After a cautious peek outside, Rhys and Dorothea were once again out and exposed on the streets. Things continued, methodical, for a while. Every path and house were inspected thoroughly. There were children and ancients and all kinds of people in between, and all were killed with a simplicity that only made the deed worse. Rhys insisted that they do a double check of each building to assure total extermination. In regards to Iree’s orders, he wasn’t willing to take any risks.

Dorothea was in the middle of wondering if Shark and the others had returned to Springen yet and if Shark would understand if she tried to talk about the chaotic amalgamation of feelings, including doubt, the day had brought when, in a burst of flying debris and soil, a howling wind blew apart their surroundings. She shrieked as Rhys grabbed onto her, his magic tearing through and slicing into harmless bits the chunks that sailed through the air to crush them.

“Run away,” he ordered. “Go!”

Well of course she wasn’t going to do that, not unless he agreed to come with her. It was clear who had arrived to thwart them. This wind magic had already killed Rhys once, and now the Ghurian soldier Wesley had come to defend the territory he’d helped steal. Given the direction of the wind, she judged him to be northwest of where they were facing. They needed to talk a plan out, and they couldn’t quite do that with the carnage whirling around them. When she put a hand on his arm, Rhys’ eyes widened with alarm.

“Dorothea, don’t—” he cried out, both angry and afraid, but the hands of time had already been turned back, the two of them going to where they had stood ten minutes before, all deaths still accounted for.

She didn’t give him time to dwell or follow the path of the emotions he’d shown before Juncture had done its work. “Listen. We can’t go back to Springen with nothing to show for it. No one, much less Iree, will stand for that.” Scrambling, Dorothea tried to make the best plan she could. “Two options. We pinpoint his location and I reverse time so we can intercept him before he has the chance to attack. Or we find a place to hide and wait for him to do whatever he’s doing, and then I come out and repair what’s been destroyed.”

“I’ll fight him head-on while you find somewhere to hide.”

No way he didn’t know as well as she did that that was a horrible idea. “I have to use Juncture, Rhys. There’s no getting around it now.”

“You don’t,” he insisted. “Not if you run.”

“Well, I don’t intend to go anywhere without you,” Dorothea stated. “So which is it? We both go or we both stay?”

“You go and I stay.”

They didn’t have time to be arguing like this. “Stop insisting on being so stubborn! Tell me exactly how you’ll win against that wind magic then, especially without my help. His attacks can cut right through yours, both of you know it, and it’s doubtful as to whether you’d be able to get him with your freezing trick while he’s in the air lashing out at you.” She took his hands, looking steadily into his eyes. “Rhys, please. Trust me.”

After glaring for a few tense moments, he swore under his breath. “I know where we can go.” Taking a sharp right and keeping a firm hold on one of her hands, he guided them back towards the entrance. Though Dorothea expected him to take them up to one of the watchtowers, Rhys instead headed towards a small hut that nestled along the wall, hidden in one of the small copses of trees that had been kept inside the fort.

Inside, it appeared to be nothing more than a sparsely furnished sitting room. A beat-up couch sat beside a table that held a tall stack of common looseleaf paper, a bowl of lemons and a fearsome chopping knife. However, Dorothea’s eye was drawn to a plywood fixture on the wall opposite the doorway. From silver pegs hung tools of all sorts: pliers, a short saw, hammer, mallet, crowbar, an odd clamp with what looked to be a rotatable screw going through its handle, rope, twine, and more.

“Is this storage for…construction?” she asked doubtfully, more so to break the silence than anything.

“It’s more like deconstruction,” Rhys replied. His vagueness only added to her sense of unease. He veered left to a lengthy floral tapestry, flinging it aside to reveal another door that opened up to a staircase in turn. After he gestured for her to descend, a sharp scent started to tickle Dorothea’s nose. It was a bitter, stale odor, telling of mysterious things passed. It grew in intensity the further they went until they had emerged into a different room. There stood a table in one corner and a chair in the other, both vacant.

“Rhys…?” What was this place? The eerie silence, broken only by their footsteps on stone, and unknown purposes present here were making her skin crawl.

“Just keep going.” Another set of stairs took them down to a long hallway with narrow cells along the wall. They too were barebones, naught but stone and metal bars. The floor of each cell angled downwards to meet in the middle towards a small drainage grate. At this point, even Dorothea couldn’t remain ignorant as to the nature of this place.

“Is all this a…a big torture chamber?” she whispered.

“We call all of these rooms collectively the Catacombs,” Rhys explained. “There’s one in Springen, too.”

“Gods…” She imagined that the next pit would have raw skeletons dangling on hooks from the walls, bloody handprints dragging in streaks, but it was nothing so cartoonishly horrid. The final descent led them into…a bedroom?

It was beyond jarring to step into this new world. From a canopy bed flowed a frilly white overhang, and white lace pillowcases stood out glaringly against silky, hot pink covers with endless rose applicades. The walls were lined to the brim with shelves of delicate porcelain dolls staring blankly out from beneath bonnets and feathering black eyelashes.

Somehow, this was the worst one yet. “Why in the name of the Gods is this here?” Dorothea demanded.

“Would you rather sit in one of the other rooms?” Rhys asked, unbothered.

“Not, uh, not particularly…” The others were so real; this one, at least, flabbergasted her enough to make it more bearable.

“The stubborn ones sometimes rest in here after a session. It helps wear them down.”

What a nice way to put it. “I…can see how it would.”

“I don’t know how long we’re going to be stuck here. You might want to get comfortable.”

She followed suit as he sat against the door, keeping as far away from the bed and dolls as possible. “You say that like either of us actually could.” They had to remain vigilant. If they were found, there would be no end of trouble.

“Point.” They were still, so still as they listened, Dorothea with her head bowed towards her chest and gaze trained on her clasped hands, Rhys looking forward with his eyes narrowed in concentration.

It came less quickly than anticipated, the smash and crash of Sunmer’s destruction. Wesley was checking for survivors, Dorothea realized, whereas he hadn’t originally. Likely, in the first go-around, he’d seen them from his high vantage point while using his magic to vault in and had decided to strike regardless of the consequences. Now, he would witness the full extent of what she and Rhys had done beforehand.

Though she was aware of the passage of time minute by minute, it felt separate from them due to their position underground. When the destruction started, she only realized that she was jumping at the sounds when Rhys put a hand on her forearm. She looked up to meet his questioning gaze and nodded; she was fine. After she returned his concerned look, he nodded as well. His hand drifted down towards hers, and he linked their fingers tightly. It was for his sake as much as hers, she knew, a tethering would help them both. That exchange was all they needed, and they returned to listening, waiting.

After a particular eternity, the crashing and howling gales that alerted them to danger had faded. Still, they waited to be safe. With another shared glance and a nod, they agreed that Dorothea’s role in Sunmer’s retrieval was to begin. The very building they had hidden in had been destroyed. Rhys seemed to worry about being buried beneath the rubble for a few moments before remembering that it was of no consequence to Dorothea. He watched, marvelling, as pieces floated back to their original location in time’s rewind.

“I’d never thought you would have to waste your time on inanimate objects. Or that it would be possible, but that’s neither here nor there,” he muttered as they stepped into the ruins, bathed by a waning sunset. Almost eleven hours had passed since their departure from Sprignen that morning, but it felt like both minutes and years instead.

“It’s not a waste,” Dorothea replied, quiet. With the both of them alive, that was enough. Every brick, every dwelling down to the last splinter, it was all put back together to perfection. The watchtowers stood tall once again, flowers and trees creeping back into life. All of this healing, and she was to ignore the corpses. They had been sliced to ribbons by Wesley's magic. More than once, Dorothea’s boot came down on something soft, slippery and wet, and she swallowed down bile and self-revulsion while forcing herself not to look.

As reversing the time on objects without a life force was easier than those with, it took far longer than it had at the original battle at Sunmer for the same symptom of a nosebleed to appear. Though she tried to hide it from Rhys, he noticed when she ducked her face to her sleeve and kept it there. “Time to take a break,” he said grimly.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” She tried to sound confident, but exhaustion leaked through. Rhys remained silent, but she could feel his dissatisfaction emanating.

The nosebleed only got worse as they moved on, rising in its profusion as it gradually blended with dizziness. When the last scar in the ground had been closed, the last brick righted, Dorothea dropped down to sit with a gasp. It had been a long time since she’d had to do so much repair; not since a particularly savage snowstorm several years ago in Sirpo had so much displacement needed mending. Strange, to think of tending to her former home now.

Strange to think of being able to face them when she returned.