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1
In the cold foothills of the no-man’s land between the human fiefdoms of the south, and the northern place that breeds little folk strong and hardy there stands a tower that has seen more wars than the most hardened soldier, more death than the saddest king. It juts from the earth as if a giant had hammered it up from the opposite side of the world, and clouds gather around its highest heights even when the sky is clear.
There is a castle around it, but it is not the first such to have been there, nor will it be the last. Such structures speak to men’s hearts through time, and on their own inscrutable schedules, summon them to take up its purposes. The rest follows. It is an inevitability.
Three figures approach the tower at the same time, none understanding the role it will try to force them to play.
Pip
The old castle on the hill comes into view just as the grass goes from sick, dark green to dead and coated in brackish water. Trees have fallen over, rotted through at their bases, and strange vines curl up from brittle soil, all easily taller than Pip, and headed in lazy parabolas to the castle.
She whistles. The animals can tell her of this place, but there’s no doubt in her head–this is where the thing she’s hunting, monster or machine though it may be, must dwell.
No birds come. No squirrels.
Instead, a sickly looking mouse puts its paws on her feet.
Pip bends and scoops it up.
“Can we go? Do you have food?” It asks, and in true mouse fashion, says the two phrases over and over and over again.
“There’s nothing here for a mouse to eat?” Pip asks.
“Can we go? Do you have food? All that’s here is dust-touched. Can we go? Do you have food? All that’s here is dust-touched.”
“Dust touched?”
The mouse looks down. It never stops chittering. “Can we go? Do you have food? All that’s here is dust-touched. Look below. Can we go? Do you have food?”
“We can go,” Pip says, and cuts the mouse off by reaching into her pockets, and putting a few crumbs of seedbread into her palm. The mouse begins eating immediately.
“I’ll carry you to the trees,” Pip says. “But I have to kill the monster that lives here. Have you seen it?”
“It comes at second moon,” the mouse says. And as Pip walks the mouse back to the treeline, it repeats the words.
“It comes at second moon. It comes at second moon. It comes at second moon.”
Ylalli
Ylalli hides in the curve of a giant, dead vine, waiting for the strange woman to leave. A fellow gnome, but this close to such a dark looking ruin, she’s not inclined to be trusting.
Mister Schemey rustles in her pocket. Ylalli reaches in and scritches his head. Normally, she’d have pulled up something for him to eat, but everything she’d fed him since yesterday seemed to have been making him sick. The foliage here was beyond all question poisoned. She’d have fed him cheese or bread from her pack, but kobalds a night ago had proven the better thieves, though she’d killed two of them for the trouble.
The other gnome scoops of a field mouse.
And talks to it.
“Clearly insane, right Mister Schemey?”
Mister Schemey is quiet. Poor little guy.
The other gnome walks back to the treeline, coddling the field mouse and feeding it.
Food wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Ylalli can ignore her stomach for a few days. Mister Schemey can’t. So as the other gnome steps away from the treeline again, and looks up at the sky, Ylalli uncurls from her hiding place.
“Hello, friend,” she says, one hand on her dagger, the other on her rapier. She approaches.
“I like your hair,” the other gnome says, now holding a massive hammer. That stops Ylalli. There’s maybe three feet between them, now, and it’s full of slick, dying grass.
“My hair’s pretty great.”
“You have a mouse in your pocket.”
Ylalli looks down. Her pocket is baggy. Mister Schemey is being still. He usually does that when people talk.
“How did you know that?”
“Because the whole time you were walking to me, he was moaning about a stomach-ache.”
Ylalli hadn’t heard so much as a squeek from Mister Schemey. She narrows her eyes at the muscle-bound, pink-haired brute in front of her.
“You really think you can talk to animals.”
“Whatever.” She sinks her hammer into the muck-ground. Fishes into her pockets. Comes out with crumbled bread. “Here. For the mouse. If you’ve been on foot and feeding him what you’ve found on the trail, that’s why he’s sick.”
Ylalli takes the crumbs. Sticks them in her pocket, and Mister Schemey starts making noises that can only be delight. It’s become so unlikely that this pink-haired gnome has the girl that Ylalli crosses her arms–hands far, far from the hilts of her weapons.
“So what’s going on with this place?” she asks. “And why are you here?”
And that’s about when the pony and the sleeping halfling came stomping out of the wood.
Corrin
Corrin woke up staring down into the moat of an old castle, with his pony giving worried grumps out into the blue sky. He stretched. Looked down. Stopped. Everything was black, and if it hadn’t also been coated into a thin, layer of slimewater, he’d have wondered if the wand of fireballs hadn’t somehow gone off again.
The castle walls were broken in a dozen places, and beyond them, a massive tower rose up so high that he wasn’t sure if he could see its top or not.
He let out a long, slow whistle, and then, “Don’t see one of those every day. I guess I know why they thought Benefart would be here.”
Rustling behind him. But nothing there when he turned. Corrin shrugged.
Well, if there’s a wizard here, I’d best get searching.But he didn’t see a good way for a pony to get over the moat and walls. There probably weren’t a lot of good ways to get a halfling across, either, but a levitate spell took a lot less effort if a small horse wasn’t tugging at his mind.
He led the animal to the grass. Seemed off. Whatever. Pony’d be fine. Probably. Horrible little monster.
It bent it’s head and sniffed the grass.
“No!”
And a pair of gnomes came rushing out of the cover of a long, thick root (or was it a vine?) that curved its way across the ground toward the castle. The pony looked up and cocked its head.
“No? What’s wrong?”
“The ground is dust-touched, idiot.” On second thought, the pink-haired one only looked like a gnome. It was clearly some sort of slightly-undersized orc. It was carrying a hammer with distinctly red-stained ends. The other one was a gnome, though.
“It doesn’t look great,” Corrin said. “What’s dust-touched?”
“It’s that,” Pip said, pointing at the mostly dead ground. “Are you dumb?”
“I don’t think so,” Corrin said. “You’re neither one of you evil wizards, by chance?”
They exchanged looks. Chattered in gnomish. Forever. And then Corrin realized what he’d done. They hadn’t met yet. They were introducing each other. He’d once met a gnome with forty-seven names, and he’d used every one of them when introducing himself.
Corrin cleared his throat at, he guessed, about ten names in for the blue-haired one.
“I don’t speak Gnomish,” he said.
“So?” The pink-haired one said.
The blue-haired one stepped forward and made a fancy gesture followed by a short bow. “Her name is Callandra Pippenr–“
“Pip,” said the pink-haired one. “She’s Lolly. Who’re you?”
“It’s pronounced Ylalli.”
“Don’t hear a difference. Wanna know who the dwarf is.”
“Halfling,” Corrin said.
“Meh.”
Corrin introduced himself, not leaving off Sorcerer extraordinaire, world traveler, and lover of fine foods. Titles were important. He left off the bit about having a magical dagger for the express purpose of murdering someone, though. That didn’t seem like it’d make any friends.
And then he realized they were all standing in a long, uncomfortable silence.
Uncomfortable was where Corrin thrived.
Pip
The absurd Halfling suggests that everyone share why they’re here. It should take six seconds, tops, and Pip sees no reason not to say she’s hunting a monster. It takes three seconds.
“Killin a monster.”
Lolly (Yuhlolly. Yoololly. Why can’t people make the same simple noises animals do?) drags her explanation out. Something, something, orphanage, something, temple, something, kidnapped girl.
She expects the Halfling to be worse. Pleasantly, he seems reluctant to give them the whole of his story.
“I’m trying to find a wizard,” he says. “The men of the Grove Fort say he went here.”
The pony stamps. Pip’s the only one who notices. She can’t talk to the bigger critters, and she’s never been certain why, but they have things to say all the same. It knows the grass is bad. It knows it gets left alone eventually when people gather outside buildings.
“Don’t suppose one of us can make sure the pony eats,” Pip says.
“Oh. I wanted to try something.” Lolly tears her backpack off in a swift motion. Rope’s hanging from it in neat loops, and it clatters as it hits the ground. She pulls out a white, crystal vial. “Sacred water. This batch was blessed by clerics of Pelor. I have six or seven types. It’s in case the girl’s cursed when I find her.”
“Cursed?” Corrin narrows his eyes. They’re quite feminine. Pip grins a little. “The wizard I’m trying to, ah, find cursed someone. If that’s what’s wrong with the ground, then–”
Lolly pours the water into the grass. The change is instant. The slime sizzles off the grass, and it straightens out and shoots up with a fibrous stretching sound. A circle of green foliage spreads, and Pip has to separate the grass with her hands to see the face of the next person who talks.
“Remarkable,” she says.
“It approaches remarkable, doesn’t it?” Lolly says. She side steps away from the grass, toward the corruption. She paces like a worried dog. “All of us bein here, all at once, all to different ends.” Her hands have crept down to her weapons again, but she’s not touching them. She’s in the sort of pose fighters adopt to look relaxed right before they need to block an attack.
The pony starts to eat, and plops one out as he does. Corrin gives the animal space.
“Seems you folk need something out of the castle,” Pip says. “Or two somethings. The thing I’m hunting wouldn’t fit in there for the world. Relax, maybe.”
“Who’s tense?” the one called Corrin says. “I think we’re about to get along famously. Imagine, three adventurers, stumbling over each-other’s quests, lending noble aid to just causes–”
Lolly grabs her neck and pretends to puke. When Corrin looks her way, she shoots back to normal. Great. An idiotic idealist and a child.
“–imagine the stories they’d tell!”
And just then, the faintest cry carries on the wind.
“Help me!”
“Silence,” Pip says. She perks her ears all the way up. “It’s coming from the castle.”
“What is?” Lolly says.
The cry repeats.
“I hear it,” Corrin says. “It’s coming from the castle.”
They all look. Corrin moves first. Lolly next. Pip sighs. Hoists Wolfbreaker onto her shoulder. Second moon is when the mouse said it’d come, and that is a long while away. Worst case, she has to track the monster again. She wasn’t about to let a little girl die in a castle.
2
The three wanderers made their way incautiously to the front of the castle and found a siege-broken drawbridge strewn over a long-dead moat. Skeletons with old arrows stuck in eye sockets and ribs littered the path.
Pip went across first. Kicked the skull of the first body. It skidded across the drying wood into the castle’s courtyard, echoing the entire time. She looked back, and her unlikely companions followed.
“Kobalds,” Ylalli said, as they moved. “Kobalds and humans, it looks like. These bodies are old.”
“They don’t last this long in the forest,” Pip said.
“They shouldn’t in a ruin, either,” Corrin said, drawing up the back and looking behind him as he moved. The mouth of the castle yawned in front of them. It seemed to spew out darkness, despite the height of the sun. “Animals should still eventually find them. And stone like this should have been lost to looters a long time ago.”
There’s quiet for a long moment. Even Pip pauses at the threshold of the castle courtyard, the first step off the wooden bridge.
“Something here’s unnatural,” Corrin said. “Be careful, Papper.”
Pip turned and gave the Halfling a concerned look. In her array of thirty-seven names, she could think of no good-seeming place to stick the word, “Papper.” It didn’t even seem to have a meaning, unlike the others.
“You’re terrible at names,” Pip said.
“Just go,” Ylalli said. Pip gave her a short, cold look.
“Peanuts from the same shell,” Pip muttered, and then stepped into the castle courtyard.
–
Darkness clung to the ground like a fog, covering the bleached bones of the long dead. Ivy had crept up the walls, once, but it was shriveled like the grass outside, and dry — no trace of the foul-smelling slime that’d coated the plants beyond the castle wall.
The courtyard stretched out toward walls they could barely see, and bricks of fallen wall–some twice the wanderers’ sizes–littered the ground.
“The sun’s out, right?” Ylalli said.
“Pour some of that water on the ground,” Corrin said. “See if there’s a reaction.”
“No,” Yalli said, almost spitting the words. “If the girl is cursed, I’ll need it, and the temple priests said there was good reason to think she would be.”
“But it could help us now,” Corrin said, “and by extension, the girl you’re in here to save.”
“Shh.” Pip didn’t turn to them to say it. She’d never had such a problem seeing in the dark. She crept ahead. The others followed, step by wary step.
“Should we call for her?” Corrin asked. “What’s her name?”
“Amalia,” Ylalli said. “And no. Kidnapped people tend to have guards.”
“I wish I could see our feet,” Pip said. “There’d be a in the dirt if anyone had gone through.”
Corrin let out a harsh, angry sigh.
“Seriously, use some of that water.”
“No!”
“Fine.”
And he made an arcane gesture with his hands that shot a bolt of pure, white light into the courtyard’s center. The darkness receded, but only a bit. The castle proper was ahead of them, its doors shut tight and wound over with dead vines. But a massive hole in the wall gaped out at them.
“Follow me!” Corrin said, and dashed toward the hole.
“Wait!” Ylalli cried after him. “Let me check for–“
As he crossed the hole’s threshold, an ethereal gray mass slammed into him, knocking him to the floor, into ancient bones. There was clatter, followed by a voice that shrieked out like a knife scraping at heart-meat.
“Leave! Leave us!” the voice was coming from the ethereal mass, and it slowly took the shape of a woman.
Pip, Wolfbreaker ready, circled in front of Corrin, her eyes locked on the new threat.
“– traps.”
All around them, the long-dead skeletons rose from the ground and clattered into the forms their bodies had once held.
And every last one of them was armed.
–
Corrin waved his arms. These were surely illusions. They had to be illusions. Movement occurred in the living because of muscles dragging sinews attached to bones. What they were seeing was impossible. Or else thinly animated, horrible golems. And either one should have fallen with a simple unbinding of illusory strings.
The illusion stabbed him in the gut.
He stared. Blood trickled down the sword. An arrow sailed over his head.
Then the wind filled his eyes. It was the only enchantment he knew by name. Expeditious retreat.
By the time Pip’s hammer crashed into the skeleton that’d stuck him, he was gone, toward the wall of the castle–the wrong way to the drawbridge.
Pip crushed another skeleton, ducked an arrow, parried.
“Wait!” she cried.
The light was following him.
Ylalli pulled a pair of crossbows from her side and leveled them at the gray woman who hovered above the floor. She had no patience for two-bit mages. She loosed both bolts.
The first one flew through the gray woman. The second one did too, but there was a flash of light as it sailed through her, and she screamed and whirled at the Halfling. Her eyes were embers that grew brighter in ebbs. Ylalli had never once thought, this must be what hate feels like, until this moment. She froze. And bolt of pure darkness sailed from the gray woman into her chest.
A tightness. She ran. Moved to the cover of a fallen brick. Realized she couldn’t breath. Then an arrow hit her, and she couldn’t tell if the magical darkness on the floor was growing worse, or if she was slowly losing her vision.
–
Pip couldn’t see. That made Pip very angry, and when she was very angry, seeing didn’t matter.
All thought went to Wolfbreaker. Ribcage after femur after skull, until she bellowing through the dust of their corpses.
She counted to twelve down before she started laughing, and skipping toward the rattle of living bones.
–
Ylalli pushed the arrow through her shoulder. Forced her eyes open. Forced a gasped of air into her lungs. Forced her brain to work, damn it, work. One bolt hurt it, the other didn’t. What was different?
She rifled through her quivers. Arrows clattered against the stone where she hid. A skeleton dragging a bastard sword approached her with the sure step of an executioner.
One of the sets of bolts had silver tips–the kind of hurting lycanthropes. But that’s not like any werecreature I’ve seen.
But there’d been enough thinking. She cocked back two of the silver bolts. Stood. The skeleton raised its sword above its head.
The sword came down.
And hissed. Melting, along with the rest of the skeleton, in a puddle of green acid.
Corrin dived behind the stone with her.
“Oh good, I didn’t hit you,” he said. “That one’s called Mumbles Acid Arrow. Or something. Watch.”
And the acid on the stone slurped into the shape of an arrow, shot to Corrin’s hand, and then launched into the darkness at his gesture.
Ylalli took a slow breath. It hurt. She found the gray woman, floating above a sea of animated bone, and fired both bolts.
The light was blinding, and put off a searing heat.
The gray woman screamed, and then shot into the depths of the castle, trailing a dust of magical darkness behind her that slowly dipped to the earth.
The skeletons clattered to the ground.
And Pip kept smashing them.
“I don’t suppose you know any healing magic,” Ylalli asked. She slid, her back against the stone, blood flowing freely from her shoulder and her stomach.
“Mildly enchanted bandages,” Corrin said. “Had them a weak ago. Used them to start a fire. That was a bad idea.”
Ylalli gave him the most incredulous look she could manage just before he started tearing strips from his shirt.
“Here goes nothing.” Those were the last words she heard before she slipped into unconsciousness.

Description
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1
In the cold foothills of the no-man’s land between the human fiefdoms of the south, and the northern place that breeds little folk strong and hardy there stands a tower that has seen more wars than the most hardened soldier, more death than the saddest king. It juts from the earth as if a giant had hammered it up from the opposite side of the world, and clouds gather around its highest heights even when the sky is clear.
There is a castle around it, but it is not the first such to have been there, nor will it be the last. Such structures speak to men’s hearts through time, and on their own inscrutable schedules, summon them to take up its purposes. The rest follows. It is an inevitability.
Three figures approach the tower at the same time, none understanding the role it will try to force them to play.
Pip
The old castle on the hill comes into view just as the grass goes from sick, dark green to dead and coated in brackish water. Trees have fallen over, rotted through at their bases, and strange vines curl up from brittle soil, all easily taller than Pip, and headed in lazy parabolas to the castle.
She whistles. The animals can tell her of this place, but there’s no doubt in her head–this is where the thing she’s hunting, monster or machine though it may be, must dwell.
No birds come. No squirrels.
Instead, a sickly looking mouse puts its paws on her feet.
Pip bends and scoops it up.
“Can we go? Do you have food?” It asks, and in true mouse fashion, says the two phrases over and over and over again.
“There’s nothing here for a mouse to eat?” Pip asks.
“Can we go? Do you have food? All that’s here is dust-touched. Can we go? Do you have food? All that’s here is dust-touched.”
“Dust touched?”
The mouse looks down. It never stops chittering. “Can we go? Do you have food? All that’s here is dust-touched. Look below. Can we go? Do you have food?”
“We can go,” Pip says, and cuts the mouse off by reaching into her pockets, and putting a few crumbs of seedbread into her palm. The mouse begins eating immediately.
“I’ll carry you to the trees,” Pip says. “But I have to kill the monster that lives here. Have you seen it?”
“It comes at second moon,” the mouse says. And as Pip walks the mouse back to the treeline, it repeats the words.
“It comes at second moon. It comes at second moon. It comes at second moon.”
Ylalli
Ylalli hides in the curve of a giant, dead vine, waiting for the strange woman to leave. A fellow gnome, but this close to such a dark looking ruin, she’s not inclined to be trusting.
Mister Schemey rustles in her pocket. Ylalli reaches in and scritches his head. Normally, she’d have pulled up something for him to eat, but everything she’d fed him since yesterday seemed to have been making him sick. The foliage here was beyond all question poisoned. She’d have fed him cheese or bread from her pack, but kobalds a night ago had proven the better thieves, though she’d killed two of them for the trouble.
The other gnome scoops of a field mouse.
And talks to it.
“Clearly insane, right Mister Schemey?”
Mister Schemey is quiet. Poor little guy.
The other gnome walks back to the treeline, coddling the field mouse and feeding it.
Food wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Ylalli can ignore her stomach for a few days. Mister Schemey can’t. So as the other gnome steps away from the treeline again, and looks up at the sky, Ylalli uncurls from her hiding place.
“Hello, friend,” she says, one hand on her dagger, the other on her rapier. She approaches.
“I like your hair,” the other gnome says, now holding a massive hammer. That stops Ylalli. There’s maybe three feet between them, now, and it’s full of slick, dying grass.
“My hair’s pretty great.”
“You have a mouse in your pocket.”
Ylalli looks down. Her pocket is baggy. Mister Schemey is being still. He usually does that when people talk.
“How did you know that?”
“Because the whole time you were walking to me, he was moaning about a stomach-ache.”
Ylalli hadn’t heard so much as a squeek from Mister Schemey. She narrows her eyes at the muscle-bound, pink-haired brute in front of her.
“You really think you can talk to animals.”
“Whatever.” She sinks her hammer into the muck-ground. Fishes into her pockets. Comes out with crumbled bread. “Here. For the mouse. If you’ve been on foot and feeding him what you’ve found on the trail, that’s why he’s sick.”
Ylalli takes the crumbs. Sticks them in her pocket, and Mister Schemey starts making noises that can only be delight. It’s become so unlikely that this pink-haired gnome has the girl that Ylalli crosses her arms–hands far, far from the hilts of her weapons.
“So what’s going on with this place?” she asks. “And why are you here?”
And that’s about when the pony and the sleeping halfling came stomping out of the wood.
Corrin
Corrin woke up staring down into the moat of an old castle, with his pony giving worried grumps out into the blue sky. He stretched. Looked down. Stopped. Everything was black, and if it hadn’t also been coated into a thin, layer of slimewater, he’d have wondered if the wand of fireballs hadn’t somehow gone off again.
The castle walls were broken in a dozen places, and beyond them, a massive tower rose up so high that he wasn’t sure if he could see its top or not.
He let out a long, slow whistle, and then, “Don’t see one of those every day. I guess I know why they thought Benefart would be here.”
Rustling behind him. But nothing there when he turned. Corrin shrugged.
Well, if there’s a wizard here, I’d best get searching.But he didn’t see a good way for a pony to get over the moat and walls. There probably weren’t a lot of good ways to get a halfling across, either, but a levitate spell took a lot less effort if a small horse wasn’t tugging at his mind.
He led the animal to the grass. Seemed off. Whatever. Pony’d be fine. Probably. Horrible little monster.
It bent it’s head and sniffed the grass.
“No!”
And a pair of gnomes came rushing out of the cover of a long, thick root (or was it a vine?) that curved its way across the ground toward the castle. The pony looked up and cocked its head.
“No? What’s wrong?”
“The ground is dust-touched, idiot.” On second thought, the pink-haired one only looked like a gnome. It was clearly some sort of slightly-undersized orc. It was carrying a hammer with distinctly red-stained ends. The other one was a gnome, though.
“It doesn’t look great,” Corrin said. “What’s dust-touched?”
“It’s that,” Pip said, pointing at the mostly dead ground. “Are you dumb?”
“I don’t think so,” Corrin said. “You’re neither one of you evil wizards, by chance?”
They exchanged looks. Chattered in gnomish. Forever. And then Corrin realized what he’d done. They hadn’t met yet. They were introducing each other. He’d once met a gnome with forty-seven names, and he’d used every one of them when introducing himself.
Corrin cleared his throat at, he guessed, about ten names in for the blue-haired one.
“I don’t speak Gnomish,” he said.
“So?” The pink-haired one said.
The blue-haired one stepped forward and made a fancy gesture followed by a short bow. “Her name is Callandra Pippenr–“
“Pip,” said the pink-haired one. “She’s Lolly. Who’re you?”
“It’s pronounced Ylalli.”
“Don’t hear a difference. Wanna know who the dwarf is.”
“Halfling,” Corrin said.
“Meh.”
Corrin introduced himself, not leaving off Sorcerer extraordinaire, world traveler, and lover of fine foods. Titles were important. He left off the bit about having a magical dagger for the express purpose of murdering someone, though. That didn’t seem like it’d make any friends.
And then he realized they were all standing in a long, uncomfortable silence.
Uncomfortable was where Corrin thrived.
Pip
The absurd Halfling suggests that everyone share why they’re here. It should take six seconds, tops, and Pip sees no reason not to say she’s hunting a monster. It takes three seconds.
“Killin a monster.”
Lolly (Yuhlolly. Yoololly. Why can’t people make the same simple noises animals do?) drags her explanation out. Something, something, orphanage, something, temple, something, kidnapped girl.
She expects the Halfling to be worse. Pleasantly, he seems reluctant to give them the whole of his story.
“I’m trying to find a wizard,” he says. “The men of the Grove Fort say he went here.”
The pony stamps. Pip’s the only one who notices. She can’t talk to the bigger critters, and she’s never been certain why, but they have things to say all the same. It knows the grass is bad. It knows it gets left alone eventually when people gather outside buildings.
“Don’t suppose one of us can make sure the pony eats,” Pip says.
“Oh. I wanted to try something.” Lolly tears her backpack off in a swift motion. Rope’s hanging from it in neat loops, and it clatters as it hits the ground. She pulls out a white, crystal vial. “Sacred water. This batch was blessed by clerics of Pelor. I have six or seven types. It’s in case the girl’s cursed when I find her.”
“Cursed?” Corrin narrows his eyes. They’re quite feminine. Pip grins a little. “The wizard I’m trying to, ah, find cursed someone. If that’s what’s wrong with the ground, then–”
Lolly pours the water into the grass. The change is instant. The slime sizzles off the grass, and it straightens out and shoots up with a fibrous stretching sound. A circle of green foliage spreads, and Pip has to separate the grass with her hands to see the face of the next person who talks.
“Remarkable,” she says.
“It approaches remarkable, doesn’t it?” Lolly says. She side steps away from the grass, toward the corruption. She paces like a worried dog. “All of us bein here, all at once, all to different ends.” Her hands have crept down to her weapons again, but she’s not touching them. She’s in the sort of pose fighters adopt to look relaxed right before they need to block an attack.
The pony starts to eat, and plops one out as he does. Corrin gives the animal space.
“Seems you folk need something out of the castle,” Pip says. “Or two somethings. The thing I’m hunting wouldn’t fit in there for the world. Relax, maybe.”
“Who’s tense?” the one called Corrin says. “I think we’re about to get along famously. Imagine, three adventurers, stumbling over each-other’s quests, lending noble aid to just causes–”
Lolly grabs her neck and pretends to puke. When Corrin looks her way, she shoots back to normal. Great. An idiotic idealist and a child.
“–imagine the stories they’d tell!”
And just then, the faintest cry carries on the wind.
“Help me!”
“Silence,” Pip says. She perks her ears all the way up. “It’s coming from the castle.”
“What is?” Lolly says.
The cry repeats.
“I hear it,” Corrin says. “It’s coming from the castle.”
They all look. Corrin moves first. Lolly next. Pip sighs. Hoists Wolfbreaker onto her shoulder. Second moon is when the mouse said it’d come, and that is a long while away. Worst case, she has to track the monster again. She wasn’t about to let a little girl die in a castle.
2
The three wanderers made their way incautiously to the front of the castle and found a siege-broken drawbridge strewn over a long-dead moat. Skeletons with old arrows stuck in eye sockets and ribs littered the path.
Pip went across first. Kicked the skull of the first body. It skidded across the drying wood into the castle’s courtyard, echoing the entire time. She looked back, and her unlikely companions followed.
“Kobalds,” Ylalli said, as they moved. “Kobalds and humans, it looks like. These bodies are old.”
“They don’t last this long in the forest,” Pip said.
“They shouldn’t in a ruin, either,” Corrin said, drawing up the back and looking behind him as he moved. The mouth of the castle yawned in front of them. It seemed to spew out darkness, despite the height of the sun. “Animals should still eventually find them. And stone like this should have been lost to looters a long time ago.”
There’s quiet for a long moment. Even Pip pauses at the threshold of the castle courtyard, the first step off the wooden bridge.
“Something here’s unnatural,” Corrin said. “Be careful, Papper.”
Pip turned and gave the Halfling a concerned look. In her array of thirty-seven names, she could think of no good-seeming place to stick the word, “Papper.” It didn’t even seem to have a meaning, unlike the others.
“You’re terrible at names,” Pip said.
“Just go,” Ylalli said. Pip gave her a short, cold look.
“Peanuts from the same shell,” Pip muttered, and then stepped into the castle courtyard.
–
Darkness clung to the ground like a fog, covering the bleached bones of the long dead. Ivy had crept up the walls, once, but it was shriveled like the grass outside, and dry — no trace of the foul-smelling slime that’d coated the plants beyond the castle wall.
The courtyard stretched out toward walls they could barely see, and bricks of fallen wall–some twice the wanderers’ sizes–littered the ground.
“The sun’s out, right?” Ylalli said.
“Pour some of that water on the ground,” Corrin said. “See if there’s a reaction.”
“No,” Yalli said, almost spitting the words. “If the girl is cursed, I’ll need it, and the temple priests said there was good reason to think she would be.”
“But it could help us now,” Corrin said, “and by extension, the girl you’re in here to save.”
“Shh.” Pip didn’t turn to them to say it. She’d never had such a problem seeing in the dark. She crept ahead. The others followed, step by wary step.
“Should we call for her?” Corrin asked. “What’s her name?”
“Amalia,” Ylalli said. “And no. Kidnapped people tend to have guards.”
“I wish I could see our feet,” Pip said. “There’d be a in the dirt if anyone had gone through.”
Corrin let out a harsh, angry sigh.
“Seriously, use some of that water.”
“No!”
“Fine.”
And he made an arcane gesture with his hands that shot a bolt of pure, white light into the courtyard’s center. The darkness receded, but only a bit. The castle proper was ahead of them, its doors shut tight and wound over with dead vines. But a massive hole in the wall gaped out at them.
“Follow me!” Corrin said, and dashed toward the hole.
“Wait!” Ylalli cried after him. “Let me check for–“
As he crossed the hole’s threshold, an ethereal gray mass slammed into him, knocking him to the floor, into ancient bones. There was clatter, followed by a voice that shrieked out like a knife scraping at heart-meat.
“Leave! Leave us!” the voice was coming from the ethereal mass, and it slowly took the shape of a woman.
Pip, Wolfbreaker ready, circled in front of Corrin, her eyes locked on the new threat.
“– traps.”
All around them, the long-dead skeletons rose from the ground and clattered into the forms their bodies had once held.
And every last one of them was armed.
–
Corrin waved his arms. These were surely illusions. They had to be illusions. Movement occurred in the living because of muscles dragging sinews attached to bones. What they were seeing was impossible. Or else thinly animated, horrible golems. And either one should have fallen with a simple unbinding of illusory strings.
The illusion stabbed him in the gut.
He stared. Blood trickled down the sword. An arrow sailed over his head.
Then the wind filled his eyes. It was the only enchantment he knew by name. Expeditious retreat.
By the time Pip’s hammer crashed into the skeleton that’d stuck him, he was gone, toward the wall of the castle–the wrong way to the drawbridge.
Pip crushed another skeleton, ducked an arrow, parried.
“Wait!” she cried.
The light was following him.
Ylalli pulled a pair of crossbows from her side and leveled them at the gray woman who hovered above the floor. She had no patience for two-bit mages. She loosed both bolts.
The first one flew through the gray woman. The second one did too, but there was a flash of light as it sailed through her, and she screamed and whirled at the Halfling. Her eyes were embers that grew brighter in ebbs. Ylalli had never once thought, this must be what hate feels like, until this moment. She froze. And bolt of pure darkness sailed from the gray woman into her chest.
A tightness. She ran. Moved to the cover of a fallen brick. Realized she couldn’t breath. Then an arrow hit her, and she couldn’t tell if the magical darkness on the floor was growing worse, or if she was slowly losing her vision.
–
Pip couldn’t see. That made Pip very angry, and when she was very angry, seeing didn’t matter.
All thought went to Wolfbreaker. Ribcage after femur after skull, until she bellowing through the dust of their corpses.
She counted to twelve down before she started laughing, and skipping toward the rattle of living bones.
–
Ylalli pushed the arrow through her shoulder. Forced her eyes open. Forced a gasped of air into her lungs. Forced her brain to work, damn it, work. One bolt hurt it, the other didn’t. What was different?
She rifled through her quivers. Arrows clattered against the stone where she hid. A skeleton dragging a bastard sword approached her with the sure step of an executioner.
One of the sets of bolts had silver tips–the kind of hurting lycanthropes. But that’s not like any werecreature I’ve seen.
But there’d been enough thinking. She cocked back two of the silver bolts. Stood. The skeleton raised its sword above its head.
The sword came down.
And hissed. Melting, along with the rest of the skeleton, in a puddle of green acid.
Corrin dived behind the stone with her.
“Oh good, I didn’t hit you,” he said. “That one’s called Mumbles Acid Arrow. Or something. Watch.”
And the acid on the stone slurped into the shape of an arrow, shot to Corrin’s hand, and then launched into the darkness at his gesture.
Ylalli took a slow breath. It hurt. She found the gray woman, floating above a sea of animated bone, and fired both bolts.
The light was blinding, and put off a searing heat.
The gray woman screamed, and then shot into the depths of the castle, trailing a dust of magical darkness behind her that slowly dipped to the earth.
The skeletons clattered to the ground.
And Pip kept smashing them.
“I don’t suppose you know any healing magic,” Ylalli asked. She slid, her back against the stone, blood flowing freely from her shoulder and her stomach.
“Mildly enchanted bandages,” Corrin said. “Had them a weak ago. Used them to start a fire. That was a bad idea.”
Ylalli gave him the most incredulous look she could manage just before he started tearing strips from his shirt.
“Here goes nothing.” Those were the last words she heard before she slipped into unconsciousness.