ophelia for removing him from her sight, she could be held back by the rest before she incited an incident. The situation was bad enough without reparations from their mob boss employer.

The carriage was large enough to seat at least four, so Ophelia refusing to let anyone else share seemed especially pointed and a bit frustrating. Given her tall frame, however, it had to be uncomfortable to sleep in. Maybe there was a magic to it. Gustav had stories about enchanted carriages, after all, and he’d been riding this whole way in a magic wagon, which was far less whimsical than all of this.

He thought about that to keep from thinking about Ophelia, sitting primly across from him with her ghostlight yellow eyes fixed on him. “I take it your katzchen hasn’t slandered my name to you or else this request might have been taken less civilly.”

Molly didn't look up from his examination of the splendid cushions. They absorbed so much of the shock from the bumpy road he could barely feel them moving except for a steady back-and-forth rocking motion. His ass and thighs were threatening to become one permanent bruise from the pace they had been keeping and he was considering having a good weep when he was bereft of the unexpected comfort. “She doesn’t really have a whole lot to say to me in general.” For a multitude of reasons- the fact that he wasn’t Lucien, chief among them. She barely knew how to talk to him as Molly, on top of the whole strangely subservient thing.

“Really.” Ophelia clicked her tongue. “She defends you without your request, then?”

You have no idea. Molly hissed between his teeth, finally tearing his eyes away from the cushions. He resisted the urge to put his feet up on the seat beside her and recline just for the sake of pretending his entire body wasn't as tight as Desmond's violin strings. “It’s so complicated.” He breathed out a long sigh. Well if he wasn't going to be able to relax... “Before we have this conversation, d’you have any kind of alcohol in here?”

Ophelia shifted and lifted the cushion to her left that he'd nearly used as an ottoman, revealing a compartment where several small liquor bottles were hidden. Enchanted carriage, indeed. She passed it off and then waited as Molly took half of it in one long continuous swig. The buzz was instant and the burn delightful. That had to be the good, expensive shit. A year's worth of wages in the circus for a tiny bottle, probably, and half of it gone within a moment. Having money was starting to make him forget what not having it was like. “Better?” She asked.

He screwed the cap back on and handed it back. “Much. Right, so…” He paused as Ophelia unscrewed the cap and took a swig matching his own that drained the last of it dry. Well. That happened.

“Proceed,” she grunted, wincing around the burn.

“I’m not Lucien,” he blurted out, quickly.

She blinked slowly, her expression searching, as if she was trying to find some hint of a lie in there. “Your friend says otherwise. I will not deny that it would make our lives simpler if you weren’t.

“Like I said… It’s complicated. And it could be that simple, honestly. I’d like it to be. I- so you are his mother?”

“Carrying a child, delivering a child, and then handing him off to another as soon as he can be taken from my breast does not make me a mother. I had a choice between being one, and becoming the woman you see before you. By your kitty cat’s estimation, I chose poorly.” She flashed her pointed incisors. “So do you wish to be my judge as well?”

“Honestly, I don’t care what you did. That sounds like your business. I’m not Lucien. My name’s Mollymauk Tealeaf and whatever is-” he gestured between the two of them, “-between you and him, I am happy to leave it be. I have no expectations.”

Maybe it was due to the alcohol, but she breathed a visible sigh of relief that seemed a little out of place on her composed countenance. “I do not like surprises. I especially do not like it when my traveling party is made up of things I cannot predict. Had your friend not seen fit to challenge me in my own home, perhaps we wouldn’t have needed to have this conversation. As it stands, it seems it hasn’t done you any harm, at least.”

“Honestly, that might be the easiest thing from… Lucien’s past that’s come up recently to cope with. It’d be worse if you weren’t-”

“A cold-hearted conniving selfish bitch.” Ophelia flashed her teeth again.

“Your words, not mine. Mine were more polite.” If Ophelia hadn’t wanted to be a mother, that was her business, but something about it must have gotten Cree’s dander up, which meant there was probably a larger story, but he didn’t care. None of that was his baggage. Ophelia was just another tiefling to him.

And he was just another tiefling to her. If all of Lucien’s past encounters could treat him like that, he might feel less like he was coming apart at the seams. He considered her for a moment. “Was that it? Just… clearing the air?”

“I needed to make sure we were all on the same page, ja.” She pulled another bottle of alcohol from her secret compartment, which suggested there was probably more to her feelings than what she said, but that was also not his business. “You are free to go.” She clicked her tongue to signal to the driver to stop and Molly gave her a tiny nod and stepped out.

Or would have, except the horses of no less than three of their party were pressed as close to the carriage as they could get, trying to listen in. He looked immediately to Caleb, who shook his head, and then looked down at Nott who was half-hanging off the horse she was sharing with him, like she’d had her ear pressed to the door the whole time. “So are you like heir to the entire Mardoon line?” She asked, excitedly.

(The sound of Ophelia swallowing more alcohol in undignified gulps intensified.)

Molly grabbed her head and pushed her back into an upright position on the horse as he stepped out of the carriage. “As usual, Nott, you hear exactly what you want to hear.”

As he walked away, she shot back, “If you had ears this huge, you’d be selective about what you hear, too!”

He chuckled and headed back to the wagon since all the horses were claimed. He made it halfway before Cree pulled her horse away from the caravan to follow him. “What did she say?”

“She said you tore into her in her house. Well done.” Maybe he radiated too much disapproval, because she flinched back a bit, and he regretted it immediately and schooled his tone to be gentler. “I don’t need you to protect me, Cree.”

She glanced away, abruptly. “That one was not about you, Mollymauk. You have the luxury of not remembering. I remember it all.”

”Lucien, please just stay down.” She’d been whispering that over and over when she’d had her panic attack in the basement, lost in a memory. A memory that might not have happened if Ophelia had kept her son closer, probably.

He shook his head. He could see where she was coming from and still disagree. He didn’t agree with either of them, if he was honest about it. Ophelia’s choices were valid. Cree’s anger was valid. And none of it was putting any good back into the world. That was why the past needed to just stay buried. You’d never stop judging if you tried to trace back every sin a person’s ever committed and see how it resonated throughout the world, spreading misery. You had to move on, move forward and onto happier things.

He climbed up onto the side of the wagon, noting her attention was still on him. Time for some advice then, unsolicited but necessary. “Sometimes you need to let the past go. It’s usually ugly and miserable and letting it fester just makes the world worse. You have to put good back in and that means only worrying about what’s here and now. You judge people on their actions in the moment. You correct it if you can and mitigate the damage if you can’t by being better than they are. You can’t hold onto anger and hate and pain. It won’t fix the world or you or anyone else. It just makes everything worse.”

She couldn’t see him the second he leapt over the side and into the wagon, but he could see her, staring wide-eyed and shocked at his words. The cart lurched forward as the caravan began to move and Cree was left behind, still processing, before she finally nudged her horse into a gallop to catch back up.

The trek back to Zadash was quick and efficient and the short length of it meant Cree didn’t have enough time to process the advice Molly had given her, which was fine, because she didn’t know if she was capable of processing something that ran so antithetical to how Lucien operated and preached. He was going to fix the world and he had nothing but pain and anger to guide him.

But a fragment of his soul was going to preach the opposite? How exactly did that work?

The same way any of it worked- Molly might be a fragment, but he didn’t understand any of what Lucien had gone through. It was easy to say the past didn't matter when you don't have one. When you had never been hurt the way they had all been hurt.

She had to push all of that aside, however, because Zadash was fast approaching and Fjord saw fit to remind her of something she had almost forgotten entirely. He pulled his horse next to hers and scratched at the back of his neck. “Uh… Cree, I hope this ain’t too forward of me to ask, but when you left, you did tell the Gentleman you were goin’, right?”

Oh. Fuck.

In truth, Cree had imagined things going differently when she left- grab Lucien, abandon the Mighty Nein while they were distracted, and gather the rest of the Tombtakers. There would have been no reason to go back to the Gentleman at any point after that- she would have her family back and her goals in sight. For a moment, she considered waiting outside the gates when they arrived, but thought better of it. If she didn’t stay on top of them, they might leave her- or worse, send the Gentleman to find her, themselves-

“You didn’t, huh?” Fjord drawled.

He must have picked up on her internal panicking. She’d pegged him for not being observant so either she was wrong or she had lost control of her facial expressions- the latter was, unfortunately, the most likely. How could she have been so careless?

She grimaced, awkwardly. “Things… went differently than I imagined them going.”

“No shit.” Beau pulled her horse up onto her other side. “So is he gonna kill you on sight? What’re we lookin’ at here?”

He will clap me in irons and leave me in a dark place with only my blood to speak to. I am too valuable to kill. She could have said that, but she didn’t want them to hear the fear that would have choked her words. “I doubt it will be pleasant for me. You will be fine, however.”

That had to be what they were worried about- being blamed for her betrayal. Anything else would be absurd, and the proof was in how they disengaged after that, leaving her to miserably guide her horse the rest of the way.

Ophelia’s men took care of the cart, the carriage, and the horses when they arrived, removing a crucial step Cree had been counting on and forcing her walk to the gallows to come quicker than she was prepared for. While the Nein chattered relentlessly around her, her world narrowed to what was directly in front of her- the path to the Evening Nip she had walked hundreds of times in two years. Soon to be her cage forevermore if she was unlucky- and she was deeply unlucky. Being a black cat would do that to you.

She had come so close, given up a good life in favor of the old one, only to find her old life was still beyond her reach. She could hope for a miracle or that the Gentleman would feel merciful and one was just as likely as the other.

Fuck. She was foolish. She got caught up in it all and gambled too much, and now she would pay for it, and this lot would be free to do as they wished, while the Somnovem awoke without their priestess to guide Mollymauk before he evolved into some sort of false prophet-

No. No, she wasn’t a passive observer to her fate. She had rejected the Raven Queen, embraced the end of a prodding, yet absent, divinity. She would find a way to talk the Gentleman down and force his hand to let her continue her path.

She was resolute in this decision as they piled into the Evening Nip. Her head was held high in defiance at the bartender, but Clive only looked up, took in Ophelia, and suddenly didn’t care about anything else.

But Jester did jazz hands at Ophelia, anyway, and said, “We have many gifts! Huh? Huh?”

Cree rolled her eyes. “Be pleased, Clive. You know they are permitted.”

He finally made eye contact with her and wheezed. “Wasn't expecting you back here,” he crowed. The rest of the Nein were already heading downstairs following Ophelia through the now-open secret door, but a few were rubbernecking to hear the conversation.

“Is he angry?” She asked, trying to gauge the situation. It would’ve been easier if she sounded as confident as she had felt walking in, but now she only sounded self-conscious.

Clive just laughed. “Guess you’ll see.”

She hissed at him, which put him on his back foot enough that his mouth slammed shut with the audible click of his few remaining teeth. Satisfied, she began to walk down the stairs where the Gentleman was already being theatrical about Ophelia, his voice carrying across the room. Perhaps he would be so occupied that he wouldn’t see her immediately. She could blend into the shadows, slip away to her room...

No such luck. She stepped off the stairs and onto the floorboards with not even a sound, but the way her employer zeroed in on her, she might as well have screamed her presence. She didn’t wither under his gaze and held eye contact. To the gallows with her pride, then.

“Well, well, well,“ the Gentleman clicked his tongue. “You know, Cree, it’s very impolite to make your employer worry about your health. With how fast you fled, I thought you must have ran off somewhere to die. I already mourned you.”

The Nein were tense, observing this standoff, but not a one of them interfered- why would they? She was the enemy. The rest of the patrons were no more her friends than they were and they pretended not to pay attention to the dramatics, while stealing excited, surreptitious looks at the pair of them, thirsting for blood.

The Gentleman went on, “So if I’ve already mourned for your loss, what do you expect that means for our relationship?”

She was not born with Lucien’s silver tongue. She had little she could use to save herself. She had believed for a moment that she had the means of it and that had led her here with her head held high and the determination to spit at fate, but reality was crueler than her dreams always.

Still, she opened her mouth to explain in some way she could only hope would be sufficient enough to lessen her sentence, and Molly suddenly leapt into the argument. “She saved my life. I’d be dead if she hadn’t followed us.”

The Gentleman's gaze snapped to Molly, mildly contemptuous, and Cree bit her tongue. No, you fool. Do not draw his ire for my sake. I cannot save you again.

And then Fjord stepped forward, backing Molly up and taking the full brunt of the Gentleman's annoyance as he did. “With all due respect, sir, Cree was overwhelmed at seein’ Lucien again and when we had to leave so quickly, she took it upon herself to follow him to get just a moment more with him after so many years apart. She would have gone back immediately after she got up to us, but, well, myself, Jester, and Yasha were taken by the Iron Shepherds and those same Shepherds, as Mo- as Lucien explained, killed him. After she brought him back, the rest of our number recruited her to help rescue us, so if there’s any blame to be had, it lies on us.”

Cree blinked.

“So really she kinda helped us with our mission,” Beau added.

Cree’s jaw dropped. This wasn’t happening. They had a chance to lose her without reneging on a deal and they weren’t taking it.

And then Ophelia sealed the deal- the most surprising thing of all. “They are correct. The kitten was instrumental in the downfall of my enemies.” She gripped the Gentleman’s chin tightly and his eyes went half-lidded in a way that Cree wasn't used to seeing. “She did well, schatz. And you and I both know that love has made fools of us all.”

The Gentleman’s anger dissipated like Ophelia’s ghostlight eyes had just done him in completely, unraveling him right here on the floor for all to see. She truly was a powerful woman and if Cree didn't hate her so much, she would respect her. “Right. That’s fair. We’ll discuss it later, then." And just like that, her employer had pulled gingerly away from Ophelia with a pleased growl and a light snap at her fingers and become all business again. He clapped his hands together. "I see new faces here! We’ll need samples, won’t we?”

Cree released a breath. “Yes. Of course, sir.”

The matter settled, the Gentleman called for rounds of drinks and for the Nein’s payment to be presented. Cree lingered on the fringes, a stranger in her own haven, observing these wild and lawless fools who had no reason to support her, and yet stepped up the second it became clear she needed someone to. She had known loyalty before, but never from people who bore the scars of mutual distrust.

It confused her, perplexed her, and then there was the matter of Ophelia. The rest she could almost explain in a roundabout way- the Nein weren't as shit as some people, she had to admit- but not her. She eyed her across the bar until her staring must have become too much and the ashen-skinned tiefling disengaged from her paramour and approached with all the stateliness of a military officer.

“I will be glad of not having your eyes boring into my skull anymore, katzchen.” She raised a glass of what was likely the Gentleman’s finest whiskey to her lips. “Ask what you wish to ask. I tire of the games.”

“Why?” She spat out. “You had no reason to defend me.”

She had failed at every part of being a mother to Lucien. She couldn’t just decide to be maternal to her and expect to have it quell her anger.

Ophelia laughed. “You think I did it as an apology, kitty cat? Nein. I look at you and I see a woman bound in chains. I am curious about who you will be once you’ve shed them.”

“That is not an answer.” Cree’s fur was standing on end now.

“Perhaps, but it is the answer I will give.” She about-faced and walked at a clipped pace back to the Gentleman, who glanced her way and gestured at her, somehow both enthusiastic like he was waving over an old friend and commanding like he was ordering a dog to heel.

“Cree! Let’s get blood samples from these two strapping folks.”

“Wait. What?” Keg balked.

“Oh…” Caduceus looked over at her, his ears lifted slightly.

And just like that, the world righted itself again into something that made sense. Cree breathed in the taste of the familiar, adjusted her satchel, and strolled over to do her job.

After this, everything would change. Things were shifting too quickly, and the familiar would be a luxury, but maybe the chaos would finally bring her home again.

Chapter Text

There was no logical reason why any of that should have worked, much less happened at all.

Cree sat on the bed in her meager quarters in the Evening Nip, her satchel and bag on the floor beside her, while she stared at this little space that had been her home for two years, now devoid of even the minimal trappings she’d gathered over time. She’d tossed out anything that seemed useless- not that she had much, she had always thrived in the practical from being forced into simplicity in certain spaces- and gathered up what she’d need for a long journey. No matter what happened, she would not be coming back here. Her presence had been erased from this room, because she could not tempt the Gentleman’s patience by returning with her tail between her legs if this should all fall apart and ask for the space back when it could be given over to someone else in his troupe. She would have to go elsewhere if she failed in her endeavor.

She could only pray that she wouldn’t fail that hard. Lucien was counting on her.

In her hands, she clutched a smooth Sending Stone. She might have lucked out in not being chained up in the sub-basement with the rats and the night terrors that would surely come for her, but she was still tethered to the Gentleman. He expected her to check in every day the same as she would if she were still in Zadash to let him know of the status of his troupe and allies that operated outside the city's limits. If he had his doubts about their whereabouts or loyalties, she would need to track them.

Beyond that, she was free to go and act as one of his mercenaries- just as the Nein were- with all the implications, therein. If he had work for them wherever they might be, he could contact them easily, and he stressed the importance of the Stone being for business only, while looking sidelong at Jester, who had pouted.

Cree would not let the bloody thing out of her sight. Something strange had happened to turn fortune in her favor in a place where fortune was controlled solely by the Gentleman. She would never be this lucky again. And if proving that she respected what a rarity that luck was meant upsetting Jester and preventing her desperate vie for a free way to bother someone without wasting a spell, then so be it. She was not charmed by the girl. She was not charmed by any of them.

She sighed. The Nein were waiting for her downstairs. They had errands to run and respite to be had, and they wanted her with them for some reason and having nowhere else to go and errands to run, herself, she had agreed. She assumed that they were delaying the inevitable of what would come in Nogvurot, but perhaps they were also not eager to quickly return to the same path they had already trod twice and with great difficulty. Hopefully, it would not be as fraught a journey for them (or for her) this time.

Hopefully, things would start to make sense again.

“You didn’t tell me about the blood thing,” Keg muttered as she returned to the table where Beau and Yasha were drinking. Across the way, Jester and Veth were observing Caduceus experiencing alcohol with mixed results, and Caleb was well on his way to drunk with Molly and Fjord- well Molly, mostly. Fjord looked to mostly be babysitting the two of them and taking his own liquor at a more leisurely pace to almost be barely drinking it at all.

Tearing her eyes away from the sight of Molly trying to coax Caleb to get drunk enough to sing with him, Beau winced at Keg’s words. “Yeah… I forgot about that part, honestly, which I know is weird, ‘cause we’ve had Cree and her creepy blood bag with us this whole time, but it seriously slipped my mind.”

“Eh. He said he’d help me if I did him a few favors, so… You still did good bringin’ me here. I appreciate it.” One of the servers came by with a mug of ale for her, courtesy of the Gentleman, and Keg saluted them as they walked by. “He says he likes my style.”

She blew out a relieved breath. “Good. That’s… great. Networking.”

The table fell into an awkward silence, broken, eventually, by Yasha, who had been puzzling over something in silence for the past several minutes. “So if Cree is with us, does she really need our blood? I mean… Do you think she’d give it back?”

“I think that’s the only way she knows she can find us if we decide to ditch her. She doesn’t trust us yet, even if we did bail her ass out.” Beau grimaced, pinching her nose. “That was for Molly, though. I’d say we’re even now.”

“But we’re still going to Nogvurot.” Now it was Yasha’s turn to puff up her cheeks and exhale so hard her long, messy hair flew up and out of her face. Both Beau and Keg had to go back to their drinks to hide their blushes. Fuck. That was cute.

“Yeah,” she choked out. “We’re still going to Nogvurot.”

Keg interjected, coughing like she was desperate to change the subject so she didn’t have to cope with Yasha’s cuteness either. “So here’s a question… I asked the Gentleman what the blood was for and he said tracking, obviously, but he also said that Cree can tell a person’s health, too. Like if one of his people is injured or dead or got knocked up or something.”

Beau choked on her ale. “Cree can tell if someone’s pregnant by their blood sample?”

“He said ‘you’d be surprised how often that’s useful,’ which… Yikes. Didn’t really need to know that, but that’s not the point. Do you think she can tell if someone’s like…” She waved her hands in vague circles and then began to mime rubbing something.

Surprisingly, it was Yasha who got it first. “Oh… Oh wow. That’s-”

Beau followed suit a second later. “I mean, it does get your blood doing weird shit.” God, she didn’t want to think about that. That Cree could look into her blood and tell if she was having sex or doing a little self-love or, like, being horny in general.

They fell into silence again. “I’m gonna have to process that,” Keg murmured and downed most of her ale in one go.

Hours later the Nein stumbled out of the Evening Nip and out onto the streets of the Innerstead Sprawl in various states of inebriation (or in Caduceus’s case, just trying to get the taste of alcohol out of his mouth) or delight. Only Cree seemed to be deeply uncomfortable with the revelry and hung back a bit as they walked in an uncertain direction.

“So,” Fjord drawled, running a hand down his jawline, “where’re we staying tonight?”

Jester was fast to make a suggestion. She’d been holding this in for the whole evening while watching Nott try to turn Caduceus onto hard liquor. “The Pillow Trove! We have lots of money now and they know us there.”

“And probably hate us,” Molly added, though it didn’t seem like he minded that, all that much. His cheeks were flush with drink and he was leaning on Yasha so much that she eventually had to just scoop him up into a bridal carry or resign herself to walking slower than everyone else to keep him upright.

“Ah…” Cree frowned. “That is in the Tri-Spires, is it not? Those folk are too rich for my blood. I will find other accommodations, then.”

Jester slowed her own pace to fall closer to Cree, arms behind her back as she stared up at her, lips pursed, trying to read her. She was uncomfortable with it, which was weird. Caleb had taught her a lot she didn’t quite understand about poverty and being underprivileged but he hadn’t minded the Pillow Trove.

As if sensing her discomfort and noting Jester’s own scrutiny (and her comparison- oh shit maybe he could read minds, maybe he got that spell while they were missing and he was always finding new spells, wasn't he?), Caleb spoke up, “It’s a bit opulent, and while it was a wonderful experience the once… Perhaps if we’re meant to be here for a couple of days, we should go back to the Leaky Tap? It would be cheaper, and we are, at the moment, between jobs. This trip to Nogvurot is not one that pays us, after all.”

“That sounds a lot more practical,” Fjord agreed.

Jester blew out a breath. “Fiiiine.” There went her plans of lots of pillows and soft beds, which she desperately needed right now. The Pillow Trove reminded her of the Lavish Chateau even if it didn’t smell of the sea or have her mama singing lullabies, but she wasn’t going to sit here and admit that she needed that level of comfort. People might think she was sad. If she asked Beau to come stay with her and share a room with her, she’d do it in a heartbeat, but she didn’t want that either. She wanted everyone where she could see them or as close as possible.

She’d have to find something else, then. She worried her bottom lip with her teeth and lit upon an idea. An even better one. “Oh! Oh my god, you guys. What if we got two rooms and had a slumber party. The girls can stay in one room and the boys can stay in another and Molly can go wherever he wants!”

Molly blinked blearily from where he was gracelessly cradled in Yasha’s arms. “Seems like the girl’s room might be a bit crowded.”

“I could stay in the boys’ room,” Keg said, pulling on her collar.

“Nonsense!” Molly cackled. “You could use a makeover. That’s what they do at sleepovers, right? Never been to one, honestly.”

Keg flustered. “Hey fuck you!”

“I could do your nails, Keg.” Jester eased closer to her, tail swishing.

“Nobody’s gonna see ‘em. I wear gauntlets.” Keg tried to break eye contact, but couldn’t do it. Such was the power of Jester Lavorre- a power she was only really just recently coming into, even if it hadn't saved her from slaver. Not thinking about that right now, thank you.

“But you’d be able to see them after you took them off! And the paint won’t chip as fast!” She was fluttering her eyelashes now until Keg was helpless in the grip of her undertow and just did the sensible thing and let it carry her.

“Fine.”

Well, that was one reticent person down. She looked to Cree, towering just an inch taller than Yasha and forcing her to look a little farther up to see her face. “And your fur is so pretty, Cree. I could make it really, really shiny.”

Cree looked down at her, brows knit. “What?”

Beau cut in before Cree could finish processing the implication that Jester wanted to brush her fur- brush it until the watered silk patterns that were barely visible under the road dirt and general travel grime stood out in the light. It would look so beautiful. “Jester, have you actually had a sleepover before?”

She shrugged. “No, but I know a lot about them. The Traveler told me-”

“The Traveler talked to you about sleepovers?!” Beau all but screamed, forcing Fjord to shush her.

Jester ignored her and just went on like she hadn’t said anything at all, “-You read smutty books and do each others’ hair and make-up and talk about girly stuff.”

That only marginally kept Beau from swinging at shadows like she could knock out the Traveler for being a creep (which he wasn’t), but her discomfort turned to the description over everything else. The girls of this party consisted of three women who spent more time with blood in their hair than any other product, a goblin, and a tabaxi woman in frumpy robes and a cloak. Of them all Jester was the only one with any kind of familiarity with the so-called “girly stuff.” Molly would know too. He had a make-up kit to rival hers and plenty of other useful things tucked away in his bag. “Molly could even do card readings!”

Beau and Cree both said, in unison, “No,” which only made Jester pout. Even though the last reading had been a little fraught, she still trusted the cards.

When she looked to Molly, the glee on his face had faded into something hollow- maybe he was still a little edgy about them after everything. It hurt her heart to see something he loved bringing him little comfort. It made her wonder if any of this comfort would do anything for her at all- nope, not thinking of that either. “We can do all kinds of things, Molly. Not just that.”

“Iiii might leave it to you all,” he drawled in that way he always did when he wanted to deflect and seem lackadaisical and unbothered and lazy. He nodded to Fjord and Caleb. “These two arseholes won’t know to have any fun without me there.”

Fjord choked. “I assumed we’d just go to bed.”

Molly lifted a brow. “Assumptions are so dangerous, Fjord.”

Caleb and Fjord exchanged looks, but Caduceus looked positively gleeful at whatever madness might await him in this new realm of experience that didn’t involve alcohol- she already liked him a lot. She was going to devote a lot of time to really breaking him into the Mighty Nein’s brand of chaos, since he seemed to content to hold himself apart and observe right now.

But first she had to do something about Cree…

(No, first she needed to do something about her own needs, but she had a plan for some of that tomorrow. Until then, she would take care of everyone else and ignore the rest. And besides, having fun with her friends indulging in something she never had the opportunity to experience in Nicodranas properly was just as much for her as it was for them. The Traveler had tried, but it was hard to have a proper sleepover with just two people. Now she got to experience it for real.)

“So are we gonna do this or what?” She asked, as they shifted their trajectory to the Leaky Tap. The question was mostly directed at Cree, herself- the rest knew she wouldn’t take no for an answer.

The tabaxi woman sighed, deeply. “I suppose you will only annoy me if I say no?”

“It’s easier to just go with it,” Molly said. And as if something had triggered in her at that response, Cree’s agreement came with a bit more certainty.

“Then yes. We can… have this sleepover.”

Jester looked over at Molly, who sunk even deeper into Yasha’s arms. He looked so miserable and small, all of a sudden. “Are you sure you don’t wanna come, Molly?”

“If I get bored with this lot, I might pop in, but it’s… Been a lot. I feel like collapsing in a nice bed surrounded by handsome men might do me a lot of good.”

"For fuck's sake, Molly," Fjord groaned. Caleb maintained his deadpan, while Caduceus remained vapid and disinterested in the implications beyond a subtle, confused lift of his ears and a soft 'aww thanks' that he'd been called handsome.

And Jester didn’t believe any of that shit at all, but if Molly had to lie to her, he probably had a good reason for it. “Okay, but promise me you’ll come with me tomorrow night to do that thing we talked about.”

Several sets of eyes locked on her and then shifted to Molly, who grinned, cheekily, a bit of lightness returning to him. “Oh, you mean that thing you haven’t told me any details of? That thing? Absolutely. Wouldn’t miss it for the world, dear.”

Satisfied by that, if not still a bit heartsick (there was no cure for that except moving forward- she had a lot to be heartsick about), she skipped ahead the last few blocks towards the Leaky Tap and the hope of distraction.

Claudia had fled, leaving the pub under new management who looked at their large group and their desire for two rooms with utmost confusion, but at least she offered the girls one of the larger rooms in the hopes of minimizing discomfort. More than likely, it would still be too cramped, but Jester was excited and Molly was glad to see it.

On any other night, he would cram himself into that space and try to coax life into the party with his own personal brand of madness, but he had his reasons for hanging back, and none of them were selfish. Selfish would have been going anyway and drowning his troubles with fruit wine and party games and weaving braids for everyone who asked.

“I can’t believe you are not with them, Mollymauk,” Caleb murmured as he began to set the wire for the alarm spell across the door. There were only two beds and sleeping arrangements hadn’t been discussed, and so Fjord was hovering in a corner with Caduceus like both of them weren’t comfortable with claiming a bed until a conversation was had.

Molly had his ear to the wall, listening to the girls giggling in the adjacent room. “Cree won’t do anything on her own if I’m there. She’ll look to me like she has to confirm half of every difficult choice she makes.”

“Sounds like she had... “ Fjord struggled to find the word, and with the way he was blushing, Molly could guess why, “...a, uh-”

“Submissive relationship?” Molly turned to look at him and watched him turn even redder.

"Now hold on- don't put words like that in my mouth!"

"Oh but you knew exactly what I was talking about, didn't you? You're holdin' out on us, Mr. Fjord." He smirked and watched Fjord sputter and bury his face behind his hand so Molly couldn't see him blushing anymore. “Anyway, I don’t think it’s quite that. I think she’s just used to people callin’ the shots for her. It’s not just Lucien. Look at the Gentleman- he tells her to jump and she jumps.”

“That woman…” Caleb sighed, finished with his wire, and pushed himself to his feet, “...is a sack of various traumas and anyone can see that. I do not know what they are, but they are very raw wounds and we have no idea what presses on them. It is a dangerous dance to do with someone who could so easily become our enemy because we kept prodding at her with sticks.”

“A lot of people are like that,” Caduceus said, and Molly shifted to look at him. He didn’t even know that Caleb was speaking hypocritically, and yet he seemed to suspect it, all the same. “She hasn’t turned so far.”

“No… No, she hasn’t.” Another sigh. He snapped his fingers and Frumpkin appeared as a cat, scarfed around his shoulder. “I feel for her, I really do. I am just… wary of danger. And wary of what to expect when we get to Nogvurot.” He looked right at Molly as he said it and Molly immediately had to look away.

“Anyway,” he said, trying to divert the subject and keep Caleb’s blue eyes from boring holes in his defenses, “I really do think I need to sleep. Tomorrow, we can hit Pumat’s and the bathhouse and not talk about any of what’s just happened for just one day.” He removed the bag from Lorenzo’s room that Caleb had identified back at the Sour Nest as a Bag of Holding from his shoulder. Despite it not being his aesthetic, he’d decided to keep it, in the end- it held all of his things, including his tapestry, and, quite frankly, he felt he deserved it. (No one had denied this, and given Molly’s outspoken views on division of loot, it seemed appropriate to give him the sack most loot would probably end up staying in until it found a home with someone else.)

“Caduceus!” He beamed now that the bag was deposited at the foot of his chosen bed with a flourish, and his coat had followed with it. “How d’you feel about snuggling?”

The firbolg blinked a few times. “I mean… I’m not opposed to it. That temple’s not very big and we had a lot of family living in it, so we were usually sleeping in pretty close quarters.”

Molly placed a hand over his heart. “Excellent, because you seem really cuddly, and I would be remiss if I lost an opportunity to see just how cuddly you are for myself, if you would be so kind.”

Caduceus grinned, lopsided. “If you wanna share the bed with me, you could just ask, Mr. Mollymauk. But yeah. That sounds nice.”

Molly all but leapt into the bed as Fjord tried to shout “he didn’t warn you he sleeps in the nu-” and then realized that Molly was not going to get naked this time.

“You just do that to me, don’t you?” He said, narrowing his golden eyes.

Molly grinned. “You need the adventure.”

Fjord sighed. “Caleb?”

Caleb waved him off, already building himself a nest with his bedroll and bag while Frumpkin spun in lazy circles to get comfortable beside him. “You can have the bed, Fjord. I am fine with the floor and my cat.”

Fjord gave a pointed sniffle in Frumpkin’s general direction and climbed into the other bed. Caduceus removed his armor, joined Molly, and then chuckled when he, ever familiar even when having just met someone, snuggled against his chest not unlike the fey cat. “Your fur smells like moss.”

“Thank you. It’s all the lichen.”

“Is that how you get your hair that color, then?”

“Mmhmm. Gotta eat a lot of it though. Otherwise it just fades back to gray.”

“I’m gonna remember that. That’s interesting.” He yawned. “Right. Night, everyone.”

Murmurs of nighttime well-wishes met him in response and then the room went quiet except for the giggles of the girls in the next room.

Even being one of the bigger rooms, it was cramped with six women- two of which took up a significant amount of space- huddled together. Yasha had to push the two beds against the wall (creating what Jester delightedly exclaimed was one HUGE bed for a cuddle pile), allowing them enough space to sit in a circle.

And, so far, that was mostly all they were doing.

“Man, if I knew I was gonna have this idea, I would’ve gotten pastries before everything closed,” Jester muttered as she worked on painting Keg’s nails as promised.

Cree had no idea how pastries could possibly improve the awkwardness of the moment, but at least Nott was willing to pass her flask around. She took an extremely long swig from it when it came to her, hoping the burn would take the edge off her tension. Being alone with these people had always involved horrible, meddlesome conversations about her choices and she expected this to be more of the same.

She hadn’t been around this many women since the Orders. She hadn’t said as much, but they had done similar things to this there- they had never called them sleepovers, of course, but groups of them would cluster in the common area after light’s out and whisper to one another and giggle quietly, hoping that Maira, the head priestess, wouldn’t catch them out and put them on cleaning duty in the Chantry for their disobedience.

Despite herself, she found she had a bit of nostalgia for those simpler times. The Orders had been kinder to her than they had been to Lucien and Tyffial.

Beau sighed. “Okay, so far this is a lot of staring at each other, so let’s make it interesting. Anyone ever played Never Have I Ever?”

The only person who responded was Cree, herself- shocking both her and the rest of the assembled group. It was one of the staples of those very same get-togethers in the cleric dormitories- stolen cherry wine swigged back and forth as the girls tried to find out the dirtiest secrets about their fellow clerics.

“Damn, Cree.” Beau nodded her approval. “Well, if we were playin’ for real that time, all of you would've had to take a swig from Nott’s flask. That's how it works- you say a thing starting with 'never have I ever' and if you've actually done it, you drink.” She further laid out the rules of the game, and though Jester was reticent to drink- and was assured she could just pretend since the goal was less about getting shitfaced and more about learning 'dumb shit about your friends'- she finished up Keg’s nails and flopped back down into the circle.

“Maybe I’ll drink a little, but, honestly, I bet I won’t have to drink at all. There's lots of stuff I haven't done yet."

Beau screwed up her face. “Uh. Never have I ever stolen anything.” She took a swig from the flask and began to hand it around to every single outstretched hand- only Jester didn’t reach for it.

“I don’t think I’ve stolen anything, like- we’ve taken things from dead people, but that’s not really stealing and I was sort of like involved when other people stole things?” She wrinkled her nose.

Nott extended the flask to her. “You’ve stolen all of our hearts.”

“Awww. Thank you, Nott.” Jester took the flask, sniffed it, and took a demure little sip and coughed. “Oh wow. Yikes. How do you drink so much of that stuff, Nott?”

“It’s an acquired taste.” Nott shrugged. “Well, you’ve got the flask now, Jester. Your turn.”

“Oh. Okay. Um.” She scrutinized each of them. “Never have I ever had a crush on someone in my own group.”

“Shit, Jester. Go hard, why don’t you?” Beau winced but held out her hand, along with everyone except Yasha. Jester quickly took a sip and tried to pass it off without anyone noticing.

“Yasha, you don’t have a crush on anyone?” She asked. She seemed… deeply disappointed by this somehow. (Cree noted Beau did as well, but at least that kept their focus away from her as she took the flask and sipped.)

Yasha turned red and ducked her head. “I, erm… Well, it’s complicated. I find you all very attractive, but I dunno if I would say crush, exactly? I don’t even know what a- a crush would entail. I've never had one- not exactly.” She was fidgeting a great deal, tying and untying the leather strips that held her holy symbol in place.

“Like your heart is gonna explode out of your chest every time you look at them.” Jester swooned against Cree’s shoulder, which only served to distract her when she realized Cree was passing the flask off to a deeply flustered Keg, after having subtly taken a nip of it- or at least she had believed it was subtle. There was no hiding from Jester's keen amethyst eyes.

“Oh my gosh, Cree! You have a crush on one of us?”

Her fur bristled a bit. “I have had my own groups. Two, in fact, before your lot.”

“You have a crush on the Gentleman,” Nott said, sagely, as she quickly sipped and then passed the flask to Beau who was only marginally less red than Keg.

“Hardly,” Cree scowled.

“I think it’s fairly obvious who she had a little crushie on,” Beau said drily, and didn’t back down when Cree shot her a glare. “Come on, Cree. We’ve all seen how you look at Molly.”

Jester patted her arm. “That’s totally understandable. I think everyone here has a crush on Molly.”

“I don’t,” Beau and Nott said in unison. Keg remained silent.

“I do not have a crush on Mollymauk.” She put as much growl as possible into her words without making it seem like a threat.

Keg grabbed the flask from Beau and took control of the game before any more could be said. “I’m gonna take the next one. Never have I ever had a boss I didn’t hate.”

“Ugh. My dad was my boss for awhile. And Xeenoth kinda counts.” Beau rolled her eyes and kept her hands in her lap.

Yasha and Cree both took the flask- or at least Cree started to take it, and then pulled back a bit, like she was struggling with something. “No… There were people who hired the Tombtakers who worked directly with us that were… Unpleasant. There were so many that I do not remember the details, but I suppose they count as... bosses. In a sense.”

Jester stole the flask from Yasha as they debated whether or not that technically counted and came to the conclusion it probably didn't. "I've never had a boss at all, then, so I guess I have to drink? Ugh.” She pinched her nose and took another little sip and then handed it to Cree. “Here you go, Cree. Give us a good one.”

A good one. She stared at the flask. She wasn't sure she had anything good and there was only one thing on her mind right now. “Never have I ever failed to save someone.”

The mood plummeted like a dropped stone. She took a sip herself and watched as very slowly Keg, Yasha, and Jester extended their hands- after a moment, Beau did as well. “Cut right to the bone, huh, Cree?” She said, as she took her sip.

“I have never been much fun at parties,” she laughed, awkwardly, trying for jovial, though it only came out as pained.

“We’re all a little fucked up, I guess.” Beau shrugged, but she was staring at her as if she was trying to see past her to something within her that was small and frightened and not worth looking at. Cree broke eye contact with her.

“So it would seem.”

The moment dragged on in silence for a long time with no one certain of how to break it, and then Jester slapped her hands on her knees. “Okay, but I really wanna know if any of you has a crush on me.”

“We all do, Jester,” Nott said, succinctly. “Except Yasha, apparently.”

Yasha sputtered. “That is not true! I-I find you very lovely and attractive, Jester, but you, uh… don’t make my heart explode?”

The girls began to banter back and forth about silly, frivolous things, and, seeing an opportunity, Cree extricated herself. “I need to step out for a bit.”

No one protested her leaving- likely assuming it was a chamber pot situation- though they all watched her leave, regardless. With her luck, if she tried to purchase a private room for herself, they would find some way to find her and implore her to return to the group and she would be out coin she couldn’t afford to be out, so a moment of peace outside on the darkened streets of Zadash was all she could hope for.

She stepped out into the chilly night air and breathed in the scents of the sleeping city. It had been her home and haven when nowhere else felt safe for two years. It hadn’t eased the ache in her heart, but it had given her a good life and good people, and she would throw it all away for Lucien, just as she threw away the Orders.

Because she loved him. Because she needed him. Because she was incapable of living her life without direction from someone. Even now, with these fools, her direction was dictated by what would best bring Lucien back. Her choices had never been her own.

She had forsaken the goddess of Fate and found herself on a path that would never truly belong to her, and she did it, gladly, and without regret. And yet… Those girls and Mollymauk and the rest of them- they were so free in all the ways she wasn’t. Was she jealous of them or was she angry that they judged her for what was a perfectly valid way of living her life? The way Beau had looked at her like she found the implications of her love for Lucien in some way disquieting…

What did she know? What did any of them know?

This world was so broken. It needed the Nonagon to fix it. She clutched her amulet and willed her resolve to return to her again. It was so fleeting now, carried out to sea with every choice she made that uprooted her existence and put her back on the path to Lucien’s dream. Her faith kept wavering, when it shouldn’t have.

Perhaps her roots weren’t deep enough, after all.

“Hey.”

She startled and looked down at Keg who had just emerged from the Leaky Tap to join her outside. Of all the people who might have followed her, she supposed she was the least likely to irritate her. Judging by her pulling her cigarettes out, she was merely here for a smoke break, anyway. “...Hello.”

“People hate it when you smoke inside, and I’m tryin’ this new ‘bein’ polite’ thing,” Keg shrugged, lit the cigarette, and then stared out at the empty streets. “Nice city.”

“It is, aye.” She leaned against the wall of the Leaky Tap and crossed her arms over her chest. “You will enjoy working for him. He is… as good a man as one can be in his situation.”

“He was pretty lenient on you. Bosses I’ve had? Wouldn’t exactly have let that shit slide.” She tapped the end of her cigarette and let the ash fall to her feet. “That’s nice to know.” She blew several smoke rings over her head like she was trying to send them to the moons hanging directly above and then continued. “Look, I don’t know you and you don’t know me, and I won’t pretend I understand… all of what’s going on here.” She gestured to Cree’s entire physical being, which somehow seemed insulting and complimentary all at once. “But I know what it’s like to grow up in the Run and I know what that shit does to you. And I know that once you’ve got people, it’s rough lettin’ ‘em go, ‘cause you’re not guaranteed anyone else is gonna watch your back there. It’s shit.”

Cree blinked down at her. “And what is your point?”

“My point- and I do have one- is…” She sighed, dropped her cigarette, and stamped it out. “These people? They’re good people to have in your corner. I like ‘em and I don’t like anybody. They taught me a few things that’re gonna stick with me for as long as I live, which given everything ain’t gonna be too long. I smoke and I drink and I fight and these things don’t make you live to a ripe old age, even for a dwarf. But whatever.” She waved her hand, which brought attention to the black nail polish that Jester had put on her, and for a moment, she stared at it with a sort of fondness. “I’m not telling you not to follow your gut or anything, but don’t write ‘em off. These people do the impossible every fuckin’ day. They might surprise you.”

She took that in, rolled it over in her head, and then filed it away. She respected a woman from the Run’s candor and advice more than she respected most people’s. There are few things more inconvenient to be and if you could survive that, then you were probably worth hearing out.

Gods, how did this get so fucking complicated?

“I have never heard of a happy story that came out of Shadycreek Run,” she finally said.

Keg laughed. “Oh man, lady… That’s crazy. ‘Cause you’re livin’ one.”

She opened her mouth to argue and then snapped her jaws shut, remembering those people set free. Kitor’s mate and their child. All those stories that were not her own, but that she had been a part of, all the same.

The world is broken and we can fix it, Lucien had said as the Somnovem turned their gazes on him and the rest of the Tombtakers.

Perhaps he was going about this the wrong way, but… She still needed to speak with him. She couldn’t just leave him. Her path had been set years ago and she was scared to step off of it.

She turned and walked back inside, leaving Keg alone, and when she stepped back into the room the girls were occupying, she froze in the doorway. They were still scattered about in a tight cluster, but they were doing their own things- Jester in particular had Cree’s glaive in her lap and a surge of possessiveness welled up inside of her before she realized she was just wrapping a red ribbon around it and tying it off.

She just stood there and watched the care with which she decorated that hideously dark and twisted thing she had kept as a symbol of her devotion, personalizing it, making it pretty. When it felt like she’d stood there staring for too long, Jester looked up and beamed.

“There you go. How’s that look?”

It looked a bit silly- a horrific martial weapon decorated with a foot of ribbon that trailed underneath the head of it… but it would move in the wind and every time she swung it, like blood trails in the air. Such a simple kindness done for absolutely no reason other than because she might like it. Thoughtful. Understanding. Done with no intent to change her heart, but just because it was a nice thing to do.

And Cree wavered at the edge of her intended path once more.

Chapter Text

It was for the best that Pumat’s was empty when the Mighty Nein (now consisting of ten people, instead of the usual seven) strolled in the next morning. One of the simulacra was seated behind the counter, reading, and did a double take when he saw the veritable army that just walked in off the street, tossing the book aside carelessly as he gave them his full attention.

“Weeeeell!” He drawled. “Lookie here.” He called over his shoulder. “Hey, Pumats. We got a big group here. It’s our favorite customers back again.” He turned back and locked eyes with Caduceus. “Well hey there! You’re a new face.”

Everyone was watching Caduceus and Keg with the eyes of people thrilled that someone was experiencing something strange and wonderful for the first time. Keg was mostly indifferent at this stage, but Caduceus was delighted. “Hey! Wow. I wasn’t expecting to see any other firbolgs this side of the Empire. That’s nice.”

One of the other simulacra emerged. “Hey there. Welcome back. ‘Fraid you came at a real bad time- we’re a bit low on stock right now what with the war ‘n all.”

“Oh yeah, I almost forgot about that.” Jester winced and then very carefully pulled her haversack closer to her, as if she was trying to protect what was inside that lead-lined box tucked within.

“That’s real lucky of you, ‘cause we haven’t been able to forget it,” the second Pumat said without a trace of malice or irony. “Hoo boy. It’s been a lot.”

Caduceus looked between the two Pumats. “Aw. You’re twins. That’s cool.”

Fjord cleared his throat in clear discomfort at being so close to a shopping spree. “We were hoping for maybe a few potions at the very least… And to introduce you to our three new companions. We love recommending your shop to everyone we meet.”

“And we love it when you do,” the third Pumat emerged. “We oughta be payin’ for you for the advertisements.”

Jester lowered her voice, “Could you do that? ‘Cause, like, I’m really good at spreading word around about people. You could totally give us, like, a discount and we’ll tell everyone we meet to come here.”

The third Pumat chuckled. “You’ll, uh, have to take that up with Prime.”

Caduceus was slow-blinking now, his fuzzy brow knit in concern. “I’m deeply sorry for what your mother must have went through.”

Keg was less polite about it. “The fuck, you guys? Am I high right now or are there three of them?”

Pumat Prime finally emerged, wiping his hands on his apron and chuckling. “Well, I can’t say much about how you may or may not be under the influence of a substance, little lady, but I will say that these three right there are just made of magic and good looks. They help me out here.”

He looked immediately to Caduceus, who just sighed in relief that some poor firbolg woman hadn't endured what had to be the worst childbirth ever. “Hey there, friend. Oh wow, you’re a bright-lookin’ fella, aren’tcha? I like what you’re doin’ with the pink there.” He stepped out from behind the counter and held out a hand for Caduceus to shake. “Allow me to properly introduce myself. I, myself, am Enchanter Pumat Sol. Pumat Prime, if you wanna distinguish me from these three knuckleheads over here.” He gestured to the trio behind him, who waved in unison. “Can’t say I see a lot of other firbolgs in the city.”

Caduceus ducked his head. “Well, I don’t get out much, myself. This is the first time I’ve been out of the Blooming Grove in awhile.”

Nott suddenly shrieked, “DO YOU TWO KNOW EACH OTHER?” like she hadn’t been listening and had only just come back to the conversation because she noticed Pumat and Caduceus were two feet from each other.

Molly gently pulled Nott back by her cloak. “Ignore her. She gets antsy if she has to let a joke go.”

Pumat just chuckled warmly and turned to Keg. “And lovely to meet you too, Ms.-”

“Keg. Just Keg.” She held out her hand for him to shake and seemed immediately transfixed by how large his was when compared to her own. “I’m, uh… actually gonna be livin’ here for awhile. You probably won’t see me much. I don’t really do magic shit, but, uh… Your shop’s cool.”

“Thank you!” He straightened and looked out over the group. “Huh. I thought I heard you say you had three new faces.”

“He was referring to me.” Cree stepped to the left, more clearly visible. Molly was wondering how she’d gone unnoticed this whole time given she was a massive black-furred tabaxi, but the answer became clear when a look of recognition sparked behind Pumat’s eyes. She hadn’t been noticed because she wasn’t a new face to him.

She’s a magic-user in Zadash. Of course she already knows Pumat, he thought to himself.

“Why Ms. Cree! That’s not a new face at all. It’s been awhile.” He stepped across the room, gently parting the crowd so he could gather her up in a hug that she enthusiastically returned with a bit of a rumbling purr. “You haven’t been by to see us in a bit. I was startin’ to worry.”

“I know, I know. I have been… quite busy with my work.”

Molly narrowed his eyes, trying to see any indication about whether Pumat knew that her work was for a mob boss. He was an open book, that one, but there was nothing in his eyes that suggested he was aware, which meant they should probably keep their mouths shut about the Gentleman around him- that was a given, anyway, but you could never truly know who was allied with who in a town like this. Pumat was clearly on the side of the Assembly, but maybe he had a whole other secret life.

“Yeah, that board’s always full, ain't it? It’s nice to see you got yourself a group now, and this lot- well, they’re some of the best I’ve encountered.”

Well. That definitely cleared up any lingering doubts about whether Pumat Sol was secretly in the pocket of the mob if he thought Cree was just a solo mercenary. A bit disappointing, too. He adored Pumat, but he was a little too perfect. It would be a relief, almost, if he had something weird going on.

Then again, Caduceus seemed completely free of anything weird beyond being a hermit who lived in a cemetery (and that was circus-level weird and therefore amazing). Maybe it was just a firbolg thing. Nothing to them but delight, simplicity, and downy fur.

“They are certainly something,” Cree murmured with about as much skepticism as one could expect. “I was hoping to purchase a few materials before I head out with them.”

“The board?” Beau was squinting at her and Cree, distracted from approaching one of the simulacra to make her order, shot her a dark look.

“The Task Board at the King’s Hall. I am sure you are well aware of it.”

Fjord nudged Beau in the shoulder to keep her from accidentally spilling Cree’s very clearly well-guarded secret. “Oh yeah. Right. Of course. That’s, uh… That’s how we met her, actually.”

Cree made a disgruntled sound and continued to the counter, allowing the rest of the Nein to split up and take in what few wares were available to them. Now that Pumat Prime was free, Molly removed the Bag of Holding from his shoulder. “Sooo you changed Jester’s haversack to a different color, and I know that she purchased it from you and customization options are probably just a perk of purchasing from your fine shop, but if I were to put down a certain amount of coin, could you maybe change this into a color that’s more… me?” He was all bullshit charm and his tail was lashing excitedly. Beau was so close to him in the space that it kept hitting her leg, so she grabbed it underneath his spade and held it still. A tiny shockwave went up his spine from the sensitivity of it, but he didn’t break contact with Pumat.

“Oh I could do that easy. It’s a pretty rudimentary spell.” Pumat scratched at his chin. “What color were you thinkin for it?”

Molly held the bag up to the light to scrutinize it. “Red. Bright, garish red.”

Beau made a choked sound and released his tail. “Molly, the fuck. You’re seriously gonna carry around a cherry red leather bag.”

“Proudly,” he beamed over his shoulder and only smiled harder at her clear disgust. The only thing better than getting something in just the right color was appalling someone who did not enjoy your sense of aesthetics.

Pumat took the bag from Molly’s hands and moved over to an unoccupied part of the counter so he could cast a spell over it that turned the black leather to a heavily noticeable shade of exactly the hue he was hoping for, removing any trace that it might have belonged to someone like Lorenzo. It was all his now. He took it back and shouldered it, spinning around to face Jester. “Well? How does it look?”

Jester squeaked in delight. “Oh my gosh, Molly. We match now.”

Fjord looked between them. “Do you two think you can handle the responsibility of being the ones to carry all our shit?”

The two of them stared at him, their tails lashing in sync, looking very much like two judgmental cats, watching him sweat. “Don’t worry, Fjord,” Jester said, very gravely. “You can trust us.”

“Absolutely,” Molly nodded. He caught Jester’s tail in his and entwined them together and they broke off giggling.

Fjord threw his hands up. “Right. I’m gonna go… Somewhere else. I’ll meet you guys back at the Leaky Tap, all right?”

“Bathhouse!” Molly corrected. “Baths, then booze.”

“I’m with you, pal,” Keg muttered. She was out of place in this magic shop, surrounded by polite firbolgs, and it was starting to get to her, apparently.

Cree was finishing up her own purchases. “I will accompany you two as far as the jeweler’s. I need to procure diamonds.”

Jester and Caduceus both turned to her. “Oh!” Jester gasped. “That’s right! Caduceus, can you do that spell too? The Traveler taught it to me before…” She looked over at Molly, who looked away, abruptly. “Well, the thing is it takes diamonds, so I couldn’t have used it anyway, even if-” She shook her head. “Never mind. We should go too. Cleric club!”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Caduceus nodded. He had just finished purchasing what looked to be a broken sword from one of the simulacra. “Um… Mr. Mollymauk? I don’t suppose you could put this in your bag for a bit? I think it’s gonna be useful, but just not right now. I gotta look into it.”

That was a lovely distraction from the horrors of resurrection magic and the fact that having diamonds was necessary for it. Molly used to be a lot more comfortable with mortality and now it seemed to be a lingering horror that grabbed at him at every turn. He opened the bag and let Caduceus drop the sword within its extraplanar space. “I don’t know what any of that means, but I like the way it sounds, and I’m all for seeing where things go.”

Fjord and Keg had already walked out by the time the clerics were situated with their purchases, so Jester bolted outside, and the second Cree and Caduceus cleared the door, she linked arms with both of them and shouted, “Fjoooord, wait up!”

They were powerless to stop her from dragging them along. It was kind of cute, actually how she’d taken to them. No cleric envy there, that was for sure, aside from her guilt at not being the one to save him, which was ridiculous. She was trapped and even if she hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have had the materials. There were only two ways it could have ended and this was the ideal one.

It was still, somehow, a gaping wound on every one of them, and no one wanted to talk about it, least of all Molly.

“We’re never going to see her heal again,” Nott muttered, breaking up his thoughts, as she took a drag from her flask.

Pumat Prime cleared his throat, drawing the attention of the remainder of the group. “This is a little weird, but… I gotta say that I appreciate you takin’ Ms. Cree into your group.”

The five of them exchanged mutually confused looks, but it was Caleb who spoke up. “And why is that?”

Pumat looked at his simulacra, who all suddenly found themselves in desperate need of things in the backroom. “Well, you see, she’s always been so lonely whenever I’ve seen her. I’ve never met a woman so sad and alone in the world as her, and maybe that’s just a lack of experience talkin’ since most people don’t come in here lookin’ like their world just ended, but she did. When she first came to Zadash about two years ago, she didn’t have a copper to her name. Tried to sell me that cloak she’s got- a Cape of the Mountebank. Real rare and fancy and worth quite a mint, even if it is used. Could’ve set her up nicely if she’d been willin’ to part with it, but she broke down before I could even give her the gold and wouldn’t let go of it. I couldn’t bear to watch such a nice lady cry so I sent her to the King’s Hall, hopin’ maybe she’d find a good job and some friends.”

He shrugged. “She found jobs, I guess, but I don’t think she ever found any friends.” He laughed, suddenly nervous, as if it just hit him what he’d done. “I, uh… Probably shouldn’t have told you all that, so, um… do me a favor and pretend I didn’t.”

“She won’t hear anything from us,” Yasha spoke up, surprising everyone, including Molly. “But… why do you think she was so sad, Pumat?”

Molly felt that answer was obvious, but he was curious as to how an outsider might frame it. Prime was looking a little more nervous now that he was fully aware he’d spoken too much. “I think she must have lost someone and that cloak was either theirs or they gave it to her. Whoever they were, they must have meant the world to her if she’d sooner starve than give it up. I couldn’t let her do either, and, like I said, it’s great that she’s with you now. Maybe she won’t be so lonely anymore.”

“That’s the idea,” Molly sighed. Well. There went the mood of the place. He shifted his bag, exhaled through his nose, and resolved to change the subject. “We’ll take care of her. For now, business. How much for the color change on the bag?”

Pumat blinked. “Oh that? Heh. That’s just a simple spell. No charge at all for that.”

“Nonsense!” Molly skipped forwards and pressed a gold into his hand and held it there for longer than strictly necessary. “You are a gentleman and a scholar and a fine enchanter and you deserve every bit of coin we give you.”

There was no way to tell if he was blushing under the grayish fur but he certainly looked bashful. “Well, hey that’s real sweet of you t’ say.”

The fact that he didn’t even mention their habit of trying to wrangle discounts was just proof that Pumat was really too kind and generous and gracious to be true. Or maybe he just had the most impenetrable customer service face. Either way, Molly was delighted. He released Pumat’s hand, blew him a kiss with both hands as he backed away and then skipped outside, leaving the rest of the Nein to finish what they were doing, while he turned the corner into the alley beside the shop and tried to breathe around a sudden weight in his chest that he'd managed to ignore for long enough to retreat.

Cree had come to this town shattered after Lucien’s death. She would choose the slow death of starvation rather than give up something that he had either given her or had worn. Her love for that bastard was unconditional and unwavering, strong to the point of being unbreakable.

He thunked his head against the brick wall and stared up at the sky, bright without a trace of cloud cover. Too pretty a day to be mired in what he could or couldn’t do.

But what if he couldn’t convince her?

And what if he shouldn’t?

“Hey, Cree?”

Cree hummed a response to Jester’s query as she walked between her and Caduceus. She was still dealing with last night, especially Jester’s gentleness and eagerness to be kind to her, and being around her for an extended period wasn’t helping make the matter any easier.

“Okay, so… The Traveler was telling me that there’s like three spells that can raise the dead, right? One is the one I can do now, which has to be done right then.”

“Yes, that is the spell I used on Mollymauk.” She looked to Caduceus to see if he knew where Jester was going with this, but he was occupied with just taking in the city- of course, he would be. A man living alone in the woods as a hermit has probably never seen a place like Zadash. The first time Lucien, Tyffial, and Jurrell had seen a proper city, they had been awestruck as well and they hadn’t been shut-ins. Only she had been beyond the Run and seen more of the world, and even then she saw it through the eyes of someone in chains, not someone free to do as she liked.

“And then the second one can be done anytime as long as you, like, have a body.” Jester twisted up her expression a bit. “But there’s another one that you can do when you get really powerful.”

“True Resurrection,” Caduceus said- ah so he had been listening, though he still hadn’t taken his eyes off the shops or the people milling about. “You can just bring someone back even if the body is gone.”

“Indeed. I am not powerful enough for either of those spells, however.” Not even when she had the full support of the Somnovem and wasn’t as weakened as she was currently. “What is your point?”

“Okay, so…” She pressed her fingertips together, “what would happen if you like… tried to bring Lucien back with that spell? Would he just get a new body exactly like Molly’s?”

Caduceus frowned, finally tearing his eyes away from the sights to look down at Jester. “Huh… That’s an interesting question. I feel like that would be dangerous to try.”

“And it would take me years to accumulate the power to even make the attempt,” Cree murmured. “I cannot stake Lucien’s life on a hope, nor could you stake Mollymauk’s on the same.”

Jester sighed. “I just think there has to be a way we could have both, you know? Then you could be happy and we could keep Molly around.”

There is a happy medium. Lucien comes back and perhaps Molly’s gentleness evens him out a bit. A full merging of the two souls. That would be the ideal, even if it would kill Mollymauk Tealeaf as a separate consciousness, but it would give us all what we want. It was a comforting thought, but she doubted that it would end well if she voiced it. It hadn’t ended well for her so far. No one wanted to lose Molly as he was. “I… appreciate your attempt at compromise, Jester, but I think it best we leave it to Tyffial.”

Jester fell into a quiet sulk that Caduceus was quick to yank her back out of. “You said the Traveler gives you your power? I’m not familiar with that god.”

“Oh! He’s really cool! I’ve got a pamphlet right here actually.” She began to dig in her haversack.

Cree hissed at them and placed her hand over Jester's to keep her from pulling anything out. “Be careful of your heretical gods- you cannot speak of them openly in this place.”

“Heretical?” Caduceus gave her that lopsided, incredulous look that seemed to dominate at least half of his expressions. “The Empire’s a little backwards if they think nature is heretical. I wonder what the Lawbearer would have to say about that.”

“I do not claim to know their logic. All I know is they will arrest you for less, and we are… Of a type that the… less tolerant disapprove of.”

“What does that mean?” Jester squinted as she passed over a pamphlet to Caduceus without even considering Cree's hand in her way.

Cree blinked down at her. “A beast woman.” She pointed to herself. “A giant-kin.” She pointed to Caduceus. “And a devil-blood.”

“And?” Once more, Jester looked to Caduceus as if he had the answers, but he was as confused as she was. How fortunate.

She sighed. “You have both been quite lucky to have avoided the jeers and stares of folk who shun that which is different. I have not been so lucky.”

Jester wrinkled her nose in distaste. “That’s really shitty. Like… People love cats!”

She didn’t want to, but somehow she found herself incapable of resisting the urge to chuckle. Blast this girl. “Aye, but people do not love six-foot tall cats with a predator’s teeth and claws.”

“That’s still stupid.” Jester folded her hands behind her back. “Okay, but now I’m curious about what god you follow.”

Cree tensed up a bit. Speaking of heretical. She didn’t want to share details about the Somnovem, especially with their marks on Molly beginning to waken. He had yet to come to her about it (and she assumed he was avoiding the subject entirely), but if any of them drew a connection to those marks and her ”gods”, then it would raise a lot of suspicions, and she was having a hard enough time balancing these people as it was.

She was starting to even like that they were taking care of her…

But that would end if they suspected she was doing that to Molly. They wouldn’t understand that it was Molly’s own fraught emotional state calling them home. That her presence had triggered them was only part of an overarching series of traumas. It would have happened with or without her.

Caduceus spared her the need to lie by making an (incorrect) observation. “It’s the Raven Queen, right? You’ve got a broach on your cloak with raven feathers.”

Fuck. She’d forgotten about that- being a cleric in the Empire meant people expected you to show your holy symbol at times, and she’d gotten a Raven Queen talisman to pin to her cape to avoid questioning. Most blood clerics served the Matron- she had learned her craft in the walls of the Blood Chantry in the Claret Order compound here in Wildemount, in fact, who were all zealots in her name. The Somnovem- or, specifically, the Nonagon who heralded them whom her faith was truly placed in- came later.

She brushed her hand over the raven feathers. “Indeed. I have enough problems as is with the work I do and the way I look without adding more to it.” She cleared her throat, lest Caduceus with his strangely observant gaze cotton onto the lie in her words. “The jeweler’s is this way. I suggest getting at least one diamond each, if they have it available- two if you have the coin and they have the stock to be on the safe side.”

Jester’s easy smile vanished from her face like a slate being wiped clean. “Do people die a lot on adventures?”

She looked down at her, at her soulful purple eyes, and then quickly looked away. “Not often. It is just always best to be prepared. I, myself, have only had to use revivify once in all my years as an adventurer. Mollymauk was my second time.”

“Did it not work on Lucien?” Jester knit her brows.

Cree winced, remembering that cold, dark midnight in the Savalirwood when they had waited too long, thinking Lucien would come back on his own. “I… The spell must be enacted within a certain time or else it is useless.” She swallowed through a sudden dryness in her mouth. “We did not understand what was happening with the ritual. We waited too long.”

“The ritual?” Caduceus cocked his head. “So you did something and Lucien died and then somehow Mollymauk came out of that?”

Another wince. “I did nothing. That spellspitter woman did something.”

“What was her name?” Always questioning, this Jester. Always trying to find a new topic to light on when other topics became too unbearable. She admired that in her. She would linger on the same topic and work it into knots until she’d exhausted herself with misery.

Her hand was on the door to the jeweler’s as it hit her just how strange it was that she couldn’t remember the name of someone so important. “...I do not recall.”

Molly had grabbed Beau by the arm the very second she left Pumat’s and began to drag her away. “Come on, Unpleasant One. We’ve got a search to go on.”

“Godsdammit, Molly! Caleb needs me to go with him to the Soul!” She tried to tug her arm out of his grasp, but it seemed fairly half-hearted. Curiosity will do that to you.

Caleb had just followed Beau out on his own terms, shoving reams of paper into his satchel. “I have other errands to run. We can go tomorrow.” When he looked up, he met Molly’s eyes with an almost too knowing look, like he saw right through him.

Molly quickly looked away. “Bathhouse in an hour!” He called jovially over his shoulder. “Don’t be late or I’ll have Cree hunt you down with your own blood.”

“Bold of you to assume you’ll be able to find Cree,” Nott said from down by Caleb’s knees. “Cats hate water.”

Caleb puffed up his chest a bit. “Some cats love it. Big cats, especially.”

“Looks like you’re gonna be the odd one out again, Nott,” Molly shot her a cheeky grin (still avoiding Caleb’s piercing, sympathetic stare).

“I usually am.” Nott made a face. “Also fuck you.”

Molly blew her a kiss and then looked to Yasha as she exited the shop. “You wanna join us, Yash’? We’re going fishing.”

“Fishing?!” Beau balked.

Yasha, however, cottoned his meaning. It was an old circus term to avoid getting into trouble over the need to purchase certain substances. “You know how I never actually get anything from it. You go. I’ll make sure Caleb and Nott don’t, erm, run off or something.”

“That’s always a risk,” Molly nodded sagely, and then yanked Beau forward.

“What are you talking about?” She groaned, finally extricating herself from Molly’s grip as they turned a corner into an alleyway.

“Fishing. You know, like for-” He mimed holding a pipe.

Beau’s eyes widened. “Oh. Oh. Oh shit yeah. I mean we’ve still got our other supply, but I actually feel like we should be saving that for someone we need to get real fucked up.”

“Exactly. And I never try the same shite twice in the same year. It just… It’s never as fun until you forget what it did the first time.” What he didn’t say was how badly he didn’t want to take another jaunt through the Ethereal Plane again after what happened in the Sour Nest. “Plus there is no way this place isn’t swarming with dealers.”

“Maybe we should ask the Gentleman. I bet he’s got plenty of good shit. And he might give us a discount.”

Molly wrinkled his nose. “You never buy drugs from anyone who pays you. That’s a terrible idea.”

She squinted. “You’ve been around for two years, Molly. How do you know all this shit? Are you just making it up.”

“I’m a circus person!” Molly flailed his hands. “All I ever bought with my coin are drinks, tattoos, nice fabrics, and drugs.”

Beau stuck her tongue in her cheek. “And overpay the staff of every establishment you ever walk into?”

“Well yeah, that’s a given.” He kept walking down the alley, checking for any secret doors or possible signs of shady dealings. This was usually where they happened in big cities- in the quiet corners where no one ever bothered to look.

Beau stopped a few times to check the walls for any indication of thieves’ cant. “So not to be your therapist or whatever, ‘cause I’m not qualified for that shit, but is this just about drugs?”

Molly froze midway through knocking on a stone wall to see if it was perhaps illusory or otherwise fake. “What else would it be about?”

“Escaping your metric fuckton of problems that you are so pointedly not talking about?” She turned to look at him, and Molly became acutely aware that the alley entrance was very far away and this side had a dead-end, so if he wanted to flee from this conversation, he’d have to get past Beau, who was probably not going to let him leave without a fight.

He played himself, basically.

“I don’t have any problems,” he lied through his grit teeth.

“Bullshit. You melted a guy’s brains.” Her eyebrow was up so far her piercing was almost touching her hairline.

Molly groaned and slumped against the wall. “How many people saw that?!”

Beau shrugged. “Just me and Caleb.”

“And Caduceus, apparently.”

“Yeah, well, he sees everything, apparently. Can't slip anything past him. It's great until it's not.” Beau ran a hand over her face. “So what’s going on, Molly? Is it Cree?”

He slumped further until he was sitting on the grimy stone of the alley and could not be arsed to care about what it might be doing to his coat. “No… I think it was always gonna happen. Probably. I dunno.” He kneaded the heel of his hand into his eyes. “I think it’s… the tattoos. The ones that aren’t tattoos. The marks. Whatever.”

“The eyes?” Beau knelt in front of him and pulled his hand away from his face so she could examine the two in the snakes. “So these things give you crazy superpowers?”

“I guess?” He made another noise of anguish, softer this time. “It’s so complicated. I’m…” He bit his lip. He hadn’t even told Caleb this yet- only Fjord and Yasha had seen him wake up from his nightmares. “I’m havin’ dreams. Dreams of this… this city. This horrifying city. And all these voices. I think whatever the hell Lucien was mixed up in, it’s trying to bring him back. They keep wanting me to-to wake them up.”

“Wake them up?” Beau squinted harder. “Molly, that sounds crazy.”

“No,” he murmured, sardonically. “I thought hearing voices was the sign of a perfectly sane person.” He took his hand back from her. “Regardless, they’re wakin’ up without me… doing anything. Three of them. Three out of nine.”

“And if all nine wake up?” Beau rocked back until she was also sitting on her butt in front of him, knees drawn up. “Lucien comes back?”

“Maybe.” He shrugged.

“And we’re going to Nogvurot where Cree’s friend might just forcibly wake them up?” Molly noted that her knuckles were clenched so tightly, they were turning pale around the edges.

“I don’t think she can do that. I think they only respond to me… My feelings.” The more he talked about, the crazier it sounded. “It doesn’t make any sense to me, either, so don’t… Just don’t ask.”

“That doesn’t fix the Nogvurot problem,” Beau pointed out.

“I… Might have an idea about that.” Off Beau’s look, he continued, “Let’s say, hypothetically, between here and there Cree agrees that I’m a valid inhabitant of this extremely attractive body.” He waved his hand to indicate himself. “If Tyffial is good enough to maybe bring Lucien back like Cree thinks… maybe she’s good enough to stop whatever this is from happening.”

Beau shook her head. “That’s a pretty big ‘if,’ Molly.”

Molly sighed and then spoke, more quietly, more lost. “I can’t go on like this, Beau. And I can’t… just continue as if this never happened. It’s not fair to any of you, but… I need this… this group. I need this so much. And if that’s selfish, then I’m selfish, but I don’t want to have to leave you all because I’m not safe. I’ve never had to be alone.”

As his voice started to break, Beau started to panic and pitched forward a bit, leaving her awkwardly flailing to figure out what to do, eventually settling on just putting her hand on his shoulder. “Molly… hey, hey… don’t. Fuck. You’re gonna make me get all mushy here. We’re not leaving you. Whatever this shit is, we’re gonna figure it out. No one’s gonna think you’re a fuckin’ bomb about to explode just ‘cause you have some freaky new powers.”

“Except I am a bomb.” And he put Caleb to the task of taking care of him should he come even a little bit close to going off, which was unimaginably cruel of him, but he didn’t think anyone else would do it. Not even Beau. “I didn’t mean to… melt that guy’s brain.”

“He was gonna hurt you. You stab people for that just fine.” She sighed and moved to sit beside him instead of right in front of him, avoiding getting into his face when he was already so cornered- shockingly careful for her usually blunt and tactless approach to things. Their shoulders were pressed together now, which was some comfort. Reassurance that she wasn't pulling away or trying to lash out.

“That’s different. That’s not….” He paused. “… impulse.”

Except isn’t it? Isn’t literally everything he does in a fight muscle memory and something in his blood that makes it so? The stupid eyes bleed whenever he uses one of his… freaky blood powers. That all came from Lucien- maybe it came from those weird voices too.

Maybe he was in the same position as Fjord, stuck with an otherworldly patron he didn’t want. The problem was Fjord seemed to relish in the abilities he had. Molly would be happy to be without his… Except no. No, he wouldn’t. He liked being able to protect people with those powers. The circus would have been dead several times over if he hadn’t leapt into the fray with prop swords swinging, all burning blood and impulse.

He dropped his head onto his knees. “I don’t want to become something I’m not. I don’t… I mean, look at Cree! Lucien couldn’t have been good for her.”

“Yeah, that relationship was clearly super toxic,” Beau said drily. “Do you seriously think you could become like that? The kind of person people look at with that kind of... creepy reverence?”

He lifted his head off his knees, but only a bit- just enough that he could give her a sidelong glance. “He did. Somehow. And besides… I haven’t had a choice in things so far. It might be inevitable.”

Beau took that in for a moment and then she balled her hand into a fist and punched him hard in the shoulder. It was so rough and so unexpected that he tipped over onto his side and nearly got tangled up in his own coat. “Fuck. You. Molly. You don’t get to talk about paths and wield your Tarot cards like you’re a godsdamned expert on what people need and then say you don’t have a choice.”

He could feel the bruise blossoming on his shoulder and the oncoming stiffness. He was gonna need the hot bath after this for that alone. He opened his mouth to say something, found he had no words, and closed it again.

Beau, however, had plenty of words. “You know when you died? All I could think about was when you said you left every place better than you found it, and how fucking arrogant that was, but you were right, you son of a bitch. We were better since you walked into our lives and made us go to your fucking circus. I was better. And no, it fucking wasn't all on you, but you started it and it built into this. It's a ripple effect. And if you end up falling to this, it's gonna effect all of us too. It might make some of us who convinced themselves that maybe there was a reason to put good in the world decide to say fuck it. Nothing lasts. Lets' do whatever the fuck we want forever and fuck how that hurts everyone else.”

Molly snapped his jaw shut with an audible click, eyes wide.

She reached over and grabbed his coat and pulled him up close. “So we’re gonna return the favor for you, you arrogant piece of shit, and we won't make ripples when we do it- we'll make waves. Lucien can’t have you. Whatever Lucien’s got goin’ on? That can’t have you either. The Tombtakers? Fuck ‘em. We’ll go to Nogvurot and fulfill your stupid bargain with Cree, but don’t you dare think that we’re letting anyone fuck your brain up without a fight. We’ll keep reminding you of who you are. You made us better. We’re not letting you get made worse. ”

She released his coat and he fell backwards again, catching himself before he cracked his skull on the stone. Once more, he gaped wordlessly, swallowed, and then, “So how hard was that for you to say?”

“Fuck you, Molly,” she spat, without venom. She stood and brushed herself off and then, after a second, extended her hand to him. “Come on, Obnoxious One. Let’s find some fucking drugs.”

Molly stared from Beau’s face to her outstretched hand, still sprawled awkwardly on the ground, and then, cautiously, he took her hand, and she pulled him up, and he thrust himself into her space to give her a hug, pinning her arms to her side so she couldn’t hit him- at least not easily.

“Thanks, Beau.” He would’ve felt better if his voice didn’t come out so choked, but maybe that was the only thing that kept her from finding some other way to commit an act of violence against him.

She awkwardly patted his back after a moment of just standing there, rigid as a board. “Yeah… You’re welcome.”

Despite having lived in Zadash for two years, Cree had never bothered to indulge in the Steam’s Respite. She couldn’t quite think of why beyond that perhaps it reminded her too much of the Claret Orders. The compounds had rather impressive baths due to the sheer amount of blood that the members ended up covered in- especially the clerics who took communion in the blood pools tucked into the second floor of the Chantry.

She hadn’t needed that nostalgia on top of everything else. The simple times were dead and buried. What good would it do her to resurrect them all on her own with only shades for company?

Now she had other company. Now she walked into the building alongside Caduceus and Jester, having purchased diamonds and pastries (at Jester’s insistence), which put the incident of her poor memory for a long-gone wizard out of her head for the moment. They were clearly the last to arrive, as the rest of the Mighty Nein- all six of them- were standing around the lobby, chatting, when they walked in.

“You guyssss,” Jester trilled. “You didn’t have to wait for us.”

“Jester couldn’t decide what pastries to get,” Caduceus explained, holding up a rather large bag. “So she got one of each.”

“So we have snacks for later,” she nodded, sagely.

“Those are gonna end up at the bottom of the haversack or the bag of holding and grow an entire mold civilization,” Beau noted. “Like full on elected officials.”

Jester stuck her tongue out, playfully. The attendant called for their attention with a cleared throat and a look of harried amusement and Molly swept up and paid them before anyone else could.

“We’re a lot, I know. Communal bath, since we’re a bit of a community.” He gave a little bow and then sauntered towards the door to the changing rooms without needing to be led. The rest of the Nein followed him with Yasha pulling up beside him. Cree caught her whisper, “I wonder what that would taste like… A mold civilization.”

Molly didn’t laugh like Lucien did, she realized, taken aback by the bark of amusement that escaped him at Yasha’s question. Lucien was given to soft chuckles or childish cackling that tended to alarm. She had always loved the way he laughed, even if it wasn’t necessarily pleasant, but hearing something gentler in comparison…

She shook her head and carried on to one of the designated rooms to start shedding her clothing. This was always the worst part for her. She’d learned modesty that she probably would never have necessarily needed being covered in fur as she was in the Orders. Tyffial would happily lounge in the nude sometimes when her personal demons would allow it, but somehow she had been the one who developed a certain amount of shame. Maybe Tyffial’s body had something to do with it- Cree had always been a bit jealous of her long willowy limbs and her delicate elvish features, while she was broad and furry and well-muscled. The way Tyffial's mutagens had ravaged her body could not steal her beauty, no matter how much it affected her to have too many uglier scars.

She expected to be gawked at when she pulled her robes off over her head, but most of the attention was on Keg, who had her back to everyone as she began to pull of her armor piece by piece. The back of her neck was red.

(Cree gently tapped the blood vial in her satchel that belonged to her to confirm something- right, well. That wasn’t surprising.)

“You okay there, Keg?” Beau asked, smirking a bit.

“Yeah.” Keg’s voice had gone up an octave. “Just… Never taken a bath with other people before. So, hey, is it too late to get a private room? I, uh… Erm.”

“Oh, but you lose the experience if you do it privately,” Yasha piped up. She seemed to have no problem with her own nudity and was perfectly fine with standing there, fully on display without slipping a robe on. Keg was hardly the only one reacting to that and Cree didn’t need to consult the blood to see it- Beau was eyeing her up lasciviously- but the barbarian didn’t seem to be paying it any heed.

Keg made the mistake of turning her head in Yasha’s direction and then jerked back to face forwards so fast, it was miracle she didn’t snap her own neck. “The… The experience?”

“Yeah!” Jester grinned as she removed some of her more delicate horn jewelry. “Molly always says that it’s a lot easier to have conversations when you’re naked and boiling.”

“I- I think Molly might be lying to you,” Keg choked out.

“I mean yeah, he does that.” Beau shrugged and slipped on a robe. “But I feel like he might be right about this one.”

“It is better to go with their whims then fight them, my friend,” Cree sighed, slipping a robe on over her own dark fur and taking great pains to close it up to keep herself as covered as possible before she dropped into the water. No sense in putting herself up for scrutiny the way Yasha was.

“See? Cree gets it.” Beau’s tone left something to be desired, but that was normal for her, apparently. She paused and then dug for something among her belongings. “Hey, Keg. You smoke. What d’you know about drugs?”

“I know some stuff?” Keg glanced behind her to make sure everyone was robed up. She was only in her smallclothes now, her body a mess of various scars. She would have made a fine Blood Hunter with the way she carried them. “Why? You holdin’?”

Beau held up a packet of something in a mottled green color and Cree squinted at it. “Guy behind the blacksmith’s sold me and Molly this stuff. Said it was suude, but it kinda smells weird and not, like, super druggy.”

Keg reached for it, but Cree interrupted before she could take it. “That is not suude. It is the wrong color. It should be brown, blue, or red.” She held out her hand and Beau hesitantly handed over the packet to her, instead. She opened the bag and sniffed it, recoiling a bit from the strong smell.

“It is indeed a drug, but it is not nearly as strong. It is an herbal mixture meant for relaxation.” She handed it back. “You were cheated.”

Beau balked. “Sonuvabitch! Molly tipped him really good, too. That slimy fuck.”

Jester was eyeing Cree up with eyes as wide as saucers. “Holy shit, Cree. You can just tell?”

Cree stiffened a bit, realizing her mistake. No matter. She worked for a criminal- they needn’t know the real reason she was familiar with drugs. They didn't need to know how many times she had watched Gorazm Pathan's men organize their shipments from a safe distance as a child, curious but also terrified of being caught. “I have worked with a man with multiple criminal ties for years and I have a good nose. I am well aware of the differences in illicit substances.”

Having said that, she left the changing room at a brisk pace to find the others, lest anyone ask her more questions. Beau was still audibly swearing when she finally reached the largest of the communal baths, emptied of any patrons except Nott, who must have changed elsewhere, draped in a very tiny robe with the faint shimmer of a disguise spell over her. She was staring at the water as if it had affronted her.

“Not a fan of hot baths, are you?” She shed her own robe, grateful that it was just the two of them. She hadn’t spoken much to the little goblin girl, but she found her to be a far less awkward presence to be naked in front of than the entirety of the Nein.

“Not a fan of water,” Nott grumbled. “I have no idea why everyone insists this is fun.”

Cree remembered why it was fun the moment she dropped into the water and felt the heat begin to remove all the tension in her body. Fuck. She needed this more than she thought she did. She was so used to carrying the weight of every trouble that until it all began to melt away, she didn’t notice just how cumbersome it truly was. “It is an acquired taste, I suppose. And cannot possibly be relaxing if you are frightened by it.”

“I’m not frightened,” Nott protested.

“It is too warm for you to be trembling like that, otherwise, Nott.” Cree ducked her head under the water to soak completely and then emerged again to find Nott just staring at her with wide golden eyes. She couldn’t see the exact shape of her illusion with Mirumus’s eye constantly active, but she knew she was still wearing one.

“...How did you know it was me?” She asked.

Cree blinked. Oh. She was so used to being among the Tombtakers that she kept forgetting that not everyone could see through illusions. She opened her mouth to find a lie suitable enough, but that was when Molly entered.

“Is it all right for you to just be out in the open like that, Nott?” He asked. “Not that I think there’s any shame in it, but you and Caleb are deeply fixated on it.”

Nott made an indignant noise. “What? Is it not working?”

Cree’s mouth went dry and Nott’s sputtering and Molly shrugging it off were incomprehensible background noise that meant nothing to her as she stared at Molly standing proudly without a stitch on. Everything was the same, except for the tattoos- every bit of that body she’d been allowed to explore time and again. It was only the soul within that was different. Her heart pounded in her ears, but she couldn’t look away, so she sank below the surface of the water, instead and held her breath until she couldn’t anymore. When she emerged, Molly had climbed into the water and hidden the parts of himself that were distracting to her and she could breathe again.

“I’m telling you, you look like a goblin to me,” Molly was explaining.

“That’s impossible! I know the spell worked.” The girls were filing in now, and Nott zeroed in on Jester. “Jester! What do I look like right now?”

“Like a tiny Beau!” She squealed.

“...Is that what my face looks like right now?” Beau squinted.

“See?!” Nott squawked, pointing accusingly at Molly. “Stop trying to fuck with me.”

Molly’s smile began to fade incrementally as he realized what must have happened, and then he yanked himself back up by his metaphorical bootstraps to grin. “Gotcha.”

Jester slipped into the water and splashed him with a delighted giggle. “Don’t be a dick, Molly.”

“And he got Cree in on it, too,” Nott sniffed.

Keg dropped into the water like a stone, likely taking advantage of everyone’s current distraction, next to Cree and let out a series of swears as the heat surprised her and then began to relax her near-immediately. “Fuck… I thought this was gonna be a nightmare, but this feels great. I can almost deal with the nudity.” (And what it did to her- Cree didn’t need blood to tell her about Keg’s current state of arousal.)

Fjord, Caduceus, and Caleb, apparently trailing along behind Molly at a more leisurely pace, discarded their robes and joined in. Even large enough to accommodate many, there was barely any elbow room and they all shifted and adjusted in the water to try and give each other the necessary amount of space. Nott remained where she was, observing.

“So Caduceus…” Jester leaned against the side and beamed across the way at the firbolg as he reemerged from where he had ducked underneath the water to get all of his fur wet as Cree had. “Is this your first time at a bathhouse?”

“Yeah,” he drawled. “It’s a lot different from the hot springs back home. Smells a lot better.” He sniffed the air, experimentally.

“You had hot springs at the Grove?” Molly’s eyes widened. “And you didn’t tell us?!”

Caduceus ducked his head shyly. “Nobody asked… And I guess time was sorta of the essence.”

“We were in the middle of trying to rescue our friends from slavers, ja,” Caleb noted drily.

“Maybe once I go back, I can give you all a proper tour of the place.”

“And you will be going back?” Fjord was so occupied with trying to keep his eyes up and not lingering on anyone that he hadn’t noticed Jester trying to sneak a bit closer, but Cree caught on immediately.

Now she knew who she had a crush on. Not that it mattered any. Why would it?

“Well yeah, eventually,” Caduceus shrugged.

“I only ask because a lot of us don’t really have places to go back to or are runnin’ to leave places behind.” Fjord scratched at his chin. "It's an interestin' change."

“I am totally gonna go back to Nicodranas at some point,” Jester piped up, and Fjord almost jumped out of his skin when he realized how close she had gotten without him noticing. “Oh my gosh, we should go there when we’re done in Nogvurot, you guys. You can all meet my mama.”

Only Cree, Keg, and Caduceus seemed unaware of the significance of that- like it was something to be excited about beyond ‘the woman who had raised Jester and had a hand in why she was Like This.’ Only Keg thought to voice it, “So is your mom, like, famous or something?”

“Her mom is the Ruby of the Sea,” Beau answered and Molly and Jester harmonized singing the best lay ever~ in response.

Keg almost choked. “Your mom is- what?”

Cree was not immune to this revelation either. She was well aware of the Ruby’s fame from previous dealings. “That is your mother? The Gentleman speaks highly of her.”

More than the Gentleman, even. Gorzam Pathan had etchings of the woman in his study. Twelve years gone and she still remembered the fuss Mistress Pathan had put up about them. And more relevantly, she recalled that she had never seen a creature so beautiful until she met Lucien.

Jester blinked. “The Gentleman knows my mom?”

She shook herself out of the memories. The Pathans should hold no place in her mind now and Lucien was a rabbit hole of problems she couldn’t afford to indulge here and now. “He is at least aware of her. He has rejected every member of his troupe who have tried to perform for not being up to her skill.”

“Awww that's so sweet." Jester gasped. "Oh my gosh, what if he knows my dad?” She gripped Fjord’s bicep and shook him, while he blushed and sputtered.

“Now, Jes-” he choked out, “that might be too much of a coincidence.”

“Well, coincidences seem to happen here, don’t they?” Caleb blurted out suddenly. Beau looked at him immediately, and Molly sank into the water up to his nose. “I cannot be the only one who has picked up on them. Ophelia needing the Shepherds dead. Cree turning up right when we need her to. And more besides.”

“What do you think it means, Caleb?” Nott asked, as if Caleb were the authority on all things.

“Where I’m from,” Caduceus piped up, “that’s not coincidence. That’s fate. Maybe some things are just meant to happen that way.”

Seeing the variety of sour looks that earned him, he didn’t elaborate, nor was he cowed by any of it. Cree, for her part, only scoffed. Ridiculous. She had served a goddess of Fate and then untangled herself from her threads to join Lucien on a new path. She bowed to fate no longer.

Apparently, Beau was eager to change the subject as everyone else was. “Hey, Molly, those drugs we got before? Cree says it’s not suude.”

Molly was currently draped on Yasha and perked up a bit in confusion. “Really? What was it then?”

“A different sort of drug,” Cree responded in the same dry tone she had explained it to Beauregard. Molly looked at her in what seemed to be an entirely new light and she sank farther into the water to avoid his stare. She could tell that this meant she would be included in any future drug excursions and she had no idea how to feel about that.

“Well,” he said, finally. “That’s good news. It could’ve been cinnamon.”

After the bathhouse, the Nein split paths to run more errands. Evening was settling and Catha was full, and Molly decided to forego helping Jester stake out the site of her Great Idea in favor of a little moonbathing. He walked as far as the public park alongside them, chatting about inane topics and allowing normalcy to overwhelm every creeping bit of anxiety that had somehow tried to edge into his lovely day.

Once they split paths, he found a bench and dug out his pipe and his share of the not-suude-but not-cinnamon-either. Cree had said it was a relaxation agent and only illegal in the Empire. In Tal’Dorei, they prescribed it for chronic pain and for anxiety.

Molly had one of those in spades.

He swore when he realized no one was around to light his pipe for him and managed to make do on his own with some effort. The effects were slow-working, but after a few moments of just puffing on the pipe and gazing up at Catha, he began to relax and drift.

Once again, he didn’t know when the shift from waking and dreaming began- it was subtle, as if dreams were just another part of reality now and he could step as easily past the veil as he could slip into the ethereal plane. He braced himself for the Astral Sea again.

Instead he seemed to be within a Tarot Card.

More specifically, he seemed to be in the Moon and the Mirror, the card as familiar to him as Gustav's trademark hat and just as much a part of his early existence before he truly started to become. The sky above was endless stars with Catha large and luminous overhead. Underneath him was a silvery film of water that he was sitting on top of. Every movement sent out tiny ripples, but he did not sink or break the surface. Cautiously, he peered down below the surface of the water.

Catha’s reflection didn’t pierce it. Instead he saw the Astral Sea, as if trapped behind glass, the shapeshifting, horrific city looming large underneath him. He couldn’t see his own reflection and he was grateful for that- he already knew what to expect there.

What he saw instead the longer he stared were three red eyes that popped open just underneath him, startling him so badly that he skittered backwards, sending up tiny waves across the surface that distorted the eyes, but didn't erase them. He could almost hear them speaking, but they were incomprehensible, unable to reach him from beyond whatever silvery barrier had been erected to keep them at bay.

He backed up a little more and hit something solid.

He tilted his head backwards and he gazed, upside down, upon a child with long silver hair, blue skin and pointed elven ears. Her eyes were the solid white color of Catha, wide like the full moon, itself, above them. The dress that fell to her bare feet looked more like a child’s nightgown than anything else.

“The Lady of Dreams asks for your forgiveness, Mollymauk Tealeaf,” the child spoke with an adult woman’s voice- ethereal and alluring. “I cannot keep them at bay any longer. I have held them away from you for two years, but they are persistent and hungry.” She locked her fingers together, her full moon eyes downcast. “Always so hungry.”

Molly remembered how everything here lately seemed to be hungry and shuddered, but that didn't matter. What mattered was this girl, so innocent and pure and yet so clearly divine. “...Sehanine?” He asked, tentatively.

Her smile was as bright as the moon above him and he wanted to melt under it. He wanted to curl like a cat at her feet and beg her for indulgence. She had been the only thing that truly made sense outside of the circus and to think she had been watching him, protecting him this whole time.

And the goddess of the moon, herself, could not stop whatever it was beneath his skin. He sucked in a breath between his teeth. “Then there’s no hope.”

Sehanine, the Moonweaver, the Lady of Dreams, knelt in front of him and took his face in her small hands. They were as cold as ice against his hot skin, but he welcomed the touch all the same. “My Mollymauk. My albatross. There is always hope. You should not exist and yet you do. You should have died on that road and yet you live. That is proof enough that this will not be a sad tale. It will just be a difficult one.” She kissed his forehead and her lips were as cold as her hands, but Molly still felt warmed.

“Do as you have always done and go with my grace. I am sorry I cannot do more for you.”

Molly didn’t realize he was crying until he felt the drops sliding down off his chin to land on his leggings, striking diamond and stripe one after the other. “What if I’m not strong enough What if he-”

The Moonweaver pressed her fingers to his lips. “Look down.”

Molly did as he was instructed- now he could see his own reflection instead of the city, except it wasn’t. Different clothes, different hair, different expression. Ruidus, in full glory, hung below him, rather than Catha.

But the most important part of it was that Sehanine’s reflection did not kneel before him. The space was empty.

“He is alone and you are not. That is why you won’t fail.”

Beau’s voice came to him, then. Don’t you dare think that we’re letting anyone fuck your brain up without a fight. We’ll keep reminding you of who you are. You made us better. We’re not letting you get made worse.

He swallowed and nodded, understanding. “Thank you.”

And then he was shunted out of the dream by the sensation of something kicking him in the ribs.

Molly woke up with a start, yelping in pain as the dream shattered around him like someone had broken the mirror of it, leaving him disoriented and adrift in the darkness of the park. Judging by the moon’s position in the sky, he had been asleep for a few hours. Fuck. He’d probably slept through several Sendings. God Dreams were probably too tough to penetrate, even for Jester’s iron will. That was a lesser problem- a burly man in merchant clothes with a thick beard scowled at him. Judging by his boot currently resting on the bench and pressing dangerously into Molly’s side, he’d been the one who had kicked him.

“Fuckin’ devil-blood vagrants,” he scowled.

Molly grunted around the pain in his ribs and fumbled around for his dropped pipe. “Just takin’ a nap, friend. Lost track of the time.”

His pipe had fallen just slightly behind his head, tangled in his horn jewelry- fortunately it had burned out before he dropped it or else his hair might have caught fire, which would not have been the first time. (He noted, miserably, that the effects of the drug must have worn off- he was no longer relaxed and he could feel pain quite clearly, which was a disappointment. He had hoped it would last longer.) The minute he closed his fingers around the pipe, the man’s foot shifted and his heel slammed onto his hand, instead.

Molly bit off a shriek of pain. “Well, that was uncalled for,” he wheezed around it. He tried to jerk his hand free, but the man was stronger and just dug in a little deeper.

“They shouldn’t let garbage like you into a fine city like this.”

A deep, familiar contralto voice purred, “Funny. I was going to say the same for you.”

The man freed Molly’s hand so he could whirl in the direction the voice had come from and Molly, ribs aching, hand possibly broken, sat up and found Cree stepping out of the shadows as if she had been a part of them.

“A fucking beast woman. Figures.” The man snapped and spit on the ground. Craving punishment, this one.

The slits in Cree’s eyes narrowed to pinpricks and Molly noted for the first time that her hand went to the amulet around her neck and not to the pin of raven feathers on her cloak. “Your blood sings off-key,” she hummed. “A bit too much red meat in your diet?” Her lips curled in disgust. “Decadence from the rich. How utterly expected.”

The hand not clutched around her amulet twitched, fingers moving as if manipulating invisible strings and Molly watched in wide-eyed amazement as the man’s arm jerked unnaturally. His hand balled into a fist and try as he might to push it down, he could not stop himself from socking himself so hard in the face that he knocked himself backwards and unconscious.

“...Fuck,” Molly breathed, eyes shifting from Cree to the man and back again. “...You might be my new hero.”

Her ears flattened to her skull as she cringed a bit. Something about that must have struck something, but Molly was too grateful to pay it much heed. She swallowed, attempted to speak, stopped, and then finally collected herself. “Let me see your hand.”

He held it out to her and she placed both her hands over it, careful not to jostle it. “Broken fingers. That brute.” The warm healing fled from the pads of her fingers- not unlike Frumpkin’s toe beans- and into his own until the pain receded and Molly could breathe without gritting his teeth. Magic always came with a smell and hers smelled intensely of old, stale blood, like a sacrificial chamber.

He flexed his digits when she pulled away, relieved that they moved with no stiffness or sign of injury. He needed those, thank you very much. “How did you find me?”

“Your blood. When you failed to answer both Jester and my Sendings, I went to look for you. You had u- them… very worried.”

Molly shot her a wry look. “Oh no, don't try to hide it, dear. You almost said us.”

Cree huffed, indignantly, puffing herself up a bit. “I do not want you dead.”

He almost countered that, but decided against it. She had come to his aide and Sehanine’s words still echoed in his head- continue on as you are. He wasn’t alone. Lucien was.

Which meant that maybe Cree wasn’t as with him as she believed herself to be. Maybe none of Lucien’s people were. They were just waiting for an alternative. It wasn’t much of a hope, but it was hope, and that was all he needed.

“Thank you… For coming to my rescue,” he said, instead. “Again.”

Cree’s fur slowly began to sort itself back out, but her tail remained lashing in clear frustration. “I seem to be quite good at it, aye." She sucked in a breath between her teeth. “Come then. We should get back.”

Molly chuckled at her awkwardness and followed after her, casting a glance upwards at the full moon high overhead as if it were watching over him.

As if it were a promise.

Chapter Text

Caleb lay another book on a pile he’d accumulated without bothering to look up from the next book he’d pulled out. All of the facts laid out before him to be claimed by his eager, hungry mind were intriguing and useful, but not what he wanted. At the rate he was going, he was only absorbing new knowledge for the sake of it- not an entirely bad thing, all told, but he had only a short time in this library.

He refused to believe there was nothing but rumors and speculation about time magic, most of which seemed to treat the whole topic as forbidden or else censored in some way.

He ran his hands down his face, stared at all of these books he’d perused and mined for their secrets, and then hailed one of the librarians and changed his focus, entirely.

“I’m curious,” he said, and the librarian’s dark eyebrows shot up with a sardonic slant to them (obviously he was curious), “what you have on eye symbolism.”

The librarian slow-blinked like he had just said something profoundly stupid. “We are servants of Ioun, sir.”

Caleb pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth to keep himself from being snide. That wouldn’t serve him, even if it served Beauregard. She wore the colors- she was already accepted, attitude problems or not. “Specifically,” he continued, “red eyes.”

He took a scrap of non-magical parchment from his satchel and a bit of pencil that had been reduced to a stub from being jostled about in the bottom of his bag and sketched out the eyes that were all over Molly’s body. Nine of them, total. “Nine eyes,” he explained, and passed the parchment over.

The librarian stared at it and pursed their lips. “This will take some time and research on our own.”

Caleb slumped a bit- he had half-expected that, but it was still disheartening. “If you could…?”

“Whatever he wants, do it, man,” Beau’s voice, exhausted and strained like she’d been exerting herself, spoke up. Caleb turned to see her stalking through the stacks like a predator. With lightning-fast hands, she plucked the scrap from the librarian, looked it over, and then handed it back. “Yeah, whatever you can find out’ll be great. This is important. It’s not just weird wizard curiosity shit.”

Seeing the state of Beau- her bloodied knuckles and wild eyes and the bruises on her face- the librarian swallowed, nodded, and fled from the pair, promising to Send word once something was uncovered. As satisfied as one could be in her state, Beau sank into the chair opposite of Caleb.

“Rough training?” He remarked drily.

Beau sniffed and then contorted her face, testing to see if her nose was slightly out of alignment. “I had a lot to catch up on. Dairon was teaching me evasive maneuvers.”

“Ja, well, you do not seem to be too good at evading.” Caleb reached over and gently snapped her nose back into place- she swore and recoiled and slapped at his hands.

“Fuck you, Caleb!” She contorted her face again and made a satisfied grunt around the wincing. “Huh. Maybe we oughta be training you to be a healer.”

Caleb returned to his book. “I get punched a lot. It behooves me to know how to fix a broken nose. Besides, we have three healers now.”

“Not to drag Cree or anything, but a healer we can barely trust isn’t much of a healer, is it?”

“There was a time when we barely trusted one another.” He didn’t look up, his shoulders tense.

“Like last week? Or two weeks ago?” Beau kneaded the heel of her hand into her eyes. “That fuckin’ bowl.”

“That fuckin’ bowl,” Caleb repeated in a very piss poor imitation of Beau’s cadence. “And not just that… Molly, Fjord… So many wasted hours not trusting them, and we would have died to save them and now…” He looked over in the direction the librarian went. “Now I don’t know.”

Beau looked down at the table, picking at the bloodstained wraps around her hands. “I feel like we all kinda owe you and Nott apologies.”

Caleb flinched. “Nott and I are adults. If your distrust of us, specifically, bothered us, we would have left.”

“That’s what got me, I think.” Beau’s picking continued until she’d almost unraveled the first layer of wrap. “That you guys could just leave, that you set yourself apart. It wasn’t just that you were assholes- we’re all assholes. Every one of us except Jester.”

He sighed. Leave it to Beauregard to somehow land on the exact problem, but only be gentle about it when they were alone and therefore no one else could see it. The vulnerability was noted. The unspoken filed away. And he already knew the truth behind every weighted argument, threat, or friendly wall-push anyway. “It was that we treated everything as transactional, that we were a group within a group. Our loyalty to anyone but each other was questionable. Yes, Beauregard, I am aware of my previous failings within this party. We have all had our share of those as well.” He closed his book, no longer interested in reading. “Molly dying… The Shepherds. We cannot deny that changed things. We are a team now. We take care of one another. There is… no room to believe otherwise.”

Technically, he still treated everything as transactional, even now- even with Molly putting his life in his hands as if he knew that on a fundamental level ahead of everyone else- he felt he needed to prevent that bill from coming due.

And to do that, he had to adapt to the circumstance and approach this from a new angle. These were no mere platitudes he shoved onto Beau- they were the result of a lot of thinking and a lot of talking privately with Nott, who was… unreasonably proud to hear him assign value to this group beyond what they could do for them in the long run at long last.

He still wasn’t sure if he could hold onto that, if there weren’t going to be times when he just wanted to run, but he was trying. He had tried for Nott and now, even in his worst moments, life without her seemed unbearable. Against his best wishes, the rest of this lot were eating at him in a similar way.

Unaware of his rapidly tumbling thoughts and complicated emotions, Beau just nodded, grimly. “Yeah… We’ve all got shit, and not all of us know exactly what we’re getting into with each other. Loose ends out the ass, and all. We just have to keep goin’, and-”

“-and look out for each other,” Caleb finished for her.

“So that’s why you’re trying to look into the eye thing on the sly?” She kept untangling her wraps. “I, uh… Might have dropped some information to another librarian to look into. About a city in the astral sea.”

Caleb bit down on his lip. “There’s more?”

“Voices. Cities. Lucien. Hell, if Lucien wasn’t such a godsdamned common name, I’d have them trawling for that too. ‘List of Luciens of significant clout to be in the Archives’ is kinda like a who’s who of douchebags that I don’t wanna wade through.” She yanked the wrap off her hand and let the bloodied cloth fall to the table. “All I know is Molly is in trouble, and I don’t wanna lose him to this.”

Caleb looked at the bloodied wraps and noted that from this angle some of the bloodstains seemed to take on a slightly almond shape, almost like the same eyes he had drawn, red and bloody as they were meant to be. He rubbed his eyes and they were just splotches again.

He gripped the edge of the table. “We will not,” he said, but his voice wavered and his confidence felt shaken.

Whatever this was, it was huge and would not be ignored under any circumstance- only a wizard would know how dangerous that was. Empires had fallen because you reached a little too far into knowledge you weren't meant to have.

Fjord walked into the basement of the Evening Nip ahead of Keg, Jester, and Caduceus and was met with the meaty slaps of flesh meeting flesh. Another fight, then. He turned to Jester and saw her eyes light up with mischief and he silently prayed to any deity that might overhear that she didn’t decide to fight someone who wasn’t a friend and might seriously hurt her.

Caduceus was alarmed by the whole prospect- at first, at least, and then he leaned into it. “Almost like seeing my siblings again,” he mused.

The Gentleman, sitting at his usual table (Ophelia at his side and his Goliath bodyguard standing behind the two of them, looking bored out of her mind), waved them over. “There you are! Keg, I have a bit of an initiation ritual for you. A formality, of course, but it’s one you’ll like better than the bloodletting, I’m sure.”

This was what had led them here:

Cree had been Sent a message via her Sending Stone asking Keg to come to the Evening Nip. As Fjord had things he wished to discuss with the Gentleman before they set out for Nogvurot the next day, he had agreed to accompany her. They had picked up Jester and Caduceus exiting Pumat’s where they had returned to purchase a magic cloak they had planned to give to Nott as a gift. Jester, curious about what Cree had said about the Gentleman knowing her mom, decided to come with and Caduceus was just along for the ride.

It wasn’t exactly what Fjord had expected (or wanted) going into this, but he knew better than to fight Jester on anything.

Now Keg eyed the Gentleman. “What sort of ritual?”

A cheer went up as a muscular halfling that Fjord had never seen before managed to knock a human man barely in his mid-twenties flat on his ass. The Gentleman looked over his shoulder as if about to call for someone and then frowned. “Ah yes… It’s going to take a bit of getting used to not having Cree here.” He snapped his fingers and Kara appeared, yanking the human’s half-conscious body up and supporting him through the still-cheering crowd. She met Keg's eyes and winked, forcing her to immediately look down at her shoes.

As they passed Caduceus, he tapped the injured man’s shoulder and a verdant light spread from his nimble fingers into him, knitting most of his wounds and allowing him to limp under his own power. The smell of lichen permeated the air before it was replaced with the smell of stale ale, blood, and sweat again.

Watching this gentle act of kindness without any expectations of a favor owed, there was no denying that Caduceus was one of the few good ones out in the world, as far as Fjord saw it with his unfortunate habit of only drawing the short straw socially- probably too good for this lot, but he had to admit he was grateful for his presence anyway. They needed that kind of balance- Jester and Molly were kind, but chaotic. Caduceus was calm waters, even if Fjord knew from experience those ran deep. For now, he seemed like he had his shit together and that meant something.

Keg and the Gentleman must have exchanged words while Fjord was watching Caduceus, because Jester suddenly grabbed his arm to force him to pay attention to the open space where the fighting was happening. “Oh my gosh, Keg is gonna waste this smug-looking shithead.”

The 'smug looking shithead' was eyeing Keg up as she finished shedding her armor and laying her weapons aside. “So you’re the new fish, huh?”

Keg cracked her knuckles. “Motherfucker, I’m the whole-ass ocean as far as you’re concerned.”

“Oooh trash talk.” Jester hopped on the balls of her feet. She hadn’t, and Fjord could do nothing about it but feel the heat rise to his cheeks, released his arm.

“Get ‘em, Keg,” he said, after he cleared his throat a few times to will his nerves to settle. Jester was so easy with her affection and he had spent his entire life seeking it from people who were more discerning. It was overwhelming, even still, after all these weeks, that she had no problem taking hold of his arm as if she fit right there.

He focused on Keg and her fight. Anything but his feelings and the feel of Jester’s colder-than-average skin on his.

The halfling- judging by the chants his name was Bado- lunged and Keg sidestepped out of the way before clasping her hands together and slamming him across the back like she was driving down her warhammer. The halfling hit the floor with a gasp and then pushed himself back up to tuck and roll away from Keg’s boot. He narrowly evaded having his ribs kicked in with that move. Rookie mistake.

Jester began to coax some of the louder members of the audience into laying some money down, while Fjord watched her out of the corner of his eye with clear anxiety, but the second he opened his mouth to protest her trying to hustle people like this, there was a heavy crack and his attention went back to the fight- Keg had just brought her knee up and clocked Bado in the chin, knocking him backwards. Judging by the drool and blood and the choking sound coming from him, she’d fed him a couple of his teeth.

Bado reached down and grabbed a handful of sawdust off the floor and flung it at Keg’s eyes, blinding her, and from there he began to incrementally work his way back to the top of the game, landing punch after punch to Keg’s stomach, while she swung too wide every time and hissed and spat as the grit dug into her eyes.

But Fjord knew this tactic. He remembered brawling for fun on the Tide’s Breath with some of the crew, back when things were simpler. He won every fight even while being small and slighter than some of the other crewmen, all because he had more endurance and more patience and a heavy, heavy familiarity with being hit that allowed him to take blows and let his body roll with them without faltering.

Keg came from that same school of hard knocks, apparently, so when she easily caught what was meant to be Bado’s finishing blow now that he was exhausted and ready to put her on the ground, everyone else gasped, but Fjord only smiled.

Keg’s eyes were bloodshot and watery from the sawdust and it only served to make her maniacal expression of victory that much more deranged. “Nice try, little man.”

She slammed him across the jaw with a left hook, her right hand still holding his failed punch at bay, and Bado hit the ground in a fresh pile of spit and blood and didn’t get up. The crowd reactions involved a mix of cheers and disappointed fury and Jester began to gleefully collect her winnings from the still-cursing losers without care or consideration that these people could chase her down and take their money back by force. At least no consideration that Fjord could see, anyway. He was still working on whether he needed to protect Jester from the world or be the shoulder she leaned on when it didn’t fit her candy-coated view of it until she could move forward again. The dance was complicated and it involved steps that no one had taught him. There weren't a whole lot of women on the Tide's Breath, but a hell of a lot of opinions on them that could muddle a young man's mind over time.

The Gentleman waved him, Jester, and Cad over (Keg had already sauntered in that direction, cheeks flushed and holding her bruised stomach, and was granted an ale the size of her head for her troubles) before he could even make the first move, leaving Jester to shove her winnings into her haversack without anyone to question or warn her.

“Well,” the Gentleman beamed, “normally I don’t expect a new recruit to win their first fight. This ritual is just to see how well you handle yourself. It seems the Mighty Nein brought me quite the investment.”

Something about the word choice made Jester shudder and Fjord pressed his shoulder against hers to be a solid presence to lean against. For now, he was better suited to being that, rather than a protector. At least he knew she liked to lean on him, the rest of the steps be damned.

“Hell of a way to put it,” Keg muttered around her ale.

Jester knotted her fingers together. “Do you… deal in slaves too, Gentleman?”

The Gentleman looked, at first, perturbed by the question, but he caught Ophelia’s yellow-eyed glare from his left and sighed. “That is a complicated question- Jester, was it? As a business, the sale of flesh is not my preferred trade. It would lose me a valuable ally in Ophelia here, who absolutely despises slavers.”

Ophelia made an agreeable little sound and sipped at her wine.

“But that doesn’t mean you don’t,” Caduceus was quick to add. “I say, respectfully, of course.”

“Any tyrant can execute traitors,” the Gentleman finally said, after taking in Caduceus’s deeply bold (Fjord had tensed up immediately) statement. “It doesn’t give you a reputation that’s original, and many of the lowest scum around don’t fear death. Knowing you might end up in chains, however… That is a threat that many would go out of their way to avoid.”

Jester stared at the table for a long time, considering that. “I guess,” she murmured, and then, like Fjord just watched her bundle up her sorrow and toss it away in real time, her head shot back up and she said, “That’s cool, ‘cause my mama would be really upset if one of her fans-slash-clients- slash-hrrm hrrm was really into selling innocent people as slaves.”

Ophelia laughed, though whether it was the Gentleman’s reaction, Fjord’s reaction, or just Jester’s word choice wasn’t clear. After a few moments of processing again, the Gentleman stammered out, “And… Sorry. Who is your mother?”

“The Ruby of the Sea!” Jester leaned forward, her tail swishing in frantic excitement. “Cree says you’re a totally huge fan.”

“Jester-” Fjord started, suddenly worried she accidentally just threw Cree under the cart, before it occurred to him that that wasn’t the worst thing she could do by far. Regardless, the Gentleman seemed to be processing that information differently than the deep befuddlement he’d processed everything else Jester had said with so far.

“The Ruby of the Sea,” he repeated. “It’s been years since I’ve heard that name mentioned out of context. I didn’t realize she had a daughter.”

Seeing her opening and darting through it before anyone could stop her, Jester leaned over the table. “Oh my gosh, soooo here’s the thing. I left Nicodranas for like a bunch of reasons we don’t have to go into here, but I thought I could find my dad, and I dunno… Maybe ‘cause you’re super smart and well-connected you might have an idea of where to find him, kinda like how you’re gonna find Keg’s friend.”

Keg winced at being included in this, but seemed to have embraced the ‘Jester will do what she wants’ lifestyle and was leaning into it. Fjord wished he could do that as easily as everyone else did. This whole conversation was making him tense and uneasy.

The Gentleman sipped at his wine. “There’s a difference in finding one man in hundreds who might have… fathered a child with the Ruby a decade or so ago, and finding a man sold by slavers in the last few months.”

“A decade?” Ophelia chortled. “Schatz, the girl is at least a couple decades at the very least.”

“Twenty-two,” Jester proclaimed, proudly.

“Is that number significant?” Caduceus must have noticed something Fjord hadn’t, given his determination to grind his nails down into the woodgrain of his table to keep from apologizing for Jester and steering the conversation away. This was important to her.

“No,” the Gentleman responded, flatly. “I just wasn’t expecting that age for a girl of such… youthful exuberance.”

“Twenty-two isn’t that old, man.” Jester wrinkled her nose.

Ophelia cut in before anyone else could say another word, her chin resting lightly on her hand. “Why is it so important to find your papa, young lady? Surely, a man who has had no bearing on your life thus far can’t possibly be of any use to you.”

Now Fjord turned quickly to Jester who looked like she’d been slapped. “Jes-”

She cut him off. “He left to find his fortune. He said he was gonna come back. That’s what mama always told me.”

“And it has never occurred to you that perhaps your mama lied to you?”

Fjord didn’t react fast enough to keep Jester from standing up so quickly she knocked her chair over, but he and Caduceus were both quick enough to follow her and place their hands on her shoulders to keep her from leaping across the table at Ophelia, which seemed likely given the sudden fury in her eyes- fury like he'd never seen from her. “You don’t even know my mama. She wouldn’t lie about that. Just because you’re a bad mom doesn’t mean everyone is a bad mom.”

Ophelia’s yellow eyes widened and then twitched. The Gentleman had his hand lifted like he was about to signal for someone to come and collect them and Fjord felt his heart thudding in his throat. This was it. They were going to die down here.

He had to take control. “I apologize, sir… Ma’am.” He nodded to both the Gentleman and Ophelia who froze, expectant and curious as to how he was going to spin this in his favor. “This is a very sensitive subject for Jester, as you can see.”

Jester looked down abruptly, her shoulders slumping in defeat. Fjord’s heart broke for her, but the Gentleman lowered his hand and Ophelia, calmly, stood. “She has had a hard week.” She eyed her, but Jester refused to look up. “Be careful, little girl. I can see the oleander behind that smile of yours, but if you’re not careful, you’ll poison yourself before you poison anyone else.”

And with that cryptic note, Ophelia sashayed off. Caduceus gently began to pull Jester aside, talking softly to her, leaving Fjord, heart still pounding, standing in front of the Gentleman. After a second or two of tense silence, the Gentleman slipped his own mask back into place and slapped the table with a laugh. “Well! You lot certainly keep things interesting, don’t you?”

Fjord picked up the chair Jester had upended with a sigh and slid his own mask back into place. “Interestin’ is a word for it, sir.” He exhaled through his nose. “I actually came to have a word with you about something, but I’d understand if you’re not up to it now.”

“Oh, by all means. If you give many gifts, I’ve many gifts to give in kind.” He waved his hand, and then, noticing Keg was still at the table, he leaned in and said, “Keg, I’d like you to go speak with Bado. After that showing, I want you to take over his route, if you’re amenable to it.”

Keg blinked. “...Uh. Yeah. No problem. Fuck. First day and I already got a promotion?”

The Gentleman flashed his teeth. “As I said- many gifts beget many gifts.”

“...Right. I got many gifts, all right.” She grabbed her ale tankard and wandered off, mumbling “best job ever” under her breath. Fjord watched her go until she vanished into a crowd of patrons and was lost to the sea of bodies crashing against one another.

Fuck. He missed the water. Everything reminded him of it.

The Gentleman cleared his throat to get his attention. “I must admit as upset as I am for you taking Cree from me, I do trust you’ll keep her alive. And that one-” he pointed in Keg’s direction, “-is an asset to have. Ophelia knows Shadycreek Run, but not like someone who has been in the employ of a rival tribe.” When Fjord didn’t respond to that, he moved on. “So what is it you need to speak to me about? Another job? I have work that could be done on the way to Nogvurot. Something in Hupperdook just came up.”

That would make Jester happy- an excuse to go back to Hupperdook and see Kiri and party again. “That’s quite the coincidence, actually.” (He ignored what Caduceus and Caleb had said about coincidence and fate. Neither served him on the daily and definitely didn’t serve him here in this place where the gods weren't looking.) “We were thinkin’ of stoppin’ back by there, but, uh… if we could put a pin in that for a tick. What I’d like to know is if you have any information on Cree’s friend in Nogvurot. She’s insistent on us goin’ to see her, and I just wanna know what to expect.”

The Gentleman steepled his fingers. “So you want me to give up information on a woman under my protection?”

Fjord filed the under his protection part away. “Well, with all due respect, we’re goin’ to meet her, anyway. I just want to know if she’s a threat to me and mine ahead of time.”

For a long moment, both men regarded one another, neither breaking contact. Finally, the Gentleman spoke again. “How about a trade then? Information for someone under my protection for information on someone under yours? What can you tell me about that one?”

He pointed across the way to where the makeshift fighting ring had been transformed, apparently by Jester’s whims, into a dance floor. There was still blood on the floor, mixed with the sawdust, but to her it must have been the height of elegance. Sometimes Fjord envied her the world that only she could see. She was just a tiny blue tiefling in a musty underground pub that reeked of sweat and blood and liquor and sawdust, but to her she and this place were anything she wanted it to be. She was a princess doing pirouettes as a handsome prince held her hand. The handsome prince was only Caduceus, however- offering her a distraction and a bit of indulgence in her fantasy world.

What could the Gentleman possibly want to know about her?

Fjord worked at his ground-down left tusk with his tongue. “You could ask Jester anything and she’d tell you.” Such was her gift, such was her curse. She was an open book or so he thought. He was starting to learn otherwise that there was more behind her eyes and in her imagination than he had initially believed.

“I could, but I want to hear it from someone who can’t take his eyes off of her.” The Gentleman chortled and Fjord felt his face grow hot. “Is that an act or is she really just…” He waved his hand at Jester dancing to music only she could hear.

Fjord breathed a sigh of relief. “She’s exactly what her tin says, sir,” he drawled. “Jester doesn’t have a deceitful bone in her body.”

A tricksy one, certainly. She’d rearrange the liquor if she was given free reign over the place and change the sign to something perverse if your back was turned, but the only person she seemed content to lie to was herself. But that wasn’t the question that was asked.

“Why do you want to know?” Fjord added.

“I was curious what sort of daughter her mother raised. An old friend of mine and I used to see her shows- gods, that was a lifetime ago. He was utterly smitten with her, wasted every copper he had for her time.” The Gentleman drummed his fingers on the table. “And then he wised up and went back to sea, but she was always on his mind until the day the sea claimed him.” He picked up his wine glass, letting that hang there. “Babenon Dosal was his name. A good man, but-” A chuckle, rich and dark like the wine in his glass. “Good men don’t get very much in this world. He’s dead beneath the waves and I’m here, and there’s no fairness in the world.”

Fjord’s heartbeat quickened. “Do you think-”

-Babenon Dosal is Jester’s father? That was the question that was cut off when the Gentleman raised a hand to silence him.

“Information for information. You want to know about Tyffial Wase? She’s a bloodletter.”

He was still processing the information about Dosal when the Gentleman moved on, reminding him the true purpose of all of this. He stumbled for a second, mind racing to catch up with the shift. “Sorry. Bloodletter?”

“That’s the derogatory term, of course.” The Gentleman lifted his wine and held it up until it caught the dim arcane lamplight. “Members of the Claret Orders who wield their blood like weapons. They're a necessary evil against dark forces, but they, honestly, make most people uncomfortable.”

Fjord had a flash in his mind of Molly striking his blades down his neck, his arms, his torso to spill blood enough to light up those blades- all those little silver hatchmark scars, many of which were too old and faded to have been made just over the course of two years.

“They’re religious zealots who hunt monsters,” the Gentleman explained more thoroughly. “Cree’s a cast-off from them. Evidently, she had a few others with her but they split off. I assume, judging by the scars, her Lucien was among them.” Off Fjord nodding dumbly, still struck by this information, he continued, “As was Tyffial. I set her up in Nogvurot at Cree’s request after her brother was killed. In return, she sends me useful things she comes across or makes. Skilled alchemist, that girl. Dangerous, but so is your lot.”

“And that’s all you know?” Fjord asked.

The Gentleman only laughed and leaned back in his seat, propping his feet up on an empty chair. “That’s all I’m going to tell you.”

Well. It wasn’t that useful, but it wasn’t utterly useless either. Killing her might anger the Gentleman, so that was off the table. Cree and Tyffial were both useful to him and in his pocket and alienating an ally who made traitors into slaves sounded like the kind of trouble the Nein couldn’t afford to get into. He looked to Jester, still dancing, and his mind flashed back to her in chains.

No. Not again.

He swallowed. “You said you had work in Hupperdook?”

The Gentleman’s dark eyes lit up with excitement. “A certain artisan in town who is… misunderstood for a lack of a better term has decided even my considerable funding and interest in his work isn’t enough to satiate him. I don’t know what he’s doing and he’s outside my reach for the moment, but Cree has his blood and you lot are skilled. Perhaps you’d consider removing the problem.”

Fjord chewed on the inside of his cheek. “You just want us to kill someone for you?”

“Huron Stahlmast is not someone. He’s a madman. I assure you if any particular qualms with assassination, lay them aside. The man’s inventions are useful, but his methods are cruel and unusual.”

So basically a madman who is only useful to you when he’s leashed, Fjord thought, bitterly. What he said was: “I’ll talk it over with the group and have Jester Send to you before we leave to let you know.”

The Gentleman grinned and saluted him with his wine glass. “Of course.”

Fjord stood with a polite nod and turned his focus to Jester, still swaying to the music in her head. Caduceus had stepped aside to let her move freely on her own and gave him a wan little smile as he approached as if he knew, with absolutely no doubt, that Jester wasn’t okay and was at a loss for dealing with it here. Tea and company and some gentle talk later might help. And she had big plans for tonight that made Fjord wary and anxious, but… Jester would be Jester. He couldn’t stop her any more than he could stop the tides, and if it would make her that much happier... Well could he really take that from her by telling her whatever it was was probably a bad idea?

As she lifted her hand in time with her personal beat, Fjord caught it in his and her eyes snapped open in surprise. For a second, she looked like she was going to rip her hand free- expecting him to be some creep- but when she realized it was only him, her smile returned.

“Hey, Fjord. Wanna dance with me?”

“There’s no music, Jessie.” His tone was sheepish, not mocking. “Not sure if I can follow a beat that don’t exist.”

She wrinkled her nose and placed her hands in his in a mimicry of a waltz- he assumed anyway. It wasn’t entirely unlike the way she had danced with Caleb in Hupperdook. (Maybe this time he could get over his shyness and ask her to dance properly when they went back...

Except… This was still properly, wasn’t it? This was an invitation into her private world.)

“Just let me lead,” she said, fluttering her eyelashes.

He blushed and stammered and considered fleeing. His face felt hot and the shame and regret nearly overwhelmed him, but Jester had him in a death grip now and began guiding him, sweeping him up like a riptide. Vandran always said the only way to survive that was to just let it carry you as far as it intended and go from there.

You can’t fight it, son. It’s stronger than you’ll ever be.

He calmed and allowed Jester to lead him. She hummed a tune out loud to give him the music she’d been hearing and eventually he caught on enough to take the lead from her, suddenly. She gasped in surprise and then laughed.

“Look at you, Fjord. You’re a natural.”

His sheepish smile returned, as did the blush. “Never done it before. Would you believe that?”

“Yeah, but you’re pretty good at pretending.” Her smile faltered a little bit and his heart skipped. For a second she looked like she wanted to say something, but she must have talked herself out of it, because she shook her head and changed her tactic. “Do you think my dad really just… left and isn’t coming back?”

He knew that Ophelia’s revelations even before now had gotten to her- the knowledge that a parent could just abandon their child willingly and not even care spit in the face of everything she believed in- but they had been piled on top of everything else. He should have said something to her about it before she exploded like that, but he wasn’t good at nuance or figuring out the heart of a major problem when it was overwhelmed by minor ones. Not like Caduceus apparently was. Not like Molly.

Not like Jester, herself.

“Even if he did,” Fjord said, carefully, remembering the Gentleman’s talk of Babenon Dosal who could be her father and was dead and gone now, “I think if he met you, he’d regret that decision immediately. It’s impossible for anyone to-” to not fall in love with you “-to resist your charms.”

“Oh really?” She pressed in closer, her expression shifting on a dime into something sultry. “You think I’m charming?”

If he blushed any more, he was going to burst something in his face and neck, he was certain of it. “Uh… Yeah. Of course. Everyone does.”

She deflated. “I mean I guess. I am pretty lovable.” She disengaged and chewed on her bottom lip and Fjord was hit with the striking realization that he said the wrong thing. “Anyway, we should probably get going. I wanna give Nott her present and get ready for my project tonight.”

She forced another smile. “Thanks for the dance, Fjord.”

And then she skipped towards the stairs, expecting to be followed, and Fjord stood there in stunned, miserable silence. The riptide had dropped him into unfriendly waters and he didn’t know how to navigate them.

A hand clapped onto his shoulder. He looked up at Caduceus, who just smiled that same wan smile, but said nothing. He just patted him, gently, and then walked off to follow Jester, leaving Fjord feeling weighed, measured, and found wanting somehow.

“I know. I’m an idiot,” he grumbled, and then followed them out.

Molly separated out the silver he’d just received from a few card readings he’d done on the street corner before the Crownsguard shooed him away. Half went into his purse and the other half he placed in a special pouch that he tucked safely within the Bag of Holding. Even without counting it for the first time since he started it, he knew it was nowhere near enough to pay for Gustav’s bail, but maybe by the time they could circle back to Trostenwald it would be.

If he asked, he knew any of the Nein would give him the coin, but this felt like his responsibility. Gustav had taken the fall for everyone and after everything he’d done for him, he felt like he owed him to save him as he had been saved. Had Gustav not taken pity on a broken, empty soul… Well, he wouldn’t be Mollymauk, would he? He’d be someone else.

He grit his teeth and scratched at the eye on his palm. The Moonweaver’s words still rang in his ears, reminding him that he, above all things, had never been alone. Beau had reassured him that no one was leaving him, no matter what. The Moonweaver had his back. And Lucien had nothing.

Nothing except Cree, desperate to get him back, but if Sehanine discounted her, she must know something that Molly didn’t. She was a goddess of trickery, not deceit. She shrouded things and protected secrets, but she was not a liar for the sake of it. He had to believe that.

He did believe that.

And he would never have known her without Gustav buying him those cards and inviting faith into his life. It was no wonder the ringmaster was on his mind more prominently in this moment when he was usually just a background thought.

He shouldered his bag and began to stroll the Pentamarket, looking for anything he might spend his extra coin on. He had a small shopping list and a lot of hours to do whatever he wished before Jester’s big scheme in the evening, and therefore the city was his to seek delight in. Lost to the cards and the thrill of doing a few good turns for a handful of genuinely sweet persons, it hadn’t hit him that he was walking the streets alone again until just now, but hopefully he wouldn’t run into any other abusive, racist dickheads wanting to start trouble. The shite in Xhorhas was apparently making them rowdier than usual about anyone who looked a bit odd.

There were clouds rolling in from the east- that was more worrisome. Yasha might leave before they did and then catch up on the road to Nogvurot- at least he hoped she would. He couldn’t imagine going to face Tyffial without her at his back to remind him of who he was just in case.

His mind was so occupied with the clouds that he hadn’t realized he’d stopped right in the middle of the street to stare until someone shoulder-checked him. He moved aside, preparing an overwrought, insincere apology to some arsehole not paying attention, and then stopped as he met Caleb’s eyes, midway through mumbling his own, more sincere, Zemnian apology.

“Ah…" He switched back to Common. "My apologies, Mollymauk.” He was wearing his best Distracted Wizard Face, as if he were completely surprised that he existed in reality and that there were consequences to it, so Molly hadn’t been the only one lost in thought here.

“Not a problem. Glad it was you, and not someone who was liable to make a thing of it.” He flicked his wrist idly. “I thought you were at the library?”

“Ja, I was.” Caleb shifted and shoved his hands into the pockets of his ratty coat. “It did not yield anything of interest, so I thought I would… window shop here.” He chewed on his bottom lip, eyes darting to the side, fighting not to linger on his face for too long..

Molly raised an eyebrow, his tail a catlike lash cutting through the air. Caleb was a better liar than even he was, but he let it go for obvious reasons. If the lying didn’t come with stealing from the group, he didn’t care enough to bother with it. This time, however, it seemed obvious what the truth was and he pursed his lips in an even more catlike grin, “Were you tailing me, Mr. Caleb?”

Caleb’s cheeks flushed scarlet and he ducked his head. “I was not tailing. Yasha told me you were here doing card readings on the corner and I... I thought that I would check up on you.”

His heart did a somersault in his chest again. One of these days it was going to vault too high and get stuck in his throat and he’d choke on it. And that would be the ignominious second death of Mollymauk Tealeaf- died from being too stupidly enamored with a filthy wizard. What a shame. What a tragedy. “You didn’t have to do that,” he said, slyly, wielding teasing as a weapon to hide his own emotional failings. “I can take care of myself. I only need someone to help me lace up my trousers ‘cause they put the laces in the back and I can't bend quite that well. Yet.”

His tail gave a pointed little whipcrack and somehow the word trousers or maybe just the implication that Molly needed assistance lacing or unlacing them (well the unlacing was the easy part actually) had a profound effect on Caleb as he was now even more unwilling to look him directly in the eye, his cheeks red enough to turn his freckles into tiny islands in an ocean of lava.

Good to know that flustering Caleb was a wonderful dagger to defend his own weak and tender and fucking lovesick heart. He probably couldn’t process the genuine truth of it all. The hidden depths. He just saw it as quirks of his personality- and that was true, too. He did this to Fjord- openly in fact. And while he would happily kiss Fjord senseless and take a tumble with him (dear gods that idiot needed it), he didn’t get fucking butterflies in his stomach when in contact with him.

No, that was solely the dirt wizard’s thing.

“Mollymauk,” Caleb said gently, eyes still fixated on a spot above Molly’s horns. “You know you don’t have to hide anything from us, ja? You… You trusted me with something dire and important, and I have not forgotten this, but if you are-”

Molly cut him off with a hiss. Fuck. He’d chosen Caleb for his pragmatism and then immediately forgot just how deep it went. “I know. I- there’s a lot going on and it, quite frankly, freaks me out? And I don’t even know how to talk about most of it. The… The brain melty thing. That’s just there. I know what that is.” He flexed his hand and dug his thumb into the red eye in his palm to scratch at it again.

“You could see through Nott’s illusion, couldn’t you?” Caleb asked, suddenly.

Molly slashed his talon-like fingernail so deep into his palm it drew blood, until it looked like the eye was weeping. He hissed again and raised it to his mouth on impulse to staunch the bleeding, but Caleb caught him before he could make it halfway. In that moment, he froze, heart hammering in his chest, and only managed to choke out, “How did you know?”

“That was not much of a trick she claimed you pulled on her. It wasn't funny, but cruel, and your sense of humor is many things, Mollymauk, but it is rarely cruel.” Caleb rifled, one-handed (the other was holding Molly’s hand in place so he wouldn't stick it in his mouth like a child and now his heart was beating so loudly and in a terribly unchildlike way that he was half-convinced that they could hear it over at Pumat’s), through his bag until he pulled out a fresh set of bandages of the sort he always wrapped his own hands and arms up in. “Truesight isn’t an uncommon ability, but it is… Very powerful. And strange of someone with very little magical ability to possess.”

“I saw Lorenzo before he was actually visible,” he admitted, captivated by Caleb just meticulously bandaging his hand right here in the middle of the Pentamarket while people walked by them, largely ignoring the immensity of this moment. Caleb’s tenderness was a rare animal, indeed- especially shown so brazenly.

“Cree can do it, too,” Caleb murmured. “She saw things that were hidden by illusions within the Nest. I do not know if she can do the other- she certainly does not seem to know. But…”

“But she would know what it was and how to… not do it when I don’t want to,” Molly finished. His tail curled tightly around his own ankle. The moment was losing traction as a good moment and rapidly spiraling into one tainted by Lucien’s shadow. Over time, would there be anything left that wasn't?

“I do not want to have to hurt you, Mollymauk. And you do not want to be put into a situation where it might happen. You just want to be careful.” Caleb finished wrapping his hand and folded Molly’s fingers inwards, testing the bandages to make sure they were neither too tight nor too loose- a very simple gesture that he could have just asked Molly to do, himself, and yet he’d sought the contact, the brush of bare fingertip over bare knuckles. He’d tried to comfort him, because he knew he loved touch.

Fuck. Fuck. This was a dangerous game. “We should use what we have, and you can trust us to keep you grounded.”

Like Beau said- the Mighty Nein would not allow him to be made worse. He had been found empty by Gustav, grew into Mollymauk through the care of the circus, and by the Nein’s grace, he would stay Mollymauk. If he had faith in them and faith in Sehanine and faith in himself, then nothing could change that.

Still, he sighed, because it was all still inside of him and he just wanted to rip it out like it was some tumor that could be removed and not an intrinsic part of this body that belonged to him and yet would never truly be his. “I would really just rather they got… Turned off. All of it.”

“I think we both know how unlikely that is at this juncture.” Molly noted that Caleb hadn’t let go of his hand yet, and he did nothing to draw attention to it, lest he realize and pull back. This was another conversation he didn’t want to have, but gods let him just have a fucking moment where he could have something good in the pile of excrement his life had turned out to be.

Don’t let the bastards grind you down, he chastised himself. That was what Bosun always said, whenever the circus dealt with hecklers or unfriendly townsfolk. Molly had embraced it as part of his own personal code. He wondered what Bosun would say if he knew the bastards grinding him down were coming from within.

He shook his head, his horn jewelry tinkling and drawing too much attention to what should have been a simple gesture. A lopsided smile forced its way across his face, the muscles pulling too tightly like it took far more effort than he wanted it to. His smiles used to come so easily and now he was stretched thin. Zadash had helped for a bit, but they were going to be heading out tomorrow. The world beyond that was more terrifying than he had ever imagined the future to be. “It’s your optimism I’ve always admired, Mr. Caleb,” he said, trying for easygoing. It came out as tight as his smile.

Caleb saw right through it, if the softening of his blue eyes was any indication. “I know this is rich coming from me, Mollymauk, but… I do know a few things about wounds, especially wounds that are best unspoken of.” He ran a finger along the wrap around Molly’s palm and his heart stuttered. “Just a small wound, left untreated, can fester and poison you entirely, until you’ve nothing left but the rot and the darkness. You shine brightly, circus man.” Caleb licked his lips and Molly found himself so transfixed that his tail tightened around his ankle as a warning to himself not to try and chase the taste of his tongue by pressing his lips to his, even just for a moment.

“One of us should keep shining,” Caleb finished and then, finally and disappointingly, dropped Molly’s hand, and started to turn. “At any rate, we should go back to the Leaky Tap.”

Panicking at the loss of the moment, Molly’s mind ran through a dozen ideas until he just reached out and grabbed Caleb by the sleeve before he could fully disengage. “Don’t sell yourself short, Caleb. You shine pretty brightly yourself.”

No one in the room had shone like Caleb when he’d told him that Molly was enough. The one thing he had needed to hear in that moment. Even though he’d been cruel to Nott and Caleb and Nott always sided with one another, Caleb had taken his side of the argument. Caleb saw him, saw the pain and the frustration, and said this was enough and let it all lie, and ever since Molly had been fucked, because he saw that moment every time he looked at that Caleb.

Caleb chuckled and even darkly pained, it was still such a pleasing sound. Husky and restrained, but genuine. The truth was a beast that stalked its prey and never let its hunger be sated, always craving just a bit more, but the honesty in Caleb’s laugh made him almost appreciate the monster. “I burn, Mollymauk. Only from a distance do people mistake that for a shine. They still shouldn’t get too close to it.”

He tried to turn again, but Molly held firm. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a tiefling. We don’t mind a little fire.”

Now was the moment when Molly was certain his heart would choke him. Everything went into continuing to breathe, which meant he couldn’t release Caleb’s sleeve, couldn’t step back, couldn’t look away. He couldn’t imagine what held Caleb in place, staring back at him, but he hoped beyond what was reasonable that it was something similar.

He really could kiss him. He could do it right here and if it didn’t work, he’d just laugh it off. Just Molly being Molly. Easy with affection, back to normal. Nothing to see here.

He couldn’t do it. Caleb saw him in that one brief moment. The idea of him believing a lie about his feelings tore at him and made him wonder if he’d never see him true again if he pushed his limits and acted on every base impulse like this was all just a game to him until Caleb believed, fully, that he wasn’t truly interested. You saw me. You saw me and no one else did. I need you to keep looking because what if I stop being me if I'm not constantly being observed like that.

Slowly, his fingers uncurled and the moment passed. Molly didn’t realize he’d blocked out the sounds of the Pentamarket until they all came rushing back to him at once in an overwhelming din.

The moment passed with nothing more between them and Molly filled the silence on the way back to the Leaky Tap like he was overcompensating for both his stress and his feelings all at once. He didn’t speak of any lingering, awful topics- not now. Maybe later, he’d get into those and work on not letting those wounds fester, but for now he just wanted to chase joy where he could.

Perhaps Molly wanted to believe it and therefore made it his own truth, but even though he was very noncommittal about his responses, it seemed like Caleb was hanging on every word.

The clouds lingering in the sky in patches had increased since this morning when Beau first entered the Archives. Caleb had left earlier, while she had stayed behind to run through a few more drills with Dairon. She needed the outlet and it might be awhile before she saw her again.

The rain hadn’t started yet, but the threat hung in the air, heavy and foreboding and brought with it a chill that rose gooseflesh on her bare arms. She blew a lock of errant hair from her face and picked up her pace, hoping to reach the Leaky Tap before the downpour started. Halfway down the Innerstead Sprawl, she spotted a familiar figure- monochrome against all the color of the city. Yasha’s eyes were turned upwards to the sky as if she was searching for something in the patterns of the clouds.

Beau’s throat lurched with a sudden difficulty in swallowing. She had started to piece together some of the when Yasha chose to leave, though she didn’t understand the why fully. Storms usually dragged her away, and she went without question every time.

Now, however, she seemed to be desperate and pleading, and the closer Beau got the more she could take in the tautness of Yasha’s body, her lips moving in what might be a wordless prayer, her jewel-toned eyes darting back and forth. She was almost in a trance, lost to something that Beau couldn’t hope to understand. Yasha was a closed book, the latch locked tight, and sometimes she wondered if even Molly had the key.

Molly would have thrown it out, if he did. He didn’t want to know anyone’s dark secrets, after all. Beau couldn’t relate. She needed to know everything, including why Yasha chased storms like they would give her an answer no one else could give.

“...Yasha?” She spoke, tentatively, which showed remarkable restraint on her part, her teeth working a blister on the inside of her cheek as she waited to see if the gentle approach would even work.

Yasha blinked herself back into focus on the world below the sky, and then blinked a few more times for good measure. “Oh… Hello, Beau.” She frowned. “That rhymed.”

Beau couldn’t help but laugh at that. “Yeah… Yeah, it did. Maybe you oughta take up slam poetry or something.”

Ugh. Fucking smooth, Beauregard. Who taught you how to talk to women? That shit was Keg was obviously just a fluke.

The moment proceeded to turn very awkward very quickly as neither was sure what the proper follow-up to a lame joke was supposed to be. Realizing it was probably on her to keep the conversation moving, Beau gestured to the sky. “Looks like a big one’s comin’.”

She’d hate herself for talking about the fucking weather, but weather was something that was sacred to Yasha. It was a segue into the real meat of the conversation.

Yasha hummed. “It’ll blow through quickly. It should be over by tomorrow morning.” She worked at the feathers in her shawl, adjusting them, straightening them. “I… Might have to leave for a bit.”

“Are you, like, a stormchaser or something?” Beau knotted her arms tightly around her chest. “‘Cause that’d be cool. Like… You get a high from running after storms. The danger. The adrenaline.”

She kept fidgeting with her shawl. “No… Not exactly. Well, also yes. I do chase storms, but it’s more like…” She screwed up her face. “...I’m looking for something. It’s hard to explain, exactly.”

Beau just nodded. It wasn’t an answer, but it was something. “I think we’re all lookin’ for somethin’ somewhere- except Molly.” So of course something found him. Yasha must have had the same thought because her expression went bleak.

“I’m worried about him. He doesn’t want to talk about it to anyone, and I’m scared to leave him alone. I was there… when he had a nightmare.” She spoke tentatively, uncertain if she should be telling Molly’s business, and Beau swept in to reassure her.

“He told me about that, so at least he’s starting to open up a little bit. Gods only know how much he’s not saying.” She picked at a fraying thread in her sleeve. “I’m trying to do some research about some of the things I found, but it’s gonna take time.”

Yasha worried her bottom lip with her teeth. “Cree knows all of it though.”

At that, Beau grimaced. “Do you think she’ll actually talk about it? To any of us? Molly doesn’t want to deal with this. He’d probably be pissed that Caleb and I are goin’ behind his back to research it, but he’s freaked out and I can’t-” lose him again. She bit off the emotional, knee-jerk sentence, and corrected herself, “I just can’t.”

“I feel bad for her, but…” Yasha sighed and threw her arms up. A rant tore its way out of her- one she'd probably been holding in for days. “It’s shit! She’s not a bad person. She’s just a person, but she wants to take Molly away, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it!”

Beau shrugged. “Ball’s in Molly’s hands. There’s a lot of stuff we can do about it, but he doesn’t wanna do any of it.” The thread snapped her hands, the result of her yanking it just a bit too hard.

“I don’t… want to kill her just for loving someone who doesn’t exist anymore.” Yasha’s hands returned to her shawl. “If she tries to take him, I’ll do something about it, but…”

“Yeah. But.” Beau exhaled through her nose. “If you have to go… chase the storm, we’ll make sure nothing happens to him. I know we failed at protectin’ him before, but none of us will let anything happen to him again.”

Yasha ducked her head, miserably. “He would want me to go… Just for a little while, anyway. I’m not letting him go to Nogvurot alone, but…”

Beau’s heart stuttered as she watched as Yasha’s face crumpled, entirely. “I wasn’t there. I couldn’t protect him, and I was supposed to. That was all I had to do. And... It- it happened again.”

No sooner had the words left her, the bottom dropped out of the sky and rain fell in a sudden torrent. The thunder rolled, overwhelming the shouts of passers-by who weren’t expecting to get drenched all of a sudden. Beau’s hair slipped out of its band and fell into her face and Yasha looked… Well, somehow Yasha still looked gorgeous soaked in the water of a storm, her warpaint running down her face like kohl tears.

She might have actually been crying, but it was difficult to tell. Beau didn’t know if she was happy to be the one here with her to help her through this clear sorrow, like it might edge her into Yasha’s good graces and get her somewhere or horrified by it- the emotions she wasn’t prepared to deal with and her fucking selfishness.

But if she ran now, she’d look like an even bigger bitch, so she stood there in the freezing rain, soaked to the bone, and asked, “What do you mean again?”

Yasha trembled in a way that had nothing to do with being stuck in an autumnal storm. “I… It’s not important. Not right now. Maybe later, but-” She started to turn to go, but Beau caught her by the wrist. She almost regretted it when Yasha went taut like the moment right before a rage overtook her, but she relaxed again, just as quickly, her shoulders slumping in resignation.

“Hey… It’s alright. We’ve all got shit we don’t wanna talk about.” Molly was no different from any of them, honestly. His problems were just more dangerous to himself- maybe them, too, but mostly himself. “And, like I said, you don’t have to be the only one responsible for Molly anymore.”

For a moment, Yasha only stared at her as the rain fell down in sheets, and then, “...Thank you, Beau.”

Beau felt bold, suddenly. It would be a deeply selfish move, but it felt right somehow. Like Tusk Love, almost. Jester would probably have encouraged her to do it if she was here. Without releasing Yasha’s wrist, she stepped a bit closer into her space and stood on her tiptoes to kiss her. She tasted of rainwater and runny ink...

... Because her lips remained pursed closed. She recoiled in shock a second after, stumbling back into a puddle. “...Beau?”

The regret hit her instantly. Beau recoiled right alongside her, releasing her wrist. “Fuck. Fuck. I’m sorry. I… Um. I thought- it seemed like we had kind of a moment, and that was really forward of me, wasn’t it? Shit.”

“It’s… It’s okay?” Yasha’s voice lilted upwards, awkwardly. “It wasn't bad, just uh... um… I just wasn’t expecting it. Thank you?”

Beau was going to die right here, right in this spot. Let the grave marker read ‘here lies Beauregard Lionett, she had no game or sense of timing.’ “...Right. You’re welcome. Um. I’m gonna… Go.” She winced. “...We’re going to the same place, aren’t we? We’re gonna have to do that thing where we say goodbye and then awkwardly walk beside each other the whole way.”

Yasha’s cheeks were flushed scarlet and the cold rain or an oncoming cold couldn't be blamed for it. “Oh. Um. We don’t have to do that… I think Molly’s in the Pentamarket. I should… Go talk to him. About going away for a bit.”

She nodded vigorously. “Right. Yeah. Good plan. Um.” She clapped her hands together. “I’ll see you later?” She winced. “...You’re gonna Yasha off. Right.”

“I’ll, erm… Meet you all in Hupperdook, I guess?” It was Yasha’s turn to nod vigorously. “Anyway… I should-”

“-go. Yeah. Same. Just-” Beau pointed awkwardly in the general direction of the Outersteads. “Later.” With the rain still pelting her, she bolted before she could choke on her foot any more than she already had.

You’re such an idiot, Lionett.

“Well, personally, I think any mother who abandons her child is scum,” Nott said, slamming her flask against the table with such force that Jester almost snapped her pencil in surprise.

“Yeah, she was all like ‘oh maybe your dad didn’t want you.’” She grimaced and went back to her deeply unflattering portrait of Ophelia. It had been hours since she’d returned from the Evening Nip and she was focusing on Ophelia and not… Whatever that moment with Fjord was. Ophelia was easy to get upset about. Way easier than Fjord not... what exactly? Being Oskar? Being exactly the fantasy she'd projected onto him? Ugh. No. Ophelia was way, way easier to be mad at.

“Obviously, it’s more complicated than that.” Nott took another swig from her flask, and pulled her new cloak around her a little tighter. The one bright spot on Jester’s day (well before Fjord went and pulled back and made her doubt his feelings and if he even had them for her) had been seeing her face light up when she was given the gift. Her ears even did the little wiggle thing that she found so cute.

Tonight, however, was going to make up for the rest of the day’s misery. She and Nott had staked out their target and figured out an ingenious plan. They just needed to invite Molly into it.

And speak of the tiefling, he suddenly burst into the Leaky Tap, soaked senseless alongside Caleb, and yet looking like being drenched was the happiest thing he could be. Outside the door, the rain from the sudden storm had slowed, and Jester could only pray that it ceased entirely before nightfall.

“Well! That came on quickly!” Molly proclaimed. Beside him, Caleb just looked like a drowned rat, but at least his clothes were clean again, if not soaked through with rainwater.

Nott stumbled out of her chair and grabbed Caleb’s hand and began to drag him towards the fireplace in the corner of the pub. “You’re going to catch your death, Caleb. Come and get dry.”

Molly slid into Nott’s vacant seat while she tutted and fussed over Caleb. Jester gently moved her sketchbook so Molly’s dripping hair wouldn’t stain it. “Were you and Caaaayleb having a nice walk in the raaain?” She fluttered her eyelashes.

Molly leaned closer until he was dripping on her side of the table. She pulled her sketchbook closed and away from him. “Maaaaybe.”

He gave his hair a little shake, splattering her with water. She squealed and bopped him on the head, forgetting that the whole purpose was to avoid getting water on her sketches. “You dick!”

Molly stuck his forked tongue out at her. “You love me.”

“I do.” Oh, she loved him so much, and it made her heart want to explode out of her chest to see him happy and playful again (maybe not in the crush way that she had described before at the slumber party or maybe she just had a crush on everyone- she had a lot of love to give). His smile seemed to light his eyes back up, instead of that hollow look he kept getting when he thought no one was looking. She knew it couldn’t last, but for right now, he was free of the weight and she was pushing her own problems aside and they were going to have fun tonight.

She laid her sketchbook back down on the table and flipped it open to her detailed sketches of her plan. “Okay, so. Let’s talk about what’s gonna be my best prank ever. The Traveler is gonna love this.” And maybe love her again. She was still haunted by him not coming for her. Maybe she fucked up somehow. Maybe he thought she was just a weak little girl and not worth his time because she got caught by those slavers.

But surely this would make him see that she was still the wonderful little seed of joy and chaos he always said she was. “Do you still have your tapestry?”

Molly had his chin in his hands as he studied her drawings. “Of course. I’ve got big plans for that. You want me to wear it again?”

“As much as I’d love to see you standing on the street corner wearing only that tapestry, ‘cause that’d be hilarious… Maybe just wear it like a cape.”

He sighed, dramatically. “Disappointing, but I can do that.”

“You’re gonna be our distraction while Nott and I go inside the Platinum House-” She paused and then leaned in and whispered, “You don’t worship the Platinum Dragon for real, right? You just say that ‘cause you can’t talk about your actual goddess?”

Molly twisted his Platinum Dragon necklace. “Oh no, absolutely not. I just say that ‘cause it makes me look more tolerable than I am. Whatever you’re doing to that place, I’m sure they need the stick up their arses removed. This is good work.”

She beamed and then proceeded to lead him step by step through the whole plan, and all the while the rain kept falling outside, gradually slowing down as night began to fall.

It was going to be a good night for chaos and maybe that would finally, finally chase away the bad feelings.

At seven on the dot (peak evening hours, according to Jester), Molly slipped out of the room he was sharing with Fjord and Caduceus- the boys and girls rooms were a cute idea for one night, but ultimately unsustainable. With any luck, Nott and Jester would already be downstairs waiting. He hadn’t seen Yasha since this morning, but given the storm had come on so suddenly, that wasn’t surprising. She’d be back.

And if this plan of Jester’s went as well as she intended it to (though given the Nein’s track record that was unlikely), he’d have one hell of a story to tell her.

The Leaky Tap was full to bursting with evening drinkers when he hopped off the last step. Most of the Nein had retired early so they could get as much daylight out of their trek to Hupperdook as possible. When Fjord told them about the Gentleman’s request, he had almost cried with delight at the distraction- Cree was less thrilled, but given who the job came from and how necessary she was for its success, she wasn’t inclined to argue with it. Not to mention that she found Stahlmast deeply monstrous, anyway, which was enough to get anyone not down with assassinations invested in how awful a person could be if the blood mage didn't like him.

He was buying time, as much of it as he could. Fjord had even pulled him aside and told him what he’d learned about Tyffial, but none of it was particularly useful or helpful. Wrangling a job out of the Gentleman? That he kissed him full on the mouth for. His stammering and blushing and panicking made it all the better.

He scanned the crowded room, looking for the familiar flash of blue and found what he was seeking closest to the door. Jester hadn’t bothered to fight for a table, so she just stood against the wall with Nott crouched in the shadows behind her skirt, people-watching. He sauntered over with childish glee. “Ready to go?”

Jester’s amethyst-colored eyes lit up as he appeared. “Yeah! Oh my gosh, Molly, this is gonna be so cool.” She grabbed his hands and did a little happy bounce that he joined in on, tangling his tail with hers. Nott made a noise somewhere between disgust and adoration, like she’d tried to be sardonic, but the cuteness overwhelmed her.

Not usually a reaction to two tieflings being silly, but he’d take it.

“We’re wasting moonlight,” she chastised. “Let’s go.”

“Go where?”

Three heads immediately jerked to see Cree standing five feet away. How the hell she could hide in crowds like that continued to shock him. It was as if she was used to figuring out how to not be seen. Maybe it was a criminal thing and not anything particularly upsetting. Molly looked to Jester, expectantly. His impulse was to lie, but Cree was extremely perceptive- just as much as Caduceus turned out to be.

Jester chewed on the inside of her cheek, looked to Molly and just winked. “We’re gonna go to the Platinum House.”

Cree narrowed her eyes to golden slits. “I was not aware you cared so deeply about the Platinum Dragon.”

“Big fans,” Molly beamed, flashing his charm, and then spinning around to show off the Platinum Dragon symbols on his coat. He paused, lighting on an idea. This could be beneficial, and given the way Jester was looking at him, she had the same thought. “Would you like to come with us?”

Nott squawked, but Jester leaned down and gently pinched her ear. “Yeah, it’ll be fun!”

“Fun is not the word I would associate with a holy place of Bahamut,” Cree murmured. Molly noted her tail was puffed up as she lashed it back and forth. He wasn’t well-versed in cats or tabaxi, but he assumed that meant she was suspicious and annoyed with the games.

“Come onnn, Cree,” Jester begged.

“Or don’t!” Nott piped up, but Molly pinched her other ear. Unlike with Jester, she slapped his hand away, either because he pinched her harder or because he wasn’t Jester.

Cree’s huff of resignation came out as more of a restrained, quiet yowl. “Fine. I feel someone must be the adult and keep you from making the absolute fools of yourselves that your smiles suggest you intend to.”

“That is not going to happen. We are going to make absolute arses of ourselves and worse than you can imagine, but it’s adorable that you’re making the attempt.” Molly slipped into her space and patted her cheek. She went rigid and flinched away and he immediately flinched back. Gods, it was hard to resist touching people affectionately, but every time he did it to Cree, she looked like he’d just done her in.

He wondered if Lucien ever actually touched her gently and she was reacting to what might have been- or worse, he did touch her like that and she was seeing shades of him within. The thought made him shudder and threatened to sour his mood, so he shoved it aside with all the other bad thoughts that weren't for tonight's consideration.

Jester grabbed Cree and Molly and linked arms with both, and while Molly went willingly, Cree was sort of half-yanked into the hold and stood awkwardly in the space, looking like she was deeply concerned about what she’d gotten into.

As she should be.

“Let’s go!” Jester trilled as they rushed off into the cool, damp Zadash night.

“I’m just saying… We really shouldn’t have brought Cree.” Nott strolled into the Platinum House as an elderly gnome while Jester had weaved her disguise to look like the Herald of the House. The entire evening congregation of the Platinum House had fled down the street to where Molly, draped in his tapestry, was yelling “prophecies” at the top of his lungs. Even now, she could still hear him barking.

“You must listen to me! The Platinum Dragon has spoken through me! I see the shape of things to come!”

He was getting really into it and Jester had to stifle a giggle to keep from ruining her disguise. “Cree’s really powerful and with her outside, we’ll know if anyone comes back in!”

Nott peered into one of the bowls where knick-knacks were tossed as offerings and frowned when she saw no money or anything of value- though she pocketed some of the items, anyway. “She could be a narc!”

“She’s a criminal, Nott.”

“And criminals sell each other out all the time.” Nott sighed, relenting in the wake of Jester pouting through her prim silver dragonborn disguise. “You’re just trying to win her over, I know, I know.”

“And it’s working too. I think she likes us.” They had reached the central chamber where the Platinum Dragon statue hovered, suspended by its chains, right where it had been when she and Nott had scouted the place earlier. It had been between this and the Dawnfather’s temple, but the moment she saw this statue, she had a vision in her head.

She cracked her knuckles, adjusted her haversack, and set to work climbing up towards the top of the dragon statue.

“-And Ruidus is secretly a sealed Betrayer god! You must keep your eye on it at all times!” At Molly’s proclamation, the crowd gasped and half of them looked up at the smaller, reddish-hued moon, half-shrouded in lingering rainclouds from the earlier storm, in deep suspicion.

From her hiding place in the shadows of the Platinum House, Cree facepalmed. “What have you gotten yourself into, Cree?” She muttered to herself.

Watching him work the crowd wasn’t like Lucien spinning lies to get himself in and out of trouble- Lucien never had fun with it. He was just trying to get his way and didn’t care what happened next, but Molly was delightful. Aside from his lies about Ruidus and perhaps a few other fearmongering suggestions (the crowd would have been suspicious if he didn’t throw a few in, and those were the ones that drew more people to him), he was mostly speaking benevolent prophecies, encouraging people to be kinder and do good things. He could tell them anything and, instead, he chose to spread primarily joy.

He was weightless, unburdened. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. People weren’t meant to be such. The world crushed them, until they all became tragedies, eventually. Nothing good lasted. Even Molly’s light would dim, eventually- with or without the Somnovem trying to reclaim their Nonagon.

At least that was what she kept telling herself. Lucien’s light had never dimmed. He just learned to be discerning about how he used it. Molly held no such restraint. It would get him hurt or killed again. He was more fragile than he realized. If the world could turn Lucien cold- Lucien who had never been allowed to trust, not once- then what would it do to someone with two years of life who had not yet experienced the worst of the world?

But he has, some little voice told her. He was there in the Sour Nest, saw the worst of the world until even Ira could follow his rage, and look at him. He hasn’t faltered yet…

Molly gripped both ends of his tapestry and spread his arms wide, giving the impression of wings. “The Platinum Dragon sees the injustice of this city! He will not ask again for you to change your ways. He will bring justice to you if you do not bring it to others!”

The Crownsguard were starting to push through the crowd now, hollering for Molly to cease, but Molly, committed to his bit, kept going, “See this?! They try to silence me! They are among the corrupt within this city who do not desire change!”

“You fool,” she spat. She made a move to dart forwards and grab him, but there was a sound of a scuffle within the Platinum House and sudden yelling for assistance, which brought the Crownsguard’s attention away from Molly as they began to rush at the building, as if they sensed that the true enemy was within and the crazy tiefling was only a diversion.

Cree felt a surge of panic. She was supposed to be watching to make sure no one went in, but she had gotten distracted by Molly. “Fuck.”

She spared one last look at Molly, who was making his grand exit in the opposite direction, and then bolted to the Platinum House.

Nott was in a hamster ball. Jester was in a closet. The Platinum Dragon statue was a technicolor nightmare with half a mustache and that was great, but the first two things were bad, bad, bad. Outside the Crownsguard were about to arrest Nott and that couldn’t be allowed to happen. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Knowing she had to act and not think, Jester burst from the storage room and cast Dispel Magic on the magical hamster ball holding Nott. Immediately, she darted to the shadows where Jester knew she’d be okay, but now all eyes were on her, instead. “Shit,” she squeaked. She threw up her hands and cast a hold person on one of the Crownsguard and then dove for the hall, but the rest of the them began to pursue, shouting, followed by the angry members of the clergy that had caught her in the first place.

Nott’s voice snapped into her head. ”So Cree ratted us out, like I knew she would. Don’t reply to this message if you’re still running.”

No. That wasn’t true. Jester wouldn’t believe it- the more likely explanation was that Molly had gotten into some trouble and she had gone to help him. If the Crownsguard were this close… Fuck. She threw a Mirror Image spell to distract her pursuers, but it failed to entice them and they were gaining on her. Maybe if she stopped, she could try a Charm Person... Maybe she could use that quick invisibility spell or Blink or-

Someone caught her by the arm as she ran past, nearly wrenching it out of its socket as they jerked her into a side hall. She found herself enveloped in the folds of a cloak, pressed against a massive fur-covered body. She looked up as Cree was looking down.

“My apologies,” she said, looking surprisingly sheepish. “I missed them coming.” The footsteps were growing louder. “Where is Nott?”

“She’s fine. She’s really sneaky. We really gotta go, though.”

“Hold onto me.” Jester did as she was asked and Cree folded the cloak around both of them. There was a sudden shift, like something jerking her sideways, and when Cree dropped the cloak, they were on a street corner. Several hundred feet away, she could see the chaos unfolding outside the Platinum House.

For the moment they were safe, but Jester switched her disguise to that of an elven girl just to be on the safe side. “Holy shit. That was such a cool spell. What was that?”

Cree looked momentarily uncomfortable and pulled the red cloak closer to her body. “It is a simple dimension door spell affixed to this cloak.”

Jester made a mental note to ask the Traveler about that one once she spoke to him again, properly. Given the chaos she’d just unleashed, he had to love her again. “Well, it’s totally awesome, and you saved me!” She liked her! If she didn't, she would have left her to get captured! It would've been so easy.

“I… Well…” Cree cleared her throat. “It was my fault that I was not perceptive enough to keep watch.”

“You had one job,” Nott’s voice piped up. She had apparently turned into a halfling with dark skin and twin braids in her hair and had her arms crossed in evident disappointment. “What the hell was that?”

“The best night of my life!” Molly jogged over, his tapestry thrown around his shoulders. He was practically glowing. “Jester, you are absolutely my favorite. Look at this! The people love it!”

“The Crownsguard do not,” Cree corrected.

“Well, no one cares what they think.” Molly waved her off. He gave a low whistle and slumped, bonelessly, against the wall of a building. “I’ve missed the feel of a good con.”

“You were… quite entrancing,” Cree mumbled and looked down, and Jester’s eyes flicked to her.

“Awww Cree. Did you get distracted ‘cause you couldn’t take your eyes off Molly?” Her tail wagged to offset her devilishly cheeky grin.

“My sermon was very powerful.” Despite his words, Jester could almost hear the apprehension in his voice and Cree’s fur was bristling, so she quickly changed the subject.

“We should totally go back to the Leaky Tap, like, right now. The Crownsguard are definitely gonna be looking for Molly.”

“Yeah, I’m… probably gonna have to hide in the cart on the way out.” Molly pursed his lips and then shrugged. “Not the first time I’ve had to be smuggled out of a town.”

Cree barked a laugh, suddenly, eyeing them up, incredulously. “You are all absolutely insane. You’ve nearly gotten yourselves arrested, committed religious blasphemy in the Empire, and you have the audacity to be playful about it?”

Molly, Nott, and Jester exchanged looks. After a second of silently acknowledging what Cree has only just now begun to figure out, Nott shrugged.

“Welcome to the Mighty Nein,”

Chapter Text

Rain had blown back in overnight sometime after Molly, Jester, Nott, and Cree returned to the Leaky Tap, still wearing the high from their successful prank. Even Cree had been unable to hide a sense of mirth underneath her clear disapproval of the shenanigans, as if everyone else’s joy was infectious. Molly called it a win and, for the first time, slept truly soundly listening to the rain hit the roof and gingerly spooning Caduceus, who didn’t question where he had been, but seemed to be keenly aware that whatever it was, he didn’t want to know about it.

Despite being the last to bed, he was the first to wake. The Leaky Tap was still quiet in the early morning hours, boasting only a handful of early risers who nursed breakfast ale and coffees while breakfast was prepared in the kitchen, the smell intoxicating enough to make his stomach rumble already at the promise of fresh bacon and eggs.

He had other priorities besides food at the moment. He yanked his hood over his horns in the hopes of deterring any Crownsguard from investigating the second account of a purple tiefling causing problems on purpose, and stepped out into the liminal space that was Zadash at pre-dawn, before it could truly wake up and become a thriving, living thing again. The air smelled and tasted heavily of petrichor and Molly breathed it in.

For two years, he had learned to love the in-between spaces. The place where night and dawn were almost a heartbeat apart, where dusk turned into night in an eyeblink and yet hung suspended for enough of a moment to appreciate. It took until now to really understand why- he, himself, had been a liminal space once. A bridge between an old life and a new. He could have fallen back and been Lucien if the world had aligned in a certain way, but he plunged forwards.

Dusk became night. Dawn became day. It didn’t go in reverse.

A flash of stormcloud-gray caught his eye and he turned to see Yasha leaning against the wall of the pub with her arms crossed over her chest. Her matted, messy hair was damp with rain water and she dripped like a victim of a near-drowning. Her warpaint had nearly washed itself off completely, leaving smudges of black and blue on her face like bruises by the way of messy clown greasepaint.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” He asked.

She startled, hand reaching for the Magician’s Judge on her back, and when she realized it was only him, she relaxed, a flash of guilt on her face. “Sorry, Molly… You surprised me.”

“Guess that’s a ‘no,’ then.” He stepped into her space and pressed against her side, not caring that her damp leathers were soaking through his coat. For a moment, they stared up at the sky together, the last of the clouds having cleared away in the night, leaving the morning free of any chance at rain to promise favorable travel. “I thought you would be gone by now.”

“I-” Yasha exhaled through her nose. “I did go. For a bit. Just a little ways south, following the storm, but I had to come back. I couldn’t just leave you.”

Now it was Molly’s turn to feel guilty, “Yash’, I know how important this is to you. You don’t have to protect me every second.”

“Look what happened when I couldn’t!” She spat it out like a bad taste in her mouth, like she’d been holding it in for so long that it had soured on her tongue. She winced and drew away from him a bit, and he grabbed her arm to hold her still, to keep her from running. It kept her here only physically, her eyes closed so tightly against something she couldn't get away from. In a way, she was always running. “I’m sorry… I know it wasn’t my fault. You said that already, but I- I feel like it is.”

“Because of Zuala.” He rubbed soothing circles around her knuckles until the tension began to slowly slough off of her.

“Because of Zuala,” she nodded.

“We can’t focus on what happened. We have to move forwards to… whatever the hell this is gonna be.” He dropped her hand and scratched at the back of his neck. The eye there burned for some reason. Mirumus. Surprise. That thought didn’t come from him, so he shoved it aside in the hopes of being rid of it. “And you can’t give up following the Stormlord just to protect me.”

“You saved me just as much as he did.” Yasha’s tone was miserable and childish in a way that made him laugh, and a tiny smile tugged at the corners of her mouth despite how stern she tried to be at him. “Don’t make fun of me, Molly.”

“You’re sulking.” He poked her in the cheek playfully. “I know you want to keep chasing the storms, see if he’ll talk to you again. I’ll be fine. Just…” He swallowed. “Nogvurot. I need you to be there when we get to Nogvurot. That’s all I ask.”

“I was going to meet you all in Hupperdook, anyway.” Yasha chewed on the inside of her cheek. “I don’t want to be gone any longer than I have to be. I don’t… Trust Cree not to try something.”

Molly exhaled. “Cree’s… a complication, but she’s backed down a lot. Probably because she thinks the end of her problems is in Nogvurot, but I think we’re wearing her down. She came with us last night when Jester pulled some shite on the Platinum House.”

That got Yasha to laugh. “What did Jester do?”

“She painted their fuck-off huge dragon statue.” Molly couldn’t hide his own laughter. “I wish I could’ve seen it, but I was being a distraction.”

“Oh of course you were. Making a fool out of yourself?” She swatted him on the ass, and in retaliation he swatted her thigh with his tail.

“Always.” He pressed against her shoulder again. “Storm’s still moving south, right? You could catch it.”

She heaved a long sigh. “It’s really okay if I go? Just for a bit.”

“I don’t know enough words to know how many more ways I can say it, love.” He stood on tiptoes to kiss her cheek. “I’ll be okay. We’ve got three clerics and one of them is really obsessed with me.”

“And that’s something to worry about!” Off his eyebrow raise, Yasha relented. “Fine! Okay! I’ll… Yasha, I guess. I’ll meet you in Hupperdook. I promise.”

“I’ll save you a drink.” He entwined his fingers in hers and pressed a kiss to her knuckles and, in return, she yanked him into a tight, bone-crushing hug. He melted into it, breathing her in, not wanting to admit that while she was worried about him, he was worried about her out there alone. The Shepherds took her when she was twelve feet from camp. What could someone do to her when she was just on her own?

But fear couldn’t keep either of them from moving forward. They both had plenty to scare them and if they allowed it to take hold, they would be paralyzed forever, stuck in a hellish sort of liminal space of their own design. Neither of them could afford to be trapped like that.

If the Moonweaver was watching him, then hopefully the Stormlord was watching Yasha, and he wouldn’t let her slip by him a second time. He’d carry her back on the winds of the next winter storm.

He disengaged from the hug with great reluctance, pulling back but keeping his hand in hers. “See you in Hupperdook, brute.”

She gave him a wink. “Not if I see you first, Ice-Spinner.”

They released their hands at the same time, and, for the first time since the Iron Shepherds, Molly felt as though normalcy had actually returned to his life. Yasha was going off on her private tour of the Empire, guided by the storms she chased, and not held back by trauma or fear of the unknown. Life moved on out of the spaces in between.

Morning had come at last.

Beau was still groggy when she dragged ass downstairs, apparently the last of the Nein to wake. After some awkward fumbling over one-night-stand etiquette, she had retreated back to the room she was sharing with Jester before Jester had even returned from whatever the hell it was she was doing. No witnesses, no walk of shame, basically.

She had to admit it was nice to just have sex with no expectation of attachment, knowing that she was going to be leaving. She’d wanted that experience with Keg for awhile, but the timing had never been right. And judging by how fucking shitty that little moment with Yasha had gone, it was for the best that she never made her move before now. She didn’t think her pride could tolerate two fumbles in that department in one week.

“Well! Look who decided to wake up!” Molly crowed from the table that the Nein had commandeered. “You missed Keg.”

“Awww shit. I haven’t seen her since… Uh...” she lied so spectacularly poorly that she didn’t even bother to finish the sentence. No one bought it. She might as well have been wearing her vestments inside out. With a huff, she waved off their stares. “Yeah, yeah. I don’t wanna hear it. Just give me the bacon.”

She slid into the space between Jester and Nott and grabbed a handful of bacon without even bothering with a plate. Half of it went into her pocket, while the rest she just shoved into her mouth indelicately. “So what else did I miss?”

“Well,” Fjord drawled. “Cree was tellin’ us a little more about this Stahlmast character we’re meant to be dealin’ with for the Gentleman.”

“He truly is a terrible man.” Cree’s teeth were pulled back from her lips in a quiet snarl as she bent over her meal. “I am glad the Gentleman has decided to be rid of him. And the pay is not insignificant. He will double the profits you made for bringing Ophelia here and eliminating the Shepherds.”

Beau almost choked on her bacon. “What the hell kind of asshole is this guy?”

“Assassination is not cheap, Beauregard,” Caleb murmured under his breath. Had her ears not been better, she probably wouldn’t have heard him over the other sounds of the busy pub.

“So we kill people for money now?” Nott piped up, loud enough that Molly reached over and covered her mouth with his hand.

“We did murder an entire house full of slavers. That was a thing we did- keep doing that. It tickles.” Beau could see Nott’s tongue poking out from between Molly’s fingers as he talked with far more subtlety- the old lick the hand trick doesn’t work on Mollymauk Tealeaf, apparently. Good to know.

Seeing that was failing her, Nott bit him instead and Molly’s hand yanked back with a yelp, allowing her to continue as if none of that had ever happened. “Well, I’m not complaining, but we do have new members here and obviously Cree has made her feelings plain, but what about you, Deucey? Are you okay with this?”

Caduceus looked up from his tea. “I mean… I don’t really like the idea of killing for money, but from what Ms. Cree is saying, this is a very bad person we’re dealing with. I’m all for stopping bad people.”

“And from what it sounds like, he’s really messing up things in Hupperdook,” Jester pointed out. “I don’t want anything bad to happen to Kiri or her new family or the Tinkertops ‘cause this guy was just out there being a dick unchecked.”

“So we’re all in agreement, then?” Fjord looked to each of them and then finally met Beau’s eyes.

She shrugged. “Yeah, it sounds cool to me. We were headed to Hupperdook anyway. Why not get paid to deal with another asshole? We’re basically gods right now.”

Molly slow-blinked at her. “That was a terrible thing to say.”

“You literally said you were our god like a month ago, Molly!” And then he died, but she wasn’t going to dwell at all on that part. Nope. The world had moved on.

He just reached over and wiped the goblin spit off of his hand on her top. “I can say whatever I want. It doesn’t mean anything when I say it. You can’t tempt fate if you’re full of bullshit.”

She recoiled, pressing into Jester’s shoulder. Nott had to duck to avoid being hit accidentally when she slammed a fist into Molly’s shoulder. “Ugh! You’re such a dick.”

Nott pulled her ears down just as Molly reached over to swat right back at her in retaliation. “If you two are going to fight, let me know so I can duck underneath the table.”

Beau caught his hand and twisted his wrist just so right above Nott's head and Molly’s caterwaul was music to her ears. “Don’t worry, Nott. He’s done. Aren’tcha, Molly?”

“Ow. Ow. Ow. Fuck you. Ow ow ow.” She let him whimper for a bit more before she released him and returned to her bacon. By now, half the pub was staring at their table.

Jester lowered her voice, eyes going wide like she’d just remembered something, “Oh, uh, right… We should probably get out of here really quickly, guys. Weeeee might be in trouble.”

Fjord blanched, but it was Beau who, still riding high off her manhandling of Molly who asked, “Why? What happened?”

Molly cackled like he hadn’t just nearly gotten his wrist sprained by an overzealous monk. “The most entertaining news story this town has heard all week.”

Cree looked so deeply aggrieved that Beau had to wonder if Jester and Molly had tortured her, specifically. “Yes, because heresy is an average person’s entertainment in the Empire.”

“What did you do?” Caleb blinked owlishly between Jester and Molly, but his answer came in the form of two Dragonborn men strolling into the Leaky Tap with grave expressions on their faces.

“Did you hear that? Cultists painted the Platinum House in chromatic dragon colors.”

“Do you think it’s the Caustic Heart?”

“Nah, they’re not that brazen.”

The two men retreated to the back of the bar, their conversation drowned out now by the rest of the breakfast noise. Beau’s eyes shifted immediately to Jester, who wrinkled her nose in disgust at all the gawking being directed her way.

“Ugh. It was just a rainbow, guys. I’m not a dick.”

While their cart and horses were being collected, Cree had offered to fetch their advance pay from the Gentleman on their way out as she still had a few more things to square away with him. Fjord, wanting a chance to be alone with the tabaxi woman to speak with her, offered to accompany her.

Cree, apparently, took exception to this, but she waited until they were away from the group before she said as much. “If this is due to lack of trust, you needn’t bother. Obviously, our fates are bound for as much as any of us, barring Mr. Clay, seems to believe in it. I have no interest in taking your coin and running.”

“That might be an unfair assumption.” Fjord rubbed the side of his neck, wondering how best to bridge the subject that had been on his mind since the Gentleman had given him that minimal description of Tyffial. “I really did just wanna talk to you.”

Her golden eyes met his, narrowed to suspicious slits, and then she turned to face forwards again. “You all do a great deal of talking, it seems. Into trouble, out of it, around it.”

He took that as a sign that she wasn’t telling him not to keep talking. “I…. Must admit I’ve been curious about the Orders you mentioned awhile back- that you and Lucien and your friends were a part of.”

Her brow furrowed, as if she hadn’t been expecting that. “Why would you be curious about that?”

Her attention caught, he put on the charm to hold onto it. Getting people to listen to you, Vandran told him once, was a lot like fishing. You lured them in with bait and once you had them, you just had to keep reeling them in. It was a con man’s game, held over from whatever it was Vandran did before the Tide’s Breath came into his life, and Fjord had inserted itself into his personality. “This may seem strange, but… I have a bit of an interest in strange abilities that come from… unusual sources. Molly’s blood powers always intrigued me, but obviously he doesn’t care to think too much about 'em and even if he did, he’s just as confused about his as I am about mine.”

“You have strange abilities?” Cree eyed him up and down and Fjord tried not to slink back underneath her gaze. She and Caduceus had eyes that saw too clearly, but unlike Caduceus who just saw to the heart of a situation to bypass the fiddly bits that got in the way, Cree seemed to analyze and judge everything that lurked in the margins. “If they are not hemocraft, then I sincerely doubt the Orders can offer you much.”

“Maybe not, but those powers come from somewhere, don’t they?” He tongued anxiously at his left tusk again. He was due for another filing soon if the small cuts along the side of his mouth were any indication.

Cree blew out a breath. “To become a member of the Orders, you must ingest a poison called Hunter’s Bane. It brings out the magical potency in blood and allows a person to wield it with training. There is no divinity, no patrons- or at least there does not have to be.”

“And that’s all it can do… The ice and radiant things Molly puts on his swords, that is? And the thing where he blinds people.”

“His Blood Rites and his Blood Maledicts, aye, but there are other skills that I’m certain he will… remember in time.” A fondness passed over her face, like the sun from behind a cloud, only to be consumed by shadow again, just as quickly. “Lucien could tell you the history of an object by connecting to it.”

Fjord went very, very still, the words registering like a punch to his sternum, knocking the wind out of him. “Any object?”

She stopped alongside him here in the street. The Innerstead Sprawl moved around them, and no one else seemed to be aware that the air was thinning. Cree squinted at him. “Ah… no. Not any average object. It would have to have a dark history.”

All Fjord could think about was that time Molly had asked if he could examine the falchion. If he had said yes, would he have seen it all? Had every answer to his questions just been one trust exercise away this whole time? And had Molly even been aware of what he could have done with the sword in his hands or had he just been trying to help? Knowing Molly, it was the latter. Maybe he’d saved them both some grief by not inviting both of their secret demons into the room with them.

Seeing Cree was, once more, trying to see through him, he resumed walking to keep her focused on things that weren't him. The Evening Nip was only a block away and he was eager to get back on the road again. “So all that power just came from a poison, right?”

“Indeed.” Cree continued to squint at him. “You are a magic-user, yourself. Do you not know where your power comes from? Is that what this is about?”

He winced. “I’ve been tryin’ to figure it out. Thought about goin’ to the Solstryce Academy to ask around.”

“If your magic comes from an unconventional source, they might well lock you up, my friend.” Fjord noted that when she said that, the tip of a finger grazed across the amulet around her neck. “Pact magic and bloodline magic suggests contact with some outside force that might be dangerous to the Empire.”

“Yeah, but what does… that mean?” Off her skeptical look, he ducked his head, apologetically. “I apologize. I’m new to this. I know what wizard and cleric magic looks like. I know what, uh, the blood magic looks like. Mine isn’t quite either.”

“Well…” Cree drawled. “A bloodline involves having something in you or your ancestry fundamentally shaped by exposure to an otherworldly or merely strange force. A pact involves a conscious effort to either reach out to or have something else reach out to you and offer a bargain.”

The voice from Fjord’s dreams popped into his head. Its chorus of demands. Its promise of reward. Potential. Learn. Grow. Provoke. Consume. Patience.

Watching.

The Evening Nip came into view as Fjord chewed on that. “Thank you for the information. It’s… appreciated.”

She chuckled, the sound a deep rumble. “I have given you only information that could be gotten anywhere. I am afraid I would need to know more to give anything else of use.”

He opened the door to the tavern for her and she slipped past him. “Maybe we can talk more about… patrons that communicate through dreams sometime.”

Cree froze two feet into the tavern. This wasn’t solely just about him in the end. It was a good bit of bait, free of anything that might set her off, but all of it had been leading to a different net. He doubted Cree could help him with his issue, though she’d certainly given him some new facts, but with Molly? That she could help with. And now they both knew, without Fjord having to ask anything about it, that she was well aware of dreams as a type of communion and that it was important somehow to both of them and more besides.

She looked over her shoulder, eyes narrowed. “Maybe.”

And then she turned to speak with Clive and Fjord let the matter drop for now. He’d pick that line up again when the time was right, because maybe he could help Molly and help himself at the same time.

There was a lot one could say about the Mighty Nein, chief among them being how foolish they were, but the one that put Cree’s fur up was the fact that they were masters at striking with their underhand. They all knew more about the situation with Mollymauk than even she did and no one was going to bridge that topic with her, leaving her adrift and fully unaware of what was actually going on there. She knew three eyes were awake and, through Fjord’s backhanded remarks, that there were dreams involved again, but beyond that, she had no idea what was being whispered in Mollymauk’s head.

She had not been killed in her sleep or accosted, so evidently it wasn’t truly awful enough to warrant her interrogation, but the whole thing still rankled her. Her mood curdled even more after she left the Evening Nip with the advance pay for their assault on Stahlmast as she waited, expectantly, for Fjord to pursue the topic he’d dropped like a bomb into her space so she could dismiss it and move on, but he never brought the matter up again, choosing to ask clarifying questions about Stahlmast, instead.

Prevented from calling out their lack of transparency on top of her own, she withdrew into herself, grumpily, and gave noncommittal answers until she and Fjord both fell into an uneasy silence the rest of the way to the edge of the city’s gates where the remainder of the Nein were going to meet them with their horses and cart.

Upon arrival, Jester was quick to bombard them and break up the stormclouds settled above them by leaping out of the cart and running up to them, brandishing a skinny mustelid with crimson fur like it was a talisman. “Look at him!! Isn’t he the cutest?”

Cree felt something odd tug at her senses as she stared at the weasel- she was certain it must be a weasel- but she could not fully process what it was that set her off, so she left the reacting to Fjord, sputtering incoherently and looking it over like he suspected it to have flecks of foam at the corners of its mouth. “...Where’d you find that thing?”

Jester stuck her tongue out. “His name is Sprinkle, Fjord. We just met a guy selling pets out of a wagon.”

“I had to talk her down from buying lions!” Molly squawked, indignantly, coming around the other side of the cart. Cree had never seen him look so comically harried. “She would have bought the whole cart!” He whirled on Beau, who, Cree now noticed, had an owl perched on her arm that was trying to untie her topknot. “And you weren’t helping!”

“Hey, I just think owls are cool, man.” The owl yanked the blue ribbon free and her dark hair tumbled around her face. She seemed to resign herself to this. “Besides I thought for sure that peacock had your name on it.”

“Peacocks are bitchy and loud.” Molly stuck his tongue out at her.

“So perfect for you, huh?” Beau shot back and received an offensive salute for her troubles. She returned it.

“They had a Blink puppy, but apparently someone already bought it,” Jester was explaining when Cree pulled herself away from that conversation. Sometimes Molly and Beau reminded her just a bit too much of Lucien and Tyffial, before Lucien became the Nonagon and none of the other Tombtakers were inclined to give him much lip.

“Probably for the best,” Cree murmured, moving to take one of the horses for her own. Caleb was at her elbow almost immediately.

“Not a fan of dogs?” He asked, lightly.

She finished mounting her horse and looked down at the wizard. There was an amused slant to his lips, like he was trying to smile but had forgotten how. “There are many similarities we tabaxi have to our lesser intelligent feline cousins, for lack of a better term. Disliking dogs is among them. Or perhaps that is just me. I have not met any other tabaxi.”

“You haven’t?” That got Caduceus’s attention. Now that most of the bickering and conversation about the pet merchant had ceased, everyone was eager to mount up and get on the road, which meant it was easier for everyone to consider anything said between two people to be a public affair, apparently. “But you’re from the Nightback Clan, aren’t you?”

Suddenly, all eyes were on her, like Caduceus had lit on a piece of history that they had all been denied by her. She was cagey and not eager to tell things about herself, but so were all of them, and yet any scrap of information anyone threw out was like meat for starving dogs. They couldn’t get enough of just a bit more understanding… Or something to file away and use for later.

They would not get this much. Her history belonged to no one but the people who already knew it. “I am not familiar with them.”

Caduceus canted his head. “But you’re from Shadycreek Run?”

She tightened her grip on her reins, her fur bristling again. Just when she thought she could begin to like these people, they found ways to annoy her, one conversation at a time. First Fjord and his backhanded attempt to get her to provide transparency and now these cruel assumptions. “Aye. But I am an orphan. I lived with other orphans in the streets. That was all the family I had to myself.”

The curtness of her tone silenced Caduceus, which she almost felt bad about. Of them, Caduceus seemed the least frustrating but that was only in comparison to the rest. Like her, he saw a great deal. Unlike her, he talked openly about what he saw if he felt it needed to be discussed... and often did to prevent the silence from festering into resentment.

Some things were better left to the silence- her history among them. Seeing the Nein had gone quiet at watching her shut the conversation down, she tugged her horse towards the open road waiting for them. “Shall we go, then?”

Those without horses loaded up in the cart and they began their journey on this same fucking accursed road again- first Hupperdook to deal with this Stahlmast bastard and then, finally, to Nogvurot to speak to Tyffial.

Once there, maybe this nightmare would cease its grip on her. She could not afford to endure this constant push and pull much longer.

The day passed uneventfully, beyond Beau’s owl taking flight and never returning. Molly had gotten a kick out of that and pointed out that people like that were running scams- they trained the birds to fly away and go back to the person who sold them, so they could just keep selling the same bird to new people, which had triggered a back and forth argument about con artistry.

Given how nervous Caleb had been about going back on the road with everyone after everything, the normalcy of it was as relaxing as his social anxiety could find senseless bickering to be. Things were likely to take a turn once they left Hupperdook and set their sights on Nogvurot, but for now the Nein were as normal as they were capable of being. Even Yasha’s absence was, at least, predictable rather than something to be miserable about.

Only Cree stood apart- very pointedly, at that. She had been a part of the chaos Jester, Nott, and Molly had wrought on Zadash, but now she was pulling back again. She is getting too close.

He knew that look, because he’d seen his face in the mirror a time or two. Cree came into the Nein with an objective she sought above all else and maybe love would not stop her from achieving it but it might slow her down. Caleb could relate to her plight, her hunger. Unfortunately, he was as capable of commiserating about it as Cree was capable of talking about herself- not in the slightest.

He still drew his horse up beside hers. The sun was beginning to set and they would need to bed down soon- Caduceus was chasing the horizon while his eyes still had light to see by, seeking out a safe place. Once he found it, Caleb could unveil a spell he’d been holding onto for over a week now. Until then, he had time to speak with the miserable tabaxi away from the eyes and ears of his nosy compatriots.

“They grow on you, you know?” He said, his gaze instinctively finding Nott who was riding on Caduceus’s shoulders, helping him scout.

Cree made a soft, borderline contemptuous sound. “You do not have to try so hard. I am aware that this arrangement is transactional.” A low growl rumbled out of her- frustration as only a cat could be frustrated. “It is not that I do not appreciate the kindness, but… We all know that it means nothing.”

Caleb shook his head. “There was a time when I thought the same. That the kindness would end the second I was no longer useful.” Or became too dangerous to keep around. The converse was true, as well, but no matter what he told himself, he was still here, even when it would have made sense to flee ages ago. “In truth, there are days when I still feel that way.”

Cree’s golden eyes flicked to him briefly and then turned back to the setting sun. She carried herself stiffly, tense and uneasy with the conversation. Given the set of his own shoulders, the feeling was mutual. Caleb Widogast was not formed from the ashes of Bren Ermendrud to become someone who was in any way good with genuine emotion. It would be easier to placate her with insincerity.

But that was what she believed they were already doing.

“It is hard for me to imagine why you would feel that way, wizard,” she finally said. “I can see how everyone looks to you.”

He winced. “They do not look to me. They look at me, but gods only know what it is that they see. No matter what Nott says, I am no leader. I have never pretended to be, either.”

Another glance his way. Another sound, a more rumbling purr- incomprehensible to him. He thought himself an expert on cat vocalizations, but Cree ran a gamut of them he had never had to place before. Even being fey, Frumpkin was far less complex. “That is not a lie.”

“You seem very good at telling the lies from the truth, Ms. Deeproots.” Caleb let his voice drip into something almost casually sarcastic. “And yet you doubt their sincerity.”

“Their sincerity. They grow on you.” Cree chuckled. “You set yourself apart from them, then?”

Caleb winced. “That is beside the point-”

“No. I believe that is precisely the point.” She pulled her horse up a bit and directed it to step into the path of Caleb’s horse, forcing it to step back and whinny in disapproval. “It seems you have found yourself a kindred spirit, yes? The difference is you have isolated yourself intentionally when it is clear these people love you. I, however, have no claim to this lot and they have no claim to me. I am only here to undo a great injustice and it will not end in a way that any of you will approve of. Their sincerity might be real, but it is not lasting.”

His heart thudded in his chest and he could hear his pulse in his ears. He was staring into a mirror, wasn’t he? The isolation for the sake of avoiding a painful reality- that neither of them were capable of choosing anyone over their ambitions. The ambitions, themselves, that might very well unravel so much. Sacrifices to be made, because if it meant people they love might yet live, then it was all worth it.

Both of them were so sure, weren’t they?

He gripped the reins tighter and spurred his horse forwards, pushing past Cree’s. He made it only a few steps before she called out to him.

“Do you know why I see so much, spellspitter?” she said, her voice more serious than it had ever been. “It is because I can feel the shift in heartbeats. The change in the rhythm of the blood flowing through the veins. You have quite the tell.”

He swallowed. “Then you know I am not full of platitudes.”

“No.” She brought her horse flush with his again so she could lean over to him. “But I have not spun falsehoods or hidden my ambitions. Be wary, my friend. The betrayal people cannot see coming from within is far more dangerous than one that has been transparent about its intentions. You all knew I was a snake before I joined you. When I get what I want, you will all have known all along what my intent was.”

And I have hidden my scales, Caleb thought, with bitterness, but if he had anything else to say, it was cut off by the sound of Nott excitedly declaring that she had found a campsite. Cree shot him one last look of deep understanding and moved her horse closer to the rest of the caravan, leaving him feeling far more vulnerable than he expected to be.

“Thiiiis is why you don’t try to help,” he sing-songed under his breath and followed Cree’s horse.

He had a dome to build- one more affectionate offering to these people he might not choose in the end. What a cruel snake he was to build the hearth they gathered around before he bit them.

As soon as the horses were secure and fed, Caleb gathered everyone around to where he had started ritually casting something. Molly, ever curious about new magic, pressed in closer to peer over his shoulder, but the words in his spellbook didn’t mean much nor gave any real clues to what he was casting. Jester prodded with questions, but Caleb’s concentration held and when the sharp snap of his magic took hold, the air shimmered like a heat mirage and a translucent dome appeared in the grass around Caleb, a smell like a distant wildfire hanging in the air.

“You… made us a tent?” Beau reached over and tried to tap it, but her hand went through. She yanked it back in surprise.

“A magic tent!” Molly exclaimed and seeing as Beau didn’t get her hand bitten off, he walked straight in and then poked his head out. “It’s pretty cozy in here. We’re gonna have to snuggle.”

“Ja, there is another spell that will make a mansion, as I may have mentioned before, but it is beyond me at this moment.” Caleb scratched at his neck. “This will keep us out of danger. No more people getting kidnapped in the night.”

“What if we have to pee?” Jester slipped into the dome and then poked her head outside alongside Molly’s. They exchanged looks and broke out into giggles.

“Buddy system,” Fjord grunted and slipped into the dome, himself. “Oh shit. You’re right. Once Yasha, gets back, we’re gonna be right on top of each other.”

Molly shrugged and pulled his head in. Fjord was trying to claim a spot as far as he possibly could against the curve of the dome, while Caleb continued to sit in the middle and tuck his books back into his holsters, his expression unreadable. “I do not see anything wrong with that. It can be... healthy to sleep in a pile.”

“Like kittens!” Jester exclaimed, pulling herself back inside and plopping down with her bedroll to get settled.

“Like kittens,” Molly nodded sagely.

Beau entered next. “Yeah, but what if the bad guys just walk through it?”

Caleb shook his head. “It only lets in people I choose.”

At that, Cree very awkwardly stuck one foot in and then tried to subtly move the rest of herself in so no one would notice she was, apparently, tentatively expecting to be locked out with the horses. Molly noticed, though, and evidently so did Caduceus because he gave her a gentle pat on the shoulder as he followed her in.

“What will we do about watch?” He asked. “We should probably still keep an eye on our cart and horses.”

“The dome can blend seamlessly into the surroundings, but it remains transparent from this side. We can trade off watches and keep an eye out safely from in here.”

“So all the nighttime shit-talking is gonna have to stop, huh?” Beau chuckled and rolled out her own bedroll. “Damn. That’s the highlight of my night.”

“If you can’t talk shit in front of the people you’re talking shit about, you shouldn’t be talking shit.” Molly bared his teeth in a grin and Beau rolled her eyes.

“You shouldn’t talk shit anyway, Beau,” Jester pouted.

Beau held her hands up defensively. “It was a joke. I totally don’t talk shit.”

“I do,” Nott claimed her spot to Caleb’s right. She took a long swig from her flask and then tucked it to her chest like a teddy bear.

“We all know you do.” Molly, without even meaning to (at least that was what he was telling himself) moved his bedroll flush with Caleb’s right side.

Jester tapped her fingertips together, surprisingly shy in a way she usually wasn't. “Caduceus? Cree? Can I sleep between you? You two are just so fluffy and I bet you’d be really fun to snuggle with and it’s totally okay if that’s weird.”

“Aww. That’s really sweet, Ms. Jester. I don’t mind. Molly’s been snuggling me like a stuffed animal every night.

“Stuffed animals don’t have bony elbows,” Molly pushed himself up onto his own bony elbows. “But I do highly recommend his snuggles.”

Cree, for her part, looked deeply uncomfortable, but seeing Jester duck her head and look sheepish seemed to do her in, and she sighed. “As you wish.”

“Yes!” As soon as the pair settled, Jester slipped in between them. Caleb snapped his fingers and Frumpkin appeared on her chest and began purring up a storm. “Oh! Thank you, Caleb.”

“Bitte schön.” The second Caleb rolled over to his left, Molly realized his grave tactical error as he’d gotten so close that their faces were now barely two inches apart. Not that there was much room in here with a seven foot tall firbolg and a six foot tall, very muscular, tabaxi tucked within, but there was certainly more room than this.

Cree was at his back, so he couldn’t really scoot farther without messing up Jester’s nest and Caleb couldn’t scoot either unless he wanted to wake up Nott, who was already snoring. In the corner of the dome, Beau and Fjord had taken first watch and were whispering in hushed tones, but all Molly could hear was his own heart beating.

“Mollymauk?” Caleb finally said, keeping his voice low.

“Mr. Caleb.” He didn’t know what else to say. He was the one who’d moved his stupid bedroll this close. What was he supposed to do? Deny it? Oh sorry, Caleb. I accidentally placed my bedroll all but on top of yours. What a random occurrence. Well, guess we’ve no choice but to deal with it.

A period of silence stretched on, driving Molly’s heart rate up even more, and at the end of it, Caleb simply curled up a bit more in his bedroll and murmured what Molly hoped was good night in Zemnian and not get out of my face.

Slowly, he relaxed and fell asleep, and if he woke up tomorrow with his tail curled around Caleb’s ankle, he was going to call that an accident. The thing had a mind of its own.

The dome dropped after eight hours, waking them with a smattering of frosty dew that had clung to it overnight dropping down onto them. A lengthy untangling process began as everyone but Caduceus and Jester, the last two on watch, yelped at the sudden change in temperature and the dampness and woke up in shock at once. Molly barely avoided elbowing Caleb in the face as he sat bolt upright.

(Fortunately his tail uncurled from Caleb’s ankle before anyone could call him on it.)

“It’s going to be a process to get used to,” Caleb muttered. “All good things have their drawbacks.”

“It’s wonderful. I love it. It’s when it goes away I don’t like.” Molly shivered and grabbed for his coat where he’d tossed it aside to use as a pillow so he could yank it around himself. “It’s so fuckin’ cold.”

“I like it.” Jester shook dewdrops from her hair and horns. “Hey, Fjord, how far are we from Hupperdook?”

“Probably another couple days’ ride if we keep this pace.” He cracked his neck.

“Okay, okay… I’m gonna send a message to Kiri.” She brushed herself off and skipped over to where Fjord was packing up. He immediately dropped his sleeping materials and held up his fingers for her.

“Hey Kiri! How are you? We’re on our way back to Hupperdook. We’ve got stuff to do and we really wanna see you.” Fjord wiggled two fingers for her. “Love you!”

“That was actually really concise,” Beau nodded in approval and Molly did golf claps.

“I’m getting better at it.” Jester leaned over to Cree. “So you should totally let me borrow the Gentleman’s Sending Stone sometimes.”

Cree tugged her bag closer to herself. “I would prefer not to risk his disapproval over such things.”

Jester’s eyes suddenly went glazed as she got a message back, and when she blinked out of it, she clutched her heart. “Oh my god, you guys She says she misses and loves us so much.”

“Did she just repeat everything you said back to you?” Molly finished stuffing his bedroll into his bag of holding.

“Well, she said ‘How are you? I’m very sweet. Good girl! Miss you. Love you.’” Jester wiped a tear out of the corner of her eye. “I love her so much. I’m so sad we had to leave her behind.”

“I don’t really want to think about Kiri around-” Molly suddenly shut himself up. The last thing he wanted was to remind anyone, least of all Jester, about the Iron Shepherds. Or Lorenzo’s infant eating habit. Kiri would have been a delicious chicken dinner for that asshole.

“I am sorry, but… Who is this Kiri?” Cree looked to someone for an answer, landing on Jester, who seemed to be the most enthused about her.

“Oh! She’s a little bird girl we found in the swamp. We kept her with us for awhile, but then we found a nice family in Hupperdook that took her in.”

“Guess the parents were out of the picture?” Caduceus frowned, squinting like he was trying to figure out if they were the kind of people who would kidnap a child and drop her off on some other family in some strange feat of dangerous whimsy.

“Pretty sure they were gator food,” Beau nodded.

Molly looked to Cree who seemed to always get weird about orphans (apparently being one in Shadycreek Run did a number on you)- even moreso than Fjord did, which was saying something. She adjusted the strap on her bag. “Well. It is good that you found her when you did. Many are not so lucky.”

“It’s too early to bring down the mood, Cree,” Molly yawned, ignoring that he and Beau had done it plenty on their own. She recoiled, ducked her head, and murmured an apology, and he had to bite his tongue to keep from making a comment about it in front of everyone. They were due for a long fucking conversation about a lot of things, and he just kept putting it off, like his problems would go away after awhile.

Maybe they would. He hadn’t had another bad dream since the Moonweaver’s visit.

They finished packing up and were in the beginning processes of deciding the riding arrangements when Caduceus and Cree suddenly turned to the sky in unison.

“That’s a pretty big bird, isn’t it?” Caduceus squinted against the early morning sky, still a bit more gray than blue.

Molly turned to follow his gaze- there was indeed a large bird circling overhead. Two more joined it. And then another. And another. Six in total, at last. Their wingspans blotted out the sun every time they swept past it in the sky. He could swear he saw the outline of horns or antlers as they circled lower.

Cree suddenly hissed. “Those are not birds! Those are perytons! Look at the shadows!”

Molly looked down across the road and recoiled- the shadows of the creatures were, indeed, strangely humanoid. If Caduceus and Cree hadn’t spotted them in the sky, no one would have thought anything about it, believing them to just be their own shadows.

“They’re diving!” Fjord shouted. The falchion formed in his hand with a salty burst of sea water.

“Stay tight! It will be harder for them to pick you off if we’re clustered together!” Cree snapped, yanking the glaive off her back. She cast a spell on it that made the tip glow with unearthly red light.

“That is the one time that tactic is viable,” Molly shouted back. He raked his carnival glass sword across his chest and the air grew even colder as all the early morning moisture suddenly froze to the blade, crystalizing it in ice.

The perytons came into range, attempting to dive, but pulled themselves back from an attack when they realized most of their prey were holding sharp objects meant to skewer them. Caleb bit down into a piece of licorice and tapped Molly and the familiar burst of speed that accompanied a haste spell overwhelmed him. He singled out one of the six perytons and unleashed on it in a series of sharp, deadly pirouettes. Its left wing was damaged so badly in the assault that it was hanging on by a sliver of muscle and sinew and despite the stag head, it cawed in pain like a bird.

Well. Now he had a new thing to have nightmares about.

Fjord shot eldritch blasts as the perytons hovered to prepare for their next attack. Beau did a running leap and knocked the antlers off one with a savage strike with her bo staff. She landed back on the ground in a crouch and hissed.

“Damn, that really is bad for the knees,” she muttered, but pulled herself up and twirled her staff getting ready for her next strike.

Nott’s crossbow backfired, knocking her back out of the protective cluster. Jester’s duplicate yanked her back so she could hide again, while the actual Jester brought down her lollipop to finish off the peryton that Beau had nearly scalped. Caduceus, noting the glow around Cree’s staff, tapped Beau’s shoulder and her fists began to glow with radiance.

“That should help,” he said and tried to step back into the throng, but the enraged perytons- four still in flight- decided to take their chances. They circled up back into the sky and then dove, one striking Caduceus and knocking him prone, two more going for Molly and Beau and missing entirely when the two of them dodged nimbly out of the way.

The final struck Caleb so hard he was dragged right out of the circle eight feet and then began to tear into him. Molly saw red again for the first time since the Iron Shepherds.

Two voices crept into his mind. No, you mustn’t let him die. You love him. We would mourn if our Nonagon were bereft of someone he loved so dearly. What would the harmony of our minds be with one such soul missing?

And, less creepy and far more succinctly, the dark growling voice simply roared, RIP IT APART.

Cree skewered the peryton on Caduceus with her glaive and yanked it away from him, her muscles straining underneath her robes. Beau with her new glowing fists slammed down onto its back, snapping its spine. Fjord shot eldritch blasts at some of the remaining perytons, desperate to keep them from diving again. The battlefield was a haze of activity and all Molly could see was Caleb’s blood being splattered across the grass as the creature tried to dig its teeth and claws into his chest.

He dropped his carnival glass sword, used Summer’s Dance to misty step and appeared beside the creature. The rage burning in his eyes gave him no choice of what to do. He slammed Summer’s Dance underneath its wing joint and then slammed his free hand down onto the creature’s stag neck and summoned that same power he’d used to kill the rogue in the Sour Nest. The peryton’s eyes bled like something out of a nightmare. It screamed in anguish, choked out a mixture of its own blood and Caleb’s, and then fell over, leaving Caleb a bloodied, torn mess, but mercifully still breathing.

His eyes were wide, and the anger dissipated as Molly began to return to himself properly. He’d done it again- all on impulse. “Caleb?”

Caleb shook himself out of the shock. It was fine.- he’d seen the result of that ability before, even if he’d never seen it in action. Nothing new here, right? He tried to sit up, but then fell back onto his back when the movement sent fresh hell through his wounds.

“He needs a healer!” Molly turned to shout, expecting to see the battle still going, but apparently the fight must have ended while he was in the haze of bloodlust.

Everyone was staring at him.

“Molly?” Jester squeaked. “H-how did you do that?”

Molly looked at the corpse of the peryton, leaking blood from every hole in its face, its tongue lolling out. It was somehow more horrifying than the rogue… Or maybe that was only because he suddenly had witnesses. There were people in this group who had never seen the result of his terrifying new powers.

He took a step back, suddenly feeling the urge to run. “I… This is not how I wanted this to come out.”

Caduceus, seeing no one else was going to step up as they were reeling from the revelation of Molly’s creepy blood explosion powers, ran to Caleb and began to heal him so he could sit up.

“Perhaps transparency is a good idea, Mollymauk,” Caleb groaned, shooting Caduceus a grateful look. He ran a hand over the gory mess of his chest and blanched at how much blood it came back up with.

The last thing he wanted was transparency right at this second, but he couldn’t see a way around it now. He’d tried so hard to bottle it up and push it to the side so he didn’t have to deal with it or burden anyone else with it beyond the few people who already knew or Caleb who he needed to be pragmatic, and it was officially a terrible idea to keep that up. Once again, he was pushed into honestly by circumstance. This time was more his own fault than the other.

Beau interjected before Molly could even open his mouth. “Yeah, transparency is a great idea, Cree. You know what all that’s about, don’t you?”

Cree, who had been staring at Molly as if in a trance, suddenly whipped her head to Beau. “I did not know he had access to that ability.”

“But you know everything about those stupid eyes, don’t you?” Beau advanced on her, her fists dropping the glow from Caduceus’s spell. “Why haven’t you said shit about them?”

“Molly did not wish to know,” Cree responded, flatly. She clutched her glaive, her eyes narrowed on Beau’s clenched fists, as if waiting for an attack.

“That’s actually true,” Molly piped up, but he’d lost control of the situation- as if he ever had it.

Caduceus began to pull Caleb to his feet. “Everyone just needs to calm down. I agree that this is something that oughta be talked about, but-”

But Beau was advancing, her smaller form right up in Cree’s space. “Well, maybe you oughta tell us in your own words now before the Cobalt Soul gets back to me on what they have to say.”

Molly went suddenly rigid, but it was nothing compared to the livid distaste in Cree’s golden eyes. “So. Rather than even ask me yourself to undermine Mollymauk’s desires, you go behind both of our backs? I knew you lot were prone to underhanded remarks, but that is an entirely new level of disrespect.”

“Don’t fucking talk about him like he’s still your godsdamn cult leader boyfr-”

Cree slapped Beau across the face. The shock of the moment barely had time to register before Beau, blue eyes wild, punched her in the solar plexus, staggering her.

“You fucking bitch.” They were on the verge of a half-literal catfight and Fjord and Jester raced to yank them away from each other.

“Cool it. Just shake it off, Beau,” Fjord snapped. He couldn’t hold her for very long, but she didn’t fight him. All the fight had gone out of her the moment she landed the punch and things started to escalate.

“Cree, please. She didn’t mean it.” Jester tugged on Cree sleeve. “We’re all just a little freaked out. Right, Molly?”

Molly hadn’t moved an inch since Beau admitted she had gone to the Soul, and when all eyes moved to him to check for his reaction, he had to tamp down on the rage building again. “You looked into it without even asking me?” His voice came out meek and small.

Beau slumped in Fjord’s arms. “I knew you didn’t wanna deal with it, but I had to-”

“Had to what?” Now Molly’s voice took on a high-pitched, crazed tone. “Had to make sure I wasn’t going to be a threat? You already know I could become one. You told me you wouldn't let it happen. And I don’t want- I don’t need anyone looking at me differently.” He took a step back. “You’re already doing it.”

“No, Molly. No.” Jester released Cree and stepped towards him, hands open and placating. “We’re scared for you, not of you.”

“Mollymauk,” Caleb placed a hand on his arm and that was almost enough to get him calm. Almost, but not quite. “It was not just Beauregard.”

Molly’s attention jerked to Caleb, the betrayal gripping his heart. Of course Caleb would want to know more. He always wanted to know more. “Why? Curiosity? Lucien came by this probably because he was curious. It’s… It’s a blight. A cancer. It’s inside me and I can’t cut it out. Who’s to say it won’t come for you too because you went looking?”

That joyful voice, fixating on Caleb, like it wanted him. His stomach churned with the aftereffects of the haste spell and the stress of the situation. He couldn’t even tell which part upset him more, and he was so worried that left here to get angrier, the situation would get worse. “I… I need a moment.”

He pulled away from Caleb and took off at a run, getting at least a hundred feet away before he dropped to his knees and vomited on the grass and curled up on himself, a ball of angry, frustrated misery.

There was no getting around it. As pissed as he was that it had been dragged up like this, that it had been looked into without his consent, he was going to have to know more, because if he didn’t, someone might get hurt, and now that everyone knew, they were all in even more danger.

Chapter Text

Molly lost track of how long he knelt, curled in on himself, with morning dewdrops soaking through his pants and making him shiver with the chill they brought. He knew he should get up, yank himself by his fucking bootstraps and set everyone in their places, and just move forwards, but the will to do so eluded him.

Because, for the first time, he felt like he had actually been wrong. He habitually operated under the assumption that his opinion was the correct one, that his strategy for dealing with things was the best way, and faced with his friends seeking alternate means to deal with a problem he said to just leave alone, it hit him that maybe it wasn’t. As much as he wanted to be livid at Beau and even Caleb, they had sought answers that Molly, himself, was risking far too much to keep hidden. He’d asked Caleb to keep a finger on the trigger mechanism should he go feral and never thought of Caleb, himself. He had wanted to protect everyone from the truth and yet not knowing the truth was somehow worse, and had always been worse.

It made his skin crawl. It was wrong, wrong, wrong. His world made sense once. His rules for living made sense once. Now it was all shifted slightly to the left and try as he might, he couldn’t line himself up with it. The world had moved on and he was still trying to operate like it hadn’t, like if he lied enough, he could convince reality of the con and shape it to suit himself.

He wondered, bitterly, if this was how Lucien started out. Maybe, without meaning to, he really was becoming him. If he pushed back against his friends now, was that the final nail in the coffin he didn’t come back from?

As badly as he wanted to shove back and yell and scream until his throat bled, his terror at being left behind prevented it. He didn’t want to be good and contrite and cowed for being wrong, but if he stormed back in and tore into Beau and Caleb for going behind his back, what would that do? Tear them all apart and leave him with nothing but Cree to temper him? Cree who would make him Lucien again with a word, if there was nothing else to ground him as Mollymauk.

So instead of pushing back or just getting over it and moving on like he wasn’t frustrated with the whole damn situation and had a lot of yelling to do, he just sat in the grass like a useless ball of flesh and silk and shiny baubles.

He heard soft footfalls in the grass beside him, but he didn’t look up. He would recognize the familiar smell of dirt and spell components and the faint charred smell of a spent fire that made up Caleb anywhere.

As pissy as he was, he couldn’t stop his heart from melting that he’d been the one to come fetch him. Stupid traitor heart.

“Mollymauk, Beauregard and I were looking out for you. You must understand that.”

Molly curled even more inwards to muffle his growl of frustration. “That doesn’t mean it was a good idea.”

“You cannot run from this, my friend. It is inside you, already. It is... perhaps making you do things without your consent, even.” Caleb must have sat down. He could hear his voice at ear level now. “You know this. I know this. Ignoring it will not make it end. Keeping it from everyone else will not make it easier to bear.”

That made him wince. “I don’t want this to hurt anyone else.”

“Then you do us all no favors trying to handle it alone, confiding only when forced to. Refusing information that could teach you to control-”

“I don’t want to control it.” Molly’s head snapped up, suddenly, teeth grit in an anguished snarl. “I want it gone.”

Caleb didn’t flinch away from his rage. “That might be something that could happen. It might not be.” He learned closer, expression dangerously serious. “You handed me a knife and told me to cut you down if you became a monster. That was a cruel thing to ask, but I am a cruel man and I took that knife and made a promise to use it. Do not think I made that promise easily. Do not think I am waiting for you to break, Mollymauk Tealeaf. I do not want to have to put you down like a rabid dog. I want to know what ails you so I can prevent it from killing you.”

“And if it pulls you in?” Molly snapped, ignoring as much of that as he could to try to find the one semblance of an argument that he had. It hurt to do so. Caleb was being so unfairly kind right now, but his pride choked him and left him needing something to relieve the pressure.

“Then it is a good thing I have such dedicated friends.” Caleb pulled back a bit. “Either way, we cannot continue as we are. As unpleasant as all of that was, at least we are all now on the same page.”

“Not everyone,” Molly grumbled.

Caleb caught his meaning. “You are going to have to talk to her at some point. Beauregard could have handled that better, but she was not wrong in her logic. There is nothing to suggest Cree would be forthcoming or truthful to any of us, nor would she be impartial to you. The Soul seemed a safer way to get concise information, free of any bias or propaganda.” A hesitant pause. "Or less of it, at any rate."

He had an answer for everything, damn him. Molly just wanted to sulk for an eternity and here Caleb was presenting him with reasonable arguments. He could continue being a little shit about it, but it would just lead to circular bullshit and maybe, eventually, abandonment, and, if not that, then perhaps the equally horrific loss of Caleb ever having anything to do with him again. The idea of distance within the group was a startling reminder of how the circus came apart and more than that... Well, he wasn't ready or willing to face the specifics of those feelings he was also ignoring yet.

So his only choice was to swallow his pride and hope it didn’t strangle him. Sighing, he began to uncurl himself. His legs protested this change, having grown used to being bent at an angle for so long. He wobbled a bit and Caleb caught him by the shoulder. “This has never been just your fight, Molly. You made that clear to us when you first met Cree. You can protect us from this if you feel you need to, but not everything is on your shoulders. We can shoulder some of it, since we are all entangled in these loose ends now.”

“You’re so full of hypocrisies, Caleb.” He hadn’t meant it to come out so snide and exasperated, but it must have rubbed a raw nerve no matter the intent, because Caleb pulled back quickly and suddenly where he'd been so stalwart before.

“Ja. Well. We have that in common, don’t we, Mollymauk?” His eyes darkened and he began to walk back to the others, leaving Molly to watch him go with an utterly miserable expression, like he'd just fulfilled some prophecy he was avoiding by being too fucking glib.

A low growl emanated from the back of his mind and Molly pressed his thumb nail into the eye on his palm until it quieted down. It wasn't Caleb he was angry at- it was himself.

Despite everything, the camp had not split down the middle and the situation was being handled as fairly as it could be. Fjord and Jester had forced her and Cree apart and into separate corners like kids in timeout, so Beau was slumped in the cart with her arms crossed, waiting for someone to ask if her head had cooled down enough to invite her back out. She was starting to go crazy from the isolation- she could see everyone being served tea and just chilling while they couldn't see her at all- when Fjord climbed up into the cart, balancing two teacups in his left hand.

“There you go. Only spilled about half of both, so at least we’re even.”

She took one of the teacups and sipped at it. Fuck. Caduceus’s damn tea had no right to be this good. “Anyone tryin’ to vote me outta the group?”

“For fuck’s sake, Beau. If your personality was enough to get you kicked out, we would have ditched you after you strangled a kid.” Fjord chuckled into his teacup and she uncurled one leg out from underneath her to kick at him.

“Whatever, man. That wasn’t even my worst moment. This wasn’t even my worst moment. Cree didn’t have to slap me.”

“Well, you made it kinda personal.” Fjord took another sip. “Not sayin’ she was right either, but this ain’t exactly an ideal arrangement. We’ve all gotta… Make adjustments.”

Beau leaned forwards, speaking softly so not to be overheard. “I don’t wanna accommodate her cult-y ass if she’s gonna try to fuck off with Molly. I know he’s… trying to win her over, but she is super gone on Lucien. That’s all she wants.”

“Well maybe now that there’s some transparency goin’ on and we’ve roughed each other up now, we can work this out like we always do- by stumblin’ through it until it gets us somewhere.” Fjord laid his empty teacup aside. “That ability of Molly’s… That’s something else.”

“He basically exsanguinated a guy in the Sour Nest.” Beau winced. “I think it’s tied to, like… his anger.”

Fjord blinked. “His anger?”

Beau rifled through her bag to produce her latest journal, full of scrawlings of everything that had happened since the Iron Shepherds. “He spent most of that fight in the Sour Nest pissed as hell, and you saw him just now with the perytons- when Caleb went down, something in him just snapped.”

He only seemed to blink more. She couldn’t blame him. All of this was ridiculous and fucked up. “So every time he gets real mad, he might… Implode something’s brain?”

“He’s definitely worried about it- and now I can see why.” She sighed and kneaded the heel of her hand into her eyes. “It was probably a dick move to go behind his back like Caleb and I did, but he’s so fuckin’ stubborn. He’d let this eat him alive before he did anything about it.”

“Or got us dragged under with him.” Fjord chewed on the inside of his cheek and looked away, but Beau knew that look and she filed it away for later. Something about Molly’s situation definitely resonated with Fjord and his own situation, but she could only take one person’s personal demon bullshit at a time. Fjord’s wet dreams had to wait their turn.

“I know he won’t go off on his own. He-” Speaking of things resonating. She winced and course-corrected the structure of her next words to keep herself from looking vulnerable. “He doesn’t wanna leave.”

He needs this. Just like you do. She never thought that would be the common ground she shared with Molly. Sure, Molly’s ground was well-tended and vibrant and blooming and hers was salted and burned, but what they wanted to grow there was the same. Connections. Bonds. People who stuck by them and didn’t leave them lonely when shit got too real.

She gripped her journal a little tighter. “So he’s gonna pull himself together and we’re not gonna let him deal with this alone anymore. Everyone knows now. There’s no reason to act like it’s something that oughta be hidden and ignored.”

“And Cree?” Fjord arched a brow.

Beau narrowed her eyes to livid slits, but she did not bare her lioness teeth again. She would be patient. She would endure. She would wait.“I’ll ring her goddamned bell so hard, they’ll hear it in Vasselheim if she touches me again, but beyond that, we just keep moving forwards.”

Until they actually had something real to fight.

Molly walked back to the group at a slower pace than Caleb, his tail all but tucked between his legs. Jester was taking the antlers from the perytons and had assembled a pile of them into some kind of strange roadside art installation while everyone else milled about awkwardly, so she was the first to see his penitent march.

“Molly!” She threw down the last antler and leapt to her feet, tackling him into a hug. “I thought you ran off and weren’t coming back.”

Her hug was so forceful he felt like his ribs might actually snap under the pressure, but he couldn’t bear to ask her to let him go so he could breathe. He just hugged her back and ran a hand through her hair until her grip began to loosen up on its own. “Shhh. It’s all right. It’s all shite, but I’m not mad at anyone. I knew you were all terrible when I got involved with you.”

Beau and Fjord had climbed out of the cart at the sound of Jester shouting, though Beau kept her eyes down. Caleb was grabbing the horse he usually selected for himself and was entirely focused on it to the point of ignoring all else. Molly felt his heart clench guiltily. He shouldn’t have provoked him like that.

He sighed. Nothing to be done with regret. Two steps forward, three steps back, and it wasn’t like he could control the rate of this dance, anyway- the tempo was more than he could keep up with. Caleb needed a great deal more help than a whirlwind romance with an errant and fucked up carnie could offer, anyway. Maybe it was for the best that he pushed him a little bit farther away before they both ended up hurt.

Jester finally released him, allowing Cree to step closer, her expression holding all the anger Molly had just pushed into a corner and covered with a sheet. “You are not angry? They undermined your wishes, went behind your back! They did not trust you to handle your own problems.”

“Like you did?” Molly exhaled. For once Cree didn’t look cowed or shocked- that was exactly what she had been doing. Respecting his wishes even when it was inconvenient for both of them. As much as he’d hate to admit it (and therefore wouldn’t), Beau and Caleb had shown more love for him by going behind his back. They knew this was too dangerous for him to handle alone and had tried to come up with an alternative without having to burden him with the knowledge.

He could absolutely despise what they did while also knowing it wasn’t actually wrong in any way beyond his own personal code of ethics. That was why he hated the truth. You always owe it more than what you’re willing to give, and the worst of that debt comes due in the form of admitting your way of thinking isn’t right. Molly had built himself from nothing. He didn’t want to change who he was. Admitting he was wrong meant having to adjust his views to accommodate it.

Petty, childish, and utterly self-destructive, but he had so little of himself. What else was he supposed to do but hold on to even the worst of him with both hands?

He had to learn to let go of it sometime by his own hands, because otherwise it would be ripped from him without his say or without his control. Little by little, he felt his grip slipping, allowing change to filter in before he could recognize it for what it was. It scared him just as much as the eyes waking up and adding things to him he didn’t ask for did, but to actively resist change like this was to alienate his friends and allow himself to stagnate and then change would occur anyway. A different sort- one that might make him resentful and cruel.

Change was inevitable. He was not an errant twig yanked from a tree and left to be carried and never progress beyond that. He was a cutting that had been repotted and grown into the start of a different tree, and that sapling needed to become something beautiful and grand and not the same twisting and cruel and gnarled thing that the original had likely been.

With all that in mind, he took another deep breath and stepped closer to Cree. “They weren’t undermining me. That’s not how we do things here. My word isn’t law, dear. You don’t have to listen to anything I say and neither do they. I like it when they do. It’s a good feeling and I am usually right.” (Beau scoffed loudly, and he ignored her.) “But you don’t have to agree with me about everything.”

“Perspective,” Caduceus piped up. Molly felt approval radiating off of him, like everything he’d said was something he’d been waiting for someone to say. “We all need it sometimes. I don’t have a lot of experience with groups, but I do have some experience with people, especially people dealing with grief. You can’t get anywhere if everyone has the same opinion. You have to figure it all out for yourself by hearing different takes and deciding which one is going to work in the moment.”

“They were looking out for me when I was doing a shite job of looking out for myself,” Molly continued, which snapped Cree’s open-mouth gape down, entirely. “And furthermore, you had enough spine to slap Beauregard, so I know you don’t have a problem standing up for yourself if you really want to. You don’t have to only stand up for me or… Or Lucien.”

Cree looked like she was trying to keep her neck straight with a godlike amount of effort, like the urge to bow her head deferentially was overwhelming. She hissed through clenched teeth. “So. We continue on and dismiss this as… a brief inter-party disagreement with no repercussions?”

“I’d really question how Lucien ran things when he was in charge, but, honestly, I don’t actually want to know.” Molly winced. “I will say that….” The wince became a full body cringe. “...That once we’re out of Hupperdook, I do want to know more about these.” He held up his hand. “How to… to control them or make it all stop. I’ll explain everything I’m dealing with and you can explain what you know, but just… Not now. Soon. But not now.”

Cree blinked at him- or more specifically, she blinked at the eye on his palm. Her shoulders slumped in what he could only imagine was relief that made his own skin crawl, but there was nothing else to be done. It was time to start growing and hope the roots he put down were strong enough to keep him from being forcefully replanted again. “After Hupperdook, then. It would be… Good to understand more before we reached Tyffial.”

She turned and went to collect her horse and Molly couldn’t bear to meet the eyes of any of the Nein. They all heard him make this proclamation, so they could either hold him to it or discourage him, but the veil of lies and deception had been lifted and trust and transparency now reigned supreme here… For the most part. There were still emotions and feelings he was burying under layers of bullshit, but he could deal with that. He’d been dealing with that all of his life- two years worth, but that was enough to become decent at coping with negativity.

When he finally went to claim his horse, he accidentally met Caleb’s eyes and noted, with a traitorous heart that seemed to have forgotten what he’d already convinced it of a moment ago, that he was watching him with a softened expression.

And then they both tore their gazes away at the same time.

The remaining two days on the road were awkward, but full of harmless, unloaded conversations. There was discussion of what travelers on the road might think of the artistically piled peryton antlers and then further discussion of why an entire flock of the creatures had come this far from the mountains. This was how Cree learned of the persistent hunger that seemed to be consuming creatures of the Empire for no apparent reason.

She kept her memories of the great and terrible hunger of Cognouza to herself. Surely there was no connection to that. Surely this was happening everywhere and not a direct correlation to Mollymauk’s presence, as if the Somnovem’s reach were extending far beyond their means. Even she would have found that altogether too frightening, especially to not be aware of it at all as their priestess.

The dome’s sleeping arrangements were uncomfortably close with lingering tension still hanging in the air and the watches Cree took even more so. She spoke as little as she could get away with, turning Molly’s words over in her head in the silences.

“And furthermore, you had enough spine to slap Beauregard, so I know you don’t have a problem standing up for yourself if you really want to. You don’t have to only stand up for me or… Or Lucien.”

Years of her life had been wasted bowing her head and yet it still came so naturally to her that she could not stop herself from the instinct, and, therefore, had simply stopped noticing it, entirely. The thought infuriated her- she had her freedom! She was bound to nothing but that which she chose and yet she defaulted to deferential politeness and keeping her eyes down when asked something by someone higher in the pecking order than her- a demand… a request.

Could she tell the difference anymore? Lucien had blended the two so seamlessly together. His requests always felt like something she could never say no to, and she argued that she didn’t want to say no to them, anyway.

She churned these thoughts over in her mind until her head ached and she welcomed the din of conversation during the day to block it all out, even if she kept herself from making offerings to it unless asked. It was… fascinating, in a way, to see what they talked about when there was no longer anything hanging over their heads they cared to acknowledge. By the second day, the tension had eased out of everyone but her and Beauregard, but it seemed as though that was simply Beau’s natural state- she always held herself like she was coiled and ready to fight something.

They arrived in Hupperdook by the time night fell and Cree was quietly rejoicing the possibility of a private room and not something so tight, leaving her pressed in with an untrusting collection of travelers who might slip a blade under her ribs while she slept, when the sound of an explosion tore the serenity from her. The sky crackled with light and sparks, and she remembered that she hated this place.

“Whoa. You all right, Cree?” Beau said, sliding her horse closer to her. “Your fur’s all poofed up.”

Her fur was, indeed, poofed up and she stifled a yowl as another explosion and flash of light ruined a perfectly good evening. “Indeed. I am not a fan of these as such…”

“These?” Beau looked up as another firework exploded. “Oh shit. The fireworks. That’s what your creepy halfling friend was trying to say.”

Jester had hopped out of the cart and started walking next to her, bracketing her in. “It’s okay, Cree. We’re gonna be inside soon and you won’t have to-” She paused as another thunderous boom brought another burst of light to the sky. Cree’s ears flattened to her skill. “You can still hear it, huh?”

“I can,” she grumbled.

Beau chuckled, darkly, and Cree could not tell if this was mockery or some sort of bullshit Beauregard-brand type of forgiveness. “Whelp. Only one solution. Time to get shitfaced.”

“Hour of Honor!” Molly shouted in glee. “Who’s participating? Nott’s our ringer. She has to do it.”

Nott twirled her wrist in a small bow from her spot on Caleb’s horse. “Thank you. I take my position with pride. No autographs please.”

“I think I will sit this one out after last time. Someone else can take my place. Fjord?” Caleb glanced his way.

Fjord considered that. “Sure. I could go a round.”

“Your lovely ladyfriend will be delighted,” Molly beamed, turning Fjord a few shades of red that didn’t complement the green of his skin.

“Well, I lost my round, so I’m goin’ again,” Beau stuck her nose in the air, contemptuously, daring anyone to argue with her.

Cree knew damn well what the Hour of Honor was. The Tombtakers had taken part in it years ago when they came through. That was a simpler time, however, and yet... “I… Erm.” She swallowed. The fireworks were still going and therefore her nerves were shot, leaving her more awkward than usual. “I am actually quite good at this. Perhaps I can-”

All eyes jerked her way, but only Molly’s eyes frightened her- he was mischievously delighted. Not enough like Lucien to make her heart stutter, but close enough to hurt. “Oh, I have to see this. You can have my spot.”

Fuck. What had she gotten herself into? Now that she’d bragged, she couldn’t exactly back out, now could she? So this is what confidence will get you. “...All right.”

“Just try not to get robbed by kids this time, guys,” Jester snickered.

Molly shrugged. “If the Schusters are still robbing drunks while their parents are around… Honestly, I’m proud of them. I hope they took some of my lessons to heart about not taking everything.”

Cree’s mind drifted, then, back to another time. Lucien scruffing a teenager somewhere that tried to pick his pocket. ”Did you know street urchins are basically prey animals? You see, it’s like this. If a rabbit is slow enough to get caught, it’s got no business runnin’ up to a fox and smackin’ it in the face. That sound about right?”

He’d let the kid go, but for a horrifying second Cree thought Lucien was going to snap his neck for the insult of trying to steal from him or seriously hurt him as a lesson to carry back with him. There had been no kindness in that moment, despite the fact that he had been that child before the Orders. He’d been an older version of him after. There were days that all they could do was steal because there was simply no work for them, and yet he looked at that child with such contempt, as if he was above him.

In the end, Lucien’s mercy extended as far as scaring the kid and leaving him to run home sobbing. He’d learned by being handled roughly and would impart the same lessons by deigning himself the cruel-to-be-kind patriarch of all broken, lost, and orphaned things, as an imitation of Antioch Dodger, the Run's most successful grifter. She never understood why Lucien emulated someone that he had hated so much.

The fireworks continued to make starbursts in the sky, rattling her nerves, but she endured, lost as she was in the striking dissimilarity of Lucien and Molly once again. Was this what Lucien could have been if he’d just been handled gently and with love- if Ophelia had kept him, if the Jagentoths hadn't hunted him, if Dodger had not bullied him, and on and on and on- or was Molly truly unique and Lucien never had any hope at all?

The thought weighed on her all the way into Blushing Tankard Tavern, and she felt she had never been so thrilled to have a drink and numb these thoughts out of her head in her life.

“Do my eyes deceive me?!” Irena Clommop gasped, nearly dropping the tankards she was dealing out to a couple of burly looking gnomes, still dirty from their work. “It’s our former Hour of Honor champions, the Mighty Nein! Come to defend their title at last!” She whirled without spilling a drop of the ale. “Oi! You buggers best be cautious. You lot won on a technicality last time.”

The ‘buggers’ she was talking about were a group of unfamiliar characters that looked less rowdy than the last group they scrapped with over drinks, but more colorful for it. Molly gave them a cheeky little wave and then turned to Irena who had finally remembered she was supposed to be serving drinks and not hyping the crowd up.

“Irena, lovely as ever! Have you done something new with your hair?”

“Oh, I’m glad you noticed.” She twirled a finger around the new little curl in her chinstrap beard. “I see you’ve still got that strapping half-orc with you.” She flashed Fjord a wink and Jester immediately turned as red as he did, albeit for a different reason.

“Hey Fjord, maybe you should let me be in the Hour of Honor instead,” she hissed, suddenly.

Fjord was choking on air from Irena’s attempts to work her magic on him and Molly relished in the chaos that had been unleashed without him even having to do anything. Fjord always made it all too easy.

“Jester, you don’t even drink,” he protested.

She planted one hand on her hip and cocked it just so, the image of someone who was not going to be the one to back down. “I can drink! I just don’t like to, but you know I am all about competition. I could totally take those guys.”

“I dunno, Jes….” Fjord looked up at Irena who had started to sashay to the bar, drawing attention to her hips. He bit his lip and looked away abruptly. “Shit. Yeah, okay. I dunno what that woman might do if I actually do something attractive instead of just standin' here mindin' my own.”

Molly snorted at Fjord’s nervous attempt at a joke. “I don’t think you have to try for her to get her knickers off, but no one’s really attractive when they’re chugging ale. It just… It doesn’t happen.”

Fjord buried his face in his hands no sooner had the word knickers left his mouth and Molly let him break in peace, backing down in favor of doing a little casual investigating of the situation. The bar was crowded, as expected, but neither Rissa or Yasha were anywhere in attendance- he would've spotted either of them among the sea of unfamiliar faces. Yasha wasn’t that worrisome- she would come in her own time, but he expected Rissa wouldn’t want to miss out on the Hour of Honor. Surely the novelty didn't wear off just because you lived here. “Hey, Irena. How’re the Tinkertops doing?”

Irena was in the process of setting them up with drinks on Beau’s request and didn’t look up from her task. “Oh, they’re doing fine, I suspect. Clef’s still nuttier than a squirrel’s shit, but Rissa’s been helpin’ him. A lot fewer errant inventions that way. I imagine she’ll be along soon enough.” She came out from around the bar and slapped their drinks on the table. “Now you will be competin’ in the Hour of Honor again, right? You wouldn’t make the lovely Irena Clommop out to be a liar, now would you?”

“Absolutely not.” Molly placed a hand over his heart. “We’re feeling so bold even that we’re not even gonna use the same line-up.”

“Ohhhh ho ho,” Irena chuckled. “Brassy. I like that. I see you’ve got a few new faces too.” She gave Caduceus a once-over. “You’re a tall drink of water. My mother always said that a Clommop couldn’t resist a tall man. That’s why she left my da for a human first chance she got.” She laughed at her own joke and the rest of the table gave her an awkward laugh out of desperation to not be insulting to the person who judges their competition (barring Molly, who howled with conviction).

“Well, you know,” Fjord coughed, diving right in like he sensed an opportunity. “Caduceus here is a very charming individual. One of the most charming I’ve ever met.”

Caduceus smiled vacuously. “You must not have met very many people, but that’s nice. Thanks, Fjord.”

Irena slid a little closer to Caduceus and wrapped her arms around his, because that was as far as she could reach. “Oh you’re funny too.

“Oh, do you want a hug?” Caduceus gently extracted his arm from her and pulled her into a fond embrace. “There you go. That's nice.”

The barmaid froze in confusion and then relaxed in his arms. “Oh… Oh, that is nice.” She pulled back, a shy smile that belied her usual expression of boisterous enthusiasm and flirtatiousness. “You’re a sweetheart. Your drinks are on the house.”

“He doesn’t even drink!” Molly shouted, indignantly, as she went to prepare for the Hour of Honor, which mostly meant yelling at a couple of busboys to clear a table and move it to the middle of the room.

“What was that about?” Beau shot immediately at Caduceus.

“She was totally into you!” Nott exclaimed, right on her heels.

“She thought she was, anyway,” Molly added, slumping in his chair and mock-pouting that he hadn’t gotten free drinks out of her, even after being so flirty and gracious.

“Oh… Was that what that was about?” Caduceus blinked. “Huh. Guess I missed that. I don’t really do that sort of thing, and it really looked like she needed the hug. She probably doesn’t get a whole lot of them in a place like this.”

“Wait. Wait. Back up!” Nott slapped her hands on the table. She had to stand up on her chair to get the full effect. “You don’t do that sort of thing what?”

“I think he means flirting, Nott.” Fjord had turned red again, but the source of his embarrassment was different this time- more mortification than anything. He’d just thrown Caduceus to a wolf without even considering that he might not even comprehend the situation he was being tossed into.

“Any of it,” Caduceus shrugged. “It’s fun watching other people get caught up in all of that, but I don’t really bother with it.”

Molly was quick to break the mingled acceptance (and deep confusion) that had settled over the table. “You know.. That actually explains a lot. No one who is into anyone has ever shared a bed with me and not come out of it completely in love.”

“Get out, Molly.” Beau grabbed a handful of complimentary mixed nuts and began to ping them off his horns. He tilted his head, trying to catch them in his mouth, instead, and he nearly forgot the hurt that still lingered in the fringes about her going behind his back to the Soul. If he pretended it was fine long enough, then it would be so. Fake it until you make it.

Irena gave a sharp whistle and the bar hushed to await her announcement. Their attention all on her, she stepped up onto a table, assisted by the busboys who helped her like she was a queen ascending a throne. “All right! You sorry sods know what time it is! We’ve got the Mighty Nein.” A cheer went up- clearly they were remembered and Molly preened that he really did end up getting a little bit famous for this shit. “And the Clockwork Hounds, our current champions!” She gestured to the wild-looking lot she pointed out when they first entered and the crowd cheered louder with a series of yips and howls interspersed between.

“Popular group,” Caleb noted.

“They’re a bunch of arseholes is what they are,” a familiar voice piped up. Molly whirled and grinned as Rissa Tinkertop slid into an empty seat at their table, uninvited. “Well, I didn’t expect to see you back so soon.”

“I owed you a drink,” Molly signaled one of the other barmaids to bring one over for her.

“That you did.” She accepted the ale and saluted him with it. After her first hearty swig, she noticed Caduceus and Cree. “See you’ve got some new faces here.” She reached over to offer her hand. “Rissa Tinkertop. Your friends got my da out of a situation he put himself into.”

“They seem to make friends wherever they go,” Cree murmured, releasing Rissa’s hand from where her own had nearly swallowed it.

Rissa shrugged and took another swig of her ale. “I dunno about that, but they certainly made a lot of friends here.”

Molly rested his chin on his hand. “How’re Ashton and Fitz?”

She barked a laugh. “Hah! Same arseholes as always, but they probably saw you coming a mile away and went crawling home without their evening’s respite.”

He slapped the table, barking a laugh of his own. “I hate having a reputation, but I love the one we’ve made in this town.”

“Speaking of reputation. Your girl's up against a real firecracker.” Rissa pointed over his shoulder to where the Hour of Honor had already begun. Beau must have slipped away to take the first spot, challenging a young, scrawny female human with hair so red it bordered on being sunset-orange. A pair of goggles were tangled up in it so thoroughly that it would probably take a knife to remove them.

“Beau might actually win this one,” Fjord observed. “That girl looks like a stiff wind would knock her over.”

"That’s Eda. She’s batfuck crazy." Rissa gestured to the skinny girl with a look of respect Molly hadn't seen on her face before. "I wouldn’t count her out.”

The Nein quickly abandoned their place to find a table closer to the action. Seeing them, a group of gnomes relinquished their own seats with civility and took their original table in exchange. “I love this town,” Molly sighed in contentment. He thought Zadash would heal his wounds, but this was what he really needed- more local flair and good hard-working people who didn't have more money than sense.

Beau leaned across the table, waiting for the signal. Eda, as Rissa called her, was vapidly staring at the crowd. “Hey, kid, are you even old enough to be drinking?”

Eda snapped to attention and just grinned so big that Beau actually shrank back in apprehension. Molly couldn’t blame her for that. There was something objectively terrifying about that girl. “I dunno. Are you?”

Irena gave the signal and Beau choked down her drink rapidly, going for speed and endurance to prevent her from thinking too hard about losing it all across the table. Eda took hers at a more leisurely pace and still finished it off before Beau reached the bottom, having had to pause to choke on her own puke at one point.

“Don’t fuck it up, Beau!” Molly yelled. In response, Beau lifted her middle finger, winced violently like she was fighting back something, and then proceeded to regurgitate most of her liquor straight back into her tankard along with this afternoon's jerky. A stream of curses followed.

“A rough start for the Mighty Nein!” Irena barked. Eda skipped back to the rest of the Hounds like she hadn’t just chugged her own weight in liquor, while Beau swayed back to the Nein’s table.

“Fuuuck I can’t believe I lost again.” She thunked her head against the table.

“To a little girl.” Molly patted her on the back with one hand and shoved another tankard at her. If anything was going to get him to start to forgive Beau for the whole ‘going behind his back’ thing, it was a series of humblings.

“Fuck you, Molly,” she muttered, snatching the offered tankard and lifting it to her lips to drink more slowly this time. “Well here’s to more hair of the hound that beat me.”

Irena called for the next challengers and another human stepped up- a leggy man with dark, curly hair who moved with a sense of rhythm. He had an instrument case strapped to his back, suggesting he might be a bard of some sort. Jester leapt up, and Fjord caught her arm before she could take up the challenge.

“Jes, are you sure you wanna do this?” He asked.

“It’s okay, Fjord.” She patted his hand until he let her go. “I got this.”

She skipped the same way Eda had and slid across from her opponent. She rested her chin under her hands and just grinned up at him, her tail flicking lazily behind her. A distraction technique if Molly ever saw one. “What kind of instrument do you play?”

“Trumpet,” he responded in a smooth drawl. He looked her over. “You’re not going to cry if you lose, are you? I hate it when girls cry.”

Molly saw the twitch in Jester’s mouth. That was going to be the last mistake he made. That girl was a team player and a good sport until she started to feel threatened. Then she got mean. “I hate it when anyone cries, so don’t feel too bad when I beat you, okay? ”

Irena called for the start of the round again and Jester wrinkled her nose, tried to chug the ale as fast as possible to get it over with, and handled the task far better than Beau did. She wobbled in place but she kept chugging long after her opponent fell over in a tangle of long limbs and trumpet case.

“Oh! That’s gonna leave a mark,” Irena winced. “Victory to the Mighty Nein! And someone get Lance off my floor.”

Jester lowered her empty tankard. Foam coated her upper lip in a faux mustache. “I won?!” She stood up so fast and so suddenly that her chair clattered to the floor. “I won!”

“Don’t rub it in,” Lance, now supported by a couple of elves who were tall enough to pick his gangly ass up, muttered as he was led back to the Hounds.

Jester was still bouncing excitedly, but once she began to tilt, Fjord leapt up to keep her from cracking her skull open on the floor. “Easy does it, Jessie.”

“Was I super cool, Fjord?” She slurred as she stumbled back to her seat, putting more of her weight on him than was strictly necessary.

“Very cool,” he nodded. “You okay?”

She stuck her tongue out. “Alcohol tastes so bad. Why does winning taste like pee?”

Fjord chuckled and helped her sit in a way that kept her from just falling to the floor, positioned between him and Caduceus, and Molly turned to Cree once he was sure Jester was secured. “You’re up. We always make Nott go last.”

“Because I’m unbeatable,” Nott nodded, swigging from her flask.

Cree sighed and stood up with the resignation of someone who clearly didn’t make an arse of herself enough. They’d break her of that soon enough. The process was already starting. “Very well,” she said, demurely.

She took her seat across from an elvish woman with short hair the color of blackberries and sharp green eyes. “Look at the kitty cat,” she purred.

Cree bared her teeth and the elf woman backed down, immediately. Lance, drunkenly, yelled, “Show her your teeth, Fayne!” He then proceeded to bark and howl. Eda immediately joined in.

Fayne scowled over her shoulder at them both and waited for the signal. Once given, both she and Cree began at the same pace, but she began to falter while Cree just kept chugging along. By the time Cree slammed down the empty tankard, Fayne was only half finished. She tried to lift it back to her lips, but couldn’t manage it.

“Shit! I’m out.” She pushed away from the table and ran to get sick in the corner, but either on purpose or because she couldn’t get to her target in time, she ended up vomiting on Lance’s shoes. The crowd got a good laugh at that and Lance’s barking shifting into a beleaguered wailing only sweetened their delight.

Molly was howling in glee as Cree made her way back, barely swaying. “Look at you! Didn’t even break a sweat.”

“I told you-I am quite good at this.” She took her seat and her ale and resumed drinking as if she hadn’t just downed an entire tankard in record time.

“I like this one,” Rissa pointed, leaning on Molly a bit.

“I think she’s growing on us,” Molly giggled. He was in his cups already just from knocking back drink after drink like he was playing his own personal Hour of Honor home game in the corner. He’d been so absorbed in watching and joking around and just being free and playful, he hadn’t quite realized how much social lubricant he was applying until the world began to get fuzzy around the edges.

Well, fuck it. The one thing he didn’t do in Zadash was get wasted beyond belief- a little high, yeah, but not a good old-fashioned Hupperdook party bender. This could be the thing that fixes him, because surely there was just one thing out here that would knock everything back into alignment the way it was before.

It seemed reasonable to him, especially in his current state.

He came back to reality, which remained fuzzy even when he focused on it, to the whole crowd chanting. Nott was taking advantage of her legacy of effectively trampling the last person who tried to challenge her by working the crowd as she marched to the table where a grumpy, balding dwarf with mutton chops and a short beard was rolling his eyes.

“You think you’re hot shit, huh?” He chuckled. His voice matched his presence- gravelly and deep and already over it. And it could mean anything from the spectacle to Nott’s grandstanding.

“Don’t let her scare you, Obsidian,” Lance cheered, having forgotten about his ruined shoes. Fayne was slumped, pretty much unconscious, and drooling on his shoulder while Eda sat cross-legged on top of their table and chanted made-up rhymes that were probably meant to be cheers.

“Obsidian?” Nott choked. “Did your parents run a jewelry store? What kind of name is that?”

“They were miners from Byroden,” he growled through a smile that looked wolfish. “Why do they call you Nott?”

Nott took a pre-game sip from her flask and gestured for her tankard to be filled. “Because I’m Nott About to Lose.”

Molly wanted to groan at that, but the alcohol said that was hilarious and therefore he reacted accordingly- doubled over the table and wheezing. He missed the start of the round due to his face being buried in the table, but when he looked up the two of them were half finished with neither showing any sign of slowing. They slammed their tankards down in unison, glared at each other… and neither wavered.

“Well!” Irena laughed. “It’s a rare thing we see somebody go through one tankard of my ale that fast without someone findin’ out what it tastes like comin’ back up. Seconds, you two?”

“Bring it on,” Nott scoffed. “I can do this all day.”

“The scary thing-” Beau hiccuped, “-is I think she actually can.”

“This is going to get ugly,” Caleb sing-songed, drawing Fjord’s attention away from a groaning Jester.

“For which one?”

Caleb went back to his ale without giving an answer. The crowd had quieted now that it had turned from a surefire win for Nott to an actual challenge. Faced with the belief that Nott might lose, Molly turned to Rissa.

“What happens if we tie?” He immediately shut his eyes when the act of turning his head proved to be far too much for him to handle at the moment.

Rissa tilted her chair back on two legs. “The Hounds and you lot will have to pull up a tiebreaker. They’ll either send Eda back in or get someone in the crowd to tap in for ‘em since they’ve got fewer people than you.”

“You might have to go in after all, Fjord.” Beau attempted to bump his shoulder with her fist, but missed and hit him in his pec, instead.

“Don’t punch Fjord in his tits, Beeaaaau,” Jester slurred, looking up from where she’d been laying her head down. “They’re sensitive.”

“Shit. Are they really?” She tried to poke him again, but Fjord smacked her hand away.

“This ain’t drunken groping time or a good place to talk about the sensitivity of my pecs, thank you. Maybe you both need some water.” He cleared his throat and moved Jester’s wandering hand back down onto the table before she squeezed his pectoral in a fit of curiosity. “Uh. Barmaid? Some water over here, please.”

Molly definitely needed water, but he settled for more ale. That had water in it. Sort of. Whatever, he’d work on water later. Now was for pints. The pints kept him from making eye contact with Cree as she watched him drink himself stupid.

“Pace yourself, Mollymuk,” she whispered. Her words had enough of a slur to them that Molly felt she was in no position to argue with his choices.

By now, Nott and Obsidian were on their fourth round and the tavern had turned from excited to terrified at where this could turn. Both dwarf and goblin were glaring across the table, but neither had reached for their latest tankards- even Irena wasn’t attempting to force rules or order into this battle of wills. She was too busy preparing for what would be unleashed when the smoke cleared.

Nott reached for the tankard. Obsidian made an attempt but instead of grabbing the handle, he missed entirely and knocked the whole thing over, spilling ale across the table, while Nott just downed half of her own. Molly was certain that despite her being lit more often than she wasn’t, she’d never been quite this drunk, which could be a problem.

Well, it was the sort of problem that people tended to have in Hupperdook. He shrugged that off as well as he did his own drunkenness and gave Nott the cheers she’d earned. The crowd was excited and absolutely terrified by the sheer power Nott carried within that tiny body of hers and when Irena passed over the winning title, she collected the chips from her shaking hands and began to stagger back to the Nein, leaving Obsidian to faceplant into his spilled ale.

“Don’t say I never did anything for you,” Nott slurred, tossing the tokens for their free drinks on the table. Caleb had to basically scruff her by the back of her cloak to even get her back into a chair.

“Are you all right, Nott?” He asked, knitting his brows.

“Never better, Cay-Cay. That dwarf wasn’t so tough.” She blew a raspberry in the general direction of the Clockwork Hounds’ table. “Amateurs.”

“Hnngh,” Jester groaned. Her enthusiasm for her victory inebriation had ended now that they had their winnings, apparently. “Mooollly, can you do that thing you did last time? You know, where you pulled all of the alcohol out of Beau?”

Molly blinked away his focus on Caleb tending to Nott, which was good, because left to his own devices, he might linger too long on that, wishing he was being tended to like that. “Huh? Oh… Oh, of course, dear. I can do that.” He shifted off the chair, nearly tripped, and caught himself on the back of Beau’s chair, shuffling around to where Jester was flailing a hand out for him to take.

This wasn’t easy when he was only a little bit wasted, but it was a new ability then. He’d actually been excited for something strange and new, for once, when he figured it out, just for how many practical uses it could have. Unlike everything else, it didn’t feel like something he was borrowing from another person.

Maybe Lucien just didn’t use it that often.

He caught Cree observing him as he drained the alcohol out of Jester’s pores and let it drop to the floor (much to Beau’s disdain- apparently, she still found the whole process weird, even if it did cure the hangover), but didn’t acknowledge her until she spoke up. “...You are using one of your Blood Maledicts as a cure for inebriation?” She blinked slowly.

“The hangover, more like,” he shrugged. “I think the effects are a done deal, at this point, but at least Jester won’t have to suffer the aftermath of her arrogance.”

“Thank you, Molly,” Jester tapped her horns against his and then reached for the water Fjord had been trying to get her to drink.

“It is… a unique use for it to be certain,” Cree frowned. “Lucien only used it to drain poisons from us, but it was not often useful. Two of our number were immune to poisons entirely, after all.”

“Which two and is one of them Otis?” Nott leaned on the table. Her eyes weren’t blinking at the same rhythm and Cree’s raking gaze looked as though it accepted the state of her as reason enough to not take offense by any implications.

“Tyffial and her brother, Jurrell.”

“The one… The one who died, right?” Molly hiccuped.

Cree’s jaw twitched. “Died implies that it was a natural or accidental death. He was arrested and beheaded by the Righteous Brand.”

Beau hissed through her teeth. She was, apparently, not drunk enough yet to not still be in information gathering mode. Of course not. “D’you know what he did?” Off Cree’s suspicious squint, she added, “Look. People don’t get executed by the military for petty crimes, all right?”

“You ask too many questions,” Molly interjected, preventing Cree from answering while her defenses were down and drawing Beau’s gaze to him.

“I’m just curious.” She was trying to steel her tone, keep things measured and off the defensive when it came to him, like she was trying to make up for everything. The problem was it had happened and as much as he wanted to ignore it, the facts were there, refusing to be drowned by the alcohol and exacerbated by Beau continuing to gingerly press her thumbs into this gaping fucking wound.

“You don’t have to know everything.” He stood quickly to avoid the argument or, worse, the lack of one. If he and Beau argued then it would prove things were not okay and he was more bothered than he let on. If Beau refused to fight, it meant she was handling him with kid gloves. He wanted no part of either.

The fiddlers were playing and he had a sudden urge to dance. If the liquor wouldn’t remove all of the cares of the past week, then dancing would. He offered a hand to Jester and led her out onto the space that had been cleared. She was still a little bleary-eyed, but she was more giggly than miserable, and it didn’t take long for her to push him out of the sour mood that had started to build itself back up as she twirled under his arm and yanked him back onto his feet when he nearly tripped.

“You’re so drunk, Molly,” she laughed… but was it his imagination or did she sound a little nervous? He wondered if she suspected something, if she was still holding onto everything that happened after the perytons. For a moment between songs, the world was suspended between two different warring sides of himself- drunk Molly with no filter who wanted to rant and scream and get all of his emotions out properly and drunk Molly who just wanted to remain in a blissful wonderland of hedonistic vices and not think or talk about anything.

Either could have been where the needle landed- it depended on Jester. No, that wasn’t fair to put that on her. She was clearly going through her own shit. (He told Fjord he’d talk to her, and then neither of them could really bring themselves to do it. He would've tried to help her through his cards, but look at how that ended last time.)

In the end, Jester decided for him, anyway, and just squeezed his hand before pulling away, her eyes fixated on a point behind him and out of focus. “I’m getting dizzy. I should go sit down.”

“Drink water,” he slurred, burying his emotions again. Maybe they would stay where they were put for the rest of the night.

“You too.” She poked him in the nose and then pushed her way through the crowd to get back to the table, leaving Molly stranded on the dancefloor. The pianist had taken over for the fiddler and was playing a soft, slower melody that he instinctively swayed to. A singer crooned out lyrics that even his alcohol-addled brain could interpret. A love song. Of all the things to play, they play a love song.

And of all the people to come and join him, it was Caleb who moved through the crowd that Jester had just parted, as awkward as ever, but unfairly beautiful all the same. It was harder to pretend not to be hurt when he was right in front of him and their individual attentions were pointed right at one another. It was even harder to say anything about it when it might make Caleb walk away again.

“You don’t look well, Mollymauk,” Caleb sighed. “You are nearly as deep into it as Nott is, and you were not even competing.”

“That’s a bit unfair. I haven’t had… That many.” He tried to count and then realized he had actually lost count somewhere. It was a miracle he was still upright and capable of carrying on a conversation, much less tearing up this dancefloor.

“You’ve had enough.” Caleb sighed. “Come back to the table where we can keep an eye on you or else let me put you to bed while I am still sober.”

Molly bit off the snipe about how he didn’t need anyone to keep an eye on him. He was the one who called himself a bomb, and yet he couldn’t handle the idea that others might think of him that way. He was a study in contradictions and those contradictions were fully at play now that everyone knew his secrets. He didn’t want to be treated differently, but he wanted people to be aware of how dangerous he could be. He wanted to hide the truth, yet feared what would happen if a wildcard were to sneak up on them, triggered by things he avoided.

He wanted to just stay close to his friends and understand and respect their love for him, but also yell at them for going behind his back like he couldn't be trusted to handle his own shit. (Because he couldn't. Because he wouldn't.)

Mostly he just wanted to throw that all out and focus on Caleb. He deserved that, right? Just one moment with this Zemnian dirt wizard bastard he’d had the misfortune to fall for?

No one could decide that one but him. Jester had slipped away before the hard decision could be made, but Molly had found a sliver of joy to latch onto and he wasn’t going to let it go. He grabbed it with both hands and used it to pull himself forward, closer to Caleb. “On one condition.” He stood on his tiptoes a bit, so he could meet Caleb’s blue eyes evenly. “You dance with me.”

For a heart-stopping moment, Molly was certain that Caleb was going to decline and he reached out to grab his wrist to prevent his inevitable departure, but fumbled drunkenly, and when he tried a second time, Caleb caught his hand. Their fingers entwined, nearly on instinct, and all Molly could think was that if his alcohol chose this moment to turn his stomach inside out, then life was cruel and there was no saving it.

“Ja. All right,” Caleb whispered, softly, his eyes turned downwards like he couldn’t look Molly entirely in the eye. “One dance.”

He took the lead from Molly, entwining an arm around his waist to hold him flush against him, guiding him into a waltz that he was far more experienced with, while he was helplessly pulled along. Caleb could have let Molly lead and take full control and call it drunken revelry and shenanigans, but he’d taken it out of his hands. Who could really say if that was a sign that Caleb wanted it to matter more than that or if he was just sparing himself some embarrassment? All Molly could say was that it made his heart hurt and sing at the same time.

He was getting used to that. His heart felt like a bird in a cage, singing sweetly, but always in pain and longing for freedom.

They waltzed together, awkwardly and off-tempo because Molly’s usually graceful footwork was struggling under his lack of coordination, but it was a waltz, all the same. The singer kept on warbling his tune about writing something beautiful for his lover and Molly caught himself humming along to it, losing himself to the moment. If he blacked out and forgot this, it would be a memory he’d actually regret losing.

But there was more than one way to lose a beautiful memory.

Without thinking, he suddenly said, “I’m sorry… About what I said before.”

That was days ago and Molly didn’t know if Caleb’s Keen Mind meant that he remembered slights and thus held grudges and it was a terrible time to apologize, but he’d panicked. If he held onto his own anger at Caleb and Beau, then he could lose so much more than their close friendship. He could lose out on another moment like this.

Caleb sighed, but didn’t pull away. “Emotions were running high. And perhaps we are both shitty communicators.”

Molly winced, but didn’t disagree. “I don’t want to be angry about this.”

The singer had begun a brand new song, but while they had stopped dancing, neither of them had let go. “You don’t want to, but you are. Feelings are not made to be convenient, Mollymauk. I do not see everything, but I do see that yours tend to be more inconvenient than most.”

He laughed, the sound unpleasantly broken. “Especially now.”

“Especially now,” Caleb nodded. He still hadn’t let go of him. Selfishly, Molly prayed that he never would. “And if I were the sort to end a friendship because you said and did things I found unpleasant or difficult to hear, I would have already done so. You have never been very delicate with me.”

He didn’t know what to say to that, because his natural response was to be glib, but now didn’t seem like the proper moment for it. He turned it over in his head, working on a response that felt honest enough to convey his feelings, but just bullshit enough to satiate his need to avoid the truth. When such a thing eluded him and he’d been silent for too long, Caleb slipped out of his grip.

“You are… Not a bad dancer,” he said, the awkwardness returning as the gentleness of the moment faded. He patted him awkwardly on the arm and then disengaged to return to the table. Molly waited a few moments, lingering in the reminder of Caleb’s arms around him and the gentle sway of their dance, and then followed.

Beau had lost her round, but not her desire to drink and Molly still being pissy underneath his bullshit had her needing it, more than ever. She’d thought they moved past it, but, apparently, Molly would rather snipe and be a little brat than actually talk about his feelings. It was something they all had in common.

Didn’t mean she liked it, especially not when it was directed at her.

At least she wasn’t the only one wasted. Cree had been regaling Jester with an extremely long-winded story about something called a Shadow Baker in Marquet, and by the look in Jester’s eyes, she was planning on marrying him as soon as possible in a spring wedding somewhere on the Menagerie Coast. All Beau could take out of it was confirmation that Cree was from Marquet, not Shadycreek Run, which didn’t add up. So much about her didn’t.

Fuck. She was too drunk to analyze this. She staggered to her feet, feeling the urge to piss coming on, and wobbled outside- declining assistance from Fjord who was still mostly sober like he’d decided to be the babysitter of them all- to squat in the alley instead of daring to take a gamble on the closet that housed the chamber pot being empty. Fortunately, the alley was not full of assholes with the same idea and she was able to relieve herself without incident- at least until she stood up too fast and had to press herself against the cool stone of the Blushing Tankard Tavern’s exterior wall. “Fuuuuck,” she muttered.

A dog barked at her feet and she blinked and looked down at a puppy with big ears and a happy grin in a play stance, wiggling his butt at her. She squinted at it. “...Where’d you come from?” She muttered. Her passive perception was god tier, if she said so herself. Even drunk she doubted a fucking dog, especially one as loud as this one, could get past her notice and just run up on her.

A familiar voice stammered, “Uh… Erm. Oh! Home, Rock!” And the dog just vanished. Beau yelped, staggered back, and then tripped and fell backwards onto the stone- mercifully not in her own piss puddle, which would have been the cherry on the shit sundae of this night. She was trying to place the familiarity of that voice while lying on her back in the alley, because at least that she could control when two figures leaned over her- the dog (now licking her face) and a woman with white-and-black hair and pale skin that seemed to glow in the moonlight peeking out above the buildings.

Yasha. Fuck. This night could get more awkward, apparently.

“Are you okay, Beau?” She asked.

“Just enjoying my tongue bath.” She winced and tried to turn her face away, but the dog kept licking her. “When did you get a dog?”

Yeah. That sounded like a good topic. Way better than ‘hey sorry I kissed you without permission in the rain and then we just awkwardly ignored it.’ Speaking of not talking about things.

Yasha didn’t seem to take exception to her avoidance. “I was heading out of Zadash and this man had a bunch of animals and this dog really liked me and I really liked him, and Molly’s always telling me to do what makes me happy, so…”

“So now you have a dog.” Beau nodded and tried to shove said dog away from her face. A blink dog, apparently. Boy, Jester was going to be thrilled.

“His name is Rock.” Yasha paused. “I’m, uh... I'm not really good at naming things.”

“No… No. I like it.” Gods, this situation was getting more and more awkward by the moment. She tried to sit up, but the world spun, unpleasantly, and she flopped back down again. “Fuck.”

She felt Yasha’s arms snake underneath her and she went rigid, at first, unsure of what was happening, and then it hit her- she was being picked up. She was being carried. By Yasha. This was a dream come true and she was too fucking wasted to appreciate it. She groaned and let her head loll back, miserably.

“I know. I know. Let’s just get you to bed before you hurt yourself,” Yasha mumbled, gently.

Lacking any reason to protest, Beau allowed it. At least this night might end on a high note, even if it was just getting bridal carried up to the room by Yasha. She’d take any kind of win, at this point.

In the Gearhole prison, a female goliath sprawled across her bed, staring up at the skylight and watching the fireworks from the nightly gatherings of hard-working Hupperdook commoners with a scowl plastered on her face. Assholes, the lot of them. What she wouldn’t give to tear a swath through them on her way out of here and back to Xhorhas.

A glint of something metal catching the light of the fireworks caught her attention and she sat up in bed to squint at it. Whatever it was, it looked like a metallic crab and it slid in easily between the slats in the bars above her. Once it was inside the cell, it dropped down onto the bed and crawled closer to her when she pushed herself away from it on instinct.

There was a note on its back. Tentatively, she reached for it, skimmed the words, and then grinned.

A moment later, the Gearhole prison shuddered as an explosion tore open a wall from within, allowing Xhorhassian prisoner of war Sken Zabriss to make her escape, pursued only by a veritable army of cackling, shrieking creatures in hoods.

Chapter Text

Cree was still describing the Shadow Baker to an enraptured Jester when alarm bells and shouts began to go up outside the Blushing Tankard Tavern. She’d managed to drink herself out of being bothered by the fireworks, but the alarms were even louder and more irritating and she gripped her ears with both hands to ward the sound off before something about it hit her. That wasn’t a normal sound for a city in the throes of revelry.

“Something’s wrong,” she whispered. She had imagined it sounding severe and commanding, but it came out slurred and lacking urgency. Jester, however, was already on her feet, scanning for the rest of the Nein who had scattered before the alarms sounded.

“What’s going on?” The tavern was in an uproar as people rushed out the door to investigate or else pulled back into safer corners, throwing tables up as shields and cowering behind them. Irena was directing the flow of traffic as best she could, urging people to either hide or fight, but not fucking dawdle.

Fjord and Caduceus rejoined Cree and Jester at the table, and the four of them stood close to one another to keep from being swept up in the crowd without the rest of their party. “They’re saying someone broke out of the Gearhole Prison,” Fjord explained.

“A Xhorhassian spy!” Nott yelped, leaping from the floor to the table in one terrifyingly accurate bound, despite how drunk she was. The landing didn’t quite stick, given she immediately faceplanted, but she did make it onto the table, which was terribly impressive, actually. It made her wonder if the liquor affected her accuracy any and if she should be warier about her when she was in a compromised state.

Fjord sighed and lifted her back onto her feet by the back of her cloak. “Nott, not everything is a Xhorhassian spy.”

“Oh fuck off, old man.” She shrugged him off of her. “That’s exactly what they’re saying she is. And might I add that a certain Xhorassian isn’t here with us right now.” Nott tapped her nose.

Cree blinked very slowly. “You... You think Yasha did this?”

“What about me?” Yasha had suddenly appeared, despite her massive size, holding Beau in her arms. At her feet, Cree was stunned to realize, was a confused puppy pressing close to her ankles and whimpering like the chaos upset it.

Nott was quick to leap back onto her feet, tall enough to nearly get her nose somewhere near Yasha's face now. “You! You released the prisoner.”

“I literally just got into town,” Yasha protested without bite.

“What’s this about a prisoner?” Beau slurred. Yasha placed her back on the ground and she had to grip the table to keep from falling over. “Yasha picked my ass up in the alley.”

“That’s what she wants you to think.” Nott hiccuped and Caduceus leaned over and cast what was likely a lesser restoration on her, which brought the slits of her cat-like eyes from wide to narrow as the spell cured her drunkenness.

“Fuck!” She screeched. “Caduceus, what was that for?”

“I need you clear-headed.” He made a face at Beau. “I can’t do it for everyone though.”

“I can do it for Beau.” Jester reached out and tapped Beau, who groaned out a noooo as her buzz was lifted and the look of hazy drunkenness faded.

Seeing this was how it was going to be, Cree made a miserable noise and cast the spell on herself. Immediately, she missed the carefree feeling of excessive inebriation, but it allowed her to pick up on the fact that two people were missing. “Where are Mollymauk and Caleb?” She blurted out.

Yasha narrowed her eyes and gave a sharp bird whistle. It was answered by another one across the room- or at least an attempt. “There he is.” She darted that way and Cree followed with the rest of the Nein on their heels.

Molly had apparently ducked behind a table with an unattended whiskey bottle, which Cree immediately took from him. “Idiot,” she scowled.

“Well! What are we supposed to do about any of this?” He snapped and tried to take the bottle from her, but he was too short and far too intoxicated. With her free hand, Cree placed her hand on his face and cast her only other slot for lesser restoration. He blinked, looked around, and swore. “Right. I get it now. This is happening.”

His swords were out, immediately, and he leapt over the table and headed towards the door where patrons were rushing out onto the street either to deal with the chaos or just watch it happen in real time. Somehow that wasn't much better than the alternative.

“If he can’t drink, he’s gonna fight,” Beau mused, observing Molly’s quick switch from drunken lout to full-on fighter with one spell. “Guess we all have to cope.” She cracked her knuckles. “I can’t say I don’t relate.”

“What about Caleb?” Jester said, turning her head this way and that to try and catch sight of him. By now the chaos had grown enough that they were being jostled and yelled at for standing in one place. With no other choice, they began to follow Molly and the crowd out the door, where Caleb quickly grabbed Beau’s arm and pulled her towards the alley.

“I just left this alley,” she groaned.

“It smells of piss,” Cree noted and, off Beau’s shrug, she guessed exactly why. There were too many other important factors at play here to worry about Beau pissing in an alley, however. “Caleb, have you heard any other details about this jailbreak… or anything about a Xhorhassian spy?”

Caleb brushed himself off- it looked as though he’d nearly been trampled into the dirt- not all of that was the same mess that usually clung to his clothes. “Nein. I got swept up in the crowd and just followed it out here. There have been multiple explosions-”

As he said that, another explosion rocked the street, followed by Molly’s groan of anguish. Cree jerked her head in the direction it came from, “Shit!”

“Molly!” Yasha panicked and tore off in that direction before anyone could react. Cree started to follow her, but Caleb grabbed her arm.

“She will get him. We need to regroup. Everyone in this town are all running to their deaths like lemmings off a cliff. We have to think rationally about this while we can.” He must have picked up that no one was drunk anymore and thus incapable of behaving rationally- only Molly rushed in blindly.

“Caleb’s right,” Caduceus murmured, clutching his staff. “This feels like organized chaos to me.”

“Ja,” Caleb nodded. “If you want to escape a prison, you have to make sure everyone is looking anywhere but where the prisoner is going.” He looked down at Nott, who gave a small nod of understanding.

Cree, lacking context for that and feeling surprisingly out of the loop (again), because of it, backed down with a low, miserable growl, and waited for Yasha to return with Molly.

Yasha’s feet pounded across the stones as she followed the sound of Molly’s voice. Rock was moving at her heels, barking and yipping and teleporting out of the way of any running feet that got too close before popping right back beside her.

“Dammit, Molly,” she hissed. She didn’t know how he’d managed to get so far- he was fast, but sometimes it felt like he could move double speed when he wanted to run away or towards something and that was before his sword let him misty step. She stopped suddenly and tried to adjust her search. The air smelled of black powder and blood and there was gore smeared in places where scorchmarks dotted the stone. A faint bit of color moved from underneath a pile of rubble that used to be the front door of a building and Yasha ran that way.

“Molly, Molly... What are you doing?” She hissed, more to herself, which was good because Molly didn’t answer her. She tossed beams and chunks of debris away to reveal him sprawled at the bottom, bleeding and scorched and coughing. She breathed in a sigh of relief and yanked him onto his feet. He staggered and fell into her.

“It just… exploded.” He started laughing, a bit too manically. “I killed it and it just exploded. Like the rats in the sewer except more…” He winced. “Ow.”

She gave him a gentle little smack on the side of the head. “Well, don’t just run off like that. That’s my job.”

He blinked up at her and seemed to only just now process that she was here. Her heart ached for him- he was in a bad way and was doing terribly at not showing it. “...Yasha. Hey.”

“Hey, yourself.” She kissed the spot where she’d just smacked him. “Let’s get back to the others. Figure out what to do about these exploding-”

“Kobolds!” An elderly gnome shouted as he ran past them, their panic mounting, as they grabbed onto the shoulders of every person they could reach. “The little buggers are everywhere.”

“Kobolds?” Yasha bit her lip. She was familiar with them, but she didn’t think they ventured this far into the Empire. They were more of a Xhorhas staple- little communities of them sprung up in the Wastes and competed with her tribe for resources. The Sky-Spear considered them the epitome of the chaos the Dolorov strove to avoid at any cost.

Maybe Nott wasn’t just being herself about that Xhorhassian spy bit. Maybe there was someone here from Xhorhas. She found herself spiraling into a series of thoughts, lost in the haze of unremembered and remembered things until Molly gripped her arm tightly and grounded her as he always did. A strong grip on her bicep and she was back in the present again where she belonged, where all that mattered was who she was going to be and who she is right now, and not who she was before.

“We need to move, love. If they’re everywhere, then more people are going to get hurt.” Gods, but she couldn’t take the sorrow in his eyes. Something had happened while she’d been gone. She wasn’t wise or observant, but she understood Molly better than she understood herself, sometimes. Molly was easy. He didn’t have unremembered dark corners to get lost in.

(Except he did- oh how he did. And his were becoming more and more real by the second.)

The two of them doubled back to where they left the Nein, only to find that a fight had broken out in front of the Blushing Tankard Tavern. The Nein were engaged with several swarming kobolds, fighting alongside a group that Yasha hadn’t seen before, consisting of two humans (one of whom couldn’t have been more than sixteen), an elf, and a dwarf.

She might not have recognized them, but Molly apparently did. His eyes lit up. “Hah! I see you lot have sobered up!”

The dwarf was holding one of those unusual metal rangedweapons that she’d seen in passing- a gun, as she recalled. The elf had one as well and if Yasha was puzzled by the open use of such strange weaponry, Nott was absolutely transfixed. (That might have been for the best- one shot from Nott and those kobolds might explode and she couldn’t shake the image of Molly being slammed into a wall from the blowback of the last one.)

Still, they had to be killed, so she pulled the Judge off her back and clicked her tongue to send Rock to safety- he blipped away from her side and she caught sight of him again on the roof of the tavern, observing, but staying out of the way. Good dog. Satisfied, she let her rage fill her until her vision went red and growled out, “Be careful! They explode!”

She lunged forward, blade out, and swung hard at one kobold, knocking it all the way down the recently vacated street where it landed, unmoving, and then lit up immediately, ripping up cobblestones and blowing out the glass of a neighboring shop.

“This is so fucked up,” Jester murmured, copying Yasha’s movements by wielding her lollipop spiritual weapon and walloping kobolds farther away where they could be taken out from a distance by the ranged fighters and only cause structural damage.

Yasha tore her focus from her own fight to watch Beau go back to back with the lanky human man who fought with a similar style to her. “You’re a monk?!” She was saying, completely baffled. “I thought you were a bard!”

“No reason you can’t be both.” He delivered a swift kick to a kobold, bringing it in range of the teenage girl who sent an automaton shaped like a small dog after it, while she worked on putting together some sort of heavy artillery cannon.

“Somebody put bombs in these nice lizard guys. That’s really sneaky-sneaky,” she trilled, hefting the cannon onto her shoulders. She should not be able to carry that with those twig arms. “Who would do that, I wonder?”

“Molly, who are these people?” Yasha demanded, after the teenager effectively exploded three kobolds with her cannon, preventing their uncontrolled explosions with a more concentrated blast.

Molly took a precise swing at a kobold that split it in half and then ducked out of the way as its top half exploded. “The Clockwork Hounds. We beat them at the Hour of Honor. They’re being great sports about it.”

Cree suddenly growled as she threw spells at the kobolds that had been pushed out of their immediate vicinity. “This is Stahlmast’s work. I am sure of it.”

“But why would he be breakin’ someone out of prison?” Fjord asked, slamming Eldritch Blasts into kobolds left and right. The entire street was torn to pieces, but there was nothing to be done about it. They were here to cause as much damage as possible and trying to ferret them away might lead them to places that hadn’t been evacuated. The damage to living people was minimal here.

“I do not claim to know the extent of the man’s madness, only that he is very mad.” Cree pressed her palms together and shot a beam of light that struck a kobold and wrapped around it. “Now, Jester!”

Jester slammed her lollipop down onto the kobold, smashing it into paste so cleanly that the bomb within only gave a little paft of an explosion. “Well, if you smash them to bits, the bombs don’t go off?” She cringed, staring at the gore splatter across the cheerful swirls of her spiritual weapon. “But it’s pretty gross.”

“Eda!” The human monk-slash-bard fighting alongside Beau (Molly had introduced him as Lance inasmuch as one could be introduced during a fight) snapped, drawing Yasha’s attention to the red-headed human with the cannon. “See what you can do about the bombs in the rest.”

“Okie-dokie, Lancey-Lance,” Eda chirped, dropped her cannon and bounded with lanky limbs towards the last five kobolds who were on the retreat arguing things about no witnesses in chittering Common. Not wanting the kid to deal with it alone, Yasha took off with her sword out. The girl didn’t protest her presence, but gave cheerful instruction. “Don’t land a critical hit! Be precise but not super precise. I think I know what’s going on. It’s about heartbeats. You want the heart to still beat, but the lizard guy to be bleah.” She mimed unconsciousness with her extremely expressive face and Yasha just nodded along.

“Got it.” Her rage was still driving her, urging her to kill, but she still schooled her strikes to land decisive blows that didn’t pierce the heart- only dropped the kobolds into unconsciousness. As soon as one went down, Eda was quick to rip into the creature, staining her dark skin with even darker gore.

“Hah!” She exclaimed, but Yasha was already moving to the next one. The rest of the Nein and the Clockwork Hounds had held back, but Eda’s automaton dog joined them and started to tear out the throat of another shrieking kobold with metal teeth that looked like they were made of razors. Yasha went after the last three, dispatching them with savage strikes. One by one, Eda quickly went to the corpses and tore out little acorn sized devices covered in blood until she had five laid out on the shattered stones. Yasha stood sentinel over her as she disarmed them, waiting for more kobolds to come.

The streets had gone quiet now and, after counting down a few more precious seconds to be certain, she finally released her rage. The automaton dog wandered up to her- with its mouth closed, it looked like a small hunting dog of some kind made of plates of interlocking metal, but it wagged its tail just like an actual dog. Unable to resist, she bent down and tried to scritch its floppy ears, her nails scraping against smooth metal. “Good boy.”

“Auto likes you!” Eda chirped. She gathered up her tiny explosives and Yasha, feeling mischievous, signaled for Rock to appear. His puppy feet skidded on the gore-coated stone and he bounded excitedly around Auto and sniffed at him, but when the automaton failed to react in any meaningful way, he turned his attention to Eda and showered her with facelicks.

“Ah! Don’t lick a girl holding explosives!” She giggled. “Just kidding. Puppy slobber is impossible to replicate in automatons. I’ve tried. It just gets rusty and ew.”

The rest of the two groups converged on the pair and their dogs. Rock returned to Yasha’s side with a signal and Eda stood up and held out her spoils.

“These were inside the nasty little lizards, Obsidian.” She offered them to him, but Nott swiftly took one before the dwarf could even scrutinize them.

“Hey!” He snapped, but Nott hissed and he backed away, scowling. “You could’ve asked, you know.”

“I’ve never seen an explosive this small before,” she mused, turning the little bomb over in her hands, effectively ignoring everything he had to say.

“Auntie Nima makes them like that! Teeny tiny bomb, super big explosion.” Eda threw an arm out, clutching the rest of the bombs to her chest with the other. “Used for excavations ‘cause the big bombs are too hard to carry up the mountain.”

“Or maybe making suicide bombers for wartime,” Lance muttered. “Nima’s been missing for a week.”

“She hasn’t been missing.” Fayne scowled, crossing her arms over her chest. “She’s out sick.”

“Out sick and not taking any visitors.” Lance spat blood on the ground and wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt. “Anyway, it’s not really our scene anyway. None of this is. We’ve just been waiting out our next score and this crap happened to mess up our evening.” He gave a sardonic little wave as he pivoted on his heels to walk away at a steady saunter. “See you around, Mighty Nein.”

“Wait. That’s it? You’re not even gonna investigate?” Beau snapped. She looked a second away from dragging him back by the instrument case on his back.

“We don’t get involved unless there’s money,” Fayne threw over her shoulder.

“I mean… To be fair, we’re about the same way.” Molly held Beau back from what would have definitely escalated into her rushing off and full-on punching Lance in the head. “But if Cree’s right and this all links back to Stahlmast, we’re on the right track and I don’t like the idea of getting more people involved in this.”

“Also they’re terrible. That Obsidian… Pah!” Nott pocketed her explosive, since no one had bothered to take it from her. “I would’ve loved to get my hands on their guns, though.”

Molly winced. “That is the last thing you need. More guns you can’t use.”

Nott grinned with too many teeth. “When I find a black powder dealer, you’re going to regret that. I’ve almost got this nut cracked.”

Yasha, absorbed in the conversation, suddenly felt a tug on her tunic and when she looked down, Eda was holding up another one of the explosives. “Two for you and three for us! Sorry it’s not an even split, but Fayney-Fayne-Fayne would get real mad at me if I gave you too much. Thanks for letting me pet your dog! Bye!” And with that, the girl skipped off, pursued by her automaton. Yasha looked down at the tiny bomb and then back up at Eda’s retreating back, confusion lining her brow.

Molly slid right into the spot Eda had just vacated. “Look at that. You made a new friend. I’m so proud of you.”

Yasha offered the explosive to Nott, who greedily snatched it up. “She was really sweet.”

Beau scoffed. “Yeah, don’t be fooled. That kid drinks like a fish.”

“And that cannon she had was craaaazy!” Jester exclaimed, but then her attention immediately shifted to Cree. “Hey, thanks for the help Cree. It’s always stupid when my lollipop misses ‘cause people are moving around so much.”

Cree shifted, uncomfortably. “It would be remiss of me to not aid you all as much as I can while we’re traveling together.” She pointedly didn’t look at Beau when she said it, and Yasha looked to Molly for some understanding.

“Don’t ask,” he whispered. “It’s… It was a whole thing. I’ll explain later.”

Following on the heels of his words, a male authoritarian voice- the worst kind of voice in her experience- snapped, “Someone explain this now.”

The Nein turned in unison to see an older gnome with gray hair and a handlebar mustache to match, wearing the attire of a Watchmaster that looked like it had been haphazardly thrown on in the dark, standing on the street amidst the destruction. He was flanked by no less than a dozen Crownsguard who looked as if they had seen the business end of some of the exploding kobolds firsthand.

“We had nothing to do with it!” Nott exclaimed, shrilly, and Fjord gently shoved her behind him with his foot.

“What my friend means to say, sir,” he stepped in with his honeyed ‘dealing with the public’ voice, “is we were drinking at this fine establishment when we heard the ruckus kick up, and we ran out to help.”

The Watchmaster took a deep breath. “What did you see, exactly?”

Everyone took turns explaining what they saw and heard and the Watchmaster nodded. “That lines up with what I’ve seen so far, but I take it none of you saw a goliath woman, did you?”

“Is that the prisoner we heard escaped?” Beau piped up. Off the Watchmaster’s suspicious look, she sighed. “The explosions started in the Gearhole Prison, and half the town went off about some Xhorhassian spy. I listen to what's going on around me, man.”

Molly followed that up with: “And we know where the prison is because maybe you remember us as the people who solved your spinny death machine problem.”

The Watchmaster stroked his mustache, but backed down from his kneejerk suspicions. “It’s been one thing after another. We got the prison fully back under our control, caught Sken Zabriss trying to steal military secrets to feed to the Cricks, then Nima Cinnarid fell ill, and now this shite.”

Cree stepped up next. “Are you familiar with Huron Stahlmast?”

The Watchmaster’s eyes widened. “Haven’t seen that kook in years. What would he have to do with this?”

“The man is a master tinker, as I recall,” Cree shrugged.

“Maybe, but what reason would he have to turn on the whole damn city after being gone for so long?” The Watchmaster shifted, uncomfortably.

“Who can say why anyone does anything?” Cree shrugged. “Regardless, we have a bounty to claim on him that we must be quick about. From my personal understanding of his habits, he employed kobolds to serve in his manor.”

The Watchmaster looked her over and then relented, sighing. “So you’re under a mercenary contract, then. That explains a lot. I don’t want to waste resources fighting a hunch, but if you happen to find Sken Zabriss where you’re searching, we’ll pay you six hundred gold if you bring her in alive.”

“And not a cent if she’s dead, I guess?” Yasha blew out a frustrated breath.

“We still need to interrogate her,” the Watchmaster scoffed. “On top of that, she’s committed crimes against the Empire- King Dwendel would see her executed himself to set an example for any other Xhorhassian spy who might be in hiding this side of the Ashkeeper Peaks.”

“We will do what we can,” Cree nodded. “And who do we call if we find her?”

“Oh! Right. Watchmaster Bram Gulchswattle.” He gave a polite nod. “And you’re… the Mighty Nine, are you?” He didn't say it with the right inflection- it sounded like the number, not the Zemnian word. He counted them out loud. “Seven... Eight... Nine. Huh. Last I heard, you only had seven members. We were trying to figure that out when we were doing the paperwork.”

Molly swept in grandly. “They were on their own private mission. Religious types.”

“By the Matron,” Cree nodded somberly, showing off her pin. Caduceus just blinked vapidly, choosing not to speak, rather than potentially get caught in a lie.

Satisfied, the Watchmaster continued on his way with his bedraggled Crownsguard. As soon as he was out of earshot, Molly whirled on Cree, excitedly. “Now see? That was taking charge. You’re not bad at this at all.”

She sighed, deeply. “I am accustomed to doing most of the talking. Lucien’s charisma is, ah… was… Cruel, oftentimes. He speaks eloquently and quickly, but most are wary of him.”

“Sounds familiar,” Beau grumbled. Molly shot her a look.

Cree gave an indignant little huff. “Regardless... I am the lesser of two evils.”

“Pfft. You’re not evil, Cree.” Jester patted her on the back.

“Just a little lost,” Caduceus added, and she hissed at him for that.

“You presume so much, Gravekeeper.”

He just smiled. “Yeah. I guess I do.”

Yasha, noting the tension in the group was starting to build again, held up her hands to get everyone’s attention. “Okay, okay, okay… What did I miss?”

“Who would like to field that one?” Caleb drawled, stepping back so he didn’t have to do it, himself. The rest of the Nein weren’t forthcoming either.

“Well, whatever’s got a bug up your arses can be discussed while we’re walking,” the lilting accent of Rissa Tinkertop piped up. She was covered in soot and there were shards of wood in her hair, suggesting she’d been caught in an explosion, herself. Caduceus moved to heal her and she brushed him off. “Don’t bother. It’s a scratch. I get worse than this working in the shop with Dad.” She looked at each of them. “You said you’re looking for Stahlmast? You ought to talk to him, then. He’s had people coming around the house asking questions.”

“We need to sleep,” Jester deflated. “I burned through so many spells on that fight.”

“We can probably find a place to set up the dome near the Tinkertops' place,” Molly offered, looking back at the state of Blushing Tankard Tavern. It looked particularly fucked up, like the kobolds had been gunning for it when they could- probably because so many people had gathered there. If they hadn't evacuated fast enough, gods only knew what kind of carnage would have happened.

If Molly kept on that line of thought, he was going to get well and truly pissed just from Yasha's experience with him, and with no further choir practice to conduct he would have nowhere to put that anger. Instead, he forced himself to release it and gestured to the half-destroyed tavern vaguely. “I think our rooms sort of… exploded.”

“Right, then,” Fjord slipped into the position of authority that Cree had just backed down from. “Let’s go see Cleff, then.” He nodded at Rissa. “Lead the way.”

Molly hung back from the group to enlighten Yasha on the situation and catch her up to speed on what everyone else knew. He felt terrible to have kept her in the dark, but, like a champ, she took it in stride.

“I know you hate it when everyone… sees you like that,” she sighed, reaching up and ruffling his hair. He leaned against her, taking comfort in her presence.

“I like to be looked at most of the time. I hate being seen. Too much truth in that.” He looked down at the puppy trotting along by Yasha’s feet and occasionally blinking away to sniff at something before blinking back “So what’s with the dog?”

Yasha blushed and looked away shyly. “I just… Liked him. He’s been good company on the road. And the man who ran the cart said Blink Dogs can be trained to fight, but mostly he’s just a good boy.” Her voice dropped into sugary sweet baby talk on the last bit as she reached down and scritched the puppy’s ears.

Molly’s disdain for most animals aside, especially the kind that could get killed easily in their line of work, ebbed away when he saw how soft Yasha looked. She needed this. Her flowers were pressed in a little book and withered and died between the pages, but given the chance, Yasha could make things grow. And he knew another part of it- the part that Yasha wasn’t saying.

Zuala loved turning into a dog for Yasha’s amusement. That’s why she loved them so much- they reminded her of simpler times without hurting her.

She hefted the puppy up in her arms so she could get face licks and cuddles while they walked. “Maybe if I go somewhere dangerous, you could keep him?” She grinned wryly. “I’m sure Jester would help.”

He wrinkled his nose. “Jester can take him entirely. I’m not good with any animal that I don’t intend to eat.”

At that, Rock whimpered and ducked his head under Yasha’s shawl, and she burst out laughing. “I think he understands what you say.”

“I’m not gonna eat you,” Molly muttered, trying with minimal effort to console the dog. He leaned in a bit. “You’d be too stringy.”

Rock pulled his head out from under Yasha’s shawl and licked Molly’s nose. He recoiled and Yasha burst out laughing so hard that it was infectious and soon they were both in a state of gigglefits that drew the attention of the rest of the group.

“Hey if you’re sharin’ jokes, let us in on it,” Fjord called out.

Molly waved him off. “Circus people humor. You wouldn’t get it.”

The journey to the Shelf was uneventful, the streets left quiet by the attack, which unnerved Molly to no end, given how Hupperdook thrived on its nightlife. Over the course of barely an hour, the entire place had become a ghost town where there was usually noise and wild flurries of activities. Come morning, everyone would be picking up pieces of their livelihood instead of working.

Rissa gave a long sigh. “King Dwendel’s not gonna like this. On top of the Warden lettin’ a prisoner of war get out, production of his fuckin’ war machines is gonna grind to a halt so we can fix up the town.”

Beau chewed on her lip thoughtfully. “He’d really be that pissed? You guys are the victims.”

“There are no victims when it’s inconvenient for the Crown, Beauregard,” Caleb murmured, almost too softly for Molly to hear. “You know that.”

“Doesn’t mean I like it.” Molly noted her expression- that ‘file that away to deal with later’ face. Something about it wound him up more than usual- had she made that same face before she decided to go behind his back? Was he just one more notation in her journal, a desperate vie to know everything.

Why do you have to know so much? He had asked her once. He still didn’t know. He still didn’t care beyond that now he was something to look into, another notation on a long list.

No. Lucien was. Or Lucien’s stupid eyes and the associated voices therein. The city and the dreams. All of that were things to look into, not him. It wasn’t personal. It didn’t have to mean anything.

So why did it still hurt so much?

They were close to Tinkertop Inventions now and while Molly was feeling sorry for himself and reigniting his anger at Beau (somehow it was easier not to blame Caleb- maybe because he’d already talked about it with him or maybe it was just a fucking bias and he was a hypocrite just as he’d been accused of), he failed to notice something that made Rissa gasp and lunge forward.

“Leave him alone! He hasn’t done shite!”

The Nein froze in place, unsure how to proceed. Three Crownsguard covered in soot and detritus were in the process of dragging Cleff Tinkertop from his shop. The Gearhole Prison’s Warden was standing off to the side holding a badly damaged chunk of metal in one hand and something smaller clutched in his other.

“You’ve really done it this time, Tinkertop,” the Warden snarled. “Was that why that automaton you gave us went mad? All to release prisoners?”

“I’m telling you, I had nothing to do with it!” Cleff was anxiously spitting back. Rissa, with little regard or respect for the authorities, pushed her way through and stood between the Warden and guards trying to accost her father.

“We dealt with that! What’re you comin’ around here placing blame on the old man like this?”

“Rissania-” Cleff tried to scold her, but Rissa snapped back.

“Don’t you Rissania me, dad.”

At this point, none of them could stand by idly and let both Tinkertops get accosted and possibly arrested. They began to move with purpose in that direction, drawing the eye of the guards and the Warden, who, at least, had the decency to step back.

“You lot are back again?” The Warden raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah, we’re here to possibly clean up another mess in your prison,” Beau shrugged, nonchalantly. “We think it has a connection to somebody we came here lookin’ for- a guy by the name of Huron Stahlmast?”

The Warden laughed. “Stahlmast? He hasn’t been seen in Hupperdook in years, just up and abandoned his entire manor and everything." He pointed an accusatory finger at Cleff. "Last person who saw him around was him and Nima Cinnarid. Close as anything, those three.”

Cleff scoffed. “I wouldn’t call ol’ Huron close. A bloody hack, that one. Tryin’ to cobble together his own legacy off other people’s designs. He got himself a contract elsewhere and skedaddled and good riddance to him!” He spat on the ground.

Cree stepped up again, her tail lashing. “Huron Stahlmast’s contractor is my employer.” Molly’s eyes were riveted to her as she reached into one of her two satchels and produced a collection of papers. “These are the details of our contracts. As you can see, he has failed to comply with several regulations and has actively stolen from our coffers. My employer has placed a bounty on his head and has hired these folk to take care of it.”

The Warden eyed her suspiciously. “The law doesn’t take kindly to independent contractors putting out private bounties without going through the Crown, miss.”

Cree’s golden eyes narrowed. “The law has a tendency to look askance when a contractor offers many gifts, yes?”

The Warden paled considerably. “Tha-that may be, but this automaton is one of Tinkertop’s designs. We’ve gotten him on-”

“Let me see that.” Cleff took the metal object from the Warden while he was still shaking from Cree’s words. “Hmm. Yes, it does look like one of my designs, but this is crude. A poor, cheap copy. This has Huron Stahlmast written all over it. Yes… Yes…”

One of the guards had taken the paperwork Cree offered. “Shit. Warden, it says here he has kobolds working for him.”

“He takes in refugees from Xhorhas and gives them jobs, which in wartime is a serious offense, on top of this brutal attack on the city, which he very easily could have masterminded.” Cree took her paperwork back and rolled it up, pointedly. “I am certain it would be better for you, Warden, if we took care of this silently and quickly or else you might have to explain to the Crown how you allowed someone like this to go unchecked.”

One of the guards whispered, “But if her employer knew about the-”

The Warden raised a hand to silence him. He was still shaking. “We can’t arrest a man for committing acts of treason before the acts were treasonous, now can we?” The guards exchanged confused looks and the Warden, shrilly, snapped, “Can we?!”

At that the guards snapped to attention, “Of course, Warden!”

The Warden coughed and unclenched his fist, revealing a blackened piece of parchment. “Ah- here, then. This was found in the wreckage. We had assumed it was a message from Tinkertop-”

“Ah, you assumed, did you?” Rissa snapped, plucking the paper from his hands to look it over. “This isn’t even his handwriting. Shite. Have you even seen my dad put anything in writing? It’s nothing but chicken scratch. This is cursive!”

The Warden opened his mouth to scold her, but he took one look at Cree, began sweating again, and ordered the guards to follow him away from the shop. Once he was out of sight, Molly let out a low whistling breath.

“That… was actually really amazing. You are a terrifying person to have around.”

“You’re tellin’ me,” Rissa gave an approving nod, still gripping her father’s arm. (Molly knew good things were in store for those two- already the shift in their dynamic had turned for the better.) “Who the hell is your employer that he’s got the Warden shaking in his boots?”

“Best you not know or else you may find yourself shaking in yours,” Cree quipped. “Now then. I know a great deal about Huron Stahlmast, but you seem to know a great deal more, Mr.-?”

“Tinkertop! Cleff Tinkertop.” The old gnome inventor reached out a hand to shake Cree’s and she had to crouch to reach it. “Don’t recall seeing you and the tall pink fellow back there when you were last here, but your friends did me a great favor and it seems I’ve more debts to repay.”

“Oh no, you’ve covered those debts,” Molly scoffed, gesturing to Nott, who held up the Tinkertop Bolt Blaster 1000 and ran her clawed fingers down it in a gesture of nearly perverse affection. “This was just a lovely coincidence.”

“Another one,” Caleb added with dry sarcasm. “We are quite adept at finding them.”

Cleff canted his head and shrugged. “Dunno what that means, but I appreciate it all the same.”

Rissa was still squinting at the note, murmuring along as she read it. “‘Worry not. I am an ally of your comm- no questions take this ring and follow- to my humble domain- tand back?’” She lowered it. “They thought you wrote this?!”

“Doesn’t sound like me, does it?” Cleff stroked his beard.

“Sounds like the Warden just wanted someone to blame,” Caduceus noted.

“And since you’ve already caused a ruckus in the prison, it seemed you were a prime target.” Fjord exhaled. “This could’ve been bad if your employer hadn’t offered us this job, Cree.”

“I assure you that the generosity is only another coincidence.” Cree patted her satchel. “But you may consider it a gift, Mr. Tinkertop. Now then- Stahlmast?”

“Oh right! Yes.” Cleff cleared his throat. “Well, Huron, Nima, and I were colleagues. Nima’s specialty is explosives, but Huron wanted to excel at everything. He was constantly trying to go beyond his means to invent new things- all for glory! Never for the thrill of the work. Too prideful, that man.” He sighed. “He would never listen to Nima and I. And then he just vanished one day, and I suppose ended up working for that contractor you spoke of. Is that correct, miss?”

Cree nodded. “Aye, that lines up. Stahlmast sought a benefactor and built many things for my employer, until he cut off supply, entirely, and fell out of his reach. A serious breach of contract.”

Rissa made a face. “I’d say death is a bit extreme for that, but we’re dealing with someone who is fucking nuts, apparently.”

“And Rissa said he had people contact you?” Caleb offered. Molly hung back, listening. Information gathering wasn’t his strong suit- at least not like this. He noted Caduceus taking point and keeping an eye out and sidled closer to him to assist, though he kept listening to the conversation, occasionally peering over his shoulder.

“He sent two of his kobolds with a letter asking for my help. That was about two days before Nima fell ill. Haven’t heard anything since- from her or Huron.”

“That Lance guy from the Clockwork Hounds seemed to think she’s not actually sick. The way he and the kid talked she’s behind the bombs in those kobolds that attacked the city.” Beau nudged Nott and she reluctantly offered up one of the tiny bombs to Cleff.

He squinted at it. “Huh… This does look like Nima’s work. But Nima would never willingly work with Huron! She hated him more than I did, she did.”

“....Do you get a lot of fog around here?” Caduceus piped up. Molly jerked back to attention as a fog started to roll in along the Shelf, obscuring their sight. Even his strange new abilities couldn’t pierce through it.

“No…” Cleff startled, taking a step back as the fog began to move closer.

“That’s not natural,” Molly murmured and Caduceus nodded.

A woman’s voice boomed out of the encroaching fog, echoed by the sounds of chittering laughter. “Hey, Tinkertop. I got a second proposition for you, and these little guys told me not to take no for an answer."

Chapter Text

This was shitty. So very, very shitty.

The worst always seemed to happen when they were exhausted somehow, like trouble waited until they were depleted on spells and hadn’t slept or were a little bit buzzed from a stupid drinking game. Jester hadn’t gotten intoxicated enough that she needed to burn a spell for it, especially not after Molly pulled the alcohol out of her, but the beginnings of a headache was forming somewhere along her temples and not all of it had to do with the stress. He told her she wouldn't get a hangover, too. Dammit. It was probably because she wasn't used to drinking. There were some things magic just couldn't protect you from.

Like surprises.

The thick cloud continued, the figures within obscured until the last second- right when the fog began to lick at their feet, it dispersed suddenly and Jester had to choke down a wail at the sight it revealed: ten more kobolds and a goliath woman with jet black hair in a high ponytail, her gray skin marked with black whorls. She carried a nasty looking longsword in one hand and her grin was feral, her teeth just a bit too square. Like Lorenzo’s…

No. Not like Lorenzo. Nothing like Lorenzo. She shook the memory of him leaning over her with his cruel human eyes, leering at her with those teeth right in her face, all of it that she now knew to just be an illusion. His real teeth were razor sharp and monstrous, just like the rest of him. Sometimes it was easier to accept the world as she imagined it if monsters were monsters and people were people.

Never mind that Lorenzo’s crew was full of people who weren’t monsters of the kind her mama told her stories about. Never mind that this woman wasn't either.

That wasn’t the point, was it? She set her jaw and stood up straighter. “Look, can you maybe do this in the morning? It’s been a real shitty night, lady.”

The goliath woman- Sken Zabriss the Watchmaster called her- flicked her dark-eyed gaze to her and just gave her an incredulous, borderline condescending smirk. “Yeah. You’re welcome for that.”

“I wasn’t thanking you,” she snapped back. Her fingers flexed, itching to cast spells she didn’t have. A nice lollipop right to her stupid face…

Sken had turned to Cleff and Rissa, who were hiding behind the taller forms of Yasha and Cree. “If you come along, old man, I won’t have to take out these nice people to get at you. I owe my new comrade a pretty big debt. I’d really hate to disappoint him.”

“Your comrade,” Cree snarled, “is a lunatic. I sincerely doubt he will let you return to Xhorhas. If anything, they will find your body at the bottom of the Falls and write the entire thing off when they fail to find his lair.”

Sken chuckled and dragged her thumb along her bottom lip. When she stepped forward, hands went to weapons, preparing for the inevitable. Jester keened a bit, realizing they were going to have to fight bloodied and nearly out of magic.

“You presume a lot, lady. You might even know a lot.” She shrugged. “But if it’s the bottom of a fucking waterfall or a prison interrogation chamber, I’ll take the waterfall. I didn’t come all this way to get tortured to death by some thieving Empire dogs.” She lunged then, going for Cree and Yasha since they were in the way of her quarry. At the last second, her sword swing chose Cree as her preferred target, who blocked it with her glaive, the red ribbon around the pole dancing in the air as she swung around and pushed Sken back with all of her considerable strength.

The kobolds lunged, then, trying to get into melee with their claws and teeth, but mostly sticking close to the shop, as if they knew their only purpose was to die and do as much damage as possible. If Jester had no opinion on Stahlmast before (and she didn’t- he was just some guy who seemed like a real dick up until right this second), then the realization of what he’d done to these poor creatures turned her completely against him. He didn’t just make them his slaves- he made them incapable of even caring about their lives at all. They were just tools.

Tears stung her eyes as she tried to push them back, away from the Tinkertops’ shop before they could infiltrate and damage it. She didn’t want to hurt them. They probably didn’t want to do this, but they were too fucked up to refuse. They didn’t seem too stupid to even know what they were doing. They could talk and everything, so that meant they could see reason if someone tried to help.

“Jester!” Fjord must have realized she was pulling her punches, because he gripped her shoulder and slid in front of her, blasting a kobold with the sickly green-yellow energy of his magic.

She tried to tamp down on the revulsion and misery, but the box she’d been shoving all of her emotions into was overflowing and everything was spilling out at the corners. “It’s not fair, Fjord! He put those stupid bombs in them and now they just fight knowing they’ll die and explode. Why are people like this?!”

Fjord’s look of utter sympathy hurt her just as much as fighting the kobolds did. “Some people are terrible, Jessie.” He got as far as that before a kobold took a swipe at his leg and tore into the leathers, dragging long, nasty gashes down his calve and dropping him to one knee and nearly taking Jester with him.

Instinct took over and she kicked the kobold away from Fjord so hard it sailed upwards where it was immediately skewered by one of Nott’s bolts.

“Nott!” Yasha yelled. She’d taken Sken’s attention away from Cree and that had earned the goliath a nasty scar across her torso for her troubles. “You have to take the bombs out and disarm them before their, uh… their hearts stop beating!”

Nott’s ears lowered. “Are you kidding me?!”

“Eda did it!” Yasha snapped back.

That was all the incentive Nott needed. She put her crossbow away and darted through the fray, grabbing for the unconscious kobold she’d just shot. She made an unpleasant sound as she began to tear through its body with her sharp claws, hunting for the acorn-sized bombs they all knew were there now. “Found it!” She shrieked with glee, holding it up in a blood-stained hand.

That was good. That was something. Jester couldn’t bear it if they failed to protect the Tinkertops' shop from destruction. She knelt beside Fjord and healed his leg, accidentally bumping her head against his, gently- well maybe not accidentally. But she’d claim it was.

“There you go, Fjord,” she whispered. “That was my last big spell, though. All I’ve got are the easy ones.”

“Thanks, Jester. I appreciate it.” She pulled him to his feet and he brushed a hand through her hair. It made her almost forget how stupid he was back at the Gentleman’s. He was always so confusing. “Wish I could do something about your hurtin’, though.”

She gave him a confused, lopsided smile. “I’m not hurt.”

He opened his mouth to say something and it was for the best that he got distracted by the sound of Beau and Molly arguing, because she wasn’t ready for the possibility that he might see right through her and call her on it. Not now. Not ever.

Molly and Beau weren’t much of a distraction- just another reminder of the shittiness of everything and how it extended beyond this fight. She had tried to forget that fight with the perytons and Molly’s scary new ability and the truth about those eyes in his tattoos, but it was just like everything else- spilling out of the box she placed it in and threatening to overwhelm her, but it wasn’t just her that it was overwhelming.

“Molly, we could end this,” Beau was saying, fighting back kobolds with her staff while Molly sliced at them with his usual pirouettes and twirls. “It’s stupid to not use everything we’ve got when we’re almost tapped out.”

“Why? So you can have something else to write to the Cobalt Soul about?” Molly snapped back. “You don’t get it, Beau.”

“I get that you’re being a stubborn brat right now!” She slammed her staff right down a shrieking kobold’s throat, turning it into the worst spitroast ever and she recoiled a bit in disgust and flicked it off to Nott, who was greedily collecting bombs from the corpses before they were set off.

“Now is not the time for this,” Cree snarled. She was shooting blood-red sacred flames to mingle with Caduceus’s verdant green ones. Caleb had held off on firebolts due to concern that the bombs might ignite prematurely and was staying back and trying to get the Tinkertops back into the shop where they would be safe.

“And you,” Beau snarled at Cree, whirling on her as she pivoted to change her focus to another kobold. “What kind of tricks are you hiding?”

“None that would help this situation, I assure you!” Cree snapped back.

Jester couldn’t take it. She could barely focus on her attacks, so overwhelmed with everything going on. The kobolds dying for something they were probably forced into believing in; Beau and Molly fighting and tearing into each other; the fact that all of her friends were bleeding and suffering and she couldn’t do anything. If it would have helped anything, she would have screamed.

And then someone else did, instead.

The Nein snapped to attention, turning back to the Tinkertop’s shop behind them where Rissa had fallen from a kobold that got past Caleb’s defenses and slashed her with its claws. The scream had been from Cleff, trying to get to his daughter. Sken, bleeding, but having wrestled herself away from Yasha had him by his collar, while he howled his grief and rage.

Rissa wasn’t moving. Her chest was a series of bleeding gashes and her eyes were glassy and unfocused, staring up at the sky. Jester’s heart leapt into her throat.

“Looks like I win,” Sken grinned, savagely. Molly tried to leap towards her, but he was too slow to get either of his blades on her and she pivoted to retaliate and skewered him neatly with her longsword like the starburst scar on his chest was just a target for her to hit. She yanked the blade free and Molly dropped to the ground, swords clattering on the stone, but still breathing in heavy, aching gasps. “Anyone else?” She snapped to the shellshocked Nein.

Fjord snarled and began throwing eldritch blasts without even bothering to aim properly and Sken retaliated by shifting the still-sobbing Cleff under her arm and holding up a clenched fist to show off a ring that she kissed pointedly, bringing another fog cloud that spread across the area in a fast moving burst. The Nein attempted to attack her as she fled, but they could not keep her from moving no matter how hard they tried, nor could they keep track of her in the fog.

It was Caduceus who called a halt to their pursuit, stabbing his staff down on the ground and using thaumaturgy to make a loud crack of thunder to accompany it. “Don’t follow her. We’re not in any shape to do it and we all know it.” He began walking towards Rissa. Caleb was leaning over her, looking ashen.

“I- I could not keep track of them all,” he panted. “I was trying to shield them. I-”

“It’s okay. You did fine,” Caduceus was saying soothingly. “There’s a lot that could have been done better here, but some things… They just happen, but we can make this right. We can make all of this right.” He reached into his bag and pulled out a diamond.

Jester gasped. “You still have a spell, Caduceus?”

He nodded. “I see how things are with you all. It seemed to hold something back.” He laid the diamond on Rissa’s chest and took a deep breath. Jester could smell peat moss and grave flowers in the air as Caduceus’s magic took hold of the diamond and began to work through it until it shone with a lichen-pink hue. “Wildmother, I ask you to correct a mistake. To save a life that shouldn’t have been taken so suddenly. We are not without our faults, but an innocent life shouldn’t be punished for our misjudgment. Bring this girl back.”

Vines worked their way out of the stone, coming to cradle Rissa at first and then to cover her until only the diamond was visible. It cracked down the middle, releasing the pink glow within until it finally shattered and the dust spread across the vines until they, too, glowed with that ethereal pink light which began to turn into a bright green like spring leaves.

The vines began to retract and fall away, revealing Rissa once more, her wounds closed up. Five brutal, terrifying seconds passed and she sucked in a breath and the Nein released their own held breaths in kind.

“There now,” Caduceus smiled. Rissa tried to push herself to her feet, but he gently pressed her down again. “Easy does it. You’re gonna feel rough for a bit.”

Rissa’s mouth moved wordlessly until she was finally able to croak out, “Where’s my dad?” She looked to each of them and when no one could meet her eyes, her face fell. “...Yeah. I figured that.”

“We’ll get him back, Rissa,” Fjord assured her. He looked to Cree. “We know where she’s goin’, right?”

Cree reached into the satchel that contained her blood vials and produced one. Even from across the way, Jester could see the label marked H. Stahlmast. “Indeed. If we rest now, we can begin the trek tomorrow. Stahlmast will not harm Cleff- he seems to need him alive.”

Jester swallowed. If it were her mama, she’d want to go right away, fuck everything else. She cautiously stepped closer to Rissa who had slumped against the stones, propped up by her elbows. “Is that okay?”

Rissa exhaled and looked them all over. “It’s gonna have to be. You lot had a number done on you. My dad’s a tough bastard. He’ll give Stahlmast a good chewin’ out and feel good about it.” She touched the site of her wound, still tacky with blood. “Maybe I’ll finally get a pony out of this. Dying and coming back to life ought to get a girl one, right?”

Her blithe sarcasm and acceptance of the situation turned Jester’s stomach. It wasn’t right- they could’ve beaten Sken. They should have beaten her! But they weren’t together. Something about the synergy of them was all off. They fought fine in town (or maybe they hadn’t and if the Clockwork Hounds hadn’t been there, they would have fucked that up too), but now everything was tossed off-balance. Molly and Beau fighting. Nott having to disarm the bombs. Caleb not being able to support. Fjord worried too much about her stupid emotions that he wasn’t paying attention.

Someone died because they weren’t all together. She grit her teeth, feeling the break coming. She pushed and pushed and pushed, but when the levee broke, she couldn’t stop the flood.

“It’s not okay! You should be pissed at us! We could have stopped you from dying and kept your dad from being taken away and we didn’t, because everything is falling apart.” She almost said more, but that was too much already. Everyone was staring at her- even the dog.

In her cloak, Sprinkle nuzzled up against her cheek and somehow that was the final straw. Tears began to fall freely and she pivoted on her heels and took off down the street in a swish of skirts. She’d find a place to pull herself together and then she’d pull this group together the way she always did.

She couldn’t afford to do anything less.

Beau started to run after Jester, but Caduceus grabbed her arm. “I’ll get her.”

He looked around at everyone, all in various states of distress- Molly hadn’t even moved from where he sat on the ground, staring at the wound on his chest like it perplexed him and caused him pain in equal measure. These people, this garden he’d been tasked with it… They were a mess, all right. They needed a lot of tending to if they were going to face the destiny that awaited them, the prophecy given to him in vague terms by a dream from the Wildmother.

Nine red eyes. Nine souls bound together.

Well, every journey begins with some difficult terrain. He wouldn’t know that from experience, but he’d heard enough stories. The important part was to recognize that difficult terrain didn’t mean impassable. They would get through this.

They just needed a gentle hand to guide them and give them a firm push in the right direction.

But first, he needed to get Jester back. He left the Nein to lick their wounds and feel a bit sorry for themselves- necessary for the healing to begin- and took off down the path Jester had started down. He found her barely three hundred feet from where she started, tucked underneath the awning of another shop in the Shelf that had been closed up for the night. She was still sniffling, but it seemed she’d forced herself to stop crying.

Her poor weasel looked like he’d soaked up the brunt of her tears. His fur was sticking up in places that suggested she might have accidentally blown her nose on him, and he’d just taken it with resigned acceptance of his fate. What a champ, that animal was.

He sat down beside her without speaking at first. She didn’t pull away or try to run- a good start. After a second, she even scooted closer so she was pressed into his side.

“Everyone probably thinks I’m really weird now,” she mumbled, finally.

He shrugged. “Well, that’s not the worst thing to be. I’m really weird.”

Jester curled in on herself, but he could still hear her laugh, muffled though it was. “I don’t like being sad.”

His long ears flicked a bit as he tried not to recall those long, miserable days and nights that blended into each other while he waited for everyone to come home- when he was so lonely that he chewed lilies just to prove to himself that someone was still listening and keeping an eye out for him. Maybe he was a hypocrite for not bringing that up, but it wasn’t a Gravekeeper’s place to share their own stories and sorrow. They listened to others and helped them heal. It just wasn’t in his nature to focus on his own pain when there was so much else that needed healing. He was strong. He would endure.

They used to say that the first Clays (back before the fey blood brought in from the old city at the edge of the Savalirwood- long before it became a ruin- took hold of some and marriage took care of the rest and shifted their lineage to generations of firbolgs) could take pain from others by devouring it and taking it into themselves. They carried the grief of every single person who wept for someone in the Grove so they could move forwards without the weight of their sorrow weighing them down.

Calliope thought that story was stupid and made up. Caduceus couldn’t say he disagreed, because pain is necessary- it shows the body is fighting off something so it can heal. Still, it was a nice thought. To be the sort of person who could take others’ suffering on their shoulders without considering their own suffering. He’d like to be that for these people.

No, he needed to be that. They needed unity and he would provide it- be the temple they all gathered around. That was what the Wildmother led him to. That’s why Cree and Molly had run to him when they were chased. His temple. His place of safety.

This was all on him.

“Nobody likes being sad,” he finally said. He snaked a spindly arm around her shoulder and held her closer to him. “But you can’t heal unless you let yourself feel whatever it is you need to feel. Emotions are like wounds, Jester. If you don’t tend to them, they fester.”

She sniffed. “Is that why Molly and Beau hate each other now?”

Molly and Beau were his next project, and what a project that would be. You couldn’t corner or bully either of them or they’d dig their heels in. “They don’t hate each other. They just have different ideas about what the right thing to do is.”

“They just need to talk to each other!” Jester pulled away slightly. “They aren’t wrong. Beau should get more information about the eyes, but she didn’t have to go behind Molly’s back to do it.”

“It’s a lot easier when one person is wrong and the other person is right, huh?” He chuckled.

Jester blew a raspberry. “Seems like the other kind happens more often.” She tugged on the bow around her weasel’s neck. “The world’s way different than what I expected it to be, you know? At first it seemed like the bad guys were always really obvious and some of them even are! Like this Stahlmast guy and the Iron Shepherds…”

Caduceus didn’t miss the way her voice dipped when she mentioned the Iron Shepherds, but he didn’t comment on it. You had to be careful with hothouse flowers like Jester- raised in isolation and then suddenly thrust out into an open world. Already, his picture of her was clear.

If he could manage self-reflection (and he refused on principle), he’d see how alike they really were.

“But then there’s things… how to handle bad situations. Like… Okay.” She shifted so she was facing him. “A month or so ago? We met this really sweet girl named Calianna. And she was apparently part of this cult to a super evil goddess, but she escaped and now she wants to destroy all these things that are used to communicate with her, I guess. So we helped her find this bowl, and there was some kind of misunderstanding- like Cali wanted to take the bowl and Caleb was like, ‘oh no this might be dangerous in the wrong hands’ and Beau was like ‘well you can’t make this decision for her’ and we just kinda ended up smashing it since that’s what Cali wanted to do with it anyway.” She sucked in a breath, because it finally occurred to her she hadn’t been breathing. “So it’s the same thing with Beau and Molly right now. Molly doesn’t want to deal with the eyes, but Beau thinks we should, and her compromise was to just… not tell Molly she was doing it.”

“I think we all need to deal with the eyes,” Caduceus nodded. “And I think it’s important that Molly understand that this isn’t just about him.”

Jester kneaded her fingers into the crinoline of her skirt. “He knows that. I know he does. He just… doesn’t want to hurt us.”

“It’s like Beau and Caleb and the bowl, though,” he pointed out. “Molly might think he’s protecting everyone, but he can’t make that call for the whole group. We have to be wholly together in this.”

She chewed the inside of her cheek, thoughtfully. “Normally I’d cast a Zone of Truth or something and we could all talk everything out, but I don’t have any spells left.”

The idea of forcing everyone to be honest would probably be counterintuitive anyway. Caduceus was suddenly glad that she had no spells- he doubted even logic would beat out her poor impulse control if she decided that was how she wanted to do this. “I think I’ve got an idea.”

She blinked up at him in wide-eyed curiosity. Her eyes were still bloodshot and shining from unshed tears, but she looked far less miserable than she did when she stormed off. That was a win, at least. “What kind of idea?”

He used his staff to pull himself onto his feet. There was a mischief in his eye that hers suddenly mirrored “My family’s got four kids, including me. My mom knew how to get everyone to stop fighting. We're gonna play a game.”

Her eyes lit up.

Molly still hadn’t moved an inch since the fight ended. He was transfixed by his unhealed wound- a single stab right through his chest, barely missing his heart. It still hurt every time he breathed. Cree had tried to tend to him, but he’d shooed her away, determined to sit in his latest stupid sulk and bleed for a moment, like the stubborn brat Beau said he was.

“Mollymauk, you are the most hurt of us all,” Caleb said, holding out the potion he kept on his person at Nott’s insistence. “You should take this for now.” Off Nott’s indignant gasp, he added, “We can get another for me before we leave if there are any to spare here in town, and if not, then our three healers will suffice.”

Her jaw immediately snapped shut, but she still glowered at Molly like she was insisting he refuse. He was too tired to be spiteful about it and waved Caleb off, ignoring how she preened about it.

“It’ll be fine. We’re just going to sleep, right?” He dragged his hands down his face, which only served to drag vertical smears of his own blood down his cheeks. Well, now the outside matched the inside. It felt like everything that drove him right now was feral and unhinged- even his pride was violent and unrelenting.

He couldn’t even meet Beau’s eyes.

“That is still not a very comfortable wound to sleep with…” He shook his head, and Caleb backed down with his usual awkwardness. “Ja, okay. As you wish. I will just… cast the dome then.”

Rissa had refused to sleep in the dome when it was offered, choosing to go to her own bed so she could process what happened on her own terms. Fjord had walked her home, though Molly imagined a lot of that was concern for Jester and Caduceus being off on their own than just simple chivalry.

Everyone wanted to keep everyone else in sight, yet they were all disparate and pulling apart.

Just like the circus, right before the end.

Molly tried not to think about those days leading up to Trostenwald. If he did, he might feel like he saw the end coming before it truly did and he’d be caught up in a haze of maybes and might haves that he didn’t need to indulge. That wasn’t what he did. He lived for the present, not the past.

But the circus was his first home and it wasn’t a disservice to his affection for the Nein to say he missed them and would have loved to have not had to leave it shattered and scattered to the winds. Was it going to be the same for the Nein now? If not now, then when? Weeks from now? A month? Maybe another two years?

Would he even last that long?

Why are you worrying about this? He demanded of himself. Why couldn’t he stop chasing himself in circles, remembering the way Ornna and Gustav were so livid with each other that they couldn’t stand within four feet of one another without sniping; the way Desmond and Bosun talked in hushed whispers and cast nervous looks Gustav’s way; the Knot sisters, as if sensing the end, discussing running. And Kylre- fucking Kylre.

If he had looked closer, he might have noticed the hunger in his eyes and how it deepened with every passing day, a tiger fed on barley and calculating how within reach fresh meat was.

Maybe all of it could have been prevented.

You don’t want to be surprised, a languid voice curled around his mind and he choked down the panic. The voices had been silent for so long- since his dream with the Moonweaver- that he had almost forgotten about them, and here was one just creeping back.

Are you influencing my thoughts? He almost spoke it aloud, but god forbid he give anyone else another reason to look at him strangely.

I am only offering that which you won’t give yourself. This wasn’t the joyful voice or the angry voice- this was the one who had offered him the ability to see through illusions. Perspective, Nonagon. You must see through everything. Deceptions and lies. The things that hide behind smiles. It might not happen again if you’re careful, if you know what to look for.

Molly grit his teeth in what he hoped looked like pain from his wounds and sent all of his newly dug up memories of the circus scattering now that he understood why they were suddenly in the forefront of his mind. Go away. I don’t want your perspective.

The voice didn’t speak again.

He sucked in a breath and opened his eyes again to see Caduceus and Jester (with Fjord trailing along behind) had returned. There was a look in Caduceus’s eyes that suggested that the oft-bandied about ‘leader stick’ had been claimed by him and there was a part of Molly’s endless curiosity that wanted to know just what that looked like in his hands, exactly.

“I know things are a little… complicated,” he said, once everyone’s attention had moved to him and not their own misery.

“You are a master of understatement, my friend,” Cree muttered. After he refused her assistance in tending to him, she had taken position apart from the rest of the group again as she was wont to do whenever there was conflict. Then again, it felt like there had been nothing but conflict since they left Zadash. Apparently, city air only did so much.

“Maybe we should have this conversation in the dome,” Caduceus offered, gesturing to where the dome had sprung up at Caleb’s will. The promise of a long night's rest overwhelmed even the awkward tension that seeped into everything, and they all made their way inside, determined to flop and sleep and damn whatever conversation Caduceus wanted to have. Jester had apparently been appointed his assistant for whatever the hell this was, however, and she went around the dome as everyone filed in, pushing them into a circle until they had shaped out the circumference of the dome with their seated bodies. Caduceus squeezed into an empty spot and Jester found another across from him (and right beside Molly) and placed her hands in the middle of the circle, all smiles.

Molly knew that look. That was the look before she cast zone of truth the last time. The urge to exit the dome was almost overwhelming, but when he tried to stand, Jester reached over and placed a hand on his shoulder.

“It’s okay, Molly. This is gonna be fun. Caduceus and I talked this out while we were walking back.”

He really and truly wanted to wrench out of her grip and take off, but he couldn’t handle the earnestness in her eyes. When she had run off like that, the guilt about how much of that pain might have been caused by him was unbearable, which, for someone who rarely felt guilty about anything, was something to consider. So for her, he flopped back down, wincing through the lingering pain from his wounds.

Noticing that, Jester began to remove bandages from her pack and started the process of wrapping them. This time, he didn’t protest it. “Okay, so I’ll let Caduceus explain the rules to his part, but this is the part I came up with.”

“It’s actually a really good addition,” Caduceus smiled. “My brother would have burst into flames if he had to do it though.”

“This is a family thing?” Fjord frowned.

“Yeah. You guys never played weird games with your family?”

A mixed bag of responses, almost impossible to discern (the answers were obvious, for the most part, anyway) came in unison. Jester finished tending to Molly’s wounds and returned to her seated position. “So we’re gonna go around the circle and everyone here has to say one nice thing about everyone else.”

The looks she got were skeptical. “What’s Caduceus’s part?” Molly asked, hesitantly.

“We go around the circle and tell everyone what’s bothering us.” Given the smirk on his face, he knew full well that everyone would jump at the chance to do Jester’s to avoid that part of the game.

If they were lucky, they would all crash from exhaustion before it came to that, but given how much Caduceus was staring at him, specifically, that didn’t seem to be likely. They were in it for the long haul.

Fuck. This was even worse than a zone of truth. Being stuck anywhere with Caduceus was like having a perpetual zone of truth up anyway.

When no one volunteered, Jester leapt at the chance. “Okay. I’ll go first. You can see how it’s done, then.” She cleared her throat. “Molly, you’re so cool. The fact that you can read fortunes is amazing.” She moved on to Cree sitting on Molly’s other side- sticking close, even after he refused her help.

Loyal to a fault, even if she was loyal to someone who wasn’t really him.

“Cree, you’re really good at teamwork- like you don’t even like us that much, but you’re always trying to support us and that’s really nice of you.”

Cree’s whiskers quivered as she stared, wide-eyed, and then ducked her head in a grimace. “As I said, it is beneficial to help you out. Keeping you alive helps keep me alive.”

“Well, at least you’re honest about your ulterior motives,” Beau smirked, the picture of snide. Jester hissed at her.

“Beau, shhh. We’re only saying nice things right now.”

“That was nice!” Beau protested. “Fjord, was that nice?”

“It was kinda the nice where it sounds like you’re sayin’ ‘fuck you’ at the end.’” Fjord scratched at his chin. “Maybe work on that before it comes to your turn.”

“Wait so backhanded compliments aren’t allowed?” Nott asked, lowering her flask. “Most of mine are definitely backhanded.”

A small scale clusterfuck broke out as everyone tried to define nice things, but Caduceus and Jester quickly wrangled everything back on track and Jester was allowed to continue to lead by example. Unsurprisingly, she had sweet things to say about everyone and her compliments dissolved a lot of the lingering tension, even if Molly and Beau were still avoiding prolonged eye contact.

Caduceus went next and was, as expected, extremely polite, but his insightful compliments cut a little too close to the bone, further acknowledging the unspoken fact that he saw through just about everything. With everyone knocked off guard, Nott threw herself into the game and managed to mostly say nice things (and went on about Caleb for almost five minutes until Caduceus stopped her before Caleb burst all the blood vessels in his face from embarrassment), but there was still a subtle hint of snideness to some of her comments. Caduceus and Jester let it slide, since she apparently tried.

Fjord volunteered to be next to get it over with. His compliments were primarily tactical and about personal strengths as part of the group and the way Caduceus looked at him and nodded in approval shifted something in him- it wasn’t a sign of an impending crush, which would have been hilarious given Caduceus’s disinterest, but rather a desperate need for approval that had just been satiated.

Molly saw things too- not as well as Caduceus did and he certainly avoided talking about any of it until it was useful, but it was part and parcel to his ability to read fortunes to see through to the heart of something. Caduceus, on the other hand, might as well have been able to read souls.

Hearts and souls... and Cree read blood. They were certainly a creepy lot, weren’t they?

Caleb went after Fjord, understanding the need to tear off the bandage. He mumbled his way through mostly simple compliments, avoiding eye contact all the while. Molly found himself leaning forwards, fingers digging into his thighs, waiting for his turn. Everyone else’s words had filled him with relief and heart-wrenching joy that chased away the darkness for the moment, but he needed to hear what Caleb had to say for… personal reasons.

He looked up to meet Molly’s eyes- only briefly- and then lowered his head. “It is as I said in Zadash- you shine brightly, circus man.”

Molly’s throat went dry and his heart did that stupid stutter again, because even if it was the second time, it was the first time he said it in front of other people. He missed most of Beau’s awkwardly spoken compliments until she said his name and he had to shift his attention to her for the first time since his frustration had started to build.

“You’re stubborn,” she said, through gritted teeth.

“That’s not-” Jester started, but Beau held up a hand to shush her.

“It is, though. Sometimes. Being set in your beliefs isn’t a bad thing. It means you have convictions. You believe in something. It’s taken me a long time to even start to pretend I believe in anything at all, but you do it so easily. There’s a time and a place to stick to your beliefs, though- like not letting them get people hurt.”

Molly was so overwhelmed he didn’t even twitch at the backhanded remark. It would have been weird if she didn’t throw that at him.

“You forgot Cree,” Caduceus noted, when Beau exhaled like her soul had left her body and her breath was trying to catch it before it could shuffle off this plane.

She immediately grimaced, and Cree, who had been growing steadily more uncomfortable with all the nice words being thrown her way, flattened her ears to her head. “She does not need to force herself to say things she does not believe.”

That did it. Molly knew enough about Beau to know that if someone threw down a gauntlet, she’d take it. It was almost hilarious that, in this case, the gauntlet was a compliment. “You don’t give up on people. It’s a flaw just like Molly’s stupid stubborn shit, but it’s also pretty admirable. I don’t know that many people who wouldn’t just bail on a situation like yours.”

“But you would rather I did?” Cree’s jaw twitched in what might have been a smile for a fraction of a second and then vanished just as quickly.

“I said it was a flaw, too.” Beau shrugged and turned away. “Yasha? You wanna go now?”

Yasha was in the process of playing with Rock’s ears when all eyes went to her. She immediately turned to Molly in a panic. “Oh, uh…”

“Remember the book, Yash’,” Molly beamed. This was going to be adorable. Yasha had a lot of love in that big heart of hers. She definitely needed to be a little more expressive of it. The group was still a little cautious around her.

“Right, um…” She shifted Rock out of her lap, and derailed the flow of the game for a moment while she shuffled through her book until she found the chapter about complimenting people- Molly knew it by the fern frond peeking out over the top of the book that she’d pulled from the Ustaloch their first day in Trostenwald. “Okay… Okay…”

She launched into a series of adorably, hilariously clinical compliments that were, at the very least, true of everyone if not stilted and awkward. They came from the heart, at least. Her pale cheeks had turned scarlet by the time she finished and closed the book and Molly gave her gentle golf claps for her troubles.

“So it’s just… You and Cree now, Molly,” Yasha murmured, shoving her book back into her bag, while her cheeks went from red to a more reasonable pink.

Knowing Cree was going to be difficult about this, Molly swept to his feet and delivered an overly grandiose series of compliments like he was making a toast. Seeing the theatrics involved, Fjord tossed him a meal tin to use as a prop.

“I can’t tell if you’re lying or not,” Beau laughed, as he finished off his elaborate and embarrassing series of compliments towards Fjord to cover up his assessment of Caleb’s good looks in the hope that they wouldn’t look pointed or overwhelmingly feelings-related.

Molly and Beau locked eyes again, the tension that had been dissolved with her words breaking up entirely. He was still angry- he didn’t know how that was going to go away. Not with ice breaking games or proof she cared and that she hadn’t been doing this because she was nosy.

Rumor was her card. He’d made it out of bitchiness because of her need to know things, but it had begun to turn affectionate. How could he keep blaming her for exemplifying the thing his cards made her legacy. “Beauregard Last Name Unknown and Frankly I’m Sure It’s Unknown For a Reason That I Don’t Care about.” (She snorted) “You think Cree’s loyal and I’m stubborn, but you are both to the point that it’s honestly kind of irritating. But I meant what I said before- you’re a terrifying enemy to have and a good person to know. And even if you’re deeply unpleasant, at least you own it.”

Beau’s jaw twitched in a facsimile of a smile, but it was somehow more of one than Cree gave. “Fuck you, Molly.”

Molly tossed the meal tin at her and she caught it deftly. “Fuck you, too.”

He sat back down with a dramatic flop that reminded him he was still injured. He whimpered and Jester and Cree immediately turned to make sure he hadn’t started bleeding again. When they were satisfied that he hadn’t, Jester turned to Cree.

“Your turn.”

Cree sighed and wiggled her fingers for Nott’s flask. After a moment of debate, she handed it over, allowing her to take a lengthy swig of it. Satisfied, she handed it back, and began to speak. “I do not know you well enough that I feel that any individual compliments wouldn’t be trite and uninspired. You have covered most of the things I have noticed about you all. There are times I feel I am only tolerated by most of you and actively distrusted by the rest.” She and Beau stared at one another and then broke contact at the same time. “However, you do go out of your way to include me and many of you have been kind to me. You have not slit my throat in my sleep. These are things I cannot ignore, and I thank you, as a whole for that.”

She paused, twisting the chain of the necklace she wore around a finger. The contents of that red gem swished along the sides and Molly vaguely recalled the way it glowed when she used her magic. It captivated him, held him transfixed, and only when Cree spoke again did he manage to rip his eyes away with a skin-crawling sense of revulsion.

“That is all I can say.”

Caduceus and Jester exchanged looks and met some silent agreement. “Yeah, I think that’s good enough, Ms. Cree. Thank you. And thanks to everyone else. That was really good of you all to open up like that. It’ll make this part easier.”

Molly tensed. In all the theater and relief and joy and love of this bloody party circlejerk of affection, he’d forgotten that was only the first stage. He worried his bottom lip with his teeth so hard that his fang pierced through it and he ended up sucking on it until it stopped bleeding, all while his tail lashed behind him.

Caduceus went on, “When I was a kid, my siblings and I fought all the time. There was always something we disagreed on or someone doing something we didn’t like and whenever it would get too much, my mom would sit us down and make us detail what was bothering us so she could figure out the root cause of the problem.” He reached up and scratched the underside of his chin. “See, in gardening, it’s always about the roots. If there’s a problem with the plant, it usually starts in the roots and works its way up. We just need to figure out where this problem started before it tears us all into pieces.”

He spread his hands. “We all care about each other- we have plenty of nice things to say. No one’s here to attack anyone or put anyone on the defensive. With that said, who has a grievance they need to talk about? We don’t have to do every single one tonight, but I think we all know where the worst of it lies.”

No one said anything for a long time, even though Caduceus was obviously calling certain people out without naming names. Beau finally broke first. “Molly, why didn’t you just use that stupid power on Sken? We could have had her.”

Molly ducked his head, biting back the urge to demand why she went behind his back to force her on the defensive. The curiosity about everything continued even now. She was willing to risk his soul for a useful tool.

No, that’s not what she’s doing, he chastised himself. It feels that way because you’re- “I was scared.”

He could feel something burn on his shoulder, another tendril of something or other trying to gain purchase on his mind. He shoved it down and the burn ceased and the tendril retracted and he found he’d stopped breathing for a moment. He took a deep breath and then another, slow in and out as the urge to panic fled from him. “I’m so scared I can’t control it, and it doesn’t feel right when I use it… It feels like a shite way to kill someone. Like I’m ripping their entire mind to shreds. Every bit of it.”

Silence fell over the group. When Beau spoke again, it was quieter. “Do you want to know why I went behind your back?”

Molly nodded, feebly. “Can’t promise I’ll agree with it, but maybe I can stop being pissy about it.”

“Yeah, and fuck you for pretending you were fine until it got to be too much. We could have talked this out before Caduceus had this little sit down.” She crossed her arms over her chest defiantly, but could only hold it for a moment before she deflated again. “But it probably would have just been more screaming. This was a good idea. Embarrassing as shit, but whatever. My family never did anything like this.”

There was an unspoken maybe it would have been better if they had in there. Molly could see it behind her eyes. Something happened to Beau- he knew that much, even if he wouldn’t pry. Something had happened to all of them.

Broken people, just like the circus. In the end, those broken pieces just couldn’t stick together. He didn’t need an extra set of eyes looking back over where things went wrong to see that it was all really just a case of things not slotting together right. Maybe the Nein could do what they couldn’t- fit together to form an unbreakable whole.

Gods, he hoped so. He doubted anyone else would put up with his shit- except Cree, but only because she’d made it her job to. That wasn’t healthy for either of them.

“When you died-” Beau started, almost choking on the words. The feeling was mutual, as Molly almost choked hearing them, “- all I could think was that maybe it wouldn’t have happened if Keg’s information hadn’t sucked. It wasn’t her fault, but we went into that shit not knowing everything. Maybe you don’t wanna know about this shit, but if we go into it without knowing what we’re dealing with…” She swallowed down what could have been a frustrated sob. Seeing how hard she was fighting not to cry, the reality of just how badly his death, however brief it was, had truly affected her. It put a lot into perspective. “I don’t want that to happen again, all right?”

She immediately turned to Cree, screwing her resolve to the sticking place and banishing the last of her grief. “So here’s my other grievance, Cree. You know more about this than any of us. What are we dealing with?” She looked at Molly. “You can step out of the dome if you want, but you can’t deny I’m right, can you? Bad information killed somebody. Not being together on this killed somebody. Bad things happen when we don’t have all the facts.”

Molly started to get up, but then sat back down. Gods, he hated admitting he was wrong. Beau was right- his convictions were strong, so strong that he couldn’t give them up even when it was inconvenient and causing pain. He looked at the world and demanded that it move for him, not the other way around. In an ideal world, it would make things better, but believing his way was better didn’t mean that it always was. He had to consider the facts he didn’t have.

And, more importantly, if he didn’t move, then the world was going to move him. These voices in his head were moving him without his consent, already. “Just tell us what they are, Cree. Is that enough for now?” He looked at Beau and she nodded.

“It’s a start, yeah.”

Cree looked to everyone around her, her golden eyes calculating. She was trying to figure out her options, but with no spell slots and a handful of injuries and a contract with the Gentleman holding her in play with them far more strictly than her need to get to Nogvurot, she had no choice but to give in. Sighing, she dropped her hands onto her lap and stopped playing with her amulet. “They are called the Somnovem. The Eyes of Nine. They have many names, both as a whole and as individuals. Lucien found them through the tome I spoke of before. It was their city he tried to reach when he… Well.” She waved a hand at Molly.

“And who are they, these Somnovem?” Caleb asked quietly. Molly eyed him, but his curiosity didn’t seem piqued. He looked ill, as though he had suspicions about something.

“Who they were means little.” Cree shook her head. “What they are is a collective of very powerful beings who named Lucien their Champion.”

“The… Noganon?” Fjord offered.

“Nonagon,” she corrected. “It is through them that Lucien was bestowed his gifts. Eighteen in total. Nine for each eye on his body and nine more as per his title.”

“Eighteen?!” Molly squawked at the same time as Nott said, “What kind of gifts?”

He whirled on her. “No. We are not indulging this.”

“What if they’re useful?” Nott shot back, and then, quite suddenly as if she had just realized something, she backed down, staring at her blood-stained claws. “No… No, you’re right. Some things aren’t worth the utility.”

Beau looked like she was chewing on something sour as she took all of this in. “So the… The brain thing- that’s a Nonagon ability?”

“It is called rend mind and it is Ira’s gift to bestow. As of right now, Mollymauk has woken up three of the eyes on his body and gained the gifts that correspond.”

Molly shuddered, remembering the voices. “And the dreams I’ve been having?”

There were uncomfortable shifts in the people who were aware of the dreams and concern in the eyes of the people who weren’t. Cree looked down. “They call them the Dreaming Nine for that is what Somnovem means in their language. They communicate primarily through dreams.”

“Do they speak to you?” Beau asked, an accusatory bite to her words. “Have they been… asking you to wake them up in your dreams?”

She growled back, “They do not speak to me without the Nonagon’s influence. They are waking up because they are drawn to Mollymauk’s emotions. Each Somnovem is connected to a different, powerful emotion. Ira is rage. Mirumus is surprise. Gaudius is love and joy. I sense their presence within him, but that is all I sense.”

The angry voice. The happy voice.

The voice who just spoke to him a moment ago.

All the other names they listed in his dreams. Vigilan. Culpasi. Luctus. Elatis. Fastidan. Timorei. Each one a feeling, which meant just now that sudden, intense fear had almost woken up another.

Jester knit her brows. “But if they’re all feelings, does that mean every time Molly feels anything, he’s gonna get new creepy powers?”

Molly’s attention shifted to Cree. He could feel the panic rising in him again and he shoved it down, watching her for any trace of a lie as she shook her head. “No. They must be very strong emotions and very specific. Molly’s rage at the Sour Nest woke Ira. His joy at the victory and having you all back safe woke Gaudius.” She looked at Molly out of the corner of her eye. “Mirumus was drawn by your desperate need for him. His gift allows you to see things true- through illusions or otherwise.”

“Is there a way to… to block them?” Molly choked out. “I don’t want any more of them, but I can’t just not feel.”

“There are spells to block psychic influence,” Caleb piped up. “But they are very powerful, far beyond anything I can do at the moment.”

“So that’s it, then?” Beau slapped her knees, clearly disappointed. “We can’t do anything about this?”

Cree shook her head. “Without Lucien to channel them properly, Mollymauk is simply living within a vessel for the Somnovem’s powers and his emotions are the lure that brings them in.”

While Molly cringed at the thought of being referred to as a vessel due to the way these Somnovem treated him like a thing, anyway, Caduceus lit on a very real, very terrifying portion of these reveals. “It seems like it wouldn’t matter who is in the body at all, then, if it’s just a vessel. A jug doesn’t care if there’s water or alcohol in it. It’s just a jug. It serves its purpose either way.”

“Read the room, Duecey,” Nott exclaimed, appalled.

“I am.” Caduceus was definitely reading Cree for filth so hard with just his eyes that Molly could almost forget that he was being compared to a fucking jug. “You don’t serve the Raven Queen, do you?”

Cree’s hand went back to the amulet around her neck. “No.”

“You serve them.” Caduceus leaned back. “So if you were loyal to what they believed, you wouldn’t care so much about getting Lucien back. You’d be happy with just the jug. You could have just carried Molly right to where he needed to go.”

Molly blinked. Shit. As much as this was killing him, Caduceus had just lit on a valid point now that things were coming out. Cree didn’t need Lucien. The Somnovem didn’t need him either, though they probably wanted him simply because Lucien was already in their thrall and it was too difficult to break a new champion in. If Cree had just avoided the topic of Lucien altogether when she brought him back, then maybe…

Well, he’d like to think he’d resist the voices, regardless, but knowing they were Lucien’s problem and everything was always about him made it easier to dig his heels in. Maybe he would have weakened if everything about Lucien didn’t make him stubbornly rigid and unmovable.

Cree clutched her amulet tighter. “Lucien is my friend. Would you not do the same for any of your own?”

“We wouldn’t call it religion and we wouldn’t kill someone who didn’t do anything wrong to get him back,” Beau added, following up on Caduceus’s thread. “We’d do anything else, but not that.”

Cree looked like she’d been backed into a corner now, and seeing that this was about to turn into another conflict that couldn’t be resolved with kind words and air-clearing, Molly cut in, abruptly. “Well, that was more information than I wanted, but hopefully it’s good enough for everyone else. Are we all satisfied?”

There were nods and miserable confirmation, but there was no denying that while the mood was sour, it had nothing to do with inter-party conflict and everything to do with the information they had just received. It was a lot to take in and even harder to deal with it. “Excellent. Now can we please all just go the fuck to sleep?”

No one needed to be told twice. Despite being the one to call for it, however, he agreed to take first watch and positioned himself at the edge of the dome, facing the Tinkertops' shop, his back turned to everyone else. After everything, he just knew that he was going to have dreams tonight, and he wanted to prolong the inevitable.

Beau dropped down beside him and offered him Nott’s flask. “You’re pretty fucked up, Molly. You shouldn’t be taking watch at all. You should be sleeping that off.”

He looked down at the proffered alcohol. “Did you steal that from her?”

“Nah, she gave it to me. I think she feels bad for you.”

Molly took the flask and was thrilled, not for the first time, that it was bottomless. “This is what I didn’t want. Everyone looking at me differently.”

“Yeah, you said that. I think there’s worse things in life than Nott being creepily extra nice to you.” She swiped the flask back and took a swig, paused, and then began to drink deeply.

He snorted at her trying to outdo the length of his drag. “I love that you can still drink that knowing she backwashed in it.”

“Hey, it’s like you said. Alcohol’s sterile.” She handed the flask back, and went quiet. “I’m serious though. Worse things.”

“Like being no better than a jar?” He grimaced and took a more demure sip. Some things even alcohol couldn’t rid himself of the taste of.

“Cad’s metaphor sucked, but he’s not wrong. Maybe there’s something to what you said in Zadash- about getting Cree to turn on this whole thing.”

“The idea was getting her to turn on Lucien. Forget about him.” He took one more sip before he handed the flask back.

“Yeah… I just feel like Cad’s onto something. He’s got that vibe, you know?”

“Oh, absolutely. It’s insufferable and if he weren’t so cuddly and decent, I would hate him.” Molly wrinkled his nose.

“Cheers to that.” Another pause. “Are we good? Like really good. ‘Cause I thought we were good before and then you just got angrier the more we didn’t deal with it until it just exploded.”

It wasn’t fair to make her squirm about this. They were both wrong, but she’d been surprisingly decent about the whole thing. She was growing as a person. That had to be rewarded.

Still, he had a reputation to maintain. Their dynamic still needed that little tug, the subtle push and pull of dueling stubborn personalities. So he considered it for a lengthy amount of time and then finally threw his arm around her shoulders.

“Yeah. We’re good.”

She tried to shove him off, but the attempt was as feeble and staged as his pointed consideration of whether or not to forgive her. He tightened his grip. “Don’t do it again, though.”

“Yeah, all right. Fine.” She rolled her eyes. “Just don’t try to ignore everything and take it all on yourself.” He grunted a vague affirmation and she punched him in the side, but at least it wasn’t his chest, so the pain was manageable. Her stupid fists still hurt like a bitch, though. “And stop rushing into fucking danger like an idiot if you’re not even gonna use those abilities, all right? I get why you’re not using them. I’m sorry I even asked. But you gotta stop trying to fight everything.”

“You fight everything.”

“Yeah, and you shouldn’t be like me! I’m terrible, remember.”

He gave her a sloppy kiss on the side of the head that made her squirm and hiss in revulsion. “I think I like you better when you’re terrible.”

She wormed her way out of his grip and gave him an affectionate noogie that forced Fjord to grunt sleepily that they could either finish their watch quietly or go the fuck to sleep. They broke into stupid giggles that eventually petered off into companionable silence.

They sat shoulder to shoulder the rest of the watch, quietly lost in their own thoughts, but with no more distance between them. Despite the struggles that led here, the result was that a shift had occurred, a change in their dynamic.

And they both understand all those things Caduceus said about siblings a little better.

Chapter Text

The dome had been tucked up against the tinker’s shop, safely out of the way should Hupperdook wake early to tend to the damage or open the shops that lined the Shelf. Life moved on, regardless of the horrors that occurred. As awful as this was, the town would survive and thrive and continue on. Dawn would come and bring light to a world changed, but no one could afford to stop for it.

Cree could relate. Apparently, her perseverance and loyalty and dedication were her finest traits. Most of the Nein’s kind words about her seemed to stem from the same root- politeness, endurance, self-sacrifice, undying devotion. They probably mistakenly believed those traits had begun with Lucien and carried over.

If they knew where those traits were born from, how they had been drilled into her since she was old enough to speak, before her fangs came in, before her claws were useful, before her kitten-blue eyes had turned gold… they might be hesitant to praise them.

And yet, curled in a miserable ball with Jester tucked between her and Caduceus, their kindness was all that was on her mind, preventing sleep from coming. She subtly licked at the wounds on her arm and hand where the kobolds had leapt up and bitten and clawed at her and tried to catch the whispered murmurings of Molly and Beau, but even her hypersensitive ears couldn’t track the threads of their conversation.

When they traded off, she was quick to volunteer to take the next one, slinking, despite her large frame, around the rest of the sleepers to take the same position Molly and Beau had vacated. Watch was pointless in an urban environment, safe within this impenetrable dome- a habitual thing. Sken Zabriss would not return to the tinker’s shop and no one knew what had transpired here yet, so no one would think to try and rob it.

The habit, at least, meant that she could stay awake for a few hours and pretend that it had nothing to do with her own clear unhappiness because the Nein’s kindness, accidentally brutal as it might be, was denying her respite. They confused her so- one minute doing small kindnesses, like stepping in to protect her from the Gentleman, and the next they were throwing accusations and distrust her way.

Well, she supposed she earned it. This relationship was transactional- they were giving to her so she would give back. They clearly intended to sway her. And Caduceus…

She trembled. His words had caught her off-guard, entirely. It was easier to focus on the kindness and compliments and appreciation than to think about the faltering of her faith, especially knowing she was half as powerful as she once was. Lucien had died and her faith had wavered and had it not been losing him that caused her magic to fail her? Had the Somnovem sensed her displeasure at them for letting him die?

She clutched her amulet. No… No. That couldn’t be. They were waking up and she was getting stronger again. She could feel spells she hadn’t accessed in years coming easily to her again. They hadn’t forsaken her. Lucien still needed her, so they still needed her.

Someone dropped down beside her without her having been made aware anyone was moving at all. She startled, fur bristling, and whirled- Caleb. “Sneaking up on a woman with claws is a very dangerous thing to do, wizard.”

“You are usually quite a bit more perceptive than that,” Caleb shrugged, unconcerned at how close he just came to having his throat torn out.

Silence came to them, lengthy enough that she grew uncomfortable with it. Her whiskers twitched as she watched Caleb just stare at the tinker’s shop, lost in some thought or another. “We do not need two on watch. The tinker’s shop will not walk away.”

Caleb didn’t look at her. “How did Lucien come to find the Somnovem?”

Ah yes. Of course. Give them answers and they still desire more. “He found that tome, as I said.”

He nodded, soberly. “Ja, you did say that. What I am curious about is if he went looking for trouble or if it just found him.”

Her fur hadn’t gone down and now it had even more reason to poof up and bristle. “Does that matter to you so much?”

“Oh, I’d say it matters to me a great deal.” He finally looked her way. “Was he desperate for greatness and someone took advantage of it or was he just hungry for power and knowledge?”

Cree’s tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth. Both. It had been both for as long as she knew him. Lucien craved power. He wanted that which he never had. “What answer should I give? He is a monster in Mollymauk’s history, regardless, is he not?”

At that, Caleb chuckled- a dark, unpleasant sound. “That is... very fair.” He paused for a moment and she thought, perhaps, the matter would rest there, but, no… He had to continue to press. “And what about you? Is it power you seek or just his approval?”

She recoiled a bit. “What sort of person would not be drawn to power when it is offered?”

“That is a very glib answer, Ms. Deeproots.” Caleb held her gaze. “You really do not care about the Somnovem, do you? You did this all for him.”

She squeezed her amulet. “I would not question a holy woman’s faith if I were you.”

“Your faith has never been in question.” He clicked his tongue. “Sometimes faith is more dangerous than people realize.”

This wasn’t the first time he’d thrown advice her way. The first watch they shared he had thrown her devotion in her face. And then he tried to convince her not to isolate herself, when he, himself, was perpetually doing the same. He seemed to be projecting a great deal onto her, but why she didn’t know.

She blinked slowly and then responded with casual indifference in the hopes that probing him might stop his ceaseless prodding of her. “I am curious what exactly it is about me that invokes such a strong sense of chivalry in you, wizard. It does not feel as though it is a natural response for you.”

Caleb leaned in very close, holding her gaze for an uncomfortable amount of time before he deadpanned, “I like cats.”

He snapped his fingers and his familiar appeared in her lap. She blinked in confusion, observing as the cat made biscuits in the folds of her robes, circled to get comfortable, and then curled up as if he belonged there. Cree made a move to lift him from her and drop him back onto his master, but then he yawned sleepily and she froze.

Fuck. That was adorable. She slowly turned to look at Caleb, who just shrugged again. “You might as well leave him. He seems comfortable there.”

She sighed heavily and then, without thinking, began to pet the familiar’s ears. “Well… You are certainly a finer creature than that fucking dog.”

It was becoming a strange second nature to just accept the Mighty Nein’s madness when it crept up on her. That was far more dangerous than anything else Caleb was implying.

Fjord stepped out of the dome for watch when Caleb called for the last one, but kept close to it. He hadn’t had any dreams from his own patron in awhile and the thought that he might after hearing about the Somnovem had kept him waking up in fits and starts, like his body just expected to be jolted out of a dream that wouldn’t come.

The hazy space between night and the break of dawn had colored Hupperdook in shades of shadowy grey that would eventually give way to brighter hues until the sun shone down on the destruction and the misery of it all would be lit by the light of day. It might look less unpleasant by sunlight.

Or it might look worse. Shadows hid a lot of things, some better left unseen. At least Nott had disarmed all the bombs in the kobolds that had attacked the Tinkertops' place. Not even a scorchmark dotted the stones here.

Lots of blood though. There was a drying pile of it in front of the shop where Rissa had fallen and it was that his eyes strayed to. He should have been better at keeping everyone together. That shouldn’t have happened. You don’t let your crew fall apart or people end up dead.

I’m really shit at being you, Vandran. I don’t know how you did it. His own voice always sounded hollow in his head, so familiar with Vandran’s accent sliding off his tongue now. The reality and the fantasy were getting impossible to discern, but moments like this… He was just an idiot orphan deckhand who survived when he shouldn’t have.

He stared at his hand and almost willed the falchion into existence just to see it, but pushed the thought aside. Red eyes, golden eyes. Powers from beings they didn’t understand. Gods, he and Molly were really in the same boat, weren’t they?

But Molly hadn’t reached for this and took it with both hands to save himself. Maybe Lucien had. He knew Cree understood more about dreams and patrons and the like than she let on, but the confirmation didn’t help the way he thought it might. She wasn’t the one having dreams. It was just him and Molly, who didn’t even want anything to do with it, but it sure wanted him.

How many eyes were on this party, exactly?

“Fjord?”

He whirled around, startling violently, his fingers spreading in anticipation of calling the falchion, but there was no threat. Jester had just stepped out of the dome and was rubbing her eyes with her fist. “You shouldn’t be out here alone.” She paused and raised an eyebrow. “...Did I scare you?”

He cleared his throat. “No, I just… almost pissed my pants because it seemed like the right moment for it. I miss those little tinkly bells you used to wear on your tail.”

Jester lifted her tail and frowned at it. “Yeah, I do too, but they make sneaking around really hard.”

“That’s the idea. No scarin’ me shitless.” He ran a hand along the back of his neck and exhaled. Fuck. This whole thing was turning him into a wreck.

Jester moved up closer to him. “Sorry I scared you. I was just worried…” She stopped.

He could fill in the blanks for himself. “I know. I just… needed some room to think.”

“About…” She waved a hand at the dome. “All of that?”

“Yeah… Yeah, it’s a lot to take in.”

Jester crossed her arms over her chest like she was trying to hug herself. Not for the first time, he wanted to stand behind her and wrap his arms around her, instead. To hold her so she didn’t have to hold herself together. But every time he faltered for one reason or another. She really deserved a better dance partner than him- someone who was confident in and out, and not just pretending.

“What if the Somnovem aren’t bad?” She asked, tentatively.

He lifted an eyebrow. “You don’t really think that, do you? Nine eyes? Seems a little shady, if you ask me.”

“Well, your patron has some weird eye thing, and all it does is give you wet dreams and make you eat balls.”

Fjord made a pained face at her word choice and judging by her expression, that was the intent. “And magical powers.”

“Which is a good thing!” She deflated almost the second the words left her mouth. “Yeah, that sounds sketchy to me, too. But people kinda think the Traveler is sketchy, too.”

“Absolutely no one thinks that,” Fjord lied.

“I think Beau does.” Jester glanced to the side.

He didn’t question that she didn’t call him on what he assumed had been a very obvious lie. “Well, Beau steals mail. She don't get to talk about sketchy.”

She swatted at him, breaking out into giggles. “Stop making me laugh. It’s not fair.”

“How's that not fair? Everyone could use a good laugh.” Her expression became suddenly crestfallen and his own face fell to match hers. “Jester?”

“I… Do you ever get sad, Fjord?” She winced and her voice took on that high-pitched mocking quality it did when she was bullshitting and doing it poorly. “That’s a stupid question. Forget it. Whelp. I’m gonna go back to bed.” She tried to turn and he gently caught her hand.

He felt something strangely electric in that moment between them, a sudden shift in everything. Jester had always struck him as this wild chaotic mess of a girl that he adored, but was too much to hold onto. She deserved a bigger world than anything he had to offer. She was real in a way he wasn’t.

Now it seemed like maybe they were both lying. “Jester…”

She didn’t pull away, but she didn’t look at him, either. They stood like that- hand in hand with Jester almost pulling away but never really breaking contact. After a second, she began to curl her fingers around his and relax. Her back remained to him, but not because she was on the verge of fleeing- she just didn’t want him to see her face.

He didn’t have to see it to know what was there behind her amethyst eyes. He’d seen it right before she ran away and Caduceus had to chase her down. He’d helped somewhat, but he’d only alleviated a symptom of something greater.

They all broke a little from what the Iron Shepherds did. They might be healing from this for a long time and pretending that wasn’t where it all started. It wasn’t Cree or Molly’s weird Somnovem shit. It wasn’t some random goliath bitch named Sken Zabriss managing to beat them. It was Lorenzo and his crew. Dead and decomposing and still torturing them.

“I do,” he said, finally. “A lot more often than you might think.”

“I mean like…” She made a soft, miserable sound and turned to face him without letting go of his hand. “Sad about things not working out the way you were hoping.”

What was he hoping? That he would be more like Vandran at this point- truly like Vandran, not just faking it? That he’d have his shit figured out? “‘Course I get sad about that,” he said, without being specific about it. “I think everyone does. I think none of this was what we were expectin’ when we left Trostenwald together, but that don’t mean it ain’t good.” He paused. “Are you sad, Jester?”

She opened her mouth, wordlessly trying to say something or other, but she must have given up on it halfway, because that miserable expression suddenly wiped itself off her face, replaced by sunshine and joy, like the sun beginning to rise behind him, lightening the darkened sky, was brightening her as well.

“Only sometimes,” she said, gently, “But it passes really quickly. Like yesterday, I was pretty upset, but then I talked to Caduceus and I was better. I just…” She reached over and took his other hand. “I worry about you, Fjord, y’know? You don’t like to talk about what hurts you, but I promise if anything hurts you, I’ll heal you.”

He gave her a lopsided smirk. She was being terribly hypocritical, but maybe she needed to be. Just for one more moment. “You’ll save a healin’ spell for me?”

Her smile brightened. The pink of the sky reflected in her eyes making them sparkle like the jewels they resembled, and he knew he was even more lost than he ever was before. “Always.”

The sun was rising on a new day. Things were changing- some for the better, some for the worst- and all Fjord could see or even care about in this moment was her smile. “I appreciate that, Jester.”

She tugged him a bit, pointing at the sky that he’d had his back to. “Look. The sun’s coming up.”

He didn’t say he already knew, that he was watching it in her eyes and the view was better from that angle. He turned to look where she pointed and drawled, “So it is. It’s a nice’un, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” She leaned against his shoulder. “Maybe it means today’s gonna be a good day.”

Molly lay face up in the endless mirrored lake that made up the Moonweaver’s dreamspace. He was dipped half below the surface, rather than sitting on top of it as if it were a pane of rippling glass, and he couldn’t imagine what that meant in the grand scheme of things, but he wasn’t thinking about that right now.

He was staring above him at the sky, the countless stars covered by churning red clouds that flashed with lightning, revealing red eyes peeking beyond the veil. With every bit of lightning came a resounding crack like glass beginning to break.

Something grabbed his ankle and yanked suddenly and Molly dipped, violently, below the water, plunged into cold darkness. He struggled and kicked but the grip on his ankle refused to give. The cracking sound was growing louder. In the darkness, he could see more red eyes flashing at strange intervals, watching him drown, unable to fight his way out.

It might be easier to just drown now before he fought too hard and still lost. He could spare himself and everyone else the disappointment. He closed his eyes and went limp, all the while he continued to be pulled down.

He could hear Sehanine’s voice in his head, whispering plaintively. They don’t need you. They just need a vessel. You’re just in the way. If you give in, then that’s all you’ll be. Not Mollymauk. Not Lucien. Not anyone. Just a tool.

Remember the albatross, Mollymauk. It’s bad luck to let it die.

Molly’s eyes snapped open and a new surge of resolve tore its way upwards and through him. He kicked off, yanking on the tether, fighting with it until it let go, and he was suddenly propelled upwards, as if lifted by invisible hands. He broke the surface of the water and hung suspended above it. The usually mirrored surface of the Moonweaver’s lake was now opaque and endlessly dark, a void he might have been lost in had he just given up entirely.

But above him, the sky still churned with red clouds and lightning still flashed. He could see the cracks in the sky as the dreamworld began to fall apart. Oblivion below him and the Somnovem above him, caught between fighting and giving up entirely. The Moonweaver said she could no longer protect him, and this was clearly what she had meant. Everything going forward depended on him.

“Is that why you said he was alone?” Molly whispered to thin air, knowing she could hear him. She just couldn’t manifest, apparently, in this half-destroyed dream world. “The Somnovem don’t need him either?”

The Moonweaver’s childlike voice trilled in his head, ”He’s a very well-trained tool, my albatross. It would be a shame for them to invest such time and work, only to lose him. But if they cannot return him to his body, they can still get what they want.”

“What do they want?!” Molly cried out, desperately, whirling in mid-air, trying to hunt for an explanation. “What was all this for?”

“I cannot say as such. Not now. I can only tell you that they are unnatural beings. They do not belong and if they destroy you and take what they wish… I fear what comes next.”

Molly swallowed. “Is this the last time I’ll hear from you?”

”I am always with you, love. I’m in Catha’s glow and the stars above you and in your cards, but your dreams are no longer solely mine and it is dangerous for me to reach out too often to shield you from them. However, I will gift you a boon. If your dreams are not safe, then you can find the dreams of others to take respite in when you need to.”

Molly felt his left palm grow very cold until it burned, like grabbing onto something made of ice barehanded. Just when it gave way to warmth again, the cracks in the dreamspace suddenly grew larger until pieces of it began to fall away. The Moonweaver screamed in pain and rage and Molly screamed with her.

He was still screaming when he suddenly felt a heavy, solid weight on his hips, pinning him down and gentle hands framing his face. And then Yasha’s voice whispered soothingly, “It’s okay, Molly. It’s okay. I’m here. It was just a dream.”

His eyes snapped open. The crowded dome was alive in wide-eyed shock, everyone thrown awake by the force of his scream. He curled in on himself as much as he could with Yasha sitting on him and refused to meet anyone’s gaze. Fuck. Was this going to happen every time now? It was bad enough having dreams with only one other person in the room. Having them in the dome seemed like an even bigger nightmare than the dreams, themselves.

Fjord and Jester must have been outside the dome, because they ran in and almost tripped over Beau and Caleb in the process. “What happened?” Fjord asked.

Molly was still remembering how to breathe in any way that wasn’t heavy pants, so it was a small mercy that Cree stepped in with a better question. “Another dream? Of the Somnovem?”

He nodded pathetically. Yasha began to move off of him to give him space, but he reached out his hand to take hers before she could go too far from him. His breathing was starting to return to normal, slowly but surely, as he took comfort in the people around him, most keeping a respectable distance, but there within reach if he needed them.

He’s alone, Sehanine had told him, which meant she knew before he did that Molly most assuredly was not alone. Somehow even having Cree wasn’t enough for Lucien to thrive in that space between dreams with only the Somnovem for company. Molly had seven people. Maybe eight if Cree could get her head out of Lucien’s ass. And all of them loved him, even when he was an absolute shithead. Even though what he was carrying them towards was dangerous. That alone was enough to calm him.

Yasha was gently stroking his palm, tracing the lines with her rough, sword-calloused hands. “Hey, Molly? Have you always had this weird birthmark?”

He didn’t jerk his hand out of her grip- couldn’t even if he wanted to- but he still jolted like he'd been stung. New things appearing on his body without his consent was up there with the scariest things that could happen to him right now. He froze and refused to look at it. “What?”

Jester pushed closer until she was peering over Yasha’s shoulder. “That’s not a birthmark… It’s not a scar or a tattoo either, though. Huh.”

“Really not helping me here,” Molly swallowed, clenching his eyes shut. “Instead of telling me what it’s not, can someone tell me what it is.”

Caduceus must have gotten closer. Molly could feel his narrow shadow leaning over him, blocking the light coming in through the dome. “Huh. Well, look at that. That’s the symbol of the Moonweaver.”

That snapped Molly right to attention. He took his hand back and held it to his face, trying to catch the dawn’s light through the dome so he could see what everyone else was seeing. It was faint, like someone had twisted the lines of his palm into a pattern and when it hit just the right angle he could see the outline of the moonbow.

He held up his other hand and compared them- the garish red eye within the serpent and the subtle hint of the Moonweaver’s essence. “That’s the second time I dreamed of her… She’s been trying to hold them at bay, but she can’t anymore. I don't think.” He glanced at Cree to gauge her reaction, but she was stone-faced.

“That’s a sign of a boon if I’ve ever seen one,” Caduceus smiled, warmly. “She left you with something to help.”

“What did she say, Molly?” Jester asked, her chin resting on Yasha’s shoulder.

“She said…” He looked over at Cree again, who only looked away. He could tell them all of what she said- how the Somnovem were unnatural and had to be dealt with, but that was a given. It wouldn’t do anything more than put Cree’s dander up again. Frowning, he looked down at the moonbow. “She said ‘if your dreams aren’t safe then you can find the dreams of others to take respite in when you need to.’”

“What does that mean, exactly?” Nott asked. “Caleb, what does that mean?”

Caleb was counting down on his fingers, not even paying attention to any of this. “Five… Four… Three… Two…” The dome vanished and they found themselves out in the open air of the Shelf getting stared at by locals who were not expecting a bunch of adventurers to just suddenly appear like that. Seeing this, he blinked and rubbed his neck awkwardly, “Ah… Sorry. The tavern exploded so we were just… camping. Heh. Go about your day.” He cleared his throat and began to quickly collect his things, spurring the rest of the Nein to follow his lead.

The locals gave them suspicious looks, but clearly had better things to do with the town in the state it was in, and with them all exposed and sort of half in the way, the Nein had to shelve what the Moonweaver’s boon meant for now. They finished packing up and took their leave to seek out breakfast somewhere that wasn’t blown apart.

Most of the damage seemed to be centered around the prison and the main thoroughfare where the majority of the locals would have been gathering for nightly revels, which meant nearly every tavern had sustained some sort of damage in the fight. There were some very determined places eager to maintain their morning business, however, and they had developed a sort of “walk-up” service where they made quickly assembled sandwiches by shoving sausages and bacon between toasted bread with fried eggs and thin slices of cheese and handed them through a busted window to everyone who came by.

“You know this could really catch on,” Nott said as she unfolded the paper her sandwich had been wrapped in. “Fast food service. Just eat and walk.”

“Bad for the digestion, though,” Caduceus murmured. There hadn’t been very many vegetarian options available, so he’d made due with removing the bacon from a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich and offering it to Beau, while he nibbled the rest.

They found an area where a lot of the broken stones and rubble had been cleared to the side and out of the way to make room for repairs, and perched on them while they ate and prepped their equipment and spells. As soon as she finished eating, Jester waved to Fjord and gestured to her hands, miming counting. He nodded, placed the uneaten half of his sandwich between his teeth and held up his fingers.

“I’m gonna send a message to Cleff to let him know Rissa is okay.”

“That’s a good idea,” Nott nodded. “Even if he’s a prisoner of some terrible tinker or whatever, he deserves to know we absolutely saved his daughter, and didn’t fuck everything up totally.”

Fjord wiggled his fingers, expectantly while chewing on his sandwich, and Jester began to speak. “Cleff, this is Jester! Rissa is alive and safe at home. If it’s not safe for you to respond, cough.” Fjord wiggled five fingers. “If you can talk- shit.”

Fjord pulled the sandwich from his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “Well, he got the gist of it.”

“If you can talk shit?” Yasha blinked.

Beau chewed on some of the bacon that Caduceus had given her. She’d found the tallest pile of rubble to perch, cross-legged, on, which gave her a wide perspective of the entire Upper Shelf. “Maybe we’ll get some hot Hupperdook gossip.”

Jester squinted, as she began to receive the response. “Okay, I think he coughed, so it’s probably not safe for him to talk.”

“Do you think they’re at Stahlmast’s by now?” Molly asked Cree, who was running through her blood vials in a quick, precise manner, whispering under her breath. She only stopped to answer when she’d reached the last one, which she plucked from the satchel.

“With her injuries, I doubt she traveled all night. I would not expect to close in on her before we reach his lair, however.” She rifled in her bag for the Sending Stone to the Gentleman. “Sir, I have done my routine checks. All is well, except for Kildaire in Bladegarden. You will need a replacement.”

“Five words under,” Fjord mumbled, like he’d been counting habitually.

Cree paused for the response and then dumped out the blood in the vial she pulled, shaking every last drop free until it was empty. “Hopefully, he sends an agent who can avoid a Kryn sword if he wants someone that close to Xhorhas.”

Molly checked to see if anyone was around their mini-camp on the edges of the thoroughfare, but the majority of Hupperdook had departed for their work in the lower areas, leaving Upper Hupperdook to be tended to the business owners trying to salvage what they could within their establishments and caring very little for anything else. They’d pushed everything non-essential to the side to be dealt with when they weren’t in the middle of war preparations, apparently. Despite what Rissa had said last night, no one here was in the mood to pick a fight with Dwendel.

“How much blood is in there, exactly?” He asked, once satisfied they weren’t going to be overheard.

“More than you think.” She unhooked the main compartment from the top of the satchel and flipped the bag to reveal the same sort of strange dark extraplanar space as his own bag of holding or Jester’s haversack.

“You’ve got a bottomless blood bag?” Nott squawked.

Cree hissed. “That is not something you should make so much noise about, but essentially. Yes. Pumat had it made special for me.”

“So he knows who you work for or just that you’re a bloodworker?” Caduceus tilted his head.

“As far as Pumat knows, I am a very dedicated priestess of the Raven Queen and it is highly important I have enough room to carry many blood vials. The most important, however, are kept right here.” She gestured to the part of the satchel that hooked over the top before returning it to its normal position.

“Like our blood?’ Beau leaned forwards so far she was in danger of tipping right off the edge of her perch.

“The blood of anyone in the Gentleman’s immediate employ, so yes.” Molly noted that Cree’s usual impatience at being prodded with questions wasn’t present. Perhaps the circle had done her some good- or maybe the lack of accusation in everyone’s tone put her in a better mood overall.

“Is that what you were doin’ just now?” Fjord cleared his throat. “Checkin’ up on the Gentleman’s people?”

“Indeed. I can tell if they are under severe physical duress, if they are ill, or, as is usually the most important, if they are dead.” She shut her satchel up tight. “Though I suppose the truly important part is their precise location. If they are not where they are meant to be and they do not answer my messages about why properly, then the Gentleman knows he has a deserter and can deal with them accordingly.”

Nervous glances were exchanged by many of the Nein, but Molly, despite the wariness that worked its way down his spine, remained fixed on Cree’s satchel. “That’s an awful lot of details to get from blood.”

“An inexperienced bloodworker or one without my pedigree, so to speak, would not be able to manage most of that and, especially, not over any significant length of time. They would require a fresh sample.” There was pride in her golden eyes- ah that explained it. She was bragging. That was adorable- a bit infuriating as anyone bragging about their skills might be, but given her shyness and reticence to share most things, Molly was willing to forgive her. “So long as I draw the blood myself, my samples never fade.”

“So all of that theater you did at the Gentleman’s? The-” Caleb twirled his fingers in a fairly accurate imitation of how Cree had pulled the blood from their wounds and sealed them within the vials. “That was necessary to maintain the potency of the blood?”

“Well,” Cree’s smugness didn’t fade as she spoke, “I suppose I’ve developed a bit of a show of things as per a need to intimidate.”

“Yeah, it works pretty well, I’d say,” Fjord mumbled.

“Could you make, like, designs with the blood as you’re drawing it out?” Jester asked, eyes wide. “Like okay… Next time you have to draw blood from somebody, could you make like googly eyes or something in the air before it goes in the vial?”

Cree slow-blinked. “I… Do not know if that is particularly intimidating imagery, Jester.”

Jester jutted her lip out a bit. “Well, no, but it might be cool.”

“I feel like if someone made googly eyes with my blood while pulling it out of me, I’d be very intimidated,” Molly nodded.

“I… Will consider it as an option.” Cree was still blinking in confusion, but she brushed it aside to move on. “Regardless, we should get going. I can follow Stahlmast’s blood to his location, but that does not make the Silberquel Ridge less difficult to traverse, and I would like to get this over with, so that we might move on with our other plans.”

“Shit!” Jester exclaimed, suddenly. “Kiri.” She smacked at Fjord’s leg until he held up his fingers for her. “Kiri, hey! I hope you’re okay. Things got really bad yesterday. We’re gonna find the people who did it, though.” Fjord wiggled five fingers. “Stay safe. I love you.”

“Good job,” Fjord nodded. “Simple and concise.”

“So I can totally call the Gentleman, right?” She looked askance at Cree, who just rolled her eyes. Before she could pout about that, her eyes glazed over as she received Kiri’s response and that took up her full attention. She came out of the trance and exhaled. “She’s okay. I think she said the butcher shop didn’t get hit and that she’s not scared. She’ll protect her family and, uh, come by soon.”

“You speak fluent Kiri,” Nott nodded her approval.

Jester preened. “She has a pretty big range of phrases now. Hupperdook’s been good for her.”

“As opposed to us teaching her new and inventive ways to swear,” Molly chuckled. He stood up and brushed the dirt and loose pebbles from his leggings. “So! To the falls?”

“Indeed.” Cree removed the blood vial she’d pulled out yesterday with its neat label. “According to this, Stahlmast’s location is somewhere within the Falls themselves.”

“Secret cavern,” he nodded sagely, and then turned to Beau as she leapt neatly off her perch and hit the ground beside him. “Told you there’s always cool shit behind waterfalls.”

She snorted. “I don’t think evil villain lair qualifies as cool shit, Molly.”

“It might if the villain has cool shit.”

“....Yeah, that’s fair.” She gave a nod and then gently shoulder-checked him as she went to gather up the stuff she’d abandoned at the base of her perch when she climbed it. Unpleasant, but at least tolerably so. Molly hadn’t realized how much being angry at her weighed on him until now. There was a significant difference in how he carried his relationship with her at present versus how he had when he was only pretending to not be angry, until it became impossible to ignore. Everything was fresher now, like a rot had been removed and things were allowed to blossom again.

Maybe Caduceus was right about the whole root thing. Now if he could remove the rot of the Somnovem, he might fully begin to heal from all of this trauma. That, however, seemed an impossible feat. He would just have to endure it, as the Moonweaver asked. His stubborn refusal to move might be shitty when it came to his friends, but versus them it might actually be his salvation.

He stared at his left palm where the moonbow shone like a bright silver scar etched into his skin, standing stark against the other scars that wove around and through it.

She had done what she could for him. He had to carry himself the rest of the way, and when he looked up and saw the Nein gathering themselves together, he remembered the most important thing she told him once again.

He’s alone, she had said.

And I’m not.

“So how many people does the Gentleman have dirt on?” They had been hiking for a few hours up the narrow stretch of cliff, the path growing narrower as they moved upwards. The air was cleaner here when compared to the industrialized smell of smoke and metal everywhere in Hupperdook and Beau shuddered when she realized how much it reminded her of home.

That was enough to feel the need to break up the peaceful serenity of their hike with conversation, and after their makeshift therapy session last night, she realized she ought to try to be a little less openly hostile towards Cree. She still didn’t like or trust her, but that shit she pulled on the Warden was kind of boss.

“A great many. It would make me a poor employee, however, if I told you the exact number.” Despite her size, Cree was surprisingly nimble on the mountain paths. She and Beau had ended up taking the lead on accident, while everyone else fought with the precarious cliffside and hugged the wall as much as they could to avoid slipping and falling to uncertain doom below.

“Anyone in the Soul?” She was well aware that Cree was trying to make her drop the subject by being brusque, but the second the thought popped into her head, she couldn’t let it go.

“Besides you?” Cree didn’t take her eyes off the waterfall that was their point of destination. It felt so close and yet an eternity away.

“He doesn’t have blackmail material on me,” she protested.

“Depending on who you speak to, that you worked for the Gentleman’s coin at all would be sufficient enough crime, yes?” That shut Beau up immediately. “I thought as much.”

“You make it really hard to like you,” she muttered.

“I am not here to be liked. I believe I have already made that clear.” She stopped suddenly, causing a mild kerfuffle as everyone down the single file line gripped one another to keep anyone from losing their balance and plummeting. Her ears flicked and swiveled, like she was trying to track a sound. “Mr. Clay?”

From the rear, Caduceus called in what could only be described as a very loud (and very anxious) whisper, “Yeah, I hear it too.”

Everyone went quiet and still, hoping to let whatever fucking disaster this was about to become pass them by without a fight. Shadows danced along the cliff face as large winged beasts, even bigger than the perytons had been circled overhead. Beau squinted against the mid-afternoon sunlight, trying to discern the features. Sort of an eagle… sort of a horse.

Fuck. Hippogriffs. By the look of it, it was a mated pair out hunting. They weren’t difficult to fight from what she’d studied in the Reserve, but they were violent, especially if you engaged a couple, and there just wasn’t enough room on the path to get into a difficult brawl. If they brought them down on their heads, then there was a chance half the party would be taking the fast route all the way to the bottom of the Falls.

But if someone was fast, then maybe they could draw their attention and allow everyone else to keep moving at a slower pace. It would mean fighting them alone, but she could handle it. She could stun one and knock it right out of the sky, single combat the second and bring it down, and then finish off its mate.

Yeah, when she put it like that it seemed simple, but from experience nothing ever worked out the way it did in her head. Whatever. It was the best possible way to keep the monsters from attacking everyone.

“I’m gonna be a distraction and hold their attention,” she hissed. “Just keep moving.”

“That's not a plan, Beau,” Fjord snapped with such ferocity that she almost mistook him for someone with authority… and then the feeling that she needed to listen to him just didn’t go away. She held her position, jaw set, and waited for him to provide a better plan.

“We got plenty of people here who can knock those sumbitches outta the sky,” he went on, their eyes locked. “If Caduceus, me, Caleb, Jester, Cree, and Nott all attack at once as a surprise attack at range, we might just put ‘em down easy.”

It was a solid plan, but, much like hers, there were problems with it being based more on a hopeful outcome that might not be what actually happens in reality. “And if you don’t put ‘em down? We can’t fight on the ridge.”

“We stay together,” Fjord insisted. “That’s the deal.” He looked around to see if anyone was going to challenge that, but no one seemed to have anything to say- not even Nott, who was usually the first to try and pull nonexistent rank for Caleb.

It was risky, but it was a risk shared by everyone, instead of just one person. If anyone did slip and fall, then the rest would be there to catch them. She had to trust in that. It was easier to set herself apart, assume she was the easiest to sacrifice- go out on a fucking high note and all that- but that was just pre-Mighty Nein Beau trying to bully herself out of her good thing. No matter how hard she tried, she still couldn’t shake the trauma her father put on her and how it had turned her into an extension of himself to the point where now she found herself instinctively treating herself as an extension of the Nein, instead. A limb that was useful, but could be removed without incident. Even replaceable if you were smart.

That’s bullshit, she spat at those creeping spiders of thoughts skittering about her head until, without any insecurity to latch onto, they scattered. Free of distraction from her personal demons, she pressed herself closer to the rock wall, white-knuckling her staff and readying for an attack just in case. Of them all, she was the most likely to survive a fall from up here, so she needed to be a line of defense that Molly and Yasha weren’t going to be able to be properly. (She checked Molly and was grateful that he hadn’t even bothered to pull out his blades, even though his fingers twitched above them. Good. His running headlong into everything had been making her irritated and worried in equal measure. He could stand to calm his ass down and think.

(Which was probably hypocritical coming from the party hothead, but she was fucking putting the effort in here. She didn't have to listen to Fjord.)

Caduceus and Cree traced the hunting patterns of the creatures with their eyes and when they were in a suitable range, all five of the spellcasters and Nott assaulted the two hippogriffs in unison. One of them dropped from the sky, hit the ridge hard and then went down the side and into the falls, loosening rocks overhead that tumbled down and sent the party scattering to the left and right to keep from being hit. Larger rocks began to fall from above, unseated by the dislodged smaller rocks, and ate at the path until sections began to crumble and fall away entirely, and the Nein quickly began to run up the ridge in their single file procession, everyone grabbing a hand to keep from losing the person behind them. When Cree failed to reach back, Beau scowled and grabbed her hand. She jolted in surprise, but didn’t yank away.

The other hippogriff, bloodied and battered, had dove down into the falls to seek out its mate, buying them a precious few moments to tear their way up the ridge while the rocks settled again, no longer triggered by the fight’s brutal cause and effect into reshaping itself. The creature let out a melancholy screech and that made Beau wince, but she didn’t have time to feel bad for the damn thing before it tore its way back up and slammed itself right into the middle of the group.

Beau’s heart did a swan dive into her stomach as she felt the humanoid chain behind her go slack, suggesting that someone had let go. She dared to whirl around in place and saw that the hippogriff had slammed Yasha into the side of the wall with both talons and was trying to take a chunk out of her neck with its beak. Her dog had blinked itself to safety- at her command probably- and Beau could hear his desperate whimpers from somewhere ahead of her and Cree.

Or maybe those were her whimpers.

Rocks were falling again, forcing the Nein to cluster together as much as they could. Yasha had avoided the hippogriff’s beak and had its mouth pried open with both hands to prevent it from trying to bite down again. It wriggled and writhed, but Yasha just kept tearing its beak open wider and wider until the muscles began to snap and strain, all while she snarled and screamed over its shrieks of pain, her eyes sparking with that strange electric light that always overcame her when she raged.

Yasha’s voice was as sharp as her blade when she hissed at the dying creature, “I know how you feel, but you’re really pissing me off right now.”

With one horrifying wrench, she tore the beast’s head nearly in half in some kind of horrifying reverse beartrap maneuver. Her hands were soaked in blood from gripping the razor sharp edge of its beak and she released it as quickly as she could with a roar of pain, allowing it to follow its mate down the cliffside.

“Oh Yasha, your hands,” Jester cried and reached over to try and heal her, but only managed to close her hands around air as he ground underneath Yasha simply fell away and she slid right along with it, her blood-slicked hands unable to find purchase on the more stable jagged edges of the cliff side. She clawed at the air like a feral thing and then seemed to accept her fate and began to allow herself to drop. Molly was screaming. Jester was screaming.

It took Beau a moment to realize she was screaming, too.

Nott was whipping out a feather and Beau dared to hope again, but then something else happened, instead. Where she had expected Yasha to begin to fall gently due to the quick thinking of Nott and her feather fall, suddenly her body began to glow in midair and with a sharp snap of wings unfurling there was no longer Yasha but a giant pale bat with black wings. The bat let out a surprised little screech and began to fly upwards.

All eyes went to Caleb who was staring wide-eyed at Bat-Yasha, a small cocoon almost crushed fully into pieces in his fist. “Oh shit that worked.”

The trail was still unsteady and every step threatened further danger, forcing them to hug the wall again, while Bat-Yasha made unhappy chittering noises as she flapped her wings to hold herself aloft.

“We’re not gonna be able to make a run for it.” Everyone was panicking and in lieu of Fjord stepping up to play leader, Beau leaned into the space his commanding presence had previously occupied.

“I can do that one more time.” Caleb was still reeling from the shock of his own clutch spell use. “That will burn my most powerful spells for the day, but-”

“But better that than dying on the rocks,” Molly cut in. He waved Yasha closer and took a flying leap off the edge of the cliffside and swung himself onto her back.

“I can carry one person up to the top of the falls,” Cree noted. “I believe it is well within five hundred feet.”

“I can do that too,” Jester piped up. When Cree looked at her strangely, she flushed, and ducked her head. “I had the Traveler teach me after you used your cloak to help me back in Zadash.”

Cree didn’t seem to know how to take that, so she simply moved on and looked towards Beau, who was still the closest to her. “Shall we then, Beauregard?”

The ground shifted underneath her feet and all pretense of hesitation and apprehension left her. She stepped lightly into Cree’s space and felt the heavy cloak fall over her. Her stomach jerked unpleasantly as her position shifted suddenly and when Cree pulled the cloak back, she was on top of the falls.

Molly was already ascending with Yasha, followed by a giant eagle with lichen-pink feathers holding Caleb and Nott in each talon. Jester appeared suddenly with Fjord in tow and Rock blinked his way up the cliffside until he joined them, whining when he didn’t recognize Yasha among the group.

Caleb snapped his fingers and the spells dropped from Yasha and Caduceus, who blinked in confusion at the sudden shift in their perception of the world and their shapes. Yasha had barely put her feet back on the stones before Rock yipped excitedly and blinked right into her arms, smothering her in puppy kisses.

Beau peered over the edge of the cliff and winced at the trail. There were places where falling rocks had smashed the path to pieces and half of it had eroded away from the intensity of the hippogriff attack and bits of it were still crumbling even now. It would be a long while before the road was traversable.

“Looks like we’re gonna have to find another way down,” she assessed, pulling back from the edge. That was a problem for later once they dealt with Stahlmast and Sken and the rest of this shit.

The falls were loud enough to be deafening here at the crest and it quickly pulled everyone’s attention from the harrowing encounter to the task at hand. The silvery water, worthy of its name, flowed down the peak and into Hupperdook. From this vantage point, far beyond, she could see the city spread out before her, smoke rising into the sky like spindly fingers reaching for the clouds.

She had a lot of better things to do than take in the view, but somehow she couldn’t tear her eyes away from it. From up here, it didn’t look like there was any damage to the city at all. It moved on, despite the scars. She wasn’t the type to be poetic, but she couldn’t help but appreciate the appropriateness of it. You could fuck up a place or a person but it would come back swinging.

A shadow fell over her and she glanced to the side briefly and then did a double take when she realized it was Yasha who had joined her, Rock still cradled in her arms like an infant and snuggling against her chest. (Without meaning to be, she found herself stupidly jealous of the fucking dog.)

“Great view, huh?” Beau murmured, dumbly, to avoid lingering on her stupid, idiotic thoughts.

“You can see the whole city from up here,” Yasha nodded, her jewel-toned eyes wide with wonder. Beau found herself wondering if Xhorhas had places like this. She couldn’t claim to be an expert- Empire schools- even places like the Reserve- had a tendency to claim Xhorhas as a barren wasteland of endless night. Even Courting of the Crick had dedicated some of its less stale and academic prose to describing the Wastes as a horrible place full of monsters and savagery.

Judging by the look on Yasha’s face, whether that was true or not, it was still nothing like this. She glanced Beau’s way and her cheeks pinkened and she quickly turned away, shifting Rock underneath one arm. “Um.. You know if you do this-” She thrust out her arm, held up her thumb and forefinger, and squinted one eye shut, “- it looks like you’re pinching the chimneys.”

Beau blinked at her for a few seconds and then mimicked her pose, just for the sake of indulging idle curiosity. “...Huh. It does.”

Behind her, she heard Fjord groan. She ignored it- awkward or not, she was happy that Yasha hadn’t held that kiss in Zadash against her and was more than willing to push on past it, and, unlike Molly, she doubted Yasha was holding any negative feelings in check underneath all of her usual behaviors.

She hoped, at least.

If Molly weren’t currently engaged in a ridiculous beyond belief flirtation with Caleb that seemed to be genuinely one-sided on his part, his eyes would have rolled so far into his head, he could see the gaps in his mind where Lucien’s memories refused to manifest through his sheer force of will watching Beau and Yasha skirt around each other. If you’d asked him before now what he thought of the two of them together, he would have said that Yasha could do better and that Beau was a fuckboy who was liable to break her heart. Now… Well. He was still on the fence about it, but anything that adorably pathetic had to be good for something.

Better adorably pathetic than just pathetic. He kept looking over at Caleb, compliments and gratitude about his quick thinking that saved Yasha dying out with every glance, because nothing seemed to be good enough to convey the meaning of it. It would be so much easier if he could allow himself to be glib and cheeky about it.

Of course, Caleb, in his infuriating perceptiveness, caught him staring and then abruptly looking away and decided to approach. There was still a lingering flush on his cheek from the near panic attack he’d had when he’d gambled on a hunch and it paid off.

“Are you all right, Mollymauk?” Maybe it wasn’t the lingering panic attack that colored his expression. There was a different kind of awkwardness to him that hung heavy between them at his approach.

Of course. We step on each other’s toes every time we dance.

Molly blew out a breath. Just let it be simple then. “That was a close one… with Yasha. Thank you.”

Caleb swallowed and then tried to brush off the compliment. “Nott would have had her had I not been able to pull that off.”

“And she would have been stuck at the bottom of the falls,” Molly protested. He might be dancing around the sincerity of a compliment with no trace of irony present, but like hell if he would let Caleb downplay the significance of his actions. “We need her here. You did good.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “You always do good.”

“Not always.” His chuckle was dry and a bit unpleasant, but it was his and Molly loved it for that.

Fuck. This shouldn’t be happening. “Just most of the time.”

The moment might have been doomed to stretch painfully long between them, as pathetic as whatever the hell Beau and Yasha were doing, with neither willing to speak again until the next Calamity, had Caduceus not called for attention and forced their eyes away from one another.

“We found the cavern,” he beamed proudly, his mohawk soaked to the side of his head. Cree, at his side, was brushing red mud off the hem of her robes and looking disgusted by the amount of water that was clinging to her from their exploration of the falls.

The Nein followed their lead to a ten-foot-wide rock shelf covered in the same red mud on Cree’s cloak and Caduceus’s boots, marked with footprints that belonged to several kobolds and at least one larger humanoid creature. Molly removed his coat and shoved it into the bag of holding for safekeeping before making a graceful deer leap through the falls and coming out laughing on the other side, soaked and chilled, but exhilarated. Jester followed suit, dropping down onto one foot with the other extended upwards like a half-drowned ballerina. Around her neck, her weasel gave a miserable cough and spat out water.

Beau did what could only be described as a tuck and roll through the falls and snapped back up onto her feet. She twirled and faced Molly and Jester with her arms spread and they gave her golf claps. Fjord followed by simply walking straight through and Molly stuck his tongue out at him.

“You ruined it, Fjord,” he said, the very picture of disappointment.

“Ruined what?” He blinked in confusion.

“The game,” Jester scoffed.

“What game?” He looked to Beau, who just shrugged.

“I dunno, man. Seemed obvious to me.”

Molly leaned closer to him. “If you ask about the game, you’ll never know. It’s a state of mind.”

“Huh.” Fjord stuck his tongue in his cheek and then swatted the waterfall, scattering drops in Molly and Jester’s direction. They had to stifle giggles to keep them from echoing across the cavern.

The rest of the Nein approached at a more careful pace until they were all gathered in the space. The main chamber was huge and there were signs of bats- guano and the remains of some of the creatures that must have been killed or died of natural causes- but no living ones were sleeping in the nooks and crannies above them. The main chamber gave way to a narrow path into the cliff that was unnaturally smooth. Caduceus approached it and ran his hands along the edges. “Stone shape,” he murmured. “They carved this out with magic.”

Cree removed her vial of Stahlmast’s blood and closed her eyes, consulting it. “He is deeper within. This must lead to his lair. Be cautious and we might manage an element of surprise.”

The Nein nodded and Cree took the lead with the most acute darkvision and softest footfalls on top of the blood that would guide them to their quarry. The waterfall helped to muffle their steps as they walked, single-file once more, deeper into the cavern.

Chapter Text

The narrow cavern extended about two hundred feet from the main entrance before Cree could even start to see the flicker of lamplight casting shadows from another chamber ahead. Halfway in the sound of the falls faded and would fail to mask their footfalls and so Jester whispered the incantation for pass without a trace to keep them stealthy as they geared up for what would hopefully be a surprise attack. Every sound carried within this space and so there weren't many of them beyond their own carefully measured breaths and soft steps on the stone and the occasional dripping from the stalagmites that seemed like bloodied daggers set into the ceiling from all the red clay. And then, suddenly, when the lamplight began to grow closer with each step and the shadows on the walls began to take form- tiny reptilian shapes and a larger, humanoid one- more sounds came to mask their surreptitious arrival.

Dice clattered against a table. Angry chittering in a language Cree couldn’t understand- though she presumed it was swearing- rose up and the goliath woman’s voice followed it. “What? You gonna be sore losers? Here’s the thing- how about we go double or nothing on the whole pot?”

The chittering increased. Cree turned to look at the rest of the Nein to check that they were ready and found every eye was locked straight ahead, weapons already in hand. Apparently, they would not stand to suffer the same defeat twice.

Gods preserve anyone who dared cross them. Even with her own considerable skill, she did not want to face them on her own. Not without the other Tombtakers at her back, anyway.

Not ever, a chastising voice spoke from the back of her mind and she banished it. Allowing it to linger would mean confronting what such a thought meant for her, whether fear for her life or fear for something else. Both were meaningless in the grand scheme of things. She must move forever onward and not become entangled in distractions. She had a task to do, something bigger and more important than some fate-touched destiny or divine right or thirst for justice on such a small, insignificant scale. The Somnovem needed their herald and she needed her Lucien and when they all got what they wanted, the world would get what it deserved. There would be no more men like Huron Stahlmast after that. She just needed to play her role right now and keep moving forwards.

So, with conviction put towards an entirely different end, she did, indeed, creep forward, taking their determined stares and readied weapons as a sign to move into striking position. Dice continued to be rolled; Sken continued to laugh; the kobolds continued to curse, and the moment the Nein began to silently file in within the open cavern space, every bit of that came to a screeching halt in a series of murmured incantations and violent surprise strikes.

Cree yanked her glaive off of her back and cast spirit shroud on herself. Several ghostly figures, all of them resembling vaguely humanoid forms that looked as if they were made of bloody mist, swarmed and danced around her, granting her a haunting appearance that startled two of the seven kobolds in the room right out of their chairs, sending them clattering, the sound echoing in the cavernous space and adding to the sudden din.

Beau went right for Sken, using her staff to vault into the room and bring her foot down hard on the back of the goliath’s head, knocking her face right into the table. The impact cracked it down the middle but that wasn’t the only thing that cracked, and she flopped over, unmoving, onto the ground, blood and drool pooling around her head as her eyes rolled back into her skull. Stunned, then.

Beau pivoted out of the way so Molly could dive in behind her, delivering vicious, precise strikes to Sken’s frozen form before ducking back and searching the room. Instinctively, Cree followed his gaze and locked onto his target at the same time as he did- two terrified gnomes, their ankles shackled to the wall, tucked behind a workbench. One was Cleff Tinkertop, but the other was a middle aged female with pixie-cut blonde hair going ashy in places. Unfamiliar, but undoubtedly the allegedly-sick-but-likely-missing Nima whose name had been tossed around so much since they arrived.

The rest of the Nein delivered their strikes, either through aiding one another or simply attacking the enemy head-on. Fjord and Jester went for the kobolds with his eldritch blasts and her summoned lollipop. Yasha slashed her way towards Cleff and the other gnome- likely hoping to get them loose before they could become collateral damage in this fray. Nott hid in the shadows and took out kobolds left and right like a sniper, and then lunged forwards between rounds to check for explosives before running and hiding again. Caduceus murmured the familiar incantation for bane, while Caleb cast haste on Beau so that when she and Molly went back to back, they were both practically furious blurs.

Sken didn’t stand a chance when she finally managed to pull herself onto her knees. Her nose was smashed in from where she’d hit the table and it was difficult to tell where the blood pouring from it ended and the blood from her split lip began. “You lot are really gluttons for punishment, aren’tcha?”

She drew her longsword and ran right at Beau who met her blade with her staff and the two tangled together with Molly leaping in to strike at her from behind, his blades dragging along the back of her legs until she nearly dropped to a knee and had to force herself to remain upright. The rest of the fight was already moving in their favor, a true show of what the Nein could do when their minds were on the task at hand and not occupied with their fear and frustration, driven by their anger and need to right a wrong.

No… No, Cree really didn’t want to have to face them on the wrong side of their rage. They would have to be worn down to the bone first, and even then…

Molly and Beau were flanking Sken on either side, but she was trying to slash Beau from groin to neck with her longsword and could care less about Molly dancing around her, all the while growling, “You Empire fucks are rearranging chairs on a sinking ship. The Dwendalian Empire is going to fall. Xhorhas is finally going to take back what you’ve taken from us.”

There was a clear opening now and only Cree was open enough to take it. She lunged forwards and drove her glaive straight through Sken’s back until the nasty curved blade poked out of her chest mere inches from Beauregard’s nose.

“My apologies for whatever it is you have suffered,” she spat at the gasping goliath woman, whose only response was to gurgle and spit more blood, “but many of us are not of the Empire, so truly this death is meaningless in the grand scheme of things. I hope you did not dream of martyring yourself to your cause, as I doubt anyone will remember this, nor will your people ever know the story of your ignoble end. Consider that in the precious seconds you have and ponder whether it was worth it.” She yanked the blade free, her spirit shroud twisting around her arms and body, wreathing her the same way Jester’s red ribbon wreathed the glaive itself, and Sken’s body dropped at Molly and Beau’s feet.

“I knew cats left dead things as gifts, but this is ridiculous,” Molly murmured, mouth wide enough to catch flies. The words were instinctual- a joke meant to hide his shock behind.

Beau got herself together far quicker than Molly did, still vibrating with the effects of the haste spell. “Damn Cree, that was savage.”

“It isn’t over yet,” the blonde gnome woman snapped to get everyone’s attention. She flipped the workbench she and Cleff had been cowering behind, scattering materials every which way and providing them with cover. “You haven’t met Stahlmast’s buddy, so either run the opposite direction or be ready for a real fight.”

Of course. That had been extremely quick, hadn’t it? Her spirit shroud had not even faded yet. One who was inclined to tempt fate and invite danger might have called this wholly anticlimactic had there not been another shoe to drop.

Cree had, honestly, been hoping for simplicity. A single woman and her kobold associates bested them at their lowest and then fell at their best and they still had Stahlmast to face. Why overcomplicate it?

She sighed, deep within. Because when have things in your life ever skewed towards the uncomplicated, Cree?

“His buddy?” Fjord balked, swinging his falchion around in anticipation of another attack. The fact that he seemed more confused than shaken said a great deal about him. Cree had known many in the Orders with a similar randiness for combat- they were usually the first on the blade or torn to pieces by tooth and claw. Hubris and fight madness was a dangerous thing in warriors. Miserably, Lucien had been one of them and Molly, himself, seemed to share it now that his shock had worn off- he was no less antsy than Fjord was, stepping lightly from one foot to another, preparing to lunge when he had a target

Nott had an armload of more of those acorn-sized bombs pulled from the kobold corpses. She flicked her ears and glanced behind her as if expecting to see an additional person stroll in. The cavern was wide and there was another opening at the other side that was more natural than the one they had taken to get this far, and led deeper into the cave system behind the falls. Nothing moved in either direction, however.

Fjord murmured, "Come on... Come on..."

Cree heard it before she found the source- a hissing voice coming from somewhere above them. “I was told that I could eat anyone who was not the goliath or the dragon-kin filth.” It spoke in barely a whisper, and yet the sound carried in this space until it felt like the voice was coming from all points within the cavern. Cree scanned the high ceiling until she spotted a glimpse of dark blue among the dark gray of the stones, moving silently as it gauged them from above.

Her voice caught in her throat. Blood Hunters specialized in certain times of monsters- undead, fiends, fey beasts, and the like- but there were times when they were tasked with other sorts of beasts that fell out of their purview, simply because when handling large threats, it’s best to task someone with the experience and the manpower, rather than trust a casual mercenary group who might take your down payment and leave it scattered in the lair of a beast when they’re devoured by it. Most people did not have that sort of coin to waste.

Cree had lost half of a team she was sent out with in the Orders to a beast with dark blue scales that loitered in caves and waited for prey to come into its nest. It was one of the few times she had not been allowed to be the healer with her preferred team. Bad things always happened when the Tombtakers were not allowed to work together, as she recalled.

The irony that she was facing one again without the Tombtakers at her back was not lost on her.

“A behir,” she whispered. Eyes snapped towards her, but only a few seemed to recognize the name and place it to the creature that now stalked them. Their expressions did a great deal to give the rest some perspective, however.

The creature continued to speak with a nearly feminine quality to its voice, though that wasn’t quite enough to discern gender from this distance. “He and I have an arrangement, you see. He wanted to build his lair in my cave. I wanted to eat him.” A low chuckle echoed around them. The Nein began to shift around so that they wouldn’t be clustered up, their eyes turned upwards, trying to follow where Cree was looking and struggling. Despite its massive size, no one seemed to be able to track it among the stalagmites the way she could- even Caduceus was struggling with the shadows. “In the end, he got his lair and I was promised I could eat anyone who came here that wasn’t one of his.”

The creature suddenly dropped down in front of them, shaking the cavern with the force of its weight hitting the ground and blocking the path into the next hall, leaving them with only a narrow space in which to flee if they were cowardly enough. Cree wouldn’t blame anyone for being that cowardly now that she was staring down one of these beasts again.

It was as if someone had taken the worst parts of a centipede, an electric eel, and a snake and combined them with the force of a summer storm. Its blue skin crackled with white-hot electric pulses making it look like a serpentine nighttime cloud pressed against the cavern floor. It reared up, showing off its pale blue underbelly and allowing them all to process the size of this creature- this slayer of dragons- before it exhaled a hot arc of lightning in a straight line, centered right on Cree, herself, as if it had known she had been the one watching. The Nein had done well staggering themselves about the chamber- it meant that it could only really target one of them.

So of course it targeted the only person who gave it a reason to waste its breath.

Cree screamed as the lightning overwhelmed her. She felt her own heart briefly stop beating before it violently started up again. Her blood felt like it was boiling. Not for the first time, she found herself regretting how attuned she was to vitals, because she was aware of everything her body was experiencing in full detail. She hit the ground in a gasping, smoldering heap, her fur scorched in places. The air smelled like ozone and burnt hair and she coughed at the reek of it and took stock of the damage. Mostly electrical burns that hadn't breached past the second layer of skin under her fur, a skip in her heart as it tried to find its usual rhythm, blood pooling from her nose from something that had burst, matting the fur and leaking into her mouth to stain her teeth.

Somehow, her spirit shroud remained loyally stalwart and continued to weave around her, offering her nothing but a firm reminder that she wasn’t dead.

Only mostly dead, she hissed mentally.

The Nein converged, then, eager to tear into it before someone else could get hit with its breath. Cree faltered as she got back to her feet and felt a warm hand on her back that brought her vitality back up to a not insignificant amount- her heart steadied and the agony of the burns retreated. She breathed in the sweet smell of peat moss and decay and glanced beside her to see Caduceus already trying to step back. “Careful,” he whispered, before turning invisible. She could still see the faint outline of him moving out of the way thanks to Mirumus’s sight, but at least the behir would not be able to target him.

Beau cracked it across the head with her staff, chipping one of its curved horns, but it shook off the stun and hissed its annoyance. She danced back and out of the way, stammering, “Uh… Uh! It’s immune to electricity! Don’t try to shock it!”

“Unsurprising,” Molly muttered. He hadn’t lit his blades up for Sken- a clear indication of how little he viewed her as a threat when the Nein were in sync, at full health, and well prepared for an attack- but now one was frosted over.

Just the one this time. Lucien always lit up both every time. It was such a silly thing to be surprised by, but she had spent countless years begging Lucien to stop risking his vitality to show off and deal more damage.

She had always been there, however. Lucien had no fear of death or dying, because she was always by his side, ready to heal him, while Molly embraced a more subdued and practical approach to opening his veins. Strangely, neither served either of them. Molly had still gambled on his vitality and died on the Glory Run Road and Lucien had died even with her right by his side. A reckless spirit always resided within that body and as such, the shroud of death continued to haunt it, like the Raven Queen played cat’s cradle with the thread that made up its essence.

Paying attention to Molly and not herself was dangerous. The behir must have seen her- bleeding and half-cooked already from its lightning breath and dopey with distraction, and tried to disengage to get close enough to whip its tail at her, but Beau and Yasha both landed hits that stilled its movement.

“Miserable creatures,” it shrieked. “I will eat you all whole.” It lashed out its tail towards its next most tempting target- Fjord- and began to coil around him, tightening its body until the half-orc wheezed out a gasp of pain.

“Fjord!” Jester screamed. She brought down her lollipop, hoping to force it to let go, but the behir shifted out of the way of it. Cree could have sworn she heard it laugh right before it bit down onto Fjord’s torso and began to swallow him whole as easily as a serpent swallows a mouse.

“Oh my god, it ate Fjord,” Nott screeched. “The irony.”

Fjord’s legs had barely vanished down its writhing gullet, sending him straight into the literal belly of the beast before the Nein converged on it, desperate to tear it apart and get him free before it was too late. Jester had tears streaming down her face as she grabbed it by its lashing tail and screamed, ”SPIT HIM OUT,” and the words were followed by blackened necrotic energy that ate away half the scales and turned it into a blackened gooey mess. The behir howled its rage and cursed them all, but Fjord remained trapped within it.

Inside the behir’s stomach there was movement, suggesting Fjord was fighting to get out. Caleb and Nott exchanged looks before Nott vanished into the shadows and then, in tandem, they shot two identical crossbow bolts- one in the form of an acid arrow- that struck true on the creature’s neck.

“Do you think we’re hurting Fjord?” Yasha asked as she severed a chunk of the behir’s half-rotted tail with the Magician’s Judge.

“Not as bad as the digestion process is hurting him,” Caleb responded.

“Fuck!” Jester was slamming the thing with her lollipop every chance she could, as if she was trying to force it puke Fjord out. “Come on, come on, come on.”

Cree was too injured to get into close combat and hung back where Caduceus had reappeared, trying to keep healing spells and buff spells active. The two of them had already failed two Command spells to get it to vomit Fjord back up, and it was due to get its lightning breath back at any moment.

Speak of the archdevil and it appears... Cree saw the beast’s eyes flash with white-hot electricity again as it zeroed in on Jester who was causing the biggest ruckus. Caleb was behind her, which gave it two targets.

“Look out!” She screamed, hoping for them to duck out of the way in time. Caleb dove, but Jester, still desperate to pry Fjord from the damned thing’s belly and so close to its face that she couldn’t hope to duck in time, took the full brunt of it. She dropped in an unconscious heap, still smoldering.

If the party lost it over Fjord being swallowed, then Jester going unconscious turned them absolutely feral. Cree was faster than Caduceus and dragged her out of the way to keep her from being attacked while she was down, pumping a healing spell into her to get her to wake up. She inhaled with a gasp and then choked through electricity-burnt lungs, her heart skipping beats in a worrying rhythm. “Caleb?”

“He is fine,” Cree reassured her without even casting a glance the wizard’s way. He was far from fine, but he was breathing and still up, and that was more than anyone could have said for Jester, herself until now… Or Fjord, who might already be dead.

Molly dug his blades into a section of the behir’s massive body, looking to carve it up and free Fjord that way, but the behir, enraged, began to coil tightly around him just as it had Fjord. Its teeth came down hard on his shoulder. Bones cracked as the weight of it pressed into him, its claws raking into his body. Its teeth came back bloody from a giant wound on his shoulder that painted his white shirt an almost solid shade of red.

Cree could feel his heartbeat slowing as it struggled to keep him alive, even while it pushed the blood he needed out of the wound in his neck. His solid red eyes were glassy and unfocused and he began to slip as the behir uncoiled around him, releasing him so that it might allow him to bleed out and be devoured later once its first meal had been digested.

And then Molly jerked a hand out and grabbed the behir by its jaw, fingers digging into the sharp teeth,still stained with his blood, as they curled into its mouth. It kept him from slipping to the ground to be left bloodied on the stone.

It also meant he was touching the behir.

His eyes were still hazy and unfocused, but his intent was clear. The behir screamed as blood gushed from its eyes and nostrils as Molly released the full extent of rend mind into it. It didn’t fell the creature, but the damage was significant enough to panic it.

Molly’s grip loosened and he slipped from the behir’s mouth, tearing his palm open on its teeth on his way down. The behir shook its head violently and staggered back, thrashing the remains of Sken’s card table into pieces and nearly crushing the two cowering gnomes.

“What is this?!” The behir screeched. “What are you?!”

Molly coughed up blood onto the stones and raised a defiant middle finger. “A circus performer.” He collapsed, unmoving, but Caduceus was already on his way before Cree could leave Jester, who was clinging to her like a security blanket since she was still too hurt to get up close and could only use her lollipop or fling ranged spells from her position in her lap.

Molly’s attack might not have done the behir in, physically, but the psychological damage that ability could inflict on a creature unable to comprehend the madness (as if anyone but those touched by it could) was clearly having an effect. No longer confident in its lair advantage, the behir backed away and tried to escape up the wall to get away from them. It made it halfway up the side of the cavern and into the protective cover of the jagged stalagmites before Nott’s crossbow bolt caught it through the back of the neck and out the other side and with a gurgling scream, it plummeted back onto the rocky ground, dead, shaking the entire cavern like an earthquake. Stalagmites dropped from the ceiling and Cree curled around Jester to protect her from the falling debris, while the rest of the Nein scattered.

When the ground ceased shaking, Jester wasted no time in pushing Cree away and leaping to her feet, running towards the dead creature. “Yasha! We have to cut Fjord out.” She had her handaxe out and was furiously trying to chop her away through the thick hide, the tears already flowing again. Yasha was quick to come to her aid, and Cree found she only hesitated for a second before she rushed in, herself, and used the glaive to split the behir’s belly open, allowing Yasha and Jester to cut around the slack muscle and viscera that held Fjord in place. The acid ate at their hands and clothes, but the three of them eventually were able to yank him free and lay him out onto the stones, where he lay, acid-burned and bloodied and covered in gore… and not moving.

Jester made a soft, horrified sound and placed her ear to his chest. “Cree? Is he breathing?”

“He is.” She was panting from both the exertion of cutting a fully grown man out of the nearly impenetrable hide of the beast’s belly and the sheer panic that had consumed the group. Their heartbeats felt so loud in her ears, especially with how many were injured and off-key. “He is badly hurt, but… he is breathing.

“Okay… Okay…” Jester swallowed and rubbed her blood and gore-slicked hands together and placed them on his chest. “Fjord, I told you I’d save a healing spell for you, and I did, so you have to wake up right now, so you can thank me.” Green light spread from her fingers and into Fjord’s chest as the healing magic began to take hold. His labored, shallow breathing became steadier and when the glow faded with a snap of oleander and candy floss, his eyes fluttered open.

He tilted his head back, trying to track every member of the Nein with only his eyes without moving too much. He groaned miserably once he'd finished counting. “I swear to all the gods, Nott, if the first thing I hear after almost gettin’ eaten by a fuckin’ centipede-snake bitch is ‘now I know how it feels to swallow shit whole’ I’m gonna punt you down the cavern.”

Nott scoffed. “Low hanging fruit.” As if she hadn’t made that joke the second he was swallowed- one day Cree was going to brave enough to ask what the fuck that meant if it was going to keep coming up. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

Fjord scoffed and turned his attention to Jester, instead. “Thanks for the save, Jessie.”

Jester blushed and buried her face in Fjord’s gore-covered breastplate to hide it. “Yasha and Cree helped, y’know?”

Seeing as they were about to have some sort of a moment- Cree’s heart ached just watching it- she made a quick departure from the scene, hunting for Molly among the crowd. Beau and Caduceus were pulling him to his feet while he laughed, half-mad from the victory, and oh-

He hadn’t put his coat back on from when he leapt through the waterfall, so all he had was his patchwork vest and the white shirt now soaked in blood. The behir had bit him on the side of his neck where his tattoos were and they were now so covered in gore they were nearly obscured entirely. He looked like Lucien in his element- covered in blood and half-dead, but exhilarated.

It wasn’t right that he could look and behave so much like Lucien and yet wasn’t. Every time she believed she could see them as separate people, these moments slipped into place and reminded her that they were just two sides of a single coin.

Which might be for the best, honestly- she couldn’t start seeing Molly as an individual. If she did, she might have to regret the fact that she fully intended to murder a very real person who had not done anything to harm her and whose only crime was forming an identity out of a spare slip of soul left to cling to that body.

But it hurt her to see it, to see glimpses of the man she buried- the one before the Nonagon became everything. How many times had she buried Lucien to see him rise again as someone slightly different?

It hadn’t just been the once, had it?

She clenched her eyes shut and focused her breathing to chase away these traitorous thoughts. They came with the same constricting force of the behir’s body and would crush and eat her whole and then where would she be? Nowhere and nothing.

Move forwards, Cree. Lucien had given her the name “Deeproots” for a reason, and despite what Caduceus said, hers were far from rotten.

They could not be replanted either.

Even after being thoroughly healed, Molly still felt like anything other than lying on his back on the cool cavern floor was too difficult. His ribs ached with bruises and his shoulder was now a mess of fresh scars where the behir had ripped into him with its teeth. Right on the tattoos, too. Those were so expensive…

Well, the ink was bound to get broken up by scars eventually with the way he operated. He pushed himself up onto his right elbow to get a sense of what the rest of the Nein were doing. Caduceus was turning the behir into a mess of glowing blue fungus that seemed to crackle with the lingering electricity that coursed through the monster’s body. The kobolds were being looted methodically by Nott and Jester, while Beau rifled through Sken’s pockets-

Oh. Fuck. Molly groaned and flopped back down onto his back. “Weren’t we supposed to keep her alive?”

Beau looked up abruptly, clutching the ring that Sken had been using to create the fog that hid her during their first encounter. “...Shit. Well, uh… Accidents happen?”

“There goes six hundred gold,” Fjord muttered. He picked up Sken’s longsword and carried it over to Caleb who had opened his spellbook on his lap, readying identify.

Molly blew out a breath. That wasn’t an insignificant amount, even if they had to split it nine ways. Could’ve been more coin for his Save Gustav fund. On the other hand, trying to get Sken down from here with the path fucked up might be more trouble than it was going to be worth. They probably saved themselves a massive headache. “Well, with what the Gentleman’s paying us and all the shiny things we might find in here, that might be just a drop in the bucket.”

Fuck. Was that how rich people thought? He should watch that. That couldn't go anywhere good.

“Hey, Nott?” Yasha called from where she was crouched over by the upturned workbench- well, speaking of things they forgot. “Can you help me get these shackles off of them?”

“Oh right!” Nott scurried behind the bench and out of view. Molly could catch snatches of the conversation- the female gnome chastising Nott for taking too long and Cleff fretting about his daughter. Nott ignored one and gently reassured the other and after a moment, the shackles must have come free because the blonde gnome woman immediately strolled out from behind cover and tested her legs.

“Fuckin’ Stahlmast,” she growled. “Never did learn to take no for an answer. Or criticism of any kind.” She ran a hand through her pixie cut and eyed up the Nein. “Well, you’re a funny lot, aren’t you? Cleff said you were coming, but I thought the old coot was full of it again.”

“You’re always so ornery, Nima,” Cleff emerged with Nott and Yasha following close behind. He looked around until he locked eyes with Caduceus. “Ms. Yasha says you’re the one who saved my girl?”

Caduceus was mulching the last of the kobolds when he looked up in surprise. “Oh… Yeah, that was me.” He smiled, lopsided and sheepish like compliments continuously baffled him in the best possible way. “It wasn’t her time yet. I was happy to help.”

Cleff’s eyes went misty and he all but threw himself at Caduceus’s ankles, hugging his leg because it was all he could reach. “Bless you. My girl’s all I have in the world. And she’s well?”

“Sleeping it off,” Caduceus nodded. “And worried about you.”

Nima swiped a few of those tiny bombs off the floor from where they had scattered when she flipped the table. “He had me making these so he could turn some of his servants into bombs. Awful bastard. He smuggles the unwanted and exiled in from Xhorhas and they’re loyal to him for getting them out of their miserable situations. Of course they’ll die for him too. His whole plan is to tear Hupperdook to the ground. That’s how he got Sken on his side.”

“Because if you destroy Hupperdook, you destroy the Empire’s military machine,” Beau murmured, thoughtfully. She looked to Cree. “That piece of half-burned letter the Warden gave Rissa said something about how Stahlmast was an ally of Sken’s comm-something. Commander, maybe? Is that why he went rogue? He got a new sugar daddy in Xhorhas?”

“I would not use the term… sugar daddy...” She puzzled over the word, making it sound overly comical in her accent and general tone. “He has always used kobolds. However, with things being as they are, I would not be surprised if he drew attention from people higher up in the Dynasty and seized upon an opportunity.”

“Sounds like Huron,” Nima muttered.

“But why would he want to destroy Hupperdook!” Jester exclaimed. “Who could hate this place? It’s great.”

Nima barked a laugh. “Because Huron Stahlmast couldn’t cut it. The man was a sub-par tinker and an even lower human being. He never cared about the work- he just wanted the attention and respect. He conducted illegal and dangerous experiments trying to pull ahead of the rest of us and when it saw him humiliated, he just became a fucking recluse. I always knew he’d pull a stunt like this. What I didn’t know was that he was living right here the whole time.” She waved a hand. “I’ve been coming to this cavern for years to collect guano for my explosives and never thought about what was farther back, ‘cause there’s been rumors about that behir since I was a kid. After I told his minion to fuck off, he nabbed me right at the entrance back there while I was working.”

“So he sucks at tinkering and he kidnapped two far superior tinkers to work as slave labor so he can take all of the credit?” Nott blinked owlishly, her voice mocking. “That’s just evil! Who would do anything like that?”

“Well, one superior tinker and this coot.” Nima pointed at Cleff, who only looked long-suffering.

“I’ll have you know that the weapon that killed the behir was my invention.” He gestured to Nott, who removed the Tinkertop Bolt-Blaster 1000 from her back and lovingly showed it off.

Nima eyed it up. “Well, a broken clock is right twice a day.” She dropped the little bombs into Nott’s hand. “Here you go. See if you can toss one down Stahlmast’s gullet for me.”

“Are you going to head back?” Molly grunted as he pushed himself up into a seated position. “‘Cause the path is less of a path and more of an obstacle course at this point. We had some trouble on the way up.”

“I know every way up and down this mountain like I know the burn scars on my hands,” Nima scoffed, showing off the impressive array of them across her knuckles. “Come on, codger.” She slapped Cleff’s back and began nudging him towards the narrow path that led back to the Falls. “Let’s get you home to that kid of yours before something else tries to kill you.”

“We’re the same age, Nima,” Cleff muttered.

Once their footsteps were lost to the various cave sounds all around them, Molly tore his eyes away from the path and back to the Nein. “I feel a spark between those two. Anyone else?”

“Yeah, that bickering old married couple thing is kind of a vibe,” Beau nodded.

“She totally likes him,” Jester agreed.

“Guess we got that hot Hupperdook gossip after all.” Molly grunted again, struggling to move to his feet and failing. “Yaaaasha?”

She was at his side not a moment later to grab his hands and pull him up onto his feet. In return, he leaned against her. “You should be resting, Molly.”

“I did rest. If I do any more resting, this will definitely become a long rest, not a short one.”

“We’re definitely gonna need a long rest soon.” Jester’s face fell. She turned towards the path that led into the next chamber. “Nott, can you sneak down there and see where that path leads just so we know what we’re walking into? Maybe there’s a better place to rest that’s not full of dead shit.”

“I dunno. I think the fungus makes it pretty inviting,” Caduceus shrugged.

Nott pocketed the last of her bombs- it genuinely terrified Molly how many of those she might have at this point. “On it.”

She pulled her cloak over her head and vanished down the hall, leaving everyone else with nothing to do but cluster around Caleb to see what the two items Sken had might be. Caleb held up the ring for everyone to look at it- it was a dark gray color shaped like a skull with a golden orb in one eye socket. “This is called a ring of obscuring. It can cast fog cloud. It might be good for any of us, but I think the healers might make the most use of it.”

“Ah yes,” Cree nodded. “A veil of fog to keep the fallen and grievously wounded from being targeted. Very clever.”

Given Caduceus was the only one of the three who didn’t engage in close combat, it was quickly decided he should be the one to take it. He slipped it onto his finger and held it up to the flickering lamplight in the cavern.

“Kinda unnerving, huh.” He turned his hand a bit, and grinned as the gold orb caught the light. “My mom’s gonna hate it, but at least she can’t say anything about my gauges anymore.”

“And this,” Caleb awkwardly held up the hilt of the longsword. “This is a special kind of blade. It’s effective against giant things.”

“Like what sort of giant things?” Molly grinned, still leaning on Yasha.

Caleb caught on to the cheek being thrown his way and his lip quirked in a grin. “Giants. And things that are giant. It could be for Yasha or it could be for Fjord.”

Yasha held up her hands. “I’m pretty okay with the Judge, honestly. You should take it, Fjord.”

“Lemme see it.” Fjord took the blade from Caleb and examined it- it was heavy-looking, the blade a strange dull ivory color like fresh bones that hadn’t been fully picked clean yet. “Huh.” He gave it a swing and judging by the way it cut the air, it wasn’t nearly as heavy as it looked. “I like the feel of that. Yeah, I’ll hang onto it if everyone’s okay with that.” He backed up once everyone nodded and confirmed their approval, and went to find a corner to sit in with the blade.

Jester grabbed Molly’s hand and tugged him in the direction of Fjord. “I wanna see what happens.”

He faltered a bit, still unsteady on his feet. “What d’you mean?”

“You know!” She lowered her voice, conspiratorially. “Fjord’s weapons are inside him. So when he gets a new one, what happens to the old one? And how does it get inside of him?”

“Maybe he’s the sword-swallower the circus needed the whole time,” Molly grinned. “He did wake up with blood on his mouth that one night.”

The two of them crouched in front of Fjord, who had closed his eyes with the blade resting on his lap in what was clearly meant to be a meditative stance. He didn’t react to either of them, so he was either ignoring them or just blissfully unaware, and their gazes shifted between the blade and Fjord’s face, trying not to miss anything.

His brow furrowed suddenly. His eyes moved behind closed lids, tracking something, and then the blade suddenly crumbled into ash and the ash dissipated entirely until there was no trace of the sword at all. Molly and Jester yelped in surprise at the suddenness of the shift and Fjord snapped to attention.

“What? What happened?” He turned his head to the left and right, hunting for danger that didn’t exist.

“Your sword just dissolved,” Jester gasped. She reached over and patted his breastplate. “Did it go into you?”

"And did you shit out the other one?" Molly tilted his head.

“No, I didn't shit anything out, Molly." He pinched the bridge of his nose while Molly snickered like an immature child. "Hang on.” He waved Jester back a little and summoned the falchion, which appeared not in the strange nasty curved shape of the Waste Hunter Blade, but with the long straight blade of the longsword, the barnacles on the hilt converging onto the ivory, giving the impression of a skeletal limb slowly being claimed by the seafloor. The eye in the middle of the hilt remained and Molly could only look at it for a second before his skin crawled in the places where the Somnovem’s eyes were branded onto his skin and he forced his gaze to the side.

He was grateful when Fjord banished the falchion back into its weird pocket dimension. He could only take so many eyes out in the open and staring at him like that. “I dunno what happened. I just kinda focused on it… And I had a vision of bein’ in the ocean. And then that happened.”

Molly raised an eyebrow. “So what you’re saying is if we give you any swords, we better be damn sure no one else wants them, right?”

“Guess so.” Fjord ran a tongue along his tusks. He glanced over Molly and Jester’s shoulders. “Did Nott die or something?”

“You wish.” Nott strolled in at that precise moment, yanking her hood down and looking a little winded, like she’d run all the way back. “There’s a big steel door about two hundred feet down the cavern. I did a very thorough search. No traps. No tricks. It’s just a locked door. Shouldn’t take more than an hour to open it.”

“I really wanna take offense to that, but we overcomplicate things a lot,” Beau sighed. “So the real question is do we wanna take the risk and head into the villain's lair where we don’t know what might kill us or stay out here in the mushroom garden.” She eyed the crackling mushrooms blooming out of the behir corpse.

“I wouldn’t eat those,” Caduceus cut in, like he just knew what Beau was already thinking.

Molly sighed, melodramatically. “I was absolutely going to dare her to, too. Or at least lick one.”

"I might lick one anyway," Beau mumbled in the petulant tone of someone who didn't appreciate being told what to do.

There was a brief discussion about whether it was a good idea to press on and try to rest within the lair while they still had an element of surprise on their side. The dome would protect them from any threats so long as no one could dispel magic and if they couldn’t find a place to rest, they could always double back into the cavern. Despite many protestations, it was eventually agreed that they were in danger the second anyone realized what had happened here and seeing what they were up against beyond the door would be better overall than simply waiting it out.

Molly could at least walk without limping now, even if his ribs still ached. He moved at a pace that wasn’t quite his usual speed, but at least he could manage stealth- like the previous path, this one took any sound and magnified it and everyone had to step lightly to avoid any unwanted echoes.

The steel door was massive and while most of this part of the mountain still had its natural crags and ridges that suggested that the original state of it had been left as is, the rock the door was set into was smoothed out.

Caduceus frowned at it, while Nott went to work on the lock. “Huh. This again. Cree, do you know if Stahlmast has a magic user who works with him?”

Cree’s tail lashed behind her. “Not to my recollection. He could have hired one to help him shape the mountain to his liking.”

“So let’s assume there’s a magic user waiting for us, then?” Molly sighed. One could hope for the best, but fighting Sken had been too easy and then the behir had happened, unexpectedly. Gods only knew what else Stahlmast was hiding behind that door.

“Ah-ha!” Nott exclaimed, pulling away from the door. “It’s like I’m a rogue or something.”

Caleb reached down and ruffled her dark hair, while Cree and Yasha pushed the door open, revealing another darkened section of cavern that stretched on for fifty feet until the faint flickering of torchlight began to dimly light the path again, casting an eerie glow on the rough stone walls. Annoyed kobold barking echoed down the chamber as the Nein found their marching order and crept forwards, keeping those without darkvision clustered in the middle so they wouldn’t be attacked from the front or behind should the torches go out or the space plunged back into darkness again, suddenly.

The smell was horrid. Burned coal, wet earth, and refuse so thick that it coated Molly’s nose and throat and made him want to gag. Cree, moving close at his side, was covering her mouth to keep from hacking at the reek of it.

“Of course he is human. Anything with a halfway decent nose would not stomach this,” she growled low under her breath.

“I apparently smell like this all the time,” Caleb drawled.

“No, you smell earthy,” Molly protested. “This smells like the rankest part of a sewer someone tried to set on fire.”

“I do not see a difference.” When Molly shot him a look, Caleb tried to look cheeky, but his hesitant smile ruined it (well, ruin is a bold word- it certainly didn’t make Molly’s stomach flip-flop any less from not landing).

“Why are your jokes better when you’re not trying to be funny?” He asked him, but Beau punched him in the arm before Caleb could respond, silencing both of them. The fact that it was the arm attached to his mangled shoulder was cruel and unusual. “Ow. That was rude.”

“We’re trying to be stealthy or did you forget that ‘cause you were flir-” Molly covered her mouth with his hand before she could finish.

“Shhh. Beau, we’re trying to be stealthy.” She narrowed her eyes at him, but when he removed his hand, she said nothing else about it. The last thing Molly needed was for Caleb to realize that his flirting was a concentrated effort and not because he was just like that. Beau’s words might not have planted any measure of suspicion in his head, but he couldn’t afford to take the risk.

The path reached a fork- curving up in one direction and then going straight to the left. Caleb summoned Frumpkin and sent him to the left first and Molly stiffened in surprise when his hand immediately went to his shoulder instead of Beau’s as he slipped into Frumpkin’s vision.

Fuck. Either Caleb was a bigger troll that he ever anticipated or he was just blissfully unaware of how absolutely crazy he made him. Probably the latter- he wasn’t in any way emotionally prepared to handle a relationship, much less tease a person consciously. Molly’s uninjured shoulder was just conveniently close by.

They waited in the shadows while Caleb murmured what he could see through Frumpkin’s eyes in the low light. An inactive turret, a workroom, a common area, an armory, and an empty prison. There was one kobold in the armory and three engaged in a card game in the common area and none of them spotted Frumpkin. More paths branched off, he noted, but he called Frumpkin back before he could explore any.

“Okay… We should do something about the kobolds, perhaps. And maybe we can set up the dome in the prison and explore more once we have rested. I liked the look of that workroom, but it could get sticky.”

Lots of books, Molly translated. That spark in Caleb’s eyes was familiar… and stupidly attractive.

Beau wrinkled her nose. “Is that a good idea? They could just shut the door on us.”

“If there’s no one in the prison right now, they’ve got no real reason to check it,” Molly pointed out. “And if the dome is sort of wedged in there, it’s not like they can break it to shut the door.”

“Fair point,” Fjord nodded. “What about the little lizard shits?”

Caleb exhaled. “I could go to work. Hopefully they are not full of bombs.”

Nott grinned toothily. “I’ll get the one in the armory, Cay-Cay.”

“There might be more beyond where your familiar saw,” Cree pointed out. “So silence is imperative if we do not wish to get trapped in a bad spot.”

“Vigilance is key,” Caleb agreed. No one argued and they began to creep forwards. Nott ducked down the hallway where the inert turret stood in the middle of the path and Molly watched it cautiously, like it might spring to life if eyes weren’t on it at all times.

There was a soft, barely perceptible sound of something falling over down the turret hall and Nott crept back a few minutes later with her hands covered in gore. “Good news! No bombs in that one.”

“Good. The last thing you need is more bombs,” Molly muttered.

She stood up, proud and straight, which would have been more impressive if she were taller than three feet. “I’m going to use them the way Beau uses ball bearings.”

Beau’s eyes widened. “Oh my god. Explosive ball bearings. You’d blow off someone’s feet.”

Molly got a good chuckle out of that. “It always comes back to people with no feet, doesn’t it?”

Jester gently shushed everyone so they could press forwards towards the common room. The barking and chittering of the kobolds engaged in some sort of lawless card game where the rules were constantly being argued more than anyone was actually playing anything.

One slapped the table and stood up abruptly to shriek in Common, “Those’re stupid rules, and I die on that hill!”

In the shadows, Caleb sighed, “Well, when they give you an opening like that, what can you do?” He slapped the guano and sulfur between his hands and the entire room lit up, incinerating the three kobolds into blackened smears on the stone floor before they could even scream. The remains of the table smoldered, adding burnt flesh and wood to the collection of horrific smells in the area.

“Wasn’t much of a hill to die on, huh?” Fjord drawled. Caleb gave a half-strangled, awkward laugh and wiped his hands on his coat.

“Dome, then?” He didn’t wait for an answer, just headed in the direction of the small prison area, which boasted a few empty crates and three small cells, which weren’t big enough for the dome, but the area in front of them was plenty sizable once the crates were pushed out of the way. The task occupied Molly who was feeling the urge to wander and explore and make sure nothing else sneaked up on them- Beau must have been feeling the same way, but without a task to do, she was left shifting from one foot to another while she kept watch for any other kobolds or anything that might wander back through.

When the dome came up, the Nein crawled into it, plotted the night’s watch, and cuddled together, hoping for a restful night while stuck in the enemy's territory.

Fjord dreamed of being submerged in salt water and enclosed in a tight space. Everywhere he tried to swim, he hit a wall. His lungs burned as his breath began to slip from him in the form of frantic bubbles. He swam upwards and pressed against the ceiling, trying to break free.

As his lungs burned, in the back of his mind blazed a golden eye, bright as a sun, and a deep voice growling, Caged.

He woke with a start and managed to make it out of the dome to vomit seawater onto the cold stones. The only witness was Caduceus who traded watch with him, politely, and said nothing.

Fjord was learning enough about him to know it would definitely come up later at a likely inconvenient and unexpected time, but for now, it was just him and the horrific feeling of being trapped hanging over him and the taste of salt water in his mouth.

Caduceus dreamed of the Grove again, the creeping blight overwhelming everything, consuming the temple and turning everything a horrific graying purple. The nine red butterflies danced in his vision and everywhere they landed, the tendrils of the blight began to warp and twist and become fleshy. Eyes blinked in and out, taking him in at various angles.

The temple exploded into bone shards that stretched to the heavens. Something that reeked of rotten, maggot-infested carrion wove its way around the protrusions and pulled taut. Decaying flesh, muscle, and bone warped together until they formed a massive throne where his home once was. He stepped back, shaken to his core, and the wind tore at his hair, scattering the butterflies.

And then they returned, a thousand strong, forming a shape that looked almost tiefling-like before separating into nine humanoid shapes and then back into another, less discernible single shape, and then back to nine again before the butterflies scattered and settled upon the throne, their wings stilled in anticipation.

He woke up in a cold sweat and brushed it off as nothing to worry about to Fjord who remained on watch, but they both knew better.

Cree dreamed of a path that forked down the middle. One led down the familiar snowy trail of the Glory Run Road to Shadycreek Run, while the other led towards the ice and snow-covered ground of Eiselcross, one of the ruins of Aeor rising up in the distance, beckoning her. Without thinking, she put her foot down on the path to Aeor and felt something tug her arm, pulling her back.

Around her wrist was a golden thread.

She whirled on the path to the Run and the scenery had changed- the road was still covered in new snow as it had been when she found the Nein and saved Molly, but now there was a long stick marking a fresh grave. Acting as a marker was a familiar maroon coat with its maddening array of patterns woven into the fabric.

Her breath caught in her throat- not at the grave, though the sight did disturb her, but at the raven perched on the stick, watching her.

“No.” She took a step back towards Aeor. “I do not serve you any longer.”

The raven cawed and took flight, and the thread fell loose, causing her to stumble and land on her ass onto the ground, which felt as cold and hard as real earth. The wind kicked up, stirring the snow on both paths and carrying the coat away. Without knowing why, she reached for it, but it was too far for her to grab and her fingers closed on nothing but air.

A flash of black and red among the white caught her eye in the snowdrift and with cautious fingers, she wiped the remaining snow away. Her heart seized up at the sight of a Raven Queen symbol, adorned with feathers that had been so frozen they hadn’t deteriorated at all, despite the number of years it must have been left buried in the snow. It was as if it had just been waiting to be found again.

The symbol she wore to fool the Empire was kitschy and impotent- a mere trinket used to distract. This was a holy symbol awarded to clerics who passed their trials within the Claret Orders- a true signifier of a Raven Queen priestess and her status as a bloodworker.

And after Lucien found the Somnovem, he had torn it from her cloak and tossed it into the snow right before he gave her the amulet that now hung around her neck, full of his blood, connecting her to him and to the Somnovem evermore. She had not missed or thought about her old symbol since, having left it buried in Balenpost, lost forever.

She reached out and touched it and saw flashes of threads, tangled together and her ensnared right in the middle of them. She yanked back and shook her head. “You cannot ask this of me,” she whispered. And then louder, screamed straight to the heavens “I have betrayed you once! I will do it again! You have no right to punish me so.”

She grit her teeth and lowered her eyes to the ground, her voice choked now. “I serve no god but the one I made of him.”

The dream faded into darkness and Cree woke, shaken and miserable.

Molly was back in the Astral Sea, all traces of Sehanine’s mirrored pool gone from the space. Below him, the city moved, tendrils snaking out and always seeking. Always hungry. At the moment, it paid him no heed.

And then a voice, one that trembled with anguished fear, popped into his head. ”I can feel it, Nonagon. Your fear is so strong. We could take that fear away if you would just let us embrace you. Can you imagine? A world where no one would ever leave you alone in the dark.”

He shook his head like a dog, trying to rid himself of the voice. “My friends aren’t going to leave me, and even if they did, I don’t need friends like you.”

”But you do,” the voice pleaded. ”You have already accepted us because you were lonely and desperate and in need of something greater. You have just-”

”-FORGOTTEN,” a litany of voices screamed in his head until he thought his ears might bleed. Floating in the sea of stars, he curled into a fetal ball and clenched his hands around the base of his horns.

“I haven’t forgotten. I’m not Lucien.”

The voices whispered among themselves, the sound as much a senseless drone as the screaming that constantly played out in the background, agony that had become so normalized it might as well have been room noise. And then the voices began to pull apart again to mock him.

”Empty shell.”

”Discarded vessel.”

”Fragment.”

”Splinter.”

”Wayward speck.”

”You could be whole.”

They began to overlap again, pressing in on him. The fear began to rise within him, burning against his shoulder, like someone pressing a comforting hand and a knife against him at the same time. He tried to jerk away, but he was boxed in by oppressive, invisible forces and eyes that flashed into his mind and a ceaseless, chaotic pattern that seemed to wrap around him until even the stars vanished beyond its nightmarish fractals.

His left hand burned with a softer warmth and he tentatively pulled his hand away from his head to stare at it. The moonbow scar had begun to glow- Catha-silver to the Somnovem’s Ruidus-red. The voices continued, but the din had become muffled- all that mattered was Sehanine’s words to him. She’d given him an escape route. That was the boon.

He curled his fist around the scar and an opening appeared in the middle of the sea- a slash of white against the black, warm and inviting against the darkness.

The Somnovem’s eyes shied away from it. ”Even here, we cannot escape the gods.”

”That cannot be! We destroyed the moon goddess’s tether!”

Molly, satisfied with his boon and the effect it had on the Somnovem, turned to look at them over his shoulder, blew them a sardonic kiss and fell backwards through the gap.

He landed on his back in the grass somewhere in Trostenwald. He knew the banks of the Ustaloch like the back of his hand now, after so much fucking strife that occurred there. He could see the circus tents being put up, the constant movement of bodies doing their assigned tasks, while onlookers paused to scoff or stare in wide-eyed wonder.

He pushed himself onto his feet and began to walk that way, eager to join them, to embrace the kind of pattern and predictability in the unpredictable that he adored so much. He made it to the edge of the circus grounds before someone stopped him- a familiar Zemnian accent coloring the words.

“Mollymauk…?”

He whirled and saw Caleb as he was when he first met him- dirty and disheveled and a little bruised, his brows knit in confusion. He took a step closer to him. “...Hey, Caleb.” He didn’t hide his delighted smile as he stepped into his space. It was just a dream. He could do whatever he wanted in a dream and there wouldn’t be any consequences.

He could dare to dream as big as he wanted, and, feeling he deserved this after everything that had happened, he took Caleb’s face in his hands and kissed him here in the shadows of the first place he found safe, built on the path that took him to the Mighty Nein. A liminal space, like the dream itself, where he can have everything and nothing awful could touch him. The Moonweaver had provided him with quite the boon, indeed.

When he pulled away, Caleb was wide-eyed, which was strange. In a dream Caleb would be melting into him right now... wouldn't he? “...Mollymauk?” He repeated, with deeper confusion this time. “What are you doing to my dreams?”

Molly jolted awake in an absolute panic just as the dome shattered around him, signaling the end of the Nein’s long rest.

Chapter Text

Molly woke up with a violent start and dug the heels of his hands into his eyes to block everything out, while the freshly woken Nein pressed around him, throwing concern his way until their voices were as garbled and droning as the sounds of the city the Somnovem kept trying to show him.

“Molly?!”

“Did you have another nightmare?”

“Was it the Somnovem?”

“Are you okay?”

It was all of one voice in his mind, even when the words separated out to make sense again. Molly hissed between his teeth and thrust out one hand, flailing it about to indicate he needed a moment. The voices quieted, instantly. “No… Yes. I don’t know. It’s complicated. I- just give me a minute.”

“You heard him.” Yasha, merciful angel, snapped and the bodies pressing close to him began to retreat, spurned on by her herding them out of his space while he remembered how to breathe. Air goes in, air goes out. He knew this even when he was empty. It wasn't difficult.

He dared to peer between his fingers to seek out Caleb, who had pushed to the edge of the pack now that the dome was no longer there to form a comfortable radius around him. His expression was unreadable and Molly’s heart sank into his boots.

You fucking kissed him in his sleep, you fuckin' idiot, he chastised himself. How did you think he was going to react?”

He pulled himself together, shrugged off any questions, and the Nein ate their breakfast in conflicted silence, broken only by someone offering a suggestion for their plans for the next stage of their attack- most of which flew over Molly’s head, entirely, leaving him giving noncommittal answers to everything said.

After they had eaten and prepared spells, they split off to explore the common area and some of the nooks and crannies therein once they confirmed that it hadn’t been repopulated with more kobolds in the night. It was busy work to get them up and moving before what was inevitably another fight that no one wanted to have after the difficulties of the last ones, but there was promise of loot and that made it all worthwhile, even if Molly doubted that a bunch of kobolds had much in the way of shiny baubles for his own collection or interesting magical items.

“Remember, stay in this area,” Fjord said with gravitas as the Nein began to prowl. “We know it’s safe right here, but if anyone hears something, give a holler.” He directed the last bit to Caduceus and Cree, and once he’d gotten their nod of assent, he moved to intercept Molly. “Hey, you okay?”

His concern was adorable and, unfortunately, could be better used elsewhere. For the first time, Molly felt he probably deserved every bit of emotion he was carrying thanks to a dream. Was this what shame felt like? He’d never felt it before now. He’d never had a reason to.

He blew out a breath in a long, whistling exhale. “I’ll be fine. It wasn’t… that kind of dream, exactly.”

Fjord blinked his golden eyes. “What d’you mean?”

Unable to resist the two birds and one stone set-up Fjord had just laid in his lap, he took a step closer to the half-orc and just grinned, putting on a good show of making it convincing. “You ever have those dreams where it feels so real that you just react-” Every world rolled over and off his tongue with a lascivious lilt and Fjord was so utterly shaken by it that it clearly didn’t occur to him that Molly had definitely not reacted in any way, shape, or form like that to this dream.

He stepped out of Molly’s space and cleared his throat. “Right. ‘Nuff said.” He disengaged and Molly was free to sort out his newfound shame in some dark corner until it went away. His best laid plans, quite tragically, fell by the wayside when he turned and there was Caleb right behind him. His breath caught in his throat and his heart followed with it and kept it from going anywhere else.

“Would you like to come with me to check out the workshop?” The bastard asked it so conversationally that it made Molly’s skin crawl a bit. He pushed that aside as well. This was so stupid. So what if he kissed Caleb and possibly revealed his feelings because he hadn’t realized what the hell was going on? He could spin that as well as he could anything. It didn’t matter. He’d make sure it didn’t.

Right.

“You just want me for my bottomless sack, don’t you?” He quipped, lightly, but the joke fell flat. He just went on smiling through it and hoped that his equally bottomless eyes didn’t reflect broken shame any more than they reflected most things. A lack of discernible pupil was sometimes quite an asset if you were clever enough about it.

Caleb, merciful angel that he apparently was, didn’t say anything one way or another. He just led the way to the workshop, while Molly followed with his tail between his legs. The lamp within wasn’t lit, but Caleb produced his globules, scattered them about the rectangular chamber, and began to sort through the books and papers scattered on the long table, while Molly, lacking anything else to do but hold the bag, began to look at the papers that were spiked to the stone walls.

“He’s got a lot of chicken scratches up here,” he noted, trying to fight against the silence. Even if he was a reader of any kind, he doubted he could make heads or tails out of the manic scrawling on the walls. The pictures were a little less confusing- diagrams of kobold anatomy; schematics for constructs, including something that resembled the crab-like automaton that the Warden had pulled from the prison when Sken escaped, and a section that seemed to just be sketches of various sharks with notations on each.

“You’re looking into the mind of a madman,” Caleb drawled. There was a pause and then, he said, “What you did last night… That was the dream spell.”

Molly swallowed. So it was gonna be here and now, huh? Of course it was. “...I can’t do magic, Caleb. You know that.”

“Ja, I know, but I also know the spell when I see it. You can create a dreamscape of any sort in the mind of a target. Many use it to cause nightmares or to send messages. I imagine that since you are not familiar with magic, you simply reacted instinctively and crafted something familiar.”

“I don’t know what I did.” He finally turned to face him, his tail looped around his ankle in some sort of gesture of contrition. “I don’t know… why the Moonweaver would give me something like that if it was going to cause trouble.”

“Under your control, I doubt it would. You could bring us all good dreams.” Caleb sighed and stepped forwards.

Moly panicked immediately, the possibility of vulnerability and honesty scaring him nearly as much as the Somnovem did. “What happened before… I thought it was just a dream. I wouldn’t have done that if I knew it was really you.”

Caleb stopped short and cocked his head to the side. “Was?”

Unable to keep himself from talking, he continued, “Well, of course I’d kiss you if I got the chance. I’d kiss any of you, but… I was just indulging what I thought was a dream, and I really hope that doesn’t make anything… weird between us.”

They stood in silence for a few moments, neither speaking. Molly wondered if the air leaving the room was a fault of the moment or the fact that they were in a cavern high up in a mountain and that was just normal. Eventually, Caleb just sighed. “No… Nothing weird. That is about what I expect from you, Mr. Mollymauk.” He patted him on the cheek a bit, half-condescending. “But in the future, I would hope you choose better targets. My head is… my business. I would rather not have anything, even something pleasant, alter the state of it.”

Once again, Molly swallowed, feeling as if this conversation had somehow gone the entirely wrong direction even with the air now clear. “Absolutely. I’ll… work on that.”

The awkwardness dissolved and the tension seemed to ease, but Molly was convinced that something had changed between them as they began to sort through the materials and pile what was necessary into the Bag of Holding to carry back with them in silence.

Jester couldn’t stop staring at Fjord.

She defended the choice to herself by calling it worry- he’d nearly been eaten by that stupid lizard thing in the cavern and the thought of being that close to losing him once was enough to put anything else out of her head. Every step he made might be another opportunity for him to suddenly go beyond her reach.

It was stupid. Fjord was strong. He didn’t need her constantly watching him, especially not when she was supposed to be searching this place for clues. She definitely didn’t need to be watching him just for the sake of seeing how his shoulder blades moved when he yawned and stretched and pretended to be bored of whatever Nott was sniping at him about.

Her eyes went half-lidded as she committed the sight of his back arched just so to memory so she could sketch it later. She was so close to just saying fuck it and pulling out her sketchbook right now when Cree cleared her throat behind her.

“Pining is not a productive use of our time here, Ms. Jester,” she muttered. Her tail was lashing impatiently behind her as her golden eyes traced every member of the Nein, like she needed to know precisely where they were at all times. A naive person would call that protective, but Jester knew better. She was still waiting for another shoe to drop, for someone to slip into the shadows and then jump out and get her.

She noted, with wisdom that belied her demeanor, that Cree’s eyes always lingered in the direction of the workshop that Caleb and Molly had gone into. She definitely couldn’t bear to have Molly out of her sight.

That makes two of us, she thought, a bit more bitterly than she might have wished. It had been well over two weeks now since the incident at the Glory Run Road and she still wasn’t entirely coping. Caduceus’s plan had helped, but it had ended before she could be forced to confront her own demons.

She and Caduceus both knew that was going to have to happen, eventually, but she kept putting it off. It was still easier for her to focus on other people- she suspected she, Caduceus, and probably even Cree had that in common.

Maybe that was what it meant to be the cleric.

“I’m not pining,” she huffed. “Fjord almost died. And sometimes he pushes buttons he shouldn’t push, like…” She moved into Cree’s space and the size difference between them meant that Jester was eclipsed in her shadow. “Okay, so when we first met and we were headed into the Empire, there was this guy who was selling things on the road and one of the things was this box that said ‘do not open’ on it and he wanted it sooo bad, but I talked him out of it.”

Even if she had kind of been curious, herself. Who even sold boxes like that? It seemed like a pretty good trick to her, but not one she wanted to be on the other end of without knowing all the details first.

Cree just blinked down at her. “I see.” She exhaled. “Regardless, I know what it looks like when someone is yearning for that which they have no courage to take. It never ends well.”

Jester bit her bottom lip. “So you definitely pined for Lucien, huh?”

All of Cree’s fur immediately went up. “Do not speak of things you do not understand.”

She had her now, though. She shifted in front of her before Cree could try and extricate herself from the situation. “Uh-huh. You said I was pining, so technically I totally understand what I’m talking about.” When Cree failed to confirm or deny, she simply pushed forwards- she was a closed window, begging for a thaumaturgy to throw her open, and Jester was just the tiefling to do it. “Oh my gosh, so that’s why you want him back so bad. I thought it was like ‘cause he’s your leader and he was all like ‘Cree, you gotta make sure I return,’ and stuff, but you’re doing this because you love him.”

Cree’s fur hadn’t stopped bristling and her claws were out, but she made no visible threat display beyond that. It might as well have just been nerves. “Would that make my reasons and methods more palatable for you, then? To know what I was guided towards was love and not ambition? Not blind loyalty, but true affection for a love lost?”

Caduceus had implied as much during the circle- that Cree was not committed to the Somnovem, so much as she was committed to Lucien, but even when looked at it like that, her love bordered on a sort of perverted version of how Jester loved the Traveler. It was a dark mirror to look into and she felt Sprinkle gently nip at her ear to bring her back to the present.

If Cree did all of this because she loved Lucien like she- well, no. She didn’t know what she felt for Fjord exactly. She wasn’t experienced enough to call it love, but Cree clearly saw something in how she looked at him- familiarity of a sort.

It never ends well. That was ridiculous. She might not know how to define love for herself, but she knew how love was defined. The kind of logic she was spouting was the kind that turned people into miserable loveless creatures like Ophelia Mardoon who assumed the worst of everyone and only cared about themselves.

Cree assumed the worst, but she also had hope. She just also hurt so much and that was causing a war within her that made happiness difficult. There had to be a way to fight that war and win her over to their side once and for all and grant her a happy ending.

Frowning, Jester crossed her arms over her chest. “So why don’t you look at Molly like that? I mean sometimes you do, but mostly it kinda feels like you’re just making sure he doesn’t get killed.”

“That is precisely what I am doing,” she huffed, but didn’t answer the question. When Jester raised her eyebrows and leaned in, all but bullying her into not avoiding the question, she scoffed. “I am not… attracted to Mollymauk. His personality… It is not what I love about Lucien.”

Something clicked in Jester’s mind. “But you don’t think Molly and Lucien are different people, right? You think they’re just portions of the same soul.” She scooted closer, noting the horror on Cree’s face. “And if Molly is just Lucien without memories, you should love all of him, riiiight?”

She sputtered. “That is an oversimplification of the situation, Ms. Jester! I-” But Jester was holding onto this with both hands and would not be swayed from her point. “Yes. Fine. I do agree that Lucien and Mollymauk are vastly different, but they are still the same soul, nurtured in different ways. Lucien was nurtured in the same environment as I was. That is why I feel… drawn to him.” She clammed up, then, unwilling to go farther.

Jester knew she shouldn’t keep probing, but she was finally getting somewhere with Cree. She just needed a bit more and maybe then she’d know what to do. “But you like Molly, right?”

Cree bristled even more, her tail cutting through the air in desperate lashes. “Do not ask such things. Whether I care for Mollymauk or not has changed nothing. And that is why love is dangerous. What we will do for those we love is far worse than the absence of love, entirely.” She sucked in a breath between her sharp teeth. “What is worse to you? That the half-orc might love you and drive you both to acts of stupidity to keep your love? Or that your love might not be shared, driving you to desperation out of a desire to be near him, regardless? In the end, it comes to misery.”

She turned away, arms crossed over her chest tightly. “There are no love stories with happy endings. Someone always ends up hurting.”

Jester wanted to scream that it wasn’t true, but she thought of her mother and her stories about a sailor who never came back, who promised he would come back. Was Ophelia right about it all?

No. She couldn’t be. The world had proven itself to be far from what she imagined it might be beyond her window in the Lavish Chateau, but that didn’t mean there were never any happy endings to be had. And besides… “Maybe you just think that because what you and Lucien had wasn’t love at all,” she murmured, expecting her to finally use those claws she’d been holding back with since this conversation started. She was prepared for that, because it needed to be said.

Cree took a startled step back, but didn’t lash out. What she might have done, instead, however, was interrupted by a voice echoing across the cavern that took everyone’s attention away from their individual tasks and called a halt to every conversation.

“Someone bring me the gnomes. Melancholia and I need their input on the Stahlmaster.”

The Nein converged quickly into the middle of the common area, hunting for the source of the voice. Caduceus pinpointed it as a long copper tube that extended up into the ceiling. “So if you talk through that, does everyone hear you?” Jester moved closer to it, forgetting about Cree in favor of something that might enable a bit of trickery. She puckered her lips and leaned closer, prepared to blow a raspberry into it before Molly suddenly grabbed her by the middle and shifted her around and away from it.

“I love the enthusiasm, dear. I really do, but maybe we don’t let anyone know we’re here yet. Soon, though. You can make every fart noise you can possibly dream of, then.”

Jester sighed in mock-disappointment. “Fiiiiine. We should probably get moving anyway. Once they realize no one is getting Nima and Clef, they’re gonna come looking.”

They stepped away from the tube and took in their choices. A path wound down and away from the common area towards a part of the cavern that forked off in two directions- to the left was the armory that Nott had briefly explored the previous night and to the right was another cavern hall that remained dark and unlit. On close examination. Jester noticed that the stone floor gave way to iron floor roughly for roughly forty feet and then abruptly became stone again.

“Hey, Nott? Is this a trap?” She indicated the floor and Nott, distracted from another investigation of the armory, approached with caution.

“Ball bearing me, Beau.” Nott held out her hand and Beau obliged her by dropping a ball bearing into her hand.

“Try saying that five times fast,” Beau chuckled, and Molly and Jester immediately tried it, their tongues tangling over the words two tries in.

Nott rolled the ball bearing across the iron floor where it disappeared somewhere into the shadows. “Huh.” She shifted her weight to one foot and carefully prodded at the floor, but nothing happened. She recoiled, suspicious of it now, took a long swig from her flask, and took off across it at a run.

The floor didn’t so much as twitch; the walls didn’t shoot darts or gouts of flame, and at the end of the iron floor, Nott stood, unharmed, and barely holding in a cackle of triumph. “I declare this floor: untrapped!”

“Well, you can’t argue with that,” Jester took a step forward with Cree and Beau right behind her. She made it one additional step before the floor suddenly collapsed underneath her and she dropped six feet down into water that was a bit too warm to be normal, given the water off the falls had been ice cold when they crossed through to reach the cavern. In the dark water, she could see Cree had lost her grip and plunged in alongside her, but Beau was nowhere to be seen and, panicked, Jester swam for the surface.

“Beau?!”

“Right here!” Beau had grabbed for the edge of the stone wall before she plummeted and had started to pull herself up. The rest of the Nein were converging on the edge, trying to figure out how to get them back up. “How’s that for not trapped, Nott?!”

“I’m a shitty rogue and you already knew that!” Nott chewed on the edges of her long fingernails. “Don’t just hang there. Get them out!”

The iron trap floor had split in half when it dumped them in and was starting to close again. Beau, caught between being crushed, leaping to safety and leaving Jester and Cree to be stuck in the trap alone, or letting go, just dropped back down into the water, yelling, “Get some rope and figure out how to open the door again!” as she fell.

The door sealed shut, putting them in pitch darkness, but Jester could see well enough that when Beau surfaced, she was able to splash her. “That was so stupid! You didn’t have to get trapped in here with us!”

“What if there’s something in here with you?” Beau was unapologetic about her decision and Jester’s heart clenched when she remembered how absolutely terrified Beau was of leaving people to face the unknown now after everything.

“It’s just water.” Jester spat some of it out and frowned. “Salt water…”

Beau blinked. “...Why would it need salt water?”

Cree made a strangled sound and pushed back against the wall. Her usually thick coat was soaked completely to her skin and she was struggling to stay afloat in her heavy robes and leather armor.“For fuck’s sake, Jester. Watch where you swing your tail.”

“That wasn’t me!” Jester protested. Something rough grazed her ankle and she kicked until she hit something solid, expecting it to be Beau- except Beau didn’t cry out from being kicked. In fact, Beau had already gone to the other side of the chamber to see if she could scale the walls. “...Guys?”

Something bit her ankle and yanked her down under the surface and she got a mouth full of suddenly bloodied salt water for her troubles. She fought against the grip of whatever had her until it eventually released her and she resurfaced with a pained gasp. She’d read enough stories about sailors to have a good idea about what was happening here. “Sharks!”

“This asshole has a fucking shark tank in his evil villain lair?!” was all Beau had time to say before a gray shark broke the surface of the water and latched onto her middle to pull her down. Jester screamed her name before she was being dragged down as well.

The water was darker now with all the blood swirling around as the sharks were whipped into a frenzy- four in total. Two were converging on Cree and every time she tried to break the surface so she could cast, she was yanked back down again. Jester felt she was doomed to suffer the same fate before she yanked her handaxe off of her belt and slammed it down onto the shark’s eye where it stuck, buried deep within the soft flesh. The shark thrashed and flailed and threw itself against the walls to try and dislodge the axe and that freed Jester to take to the surface again. She sucked in a deep breath of air and spun wildly in the space, hunting for Beau and Cree- she found Beau first, resurfacing with a shark in what could only be described as a headlock as she delivered a flurry of blows right to its snout until it went limp and sank beneath the water.

The floor dropped open again, light filtering in above them from Caleb’ globules. Molly, standing with Nott on the other side of the trap, had a light shimmery essence about him that suggested he’d just used Summer’s Dance to get himself out of the way once his weight had triggered the trap. A rope was being tossed down and Beau leapt to grab it, reaching out for Jester with her free hand.

Cree hadn’t resurfaced. The water was a churning mess of blood and attacking sharks and (hopefully) flailing tabaxi, but there was no glimpse of her. If they left her here, then Molly would be safe. They wouldn’t have to go to Nogvurot. They could go somewhere else and figure out what to do about Molly’s weird eyes.

But that would be cruel. That would be admitting the world was awful and that happy endings didn’t exist. Jester hadn’t survived this much to break like that and give up on happiness. The Traveler wanted her to be the little seed of joy and chaos this world needed? Then of course she would be.

And that started with joy.

“Beau, go on before the door shuts. I’ll get Cree.” Beau protested, but Jester’s hand slipped from her grip and she dropped back down into the bloodied water. The door shut and plunged everything back into darkness again and she was left to hope that Beau didn’t stick around to fret over her. She had this under control.

She found Cree struggling against the sharks, but still alive, thank the Traveler. It occurred to her that maybe Cree couldn’t swim- she wasn’t an expert on tabaxi or large cats, but small cats hated water. It would be impossible to tell either way- all of Cree’s energy seemed to be tied up in clawing at the sharks to get them away from her and focusing on not losing what was left of her air.

Jester couldn’t track the shark she’d stabbed her handaxe into, and she resigned herself to losing it as she kicked and punched through the other frenzied sharks (and just shrugging off the agony as they turned their teeth to her- she’d feel it later, when she had time) until she grabbed onto Cree’s shoulder. She opened her mouth to mutter the somatic components of dimension door and the salt water burned her lungs and everything tasted of copper, but when the spell reached its completion, she felt the Traveler’s symbol, larger than life, form behind her, allowing her to yank Cree through it-

-and they fell backwards into the cold rock floor, soaked and bloody at Molly, Nott, and Beau’s feet. Cree coughed and hacked and curled herself into a miserable, shuddering ball.

“I hate water,” she cursed through gagging fits. Every bit of salt water she vomited held diluted blood, telling off on the extent of her injuries. Jester laid a hand on her to heal her and slowly she began to pull herself out of her trembling ball. “I hate it.”

“No, you just hate water with sharks in it,” Molly gave her a gentle pat and tried to help her onto her feet, but she was over two hundred pounds of waterlogged tabaxi in leathers and heavy wool and there was no getting her onto her feet with his scrawny arms. Jester didn’t have any luck, herself, and Cree just hissed at her attempt.

“Give her a moment,” Caleb called from across the way. The remaining members of the Nein were trying to figure out the best way of getting across themselves. “You’ll lose an eye manhandling her like that.”

“You are extremely condescending, wizard,” Cree choked out with an irritated grunt. “But… Also correct.” She sprawled on the stone and blinked at Jester who had stepped back from trying to pull her to her feet. “....Thank you, Ms. Jester. For coming back.”

“You came back to help me at the Platinum House, and you help all of us.” Jester knelt down beside her. “Of course we’re gonna help you. We’re the Mighty Nein, right?”

Molly leaned down so he could put his face right next to Jester’s, so Cree was looking at two tiefling grins angled above her. “There’s nine of us now. You can’t argue with numbers.”

Mighty Nein. Nine members. Nine eyes of the Somnovem. The unnerving coincidence of it all made Jester shudder.

Inside her cloak, Sprinkle sneezed miserably and she put the fear the thought dredged up in her aside so she could tend to her poor weasel.

It was probably nothing, right? It was just a number, after all.

Despite the conversation in the workshop clearing the air and making boundaries evident, Caleb still couldn’t shake the unease that weighed on him from Molly invading his dreams. The kiss was secondary and knowing it meant nothing was…. Well, it was a weight off his mind, wasn’t it? He couldn’t damage something if it danced out of his grip.

No, it had just been so many years since his mind was shuffled like a deck of cards and rebuilt to suit another person’s purpose that the feeling of it lingered. No ill intent was meant, and yet the trauma of it cared not. He was moving through the rest of this lair like a sleepwalker up until Jester, Cree, and Beau had fallen into that pit. That had woken him up something fierce.

One day every single spell that altered the mind and made truths come easily and bonds to form more quickly wouldn’t feel like Trent’s fingers in his brain. What a glorious day that would be.

He could focus now, at least. Some careful work pressing close to the wall enabled them to walk across the trap door without falling into the shark pit and end up on the other side safely without even burning more spells. Using a fire cantrip, he was even able to dry Cree up enough that her fur and clothes weren’t such a miserable weight on her so they could move forwards.

“You know, big cats are usually good swimmers,” he teased and Cree thrust one of her massive paws into his face to push him aside as she stood up, the force behind it knocking him into Yasha, who didn’t budge an inch- it was like being shoved into a wall. “This is why I am not the funny one,” he groused in self-deprecating sing-song as he looked up at his barbarian friend, who just gave him an understanding nod.

They gathered themselves up, healed those who needed to be healed, and began to move down the remainder of the hall. Caleb dismissed his globules when it became clear that the torchlights were more than sufficient enough to light the way for those without darkvision. They had barely gone more than a few feet when a voice began to echo through the caverns- the same Empire-accented languid tone that had spoken from the tube before.

“I see I have vermin in my home,” the voice drawled, coming from everywhere and nowhere. “You must be quite skilled little pests to have eliminated Frigit and Sken like that. I will admit I mourn Frigit a bit more- she was a useful creature. However, Ishel is quite disappointed you eliminated one of his most brilliant soldiers… But I will let him tell you that.”

“There goes our element of surprise,” Beau hissed through gritted teeth. The words had barely left her before the torchlights suddenly snuffed out and arrows and crossbow bolts began to whiz by them. Caleb could see nothing in the darkness, but he felt the rush of air as projectiles narrowly missed him and heard the grunts of pain as they made impact on others. A bolt struck him so hard on the shoulder that he spun hard to the left, which allowed him to see the strange flash of arcane light coming from beyond- purple black and speckled with stars like magic formed out of the cosmos, themselves.

He could only ponder the nature of such energies- and the strange familiarity it held- for a brief moment before he jerked forwards in a straight line towards the centerpoint of the swirling vortex along with Molly, Jester, and Caduceus. The four of them were crushed violently together in the star-freckled sphere and for a brief moment, Caleb wondered if he would come out of this merged bodily into some unholy fusion of limbs and flesh before the spell broke and the four of them were dropped, bruised and broken onto the ground. Caleb could see nothing, still, but he felt Caduceus flailing blindly for a hand and caught it. Another hand, so warm he felt it through the thickness of his coat, grabbed his shoulder.

“You all right?” Molly’s voice. Soft and worried and just a bit anxious.

His bones felt crushed, but he wheezed out an affirmative, anyway. “Ja… Ja, that was… I do not know. I am not familiar with that spell.”

He threw up his globules again, casting the area into light and finally threw their attackers into sharp relief- an army of kobold archers and a short-statured man with the same gray-purple skin tone of the Kryn they met in the sewer. Unlike the soldier, he wore the mantle of a wizard and his sharp eyes shone with malice when they locked on Caleb.

Like recognizes like. Put two wizards in a combat situation and they know who has to be eliminated first. Caleb licked his lips and pulled himself slowly to his feet while the rest of the Nein began to engage the kobolds. Beau ran for the wizard, recognizing him for the source of the attack that had left Jester favoring an arm, and thus casting desperately one-handed, and Caduceus limping. Molly seemed fine, for the most part, as he spun like top through the kobolds until he was obscured in a veil of red mist, like the spell Cree had woven around herself during their previous fight.

As Beau brought her staff down, the wizard raised a shield, pushing her off of him like he was swatting a fly, still focused on his fellow wizard. “I see now how it was that you bested Sken and the behir. I might have passed it off as dumb luck otherwise. You’re clearly poorly trained, after all.”

“You must be Ishel, then,” Caleb drawled. “I was not expecting a practitioner of the arcane to command an army of mere footsoldiers, but I am unfamiliar with the ways of the Dynasty.”

“Footsoldiers,” Ishel scoffed. “You are looking at but a small portion of Den Hythenos’ guerilla forces.” The drow’s cold eyes seemed to frost over entirely. “And I am no mere practitioner of the arcane, Empire mage.”

Ishel might have better used his magic to ruin the battlefield as he had at the start, but for a field commander, he was surprisingly impractical when driven by the pathological need to peacock in front of another magic-user. He was well-versed in single combat magic spells, and Caleb hadn’t prepared for such an encounter. On his own, he would have been lost to the bastard.

But he had Beau, Caduceus, and Cree, who had given up on the kobolds when it became clear that Molly, Yasha, Jester, Fjord and Nott were brutalizing them. They were getting quite efficient at taking care of this so-called impressive guerilla force. Try as he might, Ishel could not face down Beau’s fists when she was boosted by spells from both Caduceus and Caleb, nor could he properly land a spell or shrug off an attack when suffering under the effects of Cree’s bane. Beau brought him to his knees with a stun the moment the last kobold fell and Caleb, usually content to stay behind, had never stopped moving towards him. Perhaps he was peacocking, himself, just a bit.

“One more strike and he is done for,” Cree called out to her just seconds before Beau almost put her fist through his face. “We should interrogate him.”

“Shit. Good idea.” Beau flexed her fingers and then gave him a sharp jab on the shoulder the second the stun began to fade, rather than a critical blow to his temple. “All right, gang. If you’ve got questions, this guy can’t tell us any fibs for ten minutes.” She eyed him up, eyes dropping to her own flexing fingers. “Also someone get the manacles.”

Some rifling around in bags got them the manacles they’d taken from the gnoll mines, and Yasha was able to manhandle Ishel into them. With his hands immobile, any somatic or material-necessary spells were impossible and with the Nein, barely any worse for wear beyond the effects of what must have been his largest spell and a few stray bolts and arrows that were being carefully removed, surrounding him, any other spells would just prove foolish.

Ishel slumped, but kept his mouth shut. Beau’s ability would not grant them information- merely shield them from misdirection and falsehood. If they wanted true results, this would have to get nasty.

Fine. Caleb could do nasty.

He knelt down beside Ishel and ran a hand over his own face. “This day has just begun, friend, and we have a ways to go, and already I am exhausted. But… I could go to work if I need to. I am an Empire mage, yes. Perhaps you understand what that means better than others would.”

Caleb refused to look up to see what he knew would be an exchanging of confused looks. He especially couldn’t look at Beauregard or Nott, who might give away how much they truly knew, all while not knowing everything.

Ishel understood, even if no one else did. “I have heard of the Volstrucker,” he said.

Caleb slapped him, backhanded, before he could say anything else. The sound was so sharp and so sudden that several people exclaimed loudly, mostly wordlessly.

“Shit, Caleb!” Fjord yelped and began to reach for his shoulder to pull him onto his feet, but stopped short and then backed up. He understood, then. He understood this was indelicate and needed indelicate hands.

“I do not care what you have heard of. I am curious what you know of Stahlmast’s plans.” He pulled some of the papers he hadn’t given to Molly to keep in his bag out of his coat and held them up. “These are plans to set explosives under the base of the mountain to bury Hupperdook. Were these ideas planted in Huron Stahlmast’s mind by you or did you seize upon an opportunity with the war escalating so quickly?”

Ishel’s jaw twitched, and he switched to Zemnian. “Are you a loyalist, herr wizard?”

“You speak the tongue of the Capitol?” Caleb couldn’t hide the flicker of amusement. Of course he did. Any spy would learn the most common language of their enemy, because no one would ever suspect their barbaric foes to take so much care to pick up something as beautiful as language to wield as a weapon. Especially not successfully. With the right disguise, Ishel could have swept through the Capitol unnoticed.

So why, then, would he be here if these were not his plans?

When Ishel didn’t answer what was practically rhetorical anyway, he went on, still in Zemnian. “What I am is not your concern. The question, Kryn, was whether these are your plans or Stahlmast’s.”

Seeing he could not edge a knife under Caleb’ fingernails with mere jibes in his native tongue, Ishel sighed and switched back to Common. “Stahlmast pulled his servant from the same recruitment pool as we did. Rather than bribe the kobolds of the Underdark to our sides, we simply pooled our resources.” Caleb was on the verge of backhanding him again when he added, “This entire operation was Stahlmast’s brainchild, but far be it for the Dynasty not to assist something that would hobble our enemy. A petty child’s tantrum can be useful with the right guidance.”

“Are you serious?” Molly balked. “This arsehole just wants to bury Hupperdook because… what? They didn’t take him seriously?”

Ishel snorted. “Indeed. Madness is quite unseemly, isn’t it? But, again, still useful.”

Cree worked her jaw, eyes narrowed. “So Stahlmast did, indeed, cut off his dealings with his previous benefactor because of what you had to offer.”

“You are speaking of the Gentleman?” Ishel chuckled. “He had much to say about him and his lack of vision. A man with that sort of power content to lurk in shadows. He was made for the light… as were we, in a manner of speaking.”

There was no lie in that, but there was a great deal of doubletalk and poetry. Caleb narrowed his eyes. “The drow are a race of darkness and shadow.”

Ishel’s sharp teeth bared, then. Were his fangs just a bit bigger, he might have gone for Caleb’s throat right then. “Do not speak of us as if you are aware of what we are. The Kryn Dynasty has transcended shadow, but you thieving Empire dogs would drive us to remain in it.”

“Time’s almost up,” Beau said, flexing her fingers. “But I could hit him again.”

“Do not bother.” Caleb stood. The weight of his years under Ikithon’ tutelage settled on his shoulders and he would have to carry it for awhile until he could slowly begin to bury it again. “What else does Stahlmast have in his employ here?”

Ishel looked at the dead kobolds scattered about. “You have removed his army and his ambassador. All he has left now to his name are his inventions and his druid lover- Melancholia. She is not to be trifled with- if he is mad, then she is moreso. She would see Hupperdook punished for its industrialization and returned to nature.”

Jester blinked. “...But she’s dating a guy who hollows out mountains and puts bombs in living things and builds the same crazy shit that the people in Hupperdook do, only totally more evil.”

“Who can say why the heart yearns for that which it cannot stand in others?” Ishel shrugged, dismissively.

Caleb didn’t miss how Cree winced, but said nothing. His own demons were too much on display for him to prod at others’. “Ja, okay. That is quite the sentiment, herr Hythenos. There is much more we should like to discuss with you, so for now…”

He gestured to Nott who darted ahead and then returned a few moments later. “I found a bedroom.”

“That is mine,” Ishel sneered as Caleb began to manhandle him in that direction.

“Good. Then we know you will be comfortable in it,” he trilled. Only Beau followed- likely because she told the others to hold back, but Caleb gave her a gentle headshake to indicate he had it under control and she frowned but obeyed.

He’d hear it from her later, but that was fine. Later, they would have a great deal more than just whatever was about to transpire in this room to discuss, he was sure. Best to get it all out at once if they were going to hold each other accountable, as seemed to be the thing of it recently.

Ishel didn’t fight against Caleb’s grip, either because of resignation or because he was smaller and somehow even leaner than Caleb, himself, and knew he had no hope of winning in a physical brawl. Nott led the pair of wizards into the bedroom and shut the door behind them. For a brief moment, he considered even sending her away, but decided against it. All Nott ever seemed to want was for him to get stronger. She would understand the things he needed to ask Ishel.

He shoved the Kryn backwards onto the simple, but elegant bed, and paced in front of it. Nott fidgeted with her flask and then began to scratch her itch by rifling through the room for anything of value. “I am curious about the nature of your spellwork. I have never seen such magic worked before.”

Ishel didn’t even spare Caleb a look, choosing to trace Nott’s movements as he pushed himself into sitting position on the bed. As far as he seemed to be concerned, Caleb was beneath his notice. “There are many in the Cerberus Assembly who would give their eyeteeth for knowledge of that kind of spellcraft. I would not offer it to anyone freely.”

“You probably should keep better track of your spellbooks, then,” Nott snorted, producing a leatherbound tome from within a trunk in the corner of the room. Ishel leapt to his feet, but Caleb was quick to draw his palms together in the beginnings of a spell and, hissing, Nott raised her crossbow, which was more than sufficient enough to convince him to sit back down.

It did not, however, convince him to keep his mouth shut. “So you have a spellbook. You cannot possibly hope to comprehend the contents of it.”

“He’s very intelligent,” Nott snapped, indignantly. She walked the book over to Caleb, who took it to rifle through with the hunger of a man starving in the wilderness. Many of the spells held within were familiar, but there were a few that baffled him. He had devoured dozens of primers on spellcraft in his youth, determined to pick the exact right school of magic to specialize in. He knew nearly every spell that a person could cast even if they were beyond his reach at his present level, but there were at least four tucked into this spellbook that held no familiarity at all.

And another that was unfamiliar and yet told him precisely why the nature of the magic that Ishel wielded had tugged at something in his head, like it was just to the left of a thing he had seen before, but not in the context of a spell.

Fortune’s Favor was the spell’s name. The spell itself had a striking familiarity to the result of staring into the dodecahedron. All those fragments of other lives, the vague suggestion that perhaps the Dynasty held the key to time magic if they could alter fate so.

Caleb licked his lips again. He could ask. He could interrogate Ishel at length about the dodecahedron sitting in Jester’s haversack and the power it held. He could finally begin the process of unraveling the threads of time to undo a great wrong…

“Caleb?” Beau was at the door. Apparently, they were taking too long. People might talk or get suspicious or burst in and his monk friend here wasn’t immune to the urge, even if she did seem to be covering for him.

“Ja, I know.” He swallowed down his need for information and held up the spellbook. “I’m going to hold onto this. We will talk more later.”

When Stahlmast was taken care of they would still need to deal with Ishel, anyway. There was much to bleed him of, even if it would be for selfish reasons. They all wanted to know more about the object they were carrying around, anyway. It was as good an excuse as any to explain his need to keep pressing the Kryn.

Caleb and Nott left the room, confident that Ishel being bound meant escape was going to be difficult, if not outright impossible. The rest of the Nein were in the middle of a short rest- tending wounds and taking breathers. Beau lingered at his side as he exited, but only long enough to warn him about acting fucking weird before plopping down on the ground to leave him be.

I’m always fucking weird, he thought. He settled a bit of a distance from the others and started to open the spellbook before he caught sight of something else Nott had brought out with her- a midnight-black scimitar that seemed to sparkle with little motes of light, like someone had added ground diamonds to the steel to give the impression of the night sky reflected off the blade. He threw up a quick detect magic and noted a slight glow around it.

“May I?” He asked, holding his hand out for the blade, which she obliged him eagerly. He had time to get lost in Ishel’s spellbook later, but this held his attention to an even greater degree- it surprised him, even. He knew precisely who could use such a blade and all he wanted to know was what it did so that he might offer it up with full disclosure.

Molly had torn through his defenses like a bull in a glassblower's shop, and yet he still felt this strange longing and a need to apologize in some strange way for being brusque with him about what happened. He hadn’t meant it- Molly was far from guileless but that wasn’t how his guile worked. It was mostly harmless, beyond being stubbornly in your face and occasionally insufferable. He didn’t deserve to feel like shit about that when he had so much else to feel like shit over.

A gift would be a sufficient balm. Caleb did better expressing his emotions with gifts, anyway.

The Nein, Nott included, left him to his identify and his rest in peace as they discussed their next actions and once he received an analysis of the weapon, he shoved Ishel’s spellbook into his satchel and took the blade over to where Molly was observing Caduceus trying to take care of the worst of Cree’s shark bites while Jester used thaumaturgy to blow little gusts of wind at her to try and dry her fur and clothes just a little more. She looked patently long-suffering, but was tolerating it.

Molly glanced upwards and then glanced back at the cleric trio quickly- too late, though. Caleb caught that flicker of an indigo blush on his cheeks that drew attention to the slight graze of freckles across the bridge of his nose that usually blended into his skin. He had never noticed those before. “Those three are going to be something else at some point. I see a lot of chemistry there.”

Caleb nodded, dumbly. Suddenly, he felt very exposed, awkwardly standing beside Molly, holding a gift stolen from an enemy to present to him- like a cat with a dead mouse. “Ja. Three clerics with good synergy. We might never lose anyone else.” He cleared his throat and offered up the blade before that dark line of thought could calcify into something to ruin the moment.. “I, ah… Thought you might like this. It is a magic sword- one that gives you a boost of speed. Like a haste spell a bit, but without the vertigo.”

Molly’s red eyes widened until they looked like bottomless blood pools set into the planes of his skull, and he reached, with nearly greedy hands, for the blade. “...This is beautiful.”

Caleb released it into Molly’s hands and almost smiled. “It does not match Summer’s Dance, but it is quite lovely.”

“No… No, it kinda does.” Molly pulled out the golden scimitar and held them together. Placed side by side, it was clear what he meant- the night sky and the radiance of sunlight. Sun and moon- like Molly’s tattoos, his coat, and his personality. Duality at its finest.

Mein Gott, you are lost, Widogast. Caleb chewed on his bottom lip.

Molly’s tail thudded on the ground. “Thank you. This might be the first time I’ve ever pissed someone off and gotten a gift out of it.”

Caleb winced so hard that he nearly drew blood from his own lip. “I…. am not pissed at you, Mollymauk. I was just startled is all. And I do not like people in my head- I’m sure you can understand that.”

His tail immediately stopped thumping on the stones and his delighted expression softened and then fell, entirely, as his eyes drifted back to the clerics again. “...Yeah. I get that.”

The silence that fell between them lingered long enough to be uncomfortable and damning, neither willing to give in to the questions between them, the lingering doubts… Maybe even the unspoken feelings that threatened to actively consume Caleb whole. With everything else driving him, they would just have to continue to nip at him. There was no room for error- not when Ishel’s spellbook might hold a key, not when that mysterious Kryn artifact might be a catalyst.

He was so sure he was closer now than he’d ever been.

And yet, he still studied the planes of Molly’s face, cast in shadow from the torchlight and ached for his smile, lost as it was to the mental shadows as well as the physical. He had to force himself to tear his eyes away.

Perhaps it was for the best that the Nein gathered themselves up to leave- for a brief moment before he turned and walked away, he caught the flicker of a smile on Molly’s face again as he studied his day and night blades and selfishly took to heart that the smile was for him in some small way.

Best to move forward and not examine that.

By gods, but this party was consumed with pining.

Only Nott and Caduceus seemed to be immune to yearning for another’s heart and Cree appreciated their sense, but it didn’t mitigate the ceaseless frustration she felt looking at the others staring at one another, lost to their affections, but never being bold enough to act upon them.

It reminded her too much of her youth, and the fact that said youth was barely a decade past mattered little. She had grown rigid in the two years since Lucien’s death, but her roots remained deep- it allowed her perspective on her failings without altering her course.

She should never have pined for Lucien. He was destined for greater things than mere mortal love. She did her heart better to remain committed to that end goal and not focus on her feelings. Nothing good came from that. He had made his choice and she had made hers.

And yet that didn’t stop the jealousy from surging up to choke her when she watched the wizard walk away from Molly, while Molly just stared after him like a lovelorn puppy. Those were Lucien’s eyes showing emotions Lucien had never felt, might not even be capable of feeling.

He had loved her, but not like that. Not with wonder in his eyes. She’d sooner face the sharks again than have to endure watching the sliver of soul piloting Lucien’s body use his eyes and face and voice to mock her with all these things that he would never have said or done.

And not a one of the Nein realized what torture it was for her to watch it.

She disengaged from Caduceus and Jester and began to search for their next path. There was work to be done and no sense in just standing here making eyes at one another or getting lost in the past. Her future was approaching, but it would not rise to meet her- she would have to meet it halfway.

And that meant taking care of this last distraction before she finally made it to Tyffial and set this right.

(And if her mind kept lingering on Jester coming back to save her from the shark trap when she was too overwhelmed to save herself or the way she had told her that what she and Lucien had was not love, then what of it? What would either of those thoughts get her? She was fighting against a current here and every word and deed the Nein did served to drag her down. Killing her with small kindness, cutting her with small cruelties. It was all the same.)

The diamond-shaped chamber beyond a set of double doors looked promising, if not likely trapped due to the four iron plates mounted into the walls with holes drilled into each one. From the safety of her position outside the door, she narrowed her eyes, and then began to circle the cavern for other options and found none.

“It seems that is our only way through,” she announced with a gesture. Nott went to investigate and came back a moment later deeply puzzled.

“It’s not trapped, but it probably is a trap. I’m too short to reach the holes.”

“Want me to hold you up to one so you can peer innit, Nott?” Fjord grinned in offering.

“This guy,” she scowled, sidling away from him, as if expecting him to pick her up without permission.

Cree watched them argue back and forth at length about the proper way to deal with a perplexing trap, her mooring began to slip even more. It was easy to fall into a rhythm with them. They were insufferable, but addictively so- not so unlike the Tombtakers, much as she wished to believe otherwise. There were too many of them and yet they were all close as kin, despite none of them having known each other for longer than a few months to a couple of years by her estimation. They bonded quickly with anyone and everyone, if they could trust them enough- and sometimes even if they couldn’t.

She worried the fringe of her still-damp cloak with her thick fingers, watching them as they gathered bits of cloth and began to plug up the holes in the trap. When the doors started to close, Yasha and Jester jammed furniture swiped from the common area to keep them open. When the holes began to spit hot steam before their task had been completed, Molly darted in to finish the job, tanking the fire damage with his infernal resistance and coming out of it mildly scalded, but smirking in victory. From beyond the trapped hall, her sensitive ears picked up on the sounds of swearing and furious clanging.

While the Nein congratulated each other on their cleverness and teamwork, the real fight was still waiting for them, and yet Cree lingered, still unmoored, watching them laugh and behave as if the fight were already done, despite how the tides always turned unexpectedly on them, despite how many secrets were hidden beneath the surface that no one seemed to know about, despite how things always seemed to go wrong.

The wizard had demons that he seemed to think mirrored hers. He’d been so quick to be alone with the Kryn and yet no one questioned him.

The monk was abrasive and determined to get under the skin of everything around her, nosy and hunting for answers in everything.

The goblin was a thief and a drunk and a fool who didn’t always pay close enough attention, and seemed to put more stock in Caleb than anyone else to the point of blindness. (She ignored the hypocrisy of this observation.)

The half-orc had secrets, had dreams of some sort, and she knew better than most how dangerous dreams were. And Cree knew enough about aasimar to know that one doesn’t get dark hair and no halo and wings of skeletal bone without committing some unknowable cruelty.

Jester was unbelievably kind, perhaps even naively so. Caduceus was up his own ass with his beliefs to the point of shoving that conviction down others’ throats, even more than Maira, her superior in the Claret Orders had been.

And Molly… Molly was barely conceivable as a person, even with all of that love and light within him. How he’d managed to become so much more than a fragment was beyond Cree, but it was foolish to devote any energy into loving that which was only a tiny fraction of life that Lucien might have held if only the world had been kinder. He was a “what-if” given shape. She shouldn’t be humoring him.

She shouldn’t be humoring any of them.

They shouldn’t be humoring each other. She could see ruination in the shape of every interaction, the cracks that would only grow if left unattended to. Monsters weren’t always just a step ahead, they were with you all the time.

She would know. She’d grown up alongside one and when he showed his fangs, she’d just shown him her neck and let him bite down. Not everyone loves quite like that.

“Cree?! Are you coming?” Jester yelled from within the hall- now thoroughly plugged up and safe to traverse. She was holding the door open as the Nein began to run through quickly before she lost her grip.

In the end, it didn’t matter, did it? The Nein would deal with their monsters on their own and in their own time. Once she got to Nogvurot, she would deal with hers, and that would be the end of that story.

There was no such thing as a happy ending to this tale, just as she had said. Jester was wrong and the sooner she learned it, the better, and yet when she brushed past her, the last to enter the chamber, and Jester released the door to fall into step beside her, her heart ached for that little tiefling girl.

It was always difficult to learn that fairy tales weren’t real. She’d learned it at a young age when a tiefling boy crept into the place she lived and whisked her away to a life of adventure and she had taken his hand, blindly, and the story unspooled into horror immediately thereafter. Even now, she was still reaching for his hand, even knowing where the adventure would likely lead, because that was her story and she was committed to it.

And then Jester grabbed her hand, jolting her out of the memory and pulled her along down the hall, quickening her pace, and for a moment Cree could almost taste the potential of another path- another hand to guide her, another way to go.

In her ears, she heard the scattering of a flock of ravens.

Don’t be fooled, she chastised herself. Eyes forward. The goal is in sight.

She slipped through the opposite door with Jester, and Yasha, currently holding it open with straining muscles, released it, allowing it to slam shut on nothing, her sigh of relief echoing through the next chamber. The Nein converged together, beads of sweat already dotting the furless members of the party’s foreheads from the sudden heat in the room. Cree had been cold and damp since falling into the shark pool and now she felt like tearing at her heavy cloak and leathers and shedding her winter fur.

The source of the heat was a forge at the back, glowing orange and casting the only light in the chamber. All along the walls were worktables, piled high with partially constructed mechanical devices, many that had been gutted and hollowed out, their innards splayed across every bit of surface. Strange humanoid shapes lingered in the corners and Cree almost mistook them for more footsoldiers until she realized they were motionless and made of scorched and lifeless metal. They weren’t what they ought to be worried about.

No, the true target was a cruel-looking, skeletal iron statue that stood in front of the forge, the glow from it giving an eerie, hellish illumination as the metal reflected the light back. Halfway up the side of it was a human man with goggles knocking his sweaty, dark brown hair askew, assisted by a lanky human woman with long red hair in equally sweaty tangles, and braided with vines and leaves.

The last time Cree had seen Huron Stahlmast, he’d been a well-dressed tinkerer who had offered her his blood with a snide look on his face, but even with the mussed hair and sweat and simple clothing she would still recognize the haughtiness of his demeanor, even if the sound of his blood wasn’t familiar enough to label him. The woman giving him a boost up with her bare arms, corded with muscle, must be the Melancholia spoken of.

“You’ve squandered your many gifts, Mr. Stahlmast,” she drawled. The Gentleman’s need for secrecy but love of his enemies knowing precisely who brought down the hammer on them meant for quite a bit of flowery language, and the words were familiar on her tongue. It wasn’t the first time she had played the assassin, even if she mostly was the tracker who led the true assassins to their targets.

“The Gentleman’s bloodworker,” Stahlmast chuckled, continuing his ascent into the giant, skeletal suit of armor. “I was wondering who might have sent the rats. And you got through Ishel after all that, too? You must really be something.” He adjusted his goggles and slid within, until only his head was visible, making it look as though someone had fused a flesh-and-bone human skull onto a horrific metal skeleton of a giant. It might be comical if it didn’t feel like such an unknowable threat. “I think traits like capability and determination of the sort you lot exemplify should be rewarded. Why don’t you abandon that fool you’re working with and join me and my team? We seem to have a gap in membership now.”

Melancholia drew a thorny vine from her messy hair and cracked it on the ground like a whip. “You can correct the addled vision of Hupperdook’s future and the future of this wretched Empire.”

“Yeah, and which vision is it you two support?” Beau snapped. “Industrialization or nature? ‘Cause it seems like you have conflicting ideas.”

The automatons along the wall began to, one by one, come alive and lurch forwards like the undead, until the Nein were surrounded on all sides by them, boxed in and pushed closer to the burning forge, the fox-eyed druid, and the massive armor that Stahlmast was beginning to awaken with unpleasant, creaking lurches.

“Mellie and I were born here in this city,” Stahlmast growled over the sounds of clanking and grinding metal. “She watched this place press closer and closer to the edge of nature and choke the life out of it until it broke her heart. No one took her seriously when she begged for this to be corrected until she was forced out. Meanwhile, I was fighting to be taken seriously. No matter what I did, it was never right. I was never smart enough or clever enough to compete with people like Cinnarid and Tinkertop. Eventually, I had to seek out other means to prove I was enough. I found the Gentleman who accepted my inventions, but even that would not change how Hupperdook treated me and Mellie. We were outcasts, shamed for not being what this city expected of us.”

The rest of Stahlmast’s rant was lost to Cree as something seized her heart- a memory, some years gone from her, dredged up by the familiarity of this cruel sentiment.

Their employer had forced them into a march all day to reach what she called the Genesis Ward. They had fought their way through several creatures to reach what she had deemed an acceptable campsite and the remains of their last fight came in the form of spectral butterflies which floated idly at the edge of where the rest of the Tombtakers were bedding down, courtesy of one of the spells Cree, herself, had used. Lucien was staring at them when Cree approached him from behind.

“Lucien…” She didn’t know what to say to him to ease his mind, only knew that he looked like he needed it eased. The week’s events had taken its hold on him. She could see it in the tightness of his smile and the way he had pushed nearly every single one of them away- everyone but her.

He allowed one of the spectral butterflies to light on his finger, an absent-minded smile playing across his features and for a moment Cree saw a glimpse of the boy who stole spiced creams and asked her to take his hand and not whatever man he’d been broken into becoming. “I’ve always liked butterflies. Everyone does… But you know, no one ever stops to look at a caterpillar. They just don’t care. But once that ugly little thing- just a glorified worm, really- becomes this beautiful creature… they can’t help but stare. Marvel at it. And no one ever thinks ‘you know that’s the same caterpillar that we called a worm a moment ago.’ They respect the butterfly, but it’s still the caterpillar who worked its arse off to become that silly pretty fragile thing.”

He closed his hand around the butterfly and it dissolved into sparkles. “What am I doing, Cree?”

“You’re trying to find your happiness, just like anyone else,” she offered. It felt like a useless platitude.

“And what if,” he said, speaking slowly, as if he were forcing the words out, “the world doesn’t want me to be happy.”

The shock of the memory threatened to overwhelm her entirely even when she snapped out of it. She had been about to call Stahlmast a fool for punishing the world for not accepting him as he was, rather than simply trying harder, and yet she knew that to be the basis of Lucien’s entire decision to become the Nonagon. The Pattern was going to change how the world saw him. The Pattern was going to make them understand.

The Pattern wasn’t a mountain collapsing and wiping an entire town off the map, however. The Pattern was unification and understanding. That was how it had been pitched to her. That was how the Somnovem explained it and how Lucien seemed to embrace it.

Destruction comes in many forms, as does death, a voice that wasn’t her own whispered in her head, a voice she had heard so many times in her youth, submerged in a pool of blood until her fur became sticky and heavy with it, back when she believed in something that wasn’t a nightmare of flesh and blood and horror that she was told was beautiful, and because the man who believed in it was the most beautiful thing to her, she thought his words must be so.

She could not waste her time comparing and contrasting, nor listening to voices from long-abandoned faiths. The automatons began to attack, driving the Nein back and allowing Stahlmast’s armor to target individuals without worrying about the entire group converging on him at once. Melancholia transformed into a dark red sabre-toothed tiger and targeted Cree, herself, as if sensing that her distraction made her an easy mark.

She was a fool to think as such. The tiger pounced on her and Cree caught her mid-leap and flipped her over onto her back, digging her claws into her chest. Both panther-tabaxi and transformed druid roared at one another and then pushed off and into combat. Cree dared to trace the steps of the rest of the Nein with her eyes as she fought, watching them fight off the automatons to get closer to Stahlmast. The heavy crossbow mounted on the armor’s shoulder had gotten Yasha twice in either shoulder, but she was still coming at the thing swinging with her blade, her eyes crackling with rage-induced lightning.

She found Molly and then lost him again as he seemed to be fighting faster than her eyes could follow, twirling and spinning with each swipe of his curved blades, hastened by a power neither she nor Caleb had granted him. Jester was close by, swiping automatons off the board with her lollipop, like a child swiping toy soldiers off of a table. Beau leapt up onto the anvil in one corner of the room, kicked off the pillars on either side of it and then slammed an automaton into a semicircle of stagnant water where it collapsed and sputtered uselessly and then fell entirely still, the lights in its eyes dying out.

Fjord swept in beside Cree, his eldritch blasts slamming into Melancholia’s tiger form. She howled in pain while Cree shot the half-orc a dour look. His charismatic grin was insufferable. “Seemed like you needed the help.”

“I did not.” As if to prove it, she slammed her glaive into the tiger’s chest and the wild shape dissipated, revealing a screaming red-haired feral human woman, who slapped the glaive away and ran at Cree with a sickle out. Fjord caught her in the back with two more eldritch blasts and she landed in a heap at Cree’s feet and made no other sound.

Fjord blew imaginary smoke off of his fingertip as if he had fired a gun and kept grinning cheekily at her. “Teamwork.”

“You all are idiots,” she scoffed, but there was little bite to it. She shifted her attention to Stahlmast and found that he had stopped fighting, his eyes locked on the dead druid.

“Mellie?” He choked out. That brief moment of distraction proved to be his downfall. Frozen, lost to the moment of Melancholia falling and not getting up, he was a perfect target for Jester’s lollipop, which hit the middle of his armor so hard that it pitched backwards and he was flung, unceremoniously, out of it and onto the stone ground, battered and bloody and prone.

And helpless to Yasha, who, clearly driven by nothing but rage, drove her sword right into his back and pinned him like a butterfly to the stone ground.

The room grew quiet then as they processed that the fight had come to a sudden, abrupt end. Automatons fell into heaps as they were dispatched with, but everyone’s eyes were on Stahlmast and Melancholia now, sprawled on the ground, facedown- an ignoble ending to two people who had done everything to try and make the world respect them and their vision, even if it meant death to an entire city.

“He called out for her,” Jester murmured, wrapping her arms around her chest. “He really did love her.”

“He was still going to bury Hupperdook in a landslide, and I don’t think half of that was for her, Jes’.” Beau blew a lock of hair out of her face and collapsed against the anvil.

“I want it stricken from the record that I said it, but… Beau’s right.” Molly stepped out and around a pile of automatons that had been cut to metallic shreds, sheathing his blades at his side. “Turns out shite people can love just as well as the rest of us.”

“Some of them, anyway,” Caleb drawled. He was boasting several cuts and bruises from being slammed into by Stahlmast’s contraption and Caduceus was tending to them with what remained of his spells.

Cree was still looking at the dead bodies.

She was half-dead, not even conscious and slipping away from an undead frost giant’s final blow and yet she could still hear Lucien whispering to her, his weight on her bloodied and ruined chest, his warmth against her long before the warmth of the health potion slipped past her lips and down her throat and she choked back to life.

“Come on, Cree-my-love. I still need you. We made each other a promise, now didn’t we?”

Cree swallowed the memory down like that same bitter potion and propelled herself forwards into practicality as the Nein began to lick their wounds and scatter about the sweltering chamber. Seeing the glint of silver lying beside Melchanolia- the sickle she had used to try and attack before Fjord felled her- she snatched it up and marched it over to Jester, who was retreating into herself, drifting farther and farther away from the rest of the group.

She cleared her throat to get her attention and got only a tiny glance upwards for her troubles. “Ms. Jester… I know you lost your weapon defending me…. Perhaps this would suffice as a replacement?”

Jester bit her lip, uncertain, but she tentatively took it as she trailed her eyes over the carved ivy along the hilt and etched into the blade. “...Thanks, Cree.” A beat of pause passed, and then she threw herself at her, wrapping her arms around her middle so tightly until Cree was helpless to do anything but allow herself to be held or risk upsetting her further by shoving her off.

She didn’t return the hug- merely awkwardly patted her head. Jester only seemed to consider this as permission to keep cuddling her, the caps of her horns digging painfully into her chest as she shifted to speak. “Hey, Cree… I’m sorry about what I said before. I dunno what you and Lucien had, but… it-”

“Don’t,” Cree sighed, too exhausted to even be curt with her. “It is all right. You and I see things… quite differently, it seems.”

Jester looked up at her. There were tears stuck in the corners of her eyes, refusing, stubbornly, to fall. “Maybe you could tell me more about you and Lucien sometime.”

She disengaged, then, seeing her opportunity and suddenly needing to be far away from this. “It is far from a happy story.”

Jester smiled, sheepish and sad in tandem, and caught her hand before she could go too far. “That’s okay. Maybe some love stories don’t have to end happily for them to be good stories.”

The two of them looked to Melancholia and Stahlmast, dead mere feet from one another- a tragic ending to two mad people who had each other when the world denied them everything else. Proof cruelty and love could exist and there was no one way about it.

Madmen could love, but sometimes they don’t choose it. It was as Ophelia Mardoon had said, apparently. Cree knew this tale and knew her share of endings for it. But she also knew one other crucial bit of information- that despite everything, her tale was still ongoing. The tragedy had only been the middle.

“It hasn’t ended yet,” she said, simply.

The true tragedy remained that between her and the Nein- only one of these stories ended happily, and nothing guaranteed either one just yet.

Chapter Text

Fights were measured in terms of seconds- you could work your way for days into a violent, decisive combat situation, only to have it end in an increment of time that people usually paid little attention to. Anticlimactic, if you're lucky. Tragic, if you’re not. Beau never realized how precious seconds were until she started fighting alongside the Nein. She banked on anticlimactic fights- over and done with before anyone has a chance to fall, before anyone has to calculate whether that insignificant handful of time needs to be spent healing or ending things even faster.

Even in fights that went well, she found herself wondering where things could have turned, already preparing for the next fight, worried that the time wouldn’t be spent optimally or luck wouldn’t be on their side.

Luck. Fuck. That was just as much a thing to pray for- if she were the praying kind- as optimal use of time. Sometimes it didn’t matter how many seconds you had, how much speed, how much movement to the next target- if you fucked up and tripped or whiffed an attack or, gods forbid, bled yourself out in front of the fucking enemy, then that was it. Best laid plans and strategies given over to the whims of fate. The gods said “no” and so you lost.

And then you get a fucking pity cleric wandering out of the underbrush and whether that was lucky or just another pain in the ass, Beau still didn’t know. Maybe it didn’t serve her to think about it too much. Maybe it was better if she just kept moving forward. She could train and absorb knowledge and learn and be patient all she wanted, but it all came down to a roll of the dice, in the end. There was no such thing as no surprises.

So this whole micromanaging dick thing was sort of pointless and making her feel like her godsdamned father. It made her itch all over until she had to pace, restlessly, around the cavern, gathering up as much evidence as she could to turn into the Soul, because at least corruption was predictable and easy to suss out. It was a salve, not a cure, to the anxiety that was still sinking its teeth into her about this whole situation. Cree was useful. Cree was fucking nice when she wanted to be, but their luck was going to turn again, and she was hypervigilant, constantly waiting for it.

Distractions were necessary, and Stahlmast’s lair was full of them. Dairon and the Soul were going to love all of this war crime bullshit. Molly had coughed up a lot of the incidental paperwork he and Caleb had found in Stahlmast’s workroom and with Ishel locked away, she even had someone to pry a testimony out of. She just needed to talk to him before Caleb did… Whatever the hell he was doing. He was being weird again and she was trying- gods she was trying- to give him space to fucking deal with his shit so long as it didn’t interfere with the group, especially after her aforementioned micromanaging dickbaggery caused that blow-up with Molly. Actions. Consequences. Learning experiences.

So you can teach a stubborn bitch new tricks after all. Hah.

It wasn’t sustainable. Her pride and curiosity and desperate need to know as much as possible would move her if she didn’t move with it. She kept eyes on Caleb as she paced, constantly aware of his movements and ready to intercept him if he moved back to Ishel’s bedroom on his own. At the moment, he was stuck in a detect magic/identify process on all the loot being gathered and was distributing it out as needed, which, at the very least, gave Beau a reason to awkwardly mingle around in earshot, just in case anything piqued her fancy.

Stahlmast had another pair of night-vision goggles like the ones they’d taken off the cultist in the gnoll mines that now dangled around her neck, useless with all the torchlight that had been lit in the communal area the Nein had regrouped in. After some meebling back and forth over whether Caleb or Caduceus needed them more, they went to Caduceus for now, since it was more important that he be able to see in the dark. If she looked like a nerd with hers on, Cad looked even more ridiculous, but he was delighted by the prospect of not being blind in the darkness and he, Fjord, and Jester took to experimenting with them in the darker spaces to see just how well they worked. She had a sneaking suspicion he was just trying to appease their boredom.

Most of the other loot was non-magical, but useful. More bolts, bombs, and tinkerer’s tools for Nott. A few odds and ends they could sell for scrap when they got back to Hupperdook (most of which came from the automatons and Beau had stopped to watch Yasha tear them apart with her hands to get all the useful clockwork pieces out- the sweating she did had nothing to do with the forge she was standing in front of, she was sure of it, but at least it provided an excuse when Yasha questioned it). Cree even found several potions scattered about and Molly kissed her right on the nose for it, which made her shove the bottles at him and quickly flee to the shadows with her tail all bottlebrushed out.

The loot distributed, Caleb finally uncurled his long legs and shifted to work a cramp he must have gotten from sitting on the stone for so long. He gave a cursory look at where the rest of the Nein were and then moved with purpose towards Ishel’s bedchamber, and, having been lying in wait for this like a lioness on the prowl, Beau fell right into step beside him, as if she had blinked there like Yasha’s dog.

“Hey, so I know we should probably turn in a lot of this evidence to the Watchmaster, but I feel like it might honestly make the whole war situation worse.”

Caleb didn’t lose a step, resigned to her appearance at his side. “How do you mean?”

She sighed. She’d been doing more than just thinking about the fickleness of luck and time and how easy it was to lose everything. She didn’t want to traverse an Empire that was being whipped into a frenzy about traitors. It wasn’t good for a bunch of loosely affiliated weirdos. “Propaganda, you know? The Soul will at least investigate this kind of thing quietly, but if we drop this bomb on the Watchmaster, soon it’s gonna get back to Dwendel and the whole godsdamned country is gonna be looking for traitors among their own people.”

“Ah.” Caleb pursed his lips. “And they will start their witch hunts with the pegs that don’t fit into the standard?”

“It would be really bad for us. Shit’s already bad.” They stopped just outside of the bedroom and her frown deepened. That was a huge part of her concern, but not all of it. “Did he say anything when you talked to him?”

It took Caleb a moment to answer, but, at least, when he did, he didn’t seem to be bullshitting her. “Not so much. I considered asking him about the-” he made the vague shape of a dodecahedron with his hands.

Beau chewed the inside of her cheek until she'd worried a welt there. “But you didn’t?”

“We would absolutely have to kill him, if we did. And given how our friend in the sewers reacted to that object and what he and his friend did to get it back… I doubted we would get anything else out of him in between.” Caleb shifted awkwardly onto his back foot.

One eyebrow went up. “What else would we even need to ask him? I mean, yeah- the Soul would wanna know shit, but that’s for me to ask, not you.” She made the implication clear without it being accusatory- what do you want to ask him?

Admittedly, with her resting tone, it still sounded accusatory, but she couldn’t help that.

Caleb fidgeted with his coat, looking heavy with its new layers of blood and grime and sweat, lost in some internal debate, and then sighed and dug into his satchel to produce a book, bound in supple purple leather with etched filigree over the cover. “I have questions about this. And this, Beauregard, I cannot give to the Soul.”

He offered it to her, but when she tried to take it, he held his grip firm. She could have easily wrenched it out of his hands but for the pleading note in his blue eyes. He was all but demanding that she promise that she wouldn't squirrel it away from him. “Fine,” she sighed. “We haven’t turned over the stupid beacon thing, after all.”

He released the book and she flipped through it, frowning when she realized it was just a spellbook, full of scribbling and arcane equations that made her eyes glaze over. While she scanned, Caleb mumbled, “Perhaps we should leave that behind.”

Beau jerked her head up, suddenly. “Excuse me? You agree we need to turn all the evidence to the Soul so the Empire doesn’t, like, start a witch hunt for Dynasty sympathizers and you wanna just drop the thing that started the war here?”

Caleb was halfway to unraveling the seams of his already threadbare coat as he fidgeted. “Just drop it in the falls… With no other evidence, it would seem like it was hidden. It might not even be found until months later.”

“Why now, all of a sudden? We’ve been fine with that thing in Jester’s bag for weeks.” Something wasn’t adding up, entirely, and under the weight of her stare, Caleb unraveled before he could do the same to his coat. He sighed and flipped the pages of the spellbook until he found a spot where a spell was scrawled in fancy handwriting.

She mouthed along the words under her breath as she read. “This is-”

“It is familiar, isn’t it?” Caleb grimaced. “I noticed it when he first used his magic. The Dynasty utilizes an entirely different school of magic than anything I have ever witnessed. I think that… artifact, that beacon might be connected to it.”

“What about the whole ‘keeps babies from being born’ part?” Beau raised her eyebrows again.

A dry chuckle. “I think we both know that perhaps Jester extrapolated the wrong information from that sentence, but… It might be many things. I would love very much to study it, Beauregard.” There was a pleading, desperation in his eyes. “But I am well aware of the risks.”

Her brow furrowed. “You’re a fan of calculated risks.”

“We have a number of them right now. I’d say they are far less calculated than this one.” Caleb’s shoulders slumped. “I very much wish to be selfish. It is in my nature to be. I’m not asking your permission to allow it so much as I am… Offering you the chance to remove the temptation.”

“Part of the temptation.” Beau handed him back the book. A few weeks ago, she’d be ready to fight him over this, but now she had to appreciate his balls. “You’re not getting rid of this, whether we drop the beacon or not. Don’t act like this isn’t a little bit calculated, Caleb. You found something else to study, so it looks like you're making a bigger sacrifice than you are.”

Caleb chuckled. “Ohhh Beauregard, you are a quick one. The book poses the least threat to the group’s safety, at least.”

“Yeah.” But not necessarily to Caleb’s… whatever. Overall mental health? His schemes and plans that probably ran counterintuitive to the group as a whole and her need to keep a running tally of every single threat? Something else, even she couldn’t guess at? In the end, it didn’t matter. The dodecahedron was probably better off not in anyone else’s hands but their own right now. The wind hadn’t turned on that particular subject yet.

She exhaled. “Okay, here’s the deal. We’ll keep it, but if you get really fuckin’ weird about this shit? I’m gonna kick your ass.”

Caleb slowly blinked at her. “You've already made that clear, you are going to have to be more specific, Beauregard. I am weird about a lot of shit.”

“I’ll let you know if you’re doin’ it.” She huffed. “And we’ll talk to this Ishel prick together.”

That seemed to deeply disappoint him, which just proved a point about him being weird and shifty. She’d let him have that one for free and call him out properly the next time, since he seemed to be disinclined to protest. “If you insist.”

“Yeah, I do, actually.” She put her hand on the doorknob and went to call for Nott to come unlock it for them, but rather than hold fast, the door creaked open at her touch, killing the words on her tongue and replacing them with confusion. “...We locked this, right?”

“Ja, and Ishel was bound,” Caleb said, carefully. He put himself behind her as she pushed the door open the rest of the way and stepped inside of the room, yanking her goggles down over her eyes so she could see into the pitch darkness.

There was no wizard to be seen. The bed was in disarray and the manacles were flung onto the floor, broken and useless. Shelves and crates were upended and it looked as if a struggle had occurred. It must have happened while they were facing Stahlmast for no one, not even Caduceus and Cree, to have heard anything.

That was so little time in the grand scheme of things. Whoever had freed Ishel, whether they were his ally or his enemy, was likely still in the cavern. There were only so many places they could go and remain unseen for such a short time. “Shit!”

She bolted out of the room, catching Caleb by the arm to keep him from falling over as she barreled past him and dragged him with her as she ran. “We got a wizard on the loose!”

The Nein began to pile into the communal chamber at a snail’s pace by her estimation. Her heart clenched in her chest as she ran through a dozen scenarios. Sneak attacks, abductions- gods, they let Caduceus, Jester, and Fjord wander off alone. Every time someone rushed back into the space and could be ticked off her mental list, she relaxed a little and then tensed up when she realized someone else was missing. She counted them off, over and over, until she was sure there was eight. Nine in total, including her, and no one had been lost.

She finally breathed. “He can’t have gone far. The room was trashed.”

“Did we miss someone else here?” Jester worried her bottom lip with her teeth. She’d been healed, but she still held her arm close to her chest, as if the memory of Ishel’s spell still gave it phantom twinges. “Ishel said it was just him, Melancholia, Stahlmast, and the kobolds, right?”

“That just means he lied,” Molly said, giving his neck a good crack.

“We didn’t end up searchin’ everywhere before we ended up in the forge,” Fjord pointed out. “Someone could have gotten past us.”

Beau wasn’t worried about Ishel if he’d simply run, beyond being annoyed that they fucked up and beating herself up about how, once again, it was a matter of luck that saved them from disaster, but the not knowing rankled her. The Nein agreed to split up carefully and comb the caverns, keeping a cleric and a person who could send messages with every three-person team.

It wasn’t enough. Even knowing the other two teams were only a little ways down the lair, Beau could barely keep her mind on her search.

“You’re edgy, Beau,” Fjord said, catching her by the shoulder, while Jester paused to utilize the pipes by sending spooky messages with her thaumaturgy in the hopes of frightening Ishel and his accomplice(s) out of hiding.

“Yeah, so’re you.” She shrugged him off, gingerly. “Jester’s spooky voice made you go all bug-eyed for a second.”

Fjord ground his bottom lip into his filed down tusks, uncomfortably. “Wasn’t expectin’ it is all, but that’s beside the point.”

“I just like having everyone where I can see ‘em when shit gets real.” It was stupid. They ran around Zadash like idiots on their own and split up multiple times in the Sour Nest, but now that they were so close to where this shit all began, she was feeling stupidly vulnerable. Luck turned so quickly here. This whole godsdamned road was cursed.

“Yeah, I know.” Fjord patted her shoulder. “It’s rough, knowing how easy everything can go to shit. One minute everything’s a daisy and the next…”

“The next someone’s dead or kidnapped or… Possessed by eyes. And there’s not shit you can do to prepare for it, so best not tempt trouble, right?”

Fjord cleared his throat. “Speakin’ of. Jessie?” His voice was a bit strained- evidently, the spooky noises in the shitty cavern were really working under his skin. If Beau weren’t so tense, she’d be ribbing him about it. Maybe later. “I think that’s enough of that.”

Jester made one last elongated wooooo offset by her thaumaturgy and dropped down off her tiptoes. “Fjooord, are you scared?”

“Uh… No. Not a bit.” He coughed. “Just… You gotta know when to quit, right? Leave ‘em wantin’ more. Too much of a good thing ‘n shit.”

Jester snorted and, godsdammit, if Beau didn’t join in when Fjord began to fluster. She was halfway to actually enjoying the moment instead of wanting to explode in coiled tension when Caduceus’s voice began to echo around the chamber.

“Hey… Whoa. That’s weird.” A beat. “Uh…If you guys can hear me, I think we found something back in the forge.”

“How the hell did they get back through to the forge without us seeing them?” Beau growled under her breath, but took off in that direction with Jester and Fjord at her heels. She met the group with Cree, Caleb, and Nott on the way back in and together they reentered the forge where Stahlmast and Melancholia’s corpses had been piled together in a corner with their fingers entwined (Jester’s idea) and were already producing thick fungus from Caduceus’s spellwork that would eternally bind them together as it continued to spread across their decaying flesh. Creepy, but the romance of it wasn't lost on even her.

Caduceus, Yasha, and Molly were gathered at a now open door that was spilling cold air into the sweltering chamber. Molly had a rope tied around his waist that was now slack in Yasha’s hands and was holding a bunch of bright blue mushrooms that glowed faintly.

“These were all along the walls. It keeps going down farther than we’ve got rope,” he was explaining.

Caduceus sniffed the fungus. “Huh. I think those grow in the Underdark.”

“Wait. Hold up.” Beau pushed her way to the front of the pack to get closer to the opening. In comparison to the heat of the forge, whatever was beyond that threshold was cold and damp. “Does this asshole have a path to the fuckin’ Underdark in his lair? First sharks, now this.”

Molly placed one of the blue fungi on her head, threading it through her hairband with the casual indifference of someone who had decided to stop worrying so much. Lucky him. “Maybe. Or he’s got the most obnoxiously long mushroom garden. We’ve only got about a hundred and fifty feet of rope.”

Beau reached up to rip the fungus out of her hair and then changed her mind. It was her color, after all. She could own it for now. “Probably the fuckin’ Underdark, though. That must be how he was getting the kobolds in here without anyone in town noticing.” She turned to Jester, and asked, flatly. “Do I look pretty?”

“Always,” Jester nodded. She peered down the tunnel and wrinkled her nose. “So are we gonna follow them?”

“I think the Underdark is far beyond your capabilities, especially at this moment,” Cree drawled. “It is not a place to be trifled with, and I sincerely doubt the Kryn is that important.”

Beau looked to Caleb, whose disappointment was palpable, but went unvoiced. “Ja. She is correct, and a drow would know the Underdark far better than we would. It is better that we rest now and return to Hupperdook and continue with our other business.”

The Nein murmured their exhausted assent and began to move back to the communal area to settle in for the evening until only she and Caleb were left in the forge, staring down the faintly glowing path. “That’s totally not a loose end that’s gonna bite us later or anything, right?”

Caleb shrugged, and forced himself to pull away. “Try not to think about it, Beauregard. We’ve got enough to worry about.”

She lingered for a moment longer, staring down into the silent, cold depths of that tunnel that promised so many more unknown factors that might fuck with them, and then turned and followed Caleb out.

Coincidences. Luck. Loose ends. It was all gonna come up bullshit sooner or later, and there was nothing she could do about it.

They slept within the caverns peacefully, worn out from the fights. No dreams interrupted anyone’s slumber and for that, Jester was grateful, though a niggling part of her said that it wasn’t going to last. Exhaustion only chased the monsters away for a little while. They always came back.

She banished that part of her with the rest of her unwanted emotions and spent the night curled between Caduceus and Cree with Frumpkin nestled in her arms, dreaming sweetly, untethered to the trials of the day. It was the only time she could be.

The next morning they made their way back down the falls, utilizing a combination of polymorph and dimension door to avoid the rough climb and were back in Hupperdook, dirty and battered, but successful, before the morning rush had concluded and were able to get breakfast and directions to a bathhouse, where they relaxed and planned the rest of the day, agreeing to finish errands in Hupperdook, camp outside the city, and then head to Nogvurot in earnest the next day.

The suggestion had been made by Caduceus, who couldn’t have known that the last time they camped outside of Hupperdook on their way to their next location everything had gone to shit and started this whole mess, but the idea was solid enough that they simply nodded somberly. Lightning wouldn’t strike twice. They would be more careful this time. The dome would protect them.

With everything laid out and the remnants of the fight washed away with hot water and relaxing steam, Jester took off with Caduceus, Beau, and Yasha to see Kiri, while the rest of the Nein scattered to the corners of the city for their own aims. Nott was shirty about her business, and Jester found it strange that she didn’t want to see Kiri after everything, but she had brushed it off, saying she’d stop by when she was finished with her errands and left no room for argument.

The butcher shop was intact and somehow busy despite it only being in the early hours of the afternoon. Jester recognized the flirty bar mistress from the Blushing Tankard Tavern piling up meats in a basket and concluded that the crowd must be the people who ran the taverns, trying to scrounge up extra means to keep their places operational as walk-up diners while the damage was being repaired. The four of them stood to the side and waited, awkwardly, until they caught the attention of Mrs. Schuster, who beamed and waved at them before calling over her shoulder, “Kiri, dear! The Mighty Nein are here!”

A series of bird noises preceded a blur of feathers that bolted from the backroom and skidded to a stop in front of them. Kiri was dressed in a nicer cloak than the one she’d had when she first met the Nein and her eyes were bright and her feathers glossy- all indicators that they’d made a good choice in leaving her behind. (Tears stung Jester’s eyes, regardless- she didn’t like to believe that leaving people behind was the right choice in any regard, but given everything they had been through since, of course she had to let Kiri go so that she could thrive.)

Kiri threw her wings out and chirped, “Welcome to the Mighty Nein!” in Veth’s voice before flinging herself into Jester’s arms. She swung her up and around in a tight circle to avoid knocking into anyone in the crowded space, but the exuberance of the reunion still forced Beau to start easing everyone towards the door and back onto the street.

Jester didn’t want to let go of Kiri, but finally obliged when the girl began to wiggle and chirp “I made something!” in a voice that sounded similar to Rissa Tinkertop. Her taloned feet hit the cobblestones and she dug around in a satchel at her side until she produced a music box similar to the one that they had bought for her. It was clearly meant to be a copy and the imperfections were stark when compared to the original, but Jester’s heart all but burst to see the pride in Kiri’s eyes as she held it up. Imperfect or not- she had built it on her own.

“Kiiiiriiii,” Jester trilled, clutching at her chest. “It’s so pretty! Is Cleff teaching you how to build stuff?”

Kiri cooed and nodded exuberantly and then waved the music box a bit, all but shoving it at Jester. “It’s a gift!” She said in Mrs. Schuster’s voice.

Jester took the music box in trembling hands and opened it up. The box itself was constructed out of love if not skill, but the intricate workings that played the music and turned the little doll in pirouettes in time with it were precise. This much Kiri must have either accepted help with or had been more diligent in recreating every bit of clockwork so that it could produce the same mesmerizing sense of wonder in others that Cleff’s had in her. The tears began to fall, then, and she gathered the box to her chest with one hand and used the other to scoop Kiri up into another hug.

“It’s so pretty, Kiri. Thank you. You’re such a good girl, oh my gosh.”

“Yes, I am very sweet!” Kiri chirped in her voice and cuddled underneath her chin. She backed up again and began to make her rounds to Yasha and Beau, trilling in confusion and disappointment that the rest of the Nein weren’t present (“They’ll swing by later, Kiri,” Beau assured her in a tone that said that she would absolutely kick their asses if they didn’t), before stopping in front of Caduceus. She was so tiny in comparison to him that when she tilted her head back to see his face, she fell backwards onto her butt with an indignant squawk.

Caduceus chuckled. “Oh. Sorry about that. Here.” He crouched down and offered a hand to pull her back onto her feet. “There you go. All better, right?”

She clicked and trilled and then repeated, “All better, right” back at him in his own voice, which startled him a bit.

“Oh that’s… that’s a whole thing, huh?” He looked to Jester, Beau, and Yasha. “I thought she was just doing a bit, but that’s all she can say.”

“All she can say,” Kiri repeated, a bit sadly. She kicked her talons into the dirt and tugged her hood over her head, shyly.

Caduceus moved to correct himself before he could be accused of upsetting the poor bird child, like the sweetheart he was. “Aw it’s not a bad thing. You must listen to everyone real hard, right?”

Kiri nodded. “Kiri can hear everything,” she said in the exasperated voice of one of the Schuster children.

“Oh shit,” Beau barked a laugh. “I bet it’s impossible to keep a secret from you.”

Kiri cooed proudly in response, and then turned, excitedly, when the door to the butcher shop opened and Mrs. Schuster stepped out, wiping her hands on her apron. “Are you ready to go home for lunch, Kiri?”

“Ready!” Kiri bounded from the four of them and right to Mrs. Schuster’s side, clinging to her skirts and cuddling her leg until the woman, with a fond smile, pushed back her hood and smoothed the feathers on her head.

“Okay, my girl.” She looked up and smiled. Her eyes were tired, but there was a happiness to her that had only just begun to return when the Nein left her and her family, free of prison and with a new little girl to look after.

We did that, Jester thought, but the thought was consumed by an unfortunate, nagging sense of negativity that seeped through the cracks in the secret doors and walls in her mind. At first she thought it was Mrs. Schuster she was jealous of, having earned Kiri’s affections with her maternal devotion that she wouldn’t have been able to master if they had kept Kiri.

But it wasn’t that at all. She was jealous of Kiri, gripping Mrs. Schuster’s hands tightly while Beau and Yasha talked to her about the possibility of coming by for dinner so the rest of the Nein could see Kiri and check in before they left. A dinner invitation was the least they could do after all the Nein did for their family and Mrs. Schuster was insistent on it even when Yasha tried to double back on her words like she was presuming too much by suggesting it.

But Jester barely heard any of that. She saw Kiri holding her new mother’s hands and transposed an image of herself, clinging to her mother’s elegant silk skirts. If she listened carefully, she could hear her mother’s voice singing along to the tune inside her gifted music box, even if she was sure that the melody was not one she had ever sung before. Tears were prickling at her eyes again and she rubbed them away with her knuckles.

A soft hand fell upon her shoulder. “You guys did a good thing for her,” Caduceus said, and Jester, lacking anything better to do with her stupid emotions, leaned on him for support.

“We did.” She swallowed. “It just… It reminds me that I miss my mama, though.”

She felt Caduceus stiffen a bit and then relax, like he was forcing his own bad feelings back behind a door too. “Yeah. It’s been awhile since I saw mine, too.”

Jester worried her bottom lip with her teeth. “How long is awhile?”

He exhaled. “A real long time. I… can’t say I ever really considered the numbers. I’m not great at them, anyway.”

“Longer than a few months?”

An almost despairing sigh rumbled out from deep within him and Jester heard every bit of it with her ear so close to his chest. “Definitely longer.”

Jester could barely fathom another few months of not seeing her mama. If it went on beyond that, into years- no, she wouldn't let that happen. Lord Sharpe or no, she’d get the Nein to Nicodranas. “Maybe we’ll run into her and the rest of your family while we’re traveling. You said they were looking for something to save your home, right?”

She was deflecting and not even being subtle about it, but Caduceus so rarely opened up that she simply couldn’t resist the opportunity to lean in and learn more. It was easier to take care of someone else than herself, after all, and eventually, he was going to call her on it, but until then, she’d take her chances.

Caduceus considered that, his long ears flicking a bit, showcasing his uncertainty. “Maybe. I have a good idea where they went and it’s not really around here, but who knows? Anything can happen.”

“Life’s chaos like that,” she nodded sagely.

Beau and Yasha broke off from Mrs. Schuster and the rest of the Schuster Clan who had filed out of the butcher shop and locked it behind them on their way to get lunch. Kiri skirted away from the family to hug Jester one more time and get reassurances that they would all be there for dinner before darting away to chase after her new siblings.

When Jester pulled away, Beau looked uncomfortable and was rubbing her neck. “I guess there’s something to that whole ‘leave places better than you found them’ thing Molly spouts, huh? It’s wild to go back and look at what we’ve done. I didn’t think much on it at the time, but-”

Caduceus chuckled, and the moment of commiseration about family and loneliness that neither were willing to breach fully passed. “You plant seeds not really expecting what they’ll turn into until you come back later. You might be surprised how many places have sprung up gardens since you’ve left them.”

“That’s a nice way to put it, Caduceus,” Yasha said, very softly. She then coughed, awkwardly, and began to disengage. “I, erm… I think I might like to do some shopping? Molly says it’s supposed to be healthy to ‘treat yourself’ sometimes and not just buy things you need. And I know I bought Rock, but...” She waved her hands in awkward circles.

“He’s absolutely right,” Jester nodded before the barbarian woman could talk herself out of being kind to herself. There were new things to focus on and she gingerly tucked the music box into her haversack along with her memories of her mama. All of it shoved away for now in favor of everything else. There was always so much, and no extradimensional space could ever hold it all, but by the Traveler was she going to try. “Like sure, maybe clothes for a horse is not a good plan overall, but at the time, it made me feel really great.”

“How’d it make the horse feel?” Caduceus asked, canting his head.

She shrugged one shoulder. “I mean, she wasn’t complaining that I know of.”

Caduceus mulled that over. “I’ve just never seen a horse wearing clothes. I don’t even know what that would look like.”

“I gotta deliver some of this crap to the Watchmaster and let him know Stahlmast is dead.” Beau interjected, making a frustrated noise at the prospect. Or maybe she was trying to prevent the conversation from spiraling into nonsense about horse clothes again.

Jester, seeing an opportunity, grinned wickedly. Any fool could see the way Beau made eyes at Yasha- and, really, who wouldn’t stare at Yasha- but she couldn’t resist nudging them just a little bit closer. “Ooh. You two should go together. Then you can give Yasha her share of the gold from the bounty- assuming we get any of it since we killed Sken- and you two could go shopping together.”

Beau turned several shades of red and shot Jester a deeply panicked, betrayed look that she quickly tried to cover up with swaggering indifference. “Uh… I mean. Cool, if that’s what Yasha wants. It might get boring.”

“I don’t mind. I could um… Back up our statements. To make sure we’re getting a fair deal... since we, uh. Killed Sken. Like Jester said.” She awkwardly punched her fist into her palm and then frowned. “Maybe not like that, but… You know.”

Beau only turned redder. “Yeah… Yeah, I’m cool with that.” The second Yasha nodded, turned, and signaled for Rock (who must have wandered off to do his business) and was therefore distracted, she leaned closer to Jester and hissed, “Jes, what the fuck?”

“Thank me later~” she chirped, without apology, and grabbed Caduceus’s arm to drag him off. “Come on, Cad. I saw a pastry shop a little ways down here.”

“We’re not done with this conversation, Jester!” Beau’s voice took on a bit of a hysterical edge.

“I dunno what you’re talking about,” she sing-songed back, and then picked up speed, lest Beau decide to give chase. She’d catch up, regardless, if she really wanted to follow her instead of taking advantage of Yasha Alone Time, but it added to the drama of the moment.

Just because she was struggling with how to write her own fairy tale romance didn’t mean she couldn’t nudge others in a direction, after all. It was all in good fun and it made her feel happier, which she desperately needed.

Of course, Caduceus would be the one to call her out on it the second no one else could hear him. She’d been waiting for it and then it crept up on her anyway when she looked away for a second. “You know, it’s just a distraction right?”

She sighed, slumping against him again. Just like that, it was all back on her shoulders. The walls she built were crumbling and Caduceus knew exactly where to dig his fingers into the cracks- not maliciously, but still. “It’s a lot easier to make other people happy than it is to make yourself happy, y’know?” She paused. “D’you know what jester means, Caduceus?”

“I don’t.” He shook his head. “My aunt puts a lot of stock in how to name things, because she feels closer to the fey side of our heritage, but I don’t really think much on it. Names are just what you put on the stone- the people behind them are what give them meaning.”

Jester smiled. Caduceus was simple and she liked that about him. Not unintelligent and far from stupid, but unconcerned with things that shouldn’t matter. It meant that whatever he did put meaning to mattered a lot.

Maybe she'd have had an easier time of things if she picked and chose what mattered to her better, instead of embracing everything.

She sucked in a breath and launched into an explanation, “Tieflings have this thing- not every tiefling, ‘cause my mama changed her name to like a proper Coastal name and some tieflings don't change their names at all- but most tieflings decide to give themselves new names that suit their personalities or the kind of person they wanna be when they’re old enough. So I chose Jester, ‘cause I wanted to make everyone around me happy, and that’s what jesters do.”

Caduceus chewed on that for a moment and then asked, with such genuine concern that it made her heart hurt, “But who makes the jesters happy?”

She clung to his arm a bit tighter. “That’s the thing. I think jesters are only happy when they’ve made everyone else happy.”

Another long pause. She was waiting for a lecture that would be too kind and full of heart to be mad about. Maybe a gentle judgment. Maybe concern. What she got, instead, was, “We’re a lot alike, you know?”

He was right, but she hadn’t expected him to come out and say it.

“You tend the garden, but no one tends the gardener,” Jester mused, showing off her own wisdom. Off his surprise, she whispered, smugly, “I see things, too, Caduceus. We’re totally alike.” She sighed with bone-deep weariness. Seeing everything was exhausting for her, and she wasn’t nearly as perceptive as he was. She couldn’t imagine what it was like for him with so little beyond his sight. “Maybe we need to look out for each other, so neither of us gets too sad taking care of everyone else. Cree, too.”

“I don’t think Cree knows what she is,” Caduceus’s voice was distant now. “I think she’s defined herself as everything she’s needed to be and left no room for who she is without being needed.”

She had suspected that. Everything she knew about Cree seemed to suggest she defined herself by Lucien- her motivations, her religion, all of it. “All the more reason to look out for her. I don’t think anyone else can really get this, y’know? Maybe it’s really just a cleric thing.”

“Maybe.” He was contemplative, not dismissive. Maybe he’d just never had anyone offer up this sort of support before. He was alone in that temple when Molly and Cree found him and he jumped at the chance for adventure. She knew the feeling.

She pulled her arm out of his and held up a pinky. “We’ll look out for each other. Cleric club promise?”

He hesitated, but only momentarily, before linking his pinky with hers. “Cleric club promise.”

Nott departed Cleff and Rissa’s place with a feeling of mingled relief and despair twisting her into knots. She didn’t want to reach a point where seeing happy families didn’t turn her bitter and full of longing, but the emotions were becoming impossible to deal with, and she had to keep them locked inside. They couldn’t be shown. Not yet.

Maybe not ever. Not until Caleb could fix this and put everything to rights. By then, she wouldn’t have to wear the tragedy where everyone could see it. It would have ended and everyone could move on together without lingering on the implications and the horrors of it.

So she looked in on Cleff to make sure he was all right and that he and his girl were reunited and safe and happy, and she swallowed the longing for her own child and husband and the jealousy that seared into her soul and the voices inside her head that mocked her for being able to solve every problem but her own, and darted through the streets of Hupperdook to her next target.

With her cloak pulled over her ears and her mask tightly affixed, she was able to get the location of where the Clockwork Hounds gathered during the day without incident. She ignored the whispers and odd looks- all of that was normal. If she wasn’t being kicked or cursed at, she was having a good day.

It took her a little longer than it should have to reach the lower levels of the city from where she started, her itch plaguing her and making her stop to stalk prissy bureaucrats complaining about the delays in production and cut their purses and relieve them of buttons to add to her collection, but she was satisfied with her haul when she finally managed to find the ramshackle building that acted as the Hounds’ headquarters and that was what mattered.

It was close enough to the Falls to suggest that it might have been a fishing lodge of sorts. Tangled fishing lines and rusted poles and barrels that still smelled of rotten fish were scattered around the outside. The whole thing was made of swollen wood with corrugated iron shingles that might have been pulled from old machines to replace the original shingles that had fallen off over time, given the whole thing a patchwork appearance. Nott tightened her mask that had come loose as she ran and knocked on the door, which rattled on its hinges.

“Coming, coming!” A young girl’s voice chirped. The skinny red-headed teenager threw it open, frowned when she saw no one in her immediate eyeline, and then looked down. “Hi-Hiii! You’re one of those people from the Blushing Tankard Tavern, huh?”

“Tell her to go away, Eda,” Obsidian’s voice growled from within.

Nott bristled and peered around Eda’s scrawny frame- the other three members of the party were sitting around an old table with fishhooks embedded in it as some sort of decorative fancy with cards in hand. Cigarette smoke filled the air and made her eyes water. “Fuck you! I have a legitimate offer here for you and you’re going to behave like that?”

“What kind of offer?” Lance, the human man with his mass of black curls and long-limbs looked up suddenly. “I bet it’s better than my hand right now.” He slapped his cards on the table and put out his cigarette right beside them, much to Obsidian’s frustration. “I fold.”

“At least use the godsdamned ashtray,” the dwarf growled.

Nott dug in her bag and produced her drink token from the Hour of Honor. “We’re leaving town so we don’t really need these anymore, so if you don’t want to challenge Rissa Tinkertop and the Schuster family for free drinks~” She drawled the words out enticingly.

Lance scoffed and sauntered closer with a rhythm to his steps, coming to lean on the doorframe. He nudged Eda out of the way. “And what’re you trading for?”

“Information on where to get ammo for this.” With her other hand, she held up the gun she’d stolen the last time she was in Hupperdook. Her mask being in place meant that she couldn’t ruin the deal with her sharp-toothed feral grin, and she was grateful for that. “You use these. I know you’re getting your ammo from somewhere.”

Lance snorted. “Hard pass. That’s not my scene.” He waved her off. “I don’t fuck around with that crap.”

“I’m not telling you shit, especially not for pity drink tokens,” Obsidian muttered, still staring at his cards. His dark skin was reddening in frustration. “The last thing this world needs is some drunk goblin with a gun.”

“More for me, then.” Fayne, the dark-haired elf in sunflower yellow dyed leathers, slapped her cards on the table beside Lance’s and abandoned the game, leaving Obsidian sputtering. “I’ll take your action. You can’t get black powder in Hupperdook- at least not for personal use. Obsidian and I get it imported from a dealer in Nogvurot named Victoria.”

Nott filed the name away. The coincidence, however, stayed firmly lodged at the front of her brain. Caleb had been going on about the sheer amount of them and here was one more. Was that a sign of good fortune or a warning? “And she’ll sell to anyone?”

Realizing the game was over and he was being contradicted at every turn, Obsidian slapped his own cards on the table and smashed his cigarette out in the empty and otherwise ignored ashtray. “Obviously. She sells to people like Fayne.”

Fayne made grabby motions with her hand in Nott’s general vicinity. “Token please. I gave you the information. I want the free drinks.”

Nott slapped it into her outstretched hand and the elvish woman tucked it into her cleavage for safekeeping. “You’ve been very helpful.” She paused, debated something, and then said with a wry little twinkle in her golden eyes, “Also we got the bounty on Sken.”

She darted away to the sounds of groaning and cursing and Fayne shouting, “I told you it wasn’t that difficult. They’re not even bounty hunters!”

Obsidian shouted back. “I didn’t wanna go back up into those falls again. People get eaten up there.”

“Auntie Nima doesn’t~” Eda sing-songed.

That was the last of the conversation she heard as she rounded the corner, giddily, and then slammed into someone’s knees so hard she was knocked backwards onto her ass. Her hood and mask slipped away and she cursed and desperately tried to fix them again before she was arrested for the crime of being a goblin. “Don’t look at me! You don’t see me.”

“I can see you just fine, Nott,” Fjord drawled.

Fuck. She was equal parts relieved and irritated that it was him, of all people, she smacked into and not a paranoid member of the community who might see something small and sharp-toothed and carrying explosives and think ‘oh hell another one.’ Goblins and kobolds don’t look anything alike, but that had never stopped anyone before. Sometimes you didn’t even have to be the same race to get racially profiled- just close enough.

“Shut up,” she growled, shoving her hood back into place, but allowing her mask to hang loosely around her neck. “Where’ve you been? Surely not shopping.”

Fjord scratched at his neck. “I went to the Blushing Tankard Tavern to see if anyone needed a hand and then checked in on a few places. It’s barely been two days and everyone’s almost gotten this place straightened back out.”

Nott’s ears flicked under her hood, a yearning tugging at her heart. Felderwin had been like that, but not for her. Never for her- at least not until Yeza, when suddenly she mattered in the grand scheme of things to one, but even then, it all felt strangely surreal, like it was part of the dare that had led to him kissing her in the first place. At any moment, they would all drop the act and she’d be nothing again.

Well, it had all faded, in the end, but not the way she expected. The time between lives was growing so wide that she wondered if she dreamed Veth Brenatto up entirely. Reminders of a sense of community were just her longing for something she never had at all, until she met Caleb and then the Nein.

She was running out of time.

None of that slipped past her sharp teeth and dry, cracked goblin lips and into the world- she buried it thoroughly among her other lies of omission and blurted out, instead, “So. Nogvurot. That’s gonna be a fun trip.”

Fjord grunted. They walked side by side in the lower part of Hupperdook, winding back towards the upper rungs of the city. “Yeah. I had somethin’ I’ve been meanin’ to ask you. You spent time with Cree’s other friend, right? The creepy little halfling?”

Nott’s expression darkened. “Otis. Ugh. They’re the worst.”

Fjord chewed on the inside of his cheek, one half-blunted tusk jutting out above his lower lip. “Were they a trustworthy sort?”

“Oh FUCK no,” she recoiled. “Their magic is all vein-y and weird and I saw them thread a halfling through bars. Have you ever seen someone do that? Like they were threading a needle. Limbs were getting twisted everywhere.”

Fjord blanched. “Don’t need the visual, Nott.” He exhaled while Nott began to collect further evidence about Otis being the worst, but before she could unleash it, he went on, “I talked to the Gentleman about Tyffial to see if I could get any information.”

Nott gasped. “And you didn’t say anything? And after we had that conversation about not going behind each others’ backs, too! For shame, Fjord!”

He gave her a flat look. “You done?”

Her response was a shrug. Unclear at the present moment. Try again later.

He ran a hand over his face where it caught on his stubble- normally clean-shaven, he was starting to let a salt-and-pepper beard grow in, but it was taking its sweet time and was in a patchy and unfortunate state. Like his tusks, he was avoiding the urge to sand it all down. Nott was jealous that he had the choice. Her first few weeks as a goblin she’d tried to file down her nails and only ended up breaking them, and then they grew in blacker and uneven and she was forced to give up- the first and only time she tried to make her new form palatable, and all it did was make her even more unsightly.

She and Fjord really ought to be operating with a sort of mutual understanding, given everything but she mostly just found herself wanting to punch him for suffering better than she did.

“I don’t want trouble,” he finally said. “It ain’t like that, Nott, but Molly has a debt to pay and I made no such bargain. If these people try to hurt him or take him away from us, then I wanna know what they can do so we can put a stop to it right then. No fuckin’ around.”

He wouldn’t expect an argument from her- that was why he was telling her this and not Beau or Caleb. Nott would deal with any threats to this group with ruthless efficiency. There were days when she kept one eye on Cree and the other on hiding places, just in case. “So… What did you find out?”

He repeated what the Gentleman told him- about the Claret Orders, about Tyffial being under his protection and how that meant if things went south, they would have pissed off one of their strongest allies. She turned it all over in her head and filed it away.

They bandied things back and forth as they walked, lowering their voices as they began to mingle with larger throngs of people. “We just have to make sure that if we do have to do something about these people, it doesn’t look like we did it,” Fjord concluded once they were back at the half-destroyed Blushing Tankard Tavern to await the rest of the Nein. They were no less sure of what to do now than they were when they started, and neither had actually felt better about the situation. Nott would see them all dead before they had a chance to hurt anyone- especially Caleb- and this Somnovem shit put back where it came from before it could do all of them harm. Fjord didn’t disagree. The cards weren’t right for that kind of gamble, however.

But Nott did have an ace up her sleeve now that she knew where to find black powder. “Give me until we get to Nogvurot. I’m working on something.”

Fjord took one look at her feral, toothy grin and took a step back. Good. He ought to be scared.

And so should anyone who believed they could fuck with her people and get away with it.

The Platinum Dragon tapestry had been through a great deal over the course of its purchase and it was showing the inevitable sign of wear already. If it was going to be used for its intended purchase, some care would have to be taken.

It was as good a distraction as anything. Knowing that he and Cree were overdue for a conversation, he’d dragged her to the Falls and was carefully brushing stains out of the tapestry at the edge of the water where it pooled before flowing out to the town. The sound of the falls eased whatever tension remained in him after the bath earlier, but it wouldn’t last. Cree would start talking and he would be lost to troubles that weren’t his own.

She knelt close by, but far enough away that she was in no danger of getting damp from the mist and spray, and watched him work. She’d been so eager to have this talk and now that it had come, she was uncertain where to begin and Molly had no questions to ask. All of it seemed dangerous and beyond him. He needed to know everything and he wanted to know nothing.

She’d already told him so much more than he cared about, already.

Cree finally sighed, the weight of it suggesting that she could no more continue to bear the silence than he could- she had just broken first. “I do not think there is much more I can say. Most of my information came from… from the Nonagon.”

One question finally popped into his head. The fear that had lingered since he’d confided in Caleb back in the Run. “Will I hurt them with this?”

She was too quick to answer, which told him either she hadn’t given this any thought at all or she had simply refused to entertain the idea that she might have been playing with fire the whole time and just ignored the burns. “Lucien never hurt us, even when it was new to him.”

“Lucien wanted this,” Molly hissed. He tossed the brush away and checked the stitching on the tapestry. Even with the abuse, the delicate lines had held and did not fray. He knew he had a good feeling about it for a reason. It was going to serve its purpose well.

Cree dropped her gaze and fiddled with the hem of her cloak. “The Somnovem are not interested in hurting people. Those gifts are so their Nonagon remains safe.”

He didn’t buy that- the latter could be true, but the former had too much evidence against it. Nothing that involved so much screaming wasn’t disinterested in suffering. In fact, to him that was a sign that it relished in it. “So the screaming is just ecstasy, right?”

Her ears flattened. “It is complicated.”

Molly pinched his nose. Gods, but she truly was stubborn and dedicated to her spin, wasn't she? “Don’t. You don’t have to defend them. You don’t care about them. We established that. You just want Lucien back, even if it kills me, which is deeply unfortunate, given I’ve done nothing to you.”

Her golden eyes locked onto his. “Do not scold me, Mollymauk. I am aware of what I do. Part of the benefit of this arrangement is that no one has any illusions about my intent. We cannot betray one another in any way the other party cannot easily see coming.”

“But you’re miserable about it. You’re miserable about everything. When was the last time you were happy?” She didn’t answer that question quickly, which all but damned her. Without waiting for her to find a response, he kept at her. “And I bet it was with him, too. Because of him. Have you ever sought out joy on your own terms?”

Her silence felt like it held years worth of pain and for a heartwrenching second, Molly thought he might have just made her cry. Her eyes wavered, watery and unfocused, before she grit her teeth and ducked her head. “You would not understand, Mollymauk. You are unfairly lucky. You came into this world emptied out and the people who found you gave you love, and you never had cause or justification to hate the world, no matter what it did. It was not like that for us. Every bit of happiness we had was precious and shared. When Lucien became the Nonagon, it was a victory for all of us.”

Molly ran a sharp talon over the platinum-colored thread work on the tapestry. “You can’t… It doesn’t work like that.” He exhaled. “We all shared everything in the circus. They knew what it was like to want and to need and to never have enough, so they found ways to make themselves happy. We couldn’t share everything, because otherwise we’d go insane, and we were separate people who needed our own shite. I have yet to hear you express a need or a desire that isn’t wrapped up in him. Have you really never had one?”

She recoiled a bit, fur in disarray from her discomfort with the line of questioning. She was clinging to that cloak even tighter now. Her mouth moved, wordlessly, and Molly, seeing her shutting down before his eyes, laid the tapestry aside and sat down right next to her, scooting until he was pressed against her side. She stiffened and almost flinched away, but then relaxed, miserably into the contact like she couldn’t resist it.

“Gustav told me that everyone’s empty at some point. ‘Babies are born crying,’ he said, ‘because they need to be filled up with something,’ and because they’re small, they don’t need a lot. Not at first. The more they grow, the more they need.” He shrugged. “Joy can fill an awful lot of a person’s life. You just have to find it in everything, and you’ll never be sick of it and you’ll never want for it. It just has to be yours.” He paused, watching the falls churn up the water around it in foamy splashes. “It sounds like Lucien was never going to be satisfied.”

Cree’s laugh was broken, a bit tight. “You speak such pretty words, Mollymauk. Joy is easy to come by if the world isn’t constantly trying to hurt you.”

“Bold of you to assume I haven’t been hurt.” He tugged on his shirt, showing off his scars. “Not all of these are Lucien’s.”

Her eyes lingered on the starburst in the center of his chest and he swallowed. “That one, especially. The circus all came from Shadycreek Run, y’know? Most of them, anyway. Whatever bad things happen to people raised there… I’ve seen good people come out of it, too. Keg’s decent. Gustav and Desmond are good men. Some of the best. You…” He elbowed her gently, “you’re all right.”

She choked on another laugh and batted at his head, nearly catching her claws on the chains attached to his horns. “You are a clown and a fool and I am done with you.” There was no bite to her words as she shoved him aside to stand. “This is not about joy or happiness, Mollymauk. And not everything can be fixed by being positive and talking it out, but… Perhaps if Tyffial cannot help-”

She couldn’t finish the sentence. Molly could supply a finish, at least. She was giving the Nein an out- if Tyffial failed at whatever the hell it was she may or may not be able to do, then the debt was paid and she would leave them be. “You would give up? Just like that?”

He was on the ground and she was on her feet and yet they seemed impossibly far away. If he tried to reach out for her hand, even being mere inches from it, he would not be able to grasp it. “Lucien could bend the world to make it accept him. I have no such power.”

She would just leave them to it, then. Leave him with the Somnovem and herself to the misery and they could sort it out on their own. It should have been a relief and, yet… Molly hoped that by now she would realize they weren’t tolerating her for the sake of a debt. They were starting to like her and the feeling was mutual in some complicated way.

“Well,” he drawled, refusing to accept defeat like this. Cree could be stubborn and proud and committed to her misery all she liked, but she still deserved joy. She just needed to be convinced she was allowed to have it, that it wasn’t some insult to a dead man or a miserable childhood to just enjoy life. You couldn’t get revenge on bad experiences. You couldn’t save your soul by selling it to something stronger to right every wrong done to you. The only cure for a rough life was finding it in your heart to love it, anyway, because not all of it was bad. Not all of it could be bad. You just had to keep hoping.

And sometimes you had to be the bigger person more often than perhaps you would like to. “You’re welcome to stay, even if it doesn’t work.”

Cree eyed him, searching his face for a hint of a lie. “I have all but told you that your life is meaningless when compared to Lucien’s.”

He shrugged. “And I’ve taken it in the spirit of which it was given- by a woman who is in desperate need of true joy and keeps denying herself. And maybe deep down, I don’t think you’ll actually do it, dear.”

She scoffed. “I would.”

“I think you absolutely believe that.” He pulled his tapestry back onto his lap and rifled in his bag for his chalk and sewing supplies. He was going to leave her with a good and fair parting and she was just going to have to deal with that. He wasn’t going to pick fights among the group that couldn’t be settled with malicious positivity, friendly teasing, and a lot of teeth-grit smiling patience. Not after last time. He needed this too much to let it burn. “But believing it and committing to it are actually really different things. You like us. I think you’d have a hard time.”

He said no more, despite her sputtering refusal to back down, and with an aggravated “PAH” sound, she stormed off and left him with his shit-eating smirk and his project. Given time, he was going to make a coat of this gaudy tapestry and he was going to make a stable individual out of Cree.

“Better than I found it,” he hummed in the tune of smarmy delight.

Yasha had been watching a street vendor peddle little clay animals to children and eager collectors or just people who looked miserable about the state of their city, still pockmarked with craters, when Beau finally exited the stockade with a bag of gold in her hand. Her neck was flushed scarlet in frustration.

“Lousy cheapskate. Next time, Fjord gets the money.” She sighed and began counting out coins to pass over and Yasha pocketed them without looking at them or bothering to check the exact amount- her eyes were all on Beau.

She’d been distracted since they left the butcher shop, and her face and neck had been splotchy with red patches even then. It wasn’t just because Jester had been teasing her either, which… Maybe she wouldn’t have picked up on that if not for that moment back in Zadash. She would have pushed it aside or labeled it unimportant.

Now she saw everything and it scared her. She was grateful that Beau had been out of sorts before Jester had sent them off together- at least she could focus on that and not the rest of it. “What’s wrong?” She bit her lip. “You were, um…” Words. Use your words. “You looked kind of twitchy when we were talking to the Schusters?”

Beau nearly dropped the sack of gold. Her cheeks reddened even more, like she was on the verge of turning into a tomato. “You… You were paying attention, huh?”

Yasha didn’t know what to say to that. She always paid attention to Beau. She drew focus, pulled her in until she was helplessly in her orbit, and her self-loathing and fear left her desperately struggling to get out and get away before she caused her pain or led her to the ax the way she had Zuala. When Beau had kissed her in the rain, she could have sworn she could already taste the blood.

Neither had really given it much thought since it happened, if the lack of discussion was anything to go by. It was settled. Over and done with, but Yasha was still watching her like a hawk, afraid that if she let her guard down again, Beau would pull her in and she wouldn’t fight anymore. She’d spin in her gravity until it was too late.

The silence couldn’t be called as such- it wasn’t quiet enough. Blood pounded too loudly in her ears. All she had to do was say anything, but all she could manage was a nod.

Beau looked like she might be going through a similar mental torment, and all Yasha could do was hope it wasn’t for similar reasons. She could carry the weight of her own sadness, but it broke her wings into frail skeletal nightmares and left her screaming and afraid to love. She wouldn’t wish that fate on anyone.

After an even more painfully loud silence, Beau finally spat out, “I… I guess I really wasn’t expecting things to be okay with Kiri and the Schusters.”

Yasha blinked. “Oh.”

Now that she had started, the words tumbled out of Beau. She was a waterfall of anguished truths and could not be stopped or redirected. “Like… Think about it. We dumped that poor kid on a family who’d been through a lot and they could have felt obligated to take her in because they owed us. They could have been miserable havin’ another mouth to feed. They could have… Not understood her or made her feel bad. She could have come to us begging to go with us because she wasn’t happy. She could have been pissed at us for abandoning her.” She stopped to breathe, taking frustrated gulps of air until her voice stopped shaking and she could continue. “But she was fine- better than fine. She’s happy and being taken care of and I’m so grateful and-”

She finally cut herself off. The dam had locked the truth behind closed lips, and nothing else was going to escape her now. Yasha, hesitantly, reached up and touched her shoulder. It was awkward and she didn’t feel like she was being the least bit reassuring, but Beau relaxed underneath it, her furrowed brow softening.

“Shitty of me, huh?” She sighed. “Good things happen to good people and I’m over here expecting the other shoe to drop. Nothing good like that ever happens- not really. There’s people out there who won’t even accept their own kids, much less a random bird kid that got dumped into their lap.”

Yasha squeezed Beau’s shoulder, her flattened, dirt-caked nails gripping the fabric of her tunic and holding her steady- maybe holding them both steady. “Maybe… It just feels like that because you’re not used to good things happening.”

At that, Beau raised a skeptical eyebrow and Yasha found herself tracing the length of her scar from Lorenzo’s glaive with her eyes. She hadn’t been there when that occurred- locked away and unconscious and helpless. She’d spent the few days she’d been in and out of consciousness believing that everything that was happening was punishment for things she did that she couldn’t even remember.

Even when she was saved and found out Molly had survived, she could barely trust any of it. The eyes on Molly’s skin and the nightmares were horrible and she would do anything to take that from him, because it felt like he had been punished for her curse.

“Yeah, it sounds stupid,” she exhaled, forcing her eyes to focus on the vendor again. “But… Molly used to tell me that back in the circus. I wasn’t really talking and I was kind of…” she made claws with her hands and awkwardly growled (Beau laughed and Yasha almost choked on her heart at the sound of it). “A-and,” she stammered, cheeks flushed scarlet, “he told me, ‘Love, you have to expect good things and trust that they’ll come. You can’t expect every hand held out to you to slap you.’”

She didn’t believe him, then, and she wasn’t sure if she believed him now, but the words never left her, and that had to mean something. Maybe they needed to be passed on to be properly grasped.

“Classic Molly. He’s kind of the worst sort of optimist, y’know?” Beau’s lips quirked upwards in a tiny smirk. “Like he full-on knows everything is shit, but it doesn’t matter so he’s just gonna do whatever the hell he wants and have fun and the rest of the world has to deal with that. It’s bullshit. I don’t know how to trust people not to fuck up.”

She paused and then her shoulders slumped, defeated. “I dunno… It just shook me a bit, I guess. Maybe one day I’ll get used to this and won’t be such a bitch about it.”

“You didn’t say anything rude,” Yasha quickly pointed out, shocked by how her tongue nearly tied itself in knots to defend Beau from her own self-criticism before the moment passed. “I think that’s progress.”

She cocked her head to the side. “...Yeah, that’s fair.”

Yasha’s heart was still hammering in her ears. The etiquette book in her bag seemed to be weighing her down, while her head swam with half-remembered passages about polite conversation and how to impress people. All she wanted to do was kiss Beau again.

The blood taste from the memory, the cool reminder of how death came to everyone she touched, was suddenly vivid and she realized, in that moment, that she had bit down on her lip so hard she drew her own blood. She made a frustrated sound and ducked her head so she could suck on it until it clotted without alerting Beau to her stupidity. “Anyway… I think you’re actually doing a lot better about, uh… Things like that. And there’s nothing wrong with who you are, in general. You’re, um… Pretty great.”

Fuck, she was terrible at this.

But Beau laughed again and Yasha’s heart soared and it didn’t matter that her entire mouth tasted like copper and her teeth were going to be bloodstained. “Thanks, Yash’.”

She nodded, still sucking on her lip, and lacking any other awkward compliments and heavy conversations hinting at bigger problems to bring up, they turned to head back to the Blushing Tankard Tavern, side by side.

They didn’t make it far. Yasha stopped the second they passed the vendor when she realized that among her little clay figures, there was a tiny painted dog. Remembering Molly encouraging her to spend her money, she passed over some of her just-received money and lifted her prize up for Beau to see. “What a good boy,” she cooed, all smiles.

Maybe it was her imagination, but she could have sworn she saw something in Beau’s smirking amusement break, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. Time lost meaning, held suspended as the two of them held each others’ gazes, only for it all to be broken abruptly by fifty pounds of Blink Dog barreling into her legs and demanding to be told he was the good boy.

Time resumed. The moment passed, unacknowledged, and the world moved on.

Cree was still reeling from her conversation with Molly when she found her way back into the main thoroughfare of the Idleworks Shelf, hunting for where the Blushing Tankard Tavern stood. The sun was going down now and she cursed herself for taking too much time with both her shopping and sulking. Any moment now and-

Her fur puffed out unpleasantly as the first crack of a firework sounded overhead, and she swallowed down an annoyed yowl. One would think that after nearly losing most of this section of the city to those blasted kobolds, the sound of anything exploding would terrify these people, but evidently, one could not scare the festival out of these gnomes.

The sky lit up with brightly colored fire and sparks danced off sticks passed around to young and old, alike. Cree hissed at a man who offered her one and he backed away, slowly, leaving her to stalk through the shelf with her goal in mind. They would have dinner, they would make camp outside of town, and they would leave this place.

And then….

Cree’s fur wouldn’t go down no matter how hard she tried to calm herself. The fireworks had driven her into a state of hypervigilance, but she had been working towards it since she had admitted to Molly that she had no plan if Tyffial could not coax Lucien back.

And Molly, insufferable fool that he was, kept encouraging her to choose herself and what she wanted. She was barely midway through her second decade and only once had she reached out and taken something just because she wanted it- a kiss stolen on a cold night in a wild town at the edge of the world.

A kiss that had turned into more and then so very little and then nothing again. She could want Lucien back because it was her role as his priestess to bring him back, but she could also want him back, because, maybe, just maybe he would love her as he did before the Somnovem consumed him. That was her selfish desire. That was what she would kill an innocent for. One more kiss, one more Cree my love playing across a tongue so sweet that everything since had tasted like ash in her mouth.

She couldn’t help that so much of her was tied up in Lucien, but she’d be damned to the lowest Hell if she’d let herself be shamed for it, as if it was something to be pitied about her. She came by this much honestly, even if, perhaps, her compulsion to put herself second was granted to her due to years of personal abuse that she’d never had opportunity to heal from.

The sound of some string instrument being strummed with quick fingers shattered her thoughts and left her, curiously, hunting for the source. She’d heard her share of bards in Ank’Harel- most of them lazily tuning their instruments outside the windows of the servants’ quarters- but she had never heard anyone play so quickly. It entranced her, knocked her on her back foot, and distracted her from the task at hand.

She needed to get to the tavern, continue this farce she was putting up with, but Molly’s words stuck in her craw, and she was always fond of music. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to indulge herself a bit to prove that she could and that it would change nothing. She would still be committed to her task when the song was done.

The beat picked up, carried by the audience, and Cree was able to zero in on a square in the middle of the Idleworks Shelf where a circle of laughing and clapping gnomes had gathered around a large fountain built around the remains of a rusted and inert automaton. Being a giant in their midst, she could easily peer over their heads and see what they saw- a short tabaxi clothed in dark green with golden-brown fur patterned in black spots and the biggest eyes she had ever seen, perched on the automaton’s shoulders with his back against its head. His posture was lazy, but his thin fingers were relentless on the strings and Cree watched in amazement as he continued to build to a crescendo.

A firework suddenly exploded above them right at the same time he tore his hand away from the lute, the timing so perfect that it had to have been staged somehow. The crowd whooped and hollered and Cree found herself so shaken by the spectacle that she hadn’t minded the explosion.

The tabaxi leapt down onto the edge of the fountain and began strumming again, leaning in close to a group of young gnomish girls, who squealed when he winked at them. “Good evenin’, Hupperdook!” He crowed in a delightful tenor, his accent impossible to place. “You guys’re keepin’ that beat for me, I see. I like that. It’s catchy, innit?” His fingers played across the lute, coaxing another round of cheers. “Let’s see if I can put some poetry to this.”

He began to sing as rapidly as he played, the words tumbling out of him- indeed, like poetry. He was hardly singing at all, but the words didn’t quite fit the meter of a poem and followed the upward cant of the beat. He picked up his own tempo and the words followed with him, almost as if he was making it up as he went along. Most of it served as an introduction, a rhythm-based history lesson on his entire life up to this town. His name was Faint Chance, he was from the Briskmist Clan of the Rifenmist Jungle, and he was on his own for the first time, dealing with the world outside of his jungle home and delighting in how much less fraught with terrors it was. The terrors he described in lurid detail, still keeping to that same erratic, manic rhyming that was almost too fast for her to follow and never losing the smile on his face.

He reminded her of Molly in a way that nearly destroyed her love of his performance. Wistful and carefree, despite his hardships. Free in every way Cree, herself, was not, and had never been.

Despite being over six feet tall and surrounded by smaller bodies, he hadn’t noticed her yet- he, himself, was barely four feet tall, and seemed to be used to serenading gnomes by now. She was certain she could avoid the same attention he was granting his audience and the embarrassment that came with it if she extricated herself quickly and let this end on a high note, but no sooner had she started to move back then he spotted her- huge golden eyes eyes meeting her own.

The music stopped and Cree felt too many more eyes on her. Careful not to trample anyone or make too much of a fuss, she began to hastily move out of the square and back onto the thoroughfare, hoping she didn’t turn herself around in her haste to get away.

The music didn’t start up again, but she did hear a voice down by her hip excitedly speaking, “What’s your rush? Wasn’t that bad, was it? Good golly, you’re tall.”

Faint Chance had slung his lute onto his back and was bounding alongside her, keeping up with her long strides easily- he was short, but his legs were long and capable of making elegant strides. He was looking at her with a sense of wonder that she hardly believed she deserved from someone who commanded a crowd. He is a fast-talker. Be wary.

She adjusted her satchel so it was on the opposite hip. “It was lovely, but I have friends to meet, and I am running late.”

If he had anything to say about her very pointedly moving her things out of reach of his nimble fingers, he kept them to himself. He just kept walking, clearly intending to follow her, his excitement never faltering. “Other tabaxi? I haven’t seen another one since I left Tal’Dorei. What clan do you hail from, miss?”

Clan. The word rankled her. “I do not have one.”

He frowned. “Really? Huh. Well, that’s unfortunate. Mine didn’t always see eye to eye with me and my dreams.” He tapped his lute. “But I’m glad I had ‘em. Couldn't imagine not havin' 'em.”

“Yes, you have many great stories to tell in that… strange way of yours.” The line between politeness and dismissiveness was thin and yet he would not alter his course- truly, just like any of the Nein, then.

Had the world always been full of such insufferable people or was this new? Perhaps Lucien had scared them away and protected her from this.

He grinned with needle-sharp teeth. “You like that, huh? I invented it- it’s an entirely new style of bardic music. You build a specific beat and you make up words to go with it. I could perform in this town every night and everyone would get a different version of the same basic story.”

“How quaint,” she drawled. “You must be quite proud of yourself.”

“Oh, I am.” He matched her pace when she tried to pick up speed. “Oh come on, at least tell me your name.”

“Cree,” she growled, impatiently. The longer he talked, the more she realized how utterly charming he was- true charm, not the sort of lazy charisma that Lucien had built himself out of tatters, silver-tongued and insincere and always just a bit condescending. This was pure and unrestrained and probably just as untrustworthy. Cree would prefer to stick with the devil she knew, but in his absence, this was the devil she had.

“Cree… Cree.” He pondered that, slowing down a bit, and in that moment of weakness, she seized her chance. “Is that short for something?”

His question went unanswered. She was gone before he could look up, vanished down an alley and then five hundred feet farther with a swish of her cloak. With an exhale that caught in her throat when it tried to become a sob, she leaned against the wall of the alley, and counted to ten to calm herself.

Molly would never let her hear the end of this- a nice tabaxi with a handsome face and quick fingers had shown an interest and she had run from him like a child on a playground. An opportunity for joy on her own terms had all but fallen into her lap and she ignored it.

“Maybe he is right, Cree,” she muttered to herself. “Perhaps you are choosing to be unhappy.”

A sharp caw and a flutter of wings drew her attention away from her misery and she glanced down to meet the coal-black eyes of a large raven- larger than any she had ever seen before and she had seen her fair share. Clutched in its beak was a pale object that it croaked pointedly around.

“No,” she said, simply. It was disbelief, not denial. She had dreamed this raven before and were she not a servant of beings who commanded the realm of dreams and built mansions out of the aether with only their minds and made them real, perhaps she would have been more confused about this.

The raven dropped the object at her feet- a pale mask, spotted with bloodstains in no discernible pattern, wreathed in feathers on a long onyx-black chain that had been snapped in two. It was faded with age, but beyond that, it was precisely the same as it was when Lucien had torn it from her neck and thrown it into the snow at Balenpost to replace it with the amulet she now wore.

Her hand went to that amulet, pointedly, trying not to panic about what sort of act of the Matron could have found that thing, in the first place, after nearly three years gone. What reason could she have had to even bother? She was nothing to her and the feeling was mutual. “I do not serve her. I am no longer of her flock. Do you understand, you stupid bird?”

The raven tilted its head at her and then, stubbornly, shoved the symbol closer to her boot. She fought the urge to kick the blasted thing in the head and send it flying back home to its Matron in dizzy circles. It would serve it right, taunting her so.

She froze, her foot inches from connecting, but the bird remained frozen in place, mocking her lack of resolve and unconcerned by the sharpness of her teeth. Defeated by the smugness of a messenger bird, she snarled at it and kicked the holy symbol down the alley, instead. “Leave me be,” she snapped.

She made it four feet down the alley before the raven swooped overheard and dropped the amulet onto her head. It bounced painfully off of her skull and with lightning-fast reflexes, she caught it before it could hit the ground. The clay of the mask was still ice-cold, as if it had been pulled from the snow moments before.

The raven was perched on the roof of the leftmost building that made up the alley. It tilted its head at her, as if daring her to throw it away again. For a moment, she even, pettily, considered it to see which of them would break first.

Instead, she shoved it into her satchel, buried among her things. “I will take this, because you are a stubborn, monstrous bird who will not take no for an answer, but know this, my friend. My choice has been made. My destiny is laid out, and I will not waver on my way to the precipice of it. My fate is no longer in her hands. Leave me be.”

The raven gave a sort of mocking sound and took off in flight, leaving Cree alone in the alley with her desperate promises that were getting flimsier by the day.

Chapter Text

Leaving Kiri behind felt a little less tragic this time- the real tragedy had been dinner, but Jester had smiled her way through it. Her conversation with Caduceus had helped her sort out some of her feelings, but there wasn't a thing she or anyone else could say to ease the ache of a girl missing her mama. She watched Mrs. Schuster with the pain only someone on their own and without their safety net for the first time could experience.

She promised Kiri presents when next they came back around and thanked the Schusters- even hugged Mrs. Schuster, and if it was a little too tight, the woman said nothing. She seemed to understand Jester's feelings without her having to admit to them.

She almost broke down when she finally pulled away from the comforting maternal embrace, but she held herself steady, said her goodbyes and rejoined the rest of the Nein.

It was already well into evening when they gathered up their horses and cart and set out, having realized that with the taverns damaged most places weren't taking in travelers as what room and board they had were going to helping people who had been displaced in the attack. Even if leaving after dinner hadn't been the plan from the start, they had no choice now, and the Nein took to it miserably.

They eventually found a place along the road not five miles out from Hupperdook that was "good enough" for the dome and Caleb began the process of setting it up, while Jester paced restlessly.

"You're torturing the grass," Molly said, lightly, as he approached her from behind. "It doesn't know whether you're coming or going."

"Oh shit." Jester lifted a foot, panicked. Caduceus talked to plants and animals sometimes- maybe grass had feelings. Maybe it hated being stepped on. Maybe-

She was cut off, suddenly, by Molly coming behind her and wrapping his arms around her from behind. She froze in place as he just held her, his face buried in her hair. "Molly?"

"Mm?" He hummed. She could hear the discordant note in the single syllable.

"Are you scared about going to Nogvurot?"

Molly sucked in a breath between his teeth, half-muffled by her hair. "...Yes. And I just... This road gives me the worst vibe. Nothing good has happened on this road."

She chewed on her bottom lip , shuddering a little. He was right. They were taken on this road. He had died on this road. It felt like every single thing that had changed how the Mighty Nein functioned and put them on a new path they didn't even want had started here on this road, so why would they ever tempt fate and walk the same path again?

She swallowed that down like a bitter pill, and chirped, instead, "Well, you know, Fjord says we can keep going north and see a completely different side of it, so at least it's not technically the same road."

He chuckled and shifted so that his chin was resting on her head. "True enough." He held himself there for a moment and she leaned comfortably against his back. Her tail twined around his and the feeling of trust and safety that came from such an intimate gesture made the worst of her dark clouds dissipate. It would be okay.

It would be okay.

If it wasn't, then she'd find a way to fix it.

Caleb finished the dome and called for everyone to gather up and Molly sighed, unwilling to disentangle himself. Jester didn’t want him to leave either, so she was fine with it. She could have stayed like this all night if she didn’t know for certain her legs would get tired and it was hard to sleep standing up. "So... I kinda... can go into people's dreams now?"

Jester gasped and spun in place, forcing him to back up quickly, lest their horn jewelry get tangled. "Oh my gosh! Molly!" She took his hand and ran a thumb over the Moonbow on his palm. "Is that what the Moonweaver gave you? That's so nice of her. She must love you so much. You're probably totally her favorite."

"Oh, I hope so. I'm everyone's favorite," he preened, but the smile didn't quite reach his eyes. More than her own sadness tempered by her boundless joy, Molly's hollow smiles hurt her deeply. Molly used to be untethered, lackadaisical, everything Jester wanted to be. Now he had burdens. Now he had rocks in his shoes keeping him on the ground when he ought to be floating on air.

"Oh!" She blurted out before she could get mired in that. "Do you want to go into my dreams tonight? I bet they're really great! I don't usually remember all of them, but the ones I do remember are amazing."

"Lots of pastries and tiny unicorns, I bet." She could see the mischief flickering back into his eyes where once there was a hollowness, and it elated her. This was all she had to be- happy and carefree and doing her best to make people smile. It was easy.

"It's like you've already been there." She grabbed his hand and led him back to the dome. "Molly's gonna go into my dreams!" She announced, once she slipped inside.

Yasha was tying a piece of ribbon to the little clay dog she'd bought earlier so it could dangle from her book like a charm, and at that, she looked up, immediately, concern lining her brow. "What?"

Molly cleared his throat. "The Moonweaver gave me this... spell." His eyes flicked over to Caleb who couldn't quite make eye contact. Huh. Weird. "I can go into and change other people's dreams now? I guess it helps me keep away from mine." He exhaled. "I know not everyone's okay with that, but if anyone's got bad dreams and is up for a bit of creativity..."

Jester glanced between Caleb and Molly and checked in with everyone else. Most were confused by the prospect. Fjord was unnerved and knowing what she did about him, she'd guess he was prepared to say no, but wanted to be polite about it.

"Sharing dreams. What a novel concept," Cree bristled, and then curled up in her spot in the dome without explaining.

"If it keeps the Somnovem out of your head, you can come into my , uh, brain anytime, Molly," Yasha nodded, laying her book aside.

Beau, surprisingly, nodded. "Yeah, why not? But if you fuck anything up in here-" she tapped her temple.

"Beau, I'm not even sure I'm brave enough to go into your head. There are some doors that should always be closed." At Molly's teasing, Beau flipped him off and they sniped at each other a bit, which kept everyone but Jester from noticing that Fjord, Caduceus, Nott, and Caleb stayed very quiet on the subject of dream sharing.

Well, she, Yasha, and Beau could take turns keeping Molly safe from the Somnovem, if it came to that.

Jester curled up beside Molly, facing him and pressed in so close that the curves of their horns tapped together, their tails entwined between them. The spell probably didn’t need proximity like this to work, but it was a nice touch.

She drifted off, sleepy from the home-cooked meal at the Schusters and the exhaustion of running around Hupperdook all day. She tried to remember, before she dipped under, how her dreams started- usually in the middle of the story, right? So maybe that was how she’d know when she was in the dream…

In the end, it was much more quiet, much more subtle. One moment Jester was laying on her bedroll in the dome and the next the sky was bright above her and full of the fluffiest clouds she’d ever seen. The space around her was an open field speckled with tents that were open and inviting, enticing anyone to come in and see what wonders waited inside. Voices cried out for attention and the laughter seemed to carry on the breeze.

“Molly?” She called out. She stepped towards the circus tentatively and then took it at a run, bursting onto the grounds like a little blue comet. “Oh my gosh, Molly! Where are you? Did you make this?”

“I stick to what I know.”

She turned to her left to see Molly, dressed in Gustav’s coat with his same floppy hat awkwardly perched between his horns. It was more muted form of his usual style, but he wore it with a grandiosity that rivaled its original owner. “I guess it is your circus. You might as well be the ringmaster.” she giggled and then spun in place. “I can’t believe it. You can just make anything you want?”

Molly shrugged. “Maybe someday. Right now I’m… trying to stick with what’s me.”

Oh. She froze in place, blinking. This wasn’t just a fun trick- Sehanine gave Molly a power to shape dreams and imprint pieces of himself onto the memories of his friends (or just sleep comfortably in their dreams- she wasn’t sure yet how it worked yet; if Molly could only control the dreams and not see them as they would be without interference). She did that so the nightmares couldn’t take him or drag him down. This really was Molly’s only safety from the Somnovem.

He looked down at himself, apparently noting that wearing Gustav’s clothes was hardly him and with a snap of his fingers, the coat turned Ruidus-red with Catha-silver accents and the hat was replaced by a small crown-shaped band around one horn. “Much better.”

Jester nodded her agreement, deciding that if she had to be Molly’s dreaming anchor until they fixed this, she’d do it gladly. She failed to save him once- she wouldn’t again. “Very you.”

She reached out her hand for his. “C’mon. It’s a dream, right? Let’s go crazy with this.”

His smile was brighter than the imaginary sun that blazed above, somehow spring-warm in the dreamspace, even knowing that outside the dome was rapidly turning into a freezing Empire winter. “I wouldn’t dream of going anywhere else, dear.”

She clutched his hand tightly, holding it like a promise, as he guided her through the tents and altered and redirected the bits and pieces of the dream to suit new ideas until the whole thing was a chaotic mess of delight and the two of them had fallen backwards onto the soft grass, laughing- real and true laughter. Not the fake kind that hid sadness. The genuine positive emotions between them stirred her and with her hair splayed out in a halo behind her and Molly’s coat tails tangled underneath him, she took a deep breath and just let herself speak.

“Molly.” By the Traveler, she didn’t mean to sound so meek, but that was how it came out, and she couldn’t correct it. Her voice wouldn’t go any louder. She entwined her fingers together over her heart and, once more, forced her stupid nerves in order, “Do you think once people start having things to be miserable about, they can never really be happy again?”

Molly shifted closer to her. “Now what would make you say a thing like that?”

She didn’t think it was right that she could cry in a dream- or if she simply had to, the tears shouldn’t burn and the snot shouldn’t build up. She should be able to cry pretty, like a delicate maiden in a fairytale or have them turn into pearls.

She choked on her next words, eyes clenched tight, “Before you died… You didn’t really have a whole lot to be unhappy about, you know? Like… sure, Lucien was out there and that was a problem, but you weren’t really sad about that. You didn't really think about it at all. And then you died… and this whole Somnovem shit started, and now you just seem so sad. Even when you’re not acting like it.”

He didn’t speak for a long time and she was too scared to glance over, in case he’d simply vanished from her dream and left her here alone with tears on her face and all these stupid feelings in her heart. She just needed to hear it would be okay. She needed to hear that it was okay to not be okay, for both of them. Just for a moment, then she’d go back to smiling, and Caduceus could check her, if he felt he needed to.

“This isn’t about me, is it?”

Jester nodded and then shook her head and then nodded again. Realizing she had just confused herself on top of probably outing herself, she sighed and murmured a defeated, “Fuck.”

He paused again and let out a low groan, but he moved closer, not farther away- she could feel it when he brushed her arm. “I’m not… unhappy. This is shite and I don’t think I deserve to be going through this because of some arsehole, and I don’t… like all this baggage I’m suddenly getting.” Another pause. “I’m dealing with it. Some days it might make me unpleasant to deal with- you’ve seen that already- but some days, I’m a damn delight like always. I’m doing everything I can. I… just have to not do it by myself.”

That last part came with a heavy sigh. He brushed a lock of her hair out of her face, and her eyes snapped open to see him leaning over her. “You went through something terrible. If I went through that, I would have gone off and killed something.”

“You kinda did,” she said, sheepishly. “I mean, you didn’t experience what we did, but to get us back, you killed a lot of things.”

“Maybe you need to really channel your anger into that lollipop.” He tapped her nose. “It’s not the healthiest way to address issues, if I’m honest, but the tension release is almost as good as a massage.” She giggled, despite herself. “You’re going to be fine, Jester. You’re just gonna have a scar. A horrible emotional scar that isn’t visible and you can’t make up stories about- the absolute worst kind.”

She swatted at him playfully and he caught her hand and kissed her knuckles. “But it also means over time, you can sort of forget it’s there, since you don’t see it every day. Just stop trying to force it to go away. Feel it, if you have to. Scream, steal from the rich, take it out on arseholes who deserve it, paint really unflattering pictures of everyone who’s ever hurt you, and always help people who’re hurting or miserable. I’ve done all of those things, and it’s a lot easier than letting people know you’re not as unaffected by the bad shite as you pretend you are. Just do good recklessly and you’ll feel good. World’s full of people who got hurt and then decided to hurt the world back, because why not?”

He rolled back over onto his back. “And that's no way to be. It doesn't fix anything. It won't make you feel better. The only way it gets better is being unapologetically kind when you don’t have to be or when no one expects you to be.”

Jester choked down the last bit of her sadness. Everything he said was true. Caduceus could give her perspective and a person to talk to and a shoulder to lean on, but Molly… Molly was action-oriented. He might not talk about his demons and kept his feelings locked away, but at least he found other ways to cope. This was just a difficult hole he had to climb out of, just like hers was. “Is that why you wanna help Cree?”

He snorted. “Cree’s a mess. Messier than any of us. She deserves to see that and see a better side of the world.”

“I like her.” It always felt weird admitting that. Cree wanted to kill Molly, but maybe it was easier to deal with that, knowing that no one would ever let her. “She loved Lucien so much.”

Molly scoffed and pushed himself up onto his elbows. “That is what we like to call a deeply toxic relationship, Jester. Don’t romanticize that.”

She rolled over onto her stomach. “I know, but just because he’s awful and was shit to her, probably, doesn’t change that she loves him and hasn’t stopped loving him. And a person who loves like that can be saved, right? Because really bad people don’t love anyone. They don’t care about anyone but themselves.”

She thought about Melancholia and Stahlmast, entombed together within the Falls, their bodies entwined in decay to create a bed of fresh fungus where one day it would be impossible to see where one ended and the other began. If they had just found a way beyond their need for revenge, they probably would have been okay, in the end. They would have been together and happy.

She thought of Ophelia and her absolute lack of love and her cynicism. She was an ally, but she’d be an enemy no less brutal than Lorenzo if they crossed her. She loved nothing, favoring ambition, and Jester didn’t believe there was any saving her from that- or maybe she was just angry and bitter with her. Maybe that wasn’t fair.

Love was not a universal truth, no matter what. It wasn’t guaranteed that everyone would care or be driven by it, but Cree was. She just needed to love them, and it was starting in simple, little ways, already. “I think we can get through to her.”

Molly smirked. “I think so too. I think good things’ll come out of this… Maybe not immediately. Still lots of bad.” He lifted his hand to stare at the red eye in the snake.

Jester reached over to cover his palm with hers, hiding the eye. “I won’t let the Somnovem have you, Molly. I promise. I couldn’t protect you before, but this time no one’s gonna hurt you.”

He looked like he was going to argue and she prepared her counterargument, but he backed down before he could say anything. “You’re not the first person to say that.”

“Then you don’t have to worry about it. ‘Cause there’s a long line of people they’ll have to fight to get to you.” She planted a quick kiss between his eyes. “Thanks, Molly.”

He blinked. “For what?”

“For the good advice and the good dreams.” She scooted closer and tucked her head underneath his chin. “And for just being you.”

Molly’s breath carried a hitch in it that she heard with her head so close to his chest, but he relaxed into the moment and wrapped his arms around her. Maybe it was silly to take a nap inside of a dream, but the grass was so soft and the sun was so warm and Molly’s arms were safe and reassuring. She couldn’t imagine a better dream that wasn’t entangled in complicated romantic wishes that would wake up unfulfilled. This was simpler, easier, and knowing it would be just as real when she woke up as it was now.

And so the dream moved on, peacefully, for both of them.

The three markings that Cree had identified as Ira, Gaudius, and Mirumus’s eyes burned like acid had been poured on them when Molly woke up from his peaceful dreamshare with Jester, making what could have been a lovely greeting to a new day a living hell.

“Do you think they’re angry?” Jester murmured, as Molly paced about the camp while everyone gathered their things. She had laid her hands over his open palm, but the coldness of her skin didn’t do anything to ease the ache. Snow had fallen overnight and Molly did everything shy of sticking his head in it in the hopes that something would touch it, but it was useless.

“A goddess is keeping them from accessing their Nonagon at the moment.” Despite her nonchalant tone, Cree was fretting- her tail gave her away, as it lashed back and forth behind her. Unsurprising, but also terrifying. It meant this wasn’t normal.

“Not a fan of the gods, are they?” Caleb mused at the same time Jester said, “Wait. They’re not gods?”

“How can you be a cleric of something that isn’t a god?” Beau asked and Molly didn’t have to look to know she was staring right at the back of Jester’s head.

“Powerful beings can ascend to godhood if belief in them is strong,” was Cree’s retort as she pushed her way to Molly.

“The Raven Queen,” Caduceus nodded, watching Cree carefully. “There’s a lot of minor deities out there with small pockets of followers, too. You don't really need to be a god to have devotees.”

“Like the Traveler!” Jester offered and then, defensive before anyone had even said anything, she added, “But he’s totally a real god, you guys. I promise.”

Sprinkle sneezed in her ear, eliciting a gasp. “Oh, Sprinkle, are you getting a cold? Here. Get in my hood.”

“This just feels like hipster shit.” Beau swung up onto a horse. “Like ‘oooh the Prime Deities are too mainstream.’”

Molly was only half taking in the conversation, eyes zeroed in on Cree as she got closer. She held out her hand for him to take and he gave it over willingly, eyebrow cocked and feet spread apart to bolt if she did anything weird with her blood magic. The warmth that spread from her fingertips gave him pause and slowly the pain began to recede and he breathed again.

She released his hands quickly as soon as the spell ended. “This is not a solution, Mollymauk. I think you and your goddess are foolish and making a problem much much worse by ignoring them, but… I do not wish for you to be in pain.”

He flexed the fingers of his hand, testing for any sign of discomfort where the eye had been burning. He checked the rest of the Nein, but they were still discussing gods and Molly, swallowing down a sudden burst of fear whispered so only Cree could hear it, “They’re not going to stop, are they?”

Cree broke eye contact. “You know what I am going to say.”

“That it would be easier and safer if I gave in?” His voice turned hard and cold and she inwardly flinched. “I don’t trust this. This isn’t something anyone should be messing around with. I don’t think…” He trailed off. “You know that, right? You might not know what Lucien knows, but you know that this is dangerous.”

She refused to look up. “It is what it is. Nothing more, nothing less.”

With nothing more to say on the subject, she walked away, leaving Molly with cold dread settling into the pit of his stomach as he watched the Nein finish the rest of their morning routines and settle into another day of travel ahead of them. He was leading them into something so dangerous and yet they were all here for him, wouldn’t leave him if he forced them to.

And he wouldn’t do that. He needed them too much. He just had to trust that Caleb would do the right thing if it all went to shit.

He hopped up onto the cart and set to the task of working with his cards as they pulled off onto the road. The benefit of the path they were taking meant they would completely bypass the spot where he had died, so it was all fresh scenery with no baggage whatsoever for most of them, but having traveled this path with the circus many times, the view wasn’t much to write about. He kept his head bowed as he shuffled the deck and pulled cards out at random, trying to get a feel for what to expect in Nogvurot.

He pressed the three cards to his lips without looking at them. Moonweaver, you’re already doing so much for me, but just a hint? Please.

The three cards he laid out in front of him were Dream, the Tyrant, and Death.

Molly pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, swallowed, swept the cards up, and then shuffled them back in and redrew.

Dream, Tyrant, Death.

Third time. Despite the cold air, beads of sweat were starting to form on his forehead. He even twisted the deck a few times, maximizing the potential of getting the reversed versions of the cards just for the sake of a change, but the same three cards appeared in exactly the same order and position.

Dream. Tyrant. Death.

“Molly?!”

Molly dropped his cards, scattering them all over the floor of the cart. He swore and started to gather them up, while Jester peered over the side, brows knit in concern. He hadn't even noticed the fucking cart had stopped. “Yes, dear?” He asked, trying to keep the strain out of his voice and failing miserably.

“We’re gonna take a break for lunch,” she said, slowly. Gods, she looked so concerned. He couldn’t burden her with this- not when she was so quick to try and protect him. If the Moonweaver felt whatever was coming so strongly that she kept sending these three cards, it might be more than she could handle. “You okay?”

“I’m fine. You caught me in the middle of a reading. I tend to space out a bit.” He tapped his cards on the floor of the cart to straighten them and slipped them back into their pouch. “Lunch sounds amazing.”

He hopped out of the cart, content to leave the matter within to be considered later. Jester followed on his heels to the little patch of snow-dusted field spotted with big rocks suitable for sitting on where the rest of the Nein were watching Caduceus stir a quick stew he must have thrown together. The smell was heavenly- really, how in the world had they got on without him for the weeks before they met him? He could never go back to jerky and pocket bacon again.

At least the promise of a decent meal was a good distraction from the cards. The problem was Jester gently tugging at his sleeve. “So did you get a good reading?” Of course she’d be interested, bless her.

“It was… auspicious,” he lied. He glanced to Caduceus who flicked an ear like a cow swatting flies but didn’t bother to look up. “But I’m going to have to think on it.” And then louder, “Wow that smells amazing, Caduceus. What’s in that?”

There was a look in his eyes when he finally did meet Molly’s that said he definitely knew he’d lied and was mildly disappointed in him for it. Despite everything he knew about himself, he found he was actually rather shamed by that look. “Root vegetables, mostly. A few mushrooms.”

“The good kind?” Molly raised an eyebrow, determined not to meet Caduceus with that shame. It was still a new emotion and one he wasn’t going to indulge more than he had to. He had his reasons and he did need to think on the cards before he really approached anyone with the information.

The question at least knocked Caduceus on his back foot, replacing disappointment with confusion. “I mean… All mushrooms are good. You’re gonna have to be more specific.”

“He means shrooms, Cad,” Beau held out her meal tin for a serving. “Y’know, like the kind that make you hallucinate ‘n shit.”

“Oh… Oh yeah, no.” Caduceus smiled a bit. “I’d put that in a dinner stew, not a lunch stew. We still have to make progress.”

Nott and Fjord both spat out their stew at the same time. “What?!”

“He is teasing,” Cree sighed.

Molly shrugged and plopped down onto the grass near Jester with his tin full of steaming broth and vegetables. “I hope he isn’t, because that can only improve our dynamic. Everyone completely tripping off their arses.”

They chatted and ate and Molly pushed the reading out of his mind even further. It was so much easier to forget anything dangerous when he could just be himself among his own people, even with Cree holding herself back and constantly at a loss when she was included. These people all saw him as Molly- a real, living breathing person. Not a shadow, not a fragment. A person who deserved to be here and enjoy life and be happy and make others happy.”

The fact that Cree was miserable was likely the guilt eating at her. Good. Guilt wasn’t productive, but at least it would lead to other things. That she felt guilty meant that she was thinking for herself and her own values, not whatever Lucien instilled in her.

They were starting to clear away their makeshift camp when Caduceus and Cree both shifted their attention to something behind a rock about thirty feet away from them, larger than the rest. While Caduceus was casual and a bit indifferent to whatever it was only they could see, Cree was snarling.

“It is rude to skulk in shadows. Make yourself known.”

A shriek that rivaled Nott’s went up and a blue-sable form stumbled out from behind the rock, dressed in plain russet-toned clothing with no armor to speak of. By the shape alone, they appeared to be a young female firbolg, all knees and elbows and tangled in the overly long strap of a very heavy looking bag that she was dragging along. “I wasn’t skulking! Honest!”

Her hair, a darker blue than her fur, looked as if it had been long once, but half of it had been hacked off, leaving the other half long and flopping across her face awkwardly like she'd tried to give herself a haircut and only made it halfway before she changed her mind. Her eyes were wide and panicked, mouth moving wordlessly as she counted them out. “Uh… Um. I can explain! I just smelled the soup and-and-”

She tried to move forwards, tripped over the bag and landed on her face in the dirt. Before anyone could stop her, Jester was running forwards to help her up. “Oh my gosh, are you okay?”

The firbolg kicked the strap of the bag away from her foot. “Yes… No. Honestly? Couldn’t tell you!” Her laugh was as nasally and shrill as the rest of her.

“What’s in the sack?” Fjord was quickly bridging the gap between Jester and the camp, fingers twitching in case he had to call on the falchion. The rest of the Nein slowly closed in behind him, while Molly circled around to see if he could get a look inside the bag.

The girl yanked it closer to her, all but wrapping her arms and legs around it. “Nothing! It’s mine! Don’t worry about it? Are you Crownsguard? Righteous Brand? No? Come back with a warrant!”

“Easy, easy,” Caduceus went to join Jester. “No one’s gonna hurt you. What’s your name?”

She sniffed. “Agee. It’s short for Ageratum, but that’s such a mouthful, yanno?”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “Agee’s easier to say.”

While Jester and Caduceus soothed the girl, Molly gestured to Nott, miming out that she should look inside the bag. She squinted at him and mimicked his motions and then waved her hands like she had no idea what he was saying. He repeated the same miming sequence, but slower. She shrugged with more frustration.

Molly grit his teeth and mouthed look in the bag while pointing vehemently at it.

“Oh!” Nott said out loud, drawing eyes to her. When she began to sidle over, everyone, including Agee, was watching her, and Molly sighed, facepalmed, and caught her by the cloak before she could go digging.

She squirmed in his grip. “What the fuck, Molly?! You said look in the bag!”

“Subtly!” He hissed.

Agee yanked the bag into her lap where it took up every bit of space and then spilled over. “I took this from some crazy people, man. Don’t think I won’t do to you what I did to them.”

Jester’s eyes went wide as saucers. “What did you do?”

She blinked her large eyes, so dark a brown as to be black, not entirely unlike a deer's. “...I ran away really fast.”

They were losing a handle on the situation- this was why Molly had a kneejerk opinion on most children and the fact that this was half of how Kiri started didn’t help matters. He cleared his throat loudly and dropped Nott back onto the ground. “All right, before this escalates into the kind of chaos I don’t enjoy… who are you, what are you doing out here, and what sort of crazy people?”

The firbolg girl blew some of her errant fringe out of her face, only for it to flop right back down over her eyes. “Uh, I’m Agee. I’m trying to get back to Nogvurot. And okay maybe crazy is the wrong word- they were actually pretty nice for, you know…” She looked around hesitantly and then lowered her voice (but given her natural speaking voice was obscenely loud, it only put her at a normal volume). “...Kryn.”

Molly looked at every member of the Nein, tracking their reactions. Shock, mostly. Confusion. Beau and Caleb, however, seemed to have come to a conclusion and were both exchanging looks, for all the world looking like they were debating who should be the one to say whatever it was on their mind.

Beau must have lost the silent battle of wills, because she stepped forwards. “You said you were from Nogvurot? Were those Kryn kidnapping you?”

Oh. In everything else that had happened, he had nearly forgotten about the kidnapped kids. He’d half-assumed that, too, was the Iron Shepherds- after all, Lorenzo apparently had a taste for kid flesh. (He shuddered.) He was about to say something when Jester gasped.

“Oh my god, are they kidnapping kids ‘cause they can’t have babies anymore?”

“Jester-” Molly sounded pained, but Agee didn’t quite grasp the significance of whatever nonsense she believed about the beacon and just tilted her head.

“They weren’t kidnapping me. They asked if I wanted to go, and I didn’t really have anything going on, so I went.” She fidgeted with the strap on her bag.

Molly blinked at her. “Then why did you run?”

Her lower lip trembled. She was surrounded on all sides by people staring at her and demanding answers and gods if he didn’t sort of feel for the kid in that specific moment, if not overall. “Because I got freaked out, man!” She dropped the strap and tugged on her long floppy ears instead. “It was so much and we were gonna have to go underground and there were giant worms. I freaked the heck out and bolted.”

“And stole their shit,” Jester noted.

“And a few other people’s shit.” Agee pursed her lips. “I won’t lie, this bag was way less heavy when I got it.”

“Forget the bag!” Molly sounded pained now. At this rate, there better be an answer to all of their problems within that stupid bag or he was going to beg Caleb to set it on fire. “Why did they even want you to come with them?”

Agee’s ears perked up. “Oh that. That part’s easy. It’s ‘cause I’m actually one of their people. Crazy, huh?” When no one reacted to that beyond stunned silence, she explained it even more thoroughly, like they’d given her permission. “See, they’ve got this thing where people who die are reborn into new bodies and here lately some of them have been reborn right here in the Empire, and I’ve been having weird dreams my whole life about being someone else. Turns out I- Is he okay?”

Molly must have been turning pale, because now all eyes were on him. His knees felt weak suddenly and he dropped down onto the dirt on his ass, deciding it was better if he didn’t try to hold himself up. The things that bothered him, haunted him, were being explained casually by a teenage firbolg girl and apparently the Dynasty just made a thing of it.

Was that what happened to Lucien? Was he meant to be dead and reborn but something went wrong and a shred of him just clung to his old body? “... What would they do if they had gotten you to the Dynasty?” He asked, aware of the dryness of his mouth.

Agee shrugged, still far too casual about the thing that was perpetually eating at his existence. “Got my old memories back, and I guess I’d be that person again? I dunno. They didn’t really wanna confuse me all at once.” She went back to fiddling with the sack. “They were really nice about it all. I’ve never been respected before. It’s usually, ‘Agee get out of the way.’ and ‘Agee, this is why your mom and dad left you.’”

(Beau winced and Molly only saw it because he was looking right at her, begging someone to make Agee stop before he threw up.)

“Hey, it’s cool… That sounds like a lot,” she cut in, and he didn’t even pretend not to be grateful for it. Apparently, Caleb wasn’t the only one who could communicate silently with her. “Listen, we’re headed to Nogvurot and if you want some people to help you get there, you can hang with us.”

That was the last thing Molly wanted, but now he’d come out the other side of his feelings for this girl. He suddenly wanted to make sure the Kryn didn’t get her, couldn’t force her to transform into something else, and that meant keeping her close until they got to Nogvurot or he got annoyed enough to stop indulging the hang-up- whatever came first.

They began to disentangle from the cluster, leaving Molly still sitting in the dirt, remembering how to breathe. Soon it was only Caleb, steadfast and silent through the whole thing, who remained. “Mollymauk?”

Molly looked down at the crabgrass between his boots. The cards he’d drawn in the cart kept repeating in his head, like a litany, like a curse. Like mockery. Dream, Tyrant, Death. “Hm?”

He wished he could speak in silences. He built himself too loud and flourished where there was noise, whereas Caleb seemed to say volumes in the length of his pauses. He could be writing poetry in the space between breaths that hung between them and Molly would never know. He just wanted to fill the space. “It can’t be the same, can it?”

Now Caleb spoke, but what he spoke was damning and unhelpful, “It is another coincidence.”

He stepped closer and held out a hand. Molly’s eyes traced the tips of his ink-stained fingers, up the dirty arm bandages to the tattered coat to the shoulders to the freckled face and blue eyes that were alight with concern and then back down to the offered hand again. “Come on, then. Up you go, circus man. You will be all right.”

We’ll protect you. That pause he understood, and it hurt coming from Caleb, who he had tasked to be his destroyer. He couldn’t protect him if he was destined to Become something else, something that would need to be put down. No one could, not even the Moonweaver, who was desperately losing control over this if his dreams and those cards were any indication. Maybe even the dream spell would fail to keep the Somnovem out, eventually.

But still he swallowed and gripped Caleb’s hand and let him pull him to his feet and lingered there for a moment, hands clasped before he pressed Caleb’s knuckles to his lips the way he had Jester’s the night before in the dream. It was a simple gesture. Affection given freely. It didn’t have to mean anything. “I hope so,” he said, when he finally let him go.

He could have sworn he heard, when Caleb thought he was out of earshot, a murmured, “You must be.”

But maybe that was just something else he wanted to hear in the silence, given voice by an active imagination.

The girl was loud, boisterous, and a bit of a kleptomaniac, and Beau kinda liked her just a bit. Not in the sense that she felt like keeping her around for an extended period, but enough to feel obligated to get her back to where she needed to be… Which, judging by the way she blithely described herself as being “communally raised” by the people of Nogvurot when her parents left her there when she was little, probably wasn’t exactly the best idea of home, but it was what she wanted- or thought she wanted anyway- and Beau couldn’t judge her for that.

The bag was basically a security blanket- not full of anything worthwhile but things she’d stolen and made hers. With no place to store anything she obtained while away from her home, she’d just kept gathering more things until it became too difficult to carry and slowed her down. She’d needed help if she was going to make it, because she refused to leave it. Now it was in the cart where Agee and Jester were chatting amicably like kids at a sleepover.

Beau felt good about what they were doing for her, but the way she’d talked about the Kryn and her strange memories and the fact that they wanted to put her back to rights when she seemed like a weird, anxious, but generally fine kid to her bugged her. What bugged her more was that the Kryn didn’t force it, which meant that every kid that went with them had wanted to.

And there was something sad in the way Agee talked about running away, like she partially regretted it.

Of course, there was Molly, too, who looked at the girl with a mixture of protectiveness and fear. She was a walking example of the life he was currently living and maybe he was picking up on her regret a bit too. No- no maybe about it. Molly wasn’t Caduceus, but he was an astute fucker when he wanted to be. He knew the girl was searching the horizon for any sign of the people she abandoned, like she’d take the chance if she saw it again, but for now was just continuing down the path she’d made for herself.

Beau couldn’t take not saying anything anymore. When they made camp, she pulled the girl aside for a private conversation and choked out a laugh when she yanked her arm out of her grip.

“Okay, no touching, lady,” she scowled.

“Yeah, okay, that’s fair.” Beau exhaled, holding up her hands, defensively. “Look, do you really want to go back to Nogvurot? ‘Cause you know there’s other choices, right? We could drop you somewhere else and you don’t have to go back to the place you clearly hate or lose your identity with the Kryn.”

The last bit dragged her eyes from the ground to Beau’s face. “Whoa. Who said anything about losing my identity? I’d still be me, just… More me. I just-” She frowned. “It’s a big change! I’m bad with change!”

Beau blinked. “What do you mean more you? You said they think you’re a different person.”

“I have a different name and a bunch of different memories. That’s still all me, though, right?” Agee shook her head. “Ever since I was little I had dreams of being important and wise and, honestly, really badass. It was the rest of the world that didn’t see it, so I never got the chance to get to be those things.”

“But going with the Kryn… would let you?” She was trying to understand this without being a judgmental bitch. Everything they were trying to protect Molly from and this teenage girl was believing blindly in the sanctity of it. It had to be naive childishness.

Okay, so she was definitely being a judgmental bitch.

Maybe she was projecting a little bit, too. No, scratch that. She was definitely projecting. She just saw a fluffy, anxiety-ridden version of herself getting abducted by the Soul because it would make her better, shape her into something else because no one wanted who she was at home. And maybe the Soul had turned out okay, in the end, but she wasn’t going to look at that situation and think she ought to thank her dad for it.

It wasn’t the same. Hard to believe, the fucking Kryn Dynasty that the Empire treated like barbarians were more merciful than the fucking Cobalt Soul who thrived in rooting out corruption.

“Honestly, kid, I don’t know what to say. If it were me, I wouldn’t take the risk.” She shrugged, awkwardly, and glanced aside, hunting for Molly among the camp. He still looked pale and shaken and he kept stealing glances this way. Speaking of projecting…

“You’d rather be nothing when you could be something?” Agee crossed her arms over her rail-thin body. She almost made Caduceus look svelte. “I dunno. I think it’s scary and kinda overwhelming, but I probably should at least… try? And if I don’t like it, I’ll run away again. I don’t care. I’m crazy.”

The last bit seemed to be her… completely awkward, vaguely off-putting way of puffing herself up, but she had to admire the confidence. Even Molly didn’t have that. Gods, poor Molly. He was staring at his exact opposite- someone with a past they couldn’t remember walking right into it, confident that she’d come out the other side a better version of herself. There was no fucking way that was going to happen with him. It couldn’t. Everything they knew about Lucien said that Molly was the better alternative.

She hoped Agee was right, because she didn’t leave much room for arguing the point. “Then I guess, uh… Follow your heart?” She ran a hand through her buzzed hair. Did she just give good advice? Did she contribute to this kid’s final decision? What if it didn’t take? What if it got her killed or worse?

Fuck. Being responsible is hard. Now I know how Dairon feels.

“Whelp!” Agee chirped so suddenly that Beau, mid-internal scream, jumped a bit. “Good talk.” She spun on her heels and trotted back to the camp. “Hey, Pink-Man! What’s cookin’?”

Beau watched her go with furrowed brows, and, quite unexpectedly and unfairly, Molly’s words popped into her head. If people are lookin’ for a path, they’re lookin’ for a path.

Leave things better than you found them.

And then, her own vow: Make sure you have all the information.

She bit her lip to stifle a groan and stalked back to camp.

The girl was strange and Cree kept her distance from her, hoping beyond hope that she would leave without stealing anything. Everyone treated her kindly and with care, but kept their valuables close by their sides, never quite taking their eyes off of her. She could be a con artist in disguise. She could be many things. Youth meant nothing, especially not youth who knew what it was like to be alone and have to take in order to have.

The main thing was that she was making Molly deeply uncomfortable, especially after she explained things in more detail over dinner as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be experiencing what she was experiencing.

She could feel it radiating off of him, like a dark cloud upon his shoulders. She had become accustomed to his better moods, his self-assuredness, and now it seemed like he was faltering… And should that not be a good thing? Should the girl’s belief in her own soul in the face of a life that hid within locked doors in her own mind not make her feel like there was some idealized version of him where he and Lucien could co-exist in tandem, entwined?

That would be the best scenario for this for her, and yet her heart ached to see him so anxious and losing that stubborn, agonizingly frustrating grip on his hope that would keep her from ever having Lucien again. She found her hand did not wander to her amulet to assuage herself of this strange guilt, but to the Raven Queen symbol moved to the pocket of her cloak, weighing as heavy as a stone.

She pulled her hand away when she realized what she was doing. You cannot slip and fall so close to your goal, Cree.

Still, when they called for watch and Molly offered to go first, she joined him. “You have barely spoken since we found that girl, Mollymauk.”

Molly exhaled deeply through his nose, but rather than explain himself, he just danced right past it to the crux of his fears. “Is that… Whatever she’s describing the Kryn are gonna do to her- is that what your friend is gonna do?”

Ah. Cree frowned. To be certain, she assumed Tyffial’s process would be a much stronger version of a greater restoration, crafted out of her mutagens and her cleverness with alchemy. She could tell him that, but she doubted it would ease his mind. Most people do not find the idea of swallowing potential poison to be reassuring. “No… None of us have been to Xhorhas. We’ve never even heard of such a process.”

He rolled his tongue along his bottom teeth the same way Lucien sometimes did, and she looked away, unable to bear the familiarity of just sitting here beside him, trying to calm him down- the him was different and yet everything else was so much the same, like a distorted mirror. “So that whole thing- that’s not what happened to him? Or like a-a botched version of it?”

“I cannot say for certain.” Her memories of the night Lucien died were strangely slippery and if she looked too closely, it was as if her mind slid right over them entirely. She could remember so many details and yet the nature of the ritual, of the mage bitch who conducted it… All of that dripped between her fingers as if she were trying to hold water in her hands, and gave her a headache when she tried to grip them too tightly in the hope that they might clarify. “But I do not feel like it was.”

She sighed, noting Molly’s continued discomfort. “I cannot promise you that whatever Tyffial does will not… do something like what she is describing. Merge the two of you into a cohesive whole. You would still be partially Mollymauk-”

“No,” he cut her off. “I won’t be partially anything. Mollymauk is who I am without anything else in my head, completely free of Lucien’s bullshit. There’s no compromise. We’ve already had this conversation- it’s either me or him, no in-between.” He swallowed, working his jaw like he wanted to say more, before just punctuating his point with: “And that’s the end of it. If the kid wants to bank her identity on what the Kryn think she ought to be, that’s her business. It’s a terrible idea, but it’s her business.”

Cree could read between the lines there. It was taking all of Molly’s best efforts not to run to Agee, shake her awake, and demand that she rethink her decisions. He was holding himself in check and judging by the way his talons dug into his legs, the thread was thin.

A subject change, then. She raked her claws through the thick fur of her neck, awkwardly, trying to light on something else, barely cognizant of why she was doing it. “I, erm… I met someone while we were in Hupperdook.”

Molly’s eyes shifted to her, their depths reflecting a measure of light they hadn’t held before. Of course that would get his interest, the bastard. “Really? What sort of someone?”

“A-a very nice tabaxi man. He played the lute and sang… and spoke very quickly.” Her fur hid her blush as she looked away. “I panicked and ran away before I could speak much to him.”

It took a moment, but Molly snorted, and from there it became a chortle and then transformed into a guffaw, until he was doubled over and wheezing out laughter so loud that the rest of the group woke up and whined at him to shut up. All the while, Cree glared at him.

“It is not that funny,” she hissed, more indignant than genuinely angry.

He was still laughing, despite all the commotion he was causing. “It is, though. It really is.” Even when he began to calm, the giggles still wracked him and Beau had to push him down and stuff a pillow over his face to smother them when she traded off watch with him.

Before Cree could retreat to her space within the dome, Fjord caught her gently by the arm and gave her a smile that was far too charming for someone it would have little effect on. “Dunno what you said to him, but… Good job.”

Cree’s ears flattened to her skull, wanting to protest that he was mocking her and that she did nothing at all to be thanked for, but the words died on her tongue, leaving her huffing out a peeved breath. “Well. Clearly he needed it.”

She had room to curl up at the edge of the dome and out of the way, but there was an empty space at Jester’s back that Fjord had vacated- the spot she was always begged to occupy- and without the girl asking, she flopped down onto it and curled against her.

Agee must have sensed something in the nature of Molly’s looks her way, because she was gone by the time the sun rose overhead and the dome dissipated. No one knew which watch had missed her, only that it must have been after his and Cree’s.

He stepped away from the camp and looked out over the horizon, watching Catha disappear from sight as the Moonweaver’s dominion faded into Pelor’s. At his back, there was debate going on about whether they ought to be worried about the firbolg kid they’d only had for a day, who had slipped away from them as quickly as she had joined them.

“And we’re absolutely sure she didn’t go off to pee and get kidnapped by slavers?” Nott was asking.

“She’s fine, Nott,” Fjord reassured her.

“She left her bag.”

“Didn’t need it.”

Something about the cant to Fjord’s voice revealed to Molly exactly whose watch Agee had left during. He could have guessed as much, but he was finding it surprisingly easy not to be pissed at Fjord and Beau for it.

Speak of the archdevil, Beau was suddenly at his side, arms crossed. There was an unfamiliar anxiety creasing her brow and Molly prodded her in the forehead. “You’re gonna get wrinkles right here if you don’t stop thinking so hard.”

She slapped his hand away with an aggrieved groan. “Ugh. Why do you always make it so hard to have real talk with you?”

“Because I hate real talk.” He mimicked her posture- or at least a mockery of it- but his tail ruined it, swishing behind him in fitful lashes. “You told her to go?”

Beau clenched her jaw. “I told her to… follow her heart.”

Molly blinked. “Why, Beauregard, that sounds awfully like what I do when I give card readings.”

She stuck a finger in his face. “No. Fuck you. You spin bullshit. I just called it like it was. There’s a difference.”

“You say tomato,” Molly shrugged one shoulder and then dropped down into a slump onto the ground, pulling his legs close to his body. “Do you think she’ll turn out okay?”

“Honestly?” Beau blew an errant lock of her hair that had fallen out of her topknot in her sleep out of her face. “I don’t know, man. I wanna believe she will be. The Cobalt Soul kidnapped me, and I’m figuring out that I really kinda like the gig I’ve gotten, even with the fucking trauma that came with it. At least they asked her to go. She had a choice and she chose to run and then she chose to go back and that’s not for us to wonder why, I guess.” She eyed him. “You pissed at me about it?”

Molly filed that bit about being kidnapped away for later. He didn’t care so much about the past, but he’d always wondered what made Beau so Beau. “You know, if I hadn’t already been pissed off at you this week already, maybe.” Off her dour look, he leaned back a bit to look up at her. “No. I think you did… as close to the right thing as anyone could.”

Beau ducked her head like she couldn’t take him being nice to her. Good. If he was still frustrating her, then their relationship was still based on the same foundation it was built on. Nothing had to change. “It’s not the same as your situation, all right? She saw that other life as a part of her that Just Agee couldn’t reach. She wanted to be whole. You’re already whole.” She paused. “A whole asshole, but whole.”

He relaxed a bit. It didn’t change the fact that he was now more terrified of Nogvurot than he’d been since they left Zadash, but the reassurance was nice. Comforting, even. And it even had Beau’s brand of bullshit to keep it firmly grounded in reality and not full of platitudes.

Rather than thank her, he rolled back onto his feet with a bit of flourish, getting dewdrops all over his coat in the process, and gave her a little pat on the cheek that she endured with rolled eyes. “She really ditched that bag, huh?”

Beau snorted. “Yeah, she said it was weighing her down… And then she said some really insightful shit about anxiety and needing to steal things to have control over her life and also she thinks maybe it has some connection to her other self too, but she was doing it wrong... and honestly she was just a really weird kid. I’m glad she could let go of whatever the hell that was, though.”

He couldn’t help his curiosity and raised an eyebrow. “Anything good in it?”

“Nope. Bunch of useless junk.”

Molly balked and then hissed “I fuckin’ knew it" between clenched teeth.

Chapter Text

Molly didn’t know what he expected from the oft-spoken of, but never seen Nogvurot (it wasn’t a place the circus had ever frequented and now he understood why), but it wasn’t what he got.

The entire place was crawling with Righteous Brand, itching for a fight and eyeing them up from the moment they entered. The fact that the Kryn were taking kids from here was a bold move, whether they were allegedly their kids to take or not, and while no one was really discussing the whole “wormholes” thing Agee had mentioned due to not knowing if the kid was a reliable source, it was kind of an itch in the back of Molly’s mind.

He didn’t care about the war or what the Kryn did- he cared about being too much in the thick of it, especially with that beacon thing in their possession. They just kept drifting a little too close to it on the wrong side for his comfort, and they had enough to worry about. Every step was bringing them closer and closer to what could be a very bad situation and Molly's stomach was twisting in knots, threatening to make him lose his breakfast.

Cree knew her way around the town and how to skirt away from the section she labeled as the Aegis Block, where the troops spent most of their time. She had no desire to intermingle with them any more than the Nein did and they kept their heads down to avoid making any kind of waves with their unique appearances and undeniable newness that always gets people interested in all the wrong ways.

Peddler’s Row, which had to be passed through to reach the Scatters (where Tyffial made her home), was a muddy, yet colorful marketplace, promising all manner of shopping expeditions if they could just take care of this mess with Tyffial quickly and it all managed to turn out all right, somehow. Stalls contained racks and racks of handcrafted jewelry and shelves of pottery and other art, while stores boasted everything needed for travelers. Molly noted Caleb’s eyes go wide when he caught sight of a small shop called The Quaint Quill that seemed to be a bookstore of some kind.

There was no need for him to stay with the group and go to Tyffial’s with them- he could have run off to take in the shop and let the rest tend to their business, but his feet remained planted on the path Cree was setting for the Nein and when they moved passed it, Caleb didn’t look back with any sort of longing.

Selfishly, Molly was grateful. And more than that, his heart ached for the selflessness of the gesture. Caleb wasn’t going to wander off and leave him to this. All of the Nein would be here for him until it was over.

This is real loyalty and love. Not the cheap, awful kind that Lucien has going on with his people.

The Scatters was where color went to die, apparently, and the shift from bright to dull so suddenly was jarring. They walked past small, drab temples to Empire-approved deities (Molly noted the immediate mischief in Jester’s eyes and inwardly groaned at the trouble she was going to provoke in a place where there would be worse than Crownsguard to catch her out), dive bars that promised the potential for thick Empire lagers and bar fights, and rickety homes scattered into vaguely organized neighborhoods.

Tyffial’s home, once Cree located it, was no different from any other home on the outset. It certainly didn’t look like the portal into the Hells that Molly had anticipated all this time and seeing it was almost anticlimactic. It was just one more graying wood home surrounded by a tiny patch of yard that was more mud than grass.

But when Cree knocked on the door, Molly held his breath like he was going to plummet from a gallows. “Tyffial, it is me. I have brought him.”

Molly recognized the sound of multiple locks coming undone before the door swung open, revealing a beautiful elven woman with tanned skin, sharp nut-brown eyes, and long hair caught somewhere between the brown of her eyes and the brown of her skin. She was dressed simply in a tunic and pants and there were pale scars covering every visible bit of skin that made him suddenly self-conscious of his own because of how it connected the two of them. Otis hadn’t worn quite so many, and Cree’s weren’t visible underneath her fur.

“Took you long enough,” she drawled out, idly, in an accent Molly couldn’t place. Even her tongue bore a thick bit of scar tissue down the middle.

“I had business to take care of,” Cree muttered, defensively. Tyffial reached over and pinched her ear.

“Excuses, excuses, kitten. Well. Let’s see him.”

Those brown eyes locked on Molly and even with the Nein trying to form a subtle barrier, Tyffial just just agilely wound her way around them until she was right in front of him. She stood four inches taller than him, so when she pressed her face into his, she had to lean down.

“I’m normally not one to call anyone out for personal space violations, but could you-” Molly started, but Tyffial shushed him. “Excuse you…”

She ignored him, tilting her head this way and that. “It’s certainly Lucien’s body. But nothing else is right.”

“That is what I have been trying to tell you,” Cree muttered. “He remembers nothing of being Lucien. His memories are locked away.”

“Allegedly,” Molly protested. The tension in the air between the two Tombtakers and the Nein was growing, threatening to boil over.

“Hm.” And just like that,Tyffial swept back into her ramshackle home with Cree at her heels, and the tension broke gently without snapping. “Sit, then. I will see what I can do.”

Molly didn’t want to go inside. He hovered at the door while the rest of the Nein awkwardly followed the proper steps in the dance of hospitality, their eyes taking in the space with anxious curiosity. Yasha was the last and she laid a hand on the small of his back, not pushing him forwards. She would have pushed him as far away from this place as she could if he asked her to, but never into it.

“Are you okay?”

“No.” Before this very moment, he’d just assumed that whatever Tyffial planned to do wouldn’t work, but he had been operating in abstracts. Now that he was here, now that he could smell the herbs and Sehanine only knew what within that house, it was too real. He didn’t know how to prepare for it and he couldn’t push it down like he had every other moment before now. It was finally here- the do-or-die moment that could spell his ending or a promise that he would come out fine and Lucien was never coming back.

Yasha reached down and squeezed his shoulder. “I won’t let anyone force you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

Molly swallowed. That wasn’t going to work- he had to do it. That was the deal. Yasha wouldn’t take that for an answer, however, and so he just moved past it, “Thank you… For not Yasha-ing off for this part.”

“I would never,” she murmured, tousling his hair, and planting a kiss in the space where horn gave way to flesh. Only then did Molly have the courage to step over the threshold.

The house was small, but suitable and comfortable for a single person. There was no ornamentation and everything seemed austere and practical while simultaneously being cluttered. There were tables that didn’t match pushed against walls- workbenches in various states of use, chemicals bubbling on some, others piled high with labeled vials on racks. There was a small area that seemed to be specifically for entertaining guests, but there were only two proper chairs, so everyone took to claiming the scattered stools from the benches and desks and tables and awkwardly set them about or else stood. Cree took one of the more comfortable chairs, leaving the second for Tyffial, who loped in and out of rooms like a wolf on the prowl.

Caduceus took note of the wood burning stove in the corner with two kettles on it. “Oh, you have tea?” He called out.

Tyffial exited a room with an armful of various jars. “One is tea, the other is poison.” She dropped the jars on a mostly empty table and walked over to the stove, lips pursed. With barely any thought behind it, as if this was just how she operated every day, she lifted a chipped cup off of a rack with her pinky finger, flipped it into her hands, and then poured a steaming cup from one kettle, allowed it to cool, and then drank it like a shot. She winced, laid the cup aside, and then carried on her merry way. “That one is poison.”

Not a single member of the Mighty Nein was unaffected by that bold move, ranging from jaw-drops to shocked noises to raised eyebrows. And, in Beau’s case, fist-biting.

Caduceus broke the silence with a mumbled, “...All right. Good to know,” and plucked the not-poison kettle from the stove and set to working on getting tea passed out for everyone, though not a single sip was taken.

“Thank you, Caduceus,” Cree murmured, as he handed her the last cup and settled down with his own. She sipped delicately and only then did anyone else decide to partake- once they were certain she wasn’t keeling over dead from it, anyway.

Molly couldn’t even bring his to his lips. His hands were shaking too much and if he lifted the warm cup, it would only reveal what he’d rather keep concealed.

“So!” Tyffial finished her material gathering and finally collapsed into her chair with, Molly noted, a cup from the poisoned teapot. “You do not recall anything about being Lucien.”

“Not enough to matter.” At Cree’s urging, he explained how he woke up and came to be in the circus in the same vague terms he’d explained it to her, all while Tyffial sipped at her poisoned tea and traced his face with her eyes.

“And what did Otis say?” She asked, snapping her attention to Cree, the second he’d finished, making him feel as if he was something to be analyzed and scrutinized and not an actual person. Tyffial had somehow found a way to treat him even worse than Cree had when they’d first began this journey- to her, he was an alchemical equation in the shape of a tiefling to be pulled apart and reorganized into something else.

If there was any good to be had about this, it was that Cree looked guilty at the way Tyffial was handling this. He caught a flicker of an apologetic look thrown his way before she went back to staring at her rapidly cooling half-finished tea. “They said that... His thoughts are his own and… Not even a bit like Lucien’s.”

“Otis can fucking READ MINDS?!” Nott shrieked, suddenly.

Neither Tyffial nor Cree reacted, even if the rest of the Nein, all wound tighter than a spring again from the way Tyffial spoke, jumped in surprise. Tyffial just took another pointed sip of her tea. “Irritating little worm, aren’t they? But I cannot deny it is a useful trick for ferreting out deceit.”

Nott continued to fume impotently on her stool and began to chug from her flask, her tea going largely ignored. That was likely for the best- if her mouth was kept busy, then she wouldn’t find a way to escalate this somehow.

Tyffial, meanwhile, mulled over this information. “I will need diamond dust for this, which I am presently out of.”

“Oh we’re totally out of it, too.” Jester made a pssh sound. “Oh well, guess we can’t do it. Thanks for the tea.” She started to stand up and Caleb caught her hand and gently pulled her back down.

“I am sensing a but there,” he drawled, eyes narrowed like he could set Tyffial on fire with his mind and make it look like an accident if he tried hard enough. Just when Molly thought he couldn’t love Caleb more…

Fuck. He needed to knock those thoughts off. They weren’t productive and they were only going to make all of this worse.

Tyffial smirked in a way Molly hated more than her complete depersonalization of him. “Ah, a sharp man. Yes, there is a but. I work as a bodyguard for Bastian Klinger, who owns the mine in the Dunrock Mountains and a few other mines in Byroden, all the way in Tal’Dorei- he is a busy, busy man..." She let all that hang there, circling her teacup with a long finger. "And I’ve come to find he has certain habits I do not approve of.”

“Such as?” Fjord offered, urging her on with a tense politeness.

She pressed that scarred tongue of hers right into her cheek as her expression twisted in disgust. “He keeps slaves.”

The reaction that shuddered through Fjord, Jester, and Yasha was nothing compared to Cree, who choked on her tea. “You did not tell me this, Tyffial!”

Tyffial waved her off. “Pah, it was only recently I heard! And I knew you were coming. It would be dealt with then.”

“Dealt with.” It wasn’t a question. Caleb was likely drawing the same conclusions Molly was.

“You need diamonds and I need this man removed from my sight.” Tyffial shrugged. “Easy as- what do they say here in the Empire? Ah yes, easy as pie.”

“We don’t even want-” Nott started, but Molly swept in to interrupt.

“Sounds fair. We do have experience dealing with slavers- recent experience even.” All eyes were on back on him now, and he fought to maintain eye contact with Tyffial. Anything less and he might waver. Anything less and he might run out of this house and see how far he could get before he collapsed.

“Do you now?” She leaned forwards, hand on her chin. “Perhaps you have more of Lucien in you than you think. He detested slavers. The Jagentoths most of all.”

A strange feeling tore its way up Molly’s spine, causing him to shiver like someone stepped on his grave. “We removed the Iron Shepherds.”

“Yeah.” Beau’s eyes were glued to him (he could feel her boring holes into his horns), but she finally forced herself to roll her attention over to Tyffial. “From what I hear, they were the Jagentoth’s men.”

“What a strange coincidence. Klinger has been ranting and raving where sensitive ears might overhear because his new supply of slaves never made it here from the Run. Someone tore through the Sour Nest. That was you, then?” Tyffial looked to Cree, smiling a bit too sweetly, like poisoned honey. “And you did not tell me that, kitten.”

Cree’s ears were flat against her skull. “As you say- I knew we were coming to you.”

“Fair enough.” Tyffial flicked her wrist. “Here is my offer. I cannot take direct action as a member of Klinger’s retinue, but if I were to say be terrible at my job and fail to protect him and his assets, well… that sullies my reputation a bit, but does not get me executed.”

“And you would ask us to kill your employer while we trust you not to turn us in?” Caleb spoke dangerously slowly.

She was watching Caleb now, brown eyes raking across his face in a way that made Molly dig his talons into his leg. “You don’t have to kill him. Rob him. Take a king’s ransom in gems. That alone would bring him to terminate my contract and seek a better bodyguard. You get your diamonds, I get out of a bad contract, and it is all taken care of.”

Beau interjected, “Are you seriously using us so you can get fired from a shit job?”

“Why not?” Tyffial elegantly crossed her legs. “You all came this far out of a sense of obligation to Cree’s mercy. You won’t leave until this is finished. Why not take advantage?”

Cree bristled. “Tyffial, stop this now. I have diamonds. We do not need the theater-“

“We can do it,” Jester piped up. First the first time, Molly jerked his face away from Tyffial to look at her- she was hunched over, her hands knotted in her skirts, her face lowered. “He’s a bad guy, right? So it’s okay.”

“Jester…” Beau trailed off. She looked to Molly, who had to look away.

This was dangerous. This was exactly the sort of situation he was hoping to avoid. He was the only one who needed to endure all of this, and yet they were all being dragged along, and while he might not be the smartest of the lot, he knew a con when he saw one. There was a lot of cleverness behind Tyffial’s eyes.

She wanted to clear the board and settle all of her affairs.

Fear and revulsion rose up within him and he felt two separate eyes start to burn, while dissonant whispers filled his head, punctuated by screams. He grit his teeth through it and shook it off, but the effect of it lingered, leaving him hollowed out and exhausted.

He growled out, “I think it’s been a very long trip and we need to discuss this.”

Cree huffed out a long breath. “Indeed. You should not be pushing them so, Tyffial.”

“I am only offering them an opportunity to get very rich and degrade an awful man. The blue one understands.” Tyffial flicked a lock of her hair over her shoulder. “Mull it over, and then come back this evening. We can try to get to know each other, perhaps clear up some trust issues we've accumulated already.”

“Yeah,” Fjord broke in before anyone could interject. He stood and laid his mostly untouched cup aside. “Yeah, I think that’s a wise decision. You’ll understand if we’re all very hesitant about all of this.”

“Then you understand why I am, as well,” Tyffial responded with a sharp curtness. “Go then. Think it over.”

Molly rose quickly with Yasha at his elbow and rushed to the door. The second the cold late afternoon air hit him, he doubled over and vomited in the mud just outside, barely out of the path, while Yasha held him and pulled his hair away from his face just like she always did when he drank too much. This could be any other day, any other moment, and not the potential beginning of the end of everything.

After dry heaving and taking gulping panicked breaths, Molly leaned against Yasha, who wrapped her arms around him. “It’s okay, Molly. We’re going to get you out of here.”

“But Cree-“ he murmured.

“No! Fuck her. If this is what it’s going to take….” Yasha buried her face between his horns. “I can’t lose you.”

Pressed against her as he was, he didn’t realize Cree had exited until he heard her drawl, “I admire your honesty, Ms. Yasha. It is good to know where I stand.”

Molly gently removed himself from Yasha’s grip so he could face her. “She’s going to get them killed. That wasn’t the deal.”

Cree at least had the decency to look guilty about that too. “I am very much aware. But Tyffial's feelings are not false, and I agree that her plan is solid in keeping herself alive as well as dealing with the man, however-“

“It is as I said,” Caleb cut in, having exited with the rest of the Nein. “She has no reason not to use us to take the fall so that there is no one to trouble either of you while you mold Mollymauk into your ideal. We have done a great deal of good by you, Cree. It should not have to come to this.”

Cree jerked her head away. “You have, yes, and that is why I will go with you when you raid Klinger’s home. Tyffial will not see another Tombtaker fall to the Empire’s axe, especially not me, and she respects that in Lucien’s absence, my word is law. If you cannot trust her word, then trust mine.”

“She had to have known it was us who took out the Shepherds.” Beau stepped forwards, eyes narrowed and fighting to catch Cree’s. “She built this up knowing that we’d fight this guy anyway, because he could have bought our friends.”

Cree dragged a hand down her face. “I have suspicions. She is clever and she is calculated, but if nothing else, she truly does detest slavers, as I have already said, and would see that man destroyed to make sure he does not bind her to him further than a simple contract.”

“What happened to you in the Run?” Molly blurted out, suddenly. He suddenly couldn’t stop thinking about the way Cree had reacted to everything within the Sour Nest, and now there was Tyffial using any means at her disposal to ruin a slaver. It wasn't necessary to dig into, especially not here, but anything to keep from thinking about the real issue at hand.

“It is best not to ask and a mercy you do not remember, however cruel it might be to us.” Cree tugged on her cloak. “Tend to your business. I will… see that Tyffial is more hospitable when you return.”

She vanished within the house before anyone could protest, leaving the Nein to stare after her, still on uncertain ground.

“Do you believe her, Molly?” Yasha asked.

Molly stared beyond the door, conflicted to the point of being frozen in inaction. There was no right move but to operate alone. The only good choice would be to send them all away and go in with Cree alone.

And he would lose to Lucien, then, because there would be no one to hold onto when he faltered. He was stuck unless he put his gold where his mouth was and believed in Cree, and put the lives of all of his friends in her hands.

“I have to,” he whispered.

The funny thing was (in a way that wasn’t exactly funny at all), if it weren’t for Tyffial being a shady bitch (and seriously what was with the Tombtakers stealing all of her aesthetics) and the Nein’s horrific track record with such things, Nott would be excited for a potential heist. Her itch remained mostly unscratched, give or take a few pockets here and there and this could promise quite the take.

But they had discussed it at length- with shockingly little shouting- and agreed to it, regardless of what a bad move it was. Molly refused to be the betrayer in this scenario and Jester was adamant on ruining this guy and Caleb- her pragmatic, powerful boy!- said that the gems they could steal would set them for a long time. The pros outweighed the cons.

They would just have to be careful and trust that Cree was right, and Tyffial would not willingly put her in danger. The risk was calculated, and measured as being worth it.

But Nott had contingency plans in case things escalated fully out of their favor. She would not lose another family and she would definitely not die as a goblin if she could help it.

She slipped from the Nein with the promise of being careful, claiming legitimate business to take care of (which was true), and tracked down the place that Fayne had told her about- a nondescript shop set several hundred feet from the sprawl of Peddler’s Row, caught somewhere between a path to the mountain and the rest of the city. The faded sign above it read VICTOR’S BLACK POWDER EMPORIUM and in smaller letters underneath it: (Wildemount branch).

Nott ducked inside the door and immediately clocked the amount of grime and black soot coating everything. Barrels were stacked up haphazardly in corners and if it wasn’t for the counter, she would have convinced herself that she’d walked into a storage room of some kind and not an actual shop.

A storage room set to the blow with one errant flame, no less. No wonder she kept it away from everything else.

“Uh. Hello?” She called out, nervously, stepping cautiously like bombs might be set into the floorboards.

A dingy curtain that might have been another color once but had faded to dull charcoal gray due to the amount of powder settling on everything parted and a tall human woman with messy gray hair, a snaggletooth, and sharp green eyes stepped out, wiping black-smudged fingers on a miserably filthy apron that did nothing to actually clean them off. When she reached up to push a pair of glasses further up her face, she dragged a line of black soot up her cheek and didn’t seem to notice or mind.

“Yeah, what d’ya want?” She spoke coolly and impassively, already bored with the conversation and didn’t seem to find Nott’s mask the least bit off-putting. Given the conditions she operated under, that wasn’t surprising.

Well, she was here and if this woman was crazy, she was doing a fairly good job of pretending she wasn’t. Nott sidled up to the counter and pulled herself up so she was dangling off the side, all for the sake of being nearly eye-level with this woman so she could speak surreptitiously. “Are you Victoria?”

“That’s me,” she drawled, one thin gray eyebrow shooting up.

“I’ve come here for-” Nott glanced around, “- black powder for personal use.”

Victoria glanced around the shop. “Well, you walked into the black powder emporium, so look at that! You came to the right place.” The sarcasm dripped off every word and Nott did not appreciate her lack of commitment to the bit she was laying out here for her.

Scowling, she dug into her bag and slapped her gun on the counter. “I need ammunition for this.”

“Huh.” Victoria picked it up, examining it. “This is an Empire military pistol. You Empire military, kid?”

“If I told you that,” Nott said, gravely serious, “I’d have to kill you.”

She snorted, turning the weapon over in her hands. “I’m just fuckin’ with you. I don’t care how you got the damn thing, so long as you can pay me to arm it.” She slid it back over to Nott and began to walk to the barrels, weighing out the contents into burlap bags of different sizes.

Nott dropped down onto the ground. After all this, it was easier than she thought. Huh. Maybe not everything in her life was a series of trial and error and absolute fucking misery before she got it right. “So, uh… Is this a family business?”

Victoria dropped three bags of black powder on the counter and began rifling behind it until she’d collected a selection of what Nott presumed to be the actual ammunition- shiny metal things, so small and unassuming, but with the force of the ignited powder behind them…

She could almost feel her pupils dilating in wonder at the thought.

“My dad ran the first Black Powder Emporium in Vasselheim until the dead started rising twenty years ago and he blew himself up.” Victoria leaned her elbows on the counter and sighed wistfully. “Old codger died the way he lived- absolutely batshit insane. So! I’m technically the only one in the family business now. It’s a young person’s game these days, especially with the way the Empire tries to control the production. And those schmucks in Whitestone have been trying to shut it all down for ages. You know my pops actually sold to the guy who supposedly invented these?” She picked up the pistol and gesticulated to it with her free hand.

Despite being the one to ask the idle question, Nott had zoned out in her eagerness for the wonderful toys laid out in front of her. Before Victoria could say another word or fall into nostalgia, she slapped down a bag of money and said, breathless with excitement. “How much of all of this can I get with three hundred gold?”

Victoria blinked at her reminiscing being cut off at the legs by such a random outburst, the unloaded gun dropping from her fingers and landing with a clatter on the counter, and then slowly, her surprise turned into a manic grin to rival Nott's own. “Oh, kiddo. You’re a fuckin’ delight, aren’tcha?”

Caleb did not believe in Fate. To believe in Fate would be to believe that Fate could not be changed, that everything that had ever happened had happened for a reason and therefore nothing needed to be fixed. The flow of time should not bend for anyone, because everything was already in the proper order.

And to believe that would be like telling himself that Una and Leofric Ermendrud died so that he could become Caleb Widogast and theirs was a sacrifice, not a slaughter. He would defy anyone to tell him that two wonderful parents should have fallen to the fire so that a worthless bastard whose bloodstained hands would never come clean should live and go on to do… what exactly? Travel with these assholes? Do a few good turns? Love freely and recklessly and be loved in turn, knowing he didn’t deserve it?

No. Fate did not exist. It would be too cruel.

And yet, the coincidences kept adding up, like everything was tied together and they were being strung along on a set path from the moment Molly died on the Glory Run Road, and try as he might, he could not divert it. Molly would not be swayed to betray Cree, even if it was killing him to put them all through such a risky endeavor, much less the risk posed to himself.

So what could they all do but keep on the path? At least until they found a place to sunder the thread once and for all.

Molly had insisted Yasha and Beau go to let off steam with the soldiers where they could take out their frustrations and maybe pick up bits of information that Beau desperately craved. Not wanting to leave him alone, Caleb had swallowed down the ache in his chest and invited him to accompany him to the bookshop, while Nott ran off on her own errands and Fjord led a still-rattled Jester to find her usual collection of pastries.

“We can go somewhere more interesting after, Mollymauk,” Caleb mumbled, as he slipped within the Quaint Quill. “I know you are not a big reader.”

“Oh, don’t worry about me.” Molly’s tail flicked restlessly. He still looked ashen and a little emptied out and he kept digging his talons into the palm with the eye just hard enough that he grimaced. He hadn’t drawn blood yet, but it was an inevitability at this point. “I like the smell of old, well-loved things.”

That caught the attention of the proprietor, a gentle half-elf with graying blonde hair, who quickly engaged Molly in a discussion about how much love went into used books, while telling off on the soldiers who enjoyed reading the smutty romance novels more than the pulpy adventure series. Indeed, there was a collection of worn smut novels that could have rivaled Chastity’s Nook and Caleb took a few that looked enticing to add to their growing library.

Caleb took note of Molly leaning on the counter, fully absorbed in what the half-elf had to say, all smiles and half-lidded flirtatiousness and coy flicks of his tail. He looked so liberated and within his element, sliding into the safety of a playful con- and it was all a con. Every now and then, Molly would meet his eyes subtly while gesturing to indicate the shelves, and then point with his tail like he was encouraging him to do something.

Detect Magic, he thought, realizing far too slowly what the purpose of all this theater was. Molly knew that he loved to throw up a detect magic in places like this to see if there was anything interesting. He remembered that. He always remembered that, and sometimes Caleb doubted it was a selfish impulse simply because he loved magical toys. There likely wouldn’t be anything here for Molly’s use, just his own.

He shook his head and stepped out of view so he could throw up the somatic motions for the spell without being caught and when he opened his eyes, he was disappointed to find that nothing lit up and the theater was all for naught, aside from just delighting Mollymauk's love of chattering amicably to new people just to see what they had to say. Well, it was to be expected- lightning rarely struck twice, after all.

He kept idly perusing at a steady pace, listening to Molly’s lilting voice carry across the small shop. Towards the back, there was a small children’s section that caught his eye and drew him in with the promise of nostalgia. How many of these books had he owned as a child? The tales were familiar to him and one, in particular, stood out. Der Bärenhäuter.

He lifted the thin tome with shaking hands and flipped through it, checking for familiar illustrations. Yes, it was exactly like the one his mother had read to him from. ”See, Bren? You should never judge anyone by how they look. It is the heart inside that matters,” Una Ermendrud’s voice traveled through time to reach out to him.

He nearly put it down to chase the memory away, but hesitated and laid it atop his pile of books to be purchased. Perhaps Molly and Jester would like to hear the story of the soldier and the hag and the bearskin.

He counted out his gold for his purchases and the pair of them left, leaving the shopkeeper rosy-cheeked and satisfied by their presence. Molly bought them hot chocolate at a small stall and they sat on a bench in the Scatters watching the soldiers march in groups of three and four as they made their rounds, while harried-looking townsfolk darted from their homes to the Peddler’s Row in the hopes of making quick purchases before dark, which was coming on quickly. The rest of the Nein were nowhere to be seen yet.

They were alone and the silence between them was discomfiting. There was so much to be said and yet he did not want to say any of it. Molly was finally starting to relax a little after their harrowing conversation with Tyffial. To bring it up or linger too much on any more of that would be to encourage more panic. There was only one thing he could do that might make him feel a bit better. “Mollymauk?”

“Hm?” Molly broke off from where he was staring at a soldier breaking rank to run and swing a beautiful town girl up into his arms, while she laughed and his friends jeered and teased him.

Caleb shifted his new books around until he found the copy of Der Bärenhäuter. “How do you feel about fairy tales?”

Molly snorted. “Where do you think Gustav gets his ideas? He likes the old legends best, but we did a few shows based on fairy tales.” He looked at the cover. “Can’t say I remember this one though.”

“Ja, it is an old one from my youth.” He paused, awkwardly. “I thought perhaps it might steady your nerves before we go back to Tyffial’s to hear it.”

His tail tapped on the bench, excitedly, even though his smile was… strangely earnest. Not wide and facetious and a bit manic. Dare he say it? Mollymauk Tealeaf almost looked shy. “I’d like that.”

Caleb’s cheeks burned hot from the weight of that smile. It wasn’t right of him to be that adorable. Then again, here he was offering bedtime stories out here in the chilly late afternoon. Perhaps that was the way of it.

The words were in Zemnian, but he read them out loud in Common. For the most part he didn’t even need to read at all- he remembered this tale just that well, and the only reason to hold the book open at all was so Molly could peer over his shoulder and look at the illustrations, so close that the jewelry from his horns brushed up against his cheek and the side of his left horn pressed against the side of his head.

His breath hitched a bit, but he moved past it to speak as clearly as his mother had, voices for different characters and all. “Once upon a time, there was an Empire soldier, returned from war, who found he had no home to go back to. His parents were dead and his brother had no more room for him. As he wandered, desperate and alone, a hag came upon him and offered to make him rich if, for seven years, he did not bathe, cut his nails or hair, pray to any god, and only wear the clothes that he was given. If he did fall to despair or perish, then he would be rich and free. If he died or gave in to the urge to break their pact and do that which was forbidden to him, then the hag would take his soul forevermore.

Seeing no alternative, the soldier agreed and the hag gave him a green coat with pockets that would always be full of money and a bearskin that he must wear over it, even when sleeping. From hence, he would only be known as Bearskin.

Bearskin set out and gave his limitless money to temples, asking them to pray to the gods he could not pray to himself that he might endure his trial. He gave to the poor and the destitute, but as the years grew on, he grew revolting to behold. He could not seek shelter for, despite his good heart, no inn or tavern would have such a creature in their midst. He had ceased to be a man in the eyes of many and there was not a thing he could do about it if he wished to win the bargain the hag had thrust upon him in his moment of true desperation.

In the fourth year, the man came upon a farmer, weeping, and Bearskin asked him, ‘Herr farmer, why do you weep so?’ And the farmer told him of his woes- he had lost all of his money and could not support his daughters or even pay the innkeeper where he was staying, and would surely be sent to the axe for theft. Bearskin said, ‘Do not fear, my friend. I will pay for your room and give you this purse of gold, as well.’

The farmer was so delighted by Bearskin’s kindness that he promised him the hand of one of his daughters and brought him home to meet them. The first daughter screamed and fled at the sight of him. The second called him a bear trying to pass himself off as human and recoiled from the sight. The third daughter, however, recognized the kind heart and agreed to fulfill her father’s promise. Bearskin gave her half a ring and vowed to return in three years.

At the end of the seven years, Bearskin met the hag who took the skin from him and saw him bathed and tended to, until he was a handsome soldier again. He returned to the farmer’s house and, not recognizing this as Bearskin, the elder daughters fawned over him, while the youngest, his true betrothed, did not recognize him. He said to the farmer, ‘Herr Farmer, I have come to marry one of your daughters,’ and while the eldest daughters dressed splendidly to attract his eye, the man formerly known as Bearskin slipped the other half of the ring into a wine glass for the third daughter, who, upon drinking it, realized he was her betrothed. They were wed and, realizing what they had given up for judging outward appearances, the two sisters killed themselves.

Later, the hag came to Bearskin with a cage containing two bright lights hanging from her belt and she told him, ‘You see, I have gotten the better deal- two souls for the price of one.’”

He looked up from the book to find that Molly had collapsed against his shoulder, breathing peacefully with his eyes shut in blissful sleep. If Caleb were to move even a bit, he would surely startle awake, so he stayed still and let him rest.

“You probably need this, circus man,” he said, gently, and then dared to press the ghost of a kiss on his forehead. Molly stirred, wrinkled his nose, but kept right on sleeping.

Whatever was going on in Jester’s head wasn’t going to be cured by pastries, but it was as good as anything else to start with, and judging by how long she’d been in the bakery, her coin purse was going to be significantly lighter at the end of it.

Fjord waited outside, arms crossed, hypervigilant. While the matter had been settled, he still didn’t like it and he didn’t like the look in Nott’s eyes when she ran off after their conversation in Hupperdook. They needed to be discerning about what plans ran counter to the Tombtakers’ plans and not… whatever the hell she had in mind.

Nott was many things, but she wasn’t discerning.

But really, most of his concern was for Jester and the way she’d stiffened up when Tyffial had mentioned Klinger being a slaver. She’d agreed without question, even knowing how unsubtle the baited trap was, because of how close this was to her. He never thought she had it in her to be vengeful, but he supposed everyone had a little bit of that boiling anger inside of them, longing to consume them utterly.

The mere thought of that word set his hand to itching and he twitched his fingers into his palm to quell the urge to draw the falchion just to make sure he still could.

You jealous? He thought, his own accent ringing false in his head, after so long not using it. Think I’ll trade your eyes for another set?

A low growl in the back of his mind crawled up his spine and set him to shuddering. He cracked his neck and straightened up. Right. We’ll talk later. I understand.

Deal with this and then maybe they could head somewhere else and figure this shit out. By the map, they weren’t far from the Capitol now, if he wanted to say fuck Cree's belief that the Academy would do nothing for him and head that way. They could get there right through the Pearlbow Wilderness in maybe a day or two worth of travel… Assuming they survived this bloody heist.

No. They would. They had to.

“You look like someone just walked over your grave,” a lilting-accented voice crooned, breaking up his thoughts. Fjord turned to look to see a market stall brimming with beautiful stuffed animals and toys and figurines of various fantastical beasts in overwhelming pastel shades. Centaur statues in dynamic poses, life-sized pixie dolls with porcelain faces, and creatures he couldn’t even put a name to.

And unicorns. So many fucking unicorns.

The person manning the stall, who’d been the one to speak, was a relatively nondescript looking elvish gentleman of indeterminate age whose only real defining feature was the mass of red hair that was straining against a bit of leather that held it back from his face and his sharp green eyes. If his hair had been just a bit less garish and his eyes just a bit less like emeralds set into the average planes of his face, he would have lost the man in the crowd easily.

Which told him that this was someone who needed to blend into the crowd, but had too much of an ego to commit to it. He set his jaw and strolled forwards, eyes narrowed.

“I’m a sailor. If I don’t die by sea, then I’ve done somethin’ wrong with my time here,” he drawled.

“So no earthly grave for you, I see.” The elf steepled his fingers underneath his chin. “I couldn’t help but notice you were with the pretty tiefling girl before. She seemed… a bit miserable.” Off Fjord’s dour look, he added, “Well, I make it my business to make people happy!” He gestured to his wares. “I can recognize a gloomy face in the crowd, because I know exactly what they need. Who doesn’t love a toy? Brings back the wonder of simpler times.”

Fjord’s eyes fell upon a floppy unicorn in pale pink hues that was just the right size to be held in Jester’s arms. The elf followed his gaze. “Ohhh I think she’d be very pleased with that one.”

“You think so?” He doubted a cuddly stuffed animal was really going to cure Jester’s trauma- if anything, it would just be a bandage when she needed an actual salve. But it would make her happy and show he was thinking of her and looking out for her. “How much?”

“Mmmm for that one?” The elf considered it. “Ten gold.”

Fjord choked on air. “Ten gold?!”

“We’re in the middle of a war. And these are meticulously made by hand by yours truly.” He held out a hand for examination and Fjord noted that it was long-fingered and lacking in any of the calluses that would be normal for a craftsman.

He mulled it over, figuring, at best, it was a scam and not an attempt to hurt Jester- the damn thing would have gone for a song if it was a curse. And if it would perk her up just a bit before they descended into yet another situation that promised to be unpleasant, then it was probably worth the coin.

Sighing, he dug in his purse and slapped the coin on the stall’s counter without a word. Anything he might have said would have probably come out vaguely threatening and he was consciously aware of the Righteous Brand soldiers idly milling about Peddler’s Row with bored expressions- any perceived trouble would be met with quick attention.

The elf snatched up the coin and passed over the plush unicorn, which was softer than it had any right to be and just the right amount of stuffing for cuddling, like it had been made for Jester’s arms. “Lovely doing business with you.”

“Uh-huh,” Fjord mumbled. He caught the sound of the chimes from the bakery as someone exited and shoved the unicorn behind his back, whirling around just in time to see Jester exiting with a large sack of pastries.

“There you are!” She chirped. “I got so much, but they had all kinds of stuff with cinnamon, and I couldn’t decide.” She shifted the bag a bit so she could size him up. “Why is your face doing that?”

“Doing what?” He wasn’t even consciously aware of what his face was doing. Fuck. Did he look nervous? Heat began to spread across his cheeks, making it even worse.

“You look like you’re up to something. And you’re red now and- what’s behind your back?” She tried to circle around him, but he spun in place, preventing her from getting behind him. She tried again until they were dizzily spinning in the middle of the Row and Jester burst out laughing.

His heart could have burst at the sound.

“Don’t be a dick! What do you have?” She was trying to sound stern, but her giggling ruined the severity of it.

“Well, I was just walking along and this little guy wandered up to me…” He pulled the unicorn from his back and whinnied out of the corner of his mouth, moving its head up and down to make it seem like it was the one making the sound.

Jester’s eyes widened and she almost dropped her bag of pastries. “Omigosh, Fjord… Is that for me?”

“I dunno,” Fjord hemmed and hawed. “Let’s see what he has to say.” He held up the unicorn and spoke in a squeaky voice, punctuated by horse-like chuffs, “Jester, please take me home. It’s so lonely out here.” Fjord dropped the voice. “Well, look at that. I think he wants to go with you.”

She shifted the bag to one arm and reached out to take the plushie with reverence. As soon as her arm was hooked around it she buried her face into the soft plush of its body. “Ohhh it smells like evergreen! Kinda like the Traveler. Thank you, Fjord.” She stood on her tiptoes and pressed a kiss to his cheek.

That should have gotten him weak in the knees and blushing, but he’d gone still when she said, as simply as anything, just like the Traveler. His eyes shifted to a point above Jester’s head, already knowing what he’d see- or what he wouldn’t see.

The stall he’d purchased the unicorn from was no longer where it was and the elf gone with it.

He was caught somewhere between unholy terror at the utter creepiness of it and the possibility that Jester’s god just conned him out of ten gold. (And how could that happen exactly? Gods didn’t need coin and they certainly didn’t do… whatever the hell that was in his experience, limited though it might be.) He opened his mouth in wordless shock and then closed it again, dropping his gaze to look at Jester, who was affixing the unicorn plush to her belt next to her new sickle, beaming all the while.

A con artist and a trickster, he might be, but he’d known what would make Jester smile and who best to be the one to coax it out of her.

Huh. Maybe not every bizarre, off-kilter and far more influential than normal patron was out to corrupt and entice and lead them astray.

Still a dick for the gold though.

Molly’s unexpected nap on Caleb was dreamless and while his head swam in frantic circles about the fact that the wizard had allowed it, outwardly he’d been flirty and playful about it, and they’d walked back to Tyffial’s having a good chuckle about the whole thing.

He very much didn’t admit how much of the story he’d heard and how it had resonated. He could see why Caleb had picked it- he probably assumed Molly was Bearskin, the red-eyed, sharp-toothed tiefling always treated with disrespect, but never unwilling to give. The truth was, it was Caleb who draped himself in drab clothes and wore dirty bandages and always looked just a bit too unkempt. He looked like a vagrant and yet underneath all of that, his heart was kind. Maybe not as kind as Bearskin’s, but kind enough. Far kinder than anyone gave him credit for, anyway.

He carried the affection Caleb had dredged up in him like a hot coal in his heart and stoked it into a gentle blaze, allowing it to warm him as they rejoined the rest of the Nein back in Tyffial’s home and settled down into their scattered chairs and stools. The only change from when they left was now there was a whiskey decanter on the end table between Cree and Tyffial’s chairs and Caduceus was on the floor, cross-legged, looking pleased with himself.

“What did we miss?” Beau asked. Both she and Yasha boasted bruises and cut lips and a variety of battle scars from messing around in the Aegis Block and were altogether less tense for it, though both of them glowered at Tyffial before taking their seats.

“We just had a chat,” Caduceus smiled, serenely. “I feel pretty comfortable that whatever we do about Ms. Tyffial’s employer, everything will be on the up and up.”

“Your friend is quite a negotiator,” Tyffial drawled, laconically. Molly noted there was a twitch in her left eye and Cree looked, dare he say it, somewhat amused.

“Yes, that is the word,” she murmured. She lifted a whiskey tumbler in a mock salute. “Rest assured, Mighty Nein. Your concerns have been considered and there are no tricks.”

Caduceus murmured his assent from the floor.

“Funky cow man did it again,” Fjord mumbled under his breath, and then, louder, added, “So what now?”

“Now!” Tyffial beamed. The twitch hadn’t left her, but she seemed to be more invested in covering it up as she plucked the decanter off the table, “Now we play a little game. A bit of loosening up so we all can be friends, no?”

Cree pawed at her face. “Tyffial…”

“Pssh,” Tyffial hissed gently. “It will be just like old times in the Orders.” Her wicked grin returned. “Cree taught us this lovely Marquesian drinking game when we were young. What was it called?”

Backed into a corner, Cree grimaced. “It was called ‘What is that about?’”

“What is that about?” Yasha asked, immediately.

Molly, feeling a bit coming on and unable to resist, said, “That’s what she said.”

Yasha wrinkled her nose. “But what is that about?”

Cree interjected before that joke could be beaten into the ground, still clearly agitated by this. “It is simple. You roll dice and whoever has the lowest number must honestly answer a question from the person who rolled the highest. Should they not wish to answer, they must drink. I assume all of you have dice?”

Nott barked a laugh. “Who doesn’t carry dice around here?” She produced several from her own pocket, though it appeared that everyone but Caduceus and Jester had one of their own.

“I’ll sit this one out,” Caduceus chuckled when Nott offered him one of hers. “I’m generally pretty honest anyway.”

“So’m I, but I totally wanna play.” Jester plucked one of Nott’s dice and rolled it around between her palms. “I bet I won’t have to take a sip.”

"You said that about Never Have I Ever too," Beau pointed out with a wry grin and Jester stuck her tongue out, playfully.

“I’m sure you’ll understand if we prefer to drink our own liquor,” Caleb drawled, gesturing to Nott’s flask, but did not protest the game, which shocked Molly. Having an out to avoid being truthful probably helped.

Tyffial shrugged. “Whatever makes you comfortable.”

They found places where they could comfortably toss their dice and rolled for their first round. Molly wrinkled his nose when he realized he’d gotten the lowest.

“Twenty,” Beau grinned across from him. Despite what a bad idea it was to get drunk with a potential enemy, even with Caduceus claiming the situation was handled, she looked eager, and Molly couldn’t help but find the whole thing delightful. Drinking was a good way to forget troubles and being an accomplished liar meant he would be drinking a lot if he rolled poorly. “Molly, what was up with the Knot sisters?”

Molly nearly had the flask to his mouth in preparation to deny her answers and then frowned, “That’s what you’re asking? That’s not even about me!”

“Yeah, ‘cause you’ve got two years worth of memories and you lie about everything and I know you love to talk shit. So what was their deal? It’s been buggin’ me.”

Molly shook his head. “I honestly don’t know and never thought to ask. I guess they were orphans? They were from Shadycreek Run. They all were, except Ornna and Bo.”

He glanced over to Tyffial and Cree who had both gone stoic. “Being from Shadycreek Run is enough to make anyone have baggage,” the elf woman said, lightly, and yet her posture was on a knife’s edge. “Enough said. Shall we roll again?”

The next round went to Nott and Tyffial, which promised an interesting result. Nott glared at her with beady eyes. “The poison thing. What’s up with that?”

Tyffial barked a high-pitched laugh. “Oh that old trick? It is a skill I picked up in the Claret Orders where Cree learned her blood magic.”

“But Molly’s not immune to poison,” Nott eyed him. “That we know of.”

“I can cure poison,” Molly pointed out. “But I feel like I’d know if I were immune to it.”

“Molly-” and gods did he hate the way Tyffial said his name, like an insult, “- is not of the same Order that I am. He is Order of the Ghostslayer. He’s a hunter of the undead, bred in the blood. I- and my brother as well, before he was killed- am of the Order of the Mutant. I concoct mutagens that improve my prowess in battle.” She lifted her bare arm to brush hair out of her face, revealing that among the hatchmark scars from blades, she had a dozen or so strange, ugly stretch marks.

“And can anyone drink those, uh, mutagens?” Fjord piped up. “Like normal potions?”

Tyffial snorted. “No. You have not ingested the hunter’s bane. You would be dead in seconds, slowly and agonizingly, as your body rejected the properties.”

Fjord blanched. “Right. I get that.”

“But do not worry about the potion I will be preparing for Mollymauk to unlock his lost memories.” She must have picked up on the looks everyone was shooting her. “I am a skilled alchemist. That mutagen will be safe for consumption.”

“It has ground up diamond in it!” Nott protested.

“Very, very ground up.”

Molly shuddered, barely registering anything after Tyffial’s description of the Orders. That was more than he ever wanted to know about his blood powers. He was content that they worked and that was all that mattered. Moving on. He rolled again- and the rest followed suit- and got a number somewhere in the middle. Judging by Jester’s squeak of victory, she’d rolled the highest.

“Fuck!” Nott swore and reached for her flask. “I got a one. All right, Jes, lay it on me.”

Jester leaned forwards mischievously. “Where do you keep running off to when you go off alone? You’ve done it twice now.” She paused. “I mean. Uh. What is up with thaaaaat?”

Nott raised the flask to her lips and took a long drag. “I’ll tell you later.”

“Aw technical foul, Nott,” Beau protested.

“No one said I couldn’t do that!” Nott responded smugly. “You all can just stew in the mystery. It’s good for you. And as a lady, I deserve to have some secrets.”

Fjord mumbled something and got one of Nott’s extra dice thrown at his head for his troubles. They went a few more rounds where no one answered questions, determined to drink, while their opponents gnashed their teeth. Molly finally rolled high at last, while Fjord rolled the lowest.

He seized upon an opportunity he had been meaning to ask about, but hadn’t had the opportunity. “What is up with your accent?”

Fjord had Nott’s flask held at chest level and he stared down at it, debating whether to drink or not. Molly noted that only a few of the Nein seemed surprised by the question- so he hadn’t been the only one who noticed him slip on occasion. “Eventually, I’ll be ready to tell that story,” he finally sighed, raising the flask to his mouth. “For now, we’ll just leave it as it is.” He cleared his throat and gestured with the flask. “Next.”

"So mysterious," Tyffial purred, leaning over the arm of her chair. Fjord choked and repeated "next" with a little more force and a lot more wheeze.

Dice clattered across various surfaces, and eyes traced over every number, checking to see who had the lucky result. Tyffial rolled highest and Cree, with a two, rolled lowest, and she rolled her eyes in kind. Shifting the ice in her whiskey tumbler idly, she drawled, “You had best ask the one with the second lowest number, Tyffial. There is nothing about me you do not already-“

“You haven’t killed them yet. What is that about?”

Cree’s breath caught in her throat. It was the last sound anyone in the room made for a long time, though Molly could hear his heart pounding in his ears so loudly, he doubted he would have heard anything else anyway.

He looked to Cree: frozen, gobsmacked.

He looked to Tyffial and there was no humor in her tight smile that showed too many teeth. This wasn’t playful banter between two friends during a drinking game- this was all but a demand and how Cree reacted could seal her fate.

With shaking hands, Cree downed the rest of her whiskey in a single swallow, slammed the glass down so hard that hairline fractures worked their way down it in jagged patterns, and glowered at Tyffial. “That is enough, Tyffial.”

Only then did the elf woman back down, palms up, all smiles. “Of course. I was only playing.”

Molly looked to Caduceus, who was eyeing Tyffial, warily, but when he turned to Cree she was bristling. “I believe we have had enough play for one day.” She stood. “I will escort them to the tavern. We will talk later.

And with that she marched out and with wobbly legs from sitting on the floor or from too much drink, the Nein anxiously staggered back out into the night air, trying to process the shift in the dynamic they had just witnessed.

Cree took their side. Molly watched the back of her head from where he was leaning on Yasha, but found no more tells in her posture and his head was spinning too much to really analyze her anyway- he’d slipped more than his fair share of sips from Nott’s flask between rounds and was feeling the dizziness. He could only pray to the Moonweaver it would lead him to more dreamless sleep.

It had always occurred to Molly that Cree was in a position to kill them if she wanted to. That she could have found a hundred ways to leave them to die if she was truly dishonorable. The Nein had only tolerated the idea because they believed that one tabaxi couldn't best all eight of them. Obviously, Tyffial believed otherwise, and she didn’t seem the type to exaggerate.

So that left only one explanation- Cree was still on her path, but she wasn’t thinking like one of the Tombtakers anymore. She was thinking like a member of the Mighty Nein, who take care of each other, and don’t hurt people if they don’t have to.

That could mean nothing... but it could mean everything.

Cree stormed back into Tyffial’s home, after seeing the Nein settled into the tavern, with a thunderclap of slamming doors. “I warned you.”

“No, your firbolg friend warned me.” Tyffial was at her stove where something viscous was brewing. Her eyes were dark and hooded and she looked pinched and irritated. Her little smiles and coy jokes were just for show- Cree had always known underneath that she was all oleander, pretending to be catmint. Of course she would break at the end and show her teeth as much as she could.

She did not expect those teeth to be turned on her. “He is an accomplished sage, for lack of a better term. You would never have been able to fool him.”

“Ah, and what of you?” Tyffial whirled to face her. “I handed you a fucking snare and you drew attention to it.”

Cree would not back down. “You do not think they realized it? It was an obvious snare. Just because they are indebted to me does not mean they are stupid.”

Tyffial was closer to her height than Lucien ever was, and yet she still towered over her, but when she pressed in closer, Cree felt like a small kitten again, tiny and underfed and desperate for true companionship.

And Tyffial was back to being an angry barely-teenage elf with a brother she had to look out for, who had to look out for her in kind, all alone in the world, except for the family she found. Once, Cree was a part of that and yet it felt so strangely far away and difficult to reach. She had obsessed over getting Lucien back, only to reach the final point in her destination and not recognize her dearest living friend.

”You brought them here to me!” Tyffial shouted, desperately. “Are they following you or are you following them?”

Cree fumbled, trying to find a point she could cling to that would save her. “I have their blood-“

“They have your heart.” Cree froze and Tyffial continued with a hitch in her voice. “A fair trade, no? We are from the Run, kitten. We do not believe in fair trade. Something is wrong, Cree. Do you want him back or not?”

For a moment, her mouth opened and closed, wordlessly, until her anger began to build and she blurted out with a growl, “Do not doubt my convictions, Tyffial. I loved Lucien more than my own life. He was mine to protect. Remember who it was that was left in charge. I know what I am doing. We do not have to harm anyone else to get what we want.”

“Only Mollymauk.” Tyffial’s lips twitched, her posture half between obedience and rebellion. How had it gone so wrong so quickly? Was she simply not ruthless enough? Lucien would be. He trusted you to be ruthless and do what needed to be done.

“We will all get what we want, Tyffial,” she sighed, through clenched teeth. “We will bring Lucien home and perhaps the Mighty Nein will understand what it is that the Somnovem have offered him and come to respect it. Surely, Lucien would appreciate a larger congregation.”

It was a poor argument, but it was one she was clinging to. Tyffial tutted, but the tension began to ease out of her- less defeated and more resigned. “Oh, my poor, sweet kitten. You cannot have everything.” She reached out and pinched her ear the same way Lucien used to do and a shudder tore its way through her.

“So I hope you choose wisely.”

Chapter Text

The door had barely shut before Beau whirled on him. “What the fuck, Molly?”

They had procured two rooms at the Widow’s Walk, the least disreputable tavern in Nogvurot by Cree’s standards and named so due to the amount of wives in town widowed by wars, which gave it a somber ambiance. One such widow was the proprietor and she still wore a black veil for grief, though whether it was showmanship or an inability to let go remained to be seen. Molly hoped it was the former. Tacky, certainly, but he could respect an aesthetic.

Only one room was in use at the moment. The Nein had all piled into it without having to be told, eager to discuss the day’s events without anyone hanging over their shoulders. Shoving eight people, a dog, and a crimson weasel into a single room left them with only slightly more room than nine people, a dog, and a weasel inside the dome.

Molly was perched on the edge of one of the beds with Jester, Yasha, and Rock (who was splayed on his back with his legs in the air while Yasha and Jester scritched his belly) and watched Beau pace what little room she had with an edge of anxiety. Oh, to be a dog getting petted with no cares in the world right now. He never thought he’d be jealous of an animal. “I panicked. It buys us some time, at least.”

Beau shifted on her heels and waved a hand so quickly, she almost clocked Fjord, standing sentinel by the door, across the jaw. “By putting us in the exact kind of situation I was trying to avoid. Fuck!”

Caduceus was sitting on the opposite bed with Caleb and Nott, the very picture of unconcerned, and Molly found himself jealous of him, too. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Tyffial and I came to a pretty decent understanding.”

Fjord stepped out of range of Beau’s flailing hands. “Yeah, I’m kinda curious what you talked about, Deuces.”

He shrugged. “I just made it clear where we stood on trust and compromise. And Cree and I agreed that if we were going to be doing this, Tyffial and Klinger had to be far away from the house so there’s no weird business. It means we have to do this tomorrow during the day, but I like that better. Things are usually better in the daylight.”

“I prefer to do things by night, but… I trust you.” Molly scratched at the Moonweaver symbol in his palm. “And we don’t have much of a choice.”

“I mean, and I am just pointin’ it out here… We do have a choice.” Fjord sighed and slumped against the wall, arms crossed. “Molly, I know you’re indebted to Cree, but this is your life. Even if this doesn’t go tits up, and it probably will-”

Molly held up a hand to cut him off. “I know what you’re gonna say, and I understand, and if you don’t wanna do this, then I won’t hold it against you. Any of you.” He looked at each of them in kind. “I need this group to work. I really do. But… I’ve always worried there would come a time when I can’t protect you anymore and this might be it. You could walk away now.”

Every single one of them held his eyes without flinching away, showing him that they wouldn’t leave. His heart clenched. Was that the kind of loyalty that turned Cree into whatever the hell she was? Was he really just like Lucien, luring people into dying and fighting for his causes?

No. You love them. And they love you and it’s real and true and good. It wasn’t the same. And the Moonweaver’s gentle words came back to him, as a reminder, as validation for his thoughts. He’s alone.

Even with his disciples fighting tooth and nail to get him back, he was alone.

Jester wrapped her arms around his shoulders and knocked her horns against his. “I’m not gonna let you do this alone, Molly.”

Yasha leaned over Rock to give him a kiss on the head and squeeze his hand. “Me either.”

He swallowed and nodded, held and reassured for a long moment, and when the tension finally began to bleed out of him, Jester pulled back, her voice soft. “Besides… This guy could have bought us before if you’d been too late to come get us. I think we should wreck his shit. And maybe if he has other slaves-”

Fjord swallowed hard, “Jes-”

Not content to be soft any longer, Jester, near-tearfully snapped, “We can’t leave them, Fjord!”

Molly watched Fjord flinch away from the outburst and Molly reached over to grip Jester’s hand and squeeze. His turn to calm her down, then. “We’ll worry about that when we get there, dear.” When she nodded, he turned to the firbolg, sitting patiently and observing. “Caduceus, what else did you learn?

Maybe it was his imagination, but Molly could have sworn that Caduceus looked proud of himself- as he should. While he was vomiting in the yard, Cad had stepped up and gotten everything worked out. He was invaluable. “The jewels are in the basement and there’s an entrance behind the manor. We just have to get down there, steal what we need, and cause enough destruction that it makes him look incompetent and that his people leaked information. Tyffial believes he’ll fire his entire staff to cover his bases, because he won’t know where the leak came from.”

Nott squinted. “And we can’t just kill him?”

Caduceus frowned, deeply. “I mean… He won’t even be there.”

She waved him off. “Yes, yes, I know, but in general.”

Caleb hissed a breath between his teeth and gently patted her shoulder. “Let’s stick with one thing at a time, ja? “

Fjord ran a hand through the gray streak in his hair. “I don’t know if I like the idea of fightin’ in a basement. There’s a lot of tactical disadvantages.”

“Like what?” Beau did another circuit of her tiny pacing space.

“Like you’re fightin’ in a basement.”

Nott cleared her throat. “I’m going to cut in here, Fjord. I’ll let you finish, but I have an idea.”

Jester’s eyes widened and she scooted closer to the edge of the bed. “Does it have anything to do with why you keep running off?”

“It does,” Nott preened. She threw open her cloak, suddenly (Beau recoiled with a shout, half-convinced Nott was about to flash them), revealing lines and lines of bags strung up on the inside. A closer examination revealed black dust clinging to the material and the faint smell of that sulfuric stench that permeated the air around Hupperdook. “Black powder! And there’s more where this came from.”

Molly felt a sense of dread rise up within him, and Fjord gave voice to it when he snapped, incredulously, “The fuck, Nott?” And then, “This is your back-up plan?”

That caught Molly’s immediate interest. He narrowed his eyes. “Wait. What back-up plan?”

Nott wasted no time in explaining, which said a lot about her lack of shame about it. “Oh right, we definitely discussed alternate means of dealing with this problem behind the group’s back after we were told not to.”

Fjord was just as quick on the draw to retaliate. “This is not what I thought you meant! Don’t fuckin’ lump me into this.”

Nott leapt up onto her feet on the bed, pointing an accusatory finger at him. “You’re complicit! You’re a collaborator!”

Molly cut in with a groan and buried his face in his hands. “I want to be pissed by this, but I’m just sort of impressed.”

Beau muttered, “Same…”

Fjord blew out an exaggerated breath. “What the fuck are you suggestin’ we do with that much black powder, Nott?”

Molly lifted his eyes to see how Nott was going to blithely explain this one. She shifted her weight on the bed and seemed to grow more pleased by the second. How long had she been holding onto this? “Well, I was going to use it to shoot Cree with my gun if she betrayed us-”

“You got that thing working?!” Molly balked. Gods, she would do it too.

Nott ignored him and continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “-but now I’m thinking we could blow the entire basement.”

Fjord slow-blinked “…Nott, we’d be down in that basement. The thing’d collapse on top of us.”

Nott flopped back down on the bed and began to gesticulate. “I shoot an explosive arrow at a keg of gunpowder as we’re leaving. It blows up. Minimal structural damage, massive damage to everything else.”

Now it was Caduceus’s turn to slow-blink. “Isn’t most everything down there structural? I… I don’t know a lot about a lot of things, but I know a few things about architecture.”

“Minimal structural damage!” Nott flailed her spindly arms. “That’s how I see it going down.”

Jester pursed her lips. “I kinda like it. Maybe we should give it a cool name.”

Molly whipped his head behind him to give her a pained look. “Don’t name it! It’ll only encourage her!”

Caleb dragged his hands down his face. “Nott, maybe now isn’t the best time to try out-”

Jester interrupted him, “Fluffernutter.”

“Was?” Caleb squinted at her. Molly’s pained expression grew incrementally more desperate.

But Jester just nodded firmly, “Fluffernutter. We should call it Fluffernutter.”

Nott was back on her feet again. “I like it.”

“…Ja, okay, but maybe now is not the best time for Fluffernutter. It is a good idea. I like where your head is at, but this is already very risky.” Caleb pinched the bridge of his nose.

Nott nodded. “Because I respect your input, Caleb, I am holding onto it as a solid Plan B.”

The noises Caleb made in response were miserable and likely in incomprehensible Zemnian, but he saw the battle lost before he’d even begun to properly fight and simply gave up while he was ahead.

Beau stopped pacing and, once more, almost clocked Fjord when she waved an arm for attention. “Okay, so let’s say that we manage to pull off this jewel heist smash-and-grab without getting screwed? Are we gonna gloss over the fact that Tyffial is gonna grind diamonds into a fine powder and feed them to Molly?”

Right. That. Molly’s stomach lurched. “I was trying not to think about that right now, but… sure.”

She sized him up until he was forced to break eye contact with her. “You’re seriously not going to do it, right? You’re a con artist. Just… do that thing where you pretend to take it, but you just dump it over your shoulder.”

Jester made a soft ooh sound. “Or maybe one of us could make an illusion of you drinking it.”

Molly sighed. “They can see through illusions. I’m just… Throwing that one out there. That’s a thing they can do.”

Beau’s shoulders slumped. Like Caleb, she’d just realized there was no fighting this battle. They had all been trying to fight it, but Molly kept stubbornly committing to it, because he just didn't see a way around it that wouldn't turn this into a bigger shitshow. If there was a more sensible approach, obviously he'd be taking it, but... He hated owing people. And he owed Cree his life and the lives of Fjord, Jester, and Yasha. “You’re really gonna do it, aren’t you?”

Ethics were a bitch of an inconvenience, but without them, he’d be just another miserable liar, not putting anything good into the world. He shifted back to look at her, begging her to understand. He had a lot of pride, but with the softening of the edges between him and Beau, he could put it aside so she could understand this. “I’m a liar, Beau, but I’m not a betrayer. When I give my word, I keep it. This is how it has to be. I just have to keep my head. Literally.”

He knew she understood what he was putting down for her, but she wasn’t happy about it. She shouldn’t be. If it was easy to be a decent person, more people would do it. “So that’s it, then?”

Why was she so worried about it? He bit down on his lip, eyeing her. “Do you think it’ll work? That I… won’t be Molly anymore after I do it?”

Beau looked offended that he’d even suggest it, but it was Caleb that cut in, “You will be Mollymauk when the dust clears. There is no way you can be anyone else. A potion is not going to erase that.”

That’s enough for me. Caleb had said, way back when, and Molly had plummeted without any hope of a safety net at the bottom. He dug his fingernails into the scratchy comforter on the bed again and gave Caleb a little nod, and when he looked back at Beau, she was watching the two of them like she was doing some sort of mental math. Fuck. He might have to field that later.

Well, he could always throw her and Yasha out there to distract her. Smokescreens were effective.

Speaking of Yasha, the weight of her hand on his shoulder returned. “And we won’t let it. Whatever happens… They’re not taking you away from us.”

Fjord nodded. “I think that much we can agree on.”

He’s alone and you’re not. Just don't forget that. Period. Molly smiled, frail but genuine. “Thanks…” He paused, then, remembering something. “But seriously, Nott, you can’t shoot Cree.”

Nott sniffed, indignantly. “I respect that, but I’m keeping it as a solid Plan B.”

Jester looked down at her lap where Sprinkle was submitting to being brushed. Her voice was small and contemplative again. “She really defended us back there. It felt like she was taking our side, right, Caduceus?”

“It did,” Caduceus hummed. “What Tyffial did during the game was just her showing how much she didn’t like what was going on, but I can see how that relationship is. Whatever Tyffial feels, she won’t go against Cree. She’s the leader here until Lucien can take back the reins.”

Jester brightened, immediately, “See? Being nice to her is working. She loves us so much.

A tiny, anxious laugh escaped Molly at that, “I don’t know if love is the right word, but ‘more than tolerates us,’ yeah.”

Jester waved her brush back and forth. “We just have to keep treating her nicely and keep including her as part of the group.”

Beau wrinkled her nose. “…Much as I hate it, she’s been a solid help through all of this. I still don’t trust her culty bullshit, but I trust her to have our backs. For now, while we still have what she wants. As for whatever happens once Tyffial has her shitty potion…”

Molly held up a hand to stop her. “One thing at a time.”

The Nein fell into an awkward silence, then, unsure of what more to say. Nott finally broke it by clapping her hands together. “So! Diamond heist tomorrow?”

Despite her clear issues with everything, Beau still smiled. “Hell yeah, diamond heist.”

Molly must have dreamt with Jester again because he woke up in high spirits, despite the pressing dangers that might await them during the heist. Their track record of things going according to plan was abysmal, after all, and Caleb doubted today would be an exception.

Well. At least someone slept well.

Caleb, for his part, had tossed and turned the entire night. The conversation hadn’t died out immediately after all of that. Fjord had demanded they come up with an exit strategy and the solution almost everyone agreed on was fleeing through the Pearlbow Wilderness to get to Rexxentrum.

Beau had tried to encourage them to take a different path (and Caleb could have kissed her for it if he didn’t know it would get him punched), but the majority were not eager to backtrack over roads already traveled, and it was more practical- if they had to flee, then Cree could track them. At least the forest would make it difficult for her. There was no argument to be had here, and Caleb sat in miserable silence and claimed exhaustion when Molly questioned it.

The thought of being so close to the Sanitarium, of being so close to him, turned his stomach and he was plagued by nightmares and woke with the acrid smell of smoke in his nose and Nott on the floor because he’d flailed so hard that he sent her flying off the bed. His apologies were met with immediate concern and lines of questions he couldn’t bear to answer.

So she dropped it, squeezed his hand in solidarity, and together they walked to breakfast, which was already a rowdy affair that seemed to be involving a made-up-on-the-fly game between Molly and Beau where they would try to distract the other and then steal from their plate when they weren’t looking. The rest of the Nein (save Fjord, who had tipped his chair back on two legs to be out of the way and buried his face in the map) were taking sides and keeping some sort of score.

Oh, how he wanted to be miserable- he certainly deserved to be- but looking at them so carefree and playful made his heart ache with possibility. For a brief glimmer of a second, he thought he could slip into their midst and be a part of that without the fear and self-revulsion taking over.

Nott slipped from his hands, joining in easily, and the world solidified into reality. Try as he might, he was always going to burn too hot for them, and the closer he got to the site of his unmaking, the fiercer that fire would grow until it started to consume. Perhaps this was where he left them.

Molly’s victorious cackle went up like a shot that felt like a crossbow bolt to his chest. The tiefling had slid back his chair and thrown up his arms while his supporters applauded him- whatever the game was, he had apparently won.

Look at him. He’s breaking apart at the seams and yet he can still be so carefree. He could be someone else tomorrow and he’s trying so hard to hold every bit of himself together. How do you not love that?

The word was a bitter pill to swallow. Love. Molly could burn out like a star on his own, and Caleb could do nothing but quicken the blaze. He was not worthy of any of the Nein’s love, much less that shining, insufferable circus bastard's.

The door to the tavern opened and provided a distraction from observing his group from the outside. With but a glance, he immediately found himself looking into a mirror of self-isolation. Cree had come back from wherever she had spent the night- likely Tyffial’s- looking as restless as he did. She stood across the tavern from him, just watching the Nein as he had. An outsider walking among them, claiming friendship and anticipating a betrayal to come.

Caleb knew he would never willingly hurt the Nein. He would leave before that happened, but Cree had no such restraint. She had not broken yet. Lucien left her with hairline fractures and didn’t have the audacity to smash her to bits so she could remake herself in his absence. Swallowing down the bile of that thought, he approached her as one would approach something wild and dangerous.

“Wizard,” Cree murmured as a greeting, without even looking away from the Nein. She wasn’t just focused on Molly, either. She seemed to be considering all of them.

“I warned you that they would grow on you.” He folded his arms behind his back.

“Aye. As I recall, you also believe that we are not so different.” Her gaze shifted to him like it took her great pains to stop looking at the Nein. “I do not believe you would do the things I would do.”

Caleb hummed to keep his face neutral, lest he crack. “Not now. Perhaps once, ja.”

She looked at him more closely then, with eyes that were quick to ferret out lies wherever they hid. “Perhaps.” Cree turned away again. “If I do not have to harm them, then I will not. Do not concern yourself with the things Tyffial said last night. She is… bitter. And she has much to be bitter about. She lives in this town with the sort of men who arrested her brother so she can fuck them and hurt them in small ways.”

Caleb thought of poison in wine goblets and rings filled with crushed oleander and stolen rat poison when you have nothing else and what loyalty to the Empire got a person. He wondered how many people in this town became ill after bedding that woman and if she was only here to quietly undermine the entire Empire army for the love of a brother. It seemed the Tombtakers only knew the same sort of murderous loyalty as the Volstrucker.

He voiced none of that, and stuck with the simple, yet truthful: “But you will still hurt them.”

Cree’s fur bristled, but she steeled herself before she lost her patience. “The body is Lucien’s and I am deeply sorry that there is not another way. I truly am. If there was, I would do it.” When Caleb didn’t respond, she huffed. “I do not know that it will even work.”

“Then why put yourself through it? Why put us through it?” Oh, but he knew the answer before she even said it. The fact that she answered at all was progress, at least.

“Because if I do not, then it is like I have betrayed him. I cannot do that. You do not understand what I had with him- what he meant to me.” She clutched at her amulet. “It is beyond religion, beyond love.”

Loyalty was a hell of a drug, wasn’t it?

And lying was second nature to him. He could ask her if she had cold nights where all she could do was huddle against Lucien for warmth or abuse heaped upon her that only his touch could soothe. He could ask, but he knew what her answer would be, and she would have his in the asking.

And she would know that he gave all of that up because he had to, because something meant more than that. And she would believe it was the Nein and that, too, would be a lie.

So best to keep the lying to a minimum, then. They were, after all, something like friends.

“For everyone’s peace of mind, then, I hope it truly does not work and this will all have been a waste of our time.” He watched her tail lash back and forth, but that was the only visible sign of her anger. “Perhaps you can finally see who you could be without him.”

He chose not to lie. He didn’t choose not to be a hypocrite.

Bastian Klinger’s mansion was a sprawling estate made of dark wood and stone set only a mile or two from the base of the Dunrock Mountains, granting easy access to the mine. The entire thing was surrounded by iron fencing that stretched fifteen feet up and still had the audacity to end in sharp points barely six inches apart from one another. A difficult climb, but not an impossible one for the more limber of the group and whoever couldn’t get over could be either polymorphed or carried over via dimension door, depending on how they wished to balance their spells.

That was the simple part. The sheer amount of people protecting the manor were the current problem. The Nein were presently concealed in the shadows of a large tree outside the gate, observing guard patterns. By Caduceus and Cree’s observations, not a single point was left unattended.

“Paranoid bastard, huh?” Beau muttered.

Molly was right next to her on the grass, doing stretches to limber up. He arched his back and stretched his arms over his head until something popped. “Wouldn’t you be if you had a vault full of jewels?”

Beau gave him a dirty look, but whether it was for the snark or for showing off his natural flexibility in front of everyone, he couldn’t say for sure. Probably both. “It’s just a little extreme.”

“You’re doing it again,” Molly sing-songed, shifting into a split.

“Doing what?”

“Micro-managing. Needing to know everything.” He stretched over his right leg and touched the tip of his boot. “Which is valid, don’t get me wrong, but it’s just not sustainable. We’re never going to know every detail about everything. We just have to stick together, try not to fuck it up-”

“And make sure you don’t pull a hamstring?” She frowned. “...Actually, maybe you’ve got something there. Maybe we all oughta be doing stretches.”

“Maybe we oughta be considerin’ what we do about the guards,” Fjord cut in. “We could do this sneaky or we could be really destructive.” He looked at Nott whose golden eyes had widened until her pupils almost consumed the yellow of her irises. “No… No. Not that.”

Nott hissed and took a swig from her flask. By the look of her, she was already well past drunk already. “You’re such a cocktease.”

“What are your suggestions?” Cree was looking anywhere but at Molly, which was uncomfortable, but he found it harder to focus on that when Caleb was also avoiding watching him finish the last of his stretches.

He waited until Caleb glanced his way to see if he was finished and then lifted his right leg all the way up in the air. The wizard turned beet red and about-faced, like the tree was suddenly far more intriguing. The display gave Molly smug satisfaction, but his traitor heart beat a little faster. “Ja, Fjord. What are you thinking?”

“Well..” He scratched his chin. “I can do this spell where I summon a demon and I’m thinkin’ if I put it right over there-” he pointed towards the front of the manor- “then all the guards will run that way and we can sneak in through the back.”

“That’s a good way to get a lot of people murdered,” Molly noted. He was reserving judgment- it wasn’t like they hadn’t murdered their way through places before.

“Do you think they know about the slaves?” Jester looked up from where she was carving a massive dick into the tree.

“Tyffial didn’t,” Caduceus pointed out.

Cree scoffed. “She is outside help to keep him from being attacked while on personal business. The household guards would know about the slaves in order to make sure they do not escape and bring their meals.”

Molly flipped onto his feet, gracefully. That wasn’t the first time Cree had reacted weirdly about slavery- the Sour Nest and then she and Tyffial and had been pretty cagey about the whole thing too. “You seem to know a lot about it.”

She kept her gaze on the mansion, expression stoic. Even her tail had gone still. “The demon is best. They will likely not bother fighting and will flee like cowards, leaving it to cause further destruction and hold their attention.”

“We’re far enough out of town where if I lose concentration on it, it won’t get too far,” Fjord quickly cut in, like he expected someone to call him on the irresponsibility of this plan. “Like… it’s not gonna be here forever. Just an hour. Maybe less if I ain’t careful.”

“Right then.” Molly flicked his wrist. “Do the thing.”

Every eye went to Fjord and he coughed, anxiously, into his closed fist. “Well, shit. You don’t have to stare at me like that.” He cleared his throat, made a grand show of shaking himself out and then raised a hand. Wind began to pick up, tearing through the evergreen that shaded them. His golden eyes rolled back into his head and in a voice far deeper than his own, he growled, “Barlgura.”

The air went thick like the moments before a storm as the wind whipped wilder. The guards milling about at their posts clamped their hands down on their hats to keep them flying away. Shouts were swallowed by the sound of something cracking as a portal tore itself open in midair and dropped a massive red-furred gorilla-like creature right on the front lawn. The portal swirled out of existence with a sickening pop and the wind cut itself off, leaving nothing but silence that lasted but a moment before the barlgura let out a bellow of rage.

“Get ‘em,” Fjord growled in the same deep, dark voice that sent a tremble down Molly’s spine. For an awkward bastard, he could be unfairly attractive.

The screaming started immediately and when the guards rushed forwards to engage or tried to make for the gate, the Nein barreled in the opposite direction. Yasha helped Molly vault over the fence with Beau right behind him. Jester used dimension door to pull herself and Cree through so she could save her cloak’s charge. Caleb transformed Caduceus into a giant pink eagle to ferry the rest over as quickly as possible until the entire group were tearing their way across the yard to the back, while chaos continued to erupt at the front of the mansion.

Nott leapt to the front of the pack as soon as Caduceus pointed out the set of double doors set at an angle into the back of the building, padlocked and trapped by her estimation. A quick detect magic from Caleb determined the lock to be enchanted and Cree dispelled it before Nott went to work on it, tearing through it easily now that its first line of defense had been cleared. Jester yanked the heavy chain away and Yasha threw open the doors and ushered everyone within, slamming the door shut once everyone was spaced out onto a long, dark stairwell. Caleb spread his silver thread across the entrance and backed away, carefully, while Molly counted out loud under his breath to make sure every member of the Nein was accounted for and hadn’t gotten lost in the shuffle or tried to venture further down without anyone else’s input.

“If anyone comes down here from this entrance, we will know.” Caleb chewed on the inside of his cheek. “That does not account for an internal entrance, but it is something.”

Molly exhaled. “It’s better than nothing.” He noted Beau and Caduceus were slipping on their goggles so they could see in the dark and he turned, brows knit, to Caleb. “Aren’t you going to make your pretty lights? You won’t be able to see.”

Caleb smirked and Molly’s heart did somersaults. The bastard spent so much time being self-deprecating and that any hint of cocky overconfidence and pride in his craft was attractive on him. “I have a lucky rock.”

“A what now?”

“It is a transmutation trick.” He dug in his pocket and produced a smooth stone that he murmured words over. It glowed with a faint light that faded and when Caleb looked up at Molly again, his pupils had dilated almost impossibly wide and carried the same faint glow as the other members of the party with darkvision.

“Oh that is a neat trick,” Molly’s tail swayed back and forth rapidly. “I like that.”

Beau swatted at his tail to hold it still. “Yeah, okay, you two are adorable. Great. Can we flirt later? After we’re not in enemy territory.”

Caleb flustered and gingerly picked his way towards the middle of the group without another word, while Molly glared and yanked his tail out of her grip, rapping her knuckles with a sharp crack as he did. She hissed in pain, but didn’t retaliate- she’d save it for later, when he least expected it.

The Nein adjusted around Caleb into a suitable marching order with Beau and Yasha at the front and Molly and Cree bringing up the rear. He could feel her eyes boring holes into him even before he looked her way.

“What?” He dared to ask. Always a dangerous question to ask her, but he couldn’t stand the gawking.

“Ah… Nothing.” Cree jerked her head to face forwards again and slowed her pace. Molly followed suit. “It is just... erm... You and the wizard-”

“Ohhh that, dear, is not a conversation we are having.” Not with her- not with anyone, but especially not her. He could almost see the jealousy stirring behind her golden eyes. “Don’t get pouty.” She made a keening noise that caught him off guard. He raised an eyebrow. “What?”

She had that sourpuss look on her face that she always wore when she didn’t want to answer, but also didn’t want to disobey him that drove him absolutely mad. Every time, he wanted to shake her and tell her that she could tell him to fuck off and that would be perfectly acceptable. “Lucien used to say that… whenever I would disagree with him and he would insist on having his way.”

Molly swallowed hard. That creeping fear began to work its way up his spine and he could almost hear a voice whispering in the back of his head, too soft to discern just yet. “That’s not that uncommon of a thing to say to someone who is actually pouting.”

Cree huffed out a laugh. “It is not in the words, Mollymauk, but in the way you say them. You are not him and yet you are him, and I do not know which way is up sometimes when I watch you. Sometimes I think you are a version of him that is simply the best of what he offered the world, freed of what made him cruel.”

Another shudder of revulsion. “And other times?”

“Other times I think my Lucien is gone and lost forever and there is a stranger in his place who does not need me, and I do not know how to behave if I am not needed.”

Lucien’s not gone. That was a cold, bitter reality that he wouldn’t bring up with her- not with anyone, even after promising to be more forthright. Saying it might invite him in. He was trapped somewhere in that city and if Molly could keep dreaming as far away from it as he could he might never have to face him, and maybe that, alone, would save him. Lucien was never close enough to touch him, so therefore nothing could infect him, save for whatever the fuck he left behind that was Molly’s problem now.

Still, his heart always, always broke for Cree. She defined herself by whatever the hell she was at Lucien’s side, and there was more besides. Daring to press on what was clearly an old wound, he lowered his voice, “What happened to you before you met him?”

Cree’s fur bristled and when it finally settled, her walls were back up and her claws had come unsheathed in a clear threat display. That was as close to a fuck off as he was getting, apparently. “I did not truly live before I met him. That is all you should know.”

He dropped the subject and kept moving- it wasn’t relevant. He didn’t care that much. Cree needed to live in the present and dredging up her past wasn’t going to make that happen any faster.

The stairwell bottomed out after about seventy feet down and the Nein stepped lightly onto the stone floor of a long hallway that stretched at least the length of the mansion. Doors were spaced out in uneven rows on either side.

“Are we gonna check behind every door?” Jester asked, quizzically.

“Whoever wishes to may do so. I prefer the direct method.” Cree stepped forwards, drawing her still-unsheathed claws over her holy symbol which glowed red at her touch, the blood shifting just slightly. (Molly could almost feel the magic burn in the back of his brain in a way he hadn’t before now- or maybe he had just ignored it and it was always there, thrumming away, blood calling to blood.) She murmured words under her breath and a long golden light, like a thread, slowly began to extend from her holy symbol and down the hall, picking up speed as it locked onto a target.

Cree made a discontented sound.

“What is it?” Beau moved closer.

The tabaxi shuddered, her fur standing on end a bit before falling back into place. “Nothing… The spell is just usually red when I use it. Golden thread invokes-” She cut herself off. “Never mind. It is this way.”

Despite protestations, they split the group as they had before- a healer and someone who could message if there was trouble in any group. Molly, Cree, and Fjord headed straight for the vault; Caduceus, Nott, and Caleb went to check on the leftmost doors and Jester, Beau, and Yasha took the right.

Halfway down the hall, following the thread Cree had spun to find the path, Molly heard Tyffial’s voice in his head and the shock of it caused him to gasp out loud and grip the wall to keep from buckling. “Klinger is in a meeting with some spellspitters. I do not know what they are on about since they have forced me to wait outside the fucking door like an animal, but I doubt this will take long. Are you in place?”

And then Cree’s voice echoed in Molly’s head, “Aye. We’re almost to the vault now.”

“Molly!”

Molly snapped to attention to find Fjord standing beside him, gripping his shoulders to keep him from dropping like a sack of flour. There was immeasurable concern behind his golden eyes and he had to wonder just how pale and shaken he must look right now. “You all right? You looked like you were about to pass out on us there for a second.”

He swallowed and gave a firm, but stiff nod. “I’m- I’m fine. I just- I heard Tyffial and-”

“You what?” Fjord gripped his shoulders tighter and then whirled on Cree, who only sighed.

“It is the connection that we, as servants of the Nonagon, share. Those with the Somnovem’s eyes can connect to others with eyes, no matter how far away we are. What Molly heard was Tyffial telling us to hurry.”

Fjord shifted his gaze to Molly, the suspicion never fading, but Molly only nodded again. “It’s true. It just surprised me is all.”

“Last thing we need are surprises.” Fjord gingerly pulled his hands away, but stuck close to him as they continued down the hall.

Molly hugged himself, willing his nerves to calm. “How come that’s never happened before?”

“The times I used it before… your eyes were closed- ah, inert,” Cree explained. “When they began opening again, I warned the others to avoid speaking through it so as not to alarm you, but now…” She exhaled. “Now it is a valuable tool that we can use. If Klinger is on the move, then Tyffial can alert us.”

“Seems reasonable,” Molly murmured, though still uncertain. He had enough voices in his head without the Tombtakers adding to it, but if Tyffial had no other way to communicate, he would just have to embrace it.

The golden thread ended when the hall did- at a large door, locked and, judging by Cree’s frown, warded with magic. She traced the pattern for a dispel and smirked as it dissipated. “Spellspitters rely too much on things that can be easily broken.”

“That’s pretty rich comin’ from another magic-user,” Fjord grumbled.

“Not all magic is created equal, my friend. Some magic is innate, or pact-based, or comes from faith, as I have told you before. But wizard magic comes from ambition and greed and hubris. They believe they are superior to all because their power is limitless so long as there are books to devour.”

Molly thought about Caleb’s hungry eyes and his eagerness for more knowledge, and then banished it. He wasn’t like that. He knew when to stop. Or at least he could learn when to stop with a bit of gentle prodding.

He swallowed that down like bile, too. The door he kept his negative thoughts behind was straining at its hinges and his fingers itched next to his blades, eager to take some of the frustration out on something.

Fjord was eyeing Cree again. The suspicion had never left, but it seemed to be growing worse by the second. “So how’re we gonna get past the lock without Nott? Your fancy cloak’ll only take one other person.”

Cree unsheathed her claws again and Molly tensed, expecting her to finally retaliate against him, but she only began to dig it into the lock mechanism. “The Gentleman receives many gifts and gives many gifts, and without Tyffial, I have needed to be my own lockpick.” The mechanism caught and Cree pulled the door open- the look she shot Fjord was nothing short of smug.

“Good to know,” Molly said, grabbing Fjord by his leathers to yank him through before he decided to stay and snipe at Cree and waste precious time.

None of the doors were locked on this side, which told Caleb everything he needed to know about what they held. Most seemed to be storage- wine in heavy casks, boxes full of materials that weren’t even worth stealing. Nott drank deeply from the casks and then began to drain them onto the stone floor, while Caleb watched the floors run red with the wasted booze and tried not to think of blood circling a drain in a tower basement.

“It’s hard to waste good booze,” Nott slurred, drunkenly. “Real… really hard. But fuck ‘em. If I can’t blow his fuckin’ house up, I’ll take as much out of it as I can.”

Caduceus stepped away from the spilling wine. “I guess that’s one way to do it.” And in the next room they investigated, he tipped over a box of supplies and grinned in vague delight. “...Huh. That’s kinda nice, actually.”

Caleb had thrown detect magic up as they searched and was hanging back from the wanton destruction, but so far nothing had pinged. At the clatter of metal, he turned to see what Caduceus had tipped over this time and jolted at the sight of surgical equipment spilling out onto the floor. Scalpels and saws and clamps, dull in the darkness, but he could see them glinting in lamplight, clear as day in some other place, some other time.

He swallowed down the urge to run from the room and vomit and, instead, carefully picked his way across the mess to kneel beside them.

He picked up a scalpel, the blade so sharp that it left a tiny cut on his finger when he ran it just slightly along the edge. It welled with blood. Death by a thousand cuts. The residuum burning beneath his skin as the wounds were healed over. Scratching at the skin to tear them free until they left jagged scars. He breathed through his nose to steel his panic, but he could not shake the feeling of being in two places simultaneously- the one holding the blade and the one being cut. “What would a rich man who makes his living on the backs of miners and slaves need these things?”

“Maybe he’s always wanted to be a doctor,” Nott drawled, scattering a box full of miner’s tools in another corner.

The sound of Nott’s familiar drunken slur and the crash of the boxes solidified Caleb’s presence in reality, tethering him to this time and place and preventing him from drifting back. He dropped the scalpel back onto the pile and turned his back on it to head to the next room.

He might have been able to shake the past, but he could not shake that something wasn’t right in this place.

“Jes, we’ve got a lot of rooms to go. I love your artistic vision and I’ll always support you, but you gotta pick up the pace.”

Jester ignored Beau’s protests and continued with her extremely detailed drawing of Lorenzo, blooming with mushrooms and half-zombified, getting his rotting dick sucked by her artistic interpretation of Bastian Klinger, going only off of a painting hanging in this basement office they had found and deemed empty of anything fun or useful.

“I want him to see this one.” Maybe it wasn’t the cute and funny drawings she normally did, but it felt good to be a little bit… disgusting to a person who was absolutely the worst kind of dick. She was glad they weren’t going to kill him now. Until he could find the time to paint over this, he was going to have to live with the image of him deep-throating Zombie Lorenzo.

”That is deliciously vile, Jester.” The Traveler’s voice was in her ear, but when she turned, she saw no usual flash of green. His presence, however, felt like a comfortable weight on her shoulder.

“Do you like it?” She murmured out loud. And then, worried, she added. “...Is it too much?” Maybe the Traveler liked the funny stuff better.

“Dear heart, I don’t think there’s such a thing as too much.” A pause. She felt Sprinkle in her hood shift to her other shoulder. “Do you feel better?”

“Kiiiinda?” It was a start. It was control. It was a prank with a little more cruelty than she necessarily preferred, but she hadn’t been able to fight the Iron Shepherds and she couldn’t fight Klinger either. She had to take something, even if it was just his dignity.

She could hear the sound of clattering from somewhere down the hall. Beau groaned. “I know Tyffial said we should trash the place, but that’s so the opposite of stealth.”

Yasha, however, seemed to be on Jester’s side. “What if I just… Cleaved his fancy desk in two?”

Jester whirled as she finished off the last few veins on Lorenzo's rotting dick with a flourish. “Don’t you dare, Yasha! I want him to sit at his desk and face this every day. If I could make it so it could never get painted over, I would.” She paused. “Hey, Traveler? Is that a thing I can do?”

The Traveler’s voice in her ear hemmed and hawed. “I don’t know… I’ll look into it.”

“Ugh! Not helpful!” Sprinkle gave her a gentle nip on the ear and she burst out laughing. “Ow! Don’t bite, Sprinkle. I was just talking to the Traveler.” She turned, still giggling to Beau and Yasha. “Okay, okay, okay. I’m done now. What do you think?”

Beau and Yasha stepped closer, both taking it in. “...That’s pretty fucked up, Jester,” Beau noted.

“Thank you.” She flicked the paint off her brush and placed it back among her supplies. “I thought so too.”

“It has, like, really good shading, though,” she mumbled, like she was trying to salvage something that didn’t need to be fixed. Fucked-up was a compliment as far Jester was concerned. She wanted it to disturb and if it weirded Beau out, then it would definitely horrify Klinger.

“...Are you okay” Beau finally blurted out. “‘Cause that seems like it came from a really dark place?”

Yasha was just staring open-mouthed, taking it all in, so Jester focused all her attention on Beau with a lopsided smile. “I’m totally fine. I don’t always draw normal dicks and cute things, you know?”

Whatever Beau might have said to that while she was caught and cornered and at the mercy of the dreaded emotional conversations (she had Caduceus and Molly for that- and this was exactly the sort of strategy Molly suggested she use!) was cut off by a bookshelf in the corner shifting to the side. A middle-aged man with dark hair and skewed glasses wearing a leather apron stumbled out of a now visible hidden doorway and stopped when he saw the three women.

He looked to each of them, mouth moving wordlessly. He looked to the painting on the wall behind them and made a stammering sound. Before he could find his voice, Jester panicked and threw up her hands and cast charm person. She felt the spell connect and the man began to slowly relax, his eyes glowing a faint dull green.

“Hey.” She stepped forwards. “It’s okay, man. We’re the painters Klinger hired to do a portrait for his office.”

The man nodded slowly. “I see that. It’s… very avant-garde.” He squinted. “I don’t know if Master Klinger will-”

“Oh no, he totally will,” Jester interjected. “This is exactly what he commissioned.”

The man squinted again and then nodded. “Ah yes, I see it now. Master Klinger does love his dead things- I didn’t think quite that much, but who am I to judge?”

“What’s your name?” Jester stepped forwards again.

He smiled like he was half-drugged, dopey and heavy lidded. “Clarence.”

“Nice to meet you, Clarence. I’m Jester.” She held out her hand and he shook it. Behind her, she could see Beau and Yasha readying weapons and she turned slightly to shake her head. “That’s a pretty cool secret door. Where’s it go?”

“O-oh. That? That’s just the sub-basement. You probably shouldn’t go down there.” He shifted nervously, but Jester kept a firm grip on his hand.

“Aww, but me and my friends wanna see something cool.” She smiled coquettishly, batting her lashes the way she saw her mama do all the time when she wanted to tease her patrons.

Beau must have caught on to what she was saying, because her voice suddenly took on a bizarre, almost vapid cadence to it as she yanked her hair out of its topknot and began to twirl the longer bits around a finger. “Yeah, I wanna see something cool.”

Yasha blinked and tried to copy Beau, but her fingers only got tangled in her messy dreads. “...Definitely. Um.”

Clarence looked conflicted, but there was no wriggling out of the clutches of a charm effect and three cute girls, apparently, because he shrugged. “Oh all right. When will I ever get a chance to brag about my work to pretty girls?”

He began to lead them down the stairwell behind the door, and Jester hissed a quick message to Nott so she could alert the rest of the Nein to follow them.

Fjord expected a dragon’s hoard worth of treasure in the vault, but when he and Molly slipped through the door, they found a sack of various gemstones and two more sacks of diamonds with not even a copper piece in the floor between them. The whole place had nearly been cleaned out.

Tyffial was the bastard’s bodyguard. She ought to have known if he was emptying his vaults. The Nein were divided up and easy prey and when Cree slipped through the door, he didn’t even register the look of shock on her face that indicated she didn’t expect this either. All he saw was Sabian in the hold of the ship right before the explosion tore it to pieces.

Every time, he always ended up here. Every time, he lost someone.

Not today.

He drew the falchion, the sea water splattering across the stones and held it up to Cree’s panther-like nose. “Was this a set-up all along?”

“Fjord, for fuck’s sake-” Molly snapped, but Fjord ignored him. He was a good person, Molly, but he had a code of honor that didn’t quite line up with his own. He gave too many chances. He didn’t yet know the ache of betrayal. He was lucky that way. He’d hoped to spare him that, honestly, but he had kept pushing and pushing, all for them to end up here.

So Fjord had to make the captain’s call before it became untenable. “Well, Cree?”

“I… This was not supposed to be like this!” Cree protested. She gripped the edges of her cloak like she was going to try to use it and Fjord reached out and snatched part of it to pull her closer to the blade before she was out of range. She opened her mouth to growl at him, flashing teeth there were double the length of any tusks he might try to grow, but he growled back in her face anyway.

“No more excuses. You don’t need us anymore. I trust Caduceus’s word. He’s good on it. He said this situation could be trusted. Guess he can misread just like anyone else.”

“Fjord, you need to stop!” Molly cut in again.

“If not this time, then next time, Molly, and by then it might be too late,” Fjord’s accent began to slip, getting farther and farther away from Vandran’s- ice-cold and surprisingly softer than his anger would suggest- and yet he felt like he’d never been more like Vandran until this moment. “She knows what she wants and it isn’t us.”

“I have made no secret of that,” Cree snarled, but despite the number of things she could try to do to give him a reason to shove the falchion into her heart and be done with it, she remained ramrod straight. “You cannot call it a betrayal when I made it clear this was an alliance of convenience. When did it stop being convenient for you to use me? Have I been a poor ally?”

Fjord’s grip loosened on her cloak and then tightened again as he remembered Sabian again. “I’ve had good allies turn on me. People who knew me better and knew the weight of what they were planning to do before they did it.”

And in his head, he could hear the voice of his patron growling. Punish.

The minute the voice faded into a dull echo in the back of his mind, he felt the sting of cold steel close to his throat, held in a shaking hand that made him draw back to keep from being accidentally cut. He shifted his gaze from Cree to the left to see Molly holding Summer’s Dance to his throat with both hands, doing everything in his power to hold it steady. “Fjord, what happened to you on that ship was fucked up, but she isn’t Sabian. Let her go. We take all the diamonds and the jewels he's got and we fuck off now before anyone gets hurt. Just like we planned.”

He should have felt betrayed or like Molly was choosing Cree over him, but he remembered drawing the falchion on Caleb in a moment of weakness when a plan didn’t quite go the way he expected and he reacted in the heat of the moment. Not a day went by when he didn’t regret that moment, worsened by the knowledge of what Caleb did to get him, Jester, and Yasha back.

He wasn’t Vandran. He wasn’t a captain. He was a scared kid, afraid of losing everything again and finding betrayal in every insignificant slight. Molly was pulling him back and this was the only thing that he understood- justice by the edge of a sword.

Fjord released Cree’s cloak first and then dismissed the falchion. Molly’s blade came away immediately after and he headbutted him gingerly in the arm with his horns to show he bore him no ill will. “Your accent slipped again.”

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat, willing his imitation of Vandran to return. The voice of the many-eyed serpent coiling around the core of his power hissed in disappointment and then faded again. “Yeah. I think I might’ve slipped too.”

Cree adjusted her cloak and scowled. “So. Do you have that out of your system, then? I suppose I expected to get at least one sword pointed at my face before this was over.”

Molly shifted away from Fjord and nodded. “And that was it. Let’s just… Take what’s here, get the others, and go.”

They worked in silence, tossing the bags into Molly’s bag of holding as quickly as possible, but just as they were about to leave and send word to the others, Nott’s voice spoke frantically into Fjord’s mind, “Blue Team is headed to the sub-basement with a charmed unfriendly. You can reply to this message.”

Blue Team. That was Beau, Yasha, and Jester. “Fuck me. We got something else to worry about.”

In tandem and in a way that deeply freaked Fjord out on a visceral level, Molly and Cree said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

Cree could focus on getting a sword put to her neck and shouted at or she could focus on the absolute shitshow this had the potential to become, and as annoyed as she was at the former, the latter was more pressing.

The former would be a distant memory, one way or another, when this was over. She did not have to concern herself with these people and their follies for much longer. If she could not get them to embrace the Somnovem, then they were nothing to her.

So why then did she worry about Jester being lured deeper into this place? Why did the knowledge that this monster could have bought that insufferable, sticky-sweet little thing and used her as he pleased disgust her and make her want to keep her from him? She shouldn’t care so much. She had personal issues with slavers and would never ask her worst enemy to endure what they could do to a person, so perhaps it was only that.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

What mattered was that she followed the Nein down the staircase that must have been hidden behind a bookshelf in Klinger's office, now carelessly slid aside, deeper into the bowels of this manor until all she could smell was a strange scent of something antiseptic and herbal and the even more pervasive reek of blood.

And she could hear, carried by the walls and picked up by her sensitive ears, a conversation. “Well, surely you know that Master Klinger is a necromancer if he commissioned that painting from you. He wouldn’t want that getting out, of course. The Empire is very strict about necromancy. The Assembly’s own Delilah Briarwood was cast out decades ago for practicing. Master Klinger brags that he was a student of hers! Can you believe that? Anyway, he’s tasked us with creating what he’s taken to calling nightmares. Isn’t that funny? He says she came up with it.”

“Delilah Briarwood?” Beau’s voice, deadpan, yet anxious.

“Oh no no. I don’t know her name. His benefactor. His muse, more like. I don’t think she’s paying for these. Honestly, I don’t know how he paid for that painting. The man’s going broke-”

The Nein had finally reached the hall where Jester, Beau, and Yasha were standing before a human man in an apron that couldn’t quite hide the traces of fresh blood if you knew where to look when the leather caught the torchlight. Unlike the others, this hall was well lit.

The living blood in this place moaned and hurt her ears. She pressed her hands to them and grimaced.

“This is… A lot of people,” the man took them all in, blinking vacuously through the haze of a charm spell.

“Ja, tour group,” Caleb was quick to cut in. “Investors. We’d like to see the goods.”

Something about the gravitas of his tone and the darkness in his eyes as they reflected the firelight sit ill with Cree. She watched him cautiously begin to pry the lead from Jester, who stayed close and friendly to keep her spell up, but otherwise allowed him to ask questions.

The man led them deeper down the hall. Now she could hear actual moaning along with the bloodsong. She jolted when a creature lurched at the bars of a cell and snapped its jaws because she got too close.

The entire hall from this point on was lined with cells holding humanoids crammed together in dirty rags and creatures pacing restlessly. The deeper they went, the more they began to see signs of torture- missing limbs, necrotized flesh, unhealed wounds exposed to the elements and growing infected.

And all the while, their guide kept talking in the vapid manner of the thoroughly charmed, “Master Klinger buys slaves out of the Run for these nightmare experiments and he pays the Righteous Brand to capture the creatures for him. Everything that comes out of the mines these days goes to one or the other, so if he has buyers for these things, then that’s wonderful. I was starting to worry we were doing it just because. It’s actually pretty emotionally taxing work, but if we disobey… well.” He swiped a hand through the air like the slashing of a blade.

They finally reached the end of the hall which would be directly underneath the vault by her estimation of the layout. There was no locked door here- just an open archway that led into a large chamber with a surgical table in the middle and more cells in a semi circle around it. Their guide allowed them to file in and then gestured to the dark cells.

“There they are. Not for the faint of heart, but I think we’ve done a good job. Merging living and dead flesh is surprisingly difficult even for the best alchemists, but the process won’t take if the base creature is still alive.

“Base creature?” Caduceus gripped his staff and his eyes suddenly went milky white like the eyes of a dead man. Cree heard his sharp intake of breath before he pushed through the crowd to get to one of the cells with more force than he usually bothered with. “...Oh no. Oh no, no, no. What have you done?”

Cree dared to move in behind him to see for herself. The light from the torches turned the shadows against her darkvision and she had to blink to get a good look. Once she did, she wished she hadn’t tried so hard. She gasped and recoiled and, growling, the creature skittered towards the light.

It had to have been human once, but its rotting limbs had been broken and twisted so that it scuttled on four legs and there was not enough of it left to determine sex. Where its head had been was the living head of a peryton- somehow kept alive through dark magic and alchemy. Folded against its rotted back, she could see the feathered wings, ungroomed and filthy. It opened its black-lipped mouth and let out a screech that neither human nor peryton would make.

Cree and the rest of the Nein backed away, but the half-dead abomination’s cries only brought the rest of the creatures into the light. Undead humans and elves and orcs with mangled bodies were merged with the living flesh of countless creatures. One creature looked like an undead owlbear that had been combined with a living griffin. There were ten in all, each more terrible than the last.

“He- he does this to slaves?!” Nott balked, her voice shaking. There was no slur of drunkenness to her anymore- whatever great evil this was had sobered her right up in sheer horror.

The charmed man with his blood-stained apron and his creepily vapid smile just shrugged. “Well, it’s hard to get volunteers for it. And it works best if the corpses are fresh.”

Cree could feel Ira’s presence before she turned to look at Molly, standing with his feet apart and gripping his scimitars until his knuckles turned pale. The eye on his palm glowed so brightly she could see it even with his fists clenched.

“Mollymauk,” she whispered.

“He almost bought my friends,” he snarled and she could hear it- the upwards lilt of his voice, different from Molly’s own. There it was again, that little bit of Lucien bleeding through.

The man blinked rapidly as the charm snapped in two. Jester had lost concentration on it and nearly dropped to her knees before Caleb rushed to catch her and both of them collapsed to the ground in each other's arms. “...Who are you? What are you doing? Oh… Oh god.”

He tried to move through the crowd and everyone able rushed to meet him before he could slip away. Molly was fastest and caught him by the throat- this lithe, agile tiefling propelled only by rage and the Somnovem who invoked it, suddenly lifting this larger man and slamming him against the wall. He couldn’t even think straight, much less consider what ought to be impossible. All instinct and bloodlust.

This was what had happened in the Sour Nest. This was what happened with the peryton on the road. This was what Molly didn’t want to happen, and yet… and yet Cree couldn’t bring herself to stop him. She was frozen. This one deserves his rage. He is complicit. He did this and did not bat an eye. Let Ira take him. It might cost Molly, but it might bring Lucien home. Rage was always Lucien’s favored emotion.

Her heart was torn in two directions, holding her in place. In the end, it was Yasha who suddenly threw herself at Molly, wrapping one arm around his waist and using the other to try and pry his hand away from the man’s neck.

“Molly, please. Come back to me. You don’t want to do this.”

Molly didn’t fight her, but he didn’t budge either. The only true concession was that he hadn’t activated Ira’s eye yet, like he was desperately holding himself back, but just barely. “If we had been slower, he would have brought you here, and this… this absolute shitlicker would have turned you into one of those things.”

Every specific curl of Molly’s r-sounds was like a knife in her heart, because that was how Lucien spoke. He was Lucien as Lucien had never truly been- driven to near madness to protect his friends. Even at his best, she could not recall him being this bold. He once took a brutal hit to bring her a healing potion as she lay dying, but never had he truly been angry on her behalf.

And here was Molly, once again. This feral, bestial best version of Lucien and worst version of himself and she loved him and she hated him and the Nein were right to fear him and Molly was right to fear that, to be so scared of abandonment that he would keep it a secret and never use it.

There could never be a true halfway point between Lucien and Molly- only this creature, driven by emotion, propelled forwards by the Somnovem whispering in his ear. An empty shell only moved by the strings of puppet masters beyond the astral sea.

Cree’s blood hammered in her ears so loudly she almost missed Yasha’s soft voice whispering, “I know, but it’s okay. We’re okay. It didn’t happen. The past is the past, right? We just have to move forwards. Remember? When we met? You told me I have to move forwards, because if there weren’t any flowers behind me… If I keep walking, I’ll end up in a field of them, eventually.”

Slowly, Molly’s fingers uncurled from the man’s neck, leaving it bruised from the tightness of his grip. He slipped down the wall and fell in a heap at Molly’s feet where he remained, shaking in terror as the monster who had stared into his mind and nearly ripped it apart was suddenly reduced to a shaking, desperate child, clinging to Yasha while she held him and smoothed down his hair.

The glow from Ira’s eye faded, but the glow from Gaudius’s eye lit up brightly. The Somnovem were still present, just trading places.

Yasha stepped away from the quivering man, dragging Molly with her, and Fjord strolled forwards, summoning his falchion again. The seawater smell of it burned her nose even from this distance. “Molly’s got a little problem where he’s never sure if his anger is his own, you see?” He held the blade in both hands, all salt-scraped white bone and barnacle. “I don’t have that problem.”

He drove the blade home in the man’s chest and when he gasped out his last, the dirge of his blood one abrupt, out of tune note, a gout of it spewed forth and splattered across Fjord’s face. He snorted derisively, yanked the sword free and dismissed it again. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

“Fjord.” Jester was still on the floor, clinging to Caleb’s arm and her voice was choked with tears. “We have to let the people go.”

No one wanted to argue with her- it was impractical, but it was the right thing to do. Cree hissed her own displeasure at being slowed down by a group of injured, traumatized captives, but could not give voice to it. She was practical in most things, but never this. “On the way out, then,” she grumbled. “Nott will unlock the cells.”

“Don’t tell me what I’m gonna do.” Nott’s slur was back- she must have been drinking heavily to get through that tense moment and return her buzz to her.

Cree made it to the archway that led back into the hall before Tyffial’s panicked voice rang through the connection. Molly gasped behind her, still held by Yasha, and she began to fret over him, but all of that faded into the background as she listened to Tyffial rant.

“What did those fools do, Cree? Klinger is coming back quickly! He heard there was an attack on the manor!”

”It is all right, Tyffial. We are on our way out. He will not beat us back.” Even with captives trailing behind, it would take an hour to get from town back to the manor.

”You do not have time! The bastard has a spellspitter and a teleportation circle set to the mansion! Get out NOW.”

Cree jerked her head at Molly, whose eyes had gone wide. He pushed his way out of Yasha’s grip and began to pull Caleb and Jester to their feet. “We have to move.”

“The people-” Jester protested.

“We don’t have time.” It looked like it physically pained Molly to admit it. Leaving those people to suffer a fate intended for Yasha, Jester, and Fjord was clearly weighing on him and Cree wanted to curse his big heart and hold him at the same time. She did neither, the metronome of her emotions perpetually caught in the middle, never swinging decisively, and lunged for the hall with the rest of the Nein running behind her. They had nearly made it to the stairwell when a sudden rush of cold air and a popping sound caused them to stop barely ten feet from it.

Cree could see the edges of the iron circle set into the floor now that there were three figures standing on top of it- something she hadn’t noticed when they first came down here, despite her keen eyes. The Nein fell back in surprise as they took in the new arrivals, and Cree could feel their hearts pounding as clearly as her own, each one with its different song that she was starting to get used to. Without looking back behind her, she could tell anyone that Jester’s heart was beating butterfly-quick and that Beau’s was as steady as a drum, but they were all harmonized until they were in concert- a panicked hymn sung in solidarity.

How quickly do hearts sync up like this? No… An idle, useless thought. Focus, Cree. Your own bleeding heart will get you killed.

Tyffial was among the trio, scowling at them all like she would smite them where they stood for being so foolish when she’d practically gift-wrapped this heist for them against her desires to have them killed. The aforementioned spellspitter- a woman with shorn black hair, easily distinguished by the chalk on her black-gloved hands and her otherwise immaculate red robes- stood beside her with a bemused expression The third must have been Bastian Klinger, himself- a short, svelte human man with black curls in an elegant black dress suit over a maroon-colored shirt with ruffles at the sleeves and collar and buttons that gleamed in the firelight. His smile was too wide, exposing rows of perfect straight white teeth surrounded by the elegant trim of his dark goatee.

“Well!” He had an unnerving chuckle and he spoke with a posh, nasally accent. “It looks like I finally have some volunteers after all.”

Chapter Text

For a long moment, no one moved, scarcely even breathed. The Nein were clustered together in this narrow hall and their only exit was blocked by two people of indiscernible power and one woman who might be an ally or might be an enemy. The winds hadn’t shifted on that yet and from the way she was glowering, Molly didn’t have a whole lot of faith that they would turn in their favor.

Klinger pressed his fingertips together. “You know, when Lady Sulia told me that the Sour Nest had been utterly razed, I was so disappointed. I was promised a devil-blood, an angel-blood, a half-beast, a couple of giantkin and a few more besides. And look at this! I have all of that and then some.” His eyes trailed over Cree. “The Mistress has something of a fondness for cats. She’d like a nightmare that’s a bit more to her taste.”

A snarl rumbled out of Cree and Molly saw her teeth flash before she bit back the urge to let it become a roar. Across the way, Tyffial’s knuckles were turning pale around her drawn rapier and the blade shook in her hands.

“What are you talking about, Mr. Klinger?” She asked in that syrupy sweet voice that didn’t quite hide the venom that bled out of her.

Klinger ignored her. “You know, it does feel like quite the coincidence, doesn’t it?”

“Ja,” Caleb muttered. “We are quite fond of those.” His tone was deadpan and while the words were directed at Klinger, he was staring at the dark-haired woman with her equally dark robes, who seemed to be growing bored of Klinger’s posturing.

The tension was mounting. Drive through them towards the stairs or fall back and try to fight them. The former seemed the best possible choice and Molly half-wished that he had the same psychic connection that he had with the Tombtakers with the Nein before it occurred to him what an unfortunate thought that was and pushed it away.

Tyffial’s voice rose to a near-maddening degree. “What the fuck are you-”

A verdant gout of fire tore its way out from the middle of the cluster so quickly that Molly felt the warmth of it brush against his skin before it struck Klinger dead center of his chest, staggering him backwards. Molly whipped around to see Jester, eyes flashing with a hatred he didn’t think she was capable of, holding her hand outstretched.

“You want a nightmare, you fuck?” She shouted, but the intensity of the statement was tempered by the fact that she was choking back tears. Molly’s heart broke for her.

And then he remembered what they were dealing with and how neatly they were lined up. He screamed out a demand to start rushing forwards because surely they could overpower them before anything could pop off further if they were quick, but Klinger was quicker.

“I do hate the holy and self-righteous,” he all but purred. That was the reaction of a man who had a lot more confidence in his situation than he should have earned- the Nein had numbers on their side and wizards were squishy, after all- which made Molly nervous. He lifted his hand and spoke words in some ancient language Molly couldn’t understand and the floor underneath their group began to crackle with a black energy that grew more intense the longer Klinger spoke his words. It held them in place, keeping them all locked in this fatal cluster and when the spell took hold, the pain that tore through Molly’s body felt not unlike when Lorenzo’s glaive pierced his heart and cracked his ribs and left him dead on the cold ground.

That was all he could see through the white-hot agony of the dark energy eating away at him. A horrible loop of that moment over and over again intermingled with flashes of the city, of that mind-numbing pattern of scratches and chaotic language he kept seeing behind his eyes and in his head when the Somnovem tried to reach out to him. This was what dying felt like. This was how things ended.

When the spell finally dissipated, Molly had blackened wounds seeping blood across his arms and torso and the Nein had their own to match. Cree’s fur was blood-matted and she breathed heavily, but whether it was rage or pain, he couldn’t say.

And then Fjord yelled, “Fall back!” Which seemed to be the exact wrong thing to do but Molly didn’t want to get any closer to Klinger and risk another spell like that. The laboratory at the end of the hall was a wider space. They could fan out a bit, maybe, and avoid another fatal funnel.

They started to limp down the hall at the quickest run they could manage, helping each other up when they faltered, and pushing forwards as best they could. Over his shoulder, Molly heard Klinger chuckle.

“Miriam, be a dear.”

There was a crackle of static in the air that set the hairs on the back of Molly’s neck up and the smell of ozone and burnt flesh followed. Jester screamed and in rapid succession, Cree, Caduceus, and Caleb joined her until it was a cacophony of anguished cries echoing through the wall and impossible to separate. Molly fell back to catch Caleb as he began to falter, held up just barely by what could only be a sliver of life.

“You’re in bad shape, Mr. Caleb,” he choked out. He checked Jester, Caduceus, and Cree, who were shaking off the effects of the chain lightning. They were bad off, but it could have been worse. It could have been far worse.

Jester limped to Caleb and healed him so he could run, but Molly still clung to him to support him as they kept working their way to the archway that led into the lab. He was so afraid if he let go, he’d get hit again. Molly could take another hit and if he kept Caleb close, maybe he could shield him from it.

Just seconds before Molly reached the arch to join the members of the Nein who’d managed to reach it faster without anything to hinder their movements, he heard Klinger sigh, “Finish them off, Tyffial. What are you waiting for? This is what I pay you for.”

Fuck.

Tyffial’s footsteps echoed off the stone corridor as she ran, lightning fast, towards them. Molly pushed Caleb through the arch and then did the same to Caduceus and Jester. Cree was still hobbling, but when he grabbed her cloak she pushed him off.

“You don't have to protect me,” he snapped at her, desperately.

“For once, I am not.” She snapped and shoved him through so hard that he stumbled into Yasha’s arms. Cree drew her glaive and Tyffial met it with a swing of her sword. When Cree pushed her back, her light feet skidded on the stone and she lifted her head in a feral grin.

“That’s a new weapon, isn’t it, kitten?”

Cree smirked. “Aye. I took it from a slaver.”

“Ah. I will be sure not to break it, then.” Tyffial swung again and Cree met the blow until the two of them were spinning in the tight space, neither of them actually landing a hit. Molly straightened and drew his swords while the rest of the Nein began to prepare for Klinger and his friend to come down the hall.

Cree and Tyffial were only play-fighting. She was buying them time to get prepared to pay damage unto Klinger and that Miriam woman the same way they did to them.

Tyffial leapt at Cree, who blocked with her glaive again and, with a show of her phenomenal strength, used the momentum to flip her over her shoulders where she tumbled mid-air, hit the surgical table, and rolled off onto the stone floor, joining the Nein in the relative safety of the laboratory.

The elf woman groaned as she fumbled for her dropped sword. This close, Molly could see that it was a cruelly constructed thing with hooked barbs along the blade and a basket hilt made of sharp wire like rose thorns. “Fucking hell, Cree! It is an act! You do not have to be so-“

By now the nightmares, as Klinger seemed content to call them and Molly couldn’t say that wasn’t an apt name, were raising a ruckus, pushing at the bars of their cells and reaching out for anyone close enough to grab in order to rend them to pieces out of despair and anger for their situation. Tyffial’s constant poisonous anger died for the first time, like it had been choked out of her. She looked at every desperate, trapped creature, brown eyes wide. “This… this is what he is doing to them?”

“Tyffial,” Cree murmured, painfully desperate. Her ears swiveled, catching every sound underneath the chaos of the growling, crying monstrosities. “You must focus. They are coming right now.”

Molly could hear it too- the steady beat of footsteps on the stone floor. Suddenly, the laboratory seemed like a poor substitute for the hall. They had moved out of a fatal funnel and into a killbox. “Get ready” he shouted, anyway, because why not? It didn’t need to be said, but he felt better saying it. It kept him from thinking about the rage burning at the edges of his mind and the voice telling him to destroy these people.

They deserved it. Everyone who had ever incited that voice had deserved it, but to admit that would be like admitting the Somnovem weren’t influencing him, and it was the other way around.

They’re drawn to your emotions, Cree had said.

A tiny, desperate sound worked its way out of his throat. He was so fucking scared of this that he could barely focus and every time the fear spiked, the whispering intensified until he could almost make out a meek-sounding voice. Don’t think about that right now. Just fight.

Tyffial gripped the edge of the table to pull herself up. Her knees were shaking underneath her and if it weren’t for the table, she probably would have been back on the floor. Without looking, she began to shift through a pouch on her hip until she had a vial clutched in her hand. “He turns them into monsters.” A horrible, wicked laugh burst out of her. “That is okay. That is fine.”

Klinger and Miriam appeared in the doorway. A volley of spells tore through the air around the cackling elf woman, hitting their marks and driving the two wizards back with snarls of protest. None of it seemed to phase her in the least.

“Tyffial, what are you doing?” Klinger snarled from slightly to the left of the archway. From this angle Molly could see his hands grasping something- a metal rod affixed to the wall. A lever.

Oh no… Oh no, no, no.

Tyffial thumbed the stopper off the vial and raised it in a mock toast, completely oblivious to what was about to happen, so wrapped up in her madness and what she was going to do to these bastards to care. “You like turning people into monsters, yes? Would you like to see what sort of monster I was turned into?”

She downed whatever was in that vial and smashed it on the ground, nostrils flaring. The effect was instantaneous, but Molly felt the world slowed down enough that he saw too much of every detail. Her torso expanded, straining against her leather armor and her lithe elven muscles thickened until she was nearly as big as Yasha. She seemed extremely off-balance from the extra weight, like her body couldn’t quite accommodate the rapid mutation, which left her slower to react when Klinger threw that lever and the cells began to open. She didn’t see the bugbear-griffin hybrid smash its way out of the cell the moment it could until it slammed right into her side and knocked her right into the cell that the peryton-human hybrid skittered out of, crab-like, into the light and made right for Caduceus.

The fight began in earnest, then. Of the ten cells, nine creatures poured out- one for each of them, but Caleb wasn’t in a fit state to fight and ducked into one of the empty cells to avoid getting ripped apart in the ensuing bloodbath. He threw a firebolt at Miriam and Klinger, lingering in the doorway, but the spell bounced harmlessly off a globe-shaped barrier he’d placed around himself.

Klinger smirked, observing the carnage like it was afternoon tea. “It’s all right, Miriam. You see, if they get ripped apart, we can salvage whatever we can from the remains.”

Miriam, who hadn’t said a word beyond the verbal components of her spells until now, just looked bored. “I’m sure the Court of Nightmares will be pleased with whatever nonsense you make of this lot.”

Molly didn’t have time to consider what the fuck a Court of Nightmares was. Something that had the torso of some some sort of large lobster-like creature and the rotting body of something that might have been orcish had come up on him. The two halves were incompatible and had to have been grafted together using muscle and sinew of something else that was necrotizing along the blackened sutures. The smell alone was nauseating, and Molly fought the urge to vomit as he activated the black scimitar’s magic and used it to bob and weave around its snapping pincers. He misjudged when he drove to the left and realized that some sort of bizarre mutation had occurred and rather than one pincer on the left, it had two as if one had grown out of the other. It caught him in its grasp and squeezed, threatening to crack his ribs and he bit his tongue to draw enough blood to black out its eyes and prevent it from getting the tentacles emerging from its mouth around his throat. It made a rasping, terrible sound and Molly responded by swinging Summer’s Dance down onto its pincer and activating misty step to get out of its reach. When it swung for him again, he ducked, rolled under it, and swung in an upward arc to remove the pincer. A gout of blackened blood, reeking of rot, fountained in quick gushes from the wound and then bled freely onto Molly’s head.

He retched violently and the moment he took to smear the blood out of his eyes was a moment too long. The other pincer swung down for him and he braced himself for an impact.

He felt heat on his face, rather than the pain of being knocked across the room like a battered doll. He blinked upwards and saw the creature consumed in flames, burning away into a pile of ash and bone. As it collapsed, Molly saw Caleb tucked into one of the cells, lowering his hand.

For a brief moment, their eyes met and Molly gave him a grateful little wink that he hoped didn’t look like an incredibly unsexy squint with all the blood in his eyes.

Caleb gave him a tiny, appreciative nod, and ducked back into the shadows, shouting, “One down” anxiously as he went.

Eight to go, plus two wizards. Molly got to his feet, shook blood from his hair- a futile effort as it was going to dry and get all matted no matter what he did- and rounded on the next creature.

Caduceus was panicking.

He wasn’t new to panic. He’d had moments, caught in the endless misery that was the passage of time when each day bled into the next with no hope of anything to break up the monotony. Every day he had hoped for a sign and then, finally, he broke. Just a little. Chewed those flowers his mother warned him about and hoped for the best, because otherwise he would go mad from the thoughts in his head. He received his orders, his quest, and the world lay spread out before him, and he wasn’t alone. He had nothing to fear anymore.

His world had been small, full of grieving families and sorrow and the sweet melancholy of life at its end giving back what the Wildmother had provided. An endless cycle that made sense. The Run was practically in his neighborhood, the Sour Nest only a short jaunt away. The cruelties of the world were so close and yet he never knew.

And yet those were still more natural cruelties than this. Nature was volatile and even vengeful sometimes. Nature could kill and torment anyone who happened to be in the wrong place when it was not in a merciful mood. He understood that. He didn’t have to like it, but he understood it.

This was a perversion. Klinger called them nightmares, but that was a poor name. A nightmare fades when you wake up (not like a prophecy- that lingers- and there’s overlap there he supposes). This was so abominable he didn’t have a word for it.

The peryton-zombie hybrid scuttled closer to him shrieking and he tried to cast turn undead to urge the creatures back and away from him, but when the spell took hold, the living head attached to the undead body broke out in disgusting boils and flew into a rage. Rather than flee, it barreled into Caduceus and knocked him to the ground.

“Holy people make my job so much harder,” Klinger drawled as the creature’s mangled limbs tore at Caduceus’s armor and the monstrous teeth went for his throat, the antlers dragging along the side of his head, shredding one ear. “But living brains make them impossible to turn… there are side effects though.”

His vile, nasally chuckle rang in Caduceus’s ears. He held his staff between his neck and the snapping jaws and tried to push through the pain of clawed hands tearing at the wounds Klinger already caused as it scrabbled for purchase.

Everything about this was wrong. The world wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Then make it right, a sweet, sad voice said in his ear, cutting through the echo of Klinger's laugh. That was enough to grant him a second wind, enough to grip his staff in one hand and use the other to grip one of the horns. The sacred flame burned away the boils with sickening pops and it shrieked and fell back, finished off by one of Fjord’s eldritch blasts as it backed into range.

Weakly, Caduceus used his staff to help him to his feet. He touched his ear and winced when his hand came away bloody. The gauge in that ear was lying on the stone, blood-splattered. Out of sentiment, he picked it up, pocketed it, and fell back to the cells to hide and wait until someone needed healing. He wouldn’t be able to take another hit.

The world was more than he anticipated it being, but he wasn’t alone and he had a journey to complete with these people. He had to keep them alive.

The odds were not in the Nein’s favor and yet they were somehow prevailing- beat to fucking shit, but prevailing.

Cree was used to support, not combat. Like the wizard and Nott, like Caduceus eventually managed to do, she had ducked into an empty cell to keep track of the battleground. The disgusting blight of a wizard and his companion were locked within a globe of invulnerability too far out of her reach to dispel and to get closer would be to risk great harm. The necrotic spell had nearly sapped every bit of her strength and the lightning spell’s aftereffects still shuddered through her. She needed to stay put.

Watching Molly struggle against the chuul abomination and being too far to do anything had nearly driven her out of hiding, but he’d taken care of it and the wizard finished it off. Her jealousy surged- she was supposed to protect him. No one else. That was her purpose, her only purpose. It wasn’t right.

She was spiraling. Focus, focus, focus. Every day she had to tell herself that. No distractions. If she had focused before on that blasted spellspitter, then perhaps she wouldn’t be in this mess, but she hadn’t!

And now she was here fighting for her life in a goddamned murder basement with these people who didn’t understand anything.

Tyffial was still engaged with the owlbear-griffin, so she focused on that, instead. Normally as swift as a south wind, the mutagen she’d consumed left her slow from the new weight of her muscles. They were probably terrified of her, having seen what she could transform into. No one in this room besides the two of them knew of the stretch marks that lined her arms and legs and torso, mingling with her scars that made her feel hideous. No one had ever seen the elf with the foxglove smile on her knees, forcing herself to vomit up the last of her mutagens so she could return to normal at a faster pace.

No one knew. They saw her poison and the murderous intent. How could she ever trust the Nein when they would never comprehend how life could turn people cruel and twisted and incapable of anything else?

Perhaps they were learning. Bastian Klinger was everything wrong with the world. She could see it in Jester- and it hurt more than she wanted it to- as she swung her lollipop into a creature that was partially ogre and partially undead gnoll and more swollen, necrotically infected skin grafts to hold the two pieces together than anything else. She could see it losing chunks of skin and fur, exposing bone and organs with every swing.

And Jester kept beating it until it stayed down with tears in her eyes. That poor girl- so rich and privileged to have lived so long without knowing how the world could break you and would never stop.

Lucien will fix it. Lucien will make it right. The mantra she and Tyffial and Jurrell had lived by. Otis and Zoran were there for the ride, but the three of them had put their faith in Lucien and when he was chosen, they were not surprised. Especially not Cree, who knew he was special from the moment she met him, back when he took her hand and led her away…

Tyffial shrieked out a sound that was primal, answering a cry that went up from Yasha when she cleaved a hybrid that Cree couldn’t even describe from how many living and dead parts had been used to create it.

The mutagen must have been purged from her when she cried out, because when Cree looked at Tyffial again, her muscles quickly decreased in mass and left her armor hanging loose. She dove at her opponent and rather than hit it dead on, slid between its legs and dragged the long, narrow rapier along with her, cutting it from chest to scrotum until she was soaked in blood and viscera as it rained down on her.

She whirled on Klinger the second she was crouched down directly behind the gutted beast, and dragged her tongue down one of the hooked barbs on her sword. As she pointed it at him, it crackled with arcs of lightning. She spat blood on the floor. “Consider this my resignation, Mr. Klinger.”

Despite the display of force and the viscera and blood coating every bit of her from hair to boot, Klinger’s reaction was more akin to the weariness of a parent watching a child behaving poorly. “You disappoint me, Tyffial, but that’s all right. Just fall back into line.” He lifted his hand and Cree choked back an angry snarl as she watched, for one brief moment, Tyffial’s eyes glow golden only for her to shake off the effects with an scream of rage that made anything that might come out of Cree’s own mouth sound kitten-small and ineffective.

“You’re dead.” She began to run, only to be met by a creature with the rotting lower half of what Cree could only guess might be a bugbear and the half-crazed upper half of a troglodyte. Even from her position, Cree could smell the reek of it, but even as close as she was Tyffial could not be deterred from her task by the poisonous miasma of its stench. She evaded its claws and swung her rapier down and Cree lost sight of her again in the mess of the fight.

Seeing an opportunity, she ran for another cell to get a better vantage point and see where where Molly had gone, only to bump into Caduceus in the process. The moment she brushed his arm, she could feel the trembling in his too-skinny frame. “Mr. Clay?”

“Ms. Cree.” His voice sounded more level than his body would have anyone believe. These nightmares were a slap to the face to his goddess. Once, they would have been a slap to the face to hers, as well.

Some part of her wondered if the Somnovem would have found them beautiful in some way. This was the chaos of unlimited imagination and no regard for the lives involved in the construction, and was that not, at least partially, what had happened to the city by her understanding? Her heart constricted. No. Lucien would not allow this. This isn’t what he would do with that power. There were many things about the beings she called her gods she didn’t understand- though her power and heart were tied to the Nonagon’s blood and therefore had little to do with them as far as she was concerned. Lucien trusted it and she trusted him.

And that was not important right now.

Yasha and Beau were fighting a pair of identical creatures- inasmuch as two creatures who had been stitched together with more than just two basic halves could be considered identical. The majority of their parts seemed to come from an undead snake-like creature, while the top was something vulture-like with hooked claws it had to use to propel itself along the floor because it could not use the decaying muscles of its snake body to move or even raise up. Despite their slow speed and the clear anguish of their existence, Beau and Yasha were being constantly tripped up by its hooks due to them being so low to the ground.

Yasha had taken a hook right into her hip and was swinging her sword with reckless, rage-driven abandon to try and get herself free. When she finally forced it back, it tore a chunk out of her side that gushed blood and sent her staggering right into something with a dragonborn’s mutilated and rotting lower half and the upper half of a troll that Fjord had been taking chunks out of with his sword. Seeing easy prey, it sank its claws into Yasha's chest while she was still reeling from the tear below her ribs spurting blood between her fingers. She screamed so loud that every member of the Nein looked up.

No. She could hear the dirge of her blood that promised oblivion ringing in her ears before the troll removed its claws from Yasha’s chest and she dropped to her knees.

“Yasha!” Beau and Jester screamed in unison and Beau, blindly furious, abandoned her target and was rewarded for her compassion by the hooked-handed abomination she’d been fighting piercing straight through her leg. With a yowl of pain and the sharp sound of splintering bone, Beau hit the ground. Cree heard the blood cry out from the broken nose when her face hit the stone more than she heard the impact of her body.

Caduceus was vibrating now with repressed anger. He seemed caught between what to do in this moment and Cree gripped his arm and began to drag him forwards out of the cell. He went willingly, which surprised her- he preferred to be out of the fight.

“We cannot let those things harm them any further. They are mindless and they will not stop just because they are down.” Beau was technically still up, but with her broken leg, she wasn’t going very far. She was dragging herself towards Yasha with her face and gritted teeth covered in her own blood, while her opponent dragged itself after her.

Jester was already on her way to Yasha, while Fjord held a beast that looked like two separate monstrous wolves stitched together at bay to keep it from getting to her, splitting it half down its middle until both the rotting zombie half and the living half were lying in separate piles.

Cree checked the battlefield- the hooked creatures, the beast Tyffial was tearing into, and the troll were all that was left. That bloody hasted sword Molly wielded had kept him zipping about the field and only now could see him running towards the creature that had felled Yasha. He was bleeding and every leap and bound made him wince- the arsehole had his ribs nearly snapped and he was still dancing around the battlefield like he was untouchable.

Just like Lucien.

“Bane?” Caduceus asked, his voice starting to shake. Cree nodded and the two of them went back to back- Cree went for the troll and Caduceus went for the hooked horror limping after Beau. The spell took hold and the troll missed an attack that would have been a finishing blow on Yasha between the spell and Jester sneaking in at the last minute to put her shield up.

The dark evergreen of Jester’s magic flowed into Yasha and Cree sighed with relief that surprised her. And then there was Molly, practically a blur, leaping onto the troll abomination and knocking it to the ground, his blades swinging so fast and so hard that it might as well have been cutlets when he finished with it.

Beau, seeing Yasha was as fine as she could be now, rolled over onto her back and when the clumsy hooked beast tried to drive its vicious appendages into her chest and missed due to the effectiveness of Caduceus’s spell, she jammed her staff down its throat until she stabbed into something vital and it went limp.

If Klinger made a move now, he was going to be able to finish off Jester, Beau, and Yasha all clustered together as they were. As Nott, shooting bolts from the shadows pierced the back of the last hooked horror’s head, Cree turned her attention to Tyffial who had finally finished off the only thing standing between her and her former employer. She ran at him, sword out, and even when he raised a hand to defend himself, sending tendrils of necrotic energy tearing through her body, she just kept running with her skin paler than normal and marked by blackened veins half-hidden by the gore on her face. When the blade pierced through him, the globe protecting him from spells popped and he staggered away from her, raising a hand to cast another spell that caused her to ignite. She staggered backwards, cursing and screaming, and Cree fled from her position to go to her before the flames consumed her to help put her out. When the fire finally faded, Tyffial was collapsed, unconscious but breathing in her arms, reeking of burned flesh and gore. She pumped magic in her to get her to stir awake, but held her tightly to keep her from trying to run, while she squirmed and punched her shoulders, weak as a child and just as ineffective. She would not let her go. She would not see another Tombtaker dead.

That left the rest of the Nein, their bloodsong in sync, but staccato, punctuated by all of it that they had lost and were still losing. Only Nott had managed to avoid taking any sort of damage since the first round of attacks in the hall.

Two wizards against a savage group of fools who would not stop fighting until they bled out on the stones. She did not like those odds for the wizards.

“Miriam, are you just going to stand there?” Klinger snarled at the wizard at his side, who hadn’t even moved since the nightmares were released.

“Nein,” she said, simply, in her clipped Zemnian accent.

And then she turned to run back down the hall.

Molly was only just coming down off the high of reducing the creature that had nearly ripped Yasha apart into so many pieces when Caleb suddenly tore out of his hiding place and bolted so quickly out of the arch that Klinger, shocked that his associate just bailed at him, allowed him to go unmolested.

Caleb never ran after danger. He stayed away from it. He was still badly injured from the first wave and had avoided getting hit again, only laying low and throwing spells and support where he could like he always did, especially when he was fucked up. So what was so important about a wizard who had barely even fought except to nearly fry him, Jester, Cree, and Caduceus that he would put himself at risk like that when he was still down so much?

The reasons didn’t matter. He’d give him grief about it when he caught up with him. With his focus narrowed to just Caleb now that Yasha was safe and protected by Jester and Beau, he took off at a run towards the arch and if he took pieces out of Klinger on the way out, then more’s the better. With his speed enhanced, he doubted the man would be able to trip him up.

He didn’t notice when Klinger lifted his hand, but he did feel the spell take hold of him- a sudden, incomprehensible fear of the man that overwhelmed him and drove him backwards at the same speed he’d tried to take the arch at, putting him suddenly right back where he was at the start. He was keenly aware of how much his ribs ached, but adrenaline prevented him from truly taking stock of the damage and where it had been anger and desperation to tear through these creatures that now littered the battlefield and stained the stones with the same amount of gore splattered across the Nein, themselves, now it was just the agonizing fear. Despite all of what they had just fought and everything he was facing being horror beyond comprehension, he couldn’t shake the fear of Klinger, a single fucking wizard.

He almost put us in the ground in the hall. He got Tyffial in two spells. She has to be powerful if she ran with Lucien, a tremulous, nagging little voice told him. You’ll never get past him. You’ll die again. You don’t know what will happen if you die again. You might not come back this time. Maybe that first time was luck.

He kept trying to force his legs to move, but they wouldn’t budge. He was shaking now, but whether it was fear or his impotent rage, he couldn’t say. Caleb’s alone out there.

Caleb will be all right. Caleb will be Caleb if he dies. Cree, Caduceus, or Jester will bring him back.

I don’t want him to die. I don’t want to see him dead.

The circular arguments with himself- just himself, no one else- were suddenly broken up by an interloper, reminding him that he was never alone in his own head. Not anymore. Maybe not ever. Nonagon…

No, no, no. Not now.

The voice was a louder version of the weak whispers he’d been hearing for days now as the fear began to grow and threaten to consume him. Now it was clear as a bell, but still soft-spoken, meek, and desperate. Nonagon, I can take the fear away. You shouldn’t need to be afraid. We are here.

No, no. I don’t need you.

And then the voice he knew now as Gaudius pleaded, Nonagon, listen. You love so strongly. You do everything through love. Why would you let fear get in your way? Your cruel goddess cannot do anything for you here. Let Timorei help you.

Timorei. Fear.

The seconds were ticking down. He heard an explosion go off down the hall like someone had just detonated a fireball. He had to do it, didn’t he? He had to get to Caleb. Fuck! Fine. Just let me help him.

And then, Sehanine, I’m so sorry.

Molly felt an eye on his neck began to burn and then a feeling like something snapping open and the fear was gone, as if it had never been there, and this time he tore past Klinger and into the hall to get to Caleb, leaving the rest of the Nein to hopefully put the bastard down.

In the moment before he burst free of the arch, he could have sworn he heard Tyffial say, in a hoarse voice. “Timorei’s awake. That’s interesting.”

Miriam Marchen. Senior Volstrucker. One of the first in the program and she wanted everyone to know it, too. When Caleb was still Bren he looked at that woman like everything Trent did would be worth it, because clearly if you can come out of the torture in one piece, then you’d be exactly like her. Cool, confident, powerful.

He had been so wrong.

Staying out of her line of sight was easy enough, but her chain lightning had seemed rather pointed. Perhaps she recognized which were the spellcasters of the party and plotted accordingly. Sometimes it was easy to pick them out- you learned that in training. If you were ever in a situation where you were outnumbered, you targeted the other magic-users first, so you needed to be able to recognize any subtle, telltale signs.

Or, as he feared was likely the actual truth, she had recognized him. He wasn't so filthy as he had been. He'd gotten careless.

Regardless, he stopped running long enough to slap the guano and sulfur into his hands and cast fireball. It hit her head on and she faltered in her running, but only a bit- long enough to glance over her still smoldering shoulder. “Ah. I thought that was you, Röschen. Still favoring fire? Astrid’s face has never quite recovered, you know.”

The sound of Astrid’s name on this woman’s cruel lips caused his heart to stutter. Now he had to kill her. She would go back to Trent. She would tell Astrid and Eadwulf. That cannot happen, Caleb Widogast, he warned himself.

She threw a spell at him that threw him back thirty feet down the hall and he hit the stones at a near-backbreaking angle and lost valuable time limping to his feet. She was too far ahead now- headed out and away. She could teleport at any point, but it felt like she was dragging it out on purpose, making him suffer because he knew where she would go next.

Fuck. She would go right back to him.

Footsteps down the hall behind him. Molly’s voice shouting, “Caleb!”

Stay on task, Widogast. He bolted from Molly and tried a firebolt, but she threw up a shield to block it. In the torchlight, Caleb could see the glint of iron from the teleportation circle set into the ground and Miriam mere feet from it. Theatrics. Of course.

He wasn’t going to make it.

Miriam’s feet hit the circle just as Caleb threw a poorly aimed, desperate firebolt over her shoulder where it exploded against the stairwell and did nothing more than scorch the stone. Miriam blew him a kiss and shouted, “auf wiedersehen, Bren! I’ll send Master Ikithon your love!”

The air left his lungs and he couldn’t get his hands up in time to prevent her from going. She vanished in a ripple of light and the pop of the teleport spell fading, leaving Caleb standing ten feet from where she had last been and mentally even farther away.

Molly’s footsteps kept pounding on the stone, but they didn’t feel real. Nothing felt real. Caleb had dreamt many nights that he had never left the Sanatorium and that all of this was a dream conjured by his broken mind to help him cope with the misery of his sad fate. He would almost prefer that more. Maybe if he closed his eyes, he would just wake up, and he would be somewhere and nowhere and nothing, free of the pain of his memories and the danger that lurked around every turn. The amulet around his neck was a heavy weight that threatened to drag him down into oblivion and he welcomed it.

And then Molly grabbed his shoulders and gave him a hard shake. “Caleb? Caleb?! Look at me.” The sting of a gentle slap across his face, like in a gnoll mine all those weeks ago. Or had it been months? Oh, time does fly when you’re dreaming, doesn’t it?

Caleb didn’t stir out of his fugue until Molly began to pat his cheeks with a little less force, but more insistence. It was a slow coming down, but promised an inevitable crash later when he felt they could afford it.

The Nein would be in danger soon, but they were also in danger now.

“Time for that later?” He murmured.

Molly nodded with enthusiasm and also with tears in his eyes that Caleb didn’t understand. Because he doesn’t know. Did he hear her call you Bren or does he just not care?

Of course he doesn’t care. He is just like you. Who is Lucien, but a Bren cut out of Molly and left to rot? Caleb would envy him if he didn’t think his parents deserved better than that.

Caleb expected another forehead kiss, but what he got instead was a hug so tight that it made both him and Molly wince from the pressure it put on their injuries. “If I’m not allowed to go off half-cocked, then you can’t either.”

It would be better to push away from the hug. He didn’t deserve it. He deserved nothing but to be alone with his sins, hiding from them, rather than dragging these people- these good, chaotic bunch of assholes- into his personal hell.

He relaxed into it, because what was one more sin to add to the pile. Allow himself pleasure he was undeserving of. There would be time to run away and leave them both bereft of this simple affection later.

Caduceus was angry.

Jester could see it in the set of his thin shoulders, the darkness in his eyes. Now that nothing was left but Klinger, who was left alone and bleeding and surrounded on all sides, all focus had turned on him. If he ran, he would meet Molly and Caleb (and she didn’t know why they had run like that, but she didn’t want the other wizard to get away either so she couldn’t blame them). And Nott had already delivered a hobbling blow from her crossbow and then come out of hiding like she intended to draw his ire and keep him away from Yasha, Beau, and Tyffial, who were in awful shape.

Caduceus was looking rough too, but he was angry, and Jester was too. She looked over her shoulder at him and watched him use thaumaturgy to turn his eyes black.

“The Wildmother reserves special punishments for people who pervert nature like this,” he said, so calm that it actually made him scarier. She used her own thaumaturgy to make his voice echo around the chamber, seeming to come from the open mouths of all the dead creatures around them.

These were just the ones that lived. How many people had he tortured only for them to fall apart when he tried to fuse them together like this? How much life had been wasted. In her mind, she could see flashes of herself, of Fjord, of Yasha laid out on that table (currently smashed to splinters from where Fjord had been thrown into during the brawl) being cut up and used for parts in this madman’s stupid experiments.

She needed him to hurt like these people were hurt, but she couldn’t stomach the idea of torture. She was angry, but not that angry. Still, when Caduceus’s guiding bolt of lichen-pink energy struck true on Klinger’s chest and little blooms burst into life on his suit, she saw a clear target offered to her.

She didn’t raise her hands for a spell, but went for the sickle on her hip next to the now blood-splattered stuffed unicorn. She lunged forward, aiming for the middle of the circle of blossoms and drove the sickle upwards until she was sure she must have hit something vital. Blood dripped from Klinger’s mouth as he stared, wide-eyed at this cute little tiefling girl driven to absolute bloodlust to take back even a fraction of the innocence she had lost to people like him.

It felt good. Maybe a little too good.

“If you see him, tell Lorenzo I said fuck you,” she snapped and twisted the sickle free only to slam it upwards right underneath his jaw, leaving the curved blade to stick out of his mouth like an extra tongue. When she yanked it free, splitting his jaw in half, he staggered back and then collapsed onto the floor.

The silence returned. Jester’s shoulders shook as she bit back tears. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t let them see you cry. But the levee had been cracked for weeks now and there was nothing she could do about it. She let out a long, anguished wail and began to sob brokenly and didn’t stop even when Molly and Caleb returned and the rest of the Nein crawled or limped over to her in order to hold her.

“It’s okay, Jes,” Fjord murmured in her ear. “It’s over now.”

It was. It was over. It had to be, right? Klinger and that other wizard had said some things… Court of Nightmares. Something about a Mistress, but she didn’t want to think about that. Klinger was Lorenzo’s buyer. Lorenzo and Klinger were dead and their operations dismantled, so that was it.

Please, Traveler, let me believe it. I just want a happy ending.

From inside her cloak, Sprinkle shifted and poked his head out enough to lick the tears from her cheek, and she heard the Traveler’s voice say, voice more gentle than she’d ever heard it, Oh my sweet Jester, we’re only in the middle of the story. It’s always roughest in the middle, but have faith.

“I’m fucking dying,” Tyffial snapped, dragging blood-soaked hands down her face and smearing the gore over her singed and black-veined skin. “I could have sworn I saw a bastard with a green cloak over there with the idiots.”

Cree hadn’t been looking. Her mind had been elsewhere, drawn back into dark places, and when she finally did glance towards the cuddle pile the Nein had made of themselves, all she really noticed was Caduceus stepping away from the group to wander into one of the cells. She heard what must have drawn him then- a soft whimpering sound. Gingerly, she laid Tyffial on the ground, which allowed her to shakily start to stand and grab her rapier. Given she was no longer in any danger, Cree supposed she could allow her to refuse rest if it made her feel better.

In the darkness of the cell, there was a small creature- partially a naked humanoid riddled with scars, partially… gods she could not tell what sort of corpse the lower half was with how rotten and twisted it was. It shivered and rasped out a whine, voiceless, and the scar tissue around the throat said why. When Caduceus lifted a hand, it shied away, but when he touched it gently, it leaned into the touch.

“I am so sorry for what was done to you,” he whispered, kneeling down in front of it. “I am so, so sorry.” His hand began to glow and Cree turned away so she couldn’t see him mercifully snuff out its light, but she felt the heartbeat stop abruptly and it set hers to fluttering rapidly and brought a tear to her eye that she pawed away quickly.

When she turned again, the body was already beginning to blossom with beautiful, fragrant flowers and fungus that did nothing to alleviate the smell of rot and gore that had become a suffocating miasma around them. Caduceus stood, somberly, and nodded. “That’s all I can do.”

Hesitantly, she reached up and touched his shoulder. “You did well, Mr. Clay.” She swallowed. “And… And for what it is worth, I am truly sorry.”

“For what?” He didn’t look at her. That was fine.She didn’t know if she could have looked him in the eye to tell him this if he had.

“For the way the world is.”

Farther back, the sound of metal striking flesh over and over made her ears prick up and she and Caduceus both turned to see Tyffial in the archway repeatedly stabbing Klinger’s corpse over and over again with both hands on the hilt of the rapier, between the metal thorns, but not enough that they didn't cut open her knuckles. No one stopped her or even indicated that she should be stopped.

For the best- she would turn that blade on them in a heartbeat if they had tried.

By the time she was finished, Klinger’s head had been severed from his body and she was panting furiously. She shifted her gaze to the Mighty Nein, clearly waiting for them to say a godsdamned word like a predatory animal waiting for something to move in the bushes. When they didn’t, she sheathed her blade.

“Bring the diamonds by later, Cree,” she snapped. “It will take me at least until tomorrow evening to finish.” Her eyes fell on Molly and that cruel foxglove smile of hers, made worse by the blood and burns and necrotic veins, returned. “You have time to get your affairs in order, then, before you go back to being what you’re supposed to be.”

She pivoted on her heels and walked out and when Cree was certain that she had vanished up the stairs to the basement, she let out a deep sigh. “You’ll have to forgive her.”

“No, I don’t think we do,” Beau snapped. She tried to force herself onto her feet, only for her shattered ankle to give way. Jester, with tears still leaking from her eyes, reached over to heal the wound so she could at least walk on it.

“What the fuck is wrong with her?” Yasha was clinging to Molly who just looked numb. He couldn’t feel too much fear if he wanted to right now- not with Timorei so recently awakened and tempering it. That would pass in time and he would miss it when it did. Soon his fear would bring the Somnovem to him with a cure for it, just like Ira sent an outlet for his rage and Mirumus sent Sight to keep him from surprises and Gaudius kept his mind from being overpowered by the charms of others. They were addictive powers and so very, very necessary. Lucien understood that. Perhaps Molly was starting to see it too, and that was just one step closer to the two of them becoming whole.

She lingered on the question for a long time, uncertain how much to say. It was Tyffial’s story, not hers, but… They ought to understand why the Tombtakers did as they did. Molly, especially. “When we were young- I think Lucien was barely twelve, then- our hideout was attacked by a member of the Jagentoth family.”

The name sent a ripple of recognition through the entire group. She saw Caleb stiffen and he and Beau exchanged a look she didn’t understand, but she moved on without addressing it. Let them have their meaningful glances. She was not entitled to their secrets. “We were taken in the night, but the cart was attacked by some creature and when it crashed, we were rescued by members of the Claret Orders. Faced with the choice of wandering about on our own in the Empire, returning to the Run, or going with them… We went with them. We did not know what we were agreeing to. We wanted to be stronger and they offered us that chance. They didn’t force us to submit to their Orders, but Lucien, Tyffial, and Jurrell drank the hunter’s bane poison that turns a person into a true Bloodhunter, not even considering what it might do to them. They were young and foolish. It affected Tyffial more than it did her brother and Lucien. The mutations she underwent every time she used those vials of hers wrecked her body. The hunter’s bane made her barren. She felt as if her choices in how she lived her life had been taken away.”

She sighed again. “We could run from the Orders, run from their rules, but Tyffial could not escape what she allowed to be done to her because she was too young and they did not sway her away from it, encouraged it even without telling her the consequences. Lucien hated them because they forced him to face monsters when they made a monster out of him. You do not know how many fiends he had to look in the eye and kill and saw only his own reflection staring back at him.

But Tyffial hated them because they did not protect her like she thought they would. They made a monster of her and her brother, and without Jurrell and without the Tombtakers as a cohesive whole again, all she has is her hatred.”

She could see them all calculating this, weighing it against things that they had caught from her over these weeks together- her fear of slavers, the way Tyffial had reacted to knowing Klinger was one. It was only half of the story, but it was all she was telling them.

“That doesn’t excuse it,” Caduceus said, after considering it for a moment. His voice was low, melancholic. “Hatred just consumes and pain doesn’t make people. If that’s what your group has been about, then maybe Lucien wasn’t as great a leader as you think.”

Cree felt her fur bristle all the way to the end of her tail. “Mr. Clay, you are grieving, so I will forgive you that, but-”

“He’s right,” Molly broke in. He sounded wrung out and miserable. “The world’s not an awful place because awful things happened to you.” He looked to Jester, who looked down. “You have to make the most of it and try to heal, otherwise you’re just making your pain other people’s problems. What good did Lucien ever try to put back into the world?”

Cree let out a low, aggravated hiss. How dare he ask that with Lucien's face. “You do not know, Mollymauk, because you have never spoken to the Somnovem properly. You do not know what they offered him when they saw the light in him and chose him to be their herald. You have only assumed. Maybe what Lucien was going to put back into this world is exactly what it deserves.”

Anything further and she was going to lose her temper and she needed to go. She had diamonds in her own satchel to take to Tyffial, grabbed from the vault before all hell broke loose, and someone would need to be there to make sure the woman took care of herself.

With her tail lashing behind her, she stepped around the Mighty Nein and through the archway and walked away.

They released the slaves from their cells and led them into the early evening air, and Molly’s heart clenched to see them weeping and crying out in joy to see the moons on the rise and the promise of the sun tomorrow. The manor had been abandoned and signs of Fjord’s demon’s destruction were everywhere, but the creature was nowhere to be found- hopefully sent back to wherever it came from like Fjord had said. Like hell if they needed another loose end sneaking up on them.

It was a long walk back to Nogvurot with that many people clustered together and the injuries they had sustained. Molly was favoring his ribs and he knew his hair was a wreck from the amount of gore in it, but all he could focus on was Caleb, walking a little ways back from everyone else. He slowed down to walk side by side with him.

“Are you all right?”

Caleb inhaled and then exhaled like a man who didn’t think he deserved to breathe, but cared enough about living to do it anyway. Molly had seen him mired in self-hate for some insane reason over and over again, but somehow it was worse now. Or maybe just more transparent.

“As well as can be expected,” he said on the exhale.

That wasn’t helpful. “She called you ‘Bren.’” Even saying the name felt wrong. When Caleb looked at him, Molly shook his head. “I don’t- I don’t care who that was. Bren’s a nobody to me. I just didn’t think we had that in common. You look as scared as I felt when we first met Cree.”

He didn’t quite smile, but Molly thought he saw an attempt there. “That is why I understood you, Mr. Mollymauk.” Another sigh. “But, despite that, I may have to eventually face him.”

Molly chewed on the inside of his cheek. “Caleb is enough. Just remember that.” When Caleb didn’t respond, he changed the subject. “Do you know how I got my name?”

He was greeted by an eyebrow raise. “You have told us many lies, circus man, so I do not know if I would know the truth from the fiction if you had.”

“Well! Here’s the truth. There’s this old story about a ship’s captain and a seabird-” Molly started, almost whimsically.

Caleb cut in with a nod. “Ja, I know that one. It… is not a common story in the Empire since it involves illegal gods, but my mutter was very fond of it. The captain asked for a blessing and Melora sent him an albatross.”

“And he got annoyed with it and killed it, because he didn’t realize it was a sign and he was, if I’m honest, a bit of an arsehole.”

“And Melora wept and so Kord sent a storm that nearly destroyed the entire ship, and in rage, the crew mutinied and forced the captain to wear the dead bird around his neck as penance. Mutter used to tease me whenever I stole sweets and said that she would hang the empty cookie jar from my neck so everyone would know what I had done.” He smiled a bit. “She had an odd sense of humor.”

Molly tugged on his coat a bit. The idea of Caleb as a kid would be cuter if he didn't know for certain that the kid was likely Bren and he was trying hard to keep the two separate. “Gustav picked me up when I was just a shell. Dead weight, practically. I don’t think anyone could have blamed him if he left me there to die, but he didn’t. He said I could have been a sign from the Moonweaver and he didn’t want to kill a potential albatross. So that’s what he named me- after a mollymawk. Neither of us were really good at spelling so it ended up being spelled wrong on all the documents, but I'm fine with that. I like my way better.”

He chuckled at the memory of Gustav struggling to spell a name he should have known by rote in the eyes of the Lawmaster and giving up and guessing a 'u' instead of a 'w.' It wasn't until later that Ornna pointed out the mistake, but by then it was too late. He'll have his own way of doing things, right down to the way he spells his damned name.

But he'd found his way into the right story with that name. Even Sehanine had called him her albatross. Maybe he had been put in Gustav’s way on purpose, because she was always looking out for him. She wanted him to grow and become something better than whatever he had been before. And no matter what Cree said, the Somnovem were not the better alternative. They couldn’t be.

But he'd still taken Timorei's help and now he wore that sin on his skin.

“I hope all of our bad luck so far has not been because we let you die,” Caleb murmured, which broke up the thought and sent Molly into a spiral.

“It hasn’t been all bad.” His tail drooped between his legs. “Does it feel like I’m weighing you all down?”

That sparked a flash of panic behind Caleb’s eyes. “No. Definitely not. That was a terrible thing to say.” He ran a hand over his face. “I am very tired and I do not know what I am saying anymore. You do not weigh anyone down, especially not me. You make me feel… Lighter.”

Molly’s tail twitched upwards- a tiny bit of hope. “Lighter?”

“Ja...” Caleb shifted his blue eyes to Molly’s face and then looked straight ahead, like it hurt to look at him. “It is not you that weighs me down, Mr. Mollymauk. That belongs to a very different albatross… and you make me almost forget about it. And that is wonderful and that is dangerous.”

Bren. Whoever the hell Bren was, that was the weight around Caleb’s neck. Tentatively, Molly reached for the collar of Caleb’s coat like he was going to tear off the invisible sins that he claimed he was wearing there, his fingers barely grazing the chain of the amulet he always wore. “We’ve all got our loose ends. We have to stick together, all right? You lot haven’t left me and I know for a fact that I’m not leaving you. You’re my wizard.”

He suddenly gripped the edge of his coat lapel and gave him a little shake when it became clear Caleb was about to flinch away. “Say Ja, ja, Mollymauk, I understand.” His impression of Caleb’s accent was terrible, but it got a laugh out of him.

“You,” Caleb drawled the word out into multiple syllables, “are a lot, circus man.” He gave him a gentle slap on the face and Molly let him go.

His hand lingered, hovering, for a moment longer. He’d come so close to pulling him in just then and doing what he had only done in a dream, but he’d backed away at the last minute. Fear trickling back in.

And then two of his eyes started burning and he rushed to join the group, only for them to fade to a dull ache by the time he reached them. No one had spells to spare for this. He would just have to endure it.

Just more sins worn out in the open. Lucien, you arsehole, what were you planning to do with these bastards?

And what have you already done?

When she returned to the hovel that Tyffial called home, Cree found the elf standing over her stove, still covered in dry blood watching a pot of water begin to boil.

“Watch pot never boils, Tyffial,” she murmured, despondent as she hung her cloak up on the peg by the door and worked her way around the tables to her friend. “You should have been in the bath by now.”

“I am boiling water for it,” she scowled. “I will never get clean with cold well water.”

“Do not scald yourself. You are not a tiefling.” Cree collapsed onto one of the two finer chairs. She was more exhausted than she had let on and the walk hadn’t helped. The stress hadn’t either, really, and here was Tyffial, glaring at a pot like the heat of her temperament could make it boil faster. Her personality would never allow her to focus on herself when she could see the distress she was covering up.

“Tyffial-” She started.

Tyffial slapped the pot off the stove with such force that Cree ducked away from the hot water as it splashed across the room. Even with such a quick gesture, the heat from the pot must have burned her fingers because she gripped her wrist and sank to the floor with another caterwaul of anguish. Cree rushed from her seat to go to her. “Tyffial, Tyffial, please- you’ll hurt yourself.”

Tyffial kicked a foot out petulantly, still holding her wrist while Cree tried to pry her fingers apart so she could look at the burns. “Good! Tear this body apart. I cannot live like this any longer, Cree. Lucien promised us we would be beyond this, didn’t he? We would be free and nothing could hurt us, because everyone would be the same and I wouldn’t have to live any longer in this twisted shell.”

Tyffial was the most beautiful woman Cree had ever seen and she remained that way to this day, but others would not see it as such, and she did not see it as such. Her body was all scar tissue and stretch marks. Her insides had been rearranged to make room for things that had no business being in an elvish body. Jurrell had tolerated it better and because he looked like her, seeing a mirror of herself that held his ruined self together made her more comfortable with the horrors she had to wreak upon herself day in and day out if she had a prayer of ever winning a fight. She was born to sneak through shadows and craft poisons to slip into unwary throats, but the Orders gave her a laboratory to craft better concoctions and the price she’d paid for it was too high.

By the end of their time in the Orders, only Cree had come out of it avoiding bitterness- even Jurrell was angry on behalf of his twin. She thrived in the chantry- a prodigy, she had been called- but seeing what Tyffial struggled with and Lucien’s own mounting disdain for the Raven Queen and the Orders, she could not in good faith choose religion over her friends. So she fled with them and slowly turned her back on the Matron.

(The holy symbol in her pocket felt heavy again, so she focused on nuzzling Tyffial’s hair and tried to lick the blood off of her face with long strokes of her tongue.)

“Oh, fuck you, you big pussycat.” Tyffial tried to shove her off, but Cree just continued, even more aggressively. “I am pissed. I do not want your affection.”

“You’re filthy is what you are. I am trying to fix it.”

She tried to shove her face away. “Don’t you have your precious Mighty Nein to tend to.”

She stiffened, her tongue rolling back into her mouth. All she could taste was her own bile, despite the gore she’d just licked clean. “I am not needed there.” I am not wanted there was more likely, but it was all of a piece. She needed to be here with her friend.

Tyffial sighed and slumped in Cree’s arms and submitted to being cleaned like a small kitten. “Bring him home to us, kitten,” she whispered. Gods, she sounded like a little girl again, calling her kitten because she was shorter than her then. She was the smallest of them all until she'd grown too tall almost overnight. The nickname stuck and Tyffial never said it the way people like Ophelia said it. “He has to make it right.”

“I know.” Cree headbutted her. “I am doing everything I can, but I need you, Tyffial. You are the only one who can craft the potion. And so I need you to rest.”

Tyffial, ever the cynic, grit her teeth. “What if it does not work? This was never a sure thing.”

No. It never was, but Cree had gone so far to get here, behaving as though it was. The thought of having to start again terrified her and her debts with the Mighty Nein were cleared when it was done. She would have no other chance if she split from them.

And the twinge of misery that gripped her heart… That had nothing to do with Lucien, did it? Would she miss them if she were alone again on some pilgrimage to bring back that which was lost?

She would. And she didn’t know how to approach that any more than she knew how to approach not being able to liberate Lucien from the confines of Molly’s mind.

But to Tyffial, she only said, with confidence that belied the truth, “Then I will find another way.”

“Don’t cut it too short,” Molly said, a little too desperately, as Yasha took scissors to the matted blood that coated his hair. He’d washed most of it out in the questionable excuse for a bathhouse here (but at least cleaning blood and gore off was a fairly normal reason to go there, given the amount of soldiers, so the attendants didn’t bat an eye at the state of them), but there were still thick clots hanging in his curls and refusing to be brushed free.

He sat on Yasha’s lap in one of the rooms they had purchased, while most of the rest of the Nein drank. Caleb had bought another room for himself and Nott and vanished into it as soon as they arrived. It hadn’t occurred to Molly until later that he’d done it the previous night as well.

He thought maybe Caleb was getting over that what with the dome and all, but maybe some habits died hard.

“I’m trying. Ugh.” Yasha shifted a bit and Molly shifted with her, checking to make sure his elbows didn’t dig into her bandaged side. She had stripped of everything except her pants and undershirt so that her wounds could be tended to, but while she was no longer in any danger of losing her spleen out of that hole in her side, the healers didn’t have enough to heal her back to full. She was still sore and bleeding a bit beneath the bandages.

Molly had gotten away with only some cuts and bruises and some damage to his ribs and all of that paled in comparison to the damage to his hair. It wasn’t vanity- well, not completely. He had never forgotten the way Cree had raked her claws through the curls along the nape of his neck and expressed concern about him growing out his hair. If he had to cut it all off, he’d look like him.

Enter Yasha’s gentle hands and expertise with a pair of scissors. Molly mourned every curl she cut free and relaxed when she managed to liberate a mat without having to cut anything at all. It was delicate work and he felt awful asking while she was exhausted, but… desperate times. And Yasha was always here for him when he needed her. She could never refuse him when it mattered and he loved that about her and it scared him a bit too. He saw how Cree loved Lucien- if he gave Yasha the opportunity, would she love him just the same way? With the same worship as she gave the Stormlord?

For a moment, he embraced the silence, occasionally broken by Yasha’s swearing and his whimpers of pain when she pulled too hard (and her apologies for doing so), but it became too much for him to endure with all the thoughts in his head, so he focused on something... not simpler, but needed to be said. “Thanks for pulling me back, Yasha.”

Yasha raked her fingers down his scalp until he leaned against her chest like a cat. His tail curled around her wrist, moving as she moved and not hindering her a bit. “I understand getting mad. I mean, I really understand it. And if you need to get mad, you should be able to just kill something! And you do, but… You don’t want to hurt people like that, so I wasn't going to let you.”

He shuddered. “No. I don’t.” Yes, you do. And wasn’t that the bitch of it? Was this always here, just waiting for him to be pushed entirely over the edge? Cree said the eyes were waking up because of him.

It’s not like I haven’t felt all those emotions in two years. Maybe it wasn’t strong enough or maybe until he died the Somnovem just weren’t paying attention. It could be anything. It could be a combination of all of them. It could just be inevitable.

And he could ignore it, or he could turn and face it.

Caleb’s words came back to him. I have to face him, eventually. Brave of him to say. Bren probably believed Caleb owed him something if whoever he was and whatever he did weighed on him like that. The Somnovem/Lucien definitely thought Molly owed them something.

But what exactly was it? Cree’s words had bothered him. No matter what the Somnovem were, they were awful, so what did they offer a bunch of broken people that they were all so completely dedicated to their Nonagon?

“Yash’,” Molly choked out. “I’m… Gonna try to talk to them.”

Yasha almost dropped her brush. “Uh… Who?” That wasn’t her usual adorable Yasha-brand confusion. She knew exactly what he was asking.

“The Somnovem… I wanna hear what they even want. We can’t stop this if we don’t even know what a Nonagon is for. So far they just… give me weird powers. And-”

“-and there’s a screaming city,” Yasha finished.

“That.” He swallowed. “Just… Can you stay here with me while I sleep? In case it gets weird?”

Yasha snipped the last mat free and stroked his hair to show him that all the tangles were gone. “Yeah, Molly. I’ll be here.”

He nestled in her arms, careful to not jostle or dig into her too much, and they fell back against the pillows, entwined.

And Molly, exhausted from the horrors of the day, began to sleep…

When he came to again, he was back in the void of stars, hovering above the city. The Moonweaver symbol in his hand burned cold and he saw the silvery portal that indicated her boon was open and inviting him into another mind- Yasha’s, probably, since she was closest. He shook his head and felt a deep pang of sorrow burn through him that wasn’t his own. He liked that even less than the disappointment he had expected.

He took a deep breath and dove towards the city, seeking answers, but before he could get within ten feet of the closest spire, he felt a tug like someone catching him by the back of his coat. At first he thought it might be the Moonweaver, somehow finding cause to intervene, but when he looked behind him all he saw were four red eyes like the astral sea, itself, had set its sights on him.

When he looked back to the city, he saw the spire he’d almost touched warp and twist and sprout five eyes of its own that crowded together like they were all trying to get a better view.

Molly felt a tremor roll down his spine.

So! It comes to us instead of its tyrannical, self-righteous goddess, the voice of Ira boomed in Molly’s head, assaulting him with a deluge of wrath the likes of which he had never felt before. Whatever had happened to these arseholes, they did not like the gods.

We were hoping you would see reason, Gaudius crooned, drawing so close to Molly, that he felt his own usually limited concept of personal space was being violated. The love that washed over him was nearly as terrifying as Ira’s wrath- was that love for him as the Nonagon or just the constant state of his being?

“I haven’t yet.” Molly crossed his arms over his chest, defiantly. “I want to know what you want? From me, from any of this…” He waved his arm. “What the hell is a Nonagon?”

The eyes adjusted their position in the astral sea so it seemed like they were exchanging looks. Without faces or any discerning thing beyond being red eyes in the blackness of the astral sea’s starry expanse, it was impossible to discern any emotion beyond the intense ones that encapsulated them, radiating off of them and straight into him.

It was Mirumus’s voice who eventually answered, The Nonagon is our herald who will bring the Pattern back to the Material Plane so that we might all share in the knowledge of the ages together and see and understand everything with clarity, unburdened by the individual consciousness.

Ira followed it with, The Nonagon will bring down the tyrannical hypocrisy of the gods and remove them from their seats of power before they can bring more destruction upon the world.

Gaudius added, The Nonagon will unite all souls in love and there will be an end to suffering. No war, no ceaseless hatred. Only the love of the self and the love of others because love of self and others will be the same.

Timorei chimed in, voice trembling, And The Nonagon will remove the fear for if there is no more death, then nothing can ever end, and there will be nothing to fear.

Molly speculated that if he had the other six here he’d get similar disparate answers. None of that answered the question. Unity of minds? An end to endings? It sounded miserable and free of individuality. Free from torment or pain, sure, which he could understand why the Tombtakers would want that, even if he thought they were idiots for it.

Were they really this stupid to not see the red flags in all of this? What could really exist like that?

Before he could say anything Gaudius pressed in on him again, Nonagon, we have discussed among ourselves your situation. We understand now what has gone wrong. When the Usurper -

Ira snarled, The insidious bitch who does not deserve our gifts for how she would use them-

Apparently, Gaudius was used to being interrupted like this, because he pressed on, heedless of Ira’s snapping. - shattered you, our gifts held onto as much of you as they could.

Molly’s nine eyes began to light up, one by one as if in demonstration. Mirumus leapt in as soon as Gaudius finished, We gathered your fragments that were scattered across the astral sea to bring you home, but Gaudius failed to find a large shard and that was what stayed within your body. We have wondered why that is, but now we understand.

The glow from the eyes winked out one by one until only four remained, and Molly did not like where this was going, already. And when Timorei spoke, he found he liked it even less than he expected. We have a Nonagon to bestow our gifts upon, to spread our Pattern, and gather the Crests that will bring our city home. We needn’t fear that once you are whole again, we will lose our light and be in darkness again, never to be properly whole or independent, driven to disunity and petty bickering over what is right.”

Molly felt his stomach churning. He had a suspicion of where this was going, but he needed confirmation. That was the whole point of coming here. “What do you mean… Your light?”

Molly saw a flash of something in the back of his mind. The horrific scattered nonsense that must be whatever they called the Pattern and somewhere beyond it, a place he could almost vaguely make out. A tendril of sinew stretching from floor to ceiling of some deep chamber made of breathing flesh blossoming with nine bulbous growths and right in the middle a faint light.

He snapped back into the present, gasping as he felt something in that light shift like it was looking at him. That’s-

We could not send our Nonagon’s true soul back to a body that managed to expand a fraction of a soul to fill it entirely, Mirumus explained. So we placed it within the Aether Crux to nurture it until it was ready.

The body was it. The soul was it. When did the two of them become a comprehensible person deserving of an actual identity to them? Only when they were merged together as one again? Or maybe they never believed in the Nonagon's personhood at all. Molly clenched his fists and Ira zeroed in on him.

His voice was all cruel amusement. Does this anger you, little shard? You two could be bound together again. We can serve our purpose with a singular Nonagon. It is not ideal but it can be served.

Ira, please- Gaudius almost seemed to sigh. A ripple went through Molly again- overwhelming love that threatened to make him weep. Now he knew it was for the Nonagon. Our Nonagon’s mind is sharp and focused and filled with imagination. The mind came with the soul, its essence nurtured in our city of limitless potential, and we gathered around it. We were disparate and full of disdain for one another and now we understand ourselves and each other again. It is by the Nonagon’s imagination do we keep our goals in harmony so that we may be the Omega without losing our individual selves.

Compromise, Mirumus agreed.

The Nonagon is our light, Timorei added, as meek as ever, though with some shred of confidence now. With his soul here, we are focused and driven. And with you beyond the Material Plane, our will is made manifest. When his work is done, then we can create the world we wish to see.

Caduceus’s voice came back to him, overlapping over the drone of rising screams- they just need a vessel.

And they have one. A vessel to use, and a soul to guide them, like a king tending to his subjects.

And when Molly was all used up… Then what? Did it even matter with all of these bizarre, contradicting beliefs unleashed upon the world? Would there even be a world?

Maybe Lucien didn’t want to come back to his body. He had the entire Somnovem as wrapped around his finger as he did Cree...

Molly woke with a start in Yasha’s arms and she held him while he tried to stop shaking. The eyes burned harder than they ever had before- a reminder, a warning.

Tyffial’s plan wasn’t going to work. Lucien was right where he wanted to be, not locked away in his head, and he and the Somnovem were going to find a way to use him whether he liked it or not.

Chapter Text

Molly never minded being looked at it- he built his entire persona to be so eyecatching that people would either stop and stare and be delighted or turn their gazes away in disgust. There was something so utterly liberating in being able to make snap judgments on a person’s character by how they reacted to the extremely loud and self-assured wearing it on their sleeves. It made everything so much simpler to not have to dance through life wondering which people were the good ones and which were the assholes, while also being true to yourself because you didn’t owe anyone else anything, especially an appeasement of their bullshit standards. The ones who mattered would find joy in your sense of self-expression and be inspired. The ones who didn’t could stand to have their attitudes adjusted with a bit of gentle conning and bullying. It was a good way of living life.

Right now, however, Molly wanted everyone crammed back into his shared room with Fjord, Yasha, and Caduceus just staring at him in the wake of his explanation of his latest dream to look anywhere else.

It was Fjord who broke the silence- and the excruciating eye contact that came with it- with a cough. “Well. Your, uh… patrons-”

Molly cringed. “Gods, don’t call them that.”

Fjord planted his elbows on his knees and leaned over them. He hadn’t even left the bed yet and was sharing it with Jester and Beau flanked on either side of him. Caduceus and Caleb were at the door- well Caduceus was, a holdover from where he went to get the others and bring them in. Caleb seemed to be trying to vanish into a corner. Yasha hadn’t moved from where he had woken in her arms from his dream, so Molly was still practically in her lap. That left Nott to be the one pacing the floor while Rock, flat on the planks, watched her every movement with his head on his paws.

“The Somnovem, then,” Fjord corrected himself. “They seem a lot more chatty than the things I see in my dreams.”

Jester eyed him. “You’ve never really told us what you see in your dreams, Fjord. Just that whole thing about Vandran and the orb.”

“Right, well, it’s ‘cause they’re confusin’. A lot of single word sentences. Not a lot of context.” Fjord waved his hands vaguely.

Molly sank slower into Yasha’s arms and she placed her chin between his horns. “I don’t know how you can call any of this context.”

“From what you’ve said, it sounds like they’re not all operating with the same goals.” Caduceus scratched at his ruined ear. It had healed somewhat, but it was still mangled and shredded and there was no saving it aesthetically. He’d brushed it off saying that if he could still use it, that was something. Just a shame about the gauge he could no longer wear in it. It was his one act of childhood rebellion that he'd hung onto for years and that meant something to him. “That’s not nothing.”

“I got that too.” Molly exhaled. He hated this part- the speculation. The theories. It wasn’t his particular brand and the things he guessed about all of this were worse than usual, but… Beau would want something to sink her teeth into and the rest of the Nein deserved to know that it was a possible concern. “I think he might be controlling them. The way they talked, it was like they were using me as a sort of vessel for their gifts- the jug thing, like Caduceus said, kinda nailed it.” It still made him cringe up to realize how accurate that metaphor was. He wasn’t even a person to them. He was a thing. An object to be used. “They need me to spread the Pattern- whatever that is- and something about ‘crests to bring their city home.’ And, meanwhile, Lucien is keeping them in harmony, keeping them all on the same track…”

As expected, Beau leapt right onto it like a feral cat on some unsuspecting prey. “Yeah, it kinda sounds like they were worshiping him, doesn’t it?”

“Thank you!” He glanced down so he didn’t have to derail the conversation to take a shot at her pride and wipe that overly smug look off her face for nailing it. He’d humble her later. That was the only pattern he cared about. The methodical push and pull of his relationships, specifically with her. “That’s what I thought. It was sketchy… And I know I’ve seen Lucien in the city. They showed me that- that weird… Gods, it looked like some sort of organ? And Lucien was just a light inside of it.”

Nott stopped pacing and squinted. “Are you sure you saw him?”

“Very sure.”

“I ask, because I mean… He looks just like you. Maybe it was a mirror or an illusion or-” She waved her hand back and forth.

Molly shot her a Look that must have looked particularly intimidating because she actually backed down for once. “I know the difference, dear.”

Jester wrinkled her nose and pulled the topic back on track. “So they think Lucien is just hanging out giving them guidance in that organ thingy and really he’s wandering around controlling the whole thing?”

“Isn’t that… kinda like what the Traveler does, Jester?” Fjord shifted uncomfortably and Beau turned her attention to him, caught somewhere between dude why and you’re possibly right and you should say it. Molly knew that conflicted expression well by now- she used it on him more often than he’d care to admit to.

Jester only looked a little offended, at least. “The Traveler doesn’t control me, but… Yeah. Kinda. I guess. He's in lots of different places when he’s not with me! He’s super busy, you guys. He’s got important shit to do.”

Yasha broke in before anyone could press that matter and upset her. “And Lucien has important… screaming city business? And what was this about a pattern? And crests?”

In the back of his head, Molly saw that hypnotic nightmarish mess of scratches and things that could barely be conceivable as words, indescribable and therefore not worth attempting to explain. If that was the Pattern, then that was one thing, but hell if he knew what it did or why it needed to be spread. “No idea. But if they’re all gathered under Lucien’s banner, it’s something he wants.”

For the first time since the conversation began, Caleb spoke up, “There is another option we should consider- that Lucien is not controlling them at all.”

Beau jumped on it before Molly could. “What? No way! The way Molly is describing it, it's like he’s got them so hung up on him that they can’t even function without him.”

Caduceus stepped forward, holding up a hand to calm Beau down. She’d started to crouch on the bed, which caused enough of a dip to knock Fjord against Jester’s shoulder, and while she stopped trying to analyze the situation, she did not stop looking like she was about to leap from the bed and go right back to pacing like she had yesterday. “No… Caleb’s got a point. They called him their ‘light,’ right? It’s like moths. The light doesn’t control the moths. It just mixes them up. They see a new light and think it’s the moons and they just keep going in circles.”

Fjord was blushing a bit from Jester being in such close proximity that she could lean against him while making it seem like an accident. “So you think they’re all just circling each other?”

Caduceus shook his head. “I’m saying they’re turning circles around something and using it to justify themselves, because they can’t see beyond it.”

Molly’s throat had gone dry, leaving him unable to speak as he considered how much this would change everything if it were true. He’d nearly had himself convinced that it couldn’t be before Caleb went on, furthering his own logic while making painfully direct eye contact with him, “This is my thinking… If Lucien’s will is so strong that enough bits of him would not leave that body to-to allow you to exist at all, Mollymauk… that would take a phenomenal amount of untapped ability and potential in a place where the strength of your mind is what separates the strong and the weak. If Lucien’s soul is just locked away… Perhaps they are using that untapped potential to fuel whatever it is they are doing there. Fattened him up on adoration until his mind was ripe, and then fed on him like a tick on a deer.”

“What does that mean?” Molly shuddered against Yasha, who held him tighter.

Beau eyed Caleb. “Sounds like it means you think the Somnovem are treating Lucien like a power source.”

Caleb broke eye contact with Molly. “Powerful beings feed on the weak and then tell them they are doing them a favor.”

Molly thought back to Klinger’s sub-basement and how he had run after that woman, how she had called him Bren, and how much seemed to constantly haunt him… And then it wandered back further, to Calianna and a bowl. Something awful happened to Caleb and he was likely projecting, but knowing how raw those wounds were right now, Molly bit down the impulse to be accusatory about it. The instinct was there, though, burning away alongside his hurt that Caleb would project and take Lucien’s side over his.

That’s not what he’s doing, you arsehole. He’s just seeing it from another angle. With a catch in his voice, he asked, “Do you really think he’s a victim?”

To Molly’s immediate relief, Caleb only shook his head. “Of his own carelessness and stupidity, perhaps. Or he could have them under his thumb and he is exactly where he wants to be. We do not know. We cannot know until we learn more.”

Caduceus broke in again before any further debate could occur on the subject and turn the whole room into a den of madness and arguments that no one was going to walk out of unscathed. It had that feel in the air- tension mounting, threatening to snap. “I don’t know a lot of things and most of this is far beyond me, but… I do think it’s a pretty interesting take on the nature of souls…” He clicked his tongue as his brain wandered and then forced his mouth to slowly catch up to it, “Huh. I mean, if Molly were just Lucien with amnesia then Lucien wouldn’t be in that place with the Somnovem. He’d still be in Molly.”

Jester’s eyes widened. “So they’re two separate people, like really two separate people?”

Obviously. That was what Molly had been trying to explain to Cree for weeks now that she wasn’t getting. “Yes.”

Caduceus held up one finger. “The same soul.” He held up two fingers. “Two different people.”

Nott threw her arms up. “And a partridge in a pear tree! What does it mean for Mollymauk?!”

That was a question. Molly looked to Caduceus with a pained, desperate expression. “Well if that’s true… and I hope it is… Tyffial’s potion won’t have an effect, right?”

“Restoration spells restore, and that’s all what she’s making really is, just a more potent version. It can’t put back what isn’t there,” Caduceus shrugged. “That’s closer to a resurrection.”

Jester leapt to her feet, nearly knocking Fjord into Beau and causing a domino effect on the bed. “And Molly came back when Cree resurrected him so maybe Lucien can’t come back. Maybe Caleb is right and the Somnovem have him caged up.”

Molly winced. Fuck. He wanted to be rid of that theory. He didn’t want to live in a world where Lucien might be a victim and the noble and good thing would be to save him and sacrifice his body. He was a good person, but not that good. If it was true, then Lucien did it to himself by getting into bed with those wizard bastards. “I wouldn’t… don’t broadcast that theory. Cree has enough ideas as it is. She doesn’t need anything new.”

Fjord shifted back into place, so he could give Beau more crouching room. “So you’re not going to even tell them the potion won’t work? You’re just going to let them think it might.”

Molly shrugged. He liked Cree, but not enough not to bullshit a little bit to protect himself and his friends. And besides… “I don’t think they’d believe me if I said otherwise, honestly. Tyffial is… awful. And it’s not like I have any evidence.”

Beau turned her squinting, accusatory expression to him. “Except you’ve got four eyes open now, and again, Molly, what the fuck?”

“It was the only thing I knew to do! That woman could have ripped Caleb apart!” He wasn’t going to regret it. Guilt might be one of the Somnovem’s banners. Gods, he was going to have to figure that out, wasn’t he? If Timorei was fear, then what were the other five? Culpasi, Elatis, Luctus, Vigilan, Fastidan…

Nott broke in, preventing him from spiraling. “Acceptable risks. We just have to be careful and, erm, let Little Timmy-”

“Timorei,” Molly sighed, not even knowing why he bothered.

As expected, Nott ignored the correction. “-Little Timmy. Be the last one.”

This time, she didn’t back down from his glare and held his gaze levelly when he snapped, “Oh yes, when you put it like that, it’s so easy to not feel anything so strongly that the ancient eye wizards are lured into my brain!”

Fjord cleared his throat. “Okay, okay. Let’s stay on topic here. If this doesn’t work, Molly, you said Cree would let you go, no chasin’ after us?

Molly looked down and began to play with Yasha’s fingers. He wanted to trust Cree would do the right thing, but that was offering a phenomenal amount of faith to someone who believed her cause was just. If she suspected for a second that Lucien was trapped- well, all the more reason not to encourage that line of speculation. “That’s what she said.”

“Fair point, and hell if we know about Tyffial.” Fjord dragged a hand down his face. “I still think we should make for the wilderness as fast as possible once everything's done and squared away. Get some distance and then make our way into Rexxentrum.”

“I don’t… disagree with that.” Molly pulled Yasha’s fingers apart until they were splayed out against his own palm, and then pressed them together again while he reassured himself of her presence against his back. The rise and fall of her chest; the feel of her cheek resting against the curve of one horn; the sharp, but gentle, pressure of her chin digging into his head. “The Somnovem mentioned that woman that Cree was talking about. The one with the book whose name she can’t remember. Whoever she is or was, they’re not overly fond of her.”

Caleb spoke up again and the worry and concern in his voice caused Molly to refocus on him and not the calluses of Yasha’s fingers. “And you wish to find this woman, Mollymauk?”

Molly exhaled sharply through his teeth. There’s the fucking rub. If this were a month ago, he would have been gone as soon as his debt was clear. That was the only thing that had held him in place this long- a fucking conscience about bargains that Gustav had drilled into him. We don’t betray and we don’t break deals, Mollymauk. “Honestly, I want to bolt as far south as I can and get away from all of this. But I know I can’t. Maybe if we find that book and destroy it...”

Yasha nuzzled him. “We are good at that. Destroying.”

They were very good at that. “It’s an idea, anyway.”

Beau, for some reason, softened, and started to slowly come down from perching on the bed to actually sitting on it. Her eyes never left Caleb’s face. “Caleb? What do you think?”

Molly caught something there in the quiet, nonverbal exchanging of looks that made him momentarily envious before he shut the door on that. Envy. That would be a good emotion for a Somnovem. And what reason would he really have to be jealous of Beau. She asked too many questions. She was bound to know things simply because she asked and Molly didn’t.

Caleb broke eye contact with her after barely six seconds of holding her intense gaze. “I think that any mage of the Capitol is not someone I want to be stealing from, but I… defer to the group. I will say that I have a spell- the spell Klinger used to get into the sub-basement, in fact- and at any moment I could have us back in Zadash like this.” He snapped his fingers.

The idea of instant transportation back to somewhere familiar and safer distracted him from his weird, irrational envy that Beau might have more perspective on Caleb than he did, which was a relief. That was a shite line of thinking. “…Is that true?”

Beau’s eyes lit up in realization. “Oh is that why you kept bugging me to ask if you could see the Soul’s teleportation circle? Shit I thought you were just being a nerd.”

“I am a nerd,” Caleb shrugged. “But yes, we could return to Zadash and go south to the Coast from there.”

Caduceus immediately zeroed in on Jester. “Ms. Jester?”

Like Molly, Jester enjoyed being looked at when she wasn’t trying to be sneaky, and also like him, she got deeply uncomfortable when she was looked at during a moment of crisis. She dug her fingers into the fabric of her skirt and kept her eyes on her lap. “I really wanna see my mama, but Fjord and Molly have stuff in the Capitol that’s really important to them-”

Molly broke in, quickly, “It’s an idea, but it’s not that important, Jester.”

She was even quicker to cut him off. “But we’re so close! It would be stupid to go all the way to Nicodranas and then have to come back. We can go after.”

Caleb slumped into his corner- almost bonelessly, like he was counting on the wall to hold him up. “Ja. We can go after. I promise you that.

Nott looked at Caleb with the same concern Beau had, but Molly felt nothing about that. He expected her to know more about Caleb than anyone else. That was how those two operated- it used to annoy him, but now it was just part of the general group background noise. “So we’re going to Rexxentrum, then?”

Caleb was miserable- any idiot could see that- but whatever it was in the Capitol that was haunting him, he was going to endure it for them. Endure it just like Molly was going to endure walking into Lucien’s past with his arms flung open. “Just long enough for answers,” he said, hoping to be reassuring. “The circus stayed away from the Capitol for good reasons. They don’t like folk like us and with the war-”

“Enough said,” Beau grimaced.

Molly looked to Fjord. “Long enough for Fjord to ask around about his whole… thing. Or get into school, I guess?”

The half-orc coughed awkwardly in response. “Uh… Right. I don’t know if I’m really into the idea of attendin’ the Academy now that I’ve been thinkin’ about it. I might ask around, but… Cree said some things that got me thinkin’. Turns out not everything out of her mouth sounds like total horseshit.”

Molly couldn’t resist shooting him a wry, “She got you hating wizards, then?” Caleb’s mock-dreary “I am right here” that followed made the moment certainly feel a lot lighter than it had been a moment previously.

“‘Course not. But she called what I can do… pact-based magic. Which I guess is different from whatever it is Caleb ‘n Nott can do.” Fjord looked to Caleb for confirmation.

Caleb only nodded somberly. “The Academy is very specific about the sort of magic it teaches, ja.”

“Still. There might be somethin’ there worth lookin’ at. But I like where Molly’s head’s at. If that book was the whole reason Lucien got fucked up, then maybe gettin’ rid of it’ll make it all go away.” Were anything as easy as it sounded coming out of Fjord’s mouth.

“We’d have to find the woman first.” That was the real crux of the issue. The Capitol was full of wizards. “Cree doesn’t seem to remember much about her.”

That made the whole thing seem like a wild goose chase and the mood of the room began to drop as it occurred to them that they might be walking into something very complicated and dangerous with no idea what they were about to face. The Coast seemed preferable, but if he ran now, he would only end up escalating the Somnovem’s plans. If he was willing to give into Timorei just to keep Caleb safe then what else might he ask them for out of desperation? How many eyes did he have to open before he truly was just a conduit for their will?

He had to take decisive action, even if it was risky and terrifying and the last thing he wanted to do.

Beau yanked on the reins of the conversation to steer it away from the muck and mire of the unknown. This group... These people... They could feel things out so much better than the circus could. It was dicey there at the beginning, but it seemed like ever since their little sharing circle in Hupperdook, they they could keep things under control and let cooler heads prevail and take the lead when they couldn't. He hoped he never had to lose this. He didn't know what he would be without it.

“Anyway! Tyffial’s not gonna force Molly to drink the world’s most expensive poison until tonight. Anyone wanna day drink and take a stroll with me?” She hopped to her feet.

Molly was suddenly seized by a deep anxiety. “I…” He swallowed. Fuck, he missed when he was utterly carefree and not burdened by any worries. Everything had happened so fast and been too much and he was struggling to cope with having to ask for the things he needed, rather than just finding ways of gently taking them. Before, he wouldn’t have cared if he got told to fuck off and had to make his own fun. Now, the idea of any of the Nein being too far from him made him nervous. “If it’s not too much to ask. Could we all stick together today? I’m learning to trust Cree. She’s done right by us, but Tyffial is a wildcard here, and I don’t like the idea of any of us being separated. And if anything happens, I’d feel better if I knew where everyone was.”

Beau looked at him with a tenderness that he would have mocked her for on any other day. “…That’s fair. So. Group bar-hopping, then?”

Like hell if he was going to let her give him that pitying look without a little bit of retaliation, however. He extricated himself from Yasha’s lap and shoved Beau backwards onto the bed before she could brace herself. “First round is on whoever’s last down the stairs to breakfast.

Beau hit the bed and bounced back up as he broke for the door. “Fuck you, Molly!”

She was going to overtake him quickly, but for the moment, he was lighter and gods how he needed that. “Fuck you, Be-”

The air left his lungs as Beau slammed into him from behind and tackled him to the floor, and all he could do was laugh between pained wheezes while the rest of the Nein walked around them to get to the staircase as if they weren't even there. They were both going to have to split the bill by the look of it.

Worth it.

Early morning came to Nogvurot with the same intrinsic misery as the previous day had ended with. The Scatters reminded Cree of Shadycreek Run if it were less of a lawless, barbaric place, but the everpresent Righteous Brand made it too far in the other direction while still being just as corrupt beneath. There was no true safe haven in any place in Wildemount, perhaps not even in the world. The Crown would only protect those it deemed acceptable and if you fell through the cracks, you might as well be dead or fit in fetters. You would never find a foothold to pull yourself out of the mire.

And all of this hell she’d been living for years would stubbornly resist change unless someone could crush the still-beating heart of civilization and remake it anew. The gods were useless.

The Nonagon would set it right.

She passed the simple temples laid out between the occasional rickety homes that all looked identical save for the few personal touches here and there and smaller taverns that didn’t boast the space as the Widow’s Walk- her intended destination (summoned by Jester who had begged her until she could not say no without getting a headache)- nestled at the end of the street, tucked between the Scatters and the Aegis Block. Normally temples didn’t draw her eye, having renounced every god when she took up the mantle of the Nonagon's priestess, but two were larger and slightly more ornate- the Lawbearer’s and the Matron of Ravens’.

Typical.

Erathis’s temple was seeing the most traffic for early morning prayer, but there were a few black-veiled widows and people in clear mourning and clerics boasting feathers on their collars and soldiers with haunted expressions drifting into the Matron’s hands at this hour. Cree stopped to watch them, half-heartedly, once more aware of her troubling visions and the holy symbol sitting like a stone in her pocket like it was weighing her down.

A sharp caw startled her and brought her attention to a raven perched on the roof of the temple. Larger than most and with sharper, cannier dark eyes. Though every one of the bloody birds looked the same to her, this one’s sheer force of personality struck her as familiar.

“You again,” she bared her teeth at it. When the last of the temple’s patrons had filed in, she veered off her path to approach the building, craning her neck so she could address the damn bird and its equally damnable mockery up on the spires. “Why are you still following me? I have nothing to say to either of you.”

The raven puffed up its feathers and nodded its head at her repeatedly, like it was gesturing. When she failed to comprehend what it was saying, it flew down, landed at her feet and began to peck at her robes.

Cree hissed and danced away from it with deceptively light feet, despite her size. “Yes, I still have it!” She dug the holy symbol out and held it out for the raven to see. “See? Is that what you want? Ridiculous bird.” The raven puffed up again with a certain degree of smugness that made her want to break its fucking neck right here in front of its mistress’s temple for all to see. She would be tried and executed for it and that would get her nowhere on her journey, but oh the satisfaction.

And then she paused, remembering the golden thread of her follow the path when it should have been Somnovem-red. “Was it your Queen that altered my spells?”

The raven spread its wings, almost like it was shrugging, and cawed again.

She took that as sarcasm. It certainly felt like it. “I did not think gods begged for followers who no longer believed in them.” The raven pecked at her soft boots and she danced away from it again, poised to kick it. “You know, I could eat you. Most birds know not to meddle in the affairs of cats.”

The raven only continued to mock her, its sounds drawing attention to this conversation and making the artisans milling towards their shops and market stalls stop and stare. Another hiss worked its way out from between her teeth. “I am arguing with a fucking bird.” She made a shooing motion. “Go!”

The bird took flight and with one glower from Cree, the townsfolk went back to their business with averted eyes and casual whistles, and she could continue on her trek in an even fouler mood than what she had started out in.

But in the back of her mind, a nagging thought persisted: It has been years since I forsake my vows to her. Why is it now that she wants my attention?

Two tables had been crammed together in the back of the Widow’s Walk’s spacious tavern and food and ale had been brought in abundance when the Nein had announced they were celebrating (a birthday, an anniversary, and a victory all at once, apparently, when not a one of them could agree on what to say when the half-elf barmaid asked what the occasion was). Despite the aura of doom hanging in the air from the aftermath of his dream, Molly was in high spirits the second the first mug of beer passed his lips and the bard in the opposite corner had started to play, filling the entire room with sweet music you couldn’t help but tap your feet to.

The subject had turned to the fight on accident when one of the Righteous Brand had asked what sort of brawl they had gotten into to be worth this much raucous celebration and Molly had eagerly taken up the mantle of spinning a yarn about direwolves in the wilderness with occasional input from Jester that satiated the man’s curiosity. He left lamenting his boredom and wishing he could be sent off to the Ashguard Garrison to deal with the Cricks and only when he was gone did Caleb begin to slowly unclench, as if he was concerned that the soldier would smell their repeated dealings with Kryn business on them.

Jester, still riding high from the embellished story they had made up, whirled back on Molly. “Molly, you’re really good with that new sword. You were just like zip-zip-zip. I couldn’t even keep track!”

His face lit up. “I know.” He turned to Caleb, who had gone back to his beer. “Caleb, what was it called?”

It took the wizard a moment to stop all but inhaling the frothy liquid. He’d said it was Zemnian beer and that he hadn’t had any in a very long time and he was already on his second, either from nerves or nostalgia. Once he slammed the mug back down onto the battered woodgrain of the table, he thumbed the froth off his upper lip. “Ah… It did not have a proper name. It is just called the scimitar of speed.”

Molly bit his lip as the thought of his own thumb trailing the same pattern as Caleb’s filled his head. Maybe he’d lick the froth off his fingers, see what color the wizard’s face turned in the interim…. Fuck. He swallowed that thought down and grimaced at the name, instead. “Doesn’t really flow.

“Are we seriously naming our weapons now?” Beau pulled a face.

Yasha, seeing Molly’s pout at Beau being a Killer of Joy, stepped in. “The Judge has a name. And so does Nott’s crossbow, sort of.”

Nott nodded firmly. “I’m thinking of calling it the TTBB1000 for short.”

“Yeah, ‘cause that rolls off the tongue,” Fjord muttered into his own beer.

Molly leaned back in his chair as Nott tossed a biscuit at Fjord’s face, missed, hit his chest instead, and watched it bounce harmlessly off his breastplate with a look of feral disgust. “I don’t wanna go around saying Summer’s Dance and the black sword. They should match.