Chapter Text
“Who wishes to talk?”
Beauregard freezes. “I need everyone to stop what we’re doing right now and do a huddle with me.”
Fjord pauses on the doorstep. “We couldn’t have done this when we were making a game plan thirty seconds ago?”
“Apparently not!” Beau half shouts, grabbing him by the hand and pulling him away from the doorway. Inside, the hag is laughing like she knows.
Beau gathers them all around a little ways out of earshot from the hut. “I have absolutely no way of proving this, so bear with me.”
“Good start,” Fjord mutters. She smacks his arm.
“This is my third time doing this. This- this day, this interaction, there were days after this but this was the turning point. I don’t know if it’s visions, or time travel, or what the fuck, but what matters is we could be about to fuck up very badly.”
Caleb perks up a bit at the mention of time travel, and Beau flashes him a glare she hopes conveys not the time. But thankfully, incredibly, she’s seeing shock on their faces, and confusion, and various flavors of concern, but not disbelief. She could almost cry with relief, and given that the faces suddenly get more concerned, she’s pretty sure it’s obvious.
“Okay then. So what have we tried before?” Caduceus asks, like this is a perfectly normal conversation to have and all he’s missing is some nice evening tea.
“The first time, Fjord offered but didn’t make a deal, and then I did. And after that… well, I’m not sure what happened immediately after,” Beau hedges, “but I’m pretty sure I died and also think maybe the world ended so like would prefer not to do that again. And the second time Fjord made a deal and it was totally fine until we got back on a boat and he went all eyeballs and scaly and-“ she makes jerky, flailing hand motions- “all Uk’otoa.”
“Uk’otoa,” Jester and Nott whisper on reflex. Fjord glares.
“And then he died,” Beau concludes, with an uneasy glance at Jester.
“Okay, so what did you trade, like, specifically?” Caleb asks. Oh yeah, he totally caught her avoiding that.
Beau sighs. “Fjord traded his ‘fortune’-“
“Well, that was dumb.”
“-Yeah, you said that,” Beau continues. “And I…” she looks at the ground. “I traded away something personal, and I have had a shit few weeks that none of you have and am not doing great right now, okay? So can we leave it at that?”
Caleb is clearly not going to let it go forever, but he grimaces. “Fine. So both of you made very personal exchanges? Maybe we try something less… individual?”
“Yeah, but like, how are we going to do that?” Jester asks. “Make someone else’s life miserable?”
Nott stands up. “I have an idea.” And without looking back she strides into the cabin.
She steps back out a few nail-biting minutes later. “Made a deal, here we go, no one ask, let’s get going.”
“O-kay, that’s a bit alarming,” Fjord starts. “Everything good?”
“Obviously not,” Nott snaps, “since I was very clearly intending to make other peoples’ lives miserable! Now we get to see exactly how badly I fucked them over, so can we just get moving and wait for the damage?”
There are worried, furtive glances between the Nein, but no one has a counterargument. After all, that is what they suggested trying. At this point, it’s just wait and see.
They don’t have to wait long.
The days pass - traveling, finding Caduceus’s family, restoring Veth, confronting Essek, all goes down exactly the same way it had before. Beau is tense through the whole time they spend on the Ball-Eater, and everyone else is more than a little worried, and despite their precautions Fjord still does not survive the assault on the ship.
But this time, Revivify and Greater Restoration work.
One fear dealt with, they refocus on the peace talks, their main goal here. Everything is running smoothly, if a bit on edge - there’s a lot at stake here. But the ships gather, the stage is set, and the Mighty Nein stand by to watch.
The first day is uneventful, hours of conversations and negotiations, ending with a cautious optimism for the future. The second day is when it all goes to shit.
The last, closing step of negotiations, after the return of the beacon, is the exchange of prisoners. Vence Nuthaleus and Adeen Tasithar are brought to the negotiating deck, chained and heavily guarded. They and their escorts begin to step forward, to initiate the exchange, and then things begin happening very quickly.
In an instant, two crossbow bolts, unleashed from an unseen foe, hit their targets. The first hits Dusk Captain Quana Kryn in the ceremonially armored shoulder. The second rips through Vence’s throat.
All hell breaks loose. Spells start flying, with mages throwing up shields and evacuating dignitaries via teleports. The negotiating platform is nearly ripped apart as the ships disengage. From the Ball-Eater, the Mighty Nein stare in horror, spells and weapons ready but unused. This was fragile enough, but any involvement now could be seen as sabotage, as an attack, rather than an attempt to end hostilities.
There’s general mayhem across the fleet as messages are sent, and things break down even further. Some idiot - Dynasty, Empire, who even knows at this point - near the center of the armadas decides to fire their cannons on a neighboring ship. After that, it’s pandemonium. The respective armadas were ready for negotiations to break down, for hostilities and battle to commence, and it’s a bloodbath. Cannon fire and the cacophony of spells drown out any chance for speaking, for being heard, for deescalation. It is a full pitched naval battle, in what minutes ago was a high stakes but stable meeting.
The Mighty Nein, in absence of any other options, decide to cut and run. It’s all they can do to get the Ball-Eater out of the fray mostly unscathed, dodging and deflecting fire aimed at both sides. Defensive only, nothing offensive - they’re still really trying to do their best to get out of here alive and without accidentally making enemies of an entire nation. Still, it’s brutal, and bloody, and by the time they finally cut away from the fighting and are underway to the relative safety of literally anywhere else, two of their sails are burned and Jester and Caduceus are tapped on healing potions.
Unsurprisingly, the war resumes, with increased fervor. The Bright Queen does not take perceived betrayal lightly, and King Dwendal needed little justification. Tensions, held narrowly at bay for the negotiations, spark back up into outright warfare.
The Angel of Irons cult dealt with, the Dynasty resumes their attack on Rexxentrum. Purple worms topple towers, ripping through the streets and causing chaos and mass casualties. In return, the Empire counters pitched battle not just with their own armies but with Scourgers, with assassins, with targeted attacks on the heart of the Dynasty.
The Nein try their best to intercede, to reach out to their allies, but with little success. The two nations tried once to compromise, to meet and negotiate, and look how that went. They’re not listening to more empty promises from a group of ragtag adventurers.
The best they can do is intercede where they can. Shepherding refugees through war-torn lands, evacuating noncombatants from sudden battlefields, reconnaissance and spying and information gathering. Sometimes it’s simple as healing spells and Sendings, sometimes they become accidental saviors of a community. They’re trying to be everywhere, do everything, make up for what went wrong.
What they did.
No one ever actually asks Veth what she promised the hag, but her signature weapon and resumed alcoholism after the failed peace talks somewhat give the game away. If she were unapologetic, unrepentant, the Nein would have a different call to make. They don’t know what they would have done, but they would have to say something, do something.
But if the Nein are one thing, it’s a bunch of fuckups. Admittedly, very few of them have caused damage on quite this scale before. But they’re fuckups trying to be better people, and gods, is Veth trying. She’s become always first into the fray, throwing herself between bystanders and the fighting with a reckless, single-minded determination that borders on concerning.
She’s especially, violently protective of children caught in the crossfire. Her own son, Luc, sees her once every few weeks now if they’re lucky. He’s staying with Marion Lavorre at the moment, far from the front lines. His father, despite only the broadest strokes of understanding how they got into this mess, is busy traveling with the Nein. He’s an accomplished alchemist, even if he readily admits he’s not a fighter. But potions, healing and enhancing and all other purposes, are useful not only to the Mighty Nein but to everyone they’re trying to help, so they reluctantly let him stay (and push him in the middle with the squishy wizards).
Everything comes to a tipping point a few months later, months of fighting and bloodshed and unimaginable destruction. They’re shepherding another group of refugees from Alfield to Zadash when they’re ambushed. Not by the militaries of either nation, but ruffians, thugs, predators taking advantage of the unrest and instability.
Normally, they’d be no match for the Nein. Normally, the Nein would be loaded with spell slots and components, rested, ready to rain hell upon their opponents. But that hasn’t been the case since the peace talks, and now they have innocent bystanders to consider as well.
It’s brutal and bloody. When the dust settles, when the Nein finish off the last of their challengers with a ferocious, efficient ruthlessness borne of exhaustion and terror, they do not all stand victorious.
Yeza’s glasses lie shattered in the dirt, next to his small, broken body.
They retreat to a safehouse in Nicodranas, as sheltered from the all-encompassing war as they can be these days. They recoup, treat their wounds, pool their resources and count their gold. Diamonds are expensive, after all, and their attempts to mitigate the damage of the war have stretched them too thin.
No one talks about what sits within Caleb’s Vault of Amber. They try and keep Luc distracted, with Caduceus’s bugs and Jester’s paints and Sprinkle just in general, but that’s not going to last, and they all know it.
They need a new way to end the war, to keep this from ever happening again. But first, they have to get their hands on some diamonds, to repair one family before they keep others from being sundered apart. For right now, the best the can do is return to their traveling habit of sleeping all together in one room, regardless of the variety of bedrooms available - keeping their own little ragtag family nearby in their vulnerability.
Beau’s slumped half-standing in the doorway outside their communal sleeping quarters, stubbornly ignoring the late hour and the human body’s need for sleep, when Veth approaches her.
“Beauregard. How did the weird time loop shit end?” She asks abruptly, intense but unusually somber. “With you, and Fjord? What reset it?”
“The first time…” Beau starts, unnerved. It’s been a rough few months for her, and she doesn’t know where this is going, but she doesn’t like it. “The first time, the world broke and I died, and woke back up there. The second, Fjord died and everything just kind of… dissolved? And then I was back. Why?”
“Gotcha. Alright. Okay.” Veth states, looking her dead in the eyes. “If this doesn’t work, and something goes wrong, tell Luc I’m sorry.”
And she shoves Beauregard into the next room and slams the door in her face.
“Veth, what the fuck?!” Beau yells, banging on the now locked door. “What are you doing?”
She has a horrible feeling about this, even over the gnawing dread of the past few months. She keeps banging, attempting to kick down the door, but it’s only a few moments until she hears another sound through her own clamor and the hubbub of her companions waking and asking questions.
The twang of a firing crossbow, and a sickening thunk.
Beau freezes, shocked and disbelieving, as the world fades to black around her.