Anastacia woke up sweaty and exhausted. The events outside Crescent had been playing out in her dreams again and again, forcing her to realize that if she hadn’t been such a shit, Alizarin would definitely be alive and they would have made it to Valor safely. If this all was a dream, when would it end? Everything being real still felt like a somewhat remote idea, but maybe it was just because she didn’t want to face what she had caused.

The king was still sitting in front of the nest, unmoving.

Anastacia tried waving her hand in front of the simulacrum’s “face”, but got no reaction.

“Uh… Good morning? Do you happen to have any old clothes laying around? These are not going to dry properly within the next decade.” She asked half-jokingly. “Anything but black, if possible.”

The king stood up and left. Some goblins ran after him for whatever reason, they probably didn’t know either.

Anastacia considered taking this chance to sneak out, but thinking twice, it’s not like being here was terrible. The forest king was trying his best to make her comfortable and unlike the last time, the number of goblins seemed manageable. Maybe this was Sylvia’s endgame for Anastacia? Make her live forever in the forest with a simulacrum and a few goblins. She still didn’t understand why Alizarin had to die though.

The king came back, carrying a folded pile of clothing. Most of it was tattered and old looking, but at least they were clean and dry. They were well tailored and even had some golden patterning on them.

“These are elven. Where’d you get old elven clothes from? Is there a village nearby?” She asked, before realizing that there wasn’t going to be an answer. “Gobby! Where are you?”

A goblin appeared from the undergrowth nearby. It had mud on its face but there was a chance that it was the same Gobby Anastacia had named before. It ran towards the necromancer as fast as it could and stopped by falling over.

“Queen call! Gobby serve!” It screeched happily.

“yeah… I was just wondering if there was an elf village nearby?” Anastacia asked, speaking as slowly as she could so the critter would actually understand the question.

“No village, But dead elves. Fought forest king, long ago! No match for forest king! But kill prince…” The creature explained seriously. “But king has queen! Make prince anew!”

After its story, Gobby just stared at Anastacia for a while. At first, she assumed it was just doing goblin things, but then she remembered the weird custom of giving away pebbles. She still had the one Gobby had given her after getting a name. When she presented it to the creature, it began to screech cheerily before grabbing it and running off. Presumably to eat some more mud.

After changing into the clothes, that were apparently salvaged from dead elves, she took a walk to see the surroundings. Wherever she went, the king followed.

“Look, I’m not going to run away now. You don’t have to follow me!” She shouted and pushed the simulacrum away.

The forest king stopped following her, but that made Anastacia feel kind of bad for it. She knew that the simulacra were just cold, unfeeling machines but the king hadn’t done anything wrong. He was probably just doing whatever he was meant to do ever since he emerged from the machine fortress where he was built.

There was an abundance of wild life around, and almost all of it had been tamed to let Anastacia pet them. Some wild boars were a bit on edge because the goblins occasionally tried to ride them, but none of them acted hostile towards her.

She found some more pools of water, they were just as clear as the one she had bathed in and the animals drank from them, so they must have been clean.

Sitting at the edge of one and soaking her sore feet in it felt amazing after a couple of days of walking around without boots. She started to think living in the forest wouldn’t be too bad after all.

Something stepped on a branch behind her. At first, she assumed it was a goblin or the forest king, but quickly realized that it was something living, and much larger than a goblin.

She slowly got up and turned around. Between the trees stood a troll, it was slightly larger than gilbert and clearly not happy. Baring it teeth at Anastacia, it growled and began its charge.

Anastacia screamed and ran as fast as she could. The troll moved far too quickly to be killed with necromancy, and Anastacia didn’t have her daggers with her in the forest. Gilbert could have stopped the beast on it's tracks, but he wasn’t there to save Anastacia. Emilia could have distracted it long enough for Anastacia to kill it, but Emilia wasn’t there either. There was nothing Anastacia could do alone.

To Anastacia’s luck, the forest king had heard her scream, and was now charging towards the troll. The two collided with a crunch as the king’s shoulder crushed the beast’s ribcage. As the troll backed off to cough up blood, it swung its arm at the king, shattering his already cracked stone shoulder plate. The simulacrum responded by grabbing the trolls arm and pulling the towards himself from it, while simultaneously punching it in the throat. As the troll fell over, it let out a scream that was one of the worst sounds Anastacia had ever heard. She snapped its neck out of pity before the forest king had to just beat it to death. The simulacrum didn’t seem to understand what had happened, and kept staring at Anastacia.

Suddenly a horde of goblins appeared out of nowhere, armed with sticks, stones and even a small beehive, they began to rush the dead troll and seemed to be trying to kill it again.

“The queen in danger! Goblin protect!” They screamed while being stung by angry bees.

Anastacia decided to leave before she got stung too, and the king followed.

“You must be confused. I’m a necromancer. You know what those are, right?” She said, still somehow expecting to get an answer. “Uh… I’ll just show you later, okay?”

The king followed her silently.

Anastacia sat down on her bed, and sighed. What was supposed to be a nice little walk around the area, somehow turned into a fight. She looked at the simulacrum’s shoulder. The hit had broken off most of the surface material, revealing a ball joint that was covered in similar light patterns as the walls had inside the machine fortress.

“We need to cover that up with something, it looks important. I’m not really a crafty person, but I can probably fashion a guard from some bone or whatever.” She said as she scraped off some of the moss growing on the king’s arm. “I may not be able to help you with the whole making a new prince deal because that’s just not how things work, but I can fix up your shoulder as thanks for saving me back there.”

The necromancer ate some of the leftover honey while talking to the simulacrum about what had happened before she ended up in the forest, how she wasn’t sure whether she was insane or not and about the whole deal with the evil necromancers trying to drag her back to Mournvalley. The king simply sat there, like he was waiting for something. As she ran out of honey and needed something else to do while talking, she began scraping more moss off the forest king.

“You’re a good listener, did you know that? It’s a rare quality these days. By the way, is it weird that I’m doing this? It’s not like horribly inappropriate or anything?” Anastacia blabbered.

At some point the goblins returned, victorious over their already dead foe.

“Queen escape safe? Not hurt?” One of them stopped by to ask.

Anastacia nodded and the creature ran off, screeching happily.

While Anastacia continued to talk to the king, more and more goblins started to gather around them. Eventually the whole tribe was present.

Gobby, who had now gained some sort of higher role in the tribe’s hierarchy, came to them.

“We sorry to interrupt quality time, but goblin have present for queen!” It said and gave Anastacia a stick that had been dyed with blueberries and stabbed through a moldy loaf of bread. “We give queen holy bread stick. Great goblin treasure!”