Tell Me Something True

Tell Me Something True 35 MINUTE READ

Rain was beating hard against the windows on a strange day for Fayr. The overcast sky meant she could have more of the day than she was used to, but she really didn’t know what to do with it, so she resigned herself to a few hours of staring out at the road with her face pressed to the cold glass of one of the front window panes.

Misra and Kaz had ridden out on some errand. Bidgug was gone with his party, and Dagny sailing them. Not due back for weeks, maybe even months. Durhmol had gone out to Sandpoint for a late breakfast with some business people. Fayr wasn’t really interested in another math lesson anyway. She wanted to know more about her tusks, and how she saw in the dark, and how it might be different from how Fayr did it, but Durhmol never wanted to talk about that, just numbers.

“That rain doing anything different?” Essa asked. She was behind the old bar counter, working on their stew pot for today, which didn’t smell bad. She’d gotten fresh cream and potatoes for it.

“No,” Fayr said. She still pressed her face against the window, and watched how her breath fogged it.

“Then come over here and help me cut up these potatoes,” Essa said. It wasn’t a request, or even a command, kind of an absent suggestion to engage her in something different. But Fayr didn’t feel like going and looking at a pot without her smoked glasses on a day when she could look out in the yard without them. Essa let it be. They passed an unremarkable half hour that way: Fayr’s neck getting a cramp as she watched the rain sheet down on the mostly-empty stables, Essa cursing once when she nicked her finger with the kitchen knife.

Then, out of the mist made by the droplets hitting the standing water on the road, two figures in black cloaks hove into view. They rode dark brown horses that walked slowly with their heads bowed and ears pricked back. The figures’ cloaks were wrapped so that even their faces were covered. They looked like twin shadows slowly picking their way down the muddy track into the guild’s courtyard.

Fayr’s keen eyes picked out the lead figure’s hand coming up to tug the wrapping around his face off as he surveyed the hall and outlying buildings. He shook stray water droplets out of dark hair that curled around a handsome, youthful face, and glanced up at the sign bearing the Varisian rose. Fayr was up from her seat at the window and at the door in a flash, pausing only long enough to dutifully tug on a cloak against the weather and shout to her mother:

“Uncle Tris and Aunt Alba are here!”

Whatever Essa had to say about that was lost in Fayr flinging the door open and splashing out into the yard. The two riders’ horses shied at the sudden burst of noise and movement, the rearmost rider having to rein in hard to keep her seat. The horses’ eyes were ringed with white. The man called out.

“Now, this is a very small adventurer!” He leaned forward on his horse and pretended to peer at her in all seriousness. “Do you work for Essa the Red?”

“Tris, it’s me!” Fayr replied, laughing. She threw back her hood and let the rain bead on her loose braids to prove it.

“That’s good!” Tristram de Campano said. “I thought so, but there was always the chance you were just a Halfling fighter or something, and I’d have to start apologizing!”

Tristram swept down from his horse in a swirl of black cloak as the rider behind him dismounted as well, landing with barely a sound. Fayr blew past him to throw herself at the second rider, who caught her and lifted her up carelessly, though her hands dug into the girl’s soft flesh.

“Look at you!” Tristram enthused as he tugged their panicky mounts toward the stables. “The last time I saw you, you still fit in Alba’s ribs!”

“You saw me two years ago, and I’m thirteen now,” Fayr reminded him. “I haven’t been in Alba’s ribs since I was a baby!”

“You’re still a baby,” Tristram insisted. He tied off the horses and absently reached to rub the forelock of the one nearest him, but it shied with his hands inches away, so he let it be.

Alba swung Fayr over a shoulder before she could protest. The girl burst into laughter as she was hauled back towards the guild hall door like a sack of oats. It opened as Tristram rejoined them and they began mounting the steps, showing Essa sans apron but wearing a stern expression, hands propped on her hips.

“You’re dangerously early,” she said.

Tristram ducked his head, curls spilling into his eyes, but he grinned as he recited a line Fayr had once read in an old book of adventure. “A wizard is never late, nor is he early—”

“—because wizards are terrible and no one sent for him, so there wasn’t an appointed time,” Essa cut in. She held her stern expression for a moment longer before she rolled her eyes and held her arms out wide and beckoned him in. Tristram fell into her with a woof of expelled breath and they hugged each other tight. “Dumbass. You probably passed on the road. Barely a week’s space between you and a paladin of Pharasma.”

“S’fine,” Tristram mumbled into her hair. “I’m great at being non-threatening.”

“You reek of death and your only traveling companion is a skeleton,” Essa pointed out. Tristram laughed.

“Yeah. How sad is that?”

Alba reached in and tapped Essa on the shoulder. She relinquished Tristram and nodded for them to go inside.

“Throw my kid down somewhere and come back for your hug,” Essa told her. “A few months of not running from place to place has padded me out enough that I won’t be maimed.”

They all came in out of the rain. Alba deposited Fayr on her feet in front of the fire before removing her cloak. The black cloth around her was three times over as long as Tristram’s cloak and wound around to pad out a figure that wasn’t there. A loop fell away to reveal an impossibly thin neck covered in protective charms and amulets, which glinted in the firelight and barely clinked together for the density of them. Finally the fabric all fell in a damp heap to the floor, and a skeleton stood in the midst of L’ordine Della Rosa’s guild hall, looking all around with eye sockets bearing appropriately deep red roses.

“Renrae’s tits, Tris, what kind of scraps have you been getting into?” Essa demanded, stepping forward to look Alba over. “She’s more bronze than bone at this point!”

It wasn’t quite true, but it was close. Seven ribs, a femur, most of the small bones in her right foot, and a large portion of the back of her skull had been cast in bronze and replaced. Swirling patterns were etched into the replacements, ornamenting them and catching the light, but the difference between bone and bronze told a story of grievous battle damage. It didn’t help that some of the remaining bones had blackened streaks and hefty chips.

“It’s been…” Tristram trailed off. He dripped on the rug as he struggled to pick an appropriate word. “…difficult.”

Fayr looked between her mother and Tristram, then shed her girlish joy with her cloak, which she dutifully hung up before holding her hand out for Tristram’s. He handed it over with an apologetic look at the trail he left on the floor, then went to fetch Alba’s as she walked around it to continue inspecting the guild.

“Never mind that, how has it been for you?” Tris said, trying for levity again. He dumped his armful of cloth nearer the door and gestured to encompass the whole hall. “Your letters don’t do it justice! Look at all of this! And you know, when I was in Ilsurian, they were talking of L’ordine Della Rosa there.”

Undercutting every word was the click and clatter of Alba’s feet on the hardwood. Essa didn’t bother answering Tristram’s effusive praise. She watched the skeleton circle, pluck at decorations and the guild ledger and various notes left out on tables. Finally, she turned, and held up a hand in a series of slow signs:

C U T E

“Fuck you, too,” Essa said, but she grinned. “You and me, we’re going to talk. About everything. Especially things ‘difficult’ and ‘cute.’ The wizard can do his job before he gets his wine.”

“But we’ve been on the road for so long!” Tristram protested. It was a weak protest, though, as he was already craning his head around, looking for the subject of the letter Essa had written him. Essa rolled her eyes and pointed up the stairs.

“Last door on the right,” Essa said. “I think she’s got them set up on a shelf. Go on, run along.”

“I’m going with him,” Fayr declared. With all eyes on her, she explained, “Sometimes when I go by the room at night, I… hear stuff. I want to help.”

Essa pointed sternly at her daughter. “You are under no circumstances allowed to become a wizard.”

Fayr crossed her fingers and laid them over her heart. Essa turned her accusatory finger on Tristram.

“You are under no circumstances allowed to try to entice my daughter to become a wizard.”

Tristram solemnly echoed Fayr’s gesture.

“Alright,” Essa said, with a dismissive wave of the hand, “have fun.”

“The first step to becoming a wizard is noting all of your interesting spells and arcane knowledge in a special book,” Tristram stage whispered to Fayr as they made for the stairs.

“I already keep a journal in a secret language I made up,” she replied at the same conspicuous volume.

“Godsdammit, you two!”

Tristram and Fayr fled Essa’s outrage by taking the steps up to the guild’s second floor two at a time, both of them laughing like children. The laughter subsided as Tristram began counting doors.

“The last one, Essa said?”

Fayr nodded. “It’s Illyasviel’s. A cleric. I haven’t met her, really. But after everyone came back from the north, from seeing Duchess Veinspyer and Big Marris, that’s when I started hearing the sounds. The… voices, sometimes.”

Tristram made his way to the door at the end of the hall, on the right. He knocked, once, for no reason other than habit, then tried the handle. He let them into the room as he scanned it for the objects he’d been sent for about.

He found the four dolls lined up next to each other on the top of the cleric’s dresser. Tristram reached for a pouch on his belt, pinched dark dirt between thumb and forefinger, and drew his hand across in front of his eyes as he murmured a series of words in Taldan. The dark brown of his irises lit with an eerie, phosphorescent green light.

“Oh,” he breathed. “Hello, girls.”

The rain was coming down harder, but less visibly, after they retired to Fayr’s room. The smoked glass and settling evening made the windows look almost completely black, the drops running down the panes turned silver and gold by lights mundane and arcane Fayr and Tristram had lit.

The four dolls had joined them, each freshly stitched with a small bronze bell over the heart. They were grouped amidst Fayr’s toys and books and art supplies, all the stuff of childhood, and what Tristram had promised was true: they were much less scary now.

Tristram had his spell book, a tome of handmade paper bound in warm saddle-tan leather, open on the floor across from Fayr’s journal as they both wrote about the ritual he’d performed from different perspectives. They lay on their bellies as their inkpens and charcoal pencils scratched across the pages.

Fayr interrupted the comfortable silence after finishing a sentence. “Tristram?”

“Mmhmm?”

“Why did you all stop adventuring after Ser Gwinn died?”

Tristram’s inkpen froze. The thick paper sucked a wide, black spot of ink from the tip, which he hurried to blot with the edge of his shirt sleeve.

“Didn’t Essa tell you?” he asked. He frowned right after, though, as if immediately thinking of a hundred reasons why she wouldn’t have. “I mean. Er. There were a lot of things. Obviously, adventuring isn’t safe with a baby. And with Gwinn lost, you know, a lot of us just… didn’t see the point.”

“I’ve written down all the dates she mentioned,” Fayr said, fixing an intense frown on him and turning several pages back in her journal to what did in fact look like a timeline. “There was over a year between when Gwinn died and when I was born. Two of the things she told me happened in there. And you and Alba helped mom with me when I was a baby, I know that, so I don’t know why everyone couldn’t have helped her to keep adventuring.”

Tristram was starting to look very uncomfortable. He capped his inkpen and rolled it back into the leather case he carried it in, waving his hand over the wet ink still on the page of his spell book to dry it faster.

“Something happened after Ser Gwinn died and before I was born that ruined it all,” Fayr pressed. “Mom won’t ever tell me anything bad, you know? It’s all kid’s stories, dressed up to be amazing, but that don’t make sense when I try to fit the pieces together.”

“She’s just trying to protect you,” Tristram offered, but even to him it sounded a thin excuse. He sighed and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “What do you actually want me to tell you, Fayr?”

“How it ended. Why it ended,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be amazing or heroic. Just tell me something true.”

“That’s fortunate, because it was neither amazing nor heroic,” Tristram admitted. “I was only a few years older than you when it happened. I… I can’t pretend young people shouldn’t know things. It’d be beyond hypocritical. But Essa…”

Fayr just stared at him with her big, dark eyes. With every flicker of the candle, the quality that gave her what he knew to be incredible darkvision also made them flash, like a cat’s.

“Essa isn’t going to tell you,” Tristram decided. “Ever.”

So he told her.

Essa the Red had bought the map, so Essa the Red called the shots. That was the condition under which she brought them back together on the gloomy night in Kaer Maga where she’d shown it to them, and it supposedly the ruling condition now, as they stood in the tunnels and squinted at it by the light of her everburning torch.

“If these tunnels were made as part of the Quest for Sky, I’m a bearded gnome,” Urdna groused. Her grimace was exaggerated by the twisted and gnarled burns on the left side of her face. “The style is Dwarven, yes, but hardly ancient. Maybe a thousand or so years old? I told you that map merchant was a fraud, Madrighal.”

“Yeah, because you’ve been down every Dwarven tunnel ever made, right, Urdna?” Essa shot back, not looking down at her from the map. “And you don’t even have a beard. What the hell is that saying?”

Essa refused to look at her for a number of reasons. Urdna was freshly allowed out of the bandages she’d been sporting for nearly three months on the condition she keep the fragile tissue moisturized, so the burns caught the light with a sickening sheen from the salve she kept on them. The effect made them look fresh. Beyond that, something in Urdna’s eyes had changed while the bandages were on. Where before there had been humor, excitement, and a touch of condescension depending on the quest or the mood in the bar, now they seemed distant, unreadable as a rock wall.

Her armored left arm trailed back to a larger hand clenching hers in a tight fist. Marris had nothing to contribute to the bickering. Her eyes were large and a little wild in the cramped hall, new hammer slung over her shoulder but posture drawn-in and tense as if she might break and run at any moment.

“It’s an ancient turn of phrase,” Urdna shot back, “and I’ve been in a sight more Dwarven tunnels than you!”

“Quietly,” Kieron Northwalk reminded them, deep voice low but rumbling as he looked far down the tunnel with his pale eyes. His long blond hair was knotted at the base of skull and his dress more conservative for the delve, but he held a mallet poised to strike a flat drum on his belt with the same seriousness Kor carried his knives.

Kor chose that moment to dive into the discussion. Until then he’d been standing with arms crossed, tensely tossing a blade up and down as he scowled at the map from beneath his mop of brown fringe. “I don’t even know why we left you in charge with this thing. Anybody would’ve been better. I would’ve been better.”

“Well, if—”

Tristram stopped abruptly in recounting the story.

“What?” Fayr asked. “What did she say?”

“I don’t—” Tristram sputtered. “She, uh. She said a few words that, in hindsight, I don’t think she meant, so…”

“Tris,” Fayr said, fixing him with another of those hard-to-match stares. “Tell me the truth. How it really happened.”

“Well, if cock-sucking were proof of leadership ability, you might have a point,” Essa snapped, “but as it stands I bought the map, I chartered the transport, and I blasted the first three giant godsdamned spiders. So, I’m in charge.”

Fayr looked at Tristram with even wider eyes.

“Your mother’s going to skin me,” he groaned.

“Wait,” she asked, “where you and Alba in all of it?”

Tristram was crouched over a small pile of bones at the side of the passage they were navigating. He lifted a skull barely bigger than his hand and studied it, turning it this way and that by the dim light reaching him from Essa’s torch.

“I think this is gnome, maybe?” he called back to them. “Do you want me to ask anything?”

But no one seemed to be listening.

“How fucking dare you?” Kor demanded. “This place is empty and I’m a moron for riding out with you. All the traps are fucking tripped, Essa! We’ve hiked three miles underground just so you can prove something about being more than a pair of tits falling out of a knotted scarf!”

“Prove something?” Essa snarled back. “This is for our livelihoods, Kor. Or were you finally gonna settle down and go to merchant school like Mama Cutpurse always wanted?”

“Our coffers were fine at the start of the year,” Urdna observed, “but since you’ve been mourning in style, things are a little tight, aren’t they, Essa? I suppose it’d be too disrespectful not to wear gold to set off the black.”

Essa glared down at her. Two new gold discs did hang from her earlobes.

“I’m just gonna… cast,” Tristram said. Alba made the skull-nodding motion that meant if she had eyes she’d be rolling them. Tristram drew his one-inch brass bell and rang it softly three times in a semi-circle around the skull. Its eyes lit with intelligence once more.

“Urdna is right,” Kieron said. Urdna looked up at him with a grim smile of satisfaction but he held a hand up. “Not about the spending. About things being fine at the start of the year. If we’d decided to mind our own business instead of carrying on this farce, we could’ve had a good split and gone off happy. Instead, we’re letting you, of all people—”

“Me, yeah, what about me?” Essa spat. Kieron coughed to interject.

“The seed money for the party was Urdna’s,” he murmured, staring the stony dwarf right in the eyes as he said, “do you really think she would’ve been charitable enough not to recoup her losses?”

“Sometimes I really think you talk just to break things,” she growled, dangerous and low, as Kor and Essa’s eyes shot towards her full of accusation.

“I believe in being aware of all the facts,” Kieron said. “Especially the nasty ones. I can’t help it if I’ve stumbled into a group bearing multitudes.”

“Who are you?” Tristram asked the skull, beneath the din. A slim numeral etched itself on the temporal bone just above the zygomatic arch as the jaw opened, and a quiet, ethereal voice answered.

“Ja sam Svirfneblin po imenu Lorrick,” the voice said.

“Er, shit,” Tristram muttered. He covered the skull with his cloak and, louder, he added, “Does anyone speak Undercommon?”

“Why are you even here, Kieron?” Urdna demanded. “Not just now, why did you even come along? You’ve been suspect from the start, but now I find myself wondering what you ever got out of this group, famous as you were on your own, other than a few more psyches to twist in knots.”

“Stop, stop, stop, stop,” Marris hissed, eyes on the floor. She was beginning to rock on her toes, forwards and backwards, like she was attempting to calm herself. Urdna only glanced up once, distracted.

“Isn’t that enough, for something like him at least?” Kor asked. He cut his eyes at the skald. “Cold-blooded.”

Kieron’s shoulders tightened. “Why don’t you say what you want to say, boy?”

“Who killed you?” Tristram asked.

“Nikada nisam poznavao njihova imena,” the skull said as a second numeral slowly appeared. The phosphorescent green light in its eye sockets threw strange shadows over his features. Alba laid a skeletal hand on his shoulder, reassuring as the argument spiked in volume around them, echoing down the hall. Marris’ head jerked up and her eyes cast back behind them into the darkness. She couldn’t see far, but her hand tightened on Urdna’s to the point of pain.

“Did you hear that?” she whispered.

“Stop it, Marris, that hurts and it’s nothing, because this dungeon is dead!” Urdna snapped.

“You don’t fucking know that!” Essa cried. “Just because halfsies here can’t find any traps? He wasn’t much of a rogue in the Cathedral either, if you remember!”

“Gods, are we arguing about this again?” Kieron muttered, pressing his hand to his face.

“You wanna go there?” Kor yelled. “I may have gone down early over stupid shit, but if you hadn’t lied to him and played along with his stupid fucking diabolical cure, he would’ve known he wasn’t gonna survive, and we wouldn’t have been in that shit in the first place!”

Essa’s eyes swirled black, and trailing curls of her white hair ran to smoke at the ends as she rounded on him, hands already aflame. He laughed in her face.

“What’re you gonna do?” he mocked, leaning down to put his face nearly in her hands as he grinned without humor. “Burn me too?”

“I didn’t catch that either,” Tristram muttered to the skull. “Uh… what killed you?”

“Zamke su me ubile. Natjerali su mnoge od nas da prođu kroz prolaze i aktiviraju ih,” the skull said as a third numeral etched itself into the bone and the light in its eyes began to dim. It paused, and Tristram exhaled in defeat. Then it managed three more words before the soul he communed with returned to rest: “Bili su Drow.”

Alba drew her sword.

Urdna drew her hand back and slapped Kor hard across the face.

The tunnel descended into complete darkness.

Kieron roared out a dispel magic that shook the ground, drum springing to life with a blood-pounding rhythm. The magical darkness vanished almost as quickly as it fell, to reveal the party back-to-back instinctively, weapons raised and spells readied.

“Drow, it’s drow,” Tris panted, shoving his bronze bell back its muffling pouch and tugging at the bindings holding in the three inch cold iron and the half inch silver. “The map was out of date!”

“That makes more sense than Urdna slapping me blind,” Kor muttered. All the heat of the argument was gone from his voice, replaced with cold focus as he raised his knives and cocked his head. “More than twenty, the way we came, how well do you know this map?”

“Very well,” Essa and Urdna said, at the same time. They exchanged a grim nod, and Essa tilted her head, wisps of smoke following, and said, “This way!”

They ran. All the exhaustion that had been creeping up them during the monotonous delve fell away against the sound of muffled but unmistakable pursuing footsteps, hisses of words in a twisted dialect of Elven, and, at one point, a long and tortured scream of rage from something which had only the suggestion of mutilated vocal cords left, like the baying of a hunting hound.

“There’s a grand hall ahead,” Urdna barked, as they rounded a corner. “The main entrance will surely be caved in, if this is a lure and trap, but no dwarf ever built a hall without three secret exits, and no elf ever found them all! Keep moving!”

Tristram glanced over at the person running beside him and found Essa rather than Alba, who seemed to have fallen into a rearguard position with Marris. Her feather-light footfalls were inaudible under the thundering of the barbarian’s.

“You couldn’t have known,” Tris called to Essa, panting for breath. He felt it was important to say even given their pursuit. Her head snapped to look at him, and, though her eyes were still blacked out from keeping the magic of the Hells ready to cast, the way they creased at the corners in the light of her burning hands spoke of regret and frustration. One hand went out, and she dug it into a belt pouch.

“Doesn’t matter,” she gasped back. She drew a large silver coin, turning it in her fingers for a moment, only long enough for him to glimpse stamped wings. She snapped it in half. Silver powder drifted up and vanished as she dropped the broken halves and they kept running. “Tris? Look at me! Doesn’t matter, I still fucked up, but it’s going to be okay, I promise!”

“The hall!” Kor yelled back to the party. “We’re almost— what the fuck is that?”

Rearing back on four of six long, arachnid legs was a monster none of them had ever seen before. It had the body of a giant spider up to a point, but where its head and eight beady eyes should’ve been was instead grafted the mutilated torso of a drow male. Marks of pain and change covered ashen skin, terminating in a face that was utterly alien, the mandibles and missing eyes of the spider surgically applied to the elf’s face, dripping poison, dark blood, and saliva. Its humanoid arms bore two spears and as it charged towards them, the sound of three more emerging from tunnels around the hall told the party what they feared most had come to pass.

They were trapped.

“Drider!” Urdna cried, throwing herself backwards to slow her headlong charge.

“Golden Hands, form up!” Essa screamed. She turned to face their pursuers as they once again made a circle, back-to-back.

So they fought.

They gave it everything. Urdna turned the halls of ancient dwarves into an unrecognizable geological catastrophe, druidic powers letting her call stone and ore to her aid, slamming into foes and blocking off as many entrances as possible as regular drow began to pour in. Marris swung her hammer in a frothing, shuddering rage, screaming and crying as she crushed skulls. Kor sprang at the drow from any exposed angle, his clever knives going for arteries they weren’t thinking to protect. Tristram laid curses with the iron bell and called back the newly-deceased with the chime of the silver, throwing their own back at the onslaught of dark elves. Alba spun in a whirl of blood and blade, near-weightless without flesh to bear her down but driven by ethereal force. Kieron kept them moving and angry with every roaring word and drumbeat and spell slung. Essa used every spell and more, laying hands all over herself to draw out everything she had ever laid into her skin, leaving her more naked than if she’d disrobed without a drop of ink on her body. They fought well, hit hard when they hit.

The ground was slick with more blood than drow or drider, though.

“There!” Kor called, pointing a finger at a passage which had been revealed by a wayward blast of fire from Essa. A statue crumbled to dust showed a dark hall through which the reedy whistle of wind could be heard. The party gasped in the fresh air. “There, a way out! We just need to break the line!”

The drow weren’t ignorant to the presence of an escape for the quarry so close to hand. The two remaining drider and seven of the foot soldiers ran towards it, cutting the party off.

“We need a charge!” Kieron yelled. “Gw—”

Alba stepped forward and Tristram choked.

“No, no, you can’t take that place,” he pleaded. He swung his silver bell, but a raised drow wasn’t as adroit as his living foe. One of his zombies went down with its head neatly severed. “Alba, they’ll break you, we need someone hardy!”

“Marris,” Essa gasped, reaching towards the barbarian, “Marris, he’s gone, we don’t have a shield to rush with but you’ve got to break them. Marris, break the line!”

“She can’t!” Urdna screamed. “She’s not right! Essa, use the scroll!”

“She already fucking used it!” Kor howled back.

Marris raised her hammer. Her mouth opened in a feral roar that wouldn’t emerge. She took one step forward towards a charge. Her muscles locked in place, veins bulging, eyes wide and pupils blown in abject fear. Words sprang to life all over the hammer, that hammer that had been a gift of the gods.

Failure.

A drow bolt hit Marris in the throat and she crumpled without a sound.

“Marris!” Urdna screamed, breaking engagement with one drow she’d been forcing back and sprinting towards the fallen woman.

“Don’t break placement!” Kieron yelled, but his command fell on deaf ears for the entire party. Suddenly, no one was thinking tactically.

Urdna slid in next to Marris’ body and spent her last healing spell drawing the bolt and closing the wound. Kor bolted blindly for a different passage altogether, drawing the drow’s attention. Kieron fumbled for a scroll in a case he hadn’t opened since he emerged from the Starstone Cathedral with it. Tristram cast and a shell of phosphorescent light bloomed which he dragged Alba into, spinning, accidentally dipping her in a cruelly comical pose that suggested they might kiss.

He glanced over to see Essa’s hands move to her inner thighs, the place she’d been teased for using like a vault but which he knew she laid her most valuable ink into regardless. Her right thigh was bare, the scroll she’d won gone, and in a way she couldn’t regret. The left still had one thing.

The Hellfire was all she had remaining to her, and it nearly killed them all. The intense column of fire sucked all the air from the hall in a moment, obliterating a cluster of drow and one of the remaining drider but leaving nearly everyone gasping until air from other tunnels rushed back in. Tristram’s shell caught the brunt of the blast he and Alba had almost been awash in before guttering out. Essa lay on her back, battered, dazed from her own casting. She turned her head in time to find Urdna dragging Marris towards the secret exit.

“Ur—” Essa gasped, choked. “Urdna, wait—”

By the time the drow recovered enough to notice and the rest of the party realized what was happening, Urdna was in the mouth of the tunnel with Marris. Her half-ruined face was a rictus of bitter fury as she slapped her palm against the wall and stone rushed out. The tunnel disappeared behind them as if it had never been made.

“She’s gone,” Kor cried, somewhere far off. “She— She got out, but we’re—”

“It’s going to be okay,” Essa choked out as she struggled to stand. The drow pressed in. Tristram shoved his bells into their muffling pouches and drew his nearly-new rapier. Something rumbled overhead and dust rained down. “I… I promised, it’s going to—”

“We’re gonna die here,” Kor wheezed, knives up but face smeared with blood and written all over with horror as the party drew back in. They formed one final, tight circle. They were close enough they could all feel the person next to them shake. “We’re gonna die here, Essa, you killed us.”

“I’m not dying like this,” Kieron snarled. His drumming had stopped as he fought with the clasp of the scroll case, its securing piece a broken part of some massive talon, “not trapped like this, I’m not—”

Alba said nothing for she had no lips to shape the words or throat to produce the sound. She extended her sword to gut the first drow who got close enough, but risked the fool-hardy move of keeping her other hand clasped tightly, painfully tightly, around Tristram’s.

Tristram’s eyes were on Essa. Something was in him now he’d never spoken of, something he thought might keep him alive. But her gift was spent, and her skin bare, and her lover dead, and her luck run out. He could see her about to form the words again. It’s going to be okay.

The ceiling of the hall exploded inwards as the remaining drider leapt on her.

Tristram looked up.

Falling from the newly-opened rent in the stone above was the figure of an armored woman wreathed in light. Behind her fell other figures, and behind them further off was the blessed morning sun. Drow recoiled from all of it as shafts of brilliance fell in on the scene. The winged figure raised a shining sword overhead and spread wings to slow her descent, wings of pure fire—

“…and then, uh,” Tristram finished, lamely, “an angel… saved us.”

Fayr stared at him. Her mouth was still hanging open from the description of the climactic battle. Tristram did not think of himself as a bard, or anything like Kieron, but the words had flowed from him like they had been waiting on the tip of his tongue for a decade. It had been captivating. Fayr’s mouth shut with a click, and her expression turned stormy as the magic of the story wore off and its abrupt ending registered.

“An angel saved you,” she repeated, incredulous.

“Yes, ah,” Tristram mumbled, closing up his now-dry spellbook and reattaching it to his belt, “the… the trouble is that there are things that even I can’t tell you in good faith, that truly aren’t mine to share, so I can only hope you can find knowing more to be better than—”

He was silenced by getting hit in the face with a haunted doll. Tristram could only blink at Fayr, standing and furious, hands loaded with dolls in a complete turn-around from the fear she’d had of them earlier.

“You’re doing the same thing,” she accused, “trying to fill me up with fairy tales and stories about angels so I don’t ask about anything. I just want to understand. You’re no better than mom! Take the dead girls back to the cleric’s room and go away forever!”

Tristram exited, pummeled by dolls, catching them as carefully as he could as Fayr chased him out, in the grips of a truly teenage moment of wrath. The last he caught before she slammed her door wasn’t one of the Irriseni dolls, but still choked him up. The angel doll that had sat on Fayr’s bed for years hit him in the gut and fell to the floor before he could stoop for it with hands already full. He knelt next to it instead.

That was how Alba found him a little while later. She stood over him and tapped the crown of his head with a finger to make sure she had his attention before she began to rapidly fingerspell.

A R E Y O U B E I N G B U L L I E D

“I was so good with her as a baby,” Tristram said, mournfully. He gathered all of the haunted dolls up in his arms amidst the tinkling of their bells, and set the angel back against the door. Alba’s bones rattled in her version of laughter.

S O M E O N E H A D T O B E

“That’s not fair to Essa,” he mumbled. “Come on. I need to put these back, and then say goodbye. I don’t know that it would be good to linger here after all.”

Alba stopped him with a touch.

A L R E A D Y

Tristram led the way back to the guild member quarters, past Essa as she yawned and covered the stew pot behind the bar for the night, not speaking again until he was setting the dolls back where he had found them on the cleric’s dresser.

“Her concerns are reasonable, I do not want to be a moral quandary for a paladin with you on the line,” he said. He rubbed at the back of his neck as he placed the last doll. “I’ve also gathered from her letters that we’re becoming… you know, the party… something of a burden, on her. We all moved on, and now that she is attempting to do the same, it sounds as if we’re turning up like bad coppers to cause her stress and make her look terrible in front of her employees.”

H A V E W E A L L M O V E D O N

“This is about Essa,” Tristram said, firmly. “Anyway, it won’t hurt to get in a few more miles today, with the horses rested.”

Alba didn’t raise her hand to speak again. Tristram didn’t feel like he’d won anything, other than a little bit longer before they had an incredibly difficult conversation.

Essa watched them ride out by the light of the lantern she hung by the front door. No amount of goading, insulting their intelligence, or begrudgingly being sincere in how she missed them had enticed them to stay. Tristram waved at the top of the rise, absurdly cheery for a figure all in black in the middle of the night in a rainstorm. Essa couldn’t help herself but to wave back. Her guts felt hollow.

“Fayr, baby, you hungry?” Essa asked a little later, knocking on the door of her daughter’s room. Her foot hit something as she leaned in and she glanced down. “Hey, you left Anca on the floor out here. You okay?”

“Go away,” Fayr grumbled, muffled by something, maybe a blanket.

“You sick?” Essa ventured. “If you got wet getting up here earlier, you could get a fever.”

Essa heard a thump and then the click of the key being turned in the door lock from the other side. “Go away!”

“Alright, Fayr,” Essa said, rubbing at her eyes, “but I’ll be up while the light’s good for you, in case you wanna do something, alright?”

She got no response. Eventually, she had to find something to do other than leaning against the locked door. She made her way back downstairs, and shook off the damp she accumulated walking back and forth in the rain by sitting down in front of the fire again. Just a bit ago, Alba had been in the chair opposite, fingerspelling in agonizing slowness so they could talk. Essa peered into it and tried to imagine she could still see the indents where her pelvis sank into the cushion.

“Riddle me this,” she asked the fire, like her father used to say when she was a kid and he was about to hit her with a real stumper, “how is it I have a party, a child, and an entire guild, and still end up sitting alone?”

The fire, of course, had no answer.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 5/14/2018 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024