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Chapter Text

There’s a beautiful person in black armor standing in front of Mollymauk Tealeaf.

Molly blinks, puzzled and faintly certain that there shouldn’t be anything, much less a person, in this place. The person in black armor is a little taller than average, built lithe, wearing a dark shimmering cloak and it takes Molly a moment of dim admiration to register the shimmer comes from the oil in thousands of inky raven’s feathers. They’re stitched in the garment. A bleached bird-skull clasp holds the collar in place at their throat.

The beautiful person is lovely and eerie in a way Molly can’t identify. Dark hair pulled back into series of plaits and braids woven with small avian bones and primary feathers. Their gaze is a dark, penetrating infinity… and warm somehow.

They’re standing over him.

“Hey, man,” says the raven-armored person.

Their voice is faintly masculine, but only just. The world, strangely, clarifies as the raven person stares, like they’ve become a focal point of the universe and from that central point the rest of reality weaves itself until Molly becomes aware of something beyond the newcomer. The air smells sweet, like crushed grass after rain. There’s a warm breeze rolling over a hillside. Moonlight shines from a lunar plane five times the size the moon should be on the mortal horizon and Mollymauk cannot recall a more comfortable night sky than the one he lays beneath now.

“Hello,” Molly says, not getting up from where he’s sprawled, comfortable, arms folded behind his head.

“I’m really sorry about this,” says the stranger.

“That’s a shame. We just met.”

“Nah. We met before. Just the once though.” There’s something sad in their eyes as they kneel at Molly’s side, folding their arms over their knee. “It was snowing.”

Molly, dimly, feels a pang of familiarity. “Oh. Sorry, I usually remember a pretty face.” Molly rolls up onto his side, catching his chin in his palm and peering at the stranger. “Who are you and what are you sorry for?”

“I’m Vax. You won’t remember my name after I leave… but I appreciate you asking. I’m sorry because I have to ask you to do something and it’s not fair of us to ask.”

“What do you need me to do?”

“Go back.”

“Go back where?”

“It’s hard for me to explain, because you’ve already passed on so completely and… well… I’ve never had to do this before for anyone. You’re a first.”

Molly grins slowly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m pleased to be your first anything.”

The raven-armored stranger kind of blinks, then grins, then seems to catch themselves and coughs.

“Uh, look, usually when someone has to go back through the veil, they have loved ones calling them home. Or unfinished business. Something tethering them hard to the barrier between realms, but you’re very comfortably settled in. It’s not fair to ask you to go back. You’re transitioned.”

“You’re delightfully opaque. What are you asking me to do?”

“Something difficult. I need to ask you to live again.”

“I don’t understand,” says Mollymauk.

“You can’t,” Vax says patient and apologetic. “Even if I stop being cryptic as shit, you won’t be physically capable of understanding because that’s how this works. I’m not, like, talking in simile because it’s my shtick.”

“Try me.”

“You’re dead and I need to send you back to the living world to fix something fucked up because the gods have determined you, specifically, can set things in motion to right the universe.”

Molly tries to hold onto the raven knight’s words, but as fast the words come, they slide away from Molly.

“I didn’t catch a single bit of that.”

Vax rubs their neck, embarrassed. “Yeah, sorry. Death is… existentially fuzzy.”

“What?”

“Well, quick example: The Moonweaver watched over you in life. She gathers her faithful into the fabric of the universe. You’re not used to being a singular instance of a soul anymore. She pulled your thread loose just to let me speak with you. It’s kind of a downgrade from pure, divine omniscient energy and it makes things existentially fuzzy and then I have to talk in metaphor.”

Molly blinks slowly, drumming his fingers against his chin.

“Shit. Sorry.”

“Okay, let’s just focus in the business at hand: You want me to stop being comfortable where I am and go do something painful but important somewhere else. Is that about right?”

“Yes. And if it helps, this will specifically help friends of yours.”

Molly sits up. “I have friends in trouble? I left them?”

“You didn’t leave them,” Vax says gently. “Not by choice, but they could use your help.”

“Well, it’s settled then.” Molly brushes grass from his pants and levers himself up and to his feet. “If I have people back there, I’ve got to go.”

“It’ll be different this time,” Vax warns him, unfolding to a standing position. “It will be different than what you’re doing right now. You’re going to remember everything and you’ll have to live with it. It will be painful and you’re going to be very, very sad for a lot of it, but in the end… I think the world will be better.” A shrug. “Or, at least, that’s what my mistress is telling me. She’ll let me break the rules for you… but only if you want.”

Molly thinks about it. “It’s going to hurt?”

“Some of it. Yeah.”

“Does it haveto hurt?”

“If this was hurt-optional, I would be a lot less anxious, don’t you think?”

“You’re a divine acolyte. I don’t know a thing about what stresses you out.”

“Okay, well…” Vax looks abashed. “This stresses me out.”

Molly folds his arms and wrinkles his nose. “I won’t remember this conversation, will I?”

“No. Like I said, you’re existentially fuzzy.”

Molly sighs, rubs his face, then tilts his head at the strange person in front of him. “Fuzzy?”

Vax holds up a hand, pinching the air minutely. “Just a little fuzzy.”

“Okay. Bloody hell. I’ll do it. One condition.”

“What condition?”

Molly points at his own face, shrugging hopefully. “Kiss for luck?”

Vax – who Molly has just enough context to understand as a divinely appointed being, sent from on high to deliver portends and god-word – seems momentarily dumbfounded. Then they roll their eyes and say, grinning, “Well, if it’s for the good of the universe.” Then they step near and place a warm, faintly luminous palm against the side of Molly’s face, tilting his jaw up a little. They are very, very beautiful and their breath is strangely cool. “You should know,” Vax says, “I definitely don’t do this for people. So…”

Then they kiss Molly, warmly, carefully, on the cheek…

And Molly wakes up under another sky.

The stratosphere is strange with storm clouds and cleaved by lightning. The dirt between his teeth and the taste of mud in his mouth is all he knows for the agonizing initial heartbeat that slams blood like fire through his aching veins. He draws a single, burning breath… then screams as a massive, pink and gray giant bows over him and rumbles, worriedly, “Oh dear. That went a little wrong, didn’t it?”

It does not take Molly long to orient a response.

“Oh fuck! Gods! What the -?”

Molly spits mud and rolls over on his flank, coughing.

“It’s okay,” says the pale monolith looming over him. “Please be calm. I’m a friend. Are you in pain?”

Molly stares at his muddy arms, bare up to the elbows, a thin dirty tunic hanging off his shoulders. He’s sitting up to his hips in a shallow grave made soupy by the rain. His fingers are caught in a tangle of ripped greenery, bright shocks of flowers and meadow plants. It takes him a moment to understand this grave – his grave – was dug up from under a blanket of vibrant wildflowers. His hair is a mess of shredded petals and green things, his horns dangled with thin stems and blooms.

He stares into his open hand, fingers spread, watching rain rinse dirt from the creases in his palm.

“My name is Molly,” he says softly, focusing on it. He closes his hand tight, until the blunt edges of his nails dig into skin. “My name is Mollymauk Tealeaf.”

There’s a quiet for a moment.

Then, from the pale giant, “It’s good to meet you, Mollymauk. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Molly finally really looks at the speaker. He has to make an effort, because said benefactor, even bent down at the waist, is nearly seven feet tall. Their skin is a soft gray. Gaunt dramatic features – hard lines, high cheekbone, and brow softened only by a sudden divergence of color into pale pink beard along the jawline. Their hair is like-wise pale pink, shaved along the sides but grown shoulder-length down the center, hanging in a thick curtain down the left side of their skull. Eyes the color of rose quartz. A worried look.

His rescuer is a firbolg.

Molly can count on his hand how many firbolgs he’s met in person. Molly’s firbolg appears to be a somewhat smaller, leaner example of the giant-kin and definitely one of the more… wild fey variety. Their eyes are lit faintly by dimming fairy fire, their nose a gentle but bestial structure – a cross between a rabbit’s cow’s nose, tipped in soft pink rhinarium. Their ears are long, curled into furry tubes, poking up from beneath the wet mass of pink hair.

“Are you alright?” says the firbolg, all strange pastel and staring at him. Their soft bovine ears quirk worriedly. When Molly doesn’t immediately respond, they (he?) tilt their head. “My name is Caduceus Clay. We should get out of the rain. I would feel pretty bad if you caught a cold sitting in the mud.” A pause. “I wanted to wait for the storm to clear, but it’s been following me for the last three days.”

“Caduceus? Okay. Um, my head’s spinning. How long’ve I been under?”

“A very long time, Mollymauk Tealeaf.”

“You’re a cleric? You… you brought me back?”

Their expression pinches, pained at the question. “Yes. It was me. You did not rise on your own this time. I called you and I… I honestly did not think you would come. Even with the storm behind me, there is nothing that binds you to me. The ritual should have failed. I… I don’t know what brought you back. I am so sorry. I would have done things differently if I…”

“You accidentally brought me back?!” Molly demands, horrified.

“No,” Caduceus says, frowning. “I did it purposely, but I had no faith in success. The storm followed me. I thought it was… significant.”

“The storm?” Molly says, feeling like his skull’s stuffed in cotton. “What does that…? Never mind. How long have I been dead this time?”

Caduceus hesitates. Then commits. “You’ve been dead for ten years.” And when Molly just stares, petrified by this number, he adds, “I am so sorry. I’ve done a terrible thing to you. Please understand: I would never tear someone from the Wild Mother… but you are my last hope.”

There is a longer pause.

“Alright,” Molly says, picking his words like bits of glass off a floor, careful of any edges. “First of all, I’m… grateful. Obviously. I like being alive so… thank you for that, Caduceus.” He hesitates. “But… I don’t understand. Why would you bring me back?”

“Because you’re one of the Mighty Nein.”

Molly blinks. “One of… wait. This about the others?” His heart jumps. “Are they okay? Oh, hell. I didn’t even ask. Beauregard got away didn’t she? The last thing I remember she was –”

“Beauregard lived that day.”

Molly relaxes a little. “She did.” He closes his eyes. “I won then.”

Caduceus says nothing for a moment, giving him a second to process.

“Mollymauk,” he says gently. “I need you to speak with the Mighty Nein. I think you’re the only one who can help them now.”

Molly drags a hand through his hair, pulling it sopping off his forehead. Rainwater runs cool over his lips, onto his tongue. His heart races painful in his chest, every breath a drag of sweet spring air mixed with earth. There’s grit on his teeth. Grave dirt on his tongue and in his eyes. Hysteria rises again in his gullet, seizing hold of him like a lover and pulling him toward a screaming, sobbing fit of paralysis and horror… but he shrugs it away. Pulls it off him like a shroud.

He looks at Caduceus.

“Are you saying my friends are in trouble? Or that they are the trouble?”

“Both.”

“Oh hell…”

“As I said, you’re my last hope.”

“I’m just… you…” Molly struggles with it for a moment before blurting, “I only knew them for a few months! It’s been ten yearssince they saw me. What you’re saying makes no sense. They were my friends, of course they were, but I died. They must have moved on. How can I be your last hope? You seem like a lovely pink and pastel person, but that bodes extremely badly, Caduceus. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“It’s possible I do not.”

“Fabulous.”

Caduceus tilts his head. “You’re very… articulate for someone who has just risen from the grave.”

“I’ve had practice,” Molly grunts, kicking his way out of the mud. He gets to his feet and stares into his grave for a moment, then into the horizon. “I remember… I remember dying.” He rubs his hands over his face, presses his palms over his eyes. He shivers. “I remember the snow and… Lorenzo standing over me.” His eyes sting suddenly, one of his hands dropping to his chest, over his breastbone which is whole and solid beneath his fingers. “He put a blade through my heart... I was so… so irritated to die.” He laughs. “Is that strange?”  

“I’m sorry, Mollymauk. What do you need?”

“I think I need to be dead. Or I needed someone else to be here when I woke. I need someone I actually know to be here, but that’s not an option.”

“it might be,” says Caduceus blandly.

Molly jerks his head around, staring at the strange firbolg. “What?”

Caduceus gestures toward the cloud-black sky and as he does a fork of lightning snaps across the horizon and burns the world bone white for a deafening instant. Then it happens again. And again. Until the air rings deafening with thunder and Molly sees – for just a wild hallucinatory heartbeat – some great figure illuminated in the thunderhead. Humanoid but terrible, composed of chain lightning and cyclone. But then his eyes clear and it’s gone.

“This storm’s been following me,” he says. “I think it’s been waiting for you.”

Molly looks toward the horizon. He becomes aware, strangely, of his clothes which appear to be precise replicas of the garments he’d worn at death. That he’s an exact replica of himself at the moment of his death. He’s aware, particularly, that resurrection doesn’t really work like this and he doesn’t know what that means. He doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t…

He clenches his fists and marches directly toward the heart of the storm. Caduceus doesn’t follow so Molly stomps through the soaking long grass, following the road toward the churning centre of it all. He scrubs dirt from his face and neck as he does, furiously, frustrated, afraid, and just… angry. So goddamn angry. He throws his arms wide, staring into the sky as he walks.

“Well?!” he shouts, the wind driving rain into his face. “What the hell do you want?!”

The storm roars up and a lightning strike rips the sky open overhead, so concussive Molly instinctively claps two hands over his ears. His eyes burn, his throat locking up but his fear reverses to anger and he turns his face to the boiling storm clouds above. He again throws his arms wide.

“Do something!” he bellows. “What the fuck is going on?!”

Thunder shakes the world, but Molly holds his ground.

“I’m two times dead and I don’t know a fucking thing! I need you to be here! What do you want from me?!” Molly can feel it even in the rain that his eyes are hot and welling over, the heat of it doused by the icy rain that batters the land around him. He closes his eyes, closes his shaking hands at his chest. “Please. Where are you? I’m scared stiff, please don’t leave –”

And that’s when someone folds him into a tight, but gentle embrace, gathering his head against their chest which smells of leathers and ion and rainwater. They squeeze him so tight his bones ache in a way that’s familiar as sunshine and he immediately grips her back, his fingers digging into muscle – much more muscle than he remembers – and lets a single ragged noise rise in his throat.

“Oh, Molly,” Yasha says, her lips against his hair, holding him fast to her chest. “Is it really you?”

“I think it is,” he rasps. “I wasn’t sure until now. But I think it’s really me.”

Yasha – acolyte of the Stormlord, fallen aasimar, and his best friend – pulls away a little so she can look at him and her eyes… her eyes are lit with lightning. There’s electricity arcing around her in fingers of gentle blue and where she touches him, that energy jumps and licks to no effect even as the grass around them blackens beneath her boots. She cups his jaw in two hands. They are scarred and twined in tattoos he doesn’t remember. Her face is ten years older than he remembers, but still beautiful, the dark to gray ombré of her hair twisting like snakes in the static around her. She’s barely here. She’s lightning held in place by will alone.

He can’t fathom what she’s become.

“How?” she whispers.

Her voice sizzles, crackling between her teeth, but her mouth twists down as she asks him and that emotion  on her mouth blots out every other inhuman thing about her. It’s not the storm god’s creature he sees. Just the woman he met at a carnival. She touches his hair, like she’s afraid to do it.

“Yasha.” He’s gripping the leather at her flanks. “I was coming to find you.” He shakes his head. “I didn’t make it.” And he watches Yasha’s expression crack when he says that. “You told me I’d die in a ditch if I was left unattended and I… you were right.”

He grins at her, hard as he can, through the tears because he’s panicking and he doesn’t know what to do. Yasha is mist, rain, and thunder in his hands and she could melt away at any moment. She’s powerful beyond comprehending, but all he wants is to hold her and so…

“Your hair looks great,” he says. “Love what you’ve done with it.”

Yasha’s eyes burn with arcane light.

“Heh. You keep doing that, Yasha, but I’m just happy to see you.”

“Why now?” she whispers.

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”

“I’m the hand of the storm now, Molly.”

“Okay, but you’re also my friend and I really want you to stay with me. Can do you do that? Just for a little bit?” He blinks hard. “Please?”

“I don’t know… I don’t…” Thunder interrupts her and she looks toward the sky. Thunder again, the sky splitting. She smiles, then looks down at him with, just, the biggest grin he’s ever seen. And all at once she grabs him into a massive bear hug. The moment she does it… he feels her solidify somehow in his arms, like he’s been holding mist before and now (only now) does Yasha truly inhabit the space in his arms. “Yes!” she cries. “Yes. I can stay. Oh, Molly I missed you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I lost you. I swore to protect you. Forgive me. I’m so, so –”

“There’s nothing to forgive,” Molly hisses immediately. Her arms are locked around the back of her neck, squeezing. He buries his face in her hair. “Don’t ever think that. Never ever.”

“I’m so sorry, Molly. We tried so hard.”

“It’s okay. I was a lousy fighter really. Making it up as I went. Bound to happen.”

“No,” she whispers. “Not that. We didn’t… we tried. We saved the world you know. Once.” She’s gripping him so tight. She’s shaking. Trembling. “I don’t know what happened to us. We’ve gone so wrong, Mollymauk.”

Molly isn’t sure what to say to any part of that, so he just hugs Yasha closer.

“It’s okay, dear. Just… let’s sit for a while. You can tell me.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Why?”

“Because right now, just for now, you don’t know what I’ve done.” Her voice cracks. Actually breaks in her throat. “You’re just like I remember you and you still think I’m who I was.” Her breath shudders. “I don’t want you to hate me yet…”

Molly’s eyes sting even as his heart jumps into his throat. “I won’t ever hate you,” he whispers. “C’mon now. What’s this?” He rubs her shoulders gently. “C’mon. Let’s get out of the rain, okay? Let’s… I don’t know. Let’s just… um…”

From behind them, a voice says, “I have tea?”

Molly turns. Yasha stares.

Caduceus, standing behind them and leaning on a long, gnarled woof staff, shrugs. “If you like.”

Yasha stares, slowly unwinding herself from Molly. “Caduceus?”

“Yasha.” He inclines his great head. “It’s been some time.”

“You did this?” She put a hand on Molly’s shoulder. “You brought him back?”

He looks at the ground.

“You swore you’d never… you… Things have gotten that bad?” Her voice hardens. “What’s he done?”

“What’s who done?” Molly demands.

“He’s closed off the keep,” says Caducues softly. “I fear the worst now. The others are gone, Yasha. There’s no one to stop him now and he barred me from the city. I needed… I needed help and I cannot fight him. I can’t. I don’t think anyone can.” He glances at Molly. “So… I thought I’d try something else.”

“Can you two please stop talking around me?” Molly says. “I get that you’re all powerful and cryptic, but it’s kinda rude. I’m but a simple carnival tiefling with mud on my face. Have mercy.”

Yasha laughs. Then blinks, like she surprised with herself.

“I really missed you, Molly. You know that?”

“I gathered. Let’s have tea and you tell me a story. Okay? It’ll be alright.” He pats her arm, hoping like hell she’ll believe what he himself does not. “I promise. It’ll be fine.”

She holds his hand. “Alright.”

Chapter Text

They end up under a large tree growing on the side of the road – bizarrely massive, thick, with a deep halo of canopy. The only one like it for half a mile in either direction and growing very near the mud that marks Mollymauk’s gravesite. Yasha tells him not to look at it, but like a festering wound, he can’t help but stare into the shallow pit. The churned earth is sweet with torn grass. Shocks of wildflowers still carpet the moss around the grave and there, knocked down in the long grass, is a small wooden plank, driven like a trellis into the ground where vines grew over the words carved there:

HERE LIES A FRIEND.

Caduceus has a small iron kettle warming near the flame. Fragrant and herbal. He’s roasting apples over flame, tending carefully to their rotation. He hasn’t said much since they settled here, leaving Molly and Yasha to huddle and speak quietly. Molly is mostly clean, his clothes dry, and Yasha helpfully combs bits of green stuff from his hair. Her touch breathes a cantrip, warm heat moving through Molly’s skin. She is exceptionally gentle.

Molly lays with his head in her lap, his neck resting on the cross-cross of her legs, sleepy comfort dominating his would-be troubled thoughts. For a while, he lets her stave off the anxiety, lets nothing but the friction of her fingers cross his mind.

“Did you see me die?” Molly asks eventually.

She’s quiet for a moment, but her fingers in his hair are unflinching. She quietly plaits parts of his hair with small blue flowers, running her fingertips along the curve of his horns, nails picking slightly at the metal in the bone.

“I heard Beau call for you… then nothing.”

Molly feels his heart tighten like a stabbed animal. “They buried me?”

“In your Platinum Dragon tapestry. Do you remember?”

Molly grins. “I remember. From Zedash during the festival.”

He can hear her smile in her next sentence. “That seems so long ago.”

“For me it was just a few weeks ago.” Molly moves his hand up lie back against Yasha’s knee. She takes his hand, lacing her fingers in his before he goes on. “I won a strawberry in a bag toss game. You won an arm-wrestling contest and had your first candy apple. Jester bought them.” He smiles, a sweet-tart memory flooding his mouth a little. “Doughnuts and drinking. That… that was a brilliant day. Wasn’t it?”

Yasha is quiet.

“Yasha?”

“I forgot about the candy apples.”

Molly tilts his head back. Yasha’s staring blankly into the fire to the side of them, a small grief written big in her eyes. Molly squeezes her hand to bring her back. When she seems to break out of it, eyes finding his again, he sees they are inexplicably bright, threatening to run over. So he takes their laced hands and pulls her knuckles to his mouth, kisses the ink there. Her skin tastes like static. She smells perpetually of rain.

He thinks, silently, that these hands can probably split the earth open. Call lightning enough to tear the world apart. He thinks that she’s the manifestation of a storm god’s will but, somehow, is sitting here with him while they wait for tea. She’s looking at him like a wonder and he doesn’t know what to do with that.

“It’s okay,” Molly says, smiling back up at her. He squeezes her hand. “You’re my best friend, you know. Maybe you have other best friends now, but for me it’s still the same. So you know you can tell me anything and I’m obligated to like you anyway.”

She laughs, but it hurts.

“Oh Mollymauk. You’ll be so disappointed.”

“Not possible.”

“I was a coward. I ran away.”

“Hasn’t everyone?”

“You don’t understand. I… I will have to show you for you to understand it.”

“Then show me,” Molly hisses, tilting his head back farther, glaring. “You won’t shock me. The world was on its way to war when I died. A slaver cracked my ribs open. It’s a brutal world and I always knew that. You know I knew that.” He squeezes her fingers again. “If you were brutal too, then I prefer that to your dying on principles. I believe in doing a good turn when possible. Sometimes it’s not. That’s okay.”

Yasha just stares helplessly at him. “Oh... dammit.” She wipes her face. “I forgot what you’re really like.”

“I think,” drawls Molly, “all of you are remembering a really different Mollymauk than the one that died.” He grins to break the mood. “I’m sort of an asshole. I love you, but I’m am not one to judge. Remember?”

“I’m starting to.”

“Tea?” rumbles Caduceus suddenly, materializing directly beside them.

Molly jumps.

“Oops. Sorry. I thought you heard me coming.” He kneels and offers Molly a small fired clay tea cup glazed in green. It smells sweet and delicious. “Careful. This mix is very rare. The last of its kind actually, I’m pretty sure.” He ponders. “Yeah, I’m thinking it’s the last of its kind, but this is a special occasion.”

Molly sits up to cautiously accept the tea. Yasha moves forward, unfolding her knees so Molly can sit back between them, leaning against her clavicle while she too accepts the tea. Yasha drinks hers. Molly follows her lead. The warmth of the drink spreads immediately though him, the bone cold in his body suddenly sliding away into an easy, fragrant heat. He blinks. Shocked to find a sudden rush of warmth behind his eyes too. As though it’s been years since he had tea and he just now realized he wanted for it.

“This is really good, Caduceus.”

“Thank you, but it’s hardly anything I did.”

“What kind of plant is this?” Molly examines the bottom of the cup. “You say it’s going extinct?”

“Sort of. I’m honestly not sure what kind of plant it is, but it only grows here.” He smiles warmly. “I’ve been tending the garden for a while though. Shame to see it go, really.”

Yasha’s head jerks up at that. “Caduceus,” she says, eyeing Molly with a faint nervousness. “Did… is this the tea from… uh…” She eyes Molly again. “From… here-here?”

Molly, who is half-way through his tea at this point, pauses.

“Of course,” says Caduceus, tilting his large pink head curiously. “That last of it should really go to you two, wouldn’t you say?”

Yasha coughs a little. “Uh...”

“What?” Molly demands, deadpan.

Caduceus considers a moment. “Ooooh, I see. You think it’s a little odd that I gave them the tea from –”

“Eh!” Yasha blurts, waving a hand to stop him speaking and Molly immediately lowers his tea cup. “Uh, it’s nothing.”

“What the hell is in the tea?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me right bloody now or I’m throwing it in your hair.”

“The flowers that steeped this tea grew from the earth around your grave,” says Caduceus easily. His tone and expression have a pleased warmth to them. “The apples I’m roasting fell from the tree that grew as your headstone. I don’t think either will grow anymore since I raised you. That splendor was, specifically, in your memory, Mollymauk Tealeaf.” A shrug. “That’s why I thought, of all the people in the world, it made sense that you and Yasha should have the last of it.”

Molly stares.

Yasha is grimacing.

“I’m drinking tea grown from my own grave dirt?” Molly says, slowly, clarifying. “Plants that grew on my corpse?”

“Yes,” says Caduceus, smiling. “That’s nice, right? Circular.”

Molly eyes the cup, eyes Caduceus, eyes Yasha, then Caduceus again. “Yeah, alright.”  And he downs the rest of the cup. “Can I get some more? It would be a shame to put me to waste.”

Caduceus’ smile broadens and he turns to Yasha. “I like them. I thought I would, but I like them a lot.”

Molly watches the firbolg amble away to get more of the tea. “He’s nice,” Molly says, draping his arms over his knees and looking at Yasha who seems relieved. “And unassumingly dark. I like it.”

“Yeah,” Yasha says. “He’s a good person.”

“Great hair.”

“Really great hair.”

“Do you mind if I ask who he is to you?” Molly drums his fingers on his knee. “He, uh, raised me from the dead and I gather he did it for the Nein and… apparently against his own moral code? Is that right?”

“Yes.” Yasha pauses, a faint shadow of regret in her eyes. “Caduceus serves the Wild Mother. Goddess of the grave and green things. Raising things from the dead is… not what he does, but he did this. I honestly…. I don’t really know why he did it.” She stops a moment. “He’s a friend though. He’s been with us since you died. He helped us kill Lorenzo and I still, to this day, I don’t know what we did to deserve his friendship.” She lowers her voice. “I think all we’ve done is break his heart in these last years.”

Molly waits a moment. Then, quietly, “Yasha.”

“Not yet.”

“I promise, whatever it is, I won’t hate you.”

Yasha closes her mismatched eyes. “It seems like such a long time ago, Molly. I… when you died everything changed. The Nein became something new.” She smiles. “They were so strong. We stood with gods in battle, Mollymauk. I don’t know how to tell you the story except… except that we were beautiful.” She wipes her face. “I wish you could have seen it.”

“I’m sorry I missed it.”

“I’m afraid for you Molly. Caduceus wants you to talk to the others and… he sees things sometimes. He dreams things that may be come true. I feel like it will be dangerous and I don’t want to lose you again.”

Molly cocks a brow. “You’re scared of them. Of the others?”

“Not all of them. And not for the same reasons. They’re all… things have changed. They’ve changed. Some of them are unrecognizable, Molly.”

“But Caduceus thinks I’ll have… what? Some sway? He wants me to talk them down from something?”

“Perhaps. I’m a little out of touch. I’ve been part of the storm for a long time.”

Molly tries to smile. “Well, I didn’t come back just to sit around and drink dead people tea. So… if there is something you think we can do to help our friends, then I’m up for it. Just say the word.”

She’s quiet for a while. Then, “I don’t want to lose you though.”

“You won’t. None of them are going to hurt me.”

“Oh, Molly. No.” She looks at him with a startled, frightened expression. “Don’t assume that. Don’t assume they wouldn’t hurt you. You don’t know their natures now. Please. If you want to do this, I’ll come with you, but don’t assume that.”

Molly hesitates then. “Really? You’re sure?”

She nods.

“Okay… well… that’s a little upsetting but…”

“I’m not asking Mollymauk to go into danger without protection,” says a voice suddenly.  

Molly twitches and looks over his shoulder, finds Caduceus standing there with his staff in his hand rather than tea cups. Molly notices, vaguely, that there are definitely green stems coiling from the wood in his staff, definitely living lichen in the whorls of it. He cups the crystal at the tip, lifting it toward his face, and gently breathes on the stone there. The amethyst begins to glow soft pink. The faint fey light swells from within and casts warm light across the downy slopes of Clay’s face. He looks to his companions and his eyes are lit again with a mirroring flame.

“If you want,” he says to Molly. “I have protection I can give you.”

Molly tilts his head. “Uh, well, I don’t turn down magic from clerics,” he says slowly. “Even ones that give me my own death tea as a beverage.”

“Good,” says Caduceus, smiling serenely. Then he makes a hand gesture at Molly, fingers sweeping in a small, precise series of movements, and in another language that pulls his voice deep and resonant, he says, a word and the word shivers through Molly’s chest, takes root, and sits there. Caduceus nods while Mollymauk shudders. “There. I can’t do it again until we rest but…”

And he gets no farther because in that precise moment something moves in the grass behind him.

Molly immediately sits up.

“Hey,” he says, frowning. “What’s that?”

“What’s what?” Caduceus says blankly. He peers behind him. “I don’t see anything.”

“Right there,” Molly says, annoyed.

He points as the small blur in the grass. The blur freezes. Actually, it’s not a blur at all now that Molly is looking properly. it’s a very small figure in a cloak. It seems startled when he both points and continues to point at it as it darts sideways, bouncing like it’s trying to magically avoid his stare. Weirdly, Yasha stares around, confused. Her eyes pass right over the small thing in the grass which is definitely panicking under Molly’s open attention.

“OI! I see you.” Molly starts to get up. “What are you –?”

There’s a burst of light and a deafening BANG.

Caduceus jerks, hard, like something shoved him forward.  He staggers for a moment, surprised, the foot of his staff coming down in the grass as he suddenly leans his full weight against the wood. His eyes are wide, lips parted on the word he was saying… then he drops to his knees with a cry, clutching  his shoulder.

There is blood. Blood soaking through the fabric.

Yasha doesn’t even cry out.

She immediately grabs Molly, yanking him to his feet. The hair along the back of his neck stands up in a sudden field of static. Her fingers dig into his shoulders, the sinews in her arms and chest suddenly tense as she lets loose a terrible, shivering war-scream that Mollymauk has never heard before – a scream that reverberates in her throat and chest, like there are a hundred voices screaming in unison and the dark celestial dim transcribes something hot into Molly’s blood.

“GET UP, CLAY!” Her voice shakes Molly’s bones. “GET UP AND MOVE!”

And Caduceus grabs his own shoulder and bares his teeth, a flare of greenery shooting up from a wound, spitting blood as a small geyser of bloody ivy erupts from the hole, grows over, then withers and dies. And then Caduceus isn’t wounded anymore. He grabs something from a cord around his neck, like a tuft of fur knotted on twine and he focuses, his fingers pinching that bit of fur and forming a sigil in front of him. He whispers, “Show me Nott.”

And his eyes flash, his expression goes rigid with fear and he looks at Molly and –

And the second shot hits Mollymauk in the chest.

He’s in Yasha’s arms and the bullet still punches through Molly directly under his right clavicle, lodging in the inside of his right scapula and the shot instantly –

Molly jolts awake. He’s lying in a field beneath a massive, luminous moon. He knows it instantly. The air smells warm like spring, like crushed grass, like rain on the horizon and he grabs frantically at his chest, at the wound surely but there’s nothing. Just his own shirt, his own ribs, his unbroken clavicle. He can’t understand what’s –? What is going on?

A beautiful person in black feather-lined armor suddenly kneels over him and takes his hands, quickly, squeezing them to stop him scrabbling. Their fingers are cool to the touch, but they warm as Mollymauk calms. He can’t say how, but he feels he knows them, trusts them. They hold his hands between their palms.

“Not yet,” says the raven knight. “Don’t worry. I’m watching over you.”

“What’s happening?” Molly rasps. He grips their hands tight, knuckles pushing white through his skin. “What is this? That bloody hurt!”

“I know it does. I’m sorry. You won’t remember it on the other side though.”

“Fuck. I have to keep going don’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Then do it. Just –”

 The raven knight shoves his forehead back and–

Molly spits up blood, gasps, his entire body glowing just pulsingwith the pain but he’s conscious. Blood is soaking his chest. At least three ribs sit shattered from the impact in his chest. There is a burning hot bullet inside him and he can’t scream because his right lung is collapsed. He is barely aware of someone holding him, clutching him like a busted doll in their arms. That they’re moving. He’s being carried, his head lolled against someone’s shoulder as they dash with his body in their grip.

He hears Yasha say, horrified, “Molly?!”

Her hands tighten. A flare of healing knits his ribs, cool blue arcana fusing the bone and inflating his ruined lung. He retches, feels that slug of iron in his chest wink out of his insides. He tastes blood and it’s too familiar. He’s choking, his chest cracked open and – “Respect,” says the beast standing over him, before his hand tenses on the glaive and – Molly yells. He thrashes and Yasha grabs him like cat lunging out of her arms.

“Molly! Stop! Stop, I have you!”

“What the fuck?!” Molly howls. Yasha is straight jacketing his arms to his sides, bear hugging him against her. “What the fuck was that?!”

“She must have followed me,” Caduceus is saying. He’s crouched behind the trunk of the apple tree, which provide very meager cover for seven feet of giant pink and gray firbolg bulk. He blinks anxiously, his ears flipped back against his skull now. “If she uses an explosive round, there’s not a lot I can do about it.”

“Is Caleb with her?” Yasha demands wildly. “Would he come? I thought you said –?”

“Is that Nott?!” Molly interrupts, Yasha still collaring him against her chest. She’s got her back flat to the apple tree and her eyes are lit with sparks of blue electricity. “Did Nott just try to bloody kill me?!”

“No,” Caduceus says, perfectly mild, “She definitelykilled you. My Death Ward pulled you back.”

Molly barely has time to process that before something detonates on the other side of the tree and a blast of fire and concussive force blows grass and dirt across the field around them. The apple tree shakes and wood splinters. Yasha kneels down, her arms still tight around Molly’s ribs, her body hunched protectively around him and it takes Molly a moment to realize she’s absolutely shaking.

“Nott.” Caduceus is speaking into a shimmering pendant on his wrist. “Nott, are you there?” A pause. “What are you doing? This isn’t like you. What’s wrong?”

“Oh, fuck you, Clay!” snarls a voice that… that honestly does not sound like Nott at all. The usual grated snarl oddly clear, almost too high to be the goblin rogue. “Are you seriously asking me what’s wrong? You turned on me once. I’m not gonna stand around while you make something to hurt us!”

“I didn’t make anything. It’s Molly –”

“Liar! That was a warning shot! I won’t give you another!”

“Nott!” Yasha is just yelling around the tree. “Nott, it’s really Molly! You almost killed him! Please, stop!”

“I can’t believe you’ve done this.” Nott sounds gutted. “Yasha, that’s not Molly! You know it’s not! We tried to raise him before!” There’s a pained noise from the pendant and Molly feels Yasha tighten her hold around him, as if to reassure herself. “Yasha, he didn’t come. He didn’t come before so why would he now? He’s gone. I’m sorry, Yasha. I’m so, so sorry, but Clay is lying to you. He’s just trying to get you on his side.”

Caduceus grimaces. The pendant on his wrist spins slightly. “Nott, please, I don’t want to fight you.”

“Psh! I’ll bet. You wanna know if I’ve still got an artillery round?”

“Yes. That. But I don’t want to fight people I love.”

“If that was true, you wouldn’t be out here constructing monsters in Molly’s image. All you care about is the balance of things or whatever! You don’t care about the rest of us!”

And here, Molly wiggles one arm free of Yasha’s grasp, snatches Caduceus’ wrist and pulls the pendant toward him.

“Hey!” he says loudly, a little flustered into the communication charm. “Nott, this is Molly. Hi. I’m not an undead abomination. I’m actually pretty much just me. Can you please, for the love of whatever god, please stop shooting at us?”

There’s a deafening silence.

Molly monitors it before adding, quietly, “Nott, it’s me. Honest. If you want to look me in the eye or do magic or whatever to check, I’ll let you do that, but you have to stop shooting.” A beat. “See? I told you those machines were a bad idea. Last I remember you just stole the one firearm from Hupperdook and I didn’t even want you to have that.”

Quietly, from the other end, Nott’s unfamiliar voice says, “Mollymauk?”

“Far as I can tell, yeah.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Okay. But do you have to killme while it’s still a topic of discussion?”

“Yes.” Her voice is so soft on the line, he can barely hear. “Because if I talk to you, I think you’ll convince me.”

“Okay, Nott, you see how that’s pretty worrisome for me, right?” Molly feels Yasha releasing her grip around his ribs. “I’ve been upright for all of ten minutes and I have old friends trying to kill me. Please, I’m really myself, I swear, and you’re scaring the hell out of me. Okay?”

“I don’t care because you’re not the real Mollymauk. I don’t care if you’re scared.”

“Nott,” Molly says. “I know this feels wrong and scary. I get it, but I’m really me so… you know… Don’t. Bloody. Shoot. Me.”

“You’re not real.”

“I’m real.” Caduceus has slipped the pendant off entirely, is letting Molly hold it, cupped in his hands, “Nott, it’s me. You know the rules have always been different with me and death. Maybe… maybe this is just another time the rules are getting bent around me. I don’t know. I honestly don’t, but would you let me figure that out before you blast the unholy hell out of me?”

Another long silence.

Then, “What was the name of the dwarf we meet on the road? The one who fought with us.”

“Keg. She smoked and wore plate armor. I liked her.”

“What card did you pull for Jester when you met her?”

“Uh, uh… Let me… The Moon. It was The Moon. Gods, Nott, I don’t have the best memory to start with. Trivia is not my strong –”

“What did you buy from Pumat Sol?”

Molly raises his voice at the piece of jewelry. “You can’t ask me to recite a grocery list to prove I’m a real person, Nott! That’s stupid!”

“Shut up! Shut up!” squawks Nott, sounding panicky. “If you’re really Molly, tell me the most expensive thing you bought from him. You’d remember that! You’d remember if you were Molly.”

“Gods, uh…” Molly racks his brain. “My heart pendant?”

“You remember the Hour of Honor in Hupperdook?” Nott’s voice sounds strained now, like its being bent over a hard surface. “Tell me who won.”

“I won. Beau lost. Fjord won. And you finished them off in a double or nothing.” Molly grips the pendant tighter. “Then we danced the rest of the night and were fucked up in the morning and got all our bloody money stolen. Every single coin we had. We killed a war machine and left Kiri with a nice family there. Then we set out and I made everyone a really nice dinner and then it all went to shit. Nott, it’s me. I’m not trying to trick you, I swear. Are you alright?”

Nott kind of chokes. “What?”

“The night I died, I thought you were… I couldn’t see you.”

Another long pause. “I was fine. That – I mean, obviously I was alright. I’m here talking to you. What are you–?.”

“I know! Gah, but… for me it was… Sorry. I’m glad you’re okay, you know, even if you’re trying kill me now. I mean, it’s fair. I might be a zombie from your perspective. No hard feelings.” A beat. “Maybe a few hard feelings, depending on how this goes. Nott?” Molly exhales noisily, a little miserably. “Can’t we be friends for a few minutes? Please. I’m really tired.”

“You told me not to steal from certain kinds of people,” she whispers. “What kind of people?”

“The happy ones. Don’t steal from happy people.”

“Oh.” Nott’s voice cracks. “Oh fuck. Molly?”

“Yes?”

There’s a noise from the long grass and Molly peers out into the still smoldering field beyond the apple tree. There near the road, standing up from a crouched position, is a small figure in dark cloak. Molly stands up, stepping partially out from behind cover only to be immediately yanked back by Yasha who moves to block him with her body. But the figure – apparently Nott The Brave, tiny as he remembers her – is tossing aside a thin metal weapon, a longer, heavier version of the sidearm he’d seen her carry all those years ago.

She tosses two more smaller weapons to the road, raises empty hands.

“Yasha?” Nott calls, sounding nervous now. “You’re not gonna stab me because I shot Molly, are you?”

A long pause.

“No,” says Yasha, but begrudgingly.

“Or electrocute me with lightning?”

Another pause. A sigh. “No, Nott, of course not. Do you promise to stop shooting us?”

“Yes. Yes, I promise.”

“Okay.” Yet another pause. “If you hurt him, I will kill you though, Nott. Sorry.” Yasha seems embarrassed. “Just don’t do anything. Okay? I don’t want to –”

“Right! Yeah.” Nott waves her hands frantically. “On the same page. No killing. Got it.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

“No, but you… you promise-promise?”

“I don’t… know other ways to promise, but… sure.” Nott shrugs. “I promise-promise?”

“Glad to see some things never change,” mutters Molly.  He ducks under Yasha’s arm and moves carefully into the open, a little warily, hands spread and empty in front of him. He crosses the smoldering grass, boots crunching in the burnt earth. “Nott? That you?”

“Uh, hi?” says Nott. Her hood is so low he can’t see her face.  

“Hi?” says Molly.

Nott just stands there, awkward, her weapons all on the road and Molly just stands there, also awkwardly, back from the dead and slightly disheveled.

“You bloody shot me,” Molly points out.

Nott holds out for a full three seconds.

Then she makes this strangled, animal noise and breaks into a sprint, bee-lining straight at him. Fast. Arcane fast. Her feet don’t seem to touch the ground. She’s so fast he barely has time to react and she’s leaping up and tackling him, arms hooking around his neck, crossing ankles at the back of his spine and there’s very suddenly a small, sobbing… gnome? There’s a gnome in his arms. Dark hair, dark skin, sobbing profusely into his shirt saying over and over:

“Oh shit! I’m so sorry! I’m sorry! I thought you were a zombie thing, Molly!”

Molly just wraps his arms around her, blinking and confused.

“Uhh? Wow. You look… different?”

“Oh, uh, right.” She leans back and stares at him with bright golden eyes, gleaming cat-like from an otherwise adorable gnomish face. The only remaining ghost of the goblin girl he recollects. This new Nott has freckles and a slightly crooked front tooth. Her hair is fluffy and black. There’s a little scar bisecting her right brow and she seems a bit embarrassed. “I look… different now. Uh, it’s new.”

“Is it real?” Molly asks, fascinated. He uses two fingers to gingerly lift a section of bangs, his other arm hooked underneath Nott’s bottom, keeping her weight on his midriff. He grins. “Wow. Nott. You’re gorgeous. Is this how you’ve always imagined yourself?

She nods, a little anxiously.

“Well then, you look great!” Molly laughs, hugging her in a great teddy-bear squeeze and spinning around on his heels. She squawks indignantly but doesn’t fight him. “Ah! It isyou! Fuck! I thought you died while we were fighting Lorenzo. I thought he hit the cages while you were trying to unlock them.” He tucks one hand up behind her head, pulling her against his shoulder. “Gods, I’m so glad you’re okay.”

“How are you here?!” Nott yowls.

“I have no idea!” Molly laughs.

“You jerk!” She pounds his back with her fists. “You can’t just come back in the middle of everything!”

“Sorry my miraculous resurrection is inconvenient for you. Should I fuckin’ off myself and reschedule?”

“DON’T EVEN JOKE ABOUT THAT!” She grabs hold of his head and he realizes she’s fighting down sobs a little. “That’s not funny! Don’t!”

Molly stops spinning and leans back a little. Nott’s gripping his horns like a pair of bony handholds at this point, something that would annoy him if he weren’t so completely fucking elated. She’s staring at him, eyes just scouring his face furiously for some discrepancy, some signal that he is not what he says he is. He waits, patiently for her to finish.

“Do you think Yasha will forgive me?” Nott whispers. “Do you think Clay will? I shot him.”

“Sure.” Molly shrugs. “What’s a bullet wound among friends?”

“Less than you think,” says Yasha suddenly. She’s moved to stand beside Molly and it says something about how enamored Molly is with Nott that he didn’t notice her approach. Very quietly the barbarian woman looks at Nott and says, “Hello there.”

The gnome-gunslinger lifts her face. “H-hi, Yasha.”

Yasha’s face wrinkles a little, at the corners of her eyes. “It’s been a while.”

“I missed you,” Nott says, rather like she’s afraid to admit it and has been carrying that around with her for a few years.

Yasha, a smile in her voice, says, “I missed you too.” She swallows. “I’m sorry that I… I’m sorry, Nott. For everything.”

Nott’s face immediately winds up, her golden eyes welling up.

“Shit! Me too!” She covers her face with both hands and yells into them. “I fucked everything up. I’m so sorry. I just… I should have gone after you or done something. I just… I thought you didn’t want us to find you anymore and after we lost Fjord I just…”

She’s vibrating with emotion and Molly preemptively opens his arms as she lunges out of his grip into Yasha’s waiting hold. Yasha catches her up, hugging her like she’s been waiting for weeks to do it and just stands there, holding her friend while she cries.

Nott is wailing. “Why did you leave?!”

“I had to,” Yasha says, clutching the smaller woman, cradling her head. “I had to, I’m so sorry, but I had to.”

“That sucks!”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“I lost all of them after you left.” Nott’s voice is muffled, her face jammed into Yasha’s hair. “I don’t know what to do. You’re all running off with your freakin’ gods and stuff. Even Clay left!” Her fists are knotted in Yasha’s clothes, gripping leathers of it like handholds. “I don’t have a god I can run off with. I needed someone to stick around! I can’t just… just blow up the problem this time, Yasha. I literally do not have a magic bullet.”

“I know,” Yasha whispers, holding Nott so tight Molly can see her arms shake. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Nott sniffs. “What are we gonna do?” she whispers. “They aren’t listening to me anymore. They stopped listening to Caduceus. I can’t get them to stop. I thought… I thought Clay had a plan or something. This isn’t a plan. This is a shitty shitty –”

“Okay. Wait.”

Yasha and Nott stop hugging just long enough to look at Molly, blinking through tears. Molly feels a little bad about that but not bad enough to keep his trap shut. He gives an apologetic head tilt, grimacing.

“Sorry, but… I still don’t know what’s going on. You keep talking gloom and doom. What the hell is going on? Why are you shooting your friends? Why is Yasha walking around as a talking lightning bolt? Just… tell me?”

Nott looks at Yasha. “You haven’t told him?”

“You started shooting before I could,” says Yasha dryly.

“Oh. Right.”

Molly feels a hand on his shoulder.

“I’ll tell you,” Caduceus says. His eyes are pale and a little tired. “It was my dream that brought us here. I saw it over and over that I needed to come here. The Wild Mother herself stood in your grave, Mollymauk, but death – and the unmaking of death – is not the domain of the Wild Mother. Only the grave.” His heavy hand squeezes gently, almost bracing Molly. “Death is the province of the Raven Queen.”

Molly just stares up at Caduceus. He thinks, vaguely, that Caduceus Clay is the most interesting person he’s ever had the pleasure to stare at in close quarters and he smells faintly of drying flowers, but also Molly doesn’t understand a godsdamned word he’s saying.

Mollymauk just shakes his head. “What the hell are you saying?”

Caduceus gently, but firmly, takes Molly’s shoulders in his hands and holds his stare.

“I’m saying the Stormlord sent his disciple to your headstone and the goddess of the grave opened her hand for you. I’m saying the Raven Queen is conspiring with the wilds and the storm. I’m saying something is so wrong in the world that the gods are breaking their rules to fix it.” Caduceus looks mournful as he presses on. “I’m sorry, but I think my dreams mean this: there’s something you need to do in this world, Mollymauk Tealeaf and if you don’t …. the next epoch starts now.”

And, well, there is nothing to say to something like that.

Silence stretches like road between all four of them, a long and winding ribbon that Molly dreads to touch.

Eventually though, Nott breaks the quiet with a soft, appropriate, entirely universal, “Fuck.”

Chapter Text

“Tell me again,” Molly says. “Just one more time.”

He’s lying on his back, fingers knitted across his stomach, the grass tickling the back of his neck. The skies are dark, over-cast, the glitter of the moon only just pressing a pale halo of light through a haze in the upper atmosphere. Molly can’t explain the longing he feels, suddenly, to see the moon and he wonders what kind of moon they’re under: waxing or waning. His heart aches strangely for a full moon, so bright it seems like the sun and wants it so profoundly it feels like missing a friend.

Nott, who’s lying in the grass, eagle spread, up and to the right of him, groans.

“We fist-fought the mad death god and won.”

“Uh-huh,” says Mollymauk.

“Specifically, Tharizdun, The Chained Oblivion.”

“I know who the mad death god is.”

“We didn’t do it alone, of course, it was like… a two-phase attack? The battle on the Astral Plane weakened him and then the Prime Deities, like, booted him through the Divine Gate into our front yard so we could finish him off. If that makes sense?”

“Right. Sure.”

A beat.

“Just… just one more time –”

“Oh gods!” Nott plasters her hands over her adorable freckly face. “Molly! How many times can we explain it? We did it. I can’t really describe it because how do you describe something like that? But we did fight a god in the Material Plane. Beauregard punched it to death. I shot it a lot. Fjord like – hacked off pieces of it and fed that shit to his patron. Jester’s god literally fought side by side with her. Caleb –” She falters just a moment. “Caleb used some kind of spell I don’t even know what spell he just… he called it his Wish. It almost killed him, Molly. We barely did it, but we did it. This is the world after we saved it.”

And again, for a while, Molly says nothing.

They lie there under the cloudy sky. They’re all four laid in the grass, the crowns of their heads meeting in the middle, bodies laid out like the petals on an dis-proportioned pinwheel. After Caduceus informed Molly that, perhaps, his resurrection was divinely designed, Molly’s knees stopped working and he sat down, then laid down and refused to get up. So the others eventually just joined him on the grass.

It’s been thirty minutes of a ten-year exposition.

“Look,” Molly says, “the last time I saw you, you were failing to pick a lock in the back of a cart and Beauregard was about to get shanked by some asshole in leather bondage armor. I’m having trouble conceptualizing any of you as god killing demi gods. Sorry.”

“Technically only Jester is a demi-god,” says Caduceus blandly.

“Shut. The fuck. Up.”

“And you don’t really kill a god you just…”

“Caduceus,” Nott snaps.

The firbolg shrugs and goes quiet.

“I don’t understand,” complains Molly, gesturing, “how do you punch out a god and then say you need myundead carcass to fix something. You remember I died in a ditch right? I was left unattended for ten minutes and died. I’m not hard to kill. It’s been done twice. Three times a charm you know. It might stick this next time.”

“I don’t know about that,” says Caduceus, which is, you know, terrifying.

“You’re an opaque motherfucker, aren’t you?” says Molly.

Caduceus flicks an ear at him. “Hmm?”

“Your divine plan has holes in it,” Molly enunciates.

Caduceus’ brow knits. “Well, I don’t know all the details. Just what the Wildmother shows me.”

“Okay, what’s the Wildmother saying now?”

Caduceus thinks about it. “Well, I think we need to head to the Menagerie Coast.”

“What? No!” Nott sits up, spinning around to stare him. “Are you crazy?”

“No,” says Caduceus, perfectly conversational. “I think this will work. If we go there with Mollymauk, it will work.”

“Oh, okay, so magically because it’s Mollythe fuckin’ Hunger will just chill out and let us stroll into the Crushing Deep and the Sucking Maw will just, you know, stop and let that happen. Okay.” She rolls her giant cat-gold eyes, ignoring Molly’ horrified look at the words ‘Sucking Maw’ and ‘Crushing Deep’. “Sure, Caduceus. Sounds like a plan.”

“No.” Caduceus nods. “That’s the plan.

Nott gapes. “That plan sucks!”

“It’ll be okay, Nott. I know these things.”

“No, you don’t know that. You believe that. There’s a difference!”

“Okay, but there’s no difference in the course of action. We need to go the Menagerie Coast.”

“No, we don’t!” Nott yells. “We’re not sending Molly out there! Far as I can tell, the gods keep messing things up. We wouldn’t have a problem if everyone just stuck together rather than running off to their deities.” Here she glares ate Yasha and Caduceus. “It’s not like they fixed anything for us.”

Yasha says nothing, but Clay flips one long ear up, humming thoughtfully.

“Well, you say that,” he says, “but it was the gods who wounded Tharizdun and the gods who reached out to us for aid. Are you saying you prefer a world where the pantheon died, leaving nothing but The Chained Oblivion beyond the Gate?”

“What the hell—?” Molly whispers

Nott doesn’t hear him though, and snaps, “I understand that, Caduceus, like I’ve said a million times. But I don’t want Molly to end up like Beauregard.”

Dead silence then.

Molly sits up and turns. His bangs slip into his eyes, but he ignores it. “What,” he says quietly, “happened to Beauregard?”

Nott looks frozen. Afraid. And that makes Molly afraid.

Then, “She was wounded.”

They all look to Yasha. She’s staring at the sky, her hands behind her head. It’s the first thing she’s said in the last twenty minutes and Molly hears, very distantly, beyond the mountains, a low rumble of thunder. The skies, he thinks, will never clear wherever she walks. Or at least, the storm is always behind her. She blinks and Molly can see her eyes are brighter, wetter than usual.

“She struck the killing blow, but it—” She pauses. “Defeating a god hurt her. She’s been sick ever since.”

“Sick?” Caduceus repeats.

Like that’s not the right word.

“Yes, sick,” snaps Nott. “Or whatever it is. Cursed. She just never woke up, okay? We don’t know. We took her home and we’ve been trying to solve that for the past decade or so, at least until everyone took off.” Nott glares out into the empty field directly in front of her, knees pulled to her chest, arms folded on top. She shoves her chin angrily into her arms. “Yasha went first. Then, after what happened to Fjord…” She shrugs. “I dunno. Everyone left.”

“I’m sorry,” Yasha says, before Molly can demand what happened to Fjord.

“Why did you go?” Nott whispers. Her fingers dig into her biceps. “We might have been able to stop it if you’d been with us. Why weren’t you there?”

“I thought the Stormlord could save Beau.” Yasha ‘s voice comes steadily but… emotionlessly. “Maybe I was just running. I don’t know now.”

Nott sniffs.

“I won’t leave this time. Not until this is done. I promise, Nott.”

Molly watches Nott’s shoulders quiver then steady. “Okay. Um… okay.”

“I’m not sorry,” Caduceus cuts in, casual as a hand-axe. “I should have left earlier. This is the right path. I know it for certain now.”

Nott, furious, turns at the waist to glare at the firbolg. “What? How can you say that? Caleb was relying on you! We needed you!”

“No. You just thought you did.”

Nott grabs the air, fingers clawed, like pantomiming what she’d do to Caduceus’ head if she were allowed to. She shakes an invisible skull like a melon in her fists.

“You’re so… fucking… impossible!” Nott screeches.

For a moment Molly really sees the goblin he remembers in the gnome girl in front of him.

Caduceus just blinks at her, confused.

“You brought Molly back from the dead because your stupid goddess told you to, but it’s them who won’t help us fix Beau in the first place! Caleb is trying to solve this problem but everyone just… took off! Now he thinks he has to do something awful and if you’d just been there to talk to him he wouldn’t have –!” She stops. Her hands clench, pressing against her face, shaking. She takes a deep breath. “Caleb always listened to you about this stuff. He loves me, but he won’t listen.”

“It’s okay,” Caduceus says. “We’ll solve this. I know where to go next. I’ve seen it –”

“If you say in your dreams…” Nott whispers, fists still on her face.

“—in my dreams.”

Nott jumps up, runs over, and starts kicking Caduceus in the knee.

“Are. You. Kidding me?!” she shrieks, enunciating each syllable with a kick.

“Hey,” says Caduceus, watching her kick him.

“I’m not doing this! I came after you because I thought you had a plan! I left because I need someone to come up with a fucking plan! A real plan. I’m so sick of everyone just running off and asking their stupid gods for help.”

“I didn’t just run off,” Caduceus says, sounded wounded.

“What? Yes, you did. You didn’t even say good-bye.” Nott points at an invisible door. “You said you had to do something and you’d be back in a month or so. I thought you had, like, weird groceries or something you were getting from the Blooming Grove.”

“It’s been longer than a few months?”

“YOU’VE BEEN GONE FOR HALF A YEAR!?”

Caduceus frowns, brow knitting, visibly thinking that over.

“Ooooh,” he says softly. “Maybe that’s why I was barred from the city…”

“I HATE YOU SO MUCH. HOW ARE YOU STILL BAD AT THIS!?”

“Caleb’s upset with me then?”

“YES. HE’S FUCKING UPSET WITH YOU, YOU DUNCE. YOU DITCHED HIM WHEN YOU PROMISED NOT TO.”

“But I am coming back. I haven’t left him or you.”

Nott gives up and turns to look Molly in the eye.

“Molly. Fjord isn’t Fjord anymore, okay? His patron… I don’t know. I think it’s either become a god or something like a god now. Fjord made a deal with it to fight the death god, but the deal was that Fjord would feed whatever he cut from Oblivion to his patron. He did it, but that wasn’t enough. Okay? It kept demanding more and more. That thing tried to eat the Menagerie Coast. That was four years ago.”

Molly feels that pit in his stomach yawning wider suddenly, the weakness that took his knees out earlier crawling through his insides like insects through a corpse. He closes his eyes. Imagines Fjord’s anxious face lit in moonlight, a sword laid across his lap, the interior of some anonymous hotel room, and he wonders, quietly, if he was afraid in the end or…  

“Where is Fjord now?” Molly asks.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes, dear. Thank you. I’m bloody quaking in my boots. Now, specifically, where is Fjord?”

A silence.

Then, “Sometimes, Caleb tries to scry on him, to see where he might be. The best we can tell… he’s not quite on this plane of existence but the door to his dimension is in Port Damali.”

“Okay. Well… Caduceus. What is it you want me to do?”

“Go to the door and knock.”

“Okay… terrible. Nott? Tell why is this is a terrible idea.”

“Because Fjord fed Port Damali to the sea and it sank.”

She’s so deadpan, Molly doesn’t need to see her face to envision her gnomish are-you-fucking-kidding-me stare. He doesn’t have to see her face for the cold, horror of it to take root in his gut. Molly’s nails dig into his palm then relax. Nott waits for him to move but when he doesn’t she goes on.

“The only way to reach it now is to walk through a valley cut through the water from the shore to the bottom of the ocean. That’s the Crushing Deep. Jester and I tried to get through it once and it closed on top of us. Jester had to call on the Traveler to get us out. We tried for months to get through. That’s why Jester left. To try and find a way to save Fjord. So…” A long silence. “Yeah. Lots of people wandering off asking gods for help.”

“Okay,” Molly says. “So…”

“The Sucking Maw is just a fancy name for the sea dragon that guards the water around the sunken city. Just FYI.”

Molly opens his eyes and finds both Caduceus and Nott staring at him, waiting.

So, he rolls over and looks at Yasha.

“What do you think?” he says.

She turns her head a little to look at him. “I think,” she says softly, “I’ll follow you wherever you go, Mollymauk.” Her mismatched eyes are sincere as sunshine. “And if this new god tries to hurt you, I have an old god that may protest.”

“Hmm,” says Molly. “Compelling.”

“Fuck,” says Nott. “I forgot you were a dumbass.”

Turns out, Caduceus can walk through trees.

As in, step into one tree, then pop out from another tree that he likes in another part of the world. He says he’s not a druid but implies maybe he made a deal with the Wildmother for this one thing and, well, the point is he can walk through trees.

“I’m not going in there.”

Molly tries to say this when the cleric very casually touches the apple tree by his grave and it just, you know, opens up a portal of glowing light in the bark. It’s morning and they’ve had a day to rest before embarking. That does not make Molly more inclined to jump in portals. Before he can reasonably articulate his fear of being trapped inside some weird-ass tree-based dimension made of splinters, Yasha shoves him straight through and Molly stumbles out the other side.

Like stepping through a door.

Mollymauk almost trips as a brilliant gold skein of sunshine bursts dry and desert hot across his skin. He blinks, blinded momentarily under a cloudless blue sky. A briny smell rides warm on the wind, filling his nose and mouth. When his eyes clear, he finds himself standing, blinking on a grassy hill overlooking a blue and sparkling stretch of shore to the east, the blue of the sea spread out endlessly into the distance.

He thinks, a little stunned, I’ve never seen the ocean before.

But he doesn’t mention it.

Yasha pats him on the shoulder when she steps through the portal behind him.

“You’re the worst,” he informs her.

She ruffles his hair.

“Ready?” she says. “It’s about a day’s hike from here.”

“No trees closer than this one?” Molly asks.

“No,” says Caduceus.

He’s stepping out from the tree after Nott and straightening up to his full and enormous height. The breeze briefly buffets the firbolg’s pale pink mane, the new sun glittering iridescent on the mottled shell of his armor and in the new brightness, Molly can see that the armor is actually extremely scarred, split in places, scratched and… almost bleeding. He peers mildly at Molly, leaning on his staff.

“All the trees in this region died after the sea rose and fell. The salt water poisoned the earth.”

Nott, standing in the grass and squinting around the immediate landscape says, “Molly, can you come over here for a second?”

Molly wanders over while Clay moves to speak with Yasha. Nott, gestures for him to kneel so he does.

The rifle slung over her shoulder seems far too large for her. The breeze ruffles her dark bangs, the sun gold on her brown cheeks. She squints at him.

“I think you should take some of my things,” she says, unslinging a small travel satchel from her shoulder. She flips it open and shoves her entire arm inside, digging. She produces an entire soft gray cloak. She dumps this in his arms. “This is charmed so you’re harder to hit,” she explains. Then she pulls a pair of black bracers from the bag and piles them on top. “These are lucky.” She goes into her bag a third time. “Where the fuck –? Ah ha!” She produces a small box and pops it open, revealing two silver rings engraved with thin, shimming symbols. “These… make you faster and a little stronger.”

“Um,” says Molly as she stacks these in his arms. “Thank you, but –”

“Don’t worry. They’re all magic. They’ll size to fit you.”

“That’s not what I –”

“Oh. And this…” Nott reaches up and rather industriously clips something to his right horn, adjusting it before Molly can resist. She’s stronger than she looks, actually. “Okay. That clasp will make you breathe under water if you, you know, get pulled under. It won’t help with the cold or the crushing though. I don’t have anything for— Oh shit! Yes, I do.” She goes back into the bag. “For the cold I have something.”

“Nott, stop,” Molly says.

“Shut up, you’re squishy as hell. I killed you with one shot.”

“You did not.”

“I’ve fought with Caduceus enough to recognize his Death Ward in action. I totally killed you.” She pulls a pair of plain steel earrings from her bag. “Sorry if they aren’t your style. I could pick up something else later, you know, if we don’t all die on this dumbass–”

Molly wordlessly loops one hand around the back of Nott’s head, fits his hand there in her soft black very un-goblin hair, then tugs her forward so he can kiss her on the forehead. He feels her freeze, then relax a little. He pulls away a moment later and smiles gently, as sincerely as he can possibly manage and then some. The sea air is ruffling her clothes and hair but she’s looking up at him with slightly shinier eyes than before.

“Thank you for taking care of me, Nott.”

“Yeah, well…” Nott drops her eyes. “Thanks for coming back this time.”

Molly doesn’t rise to that and puts on all the various accoutrements provided him. “How’s it look?” he asks, turning his head a little.

“Good,” Nott says, sounding a little raw.

“Nott, you’re a big tough gunslinging hero now, you can’t keep crying on me.”

Nott doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then she scrubs her face and says, “Uh, hey, question for you.”

“Sure.”

“The night before… you could see me when I was sneaking up on Caduceus. Right? You pointed at me.”

Molly tilts his head at the sudden topic jump. “Uh, yes. I did. It was fairly obvious.”

“Right.” Nott pulled her hood more securely around her head and touches the little blue broach at her throat. There’s a faint shimmer of enchantment, a blurring affect, but then she’s just standing there again. She peers expectantly at him, but Molly just frowns. “Anything?”

“What’s that supposed to do?”

“Molly, this is an invisibility cloak. It’s definitely working. I’m invisible.”

Molly wrinkles his nose. “Are you fucking with me or…?”

Nott smacks him and pulls the cloak off her head. “Molly, trust me. You’re seeing through illusions. Which is interesting because I don’t know many people who can do that without years of training honestly. You couldn’t do that before so that’s, uh, a postmortem skill then?”

Molly feels a sick lurch in his belly.

“I guess…”

Nott seems to regret pointing it out and pats his shoulder gently. “Or maybe my cloak is on the fritz. Don’t worry about it. We have much, much worse things to worry about!”

“Thanks, Nott.”

They make camp on the beach two miles out from the shores that were once Port Damali and Caduceus keeps watch in the night. Molly drifts to sleep under a very warm wool blanket, Yasha curled around him from behind, Nott tucked under his arm, her cloak pulled over her. Molly feels like he shouldn’t be able to drift off so easily. He should honestly be more afraid, but… well… the sound of the sea is so new and steady. Nott’s hair smells a little like something floral. Yasha’s body is a nice weight against him and…

Molly jolts awake. His arms close instinctively to pull Nott close, but his hands are empty beneath the wool blanket. She’s gone. Molly, sleep bleary, shakes it off in increments. Hears voices. Someone yelling…?

“Yasha! Wake up! I need you!”

Yasha moves so fast Molly doesn’t realize what’s happening. The blanket is torn off his body, sand kicked up against his back. There’s a crack like muted thunder and a sizzle of live current and suddenly Yasha is standing over him, her fist wrapped around the hilt of a massive black sword. The metal hums, arcs of electricity peeling off the blade and her hair flares around her skull in a localized wind. For a moment, that’s all he can see – Yasha’s back and the lightning.

She moves to stand in front of Molly.

Beyond her, Caduceus is standing fifty feet out from them, facing the water. His staff is in his hand, slammed into the ground directly in front of him like a lance driven into earth, the crystal lit like an amethyst sun in his hands. The light has weight, is billowing around him in a localized wind so his lion mane’s hair tears around his head in ribbons. He’s illuminated in burning pink light and for ten feet around him a shimmering barrier burns pale.

“Caduceus?!” Yasha shouts.

He turns at the waist and pulls something from his belt. Holds it in his fist where Molly can see it’s a small white strip of cloth. He makes three hand motions, says a word and both Yasha and Molly flare with enchantment, light looping them like a ribbon before fading and Molly feels a surge of strength like heat diffuse through him.

And then he sees what it is that has his allies moving.

Beyond Caduceus, there is rift torn open in the air exactly on the barrier where the sea meets the sand. Stepping through the rift is a person in a long gray cloak. On their shoulder is a burning falcon, its body wreathed in fire that licks harmless on the shoulder of its owner. The person appears to be a man, dressed in fine blue and black, his long copper hair pulled back, a shadow of beard along a sharp jawline.

It takes Molly far, far too long to recognize him. He is made unrecognizable, because in the moment that he lays eyes on them, the wizard raises a hand, points it directly at Caduceus and unleashes a tidal blast of nitrogenous cold.

Caduceus doesn’t have chance to move. He ducks, throwing his arm up to shield his face and vanishes in a sheet of blinding ice.

Yasha, seeing this, screams.

Her entire body ignites in lightning and from her shoulders erupts a massive canopy of interlocking bones, bursting free in a spread membrane of glittering black energy. They flare off her shoulders, fifteen feet in diameter and the darkness spread across their skeletal frame engulfs the sky over him. When the shadow falls over him, Molly sees storm clouds roiling in the shade beneath her wings. Lightning cracks over the sea in the distance.

Caleb Widowgast doesn’t hesitate. An orb of screaming fire ignites then collapses into a single hyper-dense bead of power, vibrating at the tip of one finger, curled into the center of his palm.

The mist is clearing. The cone of cold has done its terrible work, sheeting the entire are for thirty feet in hard, silvery ice. It’s ripped it way across the beach, plastered the sand into glittering spikes, and in the centre of the blast zone Molly can see a giant firbolg form, kneeling, his staff held across his body like a shield and in front of him. The air shimmers pink, steaming, ice melting from some arcane safeguard. He’s breathing hard, ice in his hair, the air fogging at his mouth.

He's somehow still maintaining that orb of light around him.

Caleb aims again at him.  

“CALEB! DON’T!”

Yasha lunges, so fast she seems to snap out time an reappear directly between Caleb and Clay, her sword humming. The pink light doesn’t affect her and Caleb just stares at Yasha and the veil of darkness at her back, arched to shield the cleric behind her.

“Don’t,” Yasha says again. “Caduceus is our friend. He’s yourfriend. Stop.”

“Why did you come back?” Caleb says quietly. “For years you’ve been gone to your god. Why come back n–” He stops. His pale blue have lit, finally, on Mollymauk. He blinks and kind of… shifts one step to the left so he can crane his neck and peer around Yasha. He blinks again and his hand lowers, expression empty as he just… keeps staring at Molly the way you look at something while sleep walking.

“Mollymauk,” he says.

“Caleb?” Molly moves cautiously to his feet.

Caduceus immediately grabs piece of paper from a loop of charms on his belt, makes a hand signal and Molly’s skin starts to glow. Then the cleric taps his staff to the sand and the air around Molly lights up with orbs of fairy fire and those orbs coalesce into three-dozen small, pale, sharp-tooth creatures. They hiss and dart like fey hummingbirds around his shoulders.

“Mollymauk?” says Caleb again.

“Caduceus brought him back,” Yasha says. “He’s just trying to help, Caleb. We both are.”

Molly feels one of the fairies brush his cheek, feels static in his hair, feels protections laced around him so tight it’s a weight on his skin. Caleb is staring past Yasha, just… staring right at him.

“Caleb,” he says, holding very still. “I’m a little confused. Why are you attacking us?”

The bird on Caleb’s shoulder takes flight. Embers hang in the air where it takes off, arcing a long flightpath from the wizard’s shoulder and hooking a tight sweep around Molly, then sweeping up into the sky overhead. The heat of its passing is so intense Molly has to shield his face with one arm and in the space between that moment and the next Caleb has crossed the space between them. Literally disappeared and reappeared directly in front of him.

The fairy creatures, suddenly aware of a threat, immediately attack.

Caleb snaps his fingers and says, “Go away.”

All the creatures instantly vanish.

Caleb snaps his fingers again and says again, “Go away.”

The shimmering layer of magic around Molly’s body winks out of existence. Molly go rigid, but the strength Caduceus instilled in his blood remains, humming invisibly inside him. There is still a burning bead of flame in Caleb’s right hand, so concentrated it glows like a tiny sun. With his free hand, Caleb taps Molly’s collarbone with two blunt fingertips and settles them there. A moment passes. A heartbeat and then three.

After a moment Caleb says, quietly, “What are you doing here, Molly?”

Shitshitshitfuckmeshit, Molly thinks.

What he says is, “That’s a funny way to say you’re glad to see me.”

Molly regrets the joke the instant it leaves his mouth, because the all-consuming indifference in Caleb’s stare is like a gut-punch. But he can’t bite it back now.

“Uh, magic, Caleb. I figured you know that stuff.” He arches a brow for effect. Shit. He’s tail-lashing. He forces himself not to, maintains a conversational grin, shrugs, loops his hands behind his head and laughs a little. Like they aren’t in battle, like Caleb doesn’t have a fireball in his fist and his hand on him. “Hell,” he says, “you probably have a better handle on how I’m alive than I do. It’s pretty –”

“I don’t care about that,” Caleb cuts him off. His eyes are pale, faintly glowing. “I mean what are you doing on this beach? On this continent. In this sea. What are you doing?”

“I… we’re trying to find Fjord,” Molly says, caught between the instinct to lie and certainty he won’t pull it off. Molly tilts his head, lowering his arms, and letting his smile get confused. Dumb. Dumb. Play dumb. “Is that bad? What’s going on here, Mr. Widowgast? You seem—" he glances slowly and meaningfully at the magic in Caleb’s fist – “agitated.”

“Fjord is gone.”

“Right. Which is why we’re looking for him. He’s missing.”

“No. He’s gone,” Caleb says, something flickering in his retinas. “He fed a god to his patron, then he bargained for one last boon. He’s beyond any of us and he’s certainly beyond whatever you’re doing here on this beach.” He glances at Yasha and Caduceus who seem paralyzed by Caleb’s proximity to Molly. “Caduceus is using you. You know what he serves? A goddess of balance. He’ll kill you when this task is done and return you to rotting. He did it once you know.” Caleb, to Molly’s surprise, moves his fingers from Molly’s skin and offers him his empty left hand open and upturned. “I’ll protect you,” he murmurs, “if you want.”

And for a moment, Molly hesitates. His mentally tries out the idea of taking Caleb’s palm in his but…

“I trust Yasha,” Molly says. “I’m alright, Caleb.”

“You don’t trust me.” Caleb says and for the first time Molly sees a flicker of emotion in his face. “She serves Kord, the Stormlord, but you think I’d hurt you?”

“I… I know you wouldn’t, Caleb. But why do I have to choose between you?”

Caleb lifts his chin slightly. “Oh. They haven’t told you.”

Molly feels a cold crawl up his spine. Gut-clenching cold, like a hand in the dark moving unwanted up his back.

He says, softly, “Told me what?”

“About Beauregard.”

Molly’s breathing hitches.

“Is she alright?” he blurts. “Did something happen to Beau?”

Caleb blinks. He loses that psychotic indifference his brow furrows in confusion. Like a puzzled puppy and for a moment he’s exactly the baffled man Molly met in Trostenwold.

“She’s… I don’t…” He frowns, brow knitting deeper. “What did they tell you?”

“She’s sick. Punching out The Chained Oblivion made her sick.”

Caleb stares.

“Sick?” he repeats. He looks now across the beach to Yasha whose standing rooted, frozen. “No, she’s not sick, Molly. It’s more serious than that. You see, when you defeat a god, you don’t really kill it. You replace it. You become the thing in that pantheon. That’s what they didn’t tell us when they asked us to do their work, that one of uswould become The Chained Oblivion.”

Molly blinks.

“What?”

“Beauregard,” says Caleb. “She’s the Chained Oblivion, or she will be. We’ve been trying to save her from that.”

“I don’t…”

“It’s alright,” Caleb says. “That’s a lot the process. I’m sorry. But you should know that before you follow Caduceus into anything. And it’s why I need to know what you’re doing out here, Mollymauk. Because here is my theory: You are a component part in some spell they are devising against me and as much as I love you—” Caleb’s hand moves up Molly’s neck, settling there, his thumb hooked gently along the corner of his jawline— “I will kill you again if you try to stop me.”

Molly doesn’t move for a moment. He just… doesn’t move, feels a stinging in the back of his eyes and a burning at the back of his throat. He knows Caleb can definitely see that’s he’s afraid, but the wizard’s face is… not even indifferent, just… resolved. Which is much, much worse.

“Caleb,” he says after a breath. “How would bringing Fjord back be a threat to you? What are you doing? I don’t understand.”

Caleb immediately looks frustrated.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know anything. I just want to help my friends. That’s it.”

“Of course, you do. I know, Molly.” He almost smiles. In a strained voice he says, “I missed you, you know? We all… we missed you.” He exhales shakily… then moves the hand on Molly’s neck and instead hooks his arm around Molly, pulling him into a tight, one-armed hug. His face is pressed against the side of Molly’s neck. His hair smells of component materials – sulfur, metals, and oil. “You shouldn’t have died,” he whispers.

He squeezes Molly harder.

So Molly loops two arms around him and hugs him back, tight as possible. He’s just a little bit taller than Caleb, actually. Not something he noticed when they were traveling together, but something he notices while the wizard is suddenly in his arms. He feels Caleb go still, hears his breathing stop for a moment. Everything is very quiet except for the crackle of fire in Caleb’s hand, burning at Molly’s back but not… not yet unleashed. Molly leans his forehead against Caleb’s temple, tucks one hand behind Caleb’s head, fingers digging just a little into his hair.

“I’m sorry we left you alone.”

Caleb doesn’t move for a moment. Just… stands there a little slack in Molly’s hold.

“You didn’t leave me,” Caleb murmurs. “You were taken. There’s a difference.”

Caleb pulls back. He uses his free hand to reach up and very gently, brush Molly’s bangs from his face. A strange, weirdly familiar gesture from the man that Molly recollects as struggling to even make eye contact with anyone. He does it like he’s done it before actually. He smiles…

Then he turns and unleashes the Fireball at Yasha and Caduceus.

The beach ignites like a bomb’s gone off, instantly consuming the ground where they stand for twenty feet in diameter around them. Molly doesn’t remember screaming, but when he snaps back to himself he’s definitely yelling Yasha’s name. He instinctively tries to run toward the blaze, but hand closes on his arm and his throat locks up, then his whole body, every muscle seizing up and the Hold Person spell latches into his bones and grips hold.

“They aren’t dead,” Caleb whispers. “They’re stronger than that. I promise. I’m sorry, Molly. I love them more now. I’m so sorry.” Caleb touches his face, then points a finger at his chest and he says a Word that aches in Molly’s blood, in a language Molly doesn’t know but he understands it when Caleb says, “Die.”

And the Word kills him.

Chapter Text

Molly hits the ground. Not hard, but he hits the ground, like someone dropped him gently. The grass cushions his head, presses into the nape of his neck. For a moment he lies there blinking. The air’s warm, his jacket pooled underneath him, his fingers slack in the silk and embroidery, one knee bent up while he lies there breathing. A silver bowl of moonlight hangs full in the sky above him and the sight feels so familiar, so comforting, Mollymauk feels a sting suddenly of homesickness and relief he hadn’t been previously aware of.

He sits up slowly.

There’s a person with long black hair sitting cross-legged at his feet. They’re hauntingly pale, beautiful, and familiar. Their armor bristles with raven feathers and shines in places but consumes the light in others. Their cloak gathers as shadow on the ground beneath them and they’re looking at Molly with an expression he interprets, faintly, as the sorrow of bystanders. A helpless empathy. When Molly just stares blankly at them for a full ten seconds, they get up and move to kneel beside him. When he doesn’t knowledge the move, the stranger touches his shoulder. Gently. Like they might brush a wound. 

“Hey,” says the stranger.

“What happened?” Molly rasps. He presses palm to his face, realizes there are tears on his cheeks. “Shit.” Molly wipes the dampness with the back of one hand, swallowing. “Why did he do that?”

“I don’t know,” says the stranger. “But I’m sorry.”

“Heh, I thought I was supposed to fix things.” He reverses his hand, finishes drawing off his tears with the heel of his palm. “He looked… he knew I was me. I could see he – fuck.” Molly drops his face briefly into his hands, breathes, drops his arms again. “What the hell was I supposed to do?”

The stranger shakes his shoulder until he looks up at them. Their eyes are dark, holding his gaze fully, drawing him in with physical gravity that pulls Molly’s head to the left. They touch the side of his face with the back of two fingers and before Molly can wonder what they’re doing… the façade buckles a little. Their brow knits with a phantom pain. 

“Do you want to stop?” they ask.

“What?”

“I’m your guide and your guardian, Mollymauk Tealeaf. I can do either. Just say which.” And when Molly just stares, confused, he goes on urgently, “I’m tasked to you. I’ll guard you here while you fight on… or I’ll take you up right now and guide you back to the Moonweaver. It’s your choice, alright? Always. I’m with you either way.”

Molly slips a wry smile. “I can’t stop. Not really.”

The stranger, who Molly knows now is certainly a reaper, falters. Then sobers.

“No. Fuck that. You can stop. You don’t have to do this –”

“No,” Molly says. “I have to.”

There’s a pause. “What do you want to do?”

“Give me a minute. Do we have a minute?”

“We always have time here.”

Molly pulls his legs up a little, arms draped over his knees, staring down the slope of the hill to the quiet meadows beyond. When this goes on long enough, the raven knight takes a seat beside him, mimicking his posture, and likewise waits in silence. Eventually, because it seems like the thing to do, Molly tips over slightly so he’s leaning on them, his cheek resting against their shoulder. The feathers tickle a little. The stranger doesn’t seem bothered.

“Oh, fuck me, I guess.” Molly sighs and sits up again. “Alright. Send me back.”

“Hey,” says the raven knight. They move to kneel in front of him, taking Molly’s face gently between gloved hands. They slap him gently on the cheek and smile. “Just stay alive.”

“Easier said than –”

They grab his shoulders and shove Molly straight down to –

Molly jolts alive, hard, sucking a loud, ragged breath. He’s lying on his back in the sand and someone is cradling the nape of his neck, a hand pressed against his chest. It takes a dizzy moment for the stars to clear from his eyes and his vision to refocus, the face overhead sharpening slowly and for a strange moment Molly is baffled by the anxious pink and gray firbolg that clarifies over him. He’s not sure who else he was expecting though.

“You’re okay?” Caduceus says sounding shaken.

“I am?” Molly says.

Caduceus ignores his question.

He makes a hand motion, says a word, and presses his thumb against Molly’s forehead. It’s familiar. Molly recognizes the Death Ward magic as it takes root in his soul again. A warm net to pull him back from the cold. It’s only then Molly notices that Caduceus is bleeding from the forehead, red slick soaking the downy fur from his right temple to his throat. He doesn’t seem bothered by it.

“Are you okay?” Molly manages.

“That’s a funny thing to ask considering you were dead a minute ago.”

“Yeah. Funny that. Ugh. My head’s ringing.”

“Yes, being dead will do that,” says Caduceus and then he pushes Molly down in the sand. “Can you just hold still for a minute?” He waits to see if Molly resists. “Okay. Thanks. Just need to do one thing…”

His hand withdraws and he yanks a pouch from his belt. There’s pre-mixed vial of what looks like ground red crystal and spice which he crushes in his palm, ignoring the blood it draws. He uncorks a flask of what must be holy water and pours it over his closed fist, then he starts to speak. Molly feels the air… twitch, then shiver, then hum. Caduceus is completely thralled by the spell, speaking non-stop, softly, eyes closed. Steam rises off his closed fist.

Which is about the moment Molly hears something explode.

He sits up on his elbows and looks past Caduceus.

There, sitting on the beach and glowing faintly, is a large pale dome of solid magic. At its center is Caleb Widowgast. He’s looking very, very harried. He’s pulled a scroll from his pocket, has it open in front of him as he reads it, mouth moving, glancing distractedly up from time to time.

It’s admirable concentration considering what’s going on outside.

Yasha – lovely Yasha whom Molly knows best from the road, from nights under carnival tents, and the chaos of circus lights and laughter – is presently a screaming pillar of lightning. She hovers a full twenty feet above the beach. Her wings are out, but they don’t move or seem to carry the air beneath them. Rather, sheets of shadows are spread like the thin skin along their frame of bone, sparking with black necrotic energy. In Yasha’s fist is the massive black sword he saw before.

She’s presently hammering her sword against the top this dome.

Which doesn’t fully encapsulate the scene, because every time she swings the sword, the air ignites at the point of impact, detonating outward in a furious wind that tosses Yasha’s hair and knocks sand across the beach. She’s hitting the shield so hard, with such force, Molly can feel it in his bones it would cleave stone like butter. The air stinks like ozone and the cold tang of necrotic magic. Over and over and over she hits, tireless, machine-like. Psychotic.

Molly’s never seen her like that before.

“I said don’t move,” says Caduceus, starting Molly out of his horrified trance.

The firbolg firmly plants a hand against Molly’s chest and thumps him flat on his back again in the sand. His other hand, the one he used for whatever spell he was casting, is empty and covered in ash. He peers down at Molly, frowning.

“I’m serious. Don’t move.”

Molly gives him a baffled look and hisses, “You want me to play dead?”

“Yes.” Caduceus rather industriously brushes Molly’s hair into his face, ignoring his sputter. “Stop.”

Molly obeys mostly because he’s too indignant and confused to be contrary. Caduceus looks over his shoulder toward Yasha. She’s breathing heavy, bare shoulders heaving, having swung back in the air to wind up for another attack. But the moment she sees Clay she freezes.  As if she’d been waiting for him to signal her… and the cleric shakes his head.

Son of a bitch, Molly thinks and starts to get up, but Clay gestures and Molly feels the familiar seizing wrench of Hold Person, the spell latching into his spine like a creeping vine around his nerves. Molly still manages to snarl, struggling invisibly against the enchantment, through his teeth.

“What the bloody fuck are you doing?”

“I’m sorry,” Caduceus says beneath his breath, “but she won’t win if she doesn’t keep her rage.”

Molly immediately looks (with just his eyes) to Yasha. She’s still floating aloft but is shaking her head frantically. She presses her fists to the sides of her temples, the sword in her hand like it weighs nothing. Her face contorts with silent, animal agony and for a moment she curls in on herself. Then she screams.

Lightning strikes and burns the beach bone white and in the split second between one moment and the next, her hands slam into the dome, her sword pinned flat against it.

“CALEB!” Her voice is deafening. She slams her fists against the barrier, screaming, “WHAT DID YOU DO!?” Then almost sobbing, “WHY!? WHY DID YOU DO THAT?”

But Caleb doesn’t seem able to answer. He’s frozen, staring up at her through the shimmering pane between them, just watching the fallen aasimar as she wails. As she hunches like she’s wounded, her fingers digging into the layer of magic and sparking with current where she touches it. She stares down through it like glass in a shop front to the man who just killed her friend and for a moment, there’s nothing but the sound of the ocean on the shore.

“Drop this spell,” Yasha says.

“So you can kill me?” Caleb asks, almost in wonder.

“Drop this spell,” Yasha snarls. Her eyes ignite. The sword in her fist reacts to her and the blade flares, burns white phosphorous bright and becomes blinding shard of pure bottle blue starfire. Yasha’s eyes are composed of the same arrested lightning. She rears back and slams a fist into the dome. She screams, “DROP THIS SPELL AND FACE ME!”  

“You’ll forgive me,” Caleb says. “You’ll forgive me when I get Beau back.”

Then the scroll in his hand disintegrates.

Immediately, a screaming tear opens with a crack in the air to some 200 meters behind the dome and disgorges a massive, howling, two-story tall mass of rust-red muscle and bone. Giant gorilla-like arms slam down, driving enormous twin pincers into the sand. The beast pulls itself from the hell dimension it was summoned from, its head a horror of distended fangs and a crown of jutting horn, fiendish eyes burning red in deep sockets of bone. The air goes sour with the stench of the fire plane before that brief, shrieking window tunnels shut behind it.

And then there’s a glabrezu standing on the beach.

“Oh,” says Caduceus. Then, “Darn it.” He brings his wrist to his mouth, speaking into the charm on his wrist. “Yasha. I just cast Forbiddance on the ground around Caleb. Sorry. I didn’t want him to run.”

“Height?” comes Yasha’s voice, distracted.

“Sixty by sixty by ten.”

“Good. No matter what he says, you keep him here for me.”

Yasha looks up from the dome, staring at the snarling pit-beast across from her the way you look up when a door opens in a room, then she looks back down into the dome where Caleb is still looking up at her. Her palm is pressed still against the barrier and from there she pushes gently off its surface. She floats up and back, until she’s over thirty feet up. Her sword hangs by her knee.

“Keep your wall,” she says. She grips the hilt of her blade and black veins begin to pulse slow from her eyes, spidering her face in dark capillaries. “I am deathless, Caleb! You can run if you want but I am coming for you!”

And then she vanishes. A lightning strike of magic leaves an after image. She reappears simultaneously directly in the air above the glabrezu. Screaming, she slams her sword point down straight into the top of its spine. The sky splits again and a bolt of lightning forks from the sky, jagging to the hilt of the sword like a grounding rod and the glabrezu howls. Yasha tears the blade free just in time to be backhanded by a gigantic forearm, the force of the blow sending her in a rocketing trajectory straight into the side of a cliff-face 200 meters out. She craters through the rock like a meteorite… then immediate wrenches herself out from the rubble.

“Caduceus,” says a Caleb’s voice suddenly, distracting Molly from the extremely upsetting vision of his best friend fighting a pit fiend. “Dismiss your spell or I’ll summon something actually dangerous and I’ll put it right on top of you. You have ten seconds.”

Clay blinks, one long ear flicking up slightly. “Hmm. No.”

Then, clearly from the pendant, “You think that casting ring makes you powerful? I gave it to you, Caduceus. Don’t try this.”

The firbolg shrugs. “Killing me won’t dispel the effect. Do it if you want, but you’re not teleporting away now.”

There’s a pause.

Then Caleb says quietly, “You want her to kill me, Clay?”

Caduceus says nothing and across the beach, Yasha dives out of the sky. She rips her sword across the titan’s back with a massive two-handed swing that knocks it staggering into the sea. Lighting strikes again, illuminating it as Yasha cleaves her blade down again with such monstrous, unfathomable force it splits one giant clavicle, snapping ribs as it carves down. Blood floods the waves. Her wings flare, dripping blood and sea water.

“You think I won’t kill you too?” Caleb asks, ignoring the battle entirely.

Caduceus kneels there. Says, “You just killed a dear friend. I don’t think you’ll kill another.”

Across the beach, Caleb slams a fist into the inside of the dome wall. “Drop the spell, Caduceus! Don’t make me hurt you!”

“No,” says the cleric.

“You were never one of us,” Caleb hisses. “You were just Mollymauk’s replacement. I killed Molly! Do you understand? You think I won’t kill you too? Because let me tell you: of all the Nein, I’ve always found you the most expendable.”

Caduceus’ enduring calm seems to flicker, for just a second. “You don’t mean a word of that.”

“Drop the spell or I’m going to –!”

The gunshot rings out across the beach.

There’s an impact against the top right of the dome, a spark of arcane light that implodes to a single, burning singularity… then the bullet unleashes a wave of arcane power that Molly cannot identify and the dome shatters. No. It disintegrates. Caleb lunges back from the wall, stumbling. As he dome falls, a fresh shield of blue magic spins up from his hands… just in time as the second gunshot puts a slug into the magic at Caleb’s knee.

He looks… honestly, devastated.

“Nott?” he rasps.

The third gunshot ricochets off the shield and Caleb immediately starts to run. As he does, the makes a two-handed gesture, presses his hands to his chest and – with sudden and a shocking burst of speed – sprints straight to his left.

Caduceus immediately says a spell word. Caleb shouts one back. Nothing happens. Caduceus lunges to his feet then. The firbolg’s voice, usually so steady, takes on a sudden lion-ish sub-vocalization and he roars, “STOP!”

And Caleb, seized by the sudden arcane command, doesn’t quite stop… but he trips, staggering, forcing his way through it...

The fourth shot hits him in the back of knee.

So he doesn’t make it to the edge of the anti-teleportation field. He goes down.

Nott appears then, as if from thin air, on a cropping of rock about twenty meters away to Molly and Caduceus’ left. She’s standing up, her hood sliding from her hair as she shells a spent cartridge from the chamber of her weapon, the long metal barrel weirdly matte in the half light of the coming dawn. Her eyes glow slightly, lantern yellow as the wind buffets her hair around her small, round face. For a moment she just stands there, unmoving, listening to Caleb scream though a shattered kneecap.

Through the communicator, Molly can hear Caleb wailing, over and over, “Why?” Saying Nott’s name and just, “Why are you with them?!”

“I’m sorry,” Nott whispers. She’s shaking. “I’m so sorry, Caleb.”

Then she turns and immediately shoots Caduceus. He wasn’t expecting that so it nails him, easily, in the upper right torso and puts the firbolg down like a sack of bricks. Clay hits the sand on his back, crying out just once, his long body curling instinctively in the sand. He clutches at his ribs, at the collar of his armor, choking as shell-shocked lungs fail to draw in oxygen. There’s no blood though. Just the airless stunning effect of being shot, almost point blank, through his armor.

Nott is sobbing at this point. She’s doubled over, her weapon still braced against her shoulder. Two teammates felled in less than ten seconds and she’s weeping.

Clay’s hold person charm unlatches itself from Mollymauk’s spine about then.

“Nott,” he says immediately. He pushes himself into a sitting position. “Hey, Nott? Nott, it’s okay. No need to get dramatic. Okay?”

Her head snaps up. She stares down at Molly from her sniper’s perch.  

“Molly?” she croaks. Her eyes are the size and shape of two coins in her face.

“Hi,” he says. “Please stop shooting people?”

“How are you not dead?” says Nott. She sounds like she’s in shock. “He… he killed you. You’re dead. No one can survive that.”

Molly tries to be calm in the face of his own rattling terror. “Clay brought me back again.” A beat. “I think.”

“You can’t… that’s not… You can’t do that! No one can–!” Nott’s eyes go wide, horrified. “You have to stop Yasha,” she whispers, dread welling in her pretty gnomish face. “You have to stop her! She’ll kill him! She’ll kill Caleb! Go! GO RIGHT NOW! PLEASE! I know he hurt you but–?!”

Molly is already on his feet.

He sprints, bee-lining it straight toward the water, a blur of magic-accelerated tiefling as Nott’s enchanted rings launch him at twice his usual speed from a runner’s crouch toward the shore. He glances, just once, in Caleb’s direction as he comes parallel and sees the wizard staring at him. Time slows, not truly but in that infinitesimal second of recognition Caleb’s face is rigid with shock, confusion, and a strange undercurrent of terror as the thing he just killed goes running past him. Untouched. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but Molly thinks he looks a little relieved.

Then Molly keeps running, headlong into the sea.

“YASHA!”

Beyond the breakers, he can see: The glabrezu is dead. The enormous mass of its body floating like a whale corpse in the waves. Yasha is literally kneeling on top of it. Screaming and covered in gore, she just keeps hacking, each blow spraying another burning gout of blood. Soaking her hair, covering her shoulders, her armor, dripping off every line of muscle. Lightning flashes in the distance, illuminating the waves around her, shining off the blood that coats her skin so thoroughly she herself looks like a flayed thing tearing into the corpse. Some primal aasimar instinct driving her into a frenzy against the hell-spawn.

Molly hits the water, wading out to his knees in to shallows.

“YASHA!” He cups two hands around his mouth. “STOP!”

She freezes halfway through a downswing, startled from her killing. The sword drips in her fist. She turns to face him, her soaking hair swinging heavily from her head. Her eyes, burning like twin suns, seem to extinguish when she sees him. Molly drops his arms and waits. He watches her stand to her feet on the mass of demonic flesh beneath her. She bends at the knees, then launches into the air and in a single arching bound is propelled the full distance.

She lands heavy in the shallows, clumsy in her haste. She drops her sword and it blinks away.

“Molly?!” She sprints toward him, water splashing up behind her. “Mollymauk!?”

She slams into him before he can reply, instantly closing him in a blood-soaked bearhug that staggers them both for a moment. He ignores that and grips hold of her armor, fingers digging into the sticky hot slick. Her hair is a stinking, sulfurous rat nest of gore against his face, but he ignores that too. Her fists are knotted in his cloak and in the back of his hair, gripping so tight it hurts a little.

“He killed you.” She’s whispering frantically. “He killed you again. I thought…” She makes a strangled noise. “I didn’t think how much worse the second time would be.”

“I’m okay, Yasha. Alright? Come back to me for a second.”

She makes a gutted sobbing sound. “Don’t do that again!”

“I’m really trying, dear.” Molly’s throat feels raw. He grips at the leather straps that crisscross her back, breathing slowly. “Hey, don’t kill Caleb. I know he did that business back there but don’t. Alright?”

“Okay,” she whispers. “Okay, I won’t.”

Molly glances over his shoulder.

Caleb has dragged himself another ten meters on his elbows through the sand. He has some kind of glowing stone in his fist and he’s looking at the pair of former carnie performers standing together in the ocean. Yasha’s cradling Molly’s head against her shoulder. The waves fill Molly’s boots with sea water. The cold doesn’t bother him because Nott’s enchanted earrings stave off the chill. Caduceus’ Death Ward lays warm in Molly’s chest. None of that seems like much protection against the echo in Mollymauk’s head – the one with a hand on his shoulder and a hand over his heart saying, softly, regretfully, “Die.”

But Caleb just lays back, his head falling in the sand like he’s very exhausted… or like a man who’s giving up on something. He grips the stone and in a flash of blue light, he vanishes.

And Molly feels something small, something loadbearing inside him, fracture.

“Shit,” he mutters into Yasha’s shoulder. He grips her tighter. “Fuck.”

If she feels him shaking she doesn’t comment. She just pulls closer until the tremor subsides.

Eventually, they walk out of the ocean.

“No, no, no,” Molly says, rushing up and shooing Nott away from Caduceus.

She’s currently helping the cleric sit up, gently, looking very, very sorry about shooting him with her rifle, but upon seeing Molly’s furious approach, she hops back like a startled hare. Molly stomps across the sand and with zero preamble seizes the front of the fibolg’s armor and yanks him very, very close. Almost nose to nose. Molly grins because he’s still nerve-shot and full of adrenaline and but also, he’s so angry he could bite something. A presumptuous fibolg will do.

Smiles are just the intermediary step to biting.

“You want to explain what the hell you did back there?”

Caduceus seems confused. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, no,” Molly grits, still smiling. “Don’t do that. I don’t take very kindly to people making assassins out of my friends. So let’s try that again.” Molly shakes him a little. “Why the hell did you fake my death?”

“You weren’t fake dead,” Caduceus says, puzzled. “You were actually dead, Mollymauk. I had to revive you. I don’t understand –”

“That’s not what I bloody mean and you know it. The moment I woke up, you cast a spell to trap Caleb on the beach. Then you told Yasha I was dead. You held me down to do it.” Molly glares. “If you want my friends to kill someone in my name, then you better do it when I’m actually dead. Not a second before. You understand me?”

Nott looks at Caduceus.

“Is that true?” she whispers.

Caduceus says nothing. Then, “I didn’t want Yasha to kill him… I just wanted him wounded.”

“Well, okay,” Molly says brightly. “That’s fine. Considering he literally talked me to death, I think wounding him a bit is warranted, but I think that’s something you need to tell your teammates. Why is just telling them not an option?”

Silence for a moment. 

Nott and Yasha look at Caduceus and Mollymauk can feel it like gravity getting denser as they do. Two of the strongest women in the realm deciding what terrible thing they might be doing in the next thirty seconds. 

“Because,” says Caduceus blankly, tiredly. “Nott loves Caleb. She loves him more than anything, in fact. She ran the moment he appeared, like I knew she would, because she didn’t want him to know she’s not quite on his side anymore.” He glances toward Yasha. “You swore to never use your battle trance again even on enemies, much less a friend. I’m sorry, but we need the Deathless Storm. We need Nott the Brave. Caleb Widogast is beyond us otherwise because you know, this time, he was holding back because he loves us. You know that.”

Yasha, standing off the side now, unfolds her arms from where she’s had them crossed over her chest. She is literally covered from head to foot in demon blood, her pale mismatched eyes bright spots in a canvas of wet red gore. Her face is blank as she moves forward. Her wings have faded but there’s a nimbus of darkness still along her shoulders, behind her teeth, and living in her stare as she kneels down and takes Caduceus’ left forearm in her hand and pulls him nearer.

He doesn’t resist her.

“You tricked me to break my vow?” she whispers.

To his credit, Caduceus looks pained. “Yes.”

“We are out here for the purpose of killing friends and you made me believe I’d lost Molly again… so I might kill Caleb too?” The empty horror in her stare is fathomless deep, her soul living out this dark alternate universe where Molly didn’t get up in time and she stood over Caleb Widogast’s corpse on a beach. “Do you think I would have survived that?”

“You’re strong, Yasha. You –”

“I am not strong!” she cries, grabbing him now by the shoulder as well, forcing Molly to let go and withdraw. She pulls Caduceus close, shaking him. Yasha’s eyes are running over now, a wildness in her that cracks her voice. “I am not! I ran to the storm because I could not face what happened after Thrazidun!I could not face what I did! I became a monster because I am not strong and you almost made me one again, Caduceus?!” She shakes him harder, mouth twisting. “Why?”

Clay seems frozen, paralyzed by the yawning wild grief in Yasha’s face. “I’m sorry. I – It’s just so important we don’t fail. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry isn’t good enough!” Yasha grabs him by the back of the neck, bloody fingers digging into the pink mane at the base of his skull. She yanks him close, pressing them forehead to forehead and she says, ragged, “I need to trust you! You’re our healer. I need you to be the one that takes care of us, Clay.”

“You can trust me,” Caduceus whispers. “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”

“Swear to me!”

“I swear, Yasha.”

And that seems to be enough, because Yasha makes this raw, animal sound and pulls the giant firbolg into a bone-crushing hug, getting blood all over him but he doesn’t seem to care. He goes rigid for just a moment, then wraps his arms around her and Molly sees a faint shimmer of healing magic start up in his hands, then spread across Yasha’s back, smoothing away scrapes and cuts along her arms, closing a gash on her brow. Yasha’s eyes are twisted so tightly shut, tears running clean tracks through the blood to her chin.

“We can’t fall apart,” she rasps.

Caduceus’ calm is very much gone. He grips her tight. “I won’t let that happen. I won’t. I’m sorry.”

It’s quiet for a moment. The ocean waves roar steadily in the distances, rolling relentlessly and indifferently forward while they struggle through a moment of terrible uncertainty – each looking at the other and wondering what terrible thoughts might be racing behind familiar eyes. The silence goes on for a while, the pale glow of coming sunrise expanding across the horizon in pale purple and pink.

Then, very quietly, Nott says, “So that’s still the plan?”

Everyone looks at her. She’s sitting cross-legged in the sand, shoulders slumped, head bent.

“I mean… I knew it was, but if Yasha is saying it out loud then it’s real, isn’t it?” She wipes her face with one hand and sniffs. “No point hiding it from Mollymauk. He’s already died again in the name of this thing we’re doing, so let’s be clear.” She looks up at Molly. “We’re bringing the others together because it took all of us to kill a god before. It’ll probably take all of us to do it again.”

Molly shakes his head.

“I don’t…” He looks back and forth among them. “You mean…?”

Yasha is not looking at him. Caduceus and Nott are watching him though.

Molly, who is covered in blood and four times dead, sitting on a battle-blasted beach and so emotionally spent it feels like there shouldn’t be a drop of feeling left in him… he feels a sting of panic looking into their sober, battle-worn faces. His instinct, immediately: To run away from it. Yell at it. No. Absolutely not. No. But in the face of their scars and the history of violence ten years old at this point, he feels paralyzed by the weight of everything they’ve done without him.

He’s suddenly a million miles away from the three warriors sitting on the beach with him.

“We have to kill Beauregard,” Molly says, finally. “That’s why Caleb tried to stop us. Because you’re coming for Beau.”

Chapter Text

“You know she was different after you died.”

Nott says this about an hour later.

Mollymauk’s watching the sun rise. They’ve moved their camp up off the beach to the top of the cliffs where there is grass and the wind is stronger. Molly’s seated in the field, arms folded on top of his knees, watching the sky blush and the faint molten glitter of the sun creep along the horizon. Nott sits beside him, just short of touching him but near enough that either of them could lean over and be immediately in contact. They’re watching Yasha and Caduceus who are at the bottom of the hill consulting a confluence of fairies about the immediate condition of the planar barriers near the coast

Because, apparently, those grow thin where the land meets the sea at Port Damali.

Nott clears her throat and goes on.

“I mean, I didn’t have much to compare to,” she says loudly, filling the silence with a grim determination. “We didn’t get to know each other that well before… well… before you died.”

“Different how?” Molly says quietly.

“Focused. Just… ready for a fight all the time, you know? I mean, she was like that before but it was purposeful once she came back. Every battle was, like, a thing, you know? Like a prayer.” She shifts her weight a little. “I mean, the Stormlord’s the god of battle and warfare so I guess it made sense but… Molly, she believed so strongly. So strongly that she would be the one to strike down Thrazidun, because it hadto be her, you know? Her or maybe Jester.”

“Why?”

“Because they were the strongest.” A pause. “Molly, none of us did the right thing after Beauregard died. We did everything right after you died but we just… we fucked it up the second time around. Didn’t mean to, but we did and I just… I…” She trails away. Then says, “I’m sorry, Molly.”

Molly glances at Nott.

She’s looking at him, sadly, her hood pulled up a little around her head and she looks both nothing and exactly like the goblin girl he knew. There’s just a large gauge firearm on her spine and he watched her gun down the man Molly knows she loves most in the world. She’s unrecognizable to him, but her sadness is familiar.

The sun’s half-way out from the horizon, difficult to look at now. Molly closes his eyes and sit there, feeling the warmth rise on his cheeks, his collarbones, and neck. There’s a shake still in his hands from moment to moment when he hears them: Voices repeating like an echo-chamber in his head – “Respect.” “Die.”– and it clenches his throat every time. When he opens his eyes, Yasha and Caduceus are hiking back up the hill toward them.

When they reach the top, Yasha takes a seat next to Molly, opposite Nott. She hooks her arms over her knees, stares into her interlocked fingers hanging between her shins. There’s still blood under her nails.

“So,” she says, “will you still help us?”

“Help you kill Beauregard?” Molly says, quietly, assigning no accusation to the question.

“Yes.”

He looks at his friend, her sphinx-like profile staring emotionlessly forward. “That’s bad business, Yasha.”

Yasha nods, her throat tightening, “Okay. Then, we’ll help you get somewhere safe then. Somewhere Caleb can’t find you. You can –”

Molly touches her bare arm, his palm settling against the bend in her elbow. “I didn’t say I was leaving, Yasha.” When she looks at him, startled, he shrugs. “I’ll help you bring the others together, but I don’t believe killing Beauregard is what we’re going to do.”

“It’s been ten years trying to find another way,” says Nott slowly. “No offense Molly, but we’ve had time to get through the denial phase you’re just getting started in.”

“Thank you, Nott. That’s a bit condescending. I’m aware.” Molly taps a thumb against his chest. “But I’m also a new variable to things this time around and I’d like to think it’s going to give us options you didn’t otherwise have before. And Caleb might have lost perspective, but he’s still smart and he thinks you’re wrong about Beau.”

“No,” says Caduceus suddenly. “He knows we’re not wrong… he doesn’t care anymore.”

“What does that mean?” Molly snaps.

“He won’t let us finish it,” says Yasha. “It’s taken ten years for us to admit what we have to do, but Caleb will never do it. It’s his fault, so he can’t finish it.”

“His fault?”

“His Wish,” says Nott, quietly cutting in. It’s quiet a moment while she collects herself. “Caleb used his Wish to stop Thrazidun.” Nott blinks hard. “But it wasn’t strong enough to kill a god. All it did was make Oblivion killable for an instant. You know, at the exact instant Beau struck a killing blow.”

Mollymauk stands up abruptly, brushing grass from his pants and cloak. He pushes his hair from his brow, pressing the loose waves of it back against his skull and stands there for a moment with the sun on his face and arms, trying to see a way forward. Eventually he glances over his shoulder.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” he says airily. “Let’s go find Fjord before Caleb gets a second wind.”

Three legendary god-killing warriors glance at one another. The shared history of violence and despair among them in that single moment is so intimate, so total in its instant understanding between them, that Mollymauk can feel the ten-year gulf (the ten years of his death) sudden as a cold front rolling across his skin. He’s a stranger standing on a hill in stolen clothes. He’s living again – as always – on borrowed time.

There was a time that made him fearless.

“C’mon,” Molly says, offering Yasha a hand up. “We can do this.”

“I haven’t changed my mind,” she warns him.

“That’s fine. I’m still with you, okay? To the end of this bloody mess.”

And she hesitates – Yasha the Deathless Storm, the woman unkillable – and she looks afraid. But she takes his hand and let him pull her up. He brushes imaginary dust off her shoulder and sweeps her hair off a leather shoulder guard. He smiles up at her and she, rather like she cannot help it, begins to likewise smile back at him. Molly wonders if she knows.

“Remember how to use these?” says Nott.

Mollymauk rolls his eyes, flips the scimitar in his hand easy as a party trick, and sends it spinning and flashing into the air overhead. It’s so sharp he can hear the metal whine as it splits the air, arcing, then falling, and finally landing hilt-flat in his palm. The balance is good on these swords. Magically good, actually. The blades themselves are a strange dark metal, scorched in a way that inlaid waves of oily rainbow into the steel. They are finer weapons than Molly has ever laid eyes on, hilts of carved bone, warm in his hand and dark with use. Worn by the many, many hands who have held them previous.

They’re dangerous, he knows. And they’re his now.

Nott took him aside while Yasha and Caduceus packed things up, digging into her Bag of Holding with nervous urgency. She gave him an anti-scrying charm, two coins with healing spells sealed inside them, a light mithril chain shirt. (“Nott, no,” he’d tried to say. “Shut up and wear it!” she’d screeched.) Then she made Molly sit and meditate on these weapons for a full twenty minutes. Then, and only then, did she let him pull the scimitars from their black leather sheathes. The moment he did, he felt a friendly compulsion to cut his own throat with them… but settled for laying open a line on his forearm and watching the metal ignite in pale radiant energy.

Which, apparently, was of great relief to Nott.

“Did you give me cursed swords?” Molly demands, amused.

“Yes, but I had the curse watered down a bit over the years. I had a feeling they’d come in handy one day. They won’t try to hurt you again. They’re yours now.”

Molly swings one blade, admiring the weight. “Why do you even have these, gunslinger?”

She hesitates, embarrassed. “I… we used to collect stuff we thought you might like.”

“Why? Just for fun?”

Nott seems to be shrinking. “Well, no there was… there was a time we tried… we tried to bring you back that one… uh… we started picking things up just in case…”

Molly quickly butts in. “I gave it my blood.” He lets the rite die from the sword, feels his strength slide back into him as he does. “I can feel my rite working, but the blade seems like it... honed in after I cut. What’s that do?”

“Oh, uh, you give it blood and it powers a spell in each blade. But, you can also activate your blade rites with it so it’s like… a one-two punch. And if they’re ever knocked from your hand, just snap your fingers. The sheathes are enchanted to return them back to you.” Nott looks wistful. “I remember when I found them. Caleb told me what they did and… well, Fjord said we should just hold onto them. They were too perfect.”

“Bloody considerate of you. What spell?”

“Uh, right. The spell is in the jewels in the pommel of each sword. Generates a single use of a shield per blade. You need to be careful though; if you draw blood to charge the spell over and over the kickback gets worse. It made Fjord dizzy when he tried it without resting.”

“Cool. How do I activate the spell?”

“Just hold the sword in front of you and say ‘shield’.”

Molly holds the sword out. “Shield!”

Immediately a shimmering sheet of iridescence bursts into existence, spreading like a gossamer curtain in front of him. Molly grins at it, then at Nott who looks delighted – like she’s seeing something she’s been looking forward to for years in fact. The spell holds for a full minute before dissipating and Molly feels a slight tingle in his skin, specifically along the thin wound where he cut himself. He sheathes the swords both at his hip and grins.

“This is amazing. Thank you, Nott.”

“I’m so happy I get to give these to you, finally.” She beams as she says this, then seems to recollect their circumstance and the smile fades. “And, well, you’ll probably need it,” Nott says, scratching her neck. “We’re going to Port Damali today. So… things will be dangerous.”

Molly shrugs. “I’ve already been dead twice since Clay brought me back. At this point I have to assume I’ve got some powers-that-be looking out for me.” He flashes a carnival barking grin. “Maybe I’m the champion of the Moonweaver. Everyone else has a token god on their side. Why not me?”

“I don’t have a token god,” says Nott. “And I wouldn’t bank on you having one either. I didn’t have any gods looking for me when things went bad. Didn’t need ‘em either.”

“That’s because you’re the best,” says Molly fondly, moving to kneel and kiss her forehead, ruffling her hair a bit. “C’mon. The others are ready.”

“Are you okay?” Nott says before he can stand up.

“Hmm?”

“You… Molly, you’re acting like this is just like it was before. Like nothing’s changed. You’re just coming with us to do some adventure thing, but that’s not what’s going on. Everything’s different. I know you know that.” She pauses, then adds, “You don’t have to pretend you’re just like you were before you know. It’s okay if you’re angry with us and don’t want to do any of this. You don’t owe us or… or whatever.”

Molly stares at Nott a moment, quietly.

“I mean,” Nott blurts out, when the quiet goes on too long, “it’s not fair to hold you to anything. I know, even back then, we didn’t know each other really, really well. You know? We were friends, but this is… this is a lot. And we’re asking you to come with us to do something terrible. We’re really, really strong Molly, but we’re not… we wouldn’t, like, makeyou come do this. You can leave you know! You know that, right? Molly? You know –?”

“Nott,” Molly cuts in, arching a brow gently. “Of course, I know that.”

“Well, shit, then say something!”

“I was thinking.”

Nott wrings her hands a little. “Okay well… you’re just acting so… okay. I feel like you should be screaming and running for the hills. So…?”

“I’m pretending things are okay because I’m scared, Nott.” He leans his elbows against the top of his knees, remaining crouched. “You’re all just short of being demi-gods out here and we’re acting like anything we’re walking into is a survivable scenario for me.” He sighs. “I think we know that’s not true. The bravado helps with that. And I think, honestly, if Yasha knew how scared I am she wouldn’t want to keep moving and if Caduceus knew he’d try to give me some horrifying pep talk.”

“Oh.” Nott struggles a moment. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you’re braver than they are, I think.”

Nott blinks hard. “What?”

“You didn’t run, Nott. Not once.” Molly holds her eyes steady. “Even when you had to gun down Caleb to get things done, something I know… that almost killed you doing that. You’re probably the strongest one here.” A shrug. “Or that’s my guess. Is that okay? Can I be honest with you?”

Her eyes are huge. “Of course, Mollymauk.”

“Good.” He stands up. “Let’s go take care of our people. Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Port Damali sank into the sea, but it didn’t do it evenly.

As they approach the wall of the city, there does not appear to be anything initially wrong – the pale walls of the coastal city stand shining in the mid-day sunlight, the beautiful, heavy wood gates standing over fifty feet in height and swung open to the road. The only sign of trouble is the quiet – the utter absence of people as they approach what should be a city check point to enter. There is a flag affixed to one of the ramparts, flapping gently in the wind, tattered and rain-worn.

“I always wanted to come here,” Molly murmurs as they pass through the arch of the city gates.

“It was beautiful,” Caduceus says. The wind off the sea is starting to really mess with his long mane, so the firbolg is in the process of tying the pink masses back in a kind of complicated knot. “It’s a shame you never got to see it before, Mollymauk.”

“It was Fjord’s home once,” Nott adds. She moves to Molly’s side and he can see she has one hand on the grip of her sidearm. “You know, the first time we came to the coast together, we accidentally stole a ship and—”

“What the fuck,” Molly interrupts.

“I know,” Nott enthuses, furious. “How do you accidently, steal a—? Oh, right.”

Because Molly isn’t talking about her story.

Which is fair, because they’ve just reached the crest of a small incline in the city street… and on the other side the rest of the city just drops. There is a massive crack in the earth that terminates out from where he stands and goes for miles across in both directions. The entire shelf of land that once supported the city sits on a sharp decline toward the sea. It’s almost dream-like in its absurdity. Like a toy city on a tilting table.

And Molly can see abruptly about a mile down this slope all the perfect empty buildings vanish into the dark line of the sea, the main thoroughfare of the city now a fantastical road leading straight down into the ocean. He can make out the pale shapes of towers and buildings beneath the waves, disappearing slow into the deeper blue waters, their peaks and roofs only just peeking out above the waves in places. But the rest of the fabulous port city is utterly consumed.

But that’s not the most incredible part.

Molly moves to the edge of the fissure and crouches there, arms draped over his knees.

Yasha standing parallel to him, says, “Amazing, isn’t it?”

“That’s a word,” says Molly. “I could think of a few others…”

The shining central thoroughfare of Port Damali ends at the sea. But where the road meets the water no water touches the shimmering white stones. A fifteen-foot wide cut of dry road slices through the middle of the sea like invisible walls hold back the ocean. Molly can see the road all way down to a dark vanishing point beyond the waves, where the ribbon of protected cobblestone disappears into a darkness so far and deep beneath the ocean that the sun cannot reach it.

“Fjord is somewhere at the end of the road,” says Molly. “Isn’t he?”

“Yes,” says Yasha. “After a certain point, the water closes overhead too. The entrance to his dimension is somewhere beneath the waves.”

“And… what? We can just waltz in?”

“Well,” Nott says, her tone perfectly dimensionless, “the Crushing Deep is just a giant trap to bring people inside so the ocean can close right on top of them. And somewhere in the water, there’s a sea serpent called the Sucking Maw and between those two things, yeah, it’s not, like, super fun getting to this place.”

“Bloody swell,” says Molly.

“I’ve killed dragons before,” says Yasha coolly.

“You’re terrifying,” Molly adds. “But that’s hot.”

She plants a hand against the back of his head and shoves it, but Molly ducks forward, cackling.  

“You are taking our imminent death by dragon very well,” Nott snaps, shaking a fist as the pair of them start running around the derelict road. “Stop being cute!”

“So the plan is what?” Molly stops running and allows Yasha to briefly catch and collar his neck with her arm, hugging him roughly while he looks at Nott. “We’re just gonna walk up, fight the Sucking Maw and get a free and clear pass through the Crush?”

“More or less,” says Nott. “Or at least we’ll see how all that stuff reacts to you. But not today. We need to sleep and get our bearings. That okay?”

“Sure. But I’m not gonna get any sleep if we’re fighting a dragon tomorrow.”

“I can give you something for that,” says Caduceus. He’s looking at Molly with that easy calm of his, but his tone is faintly… prescriptive. “Of all of us, you should get some rest, Mollymauk.”

“Because I’m the easiest to kill?” Molly demands, only somewhat sardonically, but he feels Yasha’s arms tighten around him. He sighs. “Okay, what is it? More dead people tea?”

“No.” Caduceus produces a small slip of paper from yet another satchel on his belt. It’s colorful, stitched with gold thread and folded in a fat triangle between his thumb and forefinger. “Sleeping charm. Lay down, place it beneath your head, and it’ll knock you out for a full eight hours or until something disturbs your physical person enough to wake you.”

The firbolg tosses it to Molly, who catches it lightly.

“You’re tired. You should use it.”

“I didn’t say I was tired,” Molly rebuts.

Caduceus just looks at him.

“Fine. Fine. I’ll use it. Where are we bunking up?”

“We shouldn’t go any deeper into the city,” Yasha says. She points to an empty, but still cleanly standing apartment structure. Colorful awnings still adorn the walls, faint posters papered against the stone and weeds have taken root in the steps up to the door. “That should be fine,” she says. “Clay, you’ll put up some protective wards?”

A slow shrug. “I can do that.”

“Then we should get settled,” Nott says, adjusting her shoulder satchel. “I have some tooling I need to get done and we need to talk about exactly what we’re going to do. The last time I tried this, I had Jester with me. It’s going to be much more dangerous with just us.” She glances at Clay. “Unless the Wildmother is with us?”

Caduceus says nothing for a moment, then, “She can be, if I ask it of her.”

“Okay,” mutter Nott, stomping toward the building. “Good to know.”

Molly glances at Clay. “What does that mean?”

Caduceus shrugs again. “If things get very, very bad… know that we aren’t alone beneath the sea. That’s all.”

Molly glares. “What the fuck does that –?”

“C’mon,” Yasha says, hauling him away.

“THAT WASN’T AN ANSWER,” Molly hollers, but Yasha has him through the door.

The first thing Molly hears is the sound of dripping water, abnormally loud and echoing as if through a deep chamber. He opens his eyes and feels something tap his forehead. The tap becomes. a cool slither, sliding through his hair toward the ground and he realizes then it’s water dripping from the ceiling. He’s momentarily puzzled at this, a split second of confusion flashing across the surface of his thoughts before –

“Molly!”

Molly blinks and looks to his left.

Fjord is standing there, one hand on his hip, clad in soaking wet leathers and looking amused from where he’s standing in a shallow pool of water. He’s familiar as a Tuesday – tall, broad-shouldered, dark green complexion and a bit exasperated. Like maybe he’s said Molly’s name a few times already. A look Molly knows from bunking with the handsome half-orc because it’s the look he wears in the morning trying to wake his tiefling roommate from consistently dead slumbers.

Molly lies at the edge of this shallow pool and Fjord stands on the other side. The cavern is mostly dark, but strange bio-luminous greens light the water and cast the damp rock formations into relief. Fjord’s giving him a look.

“You done gettin’ all that beauty sleep, or you gonna help us go through this mess?”

“Dibs on Molly’s share of the loot,” enthuses Beauregard, who is currently hauling a dead merrow out of the water on the far, far side of the cavern. She hauls it like sack with two hands, putting her back into it so lines of muscle strain along the dark length of her arms. “Jester! Quick! Let’s get all the stuff before Molly does!”

“Aye-aye!” says Jester, sprinting to the corpse, picking it up, turning it upside down, and shaking it by the ankles like it might have pockets to turn out. It does not, but part of its internal organs slide out of its belly and splat in a wet coil on the rocks. “Hmm,” says Jester, dropping the corpse. “No money. We should try the pool?”

“Gross,” Beau whispers.

“C’mon,” says Fjord, distracting Molly from the rather horrifying display. “Mollymauk. Up and at ‘em.” He’s wading across the pool. He folds two arms on the rock near Molly’s boots and at this proximity, Molly can see he’s soaking from head to foot. He punches Molly’s ankle. “You coming or what?”

Molly yawns theatrically. “Oh, I dunno, what’ll’ya give me for my assistance?”

“Man, I will pull you in here and dunk you if you don’t get up.”

“Five more minutes,” Molly says, pretending to lie back down.

Fjord grabs his boot at the ankle and gives a threatening tug.

“Alright! Alright!”

Molly reluctantly scoots to the edge of the pool and sits there, letting his legs swing down into the water. It’s cool, quickly lukewarm against the skin but Molly wrinkles his nose and sticks out a tongue in distaste. Fjord, unamused, puts his hand in the water and with absolutely no remorse and, instead, visible delight, he slaps a massive wave of water directly into Mollymauk’s face.

“HEY!”

“I warned you.”

“I’ll get you back you know, we sleep together.”

“We do not–!” He stops when he catches Molly’s delighted grin. “Don’t even joke. Jester’ll get notions.”

“She has those all on her own entirely independent of what I might have to say.” Molly kicks his feet a little in the water, tail flicking lazily behind him as he shrugs, grinning. “Nothing to be done about that I’m afraid.”

Fjord sighs heavily, folding his arms and for a moment just stands there in the water pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Can I ask you something, Molly?”

“Anything if I don’t have to get in the water.”

Fjord lifts his head, peering up at the former carnie with a blank interest.

“I saw you in the water,” he says. “Before.”

“You mean when you bloody teleported in and hacked that merrow’s head off without a lick of warning?” Molly’s tone is deadpan. “Yeah, Fjord, I was in the water. Not by choice, mind you.”

“No,” Fjord says, a little quieter now. He moves closer, so he’s standing in the shallows directly in front of Molly. “With Yasha,” he says. “There was blood in the ocean and you held her.”

Molly, confused, tilts his head. “What are you talking about, now?”

Fjord’s stare is suddenly… unfamiliar. The glow from the water washes the dark green from his skin, lighting him in ripples of silver and gray. His eyes are luminous yellow and slitted. Mollymauk is more than used to his friend’s orc-amber stare, but in this moment Molly feels a sudden hyper-awareness of their predator composition, of Fjord who is closer now that he was a moment ago. The water is shallower near the edge of the pool because he’s almost on eye level with Molly now.

“I don’t pay much attention,” says Fjord, “to anything outside of the ocean anymore. But I saw you and Yasha.”

He plants his hands palm down on the stone on either side of Molly’s thighs. He tilts his head.

“Molly,” he says, “you died.”

Oh,Molly thinks, his heart suddenly hot and hammering in the back of his throat. Right.

And Fjord grabs his arm.

“This is a dream,” Molly says, very, very calmly. “I’m having a nightmare. This isn’t real—”

Fjord grabs his other arm, his grip freezing and adamantine.

“You remember your old sword?” Fjord whispers.

Water runs from his lips, like he swallowed a mouthful of ocean, but the water just keeps coming and coming, endlessly from over his tongue and the language he speaks is understood but not by any means Molly knows. There are things on his armor suddenly, barnacles and crawling things, his gauntlets encrusted in limpets and deep-water corals of poisonous orange and blue. His eyes, Molly sees now, are luminous and lit like yellow lamps from the inside.

“Do you remember it?” Fjord repeats.

Fjord pulls Molly into the water, almost gently, leading him by the wrists so he slides in and is suddenly up to his hips in the warm shallows. Molly wrenches his arms, putting all his weight into it but it’s like yanking against a statue.

“Fjord,” Molly says softly. His wrists ache where Fjord is gripping them. “Stop. Listen to me –”

“I took that sword into my Falchion,” he says, ignoring Molly. “I killed a lot of people with it before I gave it to my patron. I was sad to give it up, but I did it.”

He’s pulled Molly in so deep, he’s up to his shoulders in the water now. The rest of the cavern has blurred away into a sudden darkness. Nothing exists except the pool of water and the two of them standing in it. Fjord is so close to him, Molly can make out every drop of water standing in relief against his skin, caught in his eyelashes, and dripping from his dark hair. The crawling things in his armor are spiny and fronds of sea-life slither and wave bright feelers in the water as Fjord pulls deeper still.

“Stop,” Molly whispers. He’s up to his neck in the water. “Fjord.”

“I’m tasked by my patron, Molly.”

“Oh, fuck me running.”

“I’m tasked to do four things,” Fjord goes on.

He releases Molly’s right arm, reaches up and grabs a fistful of hair at the base of Molly’s skull.

“Ow! Fuck!” Molly grabs at Ford’s wrist, then – finding that useless – jams his palm up against the man’s jaw to absolutely no effect. “Bloody hell! Stop!”

“I’m tasked to learn,” Fjord says.

His fingers are knotted so deeply, so tightly in Molly’s hair that he can’t turn his head without tearing it at the root. He pulls backward, slowly but relentlessly, dragging Molly’s head down so the back of his skull is submerged in the water, Fjord standing almost chest to chest with him, one arms hooked up behind him. Molly, feeling the water rising over his throat, sliding up along his jaw, immediately starts yelling.

“Don’t you fucking dare! Fjord! FJORD!”

“I’m tasked to grow.”

“No!” Molly pants, stops fighting and instead reaches up and grabs Fjord by the collar. “Listen to me. Listen! The others have already killed me. Nott and Caleb both. Please don’t.”

“I’m tasked to provoke.”

He pulls Molly further down into the water, so his face is barely above the surface, the warm liquid lapping at his chin. He lets go of Molly’s other arm and with that hand he reaches ups, takes Molly’s jaw in a vice-fingered grip, and holdshim there. The pad of his index finger digs against Molly’s lower lip. He is impervious to the frantic two-fisted punching and clawing Molly immediately deploys against his face, his throat, and his torso. Fjord just bends down over him, his face entirely eclipsing Molly’s vision. He’s bent so close to Molly, the water that runs from his mouth is salt and sea water on Molly’s tongue. A horrible precursor to a lover’s kiss, weaponized as a drowning death.

“I am tasked,” Fjord growls, the water dripping off sudden prominent tusks. “I’m tasked to consume.”

Molly spits water and just yells. “Can you not?!”

“If you don’t want to die, consumed, and buried at sea,” Fjord says, his eyes glowing, “then don’t come for me.”

And then he bends down, presses his mouth over Molly’s, and pushes him under –

“Molly!”

Molly opens his eyes.

Yasha is kneeling over him, gripping his shoulders in the dark. He’s sweating cold, shaking, and tangled in the blankets they’d dug out of a long-abandoned closet. The mattress beneath him belonged to a merchant lord once upon a time, the room he’s sleeping in an abandoned luxury – dust-covered bottles of perfume, boxes of silks and gold embroidered jackets. Things that would have probably delighted Molly not so long ago, but seem inconsequential now and never more so in this moment as Yasha closes him in her arms and he buries the sound of his hyperventilating against her shoulder.

“It’s okay,” she whispers. Yasha’s weight sinks the mattress next to him. Her fingers are in his hair, cradling the back of his head. “You’re safe. It was just a nightmare, Molly.”

“I don’t have nightmares. He fucking knows. He saw us standing in the ocean somehow.” Molly bites back a sound that is very close to a sob, but more like a snarl. “He’s not going to open the way for me.”

Yasha stills then. “He talked to you in your dreams?”

“Yes! Fuck, he bloody drowned me in my dream! He said he would bury me at sea.” Molly fists a piece of her shirt, presses his forehead into her collarbone. “Why the hell is everyone trying to kill me? What the fuck did you all remember me as?”

“Fjord shouldn’t have spoken to you. His patron forbade him to warn you.”

Molly blinks. Then leans back. “How do you know what his patron–?”

Molly stops.

Yasha is smiling at him. But her mouth is too big, stretching like a knife-gash across her face and the teeth that fill the gash are rows and rows and rows of glittering white needles. Her eyes are yellow and slitted vertically. Molly immediately lunges backward, but she lightning fast clamps a hand over Molly’s mouth, rushing forwarding and pinning him back in the mattress. She mounts him, crushes him flat, pressing the air out of him and for a horrifying, desperate moment he wills himself to wake up again. To wake the fuck up, because the thing on top of him is laughing and it’s changing and its growing–

“He didn’t let me have the Traveler’s girl,” hisses the thing that is not Yasha.

Her fingers dig into his shoulders, but they’re suddenly too big, suddenly razor sharp. Her limbs are swelling grotesquely, erupting up like support beams spouting violently from a bed of humanoid marrow. The ceiling buckles against her gargantuan spine, her mass fills the room. The head is all fangs now, all briny breath and freezing cold and its laughter shakes Molly to the bone.

“You’re not a godhand… but you’ll do.”

And then the thing turns into a fucking dragon.  

Chapter Text

Molly opens his eyes.

The first thing he’s aware of is the splitting jag of pain in the back of his skull, radiating from a molten point of impact near the top of his head. He’s secondly aware of his broken right arm which shoots a bolt of screaming heat up his wrist to his shoulder socket. For a dizzy moment there’s nothing but the pain. Thirdly, he realizes he’s lying in a thin layer of watery mud, silt sliding around his body about half a foot deep and soaking his clothes and hair. Water is misting cool against his face.

His vision clarifies slowly, the sound of rumbling somewhere in a muffled distance and overhead there is a thin strip of daylight nearly half a mile away, shining through the gap between the two dark walls of ocean water. Too dizzy to panic, Molly registers that he’s been relocated somewhere far along the road of the Crushing Deep and he can’t remember anything about how. Nothing but fangs and wind.

Molly groans and rolls over. Hissing and gritting his teeth against a myriad jolting of broken bone, abrasions and bruises. His arms are scraped, his clothes ripped, rather like he had to grapple with a cheese grater… or a dragon with thousands of sharp, armored scales that was trying to hold him in its claws. Molly’s aching head suggests he fell hard enough to knock the details out of his brain, but at some point he was dropped here.

The question is for how long.

He paws at his hip.

The scimitars are there. He digs into the satchel belt Nott gave him, pulls a vial of healing potion and uncorks it with his teeth and downs it. Shudders as the heat slides across his broken and bleeding parts and knits them shut, mending calcium and marrow until his broken arm aches, but functions. He tosses the vial, tries to stand… falls back to his knees, shivering with adrenaline. His tail curls instinctively around his right thigh, a shudder sliding though him. He feverishly congratulates past Mollymauk on being paranoid enough to sleep in full gear while he surveys the dark, watery corridor around him.

He’s alone.

He looks behind him – there in the far distance is the light of the shore, the size of postage stamp from afar.

He looks ahead of him – the walls of water close like an arch so no sun can penetrate from above, turning the rest of the road into a dark tunnel leading into a deep, freezing blackness. All around him, he can see shadows moving in the dark waters, like humongous fish in an aquarium… but looking nothing like any fish or beast Molly’s ever seen.

“Oh bloody hell,” Molly whispers.

He forces himself up. He can’t stop shivering. He’s shaking so hard his teeth are chattering, but he doesn’t feel any cold, just the neutral warmth off Nott’s enchanted earrings as he turns and trudges toward the shore. Every step is unsteady, shivery with adrenaline. He folds his arms around him to stop the shaking. It doesn’t work. Through the raw, driving instinct to keep moving, he still has a moment of shining, hysterical clarity just long enough to think: Being dead must have been less stressful than this.

Then Nott’s voice comes bursting in his ear: “Molly! Don’t worry! We’re coming for you! Are you okay?” Then at much higher, louder volumes, “YOU CAN REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE!”

Molly shakes off his immediate heart-stopping terror at being yelled at via Sending. Then he hisses, “I’m in the Crushing Deep. I’m not hurt but hurry the fuck up.” He glances at the dark waters on either side of him. “I don’t know where that dragon went or why it dropped me.”

Then, while he’s counting his words to determine if he has enough to add more, a voice directly behind him says, “I’m right here.”

Molly hasn’t been in a fight for ten years technically. That doesn’t stop him from spinning around and slamming his right-handed scimitar to the goddamn hilt in the speaker’s gut. Blood bursts cold over his fist, dripping heavily from his knuckles, the blade humming with a terrible joy that Nott hadn’t warned him about. It surges a brief warm glow through Molly’s body, sliding like fingers through lines of muscle. But that warmth is nothing in the face of the cold, hollow dread.

Because the speaker still looks exactly like Yasha.

She tilts her head, glances at the blade in her stomach, then grins at Molly through bloody human teeth.

“Not very smart are you? Jumping out of a dragon’s claws mid-air.”

Molly slams the second scimitar up in her ribcage and wrenches, gets a satisfying huff of pain from the shape-changer.

He hisses, “Stop wearing my friend’s face!”

The monster ignores Molly, ignores the blades in her belly, grabs Molly’s jaw in two hands, and yanks him forward, slamming her mouth against his with such force his lip splits and blood floods him mouth as the thing with Yasha’s face drags a ravenous tongue between his teeth. She kisses him vicious, catching his lip between her teeth. Molly immediately rips both blades out and carves her flanks open in gaping, bloody holes. She ignores that… but when he wrenches back, she lets him go staggering.

“None of fucking that!” Molly spits blood, baring teeth.

“You didn’t hesitate.” Not-Yasha grins. “I’m surprised with you, dead thing.”

“I’m not dead,” Molly snaps, backing up, blades in a defensive cross.

“You’re a dead thing tethered here on thread spun by gods,” says Not-Yasha. Her sides are knitting back together. “There’s power in that. Power you can eatif you’re hungry enough.” She’s walking toward him, forcing Molly to back away. “I could eat you alive over and over. Until your gods give up on you and leave you a corpse at last.” She smiles and blood floods black from her mouth. “Unless they don’t. We could consume you forever, Mollymauk. Imagine.”

“Fuck off,”Molly says in Infernal to mask how gut-twisting terrifyingthat possibility is. “My friends are coming to kill you. I hear they’re strong.”

“But you’re oh sofucking weak.” Not-Yasha moves toward him again, slowly, unhurried. “They can’t protect you. Obviously. What could I do to you before they get here? You’re nothing except a thing that won’t stay dead.” Her hand comes up, spread toward him. “But before I take you to him… I need you to–“

Molly whips the scimitar across his body, blinding fast, then jumps back and to the left.

Monster-Yasha stares at the sudden bloody stump at the end of her wrist. “Hmm,” she says. “I’m going to take your guts out one at a time.”

“Who the fuck are you?” Molly hisses.  

“Did you really think your orc brat was the only one bound to the Great Serpent?” She smiles and the smile becomes lipless, taut across the skull. “You should fall to your knees, dead thing. Your gods can’t protect you here.”

But before Molly can process the horrifying implications, there’s a gun shot. The monster’s head snaps back, a burst of red mist flowering from the skull and Not-Yasha staggers back a single step, her neck arched backward with the hit, but she does not fall. Molly jerks around just in time to see Nott, crouched in the road with a dimension door sliding shut behind her, as she lines up another shot and screams, “SHEILD, MOLLY!”

He activates the spell and drops to a ball with his hands over his ears. Nott fires again. She hits Not-Yasha as she starts to come back up (her body twitching horribly, splitting apart like rotten fruit peeling open–) and the shot detonates. The blast is so powerful, it ignites the air and the entire road is fire and super-heated steam, the kinetic force sucked the barrier bowed around Molly’s body. The air super-heats, so hot his bare skin blisters.

“AGAIN! SHEILD AGAIN!”

Molly brings up the other sword, activates the spell and the second wall comes up and for a split second through the smoke and steam, Molly sees something massive erupting upward in horrible jerking bursts of bone and flesh. Then she hits it with another explosive shot and this time the force is so powerful Molly is pinned flat in the mud, his shield like a bell jar on top of him, keeping out the fire. The spell sputters, flares, then dies… and the road is seemingly empty.

Molly levers himself up onto his hands and knees where he retches for a moment. His hands are sunk to the wrist in silt and fine sand, slithering sea-life writhing in the mud beneath his fingers but he’s too busy hacking up a lung to notice or care. He shakes his hair out of his face, grabs for his scimitar –

And that’s when the ground beneath him shudders.

“Oh fuck,” Molly manages before five massive claws burst from the sand and close over him in a gargantuan fist. Molly has just enough instinct to lunge for the largest visible gap between the thumb and forefinger before the dragon’s claws snap shut around his lower body. Then he’s being yanked upward with such velocity the world blurs. He sees things in wild snap shots, the water, his own forearm braced against mottle blue-white scales, the underbelly of a beast.

Pain flares through the bones in his legs and pelvis, shooting across every nerve, but he can’t focus on that. Molly’s moving so fucking fast he can’t see, being jolted, vertigo yanking his stomach out through his throat as the ground rushes and swings wildly away. He feels the mithril chain shirt is digging through his ribs, but even so he finds enough air to scream as loud as he can:

“NOTT! SHOOT IT! JUST SHOOT IT—!”

A bullet slams into the trunk of the dragon’s arm somewhere at the elbow… then detonates. The bullet blows the entire center out of it. Then, blasted free of the main body and spraying burning cold blood, it begins to fall… with Molly still gripped in its dead hold. He tears loose, driving his boot back into the fist holding him until a giant claw comes loose, then he launches straight forward, ripping free and then he’s falling free. The wind roars, tearing across his ears, the momentum ripping at his clothes and –

“Molly!”

Yasha materializes in the air directly beneath him and he slams into her chest, solid as a wall and driving the air straight out of him, but her limbs close around and the field of her levitation seizes hold of him. Then they’re rocketing backward together. Yasha wheels in reverse, downward, then spins around to right them before she comes to a messy, skidding landing in the briny mud. Their boots drag in the sludge, then they’re still on the ground.

“Good catch,” Molly pants, untangling himself.

He looks up over his shoulder and there, wheeling in the air between the watery canyon walls, gleams the flying bulk of a massive blue-black sea dragon. Dark and serpentine, born on leathery wings and magic, its eyes gleam luminous yellow, slit up the center, and even now are fixed on Molly. The back-draft of its wings like hurricane winds, batter and tear at hair and clothes. Blood pours from the severed stump of its right arm.

He snaps his fingers and both of his lost scimitars reappear in their sheathes at his hip. As he pulls both free, he shouts over the wind, “You wanna kill that thing or what?”

“Stop getting knocked around and I will,” says Yasha. Her eyes flare suddenly bottle blue and burning. She flips her weapon into her hand, gripping it two handed before planting her feet and launching with such force the mud bursts away from the point of liftoff. Molly immediately races back toward Nott who is screaming something like “GODS DAMMIT! WHY IS IT ALWAYS LIKE THIS?” and reloading frantically.

Molly reaches her, flips his blades across the back of his neck, and drags – feels that familiar burn of metal splitting and separating skin. Radiant fire ignites along the edge, like his blood is ignition fluid and the whole blade immediately goes up in light. The rite latches onto his soul, part of his very life force living now in the swords and it’s terrifying and comforting all at once. Then he’s standing side-by-side with Nott the Brave and for the first time things feel familiar.

“Just like old times,” Molly shouts over the monstrous eldritch roaring.

“THIS IS NOTHING LIKE OLD TIMES,” Nott screeches.

She fires again at the pinwheeling form of the dragon. It currently snapping its massive jaws, its enormous serpentine neck lashing back and forth at Yasha who, in the split second that it took her to move, rockets past and lumber-jack hacks her blade five feed deep into an armored shoulder. Molly feels the air shiver. There’s a flash. Then a boom that shakes the sea as a massive bolt of lightning strikes the blade like a rod, conducting holy blue fire directly into bone.

The dragon screams. Writhes in agony, electricity crackling all across its form, then in a frenzy it grabs Yasha with its one good hand. Claws her from its shoulder. Then it throws her straight through the water wall with such force Yasha hits it like concrete, the surface bursting a geyser of impact, before she vanishes deep into the horizontal sea.

“Bitch!” rumbles the dragon, spinning in the air to look down on the gunslinger and Mollymauk.

Even at nearly 100 feet away, Molly can see the vindictive gleam in its predator stare. Then the beast rears its head back, a sudden sluice of sea water spilling over from draconic jaws and Molly hears Nott whisper, “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck –!”

Molly, not thinking very clearly at his point, just snarls “FUCK YOU!” with all the Infernal hate he can gather and feels a blood vessel tear open along his neck. The dragon’s yellow eyes immediately blacken and run with darkness just in time for Nott to yell, “DRAGONS CAN’T BE BLINDED, MOLLY!” and the beast unleashes a blast of tidal waters from its throat.

Time freezes for a spilt of a split of a second. Molly thinks – Shit, this is exactly like the last time I used a Blood Maledict.– and then the water that most certainly was meant to hit them head on like a crushing geyser… misses by about ten feet and the water slams into the wall of magical ocean to their left, bursting and frothing up against the arcane barrier and flooding the ground behind them in a massive arc up the Demali road. The water is freezing cold as it rushes back downhill, soaking Molly up to his knees and nearly knocking Nott from her footing.

The dragon is shrieking and clawing at its face. It hits the earth behind them on all fours, roaring, “WHERE ARE YOU?!” It thrashes its head, spitting water and screaming, “YOU MEWLING IMP! I’LL KILL YOU! I’ll KILL YOU!”

“I’ll be damned,” Nott hisses, then grabs Molly and starts hauling him fast back toward the shore. “Run, run, run! If it gets close, it will definitely see us! You lucky fucking bastard I can’t believe that worked!”

And they sprint like hell away.

“Where’s is Caduceus!?” Molly yells as they run.

“That godsdamned dragon attacked him while we were sleeping!” Nott, Molly notices, sounds like she’s in tears. “We had to stabilize him before coming after you. I don’t know if he’ll be able to help us!”

Behind them they can hear the monster still roaring and cursing Molly in a slew of Draconic and Common.

Then there’s a thunder clap. A flash of blue light ignites the air around them. Molly’s pulse skips and he spins just in time to see Yasha erupting from the sea wall like dark screaming meteorite and slam into the dragon’s ribs. She’s yelling. Her voice echoes down the road, blood-chilling and psychotic, as she impacts and drives her sword over and over and over into the dragon’s flank like an assassin with a dagger except it’s a longsword composed of black metal and lightning.

Suddenly the phrase, ‘I’ve killed dragons before’takes on more meaning as a singular solo action.

The dragon is screaming and rearing away from the hideous one-woman onslaught. Yasha gets in two more blows, goring a massive, gushing flap of muscle open under her blade before the great drake rears up, roaring, and bats Yasha off like a cat smacking a mouse. Yasha rockets to the ground, smashing into the it. Then, before she can move from the impact zone, the giant sea dragon darts forward…. and snaps its jaws down on her. Mollymauk’s world goes absolutely cold around him. The dragon rips its head back and forth like a Rottweiler with a hare, brutalizing and snarling, then it hurls Yasha’s broken form to the side of the road where it hits in a crumpled twist of necrotic wings and shredded armor.

There she lies still.

Molly is screaming before the deed is even done. “YASHA!”

Nott grabs his wrist top stop him the second he tries to run back.

“No! Wait, Molly! WAIT! She’s in a Battle Trance! She’ll be fine! Just –!”

“I don’t bloody believe you!” Molly cries.

Nott looks stricken for just a moment, then seems to accept that. She reloads. “Fine. Get behind me.” She kneels down in the road beside him and lines up another shot. “Yasha will get up. I promise.”

She fires twice and the both shots detonate across the dragon’s armored chest, one tearing more deeply into the wounds already inflicted by Yasha, blowing a fresh geyser of blood from the beast. But Molly isn’t looking at that. He’s looking at his friend who lies dead in the road, torn and broken, her skeletal wings bent like crushed origami in the mud, her arms limp and twisted around her. Molly registers despair as a rising ache inside him – new and different from all the dread and terror leading up until now.

“She’ll be okay,” Nott says again. “It’s okay, Molly. The cavalry is coming. I know it!”

Molly, confused, starts to say, “Who’s the caval–?”

And then Caduceus Clay materializes at Molly’s side.

Molly jumps. The cleric glances at him. His eyes are entirely composed of soft green light, burning like twin stares trapped in his skull. There is plant-life growing rapidly across his armor, moss and lichen spreading and flowering, thin ferns unfurling from chinks in the plate armor and spiraling up into his pale pink mane. He stops for just a moment to touch Mollymauk’s shoulder and Molly feels an infusion of warmth through him, a light sinking into his skin like sunshine into a flower. It inhabits him completely, like someone embracing every part of him at once and Molly can’t catch his breath.

“We’re not alone out here,” says Caduceus.  

Then he turns his attention to the dragon, points his staff directly at the ground… and the earth erupts.

A shunt of living wood the length and thickness of a ship’s mast slams up through the massive ribcage, spearing and driving through with such force, the creature leaves the ground and is hung momentarily impaled by a rapidly growing cedar tree. It’s branches and canopy expand with unnatural speed within the chest cavity of the creature, threatening to crack the bowed bone structures out like a fist opening inside a corn husk.

“NO!” The dragon is screaming, writhing, still alive somehow. Blood sprays from its mouth, from its perforated ribs but still it screams, “NO NO NO!”

It seizes hold of the great tree beneath it in one massive claw and with an unfathomable brute strength, it tears the entire trunk into two splintery pieces. Caduceus flinches, like he felt the blow and the dragon falls to earth on four gargantuan legs. Bleeding, still speared by the head of the tree, its branches lodged inside its chest cavity, bone gleams bare along its flanks. It’s missing one arm, drooling blood and sea foam. Psychotic, pain-feverish eyes turn on the three of them in the road and its gaze seems to punch through Molly’s soul.

“The Leviathan,” it gargles, laughing, “will have you all.”

Caduceus throws out his free hand, palm out, and pink light gathers in his fingers. He whispers something and the word pulses through the ground like a tremor and instantly thousands of vines spiral up from the mud, spraying sand, and lash themselves around the dragon’s limbs. But the bulk of the beast is too enormous and it pulls free of them, begins to advance up the road toward them.

“The Sea will swallow you whole!”

“I’m out of artillery!” Nott fires two shots directly into the dragon’s armored head, briefly knocking its skull aside before it rears back, snarling. “Clay!? Any other word from Melora?!”

“I can do something,” Molly whispers. “I think… I think I can try something.”

“No, Molly!” Nott sounds terrified. “It’s a fucking dragon! You won’t get lucky again!”

Caduceus surprised, stares at the tiefling besides him even as an ancient dragon thunders down on them. “You’re much braver than I imagined you.” His soft firbolg features kind of wrinkle. Even possessed by divine fire, it makes him strangely young as he murmurs, “I’m sorry for all of this.”

The dragon is howling, “UK’OTOA WILL CONSUME THE WORLD!”

And Molly grips the swords, feels them sing through his palms, and easy as muscle memory he leans his shoulder back into some previously untouchable membrane, suddenly tangible against his skin. He pushes through it, like you shoulder aside a veil, and side-steps through into another dimension. Time hits him like a heavy velvet curtain, smacking into and enveloping him… then it slides off like silk and he stands free and alone. The world around burns and blurs gray and white, the edges of everything fuzzy and static – Caduceus frozen in the attitude of looking down at him, Nott crouched there in the muddy road with her weapon.

Molly turns, arcane winds rushing silent around him.

He can see the dragon. Black in the strange hyper-contrast of the realm around him, moving in slow motion, one claw raised in mid-stride, the mud spraying up around its massive footfall as it begins to spring forward at the cleric and gun-slinger before it. The world is silent, utterly soundless around him. But there’s a vibration in his skull and that vibration leave a hum inside him and the hum is telling him to move, move, move.

So he moves.

He darts down the road. The water on the road separates under his boots, sprays in real-time as he touches it, then slows as he passes from contact until a thirty-foot trail of frozen sole-shaped footprints are left in the slowed waters behind him. And Molly is sprinting. Lungs burning, fast as he can, the scimitars blazing white in his fists as he reaches the dragon, still hung over him and moving so slow it may as well be holding still and he knows by instinct he has just moments. Just seconds to do this thing.

He’s directly next to the dragon’s left foreleg, like a black tree trunk beside him and sure as he knows how, Mollymauk swings both scimitars one after another directly into the ankle and the blades cleave through like a butcher’s knife through beef. Blood sprays, slows, hangs in the air and Molly spins and swings again just one more time and this time the blow slams clear through…

… and the world snaps back into color and time.

The dragon’s forearm cracks in half instantly as their full weight comes down on the limb and Molly dives right just in time to narrowly avoid being crushed. The dragon hits the ground skidding on its chest, both forelegs dismembered and dragging bloody beneath it. Molly hears shrieking. Thunderous roars as he stumbles up, running toward the water wall as the road behind him is suddenly full of thrashing, screaming dragon. Maimed and howling. Molly shoves himself back again the sea wall, the ocean soaking his shirt from behind. The magic slides up his back, shivering on skin, but all he sees is the dragon.

Its tail lashes wildly, slamming into the earth near him, whipping and slicing through the water over his head, soaking Molly where he huddles, heart hammering in his throat while the giant creature surges unstoppably through its death throes. Molly knows it’s dying. He knows because he can see where the branches of the tree have rammed up through the dragon’s back, fully penetrating the chest when the beast fell forward, driving the stake fatally deeper with its own momentum.

“Molly!” Nott is yelling from somewhere, but he can’t see her. “Molly where are you!?”

He stays frozen, pressed against the water. Anticipating the random blow that will kill him, knock him again into that black void where no memory survives. Again the tail lashes near him and he cries out, closing his eyes.  

“Molly?!”

“C’mon,” Molly whispers, to who he’s not sure, “C’mon. Give me a bloody break.”

He feels something slam into the ground nearby, the shards of rock spraying across his cheek. He hears the dragon choking, a horrible deafening sound like all the steam going out in a forge and the gargle of blood and sea water. He smells it. Smells the blood soaking his boots in the salt water. He’s past the adrenaline smooth rush where the chemical makes him instinct and on to the part where it leaves him shaking. He stands there, back against the sea, swords burning in his hand, just waiting stock still and whispering…

“Don’t you fucking dare. Don’t you bloody fucking…”

There’s silence. Silence.

Molly opens his eyes.

The dragon is dead. It’s laying there, still, a gleaming black and blue mountain of armor and bloody limbs. He can’t see its head from where he’s standing but the great dome of its flank is still – totally empty of breath. Molly stares. His heart hammers clean in his chest, keeps beating. And for a single, shining moment Molly’s just standing there with radiant fire in his fists, and there is something so fucking familiar, so goddamn innate about this that he knows it down to his veins that this body has stood over monsters before. Down to the blood in his veins he knowsthis…

… and then he feels the water displace at his back and before he can react, a soaking arm hooks around his waist and a hand cased in barnacles clamps over his windpipe... and Fjord says in his ear, “Don’t move.”

And pulls Molly back through a portal in the water.  

“CAN YOU NOT?!” Molly is yelling before he’s even through the portal. The dimensions tear around him, a warping of reality that blinds him instantly and for a moment Molly feels his brain lock, unable to comprehend the quantum ripping around him and with a sudden violent jolt through every cell in his body, it ends. He comes to a stumbling stop, staggering, boots hitting solid ground as he jerks free the warlock gripping him. He spins away, bringing the still blazing scimitars up between them. “Stop fucking dragging me around! All of you! Bloody back off for a breath!”

“Molly,” Fjord starts to say, holding up two hands, palms spread toward him. “Molly. Listen to me.”

“No! What the fuck are you doing?!”

Molly looks wildly around, finds himself standing in… some kind of limitless space, water up to the ankles of his boots. The liquid beneath him shimmers like an oil with dark shifting reflections, seething shapes mirrored in an iridescent infinity on all sides of him. A horizon-less dark extends forever in all directions and the only point of distance at all, is Fjord, standing in front of him. There is nothing but the watery dark, Molly, and Fjord who is begging him, softly:

“Please listen.”

“Stay away from me. Why did you bring me here?”

“I tried to warn you. Godsdammit, I tried. I have a minute here.”

Molly backs away, swords still up. “No. No bloody way. You don’t get to do this too. You don’t get to sweep in at the last second like a fucking –!” Molly sputters, panic and rage stealing all coherence for an instant. “What’s the matter with you? What happened? What did you do?”

“I made it too powerful, Molly. It came through the dimensions and it was gonna consume my home. I had to do something. I said it could have me if it would just stop.” Fjord laughs, but it’s a ragged exhausted sound. “How long has it been since it took me? Do you know, Mollymauk?”

“A… a few years I think.”

“Really?”

“The others tried to rescue you.”

“I know. Have you seen Jester?”

“No.” Molly swallows. “No one has.”

Fjord nods, his eyes drifting shut, like hearing it is a relief he’d been waiting on. “Good,” he murmurs. “Good, okay.” He opens his eyes again, manages this lopsided kind of grin, almost rueful. “It’s really good to see you, Molly. You know that? I just… I honestly can’t believe you’re really here.” The smile vanishes. “I can’t fuckin’ believe this is how we meet again.”

Molly hedges a moment. “We’re still friends, right, Fjord?”

“Yes. For what it’s worth.”

Molly feels bile bite the back of his throat. “How long do you have?” He’s shivering. “How long before your patron comes?”

“Only for a minute more. Molly, I’m sorry. You died ‘cause y’all trusted me to look out for you and I didn’t. I tried to do better after that. Thought I did. Saved the world and all that but now…”

Molly lowers his voice. “I’m glad my death was a such a learning experience for all of you.”

“I don’t mean it that way.”

“Fjord,” Molly whispers, “why did you bring me here?”

“I can’t bargain with him anymore. I don’t have anything left to give,” Fjord says. “He wants you.”

Molly’s guts clench like there’s a fist in them. “What does that mean?”

“Just don’t… don’t fight it, Molly.” Fjord’s eyes glow yellow. “I’m so sorry.”

Molly backs away, a red ache opening through him and the ache is dread, so familiar to him now it feels like he’s never been without it. “Fjord?” He gets no response, raises his voice, desperation in his throat like an Infernal reverb. “Fjord! Don’t—!”

Then thing that’s living in Fjord looksat him.

The gaze cuts through Mollymauk like a blow. It cleaves through his head like red iron through ice, tunneling a burning hole in his psyche and Molly screams because there is literally nothing else he can do. Every muscle in his body goes taut and he nearly bites his tongue in half as an immediate grand mal seizure tears through him, but he’s horribly somehow still on his feet, standing there while his body goes into a series of agonizing convulsions. He drops his weapons and they extinguish.

There’s nothing except the pain. The grind of his teeth, his every muscle cramping so tight it’s like they’ going to snap like violin wire across his skeleton. It hurts. His hands are locked at his sides, fingers curled into helpless claws as his spine bends backward, his eyes rolling in his skull until he can’t see anything. He’s just… stuck there. Somewhere between dying and not-dying and he can’t even fall down. He can’t scream or speak anymore. There’s just dark and heat and the muffled sound of his voice trapped in his throat.

He barely feels it when Fjord’s hand settles around his windpipe and at the back of his head.

“Gods I’m sorry,” Fjord says, his voice hollow with horror. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Don’t come back, Molly. He’ll keep doing this if you don’t. Just go.”

Fuck you, Molly thinks. Fuck you, I don’t know how this works, gods dammit–

Fjord snaps his neck.

Chapter Text

Molly falls, hard. He slams into the ground and the ground smells like torn grass and earth. He’s lying face down, grimacing, fingers dug into the dirt at the roots of the grass while he rides out the echo of dying from one plane to the next. He doesn’t hurt, not physically, but the phantom pain shudders through him like hot and cold waves in succession. He lifts his head, hair sliding into his eyes, for a moment just hanging there on his hands and knees, breathing hard and shaking.

A hand settles on his shoulder.

“Mollymauk.”

Molly knows their face before he even looks at them – the raven knight, pale under the glow of the moon and they say, “Are you okay?” 

“Yasha. They killed… did they…?”

“No. She’s the Deathless Storm. She’s fine, Mollymauk. Are you okay?”

“No.” Shakes his head, still bent over with the grass tearing beneath his fingers. “No, that thing is bloody waiting for me. It’s gonna kill me again. It has Fjord and It’s gonna… I don’t know what to –”

“Stop. Just take a moment. You have time here.”

“It so much worse on the other side.” 

The raven knight places two hands Molly’s shoulders. One hand moves to the side of Molly’s head, thumb sliding briefly along his temple tucking longer sections of his hair out of his eyes and behind his ear and it’s such a familiar thing to do that Molly immediately has to bite back this instinctive, animal sound at the sudden comfort. So wildly different from the violence that brought him here.

“But you’re not there right now. You’re here. You’re safe. No one and nothing can reach you when you’re with me. I swear it.”

“But I don’t remember this when I’m alive.”

“The living aren’t meant to remember death. I’m already breaking rules to hold this place for you. Under the eye of the Weaver and the Queen, your soul is allowed to hold its anchor to the material. Gods are watching you Mollymauk.”

“Fabulous. They’re watching me die over and over?” Molly’s mouth pulls in what he meant to be a sardonic grin, but mostly turns a grimace. “They wanna do anything about that?”

The hands tighten in his shoulders. “If you want to stop you can –”

“Fuck you,” Molly snaps. “That’s not true. If I fuck off now, Fjord’s just fucking alone in that hole isn’t he? If I don’t try, they won’t find Jester. They won’t stop whatever Beau becomes. You know I won’t let that bullshit happen.” Molly’s fists knot in the grass, tearing green at the root and then he twists up and slams his fist into the knight’s shoulder. “You knew that when you picked me! You didn’t have to pick me!”

They don’t resist Molly’s blow.

“I’m sorry.” 

“Sorry,” Molly says. “Everyone’s so bloody fucking sorry. They’re sorry I died. They’re sorry I’m alive. They’re sorry to kill me and remember me wrong. They knew me for two months! This is bullshit. Fuck your sorry. You’re not the one dying over and over.”

“No, I’m not. But I have been. It’s okay not to –”

“I don’t care!” Molly is kind of mortified, but his eyes are running over and he’s too tired to stop himself. He grips two fistfuls of the knight’s cloak, dropping his forehead against his knuckles where he grips hold of them. “I don’t care if you did this eons ago. I’m doing this right now and it bloody hurts! I don’t want to do this.” 

“Then stop.”

“I can’t!”

The knight wraps their arms around him, gathers his head in one hand, pulling him close. They’re a little cool to the touch and Molly can’t feel a heartbeat when the Queen’s hand pulls him into a tight embrace, almost a strait-jacket hold, like they’re trying to bind a wound with pressure but there is no part of Molly that is not wounded. They press their chin into the top of his head, gripping him for a very, very long time.

Molly lifts his head a little. His voice is raw when he asks, “Is your name Vax?”

“Yes.” They hold him tighter. “Vax’ildan. And it’s been a long time since someone remembered.”

“What happened to you?”

“I did what you’re doing. I said no to death so I could save my friends.”

“Am I going to become like you?”

Vax freezes a moment, then relaxes, their hand briefly stroking over his hair before stilling. “No. It’s not something that just happens. You would have to ask for this.”

“It’s destroying us,” Molly whispers.

“What do you mean?”

“The other version of me. They don’t remember being here.” Molly grips tighter to Vax’s cloak. “It’s just… it’s just death over and over. There’s no reprieve. This doesn’t work unless we remember all of it.”

“I can’t do that.”

“I can feel him fraying, Vax’ildan. We’re like… like two sides of the same fucking coin, but he’s taking all the hits. He’s alone on the other side.”

“I don’t have domain in the Material Plane. I can’t travel between; I only govern transition. I’m sorry.” 

“That thing has hold of me,” Molly rasps. “What’s it doing to me?”

“There is… there is divine power this thing can feed from. That which bind you to the material plane… the breaking of the thread and the maintaining of it when you return… there’s a ghost power there it can consume with each breaking. It’s feeding off the magic that’s keeping your soul bound to your body against the pull of the Astral Plane.” There’s a pause, then, “Fjord fed his patron on the divinity of an Old God. It’s hunger now won’t be slaked by anything but more of the same. You have a breath of that power on you.”

“Tell me what to do.” Molly whispers. “I don’t know what to do.”

“I don’t know, Mollymauk.” 

“Your gods are assholes then.” 

Molly pulls away then. Getting to his feet and walking away toward the top of the hill. The moon shines silver on the grass and Molly lifts his face into the light like you turn into the sunshine in the summer. The breeze feels warm across his skin, brushing his hair from his brow. He shivers and presses his hands to his breastbone and tries to remember the feeling of metal punching through him, of the final moments beneath the snow-flurried sky on a frozen road so long and not so fucking long ago.

“Well, fuck you too,” Molly whispers. Louder, he says, “Send me back.” 

“Molly, you don’t have to –”

Molly spins around. “Send me back! Send me back right n–!”

Fjord is staring down at him.

Molly feels a dull hum of magic across his skin, glowing through him and his heart pulses fast in his chest like it’s just come coughing back to life and it’s only then Molly remembers to fucking breathe. He jerks slightly, gasping like someone coming up for air after a deep dive. He coughs at the sudden cold infusion of oxygen. He’s lying in shallow water, clothes soaked, hair soaked. Molly shivers as Caduceus Clay’s final Death Ward breathes across his skin. That last tracery of familiarity dissipates… and then it’s just him and the Leviathan.

Fjord is standing over him, shaking his head slowly, horror in his eyes.

“Fjord?” Molly rasps, too afraid to move. “Fjord, don’t.”

His friend swings one boot over Molly’s body, settles so he’s standing straddling Molly’s waist. Molly raises one hand, palm up as if to ward a blow. He can’t stop the panicked shallow hyperventilation that seizes his lungs or stop the shaking in his hand or the sound of fear that catches in his throat as Fjord kneels down over him. Molly tries to speak again, but can’t get the words out. Fjord grabs his wrist. Effortlessly. Easy. He pushes it aside, forcing his wrist down, pinning it flat in the water over Molly’s head.

“Fjord, listen to me. Or your patron. Whatever.”

Fjord reaches down almost curiously, like you do exploring a new partner’s body, and lays a hand around Molly’s throat. The touch sends a blinding jolt through every dread-sensitized nerve in Molly’s frame. He tastes bile. Feels his eyes going hot, his mouth dry. He can barely get the words out because the thing controlling Fjord is pressing his thumb into pulse of Molly’s carotid artery.

“Wait! Wait, wait. You’re going too fast. If you go too fast I won’t come back. Listen. You have to give me a break. Listen!”

Fjord hesitates. Or rather, the thing staring through Fjord hesitates. His head tilts slightly, like a cat with something under its paw. Molly’s shaking so hard it physically hurts. His entire body aches fear. The possible eternity unraveling before him in a cycle of terror and dying and dark waters.

Desperately he says, “Fjord, are you still here?”

Silence. Just the staring.

“Fjord. Help me –”

Fjord draws his finger across Molly’s neck and opens his windpipe. It’s such a clean cut, so molecularly thin, Molly doesn’t feel it. Just the sudden terrifying sensation of instant pulsing light-headness and liquid warmth. He instinctively grabs his throat with his free hand, fingers sliding over the gaping yawn in his trachea, instantly soaking his hands in blood.

It doesn’t—

He tries to speak, but can’t talk. Fjord staring down at him. Molly closes his eyes and—

“Stop it!” Vax is kneeling over him. They have their hands on Molly’s shoulders, gripping him so tightly their fingers are digging into muscle. The fear in their eyes makes them young and suddenly Vax’ildan doesn’t seem so immortal or ancient or knowing as they shake Molly angrily and yell, “Don’t fucking do that! Mollymauk, listen to me, the reason I asked for this intermediary space was to give you a rest. Okay? Don’t do that.”

“It’s possessing Fjord,” Molly whispers. “He’s been alone with that thing for years. Years. He’s been alone with—”

“And time is fast there,” Vax snaps, cutting him off. “Wait one minute or ten years here and it will be the next moment for him. Don’t run away from me like that. Don’t put yourself in a loop, Mollymauk.” 

“Help me remember,” Molly says.

“I can’t. I can’t help with that.”

“Then send me back.”

“No! Molly, don’t—!”

Molly spasms into consciousness, spits blood and for a horrible moment writhes and chokes on warm iron. His spine arches then jolts the other way, and he rolls onto one flank where he immediately vomits red to clear his airway. For a moment he just kneels there coughing and retching. There’s a pair of plain leather boots in front of him, crusted in barnacles and sea life. Molly doesn’t lift his head. Doesn’t move.

Eventually, fingers slide into the hair at the back of his head, slowly, almost gently at first… then closing, twisting into his hair and gripping tight.

“Molly,” Fjord’s voice is shaking. “I can’t stop. You gotta stop coming back.”

Molly shudders. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. You don’t want to stay here, friend. C’mon. Anyone can die.”

“No, I mean I can’t!” Molly cries. His fingers curl against the cold, soaking ground. “I can’t control this.”

There’s a low rumble then. Fjord grabs his collar and hauls him to his feet. He’s too hollow with horror to resist and Fjord gathers his jaw between his hands, fingers digging into the nape of his neck, thumbs pressing into the soft skin beneath his cheekbones. A rough handling that somehow… cherishes. Molly’s had lovers hold him like that and the comparison it like having his ribs split again. Fjord’s face is so close to his, they’re sharing the same breath and it tastes like salt.

And then a voice penetrates Molly’s head. Or rather, it emerges fully formed in the center of his brain sure as one of Nott’s bullets and it says: STAY.

“Fjord. Fight it. Please…”

ALONE HERE, says that voice, the words congealing in Molly’s head like a clot. FOREVER.

“Fjord! Gods, wake up!”

DIE FOR US.

Then Fjord yanks Molly’s head back and with his teeth he tears Molly’s throat out in a ripping red –

“FUCK!” Molly is on the ground, in the grass. “FUCK! GODS!”

Hands close on his shoulders. He smells the musk of feathers and leather and someone is kneeling beside him on their knees in the grass with him. Molly retches, but he doesn’t quite because he doesn’t have physical form here, so how could he retch? He breathes frantically. Clutches his throat and shudders.  

“Stop,” Vax says softly. “Just take a moment. Okay? Don’t fucking do this to yourself. Please, listen to –”

Molly shoves him away. “Send me back.”

“Mollymauk. You’re not invulnerable. The soul is not invulnerable.”

“Fuck you, Vax’ildan. Send me back to Fjord right now.”

“Molly! I can’t protect you if you –”

Molly wakes up and he’s still in Fjord’s hands, hanging like a ragdoll held by his biceps. There’s blood still wet on Molly’s shirt, shining on the mithril chain that Nott gifted to protect him. For a moment he just… hangs there, limp, too shell-shocked to do anything but lift his chin. There’s light in Fjord’s fingers and that sick slither of healing magic, like his windpipe just finished knitting itself back together.

Fjord is looking at him and his face is a mask of terror, his mouth and teeth a horror of arterial blood. Molly lifts his arms and grabs a fistful of Fjord’s shirt, fingers sinking into the dark, soaking fabric before he slides his hand instead to Fjord’s jaw, cradling his terrified face and it takes him two tries but he manages:

“Fjord? That you?”

“Molly, m’sorry.” He’s breathing shallow, voice strained and shuddering, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I tried to protect –” The words break off as he grips his once roommate tighter. “I tried to so hard to keep all of you away from this. And now you’re here and I don’t know what to do. I can’t do anything. I can’t fucking–”

“It’s… it’s okay,” Molly manages, then laughs. “Well, no, it’s not. It’s terribly fucked up.” Molly swallows hard, heat rising in his eyes. “Are you going to kill me again?”

“Yes.” The syllables come like razors on Fjord’s tongue. His eyes are twisted closed, his expression agonized. “I can’t stop–”

“Hey. Hey, stop that.  S’alright.” Molly tugs Fjord’s head down, gently, like he isn’t covered blood. Like it’s not Molly’s blood. Molly presses a kiss to his friend’s forehead and whispers through a smile that’s a reflex born of instinct, “It’ll be alright. We’re in this together now. Okay?”

Then Molly feels a jolt down his arms, a phantom pull and as he watches, staring openly, some invisible force unzips the veins in his wrists and a painless rush of blood floods down his forearm and drips from his elbows. The voice in his head says, DIE FOR US. And Molly can’t do anything but stand there in Fjord’s grasp until he goes lightheaded, then dizzy, then dark and the last thing he feels his Fjord catching hold of him as he falls.

The last thing he hears is Fjord saying, “Stop it. Just stop it. Don’t make me–”

“Molly, stop!”

Vax’ildan is holding him from behind, grappled like they’re trying to hold him back from a bar fight. One arm looped at Molly’s middle and one up around his chest like a bandolier. They’re speaking directly into Molly’ ear, gripping him so tight it aches a little. But it’s good. It’s good, because their arms around his body say that body is whole and his heart and lungs and everything are intact inside of him and he can breathe. He can breathe here even if his corpse is laying shredded somewhere else.

“Stop,” Vax is pleading. Their fingers dig into Molly’s shoulder. “Stay here. Just stay for a second, okay? Listen to me. I’ll get you through this but not this way. Work with me. Don’t do this.”

“Send me back.”

Molly opens his eyes and Fjord is kneeling on top of him, straddling his chest, both hands on either side of Molly’s head like he’s been waiting for him to wake up. He doesn’t say a word. He just takes Molly’s head in his hands, almost gently, thumbs set against his temples – “Fjord,” Molly tries to say, “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s not you.” – then he drives Molly’s skull into the ground with such monstrous fucking force it smashes his head open on the –

Vax is kneeling over him. They’re holding Molly’s head in their hands and they say, “You’re just being stubborn now. You don’t have to do it like this, you idiot. Let me fucking help you.”

Molly give them the finger and whispers, “Send me back, beautiful.”

And Vax looks gutted for a moment and –

Molly wakes up and the Leviathan is waiting for him, staring at him through Fjord’s eyes and the searing, burning starvation in the gaze is insanity-inducing. It puts Fjord’s hand on Molly’s sternum and there’s a flare of arcane light. Molly screams as a necrotic fire bursts into and spreads through the interior of his chest, searing away flesh and sinew until Molly is clawing, choking blind on the tastes of his own disintegrating internal organs before merciful unconsciousness –

Vax’ildan is staring down at him. Their face is blank and helpless, framed by dark hair. They just kneel there with their hands folded on Molly’s chest. They have Molly’s hand between their palms and they say nothing. They just wait and –

Molly wakes up surrounded by a hundred dark specters. The moment he opens his eyes, they seize hold of him. Their touch pulls the life out of him, like a mouth draws blood off a wound and he screams. He twists in their grip, but they hold him fast among them. Their touch absorbs everything. Light and sound and heat. Molly calls wildly for Fjord, for Yasha, Nott, Caduceus, for anything fucking familiar, but there’s just the dark and Molly goes colder and colder and colder until he can’t see or breathe or move and there is darkness on his tongue and then –

Molly is alone on a grassy hill beneath the moon and someone is saying, “Get out of my way, feather butt!” and before he can think that voice sounds familiar, there’s a tug like a string through his heart and –

Molly opens his eyes.

His sitting in the water. He can feel his left arm hanging slack, his fingers submerged, his knees drawn up a little like someone pulled him into that position. Someone is holding him tightly. Fjord is kneeling on the ground and he’s got one arm protectively around his waist, the other looped around Molly’s shoulders, pressing Molly in against his chest. Fjord’s curled around him as if to shield him and Mollymauk can hear his heart humming through the cold fabric of his tunic. His hands where he’s touching Molly are warm, almost hot, like he’s staving off cold or… or like he’s just finished pressing healing magic into his blood yet again.

“I’ll do it,” he’s saying but like it’s killing him. “I’ll do it, damn you. Just stop. Stop.”

Molly feels drunk on regeneration but glances sidelong… and sees shadows slithering around them, a black serpentine coil of darkness that consumes all light. Utter darkness nested on all sides of them. Molly looks away from that and up at Fjord instead. He tries a sleepy smile.

“Hey, roomie, what’s happening?”

“Hey, Molly.”

“That sucked.”

“I know. Won’t happen again.”

Molly grins but he feels the fraying panic behind the exhaustion, sliding inside him like a razor down skin. “Gonna make it easy on me?” Molly swallows and turns his face against Fjord’s collarbone, like that will stop anything, like the comfort and warmth is anything but a precursor to what comes next. “Don’t ditch me with your asshole patron again.”

“Yeah. Yeah of course.  I’m here.”

Molly shivers, pulls his arms up and tucks them around his middle for a second.

“You cold?”

Molly laughs ragged. “Really?”

Fjord says nothing, but Molly feels a fresh rush of heat lathe over him, hot as summer and it feels good, but it can’t reach the ice inside him, driven there like a nail through his gut. Shivers begin in his hands, travel up his arms, until he’s shaking so hard he has to clench his teeth to stop them chattering. Fjord grips him more tightly. Wordlessly.

“You know,” Molly mumbles. “If you wanted to keep me away, kissing me in a dream was a really shitty way to do it. Honestly, play to your audience, man.”

Fjord huffs this sound that’s almost a laugh. “Sorry. I don’t remember you flirtin’ with dark specters that threaten to kill you. Must have been between Zedash and Hupperdook or somethin’.”

“Oooh, I’m very open-minded,” Molly says, clenching his eyes shut. “And I told you I thought you were pretty pretty. Didn’t I? Back then?”

“N-no. You never told me that.”

“Eh.” A shrug. “Well, now you know.” Molly shivers. “Uh, can you… can you make this quick, Fjord?”

Fjord says nothing. Molly feels him trying to think of something, anything, any comfort at all… but in the end, he just leans down, his hand sliding up Molly’s neck, to his temple. There his thumb presses, like you smooth a stamp on a letter, and the contact triggers an aneurism and he –

Jester is staring down at him.  

He stares. The moon halos her head in silver. Her hair is longer and wilder than he remembers, the freckles more pronounced in her dark blue skin and the laugh lines at her mouth so much deeper. She’s got a scar across her nose and there are silver disks the size of a thumb print braided into her hair. She’s wearing a gray cloak that shimmers with all the colors in the rainbow and a few colors that Molly has no words for. She smells of carnival food, like walking past a fair in a childhood he doesn’t have.

“Hey, hey,” she whispers. Her eyes shine brighter than they should. She’s sitting with him in exactly the same way that Fjord was, his weight braced against her chest, her arms around his shoulders and middle, holding him tight. She whispers, “I traveled a long way to find you, Molly.”

“Jester?” Molly touches her hair, rubbing a small section between his fingers. “How are you here?”

“I just travel everywhere now. And your champion put out a call.”

“My champion?” Molly murmurs.

Jester glances sidelong and Molly follows her gaze… to Vax’ildan. Standing a ways off up the hill, arms folded, and looking both deeply annoyed and deeply relieved. But what catches Molly’s eye isn’t that but rather the towering figure standing behind them. Nearly two heads taller than the raven knight, a figure in a dark green cloak, the cowl pulled low over their eyes. They’re smiling just a little and Molly can’t explain the sensation of familiarity. Like he should know who they are but doesn’t.

He has to look away back to Jester. “Who is that?”

“The Traveler is with me,” Jester says. “Wherever I go, he follows.”

“Your god is just standing over there?” Molly laughs a little, voice cracking. “That’s so ridiculous!” He laughs again and hooks his arms around her shoulders, yanking her into a massive bear hug. “But I don’t even care. I’m just so bloody happy to see you.”

He can hear Jester’s throat tighten around her words.

“You too, Molly.” She hugs him so tight it aches and he just presses his cheek into her neck and inhales what feels like the first real breath he’s had in weeks. She rocks for just a second, holding him. “Oh, maaaan, this has been shitty. This has been the shittiest shit for you. I can’t believe they did this to you.”

“Gonna tell me you’re sorry?”

“Never.” She pulls back a little and this time her eyes are shining and wicked. “Because you found him for me.” She grips his shoulders, speaks urgently. “Uk’otoa is too hungry to think, so it can’t see it’s opened a road. It’s been a while since we’ve seen one another, but here’s the thing: a road is all I need now.” Her smile broadens and she whispers, “Mollymauk? Servant of the Moonweaver, the protector of secret meetings. Can you show me the path to Fjord?”

“My god is the champion of lovers and trysts.” Molly, even through his exhaustion, manages a grin. “You think she’s got your back?”

“Yes,” Jester says, beaming. “She sure the fuck does.”

And then she kisses Molly on the cheek and –

Molly opens his eyes and he’s on fire.

His skin seethes with light, like flame off an accelerant and he burns an endless heatless blue. He stands up. A sourceless wind billows around him, tearing at his clothes and hair while the cyclone of light twists in ribbons of brightness around him. The waters part at his feet and through the fire he can see something in the darkness – something massive and black, a great bristling flank moving across his entire field of vision and every 50 meters or so a great yellow eye passes, staring directly at him.

The serpent, he knows, is wrapped around him, endlessly consuming itself and everything around it.

“Fjord!” Molly shouts into the darkness. “I remember this time! I remember what I’m doing here!”

That voice rumbles through his head again, dark and chaotic but… muted now. Not maddening like before: CANNOT BE HERE.

“Fjord!” Molly steps forward, the waters moving away from his boots with each step. “Fjord, we’re not alone down down here! I’m not bloody leaving you. C’mon!”

HE BELONGS TO THE SEA.

“Fuck you! You aren’t the sea!” Molly shouts, pointing a blazing finger at the shadow. “You’re a snake with delusions of godhood and you won’t hold up to a real deity!”

YOU ARE ALONE.

“You know,” Molly says, sensing he has an audience, “I serve the Moonweaver. Goddess of misdirection. Maybe you don’t know this but in any magic trick there’s three parts.” Molly holds up one finger. “A Pledge. That’s when you show someone something ordinary. Like a carnie that died ten years.” Molly holds up a second finger. “The Turn. You make that ordinary thing interesting. Like maybe you make him unkillable, so a death-addicted demi-god takes a good look.”

YOU ARE ALONE, roars the darkness.

But Molly ignores it and holds up a third finger.

“The Prestige is the good part. Cause you’ve been looking at me…” Molly can feel warm wind at his back, can smell something sweet as kettle-corn on an autumn day, and on a breeze that blows down a road that doesn’t yet exist, he hears a laugh. So he says “You shouldn’t have taken Fjord away from her.”

And Jester Lavorre says, “Give him back to me, you ugly fucking lizard!”

And the darkness ignites.

The pocket dimension tears open and through the howling gap of light and quantum screaming, a blue-skinned woman in a cloak and frilly skirts bursts forward. She lands on two feet, her hands extended in front of her and instantly all around her a thousand motes of light shiver and burst into a thousand-thousand glittering lollipops each the size of a battle shield. They gleam razor sharp against the shadow. She burns with the same blue light that covers Molly and she says, “We’re not leaving without him!”

NO.

“Give him back to us or I’ll tear you apart!”

YOU CAN’T.

“Yes, I fucking can!” The world shudders. Jester’s eyes are blazing suns, burning white and light issues from her throat like starlight through a tunnel of mirrors. Molly feels a hand suddenly on his shoulder and there’s whisper of green fabric though the corner of his eye, a ghost of a smirk in his head, like a fading memory. But Jester is shouting and he can’t turn his head to see if her god is, indeed, standing behind her. “YOU HAVE UNTIL THE COUNT OF THREE, STUPID!”

She points at the dark before her.

“ONE!”

The swarm of lollipops beings into spin, then speed into swirling orbit, spinning around the two of them until the there is a cyclone of spiritual weaponry screaming through the air.

“TWO!”

They’ve moving so fast now that their motion and light is becoming a blur, a dome of light that eclipses the dark. The shadow beyond the cyclone is recoiling from the radiant fire that now burns away the water, the darkness, and the cold. Everything smells like sugar and feels like summer and Molly can feel it like a rush of magic through him the want to just move, to run, to tear through some unknown passageway to a different destination. The light is blinding now. Burning. Jester opens her hand.

“THR—!”

Reality pops.

Molly blinks.

He’s standing in the middle of the road. The roar is gone, the sudden silence almost deafening before the low whisper of the surf comes through and the far cry of gulls beyond the breakers. There’s sunshine against his forehead and shoulders and there’s still blood all over his armor and clothes but the dark is gone. He’s facing the water, the tide lapping at his boots where he stands at the edge of an uninterrupted ocean and he can see where the road at his feet disappears down into the water. It takes him a moment realize… it looks a lot like the road through Port Damali to the Crushing Deep.

But the Deep has vanished.

There is nothing but the ocean and the shimmering of sunlight in the waves.

“Molly?”

He blinks again, turns and looks over his shoulder.

Jester is standing in the road behind him. Beside her, wearing strange leather armor and looking… almost exactly like he did ten years ago, stands Fjord. For a moment, Molly just stands there, covered in blood and feeling the breeze against his face. Staring at his two friends who, he notices, are holding hands very tightly. Yeah,he thinks, that makes sense. Okay.

“This real?” Molly asks.

Jester has tears on her face. She can’t seem to speak so she just nods furiously.

“Okay,” Molly says. He looks at Fjord. “You good?”

“Yeah, Mollymauk. I’m okay.”

Molly realizes his hands are shaking.

“It’s over?” Molly asks.

“Yes, it’s over,” Fjord says. “He’s gone. I can feel it. I know. It’s done, Molly. I can’t...” He looks at Jester, like he’s never seen anything like her before. “I can’t believe you just did that.”

Jester holds out a hand. “You’re okay, Molly. Yasha and the others are on their way. I know it. I promise.”

“Good,” Molly says.

And that’s when Molly’s legs kind of give out

He falls to his knees and he closes his eyes and the stones under his palms are sun-hot and for a moment there’s nothing but that heat and the sound of Jester and Fjord saying his name. And it’s real. It’s real. It’s real as Jester and Fjord grab hold of him and Jester’s magic breathes burning mint and healing fire through his veins. Fjord is gripping his head, shaking him a little saying, “Hey, hey look at me, Molly. Molly. Stay here. Stay with us.”

The sun is burning hot.

Molly is freezing cold.

He hears Yasha’s voice at a distance, yelling his name and he thinks, Now both of us are Deathless.

Then he passes out.

Chapter Text

Molly wakes up with a blanket tucked around his shoulders and someone gently combing their fingers through his hair. He knows immediately from the scent of leather that it’s Yasha and his head’s resting against her thigh. He’s curled up on his side like a cat with one arm draped over her hip and his head against his own bicep and the top of her leg. He’s sleeping in her lap basically and for a drowsy, happy moment he wonders if Bo and Gustav ordered her to babysit him through this hangover or if she decided to take pity on him.

“M’rning,” he mumbles.

Her fingers still against the top of his scalp, her short nails momentarily dragging against skin and he kind of purrs. Shifts his shoulders a little and stretches. Her palm smooths out against the back of his head.

“Hey. Molly?”

“Mmm,” he says.

“How do you feel?”

“Like I got hit by a brick,” he huffs. “What did we do last night?”

There’s a long pause.

“Molly?” Her other hand settles on his back, between his shoulder blades and he feels a warm circle of magic spread from her fingers and through his body, her faint brand of healing taking the edge off his aching head. She continues to rub little circles on his back. “Molly, what do you remember?”

“Nothing. Must have been a good night.”

“Oh,” Yasha whispers. Then, “Shit.”

Molly ignores that. “Never fear. If it was embarrassing, I assure you I don’t care.”

“Please don’t be upset,” Yasha says, rather unexpectedly. “Molly, you remember the carnival is gone right?”

Molly opens his eyes. He looks over his shoulder, up at Yasha. She stares back at him – pale and beautiful, her face elaborately lined and painted, tattooed in unfamiliar places, her eyes smudged in kohl. Her mismatched stare is anxious and sorry. There are deeper lines in her face, ten years of lines that he doesn’t recollect and like waking up from a second dream, Mollymauk remembers where he’s been.

“Mollymauk,” Yasha says quickly. “You’re okay. It’s okay you’re safe now. I promise.”

Molly’s breath comes too rapid. He forces his eyes shut, forces himself to breathe slower. He can feel himself tensing up, his fingers against her knee curling in, knees pulling a little tighter toward his chest, his tail already lashed around his leg. He forces himself to breathe slower, focus on the slow rotation of Yasha’s palm against his spine and the weight of her hand against the top of his head. He calms down in increments, in agonizing slow motion centimeters.

“We’re in the Blooming Grove,” Yasha is saying. “It’s protected. It belongs to Caduceus.”

“That doesn’t make it safe,” Molly rasps, pushing himself up on the one arm draped over Yasha’s hip, steadying his other hand against Yasha’s knee. “Gods, my head…”

Yasha presses a palm for his forehead like you check for fever, but again the medicinal cool of her magic soaks through his skull and he feels the tension immediately going out of his shoulders and spine, until he’s slumped again over her leg in a boneless melt. He groans a little but can’t be bothered to articulate any further while Yasha is drawing off the pain, wiping it away like you wipe away blood from a wound. She leans down near his ear.

“You’re okay,” she says, but there’s a tone there, like she’s convincing herself too. “I’ve got you.”

“I died again,” Molly whispers.

He hears her inhale. “I know, Molly. But you’re okay now.”

Molly stares idly at a dark patch of long grass in the shadow beyond Yasha’s leg, where it converges with a twist of ivy overgrown on a faded headstone beside a small stone temple. There are a lot of headstones here actually, overgrown in moss and creeping vines, flowers erupting from around every plot. There’s a massive iron-spiked fence that wraps all the way around the flourishing graveyard and the fence itself is so heavily wrapped in wisteria and morning glories that it seems to be sagging under the weight. The sky is dark. The only light emanates from a fire somewhere far to the left.

Molly can hear low voices, the rest of the Mighty Nein murmuring and he thinks he hears someone saying something like, “—can’t ignore what we’ve seen. Everything’s changed since he came back,” followed sharply by, “Everything’s changed because you found someone to throw to the wolves. Don’t talk to me about—” interrupted by, “Stop fighting!”  

Yasha murmurs, “Go back to sleep, Molly.”

“Fuck,” Molly whispers, because his hand is starting to tremor. “I died a lot.”

Yasha, hearing this, hooks her arm around his chest and pulls Molly back against her body, tucking her other arm up around him as well and setting her chin against his shoulder. Her knees bend up a little tighter against his ribs, so she’s wrapped herself almost completely around him and the blanket he’s tangled in. Like you try to swaddle a sick kitten or something. His hands won’t stop shaking.

“It’s so fucked up. I remember not remembering. And I remember the other side. It’s like there are two versions of me living in my head right now and I… I switch back and forth from one thought to the next.” His gripping one of Yasha’s forearms. “I did this to myself. I said ‘yes’ every time I died and came back.” His shoulders jerk, convulsing on a sob with no sound. “But I also didn’t do this. I didn’t pick this. I’m the one who kept waking up in the fucking dark not knowing.” Yasha tenses, her grip on him almost bruising and Molly says, “Part of me is so bloody sorry for the other part of me… and part of me hates the other side of me, the asshole who just kept sending me back to die.”

Yasha makes a hushing sound and presses her face against his neck, murmuring against the slope of muscle along his shoulder and throat.

“You’re going to be okay.”

“I don’t feel okay, Yasha. I feel crazy.”

He feels her chest constrict, like she’s stifling a sob of her own. “You’re not.” Her hand moves up to cradle his cheek, turning his face so her forehead leans against his. “You’ll be fine. You won’t break. This doesn’t break you. Okay? You’re alive and no one is going to kill you again. You’re safe.”

Molly’s fingers dig into her arm, “Say that again.”

“You’re safe. I promise.”

Molly can’t answer. Can’t bear to tell her he doesn’t believe her. Not for a single second. He just turns his face down against Yasha’s neck and holds onto her until he’s so exhausted he can’t move. He doesn’t fall asleep though. He just feels the hysteria drain out of him like blood from a vein until he’s huddled quietly in her arms while she combs the hair from his forehead and makes soft, meaningless sounds in her throat. All he can think about is his own voice though, so determined and resolute, saying, “Send me back.”Over and over and over.

After a while, Yasha moves her head a little, nearer to him.

She says, “What do you need?”

“I don’t know.” Molly pushes back against her until the barbarian woman curls a little tighter around him. “Yasha, I thought you died.”

There’s a pause, then, “I am a servant of the Stormlord. When in my Battle Trance… it’s very hard to kill me.”

“Right. And I’m easy kill but I don’t stay dead.”

Yasha clears her throat uncomfortably. “Yup. We could take that on the road.”

Molly grins a little, closing his eyes. “The Deathless Duo.”

“You always did want an act.”

“Sword juggling just isn’t that interesting.”

“You still know how to do that?”

“Sure. Think sword juggling is what’s gonna save us?”

“If I was a god, I’d bring you back from the dead for sword juggling.”

There’s a silence and Molly can hear, somewhere nearby, the sound of a fire crackling and the low murmur of voices. He glances sidelong toward the emanating glow. Some distance away, there’s a campfire burning and he can see the hazy figures of the others – Nott and Caduceus sitting together. Fjord is there… but standing very, very far away speaking with Jester. Outside the light of the campfire and on the other side of the overgrown lawn, he’s not facing Molly and Molly admits he’s relieved about that.

“Do you remember,” Yasha says, “what you said to me the day I joined the carnival?”

“I said a lot of things to you, Yasha. Not all of them entirely appropriate. What are you thinking of?”

“You said whatever my story was, it was mine not to tell if I wanted.”

“I said that? Oof, I must have been drunk.”

Yasha shifts a little, one arm unwinding from around him and digging around somewhere. When her arm comes back around, there’s something in her hand. A small rectangular thing tucked in leather. She thumbs open the wrapping and when the cover falls away, she’s holding a familiar (if battered) deck of cards. Molly stares at them a moment before gently taking the deck from her palm, his fingers sliding over the face of the first card.

“Beauregard carried these with her,” says Yasha softly. “It’s all of them except The Moon.”

“Why did she keep them?”

“Because she wanted a reminder.” Yasha swallows audibly. “You should know, I love Beauregard. I loved her until the day she struck down a god and I love her now.” Yasha hugs him a little tighter. “She would want you to know… you’re nobody’s martyr. You can walk away from this. It’s not your fight.”

Molly thumbs at the ridges of the cards, worrying the familiar edges. Staring down into the deck cupped in his scar-crossed fingers he gets a pulse of intense de-ja-vu and for a moment it could be Gustav and the rest of The Fletching and Moondrop Traveling Carnival of Curiosities sitting by that fire and the faint smell of cooking food could be the twins fixing up the chow for the night and Fjord could be Bo The Breaker and they could be… anything but what they are. Something more familiar by far, to Mollymauk, than the collection of creatures who killed a god.

“Give me a minute,” Molly whispers.

Yasha seems surprised but unwraps her arms from his shoulders. Molly stands up, stops to kneel a moment and catch the back of her head with his hand so he can lean his brow against hers. She mirrors him and for a second the two of them just sit there in the middle of the dark part of the graveyard and Molly wonders what the world would look like if Gustav had just passed on Trostenwald ten years ago.

“I’ll be right back,” he says quietly.

“Alright.”

Mollymauk walks a little farther into the darker part of the graveyard, away from the light and the others. He can feel Yasha watching him but after a while he’s too far in the darkness to sense her looking at him. Once he feels alone, he kneels down and shuffles the cards a few times. The grass is a little damp where he kneels before a random headstone. It smells green and alive. His eyes adjust in the shadows and in the dim light of the moon overhead he can see the cards as he draws four and lays them face down. One above the others, the other three below it.

He flips the first card.

The Hanged One.

He bites down on the inside of his cheek and flip the first and second card below it.  

The Shield.

The Anvil.

Molly stops and for a moment, alone, kneeling over a deck of cards he just covers his face with one hand and breathes. Then he flips the last card.

The Shadow.

“Fuck,” he says.

Then a voice, one he doesn’t know, asks mildly, “What do these cards mean?”

Molly looks up.

There’s a man standing behind the headstone Molly’s kneeling at. The man is very tall, as tall as Caduceus, dressed in a massive forest green cloak. The hood is pulled down over his face so Molly can only see the pale, clean line of his jaw and the thin curious line of his mouth. His head is tilted a little and when Molly looks up, his unseen gaze penetrates with a strange vertigo, like falling forward. Taking a step in the dark with your eyes closed – a surge of fear, adrenaline, and excitement in one and he shivers a little, his voice catching on his tongue.

The Traveler crouches down, resting their arms on top of the headstone. He props his chin on his folded arms and says in a voice that’s eerily ordinary, “It’s okay, Mollymauk. I’m just curious.”

“It… it doesn’t mean anything,” Molly says, unable to stop himself. “It’s bullshit. All of it. Always has been.” He looks down at the cards. “The cards say something but it’s just… there’s nothing behind any of it.”

“Why are you upset then?”

“I don’t know!” Molly shakes his head, like he’s trying to shake himself awake. “I don’t know. Are you really here?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you talking to me?”

“Because the Old Gods are looking at you. I may be the only New God to notice. So…”

The Traveler leans forward over the headstone a little and Molly can’t seem to move an inch, too transfixed by the shadow that falls over The Traveler’s face, hiding everything higher than the bridge of his nose. It’s strange but Molly can’t tell if they’re dark or light skinned. He seems to be both at the same time. He’s so near to Molly, his head should throw shadow down on the former carnie, but it doesn’t. After a moment, he sits back again.

“Tell me what the cards mean.” He props his chin in one hand. “I don’t know this game.”

“It’s… it’s a modified three card spread,” Molly says automatically, like he’s selling a prospective customer on a reading. He gestures to the array before him. “General reading or specific. Ask a question, to me or in your head, and I pull four cards.” He points to The Hanged One. “First card’s your archetype. It represents who you are right now.” He points to the other three. “Then you draw to answer your question. First one: something known about your presents. Second: something unknown about the present. Third: something about your future.”

The New God nods along. “And you drew for yourself. So, what do you see then?”

Molly’s too paralyzed by absurdity, by the impossible fact of a god asking him questions, to refuse him answers. So he says, “The Hanged One is my archetype, who I am right now. It usually represents restriction, someone who feels… trapped.” Molly rubs the heel of his hand into one eye, wiping back toward his temple and blinking. “Uh, it can also mean martyrdom, but not often and I don’t bloody well buy that meaning.”

The Traveler tilts his head the other way. “And the others?”

“The Shield and The Anvil. My present known situation, um… The Shield might mean a measured approach. You deal with your circumstances carefully to survive.” Molly laughs. “I think I’ve been handling this dead not-dead thing pretty well.” He glances at the cards again. “My unknown present—The Anvil. I drew this for Jester once. I might have… played it up a bit—”

“It means a destiny forged,” says a The Traveler.

Molly looks up, startled. “You were there when I did that?”

“I’m always with Jester.”

Molly stares a minute. “I’ll be honest, I thought she was kind of making you up. You know, and other things…”

There’s a ghost of a smile. “Hamster unicorns aren’t real, Molly.” And while Molly is processing the words ‘hamster unicorns’ coming out of a god’s mouth, The Traveler asks him gently, “Are you worried about your destiny?”

“Yes.”

“What scares you, Mollymauk?”

“Dying,” Molly whispers. “Dying scares me. Doing it over and over hasn’t made me less afraid of it. I’m more afraid than ever. I’m so scared it feels like I’m going crazy.”

“Fear of death is a reasonable thing.”

“I know right? It’s not like I’m scared of spiders or gerbils or something. I’m just bloody concerned about getting murdered by angry wizards or dragons or… or gods or goblins with guns or…” Molly rubs his face with both hands. “I don’t know what I’m saying. Uh, the third card is the future.” He points at it, eyes clenched shut. “It’s The Shadow. That card says It’s inevitable. That it’s all out of my control and matter what I do the thing that’s coming for me is going to get me and there’s nothing I can—”

Something warm brushes his cheek and Molly stops. The warmth settles at his chin. It takes Molly a heart-stopping second to realize the warmth is someone’s fingers against his jaw, guiding his face gently up.

He opens his eyes and the Traveler – Jester’s young god – is suddenly kneeling in front of him, on the same side of the headstone as him and before Molly can remember how to breathe the deity takes his face in his hands. They’re lined faintly with strange iridescent markings, like the roads on a map that keeps shifting. Living tattoos that move endlessly over his knuckles and wrists. Molly can see he’s still smiling (his smile is all Molly can see) and he can’t say how he’s certain he’s seen that smile a million times before, familiar as his own grin in the mirror.

“Molly,” say the Traveler, voice easy and certain. “You’re not a fortuneteller. The cards don’t mean anything. Stop freaking out.”

Molly stares.

There’s a low laugh and that laugh is like a slide of sunshine through the soul.

“Nothing is known,” says The Traveler. “Even the Old Gods knew mortals had grown beyond them. Whatever and however they may bind you to their wishes, you are mortal. It’s only by your consent they guide you now. Vax’ildan saw to that.”

“I don’t feel like I consented.” Molly’s throat aches around the words. “I feel manipulated.”

“Because gods aremanipulating you. They’re afraid. Afraid for their children like you’re afraid for your friends.”

“So, they’re being shitty to me because they’re scared?”

“Isn’t that usually the reason for people behaving badly?”

“Are you sure you’re a god?” Molly whispers.

The Traveler shrugs.

“I’m reasonably sure, Mollymauk Tealeaf and if it comforts you, know that my acolyte walks beside you and so too do I stand with you. No small thing. So, stop looking at cards. Instead, move forward. Have hope. You’re stronger than you can remember and chaos breathes in your wake.” That smile is living in Molly, easy as air. “Now… make this world deal with you.”

And then, quite suddenly, Molly is alone.

He’s alone for a quite a while before someone comes looking for him.

“Molly?”

He glances over his shoulder.

Jester is standing a few headstones away, looking nervous but a little curious, her lips pursed, fingers knotted in a bit of her skirts. It’s so familiar it makes Molly’s heart ache to look at her and he remembers, the last time he was in this world, he’d been desperately trying to track and save her.

“Hi, Jester.”

“Are you okay?” she says.

Molly waves her over, so she jumps both headstones between them and drops to her knees next to Molly. She looks around quickly, like she’s expecting someone, then glances at the cards in the grass. Unprompted, she picks up The Hanged One, frowning at the ornate imagery of a figure bound and hung upside down from a tree. She picks up the other cards, scanning them before she stacks them in her palms and tips slightly so she’s leaning her shoulder against Molly, fanning the cards for him.

“What does this mean?”

“Nothing. I was just looking at them.”

She fingers the corner of the cards for a bit, then says, “Are you okay, Molly? Fjord told me what happened. He’s… he’s not okay. Are you okay?”

“Not really.” He drops his cheek against the top of Jester’s head. “But… I think I can be.”

He feels her tense a moment before her tail visibly begins to flip happily back and forth around her ankles. Molly absently loops his own tail loosely around where they’re sitting together and for a while they don’t say anything. Jester just leans a little more heavily against him, running her thumb over the face of The Hanged One, her pale blue fingertips outlining the figure over and over.

“Molly,” Jester says eventually. Her voice is a little squashed, a little wet. “You saved Fjord you know. I couldn’t do that alone. I might have never done it or sat by the sea for… forever. Waiting and waiting forever.” She shivers, like she’s imagining that world. “Thank you for what you did.”

Molly says nothing.

“If you need to leave because we’re too dangerous or something, I understand,” Jester adds, “but, like, you should know—we love you. And we missed you so much and every time we did something so cool, I would think ‘wow Molly would have liked this’ and I thought that so much, sometimes it felt like you were with us.” Jester is still speaking into his shirt, muffled. “Maybe that sounds weird to you. I know time’s all messed up. You didn’t even have ten years to yourself but we had ten years to miss you. And it’s all one-sided.”

Molly loops an arm around Jester’s shoulders. “It’s not entirely one-sided.”

She wipes at her cheek. “I missed you.”

“Wanna go back to the others?”

“Sure. Is that okay? Will you—?” She pauses.

“I’m not afraid of Fjord,” Molly murmurs. “At least… I don’t think I am. How is he?”

“Strange,” she says softly. “He doesn’t know what to do now with Ukotoa severed from him. Without it… Molly, he has no magic. The Hexblade is gone. He’s still super strong, like, you know? In a normal way. But he’s not…”

“He’s not a demi-god like the rest of you.”

Jester freezes a moment. “We’re not all technically…”

“You are technically.”

“Well… maybe. Technically.”

Molly grins into the shadows, propping his chin on Jester’s head and hugging her a little tighter. “Remember when I said I was the weird one of the group?”

“This is way weirder than the circus.”

“Yeeeeeeah.”

Another silence. Then, “Vax’ildan was right, Molly.” She’s looking up at him when Molly pulls back, startled, to meet her gaze. She touches his arm as she goes on. “A soul can be wounded by what it goes through. Yours has been through more than most. That’s what he meant.”

Molly hesitates, frightened by the sudden clench of fear that takes him when she says that, when Vax’ildan’s name is spoken aloud in this place. In a context outside of death. Like they—likehe—is a knowable thing and not a figment. Mollymauk searches for a way to define the panic that rushes him and – lost momentarily for words – he hugs Jester tight to his chest again and feels her arms loop around his ribs.

“Will I go insane?” he asks. “Body and soul?”

Jester shakes her head. “I don’t know, Molly, but there are things out there than can hurt a soul. I think people can only take so much. So please… be careful?”

“Who is he?”

“Vax’ildan?”

“Yes. I see him whenever I die.”

“He was… is, I guess, the Champion of the Raven Queen. He died decades ago, Mollymauk. What he is now is a something else—a guide between life and death—but all the stories say he saved the world. He and the heroes of Taldorei.”

“He died?”

“Yes.” He can hear her smile as she stage whispers, “He’s kinda cute though, huh?”

“Jester, every time I see him, it means I’ve died.”

“Oh… right.”

There’s an awkward pause.

“But ignoring all that,” she says slowly, “I still thought he was preeeeettycute.”

Molly leans back to level a deadpan look at her.

“Yes, Jester, the Raven Queen’s immortal and long-dead Champion who exists only in some limbo on the Astral Plane is totally and utterly shaggable. What exactly do I do with that information?”

A shrug. “I dunno. Try to touch his butt sometime?”

Molly laughs and plants a kiss against her forehead. “Thanks for the tip. When I die again, I’ll give it a shot. Let’s join the others. I’m feeling a lot better now. Honest.”

Maybe it shouldn’t surprise Molly that Fjord avoids him immediately.

As Jester approaches the group with Molly in tow, Fjord’s familiar figure recedes from the light around the fire. He backs a little farther into the graveyard where he takes a seat on a low gravestone. When Molly looks his way, just to see his reaction, Fjord braces his elbows against his knees and looks away. On his hip is a sword, but not a falchion. Now that Molly can see, there are snaking marks down his arms and circling his wrists like rope. He sees Molly looking and folds his hands uncomfortably. Everyone must see the exchange because there’s a moment, uncertain and silent.

Then Caduceus, calm as anything, breaks the quiet.

“How are you feeling, Mollymauk?”

The firbolg is seated cross-legged near the fire. He’s not wearing his armor, but rather a soft blue tunic and in his hands is a plain clay cup of tea that seems a touch too small for him. His expression is level, holding Molly’s gaze with a gentle focus that feels… well, familiar at this point. The last time he saw Caduceus the cleric was a burning conduit of radiant fire so it seems strange that he’s now sitting here, drinking tea, looking unflapped by it all.

“I’m alright,” Molly says, crossing his arms. “Thank you, by the way, for the save with the dragon.”

“Nott was with you,” he says. “She would have thought of something.”

Nott, who is standing opposite Molly, wringing the hem of her cloak with nervous fingers, immediately looks appalled. “WHAT? No, I wasn’t! I was freakin’ out!”

“You would have been fine,” Caduceus says, sipping at his drink. “You’re Nott the Brave.”

“I’m Nott, the gnome who is gonna be punching you in a second!”

Caduceus just keeps sipping his tea.

“You sure you’re okay?” Yasha says from her looming position against a tall and ancient looking oak. Her arms are folded, her gaze bright in the dark band of paint across his face. “That was a lot to deal with.”

“I’m not exactly okay,” Molly admits, sweeping over to take a seat beside Yasha, carefully opposite Fjord. “But as long as we don’t go right back into battle any time soon, I should be good for a while.”

There are immediate significant glances around the fire.

“Fuck. Off.” Molly groans. “I’m sore and irritable. Don’t start.”

“We’re not going back into a fight… immediately,” Nott starts to say.  

And here Fjord butts in. “Molly aint coming.”

Molly looks at Fjord, but the half-orc is staring directly at Caduceus.

Caduceus doesn’t look up from his tea, but he says, “That’s up to Mollymauk.”

“He. Is not. Coming.”

“Fjord,” Yasha murmurs.

He looks at her. “You of all people outta agree with me. How many times has he died in front of you already? How much more does he gotta give before we leave him the fuck alone?”

“Hey!” Molly snaps, “I’m honestly not up for deciding any aspect of my immediate future right now and—no offense—I don’t want any of your opinions on it. Can we just sit together for a bit? For an hour? For ten minutes without it being about the end of the world?”

“Okay, but… the end of the world—” Nott starts.

“Won’t begin unless Caleb starts it,” Caduceus says quietly. “We have time.”

“How do you know that, Caduceus?” Jester moves to, discretely, kneel between Fjord and their unflappable cleric. “Did he say something to you? Or Nott?” And here she looks to the gnome fidgeting beside her. Then, more quietly she says, “Do you really think he’ll do it? Wake the Chained Oblivion here on the Material Plane?”

“Yes,” says Caduceus. “But he also killed Mollymauk no more than two days ago.”

“So what?” Fjord says quietly.

Caduceus looks at Fjord then. “I saw the look on his face when he did it and when Molly stood back up.”

“Deuce, I recollect your fuckin’ insights being real dead on but say something that doesn’t sound like horseshit.”

“He knows now that he has another god of death standing in opposition to him. And by now, he’ll know that you are free and Jester is back on the Material Plane. That changes things. He’ll need time to adjust his spellwork and if I know him—and I still think I do—he has doubt. He knows how high the risks are in waking Beauregard, but he’s not insane. He thinks he can pull it off, but only if everything is exactly correct. There is an acceptable level of risk he’s willing to tolerate toward the outcome he wants. He’ll weight that against the risk of destroying everyone and everything.”

“How is that notinsane?” Molly says.

“It’s relative. Most people would do the same math, but very few people have the option.”

“That’s… okay… right,” Molly says.

“Caleb is recalculating,” Caduceus goes on calmly. “It will take him days to reset his work if he’s not being reckless and we desperately need to rest and plan our approach. We have long enough to take a little reprieve.”

“I disagree,” Fjord says loudly.

“Does someone have something to drink?” Molly interrupts. “Smoke? Anything that will allow me to not care about how terrible all of this is? Because I’ve been two feet from a nervous breakdown for days and I really need to stop. Right now.”

“Mollymauk,” Nott starts to say in a consolatory tone.

Caduceus tosses him a small vial of something. “That will do it,” he says.  

Molly catches it. “Fabulous. This one dose?”

“Yes.”

“NO!” says Nott, squeaking.

But it’s too late. Molly’s already uncapped it and downed the entire lot. It tastes bitter and mushroomy and a little like paprika somehow. He tosses the empty vial back to Caduceus then flops back in the grass with his hands behind his head, staring up into the canopy above. The shadows of the firelight play into the boughs and branches as whatever the hell he just ingested starts to work its slow way though him. His throat feels numb, then tingly.

He can feel the horrified looks he’s getting.

Molly shrugs. “Now I won’t function either way and I’m useless in this discussion.”

“Godsdammit, Molly.” That’s Fjord.

“This is serious,” Yasha murmurs, staring down at him. “We might not have time—”

“Sounds to me like Caleb can destroy the world whenever he wants and we’re arguing about whether is going to be today or sometime in two days. If you think we can survive a wizard in his lair by charging in there now. By all means, but I’m done. I need to stop for a minute.”

“Well,” Nott starts to say, “If Caleb--”

“What Molly wants doesn’t matter, because he’s not coming,” Fjord insists again.

Molly rolls his head to the side and just looks at Fjord. “Stop trying to protect me,” he says softly.

Fjord freezes, then recovers. “Someone has to, since everyone else hasn’t up until this point. You should have never been put in front of the things you’ve been put in front of. You’re not like us. You’re not responsible for any of this and you’re useless to us in a fight anyway.”

“Fjord, that’s not fair,” Jester cuts in. “And I’m not entirely sure it’s true.”

“Yeah,” Nott begins again, a little angrily this time, “I was there. I watched Molly—”

“He’s not coming and I think we need to move now while Caleb is still—”

“Stop interrupting Nott,” Molly snaps, sitting up. “All of you. Shut up. She’s the one who knows him best isn’t she? She’s the one Caleb is going to really struggle to lose. Why talk any tactics if it doesn’t have her opinion on it?” He looks to Nott, standing there with her hands still wrung into her cloak. “Nott? What do you think?

Quiet for a moment.  

Nott is just staring at him with giant amber eyes and a shocked, kind of frightened expression… and then she reaches into her pocket and pulls out a piece of wire. She waits for someone to stop her, but not one of the gathered Nein move to do it. So she gathers the wire in her small, dark fingers and lifts it toward her face. She murmurs the words to the spell, softly, almost inaudibly… then…

“Caleb? It’s me.” She waits, then goes on gently, “I’m sorry for what happened on the beach, but you scared me. You are scaring me. We love you. Please. Stop.”

There is a long, long silence.

Then, very softly, barely more than a whisper, “I love you too. I promise I’ll fix things, but… please don’t come home.” There’s a ragged exhalation. “I can’t trust you anymore.”

And the spell fades. Nott’s eyes have teared up and she sniffs, scrubs her face with a clenched fist.

“Uh, okay… I… I think Caduceus is right. We have time.”

“Based on what?” Fjord murmurs.

“Because he said ‘I love you’. He doesn’t do that when he’s gone.”

A silence again.

“We have time,” Nott says, but her voice seems muffled to Molly, like it’s coming through a tunnel and touched with a strange hum. Molly lays back down while she adds, “Caleb won’t kill the world yet.”

And that’s the last word he hears as the murmur of the forest seems to swell up suddenly around him. A rising buzz like a swam of cicada taking off. That vibrato moves into Molly’s bones and murmurs along his spine until every nerve is shivery with the pulse of the graveyard around him. When he opens his eyes, he can feel his friends moving on his peripheral, slow motion and dim. But kneeling above him is the man in the green cloak with a face composed of shadow. Molly can’t really move at that point or speak, his entire nervous system suddenly and pleasurably taken hostage by whatever Caduceus gave him.

He just watches Jester’s strange god reach out a hand. It hovers briefly, close enough Molly feels a summer heat. Then he taps Molly on the forehead. It’s probably a good thing Molly can’t move or speak because a wave of dominating sensation ripples out from the point of contact and possesses him in a rush of color and sound. It feels like nothing in the universe. Feels like his soul is taking root in the world and mainlining light into every vein in his body. His spine tenses up, his breath catching helplessly in his throat. It feels so good Molly can’t put a single thought together and when he finally breathes it’s like stars are inhabiting his lungs.

“Relax,” says a voice that sounds like everyone he’s ever known.

And Molly closes his eyes and there are dark colors there. There’s a humming and the humming is music somehow and that music is a weave and Molly thinks someone is speaking to him in a language of moonlight and darkness, but he can’t quite understand it. Then he’s just drifting. Dreaming. Gone.  

Chapter Text

The Blooming Grove is beautiful in the day light.

The sun slides beams of yellow through the gnarled canopy to the undergrowth, dappling dark grass and wildflowers in shifting stripes of sunshine and shadow. That’s what Molly spends the better part of ten minutes staring at when he wakes comfortably drowsy and a bit dehydrated from an all-night drug stupor. The morning is quiet, broken, only by distant murmuring and the muted twitter of birdsong. Mollymauk’s lying on his back still, though someone moved him a little into the space beneath a great oak tree, his head cushioned on a balled jacket.

For a warm sleepy while, Molly dozes a little somewhere between waking and unconsciousness, vaguely roused from his limbo by the impression of another person nearby. Yawning a little, Mollymauk sits up a bit, raking hair from his face.

Caduceus Clay is sitting nearby.

His back is partially to Molly, his face in profile serene as the morning around him.

He’s dressed in full armor, glittering chitinous green and grown with rosy lichen. Someone has taken the long section of his hair and pulled it back so the central part is woven elaborately, plaited and clipped so it stands up from his otherwise shaved skull.  The rest of his hair is braided in a heavy rope that coils over his left shoulder. There are carved bone and amber charms threaded into the soft pink.

He looks war-ready to Molly with his fauxhawk and his armor.

He looks like he’s been waiting for Molly to wake up.

Molly can hear him murmur quietly and in the fifteen seconds that he gets to simply watch, Molly supposes that the cleric is praying. His low voice is like a long chord from a strange instrument, deep bass and vibrato. Eventually, he seems to register Mollymauk’s attention and looks over his shoulder, one long ear flipping upward like a deer detecting a noise. He smiles and the fondness is all the way up to his eyes in a way that makes Molly feel extremely safe even now, despite the facts of his fate. It’s impressive really. Molly thinks Clay could calm a storm with that look.

“Morning,” Molly says.

“Good morning,” says Caduceus.

Mollymauk folds his hands on his stomach.

“I have no hangover. Is that because you have the best drugs in the kingdom, or because you did some healing while I was sleeping?”

“Both.”

“Anyone ever tell you, you’re a gentleman and a scholar, Mr. Clay?”

“No. Because I’m neither of those things.” Caduceus turns a little at the waist and holds out an upturned hand to Molly. “This is yours, I think.”

In his palm something glitters, sunshine sparking molten before Molly gets a better look. There’s a thin chain pooled around a crystal heart amulet and when Molly recognizes it, there’s a moment of mild indifference (like when someone returns a knickknack) then a low creep of unnerve when he contextualizes how someone else came to possess it. The last resting place of this necklace, after wall, was around his own throat the day Lorenzo cut him down.

“Caleb gave it to me.” Caduceus tilts his head. “I think it’s fitting that it come back to you, Mollymauk.”

Molly arches a brow. “Caleb gave you a heart necklace?”

Caduceus gives him a look. “Caleb gave me the pariapt of wound closure on account of how often I was wounded in the course of regularly scheduled idiocy.” He shrugs a little. “But, yes, if you like.”

For a while, Molly says nothing. Then he says, “How does a firbolg cleric end up with the Mighty Nein?”

Silence for a moment while Caduceus thinks on this.

“They came to my graveyard – this one, in fact – on the sunset of your death. They asked me to come with them on a mission of vengeance and justice.” Caduceus looks out over the overgrown headstones, to the temple structure beyond and Molly thinks his expression gets a little wistful, an edge of… not regret but something. “I didn’t know anything about the world back then.” He turns back to Molly. “I know a lot more now.”

Molly stares at the periapt, then says, “No. It’s yours now. I don’t want it. Not if Caleb gave it to you.”

“It wasn’t a gift. It was a tactical—”

“Sure thing,” Molly says, grinning. Then, after Caduceus has reluctantly put the periapt back on, he asks, “You really think Caleb would risk ending the world?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

Molly shakes his head. “I always knew he was deep in his head. I didn’t ever think he would… I thought he might fuck us, specifically, over. Or a lot of other people in general. I got that he was putting Nott and himself over everyone else. That made sense. That’s fine. But the whole bloody world?”

“You never knew him in context,” Caduceus says softly.

“Then put him in context.”

A hesitation then. Clay visibly wavers.

“You won’t spoil my good opinion of him, Mr. Clay. He killed me in cold blood for the sake of making a point I think.” Molly cracks a bitter grin. “I’d feel less sore about it, I think, if you gave me some framework for what makes a man do that to someone.”

Caduceus lowers his gaze a moment, then, quietly, he says:

“Caleb Widogast was insane once and finding sanity again required him to take hold of an impossible idea.” He raises his gaze then to Molly. “This idea was so fantastic it could hem in all the broken parts of him and hold his shape, make him a person again long enough to accomplish it. That impossible idea would have also, very possibly, done the world irreparable damage. So, you have this idea that Caleb ending the world is a new development and…” Caduceus shakes his head. “I’m sorry, but Caleb was always willing to end the world, Mollymauk. His restraint now is the new development.”

Quiet for a moment while Molly digests this.

“What do you mean he was ‘insane’? How and why?”

“I mean as a young man, a figure of authority convinced Caleb Widowgast to be a thing instead of a person. They hollowed him out the way authority can hollow a person and laid ideology inside him rather than morality. Then, on the say so of that ideology, he burned his family alive in his childhood home.” Cad is holding Molly’s gaze, unwavering, steady as a load-bearing beam. “The ideology wasn’t rooted deep enough to keep the horror out. He went insane. Then he stopped being insane and decided he might unravel time itself to undo what he’d done because the possibility of ‘fixing it’ was the only port in the storm.”

Molly stares.

“Gods fuck me, I knew something was wrong but… are you bloody serious?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ve talked him down from something like this before.”

Caduceus nods. “Yes.”

“How’d you stop him last time?”

“I didn’t. Nott took his hand and asked him not to do it.”

Molly is quiet a moment, then, “But that won’t work this time. This time, he’d kill Nott.”

Something reactive crosses Caduceus’ face. “No. Never. He’d risk killing her,” he corrects. “That’s something he’s not been willing to do in a long time. I’m not saying he doesn’t love others and love them—" bit of a sigh here— “very, very much. But he’ll never care for anyone like he cares for Nott. Nott is what’s holding back the end of the world. Not me or Yasha or you or anyone else.”

“The whole world on a goblin-girl,” Molly murmurs. “Something kinda great about that.”

“Yes. So much depends upon odd everyday things.” Caduceus tilts his head. “Maybe on a carnival performer.”

“Ugh.” Molly rolls his eyes. “Stop. My stomach is knotting up just thinking about it. Did everyone come up with a plan while I was sleeping?”

“Yes. Breaching Caleb’s keep would be impossible… save for the fact we have Jester with us again. The Traveler travels everywhere. It may be a difficult approach, but he won’t be able to stop us like most wizards of his ilk might be able. But he can make it a treacherous road to walk.” Caduceus gestures. “The plan is simple enough, we breach the keep. Jester, Yasha, Nott, and I will try to hold Caleb. You and Fjord will find Beauregard. Fjord will… do what’s necessary.”

Mollymauk leans back against the tree, his arms draped over his knees. “Kill her in her sleep, you mean.”

Caduceus doesn’t flinch.

“It’s been my task all along,” he says, “to one day be the person who ends Beau’s life. If the Beauregard I knew isn’t dead already, then it is an unnatural thread that binds her to the world. As a person whose walked between life and death over and over tied by powers beyond your hold, tell me there isn’t a time to let life let go.”

Molly’s jaw aches from clenching it. But eventually, he shakes his head just once.

“No, I’m not disagreeing there. But she’s my friend, you know?”

“And mine. And Fjord’s. It’ll be him that does it and I don’t envy him the task, but I wish I could relieve him of it.”

“He volunteer for that job?”

“Yes. But even if he hadn’t, you and he won’t survive a direct confrontation with Caleb Widogast if he knows we’re coming. You’ll be best to end the fight at the its source.”

Molly glances across the graveyard, to the faint sound of voices and movement. Where he can sense that the rest of the Mighty Nein are milling around on the opposite side of the shrine, gathering things and preparing. The thought sets his nerves on a preemptive razor’s edge, his heart acidic suddenly in the back of his throat and he finds himself breathing faster, his hands clenching tight and he hears it clear as a breath against the coil of his ear: Lorenzo saying, “Respect.” Caleb saying, “Die.” Fjord saying, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

Caduceus lays a hand on his shoulder and Molly twitches reactive under his palm. He waits for Molly to settle, but kneels there facing him now, pale eyes intent on Molly’s face the way one can be intent on a book they are reading. He squeezes Molly’s shoulder and it’s strange how heavy his hand lies on him, how much density that suggests in the cleric’s bones and build.

“Breathe,” he rumbles.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Molly says.

“None of us know that,” says Caduceus, “but we’re going to try. If you really think you can’t do it, you don’t have to –”

“Fuck you, Caduceus. You brought me back from the grave. If I go back to it, I’ll be on my bloody feet. Understand? I’m just saying, I’m a bit nervous.”

“I understand.” There’s a pause. “Mollymauk, I know I’ve said this before but…”

“Stop.” Molly waves a hand. “I’m sick of people being sorry for me.”

“No, I was going to say you’ve shown unusual bravery in the face of terrible things. Also, I am not really sorry. I would do it again.”

“Weirdly, that makes me feel better, thank you, Caduceus.”

This earns him a head tilt. “If you’re angry with me… with everything that’s happened, you have every right.”

“Trust me,” Molly huffs, “I don’t need your permission to be angry. I’m livid. I’m furious my friends are trying to end the world because one is an emotionally traumatized bookworm.” He sighs and rubs his forehead. “I’m furious they didn’t take care of one another and you had to dig me out of a grave to sort it out for some reason. I’m out of my fuckin’ mind that somehow the gods are hanging this nonsense on me. I’m so mad I want to bite something.”

Caduceus nods. “I understand.”

Up close, the very fine gray down that colors Caduceus’ face and throat seems to shimmer a little and there are shards of gray in the pink ring of each iris. Caduceus Clay is a pastel riot of contradicting pieces and he smells like fresh-cut grass and whatever moss is growing in the chinks of his armor. Molly doesn’t realize he’s doing it until he’s reached up and taken hold of the long, pink braid hung over his shoulder pauldron. Clay doesn’t stop him, just peering curiously.

There’s a heavy iron clasp at the end of the braid, hard in Molly’s palm.

“Why did you stay?”

Caduceus flicks a long ear. “What?”

“With Caleb.” Molly grips the clasp a little, just to feel the metal dig in. He doesn’t look at the other man. “You were one of the last people standing with Caleb. Even after everyone else had gone other directions. Nott stuck it out, I get that. But why did you?”

“Because,” Caduceus says, “there was a time previously that I was capable of holding Caleb back as well. Second only to Nott of course.”

“Wait. What does that…?”

“Hey, Deuce? Molly? You two awake and sober or does Jester need to come over here?”

Fjord’s come around the side of the temple.

He’s standing among a collection of broken gravestones, his arms crossed, wearing that strange set of black leather armor he wore earlier. The only difference now is it looks as though Jester’s painted the symbol of her god across his shoulder guard. In the full light of day, Molly can see that he wasn’t delusional: Fjord looks almost exactly the same as he did ten years ago. Time hasn’t touched him. He’s been held in a capsule. The age is (instead) in his eyes, in the way he looks at them though Molly couldn’t identify what heaviness it is exactly that ten years has put there.

“We’re okay here,” Caduceus says. He leans his weight on his staff and stands up, offering Molly a hand up. “Just discussing the plan.”

Caduceus murmurs something and Molly feels the Death Ward charm again take hold of his soul, anchoring him to the world. The cleric lets go of his hand then.

“If you die,” Caduceus says, “and there is no one there to call you back from death, that’s it. Jester’s asked her god about the rules around you dying. You can be called back as many times as there is someone to call you, but if you die and no one calls…”

“I’m dead,” Molly says. “And Fjord is no cleric.”

“I’ll look out for you,” Fjord says, a little defensive, “but if you don’t want to come, you don’t have to. Point of fact, I think I’ll move faster without you –”

“He’s lying,” Caduceus says easily. “He’s just worried, particularly since he’s operating without his patron now.”

Fjord tosses his hands up. “Thank you, Caduceus, for your rousing pre-battle pep talks. Appreciated as always.” Then when his giant teammate just kind of gives him a benign but entirely shit-eating kind of smile, Fjord shoulders past him muttering, “Fuckin’ years later, still weird as hell…”

“I heard that.”

“Yeah, I know, Deuce. It’s what you’re there for.”

He glares over his shoulder, still standing close enough that he kind of has to tilt his head back to do it. Caduceus kind of smiles in return. There’s a beat in that exchange, a crisscross where something in the cleric’s expression gets a little sad despite the unabashed fondness there and something in Fjord’s glare loses the edge. Caduceus is the one to break the wordless quiet, almost too quiet to hear.

“I’m glad you’re with us again, Fjord.”

“I… yeah.” A pause. “Look, Caduceus, about what I said last night…”

Caduceus waves a hand.

“No. Man.” Fjord gets indignant. “It’s not okay. Just… you know…” He sighs. “Thank you. Nott told me a little bit about it, but she shouldn’t have had to tell me anything. I should have known you were doing everything you could. I was just… taking it out on you because I was frustrated and… and fucked up, honestly. It’s not excuse, but it’s what I was doing.”

“I know. I’m not upset.”

“You should be. I was over the line.”

Caduceus doesn’t say anything, just shrugs and glances away which doesn’t work especially well when one is taller than everyone else around them.

“You should have never been trapped as long as you were,” Caduceus says eventually. He meets Fjord’s eyes and Molly can see now what he was masking – a plain and painful guilt. “I was afraid to leave Caleb. I’m sorry.”

Fjord steps forward and grabs the cleric’s sleeve at the elbow, pulling him face to face.

“You listen. What happened to me was my fault and no one else’s. I did what I did. I signed on full well knowing what my patron was and what it wanted. I swallowed the fuckin’ sea and I took the blade when it was given to me.” Fjord hisses through his teeth now. “Dammit, Caduceus, why didn’t you get away from him like the rest of us? You didn’t have to stay.”

“We don’t do that.” Caduceus is perfectly calm, certain as sunrise. “We don’t leave each other.”

“Bullshit, Cad. We all left you.”

“You didn’t leave me. You were taken. There’s a diff—” And here he falters. He glances at Molly. Because in that instant Molly realizes (a slow unraveling dawning) that Caleb was quoting Caduceus on that beach— “there’s a difference,” he finishes. “Maybe not everyone was taken like you were taken, but you can be taken by grief, by despair, or madness, or circumstance. You were all taken by something.” Caduceus trails off. “I’m not angry.”

“You should be.”

“I’m not.”

“Gods, I don’t get you,” Fjord groans, pressing fingers into his temple. “It’s been how long now and I’m never gonna fuckin’ get you, Cad. You’re just so fuckin’ – oof!”

Fjord’s complaint is smothered rather effectively by Caduceus casually reaching out and yanking his shorter teammate into a hug. It’s an expert hug. Both inevitable and affectionate in equal unstoppable parts. Fjord, nevertheless, gives a cursory struggle before surrendering to Clay’s (apparently) unescapable embrace, the tension sliding out of his shoulders in increments. Molly is pretty sure he can see a glow in Clay’s fingers, light sinking into Fjord’s armor before disappearing entirely.

“Did you just hug a Death Ward onto me?” Fjord demands, muffled.

“Yes.” Clay squeezes him just once more for good measure, then lets him go. “Can you go get Nott for me? She has something for Molly, I think.”

“She can’t keep giving me her stuff!” Molly protests.

Fjord looks at Molly. “She can and she will.” He holds up his arm and there’s a pair of strange gold-hammered bracers strapped to his forearms. “I don’t know where she stole these, but apparently you can grab a spell with them and throw it back.”

“I love that girl,” says Molly. Then, after a moment, he jerks his chin to Caduceus. “I’m glad you found him after I died, by the way.” He waves a hand up and down generally encompassing Caduceus Clay as a whole. “You know, good color scheme.”

Caduceus stifles a chuckle. Fjord gets a lopsided grin and pats Molly on the shoulder as he turns to go. But he pauses. There’s just the one look – brief and curious as he looks a Molly, a question in his stare… so Molly slaps Fjord on the cheek in a way that clearly confuses him.

“Oi, none of that. Head in the game.” He winks. “We’ll sort it out later.”

Fjord hesitates. “Alright. I’ll hold you to it.”

Molly smiles until Fjord’s walking away.

“You’re lying,” Caduceus observes blandly. He’s leaning against his staff, head tilted. “You don’t think we’re going to survive.”

“No, I don’t think I  am.”

There’s a quick silence. Then, “Mollymauk, I don’t think–”

But before he can start in on some platitudes about how everything is going to be okay or something, Caduceus makes this aborted choking sound and doubles over. His eyes go wide, his head jerking back, ears coming up like a startled animal. Like he’s hearing or seeing something Molly can’t. Then, with no warning beyond that, Caduceus’ eyes kind of roll back in his skull and he staggers sideways against the oak tree and drops his shoulder against it.

Molly, who watched all this with a confused horror, rushes forward.

“Hey, Caduceus?” He touches his shoulder like you reach for a high shelf. “You okay?”

“Head rush,” the firbolg mumbles, digging around in his robes for something. “Just… have to walk it off.”

“Are you alright?”

“I don’t know. I think something just… I don’t know.” Caduceus seems distressed and a little dazed honestly, so Molly catches his elbow and pulls the gangly cleric upright, letting him lean his weight against his shoulder from his seven feet of height. He’s a little quiet until they’ve walked a little toward the south side of the graveyard, away from the temple and the others. “Apologies. I might have over worked myself. I’ve been getting the team ready for the fight this morning and yesterday was… taxing.”

“Well you did kill a dragon with a tree.”

“It wasn’t really a dragon. It was a warlock.” Caduceus rubs his temple gingerly as if nursing a migraine. “If it had been a real dragon, I doubt we would have prevailed. True ancient sea dragons? They’re leviathans without mercy or the depravity of their land-bound cousins. It would not have played with us. Her cruelty made her stupid and we killed her for it.”

Surprise jolts through Molly then, his head coming up a little to glance Caduceus. Oddly, his calling someone stupid even in death seems off-color for the gentle giant-kin and Molly frowns a little.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I don’t know. I feel strange.”

“Well, shake it off. We have another round of bad business to deal with. Gotta take care of the Mighty Nein, right?” Molly kind of nudges the bigger man when he doesn’t get an immediate answer. “Right? That’s our job in this group.”

Caduceus gives him a strange look, somewhere between sad and regretful. “Yes, I guess so.”

Molly maneuvers around a low headstone, Caduceus’ hand still resting against his shoulder. “Caduceus, you didn’t seem like you had a head rush. You seemed like you saw something and it scared you. Don’t spare my bloody feelings if Malora’s sending you visions or something, you can tell me.” Molly hesitates then adds, “If the endgame in this story is me going back to the grave, you know I… it’s okay.”

“Mollymauk—”

“It’s okay.” Molly laughs, though it comes mirthless in his mouth. “It’s fine if I don’t survive this. Not many people get three lives, much less the number I’ve been afforded. It’s alright, Mr. Clay. I don’t expect to–”

“Hey!”

Molly stops and looks over his shoulder. Nott is rocketing across the graveyard, full-speed, a darting blur of gnomish speed accelerated by some kind of magic that makes her a yelling blur. Her cloak flaps furiously behind.

“Hey! What are you doing!?”

Caduceus turns.

“You’re outside the boundary! Caduceus!?! CAD, WHAT ARE YOU—!?”

Caduceus interrupts her by suddenly raising a hand and saying a word. He thrusts his hand backward. He’s holding what looks like a large diamond between his thumb and forefinger and as he speaks, magic rushes through it like light through a prism throwing a sheet of rainbow like an aurora against the wall, painted against the air like it’s solid. Then the light shudders, the diamond splits, and simultaneously the air collapse inward and becomes a humming door composed of light.

“MOLLY, GET AWAY FROM HIM!”

Molly’s heart stops.

Caduceus grabs him around the waist, hooking one long arm full around his narrow midriff and with a terrible almost beast-like strength the previously gentle firbolg yanks Molly’s slim tiefling weight up into his arms and steps back. Time seems to slow then, like it always does in a moment of horror as the quantum pull of the teleportation spell begins to close around Molly and pull him apart down to the atomic structures of himself. Nott is almost on them, having crossed the yard with expeditious speed.

Molly is inside the tunnel of light, pulled back through the threshold into the howling inter-dimension while Nott is lunging from the foyer of reality. She’s framed in a dark, living green, a window of the Blooming Grove at her back as she dives for Molly, her hand extended as if a gnome-girl jumping in mid-air will stop the pull of a high-level vortex through time and space… and Molly nevertheless believes it. He drives his boot back against Caduceus’ thigh and lunges off him like wall, his middle still collared but like a thrashing animal in a snare he gets just loose enough and shoves one arm forward and –

Reality snaps in that way Molly’s become so familiar with.

Molly hits the ground at speed. His head cracks hard against the rock, a sick jag of pain spiking his brain and for a red moment the world goes dark and muddled in his skull. Dizzy, the world rotates on a nauseous axis, wobbling like a bowl dropped on a table until it rattles to a stop and he’s laying face down on the ground. The stone is cold against his cheek and palms, the warmth bleeding from his body into the ground.

He blinks slowly, vision focusing…

He’s staring at his own fist against the ground In it: the broken gold chain of Clay’s periapt. Like he tore it from the firbolg’s neck in his panic. Confused, Molly lets it slide from his fingers and rolls onto his side.

Caduceus himself lays some five feet away. He’s sprawled, unmoving. His staff lays on the floor near his head. The amethyst at the head is pulsing slowly, like a heartbeat, revealing the dim fifteen by fifteen foot cavern they’re trapped inside, like a bubble inside solid rock. There’s no other light source, entrance, or seam in the walls of their cell and for a terrible moment, Molly feels the weight of the earth, the walls like a sarcophagus around them and panic begins to bleed in him.

Molly gets to his feet.

“Clay?”

No response.

“Fuck. Caduceus?”

Clay stirs then, groaning as he tries to push himself into a sitting position, head hanging low.

“What… what hap—?” He kind of jerks and doubles over retching. He shudders, then looks up, looks around at the dark cell around them. “Oh no. No…”

“Hey. Clay?” Molly remains at a distance. Molly has both rapiers in hand. “You alright, friend? What’ve you done? It’s okay if you’re okay now. You okay?”

He looks at Molly, looks at his weaponry in hand, the look on his face. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Mollymauk.” He touches his neck and it takes Molly a moment to realize he’s touching the hollow where the periapt once laid. “I’m so…” His expression kind of buckles in grief, a bright pain welling in his pale eyes. “I didn’t think he’d do that.”

“Caduceus,” Molly murmurs, moving slowly to kneel next to him. “What happened?”

“I think he turned the… the chain on my periapt into an enslavement ring.” And, having said the words out loud in all their horror, a low, animal growl rises out of Caduceus’ chest and the fingers at this throat dig into the collar of his shirt just above his armor. “He must have done it… a while ago.” The growl is horrible in the firbolg’s throat, this eldritch-fey noise of rage and sorrow. His words stutter and sob. “I didn’t… I didn’t think he’d…”

Molly sheathes one rapier and loops an arm around Caduceus’ shoulders. “Shh, hey. Stop. It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not.”

“The others are still out there. He only got the two of us.” Molly squeezes Caduceus’ shoulders meaningfully. “And he didn’t tell you to hurt anyone. All you did was pull us into some stupid pocket dimension or something. He doesn’t mean to kill us, I guess. It’s okay. He just sidelined us.”

“He’s split the party. They need us. We can’t fight him staggered–”

“They’ll be okay. They’ve got gods and assassins on their side.”

“How long have I worn this?” Caduceus seems to be in shock.

“Hey, stop. Hey. This isn’t a subtle spell. If you’d been under its control before, you’d know.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Caduceus covers his eyes with one hand. “I know this is the first time he’s used it, but how long has he been comfortable letting me wear this?”

“Since you switched sides,” says a voice suddenly.

Molly’s on his feet instantly. He’s only aware that he cut himself because his rapier burns now in his fist, swarmed in radiant fire. Blood soaks his shirt collar, his neck bleeding gently. Standing in the room, sudden as a blink, is Caleb Widogast. He glances at Molly’s sword, then meets his gaze. There’s something wrong with his eyes – the halogen blue color has ignited and shifts in his skull like blue flame burns behind the iris. The air around him breathes distorted by heatless mirage, power sweltering off his skin so strongly, it makes Molly’s nose sting.

“Don’t do that.” Caleb’s eyes hold Molly’s. “I don’t want to hurt you again.”

“You didn’t hurt me, you killed me,” Molly says, this even as dividing by two and just as factual. “What did you do to Clay?”

“Exactly what he said.” He looks at Caduceus then and shrugs. “It was when you asked me if I’d changed my mind about Beauregard. That’s when I changed the chain on your periapt. That night.”

That seems to do Clay some harm because his fingers dig deeper into the hallow at his throat and his eyes clench shut. So Molly steps between Caleb and the other man, his single drawn rapier throwing white in eerie ripples across the walls. Caleb’s eyes slide across the blade, then back to Molly.

“You’re stronger,” he says, “than when you died.”

“Any chance I can convince you to just back off?” Molly says.

“No.”

“Why? You win. We’re stuck in your stupid pocket bubble whatever. Gloating about it is fucking rude.”

“I’m not gloating. I’m sorry, but I need you to–”

“Fuck you and your sorry,” Molly says merrily. He circles a little to Caleb’s right and the wizard tracks him with his eyes, his fingers burning with some held sorcery that Molly talks over. “Rude to kill someone, you know. Rude to enslave someone with a cheap piece of jewelry too.”

“I’m not here to fight,” Caleb says. “Neither of you will win here. This room is made to hold my enemies. So…” He holds out an empty hand. “Molly, come with me. I need to talk to you.”

“Oh, go fuck yourself.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says, sincere as his mask of sociopathy will allow, “but I will hurt Caduceus if you don’t cooperate.” He waits for Molly to react, but only for a second before getting impatient. “Did you hear me? I will hurt him. Put the weapon away. I’m beyond you, Mollymauk. Just do as I say.”

“Suck. My. Purple. Dick,” Molly enunciates.

Caleb gives him a bewildered look.

“Go fuck yourself, Mr. Widogast.”

“I forgot how annoying you –”

“Eat me. Also, you’re terrible.”

Caleb’s eyes roll a little, a low fury coming into his gaze so Molly pivots quickly.

“If you’re such a goddamn monster now, why the hell didn’t you use that enslavement bullshit on the beach?” Molly blows air through his lips, makes a face. “Caduceus sure pissed you off then. If you’re so dedicated to this asshole shtick you should have sold it a little better, honestly. I don’t think—”

“I wasn’t wearing it on the beach.” Caduceus says this quietly, cutting Molly off. Caduceus doesn’t move from where he’s kneeling, one hand still pressed to his throat. “I was… I meant to give it you, Molly, on the day I raised you. I wasn’t wearing it.” He looks up at Caleb then. “That’s the only reason you didn’t use it to stop me earlier, isn’t it? Nothing else.”

“I told you,” Caleb murmurs. “You’re expendable to me.”

“Dramatic,” Molly snaps. “And bullshit.”

“You’ve been dead for ten years,” Caleb says sharply. “You don’t know anything. Now, put that sword down or I’ll make you.”

“I’m not wearing your stupid collar, Caleb. You want me down? Put me down.”

Caleb’s eyes flare then and he hits Molly with a spell.

Molly feels the enchantment clutch his limbs like a seizure; his hands immediately open and drop his rapier. He barely has time to panic about that, because in the time it takes them to hit the ground, Molly’s sprinted fifteen feet across the small room and slammed palms first, then sternum into the wall, pressing there like he can shove himself through the damn stone, his whole body possessed by the compulsion to just get away, far away, as fast as possible. But fast as it drives him to his knees, the compulsion is gone and he’s breathing again, gasping.

He hears voices behind him.

 Clay saying, “Enchant him again and I will make you regret it, Caleb.”

“You can’t beat me here.” Caleb’s voice has nothing in it, but the syllables. Molly looks over his shoulder. Caleb holds one hand toward Caduceus, the other up behind him, a shivering static screaming around one extended index finger. “And I won’t fall for the same trick twice. Anti-magic won’t work here, Clay.”

Caduceus is breathing hard, light fading from his staff, kneeling on the floor still but in a defensive stance now, his holy symbol raised in front of him. Molly can smell the ozone and sugar stink of dispelled magic in an enclosed space. Caleb’s stopped him from doing something clearly because Caduceus is shaking from some exertion, pink light fading off his body like steam from a hot stone.

“Tell Molly to do what I say,” Caleb whispers. “I will bury you here just to make a point.”

“Liar.” There is fey fire in Caduceus stare now, lit rose-pink in his irises, bright as the blue behind Caleb’s arcane stare. “You just attack the things you love because you think you don’t deserve them.” There’s power gathering in him, suffusing his frame and crackling across fur and fabric. “But you’re not Trent’s toy soldier anymore. So stop trying to be the monster again because it’s easier than facing up to –”

Caleb shouts something and throws a hand forward, but Clay’s staff flares and the magic dispels across his shoulders like a snowball breaking against a window. Caduceus’ eyes narrow, but there’s light shimmering on the edges of him now, moss blooming suddenly up in the cracks in the cobblestones and the air smells like soil and crushed grass and fresh sap running from spring-green wood.

“Stop talking, Caduceus.” Caleb’s stare burns chemical blue. “I’m warning you.”

“You can’t put me in a box. You won’t protect me by putting me aside.

“I’m not protecting you,” Caleb hisses, but there’s something in his words now – not anger but fear. “Don’t.”

“You can’t turn back time,” Caduceus says and with each word, the light in his eyes intensifies. His war braid starts to unravel, the light pulsing like a heartbeat in the crystal focus, in the color of his hair, and in the lichen on his armor. Light breathing through the him as radiance through a moral veil. “Live with your goddamn consequences, Caleb.”

Caleb’s eyes go wide and, “Caduce—!”

The cleric slams his staff to the ground.

A terrible scream roars up through the wood, vibrating up the shaft like a tuning fork stuck to the howl of cicadas. It’s so loud, Molly has to clap his hands over his ears and watch, horrified, as the wood in Clay’s hand erupts impossibly into a black, writhing cloud of locusts, so thick they block out all but the smallest shreds of the light in the room. Molly scrambles away, back hitting the wall as Caduceus Clay’s plague of insects consumes Caleb Widogast.

He disappears into a sea of chitinous bodies, breaking like a wave over him. Through the clicking roar of beetles and wings, Molly can hear the wizard screaming. Molly smells blood and somewhere in that swarm, he can just make out the heaving thrash that must be Caleb writhing and thrashing as Caduceus’ spell bears down, merciless as the fucking tide under the moon. He’s not stopping. Caduceus stands in the center of the room, his staff blinding in his hands, a surging mass of insects breaking against the wall in front of him.

There’s blood glistening now on the bodies of the bugs, slick and iron and Molly can still hear Caleb. He’s still screaming. This insane animal sound of agony.

There’s a flare of fire from the mass, a mound of beetle igniting suddenly and a fireball the size of an umbrella erupts through the swarm and rockets directly at Caduceus. But fast as the spell is released, the bugs swarm again, and the wizard’s spell swerves. It rips a flaming path across Clay’s shoulder instead of his core, staggering, his arm suddenly a burnt and bleeding roadmap of fused fur and flesh.

Caduceus stumbles and for a moment the light in his staff flickers and the swarm slows… before he draws a long breath, steadies and with a bullish exhalation he focuses through the pain. The swarm surges again, renewed and Caleb is again, gone beneath the ravenous mass.

“Caduceus!”

Molly lunges off the wall and races to grab his arm. He doesn’t notice. So fixed on his task, he can’t hear.

“Stop! Stop it that’s enough—!” He wrenches Cad’s arm down, grabs his collar. “You’re killing him!” The swarm continues to burrow and spiral, crushing its target against the wall in a screaming wave and Molly can see Caduceus’ face – frozen in horror, his pale, glowing eyes running over liquid light and Molly grabs his jaw and pulls his head down to look at him. “CADUCEUS! Please –!”

And that’s when Caleb, still choking, being torn by insects, manages to say a Word.

Like he didn’t know the one that killed, Molly does not know this one. He, nevertheless, knows that the Word is ‘agony’.

It hits Caduceus like one of Nott’s bullets. It slams home in his ribcage, penetrating his armor like cotton and hurls the cleric down, dropping his body to the floor where the Word takes root like a weed in fast forward. The spell erupts through Caduceus in red veins of light. The veins lash themselves around his wrists, his throat, his skull, and like hideous assassin’s wire, they garrote him to the ground. Then they start to pulse. Fast. Then faster and faster. Until it’s a constant, whirring hum inside Caduceus.

And that’s when the cleric starts screaming.

The Word lights his body up, igniting the root-system of his nervous system until he’s a writhing skeleton caged by cherry-red wiring. A nebula of burning copper with a single racing coal nested in the ribcage. He’s rigid like he’s stroking out, his eyes turning back in his skull as his spine curls up from the floor, his shoulders pinned back by paralysis.

The insect swarm dispels instantly – whatever arcane focus needed to hold it instantly shredded as their spellcaster loses his concentration over to agony. Clay is howling, this horrible split-sound between a beast bellowing and a man screaming. He thrashes wildly, ridden from the inside by the pain, possessed by it until he’s incapable of screaming and he’s just shaking and choking at Molly’s feet.

“I told you,” Caleb gasps. He staggers forward, covered in blood, his entire body a red slick of uncountable insect bites. His robes are soaked and shredded. His blue eyes are still burning, fixed on his fallen teammate’s shaking form. “I told you, Cad. I told you –”

Molly’s across the room instantly. He slams into Caleb, shoving him back against the wall and one hand around the wizard’s throat and his second rapier against Caleb’s windpipe and blade edge digging into cartilage.

“Stop hurting him,” Molly rasps.

Caduceus is sobbing and retching now. Sick with the pain and clawing at the ground.

“Caleb! For fuck’s sake!”

Caleb just looks at him, calm as a summer day, eyes pale as clear skies through the blood that soaks his face.

“You’ve been with them three days and you care so much about even him…”

“You fucking idiot! You’re such a fucking idiot! How can you be so smart and be so bloody stupid!?”

“Come with me, Molly, willingly and I’ll stop.”

Molly throws the sword down and grabs Caleb’s shirt in a two-fisted twist. “STOP HURTING HIM OR I’M GONNA BITE YOUR BLOODY EYES OUT!”

Caleb waves a hand.

The Word douses like a coal dropped in water and the enchantment dies. Caduceus stops screaming instantly. Like someone knocked the air out of him and he lies there dark and numb and gasping. The light in the staff is just barely glowing, soft and thready near Clay’s head where it fell. He’s shivering, half-conscious, hair a pink muddle beneath his skull, curled in on himself like a stabbed creature. His shaking hand curled and pressed against his chest. He looks like he’s fucking dying.

Molly has his fists around Caleb’s throat. “What the fuck is wrong with you? What happened to you? He loves you, you stupid son of a bitch. They all do. What the fuck are you doing?”

“Saving Beauregard,” he says.

He offers Molly an open hand.

“Come with me.”

Molly hisses. Full on, Infernal snarling in his face.

Caleb just grimaces a little.

“Okay. The others are coming. Are you –?”

“I hope Jester punches your teeth in,” Molly snaps.

And he takes Caleb by hand and they vanish.

Chapter Text

Mollymauk is getting accustomed to this teleporting thing.

He’s getting accustomed to a lot of things, really, like the dying. Like the constant apprehension painted in a thin, burning layer across the inside of his lungs. Like the taste of blood in the back of his throat and the way resurrection magic slithers through his body – like a climax but turned horribly inside out. Molly’s getting used to this dissociation now between his physical self and his soul as he’s pulled through reality from point A to point B. That tooth-click that keeps happening when he stops being nothing and exists again suddenly. That weird ‘pop’.

Molly pops back into being standing in what looks like a dim and unkempt professor’s study.

It’s a big room. There are long wood tables scarred with chemical and arcane fire. Books stacked and laid out everywhere, papers scrawled with shorthand that seems to slither on the parchment when Molly looks at it. The place smells of burnt ozone and there are fading white runes painted onto the flagstones beneath his boots. Suggesting to Mollymauk that Caleb’s pulled him somewhere very specific. He’d hazard it’s Caleb’s personal workshop by the vaulted ceilings literally top to bottom and wall to wall bookshelves stuffed and stacked with tomes.

Caleb Widogast is still gripping Molly’s hand. Like a man might have hold of a handle.

On immediate instinct, Molly tries to extract his hand. But Caleb doesn’t let go so they just stand there. Caleb is still just a little bit shorter than him, but his eyes are still lit from the inside by whatever power lives in him like a star dying behind his irises. He’s staring at Molly and as Molly watches, the blood and gore and the crushed pieces of dead insect that coat his skin begin to flake away, floating and peeling off like embers off a log until Caleb is whole and healed and his hand is hot around Molly’s knuckles.

Through his teeth, Molly says, “Let go of me.”

Caleb’s eyes seem to focus then, like he’d been staring at some other layer of reality until Molly’s voice brought him. His fingers unfurl and he watches Molly instantly back away three paces, massaging his hand where the wizard touched him, rubbing off whatever lingers in the ink and scarring. If he’s offended by this, he gives no outward sign.

“Don’t touch anything. I can’t promise the items here won’t hurt you.”

Molly tells him to go fuck himself in Infernal.

Caleb blinks, then says, “You say that a lot, ja?”

“Well, you haven’t listened to me yet and I really think you fuckin’ should,” Molly snaps, frantically looking around the room. There’s no visible exit, just a strange constant convergence of walls and shelves and acute to obtuse that don’t seem to quite follow the laws of geometry as Molly understand them. It makes the room simultaneously bigger and more claustrophobic. Molly finds breathing harder all at once. “What do you want from me?”

“To talk,” he says, “for now.”

Molly processing that for a minute.

Then snarls, “Are you out of your bloody mind?” When Caleb knits his brow, Molly waves his hands around. “Kidnapping me? You think holding me hostage is gonna do shit? I’m the magic undead teifling, you dumbarse. You can’t threaten me. I’m literally the most useless hostage you could take. What’re ya gonna do?” He puts on a sarcastic voice. “Kill me?”

“I don’t plan on it.”

Molly’s still got one hand around his own wrist, rubbing restlessly at the tattoo run over his knuckles. His fingers dig tight until the bones in his hand pulse with his own rabbiting heartbeat. His entire body feels wound too tight to take. Shaking to bolt or battle, but his hasn’t got any weapons now and he’s standing near enough to touch to a man that kills with one word. He consciously slows his breathing. Tells himself to stop bloody shaking while Caleb studies him head to foot. Incrementally. Like he’s committing details to memory.

“Will Caduceus be alright?”

“That cell has more air, if that’s what you mean.” Caleb circles to Mollymauk’s left. “I wouldn’t use a fire-based spell otherwise.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Molly steps right to keep the same distance between them.

“He won’t die,” Caleb says, still circling, forcing Molly to move so they’re slowly orbiting one another. Caleb never breaks eye contact and Molly’s heart keeps racing, panic telling him that, and just that, could be some somatic component in a spell. Caleb shrugs. “I don’t know if he’ll be okay. That’s a bad enchantment. It can, ah, affect people.” He waves a hand vaguely at his head. “You know, that way.”

“Torture spells are traumatizing?” Molly snaps. “Fascinating. Who knew?”

“You think Caduceus is so gentle.” Caleb’s brows lift. “So soft, ja?”

“No, he skewered a dragon and trades in man-eating beetles. I’ve met trolls that were less scary. That doesn’t mean I’m on your side.”

“Of course not.” Caleb stops to face Molly full on. “You’re on the side of those who raised you. It’s understandable.”

“Oi, bite me, Mr. Widogast. I was on your bloody side until you killed me on a whim and word.” Molly squares himself to the wizard. “Don’t try to play victim when you bring up demons and attack your friends without a kindness of warning. If you mean to make me see your reason in all this, I’m tellin’ you now it’ll be a hard fuckin’ sell.”

“I know,” say Caleb. “Mollymauk, I’m going to show you something, but you need to do a few things for me.”

“Ha!” Molly didn’t mean to laugh that loud, but he’s a little hysterical at this point. “I’m not doing fuck all. You can drag me around on a magic leash first.”

Caleb sighs, then waves a hand… and Molly starts to glow. Or rather, his mithril-chain shirt and his bracers start to glow. Also, the rings on his index finger and thumb. Also, the half-dozen charms hanging around his neck and the clasp around his right horn, and the empty sword sheathes at his hips. Molly is lit up all over, glowing from every magic source on his body which is – with Nott’s insistence – quite a lot of magical aid.

“Take all that off,” Caleb says, hand still shimmering with the detect magic charm.

Molly doesn’t move.

“I’m not identifying any of that shit,” Caleb says evenly. “Take all of it off.”

“Nott gave these to me.”

Caleb’s expression cracks. A slight widening in the eyes suddenly – not of surprise but hurt. Then it’s gone under a stern indifference and he tilts his head a little and raises his other hand, thumb pressed to his middle and index finger in the precursor to a snap.

“Last chance,” Caleb says.

“Nott gave all this to me,” Molly whispers, “to protect me from—”

Caleb snaps his fingers and the air behind him displaces as something massive just materializes in the space directly behind him. Molly jerks back, his hips hitting a worktable. The thing behind Caleb sort of… unfurls. A broad, muscular back shifts as gargantuan leather wings arch up and flare over the wizard’s tawny head. Blue hide, riddled in plates of scale, shimmers in the torch light. A long serpentine neck arches up and up until the beast turns giant predator-gold eyes to fix on Molly. Its skull is the size of a battle shield, its jaw long, draconic, and toothy. Talons big as coat hangers clack and scrap on the floor as what appears to be a bull-sized blue dragon rises up behind Caleb the way a hunting dog comes to quarry.

“Blue dragon wyrmling,” says Caleb, reaching up to pat the beast’s horrifying jaw. “They like magic. Frumpkin doesn’t get to play with anything magic in this form, you see. My work is too dangerous.”

“Caleb,” Molly starts to say, fingers, digging into the table edge behind him. “Don’t—”

Caleb says a word in Zemnian. On that command, his hulking familiar looses a joyous predator scream.

Then it lunges at Molly.

It tears past Caleb, so smooth it barely disturbs the wizard’s fine black and gold robes. Molly, to his credit, immediately hurdles the table, dive rolls, and comes up sprinting on the opposite end of the table. Frumpkin hits the table, missing Molly by inches, then it hits the ground behind him, claws scrabbling on the stone like an off-balance Labrador. Molly feels it on instinct when Frumpkin swipes at his back. He ducks right, going low, skidding, razor-sharp claws whipping through the air over his head.

But then he’s on the ground and Frumpkin is huge.

Frumpkin’s jaws snap closed on the back of Molly’s tunic and with a whip of his head, the hurls Molly against another long table like a cat slinging a mouse against a wall. He crashes through a pile of books which – wondrously – take flight and scatter like a flock of disturbed pigeons. It would be neat if a small dragon didn’t then slam Molly like a battering ram. The beast pins him under massive claws, landing so the pads of its feet are crushing Molly’s upper arms flat, his spine bent back over the edge of the table as Frumpkin the blue dragon wyrmling start to bite excitedly at the mithril chainmail beneath Molly’s tunic.

“CALEB!” His tunic shreds under eager dragon teeth. “FUCK! WHAT THE FUCK!?”

Frumpkin drives his massive bony head against Molly’s chest and instantly cracks two ribs. Molly still manages to scream. Then Frumpkin is grinding an anvil-heavy skull against him like a cat might shove its face in a pillow of catnip except it’s his fucking ribcage and stomach. Frumpkin snuffles at Molly’s skull, chewing lightly at the clasp clipped to his horn before giving that up as a back job and rearing back to study him.  

Then Frumpkin’s jaws start to open, crackling with blue static, a long tongue lashing with sparks. Molly sees it coming but he can’t stop it. Frumpkin licks Molly’s neck which… you know, fucking electrocutes him. Molly chokes as a short, agonizing current rips through him, lashing every muscle in his body into a garrote-wire of tension before the current dispels into the wood and it’s over.

Molly isn’t conscious of Frumpkin getting off of him, only of hitting the floor and rolling onto his side, his entire body throbbing and his neck searing where the dragon-thing licked him. He smells burnt skin and ozone.

“Okay, ah, that was a bit much…” Caleb is saying. “Bad cat.”

“Fuck you,” Molly snarls, but it’s undercut with a sob. His entire chest pulses red rivers of fire with every breath.  

He curls his one arm around himself and just lays there in a heap with his forehead pressed to the cool stone, tail wrapped around his body at the knee. He has one palm pressed to the floor near his waist, but he can’t find the strength to get up. Through the feverish glow of pain, he feels a hand touch his neck and that cold palm smooths from the hinge if his jaw, down the line of muscle to his clavicle. A slow bleed of magic slides through the gash, like pouring liquid salve into the wound and from there it travels down, down, spreading out inside his chest until the hairline cracks splintered through his ribs go cold as well. Soon, there’s no pain left. Just a numb buzzing in the nerves.

Molly lifts his head.

Pale blue eyes stare back.

“Are you going to take off your enchantments or do you want Frumpkin to try again?”

Molly shoves Caleb in the chest.

This knocks the wizard onto his butt. He didn’t seem to have expected that, because he just kind of drops on his ass and blinks. Surprised while his gigantic wyrmling familiar sniffs at his hair. Molly levers himself into a sitting position. Then he starts pulling the rings off his fingers, palming them, before reaching up to remove the clasp from his horn and the earrings that stave off cold. He unstraps the bracers, pulls the charms from around his neck and sets all this aside. Then he glares, gets to his feet, and turns his back on Caleb while he reaches up and tugs his shirt off over his head from the shoulders.

That way no one can see it while he wipes his eyes with the back of his hand.

Molly puts his ruined shirt on the table while he pulls the chainmail off, leaving on nothing but the thinner, sleeveless under-shirt he’s been using to pad the chainmail. The rings are still leaving marks in his skin. He’s not used to armor. Molly starts to pull his shredded tunic back on over his head when he feels Caleb start to move toward him again and –

Molly whips around, snarling, the words going Infernal in his throat: “Back off!”

Frumpkin the wyrmling starts to growl, but Caleb waves his quiet. There’s pause. So, Molly turns back around and finishes pulling his clothes back on. There’s an ache in his bounding heart now, a low panic like a current in his blood that makes him want to double over and start screaming for the frustration of it. The fucking unfairness and stupid cruelty of it. He straightens his shirt and pushes his hair out of his face, then turns to look at Caleb.

“What now?”

“That wasn’t intentional,” Caleb says.

“You sicced your giant bloody cat on me.”

“I warned you.”

“Oh. Well. Alright then. All’s forgiven.”

There’s a tense silence.

Then, “Follow me. Don’t try to run or Frumpkin will sit on you again.”

And then quite suddenly there’s an obvious doorway on the wall to Molly’s right. Caleb crosses the room and opens it, going through, not stopping to check if Molly follows. Probably because Frumpkin is now standing directly behind Molly, breathing static on his neck. Molly pauses to glance back up at the giant familiar. He literally has Molly’s cursed sword sheathes between his jaws like a grinning dog with a stick.

“Your boss is a bastard,” Molly says.

Frumpkin just blinks and nudges him in the shoulder.

“Fine.”

Molly follows Caleb.

Through the door is a long hallway, mostly featureless and should be cold for all the empty stone space, but the air seems to be magically regulated to a comfortable room temperature. The silence is broken only by the soft slap of boots against the floor and the terrible scraping clack of Frumpkin’s talons. They walk through the hall. Caleb keeps surreptitiously checking a dark metal pocket watch as they walk, but the face of it is blank and makes Molly’s eyes hurt to look at it directly.

“The others are looking for you,” Caleb says.

“You don’t seem worried. I would be.”

“I have time,” he says, pocketing the weird watch. “Jester’s young god still needs time.”

“Famous last words.”

Molly glances at a hanging tapestry on the wall nearby – a map of a land he doesn’t know. He’s certain now that he’s passed it a few times. He’s getting the impression that Caleb’s lair really does not obey any laws of physics and the only reason they’re moving through it at all has to do with the wizard himself. Frumpkin, once more, nudges at Molly’s shoulder. Like a border collie keeping a flock of one in line, confirming this really isn’t his first time playing guard dog to visitors.

“The others have told you I’m trying to end the world,” Caleb says.

“No.” Molly folds his arms across his chest, tail lashing anxiously around his boots. “They were very specific that’s not what you’re trying to do, just a possible side effect of what you’re trying to do. That’s what they told me.”

“Hmm,” Caleb says.

Molly feels a heat flare in his throat. “What?”

“I thought they’d lie a little more. I’m surprised.”

“Maybe you just think all your friends are against you when really they’ve been busy – you know – being crazy with grief or kidnapped by demi-gods. Which, by the way, I’m curious, did you try to get Fjord out of there?”

Caleb looks over his shoulder. “Of course. Did they tell you I didn’t?”

“No.” Molly rolls his eyes, leering for effect. “But you’re such a jackass right now…”

“No one could reach Fjord,” Caleb says plainly, blinking. “None of my magic meant anything in the face of that. Nothing short of a god could get close and the only god we had was Jester’s. Fjord was gone so long…” Caleb pauses. “I thought he’d be insane by the time we got him out or thralled to the Serpent.” Caleb’s eyes are unfocused, looking sidelong and away. “It seemed impossible he might still be him.”

Molly hesitates before saying, “Fjord’s stronger than you gave him credit for.”

“Maybe, or maybe he’ll turn on the others in due time. Jester has a blind spot for him. Always has. She would not accept that Fjord might be gone. She obsessed and no one could talk her down from it. Not Nott or Caduceus or anyone. Maybe Beau could have talked her down, but Beau was gone and Yasha was gone and so…” Caleb shrugs and looks forward again. “She was taken too.”

Molly tilts his head. “You say ‘taken’.”

“Yes. There’s a difference.”

“You sure?”

Caleb glances again at Molly. “Caduceus left me. He promised he’d never do that, but he did. He wasn’t taken by anything. Neither was Nott, but I don’t blame her. She was scared. I scared her.”

“You’re a moron,” Molly says.

“Thank you, Mollymauk. Nice to have you back.”

“You’re both morons,” Molly insists, bending at the waist a little to put some emphasis on it, really enunciate. “Caduceus stuck by you because he’s an optimist who couldn’t see you’ve got your head so far up your own asshole there’s no fuckin’ sunshine. Caleb, I’m here to tell you.” Molly cups his hands around his mouth. “Pull it the fuck out, mate! You’re going to end the world because you feel bad about Beau dying.”

“You act like you’re the first to tell me this.”

“I know I’m not the first, but since you won’t listen to literally anyone else, the gods brought me back from the bloody dead specifically, I think, to tell you to stop being a bastard stuffed bastard in bastard sauce and just stop.”

“I can see why the gods in their infinite wisdom decided to intervene and raise you from the dead.”

Molly spits. “I didn’t come back from the dead to persuade you of shit.”

“Apparently.”

“I’m not your conscience, Widogast.”

“You’re saying that like I ever thought that was the case.”

Molly folds his arms again, gripping his elbows in his hands and swallowing, glaring at the wall to distract himself from the slow crush of panic and futility coiling around him. It seems impossible he was in the Blooming Grove less than an hour ago. That he was laying in the grass, chatting with Caduceus. That he’d been surrounded, however briefly, by familiar faces and there was a plan, however, tenuous, as to how all this was going to end and now… he’s here. The shock of loneliness stings his throat and eyes all at once.

“You know, I’m not sure what I am, really.” Molly drags a palm across his face, pulling his hair from his brow again, wiping his eyes. “I thought my job was to get everyone together to, I don’t know, dogpile you until you stopped being a lunatic, but that doesn’t seem to be working.” He glances at Frumpkin who bares horrible fangs around belt and scabbard set in his mouth. “I don’t think I’m doing this right.”

“You got Fjord out,” Caleb says.

Molly blinks but Caleb doesn’t look at him, just keeps walking.

“It’s not your job to save us. You’re your own person. You don’t serve our purposes, Molly.”

“You can’t say that and hold me hostage, Widogast.”

“I know, but I’m a terrible person. Imagine someone better said it. It’s still true.”

Caleb’s hand is pressed against the wood of a heavy looking oak door. Molly can’t say when it was that the distance between the infinite hallway suddenly started to close, but it’s closed now and Caleb looks over his shoulder to meet Molly’s eyes. The wood beneath his hand is complex with runes and sigils, cut with some kind of arcane formula. It, like so many things in this place, ripples and changes before his eyes just looking at it. Caleb keeps staring at him, his burning stare inhuman and bright.

“Have they told you about Beauregard?” he says.

Dread drives a rod straight through Molly’s gut. His pulse rabbits fast.

“They told me a little. Like what she did, how she went down.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean have they told you about her. Do they talk about her?”

Molly hesitates. “If you mean, do they tell me funny stories about her, like what a shithead she was or the time she, I dunno, snorted oatmeal up her nose laughing at breakfast… no. They didn’t.”

“Ja. It’s hard for them.” He kind of looks away. “I remember her. I remember everything she ever said to me, actually.”

“Beauregard… she was pretty important to you.” Molly looks meaningfully around the giant mage-lair around him and the miniature dragon leering over his shoulder. “You’ve done a lot to save her. You’ve, well, you’ve pushed away everyone else who cares about you to do this. I can tell you’re dedicated but, speaking as a formerly dead person… you sure Beau would want to come back like this?”  

“They didn’t tell you she became our leader, did they?” Caleb doesn’t wait for Molly to answer or acknowledge his previous question. “She told me once, that she had a reoccurring nightmare. In this dream, she’s standing on that cart on the Glory Run Road. She can’t move, her boots are frozen to the wagon wood while Lorenzo kills you.” Caleb’s looking at him with this strange expression, unreadable as a wall. “I don’t think she ever stopped having that nightmare.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Molly says.

“She called you ‘the best of us.’”

“Wow, okay.” Molly managed an exaggerated laugh. “That’s just because you didn’t know me very well and your bar was low back then. I should have told you all about this one time, in this port town, there was this thing with noodles –”

“It doesn’t matter,” Caleb cuts him off, visibly irritated. “It doesn’t matter that you’re an obnoxious, loud, carnival man that we barely knew. It doesn’t matter that we never really understood you, that you kept secrets, and died before we knew them. None of it matters because when you died, Beauregard regretted that it was you, instead of her.”

Molly stiffens a little, shoulders tensing. “Look, that’s a nice notion and all, but from what I’ve seen over and over, none of you much remember me like I was.” A beat. “Like I am.” Another beat. “Like I was before? Ah, fuck it…”

 “Stop being flippant.”

“Sure. Stop holding me hostage.”

The wizard shakes his head, looking tired all at once. “You’re not going to listen to a word I’m saying, are you?”

“Caleb,” Molly says, “If you want me to listen, I would do that. You wanna sit down and have a cup of tea and talk? Great. I’d love that. Gossip is my thing. But I don’t think you’re trying to convince me of anything. I think you’ve already made some godawful decision and you’re just thinking out loud in my face.”

Caleb says nothing.

Just… stares at him.

It’s so strange. It’s Caleb, like it’s always been Caleb, just five degrees off Molly’s memory of the man – cleaner and more put together. He’s had a haircut and a proper shave. He looks like he should be on a council to something important somewhere, telling people to do things… but through every bit of that there’s still the fucking eyes. Just… empty and sad and resigned in exactly the same way he remembers but so much fucking deeper and blacker than that.

“I can’t talk to you,” Molly says softly, “if I’m a spell component and not a person to you.”

Caleb stares. “I don’t think you’re a spell component.”

“Then what do you want?”

“I want to know if you want to kill Beauregard.” He says it so blankly, so hallowed with exhaustion that it feels impossible that he’s been able to mask it until now. A deep festering despair in his voice that goes all the way down to the core of him as he laughs a little. “Because it seems now that everyone else in our little family has decided to kill her and it occurs to me that you, Mollymauk, might be the only one undecided on the issue.”

Molly doesn’t say a goddamn thing.

“Would you answer me?”

“It’s not as simple as –”

Caleb cuts him off saying, “Until I’m done asking questions, you should tell me the truth, Molly.”

And the suggestion takes hold of him. Gently. Not dominating but it slides over his tongue with such an easy familiarity Molly’s swallowed it before he can make even a token resistance and his shoulders kind of relax, tension easing out of his limbs for the first time since he was torn from the Blooming Grove. Caleb’s hand, holding something nonobtrusive at his hip, opens and he reaches up. It’s familiar. Molly lets him pat his cheek and thinks, unbidden, about Hupperdook and a very fucked up Caleb slurring, “Yeah. Th’only magical thing here… is you, friend.”

There’s something sticky on his palm. Smells like honey or…

“Just tell me what you think,” Caleb says.

“Okay.” Molly feels… strange, a little drunk almost but in a nice way, a mild anxiety in his breast that compels him say, “I don’t wanna kill, Beau. Bloody hell, of course I don’t.” It’s such a relief to say that, he goes on a little urgently. “Everyone is saying this is the right thing to do, but it makes my whole fucking body ache to think about. I don’t want to do it.”

“Do you think you can do it, if you had to? If it was down to you?”

“No.” The admission physically hurts to say aloud. Molly clenches his eyes shut. “I can’t.”

Caleb’s quiet for a moment.

Molly feels a hand on his head, pressed over his left ear, beneath the curl of his horn and he looks up at Caleb.

He looks strangely relieved. “Me too.”

“I’m not on your side, Caleb. It’s the wrong thing that I can’t do it. I can’t do it because I’m selfish and I don’t want to live with doing that to my friend… but I know it’s wrong.”

“I know.” Caleb laughs a little. “You feel poorly about that. I don’t. I’m not willing to kill Beau to save the world.” He shrugs. “I know its not fair or right, but she was… she really was the best of us. I can’t let her go like this.” He shakes his head, a wry smile suddenly on his lips. “This mistake. I don’t have to let it stand like the others.”

“Good people die all time,” Molly whispers. “The world’s not a fair place. It’s our job to make it fair as we can, but you can’t bloody do this.”

“My people don’t have to die,” Caleb says. “Not this good person.”

“Caleb, just stop—"

“You cared about Beau, yeah?”

“I died for her, didn’t I?”

Caleb studies his face and in his stare, Molly sees it – the bald-faced fact of it: He’s not looking at a man expecting to get away with anything. He’s not looking at someone with a tomorrow in mind. Then Caleb waves a hand and Molly feels the enchantment release its hold on his thoughts. It’s a cruel hand pulling a warm blanket off his shoulders and he’s standing in the sudden cold aftermath of the spell. All the compelled words sour suddenly on his tongue and a ripple of rage and grief lances through him simultaneously.

“I’m sorry. I needed to know where you really stood.”

And Caleb pushes the door open.

When he does, the air in the room rushes out. It’s freezing cold, turning Molly’s breath to fog instantly and penetrating him to the bone. He shivers, arms jumping up to tuck around his chest, his teeth chattering almost immediately in the artic chill. There’s light coming from the other room, cold and blue and anti-septic. It’s a large circular chamber, empty of everything, just stone walls etched in the same magical formula as the door except all the runes here glow gently blue, humming a slow two-two beat. Like a pulse.

Which makes sense because sitting the in the middle of the room, legs crossed, and facing them… is Beauregard.

She’s seated on a low stone dais. There is a barrier of blue light around the platform. The air glows around her, a vertical shaft of cold azure magic from floor to ceiling. She’s sitting as if in meditation, back straight, hands in her lap, eyes closed. She’s wiry and dark. Small and dense with muscle. Denser than he remembers. Her arms are probably bigger in the bicep than his now. Around her arms are silver bracers, smithed in the symbols of Ioun. There is blood on her fingers, on her knuckles, her lip split, her eye darkened with bruising and that… that makes her so familiar it turns something tense in Molly’s stomach.

Beau with a black eye.

Beau standing on the back of an ice-cracked wagon.

Beau screaming his name, her blue eyes wild in the dawn light, as Lorenzo –

“Why is she bloody?” Molly manages.

“She’s been like that since the day she struck down Oblivion,” says Caleb. He’s still got his hand on the door, his eyes on Beau. “Nothing touches her except divine magic. Caduceus and Jester used to heal the wounds, but they always return. Nothing we do stays. She always… goes back to the way she was in the moment she killed the Oblivion.”

Molly moves into the room. With every step toward Beau, the temperature drops, until Molly’s shivering so hard, Caleb must see it because he taps Molly on the shoulder and warmth slides through his clothes and insulates him in a thin layer of heat that makes his skin steam slightly in the freezing air. Molly moves close enough that he can see the light around her is not just light, but a thin, runic barrier – a magic layer of transparent blue writing so fine it looks like mist moving up and down the surface of the barrier wall.

“You can touch it,” Caleb says. “It only contains.”

Molly cautiously presses a palm against the magic and his hand cleaves lightly to it, like glass, like Beau’s a thing in a shop window he’s trying to see.

Molly can see now that the stone where she touches it is calcified and cracked, frozen as if by a spill of liquid nitrogen. Frost cakes the ground around the platform in shimmering white. The air near her is… humming. Shaking in Molly’s bones, buzzing down to the atoms that compose him. It feels awful and familiar all at once.

But he can see Beau clearly.

She is dressed in battle attire, or what remains of battle attire. The kind of thing you wear when you go to war for the gods.

Her long sleeveless jacket is shredded along the hem and shorn as if by a blade. The royal blue fabric is dark with blood which does not appear to have dried somehow. Her tunic is shredded open to the athletic small clothes beneath. There are etched and glowing bands around her arms, around her wrists, obsidian studs in her ear lobes that shimmer with enchantment. Her dark hair looks exactly as he recalls: shaved along the sides then knotted up at the top. Molly recognizes Yasha’s touch in the beads woven there in braids and plaits. There’s a tattoo of a posie beneath her right clavicle.

Molly’s throat knots up.

“Yasha and Beau…” Molly says, only after her gets his voice working. “Did Yasha—?”

“Marry Beau then lose her?” says Caleb. “Yes. On the same day in fact.”

Molly’s eyes burn. He clenches his hand shut against the barrier magic, leaning his weight against it. He can feel Caleb moving to stand at his right shoulder, watching him react but he doesn’t care. Frumpkin’s heavy footfalls place the dragon creature to his left, hovering protectively as Caleb touches Molly’s arm.

 “Yasha won’t survive it.” His voice is certain and indifferent as sunset. “Losing her completely after Zuella—”

Molly knock his hand off his arm, yanking away. “Don’t!” Infernal heat laces his breath. “Don’t you try to use her—”

“You know I’m right.”

Molly pulls his hand from the barrier. “You want me to help you, don’t you? You’re trying to get me to help you.”

“No.” Caleb sounds sorry. “Just… confirming some things.”

He snaps his fingers and there’s a flare suddenly from the light barrier and the color of the runes, glowing faintly from every stone surface, changes suddenly to a deep, seething purple. Black steam immediately begins to burn off the sigils and Molly lunges back from Beau’s alter, hands up like he can defend himself from anything Caleb is doing. The wizard is ignoring him. He has some kind of crystal in his right hand suddenly and he’s drawing signs in the air with the fingers of his left hand. The signs stay there, like ghost writing, shivering with terrible potential energy. Like a bow string pulled taut except pulled through the whole fucking universe.

Frumpkin bumps into Molly’s back, his tail lashing in a sudden half-circle around him, penning him in suddenly, wings flaring up over head.

“I think the gods are on my side,” Caleb says, still casting his spell. The crystal in his hand disintegrates to dust and he waves a hand. Summons a blade from somewhere and uses it to slice open his left forearm, but doesn’t stop casting. “I was hasty before. I didn’t see it.” Blood splatters the floor. “All the spells to bring Beau back are so complicated without sentient sacrifice. Willing sentient sacrifice. I’ve had to build workarounds. So time consuming but now it’s so simple…”

“I’m not dying for your bloody spell!” Molly snarls.

“You already did.” Caleb looks over his shoulder. “You died for Beau ten years ago and not just a little; you died a true death. You were dead of a different kind. The kind that matters and makes gods intervene.” There’s a smile then, on Caleb’s lips, both sad and victorious. “That magic is forever, Mollymauk.”

Light flares blinding from Caleb’s fingers, igniting the blood on the flood so it burns white and evaporates into a red steam. Caleb closes his eyes. He breathes in and the crimson effluvium disappears down the wizard’s throat and when he opens his eyes, they’re burning red as a blood-letting sunset. He turns and presses both hands against the barrier wall that holds Beauregard in. Red light injects itself into the magic, spreading out like a cancer along the surface of it.

Molly feels a pull. Not on his body but a pull he’s come to know in the transition between life and death. Every time Vax’ildan sends him to and from the plane between realms– something is pulling on his soul.

“Caleb!” Molly feels that pull again, hideous and cold and Molly hits the floor on his knees, clutching uselessly at his chest. “Fuck! Stop! Stop!”

“It’s okay, you won’t lose your soul,” Caleb says. “I just need it here…”

There’s a flare from the barrier wall and Molly screams as the light seems to shove himself out of his flesh and the sliding back in feels like falling into a solid slab of screaming nerve and blood and it hurts. It hurts. Molly’s doubled over on the floor, arms knotted around his body, tail curled around himself. This spell has no guiding touch on it. No raven knight errant gentling the transition between astral and material and its like dying a little over and over. Nauseating and awful.

“I’m sorry. Most sacrifices are dead when this is happening.”

“Oh really?” Molly grits, getting one knee under him.

“Just a little longer,” Caleb murmurs. “It’s just a little farther—”

Molly doesn’t let him finish. He snaps his fingers.

Instantly, there’s a flash of light from Frumpkin’s mouth as the empty scabbards in his jaws ignite with conjuration magic. Frumpkin’s head jerks back, the dragonling snarling in surprise. But before anyone can lift a finger, Molly pivots around and lunges at him, faster than he can remember moving in his life… and his fist closes around something solid. He dive-rolls past the familiar, tearing the scimitar from its scabbard. Molly spins up, sword in hand, breathing frantic.

Caleb is glaring at him.

“Stop fucking around.” There is a dark and throaty edge to his Zemnian accent. His eyes flare in his skull, burning brighter, fixed on Molly. “You think you’re going to fight me, Mollymauk?”

“No.” He shakes his head, breathing fast and shallow. “No, I can’t fight you.”

“I know this has been… confusing.” There’s blue flame gathering in the man’s hand. “It’s an admirable instinct, but—”

Molly reverses the sword. An easy, almost casual flip of the blade in a two-handed grip, and sets it point-first against his own sternum. No hesitation. No time. The hit at first: like being punched, the breath driven from his body, then the pain (the feeling Lorenzo taught him ten years ago on the Glory Run Road). Mollymauk shoves it through his ribcage and—

He wakes up standing on a hill beneath the shining moon.

He’s clutching his breastbone, fists stacked where the hilt of a blade was driven in the Material plane. The moonlight is shining, shimmering on his skin like a sheen of diamond dust on his knuckles. Molly stumbles. His knees give out but before he can fall, he’s suddenly tackled as a blur of blue and skirts and arcane light bursts into existence and lunges at him. He collapses against them, arms seizing instinctively around their neck and their hair is silky, chiming with silver, and smells like carnival caramel when he breathes in.

“Jester!” Molly clutches her, fingers sinking into her hair, hooking his elbow around the back of her neck as she laughs and hugs him back. “Bloody hell.” He plants a big kiss in her hair, catching the curve of her ear. “Fools flock together huh?”

“Molly! Molly! Fuck! Shit!” She’s kind of crushing his ribs. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you? How’d you—?”

“Caleb didn’t kill me,” Molly whispers. He hugs her more tightly. “I did it myself.”

Jester freezes. Her fingers dig more tightly into his shoulder.

“S’alright, Jes.” He tries to laugh, but it’s not very convincing. “I’m a one trick tiefling.”

“Can you go back?” Jester whispers. “Molly, were you with Caleb? I can break through another way, but if you can go back–”

Molly pulls back, lets Jester cup his face in shaky fingers. “Caduceus put the Death Ward on me.”

Jester nods. Her eyes brim bright with tears, her pretty white teeth biting at her lower lip. Molly carefully mirrors her, fitting his hands around her dark, heart-shaped face. She starts to say something, but it comes out a sob, so Molly just drops his brow against hers and stays that way for a moment. Feels her tail lash protectively around his right knee, her fingers sink a little more deeply into his hair.

She murmurs, not words, but a low Infernal subvocalization that has no translation into the common languages of the realm – it just means… sadness, sadness, rage, regret.

“Tell me about it,” Molly says in kind.

Jester moves her hands down his neck, to his shoulders, his arms, taking his hands in hers.

“I’ll do it, Molly.” She squeezes tight. “I can stop him.”

“I know.”

A voice over his shoulder says, softly, “You will have half a moment.”  

Molly smells dust, old soil, the faint scent of decay – not of flesh but some older less transient material. Jester tucks herself close to his side, gripping his arm tight and it hurts how much strength he can draw from that. Molly turns. Vax’ildan stands again on the hill with them, beautiful and familiar, but unlike every time before… Molly can feel the eeriness in the Raven Queen’s champion. The size of him suddenly astronomical behind his physical presentation.

There’s darkness rising from his shoulders, a strange canopy that stretches up from his back and spreads out in translucent gloom. Molly hears the rustle of wings, of feathers, of a thousand, ten thousand ravens taking wing. When he looks up, he realizes the darkness is merely the massive arch… no… just the shadow of two leviathan wings. Vax moves forward and the moonlight avoids him where walks. Molly doesn’t flinch, even when he fits both palms to either side of Molly’s face and lifts his eyes.

 “ I can give strength you don’t remember, Mollymauk. But that’s all I can do. Are you ready?”

Molly pauses, then, “Kiss for luck?”

Vax’ildan – wreathed in darkness, gaze holding the mass of collapsed stars, the voice of the Raven Queen on his tongue – gives him a look. Then rolls his eyes and says, amused, “Fuck it. Kiss for luck.”

Then he leans down, tilting his head and kisses Molly gently on the mouth.

And Molly opens his eyes.

He’s standing in the same room, holding the scimitar point first against his chest, in the precursor of killing himself. There’s blood all over his forearms, his hands, and soaked through his tunic. But he’s still on his feet and Caleb is staring at him with this… startled expression. Eyes wide, mouth open as if in the middle of saying something. He’s still got one hand against the burning red magic that’s holding Beau, the other hand kind of raised in the attitude reaching or casting.

He looks frightened. That fades though as Molly releases his grip on the blade and it clatters to the floor. Molly exhales, his breath a silvery cloud and he backs up a little, shaking his head at if to clear it.  

“Why did you do that?” Caleb says blankly. “Killing yourself won’t make a difference.”

“It did to me,” Molly pants.

“Please, don’t do that.”

Molly stares at him. “Caleb, I wish I could I say I’m sorry about this… but you’ve been an asshole.”

And that’s when Jester – stepping out of the ether like a woman stepping through a door – grabs the wizard from behind and punches him. It’s not, like, a ‘how dare you slap’. She snatches his collar in one hand, rears all the way back, and cracks him across the jaw with the other. Caleb staggers, shoulder slamming against the barrier wall. He scrabbles at the wall, visibly struggles to stay conscious through what is certainly a concussion and a broken jaw. Jester doesn’t give him the time. She raises one hand over her shoulder. A massive lollipop bursts into existence – pink and white and brilliant with ribbons. Then she takes the handle in both hands and she swings.

She hits him like a kid playing stick ball.

There’s an arcane flare – of magic hitting magic and Molly feels it as unmovable object meets unstoppable force. The lollipop hammers a defensive spell Molly has no understanding of and the impact ignites the air in blinding radiance. Molly is knocked to one knee by the shock wave alone. A body launches from the center of the room like a rachet ball and then slam into the far wall like a rag doll. It’s definitely Caleb. He hits the floor in a heap, a swirl of passive magic siphoning around his body.

Frumpkin, by then, has finished tearing across the room and lunges at Jester, jaws full of lightning –

“Bad kitty!” she screams.

Her eyes flare white and Frumpkin poofs out of existence.

Caleb seems to be regaining consciousness. He shudders and levers himself up on one elbow, head hanging low as he sways dizzily. He coughs blood, red splattering the flag stones. There’s blood in his hair at the back of his head. He can’t seem to orient himself or speak, suggesting that his skull might be cracked so badly its costing him basic functionality. He tries, with difficulty, to lift his head. His eyes are flickering erratically, brightening and dimming, like a circuit is shorting in him.

Jester, again, does not wait. She disappears then reappears standing directly over him.

She doesn’t say a damn thing.

She just raises a hand and with a flare a soft orb of pink magic blooms around her, encasing herself and Caleb. Immediately the passive magicks moving around Caleb go dormant and disappear. Over her shoulder, the massive lollipop rests like a mace in her hand. Invisible winds disturb her hair and skirts. Her eyes burn green in the iris and she just… waits. Because Caleb is bleeding out at her feet, fast losing consciousness in the neutral bubble of her anti-magic field.

Still he manages, “Jes…ter…?”

“Where is Caduceus?” she says. But when she speaks, her voice quavers. Water drips from her chin. “Did you kill him, Caleb?”

“Nev… I’d ne…”

He can’t finish the sentence.

Jester covers her mouth with one hand, eyes squeezing shut, and Caleb slumps unconscious on the floor. For a moment, there’s just silence. Blood freezing on the cold stone floor. Then Jester dismisses the spiritual weapon and drops to her knees. She fits her hands to Caleb’s bleeding head. She combs the bloody hair from the ugly split in his skull and magic begins to sink gingerly into the wound. She’s whispering something softly, like a refrain.

Eventually, Molly moves to kneel with her inside the dome.

“He’ll be okay,” she says, attempting cheerfulness as tears overrun her eyes. “He’ll be okay. I’m asking the Traveler to break some of the… the forbiddance spells around the keep. The others will be here soon. We’ll be okay.” She chokes a little on her own voice. “Everyone’s back together.” Her fingers close in the back of Caleb’s robes, the magic dissipating from her fingers, and that’s when Molly loops his arms around her. She grabs his shirt, clinging suddenly, something building in her chest until she blurts, crying, “What did we do wrong, Molly?”

“Nothing.”

He cradles her head, rocking a little as she starts to sob.

“We tried so hard!”

“I know.”

Jester is wailing now, just gut-wrenching heaves against Molly’s shoulder. “I miss her so much!” She can’t seem to breathe, giving in entirely to ugly crying, almost hiccupping. “I miss Beau! She said we needed to take care of each other and we didn’t.”

“Hey, the world asked a lot from you. S’not your fault if you didn’t do every damn thing on the list.”

“I’m sorry!”

“Shh, stop it. It’s over,” Molly murmurs, hugging her closer. “It’s over, Jes.”

Jester just keeps crying until it seems like she may never stop, but even as he begins to think this, there is a sudden rush of warm wind and the scent of… of somewhere else. Somewhere green and summer-y, sap-sticky, and hot against the skin and Molly feels someone step into the space to his left and kneel. There’s no one there of course, but Molly sees it when Jester’s hair moves a little, an invisible hand tucking strands behind her ear and only then does her wailing become a sniffle.

“I know, but I didn’t want it to be this way,” she says loudly to no one.

Molly feels that murmur of wind again, so comforting it wipes away the cold of the room.

“You promise?” Jester says, looking up at the empty air.

And there’s a chuckle, resonate and deep. Molly gets the impression of the ‘yes’ and a whisper like a cloak against his shoulder, passing by.

And Jester turns to Molly and says, “It’ll be okay. I’m okay.”

Molly gives the room a wary once over. “You sure?”

Jester starts to smile. “We can fix it. It’s… it’s going to be—”

“Finally,” says a voice.

The word splits through Molly’s skull like a nail through the roof of his mouth. He’s on the floor before he can process anything farther, his every limb locked up around a sucker punch that didn’t happen. Dizzy, he struggles to lift his forehead from the ground, but the voice goes on like a tuning fork jammed inside his brain.

“Hey, man. Don’t run, I have some questions for you.”

Molly manages to lift his head. His vision is splitting, going dark around the edges. It hurts to look.

But, there in the middle of the room, Beauregard is standing. The barrier spell around her is gone. She’s stepped half way down from her dais, one foot sill up on the platform, the other on the floor in the attitude of descending a short flight of stairs. Her body is on fire. A pillar of blue and black flame sheathes her skin, billowing the torn edges of her jacket.

She’s looking at something forward and slightly to her left.

Her left arm is extended and her fist closed around something Molly can’t see. Her arm jerks slightly, like something is fighting her hold but she’s smiling this kind of confused, mildly annoyed smile. Like someone is being a little rude at a dinner party or something and she steps down fully. Ice bursts across the floor where her feet touch the stone, the temperature in the room going sub-zero and Molly knows without knowing that if the anti-magic field drops, they’re going to get the brunt of it.

“Wow. Stop spazzing out. I just want to talk,” Beau is saying in that awkward friendly-but-I’m-kind-of-faking-it voice she does when she’s working at being a person to someone she’d rather punch. “Hey. Listen, buddy. This isn’t like before. I’m something else and I need to ask you some stuff.”

And suddenly there’s someone standing in front of her. They’re struggling to get away from Beauregard, who has one iron-fingered grip viced relentlessly around their wrist.

They’re the size of a regular person, tall, slender, arguably a male build. Their skin is strange and iridescent and glowing faintly with a dim greenish warmth that penetrates the cold around them. They are dressed in adventurer’s finery – good boots, a clean blue tunic… and a long, long forest-green cloak that’s pulled up over their head and shadows everything but the lower half of their face.

Jester, seeing this, screams in horror.

But Beauregard doesn’t seem to hear. Her focus is entirely on The Traveler. She uses her free hand to grab a fistful of their cloak and drag them closer.

“I’m trying to be nice here,” she says, exasperated when her captive shoves a hand against her chest. “I’m a new god too, you know. We should stick together.” The Traveler doesn’t say anything, just bares their teeth and light flares through their body, snapping through Beauregard like a blow that knocks her face to the left. “Fucking. Rude,” she says, glaring down at the other god in front of her. “Stop it.”

“I don’t have answers for you,” says the Traveler. His voice cuts through the disharmonics from the other god, dragging a swath of relief through the room allowing the mortals there to breathe again. “I didn’t kill a god to become one.” A smile pulls briefly at his mouth, wry, and fiercely proud. “I found a faith stronger than any in the world and she believed in me. I don’t know what you are, half god. You are not like me.”

Beau-Who-Is-Not-Beau thinks about that.

Her eyes, Molly notices now, are pitch black hollows full of nothing.

“You’re right. Duh. I need to talk to her.” She thinks about it some more, then looks suddenly toward the two tieflings huddled together against the wall. “Hey, Molly. You know Vax’ildan, right?”

“Oh no,” Jester whispers.

“I wanna talk to his boss,” Beau says. “Can you tell him that?”

Then she smiles at Molly… and of course it kills him instantly.

Chapter Text

“Fuck,” Mollymauk whispers.

His eyes are closed. He keeps them that way.

He says to himself, “That’s… fucking great.”

Molly stands rigid, hands knotted against his chest because that’s where, in his moment of death, he’d been clasping Jester’s hand against his breastbone. The air smells of torn grass and air after rainfall. The wind is up, warm ribbons of air tearing at his clothes and he knows, somehow, there’s a storm on the horizon in a dimension where weather should mean nothing. The breeze chills the tracks of salt water on his cheeks. The bones in his fingers ache from gripping.

Why and how can he weep as a nothing but a soul? Seems shitty.

Hands take him by the shoulders.

“Mollymauk!” The scent of dust and bone. “Are you alright?”

It’s a cold grip; slender thumbs pressing to the inside curve of his bicep with such strange and impossible force. Like a slim-fingered golem is gripping him with obsidian fingers. For a moment Molly keeps his eyes clenched, so no light can get though. He closes his fists even tighter against his chest, but the phantom heat of Jester’s skin is already fading from his palms despite the fact it was never there to begin with.

“Weird,” Molly says.

“Mollymauk, that death was different.” The fingers squeeze, words urgent. “She’s got a breath of annihilation in her and when she kills you, it hurts you down to the—”

“I can feel where Jester’s hands were.” Molly presses his knuckles tighter into his sternum. “Odd, right? She didn’t actually touch me. This is just… not the real me. Hey, is my body just lying there in front of her?”

There’s a soft inhalation.

The fingers on his biceps smooth upward, then stutter uncertainly, halting across the curve from his shoulder to his throat before committing. They slide up to cup his jaw and sink into the hair at the back of his skull. Molly can feel the weird negative space Vax emits like other people give off body heat, senses the reaper is face-to-face, inches away. Vax shakes Molly a little. Gently. Like you rouse a kitten.

“Hey, look at me.”

Molly does not and Vax’s right thumb smooths along the line of Molly’s cheekbone, the pad pressing a cool track up toward his temple and smoothing salt away.

“Don’t lose your shit on me now, Tealeaf.”

“Fuck right off. I will lose my shit if I want to.”

That seems to encourage Vax’ildan, who says brightly, but whispering, “Alright. After a certain point, I will absolutely have to fuck off when you tell me to, but not yet.” He pauses a moment, then adds, “Mollymauk, please… She’s one step away from godhood—”

“Beau wants to talk to your boss.”

“Of course she does. She wants a damned manual I think—”

“Don’t bloody riddle me this, you undead motherfucker.”

 “Okay, okay, sorry. Only one god before has done what Beauregard is trying to do. My queen. The Raven Queen is only mortal to kill a god to become a god and your girl wants some advice, I think. Make sense?”

Molly grits his teeth until they ache, until his ethereal bones feel sore inside him. “I think she’s gonna kill my friends to make that happen.”

“She’s only a demi-god, Molly. Not the first or the last. She can still be struck down.”

Molly opens his eyes finally, but the view is blurry and stinging, muddled until his eyes run over again and tears dampen Vax’ildan’s freezing fingers. The Raven Queen’s champion looks nervous – pale and trying to crack a smile for the comfort of an observer. Not a look that’s new to him anymore, but so, so strange on a being that still feels like they barely exist. Like a spot of quiet in a crowded room. A pocket of entropy shaped like a man in black armor. A concept shouldn’t be earnest the way Vax’ildan is being and the contradiction sets Molly’s nerves on edge.

“The only one of them willing to kill friends was Caleb and I helped crack his skull.” Molly can’t stand the finality he can see in Vax’ildan’s face, so he closes his eyes again, resisting the reaper’s hold on his shoulder. “And even he didn’t want to kill Beau. Who the fuck were they to one another that he would do that? I don’t even bloody know.”

“Molly,” Vax starts.

“I can’t do anything,” he interrupts, reaching up to wipe his own tears, batting one of Vax’ildan’s hands away and dragging the heel of his palm across his face. “My one trick is dying in dimensionally interesting ways and that’s not gonna work on a gods-damned… whatever she is!”

“You still don’t have to do thi—”

“Shut up!”

He twists a shoulder up and around, pulling his arm from Vax’s grip so hard there’s a red drag of friction where his fingers pulled across his bicep. He advances on Vax, shoving a hand into his chest and driving the startled acolyte backward.

“Don’t tell me I don’t have to do this!” Molly goes blind with rage. “Don’t you put this on me when you’re the ones who brought me back and said I have to unfuck the world! That makes it my fucking fault if I don’t do something! This is not a philosophical fucking discussion, this is the world burning at my feet so do me the fucking courtesy of not pretending I’m doing this to myself! DON’T TOUCH ME!”

Vax jerks back, his hand snapping down to his side, away from Molly’s shoulder.

 “Why the fuck did you do this to me!?”

Vax stares at him, blank with grief, a terrible… knowing in his face and starts to speak.

“No! Shut up! Let me think!”

Vax says nothing.

“We still have time, right? She can’t make time run faster.”

“No. Even she is held by time, as most gods are, and she is not yet that.”

Molly exhales. Presses his palms over his face and breathes into them for a moment, until the heat of his own breath against his skin warms his face and then, just because he needs to, he bares his teeth and screams.

He screams and lets the breath run out of him in a single, primal noise that runs on and on for much longer than Molly thinks he could scream on the Prime Material Plane, but here, in the middle world, he screams as long as his soul can imagine it. And when that ephemeral breath finally runs dry and he’s left standing there – his palms feathered with scars and open in front of him – the emptiness he feels is almost a relief.

Like vomiting after a night of hard drinking.

Like waking up with no memories in a grave.

“I’m tired. I’m so bloody tired, Vax.” His eyes ache but can’t seem to generate anything like the relief tears would bring him. “They brought me back and I don’t even want it. I don’t even want to save them or the world or any of it, I want to lie down and bloody die. I was fine. I was dead. The world killed me and so what? Now it wants me to fix it?” Molly stares into the lines of his own hands. “How’s that fucking fair?”

“It’s not,” says a new voice. “That’s why I asked you.”

Molly opens his eyes… but it’s not Vax standing in front of him.

There’s a woman dressed in black so deep it absorbs all the light around it and makes a matte void of her infinite form. The green hills are gone. There is nothing but the woman in black. She wears a white porcelain mask – a sexless platonic ideal of a female face. Alien, but blisteringly familiar, infinitely intimate. Molly’s breath goes shallow, his mouth dry.

He’d give anything if she’d wrap her arms around him and he both does and does not know for certain that if she did that, he’d die and never come back. He feels the tears burning in the backs of his eyes, heat pooling inside his skull as his heart aches with this profane longing.  

“You know who I am,” says the Raven Queen.

“You’re the one who broke the rules for me.”

There is no smile. No pity. No sense of comfort.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because there are a thousand threads bound up in you. You exist at its nexus and infinite unravelings spool out from your actions.”

“That sucks.”

“Yes.” She inclines her head. “The path of the fate-touched often does.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that deserving or not, kind or cruel, though no action or inaction of your own… you are important, Mollymauk. Made important by your own death and the memories that the living held in their grief for you.”

She moves then, lifting a single porcelain finger to lightly touch Molly’s chin and when she touches him, Molly feels instantly and simultaneously but painlessly every mortal blow – his wrists split open, his throat ripped out, neck snapped, skull crushed, ribs collapsed, and hewn by bullets, blades, and spell fire. He goes slack, insurmountably paralyzed as the Raven Queen reads the fractures of his soul one by one, carding thru them like red pages in a fragile book.

Her touch is agony and ecstasy inlaid to Molly so completely he can’t remember existing without it. Thinks, in fact, maybe she’s always had her fingers threaded through him, waiting for the day of his death.  (His many, many, infinite deaths.)

Molly can’t fathom why that’s a relief.

“It is my function,” she whispers, “to know all mortal things in their demise. As I know you. As I knew you would answer my call.” She lifts his chin slightly and Molly feels a sob rise by reflex in his mouth. “I am cruel to you because I must be.”

“Fuck you.” Molly says it, tears burning down his face. “How do I stop her?”

Molly feels it then, though he cannot see it: That goddess of death smiles at him.

“Your friend is not a divine yet, Mollymauk Tealeaf. She is a shadow of both herself and the Mad God. The potential of total annihilation held back by a sieve of humanity.” She comes nearer, that funerary mask so near, its cold kisses the skin. “But she is held back yet and so in this moment, and this moment alone, she can be either.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Remind her that she is not the thing that possesses her, in her moment of highest power, help her kill her nascent godhood. Stop her and this version of this world gets to live on.”

“That’s one hell of a con.”

“Your existence was always a confidence game. Don this last mask. Strike them down.”

She offers Molly a hand.

It’s cold and pale, her arm a river of raven’s feather and ash. In her other hand – a death mask. The likeness, Molly knows without seeing, is his own face. Not agonized, spitting, and furious as he was in death but calmer, older, the face of a person who lived to see some other end than the one Lorenzo gave him on the Glory Run Road. One of an infinite number of possible selves selected by a god for this task.

 It terrifies him.

A deep and animal horror adjacent to nothing except the fear Molly felt when someone called him by a name he didn’t know.

“Erasing me is worse than killing me,” Molly says. He jerks his chin toward the mask. “Is that what you’ve got there?”

“No. It’s an aspect of yourself. Yours by right, Ghost Slayer.”

“Don’t be obtuse.”

“You will be yourself as you are now… just stronger. As Vax’ildan promised.”

He thinks about that.

Then, “Fuck it. Fine.” He steps forward. “One last lie then.”

Molly takes the Raven Queen’s hand and he does not resist when she surges forward and presses the death mask over his face and –

***

Mollymauk Tealeaf opens his eyes.

The air tastes like summer, hot and sweet, faintly like turning fruit and foliage.

He’s lying on the broken disk of what was once Caleb’s tower and Beauregard’s tomb. The room has been busted open, the top and sides sheared off as if by some giant, reducing sections to rubble strewn with books and other wizardly equipment. As Mollymauk watches, some of the remaining stones that make up a wall begin to… flake. Disintegrating into fine clouds of atomic dust and drifting away in lazy coils of smoke-like molecules.

The horizon stretches out beyond the open edge of broken stone walls, an orange and blue-mottled sky is clearly visible above. He can hear roaring like a constant low vibrato in his ear. And all around him, eddies of deconstructed material, animated by no particular wind, swirl through the air in infinite varieties of color. He can feel their passage disturbing his hair and clothes, but they skip along his skin as if repulsed by magnetic forces.

Sitting on the edge of the disintegrating wall: Beauregard.

She’s sitting with one knee pulled up, an arm draped over that knee, looking at him intently. Like she’s been sitting and waiting for him to come back. Her other leg is swinging gently, her heel knocking against the wall. When Molly blinks and sits up, her face lights up excitedly and she drops her other leg, bracing her palms against the wall between her thighs and leaning forward.

“Well?”

Molly looks around. “Where are Jester and Caleb?”

“Jester grabbed Caleb and took off after I banished Artagan. It’s fine. I’m not worried about it.”

“Who?”

“The Traveler. That’s his other name.” She hooks a thumb over her shoulder toward somewhere in the distance, vaguely toward some shadow of forest along the edge of the visible landscape. “He’ll go anywhere but home. So I threw him back to the Feywild. That should shut him up for a minute while we talk.”

“You put Jester’s god in time out?”

“I mean—” Beau thumbs her nose a little smugly— “yeah.”

Molly whistles. “How’s that work?”

“Well, he’s only kind of a god,” enthuses Not-Beau, her eyes of infinite void crinkling with very human bewilderment. “Like kinda. He’s weird, like a New God. He was something else that was god-like. You know what an Archfey is? That. He was that. And now he’s a god by any other name because he’s got people who— Oh wait, you’re stalling. Nice try, Tealeaf. I know this is weird but I’m on a time table here. Jester is gonna go grab the others and try to stage some kind of intervention here and I’d rather just, you know, not.”

“An Archfey?” says Molly innocently baffled. “What’s that?”

Beau sighs impatiently. “Oh fuck off, you obviously know what that is. No more tangents. Tell me what the Raven Queen said.”

Molly moves into a more comfortable cross-legged position. “So what’s the plan here? You bully me into bullying the Raven Queen into telling you how to become a god?”

“I mean, it sounds stupid when you put it like that.” Evil-Beau does not pout exactly, but she definitely tossed her hands up, defensive. “I’ve been awake for like five minutes. I think it’s a pretty good plan given it’s a first draft. But also, tell me what she said or I’ll split your skull open but keep you alive through the whole thing. Okay?”

“Right.” Molly clears his throat, fighting down the instant, gut-clenching panic. “Uh, the Raven Queen says killing a god and turning into one afterward is tricky. There are steps. Also, she’s a little worried about you becoming the new Chained Oblivion incarnate and decimating the whole of reality.” A beat. “Is that… a worry you also have? Or is that the point?”

Beau’s forehead creases uncertainly.

Molly tilts his head. “I mean, are you gonna decimate the whole of reality?”

“Well, I mean… only a little. For a minute.”

“You’re gonna have to unpack that for me.”

“No, I don’t. You wouldn’t get it.”

“I mean, I’ve figured out a few things about how the universe works.”

“Like what?”

“That gods don’t know everything. They’re just working with an expanded awareness of stuff. Also, I think time works different for them and there’s some other universe where I’m, apparently, some kind of star fighter. Amazing, huh?”

“Tell me what the steps are to be a god, Molly.”

“Okay, well,” Molly says, “look, the thing is—”

“She didn’t tell you shit, right? Did she even talk to you?”

“As a matter of fact, she did. So don’t assume. Rude. Secondly, she says it’s kind of a you thing. Like an in your head thing, not something you need to go out and do. There’s not a bloody magic rock you go and stand on and they let you into the panthe—”

“Is this a fucking trick?” Beau raises a hand and Molly feels a hand close around his throat and crush, ghostly fingers but blisteringly cold. It yanks him up by the neck, half an inch off the ground into the air. “If this is a fucking trick, I’ll gut you like a fish, Molly. You’re useful and the Raven Queen is doing you favors or whatever, but you gotta stop being a shithead.”

Molly, choking, claws uselessly at the nothing around his throat. She doesn’t let go. As Molly suffocates, her face slips from a very human annoyance to a kind of… distracted interest in what she’s doing. Like a child noticing a new shiny thing...

“Not a trick,” Molly wheezes. “Stop… being a jackass…”

She blinks, then drops Molly back to the ground, coughing and gripping his bruised windpipe. He tries not to notice the weird intensity with which she focuses on his neck, on his face as he labors through the pain, realizes the first layers of skin across his trachea are burnt and blistered. He forces himself to sit up straight again and regard Beau calmly from his seat on the ground.

“The Raven Queen told me that you can be whatever you want right now. So… you know. What do you want to be?

“A god, stupid.”

“Of what, nerd?”

Beau blinks, her brow furrowing again. “I gotta be a god to do what I need to do.”

“Sounds great. What are you gonna do?”

“Fix everything. Then know everything.”

Molly props an elbow of his knee and his chin in his hand. “Okay, so that’s the bit where you destroy everything for a minute and remake it?”

“You won’t even feel it,” Beau insists.

“Because me feeling that you’re destroying me would be… bad? Right?”

Beau stares at him. “Why do you care? You’re dead. Or you will be, can be. It’s living you should worry about, Molly.”

“Sure, because the whole… fish gutting thing. No, no, I hear you. Just as a professional performer, you really want to know what your act is, right? Even gods have to commit to the bit, you know, cosmically.”

Beau stares down at him, her empty hollow eyes like wounds in the world. “Why the fuck are you here?”

“To help my friends.”

“Bullshit.” Her accusation makes Molly’s nose bleed. “These people aren’t your friends.”

“Okay.” Molly wipes red from his mouth and chin. “Admittedly, I wasn’t given much choice.”

“You chose to come here. I mean, you could have run. Yasha offered to take you away, right?” Beau tilts her head. “You must know even after everything, she’s still in love with the concept of you, Molly.” Beau smiles fondly, her expression baffled and inhuman. “You still fuckin’ haunt her.”

“Look, you’re the one trying to kill the world, I’m not sure I need a deep emotional motivation besides spite and bloody-mindedness.”

 Molly isn’t sure what the fuck he’s saying anymore. He’s terrified that Beau could do literally anything if she bores of arguing, if she remembers that's she/they are a god of death and shouldn't care about winning banter battles with purple tieflings. But if Beau was anything human she was an argumentative shithead. So… he doubles down.

He exhales loudly. “No matter what you think, I’m here to help my friends. That includes you, by the way.”

Beau laughs. “Fuckin’ right you did.” She gestures to the room around her, the castle deconstructing itself in pieces. Threads of mortar and glass eddy like sea foam around her fingers. “Look at everything you’ve done in the name of your friends just asking you.”

“That’s not why –”

“You’ve died ten times since Caduceus brought you back to fix their fucking problems and what’s worse is they didn’t even do you the courtesy of telling you who they really are now. Just letting you walk around, bleeding for shit you don’t know.”

“Well, I am kind of dumb.”

Beau doesn’t rise to the lighter tone. “There’s nothing I fucking hate more,” she says, “than people hiding the truth.”

“Well you are a nosy nerd monk, so that tracks, honestly, I –”

“Do you even know my last name?”

“I figured you had your reasons not to say. You don’t owe me—”

“What’s Nott’s real name?” Beauregard is relentless now, stepping closer with each question. “Who did Caleb kill when he was sixteen and a serving his first master? Who stole my childhood and how did a demi-god possess Fjord? Jester’s god has a face and I know it. There is man in Taldorei standing in a mansion with his daughters and when I stretch out my hand I know that Ioun’s madness ran through him once like it ran through me…” She smiles and she she says, “Oh Molly, I know what you were before you were you. Do you want me to tell you?”

“Boring,” Molly snaps.

That seems to get Not-Beau’s attention. She blinks her black eyes.

“That’s fucking boring. The past and all its trappings. Did you never listen to me when I was alive?” Molly shakes his head. “I. Don’t. Care. I don’t owe anything to all the nonsense you’re talking about. I only care about what stupid shit you’re all doing right now in the name of a past I don’t give a damn about.”

Beau snorts. “You’re a hypocrite and liar, Mollymauk. You care so much about the past you’re dying for it tenfold.

“Don’t tell me what I’m dying for, brat.”

“I AM A GOD-KILLER.”

“You’re a brat,” Molly snaps. “Kill me all you want, I’ll keep coming back just to tell you you’re an idiot possessed by a mad thing and you don’t get to lecture me until you get a fucking grip!”

“That’s not even Fjord’s real voice!”

Molly stops.

They stare at one another.

“Say what now?”

“That weird accent he’s got? He dropped that a decade ago. He started using it again just to make it easier for you.”

Molly for a long, long moment says absolutely nothing.

Then, slowly, “What… kind of accent?”

Beauregard’s face scrunches. “I dunno? Kinda wussy and posh?”

“Really?” Molly leans his weight back on his hands, still seated, looking pensive. “Oof. Well, fuck, I want to hear that.”

“I could share it with you,” Beau says idly. “I know… so much, Molly. I can do so much. I could bring Fjord right here and make him say something real if you wanted. Do you want me to?” She raises a hand, open, poised as if to pick something off a tall shelf. “I could—”

“Stop it.”

“It would only take a second, Molly.”

“Don’t.”

“Are you sure? It would be so distracting if I dragged Fjord here and forced him to talk.” She bares her teeth and the blackness behind them hollows the shadows. “Almost distracting enough…” She raises her hand, fingers coiling. “Almost…”

Her hand cracks through the air, blinking from one position to the next and the secondary position is fisted around something that warps the area around her bleeding fist. Molly jerks back as Beau works her hand to the wrist in some horrific wound through reality. It gushes and the stones turn to gold and melt into diamond where it splashes. It hemorrhages heat-death and the sun swings wildly in the sky overhead.

Beau’s eyes are full of nothing as she says, “ALMOST DISTRACTING ENOUGH THAT I WOULDN’T NOTICE A FUCKING ASSASSIN. HUH?”

She drops to one knee and twists her shoulder down like a wrestler throwing an opponent. And from the tear in the world, she produces her adversary.

He hits the tower floor, dragging an infinite ribbon of black feathers and blood. She rips him out in burst of red arterial spray. Like she’s torn out the throat of the world, she hurls Vax’ildan’s impossible form to her feet. He’s eight stories tall, composed of a thousand threads that pierce the world infinitely in all directions. He’s a screaming void in reality no taller than Molly. He’s a single black raven flapping in Beau’s fist, her fingers caging its fragile ribs and—

He’s a knight in black armor, pinned to the ground by the nape of his neck, Beauregard’s adamantine grip pressing his skull into the ground until he screams. The skies darken with wings. Two of them, half mile wide, invisible but cutting off the light of the sun. In the new and thrashing darkness, Beauregard laughs.

“Gotcha.”

Molly lunges to his feet. “Beauregard! Don’t!”

“Show your face or I’ll kill your pet!” Beau is shouting at the skies now. She has her other arm around one of Vax’s wrists, driving his arm up between his shoulder blade until his spine bends from the angle of it and the skyline fractures into static shaped like a thousand falling feathers. Something snaps and Vax screams.  “I will fuckin’ devour your catspaw killer if you don’t talk to me!” 

“The Raven Queen doesn’t give a shit about us!” Molly is losing his mind. He has no idea what the fuck is happening now. The world is a blur, swinging on a wild axis around this disintegrating tower. He’s screaming in the eye of a storm. “She’s not gonna fucking appear, Beauregard!”

She does not take that well. She smashes Vax’s head against the stone with stuck force the stone craters. He’s not dead, but just the act of her touching him is a terrible violence, two warring things composed of variant entropy suddenly in crushing proximity. But Beau is so much closer to her source of power, she is huge, and growing sure as if she were devouring the man beneath her.

“Beau! Stop!”

She has her hands around Vax’s throat and she’s crushing, pitiless and unstoppable, until the Raven Queen’s emissary is choking and—

“Fucking stop it! She’s not coming!”

“Then I’ll eat the world anyway!" Beau bares her teeth at him and in his mind she does it a thousand time, in fangs and needles and bone and ice. “I'll burn it until they believe. Then I’ll consume all of it. Him. You. Them. And all of it.”

“Which is it!? Fix the world or eat it alive!?”

“You don’t get to ask me shit! You fucking died! You weren’t here!”

“I DIED PROTECTING YOU! I CAN TALK TO YOU HOWEVER BLOODY PLEASE!”

“THAT WASN’T MY FAULT! IT’S NOT MY FUCKING FAULT YOU DIED!”

And in that moment where Beauregard’s monstrous face becomes human in its outrage, Molly ignites the blood on his fingers, left from when he wiped it from his chin earlier. He feels his eyes go black as Beauregard’s and the blood curse takes hold in her veins. The circuitry of her body become the roots of his arcane influence, tethered from the blood on Molly’s fingers to the very core of Beauregard.

This is a trick Molly never learned in this life:

The Blood Curse of the Exorcist.

Not-Beauregard shrieks.

She disengages her choke on Vax and charges him, her black eyes clearing for a moment, becoming a sudden human blue before going black again. But for that moment of clarity, she staggers, shaking her head like dog shaking off a blow, then snaps across the space between them, her fist screaming through the air at him with enough necrotic and kinetic force that it will blow a hole in his ribs and…

She misses.

Or rather, her fist stops six times rapid fire in the space that would be Mollymauk’s ribcage, the force of her blows breaking the sound barrier and blasting the air back in a cone of super-heated sound, destroying the spot where he’d been standing. Technically, it’s where Molly is still standing, but he’s now standing there one plane of existence over. He ducks right, her fists dragging at his ethereal form as he runs past her.

Molly knows this. He knows this, suddenly, horribly, he knows that were the black thing that rides her anything but the ghost of a god, he would have exorcised it instantly. He also knows even with the Raven Queen’s boon, he can only do that trick three more times and if he fails, Beauregard will tear him apart.

He drags his scimitar across his wrist, igniting it.

Not-Beauregard is screaming at him to come out. To come and fucking die.

Molly, never one to ignore an encore, steps out back into reality about 40 feet behind her and immediately hits her with the same blood curse.  This time when she screams, she doubles up and vomits something black, writhing, and shivering with necrotic fire. She retches, staggers around, pale blue eyes snapping around to meet Molly’s gaze. In her face, he sees a human recognition. A human horror. Like she’s never seen him properly and it’s just now that she can see him for what he is – her dead friend trying to save her.

“Molly?” she says.

And then her eyes go black again and Not-Beau screams.

She grabs her head and going berserk. Her existence splits into three screaming dimensions that spasm and the frequency of their splitting and jagged thrashing opens holes into other worlds. Volcanic heat pours from a gate to the plane of fire three miles out. A rift to the Astral Sea disgorges a black vessel sailing seven silver flags. A swarm of fairies tear across the top of the Tower as the Feywild crosses the ground they stand on and closes again, leaving the tower sheeted in moss.

Not-Beau snaps back together. The world snaps closed again.

“I’m going to eat you fucking soul,” seethes the thing inside her, rawer now, less human, more terrible to hear. “We will be your hell, forever, Mollymauk. The Raven Queen can’t protect you if I eat your screaming—”

Molly hits her with the blood curse again.

Beauregard’s eyes clear and her expression comes back together in a human configuration and she says, quickly, “It’s working, Molly. It’s working. Don’t fuckin' stop, I’ve almost got it. Just don’t—”

And then her eyes go back again and Molly grabs his other scimitar and snaps over to the Ethereal Plane.

He ignores Not-Beau raging on the Prime Material Plane because he honestly can’t do more than one thing right now without freaking out. Beau is in there and she's resisting Evil-Beau, maybe weakening the demi-god powers all together. So maybe she won't one-shot disintegrate him if she gets hold of him, but, you know, maybe so. Vax has disappeared. Dead or disengaged from the fight, Molly can’t say but some ancient alien part of him says that even a divine agent of the Raven Queen can only take so much punishment from a death god’s living acolyte. Also, reality is destabilizing around here so maybe he just took the nearest portal out. Also, if Vax is out, then it’s very unlikely the Raven Queen’s power can reach Molly now.

This death is the only one he has.

“Fuck it,” Molly mutters, cutting his arm again and igniting the second scimitar, feeling the Ethereal Plane shiver as his time in the liminal space begins to wane. “Fuck it. Fuck it. C’mon. Fourth time’s a—”

Molly comes out of the Ethereal Plane… and Not-Beauregard hits him.

She was standing 40 feet away, but she still hits him. Snapping across the space between them so fast he doesn’t get the curse off before her hand slams through his ribcage. Through it. Not against it. Through it.

Molly drops one of his blades.

Blood floods his mouth. Red splatters the stone beneath his boots.

Not-Beau smiles.

She hits him again. She punches her fingers like the head of shovel through his ribs and knocks him to the ground, her other hand closing over his mouth, pinning his head to the ground so she’s on top of him, driving her hand between two ribs into the cavity of his chest. Molly screams into her palm she breaks four ribs and the 100-proof pain dominates his entire existence and he is aware of nothing but the agony and the terror. He chokes as she shoves her fucking hand like a knife into a lower part of his ribs and crushes something.

He’s dying.

Not-Beau’s black, infinite eyes are directly over him, her smile insane and forever. She pulls her hand out of his chest cavity, raising it red and slick toward his face. “No more running,” she says.

He thinks, Last chance to leave the world better.

Molly extinguishes the scimitar in his hand, taking back the measure of life force that he gave to it.

He stops dying. (Barely)

And there is so much blood to cast his final blood curse.

So he amplifies it.

Not-Beau shrieks as Molly’s final fuck you tears through her. Her voice shakes the fabric of reality and drives itself through his skull like a psychic needle. Molly feels the tenuous thread of his lifeforce fray and snap as the blood curse takes its toll from him and he knows like he did on the Glory Run Road that his own blood curse is going to kill him. But this time, unlike that day in the snow, Molly sees it when Beauregard’s eyes clear and become blue, clear, and victorious.

She lunges back to feet. Her arms blaze silver and on her forehead the silver Eye of Ioun opens wide. Beau screams, her hands slamming together before driving her clenched fists directly into her chest, driving shot of divine fire through her heart. Beauregard become the fucking sun. The horizon vanishes in silver light.

It’s a familiar feeling, killing himself to keep Beau safe.  

Molly feels somewhat vindicated that when given the chance, he didn’t change a goddamn thing.

Then he feels nothing at all.

***

Mollymauk opens his eyes.

There is nothing. A sea of darkness. Warm as blood. He’s treading darkness like water and it shouldn’t feel a comfort, but it is. An embrace that holds him to the soul.

Above him: The bone-white mask of the Raven Queen, the only light in the infinite black.

“It’s done,” she says. “They will, all of them, live. The Chained Oblivion is dead. This reality preserved.”

“Is Vax okay?”

“He is with me. He thanks you for your assistance.”

“Good. But fuck you still.” Molly jabs a finger he isn’t sure exists in her general direction. “I know you helped, but like… fuck you. I wouldn’t worship you if you paid me, lady.”

A laugh, low, throaty, shaking through the sea.

“Be comforted then, god-killer. I will assist you no further.”

And Molly feels himself pulled down, beneath the surface and falling. Sinking. Down.

***

“No, no, no. Fuck you, fuck you, Molly. You can’t do this to me again, you asshole. You fuck. You stupid purple fuck you can’t.”

Molly becomes aware of someone cursing him out firstly. He becomes aware of someone hugging him and crying on his shoulder secondly. Cradling his head and sobbing wetly. Thirdly, he becomes aware of so much pain. Like, gods, a shit ton if fucking pain like all over. He’s alive and it sucks.

“That bitch,” Molly groans.

“Molly!?”

Beau, the real proper Beau this time, grabs his shoulders and pulls backward to look him in the face. She’s scraped up, bruised and bloody, still an exact image of herself on the day she killed the Oblivion. She’s… not much older than he remembers. How soon was it after he died that she became a god killer? He recognizes belatedly that she’s giving him the exact same look: The wonder of an old memory preserved against all odds.

“You came back?”

She sounds so surprised. Her dark complexion is red with crying, her eyes puffy. She’s an ugly crier and that makes Molly feel better.

“Well, I can be dead whenever I get bored of being alive so why not?”

The emotion that takes Beau then is this soul-crushing rage and gratitude and relief and she grabs him up again in a massive bear hug.

“You stupid fuck,” she sobs.

“That’s me,” Molly wheezes.  

Beau does not answer, she just squeezes him harder, her fingers digging into his shoulder blades and clutching at his shirt. And, because there is nothing else for it, Mollymauk closes his arms around her and leans his face against her shoulder. He thinks Beauregard has a bunch of stuff she wants to say because she keeps starting to say stuff then giving up in favor of continual bear hugs. The horizon is blue again, the shattered tower standing still broken and exposed to the grayish skies.

“Are the others coming?”

“I don’t fuckin’ know. Probably. My brain hurts.”

"That's what you get for having evil gods camped out up there."

"Shut up. I hate you."

“Hey, Beau?”

“What?”

“Tell me your last name.”

He feels her smile against his shoulder.