They arrived in Mistelein around noon, having taken the ten or so mile hike at a leisurely pace, stopping to harvest ingredients, the odd bit or bob that Rory appraised as a valuable material, and occasionally to obliterate a giant crab that got too feisty with them.

The village was a bustle, with groups of gatherers and fishing boats coming and going. They had seen a few groups walking toward the Strand once they approached the edge, and one group headed back, their baskets loaded with harvested materials. Rory had questioned one of the groups, discovering the entire village were aware of the dungeon boss’s demise and were gearing up to spend the next weeks squeezing as much bounty out of the font’s domain as possible.

They found Toben and his wife having lunch on the generous deck wrapped around their home, watching a couple of their children play in the water at the shore.

“Welcome back, my friends!” Toben called from the shade. “Join us for lunch!”

The four finished their approach to the house, divesting themselves of their packs and beginning to shuck off their armor and weapons. Enora rose and went inside, reemerging with four more mugs and a pitcher of some kind of cold, sweet cider. Within a few minutes, they were all laughing, drinking, and eating together as though they hadn’t almost died the previous day.

“You barmy shit. You said it was a giant SHRIMP!” Rory waved his mug at Toben.

“This was not a lie,” he smiled.

“I expected a prawn the size of a carriage, not a twenty-foot hammer-fisted death machine!” he laughed.

“Yet, here you sit, your packs fuller than when you left,” the big man laughed back.

“We almost didn’t make it back,” Layla mused.

“Oh?” Toben frowned.

They relayed the story of the grueling fight through the Strand’s inner mantle and the harrowing fight with the giant mantis shrimp. Each of them contributed to the tale, but surprisingly, it was Layla that told the story with the most flair and precision. She downplayed her contribution, but the others made sure to add that she’d finished the boss herself.

“Is that spell not of the second weave?” he sat up.

“Uh, yeah, tier two,” Layla replied.

“You learned your first spell of the second weave during the fight with the heart guardian?!” he gaped.

“Well, yeah. I mean, technically my second, but I learned the first one earlier that day,” she mused.

Toben had turned grey, then jumped as Enora poured a cup of cider into his lap.

“You great idiot! You let them go into the Grotto before they reached the SECOND WEAVE?!” she railed at him.

“My pearl… I didn’t know. I thought…” he gestured at the four of them.

“So, we weren’t supposed to be there?” Jack offered.

Enora wheeled on him, “The last group of warriors that conquered the heart were in the FOURTH weave!”

“Enora, I did not know,” Toben held his hands up.

“Oh, you great, thick-headed bull. You sent these babes into the Grotto’s heart against that monster. It’s a wonder they’re not full of HOLES, Toben!” she continued to dress him down.

“Well, actually,” Erin pulled out her ruined breastplate, having decided to just leave it off for the trip back.

Toben fell back in his chair, a look of stark horror on his face. Enora’s hand covered her mouth.

“How did you survive this?” he stared at the crater in the plate mail.

“Not sure I did for a few minutes, honestly. I was pretty sure I was dead when Layla healed me,” she admitted.

“The second breath,” Enora whispered.

“What does that mean?” Rory set his drink down.

“When a warrior has great verve… life force… sometimes there is a moment, after a mortal wound, where they can be pulled back from death,” he replied solemnly. “It is very rare. I have never witnessed it myself. Usually, when the verve is expended, death is certain. The soul abandons the body,” he said grimly.

“Guess we were lucky Layla was there,” Erin smiled at her.

The succubus paused mid-sip, eyes wide, then slowly turned to look at Erin. She swallowed with an audible gulp.

“Umm… I mean. You would do the same for me,” she smiled sheepishly.

“Yeah, I would,” the dreadnought pulled her into a hug and smooched her on top of the head.

Enora stood up.

“You must all be terribly exhausted from your ordeal. I will clean up here. Please, rest inside. We will have dinner around sundown. Unless the town decides to throw you a feast for defeating the guardian,” she winked at them.

Then she turned to her husband, and the four watched as a storm of fury gathered on her face like darkened rain clouds carved in furrows of brow-creasing, thunderous rage.

“And you… change your pants. Then we will have to figure out some way to make all this up to them,” she glowered.

-----

The village did, in fact, decide to throw them a feast, but not that night. Such things took time, and the elders of the village had their hands full with coordinating the trips into the Dead Strand. Enora seemed mollified by whatever restitution Toben had thought up, but the four assured him they didn’t hold a grudge, and they didn’t feel he had done anything wrong.

Instead, Rory cajoled him into wandering the Mistelein’s market, which was surprisingly robust, for the better part of the evening. It turned out that the town was a good bit larger than they had originally thought, and “small port” was probably more accurate than “fishing hamlet”. They received traffic on the waterfront from ships arriving to sell their catches or goods shipped from down the coast to the south, and some trade by road from other villages that sought the materials and ingredients harvested from the Dead Strand.

When they returned, Jack and Rory laid out the sum of their collected bounty and consulted Toben over dinner on what could be sold locally and what they should hold onto to maximize their profits. When they revealed they had gathered about fifty pounds of the mantis shrimp’s brilliant carapace, Toben’s eyes lit up. He revealed that Mistelein’s blacksmith was a reasonably competent magic armorer, and was gifted enough to work the guardian’s carapace into a significant upgrade to Erin’s ruined plate. Further, he could likely work with, or at least be willing to trade for, the shrimp’s damaged weaponry. The pollinated hide taken from the lymantrian buck was a first-tier crafting material that could enhance poison magics or sneaking skills. The exquisite cloth Rory had failed to identify was a third-tier material called glimmerweave that now represented a majority portion of their total wealth. The two bolts were enough to craft a set of magical garments for Layla that would both improve her survivability and the rate she regenerated mana. The vargr crystals were used to enhance cutting power in weapons, and the blacksmith could easily use them to improve the lethality of Jack’s longsword. Finally, the remainder of their goods, the gems, ratite claws, various hides, and the thirty or so pounds of gathered materials and ingredients from the Strand could be sold for a fair price at the local market.

They thanked Toben for his indulgence and turned in for the night, planning to set out for the market in the morning. Not long after dawn, they dragged the lion’s share of their goods into the town in a wagon they’d borrowed from their host. Jack was out of his depth, and he couldn’t help but admire the way Rory weaved in and out of stalls, sometimes negotiating with two merchants simultaneously, creating an impromptu bidding war. This tactic never seemed to backfire on the salesman, and when Jack asked him about it, he simply replied that he’d never pit a merchant against another if he sensed they’d react badly to the competition. They spent the entire morning haggling, closing, sometimes walking away, sometimes making sales, usually circling back around to the more stubborn merchants to tease them with their gradually dwindling supplies. As often as not, Rory managed to close a sale on his second trip through.

They also took time to consult the armorer, a soot-soaked black-bearded dwarf named Holfdyr. The grizzled craftsman was overjoyed to have a more challenging project, and he ultimately traded the broken scythe and hammer for the cost of labor on Erin’s armor. He promised the two that so long as Erin stopped by that evening for measurements, the new suit of chitin plate would be done within the week. He took the ratite claws in trade for the work on Jack’s sword and told him the blade would be finished by sunset tomorrow. Holfdyr was apparently both skilled enough and possessed of enough mana to perform multiple crystal infusions in a single day.

Finally, Rory unloaded the rest of their goods, and they headed back to Toben’s house, their coin purses significantly heavier than at dawn. The two stopped short when they approached the house to find the girls dressed in the sheer summer fashions of Mistelein’s young women.

“Time to get dressed boys. They’re feedin’ us tonight,” Layla laughed.