Caved, In

mong the screams, grey smoke consumed the Silver Stag until the common room seemed less a place and more the remains of one.

The fire that had once belonged harmlessly to the hearth had along spilled out onto splintered furniture, climbing broken tables and licking at the beams overhead. Charred bodies lay where they had fallen, limbs twisted into grotesque shapes by the agony of their final moments - some hidden beneath overturned benches, others exposed whenever the smoke thinned enough for the flames to find them. Blood darkened the grooves between the floorboards and had been tracked everywhere by boots, paws, and clawed feet until scarcely a clean patch of woo
d remained.

The fighting had lost whatever shape it once possessed. Kenneth bellowed somewhere to Neil’s left, the dwarf’s axe striking a howling creature with enough force to be heard even through the surrounding uproar. Lindsey’s bowstring answered from farther across the room, sharp and regular but impossible to place through the smoke. Gregory’s voice rose behind him in a hurried incantation, the final words nearly swallowed by the crackle of a bolt that followed. Joshua appeared only in fragments between bodies and overturned furniture, moving wherever the press thinned enough for the ranger to exploit it, while Ashley was impossible to follow at all. Neil would glimpse the rogue beneath one table or beside one pillar, then look again and find nothing except a goblin collapsing with a dagger buried beneath its jaw.

They were all still alive. Beyond that, the paladin knew almost nothing.

There was a scream ahead of him. Another cry followed somewhere behind him. Through a gap in the smoke he saw a man disappear beneath two goblins, and farther away a woman stumbled against a table with both hands clamped over her belly, staring down as blood pushed between her fingers.

The Silver Stag vanished for the length of a heartbeat, and Neil saw the market again: bodies in the street, overturned stalls, people calling from different directions. He remembered the terrible arithmetic of deciding which voice he could reach and which one he could not.

“Neil!”

His sister’s voice came through the dark smoke.

He turned toward it and saw nothing.

A hound burst from the haze instead. Neil caught its weight against his shield, felt claws scrape across the white-painted face, and forced it sideways into the remains of a table before driving his sword through its ribs. The creature went still. Lindsey called again, farther away now, and Neil finally understood what should have been obvious from the moment the door had fallen:

They were not holding the tavern. They were being broken apart inside it.

Neil drew breath to order the retreat, but the hilt of his sword warmed beneath his palm. At first he mistook the sensation for the heat filling the room. Then it deepened, faint but unmistakable, and a pale radiance stirred along the ricasso. It was not the strengthening glow that came when he summoned the Light through the blade. Something nearby had touched it without touching him, another light calling quietly to his own.

He looked toward the doorway. Through the smoke he caught sight of Kenneth forcing a path toward a broken section of wall. Joshua had already turned toward a shattered window. Lindsey was falling back toward the entrance between shots, while Gregory stumbled after her, sweeping his staff in a broad arc that sent two goblins sprawling beneath a spray of purple sparks. Every instinct told Neil to go with them, yet the sword grew warmer in his hand.

He swore and turned back.

Near the far wall, he found the source: a woman kneeling among the wreckage beside a man whose chest had been opened by claws. Her pale robes were dark with soot and blood, long brown hair hanging across one side of her face as she pressed both hands against the wound. Beneath her palms shone a soft white light.

Neil slowed despite himself. He knew the Light, but he had never seen it move like that. There was no violence in it, no force waiting to be unleashed. It settled into the wounded man almost tenderly, drawing torn flesh together by painful degrees while the woman trembled with the effort. At last the man coughed, his eyes fluttering open as though he had returned from somewhere very far away. He found the priestess above him and reached weakly for her hand.

“You... saved—”

A goblin dropped through the smoke behind him and drove its blade into his chest before either of them could react. His eyes widened, his fingers tightening once around the priestess’s hand before falling slack. She stared at him in stunned disbelief as the creature wrenched its weapon free and turned toward her, crouching to spring.

A heavy white shield slammed into it. The impact hurled the goblin sideways into the wreckage as a paladin emerged to retrieve it, and his glowing sword followed into the creature before it could rise.

“Move,” he said.

The woman looked up. Her face was younger than Neil had expected, though exhaustion had drawn it tight around the eyes. Fear was there, but whatever else governed her had pushed it somewhere beneath the work before her.

“There are others,” she said. “They still need help!”

A second goblin lunged between two overturned chairs. The paladin cut it down, then nearly collided with a hound coming from the opposite direction. He drove his shield into its muzzle and heard bone crack.

Neil shouted over his shoulder. “Everyone out! Now!”

Kenneth answered with a roar and shouldered through the weakened wall. Lindsey released twice more before disappearing toward the front. Joshua changed direction immediately and dashed through the nearest opening. Gregory staggered behind him, staff blazing as he cleared his path. Ashley disappeared into the smoke so completely that Neil could not tell whether she had obeyed.

They were leaving the same way they had fought—separately, trusting that everyone else possessed enough skill or luck to find the outside. The heavy beams above them were slowly turning to embers, cracking beneath the heat and threatening to cave in at any moment.

Neil turned back to the priestess and caught her by the arm. “We’re going!”

“If I leave him—”

“He's already dead, woman!” The words escaped before he could soften them.

She stared at him.

Neil regretted them immediately, then looked down.

The man beneath her had stopped breathing. The priestess followed his eyes. Her hand remained against his chest for another moment as the white light faded slowly from beneath her fingers. Whatever she had been urging the body to do had reached a place where the body could no longer answer.

The paladin reached for her again, but this time her attention shifted to his sword. The pale light along the blade had grown stronger in her presence. She watched it with an expression Neil could not read at first—not surprise, exactly, and not fear. Recognition.

“You carry the Light,” she said.

A hound dropped from the second-floor gallery before Neil could answer. He saw it too late to evade cleanly and met it instead, catching its jaws against the flat of his blade as the creature struck him high. The impact jarred through both shoulders. Neil twisted with its weight, forced the sword through its mouth, and drove forward until steel tore through the back of its skull. The headless beast collapsed heavily at the priestess’s feet.

White cloak covered in soot, the paladin ripped his blade free and looked at her. “I do. And if we stay here much longer, I won’t."

She looked once more toward the dead man.

Neil did not give her time to reconsider. He scooped her beneath the knees and lifted her against him. He carried her toward the nearest opening, shield angled to protect them both. A hound bounded after them across the wreckage, claws scraping for purchase along the bloody floorboards. Neil heard it gaining ground but could not turn while carrying her.

An arrow passed beside his shoulder. The hound tumbled forward with the shaft buried through its throat. Lindsey stood outside the broken doorway, another arrow already drawn.

“Hurry!”

Cold air struck him as they stumbled into the night. For several seconds he knew only breathing, and then he counted.

Gregory stood doubled over beside a tree, leaning so heavily upon his staff that it seemed the only thing keeping the young wizard upright. Kenneth had one hand pressed to his shoulder, blood soaking the sleeve beneath it. Joshua stood farther from the tavern, watching the darkness rather than the fire, his shortbow still raised. Lindsey remained near the doorway. Ashley was there as well, though apart from the others, a ragged tear in one sleeve exposing the bloody claw marks beneath.

All of them alive. Neil lowered the priestess carefully to her feet.

Behind them, the Silver Stag burned. Fire poured through shattered windows and crawled beneath the eaves until a section of roof collapsed inward, carrying a storm of sparks into the night. A scream rose from somewhere inside, and Neil turned before thought caught up with him.

Kenneth seized his arm. “No.”

Neil looked at him. The dwarf’s face was grey beneath the soot.

“There’s nothin’ left for us in there, paladin. Not even you.”

Another cry came from within. Neil stared toward the doorway, and for an instant the smoke belonged to another place. He saw market stalls behind the flames and remembered voices calling from directions he could not reach. His grip tightened around the sword.

Joshua stepped beside him. “More are coming.”

Though the ranger was right, that did not make leaving easier.

Neil forced himself to turn away. “Shelter. Far from here.”

Joshua nodded once and sprinted westward immediately, moving toward the low folds of the surrounding land where the darkness gathered most deeply. Kenneth followed with a visible limp. Gregory forced himself upright and went after them, muttering something bitter when his staff slipped on the damp ground. Lindsey waited until Neil and the priestess had started moving before falling behind them to watch the trail. Ashley disappeared into the darkness along their flank, never quite joining the line.

Neil glanced toward the woman beside him. “Can you run?”

She looked back at the burning tavern with tears in her pale green eyes. He placed her gently on the ground again.

They ran.

Joshua kept them away from the road and led them across low hills where wet grass dragged at their boots. The Silver Stag disappeared behind the folds of the land, though its fire remained for some time as a dull orange glow beneath the clouds. No one spoke. Their breathing was too ragged for conversation, and every distant howl sent hands toward weapons. Gregory stumbled once and cursed when Neil caught him by the arm. Kenneth repeatedly rolled one shoulder as though trying to decide whether it still belonged to him.

Lindsey said nothing at all.

The priestess remained beside the paladin. Only once did she look back.

He did not.

Joshua found the cave shortly before midnight.

The opening lay beneath a low ridge, half concealed behind the roots of a tree that had grown crookedly from the stone. It was narrow enough that Kenneth complained before they had even entered, but beyond the first few yards the passage widened into a shallow chamber where they could sit without crowding one another. The cave smelled of wet earth and mineral water. There were no tracks at the entrance, no bones inside, and no signs that anything larger than a fox had sheltered there recently.

The ranger disappeared into the dark alone. When he returned several minutes later, he sheathed his sword.

“Empty.”

They entered without ceremony, and only when the mouth of the cave had become a patch of deeper darkness behind them did exhaustion seem to settle into their bodies all at once. Kenneth lowered himself against the wall with more care than dignity and pulled flint from his pack. His first strike missed the steel. The second produced a spark that immediately died. He frowned at his own trembling hand as though personally offended by it, waited until the worst had passed, then tried again. The third spark caught in the dry grass Joshua had gathered, and the dwarf bent over it until a thin thread of smoke appeared.

Gregory lowered the end of his staff toward the ember. He spoke no incantation; the little flame brightened anyway and spread through the kindling until a modest fire began to warm the chamber.

Its light revealed what darkness had hidden. Blood had dried along Lindsey’s temple and beneath one ear, while her fingertips were raw where the bowstring had torn at them. Gregory’s robes were blackened along one side, his face colorless with fatigue. Joshua carried a long cut across one thigh and another near the shoulder. Kenneth appeared to have been injured in a dozen places without being badly injured in any single one, which struck Neil as somehow appropriate. Ashley remained against the far wall with her wounded arm untreated, watching the others from beyond the strongest reach of the fire. The priestess stayed near the entrance, pale and exhausted, her hands folded quietly before her.

Then she noticed the blood soaking through Kenneth’s sleeve.

“May I?”

The dwarf looked up at her. “May ya what?”

She glanced meaningfully toward his shoulder.

“...Oh,” he muttered.

A soft white glow gathered beneath her fingers. Whatever relief had begun to creep into Kenneth’s expression vanished beneath immediate suspicion. “I... I’ve had worse, y’know.”

“I do not doubt that.”

He looked around the cave as though hoping someone might intervene on his behalf. No one did. With a muttered complaint, he finally extended his arm.

The priestess knelt beside him and held her hands near the wound. Neil watched more closely this time. Her Light behaved nothing like his own. When he called upon it, warmth gathered into strength, something that answered will and oath and became force within him. Hers seemed almost to listen. It settled gently into Kenneth, encouraging rather than commanding, and the tension around the dwarf’s eyes began to ease before he seemed aware of it.

When she withdrew her hands, Kenneth rolled his shoulder experimentally.

“Hm.”

The woman looked up. “Mm?”

“That’s not... terrible.”

A faint smile touched her face.

She moved next to Gregory.

The young wizard extended his hand without protest, though his attention remained fixed upon the glow gathering beneath her hands with open academic fascination.

“You are studying me?” she said.

“Observing.”

She tended the burn along his side before moving to Lindsey. The archer allowed the priestess to clean the cut at her temple and settle the Light over the raw places along her fingers without saying much at all. Joshua waited until she reached him, then silently offered his wounded shoulder.

The ranger studied her as she worked. “I don’t know you.”

“That is fair.”

When she finished, Joshua tested the joint once and nodded.

Ashley refused before she had taken more than a step.

“No.”

The woman stopped.

Ashley remained against the far wall, one arm bloodied beneath the torn sleeve, her expression making it clear there would be no discussion. The priestess regarded her for a moment, perhaps searching for an argument worth making, then simply nodded. She returned to the fire.

No one asked her name.

Neil leaned his shield against the wall and worked the stiffness from his sword hand. His fingers hurt badly enough that closing them fully required thought. He counted the living again and found every one of them still there. It should have felt like victory, but whenever the cave grew quiet enough he could still hear the screams from the Silver Stag.

“Gods," Joshua threw his bow to the ground. "None of you knew what anyone else was doing.”

Kenneth pointed toward him. “Oh? And where were you? Every time I looked for a ranger, you were dancin' around.”

“Moving.”

“Runnin' away.”

“Repositioning.”

Ashley smiled faintly. “Ah, so he fled with professional vocabulary.”

Joshua turned toward her. “Yes, you would know something about disappearing when things get difficult.”

The amusement left her face. Ashley pushed away from the wall. “No. The problem is apparently that the rest of you require permission before anyone moves.”

Neil held up a hand. “No one said that."

“You complain when I stay. You complain when I leave. Perhaps next time I’ll ask where you would like me to stand.”

“I would settle for knowing whether you are even still in the fight with us," said Joshua.

The rogue’s expression sharpened. “If you cannot see me, ranger, that generally means I am doing my job.”

“If I cannot see you, I cannot account for you.”

“I am not yours to account for.”

“That attitude will get us killed.”

"Would you like to know what we rogues call those who are afraid of death?" Ashley took one slow step nearer the fire. “Cowards.”

Joshua lowered his voice. "Careful, elf."

Ashley held her stare. “Oh, trust me. I am being very careful.”

Neil exhaled sharply. “This is getting us nowhere...”

The dwarf pointed at him. “Hey, the human started complainin'.”

“This human's name is still Joshua, Kenneth. And I only identified the problem.”

“You identify everyone else’s problem," muttered Kenneth. "Never yours.”

“I had fewer than most, that is no fault of mine.”

"And what, pray tell, is yours?" Gregory said, sitting up. "By all means, grace us with your wisdom."

Joshua reached for his pipe.

"Trusting you people."

Ashley laughed once. “Ah, there it is.”

Joshua turned toward her. “What?”

“Our ever-infallible ranger.”

“I did not say that...”

“You hardly need to.”

Gregory glanced toward Joshua. “She does have a point.”

Joshua’s jaw tightened. “You were nearly killed twice, wizard.”

“And therefore everything you did was correct?”

“I kept people alive.”

“So did the rest of us.”

Neil tilted his head. "Did we?"

For the first time, Lindsey looked up.

Joshua pointed to the archer, who sat several feet away with her back partly to the group. "Had I not been there, Lindsey would have been dragged beneath a table.”

Neil straightened despite the pain in his side. “Do not use our sister to win an argument.”

Joshua looked toward him. “I’m not trying to win anything. I’m telling you what happened.”

“And I am telling you that you have known us for less than a few days.”

Joshua pointed at Neil. “That is more than enough time to learn you three are more dangerous together than you are apart.”

Gregory’s hand tightened around his staff. A faint violet glow awakened beneath the crystal before he seemed aware of it himself.

Neil raised his hand low. “Easy.”

“I am perfectly calm.”

“Your staff disagrees, brother.”

The glow faded as the young wizard forced his grip to loosen. Neil watched the argument continue to pass from one grievance to another, exhaustion stripping away whatever patience the fight had left them. Kenneth wanted someone to admit Gregory’s magic had endangered him. Gregory resented being judged by people who knew nothing of what his spells required. Joshua spoke as though the battle might have been solved by sufficient discipline, while Ashley treated dependence itself as a weakness and every complaint about her methods as proof that the others wanted her to become something she was not. Each possessed some piece of the truth, and none appeared interested in hearing the pieces held by anyone else.

“Then perhaps we can agree on one thing,” Joshua said. “Whatever else happened tonight, none of us can fight as though the others are not there.”

“In the forests of Medford, no elf needs to be told where another is in battle. We listen. We watch. We know.” Ashley's eyes passed over him dismissively. “Perhaps getting lost among your own companions is simply a ranger tradition.”

Joshua remained composed. “There is nothing personal in it. If seven people intend to fight together, they need some awareness of one another.”

“Then be more aware.”

Kenneth gave a tired sigh from beside the fire, but Joshua ignored him.

“I cannot account for someone who deliberately makes herself impossible to follow.”

The elf looked almost bored. “You keep using that word. Account. As though I’ve misplaced myself and you’re responsible for finding me.”

“That is not what I said.”

“Oh no, ranger. You’re much too careful to say what you mean.”

Something tightened briefly around Joshua’s eyes. Ashley noticed. That seemed to improve her mood.

Joshua shifted his weight against the cave wall. “Fine then. You want to talk about it? The gallery.”

Ashley clicked her nails against the hilt of her dagger. “Finally.”

“You climbed toward the second floor without checking what was happening above you,” he pointed.

“I knew exactly what was happening above me.”

“You collided with me.”

Ashley stared at him for a moment, then laughed softly. “You rolled over a railing and landed on me!”

“The stairs were blocked, elf. I was repositioning.”

“Child, you were falling.”

Joshua’s patience visibly thinned, though his voice remained measured. “And neither of us reached it because you moved into a route you could not see.”

Ashley pushed away from the wall at last. “There it is.”

“What?”

“That wonderful little human certainty.”

Gregory glanced up.

Joshua’s expression cooled. “Meaning?”

Ashley took her time answering, brushing a fleck of dried blood from her sleeve. “You humans are always so impressed with yourselves when you find a road. Suddenly it belongs to you. Anyone already standing on it must have taken a wrong turn.”

Joshua gave a small, humorless smile. “And elves apparently believe being older excuses poor judgment.”

Ashley sighed as though he were exhausting a patience she had never possessed. “I climbed to higher ground because the floor was filling with hounds. You came tumbling over the gallery because apparently the legendary rangers of La Mirada have not yet discovered stairs.”

“The stairs were blocked.”

“Yes, you’ve mentioned it. Several times. And you had a clear shot at the first hound that came through the window,” she said. “You watched it for a heartbeat too long. That’s when it took the man by the throat. You were patient. And weak. And now another family has no father.”

Joshua’s jaw tightened. Ashley smiled.

“Perhaps every elf in Medford learned to disappear as well as you do. That would explain why no one’s seen one from your forest in years,” Joshua said, his expression barely changing. “Except they didn’t disappear, did they? They died. All of them. So maybe stop holding up a graveyard as proof that your people knew how to fight.”

The priestess' eyes went wide.

The cave quieted.

The elf's blue eyes darkened. For the first time, the contempt in her expression was no longer playful.

Ashley walked directly toward him.

This time Joshua did not remain where he was.

He came forward to meet her, and the last traces of amusement disappeared from both their faces as the distance closed.