Archive of Our Own

The thing to do for charm spells, Molly knew, was a short, sharp shock, re-administered as necessary until the victim came to their senses.

One thing Molly had learned about Yasha in recent weeks was that sometimes it could take a lot of re-administration, in her case, but the upside was that she was Yasha. She could take a lot. She could certainly take a lot of shouting in a scary voice. For good measure, he’d activated both his swords with radiant light. He’d chosen that rite specifically knowing that, while it would hurt her, Yasha’s own angelic blood would let her resist the worst of it.

Even so, as the battle raged on and the Mighty Nein’s struggles grew more desperate, Molly’s cries for her to listen and come back to them grew more desperate in turn.

“Yasha, come on!” he snarled, deflecting one swipe of her blade off of Summer’s Dance and backstepping hastily to dodge the other. “This isn’t you! Fuck him, fuck whatever happened in the past!”

She couldn’t understand Infernal, of course, but hells, it didn’t seem like she was hearing them anyway. Maybe the power in his voice could cut through the haze that still had a hold of her despite the fact that Oban was a puddle of ooze on the floor. Maybe he could reach her that way if he just tried hard enough.

And this was Yasha, his dearest friend, his most important person. He would never stop trying even as she kept coming with empty eyes and a wide, gleaming grin. He didn’t let that stop him from lashing out with his blades in turn. The first cut drew a brightly limned line down her arm. The second was blocked when the ring on her finger flashed just as brightly for an instant. Her eyes remained glassy, her grip on the sword remained strong.

All the while, Molly tried not to think about the fact that he’d entirely lost track of where the rest of the group was. Judging from the shouting, they’d all retreated or were in the process of retreating to the chamber’s upper landing. The bulk of the Laughing Hand was easiest to distinguish out of the corner of his eye – it had leapt up there in a single bound to continue harrying the others. The shadowy hounds seemed to have followed it, no doubt drawn to the densest cluster of prey.

He had to hope that, all together, they could take it down. He had to hope that, by keeping Yasha occupied, he could give them that chance.

His arms were increasingly going numb from the force of the blows she’d rained down on him already so that when the next one came, it knocked his defenses aside easily and only a stumbling step to the right kept him from being stabbed through the heart rather than the gut. Molly’s cry of pain became a howl of frustrated fury – rather than drowning him beneath it, he forced the lance of pain that arced through every nerve to sharpen his sight. He saw that she’d left herself open, been reckless. His arm seemed to move on his own as he swung the scimitar around and bit deeply into her side in turn so that, for just a moment, they were locked in a demented embrace of steel, glass, and flesh.

The taste of blood was hot and high in his throat. Molly coughed weakly, felt it dribbling down his chin. He took a weak, rasping breath and stared up into her eyes, willing himself to see something.

“Please,” he whispered, too weak in that moment to put any Infernal power behind the words. He wasn’t even sure if she could hear him over the laughter and screams. “Come back to us.” Come back to me.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her arm raise – holding the greatsword with one hand, but there was no doubt in his mind that she could still swing it with enough force to cut through half his neck if not fully take his head off his shoulders.

Then in the breath before she could swing, he saw her freeze. Her muscles were trembling with the effort. He couldn’t tell whether it was an effort of trying to hold herself back or of trying to force herself forward. In that moment, it didn’t matter – all that mattered was that she stopped.

A moment was enough. Molly brought his other sword up, drove the point hard into her shoulder, and used it as leverage to shove himself back and off the sword still digging into his flesh. He stumbled back, suddenly, brutally dizzy as blood gushed forth from the wound. But he could move again, it felt like he could breathe again, and he was not dead yet.

And Yasha still wasn’t moving. As he stared at her, tense and ready, she slowly lowered the sword and stared at him with her head slightly tilted. It wasn’t recognition, it wasn’t her, but it was sufficiently different from everything about the last handful of minutes that for a moment he felt himself hoping.

The dashing of those hopes were preceded by the sound of Nott screaming his name. “Molly, look out!”

On instinct, he half-turned towards her just in time to see one of the shadow hounds leap at him from behind, jaws agape. The warning gave him just enough time to grab its jaws in a strength he didn’t know he had and shove it aside before it could tear his throat out. The effort was enough to make him slump, however, dizziness nearly overcoming him again. For a moment, he didn’t understand what it meant when three crossbow bolts sailed over his head, followed immediately by three thunks of impact on meat that were barely audible in the tumult of the room.

Then he recognized the grunt of pain that immediately followed. He went cold. Oh. I turned my back on Yasha.

A great many people had died for more minor mistakes than that. As he turned just enough to keep her in sight while still keeping half an eye on the hound, the movement made the fabric of his coat tug painfully where blood had already plastered it to his side, and the feeling reminded Molly forcibly that he wasn’t necessarily not going to be one of them.

The very presence of that thought in his head still shocked him almost as much as the next swing of her blade against his. Because this was Yasha. This was his best friend. She was the only consistent, reliable, dependable thing there had ever been in his short, strange life. But whatever moment of hesitation had gripped her, the smell of fresh blood on the air had dispelled it. She stared at him with the fixed, gimlet gaze of a predator, and Molly refused to admit even to himself that he was scared.

That refusal did nothing to dispel the heavy, sour weight of fear in the pit of his stomach.

“For fuck’s sake!” Nott’s voice again, a high-pitched scream raised above the laughter. Molly had the majority of his attention focused on the hound, seeing its phantom muscles tense and bulge as it prepared to spring. It let him catch a glimpse of a blur of movement behind it before Nott’s short sword flashed in the dim light, sending up a spray of black blood as she carved into its flank. “Pick on someone your own size, you…stupid…not real dog!”

Relief and shock combined together to make Molly burst out laughing. It hurt to do so, but everything hurt by then, and the sound of his own slightly-hysteric laughter helped steady his soul against the maddened cackling of the Laughing Hand up above. “Not a good day for you and one-liners, is it!”

He grinned at her, and she grinned back. With her flanking the hound even as it flanked him, its threat was greatly diminished. With the presence of a friend who still knew him nearby, Molly found the strength to dodge Yasha’s next flurry of cuts and instead chop his scimitars once, twice, into the hound’s neck, decapitating it. It faded back into the shadows from whence it had come before its head had even finished rolling across the floor.

“Great!” Nott yelled as Molly turned to fully face Yasha once more. “Now let’s go!”

“Working on it!” he called back. This wasn’t an easy fight, but he’d accepted that this was how it was going to go. He’d handle Yasha. The others would handle the Laughing Hand and its diminishing pack of beasts. It wouldn’t be an easy fight, but they’d faced worse. They’d surely faced worse.

And yet, the silence from Nott’s lack of a reply was like a fresh weight on his shoulders. “Molly—”

“Whatever you’re about to say, it had better be another terrible joke!” he snapped. He knew what she was about to say. She knew what she’d been about to say.

But she didn’t say it out loud, didn’t grant her temporary insanity the honor of more breath, and that was all that mattered.

All she said was “I’m sorry”, and then he heard the sound of her racing back up towards the stairs. Molly braced himself for the next attack, and tried not to feel abandoned. She’d get a better shot from the landing. That much was undeniable. And the fact that she’d actually come within short sword range to protect him wasn’t nothing, not when Yasha could have easily cut her in half with one brutal strike.

But all of that was still small comfort compared to being left alone to face her once again.

Something inside Molly broke at the sight of her hefting her blade again. “Fuck you,” he rasped in Infernal. “Fuck you for not staying in the middle.”

She flinched, ducking her head and pressing a hand to it against the momentary stab of psychic pain. But though a trickle of fresh blood streamed from her nose as she lifted her gaze to him once more, there was no mercy to be seen.

By the time Fjord’s shouting for him pierced the haze of adrenaline and panic in Molly’s mind, he’d left half a dozen cuts on her, including an accidentally, viciously deep one along her stomach that had made him nearly seize with panic to feel himself inflicting. She’d left fewer wounds on him, but the ones she’d gotten past his defenses were brutal, deeper. He’d burned a blood maledict to keep her from impaling him through the chest. He was keeping the other one back for the next lethal blow.

Even so, when an instant of respite presented itself, he looked towards Fjord. The half-orc had leapt down from the landing up above and was racing towards him, one hand outstretched. “Molly, come on! Let’s go!”

He knew what Fjord meant. His friend was inviting him along for a thunderstep. It was a routine he knew well by now – they frequently combined their efforts with Fjord pulling him along for a thunderstep and Molly hopping further with Summer’s Dance. Sometimes it was the only way to keep up with Caleb when the wizard really wanted to get somewhere.

But Molly had burnt his blade’s magic just getting past the Laughing Hand to check on Yasha, and thunderstep only worked if he was willing. He could judge the distance well after so many times taking this trip. Fjord could take them right back out into the hallway. Fjord was obviously planning to take them both right back out into the hallway.

And Molly did not want to go. He did not want to leave her.

We don’t leave people behind.

It was one of the first lessons he had ever learned and he had kept to it, always.

So he felt Fjord’s fingers close around his wrist, but Molly was braced for it and managed to pull back at just the last second. He had just enough time to see his friend’s eyes go wide with horror before he vanished in a deafening clap of rolling thunder. It swept over him and Yasha both in a bone rattling impact that drowned out the sounds of their twinned screams of pain.

Oh, Molly thought dimly, as the magic almost rattled his bones out of his body. I’ve never done that before. This hurts a lot.

As the thunder faded, the sound he heard next was quiet, soft – it shouldn’t have been audible over the chaos, but it sounded strangely piercing in his ears all the same.

It was the soft, wet, final sound of metal piercing meat. All he felt to go along with it was a soft shove against his back, a wetness against his chest, and a deep, deep cold.

Feeling strangely distant and disconnected, he looked down at the tip of Magician’s Judge protruding from his chest, before Yasha viciously yanked the blade free and left him to fall. He barely felt himself hit the ground. From his newly skewed perspective, he could see the slowly spreading puddle of his own blood pouring out from him. He could see Yasha step through it and carry on, towards the stairs, never once looking back. But then, why would she? Even and perhaps especially as she was now, she knew as well as he did that he’d be dead in moments.

Except the joke was on her. He’d be fine in a minute, he’d just have to wait for the periapt to do its work.

Then he remembered that he’d given it to Caduceus, all those months ago out on the ocean, after their newest friend had had yet another close call on that damn island of snakes. It had served him well since then. It had been the right choice.

Yet Molly wished so fiercely in that moment that he’d been just a little more selfish.

He watched as Yasha ascended the stairs, no doubt to join the Laughing Hand in finishing off the rest of the Mighty Nein. He saw a wall of fire bloom to block her and its path to the door, no doubt put up by Caleb to give the others some extra time to get out. Except Molly was on the wrong side of it.

Don’t leave me! He didn’t know which of them he was praying to in that moment, didn’t know what difference it would have made even if he could have spoken loud enough for anyone to hear him. Please don’t leave me! Desperate, he tried on wild instinct to drag himself forward, and didn’t even make it an inch before the pain nearly made him white out.

He wished wildly in that moment that he hadn’t been so stubborn as to cast Fjord’s hand aside, and then hated himself fiercely for wishing. So he’d die a hypocrite, on top of everything else – a piercing insult added to a final, agonizing injury.

As his world started to go grey at the edges, Molly heard a loud, furious scream growing slowly closer, slowly growing louder until it rang above the roar of flames and the laughter of monsters and his own feeble heartbeat in his ears.

And then he realized with a wild, lurching thrill that Beau wasn’t about to let him off that easily.

He didn’t even have the strength to lift his head, but from the angle he’d fallen at, he could still see it as Beau hit the ground, rolled, and came back up to her feet in a bound, patting frantically at the traces of flames licking at her clothes. “Fuck I’m on fire, fuck I’m on fire, fuck I’m on fire!” she was yelping, as she closed the distance to Molly in a blur and slid to her knees beside him. “Fuck, you stupid asshole!”

There was no mistaking that this last was directed at him. Molly’s laugh became a scream as she hauled him to his feet with brutal, panicked efficiency, one arm around her shoulders. “Caduceus!” he heard her scream desperately.

The firbolg must have been waiting for her signal. Warmth flooded Molly’s limbs again and his heart jolted painfully back into rhythm. It wasn’t enough to take away the pain, not by a long shot, but the feeling of being forcibly dragged from the Raven Queen’s threshold still sharpened his senses enough to let him remember how to walk, maybe even run.

“Go, go, go!” she snapped, shoving him towards the landing, towards the wall of fire, towards the door and a chance at living through this. Molly staggered, started to run, but looked back at the last minute to make sure she was following.

She was, but more slowly, and with her back to him. Beau had her staff before her, braced and held at the ready, as Yasha stalked nearer to them both with all the cold, forceful surety of an oncoming storm, her sword dripping a trail of Molly’s blood behind her.

Beau was covering for him, giving him a chance. Molly had no doubt that Caleb would also be waiting to drop the wall of fire as soon as he saw Molly coming.

And yet, even then, he hesitated.

Caleb must have been expecting that hesitation, must have been watching and waiting for it, because the next thing he knew was the human’s voice raised in a calm, commanding cry.

“Mister Mollymauk! I suggest you stop this foolishness and save yourself by coming with us!”

Molly was so tired, in so much pain, so lost and scared. It was easy for the charm to take hold of him. He didn’t even fully realize until later just what Caleb had done. All he knew was that, all at once, everything felt obvious and sensible. The way forward was clear.

He felt himself running, taking advantage of the renewed burst of strength in his limbs. The wall of fire was already down. The Laughing Hand was only just being kept at bay by the battering of the spiritual lollipop and the devouring swarm of Caduceus’ spirit guardians. Getting past it and out the door still required Molly getting into range of its wickedly sharp sword arm. He probably could have played it safe, taken care to not engage at all, but with his regained clarity of thought, he realized that to do so would be to leave Beau to bear the full brunt of its rage. He glanced back to see her coming up behind him at a sprint, leaving a stunned Yasha behind.

So instead, Mollymauk Tealeaf took a gamble. It wouldn’t be the first time. It would thankfully prove to not be the last, either.

He planted his feet and snarled at the Laughing Hand, a wordless howl of rage and pain, and as he did so he felt one of the red eye marks on his back tear itself open. He couldn’t see the things’ eyes beneath its grimy hood, but it must have had them, because the maledict took hold of it enough to make its attack go laughably wide. He barely had to duck beneath the blade before sliding out through the doors to join the others.

The doors had been opening back up again – the others must have reset it in order to give him and Beau enough time to get out. But, as he watched, Jester grabbed the dagger and pulled it free in a single yank.

With a slow, ponderous grinding, the doors started to slide closed once more. Beau raced through the gap at such speed that she collided painfully with Caleb, sending them both sprawling to the floor in a heap.

And maybe it was that minor impact which disrupted Caleb’s concentration when nothing else had, or maybe he’d never intended the spell to last longer than it took to get Molly through the door and into the hall. All that mattered was that, as he looked back, Molly felt the haze of the suggestion spell lifting from his mind, leaving him bowed with pain but fully in possession of himself once again.

All that mattered was that he could see Yasha moving to stand beside the Laughing Hand and realize, fully and truly comprehend, just what he was doing.

“Yasha!”

He barely recognized the sound of his own voice but he certainly felt the scream as it tore free. He didn’t even realize he’d started forward again until he felt Jester fling her arms around his waist to hold him back. And for a wild, desperate handful of seconds he didn’t understand, he didn’t know why she was doing this, couldn’t she see, didn’t she care—

“No – no, stop! Yasha! Stop, stop, Jester let go of me, she’s—” He struggled, but she’d always been stronger. He clawed at her arms, but now even Nott was there to help restrain him. There were tears in her big yellow eyes but he didn’t care because she was still stopping him. “Can’t you see she’s still – Yasha, please! Jester, she’s still in there!”

They weren’t managing to drag him back, but they didn’t have to. All they had to do was hold him fast and wait another few seconds.

Yasha was waiting, too. He could just barely see a sliver of her now, framed in the closing doorway. She stood quietly beside the Laughing Hand, her bloodied sword at her side, staring back at them with an expression of quiet, endless patience. She didn’t so much as twitch as Molly reached out desperately for her, as Jester and Nott and Beau sobbed for her.

“No no no no no!”

With a heavy boom of stone and finality, the doors closed, leaving most of the Mighty Nein on one side, and their wayward friend on the other.

The reverberation of the impact through his bones took all the fight out of Molly. Jester must have felt him go limp – with a tenderness that was especially surprising now, she helped him sink to his knees, and her arms around him became less a restraint and more an embrace.

“I’m sorry, Molly,” she whispered, her voice thick with tears. “I’m really sorry.”

He couldn’t think. He couldn’t tear his gaze away from the door. He could barely breathe. It took everything he had to even lift a hand and squeeze hers’ tight.

For a few minutes, all was still. They stood or slumped, breathing heavily, nursing wounds, staring as one at the door and trying to process, trying to understand.

The stillness and silence were broken by a teeth-rattling, floor shaking impact from the other side of the door. The heavy stone slabs didn’t move, but they felt the reverberations up through the souls of their feet, strong enough to send even the weariest of them scrambling back upright and getting ready to run.

Another colossal thud followed it, and another a few seconds later.

“It’s trying to get out,” Fjord breathed.

“We have to leave,” Caleb said, turning sharply away and starting off at a hasty limp down the hall. “Now.”

They all knew he was right. Molly could see it on their faces as he glanced from friend to friend. Hells, Molly knew he was right. But, as the Mighty Nein turned and began to make their collective escapes, he found that he still couldn’t move. He couldn’t turn away. He couldn’t leave her.

We don’t leave people behind.

The hand that took hold of his was impossibly careful and gentle. By rights, he shouldn’t have been able to feel it at all through the pain and panic and grief. And yet, somehow, that warm, sure pressure stood out above all of that.

He looked over to see Jester kneeling beside him, tears in her eyes and pouring down her cheeks, a torment in her expression that Molly knew without a doubt perfectly matched his own. So even if she didn’t speak, she didn’t have to. When she gave his hand a gentle tug before moving to help him stand, he let her. When she started to lead him away, he let her. He even just barely managed to keep up with the hurried pace, though the half-healed wounds in his chest and gut screamed at him to stop.

Even so, he still found himself unable to keep from looking back at the door for a long, long while, unable to fully look away until Beau closed the secondary crystal barrier behind them. Even then, Molly thought he could still hear the vibrations in his feet as the Laughing Hand kept trying with that same endless patience to batter the doors down.

Caleb was right. It was trying to get out. It would get out eventually. It was just a matter of time, and all they could do was try and get as far away as possible before it did.

The remainder of the Mighty Nein turned away and fled – across the bridge of gibbering whispers, through the room of endless undead, up the misty tower where together they managed to finish off the invisible assassin that had plagued them on the way down. Then through the scorched chamber of spider corpses and up and along what seemed to be endless cavern pathways. It seemed to take hours and an instant all at once.

Molly remembered little of their escape. Given the state of him, none of the others expected him to fight or think or do anything except run as fast as his broken body would let him move. And he did run, guided entirely by instincts that just this once were entirely his own. But to escape the pain and the horror and the yawning, ragged loss, his mind spent most of the journey detached from his body and wandering on its own.

*  *  *

No one was coming for him.

He was trying not to break down, trying not to give the guards the satisfaction, trying not to betray more weakness, but as new morning sunlight poured in through the bars of his cell, the increasingly inescapable reality of his situation felt like it was choking him.

Today had already been the day the circus had planned to move on, and no doubt they’d be moving on faster since hearing about Molly’s arrest – over a bar fight, of all things, he hadn’t even started it. He never wanted to start things, except he was fast coming to learn that his very existence sometimes seemed to be provocation enough.

The circus wouldn’t come for him. They wouldn’t risk that. They couldn’t have even if they’d wanted to and he was sure at least some of them did. His fine was five gold and that was more than they’d made in this town and the last two combined. He wasn’t worth that.

These were all true and rational things, and the fact that he hated it didn’t change anything. He certainly didn’t begrudge his people for being smart, but no matter how brutally rational he tried to be, the fact remained that the higher the sun rose, the higher the panic kept clawing its way up his throat. The sound of his own panicked, wheezy whimpering echoed loudly back to him from the hard walls of his cell, sounding as if it belonged to a stranger. He tried to force himself quiet and keep himself steady by digging his nails into his arm, newly adorned as it was with a curling snake in emerald ink. Even so, he could feel himself slowly starting to disconnect from himself, starting to feel empty again, and wondered if that was really such a bad thing.

The guards probably wouldn’t keep him here forever. It would be too much trouble to feed him and too much of a nuisance to keep him around while he starved. They’d probably throw him out eventually, but it would be after the circus had moved on. Would he be able to catch up? Would he be able to find their trail at all? He wanted to believe that he could, even if he was kept in here for days, but Molly had never been forced to travel on his own before. He’d never been alone before at all. It made him want to scream except that would have just led to him getting kicked again.

This past night was the loneliest he’d ever felt in his short life and he would have happily, eagerly, given anything to escape it.

So when the sound of a familiar voice came to him from down the hall, Molly thought wildly at first that he must have been hallucinating it. Especially given what he thought he heard Yasha saying.

“I’m here to pay the tiefling’s bail.”

It should have been just a hallucination, except…except the guards answered her, laughing, mocking, disbelieving. And then he heard Yasha repeat herself more stubbornly, a warning in her voice that she usually reserved for people who tried to make trouble in the tent. “Do you want the gold, or not?”

Where had she gotten five gold to spend? Why was she spending five gold on him?

He didn’t have the words to ask her. As the guard led Yasha down the hall and towards the cell, as he grabbed a ring of keys off the wall to unlock the door, Molly caught her eye over the human’s shoulder. She smiled at him, brief and bright, and then he was just proud of himself for not breaking down entirely in tears.

The second he staggered out the door and within arm’s reach, she slid an arm around his shoulders and pulled him close against her side. Molly was happy to allow this, twining his tail around her leg and squeezing her hand in turn.

“Let’s go,” she said. “Everyone’s waiting.”

All he could do was nod in agreement and smile in relief, but that was enough, and together they walked out of the jail and back out into the early morning sunshine.

She waited until the jail was well out of sight and the outskirts of town were upon them before she spoke again. “Everyone’s waiting at the edge of the woods. We wanted to hide somewhere out of the way while we waited for the Crownsguard to wake up.”

“That’s good. That’s smart.” He was faintly surprised he could muster up even that handful of words, and his voice had gone rusty and faint as it had back before he’d had a name. But then again, Yasha was by his side, and he’d already learned that so many things were so much less scary when that was the case.

“Everyone is probably going to be shoving a lot of their chores on you to make up for how high your bail was. And--” Here she sniffed lightly, and he grinned ruefully. “—possibly throwing you in a river the next time we pass one.”

“That’s fine.” That was so fine, in fact, that Molly felt a giggle bubbling up in his throat and didn’t bother to hold it back. “I’d do the same in their shoes. I’m just—” He slumped, sighing softly, pressing a little closer to her. The words he said next were little more than a whisper, admitted like a shameful secret – but, though the darkness of the cell already felt so far away, it didn’t feel nearly far enough. “—I’m just glad you showed up at all.”

Yasha stopped, and because she was most of the reason he was moving forward at all he stopped with her. When she gently rested her fingertips against his chin to tilt his head up, he didn’t fight her.

Then his heart skipped a beat, because he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her look so very sad. It wasn’t too terribly visible, not much – you might never have noticed if you didn’t know her, but he liked to think that he did, and the sadness behind her multicolored eyes was so very old and so very deep.

“Did you think we weren’t going to?”

He only shrugged, well aware that the idea seemed silly and even shameful now, but unable to shake how real it had felt scarcely an hour ago. “That was a lot of gold. For us, at least.”

“Mollymauk…” She cradled his face in her scarred, calloused hands and kissed his forehead with a tenderness that made his chest ache. “Fine, it was a lot of gold, but we would have found a way even if we couldn’t have gotten it together. You’re more important. We can earn more gold. There’s only one you. We would never just walk out on you like that. Okay?”

“…okay.”

She slipped her arm around his shoulders once more, guiding him to walk with her again, and he did so. They walked together through the tall grass of the field, butterflies fluttering about their heads and smaller hopping insects bounding around their feet. It truly was a beautiful day - Molly’s steps were steadier, and his heart felt lighter to be out in it.

Especially when he heard her murmur, as if she were saying it only to herself: “Besides. I would never let them.”

*  *  *

The light of the sun bursting into view above them and the feel of the dust storm still raging around them dragged Molly forcibly back to the present once more. There was sand under his feet and open sky overhead, the wastelands around him and the cave at his back, though even as he watched Jester scrambled to pull the emblem free of the wall and close it up again. Caduceus, Nott, and Caleb, meanwhile, immediately scattered to scan the wastes as far as they could and call for the moorbounders.

Beau and Fjord stayed nearby. The monk sank suddenly and abruptly to her knees, staring fixedly at the sand, her jaw so tight that Molly fancied he could see the veins standing out in her neck. Fjord, meanwhile, simply stood where he’d stopped running and stared up at the sky, the falchion dangling at his side and a hardness in his eyes that Molly didn’t know if he’d ever seen before.

For lack of anything better to do, he went to both of them in turn and wordlessly offered them a swig from his waterskin. They each accepted it in their turn with nothing more than a nod of thanks, weary but sincere.

Eventually, after what was probably only a few minutes but which felt infinitely longer, the distant bulk of the three moorbounders became visible through the dust, each led in turn by its master. Nott had already taken her spot on Jannic’s back, her hood pulled up far over her head and her mask obscuring the remainder of her face.

But it was the sight of Caleb that suddenly, brutally jolted Molly from his stupor – before he knew it, he was moving, marching across the sands towards the wizard, heedless of anything, even the enormous cat monster that was already growling threateningly. Yet Caleb held the beast back and Caleb watched Molly come without flinching, obviously expecting exactly what Molly intended.

And maybe it was that expectation, that calm acceptance, which stayed his hand. Because all Molly knew was that, even as he reared his arm back with the full intention of striking Caleb across the face, he was suddenly, utterly incapable of going through with it.

He wanted to, he desperately wanted to, he was far from a saint and he knew now exactly what Caleb had done. He’d had no right. It felt like every drop of Molly’s blood was screaming that Caleb had had no right, that this was somehow all his fault.

Yet in the instant before the impact he also saw that Caleb not only saw right through Molly’s rage to the pain that lay beneath, but also understood it perfectly. That Caleb wouldn’t have blamed him if he had been able to force himself to strike. And the sadness behind his deep blue eyes was so very old and so very deep.

“I’m sorry,” he said, as Molly let his arm fall with a frustrated growl. “Truly, I am. But I would have done it again in an instant.”

The breathy huff of air that left Molly’s lips barely counted as a laugh, but the intent was there. He managed to force a smile for Caleb that didn’t hurt too much. “I know,” he said, and meant it. Then: “I would have done the same in your shoes.” He meant that, too.

Even though they had the moorbounders back and ready to go, the Mighty Nein didn’t leave right away. For once, they had too many potential paths forward – where should they go? Who should they tell? Should they return to Rohsona and face their failure or run and save themselves?

Trying to discuss as much there and then only resulted in the lot of them getting tongues coated with dust and Molly and Fjord getting into a screaming argument with each other when the half-orc made his feelings on Yasha’s survival very clear.

“I hope she does get out!” Molly snarled, rubbing at his bruised cheek, watching Fjord lick away some blood from his split lip. “Otherwise she’d starve down there and it’d be all our faults!”

Silence fell with all the heavy finality of an axe, after that, leaving only the sound of Molly and Fjord panting for breath to be audible over the sound of the storm. As Molly glowered at the half-orc and his former friend glared back, for the first time he was left grateful that their rooming arrangements back at the house had left him without a roommate.

It was Caduceus who finally, fully cut through the rage and grief, in a way he’d already proven so adept at. “No one is stupid!” he barked, louder than he ever was – those words and the ones that followed would prove to be something for Molly to turn over and over in his head for many sleepless nights to come. For now, they were enough to hold his attention and let Caduceus steer him towards Clarabelle while Jester guided Fjord towards Yarnball.

Quiet and grim, wounded and weary, the Mighty Nein mounted up and fled the King’s Cradle, leaving one of their number behind. The dust covered their tracks behind them.