The Last Sound — Solis Lantern Chronicles

The wet season is approaching.

You can feel it before you can name it, something in the air that makes people move differently, check over their shoulders more, hold their children’s hands a little tighter in the street. The gates to the Outer Tier are busier than usual. Harvesters coming back through with their carts loaded heavy, researchers travelling light in the way that means they left in a hurry. Families moving inland in ones and twos. The military going the other way. The city has been doing this long enough that it knows how to step around itself.

Nobody says the word Leviathan if they can help it.

The Last Sound Inn sits near the inner-facing gate, one wall built directly into the stone of the Middle Wall itself. On that wall hangs a horn, a brass system of pipes and valves woven into the city’s own infrastructure. If a Leviathan ever breaches the Outer Wall and turns toward Brinegate, the horn will sound. One long note, carrying through every room and street in the city.

They call it the last sound most people would ever hear.

People come up to the pipes sometimes, this time of year. They press a palm to the brass, not quite praying, just needing to feel something solid. Then they step back and get on with their morning.

The common room is loud. Adventuring parties eating and arguing and sizing each other up, the way they always do before the season, when work is about to get easier to find and harder to survive. Thorvald Royce works behind the bar, his mechanical arm moving with practiced ease, the rest of him doing three other things at once. He hasn’t smiled at anyone yet this morning. This is normal.

Near a window that looks out toward the Wall gate, a small figure takes her bow.

Wynn has been playing at the Last Sound for years, long enough that the inn is hers the way places become yours when you’ve outlasted everyone who knew you when you arrived. The crowd this morning is thin and not really in the mood. She played anyway. She always plays anyway.

When the last note fades a small bird drops from the rafters, one wing working properly and the other not there at all, the socket healed long ago into a smooth curve. It lists to the same side with every loop it makes down toward her shoulder, the same imperfect arc every time. Wynn has always thought it looks like dancing.

At the table near the window, the others are waiting for their food. They ordered for Wynn too. It’s a small thing, the kind that doesn’t get mentioned.

Mara is watching the gate. She has been watching it since they sat down, which Nyssara knows because Nyssara watches everything. Mara is a tiefling, red-skinned, and she holds herself with the stillness of someone keeping something carefully contained. She has been looking for two faces through that gate every morning for months now. She knows she won’t find them today. She watches anyway.

Nyssara has her tinted glasses on and her fork in her hand and is looking at her plate like it has done something to offend her. She glances at the room, files away what she sees, glances at Mara and says nothing. Yet.

Querc has both hands around a cup of something warm, their small drum resting at their hip, the wood worn smooth from years of use. They were watching Wynn play with the kind of attention that means they are trying to feel a little less far from home.

Marlowe arrives at the table with four plates balanced across both arms, sets them down in the wrong order, looks at them, rearranges without comment.

“The egg situation this morning,” he says, to nobody in particular, “was complicated. I’ve done what I could.”

Nyssara looks at her plate. “There are no eggs on this.”

“Exactly,” Marlowe says, and is already gone.

Mara pulls her plate toward her without looking away from the window. Querc eats. Nyssara picks up her fork, sets it down, picks it up again.

“You’re doing it again,” she says.

“Doing what.”

“You know what.”

“I’m watching the street.”

Querc, not looking up from their food: “The street leads to the gate.”

Mara says nothing. She moves her gaze about six inches to the left of the gate and holds it there.

Wynn drops into the empty seat still flushed from the set, the bird making its last tilting loop down to her shoulder. Thorvald has already set a drink at the bar end nearest their table without being asked. Wynn spots it and lifts it briefly in his direction. He’s already turned away.

“Good crowd,” Wynn says.

“Thin,” Mara says.

“Thin but attentive. There’s a difference.” She reaches across and takes something off Querc’s plate without asking. Querc watches this happen and decides it isn’t worth it. “How’d the egg situation go?”

“Complicated, apparently,” Nyssara says.

That is when the door opens.

The room doesn’t go quiet. It shifts. Conversations keep going, Thorvald keeps working. But something changes in the air, the way it changes when a person walks in who has earned a particular kind of attention from the world.

Kisara Solis crosses the threshold carefully, favoring her left side. She is in her fifties and the years are on her, in the scars and in how she moves and in the way she spots the table she wants and goes straight to it without stopping for the people who start moving toward her and then think better of it. Her leg has been torn open. She waves off a medic without breaking stride, with the manner of someone who has survived much worse and does not need help saying so.

Thorvald has a drink waiting before she reaches the bar. She takes it and carries it to a table with its back against the Wall and sits.

Every adventuring party in the room becomes aware, all at once, of being looked at.

“Is that—” Querc starts.

“Kisara Solis,” Mara says.

She has completely forgotten about the gate.

Nyssara’s fork stops moving. Wynn’s hand stops mid-reach.

“Standing permission to the Outer Tier,” Mara says, her voice lower than she means it to be. “Not seasonal. Not escorted. She’s had it for decades. Her party held a Leviathan breach point for six hours once, just the four of them, while reinforcements came through. Three years ago she went in alone and came back with specimens the researchers at Jakata said couldn’t have been retrieved by a party of less than eight.” A pause. “I grew up hearing about her.”

“Most people did,” Nyssara says.

“She’s bleeding,” Querc says.

She is. The leg wound is visible once you know to look. Kisara has settled into her chair and is scanning the room with the calm of someone running through options.

“She’s looking at us,” Wynn says.

“She’s looking at everyone,” Nyssara says.

“She’s still looking at us.”

The look holds. Then Kisara’s eyes move on, sweeping through the rest of the room, and the table lets out a breath that none of them quite planned.

Marlowe drifts past collecting cups and on his way back Mara watches him catch Kisara’s eye. He changes direction. Stops at her table. Sets down a drink she didn’t ask for, leans in with his head tilted slightly to one side. He listens. Something in his face shifts, pleased and careful at the same time. His eyes travel across the room.

They land on the window table.

He looks back at Kisara. She nods.

Marlowe crosses back and sets down a cup nobody ordered. He looks at all four of them with the brightness of someone who has just arranged something they find deeply satisfying.

“She’d like a word,” he says. “All of you.”

He gives them a wink, broad and entirely unashamed, and walks away before anyone can say anything.

The table is quiet for a moment.

“All of us?” Querc asks.

“Apparently,” Nyssara says.

Mara is already pushing back her chair.

They cross the room a little too quickly and all of them know it. Kisara watches them arrive with the expression of someone who has already finished half the evaluation.

She does not offer pleasantries. She sets a wrapped package on the table between them, sealed, plain, and says nothing about it yet.

“I need this transported,” she says. “Thornhaven Cemetery, two days north. I’d take it myself.”

She glances at her leg.

“What happened?” Querc asks.

Kisara looks at them. Then, deciding something, she answers.

“Thorn-wolf. Outer Tier breed, dire wolf that’s been blood-touched over generations. They grow thorns from their backs, shoulders, down the flanks. When they hit you it’s not just the bite.” She pauses. “I’ve taken them alone before. Many times.”

She says this without particular pride. As though it is simply a fact that exists.

“But not this time,” Mara says.

“I was unlucky.”

Querc looks at her then, really looks, and something shifts in what they see. The careful way Kisara holds herself. The particular quality of her tiredness, which is not the tiredness of a hard journey. It’s older than that. It goes down to the bone in a way that a few nights’ sleep won’t touch.

She’s tired, Querc thinks. Not from the wolf. From all of it. From doing it alone for too long.

But Kisara’s face gives nothing away, and Querc says nothing.

“What’s in the package?” Nyssara asks.

“I don’t know.”

A beat.

“You don’t know,” Nyssara says.

“I was paid not to check. And before you ask—” Kisara’s eyes move across them, “—it may not be a privacy matter. Whatever is inside may not travel well in the Middle Tier environment. Opening it could compromise the contents. So the seal stays on.”

She looks at the package, then back at them.

“Someone I trusted asked me to retrieve it and bring it to a graveyard. That’s the job.”

“Who asked you?” Mara says.

“Someone who can’t ask anymore.”

The table is quiet for a moment. Nobody pushes.

“I can look at your leg,” Querc says. “If you’ll let me.”

Kisara considers this. She extends the leg.

Querc’s hands find the wound with the ease of someone who grew up knowing what bodies need. The flesh begins to knit, slowly, not all the way, Kisara doesn’t stay still long enough for that, but enough that the worst of it closes. Kisara looks down at the result without comment. From her, this counts as thank you.

At the other end of the table, Nyssara’s glasses slip.

She catches them immediately. Adjusts them. Scans the room the way she always does, eyes moving quickly and professionally.

She clocks nothing of concern.

She has missed something concerning entirely.

Querc sees it first.

A cockroach on the leg of the next table over. Small, unremarkable. Querc watches it for a moment with the instinct of someone who grew up in a deep forest, where wrong stillness always means something. The cockroach is not still the way insects are still. It is still the way a constructed thing is still when it is receiving.

Querc leans slightly toward it and it moves, immediately, with a purpose no real cockroach would have, threading between chair legs toward a specific table across the room.

Querc glances at the others. Wynn is mid-sentence. Mara is watching the table the cockroach came from. Nyssara has already noticed Querc noticing.

Then, quietly, Querc becomes a mouse.

Querc is aware, as they always are in a shifted form, of how different the world is from down here. The smells of the inn are overwhelming and specific, spilled drinks and sawdust and something charred from the kitchen and underneath all of it the warm animal scent of the crowd. The floor is huge. The chair legs are pillars. They move through it all quickly, nose working, following the cockroach by the faint mechanical smell of it, something like oil and crystal and the particular sharpness of a held spell.

The table the cockroach belongs to has four people at it who have not once looked at Kisara since she walked in. The Gilt Knives. Mercenaries with the look of people who have been almost successful for long enough to have strong feelings about it. Their leader, a human woman called Senna, sits with the coiled posture of someone who believes she has been passed over for things she deserved. Next to her, a goblin in an oversized coat with too many pockets, his eyes gone slightly glassy. The cockroach climbs back up to him and the eyes clear. He blinks rapidly, coming back to himself, and his expression settles into something pleased.

Querc does not need to hear what he tells the others. They can see it in his face. He knows about the package. About Thornhaven. About the terms.

They slip back under the chairs and cross the floor toward their own table.

Querc returns to their elf form beside the table and tells the others what they saw.

“The goblin’s eyes,” they say. “They go glassy when the cockroach is active. He was listening to everything.”

The table looks to Kisara.

Kisara shrugs. “Part of the job,” she says. “If it were easy I wouldn’t need to hire anyone.”

She looks at them with the same measuring patience she has had since they sat down.

“Now. The route.”

“Two options,” Kisara says. “Through the forest, three days. Safer, quieter, no legal complications. Or along the Wall road, two days.” She pauses. “The Wall road is illegal. Patrols, maintenance crews, and the ecosystems are harder up against the Wall than anywhere else. Edges are where things evolve fastest. You’ve seen what the blood-touched land produces. Up against the Wall it’s worse.”

“You’d take the Wall,” Mara says. It isn’t quite a question.

“I would. I always have.” A small pause. “But I understand if it’s not the right choice for this party. Three days through the forest is a legitimate route. You’d have fewer variables.”

“What’s the difference in pay?” Nyssara asks.

“Three days, a hundred gold each. Two days, a hundred and fifty.”

Nyssara is already doing the calculation. Wynn is looking at Querc. Querc is looking out the window at nothing in particular.

“It’s important,” Kisara says, “that you know your own capabilities. An adventurer who takes on more than they can handle isn’t brave. They’re a liability. I want the package to arrive, which means I want you to arrive.”

“We take the Wall,” Mara says.

Nyssara looks at her. “You could have let us discuss that.”

“We would have said yes.”

“We might have.”

“Would you have said no?”

Nyssara holds her gaze for a moment. “No,” she says.

Kisara watches this exchange and says nothing. But something settles in her expression, small and almost invisible.

They say goodbye to Marlowe, who presses a cloth pouch of food into each of their hands with the focused sincerity of someone who takes this seriously. “Be careful,” he says, and means it in a way that is not a figure of speech. They gather their gear. They step out into the pre-wet-season city and head north toward the Wall.

The Middle Wall is enormous up close. The stonework is stratified, centuries of repair and reinforcement visible in the different eras of masonry, and the road that runs alongside it is well-maintained and watched at regular intervals.

Less than an hour of walking and Nyssara holds up a hand.

“Tower,” she says.

They stop. Ahead, built into the base of the Wall itself, is a guard tower. Two guards on the ground scanning the forest. One above with a spyglass, sweeping the road in both directions.

“We could go around through the forest,” Wynn says. “Wide arc. Adds time but—”

“Adds danger,” Querc says. “The forest is denser here. Closer to the Wall.”

“So we need to get past the tower,” Mara says.

“Without being seen,” Nyssara says. “Or stopped. Or arrested.”

They look at the tower for a moment.

“I have an idea,” Querc says, and walks toward the tree line.

The squirrel sees Querc before Querc sees the squirrel.

It is sitting on a low branch watching them approach with the careful attention of a creature that has decided not to run yet. Querc stops. They look at each other.

“I need some help,” Querc says, in the easy register they use with animals, not louder or slower, just present and direct. “There’s something at the top of that tower I need someone to get for me.”

“What something?” the squirrel asks.

Querc looks at the tower. At the guard on top with the spyglass pressed to his eye.

“That.”

The squirrel studies the spyglass for a long moment. Then it looks back at its friends in the branches, a loose group of them pretending not to be paying attention. Then back at Querc.

“What do we get?”

“The tower,” Querc says. “And everything in it. If you’re strong enough to take it.”

There is a silence in which something is clearly being decided. The squirrel drops from the branch and lands in the leaves with the posture of a creature that has just committed to something.

“I’m Pebble,” it says. “I’ll do it.”

The plan, when they assemble it, is a small masterwork of collaboration and increasing chaos.

Nyssara raises her hands and tiny dancing lights appear at the tree line, moving through the underbrush in the pattern of torches carried by running people. Mara extends a hand and the ground shudders, trees rustling in still air, a tremor that comes from nowhere and suggests something large moving in the dark. And Wynn, lifting her instrument, draws from it the sounds of voices, panicked and breathless, people fleeing something that is very close behind them.

The two ground guards look at each other. Then they run into the forest.

The guard above sweeps the road. Nothing. He sweeps the tree line. Nothing but leaves.

Then a small shape appears at the base of the tower and begins to climb.

What happens between Pebble and the guard is not entirely visible from a distance, but it involves a great deal of frantic motion on the guard’s part and a great deal of focused determination on Pebble’s, and then a great deal of additional squirrels arriving from the tree line with the collective energy of creatures who have just been told there is a tower available for occupation.

“Run,” Nyssara says.

Wynn’s legs are short. She is already moving. Mara, making a quick calculation, scoops her off the ground mid-stride. Wynn makes a sound somewhere between protest and delight. They run. They are spectacularly loud for a group that started this plan with the word stealth, all clattering armor and gnome-and-tiefling logistics and Nyssara’s expression of refined suffering as she runs alongside them with considerably more dignity than the situation deserves.

Behind them, the tower guard hits the ground.

Not dead. Dazed, winded, surrounded by squirrels already conducting a detailed survey of their new home.

From a safe distance the party slows, breathing hard and largely triumphant.

They hear a small tik-tik from behind them.

Querc looks back.

Pebble is at the top of the tower with the spyglass to one eye, training it carefully on the retreating party. Even at this distance you can tell he is very pleased with himself.

“We just gave a squirrel a spyglass,” Nyssara says.

“We gave him a tower,” Querc says. “The spyglass was already there.”

Nyssara considers this. “That does not make it better.”

They walk on. Behind them, the sound of small excited feet.

Some hours later the forest sends a reminder that the Middle Tier is not as safe as it appears on maps.

The path ends.

Not abruptly, the change builds over a hundred yards, the forest pressing closer to the Wall, the undergrowth thickening and then becoming something else entirely. Vines. Enormous, layered, dozens of them twisting up from the forest floor and slamming into the Wall with rhythmic, furious force. Stone chips scattered across the road. Cracks across centuries-old masonry where the face has been stripped away. The vines are ongoing. They are not slowing.

The party stands at the edge of this.

“We could go around,” Wynn says.

“Same problem as before,” Mara says. “The forest is denser here.”

“Can you tell what they are?” Nyssara asks Querc.

Querc steps closer and reaches for the sense that connects them to the land, the living network of root and soil and blood-soaked earth running through the Middle Tier in ways that are not always visible.

What they find is anger.

“Blood-touched,” Querc says. “The Leviathan ichor changed them. Made them hot. Aggressive.” They watch the vines hit the Wall, rhythmic and relentless. “The Wall runs warm. Something to do with the maintenance infrastructure. To the vines it reads as threat. They’ve been hitting it for days.”

“Can they be calmed?” Mara asks.

“I think so. But not by force.”

Wynn is already sitting down, already reaching for her instrument. “I can try,” she says, and starts to play.

The music takes a moment to reach them.

It is slow and patient, a melody that asks nothing except attention. Querc pulls their drum from their hip and finds the rhythm beneath it, something older and lower, the kind of beat that comes from a tradition that understood the relationship between sound and the land long before the Empire started building walls to manage everything.

The vines slow.

Not all at once. Gradually, the way agitation drains out of something when it stops feeling under threat. The frantic beating against the Wall becomes something less desperate. The air settles. The music continues and the vines, by degrees, listen.

They are calmer. They are not gone. They still fill the road entirely, a wall of living anger at rest.

Mara walks up to the nearest vine and puts her hand on it.

Something moves through her that she will think about later, or try not to. The feeling is specific: not threat, not pain, something closer to recognition. Something that gets very hot and cannot cool itself down. Something that hits because it cannot think of anything else to do. Something that would stop, she thinks, if something outside it would just say you can stop now.

“I think I can hold them open,” she says. “Make a gap. But you’ll need to move fast.”

“How fast?” Wynn asks.

“Fast.”

She takes hold of the nearest vine, careful and firm, and begins to pull. Then the next one. Gradually, working with a steadiness that costs her something, she opens a gap in the wall of vegetation. Narrow, but passable.

Nyssara moves without discussion.

She reads the gap, calculates, and goes through it in a single fluid motion, hands raised, not touching anything. She lands on the other side and turns back. She had not quite calculated that the others would have significantly more trouble.

Wynn and Querc start through, still playing as they go, and the vines feel the contact of two warm bodies moving between them and begin, slowly, to tighten. Mara holds the gap with both hands, feeling the resistance grow. The music is helping but the music cannot reach the vines that are touching people, and those vines have simpler instructions than the ones that can hear the melody.

This is not going to work on its own, she thinks.

The moment arrives when she understands that Wynn and Querc are not going to make it through without help.

She releases the vines.

She pushes them.

Her shoulder behind Wynn, her arm around Querc, she shoves hard, and they stumble through onto the other side, and then the vines close around Mara entirely.

What the others see from the far side is one hand.

Mara’s hand, extended from the wall of vines, fingers spread. And then, muffled through half a meter of vegetation, her voice.

Nyssara’s rapier is out before the hand stops moving. She does not deliberate. She starts cutting.

On the other side Wynn and Querc drop their instruments and grab the hand.

Pull, Querc thinks, feeling the resistance of the vines through Mara’s arm, and Mara is pulling too, and the vines are fighting all of it, and for a moment it is genuinely unclear—

Mara comes through.

Hard, bleeding from a dozen cuts, her armor scraped and dented, the fabric of her clothes in several different states of ruin. She lands on her hands and knees in the road on the far side of the vine wall and stays there for a moment, breathing.

She is upright. This is its own kind of answer.

“You’re bleeding,” Querc says, and their hands are already finding the wounds, already knowing what order to work in. The healing comes steadily. Wynn adds her own to it, and between them the worst of it closes.

Mara looks at each of them. She looks like she is going to say something practical.

“Thank you,” she says instead.

“Thank you,” Querc says back, meaning something different by it.

Wynn puts her hand briefly over Mara’s and says nothing. It is enough.

After a moment someone thinks to check the package. It is on Mara’s back, where it has been since Brinegate. The wrapping is intact. Whatever is inside is fine.

Nobody opens it. Kisara asked them not to.

“Are you alright?” Wynn asks Mara.

“Yes,” Mara says, and after a moment: “I don’t know what that was. With the vines. They felt—” She stops. “Never mind. I’m fine.”

She stands up. They walk on.

The forest finds them a campsite before dark, a clearing that has the quality of a place that has been left alone long enough to feel genuinely peaceful. They make a fire, eat, let the day settle.

Querc disappears briefly into the trees and comes back with mushrooms.

“From home,” they say, when Wynn looks at them. “My people use them before uncertain things. They calm you. And they help you dream things that are worth dreaming.”

“What kind of things?” Mara asks.

“Things you need to see. Or things that are coming.”

A silence. The fire crackles. Somewhere above, the bird rustles inside the small pouch on Wynn’s pack and goes still again.

“I’m in,” Mara says.

“Of course you are,” Nyssara says, and then: “Fine. Me too.”

Wynn simply holds out her cup.

Querc boils the water. The mushrooms steep. The package on the ground nearby begins, softly, to glow, organic light pulsing in rhythm with something none of them can name. They notice it. They sit with it for a moment.

“Should we—” Wynn starts.

“No,” Mara says. “Kisara asked us not to.”

Nobody argues. They drink the tea around the dying fire, watching the stars appear one by one, and then the night takes them.

Mara is standing at the end of a long corridor and her mother and sister are walking toward her, both of them whole and luminous, arms open. She moves toward them and they burn.

Not suddenly. The way candles burn, starting at the edges, the light consuming itself from the outside in. Her mother’s voice comes through the flame, calm and specific:

“You were not quick enough. Your fire killed us.”

Elody is already ash at the shoulders. She looks at Mara with eyes that are not accusing, only desperate, and says:

“I will be the hot-headed one. Just stay safe.”

The ash falls.

Mara is on her knees in an empty corridor, making a sound she cannot stop. The walls around her are warm. She puts her hands against them and feels the heat coming from the other side, steady and old and immense, like something that has been burning for a very long time and has no intention of stopping.

She does not know what the warmth means yet. She files it away somewhere in herself and keeps making the sound.

Wynn walks through a world with no one left in it.

Not a ruined world. A peaceful one. Forests and rivers and a sky so old it makes you feel, briefly, how small and brief everything else is. She is the last. She has been the last before, in the way that something which has lived long enough eventually is. She opens her mouth and finds no sound comes out.

So she listens.

The trees have a song. The wind carries harmonics she has been trying to name for centuries. The animals move through patterns that are themselves a kind of music, and she sits down in the middle of all of it and lets it fill her. Vast and patient and enough.

The bird circles above her, listing to the right as always, tracing its imperfect arc against a sky that goes on forever.

She is the last person in the world and it is still singing and she finds, with a surprise that is by now familiar, that she is at peace. Not happy, not unhappy. Just here. Just breathing. Just another thing that is alive in a world full of things that are alive.

This too shall pass, she thinks. And that is all right. I will be here while it lasts.

Nyssara is young again, in a room she knows.

The drow across the table has been her teacher for years. Patient, precise, entirely devoted — so he has always seemed — to her success, her safety, her future. He is explaining something. He is always explaining something. The nature of information. The nature of families. The nature of carrying a secret.

“Your eyes could ruin everything,” he says, with the gentleness of someone who loves you enough to tell you hard truths. “If people find out what you are, your mother will have no choice. But she won’t find out. Because I will make sure she doesn’t. I will always be there. I won’t abandon you, even if the truth comes out.”

He reaches across the table and adjusts her glasses, carefully, the way you handle something precious.

“We just have to make sure it doesn’t.”

His smile is warm. His smile is the smile of a man who is helping you. This is what helping feels like. This is what being safe feels like.

This is what being managed feels like, something in her thinks, very quietly, and she doesn’t know what to do with the thought, so she puts it away and lets the warmth of the dream fold back around her.

She wakes before the others and lies very still for a while, looking at the sky.

Querc runs.

Not from anything. Just the pure fact of it, four legs on earth, the forest moving past at the speed of something that belongs here. They are a wolf. They are exactly the right size for the world they are in. There is no past in this body, no sickness spreading through a village far away, no mother’s face growing thinner in the firelight, no man who said what he said and then left, no citizenship process caught in Imperial bureaucracy, no body that has never quite been the right shape, no daughter of a matriarch who is supposed to become a matriarch herself.

There is only forward. There is only now. The pack runs somewhere ahead and the night is everything.

They could stay.

Not as a metaphor. As a fact. The forest goes on in all directions. The elf, the person with all of it, could be left at the edge of the trees. The wolf does not carry grief. The wolf does not carry the particular ache of a body you live in sideways, the constant low-level friction of a self that does not quite fit the name it was given.

The wolf does not know that feeling at all.

Stay, something says. Stay and run and never stop.

And Querc understands, in the deepest part of themselves, why an animal that could become a person never would.

The pull is real and profound, and they stay with it for a long time, feeling the wolf’s paws on the earth, the wolf’s lungs filling with cold air, the wolf’s heart beating with the simple animal joy of being alive and fast and exactly what it is.

But somewhere in the dark is a drum worn smooth with years of use. Somewhere is a mother who is sick. Somewhere is a man who took something with him when he left, and Querc cannot forgive themselves for leaving until they have done something that makes the leaving mean something.

They become an elf again at the edge of the dream.

They wake first, before the others, and sit in the fading ember-glow watching the fire breathe until the world comes back. Their hands are shaking slightly. They press them flat against the earth and feel its warmth beneath the dew and stay like that until the shaking stops.

They wake at different times and when they are all awake none of them speak immediately.

The silence is charged at first, the rawness of having been seen somewhere private. They all carry something from the night, and they can feel, faintly, that they carry pieces of each other’s somethings too. The embarrassment of this is real and nobody is sure what to do with it.

Then Querc puts a pot over the rebuilt fire and Nyssara finds what is left of the food in her pack and sets it out without comment, and the business of breakfast does what it always does, gives the hands something to work on, lets the silence change by degrees from charged to simply present.

By the time they eat it is different again. Comfortable. The kind of silence where you can look at someone across a fire and the look contains more than you have said and neither of you has to say it.

“I’m alright,” Querc says eventually, to no one in particular.

Nobody asks what they mean. Nobody needs to.

“I know,” Wynn says.

They pack their things. Mara checks the package, still intact, still glowing faintly, easier to ignore in daylight. They are more like a party than they were yesterday. They will be more like one tomorrow.

They walk on.

The Wall road is easier going. The ground is firmer, the forest less aggressive, and the party moves with the settled rhythm of people who have survived one difficult day and adjusted their expectations accordingly.

Somewhere around midmorning Nyssara stops without quite breaking her stride.

Her eyes go to the ridge behind them. A glance, smooth and casual, designed to register as nothing.

She saw a head. Dark hair, good coat. Gone behind the ridge before she could be certain.

“We’re being followed,” she says.

“Gilt Knives?” Mara asks.

“Possibly. Or Kisara.”

“Kisara is injured.”

“Kisara has been doing this for thirty years.”

They discuss an ambush briefly. File it away under problems they don’t need yet. They have a destination and whoever is behind them has their own intentions, and the best response to both is to arrive first.

They pick up the pace.

The sun is low when they arrive, the light coming through the cemetery gates at the particular gold of late afternoon in early autumn. Thornhaven is not a small cemetery. Adventurers die in quantity and people put them somewhere, and this has been somewhere for generations. The markers range from elaborate stone to simple posts, and the whole place has the quality of ground that has received a great deal of grief and held it without collapsing.

At the center, a figure stands among the graves.

The party stops at the gate.

Mara looks at the figure. Looks at the leg, the way it’s held, the posture.

“That’s not Kisara,” she says.

“How do you know?” Wynn asks.

“The leg. Kisara favors her left. That figure is standing evenly.” She keeps her eyes on it. “And we left before Kisara. Even injured she’s fast, but not that fast.”

“Illusion,” Nyssara says. “The goblin.”

They look at each other.

“Split up,” Nyssara says. “I’ll take the perimeter. Querc, can you get closer without being seen?”

Querc is already becoming a snake.

Nyssara moves along the eastern edge of the cemetery, stepping between markers, and raises one hand. Small lights appear, soft points drifting toward the figure in the center like they are simply following a current. A test. She wants to see what it does.

Meanwhile, snake-Querc moves through the grass with the patience of something that has nowhere to be and all the time there is to get there.

The cemetery smells of old stone and damp earth and the particular mineral quality of disturbed ground. The grass is long here, close to the central markers, and Querc moves through it easily. They can feel the warmth of the earth through their whole body, the way a snake feels it, and the sensation is grounding in a way that helps after last night.

Near the central graves the grass parts around a flat stone, and on the stone:

A cockroach.

The same cockroach.

Its crystallized carapace catches the dying light. Its crystallized eyes are fixed on the figure in the center.

At that moment the figure makes an irritated gesture, and the dancing lights vanish.

The real Kisara was not a magic user.

Querc slips back through the grass. Nyssara is already circling back. They regroup at the far wall, and the picture comes together: Fetch in the center, transformed, wearing Kisara’s face. Renn and Kade visible as shadows further into the grounds, half-hidden behind markers. Senna nowhere obvious.

“The fountain,” Nyssara says quietly. “In the center. Someone is behind it.”

They are still working out the approach when a hand comes down on Mara’s shoulder from behind.

They spin, weapons half-raised.

Kisara Solis looks back at them, slightly out of breath, entirely unsurprised.

“You’re better than I expected,” she says.

“You followed us,” Nyssara says.

“I did.” A small pause. “The job was never just the job.”

“You were testing us,” Mara says.

“I needed to know what you were before I asked you to be part of something.” She looks out at the cemetery, at the fake version of herself standing at the central graves. “The goblin’s real self is behind the fountain. The two at the back I’d handle last. They’re hired hands. The woman—” Her eyes find the fountain. “She’s the one who wants the package.”

She holds out her hand. Mara gives back the package.

“How do you want to do this?” Mara asks.

Kisara looks at her. “How do you want to do it?”

Mara thinks for a moment. Then she turns to the others.

Nyssara and Wynn take the long way around, silent, ending up behind Renn and Kade with the unambiguous geometry of blades against backs. Renn does the math immediately.

“Easy,” he says. “We’re easy.”

Kade says nothing. He is looking at a point somewhere past Wynn’s shoulder and has decided to keep looking there.

Mara and Kisara walk straight up the center.

The Fetch illusion drops when they are twenty feet away. Where Kisara was, there is now a goblin in an oversized coat covered in pockets, watching them with the bright unreadable expression of someone who has decided they are going to get what they came for. His eyes keep going to the package in Kisara’s hands. Not to Mara, not to Kisara. To the package, with the fixed attention of someone who has been thinking about a specific thing for a long time and cannot quite stop.

Senna steps out from behind the fountain with two rapiers drawn.

“We don’t want trouble,” she says. “We just want the package.”

“No,” Mara says.

“We know what’s in it. Resurrection technology. That’s illegal in the Middle Tier.”

“Then report it,” Mara says. “After we leave.”

“We could take it right now and report nothing to nobody.” Senna’s eyes move to Kisara. “Nobody needs to know you were ever here.”

Kisara says nothing. This is, Mara understands, still the test.

“Walk away,” Mara says.

Fetch’s hands come up. Something builds between his palms, light and heat, getting realer by the second. His eyes are on the package and they are hungry and he is past negotiating.

Querc is a snake no longer.

The wolf covers the ground between them with a speed that does not leave room for reaction, and then Fetch is down, and then he is still, and then the sounds the wolf makes are not sounds the others will describe later when they talk about this night.

It is over quickly. It is not quiet.

Renn, behind them, lets out a breath. “We’re still easy,” he says. “Very easy. Incredibly easy.”

“Go,” Nyssara says.

They go. Into the trees without looking back.

Senna has watched all of this. She is looking at where Fetch was, then at the wolf, then at the blade Mara has not sheathed. She raises her rapiers slowly. Lowers them. Something shifts in her face, the particular resentment of someone who believed tonight was the night things would finally go her way.

“That’s illegal,” she says, nodding toward the package. “I’ll report it. I’ll tell them exactly what I saw.”

“You can try,” Mara says.

Senna takes a step back. Then another. She reaches the cemetery gate and pauses there, her back to it.

“You’ll regret this,” she says.

She turns and walks into the long evening light.

She does not hear the wolf until it is too late to run.

The wolf brings her down at the edge of the cemetery, methodical, a thorn-vine from a paw winding around her ankle, and Senna’s voice carries through the dusk in a way that makes the others go still.

No one moves to stop it.

They stand at the gate and feel the thing that is happening, which is not simple and is not clean. Querc has crossed a line that was inside themselves, not the world, and somewhere the person and the wolf have stopped being separate things in the way they usually are. They can all feel it, the specific quality of it, and they stay where they are until it is finished.

The wolf stands over what remains of Senna in the grass. Then slowly, the shape changes.

Querc is an elf again.

They are on their hands and knees, blood on their face, staring at their own hands. Their eyes have the quality of a person who has come back from somewhere very far and is still working out the distance.

The party waits.

Wynn crosses the grass and sits down next to them and puts her arms around them and holds on. For a while that is all that needs to happen.

“I’m here,” she says.

“I know,” Querc says, eventually. “Thank you.”

The others come closer. Nobody speaks for a while. Mara puts her hand on Querc’s back and keeps it there.

Eventually someone searches Senna’s body and finds a note in the breast pocket. No signature. Precise, unhurried handwriting:

Bring me the resurrection technology Kisara carries and you will be rewarded handsomely.

The party looks at the note and then at each other.

“Someone knew what was in the package,” Nyssara says.

“Someone planned around it,” Mara says.

“Someone is still out there,” Wynn says.

Kisara takes the note and reads it. Her face does nothing. But she holds it for a moment longer than she needs to, and then she folds it and puts it in her coat pocket, and the way she does this tells you something without her having to say it.

“Come,” she says. “Let’s open it.”

The package glows stronger near the graves.

Kisara carries it to the center of Thornhaven, to the place where Darrow Thane’s marker stands between Mira Sweetwater and Kess Ironfinger. The light from inside the wrapping spreads outward through the grass as she approaches, finding the edges of the three graves like it knows where to go. The cemetery is lit in something warmer and softer than lantern light.

Inside is a mushroom.

Not an ordinary one. A mycelium construct, engineered and cultivated, glowing with its own internal luminescence. The same organism that was in the tea last night. The same organism that made their dreams bleed into each other.

Kisara takes it in both hands and something in it responds, vibrating slightly, cycling through its glow. And then the light rises.

It forms slowly, the shape of light given the outline of a man. Tall, unhurried, carrying himself with the ease of someone who has spent most of his life outdoors. The features arrive last: weathered, warm, the face of someone who has seen you through many versions of yourself.

His voice comes before his mouth moves.

“Kis.”

Kisara goes very still.

“I’m glad you found it,” Darrow says. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

“I almost didn’t,” she says. Her voice is level. Her hands are not quite.

“I know. I’m sorry about the leg.”

“You’re not here to apologize.”

“No,” he says. “I’m here because I missed you.”

She looks at him for a long moment. The party stands at the edge of the light, not moving, not speaking. This is not theirs.

“You shouldn’t have done this,” Kisara says. “The mushroom. The whole scheme.”

“Probably not.”

“It was a bad idea.”

“It brought you here.”

“I would have come anyway. I come every year.”

“I know.” A pause, and in it something that is not quite sadness and not quite peace. “I wanted to see you one more time. And I wanted to give you a choice.”

He looks at the party then, the acknowledgment of people who carried something they were asked to carry and brought it to the right place.

“We could have more time,” he says, turning back to her. “If you want it. There’s still so much we didn’t see.”

Kisara is on her knees.

This is the most surprising thing the party has seen in two days, not the vine wall or the squirrel or the wolf, but this. Kisara Solis, veteran of decades, on her knees in the grass of a graveyard, holding a glowing mushroom, with tears moving down a face that does not often allow them.

“You’re an idiot,” she says, through it.

“You’ve said so before.”

“I’ll say it again.”

“I know.” And then, gently: “Tell me what the party says, Kis. I need you to listen to them.”

She looks up at the four of them.

“Tell me,” she says. “Honestly. All of it.”

They look at the mushroom and at the light and at each other.

Mara goes first, asking Kisara what she knows, what she was told. Querc examines the construct with care, reaching for what they can feel of it through the ground, the biological truth of what it can and cannot sustain. Wynn listens to what is not being said. Nyssara puts the pieces together quickly and quietly and when she speaks she speaks plainly.

The mushroom can sustain something. But what returns would not be Darrow. Not really. It would be a version of him that begins forgetting immediately, losing itself one memory at a time, dissolving slowly into something that looks like him and can speak with his voice but is moving, from the first moment, toward nothing. Weeks. Months if they were lucky.

She would get some time with him. And then she would watch him dissolve.

The party tells her this.

She is quiet for a long time. Long enough that the only sound is the grass and the distant city and the faint hum of the mycelium in her hands.

“He would hate it,” she says finally. “Watching me watch him go.”

“Yes,” Wynn says.

Wynn moves to where Kisara is kneeling and sits down beside her in the grass. They sit shoulder to shoulder for a moment before Wynn speaks.

“I have lived a long time,” she says. “Long enough to have done this many times. Said goodbye to people I could not imagine the world without.” She looks at the light, at Darrow’s face, at Kisara. “It never gets easy. I won’t tell you it does. But I will tell you this: they don’t go away. They live in what you do with the time after. In what you build. In who you become because you knew them.”

“Let him go. Not because it won’t hurt. Because it will be harder to carry him like this than to let him rest.”

Kisara listens. Sits with it.

“He would hate it,” she says again, but quieter this time. To herself.

She looks up at Darrow.

“I know what you’re going to say,” Darrow tells her.

“Then I won’t say it.”

“You can say it.”

“I don’t want to.”

He is quiet for a moment. The light that makes him shifts slightly, the way firelight does when someone breathes near it.

“Do you remember the pass in the northern reach?” he says. “Three days into that blizzard and we’d run out of everything worth running out of.”

“You burned your spare boots,” Kisara says.

“My feet were fine.”

“Your feet were terrible.”

“My feet were acceptable. Mira’s healing was exceptional.”

Something moves in Kisara’s face. Not quite a smile. Close.

“I keep thinking about that night,” Darrow says. “When the storm finally broke and we could see the stars again. You said it was the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen and I said I agreed and I wasn’t looking at the stars.”

“I know,” Kisara says. “I knew then.”

“I know you knew.” A pause. “I have no regrets, Kis. Not one. I want you to know that.”

“I have one,” she says.

“What?”

“That I’m still here and you’re not.”

The light is very still.

“You were supposed to be there,” Darrow says, gently. “That last fight. You weren’t. And I know you’ve been carrying that.”

“Every day.”

“Then put it down.” He says it simply, without drama, the way you say things to someone you have known for a very long time. “You didn’t fail us. You were somewhere else doing something that needed doing. That’s what we were. We were people who went where things needed doing.” A beat. “You still are.”

She presses her hand against the light and the light presses back.

“I’m not finished,” she tells him.

“I know,” he says. “That’s why I’m letting go.”

Kisara deactivates the mushroom.

The light builds for one moment to something brighter, and then it opens outward, a wave of something that is not light and not sound but moves through the party like both, and for a moment they are somewhere else entirely.

Around a campfire. Seeing through someone else’s eyes. The fire is small and the night is cold and across from them Kisara is laughing at something Kess just said, young, her face unlined, and Mira is cleaning her holy symbol and humming, and Kess is grinning with the particular grin of someone who has just been funnier than they expected.

The warmth of it is specific. The warmth of a fire in good company, of knowing exactly where you are and exactly who you are with and not needing anything else.

And then flashes. Mira and Kess, falling in a wall of Leviathan aggression, and two people holding each other in the wreckage of that. Years of the same two people, older, quieter, sitting at the edge of things as the sun goes down. A hand finding another hand. No words needed.

And last: three faces in sunlight. Darrow, Mira, Kess. Young again, or maybe they were never old in the ways that mattered. Darrow turns and nods once.

Thank you. It’s alright. Goodbye.

The graveyard returns to itself. Moonlight. Grass. Markers in the dark.

Kisara stays on her knees a while longer. Nobody tries to fill the silence. The party stands around her, not too close, and lets it be what it is.

They build one at the edge of the cemetery. Far enough from the graves to feel like they are giving the ground its space. The fire is larger than it needs to be and nobody objects.

They eat. They sit. The night settles around them.

After a long time, Kisara lifts her head and looks at them across the fire.

“I want to tell you something,” she says. “About why I’ve been doing this alone.”

Nobody moves.

“After Mira and Kess, I kept going because Darrow was still there. After Darrow—” She stops. Starts again. “I told myself I was fine. That I didn’t need anyone. That needing people was what got them killed.” A pause. “That’s not wisdom. That’s just grief talking, and I’ve been letting it talk for three months.”

She looks at each of them in turn.

“I’ve been watching you since the inn this morning. The way you move together. The way you fight for each other without discussing it first. The way the gnome plays and the wolf holds and the rogue calculates and the paladin pushes through even when it costs her.” She pauses. “You’re not finished yet. None of you are. But you have something that takes most parties years to build and some never manage at all.”

“We’ve been together three months,” Nyssara says.

“I know. That’s what I mean.”

Kisara is quiet for a moment.

“We are pack animals. Every one of us, under everything else we are. We are not built to do this alone. The Empire has been telling itself for so long that surviving is enough, that the Leviathans have taken everything soft out of us, that there’s no room for anything except the fight.” She shakes her head slowly. “The fight is wasted if there’s nothing worth coming back to. The horrors of this world are wasted if we don’t find a way to build something good inside them. Warmth. Safety. People who know your name and mean it.”

Wynn has taken out her instrument. She is not playing yet, just holding it, the bird on her shoulder watching the fire.

“I am going to build a guild,” Kisara says. “I’m calling it the Solis Lantern. A light in the dark. For the parts of this society the government leaves behind, the people the bureaucracy won’t send resources to, the problems too small for a desk and too real for ignoring.” She looks at the fire for a moment. “I want you to be the first members. All of you.”

Silence.

“All of us,” Mara says.

“All of you.”

Mara is quiet for a moment. She is thinking about her mother and her sister, about the gate she watches every morning, about all the things she came to Brinegate to find and hasn’t found yet. And she is thinking about these three people around this fire, and about how the warmth of it does not feel like a betrayal of what she is still looking for. It feels like a reason to keep looking.

“Yes,” she says.

Querc looks into the fire for a long moment. They are thinking about the wolf in the dream, about the pull of the forest, about the drum at their hip and the mother who is sick and the man who left with something that wasn’t his to take. About what it means to belong to something without losing the part of yourself that belongs to somewhere else.

“Yes,” they say.

Wynn starts to play. Softly, the melody finding its shape as she goes, something that is new and also somehow familiar, a theme she has played before in different keys across different decades. She does not answer in words. The music is her answer. Something about new beginnings that echo old ones, about the bittersweet particular beauty of a moment you know you will carry with you long after it has passed.

Nyssara is quiet for the longest. She is looking at the fire and her hand has moved to her glasses without her thinking about it, the old reflexive gesture, checking they are in place.

She takes them off.

Her eyes catch the firelight, amber and gold, warm in the dark. She blinks once, feeling the air on her face without the frame of them. The others have known for a while, in the way people who pay attention know things they haven’t been told. Nobody says anything about it. Nobody makes it into anything.

Nyssara looks at the fire. She looks at her companions. She smiles, and lets herself.

“Yes,” she says.

They sit for a long time after that. Kisara talks about Darrow and Mira and Kess, the stories you tell when someone is gone and you want to keep them real. She tells the one about Mira’s cooking, which was extraordinary in its ambition and catastrophic in its results. She tells the one about Kess and the burning building and the one hand because Kess only needed one hand for a thing like that. She talks until the fire burns low and then she lets it burn.

The note is in her pocket. Bring me the resurrection technology and you will be rewarded handsomely. Someone knew. Someone planned around it. Someone is still out there.

She will think about that in the morning.

Tonight the fire does what fires do, and the Solis Lantern exists, and that is enough.

They leave for Brinegate at dawn.

A new guild is waiting.