Spirits of the Earth

@MadEmperor @Imperfect_M

[Continued from here (http://www.spiritsoftheearth.net/smf/index.php?topic=27036.0)]

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It was well passed noon by the time the maid who had brought their tea came into the parlor to inform Grav and Kiara that Lord and Lady Hallis had located an alchemist in the city who may be able to assist them.

"She's being escorted here," she explained, "should be due at the front door within the hour. Lord Hallis will introduce you when she arrives."

As she ducked her head and scurried back out, Kiara gave a low sigh of relief and shot Grav a quick smile. "Thank gods. Shouldn't be too much longer now and someone will be able to take a proper look at you."

The parlor they were seated in had a wide window along one wall that allowed them to see out onto the lane that led up to the townhouse's front door, and Kiara shifted a bit on the chaise to try to get a better view, one leg jiggling anxiously as they waited.

Grav sighed in a strange kind of relieved anxiety. He was happy to be able to finally get some answers. At the same time, he was afraid of what those answers could be. Would there be no cure? Would this keep advancing until he was something else? Would his mind be next?

He looked in her direction, his eyes full of anxiety. Gone was the carefree adventurer she had met in that inn on the road to Selevea. "Is it... weird that I'm even more worried now? Because it feels like answers are going to somehow make this more--I dunno, real."

She tried to give him an encouraging smile. "No, mate, I don't think it's weird." She opened her moth, then paused, wondering if what she was going to say would be empathetic or just...self-centered.

Fuck it. May as well give it a try.

"Listen, you...saw what I was like with my Da. It's not great. But—but it was worse before I knew, y'know? When I was little, and different, but I didn't know why. I don't—I don't know what answers you're gonna get, but...I think answers at all will help."

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Serendipity
Summervale
Windfall Village
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"If I had a silver coin for every time an old colleague asked me to examine a Connlaothan, I'd have two silvers..." grumbled the Halfling as she continued to put more things into her backpack. "Not a lot, but strange it happened twice..."

Tathfheithleann's enchanted backpack thankfully could hold up to an entire alchemy field lab being stuffed into it. The dimensional space within its sturdy canvas held far more volume than a backpack fit for a child would allow. In it went boxes and boxes of equipment, potions, ingredients... Anything that the little mage thought she might need for this first visit. The person on the other end of her Sending Stone had frustratingly few answers for her.

The Halfling mage approached her teleportation circle, shouldered her bag, and threw her cloak over one shoulder. One should always account for the weather, after all. The circle set itself aglow with a soft blue light as it awaited her instructions.

"Arca," she commanded.

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Serendipity
Arca
Undisclosed Apartment
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The promise of a mage from Summervale arriving in Arca "within the hour" was as if a madman promised the world over. Or so it would have sounded. The art of magecraft and its commonality in Serendipity opened the door for many trades, utilities, and luxuries alike. Teleportation circles were expensive in ingredients and difficult to maintain on a large scale, making them next to impossible for infrastructure or public mass transit... But if one could afford the space and the circle, such travel made life a far easier and safer experience. And Tathfheithleann had both.

She reappeared with a flash of light and the crackling of static in a circle exactly identical to the one in her workshop. This, too, was a shop of her own, though smaller and used primarily for storage.

"Welcome back," called a disembodied voice, one that mimicked the Halfling's own.

"Can't talk, nobles are waiting on me," Tathfheithleann said to the empty air. "Keep the sigils warm, I'm not staying long."

"As you wish," the voice replied.

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Serendipity
Arca
The Halli Family Estate
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Kiara and Grav, what conversation they were having, would be politely interrupted by a maid to announce the arrival of the alchemist. Behind Lord Hallis walked someone about the height of a Human child, but even at a glance it was clear that this one had the proportions of a fully grown person, just scaled down to a four-foot height. Not a Human at all; but a Halfling from far-flung Summervale. From dress to mantle, her clothing was decorated with sigils and circles of some kind, and comically attached to her back was a rather simple canvas backpack. Even from her diminutive height, the Halfling scanned over the room and those in it with soft purple eyes.

"Tathfheithleann of Summervale," was the name she was introduced by.

Grav had seen a halfling exactly, well, never. He had learned everything he did know about them through hearsay. He would have even had a thousand rude question... if his mind wasn't thoroughly preoccupied with his present situation. Some things were just more pressing than curiosity and wonderment.

The first unusual thing Tathfheithleann would notice about him was his decidedly un-Connloathian acceptance of magical assistance. Sure, he looked nervous, but that seemed more like general anxiety than anything directed at her. The second thing was the color of his eyes; they were red.

"I can't say that I'm glad to meet anyone under these circumstances, but... thanks for coming," he said nervously.

"Oh!  And I'm Grav. Err, Caviin." A Serenian surname? That would be the third thing.

Kiara got to her feet and nodded politely, though she was shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. "Kiara," she introduced herself with a little wave. "Thanks for ah, turning up on such short notice."

She looked between the two of them, biting her lip. "Did someone tell you what—what happened?"

Tathfheithleann's violet eyes ran Grav up-and-down (or rather "up-and-up") as if to scan him for any symptoms or signs that would give insight into his condition. She got straight to work and straight to business. Down went the backpack and out came the tools.

It was a comical sight seeing a Halfling pull the equipment for a poison control center or a laboratory out from such a small backpack. Plenty of the cases she drew forth from the canvas bag folded open into racks, trays, and other sort of organizers for everything from scalpels to vials of gods-know-what.

"Did someone tell you what-... What happened?" Kiara asked her.

"The mage who sent me the message was vague on details," she responded in a deadpan contrasted by her high, chirpy soprano. "From what I understand, you're supposed to be dying. But you aren't, and that's what has everyone worried."

The Halfling mage put on a pair of silk gloves. As soon as she drew them snug over her hands, sigils on the backs of both set alight in soft hues of blue and green.

"Sit down somewhere I can take a look at you," she said to Grav before briefly directing her attention to Kiara. "And tell me what happened."

"D--dying?!" Grav's eyes went wide as he practically fell into a seat. "Who said anything about dying?!"

"And why are you asking her? I'm right here. You know, the patient," he grumbled, becoming irritated.

"What happened is that I got stuck by a couple of manticore quills, and for some reason that prompted the crooked healer that treated us to dose me with something using his freaky mutant reverse leeches. And now my body is changing somehow. Hence the red-eyed Connloathian."

Kiara moved forward to put a hand on Grav's shoulder automatically, hoping the touch might be grounding or offer some sort of comfort. It didn't take her long to second-guess the action though, and she pulled her hand back and clasped both tightly in front of her body.

"I mean...yeah, that's the long and short of it," she agreed with Grav's summary. "We were hired to deal with the manticores, but they were...not normal. Smarter, more venomous, bigger. And they hunted in a pack, which I've never seen before."

Grav's irritation didn't even slow the little Alchemist's roll as she listened to his description and Kiara's agreement. But yet somehow, amidst the young man's emotion, the Halfling appeared just a hair and a half more tired than she was a moment ago. Tathfheithleann was not known for her bedside manner, nor her poker face.

She approached Grav and immediately cupped his face with one hand only to pull his face down to her height. Even when sitting, most Humans were still taller than her. With the other hand she wove delicate, tiny sigils in the air. A circle formed at the end of her fingertip and she held it over the young man's eye. The Halfling peered into that circle, then hovered it over his other eye to repeat the gesture.

"Believe it or not, you're the second Connlaothan boy with outlandish powers I've examined," Tathfheithleann idly commented as she studied Grav's eyes.

She flicked her hand like putting out a match and the tiny magic circle vanished, winking out with a mote of light. The little mage tapped her thumb against her middle and ring fingers in some arcane gesture before returning to her admittedly aggressive examination of Grav's condition. She traced her middle finger along his facial structure, following the lines on the boy's countenance as if to remember the shape of his face.

"Manticore quills and... Reverse leeches?" asked the little mage. "Actually-... Shush a second."

With a gesture many would describe as a "sleight of hand," the Halfling had the young Connlaothan boy's chin pinched between two fingers. She opened up his lips and out came that tiny, glowing magic circle again.

"Hold still," she commanded. "Hard for me to get a good look if you're talking or moving around."

Closer examination of his eyes revealed a few flecks of blue left over from his natural color, which were slowly shrinking. His mouth, on the other hand, was perfectly normal except that his canine teeth seemed just a little too sharp. The contours of his face revealed even less, but for the fact that he had that symmetry going on that humans seemed to find appealing.

Further examination would require him to disrobe. He would probably be fussy about that, but that was just how such things went. Thankfully, he was being cooperative so far.

"Should I, um...?" Kiara hovered uncertainly, wringing her hands—at least until she realized that she was doing it, when she quickly locked them together behind her back.

"I feel like I'm just going to get underfoot," she told Grav apologetically. "I should, y'know, probably excuse myself?" She looked the the alchemist for confirmation, feeling supremely awkward.

"Just don't touch anything and you'll be just fine," Tathfheithleann said to Kiara, though her eyes remained firmly locked on her work.

The Halfling reached into empty air as if expecting to grab something from it, and out of that empty air appeared a scroll neatly bound in a ribbon. She pointed at it, still not taking her eyes of her work, and commanded:

"Take notes."

On command, the floating vellum obeyed. The ribbon untied itself, the scroll unfurled, and words began to simply write themselves on the page in neat Serenian script.

Tathfheithleann stepped back and clapped her hands together, sending tiny sparks of green from between them. She turned her hands over and opened them, revealing a glowing shape like that of a piece of paper surrounded by glyphs and runes. The mage held her hands like she were framing Grav for a portrait, all the while looking through that screen of glowing green. The spell she wove was one that allowed her to see through "layers" of the target. Clothing, skin, and even down into the body's tissues and organs. The spell's only hang-up was that it could not pierce magical barriers, but it -would- highlight them if it detected any.

"Start with the 'crooked healer' and 'reverse leeches," Tathfheithleann ordered. "We'll go from there."

"His name is Anton Volke. Aneas--err, Master Hallis told us that he's a life mage and alchemist and a friend of the family."

His skin appeared normal, except for three places. First, his shoulders had extra hair coming in, almost like sparse fur, and a few irritated spots along the top. His arms had what appeared to be slits in the skin just above the elbows. Lastly, his tailbone area was oddly swollen.

"He applied leeches to suck out the poison, but instead they pumped something into my blood. He had evidently mutated them like he must have altered the manticores."

His musculature was clearly stronger, with unusual muscle growth along his elbows and tailbone. His skeleton brought it all into focus. The spots on his shoulders were where a few bony spikes were forming just under the skin. His elbows had grown a retractable spur of bone with a hollow spike for delivering venom. And his tailbone was... well, extending into a tail.

"So...what exactly are you doing?" Kiara asked as it's something like wary curiosity as she stepped back to give the two of them room and found herself just sort of hovering around the other side of the parlor's chaise. "Can you...I dunno, reverse it? Or stop it? Whatever it is..."

As Grav explained the context of his situation, the floating vellum nearby Tathfheithleann dutifully transcribed everything he was saying. Every stutter, every syllable, every word. The Halfling on the other hand was still peering through the paper-sized field of whatever it was she had conjured between her hands.

"Field notes," she said to no one in particular, and out of thin air conjured another vellum to write her notes in order. "Connlaothan, Human, male, young by the looks of him. Shoulders are growing shaggy hair, thicker than Human body hair. Skin has split above both elbows towards the shoulders. Coccyx elongated, tissues around lower back irritated. Ulna warped into a pointed shape; looks similar to a spike. Draw it."

On-command, the vellum transcribing her notes drew a quick diagram of the image in Tathfheithleann's mind. Tathfheithleann herself did not seem very bothered by seeing the changes in Grav's body. This was not her first rodeo and, given her line of work, probably wouldn't be the last either.

"So... What exactly are you doing?" Kiara asked the Halfling mage. "Can you-... I dunno, reverse it? Or stop it? Whatever it is..."

Tathfheithleann pinched her index fingers and thumbs and pulled her hands apart, dispelling the field she once held in front of her. The field notes vellum rolled itself back up and bound itself in a red ribbon, then winked out of existence in a puff of smoke and a flash of light.

"Just writing down what's happening to him," explained the mage. "And I'm not that kind of healer. Whatever's happening to you isn't the field of study I work in; the most I can do is put notes together for the healer who does know what to do."

She took Grav by the arm and extended the young man's hands out, turning his arm this way and bending his elbow.

"No pain at all when I do this?" she asked.

Grav was very disappointed to hear that this was just an examination. He frowned; he had hoped for some kind of treatment. What she was seeing was frightening enough without having to wait for another specialist. Just what was he becoming?

"No, it doesn't hu--" Bending his elbow a certain way triggered the hollow spike--stinger--to spring out. His eyes widened in shock. "W-what the hells is that?!"

Kiara actually squeaked, eyes going wide as she jumped back a step instinctively. "What in all gods' names?!"

She quickly coughed, feeling guilty for the reaction, and shot Grav an apologetic look. "I mean, ah...that's...that's new."

The stinger on Grav's elbow let fly like a spring-loaded blade. The visceral sound of its extension and the punching of cloth was so sudden that Tathfheithleann loudly yelped in shock. She hopped back, her hands reflexively pulling to her shoulders as if expecting the bone spike to suddenly explode if she had touched it further. Though as quick as her reaction was, her shocked expression dulled back into her usual deadpan after only a few heartbeats of tension.

"S- Stop moving it-! Stop waving around!" she barked as she tried to collect her thoughts.

The mage moved forward to continue her examination. She performed the same gesture to call forth her illusory field she used to examine Grav the first time. Though she was eyeing over the bone spike, she was careful not to touch it. Her gloves would protect her, but she was not going to go poking around if she noted anything abnormal. The spike itself was hollow like that of a stinger, though what venom glands it was meant to be connected to, she had no idea.

"It looks like a-... A stinger, or a fang," she reported, more to her notes than Grav or Kiara. She continued to peer through that paper-size screen framed by her fingers. "Doesn't look like it's connected to anything though... It's just... Empty."

Grav gave Kiara a frightened look. He was slowly becoming something monstrous, like in his nightmares. In that moment, he wished he had never left home or gone on any adventure.

"Do either of you have any idea what kind of creature Volke mixed into me?" he asked the both of them. "If that's even what he did."

Kiara shook her head helplessly. She knew he was scared--he wasn't exactly hiding it well--but she didn't know what to do for him. With no better ideas, she moved cautiously closer and put one hand on his other arm. She didn't say anything, just hoped the contact might be comforting, in any way that was possible.

"You're asking me to make an assumption," Tathfheithleann sighed in a deadpan. "For legal reasons, I'm obligated not to answer."

The mage regained her composure and calmly dictated a description of Grav's "stinger-" as it was- to the floating vellum that, despite it only being the size of a typical scroll, seemed to have an endless amount of writing space on its surface.

"I don't know the name 'Anton Volke.' The most I can do is make a note of him and send a blacklist request to my guilds," Tathfheithleann explained. "The most I can say with my Alchemy license level is that- alchemically- you are being affected by a Mutagen. Mutagenic Alchemy isn't common, but it's not unheard of. Considering how you haven't turned into a mass of... Mass... You're lucky. Most illegal Mutagens I've seen are more harmful than not."

Tathfheithleann lifted- or rather bade Grav to lift- the young man's leg to test the flexion of his legs. "Let me guess... You've been eating more and get hungry more often?" she asked him as she settled back into her professional, clinical demeanor.

Grav was too busy fretting over the possibility of melting into a quivering mass of constituent elements to immediately answer. When he did answer, he was distracted. "Y-yes. Very much so," he said, cooperating with her instructions.

"Could being stuck with manticore quills without reacting to the poison have told him I might survive his mutagen?"

"Wait wait." Kiara raised a hand. "Illegal mutagens? So...what, Grav is now physically an illegal substance?"

What the hells were they supposed to do about that?

"Y-yes," Grav replied. "Very much so."

"A-yep... You're definitely changing alright," Tathfheithleann commented as she clicked her heels together twice. The Halfling girl levitated upwards and over the other side of the chaise. She tested the range of motion of Grav's neck and felt along the young man's muscle to feel for any abnormalities she may have missed. "Lucky for you, the one who did it at the bare minimum knew enough to keep your change slow enough to let you adjust."

"Could being stuck with manticore quills without reacting to the poison have told him I might survive his mutagen?" Grav asked.

"Can't answer you directly. Not legally anyway," Tathfheithleann flatly answered. "But to a more general point, you're kind of supposed to survive. That's-..." The little mage gave an exasperated, sharp sigh. "Point is, any Alchemist who kills a subject should be called a murderer. I don't share my trade with punk Hedge Mages boiling horse urine in their basement."

She rolled her eyes at the thought. Clearly Tathfheithleann had something of an axe to grind with people like Anton Volke. She was certified after all, and what a series of trials that was.

"Wait wait," Kiara chimed in with a raise of her hand. "Illegal mutagens? So... What, Grav is now physically an illegal substance?"

Another sharp sigh from Tathfheithleann. Not at Kiara, but at the elusive Anton Volke. "No. He's not illegal," the Halfling answered. "Your friend here is a victim of a rogue Alchemist among other things."

The little mage floated back down to the floor, reflexively evening out her skirt like that of a schoolgirl hit by a breeze. "My suggestion, as a professional, is to ask the Guild of Chirurgeons to take another look at him. I'll give you everything from my examination here. I'm not a healer; they'll see things I can't. Once they do that, then I'll know what to start researching to treat him, if he needs treatment at all."

Grav took this all in with a heavy sigh. What was he going to look like by the time any kind of treatment would be ready? What if there wasn't one? And what could she even mean by not needing one?

"What do you mean by no treatment at all? That this could be temporary?" he asked with a sliver of hope. He knew that she couldn't make any promises, but it was the only thing he had to hold on to.

Kiara had a very bad feeling in the pit of her stomach that "temporary" was not what the petite alchemist meant. She didn't voice her fears, not wanting to make Grav feel worse. But she did place her hand back on his shoulder and squeeze lightly in an attempt at encouragement.

"What do you mean by 'no treatment at all?'" Grav asked as Tathfheithleann plied her trade. "That this could be temporary?"

"Again, ethics. Can't answer that directly," she replied. The mage shuffled over towards her field kit and produced a series of small reagent bottles with a beaker. "An old colleague of mine published a study on mutagens. Most victims of rogue Alchemist cases usually needed some form of treatment in order to get a... How to put it... 'Normal life' back if they wanted one."

She set out her reagent bottles with her beaker on the low table fore of the chaise. Normally it was used as a tea table or coffee table, today it would be a makeshift lab counter. The Halfling snapped her fingers with authority. Blue, crackling sparks leapt from the dull thwip of her finger striking the anvil of her palm, and a ripple like that of a fallen pebble in a pond raced across the table's surface. And just like that it was spotless. Not just clean, but completely sterile. One could practically see their own reflection in the wood varnish.

"Sit back down if you will," Tathfheithleann bade. "And give me a body part you don't mind getting cut. I'm going to take a look at your blood."

"My... blood? O--okay." He extended an arm towards her, not squeamish about a small cut. To Kiara, his muscles did seem, if not much bigger, more defined.

Once examined, it was evident that his blood wasn't technically human anymore. However, what exact creatures Volke had used for his serum was a total mystery; as far as Tathfheithleann could tell, it could be as many as half a dozen of them. Only a very skilled alchemist could pull off a stable fusion of so many lifeforms.

"Oh, that's..." Kiara trailed off with a frown as she stared at his arm, not sure if she should voice the observation. But, well--all data was useful, right?

"Um, Ser Tathfheithleann? Not sure how relevant this is, but, ahh...I just noticed that is seems like Grav has gotten...fitter?"

Her cheeks went a little red and she looked to her friend, adding quickly, "Not that you weren't before or--I mean it's not something I really noticed--" a bald-faced lie--"Just, um, I mean..."

She waved a hand helplessly at his arm, trying to indicate the definition in muscle that she was sure hadn't been so pronounced even a day ago.

Tathfheithleann, ever the professional, gently took Grav by the wrist and snapped her fingers against. Grav felt a sudden surge like lightning across the skin of his hand and wrist. Shocking, perhaps, but certainly not painful. The Halfling drew a circle in the air with her finger and traced along it a second time with tiny, nearly-imperceptible twitches of her gloved digits.

The circle illuminated itself and out from it fell a wooden stylus covered in engravings of beautiful, winding vines. A layman might call it a "wand," and while that would not be a lie, it was inaccurate to the thing's actual function: A magic focus. Tathfheithleann dotted two places on Grav's wrist, or rather more accurately, she marked his blood vessels. Next to them she simply drew the number "3."

"It's not going to hurt," she explained.

The Halfling touched the back-end of the stylus against Grav's wrist. With a flash of light and the scent of ozone, those two marks opened Grav's wrist. They were tiny things, but they were bleeding a lot. The blood, surprisingly, did not fall from his arm. In fact it didn't fall at all. Tathfheithleann held Grav's upturned wrist, and his blood levitated out from the cuts upon him and pooled into a neat sphere levitating just above the site.

One second, then two, then three. On the third, his bleeding suddenly stopped, and his cuts closed themselves, his skin stitching together and leaving two neat, tiny surgical scars.

"Um, Ser Tathfheithleann? Not sure how relevant this is, but, ahh-..." Kiara half-murmured. "I just noticed that it seems like Grav has gotten... Fitter?"

The Halfling, without so much as blinking or breaking focus, gestured at her floating parchment with her stylus.

"Write that down," she told it.

The parchment stiffened as if to salute its enchanter, and Kiara's explanation wrote itself upon its vellum surface.

The floating sphere of Grav's blood was barely the cow's eye. Tathfheithleann released his wrist and the sphere floated to her beaker, depositing itself in it without so much as a single drop splashing against the beaker's walls.

The mage girl had to stand to see over her equipment where a Human could easily sit upon the floor. Halflings weren't particularly tall folk, after all. Her hands moved about her bottles and her stylus like water; the entire process of whatever arcane ritual she was performing was as a single motion. She had the hands of someone who had done this a thousand times, and she would do it a thousand more.

The blood sample in the beaker, mixed with all of those strange liquids, bubbled and blackened. Tathfheithleann tapped the glass with the back of her stylus, and that same black blood suddenly hissed a cacophony as a multitude of vapors and smoke rose from its surface. Yet, those selfsame vapors did not go anywhere, as steam or smoke normally would. Instead they collected in a solid, gray puck beside the glass in defiance of all reason. The Halfling seemed completely unbothered as she examined it with that same cold, clinical expression. After a few seconds, there was nothing left in the beaker; not even a residue.

"Well, you aren't turning into a bug. Or a plant. Or a crab," she said dryly in some attempt at humor. "And your blood isn't doing anything it isn't supposed to do."

Which was, of course, a very simple way of saying "you don't have any form of cancer in your blood." But the Halfling wasn't about to say anything out loud that would cause more questions such as "what is cancer?"

Tathfheithleann dropped her stylus into empty air; the little focus winked out of existence through a circle identical to the one it had fallen out of. She clapped her gloved hands together, and her equipment- summoned or otherwise- snapped to attention like soldiers called to muster. The vellum parchment rolled itself up and underneath it appeared a scroll case. That gray puck settled itself atop the vellum as the entire collective neatly packed itself. Within the minute, Tathfheithleann's entire field kit returned to her backpack and she was left holding a scroll case of hardened leather.

She extended it to Grav and Kiara. "Guild of Chirurgeons. Whoever they send, hand them this; it has all of my notes from today and the results of your blood test," explained the mage. "Absolutely. Nobody. Else. No quacks, no hedge healers, and no village wisefolk. Guild. Of. Chirurgeons. Understood?"

"Guild of Chirurgeons. Got it." Grav nodded in understanding. He was still disappointed that he had to wait and have his problem advance, but at least there was hope. Maybe he wouldn't be an alchemical mutant forever.

That just left one thing: tilting his head inquisitively, he asked, "Yeah... what's a chirurgeon?"

Kiara raised her hand slightly. "I second the question," she admitted. Most of this was going directly over her head, and she wasn't so proud as to pretend it wasn't.

"Yeah... What's a chirurgeon?" Grav asked.

"I second the question," Kiara chimed in.

Tathfheithleann blinked. Once. Slowly. Her face went near-completely statue still as she stood there in abject, stunned silence. When she finally did move, it was a single twitch under one of those lavender eyes of hers.

They didn't know.

The Halfling bit her lip. She almost bit it hard enough to draw blood as she sucked in a calming breath.

"A doctor. A licensed surgeon and healer, both magical and not," she finally answered after a few moments of awkward silence. "There's an organization of them here in Arca; they're certified not to kill patients or give you fake cures. Granted there's supposed to be certifications and tests all over the country, but regulations suddenly cease to exist outside of Arca's walls for some reason or another.

She pinched the bridge of her nose and cleared her throat to try and mask her emotions. "You'll find their clinics all over Arca," she told Kiara and Grav, her voice returning to its usual flat professionalism. "Go in, ask around for someone who understands mutagens, and ask that one to take a look at you. They'll write a record of their notes, or add to mine. The point is, you will get someone to look at you within the day. Every licensed Alchemist knows what 'urgent care' means. And because you got stuck by a rogue Alchemist, you're automatically 'urgent.' I put that in my notes too."

"Okay." Grav nodded. "I actually get what you're telling us to do now. Sorry, I can be... well, I just don't know a lot."

He gave Linn a weak attempt at a charismatic smile. "Thank you for coming so quickly; we had absolutely no idea what to do or who could help. I won't pretend I wasn't hoping for more answers, but we know more about what we're dealing with now. So, again, thank you."

Such humility from him was... kind of sad.

Kiara nodded to the alchemist, dipping her head in a sort of half-bow. "Thank you," she repeated Grav's sentiment, unsure what else she could say. This woman had come at the drop of a hat and done everything she could to help them—what else could she do but thank her?

"Listen, if you ever...need anything. A favor, a job, whatever. You can call on me."

Tathfheithleann already had half-turned on her heel to leave by the time Grav and Kiara offered their thanks. Strange, she thought, that this would be the second time she had heard thanks like this in her lifetime. The first time was when she saved a little Connlaothan girl's life from sickness; though- in Tathfheithleann's mind- she had done little more than treat the fever. She forgot how these things that she took for granted seemed so much more profound to those outside her field.

The little Halfling paused for the briefest of moments, her lips drawing into a line on her features. She looked over her shoulder at the two adventurers.

"Don't thank me. Thank your friend in the Hallis-es," she flatly answered. "The family knows a mage I used to work with."

"Listen, if you ever... Need anything," Kiara told her. "A favor, a job, whatever. You can call on me."

"I'll buy that in now. Go to the Guild of Chirurgeons," Tathfheithleann replied, her tongue a blade point sharpened by years of fallout from people stepping outside of instructions given to them. "All I did was examine him."

The mage removed her silken gloves and replaced them in a little hardleather case on the belt around her dress.

"I'll be as honest as I can, as a professional..." Tathfheithleann explained. "I owed a favor to the Hallis' mage-on-retainer, that's why I agreed to examine you in the first place."

She sighed; this time her breath was a slow, weary one. If Grav and Kiara didn't know better, the look in Tathfheithleann's eye made it seem like the Halfling had just ran herself ragged from days of marching or exertion. The mage clicked her heels together and simply gave the two adventurers a nod before turning to leave. Back to her workshop and her projects. After all, she had a business to run; the Hallis' invoice was already processed.

Grav watched Tathfheithleann leave, and when she was gone, he looked at Kiara with a sigh. "I guess we're headed to the Guild of Chirurgeons."

He was relieved that there were people trained to deal with his problem but anxious about the lack of a guarantee that anything could be done. This wasn't the kind of adventure he had in mind.

"Right." She nodded quickly. "I'll go tell the Hallises we're leaving—and thank them, I guess."  She scoffed and rolled her eyes. "Toffs and their manners."

Her voice was a little too chipper, clearly trying to act normal in an effort to put him at ease, or possibly cheer him up. She seemed to realize how awkward she sounded, wincing a bit and rubbing at the back of her neck.

"If you, ah, can flag down that steward and grab our packs, I'll make our excuses to the master of the house."

Grav nodded, smiling weakly at her attempt to help his mood. "On it."

---

He was waiting in the foyer when she finished saying their goodbyes and descended the central staircase. The adventurer had changed back into his clean traveling clothes and was already carrying his pack over his shoulder. He was anxious to get the medical exams over with.

When Kiara returned to the foyer, she had Aneas in tow. The young lord Ling had cleaned up well, and he was carrying a neatly wrapped bundle.

"I hear you two are off," he said with a nod to Grav, before thrusting out the wrapped package. "Here. It's not much, but... As thanks—you not only saved my life, you've exposed Volke. We owe you."

Kiara took her pack from Grav and nodded to Aneas. "Thanks, mate. Be seeing you, yeah?" She grinned and punched his arm lightly. "Try to keep out of trouble."

"Thank you, Aneas." He nodded gratefully, taking the bundle with curiousity. The weight of it made him raise a brow at the lordling. He pulled back the cloth to find the ornate hilt of a high quality sword in an equally quality scabbard, a noble's blade of fine steel.

"No... I--I can't accept this. It's... too much," he argued humbly, taken completely off guard by such a valuable gift.

"Please." Aneas stepped back, hands up to show he wasn't going to take the blade back. "It's the least we can do, really." He looked between the two of them. "Are you sure you don't need to stay the night? We have plenty of guest rooms..."

Kiara glanced at Grav, biting at her lower lip. "I think we should get you to these Churio-whatevers as soon as we can," she murmured, though she seemed to be leaving the decision up to him.

"Right, of course." Aneas nodded quickly. "Well, just—don't hesitate to call on us if you need anything."

"We would love to rest, but we were told to go straight to the Chirurgeons." Grav gave an apologetic smile as the pair left to find the guild in question.

Once outside, he said, "Aneas turned out to be one stand up guy, didn't he?"

"Yeah." Kiara smiled sidelong at the massive townhouse even as they left it behind. "For a mini-lord, not so bad."

Glancing over at Grav, she added with a nudge of her shoulder against his, "And generous, too. That blade's pretty damn high-end, huh? Gotta say, I feel a little left out."

She pouted, but it was clear from her tone that she was joking. With a dramatic sigh, she shrugged and said, "Guess he just likes you better."

Grav unwrapped the blade more, the white scabbard shining in the magical lamplight. Something else fell out, but he caught it with surprising quickness. He lifted up a long dagger in a black scabbard. Its silver hilt was decorated with a ruby, the opposite of the golden hilt the sword bore.

"I think this one's for you."

"Oh shit."

Kiara took the smaller blade and slid it halfway out of the sheath. She whistled appreciatively, admiring the edge in the lamplight.

"Damn. He really didn't skimp on these, huh?" Grinning, she belted the sheath to her hip. "C'mon—let's get you to these Chirurgeons before something else happens."

Grav nodded, and they departed the Garden District.

---

They had made Kiara wait in a sparsely furnished room, asking her all sorts of questions about the circumstances of Grav's condition. Like Tathfheithleann, they made no promises. They could only do the best they could.

Eventually, she was told that they needed time to observe him and that she needed to come back in the morning. However, she was allowed to check in on him before she left for an inn.

"This is ridiculous," was the first thing out of her mouth when she entered the room where Grav would be staying for the night. "We've fought fucking manticores and crossed the Fae Realms together, and for some reason I can't stay for your damned check-up?"

She huffed and frowned at the wall, arms folded. She didn't like places like this--houses of healing, telling her to come back in the morning, they just need to observe her--him. Observe him.

Shit.

Sighing, she pinched the bridge of her nose and shook her head. "M'sorry," she mumbled to Grav. "I just--I dunno. I'm...worried about you?" She chanced a peek up at him. "How're you feeling?"

Grav shrugged as he sat on the edge of his cot. "I dunno. Like a bug in a jar with just enough holes to not suffocate?"

"I hate it." He gave her a crooked frown. "I hate feeling this powerless. It's like I have no say in my life."

Kiara bit her lip, then cautiously sat beside him on the cot. "I'm sorry," she murmured again. "I--I wish I could do something for you..."

She was quiet a moment, then nudged his shoulder with hers and offered a lopsided half-smile. "Want me to sneak back in after hours?" She knew better than most how sometimes saying "fuck the rules" could make you feel like you had a little more control.

The swordsman grinned. "Oh gods yes. It's not like they're going to kick me out."

"But, truthfully, I may be asleep." He yawned. "And I'm not sure I want to get woken up."

"That seems fair," Kiara chuckled. She moved as though to hug him, then seemed to catch herself and changed the gesture to a slightly awkward pat on the shoulder.

She stood and stretched, then huffed, "Well, I suppose I'll be seeing you in the morning then. You just...take care of yourself."

She moved to the door, then paused, one hand in the doorframe. "Listen, Grav..." She tapped her fingers against the wood, not quite looking at him as she said in a hurry, "I don't make friends easy, and I don't keep a lot. So, y'know...I'd hate to have to replace your slot, is all I'm saying."

She gave him a brief flash of a crooked smile, then slipped out.

Grav smiled tiredly as he watched her leave; she was a good friend. Alone, he lay down on the cot and fell asleep. To his later surprise, he only dreamed of the next adventure.

---

When she came to collect him in the morning, she was escorted back to an examination room where he was waiting for her. Doctor Asana, the Chirurgeon he had been assigned, was there with him. They stopped their idle conversation, and he gave his friend a smile and a nod.

"Good." The chirurgeon's expression changed to one of pure professionalism now that it was time for her to go over her findings. "He wanted you to be here before I got started. Take a seat, and I'll tell you what we know and what options you have."

Kiara returned the greeting smile with a small one of her own, though her expression quickly sobered as she crossed to stand beside him and looked the chirurgeon up and down.

"Alright..." She sat, looking stiff and uncomfortable. "Fire away, doc."

Asana first repeated a lot of the same things Tathfheithleann had said, but in more digestible terms. She added that the traces of manticore venom in his system indicated that his blood did, in fact, have a degree of resistance that helped him survive the mutagen. It also explained why Volke had risked exposing himself to test his compound.

Grav would likely experience an increase in aggression going forward and that they needed to be on the lookout for other behavioral anomalies. He was also likely to gain some more obvious mutations before his body stabilized. The tail he appeared to be growing would be the first of these.

Then came the bad news: even by cooperating with Tathfheithleann, any attempt to reverse the process could take a very long time, and there was no guarantee of success. The best they could do in the foreseeable future was provide medication that might work to slow the process and mitigate any behavioral changes.

The news made Grav's improved mood vanish. It was looking too much like he would never be normal again. He looked at Kiara, then away as he fought to keep tears from welling up. Heroes weren't supposed to feel that way.

Kiara listened, nodding along with Asana and working to keep her expression blank. It...well, it didn't sound great. Grav would survive, which was obviously the biggest concern, but everything else...

She caught the way he looked at her out of the corner of her eye. As Asana finished, she nodded quickly and gave the chirurgeon a polite smile. "Thanks. You mind, ah, giving us a second?"

"Of course."

Once she'd left, Kiara turned to Grav and laid a hesitant hand on his shoulder. "Hey, mate. How you holding up with this?"

Grav gave a shuddering sigh as he wiped his eyes. "Me? I'm great," he said in a weak attempt at keeping it light, but it just came across as bitter. "Sorry. I just—no, I'm not okay. I mean, I'll manage, but I'm worried I won't be me by the time this stops advancing."

"Hey, it's..."

She reached out, then paused, chewing at her lower lip. "It's...okay," she murmured after a moment, cautiously laying her hand on his arm. "I mean, it's okay to--to not be okay. This is a lot, and it's scary. You're allowed to be...not okay."

She hesitated a moment longer, then shifted a bit closer and opened her arms in an--awkward if sincere--offered hug.

Grav wrapped his arms around her and buried his head on her shoulder. He did cry, but spared his pride by only crying a little. Afterwards, he straightened up and gave her a weak smile. "Thanks. I needed that."

Awkwardly, he added with a crooked smirk, "Y'know, the hug, not the crying that didn't even happen."

"Oh, right, of course. You're very manly," Kiara huffed at him, rolling her eyes. She gave him a quick squeeze around the shoulders before standing.

"Well...suppose we'd best meet up with Kit, let him know what's been going on." She'd been able to reach the edge of the city the night before, just long enough to contact the dragon and briefly explain the situation, but they hadn't been able to stay in contact long.

Once they had received the medicine, they left to check in with Kit.

---

"So that's the long and short of it. I'm stuck like this unless a miracle happens."

He managed a small grin. "But, hey, enchanted sword worth more coin than everything I've ever owned put together."

Kit snorted, tucking his tail primly around his front paws where he sat in the field they'd called him to not too far from the city gates.

"Well." He looked between the two humans. "That's...rough."

Kiara sighed and leaned against his flank. Her lips were pursed, a thoughtful frown on her face as looked out over the horizon.

"A miracle..."

Grav watched her face for a second before he got the impression that she was having a specific idea. He was intrigued. "What? Do you actually know of something?"

While he didn't want to get his hopes up, he was eager to hear any way out of situation. It didn't matter how outlandish it might be.

"Maybe..." She bit her lip. "Maybe. It's...an old story. A story even to faeries. I don't remember all the details but..."

She sighed and pressed the heel of her hand into her eye. "Fuck. I think we need to go to the library."

Kit snorted. "The library. As in...?"

"Yep." She popped the "p", glancing over to Grav. "How do you feel about another jaunt through the Fae Realms?"

Grav looked at her like she had lost her mind. "Again? But I thought you hated it there. I can't ask you to owe the fae anything."

He didn't push back with much enthusiasm. He was willing to try almost anything to avoid becoming... whatever it was he was becoming.

"I don't hate it there, exactly." She sighed. "I hate the Courts. I hate the bullshit politics; you'd think the Fae would be beyond that sort of thing, but—no, sorry, not the point."

She shoved away from Kit's flank and dusted off her breeches. "Bedsides, doesn't matter how I feel—the book we need is in a faerie library. It's not actually in any particular Court, thank gods; hopefully we'll be able to just sorta...pop in."

After a pause, she admitted sourly, "Besides, I already owe them something, according to my grandfather. This won't add all that substantially to the pile."

"Good. As long as we don't--" He paused for a moment, then shot her a look of worried annoyance at being left out of the loop.  "You owe him what, exactly?"

"Er..."

Kit snorted, giving her a look that was oddly similar to Grav's expression. "Kia..." the dragon said slowly. "What exactly happened in that audience with your grandfather?"

"Listen, it's--okay, things were sorta happening quickly, it wasn't exactly priority to mention--"

"Kia."

She groaned, rubbing at her temples. "Alright, alright, it's just...well, bullshit faerie politics. My grandfather--the Autumn King offered to make me part of the Court. Y'know. Officially. But it comes with a catch because of course it does, so I asked for some time to think about it." She blew out an exasperated breath through her lips. "Not accepting that kind of "offer" right away is already an insult--I'm basically already on the hook just for asking for the three months to consider it."

His mind latched onto the undisclosed "catch" and wouldn't let go. He could hardly believe she was still trying to downplay things. "What sort of catch? Is it what happens when you say yes, or when you say no?"

"And please stop walking on eggshells with me. I'm a big boy."

"I'm not walking on eggshells!" she protested quickly. "But we obviously had bigger things to deal with! For all we knew you were dying, I couldn't just—"

To her complete horror, she realized her throat was growing tight. She tsked and looked away quickly, trying to swipe at her eyes as subtly as possible.

"It's...sort of a catch either way," she admitted with another sigh. She sort of just...sank to the ground, as though standing was suddenly too much work. Head in one hand, she muttered, "If I stay here, if I stay human, my—my magic is going to burn me out. It could be in a few years, it could be in decades, but it'll happen eventually."

Kit snorted, jerking his head back. He'd known her magical condition was more serious than she'd wanted to believe, but...

"But if I take the offer, if I let them make me part of the Court..." She glared at her feet. "My grandfather doesn't actually give a damn about me. He just wants another bargaining chip. I think he's planning to marry me off to another court."

Grav was speechless. He knew her magic was more than her body could handle, but he didn't--he didn't think it was going to kill her whether she used it or not.

"And you can't just, I dunno, not use it?"

She shrugged balefully. "I can. That'll probably buy me some time—but I don't know how much."

Kit made a soft whimpering noise he'd never made around Grav before and ducked his head to nuzzle her shoulder. She patted his nose and tried to smile at both of them.

"But listen, the Fae aren't great with, y'know, time. I probably have a good few decades, my father is just paranoid."

Grav was dubious, but he didn't press her further. He hoped, for her sake, that she was right. So he kept the conversation moving. "So, how long will it take us to reach this library?"

"And how will even find the info we're looking for without owing a faerie a favor?"

"A few days? Give or take." She shrugged. "Honestly it mostly depends on how quickly we can find a natural gateway—I don't want to risk using the amulet again, my father knows when I do. As for the favor..."

She shrugged again and scuffed a foot over the ground. "I know the book we need. Da—he took me a few times. The library is one of the few truly neutral  places in the faerie realm. As long as we follow the rules, we should be able to look at the book we need."

"That's a relief. I'd hate to know the kinds of favors they ask." Grav nodded. "But, uhh... how exactly do we go about finding one of these natural gateways? Do you know? Or do we have to go two libraries?"

"I know how to get there." She pushed herself to her feet with a low groan and stretched her arms up over her head. "There's a number of ways—we just need to find the most convenient one."

She pursed her lips, considering. "A mushroom circle would probably be quickest—and it helps to try the crossing at dawn or dusk."

Grav scanned the horizon for a forest. "It looks like most of the trees around have been chopped down for building materials. And how do we even find a mushroom circle on purpose? Unless..." He looked at her curiously. "Unless you're saying you know where one is?"

"I know the likely places to fine one," she replied with another shrug. "We'll have better luck in the highlands--if we fly, we can be there by sundown, or at least close. Assuming you're up for it?"

She glanced to Kit at the last, and the dragon responded with a huff and a nod. "Of course."

The flight to the highlands filled Grav with new wonder. With his enhanced eyes, he could see better, farther, and just more.

"Whoah... Was the world always this big?" He was gazing at everything with wide eyes and a wider grin.

Kiara couldn't help chuckling a bit at his wide-eyed wonder. "Yep." She nudged his shoulder lightly. "Welcome to the great wide yonder."

Kit snorted, smoke trickling from his nostrils and blowing the scent of brimstone back to his passengers.

"No, I mean I can literally see more. It's amazing. Terrifying, but amazing." He snapped his gaze back up before he got dizzy. "Yeah, okay, maybe that's enough contemplating heights for one ride. Seeing better doesn't mean I can fly myself."

He coughed at the smell, wrinkling his nose. "Gah! I can smell better too."

"I knew what you meant," Kiara chuckled. "Hells you can probably see farther than me now—and I've got pretty sharp eyes." She shrugged. "Guess there's a thing or two I can thank Da for."

Kit just snorted again when he complained about the smell, sides vibrating with a rumbled laugh. "We'll be setting down soon enough, I'm sure you can tolerate it for a few more minutes."

"Yeah, yeah." Grav laughed, mood actually lifted a little. 

---

They landed in a large clearing deep in a large highland forest. Grav seemed to be amazed by every single thing as Kiara led the way to the mushroom ring. It was almost as if he'd never even seen a forest before. In a way, he hadn't; at least, not like this. 

"Keep up, puppy," Kiara laughed the third time he paused seemingly to stare at a fern. She couldn't really blame him, though—frankly, it was just nice to see him smiling again. Properly smiling. She hadn't realized that she'd missed that.

"Alright, here." She glanced up, one hand raised to shade her eyes. "We should wait for twilight; it's easier to cross the veil at in-between sorts of times."

Kit seemed to have spotted a problem. "Uh, Kiara? I'm not going to fit in that circle."

She winced. "Ah. Yeah. No. No, you're not."

The dragon's eyes narrowed and he growled a warning.

Grav was feeling more like himself. It wasn't easy, but he was trying to think about everything but the future. That's why, when it struck him that Kiara planned to leave the dragon behind, he realized he had never considered that as a possibility. 

He  looked from the circle, to Kit, and then to Kiara. "Surely we have time to find another way in."

"Even if we did, I wouldn't take it."

Kit snorted, clearly about to protest, but she cut him off: "Kitten, you know I don't like going without you, but you're just too noticeable. We want to be in and out this time." She held the dragon's eyes, voice sympathetic but firm. "Please. Just wait. If we aren't back in two days, you can come after us--I'll leave you the amulet."

Kit looked like he was going to argue for a few moments longer, but then he sighed and let his head hand a little lower. "Fine," he grumbled. "Two days. That's it."

Grav smiled sympathetically. "Sorry to keep making her leave your side."

Then, he smirked teasingly, eyes twinkling. "And don't worry, I'll make sure she behaves." 

He sidestepped before Kiara could punch him in the shoulder. Mopey Grav was truly gone, at least for the present. 

"Oh, good luck," Kit snorted, "if there's a single feasible way to keep her out of trouble, I haven't found it yet."

Kiara gaped at them both, then folded her arms and glowered. "Y'know what, maybe I'll go by myself, how about that?" She sniffed and tossed her hair, but there was a hint of a grin at the edges of her mouth that revealed she was teasing.

"Make sure I behave," she scoffed. "Like you're any great example of behaving. You think I don't see you eyeing up every pretty girl we pass?" She stuck her tongue out at Grav. Petty? Yes. But she did still owe him for the dress crack.

"Yes, but I don't rush headlong into dan--" He caught himself in a blatant lie. "Okay, fine, I do that too. But we misbehave differently; together we mostly behave."

"Right?" He had his doubts that he was at all convincing. 

Both Kiara and Kit snorted. "Mostly behave. Alright. I guess it'll do."

Kiara began pacing around the mushroom circle, glancing up at the angle of the setting sun every few seconds, as though she was doing some sort of calculation. "So, crossings like this aren't as...clean as when I use the amulet," she warned Grav abruptly. "I've done this enough times that I should be able to get us close to the library on the first shot, but you'll have to hold onto me. If we get separated, we might end up in different places."

Grav gulped and nodded. "Noted."

"Is that, uhh, all you mean by not as clean? Or will I lose my lunch? Though I would have last time if I hadn't been running on empty."

Kiara shot him a slightly sheepish look. "Honestly, it might...not be great. It's always easier for me, 'cause part of me, y'know--belongs there. I'm not sure how bad it'll be for you."

There was actually a chance that the alchemical mutagen in his system would make him more recognizable to the faerie lands; but there was just as much a chance that the inherent magic of the place would sense an enemy, an intruder.

Still, she held her hand out to him and said firmly, "One good thing about my fucked up family ties: I do belong there. As long as you're with me, you'll get through."

"That's all the assurance I need." He took her hand without followed her into the ring without hesitation. The swordsman trusted her implicitly at this point. Even if the less controlled entry into the Fae Realm had unintended consequences, he trusted that she would see him through it. 

"Let's do this."

For a moment, she just stared at his hand in hers, as though surprised he'd actually taken it. Then she shook herself and nodded briskly. "Right. Let's do it."

She looked up to Kit and smiled. "Two days. Not a second more, I promise."

The dragon rumbled and ducked his head to nudge her cheek. "I'll hold you to that."

Kiara kissed the tip of his nose, nodded again, then took a step into the mushroom circle, pulling Grav with her. She squeezed his hand. "You, ah, may want to stand closer to me. And here, gimme your other hand." She turned slightly to face him, holding her other hand up, palm out.

Grav took her other hand and, for a moment, it looked like they were about to perform a dainty, polite dance of the upper classes. He, of course, noticed this and smirked. "Hello, my name is Lord Incestio von Fancyknickers. May I have this dance, m'lady?"

"Oh my gods." She snorted and rolled her eyes so far back she thought she might see inside her own skull, but she was smiling. With all the grace of someone who spent her life both throwing and dodging knives, she dipped into a theatric curtsy--which was rather difficult to do in breeches. "Of course, good sir."

She tugged him a little closer, feeling magic start to fizzle against their feet. "Careful. It's gonna be a hell of a dance."

Normally, faerie rings were considered dangerous as a portal between realms; mortals who crossed into one could be snatched away by the Fair Folk. But since Kiara had a connection to those same Folk, she was actually the one doing the snatching. In a sense.

Eyes closed, she tightened her hold on Grav's hands and actually seemed to start a sort of dance, stepping lightly into a carefully choreographed circle. And then, between one step and the next, they just sort of...shifted through the veil.

The journey lasted longer than when she had used the amulet or when Aeolthaine sent them through directly. The world seemed less to swirl around them and more to...slide, blending trees to sky to sea, and then slowly resettling itself into something new.

Grav looked a little green around the gills, but he was holding it together this time. "Uuugh... that is not the least bit fun. Like, at all."

He looked around, noting the large naturalistic structure in the middle distance; like a mortal library, if it were made of mossy stone and living trees. 

"That it?" 

"Yep." She sighed and finally dropped his hands, smiling tiredly. "Damn. We actually got really close. We could be in and out before morning."

She gave Grav a quick look over. "How you feeling? Remember everything I said last time? Same rules--no food, no drink, guard your name, don't ask for anyone else's. Oh, and if you get sick, please do it away from my general direction."

Grav nodded in understanding. "I dunno. I feel the same as last time, I guess. Maybe a little better. Made my impending fifth limb tingle a little though."

"No, I don't think it's anything to worry about. I'm fine to keep going."

He followed her inside, marveling at the odd building... if it even technically was a building. "Did they seriously grow this place? How is anyone that patient?"

"It's easy to be patient when you look at the world in terms of centuries rather than years," Kiara replied with a shrug as they crossed the threshold. Immediately her shoulders relaxed, feeling the wards of neutrality and sanctuary that this place had been founded on, even if it was mostly a subconscious thing.

"Alright." She looked around at the scores of shelves that seemed to be grown directly from the limbs of twisting trees. "We need histories and folklore. If I remember right, it's...that way." She set off at a brisk pace. They seemed to be the only people in the library--not even a shelving pixie or librarian satyr could be spotted.

Grav followed her, curiously scanning the shelves. The titles seemed to be in every conceivable language, even ones that hurt his eyes to read. The sheer number of them boggled his mind. 

"So. Many. Shelves." He groaned as they kept walking, and walking, and walking. "I swear the library wasn't this big on the outside."

"Of course it wasn't." Kiara shot him a quick grin as she turned down a corridor of shelves. "That would make sense. And nothing in this fucking realm is allowed to make sense. Ah! Here, this is the right section. I think."

They had entered a smaller room off of the main corridor, this one seemingly grown mostly from beeches, with books tucked away into carefully twisted holes in the trunks with seemingly no organizational pattern.

"We're looking for something called "Stars' Tears", or "Tears of the Firmament"," she told Grav as she started brushing a finger along books' spines. "The story if from before the Fell, so just grab anything from that era and we'll sort it out from there."

"I mean... they probably think the same about the mortal realm, right?" he pondered as he fingered through the tomes. How was he even supposed to know what was from that era? It wasn't like they were labeled. Then, he found one with different style of spine and pulled it out to look. 

"Ones like this? Heck, as far as I know this is it. Hells if I can read ancient... whatever they used back then."

"We'll have to take them to the reading room to actually get anything out of them, but yeah, that looks right." She squinted at the tome he held, then nodded. "Most of the books in this section are older anyway--just look for bindings with gold thread." She shrugged. "It's not the most precise indicator, but it should get us in the right direction."

She pulled a few books herself, then paused. "Grav...you know this is a longshot, right?" She glanced up at him, biting at her lower lip. "I just...I mean if I'm right, if I remember this story correctly, it is a real thing that exists. But--but finding it, and making it work..."

She trailed off. She had no idea if this was actually going to go the way they wanted. The way they hoped.

Grav stopped grabbing books to sigh. "I know. It would be a miracle if we even find it, let alone be able to harness it. It could require magic we don't have, a sacrifice we aren't willing to make, already have its power spent, or even be broken."

"And I know you could use up all the time you have left among mortals trying to help me. I... don't even know if I'm worth that. So if it comes down to it, I want you to spend at least some of that time on yourself. Okay? Promise me that."

"I--"

She blinked, a little taken aback. She hadn't been expecting that. Without thinking, she started to agree: "I pro--"

Her voice cut off and she found herself staring blankly at the book she held. Slowly, she put it down, releasing a long breath.

"...I told you my mother got sick when I was young, right?" she said, softly if still abruptly. "She hung on for a while, but it was just...she couldn't fight it forever. And I just had to watch her die, a little bit every day. I couldn't do anything, I--"

She took a breath, then suddenly looked up at him, dark eyes aflame. "I can do something to help you. So I'm going to. No matter what it takes."

Grav was quiet for a long moment as he processed her words. Though he had never experienced such loss, his empathic nature let him feel some it through her. He couldn't imagine the true depths of what she must have gone through. 

"I..." He sighed and nodded. "I can accept that. You're... a good friend."

She smiled at him a bit. "I dunno about that. I don't have enough friends to really put that to the test." She glanced down at her little pile of books and exhaled slowly. "But...I hope I can do right by you. For whatever that's worth."

She was quiet a moment longer, then gave herself a little shake. "Right! Come on, let's grab a few more books and find the reading room--it's gonna be a long night."

In the reading room, Grav had been surprised to find that the magic of the library allowed him to actually read the books that weren't in Serenian or Common. So, for the last gods-know-how-long, he had been scanning book after boring book to find anything that could be related to the artifact. 

"Hey. What about this?" He held up a book and read aloud. 

"And the tear shed by the stars fell upon the brow of the Warrior Sage, bestowing him with wisdom and strength unmatched by mortal men."

"It just goes on like that. No details." 

While most faeries had some version of a gift of tongues, there were the rare few that didn't, and the reading room was a necessity for them in a neutral space like the grand library. Lucky for them both, because aside from the Autumn Court's dialect of Sylvan, Kiara didn't know any languages other than Common and the few phrases she'd needed to learn in Thanati for a particular job a handful of years ago.

"Oh, yeah, that sounds promising." She leaned over Grav's shoulder to read the passage she was talking about, a thoughtful furrow in her brow. "See, I've read stuff about it falling, too, but half these stories seem to refer to it as a liquid, like an actual tear, and half seem to think it's some sort of--sort of a gem or crystal or something. And here, this bit--"

She pulled one book from her own stack and flipped to the page she'd been on, reading aloud, "And though the Tears could never again be used by the impure of heart, those worthy may offer a sacrifice and cure any ill, or lift any curse." She snapped the book shut. "That's the part I remembered from when I was a little girl, but it doesn't say what worthy means, or why the Tears can't be used by someone "impure of heart"--or what the fuck that's even supposed to mean."

She tapped her fingers against her leg, frowning. "So, sometimes it's an actual blessing of sorts, that...becomes part of the person who receives it, like the Warrior Sage. Or sometimes it's a...substance?"

"Maybe he wore it on his brow? Like, as part of a crown or diadem. And the falling could mean the jewel fell from the sky?" Grav was sure of nothing and just throwing ideas at the wall to see what stuck. "As for pure of heart, that usually means good, right? Though who knows how pure it requires you to be."

"None of which helps us find the thing." 

"Do you have anything about where this Warrior Sage was from?" she asked as she went back to flipping through her own stack of books. "I know it sounds more like a title than a name, but it's still the closest we've got to an individual identifier. All the other stuff I've found is just like "he of a noble heart" and "a kind-hearted young girl"--y'know, bedtime story sorta stuff."

"I sure hope it isn't Fell," he commented as he searched. 

"Aha!" The adventurer grinned as he read, "It's not much but, 'With a mighty crack, the ground opened up and swallowed the Sage. The mountain now held his great and powerful star.'"

"Mountain!" Kiara nodded quickly. "That's a start. Don't suppose there's anything about which range--although, fuck, I guess the name's might've changed..."

She started flipping more sporadically through her half of the books, searching for any mention of a mountain, or even an earthquake, something that might explain the ground "swallowing" someone.

"Ooooohhhhhh wait wait wait!" She jumped to her feet, reading excitedly, "The Crystal Gorge, cut through the heart of the Terrin range, has sometimes been called the home of the stars on earth, for the plethora of silver-white stones that can be mined from its rock." She looked up at Grav. "That has to be at least close, right?"

"It sure sounds like it." Grav agreed excitedly, hope in his eyes. "And, I mean, all sorts of lost are rumored to be hidden in the chasms of the Terrins. Treacherous for sure, but no more than Kishan or the Glass Desert would be. And way less dangerous than The Fell."

He stood up and worked the feeling back into his legs. "Yeah! Let's do this!"

"Alright." Kiara quickly scrounged up a quill and parchment--luckily the reading room provided ample supplies for note-taking--and jotted down as many phrases as she thought might be important in helping them to identify their destination.

"And look at us, getting what we need ahead of schedule," she noted with a quick grin. "We should be back with Kit by noon. That's not even a full day."

Of course, that was provided they didn't actually rest here, and they had been researching through the night.

Grav yawned tiredly, unsure in that moment that he could make it outside. "And then we sleep, right? I don't know about you, but my brain is currently turning to mush."

The adventurer knew that he had himself up for a wisecrack, but he was too tired and hungry to care. She could have it. He owed her one anyway. 

"And that's different from usual because...?" Kiara smirked, though the expression didn't last long. She sighed a bit and nodded in acknowledgement of his point. "But yeah, you're probably right. We should rest. We just can't do it here."

Moving for the door of the reading room, she explained, "Neutral places like this have to have rules that keep them neutral. One of the library's rules is that in order to remain under its protection, you have to be using the library. Unfortunately, we can't just tuck in here."

She glanced both directions down the arbor hallway, then set off back for the entrance. "We can probably find someplace close by to pitch camp for a few hours. Most folks don't start trouble too near neutral ground."

The walk out was quiet; Grav was conserving his energy so to not collapse between the stacks. Why was studying so gods damned tiring? It didn't even require standing up! 

It was indeed noon by the time they emerged. And as soon as they set up camp, he was out. He had barely even made it into his sleeping roll. 

Kiara sighed, smiling crookedly at her sleeping companion. Seemed first watch was up to her.

She didn't mind; she wasn't nearly as tired as Grav seemed to be—though whether that was due to her greater familiarity with the faerie realm or...something else, something to do with the mutagen in Grav's system, maybe, she didn't know. Either way, it meant she was alone with the fire and her thoughts for the first part of their midday rest.

For a few hours, all was peaceful. The Fae Realm could be quite serene when it wanted to be. The sky was clear, the bright grass waving in the breeze, murderous eyes watching them from the bushes, small faeries sipping from flowers like hummingbirds

Wait... back up... 

Kiara had actually started to relax; the library was neutral territory, after all, and they were close enough to it that she didn't expect anything too troublesome. Maybe a mischievous sprite or two.

But then the hairs stood up on the back of her neck, and she got the familiar, sickening feeling of being watched. She tried not to react too quickly, standing and stretching before pacing around the fire, looking into the foliage around them.

Eyes. Bright, beady, red eyes.

Oh no.

Still moving languidly, as though she hadn't seen the ambush forming around them, she knelt by Grav where he rested and reached out to shake his shoulder lightly. "Alright, up and at 'em. We should get moving," she said cheerfully.

In a much lower, harsher voice, she whispered, "We're surrounded. Get up with a hand on your blade."

Grav mumbled something about having five more minutes. However, when she harshly whispered in his ear something about being surrounded, his arm shot to his sword. Scrambling to his feet, he drew the sword named Brightedge and took a combat stance. 

A dozen small figures leaped out from the foliage, sharp knives glinting malevolently in the afternoon sun. They resembled juvenile goblins, but their sharp teeth and bloodstained red caps meant only one thing: Redcaps. What they lacked in size, they made up for with a gleeful savagery beyond that of their mortal counterparts. 

"Okay what the hells are those?" the swordsman asked. 

"Redcaps," Kiara hissed back, her own new dagger drawn and ready as she put her back to his. "Vicious little buggers who keep those stupid hats red by soaking them in blood."

One of the vicious little buggers in question bared his teeth at her in something between a grin and a snarl. She growled right back, sweeping her dagger in a wide arc. "Keep back!"

Taking her warning as a challenge, the redcaps attacked. Several leaped at the duo at once, aiming to overwhelm them. Some slashed their blood-rusted knives while others bit at them with rotten yellow teeth. 

Grav's blade flashed, sending sparks flying as the cackling redcap's knife slid along its length. Narrowly sidestepping the bite of another, he drove them back with a shove of his blade and a well placed kick. 

Immediately, three replaced them. Grav cut one down, but took a cut on the arm from another as it sailed by. He blocked the next, but he couldn't take them all.

Kiara was keeping the handful of redcaps that had launched themselves at her at bay, but barely. She slashed with her dagger, wide, sweeping blows meant to clear the area around her more than to actually strike her opponents. For a moment, the dark blade seemed to sort of...shimmer into a blur of pure shadow.

One of the redcaps squealed as the shadow solidified once more into a blade, thick, almost black blood dripping from its edge.

She backed up a step and felt her back suddenly thump against Grav's. "We've gotta run," she panted. "We're not gonna be able to drive them off. On three, I'll make a path, you follow me through. Ready?"

Grav nodded resolutely. "Ready."

When she finished counting, he disengaged as he prepared to run. His wish for a distraction made his blade shine brightly enough to drive back the nearest redcaps with hisses and squeals. He'd have to experiment with that later. 

On her "three", Kiara leapt forward and slashed her dagger in a wide arc, the blade once again that blur of shadow that seemed to snap out and slice at the red caps almost as though it felt her will. Breaking through the line, she took off into the silver-barked trees, eyes darting about frantically for some method of escape.

"There!" A faerie ring--another perfect circle of mushrooms tucked between three towering trees that smelled faintly of honeysuckle. It wasn't the optimal time for travel, and she didn't have time to properly prepare herself, but they didn't have much choice.

She reached for Grav's hand as she sprinted for the ring. "Don't let go, whatever happens just don't let go!"

Grav slashed at one as they ran. The bright glow shot forward, for one brief moment doubling the length of the blade with searing light. The unlucky redcap was cut in half, cauterized wound steaming. 

He held tight as she dragged him into the ring. "Whoah! Did you se--" The world slid before he could finish the thought. 

Kiara didn't have time to look and see what Grav was talking about, the world was already spinning around them. Thank gods, they'd made it--

A cry of pain suddenly wrenched from her throat as burning, searing agony raced up her leg. She glanced down just in time to see one of the red caps with his teeth embedded in her thigh, red eyes glinting with vicious victory, before the portal activated entirely and neatly decapitated him.

A rusty feeling spread up her leg and she collapsed back out of the circle, dragging Grav with her from where she was still gripping his hand.

"Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew!"

She kicked the red cap's head away frantically, then pressed one hand over the heavily bleeding wound. She couldn't even see where they'd landed--she'd been trying to get back to Kit, but in all the chaos and then that damned bite, who knew how close they'd gotten.

Grav jumped into action and pulled out his only handkerchief, which he handed over. "Here, use this." 

His sword had already lost its glow, so he sheathed it as he looked around. They were at the edge of some old battlefield, covered in small monuments to the fallen and swathed in fog. Every now and then, there was a gouge in the earth or blackened tree from magical combat. 

"Where even are we?" 

"I don't--" She hissed, pressing the offered handkerchief to her leg. "I don't know. I was trying to get back to Kit, but we were in such a hurry..."

She looked around, brow furrowed. "Looks like...an old battlefield." Which made a sort of sense; on this side of the veil, that was where redcaps tended to prefer to skulk about.

Looking around nervously, he asked, "They can't follow us... right? Because I'd rather not face redcaps and restless spirits."

It was the fear of an ignorant and inexperienced peasant who knew too many tall tales. But then that's exactly what he was. As far as he knew, shades lurked everywhere with a history of violent death.

In his defense, the area was incredibly spooky.

"No, they shouldn't be able to. Red caps usually aren't powerful enough to cross the veil without a proper blood sacrifice--like a battle." She looked around. "Which seems to be long over, here..."

Carefully, she tried to get to her feet. But the second her weight leaned on her injured leg, she went down with a hiss and a muffled curse. "Damnit."

While she didn't necessarily think a bunch of ghosts were likely to pop out of nowhere at them, she also didn't want to stay in this place any longer than necessary. It might not be haunted, but it was creepy, and it was far too close to a path through to the feywilds.

Grav helped her back up and acted the part of a crutch. "Just lean on me, okay?" 

He thought for a moment, scratching his short beard like he always did while thinking. There had to be something nearby; someone had to put the monuments up. "I think I see a hill. We should climb it and try to make out a village or a road."

She tried to stand on her own again, buckles, and swore. "Fuck. Fine." She leaned into his offered shoulder, wrapping one arm around his neck lightly. "Thanks."

She nodded in agreement with his plan; figuring out the nearest town or village would be a good first step on figuring out which direction they should be heading.

"Kit's gonna be losing his mind," she sighed, dragging her free hand over her face. "Shit. Maybe we do need a babysitter." She snorted, then started to laugh, wheezing lightly with the strain.

He barked a laugh as he started towards the hill. "It couldn't hurt."

He sighed. "One of these days, we're going to give the poor guy an ulcer."

Once on top of the hill, almost above the low fog, they could see much more than they could before. The late-day sun peeked out from behind a cloud, giving them much needed context. To the west was a wide road, and a gloomy little village beyond. To the south, farmland. Lastly, there was forest to the north and east.

"Recognize anything?"

"A dragon with an ulcer," Kiara huffed with a chuckle, "that might be a first."

Once they reached the top of the hill, she looked around, struggling to identify their surroundings. "Well...the road is promising. Suppose we could always just...head into town and ask someone where we are?"

Grav didn't even have to think on that. "Town. Hopefully they have a healer, because gods know what nasty shit redcaps have staining those teeth."

He shuddered at the thought and led them towards the town. The swordsman would just have to pretend a little longer that they weren't limping through an incredibly spooky old battlefield.

Relax. There are memorials, and we can't be too far from Arca; how could there possibly be undead looking to eat your brains?

The he saw the skeletons scattered across the ground around them. Skeletons gripping rusty weapons. Skeletons that should have still been buried.

"We... need to hurry, don't we?"

Kiara swallowed. "Yep. Yepyepyepyepyep."

Hobbling along as quickly as she could, she started scanning the surrounding graves for signs of disturbance, some sort of pattern. A necromancer meant the graves would have been dug up from the outside.

To her horror, it was looking like the dirt had been clawed away from inside.

...Fuck.

"Grav, I don't think we're moving fast enough," she muttered, eyeing the horizon. Knowing he wouldn't listen to her, she felt like she had to say anyway, "I can find somewhere to hide—you just get into town."

Grav didn't let her stop. He shot her a disapproving look. "Oh no you don't. I am not leaving you to die any more than you'd leave me."

He gave a crooked smirk. "Besides, if I did that, Kit would turn me into charcoal and then we'd both be dead."

As the sun drifted even lower, an eerie, pale green light began to seep from the soil. Bones immediately began to rattle and move together.

Yeah, we're so boned.

"Fhhhhhhuuck." Kiara tried to break into a run, ignoring the burning pain in her thigh. "Hells, Grav, just go! Unless you want to bleeding carry me you don't have many options!"

She was trying to draw her dagger as she spoke, one eye in the rattling bones and one on the village ahead of them, calculating distance and time.

Grav knew he was stronger, but could he carry her? She was right about there being few options, each crazier than the last. So, he rolled the dice.

"Then you're going to hate me for this!" He stopped, but only long enough to unceremoniously hoist her over his shoulder. She was hardly as light as a feather, but he managed to get a slow run going.

"What are you—?!"

Well. She didn't know what she'd expected, really.

"Your noble impulses are going to get you killed," she snapped as she clung awkwardly to his back.

The eerie light and rattling of bones seemed to grow in intensity. She gulped. "Oh dear..."

The skeletons began to rapidly reassemble. One after another, they rose into clattering legion of the dead. Grav picked up the pace as much as he could.

"Use my sword!" he shouted, "Maybe it'll light up for you too! And undead are weak to light magic, yes?"

"How?!"

She'd never touched a longsword in her life, let alone an enchanted one. Still, she did her best to yank it backward from the scabbard at his hip and swung wildly behind them, muttering, "Please work, just light up, do the glowing thing please please please."

"I don't know how! It just did it! Then it cut a redcap in two even though I missed!" the swordsman yelled frantically, panting.

For what seemed like an eternity, the sword did nothing. But, as they grew more desperate, it slowly began to glow. Unfortunately, it had yet to get bright enough to do anything.

"Just do it, you dumb sword!"

The blade dimmed, as if sulking.

"Ah, shi—he didn't mean it?" Kiara shook the blade lightly, doing all she could to avoid accidentally slicing at Grav's legs. "You're a very good sword, err, please work?!"

The one benefit to fighting the undead: they were slow. While they would have caught them easily if they were still hobbling along at Kiara's pace, even with her weighing down Grav's run they were steadily gaining distance.

"Wait, really? I hurt it's--" Grav almost laughed at absurdity of a sword with a sense of pride. "Fine, okay, I'm sorry, Brightedge, you're the best! Now please help us!"

The sword brightened up, hurting her eyes but also setting the nearest skeletons aflame. They clattered to the ground, tripping the next in line. By the time they climbed over the pile, the duo was almost to the road.

Kiara whooped, making an obscene gesture with her free hand in the skeletons' direction as they hit the road. "Please tell me that town has a gate!" She thought she'd seen one, but she hadn't had long to really observe the place before they were running from the undead.

The town did indeed have a gate, and a highly bemused guard at the controls. "H-Hail?" he called as they came into view on the road.

"No time! Undead on our heels!" Grav called back, not stopping even as a horrible wail sounded behind them.

The guard scrambled to activate the mechanism to shut the large wooden gate. It began to creak and move inward, at such a speed that they would just make it inside.

Kiara slashed wildly with his sword again, though she was wary of throwing off his balance as they just barely made it through the gate and into the relative safety of the town. Despite not being the one running--and carrying someone else--she found she was panting lightly.

"What the fuck are those things?!"

Grav let her down and bent over, hands on his knees, as he caught his breath. "Skeletons... I thought... we covered that. But... what was screaming!"

One of the gate guards stepped forward to answer, "We don't know what it is, but it moved into the Memorial Field a almost a week ago. Ever since then, every night more long dead soldiers rise from the ground to attack the wall. We sent a rider to Arca for aid, but they haven't returned."

The guard at the gate lever swapped places with another and came down. "Judging from that display, I wager a guess you are... Oh! You're wounded, that explains alot."

He looked at the guard that spoke first. "Vythe, take these... adventurers?... to the town healer. Then tell the mayor we have guests."

Vythe nodded and stepped out onto the street between them and the town proper. "Right this way."

"Right...healer...mayor...okay." Kiara forced herself up to her feet and started limping along after their guide. She glanced sidelong at Grav, awkwardly passing his sword back to him. "You alright, puppy?"

Grav followed along, nodding as he sheathed the blade. "I'm going to regret that in the morning, but yeah, I'm fine. Surprisingly."

"You must have quite the constitution," Vythe said, impressed.

"It's a long story. To put it simply, I'm not your average Connloathian-born Serenian citizen. Assuming there are enough of us to average. I've never met another."

"Good." She exhaled sharply, then muttered, "...Thanks."

Trying to breeze passed the moment, she asked their guide, "You said a rider was sent to Arca--when was this?"

"About two days after the dead started rising," he replied. "Nearly five days ago now."

Kiara frowned. "And...how long does such a trip usually take?"

"Two days." His expression was grim. "He should have been there and back by now."

Two days. So they weren't too far from the city, that helped her orient herself a bit. Gods. Kit was going to roast her alive.

"We don't have another man to spare, so we can only hope he at least made it to Arca," Vythe continued.

Grav looked almost ready to volunteer their aid right there. He and his stupid noble streak could be infuriating. "And you can't find the thing in the daytime?"

Vythe shook his head. "Even if we could, our unenchanted weapons can't harm it. Fortunately it has never attacked us directly."

Kiara shot Grav a "don't you dare" look, but too late.

Gods. Every fucking time.

"Listen, errr, I don't suppose anyone might have uhhhh spotti f anything g else unusually, the last day or so? Anything like...a dragon?"

Their guide gave her a startled, slightly wary look. She winced. "Right. Never mind."

Grav returned a "what? I just asked a question" look, and another that said "come on, they need us. Isn't this exactly what we do anyway?"

"Don't worry, the dragon's not a threat to you. In fact, he could make short work of those skeletons if he wanted to."

The guard seemed skeptical, but he relaxed. "Y-yes, I'm sure that he could."

He turned and walked up to healer's house, knocking on the door.

Grav turned to Kiara and whispered, "Just think of the reward we could get if we turn in whatever this monster leaves behind."

"Rewards are only good if you're alive to spend them," Kiara hissed back quietly. "I'm case you hadn't noticed, puppy, I'm not exactly operating at top form just now—and we still don't know exactly what's happening to you. What if you sprout a full tail in the middle of a battle, hm? That seems pretty damn distracting."

They seemed to be nearing the healing house of the town, judging by the flaking-paint sign depicting a mortar and pestle hung by the door.

"Point taken," he sighed, looking at her like a crestfallen puppy. "We can at least make sure help is coming, right?"

Vythe exchanged words with the apothecary and waved them inside.

She nearly groaned when he flashed her that look. Damn puppy eyes.

"Of course we can," she muttered as they limped inside—well, she limped, at least. "But honestly, we'll do these people more good if we can find Kit and get him here. I'd feel a lot better about our chances with a dragon on our side."

"Well, yeah. I didn't mean now," he whispered back.

The healer cleared her throat, arms crossed impatiently. She was a severe older woman with green hair and a no-nonsense expression. "Are you here for treatment or not? My dinner is getting cold."

"Er, right, yes. Sorry." Kiara gave her a sheepish smile and a little wave. "See I, um, sort of got...but. By a redcap."

The healer's eyebrow quirked up. "Odd. Would've thought the shambling dead would keep the buggers away from that old battlefield."

"Yeah, rotten luck I guess," she chuckled, not exactly wanting to explain where the biting had occurred.

"Well, in any case, have a seat there while I hunt down the right herbs." She gestured to a chair as she moved to her shelves. "I can't use my magic to close the wound until we clean out the gunk."

"You. Boy. Use this to wash out the wound." She tossed Grav a bottle of cheap booze. "Tastes like piss, but it's good for cleaning."

With Kiara seated, Grav hesitantly peeled back the handkerchief.

She hissed as the handkerchief peeled away from the wound, pulling some of the shredded fabric of her breeches with it.

"Oh, there's no saving that. Shears are on the table beside you," the healer told her briskly.

Kiara nodded and picked up what looked like common kitchen shears, quickly cutting away the majority of her pant leg so that the bite was properly exposed to the air.

She looked away quickly. "Fucking redcaps..."

The wound was ragged and deep, still weeping red and now some sort of...greenish pus that could not have been healthy.

Grav opened the bottle. "Sorry. This... is going to hurt." He poured a liberal amount of alcohol over the wound, rinsing it clean in a very painful fashion.

Meanwhile, the healer was adeptly grinding up herbs and mixing them into a foul-smelling poultice that the pair could smell clear across the room.

Kiara gritted her teeth as the alcohol stung over the wound, curling her hands into fists so tight that her nails but into the flesh of her palms. She forced herself to breathe through it, then tried for her best attempt at a grateful nod in Grav's direction.

"You're lucky you're not going to lose that leg," the healer noted bluntly as she approached with the poultice. "Redcap founds can fester in a matter of hours. Also, this is going to hurt as well."

Kiara swallowed, already a little pale, and somehow found herself reaching out for Grav's hand.

Grav let her take his hand without making any jokes. "Squeeze as hard as you need to. I can take it."

"I'm glad we made it in time. We got here as fast as we could."

The healer nodded. "Vythe told me you barely made it past the undead. You're also both lucky to be alive."

She slapped the poultice onto the wound without further preamble.

"Motherfhu--!"

Kiara bit her lip and squeezed at Grav's hand hard, blood smearing between their palms from the tiny cuts she'd already made with her nails.

The healer slathered the poultice on thickly, then began wrapping the wound. "I'll need to look at it again in the morning," she told Kiara, as though the younger woman wasn't currently focusing on counting her breaths to avoid passing out. "If you're lucky, this will clean the wound completely and speed your healing along. You should be walking normally in a day's time."

"Walking...great," she puffed. "What about...fighting?"

Because gods knew how long she could keep Grav from going off on his own.

The healer gave her a stern look. "Fighting?! Oh, no, no, no, young lady. Nothing like that for at least another day."

"Your job, young man, is to see to it that she doesn't exert herself and reopen the wound, got it?" she asked Grav.

"Yes, ma'am." Gods, he felt like a kid again.

"Yeah, yeah." Kiara sighed and let her head dip forward slightly. "Look--thanks, ma'am. What do we owe you?"

"I suppose that depends on if you're fool enough to face the undead that have been bothering us," the healer replied briskly. "For now, let's just say I'm starting you a tab."

Kiara smirked a bit at that despite herself and glanced at Grav sidelong. "I like her," she said softly--then suddenly seemed to realize she was still clutching his hand. She snatched hers back with a faint flush. "Er--sorry."

"Yeah, she reminds me of my gr--" A warning glare cut the comment off.

With a gulp, Grav turned his attention back to Kiara. "Don't mention it." He rubbed the soreness out of his hand with a wince. "Eesh, Kiara. You've got a strong grip."

"Now, please, get out. It's late for those of us who aren't whippersnappers." The healer shooed them out, but her tone was more playful than genuinely cantankerous.

Kiara winced again and shot him an apologetic look. "Sorry."

She nodded to the healer and got laboriously to her feet. "Thanks again." She looked back to Grav with a tired half-smile. "Guess we'd better find some place with a bed. Preferably two."

"You'll want the inn. It isn't much, but it's close and it's cheap." The healer interjected.

Grav supported Kiara. "You heard the lady. To the inn we go."

Once they were outside, he said, "We'll... have to hope Kit doesn't burn down the countryside trying to find us."

"Yeah..." Kiara sighed, leaning against him a bit more heavily. "We have a pretty far range to connect—about twelve miles, I think—but I don't know how far we are from where I meant to get us..."

She paused, glaring down at her feet. "I'm sorry," she muttered abruptly. "This is all my fault—it was my idea to go to the library, and to leave Kit behind, and if I had been paying attention I wouldn't have gotten bit and—"

She huffed, dragging one hand down her face. "...Sorry."

Grav's voice grew serious. "Hey," he said, gently but firmly, "Don't blame yourself. It was just bad luck. But if you absolutely have to blame someone, blame Volke for putting us in this mess in the first place. Kit will forgive us. You, definitely."

She snorted. "You underestimate that dragon's ability to hold a grudge." She gave him a half-smile and added, "Honestly at this point he probably likes you better than me."

"That's ridiculous," he argued, rolling his eyes. "You're family. I'm just some random guy you let tag along. Sure, we're friends now, but it hasn't really been that long at all."

"That's the thing though, isn't it?" she chuckled. "He's always gonna love me, but he doesn't have to like me better when I've fucked up." She shrugged. "Family."

She walked—well, limped—in silence for a few moments before noting, "I guess it really hasn't been that long, huh? Feels like a lot has happened."

"Well--I mean--a lot has happened." He chuckled. "The kind of things that make friendships fast."

He smirked wickedly. "It doesn't hurt that we're both reckless idiots."

"Though you think things through more than I do. If it were just me, I'd have gone charging out to get killed by the living dead."

"Yeah, well." She shrugged. "If it hadn't been for you, I would have been run down and eaten by shambling corpses, so—let's call it square."

The small town only had one inn, and since the clattering undead didn't exactly make the place a tourist spot, they had their pick of rooms.

"Kit is seriously gonna kill me," Kiara sighed as she waited for the innkeeper to return with keys. "And then he's gonna wait for whatever necromantic bullshit is happening here to bring me back, and then he's gonna kill me again."

"You're really worried about him, aren't you?" Grav asked. Of course she was. How couldn't she be?"

"Sure, he'll be mad. But after that, he'll just be happy you're not dead, even if he's grumpy for a while."

"I'm not worried about him, I'm worried about how pissed he'll be." Kiara tried to laugh him off, but there was a tightness around her eyes that made it hard to pull off.

"Here." The innkeeper returned and plopped two room keys onto the counter.  "Roads won't be safe until morning, when the dead are back in the ground, so you have 'em until then."

"Thanks." Grav picked up the keys and began helping Kiara to her room.

---

The next day was aggravatingly uneventful for a pair like Kiara and Grav. Healing was all they accomplished, though that was tiring for both patient and minder. He lost count of how many times he had to keep her off her leg before the healer pronounced her healed enough to walk.

After a celebratory meal, the pair returned to their rooms to rest. However, this night was far from peaceful. Around midnight, she was awoken by screams outside. Screams... and the glow of fire.

It was more the sense of familiarity that woke her than the screams—a presence at the edge of her mind that had been absent since they crossed into the faerie realm.

She sat up groggily, automatically reaching out. Kit?

But then there was the screaming, and she suddenly seemed to have more pressing issues.

"Ohhhhhh shit weasels." She bolted from bed and dashed out of her room, crossing the hall in two steps and throwing open Grav's door with a shout of "We've got problems, puppy, up you get!"

"I know!" Grav was already scrambling out of bed. "Do you think the wall was breached?"

He had slept in his clothes, so he only had to strap on his sword belt to be ready to go. The swordsman nodded to her with grim determination as he stepped up to her. It seemed he had gotten his way, but he wasn't happy about how.

"I don't know, but we should assume the worst." Though she wasn't fully dressed, she'd had the presence of mind to throw her boots on at her door, and her dagger was already in hand. "I thought I felt Kit--just for a second, but he might be close. I'll try calling him, but we don't have time to wait, let's move."

Grav glanced down at her feet before holding up and finger and rushing to put his on. "Okay. Now I'm ready."

Once downstairs, they found the innkeeper huddled behind the counter.

"We heard screams. What's going on?" Grav asked.

The innkeeper gulped, clearly terrified. "I d-don't know how it started. But one minute everything was normal, and in the next, villagers were biting each other to death and the temple was burning. Th-the curse must have spread."

"Biting?" Kiara repeated. "Well shit, that sounds bad."

In the back of her mind, she kept a constant litany calling for Kit, hoping she hadn't just imagined his presence. But she didn't have time to try to track the feeling down.

"Fire was probably a good instinct," she noted as she tried to peer out a window. She glanced to Grav. "We need to get these people indoors, away from anyone who's...infected, or whatever is happening."

Kiara saw a dead man shambling up the street, a ragged wound where his throat should be. It looked like... Vythe.

Grav nodded and turned to the innkeeper. "How many can this place hold?"

The innkeeper gulped, hesitating. "H-here? Maybe forty, but it'd be tight. And nearly the whole town."

Grav appreciated the man's overcoming of his fear enough to cooperate. "It's a start."

The swordsman moved to the door and gave Kiara a look that said, "ready when you are."

"Try to get this place fortified—board up the windows, make sure the staff is somewhere safe. The cellar of you have to," Kiara told the innkeeper, who nodded quickly and hurried off.

She met Grav's look and nodded, lifting up three fingers. Watching the approaching corpse—gods, the poor man—through the window, she put them down one at a time.

"Now!"

She burst through the door, falling back to the right to give Grav a clear shot. "Guard the inn! I'll bring people back here, make sure none of those things get through!"

Grav muttered a prayer for Fyarion to guide his blade and to aid the soul cast out by dark magic. When Kiara finished counting down, he came out with a high slash, cutting the zombie's head clean off with a single stroke. He kicked the falling body away from him and nodded to her.

"Don't worry about me, and be careful; you're still not at a hundred percent."

She wasted the half second it took to grin at him and quip, "Aw, puppy. You worried about me?" She winked. "Back soon."

She faded back into the shadows along the side of the inn, dagger raised as she darted from one hidden patch to the next. The screams were growing more sporadic, as the townspeople seemed to be realizing that sound drew the undead in.  Kiara glanced toward the fire, hesitated, then shook her head. She couldn't risk her magic, not in her current state.

So she made for the noisiest cluster of townsfolk, moving quick and silent through the shadows. "The inn," she told any stragglers she passed. "Make for the inn, get inside. Help fortify the place, then hide."

As she neared the healer's house, she saw that a window was broken inward. The glass had some blood on it, but not enough to have come from a living person climbing through. Suddenly, there was a crash from inside.

Grav had re-killed a second ghoul by the time the refugees started showing up. The undeath was spreading with every person that died. One of the refugees had said his brother had been killed but rose up mere moments later. Grav figured the effect of the creature causing this had been over the town the entire time, waiting for someone to die.

Shit.

She had about half a second to make a decision--and to her surprise, though her instinct normally would have been to head for the people she knew she could save and hope the healer was smart enough to hole herself up somewhere and wait until danger had passed, she actually found herself climbing through the damn window.

Fucking Grav and his stupid fucking noble intentions, she cursed silently to herself as she dropped quietly to the floor and looked around the darkened space. There was a scuffle somewhere to her right, and she flicked out the dagger almost entirely blind, somehow trusting she was going to hit the right target.

The ghoul to her right collapsed with a groan, its spine severed at the neck by the enchanted weapon. It hadn't even gotten to turn around. The sound of a glass jar breaking came from the back room.

"Back! Back, you rotting corpse!" the healer's voice shouted.

Kiara darted for the back room, trying not to think too hard about how easy that had been, and in a matter of heartbeats she had flickered up behind the ghoul that was backing the healer into a corner and internally decapitated it with one quick, sharp thrust.

The body fell with an unsettling fwump and Kiara was left standing, just staring at the healer. "The inn," she managed to get out after a moment. "Head for the inn, tell anyone you meet on the way."

---

Halfway across the small town, the same sickly green light that had dogged Grav's and Kiara's steps when they fled the battlefield seemed to be gathering at the edges of town--just beyond the boarder that Grav had carved out around the inn. It flickered and pulsed, seeming to seep into the ground and then rise up again like a sort of mist.

"I've never been happier for someone to ignore my advice." The healer smirked before heading out as if she hadn't almost died.

---

"Well, that's not good." Grav stared at the encroaching glow warily. The source of the crisis was coming for them.

He hurried the next batch inside. Seeing the healer coming, he yelled, "Hurry! Something's coming! Avoid the glow!"

The healer barely glanced at him before nodding and hurrying the last few yards into the inn, ushering ahead a cluster of three teenagers she must have stumbled across on her way from her home.

"Your friend has nearly reached the gate," she told Grav as she passed. "With any luck, we'll have gotten everyone who can be saved back here before long."

"What is that?" One of the boys with her was frozen, staring at the glow as it pulsed and sunk and rose. With each pulse, it seemed to spread just a bit further, inching along the ground with slow, malevolent purpose.

And then there was a scream out in the darkness, beyond the misty glow.

Kiara's voice.

Grav's eyes widened in fear for his friend. "Get inside and barricade the door! Now!"

The healer nodded resolutely, for she could see on his face that nothing would discourage him from running the rescue. As she hurried inside, he ran for the sound. He urged his blade to shine, clearing a small path through the misty glow, which parted as he ran.

Kiara screamed again, voice thin and high in way Grav would never have had the opportunity to hear. Shadows shuffled and skittered around the edges of the path that he cut through the light, parting before him and closing in behind.

"Get off me!" Kiara's voice was close, then fading, following the scuffling sound, as though she was being dragged. "Get off!"

And then her voice again, but further off, ahead of him in the gloom and not nearly as clear. "...listen! Grav...need to...help...please!"

"I'm coming! Just hang on!" he yelled, pushing himself to run as fast as he could. Where was it taking her? To the battlefield? He wondered just how fast it was if he wasn't gaining on it.

Gods, I'm completely turned around in the gloom. Where even am I?

"Grav, no--!" Whatever she was trying to say cut off in a half-choked scream; for half a second, the shadowy movement of shapes in the gloom showed a towering, impossibly angled figure dragging a slighter shape behind a crumbling stacked cairn; a cairn that had marked the edge of the battlefield where they had crossed the veil a day before.

Kiara's voice came again, but from behind him, faint and thin: "Please...don't...listen...!"

Grav whirled around, perplexed. How could she be behind him? And, come to think of it, how was he outside the wall? That shouldn't be possible; he would have noticed himself crossing it.

"Kiara?! Where are you?!" he called out in confusion.

"...out...it didn't...hear me? I...Grav!"

"Grav!" Her voice again, much closer--from where the spindly shadow had dragged its hapless victim. She was running toward him through the sickly green mist, her breeches shredded around the calves, as though bony fingers had been clawing at her from the earth. Her eyes were wild, face pale. "Grav, please--!"

She reached for him desperately as that same figure rose up behind her, long fingers wrapping around her throat to drag her back, choking of her scream before she could fully voice it.

Instinct took over and he rushed for the figure, gripping his blade tight with white knuckles. His blood boiled with righteous anger. No illusion was going to distract him from saving her. "Let her go, you bastard," he growled through clenched, sharp teeth, his hair practically standing up, as if some beast was trying to get out.

Kiara's bare feet dug furrows into the earth as she was dragged back. The creature holding her hissed, tightening its grip on her throat until pinpricks of blood gathered around its claw-like nails.

"Come and claim her then," it hissed, voice low and rasping as it taunted, forcing her back behind the cairn, back onto the battlefield.


And again, that faint echo from the fog: "Puppy, stop!"

Grav hesitated, stopping right before the edge of the battlefield. Something felt wrong about this. The creature was always just a step ahead, the night was too dark, and Kiara was no damsel in distress. She wouldn't get taken so easily, would she?

Was this real?

Something slammed into him from behind, then quickly backpedaled, panting.

"Oh thank gods," Kiara gasped, looking around wildly. "I got back to the inn and the healer said you'd gone off on your own--what happened? I kept calling for you but it was like you...couldn't...hear me..."

The shadowy figure had reappeared, Kiara's panicked double still in its grasp. The Kiara at Grav's side gaped while her doppleganger writhed in the figure's hold and reached out to them desperately.

"That's...mildly terrifying."

"Wha--how--you're you, right? Not that one?" He turned back to the doppelganger, deeply confused. "'Cause that looks very real."

Then he noticed the way the fake Kiara was just a little translucent, as if projected over a skeleton. "Okay, I see it now. The damned thing got in my head and made it so I could only see what it wanted me to."

"Yeah, that is just unsettling," Kiara agreed, rocking her weight between her feet as she tried to figure out what exactly was happening. "What is that thing?"

The spindly shadow chuckled, still puppeting the illusion despite the fact that it must know the trick had been discovered. "Help me," the illusory Kiara begged, tears gathering in her eyes. "Grav, you're my friend, please--why won't you help me?"

The real Kiara screwed her face up. "Oh ick. Hate that."

Grav was about to say something when he noticed the new problem at hand. They were surrounded by undead, both ghouls and skeletal soldiers alike. He looked in every direction, trying to find a gap that just wasn't there. They had no choice but to make a stand.

"Uhh... Kiara? I think we have a bigger problem," he said worriedly.

"Oh...hells," Kiara muttered succinctly as she looked around and saw the "problem". She took a step back, and the skeletons behind them chattered menacingly. "What are you, you sick fuck?" she hissed at the shadowy figure still operating her illusory self.

Finally, the figure seemed to grow bored of its puppet, allowing it to melt away with a far too disturbingly real affectation of literally melting flesh down into the ashen ground. Kiara felt her stomach roil; she liked to think there wasn't much that could shake her, but watching herself dissolve into a puddle of sickly goo was definitely a contender.

One of the ghouls shuffled forward and she automatically fell into a defensive stance, pressing her back to Grav's in an effort to minimize their vulnerabilities.

Grav glanced down at his sword. "Okay, Brightedge, do your thing." The blade lit up, making the dead recoil. But the sickly magic in the air protected the undead from burning. The swordsman frowned. "Sorry buddy. You tried."

A pair of skeletons attacked him with their swords, but they were slow. He easily blocked their strikes and countered. His luminous blade made short work in returning them to the grave. However, he didn't have time to rejoice before the whole throng attacked. He could hold them at bay, but for how long?

Kiara was slashing back and forth with her dagger, mostly just trying to keep some space around her clear. The shadowy tendrils that occasionally snapped out from her blade didn't harm the undead in the way Brightedge's light did, but they did move in quick, whip-like cracks that helped her to keep the hoard at bay. At least, for a little while.

"There's too many!" she called to Grav over the din of battle. "We have to take out that thing controlling them!" She knew it was a task much easier said than done. If Kit were here, he could have controlled the hoard while she and Grav went after the puppet master. But as it was...

A ghoul got passed her defenses, raking claws down her already wounded leg. Her knee threatened to buckle and she cursed as she slashed wildly at it. They were getting overwhelmed.

Grav swung hard, releasing the light from Brightedge in blinding arc that cut down a swath of undead. But it was only enough of a reprieve to allow them to get just a little closer to the primary undead. The swordsman felt his pulse quicken and his spine tingle as they grew more and more overwhelmed. The fire in his blood consumed his mind bit by bit with every kill, every wound he received, and every second that passed.

Kiara was flagging; she could feel Grav at her back, sensed a subtle shift in him with every passing moment, but there was no reprieve from slashing and stabbing and rolling for her to truly try to process what might be happening.

For every piece of the hoard they felled, every undead they sent back to the grave, three more rushed in to take its place. Her stomach twisted as she realized...

They weren't going to make it.

"I'm sorry, Grav," she whispered, her wounded leg trembling and threatening to buckle even as she struck a ghoul at the base of its neck.

I'm sorry, Kitten...

No.

Fire exploded around them--no, it was above them, an arc and then a circle that raged to life, surrounding them in heat and light and sending the undead scattering.

Kittsareyn landed in the center of the circle of flame with them, wings giving a sharp crack before he folded them in and snarled at the hoard.

"You don't touch her."

Blood trickled down one useless arm, his bicep torn open by a ghoul's teeth. He flailed his longsword the best he could with one arm, barely keeping himself alive. A skeleton's blade raked him across the chest, and he cursed himself for not wearing armor. He was bleeding quite a bit and couldn't take much more.

Then the sky exploded, and he grinned.

"Oh, so they can touch me?" He smirked, morale returning. "Really buddy, I'm hurt."

Kit spared him a droll look and a companionable flick with the tip of his tail, then returned his attention to mowing down rows of undead.

When they had fought the manticores, Kit had been adamant to join the fight despite Kiara's insistence that he wasn't fully recovered--and he had certainly held his own, enough that Grav may have assumed Kiara was being overly fussy with her draconic foster brother.

As he burned swaths of skeletons and ghouls to ash, crunching anything that still moved between his jaws or smashing them flat with a well-placed swipe with his claws or tail, it became clear that he really hadn't been operating at his full abilities.

With a dragon to turn the tide, the primary undead seemed to realize it may be most prudent to cut its losses. The hoard thinned, and new corpses and skeletons did not rise to fill their places. The source of the problem seemed to have escaped--but they had survived the night, the barest threads of dawn light streaking the horizon.

"You have some timing there, big guy." Grav chuckled, a little dizzy from blood loss. "Any later and we'd be mobile worm chow."

"Help us back to town, would ya? I think... we're in trouble."

Kit snarled, cracking the last skeleton in half before he turned to look at his two humans.

"Fuck," he said, quite succinctly, and quickly lowered himself to the ground before reaching over and plucking Grav up by the back of his shirt, like a mother cat with a kitten, before carefully depositing him on his back. He repeated the process with Kiara, then shuffled his wings to settle them better on his back before rising to his feet and starting off toward town at the smoothest gait he could manage.

Thoroughly exhausted, Kiara slumped forward over the dragon's neck, one arm wrapped around him while she reached back with her other hand to grip Grav's wrist lightly, reassuring herself that they were both there.

"I missed you so damn much, Kitten," she murmured. The dragon crooned quietly, but didn't stop, too worried with getting them to a proper healer.

The following day was an eventful one. The small town was a bustle of activity as the still-living villagers worked to ensure that the dead couldn't rise and and began to repair and rebuild. It said a lot that only a few chose to cut their losses and leave. The probability that the problem would return was low, but many feared it would return the moment the dragon left.

Nara the healer, meanwhile, treated what injuries she could while a rider traveled to the next village, where a more magically gifted healer lived. All she could do was keep Grav's and Kiara's wounds from festering.

Grav looked over at Kiara in the next cot and smirked, teeth sharper and hair longer than before. And the new fleshy stub of his future tail was making a comfortable position hard to find.  "Quite a pair, aren't we?"

Kiara snorted. "Aren't we always?" she chuckled tiredly. She rolled onto her good side, wincing slightly at her leg--which was still somehow miraculously the worst of her wounds--protested.

"Think they'll get the mage healer here by the end of the day?" She smirked crookedly. "Not that I'm not grateful for the accommodations, but I am so ready to be up and out of this bed."

Some of the humor bled from her expression. "That thing is still out there," she murmured, softer. "Whatever was animating the dead--it got away.

"I know." He frowned. "As long as Kit's here, it'll think twice about attacking. We'll just have to hope we're back in fighting shape by the time it regains its nerve."

"Nara, at least, thinks the mage will be here today if Harthome isn't dealing with its own crisis."

He adjusted his position with a wince. "Gods damned thing on my ass is in the way."

"How far along is it?" Realizing that might be a tad personal, Kiara quickly backpedaled, "I mean, y'know, if it matters? Or you--want to tell me--never mind."

She rolled onto her back again and stared hard at the ceiling, feeling an awkward flush rise up her neck.

Just outside the healer's home, Kit shifted his bulk and resettled himself alongside the tiny, rickety porch, like a cat trying to find the choicest patch of sun.

Grav laughed, then winced. "Ow. Chest wound. It's okay to ask. It's, well, maybe a couple of inches? I'm not remotely sure what it will look like."

He was trying to be brave, but his eyes betrayed the fear and uncertainty in his heart. He knew he might become something else entirely. And he didn't know what.

"Hey." Kiara looked back to him, then reached her hand across the space between their cots—an offer of comforting touch, if he wanted to take it.

Unfortunately, she didn't know what she could say about his changes that may be comforting, so she went for blatant distraction instead.

"You're an idiot, you know that?" she told him abruptly, half smirking. "Why did you go after that thing on your own?"

Grav took her hand, but was uncertain what to actually do with it.

"I thought you were in danger!" he protested defensively, though he wasn't entirely serious. "How was I supposed to know I got mind-whammied?! Not knowing is the whole point of the mind-whammy!"

Kiara snorted, rolling her eyes at him. "You could've at least brought backup!" She mock-glared, squeezing his hand lightly. "There had to have been a guard or two at the inn at that point! What, you just heard me yelling and--and came...running..."

It occurred to her--obviously and abruptly--that that was exactly what he had done. She knew it was just his nature, his stupid, noble nature, but something about the realization made her throat grow momentarily tight.

Huffing, she looked away. "Well. It was still dumb," she muttered, reflexively giving his hand another squeeze.

"Yeah, well, nobody's accused me of being smart," he muttered back, noting that she was still holding his hand. He might not be intelligent in any traditional sense, but he was emotionally perceptive. So he could tell there was more than comforting him on her mind, but he couldn't or wouldn't see what it was.

"Of course, didn't you do the exact same thing by running after me?" He smirked teasingly.

Kiara seemed to remember that she was still holding his hand at about the same time he noticed it, and quickly snatched her own back to her chest. "Yeah, well." She huffed sourly. "Maybe I'm dumb, too."

"Maybe?"

She turned her face to the window and gave Kit a pleading look. She had explained the situation to him, their mad dash from the faerie realm pursued by red caps, while they were initially being treated. And though the dragon seemed to have accepted the explanation and apology--she had the feeling she was getting something of a free pass due to how beat up both she and Grav were--he was still a bit snarky about it.

"I am sorry, Kitten," she said for the tenth time that morning.

The dragon huffed at her. "And what did we learn from this little adventure?"

She sighed and rolled her eyes back to the ceiling. "Always bring the dragon with you, even if he's going to attract attention."

"Thank you."

"Ass."

Grav laughed out loud. "Ow! Gods, that hurt."

---

Late that afternoon, the mage arrived and the two healers went to work. The reexamination of their wounds revealed that Grav was healing well so the mage set to healing Kiara first despite any stubborn resistance. By the time he closed Grav's last wound, it was almost midnight. The exhausted healer excused himself and left for the inn.

The dead hadn't risen.

---

Grav groaned as he stretched next to his cot. "Gods. One day and I'm stiff as a board."

"I know." Kiara sighed, sitting up in her own cot. She still was technically on "bed rest" for a while longer, but hey. She hadn't left the bed. "The worst part of a bad fight is the waiting to get back up again."

"Really." Kit gave her a dry look through the window. "I would've thought the worst part was almost dying multiple times."

"Yeah, well." She shrugged and grinned at him. "That part happens all the time."

Grav smirked at the dragon teasingly. "Yeah, dying is easy. Living is the hard part." He blinked at his accidental near-profundity.

"Aaanyway... what are we going to do about tall, dark, and deadly once we're back in fighting shape? You know my vote."

Both Kiara and Kit gave him slightly surprised looks, though their expressions changed when he mentioned next steps.

"Seeing as your vote is pretty much always to run off half-cocked and hit things until either you or it are dead, I vote we come up with an actual plan," Kiara said, but there was more humor in her voice than real rebuke. "First thing we should figure out: what exactly was that thing?"

Kit rumbled consideringly. "We know it controlled the dead, and crafts illusions—or maybe it was directly manipulating Grav's perception?"

Kiara shook her head thoughtfully. "No, I saw it too—and lemme tell ya, watching yourself melt isn't something you forget easily," she added with a shudder.

Grav shook his head. "I think it did both. I couldn't see the real you until you were right in front of me, close enough to touch. I could only barely hear you either. I thought you were the illusion."

"I read about something called a lich once that kinda fits, but honestly, I think we'd be dead if we ran into one of those."

"A lich," Kiara repeated, wracking her brain. She was vaguely familiar with the concept—but as far as she knew there hadn't been a recorded lich in Serendipity in generations.

"It makes more sense than anything else...but you're right. We'd be worm food if that had been a real lich."

Kit thrummed softly. "They don't start out that way though, do they? Maybe this one was...unpracticed."

"Or not fully formed," Kiara said slowly, nodding. She pursed her lips. "I just don't know enough about this stuff," she muttered after a moment.

Gra scratched his scruffy chin in thought. "I seem to remember something about them binding their soul to... something... so they can't be killed. I'm sure failing to do that right could have very bad results."

"Maybe that mage knows something about them? I mean, if she attended a magic school. Surely they teach about the danger of necromancers."

Both Kit and Kiara nodded as they considered that.

"Guess we have to wait for him to come back and check on us then," Kiara huffed as she flopped back onto the cot. "We're both technically still on bed rest."

Kit snorted at her and rolled his eyes. "I could always got find him."

"You hate talking to strangers."

"Not as much as I hate being left behind while you get yourself savaged by red caps and nearly fall to an undead hoard."

She winced. "...You know what, Kit, you should do what you think is best."

"Thank you." He dipped his head to her in a manner that could only be described as sarcastic. "I shall."

He heaved himself to his feet and shook himself lightly, then padded off away from the healer's house.

Kiara lolled her head to the side to look at Grav. "He's never letting me live this down."

Grav smirked lightly, laying back on his cot before he got caught out of bed. "Not for a long, long time."

Kit would find the two healers exiting the tavern, engaged in lively conversation. They both jumped as they saw the dragon, but quickly recovered enough to hear him out. They returned with him.

Nara squinted at them. "So which of you damn fool kids is hatching the idea that you're going to challenge this thing again?"

Kiara immediately pointed at Grav, saying shamelessly, "He is," as though she hasn't been just as involved in their hypothetical planning.

When Kit growled at her, she sighed and amended, "Well, both of us. Listen, Ma'am, that thing isn't just going to leave. It's only held off attack because we have a dragon. Better we press the advantage than let it shore up its forces and try again."

"Look, I get it," Nara sighed, "But you barely survived the first try. And a dragon can't protect you if that thing gets in one of your heads again."

Grav gave Nara a kind smile. "Thanks for the concern, really, but that thing isn't going to give us much say in the matter of whether we're ready to fight, and there is no guarantee of help coming in time to matter. We have to be as ready as much as we can."

He looked at the mage. "Please tell us that you've had formal magic schooling. Because we could really use an idea of what we're dealing with."

The mage hesitated, then sighed and nodded. "I never attended the colleges in Arca, but yes, I've had formal training. What do you need to know?"

---

After an hour and a half informal lecture one the precise nature, powers, and pitfalls of lichdom, Kiara's head was pounding.

"So..." she said to the ceiling, once more lying on her back on the cot, "it sounds like this...whoever they are--were--had a ritual set, planning to use the battlefield for the focal point of the necrotic energy. But something went wrong, and now it's not a lich, but it's not not a lich?"

"If it can create enough death to power its metamorphosis, it can finish what it started," the mage reiterated.

Grav was even more overwhelmed by all the information, but he gathered enough to know how they were supposed to kill it. "So we just need to find this philalacrity thing and break it?"

"Phylactery," both Kiara and the mage corrected, the latter seemingly on reflex, the former absentmindedly. "And yes," the mage continued. "That should be enough to destroy it, in its current state."

Kiara was chewing at her bottom lip. "Where would it hide something like that? It needs it to complete the ritual, right? So it needs access to it. And we're assuming it's set up camp somewhere in that old battlefield--maybe underground?"

"There's a massive cairn at the southwest edge of the field," Nara noted thoughtfully. "Our ancestors built it, along with the monument. It's the closest thing we have to a proper tomb for the fallen of that battle."

Grav was going to scratch his chin bloody with this much planning. "We should attack during the day, limiting the number of dead he can raise to whatever is in the darkness of the cairn. Unfortunately, that means Kit can't help unless we can get it outside somehow."

The mage nodded. "A good start on a plan. Life magic isn't much use offensively, but I could cast some temporary wards against death magic on your clothes. They should protect you from that element at least."

Kiara nodded, despite Kit's rumbling growl at the idea of not being able to help. "We've also got Brightedge," she said with a nod in Grav's direction. "And Kit's fire can help contain anything that reaches the surface."

She glanced aside at her dagger, considering. She still didn't entirely know what it could do, but she doubted that shadow magic was going to be particularly useful in an already dark tomb.

Although...maybe it could be.

"I could run recon," she offered, looking back up to Grav. "I'm smaller than you, and quieter. I can get into more potential hiding places."

Grav and the two healers gave her a disapproving look, doubtlessly echoed by the dragon. "By yourself? I thought I was the reckless idiot here. That--that's just..."

"Crazy enough to work, actually."

"Thank you." Kiara gave both Kit and Grav a triumphant look. "What if we don't go in daytime? Maybe dusk, when the almost-lich will be confident enough to come out of the cairn. You and Kit keep that thing and whatever undead it's got distracted, I go in and find the phylactery. Easy."

"Easy?!" Kit demanded. "You're insane!"

"I'm not hearing a better plan that doesn't involve leaving people to die," Grav pointed out. "Of course, I wouldn't call that easy or sane, but sometimes crazy is the only option you have."

The mage chuckled. "I wouldn't quite put it that way, but risky solutions are better than no solution. In my work, at least, the possibility of death is always preferable to the certainty of it."

"I'd rather minimize the whole concept of death in the plan," Kit grumbled.

"Well, that's why you're there," Kiara told him brightly. "If things go sour, you can get Grav and me out and we'll try something else."

"And how am I supposed to do that if you're underground?"

She waved a hand. "Details. We'll figure something out."

Grav gave the dragon a confident smile. "It only wrecked us so easily because it drew us into the horde. I'm sure that this time our odds are much better. We'll be fine, Kit. If anything does happen, you're free to roast me alive or dish out whatever punishment you see fit to dish out. Okay? I won't even resist."

"But it won't come to that."

Kit grumbled and argued and paced, but eventually he agreed to the plan, as long as Kiara was sent in with a number of wards and other failsafes in place—and on the condition that she bail the moment she needed to, or the dragon would, quote: "dig your scrawny ass out of the cairn myself."

"We're probably better off pressing what advantage we have while we have it," Kiara said once he'd agreed. "We don't want to give that thing anymore time to prepare for another strike if we can help it."

The mage, Theron, crossed his arms and nodded resolutely. "Then let's get you two prepared."

---

At dusk, Grav hopped off of Kit before the cairn. Stepping close, he shouted a challenge. "Hey, you rotting sack of failure, get your bony ass out here and face me!"

There was a snort just behind him, and Kiara's muttered, "Classy," before she was slipping passed him and ducking into the ever-lengthening shadows around the cairn.

Kit growled and raised his wings slightly, trying to make himself seem bigger as he paced behind Grav.

That eerie green glow from the first attack began to seep out from the stones of the cairn, creeping toward the dragon and swordsman like a low, thick fog.

Grav readied his blade and coaxed it into shining in order to hold back the sickly glow. He focused his mind on what he knew to be real. As if insulted, he boldly said, "No cowardly tricks, no hiding this time. I demand to see what you really are."

He had zero expectation of a fair fight, but it couldn't hurt to try.

A rattling sigh seemed to echo from the fog itself, and that spindly, shadowed figure that had "captured" Kiara seemed to pillow from the entrance to the cairn.

The unsettling shambling, shuffling sound of the dead began to pulse through the dusky gloom around them.

The moment the entrance of the cairn was clear, Kiara clutched her dagger tighter and raced forward, keeping herself low and quiet. For a moment, the shadows almost seemed to bend around her, shielding her from sight as she delved into the ancient tomb.

The interior was almost black, the fading light from outside doing little to illuminate the gloom. Looking back, she would see Grav and the almost-lich circling each other. A dark bolt flew, and Grav blocked it with his glowing sword. He was saving his magical attack for a killing blow once the phylactery had been destroyed.

Further in, a circular stairwell of stone slabs descended deeper into the darkness. There, deceased knights and commanders were entombed with honor not given to the scores of nameless dead. It was the perfect place to hide a phylactery.

Alright. Now they were talking.

Kiara kept close to the stone wall as she followed the staircase down; judging by what Nara and Theron had said, she assumed much of the current interior of the structure had been crafted by their wannabe lich. Save for the tombs themselves, most of which were set in niches along the outer edge of the chamber.

Carefully, she began making her way around the perimeter, hoping not to draw any unwanted attention to herself—there were enough undead up top for her taste, thank you very much.

She silently passed a pair of dead commanders. They were lesser noblemen, dressed in ceremonial armor that provided little actual protection. They must have shambled out of the secondary original chamber where the more important men were laid to rest.

Soon, she reached a passage further down that wasn't part of the original layout. As the passage turned, she heard a shambling ahead. It was getting louder as its source came closer.

Oh shit.

Kiara paused, trying to pinpoint the source of the sound as it drew shamblingly closer. She pressed herself against the wall, praying to blend into the darkness—although for all she knew the undead used some unknown sixth sense rather than sight.

Her thin blade felt like it was humming in her hand, and suddenly she could feel the shadows pressing around her like a cloak.

While she knew the enchantment in her dagger made it unsettlingly accurate in low light or darkness, and she had occasionally seen shards of darkness scatter from where blows landed, this seemed to be the true strength of the enchantment. While Brightedge could illuminate and scar anything adverse to light, this dagger could apparently help her hide.

I owe Aneas big time, she thought to herself as the shuffling sound grew ever closer.

A trio of dried up ancient ghouls shambled right by her. They stopped and looked around as if searching for flesh to devour. For a long, excruciating moment, it looked like they were going to notice her and draw the entire cairn down on her. Instead, they wandered on.

Kiara held her breath until the ghouls were past, feeling the enchantment become what she could only describe as "tighter" with every passing second.

When they were finally out of sight, she exhaled and felt the spell break with a backlash wave of brief exhaustion. It seemed the enchantment wasn't indefinite—that only made sense though, she supposed.

She kept going down the hall, becoming a little more impatient to complete her task. Every second she spent down here searching for the phylactery was another second Grav and Kit had to face a nearly immortal foe on their own.

A sickly green glow pulsed beyond the end of the hall. Whispers creeped at the edges of her thoughts, growing louder with each step. She could feel the lich's power flowing from the chamber beyond; soon she would--

A distant scream floated to her from whence she came. It sounded like... Grav!

Kiara froze. There was no way she would have been able to hear that scream from down here, right? It—it had to be a trick. The lich did this, it manipulated them...right?

She hesitated, trying to reach out with her mind to Kit, to check in on her friends. But...she couldn't reach him. Was that the lich too? And if that was the lich, then maybe she had heard a scream, maybe that wasn't an illusion, maybe—

Would it try the same trick twice? It seemed too clever for that—which meant the scream was real. Unless it was expecting her to assume that, in which case...

Entirely immobilized by indecision, Kiara felt herself starting to vibrate with tension. She didn't know what to do, and she had approximately two seconds to make a decision.

Then she heard something hit the bottom of the stairwell, followed by the clatter of steel on stone. There was no second scream. There was only silence.

Shit!

There was no more thinking; she just moved. Turning on one heel she sprinted back down the carved hall toward the main chamber, praying even while she ran that she was four kinds of idiot, that it really was an illusion of some sort, that he was fine, he was fine, he was fine--

She skidded to a stop at the entrance to the main chamber, panting and looking wildly around the room.

There, in the center, was a body surrounded by a spreading pool of blood, his dead eyes staring at her in accusation. Grav had fallen, his neck and limbs twisted at unnatural angle, a deep gash across his back. Brightedge lied next to him, its light extinguished.

Above, the luminous red eyes of a desiccated knight stared down at her. It had to be a trick... didn't it? Could Grav really lose to some ancient, rotting ghoul?

No.

No. No, this wasn't real, it was another trick, it--it...

Kiara took a shaking step forward, her lips forming silently around his name. This isn't real, this isn't real, it isn't real...

It looked real. And she still couldn't connect with Kit, couldn't reach out and ask, couldn't be sure--

Oh gods.

A terrified sob caught in the back of her throat and she raced forward, uncaring of the undead knight still watching her, the phylactery and her entire purpose for being in this forsaken place all but forgotten.

The knight emitted a horrid wail and raced down the stairs. Whatever dark magic was animating him, it provided the ghoul with a speed and nimbleness far beyond the typical undead. About two-thirds of the way down, he jumped down the rest of the way and landed with a clatter of rusty armor. He stomped towards her, faster with each step, his sword raised to strike.

Kiara had to change direction halfway across the chamber to avoid the knight's charge, darting back and then around the perimeter of the room. The thing was huge; she just had to hope it's size made it slow, or less agile.

She backed up, forcing herself not to look at the crumpled body at the bottom of the stairs. Teeth bared, she raised her enchanted dagger in one hand and drew the smaller knife from its sheath at her lower back with the other.

"Come get me then, asshole," she growled at the undead knight.

"...ive...er...ack..." The knight groaned unintelligibly, lunging with a powerful swing of his longsword. Death didn't seem to be any hindrance to the skills he had in life. In fact, normal humans didn't typically move that swiftly, meaning he had been well-trained.

"Shit shit shit," Kiara panted as she just barely dodged the blow. There was no way she could parry a longsword with a dagger, so her best defensive was just not getting hit.

With a wordless cry, she exploded toward the thing's unarmed side, slashing with her dagger and aiming a swift kick at the back of its knee—she had no idea if pain would register on a creature like this, but snapping tendons should be something that at least slowed it down.

Provided she could actually hit it. Damn thing was way faster than it should be.

He hissed as her dagger cut through his armor like it was cloth, black blood oozing from the wound. Yet the knight managed to dodge the kick with unexpected grace, twirling his blade around for a backward thrust. How on Earth could he move like that? Something about his style was distantly familiar.

"Just hold still and fucking die again, bastard," Kiara spat at the thing when it dodged her kick. Damnit, none of the other undead had been able to move like that, even the ones she'd seen controlled directly by the lich.

How—

Wait.

Halfway through a strike she suddenly tried to pull up, sending her dagger glancing off the edge of the thing's blade rather than jabbing for his hip.

She fell back a step, and her eyes were drawn to the crumpled form at the bottom of the stairwell. She forced herself to look at it, to see it. Her chest went uncomfortably tight, hope and fear warring in the pit of her stomach.

For one brief fragment of a second, she almost thought she saw a crumbled ghoul instead of Grav. But then the knight was on her, pressing the attack with a flurry of lightning-quick thrusts. It seemed furious, which was unusual for a mindless husk.

Wait. Wait, was he—

No time to think, she could only dodge her attacker's furious blows, or try. She was still faster, but not by much; and now she was hesitant to actually strike him, uncertain of her own senses, of the reality around her.

"Grav?" she tried even as she darted around behind him. "Is—is that you? Gr—"

She was so intent on trying to figure out what was real and what was illusion, she forgot she was in a fight. One sweep of the sword caught her in the slide, slicing a long, deep gash over her ribs. She gasped, staggering back and throwing her off-hand knife wildly on reflex.

The knife landed in the knight's leg, going right through his armor like it...

...wasn't even there...

He groaned, reaching down to pull out the short knife and toss it aside. The knight/maybe-Grav wailed at her. "...o...ore...icks..."

He swung at her, staggering a little from the leg wound. She may have to disarm him to truly find out which ghoul was the illusion. Or perhaps the Brightedge on the ground could reveal the truth.

Kiara could only stagger back, bleeding heavily from her side, and desperately try to avoid another blow. It was so damned dark down here, even with better eyes than most humans she couldn't—

She ducked another swing and had to go into a full roll,, scrambling to get her feet back under her. Her heel brushed against something smooth and metal. Brightedge.

Praying it would do something, she grabbed for the sword and tried to swing it up into a block, gasping, "Please work, please work, please work."

The blade turned into a rusted relic in her hands. There was only one explanation: the knight was actually Grav. The certainty of it drove away the rest of the illusion as Grav bore down on her.

The anger in his very blood had furthered his condition. The swordsman now had pointed ears, much like hers, and clawed nails on his fingers. Behind him, a tail emerged. It looked like a lion's tail, ending in a golden tuft. However, the way it moved was more like a snake or a monkey.

Oh gods.

Oh gods.

Relief so powerful that it literally stunned her nearly took out her knees. She dropped the rusted sword and sat back on her heels, watching Grav come at her in frozen silence for a long heartbeat.

Then instinct kicked in and she scrambled back, one hand raised toward him with her fingers splayed, showing no weapon.

"Puppy, wait," she begged softly, refusing to lift her dagger, hoping that would be enough.

The mutated swordsman hesitated, confused. It was a trick. It had to be. If Kit were alive, he would have broken through the cairn by now, so how could everything be an illusion. This thing that killed her had to die. That made sense.

"I'm not getting tricked again," he said with cold anger.

"Puppy, look at me," Kiara begged. And she did possibly one of the stupidest things she'd ever done: she dropped her dagger.

Completely unarmed, she crouched on one knee in front of him, hands outstretched. "It's me, Grav," she said quietly. "I thought—-I thought you were—"

She swallowed thickly, blinking to try to clear her vision. "Kit," she realized. "I can't—I can't hear him. Grav, where's Kit?"

Grav blinked and slapped his face hard. "Oh gods damn it... again!" he shouted in frustration.

Then he saw her wound and rushed over, frowning in concern. "Oh hells. I was really trying to kill you." He brought out a bandage, thoroughly ignoring his own wound and the question of Kit. "Here, let me wrap that up."

"Yeah, well, I stabbed you," Kiara said with an exhausted, crooked smile. "Twice. So. Even."

She could only nod at him when he moved to wrap the wound, lifting her shirt so he could see the cut along her ribs. She was trembling, and it wasn't until her vision started to fog over that she realized she was tearing up.

"Oh gods." She swallowed through a tight throat. "I—I really thought—" She swallowed again and tipped her head back, focusing on her breathing. "You were dead," she whispered into the darkness. "I saw you dead."

Seeing her fight off tears, he was overcome by his own relief. He closed his eyes for a moment. "I saw you—saw you dead too." He sniffed back a runny nose. "You...Gods, I saw you die. And I could do nothing but watch. "

"It was so real. I... I thought I was alone." He looked so lost at just the memory of it that he couldn't look her in the eye.

Her body moved before she could actually tell it to do anything, arms going around his shoulders and her face turning into the curve of his neck as she hugged him tightly. They were both still bleeding, she didn't know where Kit was, there was a godsdamned lich to deal with, but for the next five seconds she didn't care about most of it.

"I'm glad you're okay," she gasped out, chest uncomfortably tight. One hand fisted in the back of his shirt and she struggled to swallow back a sob as she held him a little tighter. "Bloody hells, I'm so glad you're okay..."

He held her tight, not wanting to let go for fear she would fade like a ghost. The depths of her relief raised a question in his mind. He had long dismissed the idea, but was there something more between them than there had been?

The thought would have to wait; they were still in danger. "As glad as we are, we have to get up. Okay? On three: one... two... three!"

He didn't let go.

She nodded into his shoulder, then stood with him on "three". She expected the motion to be enough to break them apart—but he didn't let go. And she found herself holding onto the hug for a breath longer, two.

A very vague corner of her mind was bizarrely focused on the way his scruffy beard felt against her cheek.

Then: "Kit."

She pulled back, digging the heels of her palms into her eyes. "I—Kit. Is Kit okay? What happened up there?"

Grav felt his heart sink and, again, he averted his eyes. "I... I don't know any more. I thought I saw him get hit by a death bolt. I- I thought he..."

"I thought he died."

"But if you're okay, maybe he is too," he said with new hope. "Go. I'll take care of the phylactery."

She had been afraid he would say something like that--but she had to believe that if Kit was really dead, she would have felt it in their connection. Or, the lack of it. It didn't feel gone, just...blocked.

Which certainly wasn't good, but it was worlds better than dead. She had to get to him.

Still, she hesitated, wavering between Grav and the stairwell. "I--I think it's down the carved tunnel, but I hadn't found it before I heard..." She swallowed. "Are you...sure you can be down here alone? There were more ghouls in the tunnel, what if--"

She bit her lip, both wanting to argue that she should stay and back him up, and also aching to get to Kit as quickly as she could.

"I still have my magic slash. I'll be fine." He gave her an assuring, confident smirk. "You'd be distracted with worry anyway."

He gave her a gentle shove towards the stairs. "Now go."

She knew he was right, and started to move with the little shove he gave her. Then she paused, turned back, and quickly reached up to wrap her hand around the back of his neck, pulling him down so she could butt the side of her head against his gently. Fixing him with a glare, she warned, "If you die down here, I'm going to kill you."

She broke away and started pelting up the stairs, her whole body buzzing with anxious adrenaline even as she cast her mind out for Kit's again and again.

When she emerged from the cairn, she found Kit flailing around like he was wrestling with the air. The spindly form of the semi-lich watched with a smug, amused smirk on his withered lips. He turned to her and gave a raspy chuckle that sent shivers down her spine. "I see you didn't enjoy my little performance."

From Kit's perspective he was locked in battle with a skeletal beast constructed from countless human bones. It roared at him, assaulting him with the stench of death as the countless skulls throughout its body chattered.

"Eat an entire bag of dicks," Kiara snapped at the figure, not even slowing her pace as she ran for her dragon. "Kit! Kitten! It's not real! We're okay, Grav and I are okay! It's not real!"

The dragon shook his head, her voice like a gnat he couldn't rid himself of. No—no he couldn't...why couldn't he hear Kiara? The connection wasn't gone, it was...

His head turned toward her, just for a moment—and then he was snapping and flaming at the air again, distracted by the persistence of the illusion.

Kiara dodged one of his wild strikes and turned to the would-be lich. "How's that illusion magic working for you, huh?" she taunted. "Can't hack the necromancy so you stick to petty tricks?"

The undead mage sneered. "Why don't you tell me?" He waved a skeletal hand towards the cairn, where several armored ghouls and skeletons emerged into the shrinking light. Then, whether or not she turned to look, he flung his hand forward to send a crowded swarm of biting insects her way.

Kiara bared her teeth and rolled to try to duck under the swarming insects.

"Kit!" she bellowed, darting all but directly under his front paws as he thrashed and raged. "Kit, I need you here!"

---

In the cairn below, down the carved tunnel, the oppressive feeling of death magic grew thicker in the air, which could have been a sign that the phylactery was close. The tunnel grew rougher and rougher with each step, as though it had been carved out with little more than bare hands and a shovel.

Brightedge lit up brighter in response to the evil in the air. He cut through ghoul after ghoul as he raced down the tunnel, his strange mutations allowing him to dodge and weave through them with ease even in such narrow confines. Bounding off the wall as the passage took a hard turn, he finally had the end in sight. He skidded into the chamber at the end, suddenly face-to-face with...

A dead end. All those ghouls, all that magic thick in the air, and the tunnel just...ended.

But...there was a fissure of some sort, a crack in the rocks that looked too regular to be entirely natural. With some leverage—a sword, for example—it wouldn't be impossible to break the thing open wider.

Grav studied the fissure for a long moment. The damned thing had to be there, so how could there be a--wait, something didn't look right.

"Sorry about this, Brightedge." He jammed his sword into the crack and tried to pry it apart.

The stone groaned in protest, but with enchantment reinforcing the blade, it was no match. It cracked and crumbled away to reveal a small cavity in the rock, which an innocuous glass bottle tucked away in the dust. The necrotic magic swirled thickest around the bottle, actually creating a small haze in the air around it.

---

Above ground, the spindly almost-lich suddenly froze, illusion flickering. Kit shook his head as the creatures hissed, "No!"

"Wh-what—?"

"He did it," Kiara breathed. "He found it... Kit, now!"

The semi-lich gave a horrid shriek of rage as he put up a barrier of darkness in vain hope of withstanding dragon fire.

---

Grav spun his blade around and brought the pommel down on the vial.

The vial shattered easily, incredibly understated for how much trouble the damn thing had caused.

Understated save for the invisible pulse of death magic that ripples out from the fractured glass, sweeping through the entire cairn and up the stairwell.

---

Kit roared, white-hot flame engulfing the never-a-lich and crisping it where it stood with an awful, keening shriek.

Kiara whooped, punching the air. "Hells yes, Grav!"

Then the earth shook under their feet, she felt the magic rising up and sweeping out; Kit lunged forward to wrap his wings around them both, a dragon's natural resistance to magic shielding them from the weakening pulses.

It still nearly knocked them both over, but by the time it reached the edges of the battlefield it seemed to have disappeared entirely. The undead clattered to the ground all around them.

Kiara exhaled, a little nauseous from the wave of power. "Damn, that was strong."

Then she and Kit both realized at the same time: if the magic was that powerful so far from the source, then—

The color drained out of Kiara's face. She whirled and sprinted for the entrance to the cairn, even as Kit tried to bound after her, futilely calling for her to wait as she dove back into the darkness.

They found Grav crumpled against the side of the tunnel, which had miraculously avoided collapsing immediately. The powerful surge of necromantic energy had decayed his clothing into crumbling rags, but he appeared to be intact save for the bleeding where his head hit the wall. He was pale and breathing weakly, as if drained of vital energy, but he was alive.

Kiara was first down the stairs, but Kit was tearing open the cairn behind her and then leaping down into the central chamber.

Kiara found Grav quickly—there was only so much of the place left standing—and for a heart-stopping moment he really did look dead. And with no more lich to create illusions—

No. No, he was breathing. Oh thank gods.

"Grav!" She dropped onto her knees next to him, quickly checking his pulse before she started looking for injuries. Aside from the general scrapes and bruises from the battle—and her own two stab wounds—she wasn't finding anything physical. "Puppy, c'mon, wake up. Can you hear me?"

Grav didn't respond. He needed a healer, and fast. To make matters worse, the cracks in the walls were steadily growing, and loose soil had already begun to rain from the ceiling. She would have to drag him out.

"Oh, fuck me." Forcing herself not to panic, she grabbed him under the arms and started dragging him back down the tunnel.

"Kit! We're gonna need to get out of here fast—can you fly?"

The dragon snorted an affirmative, barely waiting until they were visible near the mouth of the tunnel before he scooped them up in his front paws and rocked back onto his haunches to launch them up.

Dirt and rock showered around them as they exploded from the earth and Kit banked to bring them back toward the village.

Sometime later...

Grav's eyes fluttered open as he pulled himself back to reality. Where was he? The last thing he remembered was breaking the phylactery. Then everything went black.

"... what... where..." he mumbled through a dull headache.

"Easy now, lad." Nara, the healer, was standing over him, rewrapping a bandage around a cluster of cuts on his forearm. "You're safe. You're all safe."

Theron, the mage, had been the one tending to Kit outside the healer's house—while Nara was very good at her job, he was more equipped to handle a dragon's care, since the dragon's primary caretaker was currently unconscious in the cot next to Grav's.

Again.

They were making a habit of this.

Grav's eyes widened as he saw Kiara, only a quick push from Nara keeping him from trying to sit up. The truth was that he couldn't have in the condition he was in. "What happened? Did we... did we win?"

"I assume so," the healer said briskly. "Your dragon friend brought you all back here, said something vaguely apologetic about destroying the cairn, and then the lot of you passed out. Well, you were already out, I believe. Apparently that near-twig of a girl dragged you out of wherever that phylactery was." She nodded toward the window. "According to Kittsareyn, anyway."

Kit, who had woken about an hour before the humans, shuffled closer despite Theron's protests, and popped his head up on the wide windowsill—at least as much as he could.

"The thing's dead," he assured Grav quietly. "Torched it myself. But there was this...backlash. Death magic. You...didn't look so good when we found you."

"You still don't," Nara corrected, "But you're not pale as the grave anymore. It's a miracle you're even alive. I figured you would be out for days... or perhaps never wake."

"I'm tougher than I look." Grav gulped worriedly. "Is she... alright?"

"Exhausted," the healer responded briskly. "But you seemed to take the brunt of the magical backlash--aside from that wound to her ribs, she actually got out of all that surprisingly well."

Kiara stirred quietly, almost as though in response. Then her eyes suddenly snapped open and she gasped, bolting upright. "Kit--! Grav--what..."

She looked around, seemed to realize where she was, then groaned and leaned back onto the cot. "Ow..."

"You and me both." He chuckled, his voice weaker than usual. "But I guess I'm probably worse, huh?"

"Gods."

"Don't you dare get out of that bed--!"

Ignoring the healer's snapped command, Kiara scrambled up from her cot and managed to stagger over to his before she collapsed on the edge. "You're okay," she breathed, relief plain in her voice as her spine curved and her head bowed. She glanced up when Kit rumbled and smiled tiredly at the dragon. "You're both okay..."

"Yes, but they need rest," Nara snapped. "As do you."

"Well, okay might be a stretch." He smirked tiredly. "I feel like someone threw me out a window. Into some rose bushes. Covered in a sleeping potion."

"And then Kit sat on me."

The dragon chuffed. "Don't tempt me."

Kiara smiled at them both tiredly. "I vote we never do that again," she laughed a little breathlessly, even as Nara shooed her back to her own cot and forced her to lie down.

"You need rest, and to drink this," the healer told Grav briskly, placing a strongly scented potion on the little table beside his cot. "Try half now, get some sleep, and finish it when you wake up. I don't know how you survived the full brunt of that death magic, but this should help you recover your strength."

"The same reason I have a tail now, I imagine," he answered absently as he picked up the potion. He popped the cork, recoiling from the smell, before downing half of it with a grimace. He made a disgusted face as he replaced the cork. "Gods! What even is that?"

"What it is, is good for you," Nara huffed. She gave them both a hard look, then pointed a finger between their cots. "Now rest. I'll be back to check on you in a few hours, and I will know if you've been out of bed."

Kiara gave her a grin and a mock salute. Kit snorted. "I'll keep an eye on them."

She nodded to the dragon. "See that you do." Another sharp look at her charges, and she swept out of the room.

Kiara smirked a bit and tipped her head to the side in her pillow. "So. Dare me to try a handstand?"

Kit growled.

Grav grinned, smirking. "I think that's a no on the funny business."

"Now." He yawned. "I want nothing more than sleep. So, shush."

He closed his eyes, falling asleep nearly instantly, still smirking.

Kiara chuckled a bit, but she was honestly still exhausted herself, and dropped into sleep not long after him.

---

It was dark by the time she opened her eyes again. Nara had clearly been back in to change their bandages and place a jug of water and cups on the small table between the cots, but she healer was nowhere in sight as she looked around.

She sat up slowly, wincing and rubbing her shoulders as every muscle in her body protested with soreness. Kit's head had vanished from the window, but she could hear him snoring lightly—well, lightly for a dragon—just outside.

Grav stirred, his eyes drifting open. He was looking even better already, aside from the bags under his eyes. He looked over at her and yawned. "I want to stretch like the comfiest cat ever. But I don't want to move."

Kiara chuckled and nodded. "I'd bet according to Nara, you shouldn't be moving."

She gave her own arms a quick stretch before turning toward him slightly, propped up with one elbow on the cot. "How're you feeling?" she asked softly. "That whole thing back there was...a lot." She smirked a bit. "Also, I do think you have a real tail now? How's that going?"

The young adventure was quiet for a moment. "I haven't really had a chance to process that. It definitely feels bizarre having this thing attached to me that can move. I think I'm even faster too. I tore down that tunnel like a tornado. It was kind of intoxicating."

"You're definitely stronger," Kiara noted, touching the gash on her ribs with a slight wince. "I mean, that thing made you look like a death knight and I believed it."

Her mouth went a little tight as she remembered the rest of that illusion. She quickly shook her head, trying to put the image of him broken on the floor far from her mind.

"Oh hey, and did you notice?" She gave him a crooked grin and tapped the point of one of her ears. "We match."

Grav tensed at the memory of almost killing his best friend, going slightly pale. He was grateful when she moved on. Reaching up, he felt his left ear. "Huh... So we do."

He seemed far less distraught by his changes than he had been. But perhaps that was because he currently had enough more pressing things to deal with that they hadn't really sunk it. Or, possibly, that intoxicating feeling that he had mentioned had changed something about how he felt about it.

Kiara's smile softened a bit; she was pleased that he didn't seem as despondent about his changes—not that he didn't have a reason to be of course. He could feel however he liked about it, as far as she was concerned. But she could admit that she preferred it when he seemed at ease.

"Hey, uh, Grav?" She winced a bit, then cleared her throat and said quickly, "I'm really, really glad you're not dead."

She tried for another smile, a little awkward, but sincere.

"Me too!" Grav smirked, feeling more like himself. "Personally, I love not being dead. The quiet is nice, but I don't like all the bugs."

More sincerely, he said, "I'm really, really glad you're not dead, too."

Kiara crinkled her nose and resisted the childish urge to stick her tongue out at him. "And a lucky thing, too. I think Kit might've ripped the whole place apart."

The humor faded from her expression as she thought back on the previous night, on what they had all seen—or thought they had.

A memory tickled at the back of her mind and made her frown. "Grav..." She hesitated, not wanting to linger on the horror of that fight, but still... "When we fought—when it made us fight each other...you said—you said something that sounded like...give her back." She turned her head on the pillow to look at him. "But you told me it tricked you into thinking I'd died. You weren't..."

She trailed off. How did you just casually ask someone if they'd been considering necromancy to revive you when they thought you'd been murdered? No, she was definitely overthinking—that has been one hell of a fight, who knew the kind of things they both might have said, or if she'd even heard him right.

She shook her head and looked back up at the ceiling with an awkward chuckle. "Sorry, nothing. Never mind."

He looked away. "In the moment... yeah, I was tempted. But, don't worry, I wouldn't have ever made a deal with that thing. Whatever he raised wouldn't really be you anyway. Not in any way that matters."

"I was just... grief stricken and so full of anger that I couldn't think straight. You don--" His voice wavered with intense guilt. "You have no idea how close I came to killing you. I... couldn't have lived with that."

"Hey."

Nara would have given her a solid thump upside the head for it, but she clambered stiffly from her cot and crossed the small distance to sit on the edge of his. "It's fine," she told him with a small smile, reaching over to pat his hand lightly. "I'm fine, see? You stopped. You heard me. Even through all that, you heard me."

She realized her hand was still laying lightly over his and quickly pulled it back, threading her fingers together tightly in her lap. "Besides, you only got the one solid hit on me--I stabbed you twice, so you've still got a freebie," she tried to joke.

He turned his head so that his watery eyes could meet hers. "Just... consider us even for the dress crack," he joked half-heartedly.

She laughed, her own eyes just a little watery, and leaned down to press her brow to his. "Officially even," she agreed quietly.

Her chest had gone tight and fluttery in a way she'd only felt a few times before, and she suddenly felt as though she couldn't catch her breath.

Oh no.

"I, um--sorry. I'll leave you be," she said in a hurried whisper, starting to pull back. "Gods, I'm sure you're still exhausted after all that."

Grav had no idea what to make of her strange and awkward reluctance. One second she was trying to comfort him, and in the next she was pulling away as if afraid of something. It was confusing, to say the least.

"Actually, I think I could use a little conversation. Just..." He chuckled. "... don't be surprised if I fall asleep on you."

Kiara hesitated, biting her lip. Then she exhaled quietly and nodded. "I can do conversation," she said with a small smile. With a little chuckle, she added, "And you are well within your rights to fall asleep."

She drew one knee in toward her chest, her other foot braced on the floor as she leaned back a bit on the edge of the cot. Nara had left her in breeches and her sleeveless undershirt, and braided her hair loosely over one shoulder so she could better get at her bandages. It was less layers than she was used to wearing, and left the tattoo between her shoulders visible where it normally wasn't. The dragon arising from flame bore a slight resemblance to Kit, but on closer examination wasn't entirely black--it had a silvered underbelly, and ruby red eyes where her partner's were golden.

"Think we might get some sort of reward for saving the town from an undead hoard?" she said flippantly after a moment, smiling lopsidedly. "I dunno about you, but I've been thinking we need to stock up on supplies if we're going after these Tears of the Stars."

"We stopped the ascent of a lich." He smiled proudly. "We deserve medals. Preferably many tiny, gold ones we can exchange for goods. And maybe titles. But gold will do."

He smirked. "And I seriously need some armor. I'm waaay too stabbable."

Kiara winced, chuckling sheepishly. "Er, yeah. Sorry again about that." She let her cheek rest on her knee, head turned toward him. "Y'know, I'm realizing that we should probably spar one another more often," she mused. "I mean, I know your style well enough to fight with you, but when I had to fight against you like that, well..."

She crinkled her nose. "If I don't have Kit backing me up, I'm really just dodging a longsword. And you definitely don't know how to properly defend against two blades--don't get my wrong, you absolutely gave me a run for my money, but I think the only reason I managed to get a hit on you at all is because you're not used to your opponent having a blade in their off-hand."

He rubbed his neck in embarrassment. "Yeah. I'll... have to work on that. I've only ever really fought other sword users, but I guess you've figured that out already."

He chuckled. "Gods. How did I ever think I was the best swordsman ever? I feel like an idiot for being so cocky. No wonder you shot me down."

"Shot you down?" Kiara repeated, laughing. "When did I...?"

She thought back to how they met, those first few days traveling together. A rather obvious realization struck her--okay, maybe she should have known, but--but he was like that with everyone! Well, everyone who could fill out a corset, anyway. It genuinely hadn't occurred to her that--

"I didn't think you were serious!" she whisper-shouted, staring at him. "I--you--erm..."

Oh dear. Her face and neck started to feel hot. "Oh my gods." She dropped her face into her hands, mortified.

Grav raised a brow. "What? I thought you were pretty, underneath the road grime anyway."

"I mean... I can see how you'd think I blindly hit on all the girls. Because I do. But, I dunno, you seemed different and exciting so I was serious for once, yeah."

He placed a hand on her back. "Look. It's okay. I got something way better than just a hookup on the road that I'd probably never see again even if we hit it off. "

She started a bit at the touch of his hand against her back, but she did lift her head to glance at it, then him.

"Right," she said slowly. "I mean, we're...we're friends. And that's...we wouldn't want to mess that up, right? Honestly, I've never had a friend like you, Grav, and I don't--I mean it would've--"

If you don't tell him, I will.

Kiara squeaked and snapped her head around to see Kit peering in through the window. "How long have you been up?!"

The dragon snorted. Long enough. Your angst is enough to wake the dead. Now sort this out so I can go back to sleep. Grumbling, he dropped his head back out of sight.

Very red in the face now, Kiara glowered at the window for a moment before glancing back down at Grav. She swallowed. "I'm...glad we're friends," she told him quietly, not quite meeting his eyes. "But I--I mean, I'm not very good at--" She sighed. "I've never been good at this," she muttered, rubbing her fingers in circles over her temples. Then, in a rush: "Having a friend in you means more to me than I know how to say, and I'm terrified of messing that up, but I don't--I think part of me wants...something else."

She went quiet, eyes fixed on her knees. Then she gave her head a quick shake and added, "But I mean, that's my problem, it doesn't have to be--you know what, I'm gonna let you sleep."

Outside, Kit sighed and rolled his eyes so hard they were at genuine risk of getting stuck.

Grav was too dumbstruck by the confession to respond. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. Eventually, his brain started working again, but by then it was too awkward to say anything. Besides, he was too tired to really know how he felt. After they met, he'd have been beaming. But after becoming such fast friends, he hadn't even thought about it again.

"I--okay, I'll get some sleep. We can... talk about that when I can think straight."

"Good idea." Kiara nodded briskly and quickly stood from the edge of the cot--too quickly, maybe, as the wound on her ribs twinged in protest. She ignored it, climbing back into her own cot and quickly curling up with the blanket drawn up almost to her head.

I blame you for this, she thought petulantly at her dragon.

Whatever helps you sleep, Kia.

Grav remembered his second dose of potion and quickly choked the foul concoction down. Then he closed his eyes and drifted off.

---

It was nearly noon before he woke up again. Or, rather, before his complaining stomach woke him up. He sat up, his muscles aching from the previous night's punishment. The fact that he could move was a vast improvement.

He looked over to see if Kiara was still asleep.

In the night, Kiara seemed to have relaxed slightly, uncurled from her tight fetal position to lie more relaxed on her back on the cot. Her hair had half come loose from the braid Nara had tied it into, tossed around her face and haloing her head on the pillow.

"You're up," Kit noted from the window, giving Grav a greet snort. "Should I get the healer? She checked on you two early this morning, but said to let you sleep."

"Only if you want to," Grav responded distractedly. He couldn't take his eyes off of Kiara's sleeping form. Did she really--"Kit? How... how long has she felt this way? About me, I mean."

"How long has she felt that way?" Kit asked with an eyeroll. "Or how long has she known? 'Cause I think that's too different timelines, mate."

He glanced at his rider, then sighed quietly. "I really don't think she noticed until...well. Until she thought you'd died. But that's just my guess. As for how long really..." He huffed quietly. "I dunno if I can say. Longer than that, though."

Grav mulled the information over. "So I haven't just been super dense then. That's good to know."

He still had no idea if he felt the same way, and the indecision was practically written on his face. It was true that her apparent death had left him feeling as lost as he ever had, but did that mean he had romantic feelings for her? He just didn't know.

"She probably would have kept quiet as long as she thought she could get away with it," Kit noted quietly. "She cares about you. Your friendship, I mean. She'd never want to put that at risk."

He exhaled a small puff of smoke and gave his head a little shake. "She'll tell you all that herself, once she's awake. Or, if you just want to pretend it never happened, she'd probably let that go too. I'm the one who thinks it isn't good for her."

"I agree with you. Of course, neither of us are that good at sincere conversation. So try to bear with us, okay?" Grav asked. He went back to watching her sleep. She looked like a grumpy angel.

Kit huffed a quiet laugh. "Not like I have much choice. I'm stuck with you two idiots."

He arched his neck, opening and folding his wings a few times. "I'm gonna stretch my wings," he told the swordsman, lumbering to his feet. "I'll keep close enough that Kia can call me when she wakes up."

He paused, then stretched his head forward to wiggle his nose in through the open window and give Grav a brief butt on the arm with his muzzle. "For what it's worth...I like having you along, too."

He pulled back and got some distance from the healer's house to bound into the air, rising with a few thunderous flaps and then banking away.

Kiara stirred slightly at the nose, rolling onto her back and mumbling something intelligible. Her lashes fluttered as she seemed to be approaching consciousness, back arching and arms reaching up in a long stretch.

Grav watched the dragon take flight with a smile. He turned his head back to Kiara and smirked a little. "I can't believe I woke up before you. There's something very wrong with that."

"Mmm." Eyes still closed, she smirked a bit and tipped her head in the direction of his voice. "Don't get used to it. Gimme another day and I'll be back to getting up at dawn." She yawned and stretched again, then finally blinked her eyes open.

Groaning, she sat up and rolled her head from side to side. "How long have you been up? Nara come back yet?" She still seemed sleepy enough that she either hadn't fully remembered their conversation the night before, or she was too tired to be embarrassed yet.

Grav wasn't going to pretend it never happened, but that didn't mean he was anxious to bring it up. "I've only been up a few minutes, but I hope she shows up soon. I'm starving."

His stomach growled in agreement. He patted his belly, chuckling. "Soon, buddy. Soon."

Kiara chuckled at him and rolled her eyes. "Yeah, I could definitely use some food," she replied even as she cast out absently with the corner of her mind that was always aware of Kit. "Preferably with a drink or two."

Then you two are going to love this.

She cocked her head at Kit's voice, frowning. What do you mean?

Before the dragon had time to explain what he saw while circling above the village, Nara came bustling into the room.

"Oh good, you're up just in time," she said even as she started checking both their bandages. She nodded in approval when she saw Grav had finished his potion. "Half the town has got something together for you outside—seems our regular harvest fest has turned into something of a "thank the gods the ascendant lich is gone" fest. And you're the guests of honor."

Kiara blinked. "...What?"

Grav blinked at almost exactly the same time. "Seriously?"

Nara gave them both a look. "Did you really think us so ungrateful that we wouldn't find some way to reward you?"

The adventurer smiled, chuckling. "No. I guess not. But are we really good to be walking around yet? You said it yourself, I should be dead."

"Yes, but seeing as you are not..." The healer fixed him with a hard look--then smiled slightly. "I officially give you permission to explore the festival for an hour. But if you feel even the slightest bit ill, you come straight back here."

Swinging her legs over the side of her cot, Kiara gave her a jaunty little mock-salute. "I'll make sure he doesn't push himself, ma'am," she said with a grin.

Nara harrumphed. "See that he doesn't. Nor you, miss."

"Yes, ma'am. I'll be good." Grav eased out of the cot, carefully testing his balance before putting all of his weight on his legs. "Don't think I'll be dancing yet, but so far so good."

When they set foot outside, he turned to Kiara and said, "Gods, we're making it way too much of a habit to get beat up."

Just a little bit wobbly on her own feet, Kiara found herself leaning against one of the porch posts and chuckling as she nodded in agreement with him. "I dunno about you, but I could use good food, good drink, and some music. And no undead for like...at least the next two days."

The healer's house was situated near the center of the small town, so they had a clear view of the festivities being erected in the town square. There were small stands that must usually serve as market stalls being decked out in colorful fabrics. A group of about eight was tuning instruments by a public fountain, and the smell of baked goods was already in the air.

Kiara smiled at it all, but her expression sobered a bit as she saw the figures skirting around the edge of the festival preparations, some she recognized from that first chaotic attack and some she didn't--people who had lost someone to the hoard.

"We must have slept through the burials," she noted quietly.

"I wish we could have done more to help that night," Grav said regretfully.

Someone cleared their throat behind them. When they turned, they saw a thin, hawkish man old enough to be their father. "From what I understand, you've gone above and beyond for the people of Aria. You need not feel regret for what you were in no position to change."

Kiara started slightly and whipped around just a tad too fast, nearly overbalancing. She managed to catch herself and cleared her throat awkwardly.

"I--thank you," she murmured with a dip of her head in the stranger's direction. "But really, we just did what anyone would have done in that position. We had the ability to help, so we did."

She blinked, briefly taken aback by her own words. She wouldn't say that she had ever been particularly ruthless, but she certainly used to place her own survival a bit higher on her priority list. There was more calculation before the heroics--lately, she tended to leap in head first.

Mostly because she knew Grav would be leaping whether she did or not, and the noble idiot needed someone to watch his back.

Grav took it slow, moving with the careful grace of an old cat. He couldn't help but smile at her response. "Exactly. We just did what we could."

"Also... who are you?"

The man blinked, then chuckled embarrassedly. "My apologies! I'm Navit Vahne, Mayor of this fine village. It's a pleasure to meet both of you." He shook Grav's hand before holding his out for her.

Kiara took his hand with only mild natural wariness, and she nodded to him politely. "A pleasure," she echoed as they shook. "And, er, thanks for...y'know. Housing a dragon the last few days. I know that's never easy," she chuckled a little awkwardly.

Though she hadn't been projecting the words to Kit, as if on cue the dragon swooped down in a low arch to land to the side of the healer's house and padded toward them.

"I admit I was nervous at first, but then I chanced to speak with him." He perked up as Kit approached. "Ah, Ser Kit. Glad you decided to join us. The children are so looking forward to meeting a real dragon."

Grav almost choked as he fought the urge to laugh at the image of Kit suffering through the attention of a throng of children.

Despite a dragon's generally harder-to-read facial facial features, the face Kit was pulling was clearly a grimace. He managed to school his expression back to neutrality--which for a dragon read somewhere in the realm of solemn menace--fairly quickly and dipped his head.

"...Of course, Ser."

Kiara, who knew how much Kit generally disliked speaking aloud to strangers, was caught between pride and amusement. She lifted a hand to cover her smile and winked at the dragon, who showed her a flash of silvery fangs in response.

"So, Nara told us this is usually a harvest festival?" Kiara asked, her curiosity fairly evident: it wasn't exactly late enough in the autumn for such a thing, typically.

Vahne chuckled a bit and nodded. "Of a sort, but not the harvest of our crops--we forage in the forests at the edge of town through most of the late summer. Old town legend says that's when we will find the gifts the Fair Folk have left us for the year: healing herbs, sylvanwood, the occasional trinket. That is the harvest we celebrate."

Kiara's smile went just a little stiff. "Right. A faerie harvest. Makes sense."

Grav gave Kiara a knowing, supportive smile before turning back to the mayor.

Vahne clapped his hands together and grinned merrily. "I know you've only got a limited time, so, come, allow me to escort you to your seats of honor so the festival can officially begin. And, don't worry, the festival lasts several days. We've planned to hold the official ceremony of thanks when you can properly enjoy yourselves."

Grav almost linked arms with Kiara as he followed, but pulled his arm back in the hope that she didn't notice and get mixed messages.

She caught the flicker of motion, cast a curious look in his direction, then seemed to abruptly realize what he might have been doing, and why he might have stopped himself. Her cheeks went ruddy and she quickly looked away, hurrying to follow after the mayor as he led them into the town square.

Their "seats of honor" were seemingly two hand-carved wooden chairs, pulled from someone's house and decked in flower wreaths. Seeing as their "heroes" weren't quite up for proper merrymaking, this first night of the festival seemed to be focused on showering them with good food and good drink, as well as dealing with a shockingly endless parade of people who wanted to thank them personally.

Not too far away, Kit was sitting primly with his tail wrapped around and folded over his front paws, while a gaggle of children at least two dozen strong babbled and played around him, some even brave enough to scurry up and touch his curved talons, or play a skipping game with the flickering tip of his tail.

During a lull in the visitations, Grav tapped Kiara's shoulder and directed her attention to the dragon with an amused smirk. "He's never going to let us forget this, is he?" he managed to say before laughing.

Kiara glanced where he pointed and snorted quietly into her drink. "Oh, never," she agreed as she put her cup down. "Hells, he's not gonna let our grandchildren forget this."

She heard the words, what would have a day ago been a meaningless joke, and flushed then quickly amended, "Y'know, mine or yours. Individually."

Oh, well done, a voice that she really wished she could have blamed on Kit jeered in the back of her head.

Luckily, there wasn't much time to dwell on her awkwardness, as another group of grateful townsfolk seemed to be approaching.

At her slip, Grav very nearly had a spit take. He coughed, thumping his chest to help cough up what he knew went down wrong. "I'm okay," he croaked in response to the worried looks, "Just swallowed wrong."

Yeah, 'cause that was less conspicuous, his own mental voice pointed out.

Oh dear.

Kiara frantically willed her blushing to die down as one of the craftsmen who had approached them thumped Grav heartily on the back and laughed about "the festival getting the best of all of us".

"I'm, ah--" She stood abruptly and smiled at the crowding well-wishers. "I just...need a bit of air. I'll get you some water," she told Grav hurriedly before scurrying off, smiling tightly and shaking hands when people stopped her but clearly anxious to get some personal space.

Grav thought about going after her but, by the time he almost made up his mind, he found himself neck deep in another deluge of grateful townsfolk. When she returned, the hour was up, and Nara was strict and unbending in her insistence that they get some more rest.

Once they were alone again, Grav looked over at her. "We should... probably talk about the metaphorical dragon in the room, shouldn't we?"

Kiara put up some token resistance when Nara came to collect them, but honestly she was pretty tired. And she wasn't used to being the center of so much attention; it was making her itchy.

Kit, as the most healed among them--and many times Nara's size--was not subject to the same strict scheduling, but once Kiara and Grav had departed he took the opportunity to  get away from the crowd, telling his partner that he was going to stretch his wings, but he wouldn't fly far.

Which meant Kiara unfortunately had no easy escape route when Grav spoke up once they were back in their impromptu medical wing. She winced and closed her eyes. "Do we have to?" she laughed, trying to joke but her voice sounding a little too plaintive. She couldn't look at him. "I--look, it's not...it doesn't have to be a big deal," she said quickly, bustling around in an effort to distract herself from her own discomfort. "Like I said, you're--I really like being your friend, Grav. It doesn't have to be--I don't wanna screw that up."

Part of him really wanted to tease her. Like, a lot. But the kinder part of him prevailed, and he just smiled softly. He hesitated for a moment, uncertain what to say.

"I don't either, but you feel how you feel. I can't ask you to pretend you don't." He surprised himself with what he said next. "Honestly, I don't know how to feel. When we met, I would have been over the moon to know you felt that way. I wouldn't have even thought about it. But we've been through so much in such a short time that I haven't had time to stop and think about what I want. And about whether or not I'm even still the same cocky, naïve guy I was back then. I feel like something fundamental has changed, and I need figure out what."

Kiara released a long, low breath and nodded. "That is incredibly fair," she murmured, still not really looking at him, fiddling absently with the corner of her cot's blanket. "And I need you to know I'm not--I wouldn't--I'm not asking anything of you," she said hurriedly, chancing a quick look up at him. "I know I sort of sprung this on you in the middle of...well...everything. A lot has happened, and I know you're changing--in a lot of ways--and gods I would have hated it if someone did that to me, I--"

She forced herself to slow down and take a breath. "Just...I get it." She smiled at him a bit, hoping that at least most of the confusing swirl of emotions in her chest was hidden. "You need time. Honestly, I think I need time, I'm not...I don't do this often. Ever, really. I'm...kinda confused, too."

Grav smiled back, a little nervous himself. Sincerity was difficult enough without potential romantic feelings confusing things further. "Thanks. For understanding, I mean, it... means a lot."

"When I figure out who I am again, I promise you'll be the first to know. Hells, as dense as I can be, you might know before I do. At least Kit will."

She chuckled a bit and nodded. "I'm gonna go ahead and blame him for this whole thing," she added, gesturing back and forth between them to indicate the "whole thing" in question. "He has...let's say opinions about how I handle my own emotions."

She started to move back toward her cot, then hesitated and coughed awkwardly. "Should I...do you want me to ask Nara if there's somewhere else for me to sleep?" she offered quietly, still feeling a little unsure of what exactly was the right thing to do here.

"What? No, you don't need to do that," he responded, a little uncertainly. "I mean--unless you would feel awkward being around me right now."

He hoped it was obvious that he wanted her to stay. He just felt awkward about saying it out loud.

"Of course I feel awkward!" Kiara laughed, cheeks a little red but her shoulders finally starting to relax. She grinned at him and said, a little softer, "But...if you don't mind, I'll stay." She crinkled her nose up as as she added jokingly, "Besides, I think I've gotten too used to your snoring to sleep without it at this point."

"Pfft! Slanderous lies." Grav waved away the accusation with a laugh. "I don't snore. I think I'd know by now if I did." He looked straight at her as doubt set in. "I don't, right?"

Kiara laughed, looking more like herself than she had for the last two days, and climbed into her cot with a cryptic, cheerful, "Goodnight, Puppy," as her only response.

She settled in to sleep with a small smile. Yeah, things were still a little awkward. But...she actually felt better than she knew she would have if she'd just let things sit as they had been.

Damnit. She hated when Kit was right.

Grav nodded to himself as he made himself comfortable enough to fall asleep. He definitely didn't snore.

He snored, albeit softly.

---

The next day, they were cleared to enjoy themselves for as long as they could handle. The only caveat was to rest the very minute they got tired.

Once back in the square, he held out a hand like a mock-gentleman. "Wouldst the lady do me the honor of having this dance?" he asked in a snooty voice.

The second day of festivities found Kit once more the center of a cluster of children's attention, and Kiara was so busy laughing at the sight that it actually took her a moment to process Grav's invitation.

Laughing harder at his affected manner, she dropped into a curtsy—one clearly trained into a high-born daughter, if slightly undercut by the fact that she was in breeches and a loose blouse rather than a gown—and took his hand.

"The lady wouldst," she giggled, allowing him to pull her into the celebrating crowd dancing around the square's center fountain. "But you'll have to forgive my footing—I'm better with knives than I am with dancing shoes."

"It's okay." He grinned, gracefully gliding around her as he led the dance. "I've got moves enough for us both."

His tail swayed in time with the music, always staying just out of the way. It was almost like it had a mind of its own.

Kiara laughed again and easily let him take the lead; though she protested her lack of skill, she actually seemed to be quite a good dancer--maybe her few years living as a minor lady of the Autumn Court had instilled some courtly lessons, or maybe being light on her feet and quick with a blade just translated well to the festival's music.

She twirled out from Grav's hold and back again in time with a trill from a fiddle, echoing the steps of the dozens of dancing couples around them.

"You've got some experience with dancing then?" she noted as they glided through the next steps with relative ease.

"Only to festival music," he answered as he twirled her on her feet. "Only Griffonbeak's big one is after the height of fishing season."

"It's a good thing we trade most of it, because everyone's sick of fish afterwards." He dipped her.

Kiara was not used to feeling light; she knew she wasn't exactly a large person, but she didn't often trust the entirety of her weight to anyone but Kit. Maybe it was the mutagen in Grav's system, or maybe he would have been able to lift and spin her anyway, but she found herself giggling as they twirled around the fountain.

"I'll admit, I've never been much of a fish person--oh!"

She grabbed for his arm when he dipped her, instinctively afraid she was going to fall. But of course he didn't let her. She let her head tip back and laughed aloud.

"Y'know, you might not do so bad with the courtly bullshit," she noted, upside down and grinning. "It tends to be a lot less vigorous ."

"Sure, with the dancing. It's the talking and the manners I worry about." He laughed as he brought her back up. She found his happily smiling face right in front of hers—his stupidly handsome face with its kind eyes and sof--

No. Don't think about that, Kiara.

The abrupt change in her center of gravity sent her head spinning momentarily, and she laughed giddily again as her hands settled on his shoulders, eyes sparkling and a shockingly deep green in the firelight, where normally they appeared black.

And then very suddenly she realized how close they were, how she could feel his heartbeat thumping against hers, and she stumbled. "I--oh, shit. Sorry, I--"

She tried to laugh it off and started to pull back, glancing away from him. Damnit. Damn her. Damn him. Damn everything. This was not helping with the whole "give this time" concept.
 
"I guess I'm...getting dizzy," she murmured lamely. "Sorry, I...maybe you should find another partner."

Grav was assaulted by the primal impulse to lock lips, like he had with many girls after festive dancing had gotten his blood pumping. It occurred to him that perhaps this had been a bad choice of activity.

"Yeeaaah..." He was blushing furiously. "Or maybe we just need a less--uh--romantic activity. Like, literally anything."

"Food!" Kiara exclaimed almost frantically. Her blush matched his, which she was valiantly attempting to ignore. "Food isn't romantic. Let's get some food."

Across the square, she swore she heard Kit snort in amusement, but when she looked at him he was busy trying to gently pry a small child off the tip of his tail.

"Right! Food!" Grav replied with too much enthusiasm. "I could eat!"

Together, the pair weaved through the dancers and returned to their seats of honor. As they were brought food, he breathed deeply and grinned, "Gods. That smells amazing."

"It really does," Kiara said with a mix of relief and enthusiasm. She'd seen Grav eat when he was hungry--it would be difficult to maintain the level of...tension that dancing had inspired when he was so focused on something else.

"Here, try these," a middle-aged woman with a kind smile said as she pushed a bowl of sweet-smelling fruit into Kiara's hands. As she lifted one to her lips, the woman said brightly, "They're good luck, you know--all the village girls make tarts with them this time of year to give to their sweethearts."

Kiara choked on her food.

Grav barely kept from genuinely choking. Whatever god of love was toying with them really needed to mind their own business. "No--We're not--not like that," he croaked between coughs.

What next? Were they going to be picked as the Harvest King and Queen? Taking time to sort out their feelings was going to be impossible at this rate.

"You know what!" Kiara exclaimed, too brightly. "That cider looks amazing. Doesn't it look amazing? I'm gonna go get a cup. I'll be right back."

Maybe some actual physical distance would help.

She scurried away, to the slight bemusement of the woman who had given them the fruit, but she just smiled in a kindly way and nodded at them before bustling off.

Kit, closer to their seats now, craned his neck around to peer at Grav. "So. How're you enjoying the festivities?" the dragon asked cheekily.

Grav ran his hand over his face and groaned. "Trying to have a good time at a festival without thinking about romance is incredibly awkward, thanks."

"I almost prefer fighting the undead."

Kit snorted a laugh. "If you tell Kiara that, please make sure I'm there to see it," he said with a dragon's grin.

Across the square, Kiara had been stopped by a girl of about eight, who was holding up a woven circle of woodsweet and small lavender blossoms from one of the blooming fruit trees near the edge of town. She laughed and knelt, allowing the girl to place the circlet on her head, much to the child's obvious delight.

Kit huffed. "She can keep the lot of them, far as I'm concerned," he grumbled.

Grav watched with a groan as Kiara got crowned with what would doubtlessly turn out to be a symbol of love or fertility. Kit's comment about the children was a welcome distraction from thinking about it. So, he looked back at the dragon and smirked at him dubiously. "Can't admit you were actually enjoying the attention, can you, big guy?"

Kit growled, a sound that would have seemed threatening to anyone who didn't know him—by this point, the dragon assumed that Grav could tell the difference between his "you're irritating me" growl and his "I'm about to roast you" growl.

"I admit nothing," he sniffed, glancing back across the square out of a habitual need to keep Kiara in sight.

His rider seemed to have acquired her glass of cider and was heading back toward them, when one of the villagers caught her attention with a small wave. Kit couldn't make out specifics over the general cheerful noise of the festival, but the young man gestured to Kiara's new flower crown with a friendly sort of laugh. She went a little rosy but laughed herself, shaking her head, and responded with a smile.

The young man laughed again and said something that made her blush darken a few shades. She nodded and gave him a little wave before heading back toward Grav and Kit.

"Here." She held a cup out for Grav, then said to Kit, "I asked the vendor if he can save a barrel for you for later."

Grav took the cup with thanks. He clinked his cup against hers and took a swig. "Ahh..."

"Was that guy hitting on you? Do you want me to punch him?" he immediately regretted asking.

Kiara blinked. "Errrr...no? I mean, I don't think so?"

Kit scoffed. She glared at him, then clarified, "I mean, he was just being friendly—apparently this flower thing is another local tradition; most of the village girls wear them as a sign they're open to courting." She rolled her eyes with another little blush. "He just...asked if I was, that's all."

Kit gave Grav a very droll look. If there was anyone more deliberately oblivious to romance than the swordsman, it was his rider.

"He was totally flirting if it made you blush like that," Grav teased with a grin.

The music died down as Mayor Vahne stepped onto the festival dais. He was about to speak.

"Alright, fine, he was flirting," Kiara said with a theatric roll of her eyes. "Doesn't inherently mean you need to punch him."

She might have quipped something else, but then the mayor was clearly preparing to speak and she hurried took her seat beside Grav, sipping absently at her drink.

The atmosphere grew solemn. "We... we have suffered a great tragedy. Many were lost, and much of our crops have no one to harvest them. But, for our lost, we of Aria choose to celebrate their lives rather than mourn their passing..."

He eulogized the dead for a little longer before taking on a tone of thanks. After the annual thanks for nature's bounty, he faced the two adventurers. "But this year, we have something more to be thankful for. I'm speaking, of course, of the three individuals who bravely risked their own lives to save our humble home and the homes of many more of the good people of Serendipity. Please, stand so that all may see of whom I speak."

Grav gave Kiara a wide-eyed look at being put on the spot. He slowly rose to his feet and waved to the crowd. He quickly got over his nerves and began eating up the praise.

Kiara returned Grav's look with an expression of befuddled helplessness. She was a beat behind him to stand, and did not seem to warm up to the adulation the way he did. In fact, it seemed to be taking most of her willpower not to hide behind her dragon.

Kit, for his part, remained placid; Kiara could feel some of his tension from sheer familiarity, but outwardly he was the picture of a calm, regal presence, neck arched as he sat calmly behind them.

Feeling like her awkward smile was plastered onto her face, Kiara hissed, "How long do we have to stand here?"

"I have no idea. Do I look like I have an idea?" he said through his teeth. "Just enjoy being a hero."

Eventually, Vahne continued his speech until: "To show our appreciation, we have taken up a collection. We may not have much to spare right now, but what we do is yours. And, should you ever return, know that you will not want for food or shelter."

The assembled townsfolk cheered as the mayor's wife approached the heroes of the hour to personally hand them a modest sack of coin."

"Easy for you to say," Kiara replied, hushed, "you were born for this sort of thing."

When the mayor's wife—coincidentally the kindly woman who had given them the bowl of fruit—handed over the coins, Kiara actually found herself hesitating for a moment.

"That...it's really not necessary," she found herself saying, while her more practical side begged for her to shut up.

"Hush." The woman smiled at them. "We won't take no for an answer. You've done a great thing for us—it's a matter of pride for all of us that you have a reward for your work."

Grav noted Kiara's hesitance with a smile. It seemed he was truly rubbing off on her. He took the sack with a grateful bow. "Then we have no choice but to accept your generosity."

"Spend it wisely, alright?" the woman asked with a kind smile.

The crowd applauded again when Grav accepted the reward, and the kindly woman stepped back with a smile.

"Now!" Mayor Vahne beamed at the gathered townsfolk. "I will delay our festivities no longer: we have good food, good wine, good music, and the rest of the evening to enjoy them!"

The gathered townsfolk laughed and cheered, and Kiara breathed a sigh of relief as attention moved off them for the most part.

Grav sat back down with a bittersweet sigh, finally getting his wish to be a hero but at a terrible cost.

"Not one for the spotlight, I take it?"

Kiara gave him a very dry look. "What was your first clue?" she grumbled, sinking down a little further into her chair.

The music had started up again, and it seemed like half the town of Aria was dancing in a series of interconnected circles, most of them laughing and shouting to each other joyfully.

She smiled a bit as she watched. "Well...at least they seem happy."

"As happy as they can be, anyway, considering the circumstances." He smiled sadly. "I don't think I could focus on the good times so easily if I lost people that I cared about."

"Or dragons," he added for Kit's benefit.

"Yeah," Kiara agreed quietly. "This place is...special, I think."

Despite all that had happened here, she found herself feeling rather lucky that this was the place they had emerged when they crossed the veil.

Kit whuffed an agreement and lowered his head onto his front paws. "You two aren't interested in joining in?" he asked innocently with a nod to the dancers.

Grav squinted back at the dragon. "You just want to see us squirm when the dance gets romantic again, don't you?" he teased.

"Besides, any more of that, and Nara will come after me for pushing myself. And she scares me more than the not-quite-a-lich did. Somehow," he joked with a grin.

"I admit to nothing," Kit responded primly.

Kiara chuckled at his assessment of Nara. "Hells hath no fury like a healer ignored," she agreed with a wink.

A soft clearing of someone's throat drew her attention, and she blinked as she found herself looking up at the same young man who had spoken with her before.

"Hello again, Ser Kiara."

"Errrr...hi. Ah, Dane, right?" She gestured between him and Grav. "This is Grav—well, the mayor said that, you probably knew that already..."

Dane smiled, revealing a dimple in his left cheek. "I did. But it's an honor to officially make your acquaintance, Ser Grav."

Grav smiled, unable to stop himself from evaluating his competition for a contest he hadn't yet agreed to. It's a guy thing, okay? The man was attractive, sure, thanks to that adorable dimple, but not really Kiara's type as far as the swordsman understood it.

"Please, just Grav is fine. As fun as it to pretend I'm a knight for a few seconds, I don't think either of us is big on formality," he chuckled. "So, Dane, what do you do around here when not looking for a pretty face to court?"

Dane chuckled, evidently taking that in stride, and replied, "I've been apprenticed to the tin smith for the last few years. And what is it the two of you do when you're not saving hapless villagers from an aspiring lich?"

Kiara had never been much of one for small talk, and it was fairly clear she was struggling to remember social niceties. She replied somewhat distractedly, "Oh, y'know. Kidnap lords, fight manticores, that sort of thing."

"Rescue," Grav corrected, "we rescue lords... by kidnapping them."

"... It's a long story. Very long considering we've only even known each other a few weeks. Gods... it really feels like so much longer."

Dane's eyes went wide. "Manticores? Plural? I know a lich is worse and all, but... damn, you really live dangerously."

Kiara chuckled a bit and shared a pointed look with Grav. "Not always by choice—we wouldn't even have been here if not for the red caps."

Dane whistled lowly and shook his head. "Red caps? I hadn't even heard about that part."

She shrugged. "It was...unplanned. Like—well. Like pretty much everything we do," she laughed.

"Yeah," Grav laughed. "We don't seek out danger as much as we trip and fall face-first into it. Though, I mean, I guess looking for trouble is pretty much exactly what our job is. Might as well find it before it finds us, right?" He smirked like the cocky adventurer he was.

Dane chuckled, "Yeah, I could never do what you do. Can't swing a sword to save my life anyway."

"Neither can I," Kiara snorted. Kit huffed a laugh in agreement. "Hence the daggers," she added with a shrug."

Dane chuckled, nodding, then tilted his head at them. "Well...I don't have any talent with a blade, but I've been told I'm a rather good dancer. May I?"

He extended a hand to Kiara, who merely blinked at it. "Ah..."

"Oh." He started to withdraw his hand with another little laugh and a slight wince. "I'm sorry, I should've realized, you two are--?"

"Er, no." Kiara shook her head, not sure where to look, what to say. "No, we're--we're not. It..."

She glanced at Grav a little helplessly, then abruptly looked away again and got to her feet. "Well, I mean...there's no harm in a dance, right?"

That didn't have to mean anything. It was just enjoying the festival. Right?

"Go. Have fun," Grav chuckled. He didn't realize he wasn't quite so okay with as he had thought until Dane was already escorting her to the dance area.

Jealous? Who's jealous? Why would I be jealous? We're just friends. Just. Friends.

For now.

No! Not helping!

He glanced at Kit, wondering if the dragon could read him as well as he read her.

"Right. Okay." Kiara took Dane's hand with a friendly smile. "Thanks."

"Oh, it's my pleasure," the tin smith apprentice assured her as he led her out to the other dancers. The tune playing was a lively one, and though Kiara didn't know the steps the way the rest of the townsfolk seemed to, it was easy enough to cheat her way through, especially with a competent partner to lead.

Kit watched them for a few moments, then glanced sidelong at Grav, more curious than anything else. "So. He seems nice," the dragon noted in a slow, bored drawl, far too innocently.

"Oh, let it rest already." He groaned, running his palm over his face. "You'll know when I figure myself out enough to know how I feel."

"You really want us to rush into that without thinking too?"

Kit chuckled but relented, "Alright, alright. I'll drop it." Letting his muzzle be pillowed on his crossed front paws, he glanced sidelong up at the swordsman and added, "You're right--you shouldn't rush yourself. But for what it's worth...maybe consider if you'd be looking at her like that if she had never said anything."

Privately, from his own observations about the two over the last few weeks, he rather thought Grav would. But maybe these things were simpler for dragons.

It did not occur to him in the slightest the irony of his feeling so smug and mature at his grand total of seventeen years, which was young even by human standards, let alone dragon ones.

That... was a good question. Would he? It certainly wouldn't be out of character. He probably would have before what happened to him. Was he overthinking whether or not that made him different?

Grav was more conflicted than ever. "I... I think I need to lay down," he lied, standing, "Tell her that, okay?"

He didn't wait for an answer; he just left for the healer's house.

"Hmm? Oh, yeah. Sure." Kit lifted his head slightly to give him a concerned look. "You don't...do you need anything?" he asked, a little awkward if genuine. Seemed he and Kiara were more alike than probably either wanted to admit.

Grav shook his head. "Nah. I'm good."

By the time Kiara returned to the room, he was asleep.

---

With the festival over and their wounds healed, the pair set out west. Their destination was the Terrin Mountain. Well, alright, Arca to use their meager reward to at the very least get some cheap body armor for Grav. Then to the mountains.

[ OOC: Continued In (http://www.spiritsoftheearth.net/smf/index.php?topic=27106.0) ]