“Can you please tell us what all of this is about now, Reeve?” Walter stumbled and nearly fell onto the root-gnarled trail as he tried to keep up with his daughter, despite her having the added weight of the badger slung over one shoulder.

“That thing back there, it was a dragə.”

“A what now?” Walter said.

“You are certain?” Leaf said over her shoulder from her point position. The fallen elf’s fast stride was already flirting with transitioning to an outright run, and the question seemed to push her faster.

“Yes.” Reeve glanced back at her father, who was already falling behind again. “A dragon larva.” She gestured to her back and stopped, quickly squatted, and held the position just long enough for Walter to leap onto her. He rested his head on the shoulder opposite the honey badger. “Nyx found a huge honeycomb-like structure just south of where we crossed the stream. It was adhered to a treetop that’d broken and collapsed. She didn’t know what it was until she got back and saw the larva. The egg sacs might have taken a spill, but it apparently didn’t kill the larvae, because it looked to Nyx like all of the chambers were now hatched.”

“Chambers?” Dusk said. “How many?”

Reeve considered the mental image Nyx had shared. The white mass looked like a foam made of huge pores. A lot of pores. “Couple hundred?”

“There could be a couple hundred of those things in this wood?” Walter said loudly in Reeve’s ear.

She gritted her teeth. “Maybe not that many left, a lot of the weaker ones probably didn’t survive long enough to grow to that size, but, still, we need to get out of here fast. If they’re innately drawn to the smell of spilled dragon blood the way their parents are…”

“Or,” Leaf said, “if their parents smell the spilled blood of their kin…” Her already fast pace finally broke into a full run, and Reeve pushed herself to match.

“You think she’ll be OK?” Walter said quietly.

“I hope so. She’s tough. And honey badgers IRL are pretty resistant to venom. Hopefully, she is too.” The distance between Leaf and Reeve began to slowly widen, and Reeve made a mental note to work on her Stamina next time she leveled. “Well, good thing the twins hit it with a fire spell when they did. Could’ve been worse.” Reeve ran harder, shifting the naginata away from one of her father’s hanging legs as she followed the winding trail.

“That was me,” Walter said.

“What was you?”

“I hit it with my bee smoker.”

“You what?” Reeve frowned but didn’t try to turn to see her father’s face. “Really?”

“That’s why I had to go fish it out of the stream before we left.”

“I thought you just dropped it somehow.” She felt her father shake his head.

“Wow. That’s…well, that’s actually impressive.”

“Wurmslayer has renewed his claim to his title.” Dawn’s lilting voice floated up to Reeve, who grimaced lopsidedly.

“And I’m Level 3 now,” Walter said.

The path’s descent steepened as it joined a creek that begin cutting the earth into a gulley more pronounced with every footfall.

“Already spent your points?”

“Uh-huh.”

“More beekeeper-pyro?”

“It seems like I have a good thing going.”

Reeve mentally modified one of her favorite mantras, and repeated to herself several times, “I give my parents permission to make bad choices.”

Leaf slowed as the packed dirt path suddenly disappeared onto scattered, bouncy-ball-sized river rocks, the first of which the fallen elf leaped onto before skipping on to another and another. Reeve was careful to follow in her exact footsteps, finding it a challenge as the light, so bright only an hour earlier, seemed to dim with each leap.

“And, some more good news,” Walter said, “if Bunce can make it through—”

“Buns?”

“Bunce. The honey badger.”

“Why are you calling her Bunce now?”

“When I was naming her—”

“You can name her?”

“—yes, that’s part of the good news. Listen.” Walter cleared his throat. “With no concern to the risk of your own life, you have selflessly attempted to defend that of your non-anthophile Companion, who, if she survives her injuries, will dedicate herself to you in the way that you have dedicated yourself to her.”

Walter emitted a few small coughs, prompting Reeve to pause on a large rock and glance over her shoulder. “Are you crying?”

“It’s sweet, Honey.”

Reeve jumped to the next rock. “And you named her Bunce?”

“Well, not on purpose.”

“Of course.”

“I was trying to hang on to you and listen about the dragon lava, and when it gave me the option to name my companion, I tried to think of something related to honey, and I thought of a cereal I liked when I was a kid…I may have just rushed trying to tell the game what I meant, and…”

“Bunce.”

“Yes. Won’t let me change it now.”

“No, once you name a companion, that’s it.”

“I should also now be able to influence the behavior of bees.”

“Just need some bees.”

“Yes, just need some bees.”

Reeve jumped from stone to stone to stone, the walls of the gulley rising high around them.

“But,” Walter said, “the thing is that I still don’t really want to have anything to do with bees.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Reeve said. Keeping an eye on Leaf’s choice of landing points, she glanced up and saw that the rocks ahead were smaller and the slope of the terrain flatter. “Any sign of the dragə—the serpent things—behind?”

Walter turned. “No, just the twins.”

“They don’t count as serpents?” Reeve said.

“Evie!”

“I’m just kidding. They’re alright. Hold on, last big jump.” Reeve leaped to follow Leaf onto a gravely shelf, from which it looked like the path continued along the wall of the gulley.

“Quickly, now,” Leaf said. “Once on the other side of the ford we should be beyond the dragon’s summer territory and in safer land under the protection of Fellgrave.” She turned and resumed her light run.

Reeve pushed the badger farther up her shoulder and resumed her own, more encumbered run. “So, can you see more info in your Companion Log now?”

“Oh, right. Yes, it looks like Bunce is Unconscious and Poisoned. That doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s not. Can you see her health?”

“There’s a thingy but it looks empty.”

Reeve nodded. “That’s what I was afraid of. She may basically stay like this and eventually die, unless we can improve her condition with some sort of healing, at least that’s how it’d work for most player races…look, it’s the ford! Still no dragə?”

“Just the twins, who, I would remind you, have been very understanding about my little mishaps.”

“This is it.” Reeve slowed as she ran from the gravel onto finer sand. She stopped next to Leaf and Nyx, and the twins flanked them almost immediately, seemingly unwinded despite the pain in Reeve’s sides and the deep breaths she found herself taking. The creek they had followed was spreading wide as it ran toward the massive River Deiluyne, which lay before them. Upriver, its great flow emerged from between cliffs, the southern remnants of which the party had just descended by way of the gulley. On the opposite side, the river bank stretched into open plain. A league or more from the river, a haphazard array of moss-covered stones marked the site of some ancient ruin. Between Reeve’s party and that plain, the river ran shallow and more than a mile wide, its whitewater continuing downriver toward the low sun and disappearing after a few hundred yards over a drop of a height none but Leaf knew.

“Let us not tarry,” Leaf said. “The presence of the dragə, and their uncertain breed, is unsettling. We should put the river between us and them with haste.” She looked at Reeve. “You can suffer your burden yet? Though shallow on a half-orc, the current is swift and could carry a halfling toward the cataracts that lie downstream.”

“Yeah,” Reeve said, “we have some experience with that. I’m fine, let’s go.”

Leaf nodded and led the party forward into the river that began as water not even deep enough to cover the tiny stones around which it lay but quickly climbed their ankles, calves, and knees, coming to rest on Leaf’s and the twins’ upper thighs, just above Reeve’s knee, and high on Nyx’s chest. Though strong, the current was reliably steady, and they found the footing consistent, their progress slow but reassuring.

“L-lava! Draguh! Larva! Larva! No, larvae! Lots of larvae!”

Reeve stumbled as she tilted her head away from her father’s shouts. She didn’t look back, not wanting to risk a slip while turning with her two burdens. “How many?”

“All of them!”

Reeve shook her head. Plowing forward through the water, she called to Leaf, who had turned to assess the bank from which they’d come. “Bad?”

“Easily two score.” She waved Reeve and the twins forward.

“They at the water?”

“Just reaching it...“

“What?”

“They have stopped short, unwilling, it seems, to enter.”

“That one back in the woods didn’t seem worried about striking the honey—

“—Bunce!” Walter yelled, panic elevating the word.

“—Bunce. It struck right out over the water.”

“Perhaps the River Deiluyne is more intimidating than a small woodland stream.”

Reeve pushed on. They were a quarter of the way into a crossing that would likely take the better part of an hour, and she didn’t want to give a single dragə time to decide it fancied a swim.

The only sounds around them were those of water. Reeve had always enjoyed the deep whoosh created back in the days when she walked in the shallows at the beach or in a wading pool, and she fell into a rhythm, the music of the water muting the threat behind and creating a trancelike state. Her companions likewise trudged on, their thoughts their own.

After hundreds of measured steps, the waves on the water before Reeve darkened, and she looked to their left to find the sun disappearing below the horizon at the point of the river’s unseen plunge.

“We’ve still got a good hour before last light,” she said loudly, trying to overcome the noise all around them, “but we should get out of here quickly so we can find a safe spot and make camp.” More quietly, she said for the benefit of her father, “I remember how swimming in the Jacob’s pool at night was an exciting treat, but, in this world, I’ve never found a body of water you want to be in after dark.” She glanced up at the unobstructed sky that stretched around them in all directions. “I also want to find some sort of concealment in case the mama and papa dragons or the juveniles join the party.”

Leaf and Nyx stopped ahead of them and stood still as the current continued to flow past. Reeve received a sense of anxious uncertainty from Nyx.

“What is it?” Reeve said, approaching the two.

“The water…,” Leaf said.

Reeve and the twins reached the point where Leaf and Nyx stood. A stinging chill seeped into Reeve’s already cold leggings and boots. “It’s colder,” she said. “Way colder.”

“Could this part of the river be coming from a lower, colder part of the river upstream?” Walter said, having to imagine what the others were feeling from his dry perch on Reeve’s back.

Dawn raised her hands, cupped. “It’s not that kind of cold, Wurmslayer,” she said, turning to look upstream, then down.

Three figures in cloaks that blended almost perfectly with the whitewater rose from the river directly in front of the party, water shedding from them and leaving them dry as though they’d never been touched by it, their hands held in front of them in an odd position that reminded Reeve of someone playing an old console game but with an invisible controller. As Leaf drew her cudgel, Reeve raised her naginata and glanced over her shoulder to find the twins beginning to push spells forward, but she also saw three more of the cloaks behind them. Nyx sprang high out of the water toward the nearest figure at the same moment that all six of figures raised their hands above their hooded heads and then drove them down toward the river’s surface. The footing beneath Reeve gave way, and she plunged into bottomless water, the fading light of the sun immediately lost, her father and the honey badger stripped from her, the chill she felt deepening as her thoughts became muddled and then went entirely dark.