Chapter Text
“Dude, seriously, stop following me.”
“I’m not following you. We’re traveling together.”
“No we aren’t. I didn’t invite you.”
“You didn’t have to. Your parents are paying me to keep an eye on you, remember?”
“They’re what?”
“Worm, I tell you this every time I manage to find you. Stop forgetting.”
“Fuck y—”
Something loud and piercing and terrifyingly human screams overhead, and Pleg freezes in place, looking up to see a massive roc soaring overhead above the trees. It’s a terrifying reminder that they aren’t apex predators here in the feywild, and many monsters are out to kill them.
Clearly, Worm doesn’t share the same sentiment.
“Dude, you look horrified. It’s just a stupid bird. Are you coming or what?” he asks from further ahead, where he had kept walking as Pleg eyed the beast in the sky.
Pleg glares at Worm. “It’s a roc, not a ‘stupid bird,’ and it’s currently hunting. We don’t want to be on the menu.”
“Speak for yourself,” Worm retorts, but he must see the alarm in Pleg’s expression, because he adds: “What, you wouldn’t want to be eaten by a gargantuan bird? I for one think that’s an awesome way to die. If I’m going out, it’s gonna be in style. Snatched-by-a-massive-eagle style.”
Pleg runs a shaky hand down the side of his face in exasperation. He never should have come here. If the disgraced son of the Autumnset family wants to run off into the feywild and get himself killed, Pleg has no business being the one to stop him. He isn’t a babysitter.
Unfortunately, he is taking the family’s money to keep their only child alive, because he currently has no other source of income and he could really use the coins. Much to his chagrin.
He’s blinked his eyes thrice in the time it takes for him to realize Worm has disappeared. Again.
He opens his mouth to shout for the teenager, but the roc’s shadow passes over him and reminds him why that would be a terrible idea. And then dread starts to set in—neither he, an abyssal tiefling, nor Worm, a red-and-yellow fairy, are particularly good at blending in when surrounded by a lush green forest. Especially not in a forest explicitly designed to kill them.
Pleg’s combat medic training kicks in, and he takes off running in the direction Worm was facing the last time he saw the kid. He hasn’t lost a patient yet, and even if he’s no longer a medic and Worm is most certainly not his patient, the point still stands. He isn’t going to lose his charge today (or hopefully ever, no matter how annoying the rogue may be).
When several minutes of running pass and he still hasn’t found any sign of Worm, he groans, turning around to look in another direction.
“Boo!” Worm shouts, right as Pleg spots him sitting on a branch twenty feet in the air. He dissolves into a giggle fit when Pleg crosses his arms in frustration.
“How long were you up there?”
“Uh, since you got here. I’ve been following you since you started running.”
“You…” Pleg starts, but he lets the words die in his throat as quickly as they come. The last thing he needs is for Worm to go crying to his parents that Pleg was rude to him. That would most certainly be a fast track to getting blacklisted from any and all future contract jobs in Hollowden.
“Me?” Worm replies cheekily, trying to goad Pleg into an insult. But Pleg isn’t a child, and he’s not going to give in to the immature desires of a teenager.
Eventually, Worm realizes that no amount of taunting is going to make Pleg lash out, so he huffs and says: “Whatever. But I’m not coming down. I have a great view up here, and it’s way safer than down there.” He says the last word with disgust, clearly criticizing Pleg for his inability to fly.
Pleg only shrugs. “Okay.”
He starts to roll out his blanket, unpacking his priest’s pack as he sits down to settle in for the night. The sun is beginning to set, and Pleg knows he’ll be waiting Worm out for quite some time if their past encounters have been anything to go by. He can hear Worm complaining about something above, but he doesn’t pay much attention to him, focusing instead on ensuring he’ll be safe to fall asleep at the base of this tree.
Briefly, he wonders if he should figure out a pulley system to send rations up to Worm so that he doesn't starve to death overnight. He knows the rogue certainly didn't pack his own supplies, and a fast metabolism such as his is a death trap in the feywild.
But then Pleg feels a small piece of bark launch into his shoulder from his charge above, and he decides to let Worm figure it out on his own. If the kid's going to act like a brat, he's going to be treated like one.
After all, Pleg is being paid to keep Worm alive, not necessarily full.
"Dude, you're going to die down there," Worm says a few minutes later after Pleg has finally finished setting up camp, sheltering his supplies with various branches propped up against the tree trunk to conceal them from view.
Pleg glances up the tree to see Worm kicking his legs casually over the branch he's currently perched on. "I blend in far better than you do right now."
"What are you talking about? You're blue! At least I can get away with just hiding in the shadows and be fine!"
"Indigo, not blue," Pleg corrects. Then, a new thought occurs to him, and he feels stupid for never realizing it before. "Worm, are you color blind?" he asks, and he doesn't mean for it to come out quite as accusatory as it does. But he can't think of any other explanation for why a fairy, dressed primarily in vibrant red, with red-and-yellow hair and wings (which he keeps fully extended at all times for maximum visibility, of course) would ever see himself as capable of blending in with a forest.
More bark pelts him on the shoulders and on his head from a clearly-offended Worm. "No! Fuck you!"
"Well, you most certainly do not blend in as well as you think you do. You’re as visible as an orc in a room full of halflings," Pleg replies, but the warning seems to be lost on Worm, who crosses his arms and looks away in a pathetic attempt at a pout.
Pleg opens his mouth to say something else (an apology or another "Get down here," perhaps), but before he can speak, the sound of millions of cicadas begins to call throughout the trees.
But something sounds… off. These aren't the cicadas from his home. A fleeting glance up shows that Worm has clearly noticed this as well, if his sudden visible discomfort is anything to go by.
"...Pleg?" Worm nearly whispers when they make eye contact.
And then the singing stops, just as quickly as it started.
Something about the sound is so familiar to Pleg—but he can't place it, can't recall where he last heard it. It's an itch in the back of his mind that he cannot begin to scratch.
But once the silence stretches on for several minutes, the chorus begins again, much louder now.
Pleg moves quietly as he gets settled in his makeshift shelter. There's something particularly eerie about a silent forest when the cicadas are hushed, and the sun has just slipped past the horizon. He'll have a clearer mind when he's well-rested, and perhaps then he'll be able to remember where he recognizes the distorted singing from.
As he's starting to nod off, something sends a rush of dread through his veins. And he remembers why the chorus is so familiar to him.
He isn't surrounded by cicadas desperate to attract a mate.
He's surrounded by the sound of sinister laughter, in the same way that he imagines a gnoll would laugh before a feast.
Something is being hunted. Perhaps by the fey themselves, or perhaps by something far more terrifying.
Pleg doesn't know what their prey is. That thought scares him more than anything else.
"Worm," he says softly as he begins to gingerly repack his supplies. The laughter stops again at his voice, and he cringes.
When he doesn't hear a reply, he looks up, only to find the fairy completely asleep, a leg and an arm hanging limply over the edge of the branch. He wants to speak louder, but the fear of being the predators' target scares him out of it. Instead, he glances around, finding a small pebble in the grass at his feet. A pang of premature guilt shoots through him just before he chucks the pebble at Worm. He winces when it hits the kid’s head—he had been aiming for his dangling arm.
“Ow– hey!”
Far more rustling than Pleg would ever be comfortable with surrounds them at Worm’s exclamation, but it certainly does a good job of shutting the fairy up as he looks around wide-eyed for the source. His eyes eventually lower to land on his handler, and Pleg can visibly see the fear in his expression melt into indignation.
“Fuck you,” he mouths silently, but Pleg just shrugs in response.
And then he remembers why he woke Worm up in the first place.
After an elaborate series of hand gestures and mouthing words that Worm clearly cannot decipher, Pleg finally manages to silently convince the rogue to get down from the tree. Which he does. Horribly.
Worm is an excellent flier—anyone in Hollowden can confirm this, as he’s eager to show off to everyone in his vicinity at all times—but every flight he’s ever taken has involved drawing as much attention to himself as he’s physically able to. Somehow, he manages to get the message from Pleg that subtlety is key in this situation, but Worm neglects to remember that he is very terrible at subtlety. So he launches himself off of the branch—every bit of twenty feet in the air—and attempts to fly directly down with his wings half-spread.
Pleg isn’t quite sure what Worm’s initial thought was upon jumping, but he can immediately tell that Worm is going to slam head-first into the ground. ‘That little…’
Before he even really processes what he’s doing, he’s diving toward the plummeting body, wincing when eighteen pounds of stupid crashes into his arms far more painfully than he was expecting.
“If you don’t let go of me right fucking now—” Worm hisses into his ear, cutting himself off with a grunt as Pleg unceremoniously drops him onto the ground.
The woods have been silent throughout their exchange, reminding Pleg that they need to leave now.
“Stay close,” he whispers, but that’s all the warning he offers before sprinting off in the direction he hopes they came from.
Less than a minute into their fleeing, the laughter picks back up again. But this time, it’s laced with the occasional murmuring “Run!” or “Hide!” Something tells Pleg that neither option is going to spare them, but he’ll be damned if he doesn’t try anyway. They just need to get out of the feywild, and then they’ll be okay. That’s all they need.
But Pleg’s forearm is starting to throb uncomfortably. He may have retired from proper medicine years ago, but he recalls enough to know his ulna is broken. It won’t inhibit his running, at least, but it’s certainly painful. But even more painful would be being eaten alive by whatever predators are currently hunting them, so he elects to ignore it and keep moving. He can heal himself when they stop.
During one of his frequent glances back to check in on Worm flying behind him, he notices something moving through the undergrowth behind them. He can’t make out any distinct features, but whatever it is is following them far too quickly for his liking.
“You’re good with a bow, right?” Pleg asks quietly the next time Worm makes eye contact with him. At first, the rogue is visibly confused by the question, but recognition finally lights his face and he grins wickedly.
“You bet your ass I am.”
And he pulls out his bow and quiver from his backpack, turns around, and begins to fire.
As it turns out, Worm is definitively not good with a bow. He’s terrible, in fact. He missed almost every single one of his twenty arrows, with the sole exception being a lone arrow piercing something that let out a low bellowing howl upon being hit (Worm had no idea the creature was even there—he was aiming at something else, eighteen feet to the left).
But, miraculously, the chaos of frenzied arrows flying through the air seems to have been enough of a distraction to silence the hunters for the time being. The trees and undergrowth are no longer rustling around them, and the sound of footsteps has long since faded into the distance. Pleg has a sinking feeling that this is the closest they’ll come to catching a break in the feywild—at least at night when predators are on the prowl.
And he’s exhausted. He’s slowed down exponentially since he first started running, but now he comes to a complete halt, left hand holding his injured right arm stable as he lowers himself into a sitting position against the closest tree trunk.
“Dude, I totally scared them off,” Worm begins, landing in front of Pleg with a shit-eating grin on his face, waving his hands excitedly. “Did you see that? They were terrified of me! And then I shot that guy—or maybe it was a dog—and scared him off! That was so cool. I told you I was good with a bow. I didn’t even need y– wait, what are you doing?”
Pleg grimaces at being noticed, but he’s already begun to use his cure wounds spell, so there’s no getting out of it now. “Just keep talking, alright?” he says through gritted teeth as the pain of shifting bones sends fire throughout his nerves.
Worm eyes him suspiciously for a split second before supposedly deciding that he cares more about taking full advantage of the opportunity to speak more. “Well, you couldn’t see it because you weren’t looking back like I was, but there were so many eyes back there. And it was like they always blinked at the same time. And I know they weren’t fireflies, because last I checked, fireflies don’t have pupils. Scary shit. But I was totally scarier, so don’t worry. You’re completely safe with me.”
By the time Worm finishes monologuing, the spell is over, and Pleg’s arm is healed. He flexes it a few times, satisfied to only feel a bit of lingering soreness in return.
“Did you hurt yourself?” Worm half-laughs. “Dude, we were just running. How in the world did you manage to fuck up so badly?”
Pleg glares at him. Hard. But Worm either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, because he continues snickering to himself in judgment. Pleg decides it isn’t worth arguing over, and he’s fine with letting Worm believe he’s just a clumsy idiot as long as the brat is still alive.
“We should try and rest for a bit here. It seems like it might be safer, and the added moonlight helps too.” He glances up to see a sturdy fork in the tree he’s sitting against, about ten feet off the ground. “I’m going to set up a hammock up there and hopefully that’ll work. Are you fine with falling asleep in another tree?”
“Dude, I’m two feet tall and I have wings. I was practically built to sleep in trees. But how are you going to… oh, okay.”
Pleg is already halfway up to the branches by the time Worm realizes he’s climbing. There are enough footholds for him to haul himself up with a bit of effort, and once he’s reached his target, he hangs his backpack over a smaller branch for easy access. From there, he pulls the blanket out, fashioning it into a crude hammock. It’s dubious at best whether the hammock will even hold his weight, so he repeatedly tests it with his hands, eventually deciding to take the plunge and lay down in it.
Surprisingly, it holds steady, swaying with the added weight but not so strained that Pleg is concerned about anything snapping. It’ll make a decent bed for now, at least.
“Do I get a hammock?” Worm asks, suddenly perched on the branch at Pleg’s feet after flying up to meet him.
“Did you bring one?” Pleg replies, already knowing the answer.
“You didn’t tell me to.”
“I shouldn’t have to.”
Worm pouts at that, but then he must find a better place to rest further up the tree, because suddenly he’s shooting up toward it. It’s a much smaller fork, but it’s good enough for the fairy.
Finally satisfied, but holding his quarterstaff to his chest just in case, Pleg listens to the sounds of the forest around him for a while. When there isn’t menacing laughter following them, it’s actually quite peaceful.
If it weren’t for the fact that they’re currently being hunted by unknown foes, the feywild would be fairly nice, Pleg thinks.
“Pleg?” Worm asks a few minutes later, catching the cleric’s attention.
“Yes?”
“Fuck you.”
“Okay,” Pleg responds, already half-asleep.