Night fell slowly. Riding with knights of Illikon on a mission reminded Caiden of marching with the Legion, but on horseback this time: a luxury he never had as an infantryman.

Even when day turned to evening, the knights refused to slow. They’d barely exchanged words during the entire ride, save for their brief introductions.

“Venatori,” the head knight had said the instant they’d met on the road, “we ride to Eloh, answering a call to take up arms against marauding beastmen. Perhaps the gods happened to put you here – yours is the exact aid we could use. Will you help us?”

All it’d taken was a nod from Caiden, and they were on the road again. Not much interrupted the steady, heavy beat of the hooves, the clanking of plate armor, or the lighter clinking of mail.

Caiden appreciated the relative silence. Relative for him, at least. It gave him a small chance to try blocking it all out again. Try and largely fail, but at least he didn’t have to focus on hearing someone’s voice through the din.

If he needed something else to focus on, he could always turn to the pain of his wounds. Riding so hard wasn’t something he had planned immediately after taking a beating from a werebear, but here he was. Gwen had already noticed, side-eying him through most of the ride – though she still didn’t say a word about the hints of pain she probably saw etching the lines deeper on his face.

Right now, she was more worried about what they were doing. Wasn’t hard to discern that, if only because she was so close to him.

It was hard to discern, however, almost anything else that might be going on. He was riding amidst a storm of emotions, of whispers, of hot and cold and so many thoughts it was maddening. Gwen, the knights, the horses…

It was getting worse.

And somewhere in that chaos that beat against him like a choppy sea battering down a stone, something roared for release. An angry inferno, chewing up everything around it, drowning out many of the other emotions with its sheer, restless noise. Somehow, it felt almost familiar – something he caught himself sympathizing with. And yet he was also sure he’d never known a feeling quite like this before. It wasn’t even like the berserker’s madness.

It felt worse. Stronger.

Finally, as the last glow of twilight began to fade, the knight heading the army halted his horse and shouted, “Hold!”

In an instant, just as well-trained as any Legion, the Illikon knights stopped. A few horses chewed at their bits, a few pawed at the earth, but none of them disobeyed.

The head knight, clad in a suit of heavy plate decorated in red dragons, turned to face them. He lifted the great helm from his head and put it on his saddle pommel.

“We make camp by the road tonight,” said the knight. “The horses need rest, as do we, if we are to be of any use assisting the people of Eloh.”

No one protested. The knights began to spread out, finally losing the impressive coordination they showed while riding, as everyone tried to find a good place to set up their own tents or lay out some bedrolls under the stars.

Caiden turned his horse away from the majority of the knights, who were generally clustering together to camp, and stopped a fair distance from all of them. Only then did he carefully dismount, trying not to agitate his already aching wounds any further, as if it mattered at this point.

Didn’t take long for Gwen to appear by his side, already off her horse and reaching for the bedroll on his saddle.

“Let me help,” she said, and Caiden didn’t feel like protesting, so he let her.

Once she helped him set up his meager camp, Gwen stood beside his bedroll and waited. Caiden gave her a look.

“What?” he said.

“Your wounds,” Gwen said, gesturing for him to sit. “We really need to tend to those. You’re bleeding, Caiden.”

He shifted in his armor, sticky and moist at the shoulders, then took a step toward the bedroll and sat as she’d indicated. But before she could even reach for any bandages from her pack, he pulled a potion from a strap at his hip and uncorked it.

“Caiden…” Gwen started, and Caiden threw her a look.

There was a reason, or so he’d been told, why Venatori didn’t often take what they simply called potions of regeneration. First, the ingredients came from monsters not often hunted and even less often actually killed.

Second, they didn’t always work. Not well, at least. Potions were hard enough on the body, but this kind was especially rough. The healing didn’t come easy: it was exhausting, painful, and mostly made of scar tissue – probably because no one had any business healing that fast.

Third, it made the person drinking it feel like shit, and it didn’t taste much better. Not that most potions were palatable.

And Caiden currently held one of those, uncorked and ready to drink. Gwen wore a frown and radiated prickling worry, and he huffed quietly.

“They wouldn’t give them to us if they didn’t work,” he said, and he threw the potion back before Gwen had a chance to protest.

It tasted terrible, which wasn’t too surprising, given its appearance of greenish muck – and its matching consistency, like oily sludge. But Caiden swallowed it without gagging, though he did shudder slightly in disgust before shoving the empty potion bottle back into his belt and immediately reaching for his canteen.

Beside him, Gwen knelt there with her face scrunched up like she was the one tasting it. “That must’ve been very gross.”

Caiden huffed. “Wasn’t so bad,” he said, despite that being only half true at best. “You drink other potions.”

“But that one is especially gross. It’s troll blood, Caiden. That’s the main ingredient. Even the herbs mixed in are some of the nastiest herbs I can think of, one isn’t really an herb, it’s a fungus, and…”

He side-eyed her and lifted a brow.

She snorted. “There’s just no grossing you out, is there?”

“Not like there’s much point now, I already drank the damn thing.”

“I hope it can heal you, then,” Gwen said, setting the bandages beside him. “You’re sure you don’t want my help?”

He nodded. “I’m fine. Go get some sleep.”

Gwen nodded right back, stood, and said quietly, “Good night, Caiden.”

Caiden glanced over his shoulder and watched her go, before looking at the little pile of bandages. She’d left him ointment too, and generally everything he needed to clean and dress his wounds. He frowned briefly and wondered if he should’ve sent her off like that.

But no. He was fine. He’d be fine, at least. Still, he started taking off his gear and peeling off his armor, giving the blood running freely down the back of one arm a quick scowl. He’d treat his wounds himself, then pretend to get some sleep. They still had a long ride ahead of them, and hopefully the regeneration potion would have the worst of his pains eliminated by the morning.

Turned out regeneration potions had aches of their own.

All through the night, every wound on his body – every break of his skin, every crack in his bones – hurt incredibly. A deep, throbbing kind of pain that not all the injuries called for. His skin twitched, felt almost like it twisted. More than once, as he tossed and turned pretending to sleep, he almost thought he felt his own flesh growing back. Mending together roughly, forcefully, no doubt leaving scars in its wake.

Between that and all the emotions coming off the knights, even as far away as they were, Caiden didn’t exactly get any rest. The knights were alive with memories, good and bad, with whispers of thoughts and feelings varying so wildly that Caiden, half-addled on exhaustion, couldn’t parse them well.

And always there remained an undertone, something powerful and unnamable that gnawed at the base of his mind and occasionally burnt all the other sensations away… rage. Bloodlust. Impatience.

Whatever it was, and to whomever it belonged, it almost felt inhuman.

When he awoke, a deep and unabating hunger wanted to eat away his stomach and something farther inside him, though he wasn’t sure what. Maybe it was from the potion he’d taken. He’d chalk it up to that for now.

So he got up, pulled on his gear while wolfing down his excuse for breakfast, and got on his horse. They still had a ways to ride. As he rejoined the knights, Gwen quickly found him. Her palomino horse trotted up with as much nervous energy as Gwen let off, doubling up the almost electric emotions in the air and making the hairs on Caiden’s arms rise.

“Good morning,” Gwen said as she approached, offering him a quick smile.

Caiden nodded. “Morning.”

She furrowed her brow and gave him a look, her smile dropping in a hurry. “Did you get any sleep?”

He huffed. “I’m fine.”

“Knights of Illikon!” the lead knight, who had previously introduced himself as Earl Warren Drake, shouted back at the lot of them. “Today, we reach Eloh – be prepared for battle, for we know not what we’ll find!”

With that, he wheeled his horse about face and set it off down the road east, toward Eloh. The other knights promptly fell into formation. One rider wearing a tall red crest passed just to Caiden’s left, bringing with him some fire coursing through his veins, rage following sharply and palpably in his wake.

What Caiden had felt the night before – it must have been him, whoever he was.

He didn’t get a good look at the knight before he mostly disappeared into the formation, though his blood-red horsehair helmet and bare shoulders remained visible among the other riders. Caiden squinted after him briefly before focusing on joining the formation, Gwen following along behind him.

The ride was a visually pleasant one, at least. Under the gaze of a clear blue sky, golden grasses brushed together gently and made only the faintest whisper of a soft rustling, all but inaudible over the rush of hooves and rattling of armor and weapons. Same way the smell of grass gave way under the heavier scents of horse and polished steel that clung around the army.

Those grasses stood all around them for leagues, with only a few sparse and lonely trees interrupting the vast Plains of Illikon. Underfoot, the horses trod along a tightly-packed road of dirt. No cobblestone here, no expensive stone lane to one side made for wheels of noble carriages and merchant carts, like back in the Heartland.

That continued for almost half the day.

When they reached Eloh, they found chaos waiting for them.

Smoke. It reached him suddenly, strong and caustic. Not too long after, buildings arose on the horizon. Straw-roofed homes, fenced-in farmlands…

Many of them on fire.

Shapes moved about in the distance. Riders on horseback, likely local knights, were heading for the chaos much like them. People were stumbling into every other direction, trying to get away from the fires.

And not just the fires, but the creatures amongst them that moved so much faster than any human could. They were tall, many of them hunched like angry animals, trailing long, bestial tails as they ducked and ran. It was a grotesque sight, and for a moment Caiden couldn’t help but stop and stare – trying to figure out just what he was seeing—

Beasts turned man or men turned beasts, half concealed by smoke rolling thick and dark from the fires, as if they had burst straight from an Achaean’s storybook – while it burned.

The plains rang with screams. Frantic. High-pitched or hoarse. Helpless.

Under him, Caiden felt his horse tense. Its ears flicked back in alarm, and it huffed in protest when his heel snapped back to drive it forward. Right along with the knights and their sturdy destriers – warhorses that, unlike Caiden’s steed, didn’t flinch at cries of pain and the smell of blood. But even they hesitated at the sight of these beast-men.

As they drew nearer, he thought he saw most of the beasts breaking off, their paths taking them through and away from the burning buildings. Away from the approaching knights. Were they fleeing?

No. Not fleeing, Caiden realized. They had simply gotten what they’d come for.

Carried under their arms, most of the monsters held struggling shapes – prisoners. Humans, the farmers who’d been living so peacefully before in these almost idyllic houses of simple straw and wood, their lives very literally going up in flames.

“After them!” shouted the head knight, Earl Warren Drake. Blades were drawn, metal ringing and flashing in the smoke-filtered sun.

Caiden didn’t draw his blade. Instead, he pulled the crossbow from his back and loaded it, hands quick and deft. Then, he picked his target.

A monster cut through the smoke not too far ahead of him, hunkered low but carrying one human under each arm like sacks of grain. It ran at a full sprint, away from the charging knights on horseback.

These monsters were fast, even running on two legs. Two long, loping, animalistic legs, ending in great clawed feet that seemed to hit the ground without a single noise, their light gait looking almost effortless. They could outrun a human on foot, but they didn’t seem able to outstrip a galloping horse.

Caiden steadily gained on the one he chased: a monster covered in a hide of thick, dark scales, with a ridge of spikes running along its spine…

It plunged into the chaos, ducking into the remains of a collapsing building and coming out the other side even as Caiden had to stop his horse and wheel it around past the smoldering home.

The smoke grew thicker, stinging his eyes and filling his lungs. Coughing, he pulled a portion of his long cloak over one shoulder and slung it around his neck, pulling it up over his nose and mouth.

The monster, however, disappeared.

It faded into the thick haze billowing from a nearby barn, until even its silhouette was gone. Didn’t leave a trace.

“Shit.”

Picking a direction that wasn’t backward, Caiden set off again, reins in one hand and crossbow in the other, couching the stock against his shoulder. Ready to fire the instant he saw the monster again.

He burst through the thickest smoke, emerging on the far side of it. Just in time to see the monster, running for a line of dark trees not too far away now. Just in time to take aim—

And just in time for a streak of black and red to rush headlong past him, blocking his shot.

That streak was a knight, the same one trailing red-hot rage in his wake. Now he leaned low over the neck of his black horse, a long spear in one hand. All at once, he flipped his grip on the spear in one quick twirl, took aim, and threw.

His javelin cut through the light veil of smoke still hanging around them—

To fly straight into a tree. It lodged there, the head stuck firmly in the bark, as the monster disappeared into the darkness of the trees seconds before the spear struck.

The heat coming off the knight, clad in a sleeveless breastplate and horsehair helmet like a hoplite, intensified to a quick burn that made Caiden’s grip on his crossbow tighten.

And the knight snarled only one crude word: “Malakas.”

All around them, the other knights arrived, bringing with them their currents and eddies of emotion. Mostly frustration, but none pulsed as powerful as the hoplite knight with his tall, blood-red crest.

“Hold!” shouted one of the many other riders, halting a good several feet from the edge of the strangely dark forest. His bright yellow tabard, adorned in a pair of equally as vibrant blue fish, stood out stark against the black trees.

Black, not like the poetically dark pines Caiden had heard of in Northrim, but black in color – an ashen, deep, grey-black. Unnatural, like the trees had been charred dead and twisted but stayed that way regardless. Black because something was wrong with them. So wrong, Caiden could feel it from here, standing on end every hair on the back of his neck.

“We will pursue them no further!” the knight taking charge continued. His finned great helm muffled his voice, but not enough to stop him from being heard, the way he was bellowing. “Turn back, return to Eloh, and stay the night as a show of my gratitude!”

“Like hell we won’t pursue them further!” shouted the knight with the red crest, the one who’d thrown the spear. “How many people did they take – a dozen? Two dozen?”

The commander turned his helmed head toward the upstart, glaring.

Caiden, at least, assumed this was their commander. Always hard to tell with knights. Noble blood tended to create ranks of its own, ones the military never could quite sort out. Arguing over lineage, how much land they held, how much gold they owned…

“Thomakos!”

Earl Warren Drake, the knight who’d headed the contingent Caiden and Gwen had ridden with, stopped his horse alongside the hoplite knight. The latter’s black steed pawed at the ground and snorted, sending off waves of restlessness not too far removed from its rider’s.

“What?” that knight said, rounding his horse on Warren next. “What does Marks even have to be so grateful about? What’d we even do here other than embarrass Illikon and whatever hole Marks considers his city?”

“Stay your tongue!” Warren snapped. “We rode for three days to reinforce Eloh and answer Earl Marks’s summons. He has much to be grateful for.”

“Indeed,” added Earl Marks, the knight in the yellow-and-blue fish heraldry. “The least I can do is offer hospitality for those willing to offer me aid.”

“We haven’t done any aiding,” Thomakos snapped right back, not even throwing Earl Marks so much as a glance. “We don’t deserve to sleep anywhere until those people are brought back to safety.”

“You will not disrespect my father in such a way, Drake!” a fourth knight shouted, voice cracking like he’d just come out of puberty. Which, with knights, maybe he had. “Earl Warren, I demand an apology!”

“Get bent, Cassian—”

“Thomakos!” Warren barked a second time.

Caiden sighed, as Gwen slowly walked her horse up alongside him and blinked at all the commotion. He glanced at her, and she looked back, confused. The knights kept up their back and forth, faster and louder than anyone could interrupt or get a word in edgewise, despite a few other knights joining the verbal fray.

It wasn’t often that Caiden felt his own emotions in quite the same way as he felt them from others. But a surge of heat seemed to fire up inside him, like bellows blowing a furnace – and his patience broke.

“Enough! All of you!” he shouted over the din of arguing, pulling out his Legion captain voice. “Earl Marks,” Caiden’s eyes cut to him, “if you’re in command, give the order. Follow them or don’t. We’re wasting time those people don’t have.”

More than a few sets of glares and curious looks locked onto him. He could feel them assessing him, wondering who he was, hot and cold with outrage, curiosity, or simple alarm.

But still more eyes turned to Earl Marks, who sat up straighter on his horse.

“I refuse,” he said, “to order knights into a cursed forest – and into a cursed swamp, infested with monsters – all to recover a few handfuls of peasants who aren’t worth the effort.”

With that, he turned his back on all of them, setting his horse off. “You are all welcome to join me in Eloh,” he called out to the general congregation of knights, “to rest before you return to Illikon…” He cast one last look in Caiden’s direction. “Or,” he added, “wherever it is you came from.”

The knights began to disperse then, most of them heading through the smoke to something they knew stood far off to the north: the city of Eloh, Caiden assumed. But he didn’t move, staring deep into that forest.

Earl Marks had called it cursed. Caiden didn’t know the Northwest, but if it was cursed, that would explain a lot.

It also didn’t make any difference. One way or another, he was going into those woods. Because that knight, Thomakos, was right. Those people needed to be saved. And if the knights wouldn’t do it, then, as usual, it fell to the Venatori.

“There goes the backup,” Gwen muttered.

But the Drakes weren’t finished.

Thomakos shot Earl Warren one last glare and growled, “I’m going after them, even if I have to go after them alone.”

He set his horse off at a gallop, charging right past all of them toward Eloh, leaving Warren in the dust. For his part, Earl Warren threw Caiden and Gwen a look – one that sent Caiden no small amount of frustration, though barely a spark in comparison to what Thomakos merely left behind in passing.

Warren said, “You have my thanks, Venatori. I apologize for wasting your time.”

He didn’t wait for, and apparently wasn’t hoping for, any kind of response. Caiden only had time enough to nod, and Warren was gone. Slowly, the tension in the air began to fade, leaving behind only the usual echoes. Gwen’s eyebrows seemed to be fixed too high on her face and had been that way for a while.

“Well,” she finally said. “That was… That was what knights are like, then.”

Caiden huffed.

“We’re going after those people, right?” Gwen asked.

“Yeah,” he said promptly. “But we don’t know the lay of the land here, and if that forest really is cursed, we shouldn’t go in blind. We need more information.”

“A guide?”

“No. A guide would be a liability. If the knights aren’t backing us up, we do this alone.”

Gwen paused. “Venatori aren’t supposed to bring in anyone else if they can help it, but…” she glanced again at the heavy darkness looming beyond the forest’s perimeter, “this seems like an exceptional case.”

“Maybe. If you want someone following us around, fine. Just make sure they stay outta my way.”

He directed his horse back toward that smoke, the way all the knights had picked. Gwen stayed alongside him, wearing a frown.

“Not everyone is like the people who provoked that werebear, Caiden.”

He grunted. And thought again about the word ‘cursed,’ about how everyone, including Gwen, had used it, and would still use it. Even in relation to him, if any of them found out the truth. He didn’t have much doubt about that.

Who’d be the ‘monster’ then?

“You know that,” she added at length. “I know you do. If you didn’t think people deserved being protected, you wouldn’t have stayed a soldier for so long or signed up with the Venatori to begin with.”

Yeah. He knew she was right.

But he only said, “I don’t want them causing us trouble… Or getting more people killed.”

Gwen nodded. “Fair enough. But we really need information, at least. And if I’m not mistaken, that knight with the red crest would be happy to share it with us, if we can find him.”

Eloh rested so close to the foot of the mountains that everything gently sloped downward to the Plains of Illikon, so riding through the gates was going uphill, toward the more interesting parts of the city.

Not that much in this city interested Caiden. Like every other, people milled to and fro, too often getting in the way of the horses. And like every other, it was loud. Annoying. Voices, feelings, something like hands reaching for him. Flashes and catches of memories that weren’t his. Caiden took a breath and tried to block it all out – as usual.

But still they came knocking, kicking down any walls he tried to put up. And he thought again: it was getting harder. It was getting worse.

They entered a market full of sights and sounds. Colorful fruit and vegetables, the crops of bountiful harvests, among other things – crafts and especially things made from stones and jewels, some of them expensive and plenty of them cheap. All of which seemed to interest Gwen, but Caiden focused on looking for Thomakos’s blood red crest or breastplate, and he didn’t see it anywhere among all the merchants hawking their goods and the various store windows staring back at him.

Then he felt it – or what was left of it. An echo of what was here before: burning hot frustration, stronger than any he’d felt other than his own. Furrowing his brow and feeling too much like a dog on a scent trail, he glanced back at Gwen and nodded for her to follow, which she did without word or question.

It took him to an inn with a golden pickaxe on the sign he couldn’t otherwise read. Caiden gave it one cursory glance before dismounting, hitching the horse and silently leading the way inside.

“Guess this is as good a place to look as any,” Gwen commented from behind him.

The inn was crowded this time of day, especially with so much of interest happening outside the walls. Gossip bounced off every corner of the place: conversations about beasts walking upright, people cursing them, people blaming other monsters, people blaming demons—

And, off to one corner, that knight from before sitting at a table with his arm around the neck of some little… Was she an elf?

The hood on her head rested cocked to one side, like she’d stopped caring about having it on straight – or else Thomakos did the job of knocking it askew for her, from the way he leaned so far into her personal space. Not that she seemed to be discouraging it.

Still, that hood now let a long, pointed ear stick up and draw more than a few eyes. Thomakos, on the other hand, already has his crested helmet off and sitting in front of him on the table.

“It means ‘dragon,’” he was telling her as Caiden and Gwen drew nearer.

“It also means ‘duck,’” the elf replied, with an accent thick, melodic, and not like one Caiden had ever heard in his travels across the Achaean Empire.

Not that he’d ever met an elf.

“Uh-huuhh, sure, but I’m named after the dragon. I’ve got dragon blood.”

“So you mentioned.”

Caiden neared the table. Thomakos turned up his head of short, spiky dark hair and fixed both the Venatori with a stare made of green and gold. Or something more savage than gold, his eyes flecked with animal-yellow sparks like fire.

The moment the knight’s eyes met his, they threatened to stoke a flame in Caiden’s soul he always fought to keep contained. Behind those eyes burned bloodlust and rage so powerful it called to Caiden’s own and howled for it to come out of its cage.

Something about this man was very wrong – it was what he felt earlier, on the road. And yet he didn’t seem to act like it. Not at all.

He acted like what he was: a teenager. He was just a kid. Maybe trying to get his help wasn’t such a good idea after all. He couldn’t possibly be much older than seventeen, maybe eighteen…

“So you got dragon blood…” the elf said thoughtfully, then looked up and seemed to correct, “But he’s taller.”

Blinking, Thomakos broke his gaze locked with Caiden’s to throw her a look. Thomakos’s fury faded, replaced with an almost overwhelming self-confidence and pride, tempered only by incredible concern. Most likely for those civilians he surely still wanted to save.

“Do what now?” he said, eyes on the elf.

“You’re short, eh?”

“I am not short, thanks. Pretty sure I’m a lot taller than every single knight I rode with.”

“Shorter than him,” she nodded toward Caiden. That earned a quiet giggle from Gwen, who promptly cleared her throat and tried to look as serious as possible.

“Knight,” Caiden said, getting Thomakos’s attention again. Which seemed easy to do, though not easy to necessarily hold, “earlier you said you were going after those civilians.”

That finally got Thomakos to look focused. “That’s right,” he said, and his tone changed entirely. Some people hid their emotions and made it hard for anyone other than Caiden to know just what they were thinking, wanting, or feeling. That wasn’t the case here. The determination that Thomakos let off like smoke from a high flame now also weighted his voice.

With that, he stood, that same pride stoking his flame ever higher. And he shook Caiden’s hand, all while again looking him square in the eye.

“Tom Drake, Dragon-Blooded, squire of Illikon,” he said.

“Caiden Voros of Redfield.”

He wasn’t as tall as Caiden, it was true. Maybe by just less than a head. Then again, that was actually impressive, considering Caiden had never met someone near his height. Most likely, this Tom Drake had more than a little Nordling blood in him despite that almost eagle-like, Imperial nose and bronzed skin giving away noble Heartland heritage – and plenty of time spent under the Northwest’s blazing sun.

Caiden threw the elf, who sat there watching, a quick look. He turned back to Tom and said, “We need to talk. Alone.”

Tom quirked a brow, but he nodded, so Caiden turned and led him a few paces off, toward a fairly secluded corner of the tavern. As secluded as one could manage in a place this crowded, at least.

Once he was reasonably satisfied with the attempt at privacy, Caiden turned to face Tom again and folded his arms. Tom tilted his head very far to the left.

“I need your word as a knight,” Caiden said, “that you won’t try to give us orders and expect us to follow them.”

Tom then tilted his head the other way, and it looked fairly ridiculous.

“Why would I do that?” he asked, almost flatly. Before Caiden could answer, he said, “Let me guess: you think I’m like all the other Imperial nobles out there. Or, well, most of them, or at least ‘a lot.’ I get that. But I’m not here to tell you guys what to do or how to do it.”

Caiden grunted. After a moment, he said, “Good. Then I need your word for something else.”

“Yeah?”

This knight didn’t hesitate. He didn’t withhold any emotions – no festering frustration or dislike, no resentment, nothing to hide. Caiden didn’t exactly think of himself as being able to detect lies, but he’d pretty much learned how. And, right now, there was nothing to make him think this Tom Drake would go back on his word.

“I need you to listen to us,” Caiden finished. “We’re not fighting enemy soldiers, bandits, or some other mob. These are monsters.”

Tom nodded. “So let you take point and listen to what you say. Sure, I got it. Is that it?”

“No,” Caiden said, before jabbing his chin in the direction of the elf and having Tom glance back at her. “What about her? Who is she?”

“Oh, her? She’s, ah… Well, I found her hanging around – total stroke of luck, really – and she’s agreed to navigate me through the Shadowvale. She’s from there. She’s like a nymph or something.”

Caiden huffed. “She’s an elf.”

“Yeah, one of those. Same thing – I mean, a lot Imperials call them nymphs. They do in the stories, or at least a bunch of scholars say they’re the same thing. Anyway, they say bad things about elves, but they say a lot of things, right? She doesn’t seem so bad…”

“We can’t trust her.”

“Okay, maybe not, but she’ll at least get us through the forest—”

When Caiden threw another look in the elf’s direction, however, she was gone. At least, until she appeared in the corner of his eye, standing just to his left, and she stuck a hand out at him.

In all fairness, Tom wasn’t short at all, several inches taller than most Imperials. But this elf was. Standing in front of Caiden as he turned, she didn’t even reach the base of his sternum. Not that it was stopping her from craning her neck straight up at him, amber eyes meeting his.

Heat flared in him, instant and irritating. Caiden wasn’t sure he appreciated the presence of either of these people.

“Ceri Meadowlark. Since we elves have good ears and I heard you two jabbering about elves and nymphs, thought I’d introduce myself,” she said, redirecting her handshake offer up directly toward his nose. “Your talk made my ears itch. Nose burn? What’s it you Achaeans say?”

Gwen cleared her throat as she moseyed over too; even she all but towered over the wood elf. “Sorry, Caiden. I lost sight of her in a hurry.”

“It’s fine,” Caiden said, shaking the elf’s hand while hearing Tom then introduce himself to Gwen in an overly eloquent manner. The instant his bare fingers touched Ceri’s, though, she slipped her hand away from his in something like alarm, letting out a low hiss.

But she only blurted, “I take it back, you might accidentally crush my hand and I like my hands.”

“I like your hands too,” Tom put in with a wink, and Ceri gave him back a smirk. Gwen promptly blushed at the mere comment that wasn’t even directed at her.

Caiden folded his arms.

“We’re going after those captured farmers,” he said, giving Tom a look, “but we don’t know the lay of the land here. If you can tell us about that forest and whatever you know about the swamp, we can get those people back.”

“Sure, I can tell you,” Tom replied with a shrug. “But I’m coming too. And so is Ceri, since she’s already agreed she’ll be my guide through all that stuff you just mentioned.”

Ceri attempted a salute, done improperly in more ways than one. Caiden looked at her: a little elf wearing simple leather clothes and gear, a bow, a quiver, and a lopsided hood she still hadn’t bothered fixing in any particular way. If she guided them as carefully as she maintained her mismatched bits of armor, they’d be lost within, optimistically, two hours.

Right.

Ceri busily glanced Caiden up and down. “So, are you a proper knight? Not like Squire Drake?”

“Hey, whoa whoa, I’m going to be a ‘proper knight…’”

Caiden kept his gaze on Ceri and answered, “No.”

“Oh.” She shrugged. “You look like a knight, but I suppose you aren’t shiny enough.”

“He’s missing heraldry too,” Gwen added.

“What’s that?”

Tom jabbed a thumb at his chest, the pectorals of his breastplate decorated in the golden crown of the Empire held aloft by a pair of red dragons. “All the colorful symbols the knights wear.”

“Neat.” Ceri turned right back to Caiden. “So, Sir Redfield, when do we leave?”

Tom and Gwen exuded about the same amount of annoyance then – a frustration with someone as foreign as an elf who didn’t bother respecting Imperial ranks. Or seem to know how knight titles even worked.

In spite of himself, Caiden snorted.

“Technically he’s from Redfield…” Gwen commented.

“Redfield, Voros—”

“Caiden,” he corrected.

“Sure, Voros. When are we leaving?”

These two made a good pair. Both annoying and restless as hell. Caiden had felt this before, but usually he’d been around unruly horses chomping at the bit.

But all Caiden said was, “Soon.”

He turned and made his way through the other patrons, toward the bar. All three of them – Gwen, Tom, and Ceri – trailed along after him like a trio of ducklings.

Caiden furrowed his brow as the thought all but butted its way into his head, feeling foreign, like all the emotions in this room. Since when did he think about ducklings? When was the last time he had even seen a duckling?

That same instant, Ceri said behind him, “Duck?”

Caiden rumbled low in frustration. Getting worse, he reminded himself.

“Ceri, let’s try again, huh? Tom. Drake. No ducks in here at all.”

Just ignore them. Caiden set his jaw and took a seat at the bar, ordered himself some food and two drinks, and dropped the coins on the countertop. Trying to block out all the yammering behind him that moved up on either side, like he tried to block out all the impatience. The fire. The whispers. The pulling at him – and the restlessness inside him wanting to pull something in.

What the hell was with that?

So he had to ignore it. Like usual. No matter how new some of these feelings were.

He did ignore it, too, at least until Ceri leaned far forward into the corner of his vision, staring at him, and the hunger in him got worse. “We’re waiting for you to eat before we go do the desperate heroics?”

“You know, you said it yourself, buddy,” Tom said, appearing by Ceri’s side, just a little farther down the line. “Every minute we waste is another minute those people lose.”

Gwen, meanwhile, quietly sat down and started re-counting her arrows, separating the silver-headed ones, with their white instead of blue fletching. She exuded a quiet sort of amusement, a smile playing on her lips when she threw Caiden a look as a plate of food was set under his nose.

Surprisingly, Tom actually noticed and said to her, “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing, not really,” she replied with an innocent shrug. “Only you two. It won’t take him that long to eat.”

“Did you look at all that food? Most people don’t eat that much food.” Tom frowned. “Usually. Sometimes.”

They kept talking, all three of them. Tom sidled over and around to Caiden’s other side, to sit alongside Gwen – and Caiden tried to ignore it, like he tried to ignore everything right now except his food.

He cleaned the plate, swallowed the last drop of ale, and gave his crossbow a quick inspection. The others were still talking when he stood and jerked his head toward the door.

“C’mon,” he ordered.

As he led the way out, Tom appeared alongside him, putting that red-crested horsehair helmet on again as he walked. Closer to it as he was now, Caiden could discern its every detail: most importantly, how the cheek-guards and entire front of the helmet looked like red dragon wings and the nose-guard was a golden dragon head.

Then there were red dragons on his gauntlets, red dragons on his boots… Someone was certainly preoccupied.

“So who called the Venatori all the way up here?” Tom asked. Not without respect, though. No sarcasm, annoyance, or disgust came off him or his tone, unlike what Caiden so often felt when someone brought up the Empire’s monster hunters.

“No one did. Not for this, anyway.” Caiden felt an itch at his back and glanced over his shoulder to see Ceri padding along behind him, staring without shame, while Gwen gave her side-eyes.

Caiden’s scowl etched itself a little deeper.

“Why, then?” Tom said. “You just happened to be here or what?”

“Sort of,” Caiden said. “We were summoned up to Gryphon’s Roost over a confrontation with a berserker, and we were heading south again when we met you on the road.”

“Lucky me, huh?”

Caiden grunted.

“You’re really set on helping these people, right? Not like Marks and the others?”

That made Caiden pause and throw Tom a look. “You’re asking me if I’d cut and run.”

Tom shrugged. “I mean, hey, you saw those things running around out there in the smoke. It’s enough to scare most people out of their minds.” He paused. “Not that you look like much would scare you in the first place, but still, can you blame me?”

“No. But we won’t. You’ve got my word on that.”

Instead of speaking, for once, Tom only nodded. Caiden might’ve had half a mind to ask him the same question, but with this knight, there was too much rage. Too much bravery and pride. If there was one thing Tom wasn’t, it was a coward, and he made that plain every second he walked alongside him, burning blindingly and deafeningly.

Caiden wished he didn’t know that, and that he did have to ask if Tom would hold his own. But he didn’t. Maybe he should have, just to keep up appearances, but appearances didn’t much concern him.

“Fighting monsters is what we do,” Gwen put in.

“Not me, I might cut and run,” Ceri added from the back. And when Caiden threw her a look, she batted her eyes and offered a smile. Then added, “I’m breaking my neck trying to look you in the eye, Vorosfield. No one’s got a right to be that tall.”

Caiden grunted.

“’Course you all know we’re on foot once we reach the forest,” she continued. “Not like there’s a convenient horse hitch while you romp off for heroics in the middle of monster-infested swamps. Not if you want a horse to come back to, anyway.”

“Right.”

“I bet Ghost could get me through there,” Tom said, “but sure.”

Gwen frowned. “I wouldn’t want to risk my horse. I don’t exactly have four more back at a stable…”

“Hey hey,” Tom cut in, “don’t do the whole ‘nobles are jerks’ thing with me, I’m not one of those guys. If I was, I wouldn’t be out here. I’d be sitting around right now feeling good about riding around pretending to help people, like Cassian Marks is doing.”

Caiden set his jaw and tried to block out all the talking. Again.

Though he did catch Ceri whispering not-so-quietly to Tom, “He’s taller but his ears are bigger and poke out.”

With a huff, Caiden elbowed behind him and narrowly missed Ceri, which set her to snickering.

“Just comparing,” she said. “It’s alright, though, Drake’s got a big ol’ nose.”

Tom sputtered. “Do not? This is an Imperial nose, it’s a sign of nobility and dragon blood and—”

Caiden pinched the bridge of his own nose, and Gwen carefully patted his arm very briefly before retracting her hand like she realized what she’d just done and somehow it was forbidden.

This was going to be a long trip.