Walter rose, tucking the red cloth away in his waistband so he could grasp the hilts of his blades where they hung in their sheaths.

“Not those,” Reeve said. “Try your smoker.”

At the mention of the device, a low hiss came from the mouth of the cave, and both Walter and Reeve turned slowly to see the honey badger, still staring into the night, but barring its teeth in Walter’s direction.

“So…,” Reeve said, “…let’s make sure you don’t practice near her.” Reeve waver her father farther into the cave.

“You need not the sigil for this?” Dusk said.

“No, thanks,” Reeve said, indicating the egg she held between her finger and thumb.

Dusk nodded and, rising to her knees, held her palms toward the still floating sigil and then pulled them back toward her, rotating them inward to face her chest. The sigil faded, and Dusk shivered as through in pleasure.

“What was that?” Reeve said.

“If a persistent spell has not reached its maximum duration and dwindled, it can be withdrawn and some of its mana reabsorbed.”

“Good to know.” Reeve turned and joined Walter where he waited away from the others.

Thrown by Dawn’s still bright fire, Reeve watched a silhouette of her half-orc and her father’s halfling play against the cave ceiling as it sloped away from them down into darkness “Don’t go any farther back,” she said to her father. “You might have enough clearance, but I wouldn’t.”

Walter nodded and moved back a few steps toward the front of the cave.

“We’ll be quick, ‘cause we should all get some sleep stat. You ready?”

“Should I get the bee smoker out first?”

“No, let’s try it straight out of Inventory. You seem to do well with that. We can experiment with having it out first another time.”

“OK.”

“One sec.” Reeve retrieved her naginata from the high stone shelf. “If you have any trouble, I’ll take care of it, and we’ll try again.”

“That sounds good.”

“Ready?”

Walter, not comfortable voicing his assessment of that point, did not respond.

Reeve lofted the egg deeper into the cave, where it stuck, underwent its shockingly violent metamorphosis, and, as a Giant Wolf Spiderling, charged the cowering halfling.

Despite his best intentions, Walter instinctively began to take a step back but found a firm hand pressed between his shoulder blades.

“You got this!” Reeve said loudly from where she towered above him.

Walter reached into his hammerspace and flung forward the bee smoker which, as soon as it left his hand, developed a comet tail of white flame as it flew, straight and true, into the head of the oncoming spiderling. With a deafening metallic clang, the bee smoker impacted the spiderling and fire exploded around the creature like a net of flame, enveloping all but the tips of its legs. Walter shielded his eyes from the flaring light and heat, which quickly extinguished, leaving a scattering of black ash, a few spider parts Walter could not name, and a loot bag.

Walter looked up and over his shoulder. Reeve was staring down at him.

“Pyromaniac, huh?” She said.

Walter shrugged his shoulders. “I, um, did not anticipate that.”

“I doubt the devs anticipated that. They probably haven’t gotten around to testing the beekeeper-pyro build.”

“We going to do another?”

“Let’s stop while we’re ahead.”

They both nodded in unison.

Reeve looked past her father for a moment as she received a series of mental impressions from Nyx.

“Dad, get the smoker. I’m gonna figure out what Nyx and the honey badger are smelling.” She turned and walked toward the cave mouth, gesturing as she went for the twins and Leaf to join her. Reaching Nyx, Reeve squatted and lay a hand on the cheetah’s tensed back as the great cat looked into the night and twitched her nose side to side.

“Something nears?” Leaf said quietly, squatting next to Reeve as the twins arrived to stand behind them.

“She smells something. She hasn’t smelled it before, not in the wild, but she detected it on us when she rejoined us outside Werfendale. The smell’s been growing for the last little while. The honey badger seems to smell it too, though I can’t communicate with her to confirm.”

Reeve, Leaf, and the twins peered through the rivulets running down Dawn’s shield into inky darkness still frequently interrupted by lightning and the explosive cracks of thunder that followed. The flashes illuminated only streaking rain and tall grass leaning first one way then the other in the tearing wind.

Away from the cave mouth and the concerns of his companions, Walter stooped and picked up the loot bag he’d just earned, the first, he realized, that he’d achieved through deliberate action. Mostly deliberate actions, he acknowledged. “Not too shabby,” he said to himself and smiled.

Holding the bag in one hand, he walked farther back, looking for the bee smoker, which he’d lost sight of when the spiderling had been engulfed in flame. He figured it must’ve just bounced off the spiderling’s head and landed a little farther back.

Almost to the point where he’d need to stoop to clear the slanting ceiling, Walter caught sight of the bee smoker ahead of him as it emitted a soft glow, illuminating its immediate vicinity.

“Well, hello little guys,” Walter said to the tiny person holding the bee smoker and to the dozen or two of its fellows who stood around it. “Cute like the one that shot me with a bow, but no wings, I like that.” Walter chuckled, encouraged both by being bigger than the little guys and by their apparently reverential silence. Maybe they were overcome by his Charisma, like Reeve was always talking about? He shook his head. “My wife, Wanda, she’d call you ‘little darlings.’”

Walter began to chuckle again, but the chuckle was cut short as the creature holding the bee smoker pointed at him with a shaking hand and said quietly in a high voice choked with rage, “Wanda? The twiceling that calls herself Wanda?”

Walter scratched his bushy hair. “Well, I’m not sure what a twiceling—”

“It wasn’t enough for you to slaughter our brothers in Werfendale—“

“We did just come from Vurbenfale, but—“

“—you had to track Golson, the lone survivor, back to our home, so that you could carry on—“

“Look, I’m not sure—“

“He has Golson’s hat!” A horrified voice said from Walter’s right. “That must be how they tracked him here.”

Confused, Walter’s free hand flew to his head, then he saw an accusing finger leveled at his waist. “Oh, this.” He pulled the piece of cloth from his waist belt. “No, I just found this over there, I think Dusk must’ve stepped on it.”

“From Golson’s tale of terror, that was just the beginning of what your party of savages stepped on,” the smoker-holding creature said, his fury reducing his words to a tiny whisper. “And for that, and all your crimes against gnomedom, you must pay.”

Dozens of tiny rapiers glinted red in the dim firelight.