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George, Elena, and Sella
Written from April 11, 2026 to May 22, 2026, 42 days

Chapter 1
George sat on a log and looked around, his arms folded across his chest. One eye opened and peeked at the group of people across the well-stocked stream, his and their boots caked with mud. They huddled around a pink goblin. Right as he was about to shut his eyes for the next several minutes straight, one of them swung around, waving him over. With arms still folded, he stood up, strode across the stream, coming up beside them, and looked between them toward the goblin lying in shackles. “What?” he asked with his gruff grunt of a voice.
Melly made a circle with his finger. “Try using [Identify Core].” His voice stiffened one word after another, testing the dimensions and soundness of each before committing to them fully.
George clasped his hands together, and a burst of particles erupted from his closed palms. It smothered the goblin briefly, fanned out, and vanished.
A blue screen appeared in front of him, which he made copies of, and he swiped them left and right to the others by sweeping his finger around many times. The others leaned into the screens they got and used two fingers to pinch-zoom in on the labels and numbers on the left of a spinning textured black orb with the words “Pink Goblin” over it.
“Interesting,” said Rayla, standing on George’s right, her voice soft like dew in a spring morning, but with a slight roughness like a weathered outcrop drenched in tender grass.
“Well, Rick will take care of this?” said the man crouching directly across from Rayla inside the huddle. 
His and George’s eyes darted to Sella, the one on Rayla’s right. 
She twitched her brows up.
The huddle broke, and the people went their separate ways. Melly and George sat back down on the log. Thorn stood nearby on their side of the stream, head wandering.
George drew his hands behind him, planted them on the log, and leaned back.
Melly crossed his legs, turned his head aside, and gazed off into the distance, stroking his right fingers together.
The goblin was heaving and rattling the chain, drawing the manacle tight against its reddened wrist. Its throat rasped with the strain and drove out guttural groans. Upon going limp, it lay with eyes closed as if dead, like resting cattle.
Its ears twitched often against the mosquitoes. 
Its face was straining.
From across the stream, George pursed his lips, twsisting them into different shapes. He sometimes pushed air out while saying “Pf” like a drum beat. On the left side, Melly hummed drinking songs at a different pace. Farther down his left beside the swishing water, Thorn clapped with the timing of hanging rainwater before it dropped off eaves.
Once the goblin went completely still, its breathing sedimented into a soft murmur. 
A few ants crept across its relaxed hands on the ground like eon-battered dragon bones. Its slightly curled fingers rose like the dragon’s gritty ribs in faint, gassy mist.
To the goblin’s left ran the stream that murmured through an expanding dell. Its low hum snapped whenever Thorn clapped, while the mountains hung far and muted in the haze of clouds.
George sprang to his feet. “I’m hungry! Let’s go eat!” With hands on his hips, he swaggered away, his voice trailing off. “I’m starving…!”
The pair left at their own pace and followed him down the trail home. 
In the city, the door of a tavern hung open. Worn-faced men carrying bulging bags scrambled inside, while guffawing, belly-rubbing men dawdled out onto the grimy, boot-scuffed cobblestones. Gleams from street lamps showed every figure: frayed tunics, buffeted gambesons, a scratched hammer, and sodden, sagging herbs.
Among them, George spread his arms, embracing a girl half his size. The squeals she made drowned in the crowd, but in his ears, she rang continuously. His grin grew wider the longer she romped in his eyes. His free hands only shielded her from the brunt of traffic, and his frame kept towering over her gently. He wiped her cheeks when they grew moist with spittle. They puffed out against his fingers as her eyes crinkled.
To his rear left, Melly bent under the weight of the bags George had piled onto him, his arms stiff and burning. With half his mouth open, he squeaked, “I’m heading inside.”
George nodded, facing the girl.
After offloading the bags back to him and getting his thanks, Melly dipped his head and headed inside the tavern, Thorn following behind. In the hall, high paintings smothered the walls, and heavy-laden tables flanked by aisles spread across the main floor. At one table to the right, Rayla, Sella, and the others chatted, elbows draped over chair backs and legs splayed across the polished concrete floor. They darted glances toward the darkened entryway. One of them waved at the pair, who stopped on one side of the room, still standing. Passing the two, George and his daughter laughed together as they headed to the table. Along the aisle, bags crammed the floor against the wall, where people stood gazing around the room for empty seats. Shoulders overloaded with bags, George blocked the table’s aisle and the group’s view when he arrived. He pointed his strap-strained index finger toward the hall’s main expanse. For a moment, the group shared looks, and questions flew across the tabletop. As soon as heads nodded, they, along with George’s daughter and the pair, got up one by one. They filtered away. People unknown to each other scooped up the newly freed table.
“Ba-da-beem-ba-da-bam-boom-boom,” George’s daughter went on babbling, swaying as she walked.
“Are you going to mass later?” a nearby tall, bulbous-nosed man grunted, his oval head tucked between a wide-brimmed cap and a jutting stomach. Another raddled, cane-hefting man, his spotted skin covered in airy robes, croaked, “Yes.”
“Yuppity-yuppity-yup!” she mumbled to herself, sitting beside her father, whose hand-masked snicker with Aunt Sella petered out in the chatter-dense air.
She rubbed her fingerpad against the edge of the table to feel its tiniest dots. When her father’s arm lay across the table, she rubbed it next, parting and bending hairs. Once she got to his sweat-damp hair, her fingers cooled.
A stubbled, thick-browed man in a gray-edged cloak scurried to the table and plumped onto a cushioned seat.
Sella’s expression vanished as she turned from George. “Rick, what did Leo say?”
He shrugged. “Said pinks don’t have spots. This one had spots.”
“Ah…” She hung on that sound.
Her eyes jumped. “I-I don’t remember it having spots.” She raked through the others’ faces. “Did you?”
“No,” they said.
She twisted her head at him. “What happened after we left?”
“I just saw it like that.”
She thrust herself forward. “Before you arrived.”
“Dunno.” He tilted his head like a shrug.
She leaned back and expelled a huff from her nose. “We’ll just try again then.” She folded her arms and rubbed her left shoulder with her right hand. “Damn it,” she muttered and left her hand up as if about to hurl it.
“I should have had one of you wait for Rick.” She pinched her underlip.
George sank his upper body onto the table. “I made a mistake. I told them to leave because I was hungry.”
“No, no.” She waved her hand. “Need to find out why. How. It doesn’t make sense. What did we miss?” 
George planted two straight fingers on the table, then made it walk along the table toward his daughter, stopping it in front of her right hand. He pointed one of the two fingers at it and wagged it.
Eyes lighting up, she stuck the balls of her hands together, curled all her fingers, and snapped the “teeth” as soon as the “human” fell within its shadow. “Roar, roar.”
George drew it back by making it run backward and evaded her. Once he had it settle a distance away, he arced it backward, then jerked it back and forth, imitating a guffaw.
Right as she whooshed her hands at the human, he let it get caught and showed it struggle before falling limp.
He turned to Sella. “I’ll show you what I last remember.” He beckoned the others. “Guys, help me out here. Put your fingers on the table.” He made the same human shape with two fingers. “Like this.”
Sella, who was rubbing her finger’s side against her underlip, stopped, eyes tracking his hand.
“The goblin was here.” He extended his other hand toward Melly, whose human he brought to another spot near his goblin. He grabbed three more, then stopped. “This was the arrangement of the me… Melly… Thorn… and the goblin. Wait.” He grabbed Sella’s and Rayla’s hands and had them form the start and the end of the stream. “Rick. Where did you come from?”
Rick jabbed the right side of George’s goblin. “Here.”
Heads raised, and eyes flickered.
George’s daughter crushed his goblin in her hands. “I got you!”
George pointed at her monster. “Now, who… or what… made the goblin get spots?”
Melly frowned. “Can’t it just be some disease?”
“In the span of what… an hour?”
“Maybe?”
He leaned in close to Melly and raised his voice to explain. “No, let’s eliminate the most tangible possibility first, since any problem stemming from the goblin’s body itself could be anything.” The crowd noise flooded back in, but the others’ eyes stayed on his table-staged map made of fingers.
Melly paused, then settled on a nod.
Sella rose to her feet and eyed George, drawing his gaze and twitching her brows at him. “Let’s go back.” She looked at the rest. “Who wants to go?”
Rick left his seat and waved. “I’ll be outside.”
Two others tagged along after him.
Sella and George trickled away. 
Outside, Rick, Sella, and George, along with the other two, set off.  
When this group got to the stream, Rick pointed. “See. Spots.” His finger shook the more he looked.
Across the stream, the goblin stood facing the wall, head down, its pink skin drenched in black spots.
A black film like frozen fog clung to the ground, lay across the stream, and stained both banks. It started here, to the group’s right, where Rick had said he’d come from.
Under the goblin, the film pooled and ended.
“The fuck,” George mouthed. “We have to leave.” 
Sella met his gaze and stifled the shudder in her underlip.
“Now!” He herded them back onto the path.
A flame shaped like a male human appeared beside the goblin and laid a hand on its back.
The goblin burst out swinging. It flailed its arms through the air and danced, its steps alternating between the balls of its feet and the very tips of its toes. Sweat poured down its skin, and tears bit into its chin.
The flame turned its body to the fleeing group, white balls like eyes curling upward like coiling smoke.
It vanished before wresting itself back, appearing beside George.
“Indicate, indication, the being of a sum, the natural order of mar-things.” A man’s voice growled from it, and it spoke so rapidly in a blur of writhing, twisting mouth movements that George’s screaming soared up the hill.
It disappeared.
Breezes tossed through the tall branches, rolled off spreading trees, and crept into the tangle, some summiting the loftiest canopies.
George puked, spittle clammily prickling below his mouth. “Fuck, fuck, fuck…” he squeaked. He hoisted his hand which a worn tremble left dragging and tingling, then banished it from his sight, sending the dirt it scraped away.
Sella dammed up her mouth with her hand, retched, then twisted herself from him.
Rick fell clawing his hands against the ground and uttered brokenly, his shape quivering.
The two others sagged motionless against a tree.
Parching sweat chilled skins it once glossed and sent them shivering.
They got up and returned home together.
On the street in front of George, his daughter raised her arms. He picked her up and carried her with one arm, padding on.
They went inside, climbed upstairs, and fell asleep in their room.
The sun rose.
George bent down against the bedside and peered at his feet, smiling. From underneath, his daughter’s head popped out as she rolled on the floor.
“Ya-herrr!” she crowed.
He burst out laughing.
She stopped to stare at him.
He caressed her cheek, then pinched it as he walked off to the door, opening it, and leaving, letting it shut itself.
In the tavern hall, Sella set ten cups and rotated them until their handles were perpendicular to their tabletops. Rick sipped his steaming mug and hissed when the surface stung his tongue. The other two who came with him yesterday wiped their mouths with their own embroidered linen handkerchiefs.
When more members appeared, Sella filled their hands with their own sleeved cups. The balmy heat emanated only from the beverage, leaving the handles cool.
Along the same aisle as Sella, George emerged and passed Melly and Rayla, who were chatting and holding cups.
George stopped by Sella, and these two stood staring and smiling. She planted a mug in his rising palms. He thanked her and lowered himself onto a chair near her. The bold-and-clean-tasting coffee in the cup sat flat.
“How is it?” As she faced away, her smile briefly deepened.
“Fine—good! Very good!” He raised it, spilling a little, which got her turning her head. “Whoops.” He wiped it many times, shifting between his wrist, forearm, palm, and sleeve. “H-how ‘bout you?”
She laughed faintly and brushed her lip. “How’s Baby Elene?”
“She’s good, she’s good.” He propped his elbows on the table, while taking a few delayed sips.
“Okay.” She let her voice hang.
His eyes drifted for a moment, then he looked at her face again. “Where’s… Rick?”
She pointed to the side. Rick lay back in his chair against the wall with one foot hanging from his crossed legs.
“How’s he?”
“Good. Too.” She glanced down at herself.
“Oh? So you’re…”
“Yeah. Well.” She looked down at his cup. “Now, yeah.” She smiled, hands clasped in front of herself.
“No, I mean, you’re… you know? The way you spoke made it sound like you were pregnant with Rick’s child for a second.”
“Huh!”
“Uh. Woohoo…”
“I meant I was doing fine! ‘Too’!”
“Yeah, that’s, that’s what I meant. Originally.”
“Okay.”
He faced forward, nodding as he sipped.
“I don’t get it,” he said.
“You wanna discuss it?” she said.
“Yeah. What… was that?”
“A beast, probably.”
“Well, not all beasts talk like that.”
“You heard it.”
“It sounded wrong.”
“Well… that’s one of the things.”
“It had… what you call it… a body made of…” His eyes went distant. “Fire.”
“That’s crazy.”
“It is…” He stopped, then sipped.
A gasp like a sigh left her mouth. 
He glanced at her. “Yeah.”
He stopped mid-sip. “How about the other two?”
“They’re fine. At least.” She looked at them again. “Well, they should be. So.”
“Yeah.” He finished his sip and drank the whole way.
“Very good.” He got up and put the cup with the rest of the empty ones. Rick’s was coming.
“Hi, Rick,” George said.
Rick nodded and set his next to George’s. “How are you?”
“Doing alright. The other two?”
“Doing fine. I talked to them last night and, well, this morning. They are.” He made a circle on his temple. George’s face scrunched. “Joke,” Rick said. George breathed.
“Eleno?” Rick said.
“Not okay.” George’s face scrunched again.
“What?!”
“Joke!” George got his same tone, but inflated it.
Rick held his head while shaking it. “Boy, oh boy.” He went away with fingertips pressed on his forehead.
“What!” Sella feigned a shout.
George made an X with his arms. “Okay, too late. Joke’s over.”
She chortled.
Rick stopped and eyed her. “Where’s?”
She pointed. “I told them to sit down there ‘cause… you know.”
“The others know?”
“No. I just thought we’d all five of us connect before anything happens. You never know when you’ll get some alone time after all that. I mean… it happens.” She folded her arms.
The other pair passed between her and George and set their empty cups along with the rest, stonefaced. “Yeah,” one of them said.
“How’s the…” George said.
“Good.”
“Hey, that was my answer.”
“But seriously, when are we going to…”
“To them?” She half-frowned, drawing one corner of her lip down. “I don’t know… What do you guys think?”
Eyes everywhere else but each other, the other four shrugged.
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” she tried.
“Nah.” George rubbed his forehead with an upside-down hand and straightened himself in the seat he’d just taken.
“Really?” Rick blurted, and his eyes leapt as he passed his hand over his mouth.
George leaned back against the table edge, hands perched on his hips. “You all are out of sorts today, aren’tcha?”
“Yeeah, I guess.”
Sella tilted her head like a dramatic shrug.
The other two rocked their raised arms back and forth, with fistfuls of their handkerchiefs.
One of the two went to the outer edge of this gathering and imitated Melly, making big strides and cumbersomely swinging his arms. “Yeah, like I didn’t hear all that!” he said in a low-pitched voice.
Sella cackled, then went quiet. “But if he does hear…”
“Well, if he does, it’ll be finished,” Rick murmured.
“Well, if he does, we’ll be finished.” George corrected him, half-pretending.
“What?” She held the sound. “It’s not like we did anything bad,” she whispered.
George’s head tossed left and right. “Well, maybe. I don’t know. What did we do? Again?”
“Get fucked in the ass.” She pumped her fist.
“Well.” He shrugged and grinned quietly. 
Quiet settled on the five of them.
Several minutes later, Melly and Rayla dropped by to leave their empty cups.
Glances shot among the five.
“Yo.” Rick waved.
Sella speared him with her eyes, shaking her head ever so slightly. She let a warm smile blanket her face when Melly and Rayla turned around toward Rick, brows raised.
Rick hummed. “Yam is like my favorite shit!”
Melly furrowed his brows while Rayla narrowed her eyes, tilting her head. When even Rich smiled, they slowly turned back and went on their way. “Whatever you say.” Melly’s voice trailed off.
Sella scrunched up her face at Rick. “Brother,” she muttered. “Stop-eet.”
“I thought,” Rick mouthed, darting his eyes at the others.
She pressed her lips together. “Well… No. Not yet. I decided.”
George stood up and started walking. “Okay, I decided too.”
“What?”
“I’m gonna go to the goblin site. Who wants to come with me?”
“That’s… a little…”
“Well, at this point, it’s either-or. Unless you reveal it or I go check it out for myself. I want to know what’s out there, Sell. You know? It’s the kind of thing you can’t let go.”
“Elene?”
“Elene knows better than I do. I just never stop. That’s my weakness.”
“Well, we all know you won’t be dying alone.”
“I won’t?”
“Come on.” She subtly gestured at herself.
“I mean, I was hoping, but I didn’t expect it.”
“I’ll come.”
“You sure?”
“I will. Come on, let’s go.” She passed in front of him. “See?” She raised her arms.
He grabbed her right hand and shook it. “Thank you.”
“Just kidding. I’ll tell them. Who’d want you to die before your daughter grows old?”
“Me apparently, hehe. But I was mainly doing it for that.”
“For me to give up?”
“Yeah…”
“Well then. Fuck it!” She whooped, one arm hoisted in the air.
She passed Thorn first, then stopped. “Can you help get everyone? I have an announcement to make.”
Thorn nodded and went out to the hall’s main room where the rest of the group was scattered across the packed floor. He discovered their spots one by one and loped over with the order to assemble for Sella’s report.
The whole group, fifty in number, filtered to five long tables connected together.
Sella shifted in her seat, leaned over to George, and whispered, “What should we call it?” 
His eyes swept the members. “Fire-guy? I don’t know.”
She paused. “Fire thing?”
He glanced in her direction. “If it works.”
She sprang back.
“Fire guy, fire guy, fire guy,” she mouthed, feeling it out.
Hands jogged paper stacks against the table.
“Do we even need those?” she muttered.
The other one beside her, Melly pursed his lips as if shrugging.
George put his hand on the back of hers along the tabletop and shook it with a twitching mouth. “Just tell them we got our asses fucked.” He snickered.
She jerked her hand from his, then palmed her face, stifling a grin.
Meanwhile, George’s daughter swayed into the tavern, peeking across the hall at her father’s and Aunt Sella’s backs. Two boys paused mid-trot in the aisle near her and shot imaginary bows. “Fwoosh!” A third boy reloaded his musket and aimed with one eye shut. “Pschow!” She watched as they darted between stately tables and filled chairs drawn out at different angles and distances, forming jagged walls.
When she got to the get-together, Dad swiveled to her, legs splayed toward her. She fell into him, sinking, and his arms swathed her in the snuggest hug. When his sharp eyes opened softly, they dug into the walls behind her, and his cradling crush bunched up her clothes’ folds. Her legs sprawled slack.
On his right, Aunt Sella began, “We came face to face with a flame beast.” 
“What!” someone shouted from across the table, her voice sounding faint.
“A flame beast? Do you mean a wildfire? Or are we talking about a fox with its tail set on fire?” someone else said from her right.
“No, a literal flame… thing… person…” She stopped to close her eyes, then swept her voice over all the members. “It had the shape of a human being, but it was made of flames.”
“A mage?”
“Probably.”
“Do you think it’s a human?”
“Maybe. Likely, now that you say it.”
“What’s our game plan? The guildmaster should know this, and then everyone.”
“Well, we’ll be right on that, but any more questions that I might be able to answer? Actually, I should tell the whole story. Just the flame beast alone won’t cut it. Here’s how it happened.”
After naming the four who went with her, she told the story, from the goblin facing the wall to the group’s flight and breakdown.
“Any more questions? None?” She stood up. “Okay, that’ll be all. Thank you.” She left, and Dad, who was holding his daughter’s hand, followed.
Behind them, conversations among friends resumed, even as questions about the flame beast grew.
“What were you going to say again?” Aunt Sella asked Dad.
“First, where are we getting the next pink goblin from? Second, do they come with flame beasts?” Dad imperceptibly smirked.
Aunt Sella snickered as the three passed the doorway on the way out, where the sun bathed everything. They skirted its rays by pressing along the edges, while they crept past crowds and wheeled around corners, eyes darting routinely.
A vendor beneath a canopied stall hawked fresh produce, jabbing avocados toward them. The stall’s softwood posts and beams held up a net made of hairy coconut fiber for a roof. The nails jutting from the outer side of these beams hooked it in place.
Chapter 2
“Dah-dah-ruh, dah-dah-dah-ruh, dah-dah-ruh-ruh.” Elene raised a little kitty with both hands and laid it against her chest, rocking from side to side.
Standing behind the chair beside her, Dad took his hand off the backrest and caressed the kitty’s head. He gazed and nodded firmly at Aunt Sella, who was seated across the table, as she spoke.
Aunt Sella got up, strode back and forth, and pointed and gestured at the air with her hands.
A smile alighted on his face, a grin at times, even a snicker that she mirrored when something funny drew their gazes together.
Elene turned to the window and peered down at the cobbled street, where arms clasped behind necks and smiles filled faces, while horse-drawn carriages and carts rolled past crowds farther ahead and mountains were clothed along the skirts with forests, among which this town blossomed cream, mint, and oxblood.
She let out a graceful breath.
Dad and Aunt Sella stopped, turned, got their bags, waved and said goodbye, and left.
She smiled before turning her gaze back to the window.
In the open air, George laced his fingers and stretched his palms outward. Sella looked at the cobblestones as she plodded through the narrow street. 
Leaving the house behind, the two traveled along one long, busy road. 
Within forty minutes, they turned down several byroads and found themselves in a large, crowded lot. 
A rotunda entranceway large enough to hold half a million books rose weathered and pitted from the side of the lot. The rest of the edifice stretched so far and high that a number of gates and corridors cutting through the interior arcades kept it from becoming a blockade the locals would mine and transform into an exposed warren of passageways. The sign above the entrance read, “Adventurers’ Guild.”
A staircase half-circled before the haggard, beaten doorway. A cluster of luggage-bloated groups buzzed to and fro, where stops meant only one of three goals: check the map, finish up the lingering concerns, or squint at the quest’s fine print for the details missed and prepare to back out if necessary.
In the crammed, rackety entrance hall, George and Sella wandered toward the gleaming, sleek counter edged with two repeating yellow lines.
A clerk blinked at them.
“Oh, right, hello.” Sella almost waved, but stopped herself. “We’re looking to report a finding.”
“Finding? What kind?”
“A ‘flame beast.’ Of that kind.”
The clerk turned aside, grabbed a quill and paper, and wrote. “A ‘flame beast,’ hmm?”
“Yes.”
“Is this… ‘the human shape made of flames’?”
Sella’s eyes lit up, then she knitted her brows. “Y-yes, that’s it. Were you told prior to…”
“Yes. By Mrs. Aileen.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Okay, give me your name. I will add it to the list of confirmations.”
“Uh, Sella Wisher.”
“Okay, is there anything else?”
“No, that was all.” Sella slowed turned and left, eyes distant.
George walked up to her. “Aileen wasn’t in the meeting.”
When they went outside and found a spot, she said, “I had a feeling Rick told someone, but I guess it was inevitable, huh?”
“Maybe.” George was rubbing his chin.
Three days later, the pair met here at the crack of dawn to witness the boards crammed with the first findings from the flame beast investigations. Details ranged from color and size to affected routes and advisories, culminating in potential death counts. A map sprawled over multiple parchments, its areas shaded red based on the last known sighting. Response times dictated future directions and calls to action.
The pair copied the gist onto their own parchments and brought these to the tavern tables.
“Guess group activities are suspended for the time being,” Melly probed, setting Sella’s and George’s cups before them.
“Effectively.” Sella unclasped her hands and raised an open palm like a shrug.
George slurped when his first sip came warm. “How’s Assa?”
Standing to his rear left, Rayla strode up to the table and planted her palms,the left wrapped, the right bare. “Wanna scare off merchants? Another merchant’s been shouting at her in the middle of the day about having the same product.”
“What product?”
“Books.”
George snorted airily, rubbing his fingernail. “So what? I just go there and tell them off?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure.” He turned to the others. “Do you guys want to help? Sella?”
“If talking’s not off the table, sure. I could use some variety.” Sella drummed her index fingertips together.
“Elene-o, wanna come?” George turned around at the child sitting with three other members at their own long table. These three pointed her to him while she was speaking to them. She swiveled in her seat, clenching the chair back. “Hmm?”
“Wanna come with me? Tommorow?” 
“How long?”
“Whole day.”
“Yeah!”
The next morning, right outside the tavern, George grasped his wrist behind his back and stretched. “Fuck…”
Sella adjusted her bag’s strap and stamped the ground three times to test her boots.
Elene laced her fingers inches from her face and peered at the creases between them.
Rayla wrapped her left hand with scuffed cloth and rolled it all the way to her elbow.
Melly rapped his nail against an inkwell he’d raised to his face.
Thorn sank his hands into his bag to re-fold clothes that rumpled on the way here.
Rick swore as the sheath to one of his knives stopped snapping shut, leaving the blade exposed inside his bag.
Rick’s two friends took turns walking through wrestling moves on each other.
The other group members lined the wall, some crouching, most standing. Their chatter filled the air, while some dug into bags propped on their thighs and chests to triple-check.
“Let’s rename to Assa’s Private Army,” George said and snickered, while Sella’s brows were still rising. She tittered along once her eyes got to flashing.
The group got to the bazaar in four hours, around mid-morning.
Assa stopped, squinting at the drove behind George and Sella, who were sauntering toward her. “The hell?”
George bowed toward her, saying “Your Majesty.” Sella mirrored both. The drove bent as one and chorused the line.
“Guys…” Assa drew out.
The other merchants, whose stalls clustered around the bazaar, gawked; one even scratched their head.
“Well, I have no space for all of you guys.” She glanced around at her stall filled with stacks of round, flat footstools.
“I’ll just have them go exploring the city then.” Sella turned to the members and instructed them like so. “You can come back before evening.”
They scattered.
George came up to Assa, leaned behind her, and whispered in her ear, “Who is it?”
“Hmm?” Her eyes went wide. “Who? What?”
“The target?”
She lowered her voice. “Target? What are you talking about?”
“The rude… merchant.”
“Oh, that. I can point her to you if you want.”
“Where?” George went on tiptoe and peered at the stalls across the bazaar.
“Later. Just sit here.” She went to the footstools, bent down, lowered a footstool from the top of another one, heaved it to George’s side, and patted its top.
He settled stiffly on it, taking a moment to spread his legs and relax. After testing the seat’s give, he reached for his daughter and pulled her down between his knees. With the two of them set, Assa walked out in front and struck up a conversation with a customer about the history of her products.
Sella stood watch on the stall’s side.
When her roving gaze snagged on the seated pair, he clapped his knee twice and gestured to his thigh, indicating a seat, nodding sharply with a grin.
Her face crumpled in a mock-grimace as he contorted in his seat toward another footstool, dragged it beside him, and patted it. Sella wavered her way over and sat slumped, laying out her trousered legs and plonking her hands motionless on her knees. When she shifted and the hem of her dress caught between her and the chair, she rose briefly to yank it out.
“How’s your mom?” he mumbled.
“Fine.” She eased her lips together.
“Really?”
“Yeah, she got to eat before I left.”
“Okay.”
Elene looked up at them.
The pair smiled at her one after the other.
Her mouth sat at rest.
“I hope she’s okay,” she said.
Sella looked down and distant. George rubbed his mouth.
“She will be,” he tried.
Sella locked her softened eyes with his.
“I don’t think the situation warranted the whole group, or even any of you, coming at all, but why, here’s something to drink!” Assa stepped before them, passing them each a fruit punch.
The seated trio sipped along.
Meanwhile, Rick stuck his head into a store. Knives hung all over the walls. An older man sat inside beside the door, thumbing through a book. “Do you have a sheath I can replace my broken one with?” Rick said, showing it.
The older man gently handled it and hummed while rotating it. “I have one.”
“Where?”
The older man stumbled to his feet, scuffed across the store, and took one from the display of sheaths. “This.”
Rick went inside and checked it. “Ooh, this fits. Can I try?” He set his bag on the floor and carefully took out the exposed blade.
While the older man held one end of the sheath, Rick put his knife in, and it snapped shut.
“Yes!” Rick stifled a yell.
He paid for it and left, joining Melly and Rayla at the city square, where pigeons roving the ground scattered along his path.
“I wish I had bread right now to feed them with,” Melly whined as Rick sat between him and Rayla on the seat wall with plenty of elbow room.
Rick removed his new knife sheath from the bag and buffed it with the ball of his hand.
Thorne arrived, standing and gazing around near the three.
As dusk came, the group’s members drifted back to the bazaar.
Once everyone was present, they departed and returned to the tavern hall around bedtime.
While the rest got their bags and trudged the remaining way home, George, Sella, and others stayed to review the day. His daughter slept on their table.
Around midnight, they wrapped it up and went home, slumping into their beds.
By noon, George, his daughter, and Sella were in the tavern. A number of the group’s members were also present.
He lay slumped into his chair, clapping a hand over his mouth, one leg over the other, his boots reaching far under the table. On his left, Sella sat suspended in the narrow gap between her chair back and the table. Beside her, Elene mirrored her posture, holding her own chin.
“Let’s take it.” He leaned forward, tapped the poster on the table, then sprawled back into his chair. “We can do it.”
Sella slowly nodded, squinting and brushing the side of her hand across her mouth.
On George’s right, Melly eased along their side of the table and ran his fingerpad across the poster’s parchment corner.
Across Melly, Rayla was straddling her chair and kneading her thumb into her palm, with three pieces of paper lined up before her. Melly’s inkwell sat on her left.
George folded his arms, one elbow propped upright on the other, rubbing the side of his finger across his closed lips. He tilted forward.
Rayla raised her fingers, counting. “I have six, seven hundred. We can take Leon Way.”
George’s gaze bore down into the table surface.
Sella sank her elbows into the table, holding her lopsided head in one hand.
Right as George stood up to get a cup refill, her eyes flickered and snapped to him. “Let’s go.”
George stopped and slowly turned to her. “Hmm? Now?”
“You think we can take out three in one day?”
“Take out three?” He rubbed his free hand against his chin. “Well, it’s possible, but we’re not there to take out three, or anything for that matter.” Melly tapped the poster for him.
She flumped back into her chair. “I don’t know.” She stroked her brow. “Do you guys have any suggestions?”
He met the others’ looks. “Well, we can just do as the quest says?”
She sank down further into her chair, covering her face with curled fingers, breaths from her nose sifting through them, her chest heaving gently.
After several minutes of relaxation, she straightened up, grabbing her things and getting up. “Fuck. Fine.”
She called everyone, who already had their bags on their laps, to move outside.
The group filtered across the hall and spilled out into the late afternoon sun. Beams kissed their skin, nurturing them with warmth.
In the back of the group, Rick waved his sheath around as he tromped, while his two friends strode and giggled behind him.
Thorn marched in front of the group, leading the way, with Sella, George, and his daughter strolling right behind.
After leaving the heart of their cobbled, concrete city, the group filed along a dirt path that curved through the hills embosomed in high jungles. Scree littered the edges, and boot-eroded debris dropped from chipped mule-drawn wagons sometimes came up underfoot.
The group drew up midway through the road, settling down on the side within sight of a rift torn into a turf-grown rock face. Bags heaped on one corner, and legs in soft armor lay flat along the dirt that shelved gently into the grass-stippled sunken abyss.
They descended into it in one wave, breaking against its edges as they inundated it with a draining slurp, stomping over the sparse flower patch on the way in.
Their train of torches rolled down inside as dark titans rode along the ceiling. Sand-like dirt crunched and shifted underfoot. Faces faded away, while voices, some chuckles, rang from end to end.
The passage expanded into a cavernous stretch, where azure dazzles flooded their bodies, piercing into their skins, leaving them stinging.
When they gazed again, the crystals doodled on their poster glimmered on the ceiling.
Short figures crept faintly among the stalagmites rising into the glare, one holding a musket. The figure aimed the barrel, and a blast of smoke gushed out, while a projectile slammed into the ground in front of them. A goblin’s oath tore through the fusty air. “Khalagtahg!”
Another gush of smoke crept up into the air, and worn-nailed green hands freed swords from pitted scabbards. A hand raised, drew goblin gazes together, and fell. Guns blasted. Swords ran across the floor. A blade edge punctured into blood, dulling and smearing. “Fuck!” Armor clanked, then shattered. Eyes looked, then glazed over in the corpses that appeared. Tips ran across flesh and slid into the ground as weapons hammered and stopped each other. In helmet holes, screams reverberated. A smile crawled along George’s face when his spear poked into one of the last heaving chests. The humans went out of their way to swarm the skittering goblins.
A jagged human laugh broke out, then a din of them.
“Shit, fuck!” George covered his face, cackling. “Fuck, fuck! We almost fucking died!”
Sella clapped his shoulder. “Good job.”
“You too! Genuinely. Fuck.” He rubbed his sweat-drenched forehead. “Fucking…”
Elene went out from behind a corner. “Dad.” She reached out to hug him, fell into his arms, and bawled.
“I’m sorry, Elene.” He stroked her head.
“I did as you said.”
“You did. But don’t always do what I say, okay?” He smiled lightly.
The group changed out of their blood-fouled clothes, sniffed fresh, sweet ones pressed flat against their noses, and took turns putting them on behind the thickest stalagmite. Thorn even handed Rayla his spare shirt to replace her backup arm wrap, which had broken while she was putting it on.
Someone came up to George. “Narra’s sick.” She showed her to him.
George clenched his jaw, went to Sella, and told her. 
Sella went out to everyone and raised her voice. “We have to go now. Get half and go.”
“Only half?” someone said. “The quest requires sixty casels, so only thirty?”
“Yes. Go, go.”
“Shit,” someone else said. “Almost died for nothing.”
“And someone could die if we don’t go back now. Fast. Do it now.” Sella clapped at them to hurry.
After thirty casels of crystals went into sacks, the group strapped on either one huge bag or many small ones. Rick got the former and barely spoke along the way. George laughed with the latter. Sella and Elene shared one weight. They trekked home and got back before sundown.
The next afternoon, George snickered beside Sella, clapping her shoulder. “I thought you said no quests!”
She rocked back from his slaps, her mouth twitching. “There were goblins.”
“You said it, okay?” He turned to the rest of the group. “You guys heard her, alright! We’re going tomorrow!”
The group played along, whooping.
As they settled, rumbles gradually vibrated the tavern, starting as hisses and developing into a sea of drumming clatter, which the faintest, traveling thunder interspersed. Cool air drifted into the building as the entryway grew slick under rushing feet and dripping hairs, with boyish and girlish laughter. Even in here, the fragrant, sighing breath of lush, lofty, busy trees compacted them. Passing chills wove into the group’s pressing, balmy warmth. Men, women, and children like airy presences stood against tables; others loitered toward scattered seats to chat, spar, and rag.
The morning after, Sella suited up and headed to the tavern while it was still dark. 
Baby Elene and George slept inside, her lying on the table and him slumped over it. Papers sprawled end to end, some crumpled under her, others heaped as his headrest. Their dirty, unfinished cups sat on the next table.
Sella poked him awake.
George stared dazed for a moment, looked around the table, then slumped back down, his voice muffled between his folded, ink-speckled arms and Baby Elene’s scratchy worksheets. “I taught her how to write a few sentences.”
She patted him on the back and slunk away to the counter.
There, a group of striped-robed older men thronged, some slumped over the counter, showing each other items and making chitchat. Others paired off and went to one corner.
She stood at the far end and ordered drinks for three.
When she got the tray, she strode to George and Elene’s table and replaced the pair’s cups, separating the last one for herself.
George shifted at the clatter and thump against the wood, tilting his head up toward Sella. He twitched downward, seeing the cup. “Thanks.” He grasped its handle and pulled it to him, letting it sit while he gazed around the hall. “What time is it?”
“Five, five-ten, somewhere there,” she said as she returned the tray with the two’s old cups.
She got back within a minute.
He yawned like he was opening demonic gates. “Where’s-uh-where’s the flame being right now? Did they say?”
She paused halfway through sitting down. Her dark hair fell back into place past the shoulders. “No one’s said anything.”
“Not yet. I expect it to be resolved next week. Hopefully.” His sleeves brushed against hers while he was rubbing his hands. He gasped through a wide-open mouth toward the end of his yawn. He glanced at her hair from behind, then at his daughter, who pushed hers off her mouth while asleep.
Sella’s sip started as a slurp, then went back to silence and the thump of her putting it back down.
He rolled his lips together, sucked in air, and smacked them open, making sounds like bubble pops. Slumping onto the table, he sank his face into his folded arms. “You think Matthew’s gonna do it?” He propped his chin on his arm, eying her.
Her gaze sat distant. She rubbed her other arm. “He said it pissed him off, didn’t it? So maybe.”
“How about us? Goblins?”
She chuckled almost but set herself straight. “We’ll do it. Don’t worry.”
“Well, I’m more worried about you.” He hid his face in his arms again. “You know?”
“Ha-ha.” She scooched back in her chair, pressing her thumbs together, hands on her lap. “I’ll manage. As I do… ‘Ve always done it.”
“Really?” He gently pointed at her as if poking.
“Yeah.” She broke into a crooked smile.
For a few minutes, the two sat quiet, along with the sleeping child, whom Sella squeezed on the shoulder. 
She slowed rose to her feet. “Okay, I’m heading back. Gotta be there when she wakes up or else she’ll worry I forgot to come home.” She chuckled.
He smiled, looking down on the table, stroking its pores and grains.
She slung her bag over her shoulder and kept her hand raised to wave when he met her eyes. “Bye.”
He barely waved his hand over his shoulder. “Bye.”
She wavered along her way from the table, her creeping steps transitioning into strides the closer she got to the entrance. 
George clasped his daughter’s hand, compressing his lips as he smiled. The sound of Sella’s hurrying steps went away.
“Good morning!” Elene sprang up.
His moist eyes crinkled. She scooted forward to hug him. The two softened in each other’s steady arms, her feet pressed against his lap.
Chapter 3
By mid-morning two days later, the screeching of a dry, shrunken spoke in a moving wheel punctuated the squeaks, exhales, and rustles from people climbing in and out of wagons. An assemblage of armed groups in mixed armor filled the cobbled entryway ascending into the tavern—a growing hubbub of banter, abuse, and laughter.
Thorn and Rayla strode down the entryway, weaved past the crowd, and continued along the sidewalk. Across this area, the same armored groups, with their rich, brilliant colors, made a din and popped among the city’s drab stalls, smithies, and stores speckled with workshop items: abraded gear, misplaced hand tools, and both clean and dirty clothes hanging side by side from containers. Noses briefly stung with the reek of something like charcoal and goat dung.
In some corner of the city, the pair turned down a doorway and slithered into a room with chairs, flat, empty walls, and a long table fatter than the doorway. Inside, a number of their group’s members hid flumped, slumped, and asleep in their seats.
George set both palms on the table, stroking the edge on his side. “So, wanna try?” He grinned.
“We can try.” The base of Sella’s hand pressed on the table as her hanging index finger flicked along the surface. Her other hand cradled her head while her elbow lay propped on the table.
“I wanna try!” Elene stifled her cry and ran around the room. He propped his elbow on the table and held it up for her. The two clapped their hands together as she passed in a blur.
“Why don’t we try then?” George turned back to Sella.
“You sure?” Sella looked in his direction out of the corner of her eye.
George held his hand up. “Why not?”
She sat there motionless. He twitched his brows up at her before looking around, yawning.
With an inflated sigh, she raised her hand, and the two slapped their hands together, he more than she.
“Okay, guys, we’re going!” she yelled.
Hands went around and woke up the sleeping. Slowly, the group assembled in the street. Within fifteen minutes, they got back to the tavern. By this time, most of the crowd had dispersed. After stopping to eat, update the staff, and absorb any group members absent earlier, they prepared their bags and trekked to the city gate.
From this chokepoint, they called themselves a travel agency to ease info exchange with the armed groups. Which long monster-infested paths were now clear? The next steps of most groups? Their overall numbers? Their current map went through heaps of drafts, and many pre-sketches piled on desks. At least one new main route crammed the top of every parchment. And distinguished among them were “optimal,” “backup,” “situational,” and “hell.”
By the third week, the boom and craze driving the armed groups had ended, and this new broker group went away as fast as it had come.
Just after noon, George, Sella, his daughter, along with the other members who participated in most of it, slouched on the striated nail-holed tavern tables. “Fuck,” he said.
“Fuck,” someone else said.
“Fuck,” a third went.
Cackles burst throughout the hall.
By evening three days later, George sat inside an eatery. Wind-borne leaf cuts, deadwood, and chaff slid along the floor. Blusters beat surfaces until their cold pricked into the feet. The breaths that collected inside undulated around the tables and billowed inside clothes. The hilly glooms rolled and rocked outside, sometimes roaring and rumbling with rupturing trees. So a staff locked the latch windows one by one. Silence flooded inside end to end. One set of ears even rang. The scritching of a broom sweeping and mounding debris in one corner whipped into the air.
The soft, chewy texture of beef and potatoes slid into George’s mouth and stroked its roof, bunching against his tongue. “Hot damn, this shit is good,” he muttered so faintly he practically mouthed it. The nourishing air staggered the crisp sparkle and brisk spring of the beef’s brunt and fused into it. His throat caught, and the crumble like kneaded dough filtered into his stomach, filling it slot by slot as if ants had organized its storage plan. His heart flooded with rains, and the sky faded and dappled in his soul’s lattices.
He let out a pang-like moan.
Elene sat beside him, giggling mid-chew. “Dad, your face looks funny.”
He giggled, licking the softened dregs in his mouth. “It’s good, right?” 
She covered her mouth and swallowed, then said, “It’s deliciosee!”
“Yup, yup.” He took another forkful.
“Hozza damnneea!” She nibbled on hers.
“You know…” A soft smile slithered onto his face. “I never thought I’d say this, but… if anything happens, I want you to know that…”
His head jerked side to side. “Nah, ha-ha.”
Her firm eyes shot into his the whole time. “Okay.”
He tried to hug her, and in his arms, she tumbled against him.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he muttered. Tears dribbled down his cheeks, wicking into her hair.
Her expression settled, and her smile returned.
He parted from her and gave his tears a gruff wipe with the side of his hand as he sniffled.
His gaze glinted piercingly.
The next afternoon, outside the city, a goblin slouched around with a wide tread and stroked the slashed blue floral wrap on its scabbed elbow. George scrambled from the bushes, riddled it with stab wounds, and trampled its legs into the ground. “Fucker!” He tore the word from his grated throat, huffed, and spurted spittle. His every stomp sent the goblin’s body into a judder. The pucker traveled up the wrap, where the embroidered flowers kinked up and parted in its cragged cuts.
“Was this the scout?” He heaved, smeared sweat on his arm, and hung over the ground. His hands sat propped on his knees. His body sank standing.
Sella stooped, popped her head out of the bushes, and shot him a thumbs-up.
Blood seeped into the earth. The corpse spasmed with half-closed eyes. Its scab soaked under tearing gore. Its wrap had rippled to the ground. Its stooped head and slender legs lay flopped.
She handed him a pouch, and he emptied it into his thirst-squeezed throat in one long chug. A fresh, relaxed sigh, low and guttural like a growl, shoved from him.
The odoriferous jungle launched fruity soughs beneath the sky. Finches shrank into the smallest sheltered recesses and hollows. Stone chips clattered against fissured tree roots. The remotest trees smudged into green apartments that climbed two or three stories high.
Eyes clambered up the spreading vista and dipped into a sonorous blue.
Within sight, a slanted wooden bridge, close to collapsing into the gritty stream, connected its banks. Overgrown, slick moss grew into the wooden columns’ pores until their scent enriched the replenished air. Its northern side lay lodged in the stream bed, buckled and cracked. Traffic and rainfall had scoured and rotted it away patchily. Sluggish water creased and eddied along gravel-sheeted plant matter underneath.
It squeaked and crashed underfoot when George, Sella, and their group wriggled out of their bags to pad over it. Down the rattled bank, peals of laughter tumbled first, then a string of obscenities, then both.
When they flumped onto their palms and got back up, they wiped themselves off. Some got their hands grubby, and fresh water dripped out of squeezed handfuls of mire.
Six lone goblin corpses dotted the stretch behind them.
George bent down against a downed log, gazed inside for a moment, bore his shoulder against it as he went in for a single violet, and snatched it in his blocky fist.
After he called Elene, she breezed to his side. When he showed the sprig to her, she jabbed her finger at it and the log and stomped her feet into the exposed dirt. “Put it back!”
He peered down at the flower while the breeze stirred it on his raised palm. “Oh.” He turned to lay it on the top of the log with both big hands, carefully plucked at its petals so it opened into more daylight, and adjusted it perpendicular to the air-fostering nurse log.
“How many more?!” asked someone at the back of the group.
“Two!” Sella raised two fingers overhead.
A human-skull-clad goblin in an oversized breastplate dragged a greatsword from behind a distant tree ahead. A growl hurled from it like a decree.
From the back of the group, a javelin soared through the air, rent into it, wrung its meat bare, and sent it into a thrash that left dirt and spittle flung. The goblin’s coughed cries and crammed huffs hung in the air.
It lay down flat on its back, one knee going down after the other, and its pupils eased wide. Underneath its armor and skull helm, its hair and fabric flitted in the breeze. Blood crinkled and crawled down the sides of its belly. Something like a smile wrinkled its lips. A glint of light shone down through its helm. Moisture cooled its eyes.
Thorn dragged the bodies into one pile, some joining him. After the group ripped apart their rags’ stiff, crusty clots, they wiped the few blades and tips used today, especially the nooks and crannies thick with rust and indurated grime, and worked them clean and smooth with the help of spit, sweat, and drips of water. Sighs spread across the group, which came as huffs at first, then gradually seeped out as their shoulders settled back into place.
They left the last goblin out there when they departed.
To George’s left rear, Elene pranced and rocked her head in a playful sway, a handkerchief rippling from her hand. On his front left, Sella trod on pace with the rest of the group. He filed behind her, lugging a thorn-punctured sack that burned into his shoulder muscles, huffing breathlessly, eyes stinging in sweat. Friction had thickened their dirt-hardened ankles, Elene’s to a much lesser extent.
Past a sweep of trees to the front right, once the blinding edge gave way to rendered green, shrubs and sedges specked a vale bank and glistened with exuded water, coated in windblown drizzle.
The farther they traveled, the more wagons appeared down the path. They rattled and tipped as the group clambered on beside their crates before toweling their necks and faces dry.
The first wagons rolled a short distance and lurched to a stop, but slowly, every wagon rattled away and combined into a single rumble.
Every so often, eyes among the group knifed the sky that shimmered in patches through the continuous overstory.
“Bro, the fuck is Mark doing?” Resse said, lying against the wagon side, his legs atop someone else’s. “He said he’s finally got his head in the game, and now, he’s fucking flipping over… what?”
“Yeah,” Multe said, sitting on one of the crates beside the front.
“It’s fucking insane. Like I can’t believe we’re forced to watch this happen straight.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Like, fuck, damn. But yeah, finally.”
“Yeah, I kinda want to join him next time actually.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I mean, as a side thing. Not as a main thing.”
“Kinda me too actually.”
“You want to go together?”
“Well, if George allows.”
George mock-sighed, smirking underneath. “Bro, as if I ever said anything about not being allowed.”
“Well, he said it.” Resse snickered, brows creased. “Let’s go.”
“You guys want to come too? Maybe, we should take everyone.” Multe grinned.
“You want?” George took off his smirk and glanced around.
“What do you guys think?” Sella, blank-faced, straightened up, cross-legged, hands clasped on her legs.
Eighteen days later, two weeks’ travel away, a town sprawled across a mountain and cascaded down steep roads that flattened along streets, punctuated by patchy terraces. Roads thinned out the lower they went, and travelers coming in groups filtered into rows of inns. 
In the town, a windowless, angular, stand-alone building sprang up behind the corners of the roads converging on it, etched against a clear, blue sky, tempered only by its sole other large counterpart—a bar lined with outdoor balconies across its two floors and contiguous with many other establishments along its block.
Inside the former, a young man strode through a doorway, eyes swiveling around the hall. Packed around were draped, square tables and unupholstered armchairs. To one side, tiered seating for guests stretched end to end. 
In one of the groups standing across the hall, he stepped forward. “Hello, greetings, how’s everyone?” He beamed, then fell back to a smile. “Good, good, good evening.” Going around chattering and chuckling, he shook hands—even over other arms. By the time he got to Sella, she opened her mouth and leaned forward to ask, but he raised his palm. “After.”
Lips compressed, she nodded low even as he already went to the next. Slipping away, she headed back to the tiered seating and, after weaving through the leg-covered row, squeezed herself beside George.
“Okay, so how are we asking him?” She smoothed her dress.
George rubbed his bottom lip as he fiddled with his hem. “Do we even need to? We can just talk to his people and register or whatever through them. I’m sure many like us are trying to join.”
Two days later, they got permission to join and signed their group up name by name.
Once they returned home, the rest of the group was ready, and they left early next coming. This time, they went to another city, much closer, only five days away. As soon as they arrived, they made their way to the guild where other groups were seated in rows.
A woman went out and called group names one by one, guiding them inside the guildmaster’s office.
When it was George and Sella’s group’s turn, the two went by themselves.
A lot of “yeses” was said.
The questions ended, and they walked out with cards each bearing a member’s name.
The group stayed in a nearby inn while waiting for the date.
On the morning of the event, the young man whom George and Sella had met all those days ago stood in the guild as more and more registered groups woke up and came from their accommodations.
By noon, the hall packed with chatter, buzz, and laughter. Bags cluttered the floor beside legs, and cloth-wrapped weaponry sat in wagons and carts lined up outside. Many were holding and eating loaves of bread from the bakery across the street.
“What do you guys wanna try first when we get there?” George said, standing and bent against the backrest.
“Koruol kuitouns,” said someone, sitting sideways with one leg curled on her seat.
“I’m okay with just goblins,” said someone else. “If I had to fight anything else, I’d have to start getting serious.”
A few chuckled.
On the wall behind them, a banner read, “Calamintop Cavern.”
Inside a chamber near the Calamintop entrance, a goblin staggered, buckled, and bled, slamming into the ground with a splatter.
Near the goblin, a broken, waterlogged guffaw ripped from a spear-skewered man slumped against the craggy wall.
From the passage, a young woman bolted to him. “Dad, dad!”
The older man tried to laugh again, but it came out as throat-burning coughs. “Look—” He coughed. “Look, look, Ada, I know, I know.” He wheezed, snickering. “You still love me, right? Right? You love Daddy?” His laugh crumbled, as his head began to sway. “Shit, Ada, I’m sorry. I fucking… I fucking hurt you. I know, I know…”
His breath squeezed out of him one last time.
Screams tore out of her head, echoing across the chamber, clambering all the way up to the entrance, where they wafted through the open air as a faint breeze.
She scrambled for the goblin’s dagger. “Shit, shit, shit…” Tears dribbled down her cheeks. Her hands trembled as she parted the goblin’s clothes. She dashed back to her father, pared the spear shaft off, and tossed it aside. “Dad, dad!” She sobbed, “Please!” She cupped his face and stroked it, smudging her nails in the blood that streaked it.
She sank back, clutching herself and huffing down against her chest. “Fuck…” she whined.
She dragged her hand against the rubbly floor, abrading her skin against the small rock fragments.
Her chest jerked as she sobbed and sniffled.
She lay down beside him.
Back in the guild, George mimicked someone holding a sword and slashed forward. Elene took the fake hit and let out a mock-groan. The two fell back in their chairs, snickering.
“Dad.” Elene raised her arms for a hug, flumping toward him.
George caught and lifted her in his arms, smothering her.
As he was about to close his eyes, her voice rang in his ears: “Do you know when Mom’s coming back?”
He jolted, then smiled. “She won’t approve of this, you know that.”
She made a face. “But it’s not like anything bad’s happening.”
He almost scratched his head, but her weight pulled him down. “Well… I agree with her partially. This—what we’re doing—isn’t the safest environment for a child.”
She barked, “But I like it! Isn’t that enough? And even if something bad happens, you’re there. So it doesn’t matter.”
He tilted his head up and around. “Well, I might… you know.”
“Nah, you can’t.” She clung tighter.
He met the expressionless glances of his fellow group members. “He-he.”
She let her eyes fall shut, and the two stayed like that for a while.
Her head snapped back at him. “Then why do you bring me?”
“That’s only if I know if it’s safe.”
“But still! If you bring me, that means it’s safe!”
“No, not always. No, not at all. I can prepare all I want… but…” He glanced at his fellow members, who averted their gazes. “You know. There will be those days.”
She let what he said sit, face pressed into his chest.
His voice vibrated through her. “But not this time. I can’t bring you.”
“Noooo!” she squealed.
He beamed, laughing breathily.
By late afternoon, the guild gradually emptied, and the passenger wagons outside filled.
Three members of George’s group hung out under a lone tree, staring out at the departing groups. 
“Boy, you think there’ll be a fishman there?” one said, sitting on the tufts of grass directly below the tree.
“In a cave like that? No, nah,” another said, standing, one leg crossed over the other, clinging to the branch.
“Damn it! If I only brought my hooks and worms, then I’d find at least one.”
“You know that’s not how that works, right?”
“I’m fucking joking.”
“Guys, shh. I’m trying to enjoy this moment,” the third said, his boots planted. 
For a moment, the first two went quiet.
“You think she broke him?” the second whispered about the third.
The first broke into laughter, holding his stomach.
The second started giggling, adding more and more details.
The first fell to his knees and slammed the ground, his guffaw stretching.
The third took a breath like a sigh, gaze fixed. “They’re calling us.”
They quickly joined the rest of their group as everyone left.
By sundown, the groups encamped for the night outside Calamintop. The way from the cave spread wide and flat before plummeting behind their camp into a sunken garden hemmed in from above by jungle rises, whose trees formed a continuous canopy that ended around the middle.
The echo of distant tumble and clatter, like hands reaching in the dark and people falling over their equipment, tore through the air. It hung long after the sounds were gone.
The jungle’s murmur sharpened. The sky loomed a decaying blue.
The torches lit up one by one. Chuckles spread. The trees swayed harder and harder.
George’s laugh went on and on in one of the tents. Elene shook her hands in the air. “And then the monster falls!” She imitated a splash and an explosion with her mouth. Sella stood by the door, hands folded, smiling. Thorn went in to her side and said, “The first chamber.”
“We check it tonight.” She nodded flatly.
“Won’t Mark be the one to say it?” He almost scratched his head.
She glanced at three others who were standing outside waiting, Rayla, Rick, and someone else. “Everyone’s already going to check it. It’s better that we’re not lagging behind.”
Thorn nodded and went to the other three, leaving with them to spread the word to the rest of the group.
Inside, George had his hand on Elene’s shoulder. “This time, you really can’t go with us.”
“Yeah!” She beamed.
Watching them, Sella took one of her last deep breaths of the day.
She and George went out to four people carrying a covered figure on a bed.
A young woman hurried alongside it. “Dad, Dad!”
Throughout the camp, everyone went out when they heard, then stopped when they saw.
“Is she with us?” one said.
“Look at her,” another said.
“They were inside,” a third said.
“How long?” a fourth said.
“What happened?” a fifth said.
“Goblins,” a sixth said.
“Why?” a seventh said.
George went back.
“What happened—” Elene peeked out of her tent, keeping her toes inside.
He leaned onto her, enveloping her in his arms.
“What happened?” she whispered.
“Someone…” He stifled something.
“What?” She tried to tilt her head in his squeeze.
“Something.” He breathed past her.
“Yeah?” She almost laughed.
“Something…” He settled like this.
The two stayed there for a while.
“Dad?” She interrupted.
He clenched. “Yes?”
“Want me to come with you?” She was stretching her feet that ached from standing against his weight for so long. 
“Ha-ha, no, no. I’m fine.” He freed her, patted her head, and left.
Sella stood outside, facing him. “Come on, let’s go.”
He nodded, eyes averted.
The two rejoined their group, and Mark was already out front at the entrance. The groups formed the coalition here.
Their numbers poured inside.
The way to the second chamber hung ahead of them.
A screech vibrated the walls.
The ground quivered for a moment, the rock chips skittering up and down; some dissolved away.
Dust wafted down from the pores in the ceiling, settling on heads and helmets.
Someone’s knife clattered and displaced dust after they dropped it.
Someone burst into a cough, triggering a chain of coughs through the coalition.
The passage filled with chuckles and snickers before guffaws erupted. The laughter continued with banter, abuse, and chatter. Groups, friends, and strangers resumed their conversations.
A goblin peeked from inside the second chamber. An arrow sliced through it, leaving a sparkling gash. Its guts spilled onto the floor.
Another arrow flew, eviscerating another goblin behind the first. Flames burst from the wound, consuming the creature. 
A third ran away. From behind a corner, someone swept into the chamber toward it and cut its legs with two daggers, sending it crashing to the ground. From his left rear, someone else lunged with a hammer, smashed it on the head, and staggered as the ground under it cracked, sank, and spat out dust. “Fucker!”
A fourth goblin screeched, raising one palm and clenching it shut, grasping a spear in the other. “Khalagtahg!” A flame sprang from its fist. It ran its burning, unharmed hand over the spear, coating it with fire. It opened this fist, and the flame swirled away.
A third, fourth, and fifth person ran at it.
It thrust forward several times, flame whooshing toward them, halting their advance, then swept its tip around and slashed it forward like a sword, sending its flame in a moving wall.
Four more people whirled their hands, and a translucent, glowing white wall emerged from the ground, blocking the flame. Three more spells appeared: a shard of ice, a flying sword, and a black fog that embrittled non-human flesh.
The first five people charged it.
The spear clattered away.
In places, the goblin had frozen, bled, and lost flesh to shatter, slumping to the ground.
Snarls and gibbers spread through the chambers. Creatures stirred, skittered, and rumbled throughout the cavern.
A giant floating stark-white featureless hand crept from around the corner, smashing someone before scudding away.
The person croaked while a group of green robes extended glowing hands, restoring her bones and the shape of her face.
A tall tree creature blasted over, kicked someone into the wall, and whipped away.
His armor crushed into him. He collapsed, groaning when he should have been screaming.
Glows brought him back to shape, but his eyes lay empty.
A different series of glows jolted him back to cussing and thrashing on his feet.
Two doves appeared on the ceiling and spat fast glowing purple balls that exploded on impact, scorching flesh and paralyzing bodies.
Arrows bounced off the doves, hitting an invisible sphere.
A beam of lightning shattered through it and left falling dust where they hung.
Bolts from the third chamber shot continuously, hissing on impact.
Walls arose, blocking the first attacks, but the coalition slowly backed off around a turn in the passage to wait out the rest. But the bolts stopped only seconds after they retreated.
They proceeded again, and more bolts came, holding them down. But every time the bolts paused, they crawled forward, getting closer and closer to the third chamber.
Then the bolts erupted into a barrage. The tree creature and floating hand charged forward, along with a company of goblins. Already halfway to the human coalition, they were set to rupture it mid-maneuver.
The bolts tore through shields and walls, but a line of people absorbed the damage that should have pierced through them and into everyone behind them. Green robes were shining rays into them, and red potions stained and dribbled their lips. From behind, Mark surfaced, and his line of cannoneers edged their cannons out front and aimed.
Blasts boomed, and round shots flew, making fractured craters wherever they hit.
Battered and growing awkward in its gallop, the tree creature skidded, then slipped and crashed to the ground, twisting its leg with a resounding snap. It lay groaning, shuddering, and throwing its head back while the floating hand and goblins pressed on to maintain their momentum.
They slammed into the coalition’s first ranks, impaling and smashing them into downed, stunned heaps, while Mark hurried from the edge, bringing many others to hack away at the rest of the tree creature.
It cracked, broke, and snapped under abuse, shattering. Goblins turned heads; some of them missed a block, ingested the brunt of a blade’s streaking potion, and flopped dead with a soaked splat within seconds. The floating hand jolted back, and a spear drove through its palm, acid sizzling through it. It coughed, blood streaming from its punctures. Nearby, a goblin slammed sideways into the ground and lay still, wisps of golden light and ethereal choir wafting out of its charred gaping window of a cheek.
A goblin’s eyes crept up the tree creature’s remains, flickering one last time.
A spear ran through it, leaving black rot in the flesh.
The blur of swords that ripped into flesh and tore out more on the way out dissolved into darkness, giving way to an apparition of the boundless sky.
It awoke to sunshiny showers, flowery streets, and clattery wagons.
Back in the cavern, Mark returned and helped catch the fleeing goblins one by one.
Nearby, George and Sella, along with the rest of their group, pressed fists, hardened skin squishing.
After setting barricades between the second and third chamber, almost all the coalition returned to camp and slept. Only a few who had failed to participate earlier stood guard and intercepted any remnants, keeping the field clear.
In the morning, the rattle of ox-drawn wagons, which the locals supplied for hire under official orders procured from the magistrate of the district, filled the camp. Well before the fight, they had been shuttling to town, carrying back the clink of empty flasks and used cleaning and repairing tools, and bringing the nourishment of fresh food and the overwhelming cornucopia of apothecary ingredients like hillwort and horehound to camp. Even stacks of sun-dried, washed clothes, socks, stockings, drawers, and beds came in their own supply run. The cleared route to town wound and knotted, kept safe from steep, slippery forest paths, with armed pickets drawn from different groups scattered along it. Wagons fed them along the way, with salted pottages, sippets, herb-farced fillets, roasted eggs, and raisins.
Around the doodle-charted plain of tent tops, Elene sprinted, the billowing wind at her back, the humid air scented with broth. She veered along ranges of mountainous tents lined with towering gabions, circling them to hide and shake off pursuers. She stopped at the sign-marked edge that led into the bowl. The children behind her stared. The expanse below stretched as far as their eyes could see and sank deeper than they could reach safely from here. In their eyes, hill towns made of grass extended along routes that ascended vast escarpments. A life could give birth, gaze aloft under passing clouds, and expire here.
In one of the pickets, two men chuckled, even with the chewed ball of biting, crunchy endives in their teeth. A goblin lay in front of them, scalded all over. Its boiled flesh could have gone in their soup, they joked.
Sweat lingered on skin. Mud flecked like scratches. Hands shook like wrenches and wrestles. Smiles glided along faces, spreading through groups like a morning breeze. The sky grayed with the clouds, then lit again with their passing. The ground slapped, sucked, and swished underfoot, the bedrock distant like myth and the way to it congested with saprolite and clays. Trees unfolded upon the world in tangled roots, bracing it all together.
Back in camp, Sella let out a sigh before handing George his pouch. She was sitting cross-legged with her back straight and eyes swiveling around.
Their group spread across a whole row of connected tents. Just outside, the whole camp hung smothered inside the breathing jungle and a sprint away from the cavern chambers, with the threat of something breaking through and pursuing retreating fighters back to camp. But people held onto their soft beds and clothes and wrapped themselves snug, slurping from streaming-hot stew that kept their tummies warm and sated. The chatter and chuckles of family, friends, and welcomed strangers wafted throughout the camp. The dripping, slick jungle edges farther out gusted along. The route back to town lingered always with a smattering of coming wagons, an endless hike.
When everyone had eaten their fill, Mark clapped his hands in front of him. “Third chamber,” he declared.
“Third chamber,” chorused tent by tent throughout the camp.
Groups went outside and formed lines.
Drawn from different groups, the coalition officers sorted everyone into tight combat formations based on ability and coordinated with the overall structure. Most were standard infantry and support, even with enchanted weaponry. Those with magical beams and the like were scattered across the front fringes to give them clearance and prevent collision. Cannons edged just behind the front to topple any all-out charge. Half of the healers were regularly interspersed, but the other half amassed behind the front beside the cannons. Those who absorbed barrages of spells like penetrating bolts and overloaded themselves on potions were woven into the front. But most in the front were detached attackers wielding daggers, hammers, and other close-combat weapons or spellcasters with ice shards and flying swords. Crucially, friends, not group mates, were kept as close to each other wherever possible at the very edges of their formations.
The coalition entered the cavern, heading down into the first chamber and continuing into the second.
Skitters kicked up dust across the third chamber, while the rumbling marchers brought mud on their way from the second. With the barricades already removed, the passage opened up, and the shadows crept larger and larger.
At the third chamber, a goblin settled in front, holding a crossbow. It shot, landing squarely into a shield. It looked back and waved at the other goblins, who ran over with crossbows and shields. They all aimed through the entryway and let loose as one. The bolts slammed into a magically created wall and dropped, soon becoming crushed underfoot. Curses shot from their jaws.
Arrows flew from the coalition, shattering their shields and tearing gashes in them.
A taller goblin strode behind the smaller ones and ordered them to move out of the way. But when they already lay dead, it heaved a breath.
Snowflakes swirled around its larger crossbow in a crisp winter-swept cylinder, vanishing at the edges.
It shot at the coalition, and the bolt broke a wall, but plunged to the ground after that. It clicked its tongue.
An arrow from the coalition flew, and it tore another small goblin.
The tall one barked, and every goblin in the cavern came over with different weapons.
It waved its hand and coated their weapons one by one with that winter effect, only much smaller and fainter.
By the time it was done, it shouted at them to aim their crossbows, raise their shields, and clench their swords and spears.
A heavy, tense, breathless voice from the fourth chamber ordered them to withdraw.
It echoed the order in a yell, straining its throat, and the goblins abandoned the third chamber.
A number of goblin stragglers at the back fell to daggers, ice shards, and hammers.
Once the coalition cleared the chamber of traps and set up barricades, they proceeded down the passage toward the fourth chamber.
More goblins fell to arrows.
The nearer they came, the thicker the dead creepers cascading from the roof. Their surroundings soon vaguely resembled a forest tunnel.
From the fourth chamber rolled a thunderous cheer.
A goblin with a gem-encrusted crown tottered out of it, clinging to the wall. 
An arrow flew.
The goblin raised its palm, and the arrow dissolved as soon as it entered an invisible sphere.
Smirking, the goblin shouted as more and more energy surged through its head, chest, and arm into its outstretched palm.
From its palm, a blast ripped through the air and slammed directly into the first ranks. Blood amassed, and eyes and faces blackened. Bodies collapsed into each other.
The blast continued as a constant beam, slamming with an endless force.
A lightning beam shattered the sphere, but the goblin kept healing, absorbing all the damage until the beam flickered out.
“Retreat!” someone shouted.
Someone else pushed his way through his formation and ran off, driving his elbows back.
Glows brought back several others, who fled just as fast.
The coalition fell back and ducked behind the barricades.
The beam destroyed any straggler as they lay screaming with a hand raised toward the others. The passage dotted with corpses. Some even died inside the third chamber when the beam got past a gap.
In full purple and yellow, Mark ran up and sliced the crowned goblin as it turned back. He struck it again and again, using a spear, a blade, a dagger, a knife, and an arrow. He even dumped a crucible of lava he pulled out of thin air.
The crown clattered, and the charring, burning, steaming corpse perfurmed his nostrils. His sweaty face with its small smile turned back to the watching coalition right before he sprinted all the way back, weaving through the bodies. A tenth of the coalition lay among them.
Thorn—along with five others from George and Sella’s group—had stared, sputtering out his last breaths.
Chapter 4
George stared. A trickle was tapping the water in the bucket in front of him.
Elene ran past him, squealing.
Reddish clouds floated above. Yellow blossoms swayed on a tree nearby. He glanced at them.
Sella returned with a hot bowl of stew. He took it and held it by the edges, keeping his hand from the heat that crept through the wood. He held the silence for a moment, then said, “Thank you.”
She cupped his shoulder and beamed. “No worries!”
He half-smiled.
As she turned, he compressed his lips. “S-Sella.”
She raised her brows at him, standing there.
A smile flickered on his face. “Ah, a-ha, I…”
She let out a sigh, blinking through it. “It’s okay. I mean, of course it’s not, but we’re here, right?”
He locked eyes with her, peering into them.
“Okay,” he said.
She turned away.
Soft breaths broke behind her.
The next morning, the third day of the operation, George stretched. Though yesterday morning had been full of death, the rest of that day was spent on recovery and review with a dash of tribute and group hugs.
When he strode out of his tent, he raised his brows at choruses of laughter.
Rayla and Melly compared quills on one side while Sella and Elene played clapping games nearby. Elsewhere, Rick and his two friends sat debating the best fighting techniques when Resse and Multe mingled with people outside the circle. Even those least involved with the group’s inner circle, Leo and Mrs. Aileen, chatted in the back. Throughout, the rest of the members had formed similar groups.
George smiled, right as Sella and Elene beckoned him to join their game.
He stepped forward, right where Thorn and those five others had just been.
He played as part of his broader group within the camp.
“Fourth chamber!” people yelled across the camp after everyone ate breakfast.
The coalition assembled.
The third chamber darkened with their presence.
The passage leading to the fourth had long been cleared of corpses.
The entryway to the fourth loomed beyond them.
Mark stood at the front.
George sighed. “Fuck.”
Sella half-laughed.
The marching began.
The entryway remained empty and dim. The passage was still clear. Muted skitters emanated, but that was normal.
They got all the way to the fourth chamber. It was empty.
Someone shuddered.
The officers ordered a halt.
They sent someone inside.
She came back, shaking her head.
They sent another, farther this time.
Same response.
They sent a third, as far as the middle of the passage leading to the fifth chamber.
Nothing.
Everything was quiet.
Everyone was ordered to stay vigilant.
The fourth chamber could be controlled and barricaded, but they were kept just outside it.
Quiet sighs broke up the silence.
The officers ordered a retreat.
Everyone went back to camp.
The officers announced that the operation was ending, citing bad intel.
Everyone stifled their sighs, clapping, and whooping as they went to their bags and tents and got everything ready to leave.
Once the coalition broke up and the groups set off on their separate ways, George laughed alongside Sella, their eyes wet with tears.
Upon returning to the tavern, everyone in George’s group went home and hit the sack.
The next morning, five thickset men strode through the tavern doorway, thumping in high-topped boots. Their violet and sand-yellow overcoats swished and cracked, settling on their shoulders before each harmonious stride. Mark’s wasp insignia rippled on their chests. They darted glances around the room, but lingered over the scraped, dirt-chalked bottom of chair legs. In their rough palms, orbs glimmered and rolled against thick mud crust. “Good morning,” said one as sweat dropped from his nose onto his upper lip. Rivulets ran down his chin. “Are… George and Sella here?”
After a moment of silence among the regulars, someone straightened, raised his palm, and said, “They’re not here. But they should be any time now.”
As the five sat one by one on the bench and leaned back, they propped their elbows behind them on the table. “Shit, how do you guys cope with this shit?” the earlier speaker among them said and heaved his hand across his slick forehead.
Some regular nearby half-laughed. A smile tarried on his face long after the sound in his throat left.
The head of George poked inside before the rest of his body came padding through, already grinning, while Sella and Elene giggled just behind him.
The second speaker among the five tilted his head in their direction. “Oh, there he is. Georgie. How’re you?”
George slowed to a halt. “Good morning.” With a smile on his face, he spoke evenly. Behind him, Sella’s chin lowered imperceptibly, and her eyes snagged on their colors, stopping on their insignias. A smile blossomed out of her face. Elene straightened behind the two, leaning on Sella’s side.
“Try Georjo,” said the third member.
“Georjo,” the second tried. “Nah, that sucks.” He turned back to George, holding up a parchment he got from the fourth member. “Mark wants to speak with you… regarding… you know. Compensation.”
“They aren’t exactly… compensation,” George said with a heavy look.
The second raised his brows and his eyes went distant. He compressed his lips, slightly frowning. “Call them free money and food then. Either way, boss is sorry five of yours got nacked.” He made a very slight grimace.
“Okay then.” George gazed down for a moment, then up at him. “Six.”
The second leaned forward, rising to his feet. “Hmm?”
George looked to the side. “Six got nacked.”
The second rubbed the ridge of his brow. “Oh, I apologize then. That’s on me: I read wrong.”
“You know my handwriting’s crude!” whispered the fourth.
“Apologies, apologies,” the second muttered back. He faced George. “Sorry,” he spoke clearly. Apart from the second and fourth, the other three members shifted in their seats and shared glances out of the corner of their eyes. Sella supported Elene beside her as they sat at George’s side.
The second tapped his chin. “Wanna come with us? We’re leaving tomorrow. If you go directly to Mark, he’ll have something for you beyond this ‘free money.’” He lifted his palms, drawing them outward. “Big things.”
Sella breathed hard and almost stood but stopped with Elene’s weight on her. “You’re tasking him, or the group?” Her voice dipped: “We come together.” George turned his head aside toward her.
With the silence looming over the five members, Elene eased herself off Sella. She rocked from side to side and swung her legs back and forth, scatting to herself.
George balled his raised hand. “Then it’s settled.” The five lolled, slouching forward toward him.
By the next day, their group amassed at the tavern entrance. “Juniors, Buniors, Suniors, damn it, I lost track, who’s Michael again?” said one.
“I can only guarantee at least sixty, but I’ll give you seventy for tomorrow,” said another to someone else.
“There’s four of us today,” said a third in a different conversation. “Tomorrow, he should go.”
Inside the tavern, George and Sella laughed while shaking hands. “So he’s supposed to be willing to give that?” He burst out laughing.
Sella bent over, hand on the chair. “Ye-yeah, that’s what he said!”
Beside them, Elene mimicked a bow and drew it long, letting the imaginary arrow loose into the open air.
They soon went out. The five who had invited them followed. They combined with the group, and everyone left, bags, wagons, and all.
Nearby, an arrow struck a boy. He fell and touched his bloodied leg, screaming as he struggled to lift it.
Elene jerked her bow, then dissolved it with a lift of her brow.
George stared back at her. “What the fuck.”
She straightened up partially.
George stepped toward her. “Elene, did you do that?” He looked back to the others. Someone was already healing the boy.
She tilted her head. “I did that?”
He crouched and embraced her. “What you did was an accident, but it’s good that you apologize to the boy afterwards.”
“Is he okay?”
“Going.” He parted from her and rose to his feet, peeking at the boy, who breathed softer now. He beckoned her. “Let’s go.”
They went to the boy.
She and the boy looked at each other, but the boy left with his mother, asking for biscuits.
“Sorry!” she snuck. She looked at George again. “I did that?”
George saw Sella coming and spoke fast, “Yes. Magic. You have it. I can check now. The arrow came from you.” He turned to Sella. “Did you see it?”
She swiped a copy of her blue screen to him. “Yeah. What the fuck was that?”
He stared, eyes glowing with the white text. “[Arrow Conjure],” he stated. She nodded flatly.
He gave Elene a copy. “See that?”
Elene nodded at an angle. “I did this?”
George watched her while Sella went to talk to the others. “Yes,” he said. “If you look at it, you’ll see your stats. I can’t see it for myself, but you can. Do you see it? What does it say?”
Elene paused between each letter. “M-Q 1-5-6.”
“150 MP,” he told Sella when she returned.
“Great. Let’s get her in.”
He raised eight fingers. “Let her rest and watch first.”
She nodded after a moment.
Later, the rest of the group made a path as Elene crept back to the tavern.
“We’re leaving her with Geasi.” Sella raised her voice. “Anyone else wanna stay?”
No one lifted a palm.
She nodded. “Okay, we’re heading out.” She set off first.
Chapter 5
Elene stared at the creature bouncing on the windowsill. “Who are you?”
“I’m Wimcy!” The chicken-sized creature with black fur, four legs, and cat-like ears beamed. It leapt into the air and thumped back down onto the sill with its soft paws. “Your well-structured assistant!”
“Okay.” She imitated the thinking posture she had seen many adults do. “What do you do?”
“Play!” It went down and ran around, climbing the walls like an ant and speeding across the ceiling.
“Burm-burm-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-burmmmm!” She made sound effects for its rush.
It dropped back down to the middle of the room. “You got it! That’s the zest!”
She tilted her head until her hair rippled on the ground. “What?”
It swelled its chest. “Zest!” Its voice whipped a breeze around the room.
Her voice soared. “Okay!”
Dad’s friend peeked inside the room and beckoned Wimcy back. Once it hopped onto her palm, she dissolved it with a wrinkle of her nose. “How are you doing?” she said, grinning.
Elene tried to nod, but because her head was already tilted up at Dad’s friend, it craned forward instead. “Squid—” She broke into a slight grin. “I’m squidilicious!” She imitated the sound of the breeze Wimcy made when it exclaimed, “Zest!”
“Boushish-woooo!”
Dad’s friend stared, eyes flickering, before she proclaimed, “Okay then!”
She stayed there at the door, gripping it, while Elene continued her sounds.
“Hey,” Dad’s friend continued, slowly drawing a plate from behind the door. “Are you hungry?”
Elene shook her head and showed Dad’s friend five fingers. “Not yet. 5 PM. I eat.”
“Oh, right… Is there anything else you do… at certain times?” A bead of sweat dropped down the ledge of Dad’s friend’s cheek.
Elene bopped her lips tapping them with her finger. “Hmm… Well, certain days. But it’s okay. I’ll just wait for Dad!”
“Okay.” Dad’s friend threw in a thumbs-up. 
She turned and whispered to others behind her as she eased the door shut.
Elene made sounds with her lips, like pops and smacks.
Elsewhere, on a road cutting through a jungle, George stiffened his jaw. “Okay, but we can’t just abandon her. We have to integrate what she’s capable of.”
Sella knitted her brows for an instant, then went in front of him to face him. “But you know her. She’s still a child. What she’s doing. What she can do. You can’t force her to make it serious.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.” He glanced at the other members of their group from the corner of his eye, swallowing. “Either she goes forward or we’ll abandon her while she’s still young. This is an opportunity, Sell. She can do it.” His mouth twitched with a half-smile.
She turned her head aside and stared deep into the stretch of forest.
“She’s yours, anyway,” she half-said, turning away.
He looked at her as if punctured.
“No. Sell, talk to me.”
She smiled at him. “So?”
His eyes darted down and around while he stood stiff as a rod, hands smoldering.
“Eight.” He raised eight fingers.
Her smile froze. “I mean, if it’s just that—sure.” She nodded promptly multiple times.
“Plus, 150, remember?”
She slowly nodded. “Yeah—yeah, yeah.”
Behind them, the group had been standing with their hands propped in front of them, looking around.
To ask a question, he gave her a double thumbs-up, tilting his body a little and raising his brows.
She waved her hand to say yes. 
Facing the path, her gaze gradually went blank, and a light smile crept into her face. “By the way, did you see Rayne earlier? She was laughing so hard she broke her jaw.”
“What?” he said, halfway through multiple different tones.
“Oh sorry, I meant she had to re-adjust her jaw earlier. Don’t worry, she’s fine.”
He half-laughed, brows still up. “Okay…” he said like a question.
When she got one look at his face, she snorted before bursting into a cackle, glancing at the verdant, brilliant sun-dashed world.
He made a few delayed nods, his head shifting left and right with knitted brows, a smile forming on his face.
The two continued walking laughing, one on the verge of a chortling guffaw, the other in a blur of tones with a whisper of a grin, while the group followed them. Thorn, who had always been in front at the beginning of their trips, was, for the first time, absent.
Everyone was chatting and jesting, bumping into one another and tramping forward with beaming smiles on their faces, even with the bulging bags and mud-chalked wagons they had to adjust throughout their journey through the looming jungle. Rapidly growing vegetation and watery mushes smothered their paved route. Half-knee-deep floods from far-away rivers punctuated it. But they worked through it, cutting, grabbing, tossing, and sweeping chunks off the road, just enough for the wagons to pass. Anything that tore or broke and became unmanageable to carry was left on the roadside.
Rayla and Melly snickered softly together while Rick and his two friends flicked leaves off their hands to see who could get theirs farthest. Their litter of leaves stretched the longer they played.
Thickets that had once smothered them tipped over the edge of the visible distance. Sweat would soon evaporate.
The continuous canopy overhead—the group’s lens of the sky—even for a moment, thrummed with their easy, open, full sound.
The moment they arrived, faded, crusty posters of a distorted, smirking Mark, who was garbed in what was once vivid purple and yellow, glided and scuffed against the street along the walls of buildings.
People scattered along the streets hobbled about, while towering above them were a number of pyramidal towers with large, wind-swirled crystals floating, whirling, and bobbing above them.
Men in dark clothes repeatedly popped out of thin air, vanished, and appeared again ten steps farther along the road.
Sella flicked the hair off her face and turned down a sunken, dark-swallowed alley. Following behind were the rest of her horde.
“Good afternoon, gents and ladies!” croaked an older, white-haired man wrapped in a tight-fitting overcoat that covered him from neck to toe. The horde poured past him, blowing a gust.
A woman sat on the ground with her knees drawn up. On her were a flowered blouse and hat, which dangled a feather over her face. They rippled as the looming horde thundered around her.
The boom of their footsteps flooded the alley. The flickering edge of a tower crystal showed just out of sight in the strip of sky overhead.
Tiered crates broke up the empty, eroded, pitted walls. Hollow groans vibrated out of them.
They turned again and descended a dizzying staircase of alleys. Ragged, frayed figures huddled in the corners. By the time they got to the bottom—one of many depths—only torches glinting ahead warded off the dark. Torchlight splashed against the outlines of a chiseled stone bridge, gray wraparound balconies, and sculpted balustrades—all converging on a high-ceilinged room with three-columned windows.
The five who had invited the horde went forward along the balcony and entered the room through a doorway after several steps.
When they returned, a wide-shouldered man twice their size appeared behind them, waved hello, and beamed, his huge hands settling in a clasp in front of him. He wore a tunic that glowed an endlessly rippling rainbow. A rubbery-skinned green shark banded with shining yellow swam in mid-air beside him, wagging its tail.
“Come along.” The giant beckoned, turning around and tramping toward the doorway.
Sella strode beside him, while the horde filed forward alongside the five.
A robed, older woman stood before an array of seats split down the middle, and behind her stretched a wall-to-wall, flippable board. “Take your seats.” On the board, a map spread, featuring wavy mountain scribbles varying by height.
Sella looked behind herself as she sat down, arm resting on her chair back.
The horde filtered into their seats.
The older woman steepled her hands. “Mark’s not here. But we’ll be meeting him in a camp far west of St. Claire. Let’s go.” She turned the board, passed under it, and descended a staircase that sprouted into a jungle glade embossomed just outside an open, surface cave.
When the members of the horde came out one by one, their giggles, howls, and shrieks dinned the birds. Pink bougainvilleas jerked at the startle of a bird, loosening into a breeze-undulated sway.
The five men, George, Sella, and the giant all stood about as the horde seeped across the leafy, viney glade, some pelting toward the trees. They trod over lush and soft herbage past large lance-shaped leaves and underwood. The occasional thud and clack of footwear against small quartz stones, iron stone gravel, and fragments of ferruginous stone filled this great nest of greenery.
Among the trees, goblins hung shriveled and pitted on hooks pinned into trunks, some strewn with hard vines. What remained of their eyes was glaring and bloodshot, fluids blackening into an ossified trickle staining their pallid upper cheek. Their decaying organic sludge mired the ground below them and hardened with the scorch-crusted mud, cementing into the path. Blade cuts clumped on the trunks on the left and right of each goblin, some cuts peeping just behind the flaky, green-enamelled underside of a monster ear.
Behind them, the bulky cave top bore down on its minuscule hollow and soared up a glistening limestone cliff to a cobbled, blue-spired tower. The tower linked to a massive, pockmarked wall, which edged the prominent ridge tapering off into fog. The scudding, whirling bank of fog laced the face of the mountain like a ledge. The silent, breezeless enormity of this scene met their eyes like fact, and a single turn-around dissipated the fact of its loom and weight. The scritches of their crust-laden boots against dirt petered out just below the canopy, clinging to the hardpan.
Mud crust amid thin-bladed grasses and ferns rubbed occasionally against the feet of those in sandals or clogs.
Sweat flavored their lips.
Along the left and right, mounds, slopes, and rock outcrops and strips diversified the otherwise flat green-covered terrain, complicating wheeled locomotion. Above these features, ledges invisible when seen from the front protruded now along the cliff. Grass-dressed outcrops beside the exterior cave wall showed pocks and marks. Craggy lines climbed over their middles like welts. Mineral flakes covered the reddish dirt forming the cave exit, which was firm in some places. Moss vines streaked the damp crag, with slight coils.
Elsewhere, deep in the same jungle, a spectacled goblin gently held onto a blade in its left hand and blue-green flame in its right, staring out into what remained of the sky after it passed through the canopy. Just after its groan-bark, it crouched and crushed its fallen goblin-kin’s head with the forceful, fiery clutch of its hand. 
It strode through glades, one after another, passing the trees like a ghost.
A human half-stepped from behind a tree, then froze, his eye locked with the monster.
It leapt, soaring forward in mid-air, before landing behind him. It grabbed his head and crushed it against its knee, drilling its fire into the center of his brain, powdering it.
Screams had died in the area.
The goblin used its blade to skin the human and collected it into its porous bag, running along in a wandering scamper. Behind it trudged its empty-handed gang.
It and its gang garnered a number of caches tucked at the bottom of trees, some half-dug into the loamy dirt, others cool, dry, and shady within the buttress roots. The caches contained scored element-enchanted shards, along with mud-pored hilts and wax-shielded fragments of a suite of repair and metalworking tools. Their sack-laden tread sank into the earth.
The gentle scent of sweet trees infused the already deep jungle air and passed through their noses with each breath. The coolness opened their chest, expanded their lungs, and swelled into their stomach. They bore and plunged through the jungle amid the sticking swelter, crested and stepped off boulders, and pressed down into stream purls with crisp splashes, journeying below the canopy-frayed strip of sky through thinning, tuft-lipped meanders and ragged river knees with high, smooth stone walls. Leaflets fell like dream doves. Damp bark handholds, stone pockets, and metalworking tools almost slipped from their sweaty, clamping grip. The clanging down the rocks preceded the burst of the water-rushed foam when the goblins fished the tools out.
“Fucking hell, why aren’t they here yet?” one said and scratched its head. Behind him, the rest of the gang put down their bags and took snacks out. They had settled on a lush bank to breathe and look out at the brows and mossy saddles of the hills.
Another frowned, looking into the distance, where the stream crept into a gully suffocated between two flat bluffs like a cloven hoof.
Out of the thick of the gang, the spectacled goblin crystallized as it made its way to the side of the stream. Its strides came in ripples and stamps as if billows burst out from under each of its steps. The gang behind it stopped and stared at it. “We can wait,” it said, its flat tone hanging in the air, even drifting and purling away. The stream murmured below it. Its right eye glowed a faint blue-green etched against the reflected spotty blue haze of the sky.
Out of the corners of the goblins’ eyes, a human hove into view on top of one of the two bluffs. On him was George’s scrunched face. Yells streamed from him to the rest of his group. “Fucking gobs! Kill them! Fucking kill them!”
The goblin gang rippled, stirring.
Arrows jabbed into the air, then penetrated the skulls of the awaiting goblins.
A goblin squealed, breaking into a sound like laughter, trying to reach for its sword in the mud, but it kept slipping and slamming its face against it, covering itself in grime, until all it voiced was a choked gurgle. A human sniped it, muting it.
The spectacled goblin struck the ground when it erupted into a scrambling run. It heaved a greatsword, and the blade scraped far down into the bank. Each slogging step propelled the goblin forward, its squeezing sighs like pinched gurgles. Its mouth bulged with its clenching, aching teeth.
The humans hung still on the crest above it, and its eyes swept their items, stopping on the bloodied blade of the one who had shouted. It advanced onto the foot of the hill. Bark-shouts flushed down the rocky, leafy, muddy slope, and arrows dug deep into the goblin’s skin.
It fell like dust filtered from the ceiling. Blood splattered. Blue-green smoke curled up from it.
It had opened its palm mid-fall, summoning its flame.
Still eyes burned away.
George smiled and clapped. “Good job, guys!” said Sella in front of him. Everyone else whooped.
The green stragglers were still on the run.
Arrows followed them wherever they went, from whatever angle, as long as a human kept hunting them.
One goblin smashed the ground in a spatter of red.
Another fell against a trunk and whirled to the ground.
A third climbed a tree and lost its footing, its crash wrenching out a bone.
A fourth ran so far down the jungle that it fell off a drop, twisting an ankle.
The humans, when they saw the incapacitated, left.
Out there in the jungle, a number of paralyzed goblins worried their nails, one of their last few motions.
The sun dipped down so low that it threw a rosy violet upon the canopy, a fleet of leaves. For these goblins, when the cloud soared away, the explosion of glitters and flutters froze into their moments. The light like a sea’s patina before them vanished when a gap drifted open in their smothering tears. With one wipe, their inland world resumed with the rustle of wide-spreading shrubs.
A younger hardened face whipped past, stopped, and drew his bow, loosing an arrow at every one of these goblins. Blood threaded over the eyes.
The stomp of human feet fragmented flakes along their trail, leaving behind goblin faces smudged against the filth.
When George and Sella’s group arrived, they stood in the shade of a massive mango tree. Mark sat high on a wooden watchtower edging out from behind the trees like a pocket flapped open, his figure a white flame against the twinkling of the rising sun. His legs spread wide apart while his forearms and elbows rested on his thighs. His head hung low, his short hair still and rigid. Around him, whiskered sacks lay open, with a tumble of sweet windfallen mangoes tapering out. His purple and yellow garb flapped and puffed with a passing breeze, but hung off and draped like liquid this mostly windless morning as he peered down at them. His lips shifted first, then his eyes, then his whole mouth. “Good morning!” His voice spouted like silence killing cacophonous jungle birdsong, and he beamed, waving high and broad, his distant figure a flicker in the grand stage of the forest. Beads and yarn drooped around his wrist.
The shoulders of the group fell. Faces loosened. Smiles returned, even chuckles. The whiff of goblins rotted in the back—their tiniest remains in a wagon on their loot.
Along this lowland stretch, some threadbare patches ran along creepers and tall grasses on one side, while others peeped underneath them. Members of other groups would haul their bags and grip their rolling wagons here.
Back at home, Elene ran around with arms wide, as if swirling and flying across the room. Behind her leapt the black, pawed creature Wimcy from a bookshelf to a long table to a wall shelf to a round table.
“Where are we going?” she said, breathless, almost slipping on a sedge mat.
“The Isles of Hubuhu!” it squealed, landed on a four-poster bed, and rumpled the bed-clothes on it.
“Ooohh!” she chirped, her momentum kicking up a draft past an upholstered chair.
Outside her room, down in the tavern hall, Geasi—the woman Sella had left Elene with—sat with her legs crossed. Around her, a houseful of people brought posts, sacks, boards, and tables in ones, pairs, and fours. The cold prickle of sweat trickled down the side of her head. Sweat drenched her lower back. The flowers blew dry. Breezes sometimes licked in. Outside, the beginnings of stifling heat showed in a flash of rays, with a few crickets already throbbing; even inside, skin gradually scorched. The hearty, funky smell like wood and tea weighed down the air long after the tables had been cleared of sun-fermented fruit.
She spread her fingers wide to check for dirt, pinched her trousers smooth and aligned, and brushed a mosquito off her clean pink sleeve. She sat upright on the edge of her chair and planted her sandals evenly together as a soberly dressed man came up to her from across the network of tables. He eased down at the other end of her table, his thick-browed face heavy with shimmery sweat. His big-gummed smile looked like a sneer, his teeth jagged like scribbles with a blunt pencil. His muscly feet lay in a sturdy pair of cracked sandals with peeled edges.
While both looked down, he said, smiling almost to himself, “How’s Elene?” He looked up at her.
She sighed, gaze still on the ground and her own fingers, as she blurred and unblurred her vision between them. A tuft from her curly ponytail flowered just left of her eyes, resembling a post in the corner of the room. Her dress sleeve encroached on her wrist, threatening her hand; she hitched it back. “I don’t…” Another sigh left her. “Well.” She bent forward, then straightened up, throwing in a chuckle. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Well, I guess she’s fine. But I’m not too sure. I mean, about George and Sella. Or the whole thing. I don’t know.” Her voice snagged on a word, then she pushed her lips shut. “Something I can’t fully embrace—the whole thing with him.” She broke into a titter. “Yeah.” She drew out the word for as long as her throat was slick. “Damn.”
He nodded softly, then hard the second time. “Yeah, I guess.” Something caught in his throat. He cleared it. “Have you heard of Mark?”
“Yeah, yeah, I have.” She glanced through the window at a group gathered beside the open-air garden flanking the tavern wall.
A plate clinked on someone’s table, half a serving of smoky pork and starchy root vegetable chunks still left on it, striped in somewhat smeared sauce.
He cough-laughed, glancing around.
She smirked at him, the corners of her eyes crinkling.
Something choked them into laughter, he stamping his frayed sandal, she bouncing the tendrils that framed her face.
Across the hall, someone blew her nose before dipping her quill in one of many inkwells in a carousel, ribbon-bound letters mounded on her left.
“You know what, fuck it. I’ll teach her the ropes.” She got up and swung toward Elene’s room.
He grinned, showing teeth. “That’s the spirit.” A laugh softened his features. When he leaned sideways against the table edge, its striated, chipped surface prickled into his skin. He let his eyes half-close.
Humming greenery sprouted from a sidewalk behind housetops. He patted his chest where his thumb-sized gash had been. The rumble of carts stopped. Teamsters unlatched their tailboards with a click. The wood creaked like a hoarse chuckle when they climbed and hauled the sacks off. A crystal set flush in a nearby scabrous wall glimmered momentarily. Dull water in buckets plinked below recessed rain chutes. A vine snaked along a bristly eave, as if slung. Patchy clumps, resembling fields, grew on the open sewage canals lining the road. Moss dotted the undersides of the canal coping stones, interspersed among the dark, dank pores.
Inside the tavern, another man took a steady route to him, chopping up the rays from the windows, squinting half the way. His blear eyes crept along the floor where his feet drifted forward. Once he got to the table, he slumped down with a rattling thud and a few whispery scuffs as he shifted in his seat. After twitching his fingers inward a few times, he yawned and groped his own shoulder. 
He looked at the man, who handed him a letter from his own side of the table. Closed-lip hums with changing tones from reading each line punctuated the lull of flipping parchment around with knuckles red from hauling sacks. He swallowed in his throat, smiling crinkly-eyed. His invisible breaths dissipated around the edges, but vigorously shoved out.
The beat of vast everyday feet vibrated everything, the hand warring for fixture. Mud trailed continuously, indurated into the ground by sun overlay. Adventurers sought, out there, where frost came in sweat shivers, heat in leaf-prick itches, and pinches in travel-sore feet. Their luggage fell constantly into their grips, dragged them against the earth, and wore their skin away. Inn stews rebuilt their damaged tissues, mended their muscles, and healed their wounds. Warm faces, lowered tones, next-morning breakfasts in the coffee-room, and bed-rooms for low prices per week drew their smiles and loosened shoulders. Those who kept out of card games, noble circles, treating ladies, tavern favors, merchants’ lodgings, debt, oversharing, and supper houses smiled all the more. Over the last year, slowly but steadily, the trails regenerated as fast as they eroded, shifting back and forth in ragged variations. The world crackled under dirt-nailed grips, scours, and scores.
Many hours later—long past the recession of rosy, ruddy, purple, and golden clouds—by 8 AM, a camp far west flickered with figures. Sella slowly put on the sweet, earthy, purple and yellow overcoat Mark had given her group. George grinned outside her tent, sporting his own from neck to knee as it sheened and held against knocks like starch. Each group member saw their name written on theirs. The overcoat designs varied, as if customized, ranging from short to long, single- to double-breasted, and one- to many-pocketed, but the same banana fiber wove them all. With Mark’s light armor, the group rasped and hissed through the morning pot-stirring gaggle. The texture of theirs etched out their group, but so did others’. On top of footwear conditions, weapon embellishments, and grooming weirdness, insignias had also sifted everyone like parchment tags. The outlines of groups broke down as members went different ways, going alone or pairing off, as officers drawn from different groups spoke to them. With all the lumpy bags banked around, pay could have gone by the weight, but everything was written on sheets plastered all over wooden posts and, for staples, boards. Water slogged up and down thicketed slopes in sealed buckets and barrels, supplying the clerk’s counting-tent. While clerks hogged the blank papers and books for the number, any actual bulletins came in cross-camp shouts started by the officers. The soft drum and tinkle of white rain milling the massive sky of the jungle drew everyone inside their flaring tents like hidden swaths, all while their overcoats rattled slightly in the breezes that slipped through their entrances. A peek out the cleft hit the nearby green, but where feathery leaves died climbing the sky, the mountains hung distant like frozen gods, as imperceptible travelers plowed through their rock scrambles. A brief walk away, in the woods, a little brook watered a hollow. Paths had yet to cut through all manner of bosk and copse, that growing ledger of strangulation. Eyes itched in the sting of dappled sweat and leafage. The sooner wagons seamlessly rolled, the faster sacks traveled and the less people struck off with their bodies all twiggy and clammy. Where waters burst all over them, a bridge built across and far from the shingle deposits could be a place to dry off. Some time after the splattering rain let up, in the midst of the homely tents, a few ruddy boys and girls pattered and cut capers around, dashing rainwater at each other from their cupped hands.
“Johnny! Keep your legs off the water!” said a child, wisps of hair clinging along her damp face.
“No! I can do it! I’ll just absorb all of it!” said another, propelling his hands toward the departing clouds.
“But no, you have to stay afloat! You’re gonna drown!” She half-slid on a clump of hibiscus.
“I will absorb all its strength, then I’ll be heroic!” He raised his pocket handkerchief, whipping it about.
“No, no, don’t do it!” She sank to her knees, as if collapsing.
“Herrrrrrahhhh!” His fingers soared.
Boots rippled mud streamlets behind them.
“Okay, that’s enough guys,” said a third, gaze affixed on the overcoat and strengthened thighs cleaving past. He turned back to the other children. “No wasting water!”
“This doesn’t count!” said a fourth, waving her arms like a bird.
A fifth inched along behind them, still as death. Her eyes flitted about ever so slightly, widened and narrowed at times, and bore through everything they stopped on. She had a bag with her, and inside pressed all her different items together: a stone she had taken from a sunken pond south of the camp, near where the stream cut off and diverged into a gouge between a detached canopy of four mature trees; an ice shard from the spoils of some forgotten clash, inlaid with mother-of-pearl enchanted to slow its melting; a giant’s ring larger than her hand, worn like a bracelet that fell off every time she put it on; a few fragrant, blotted letters; and others she had left in there for months, packing like split slate, sprinkled with brittle flakes of paper and leather.
From where the five stood, the gray in the underbellies of rakish clouds beside far dark-olive foliage and in the pale green of rain-visited grass against the light-brown tents and dark-brown trees stopped just shy of the sun dazzles. Vines floated along.
Across the rugged slope from the crest to the foot, rain dripped and rolled off, trickling past the snaggy wet tangles and mud slips, cutting a glimmering trail into the perched boulders and embedded stranglers. Their sounds sometimes recurred simultaneously or in a series like a harmonious breaking wave.
Somewhere across the camp, George almost yawned, but clamped his dampish mouth closed and released the yawn into his musty hand, the foul suction hissing against his palm. “Damn, I’m hungry,” he said, muffled. He wrinkled his nose from the smell and lingering tang on his tongue.
Sella squatted on her haunches, her hip-high boots safe on a firm patch.
Melly was flicking his thumb against the side of his middle finger to remove dirt no longer there.
Rayla cracked her knuckles and wiped the slightest bit of sweat from her hands on her clothes.
Standing, Rick held his head, his elbow resting on his crossed arm. His hand shielded his closed eyes from the direct blaze. In a tent nearby, his two friends slept, their overcoats draped over their bags on the floor.
A stranger thudded in their direction. With her smoky eyes, tousled tresses, and glossy lips, her head and face alone popped, but on the overcoat closely wreathing her body, the wasp insignia had three wings, the one Mark had told them about. “Hello, I’m Astral.” She shook hands with the five present, welcoming each by name—”Welcome, George.” “Welcome, Sella.” “Welcome, Melly.” “Welcome, Rayla.” “Welcome, Rick.” The sharp fragrance on her made George seal his nose with his dust-grimed palm and pose as if deep in thought. “I’m here to give you guys your task. Are you ready?” 
The five nodded each in their own way.
She turned briefly toward the pack-laden five-person group clomping behind her. “We just need you to come with us. Anything else will happen on the way.”
The five followed, then stopped. “Who’s coming?” Sella said.
“The five of you is fine” Astral tilted back, surrounded by her group. “Who else wants to go?”
“Can we tell them?” Sella glanced all around the camp. “They’re kinda all over the place right now.”
“Sure, sure.”
Once Sella rounded everyone up, she had forty-three people, including those asleep in ancient dreams.
“Is this enough? Too much?” she said.
Astral shook her head. “No, this is fine. Let’s go!”
Once they got to three wagons beside an arrangement of sacks, boards, boxes, pots, handicrafts, and posts outside, Astral said, “First, we need you to help carry some things. Is that alright?” Someone clip-clopped onto the wagon to receive and load the cargo.
Sella almost nodded, then she eyed George, who raised his brows. “Actually, we haven’t eaten yet.”
Astral opened her mouth for a moment before closing it. “Oh right. You guys can go ahead.”
Later, George sighed, smiling. “Food really tastes better when you’re hungry.” He took another spoonful. “Man, if I could be hungry all the time, that’d be great.” He went on chewing and stifled a moan. “Reminds me why roadside eateries taste the best.” He looked at Astral, who waved and beamed vigorously at him. He mirrored her. “I guess that’s all we’re going to eat now.” He smirked and twitched his brows at Sella, who raised hers back. Someone else beside him slumped with her face in her crossed arms over her bag.
“Sorry, what?” Sella said, rubbing her lithe eyelid. “Oh, yeah, food. Oh, I just realized. I finished it. How was yours?”
The breeze chuckled over the tent tops behind them, whipping and molding them about. “Good. Pretty good,” he said, with a twinkle in his moist eye. He jerked his hands together in a clasp and gazed outward, riveted to the spot.
Misty impressions crept up the spanning, crumbling horizon, forming huge smoky blocks. New vines grew from the ground, like emerald puffs. Glittering white lines cut across the sky over the sun-deluged midden green. At times, the interlocking canopies dwindled to traces. And finches slunk across the distance, sliding around the edges of the fog. The ring of cicadas pushed its way into the crevices of every ear, laying bare just how quiet tamed lands were in contrast. The mass of trees tempered the balminess and let out resinous warm smells and a sweeping murmur, interrupted only by laughing thrushes and chorusing parrots. Sometimes, these birds’ calls sounded like raucous wails or distorted whimpers, stirring the heart with a hot rush of blood, even while blending into the jungle’s clattering thrum. When the cloud passed over and the sunlight faded, the thousands of gaps in the leaves went from a riot of blinding, exposing beams to clear blue loopholes in an obscure chamber.
“Okay, let’s go,” Sella said after drinking, a gleam in her eyes.
The forty-four overcoat-clad members of her group, including her and George, rose to their feet, but each in their own time.
Their marching forms sliced forward, jaws set, only a few lagging footsteps catching up. When someone stooped to double-check their bulky bag, the rest continued on, but someone else was always there to hustle the straggler back. It was a one-minute walk to the three wagons.
Astral’s lightly shod steps cut alongside them. Sella and George’s eyes were on her. The mid-morning heat bit into everyone under the sun and seeped through their bodies, exhausting their motions and sagging their stances. Sweat kept them fresh and brisk.
When they got to the wagons and cargo, Astral’s teammates showed them how to carry the different weights to avoid breakage.
As soon as they set off, George looked back one more time. As soon as they set off, George looked back one more time. The somber, wet camp receded into grayish blues and violets like the wild-fruited trees.
Everything he had known there that remained—along with the routes his group had taken to get there in the first place and everything before that—went away. Even if he stayed, the trees would age. Leaving hid this, as if everything had always been that way, whether old or young, and returning would rejoin it, but only if he never actually did.
This was day one of his group’s first journey in overcoats.
Chapter 6
George stared at a figure protruding from a bush. “Hmm. You see what I’m seeing.” He took a sip from a pouch of water.
“No.” Sella turned around, mouth full of food. They were eating at the little camp their group had set up for a meal in a jungle-edge meadow midway through the journey. Even now, the heaving of their chests continued to ease and soften after having taken off their muscle-burning bags.
“Is that… No, it can’t be. I mean, how could it be? It’s way too obvious. Do they not realize we can… see them?”
“See what? What am I looking at?”
“A goblin, it seems. Well, not sure. It’s green, but that may just be the vegetation.”
“Yeah, what am I looking… for?”“
“Figure, to the left of you… wait, let me see.” He moved behind her to see it from her view. “Oh, there!” He pointed. “See that!”
“Yeah… Wait, why are you pointing then!”
“Oh, right.” He lowered his hand. “There. Happy?”
“No, but why isn’t it moving… though?”
“It’s probably sure it’s far and concealed enough it can’t be seen.”
“Well, it might just be dumb.”
“Who knows? Maybe we’re the dumb ones looking at some random log that looks vaguely enough like a person. Funny, right?”
“No? That looks like a person to me, if not a goblin.”
“Well, goblin or not, we should warn the others. Well, less so warning, more so heads-up.”
“Yeah.” She rubbed her brow. “Oh, I just remembered something. Did you see the letter Elene sent?”
“Yeah. We can talk about that when we come back.”
“If.”
“Hahaha. It’s always funny hearing you say that. But yeah, if we come back. I really hope we do, but no promises. Man, I’m excited. Dunno what for, but hopefully something boring happens.”
“Did you guys see the goblin?” Rick strode up.
“Yeah,” Sella said. George echoed her.
“Well, hopefully, that’s not a sign of anything… I’ve had my long fair share of gobbos.”
“‘Gobbly-goos’ is a better name,” George said.
“Who cares! I got dibs on 50 anyway,” Rick said.
“50? Who’s counting?”
“Me and Drax and Tullip. I mean, who else? If you guys haven’t been counting, that’s on you.”
“Shitse!” George said.
“Lady Sella, please tell—”
“Not one more word. I’ve had enough of ladies. Can you tell them that’s an order?” Sella said.
“Order? Whoa-hoah, Sell’s bringing out the crossbows. Let’s see what everyone says,” George said.
“Anyway, please tell Rayla I’ll be taking her position on the goblin raid, if ever,” Rick said.
“Yeah-yeah, sure.” She waved her hand.
“Man, please make that goblin fucking stupid or something!” Rick said and steepled his hands as he left. He grabbed fatty skewered pork offered to him.
From Rick’s side, someone else trudged out. As she neared the bush, she turned her head away as if observing the trees. When she got within arm’s reach, she snapped toward the bush and hurled herself at the goblin inside, battering it limb by limb until all that was left was bone, flesh, and paste. This took five seconds with the blunt and spiked sides of her halberd-length hammer. The stench made her cover her nose, but a cold-eyed grin forced its way onto her face. She wiped the sweat from her forehead. “Whoo!” She shuffled out and went back. “I need water.” After drinking, she sat down sprawled on the ground with the others, laughing along to someone’s string of puns in a smaller group. Trapped water fizzed and bubbled through a crack someone had just stepped through in the brittle ground while guffawing. Staring at someone talking, she sat up, crossed her legs, and laid the head of her hammer between them, its handle leaning out against her thigh. With her forearms resting on her lap, she rubbed her nails, nodding toward the speaker. When the conversation entered a lull, she raised her hands, and three blue screens appeared hovering in front of her, readable only to her. A smile crept onto her face over the second. She scrolled far down the third screen, but kept returning to three specific lines.
“What’s her name again?” George grabbed his bag, pointing at her with his eyes.
Sella slung her bag over her shoulder, keeping the breeze-streamed strands off her face. “One of Astral’s? Dunno. Alice or something like that. Maybe Anna.”
George narrowed his eyes at the woman’s hammer, rubbing a mild itch on his lower leg. “Hmm. She’s pretty strong.”
Sella shrugged with her mouth and a dip of her head. “Well, as long as we’re together.”
Astral drove past them to the front, where she spoke up about “the next stage of our journey”—what they were going to do next and what to expect along their route.
The two eyed her and then each other.
The combined group set off. They passed along meandering paths choked up with muck, exposed roots, and fallen leaves, fringed with foliage. To cross shallow waterways, instead of propelling boats with long poles, they waded barefoot into water icy against their skin, drenching their clothes to air-dry later, though some removed theirs. Every now and then, scores of garish birds appeared, each bird searching bark, leaf, or twig independently, but left as if nothing had happened. Everyone threw rocks or pushed boulders down into still water at least once. While picking their way downhill, they clambered over, crouched under, and held onto the branchlets of a cliffside mango tree. Their singing and yelling echoed around.
In thirteen days’ travel, they reached their destination—a city past the river that Astral had tapped on her map. They arrived while the predawn was still gloomy. Before them, the city formed a single light-strewn row: turreted shophouses built from timber, bamboo, and leaf thatches—rather than towers, walls, and barred gates—and adorned with wood, pots, and handicrafts. Parchment-faced, mahogany-skinned older men strolled around, their eyes limpid and swift, greeting with solid, high waves and distant, ancient smiles.
The three wagons Astral had everyone bring stopped in front of one of the shophouses. George and Sella’s group carried the loads out one by one, as gently and evenly as Astral’s teammates had shown them. In the dark, water sheets coated the ground beside the bits of dirt and scratchy grit—the aftermath of desiccating heat, cooling winds, and eroding rainsplash across decades. Glowing orbs wafted and meandered about, intermittently diving and swinging back up. They mirrored off the sheets and cleared the road of its gloom. As they floated and lolloped past the group, people’s backs, faces, and luggage shimmered, the light going still for a moment then whooshing on in a downward arc.
Once the three wagons were empty, Astral had them sold to a boy at a storehouse a dozen houses down the road. He sported pearly hair, a fixed blue-eyed stare, and black cheek marks like freckles with the sunken texture of shriveled fruits. She shook hands with him; beneath his skin coursed warmth.
When the boy closed the storehouse and left, Astral turned back to her group and gave a smile with her eyes, then softened it, lowering her eyes, losing the slight bounce in her steps. “Okay, we’re going to clear the caves here. Is that alright with you guys?”
Sella nodded and looked behind her. George followed, then everyone else in their group.
“But yes.” Astral grinned. “Eat first.” She made the eating motion with her hands.
A number of people let out stifled whoops, breaking off into blocks of chatter. The rest held themselves up and dragged themselves along, scrunching their faces and rubbing their stomachs. Others still, covering their laughter, supported them with free shoulders.
George and Sella chuckled and mock-punched the air, as if Elene were there, squealing on the side. “Pshh, pshh, pshh!”
Fragrances seeped under the door of one of the shophouses.
Astral knocked and said her name.
The door opened, and three boys rushed outside.
An older man and woman bolted after them, caught them, and pulled them back inside.
Astral’s smile remained on her face the whole time.
When the older man returned to firmness and his face to a warm smile, he spoke softly, “Would you like something other than pottage this early morning?”
“Alafa.”
“That would be chicken, dried mangoes, onions, and eggs, bread, and then boiled green beans and peas on the side.”
“Yeah, that’s fine with me.” She turned to the others. “You guys good with that?”
Sella looked behind her, and everyone nodded. She twitched her brows at Astral.
“Okay, coming right up.” The older man smiled, turned, and headed toward the kitchen.
Once everyone—all fifty members from Astral’s six-person group and George and Sella’s forty-four-person group combined—had their fill of the older man’s savory-sweet meat pies, they went off to the cave at the end of the road. They traversed a huge basin, crossed one of its thousand rills, and pulled themselves halfway up the verdant slope to the cave entrance, whose floor plunged briefly but continued wide and flat. Down the long entryway, a tight intersection of plumb walls branched into corridors stretching out in three directions. A chest sat in the corner against one of the walls.
“Is that…?” Sella pointed.
“Yeah,” Astral whispered. “I would say don’t touch it, but we do need to clear ground. So keep your distance. Use a bow. Do you guys have one? Actually, I’m an archer. Give me a sec.” She mimed the shape of a bow with her hands and fingers, then punched through it, the bow appearing in her fist. Just as the sun’s indirect daylight scattered, she stepped inside and shot the chest.
Tendrils and legs sprouted from its wood-like surface. It crawled along the floor toward them. Its tendrils shot out to heave aged swords and spears off the floor and pointed these weapons at them, whirling about behind dead-still blades, ready to jab and hack away in a frenzy.
“OK! Leave, leave, leave!” Astral said, skittering alongside everyone else to the entrance.
They ran out and watched it go out and about in the sunshine. It scuttled for a while, then fled back inside.
“Okay, that’s a little too strong for us,” she said.
“What the fuck do you mean?” George said, glancing at Sella. “We have Alice, or Anna, or whatever her name was, and you? Aren’t you strong?”
“That’s not a goblin. It can kill us,” Astral said.
“Seriously? In the middle of buck nowhere?”
“Well, you should know these dungeons aren’t cleared yet. Don’t expect it to be easy.”
“Oh yeah, sorry. I’m just surprised we encountered one this quickly. How strong is it?”
“It can kill any one of us.”
“Well, that sucks. What do we do?”
“If you’re asking, we can try pelting it down to size.” She raised her hunting bow and eyebrows with a smirk to say, “What do you think?”
“Well, if it works.” He eyed the members holding bows.
She climbed to the entrance and loosed a series of sparkling arrows.
The chest’s roar resounded through the corridor.
She continued shooting.
The chest wheeled around and sidled behind the wall.
She swore.
To their left, two red figures stood across the dawn-touched slope.
“Are those…” someone said.
“Demons!” Someone else stifled a shout.
A meteor fell.
“The fuck!” someone yelled as its explosion slammed into her, her blood-logged, charred skull shattering against a subcrop, weeds, and dirt.
“The hell, the hell! The hell!” someone else said, bolting downhill, tripping and softening the fall with his arms. His lower leg gashed against a rock.
George and Sella’s faces crumpled.
“Run, fuck, run!” someone cried.
Everyone surged downhill.
They got back after hurtling all the way across the silhouetted basin, the demons now far receding dots. Sinking onto the ground, they panted out gasps.
Only one had actually died. They had saved the paralyzed one.
Their dim chests heaved with broken sobs.
“Suya…” someone croaked. “I loved you,” he snuffled in the half-light.
The sun had yet to rise. The glowing orbs of the darkness were slowly vanishing one by one. Sunlight was swooshing toward everyone from beyond the horizon.
When light came, Suya was missing among them.
Amid the dirt, the grit, and the tacky blood on someone’s leg, someone else stood up and walked away. Another went the same way. A whole portion of the group filtered off together.
Seated, George and Sella shifted their eyes to them.
He looked at Sella. “Let’s go with them?”
“Yeah,” she said.
The two got up, and everyone else followed them, except for Astral’s group.
Of them, forty-three remained, one person short.
They traveled home and slept.
The sky shifted across many days.
One day, George woke up, covered in pillows and thick folds of blanket. Elene smiled on the bed, crawling beside him.
“Hello!” She rose to her knees and punched the air overhead.
He smiled; halfway through, his eyes shivered wide.
“Wow,” he said. The storm brewed and battered against the window. “The wind’s strong today.”
“Yeah!” She whirled around on her knees along the bed.
The corners of his eyes crinkled. “Well, looks like we won’t go outside today.”
“Yehey!” She jumped off the bed with a soft thud.
Later, at the tavern hall, Sella rubbed the sides of her nose, peeking intermittently at the rain-slick entrance. She sighed.
She snapped her head up at George and Elene’s voices.
They waved at her from the entranceway. She smiled.
“How’s everyone?” George said, looking around.
She smiled with a chuckle. “Same as you and me.”
He pointed at her overcoat, the one from Mark, raising his brows.
“I thought it looked nice. Plus, it feels good to wear something new.” She flapped its lapels, briskly at first then slowly, until she dropped her hands limp on the table. “How ‘bout you?”
His cheeks shifted up. “Well, I’m planning to go to Mark again.”
“Ha-ha, me too actually.”
“Well.”
“The others are ready as well.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, right now. They’re waiting. I just held them back because you weren’t there yet. But they waited. And you’re here.”
“How long?”
“It’s only been a week, so we’re fine.”
“But still.”
“Yeah. So, wanna come?”
“Of course!”
Cries and noise broke out in the street, transforming into clamor.
The two looked outside. Three goblins walked in the rain-washed streets, flanking two figures. Behind the figures, three dholes trotted about. A dog-sized insect scuttled past them, kicking up spritzes.
“Special goblins.” Sella made a quick point with her finger.
George raised his brows. “Sorry?”
“The ones they allowed him… Peter.”
He gave a slow, rocking nod, gazing. “Really… Who?”
“Officials.”
He rubbed his mouth from nose to chin, two fingers pressing both corners, his eyes going up. “Interesting.” His mouth broke into a grin.
He barged outside in the damp air, waving his hand. “Peter, Peter!”
Sella shrieked, “George!” She pitter-pattered after him, almost slipping.
“Can we work together? Peter!”
Peter stopped and turned his head toward George, but resumed walking when one of the dholes placed its paw on him and imperceptibly shook its head, cutting him a look.
George slowed to a halt. “Oh.”
“George, George!” Sella bumped into him with a wet splat, chills flowing through them, her mouth panting. “What are you doing?”
“I thought I found something.”
Elene shivered behind them. “Goblin?”
Sella wheeled around and went to embrace her. “Yes, don’t worry. They won’t hurt us. You’re okay, you’re okay.”
George glanced between the sniffling Elene, against whose shoulder Sella was pressing her head, and Peter’s splish-splashing entourage.
He joined Sella and embraced them both. Sella’s eyes widened, but she let them ease shut.
From the stone-pillared tavern, people from their group went out in twos and threes, stopping against the after-storm breeze.
After half a minute, Elene patted the two—George on the head and Sella on the shoulder—and pointed them to the others.
Sella, after taking a moment to breathe, opened with a smile. “Let’s go inside first.”
When they all got inside away from the slopping commotion, she stood while they sat down. “Are all of you ready? We can always do another quest. The guild is open.”
George twisted in his seat, boots squeaking. Everyone else sat still with hands on their laps, under their chins, or on the damp-trailed wooden tabletop, Elene among them.
After a long stare between Sella and the group, she shrugged. “If we’re gonna do it, we’re gonna do it.”
Elene sprang up and whooped. “And I get to come!” She mimed a hunting bow and loosed an arrow, the bow only materializing once the arrow soared halfway through the air. It would hit the mound of dewy, hole-riddled sacks against the wall.
“And yes, you get to come.” Sella laughed before breaking into a “Woah!” at the shot.
Beside Elene sat her governess, Geasi, who had already been grinning.
Chapter 7
Shambling about under hanging palls of cherry-red dust, two women patrolled along a series of ashen vaulted archways bookended by a pair of tall black gridded gates. One gate led to a raw hardpan bank stretching alongside a wooded bluff that crept farther inland, while the other stopped at scored, pallid, towering double doors before opening into a rotunda ringed with potted plants, hooked sconces, and curved shelves.
From the hills, men slid down the slope, stumbled up, and flocked to the entrance. “Mark’s coming!”
The two women jolted and bolted inside, passing through the rotunda and opening the smaller double doors at its opposite end. From here on, the structure expanded into a fenced stretch of spiraling staircases beside a gigantic chasm that plummeted into pitch black. “Mark’s coming!” the two yelled, the sound of their voices giving out within the expanse. They tried again, their voices wan this time.
Following a screeching rumble—crunches and livid clouds resounded and gusted from the darkness, their hair whipped up in the updraft.
“Mark’s coming!” the darkness bellowed farther downward.
From deeper down, distinct growls and grumbles splintered up through the walls.
“Noted,” a person’s soft voice said in their ears.
When the yellow-and-purple Mark arrived, he giggled and guffawed, clenching his teeth, tearing out a scream. “Fuck, fuck! These mother-fuckers! Why the fuck did I even put my deep, heartfelt, soft faith in them?! My heart, my beloved heart, this fucking disgusting fuck-riddled heart of mine! Why the fuck did I give myself to these ma-fuckers! Damn it!” He jerked his hand up, palm open wide, staring down the ground, his ears boring holes in it. “Fucker! Fucker!”
He stared at the circular bottom edge of one of the balustrades, where the mud speckled and trickled off into the lake. “There is something to be done about this world, and I must put my little head in, just a little. A little more. Until all is said and done, until what I ought becomes actual, and nothing else interrupts me, disrupts me, obviates my purpose, causes me grief, grievance! I would hate to have to make someone another. To make them a fuckery of all the things out of which I’ve spent so much time building. To fuck is to live. To have to cause them grief. It pales me, hurts me, causes me things I don’t want. It hurts. Impi, impi.”
He shot his hand forward, and there, a goblin popped out of thin air and fell to the ground. Advancing, he lunged, softening against it in a warm embrace. “Do you know that I love you? That this world in all its glory could never bestow joy and praise and hope and all the wonders of this awestruck thing we call a world except for the communion between two spiritual souls, that thing which must, which must! Do you hear me? Do you heed me? Are you functioning in there, in that little thing you call a brain, because in my little thing I call a brain, I see myself and in you, I wonder who? Let us engage in total truth.”
Far down the archways, the men and women bit back yelps and yells, shaking and half-whimpering on the ground.
Mark strode away in a rush.
The melodic shrieks of goblins twisting their bodies to dance filled the hills around him.
“Joy is a price I must pay to make way for something even greater.” His shivering face twisted through countless expressions.
Later that day, before the westering sun, on a road elsewhere, George chuckled, slapping Elene’s palm with his.
Their wagon bumped along the road.
A cloud of smoke wafted up from the bush Elene had been looking at.
George’s body thudded against the ground. Sella’s gasp split halfway as a bullet penetrated her head, and she fell the same way all the dead goblins did.
Elene’s scream cut across the sun-bronzed jungle, startling birds to flight.
A goblin grabbed Rayla’s head, and another thrust a blade through her nape.
Melly grabbed Elene and whizzed from an emerging line of goblins, down the slant-shaded road in the opposite direction their wagon had rolled. “Damn it!” His eyes welled like drawn blood.
A mass of countless metal-glinted green dots swarmed across the sea of the sunglow’s yellow-orange and their uniforms’ creamy pale yellow and confined the wagons and those who remained from the forty-three under George and Sella.
When Melly and Elene got back home, her torn screams blared through the street flooded with the amber hue of lamps.
“Good morning,” George’s friend said the next day.
Elene stared.
“What happened?”
Her voice floated up there in the clouds.
“Ah.” Something like a smile was on his lips.
“Well, you’ll understand in time. You saw it, but that’s a whole nother thing altogether,” he continued.
“Okay.” Her voice broke out of her.
“Yeah, yeah.” He offered her food.
Her head shook imperceptibly.
He smiled. “Try. Try to eat.”
The clear, sunny sky banged. Grass crunched in her ears. Her eyes drifted across many versions of blue.
“Elene.”
She turned instantly, but halted halfway.
His face hung across from her.
“Yeah,” she said.
He handed her his sheath. “This means much to me.”
She stared down at it, the silence hanging.
“I don’t get it.”
“What?”
“I don’t get it.”
“What? What?”
“Why? Why? And, and why are you showing me that? And why does it mean so much to you?” Tears like years dripped from her eyes.
“Oh, this?” He touched his sheath while it sat on her hand. “It means so much to me because it’s a bit of myself. The same way you were a bit of him. Literally. Of Sell. Of everyone here.”
She sobbed and wailed throughout the tavern hall.
He held his hands up to offer a hug.
She stifled herself, then leapt at him, holding him snug. “I don’t know your name. I forgot.”
Melly stood behind him, smiling with his hands clasped, crying himself.
Rick grinned.
Two months passed, and thirty remained of their group, thirteen short.
“Rick, it’s your turn. Come,” Melly said and struck the wall with his pickaxe. Beside him, Rick hit the same mark, and the crack widened.
Behind the two, Elene carried Melly’s pouch bag in both arms.
Hanging from the ceiling overhead—mottled when still, glittering when breezed, thousands of dots appearing and vanishing—pink-petaled vines formed a lush upside-down forest smothering glowing yellow crystals. Once the breeze left, even when Elene sauntered under these vines, the glitter of these shifting dots disappeared.
Her feet shuffled.
“Elene.” 
She half-turned only after the third time Melly said it. Then she turned the rest of the way. Something had snagged halfway through her turning her head.
Her mouth transformed into a smile. “Are we eating meat pie on the way home?” she chirped, semi-bouncing on her toes.
Melly and Rick turned to her together, beaming. “Yep,” Melly said.
She whooped.
When the three left the cave, they ascended the hummock in their way, Elene catching the breeze with arms outstretched overhead.
The three of them stood beside one another, the two behind her open arms. Across the land, they peered at the imposing saddles inundated in green stripped bare along a winding, piercing valley trail. It plunged forward through a plain that held high-walled clusters of houses loosely flanked by stretching palls of jungle. Across this settlement, the trail ran northeast toward the city’s heart.
“You ready?” Rick panted.
“Whir-hooooo!” she squealed.
From behind them, the other twenty-eight from their group climbed past. Melly smiled broadly.
Twenty days west of the hummock, in the middle of the jungle by the sea, George and Sella’s human skulls were mounted on stakes.
The growl of a goblin beside these skulls echoed across rows of goblins in red and green. “The fuckers that murdered one thousand we knew and loved! 
“And many more of these fuckers where they came from!
“Death to the darkness of this world!”
In the middle of the horde, a goblin child looked up at the hundreds of pumping fists awash in glaring sunbeams.
Her father’s frame kept towering over her gently, shielding her from the horde threatening to trample her. “Remember: don’t let them get away with it!” 
She nodded, eyes narrowing toward the floating sky.
“Your sister! Don’t forget her!” he quavered.
She sobbed, “Yes…”
He enveloped her in his snuggest embrace. “Be strong!”
She nodded through tears that split on her nose.
Sweat had been soaking her body throughout the rally, now mixing with these tears.
The fists changed to muskets.
After the horde dispersed, inside a cottage some distance from the rally location, she sat down at a long table. He ran the tip of his spoon through his broth, blowing on the spoonful he got. “Okay, how’s this?” He extended it to her mouth.
She sipped it a bit and leaned back for a moment to let the taste sit—savory softness, the crunch-like zest of starchy vegetables, and the tasteless, tea-like clarity. 
“Mmm!” She licked her lips. 
The seat to her left, her only sister’s, was free.
“What do you think?” He sat down and clasped his hands on the table, pressing his thumbs together.
“It’s good!” She mimicked her voice.
He half-guffawed and imitated his own tone when her sister would say that. “That doesn’t help!”
A red-and-green-plated musket hung across a small open box of her sister’s things: a wrinkled, browning, powder-sandpapery, eight-chevroned leaf a little larger than her palm; and a blemished brown leaf, cracked on top in a tree-like pattern from its bottom left edge toward its top right. Paper cartridges sat beside it on the floor.
Outside the cottage, sparrows’ shadows scudded along the ground. Full-shaded breezes sheared the heat off their bodies. Cobwebs of shade and blobs of sunlight wobbled under a loose cascade of spindly, feather-leafed branches like webbed feet at the extremities. A rod of light crept into the darkness under the door. A group of birds flew over the roof and disappeared behind the trees.
Blaring horns resounded across the horizon.
“You good?” someone said. “Where’s your bag?”
“It’s just back there,” another said. “Wagon.”
Fifty pairs of green feet crunched and smudged along the jungle floor—blood-worn muskets, dented blades, and sparsely punctured bags in hand.
The heat pressed on their foreheads and cheeks, sweat pooling on the sides of their faces and necks and below the ridges of their shoulder blades. Fallen pinkish-white petals blew down the path, and dry, crunchy brown leaves gathered.
One minute away, on a hill ridge, a man in a skintight purple-and-yellow outfit zipped from tree to tree, shielding his eyes from the blinding rays.
A goblin’s glowing eyes glinted blue-green toward him.
He bolted and rode a giant bird, flying off in a blur of red, white, and black.
For the next two months, a fifty-goblin column would set out on foot daily, taking a different route each time to a cave nineteen days east and hidden deep within human territory—near the point on the trail where George and Sella had died.
The goblins’ snickers fizzled out in the epic theater of the jungle, and their paths marginally overlapped with humans’, only a fraction of goblins brutally losing their lives in human-orchestrated ambushes and search parties. George and Sella’s circle had spearheaded many of these.
Two years ago, Alaya looked up at the clouds.
The growl of a human ripped across the land. Pained screeches echoed afterwards.
Hurrying on bare pricking feet, Alaya held her wailing son’s hand. “It’ll be okay,” she hushed him.
“Ma-ma! Ma-ma! No, no, noo!” he screamed. She jerked up.
A streaking form slammed into her, crushing her body. An ax fell on her son and parted him in two. The force threw her into a tree, fracturing her spine and deforming her.
From behind the form came another human, who grabbed her and started slamming her head against the bark. The human’s long hair shook each time.
Two years later, along a jungle path, among forty-nine other goblins, Alaya’s brother stifled his scream: “Death to the fucking humans!”
Shadows split from the trees, running around them, boxing them in. Figures among these specters made gestures and shapes with their hands, and around the goblins appeared many concentric bubbly spheres that cut them out from the world.
While they stirred and reeled, a barrage of magic blasts dropped on them from above, entering the spheres through the holes on top.
After the fog lifted and the spheres vanished with the sounds of flickering boops, charred remains were scattered amid crimsoned watery holes and circles in the dirt. The spillage gurgled outward in dashing lines, and crumble rode aboard it.
“They didn’t know what hit ‘em,” someone chuckled.
“Sorry, that… was all me,” another said as he dropped from the trunk, waving his staff.
A third laughed, shouting, “If you guys saw what my [Cover] did though!”
“Your [Cover]?” a fourth barked, putting his hands on his hips.
“My [Cover]! I designed it! I’m practically the architect!”
“That’s, like, not counted. Architects are the ones who actually build the thing, you ain’t an architect, you’re a swindler!”
“Well… notifications just in: 800 XP, you hear that?” a fifth said, swiping away his blue screens.
A sixth raised both palms. “Hah! I got 1600 XP! The record’s straight!”
A seventh covered his mouth, snickering. “Nah, nah, nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah, I got 2400! Who’s laughing now?”
An eighth ran around. “Guys, guys! Dave got 5,000! What the fuck!”
“I got 80…” a ninth murmured, head low.
“Bro, what did you even do?” said a tenth.
“That was still, like, my most leveled [Explode]”—he imitated someone crying—”hu hu hu hu.”
“Keep working at it!” The tenth gave him a thumbs-up with a closed-eyed smile.
An eleventh flapped out his purple and yellow overcoat to keep its back from folding in on itself. “Guys, where’s the second? There’s supposed to be a second one, is there?”
“Dunno,” the sixth said. “We only saw these guys.”
“Plus, I said preserve one.” He gave his hand a quick twist, summoning a blue flame-like puff that dwindled instantly. “At the very least, one of you should still have yours. It’s bad principle.”
“Don’t sweat it,” the first said as everyone set out. “We’re going back anyway.”
“Wait, what ‘one’? Goblin?” a twelfth asked.
“No, [Explode].”
“Oh shit. I’m out.”
“Nah, don’t worry, we’re going back.”
“Still fifteen hours though?”
“No? Isles is here.”
“Oh, right.”
A giant bird dropped in the middle of the glade, carrying someone else in skintight purple and yellow. “Fucking hell,” the rider said. “If you guys kill my bird.”
Everyone began climbing it, and its eyes flitted between the load and its rider.
“Woohoo! Fuck this hellhole!” The third flipped the jungle off as they soared away. Its green mounded expanse swept below, while the passengers’ fingers ran through the full force of its rushing winds. Into the distance, mountain spurs peeked and stretched before them out of the drowned murk of green like limbed towers in a world-swallowing flood. Beneath the canopy just shy of their thickset rows of shod feet and their ride’s enormous leg talons, structures snugged in scruffy, grassy walks against rilling trails of smoke, down among climbing slopes leading over hill ridges infused with clods of faux-solid mud—all fluffy with puffy green. From here, the sweltering drench melted from their bodies, leaving a thick cool that married with the compressed blast of open sky.
“John,” the fifth said.
“Yeah?”
“Shut it.”
“Yeah.” John laughed weakly.
“Ha-hahhahaha!” the second roared with laughter, bending over the cataracted, crazed orb of his staff as it hung over his hairy crossed legs.
They reached their destination in a day, a breezy trip compared to the ten days it would have taken on sodden foot—landing on a sleepy foothill crowned with a manor, family homes, workshops, and other village buildings.
Here, someone waved. The burly sleeves of his purple-and-yellow, lace-surfaced, padded outfit flared from the wrist, and its hem sent down ruffled offshoot curls. “Yo, yo, yo!” He swiped his fingers in the air around the same spot, then dropped them to his side. Taking out one of a dozen black-lead pencils and a memorandum-book stowed in two of his overcoat’s eight pockets, he thumbed through the pages. He stopped multiple times to zip horizontal lines onto the page.
To his rear right, someone else in an overcoat with spectacles eyed each person the giant bird’s rider brought. He handed over bags, from which a rich blend of aromas puffed out. Inside, shapes pressing against the hands of those holding the bags, thick, wrapped meat pies wafted gentle heat, and those close by salivated, their empty bellies growing cavernous. He smiled as they crept up toward his cooking.
Behind these two greeters, another overcoated man, stuffed with bulky, nested clothes loose and surface-holed from fretting against jungle matter, sat on a crate before the ledge drop, with a thin smile, half-lidded eyes, and bright, smooth under-eyes. At his foot, beside rock flecks, his wolf sat with lolling tongue.
Dirt clung in slits and speckles under everyone’s bare fingernails—both those fresh from the jungle and those resting at this foothill—and every so often, someone stopped to hook theirs out with another fingernail.
A number of people waddled over with casks of water.
With the help of others holding up the casks’ backsides, everyone riveted bungholes against their mouths, letting the water glug along inside. While the drips fell on their clothes—sucked up—the river washed away the ache deep inside their gullets and smoothed their mouths and throats.
With the casks put to rest, they gazed at the largest squat clouds as if moving to subjugate them.
Elsewhere, Elene peeked at a lake through the window from inside a hut. The surrounding sweep of tall grass would labor visitors and mat thickly under the hunk of a wading foot. “What will we find here?” she had asked.
Melly sat on the pier over the water, his legs rocking back and forth. “Oh, just some fish,” he had answered.
“How many?”
“Well, not really a number. It’s more like if we get one.”
“Why? Is it hard to get?”
“Yeah, something like that. You don’t usually get it. If at all. It’s rare.”
“Rare? Why not just go in the water?”
“Well, once you do, it’ll go away. It’s hard to explain. I have to get it while I’m not underwater.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah.”
A large fish swooped from the water, casting him in deathly shadow. He held up his gear-looking artifact. The monster froze midair, glowed a vibrant glossy blue, and transformed into a guppy. The artifact dissolved into thick, grainy dust in his palms, where this guppy wriggled slimily instead.
He showed it to her. “Like it?”
“Ooh! Ooh! Let me touch it!” She held it with both hands, then dropped it back into his palms. “Ew!”
He smiled. “Don’t worry. We won’t keep it. It’s for selling.”
After wiping her hands on her clothes and loudly dusting off the slime, she turned to his face and slowly said, “If it’s so rare, how did you get it now?”
“I’ve been waiting long enough, is all.” His breath undulated out of him.
“I didn’t know.”
“We all have our things.” The sunbeams cut slants along his body.
He drew in a breath and held it partway. “What’s yours?”
She shrugged.
Clouds closed in yet remained colossally distant.
Beside the two, Wimcy bounced out of a short-lived portal, landing on all four paws, and Geasi strode up, swishing her cloak-collared overcoat with a starchy crack. “Eyyo!” the furred creature boomed, while the governess gave a thumbs-up.
“How’s your training?” she said.
“Training? What training?” Elene said.
“What Melly said you’d do.”
“Which one? We just sat down and waited for a fish.”
“What?”
“Wait, that was training?”
“Mell?”
Melly smiled. “Sorry, I’ll give her the training next time. She learned patience today, he-he!”
“What did you have to do now?” Geasi rubbed her brow.
“Oh, have you seen it?” He showed her the guppy.
“What’s that?”
“Oh, you’ll see.”
He tied the guppy to a rope and swung it around in vigorous swirls. It glowed a brighter blue the harder it flew. The air directly around it convulsed and scintillated in a hard-edged sphere. Shimmers of severed tall grass flew in the beams ablaze with hot air and disturbed, wind-torn haze.
“This’ll be our goblin-killer,” he said, a grin squeezing onto his face.
The three—Geasi, Wimcy, and Elene—stared at him.
Behind him arrived Rick and other members of their group, dragging a hollow-cheeked pink goblin chained by the foot.
The guppy-formed blur only blitzed around in orbit.
Melly flailed the goblin. It fell on the matted grass that bent around it.
A jagged crater larger than it had formed over its smooth body at the site of impact, exposing its oozing insides and bone structure.
Elene shifted her head like a nod.
The blood dribbled like sweat. The grass held and exposed it to the wind. The dirt drank it up.
Rick loudly yawned after having half-opened his mouth so many times, waving his hand. “Okay, pack it up. I’m leaving.” He took swigs, let out almost exasperated sighs, and released an explosive burp. After he blinked hard to moisten his parched, lowland-wind-pricked eyes, he pressed the bridge of his nose to manage the building ache, stuck out his tongue to release the compression in his face, and gaped to relieve his hard jaw.
Melly produced three pieces of paper and ran his eyes over them. “Do you guys have a ‘machine-like thing’? Rayla wrote it, but I don’t get it. She didn’t specify here.”
“Hmm?” Sella would say if she were here.
But Rick could only fill the gap with a laugh. “Just assume she meant artifact.” He squeezed his lips together.
“Wanna go? Like?” Geasi told him.
Melly looked at her, then stared at Rick. Everyone else mirrored him and her.
“To? The cave?” Rick hid his lips.
“Yeah,” she said, letting it hang.
“Hmm.” He rubbed his chin as Sella would sometimes.
Geasi glanced at her left, where George would be. Her eyes shifted left and right momentarily.
“Well.” Rick smiled. “We can go,” he almost exclaimed. He lifted his arms like a shrug.
Elene tilted her head up at Rick, her eyes settling where something slight twitched his face.
“The fuckers, let’s go!” someone yelped.
Rick, Geasi, Melly, and Elene all snickered along with the rest of the group.
Once silence fell on the group, Melly’s face clenched as he pressed the guppy with his fingers, while Rick grinned behind his mouth-clamping hand. Geasi clutched and twisted the air, tautening her biceps to contort her forearms. Elene glanced between the three, then at the swaggering, hauling gaits of the others.
Eventually, the woodland turned into forest, and wooden towers crept up behind the trees. Arrows fell.
Melly yelled, “Fucker!” He swung the guppy, and it dissolved several arrows, while his teammates’ shields rose from the ground below him, passed through him, and blocked the scattered, sporadic, non-volley arrows that got past his flail.
Rick raised his fists and pounded the air. Rhythmic cracks resounded, until something fell apart with a crunch. From the crunch, wolves materialized from their paws up, bolting alongside the tree-walled paths. They ascended trees vertically, then leapt off in a volley, soaring airily toward the goblins atop the towers, with jaws wide open to bite out hunks of flesh. They disappeared moments later, leaving behind charcoal wisps of smoke.
Geasi clasped her finger with one whole hand, then from that finger, light beamed, then swung around, leaving the teammates it hit sparkling green.
Elene shot arrows from her spectral bow, hitting goblins like her training targets. Goblins fell like stones in a lake. Her eyes flashed myriad blue, swelling green, and slight brown, reflecting off the skylit forest path.
The other members of the group ran with large blades and weapon heads, stout, baggy frames, and a sweeping formation. Screams and howls scrummed through the trees, bumping trunks.
Goblins fell and scrambled off with limping legs.
Blades bore down on each of them, plunging from the grips of green-sparkling, hairy arms. The dim blood on the humans’ faces seeped down. Archers killed off any leaping bush-cloaked goblins. The rare mages blasted thick crowds. The still fewer healers held and embraced split, concaved faces back into shape.
Bodies decayed across the battlefield, peeping from behind trees and beneath vegetation. Humans stood over them, hunched and hulking.
A writhing, mute-groaning goblin glanced up. A darkened human had come between it and the sky. He twisted his blade inside it.
“Man, goblins really are fast,” Melly sighed.
“Yeah—where’s Elene?” Geasi said.
“Here!” Elene leapt behind the crowd.
“I mean, they built this in what?” Melly wiped the sweat from his forehead. “When was the last time?”
“Five, six? Seven?” Geasi laughed, shifting her tucked clothes.
“Seven!” He pointed. “It took seven months to make all this. Crazy. Well, not. But crazy, pretty…”
“We had… Ally then. Where is she?”
Geasi half-shrugged. “Didn’t she go to Mount?”
He shrugged back. “Maybe. What did George say?”
Rick sighed. “If she didn’t leave without saying anything, we would have at least given her the loot then. But hey!” He raised his hands. “Finders keepers. Leavers losers.”
Melly barely laughed.
“Anyway, hopefully,” he said, “this is most of them. I need to get home before I lose the extra ‘on-time’ benefit.”
“Right.” Rick grimaced. “I also forgot I should’ve ordered it for dinnertime. My helmet. He-he. It’s fine. I can handle the storage fees.”
Melly offered some kind of laugh.
Geasi rubbed her brow, then pulled the approaching Elene close with one arm, patting her head.
A goblin head squished under heel.
Threading through the trees from the direction of the cave, green swarmed, a chorus of goblins in their crisp-snapping purple and yellow outfits.
“What the fuck!” Rick yelled.
One of the goblins shook as he stumbled forward among the corpses. “You… did this?”
Melly’s voice caught in his throat.
“We already… Fuck… You know what… Maybe you guys didn’t know. Why didn’t they tell you? How long it’s been?” the goblin said.
“Two days,” another goblin behind him said.
“Fuck…”
“Understandable.”
“No—No! No…” The first goblin fell to his knees, breaking into a bawl. “Fuck, fuck, fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck. Anna.”
Geasi swallowed roughly. Elene was hiding behind her.
Every human present still wore the purple and yellow overcoats Mark had given them, and they already looked slightly muted.
“They weren’t…” Melly tried.
“Yeah,” the goblin on his knees said. “They weren’t.”
He clutched the garb of one of the fallen, mudded goblins, who all wore the same brown. “Shit… fuck.
“I should’ve, I should’ve.”
“Sir, please, not here,” the goblin behind him said, patting his shoulder and pressing on his back to get him to stand.
“Y-yeah.” He wiped his face with his whole palm, covering his tears even as they broke through his fingers and streamed down the back of his hand anyway.
Melly’s face crumpled for an instant.
A third goblin came forward and spoke up while the other two inched away. “We didn’t give them the purple and yellow, so your actions here today was… unfaulty.”
Melly furrowed his brows, clenching his teeth. “Why… Did they attack us first? We were wearing…” He tugged the lapels of his overcoat.
“It…” The goblin stammered. “It looks slightly faded.”
“Slightly? They fucking tried to kill us! And…” Melly’s eyes went distant, his underlip shivering.
Wails erupted among the goblins behind the speaker, who himself was twitching all over.
Elene was already sobbing heavily in the back. Until Elene’s cries pierced her ears, Geasi’s eyes were dry. The governess broke down, hugging the child.
Wimcy sprouted out of thin air. “Hoo-wee!” It froze in front of the bawling pair, then ran, climbed the trees, and emerged atop the canopy, where the gust carried all air away, chills surging into the creature’s body before its body generated its own warmth to balance them out.
Chapter 8
“Elene.”
She raised her head.
“You okay?”
She nodded when she could have said yeah.
“Right.” Rick rubbed his sweaty brow.
“We…” He shook his head.
“We…” He swung his head. “Damn it.”
“We… have to try. Something. Something.” His eyes looked up at the distant mounting sky, glowing under the windswept heat.
The sea of clouds below them rushed. To his left, goblin hands gripped the wooden handrail he leaned his arms on.
To the right of the ship-like, flippered beast they were on, a giant bird flew, carrying twenty men in purple and yellow. 
“Aren’t we going… to?” Elene tilted her head ever so slightly.
Rick’s smile froze, then broadened as he faced her. “Oh right.” He clapped her on the shoulder, the corners of his eyes crinkling.
She fiddled with her overcoat lapel as she would with a strand of her hair, smiling.
Everyone aboard both creatures wore the same two vivid colors. Even these creatures cut across the dazzling sky while draped heavy and thick in them. The flapping banners—the matte, dyed fabric wrapped around the sun-bounced sheens on their giant squall-weathered bodies—undulated, billowing and kicking inward against the passengers’ feet, but the handrails, fixed with crossbars stretching across the spine, held firm. A drop into green abyss hung below like a wisp, a secret held close to the ear. The sky-long plunge would be buffeting. The mud would lather whatever was left of the fall, sweat and all. Goblins and other roaming creatures would blend with the remains, then drift off in a never-ending circulating breeze. The sky would hang always present like clouds, but much closer, like a teardrop. Death would be as good as living.
The gale whipped around a grinning Elene. The eternity below burst with ripe, crunchy wild fruits. Plushy boughs of feathery leaves as well as hushed wearing waterways filled the rest. Dad and Aunt Sella had rambled these parts, the record of their rich, brief lives intact in trampled soil amid the geological flux. Mom could still be traveling out there, widening trails underfoot.
“Ya-herrr!” she crowed, raising her brows at her own voice. Rick clasped her shoulder, reciprocating her earlier grin. Melly whooped behind them, shooting them their shared grin. The goblins gave downturned or wry smiles. People and goblins had already been standing among one another, making the slightest conversation. 
Gazes rarely grazed each other, as if always a step away from leaping off the transport.
Geasi strode through the goblin-human crowd and handed her pet creature Wimcy over to Elene, who squealed and hugged it.
Among the crowd, eyes moved but stayed parallel.
Snickers broke off on one side, then spread all over. By the time everyone was letting out big, unbroken laughter, the gentlest smiles popped and blossomed.
Elene tucked in it all.
She closed her eyes, her hair blowing the loosest it had ever done.
“Oh…” she breathed, luminous eyes widening.
“Hm?” Rick raised his brows, the thirty-something man in his oddest expression.
She glanced at him and stopped. Her mouth grew into a broad grin, and she cracked up.
The pair of creatures soon landed on the open-air top floor of a colossal building, its loftiness fizzling out in a surrounding metropolitan ocean—family quarters, immured passageways, hangout crannies, and eating holes-in-the-wall just off the congested public ways. They lumbered down a ramp to the level below and settled in spots marked with giant barrels, backs to the wall. Their passengers climbed and dropped down, leaving them supplied with these barrels of feed. Around, many other beasts larger than theirs reached even higher, but barely came close to the ceiling. The thickness of the walls dwarfed even the largest beasts currently housed.
Later, outside the building, Elene’s whole group, as well as those aboard the giant bird, stepped off a carriage onto a hanging cobbled sidewalk, peering at the inn-and-open-canal-riddled world around them. Heavy-garbed people brushed back and forth, goblins intermixed among them. Almost all passersby and bystanders dressed in purple and yellow; the scruffiest shopkeepers stacked their mottle-hard coins in dyed-cuffed hands.
In one direction, the stretch ran back to the free world. In the other, it plunged into the rising city lines.
During the carriage ride, Elene had sat with her hands gripping the edge of her seat between her splayed, rocking legs. Rick had been talking with Melly and Geasi like old times. The rest of the group had been chattering again.
She breathed long, slow, and deep, the whiff of small and damp streets itching her nose. The rumble of the melting pot of sounds from buildings pulsed through her ears. The bustle garbled people’s voices around her. The heights crept up the sky, covering whole sides of it like drapery. Worn-in clothes whooshed about, bringing a mix of zephyrs. Sweet, creamy biscuits dissolved on someone’s tongue, the crumbs drifting down like rainfall, some showering her.
Rick snatched her hand, his nails pricking into her palm. “Are you okay?”
She glanced from side to side before giving a smile.
“Well, okay then.” He raised his palm toward the rest of the group, slowly closing it. “Anyone know where the guild is?”
He glanced back at her. “What you want to eat? We can go look. Wanna go look?”
Her eyes shifted to his dark circles. “Okay.”
She swallowed heavy saliva with a suction-like squelch.
His eyes moved down to her gulp-recessed throat, then back into hers. “Did you drink before we left?”
She shook her head like a lurching sack.
“Here.” He handed her a pouch of water, which she guzzled immediately. “Sorry,” he gruffed.
He raised his hand above her head but stopped halfway to clutch his chin.
Melly and Geasi strode up to these two. “She okay?” Melly said. Geasi breathed, “We haven’t transcribed the papers yet by the way.”
“Right, yeah.” Rick bit his lip. “Can we, can we do this another time? Sorry, I’m just tired right now. Let’s focus on sleeping for the next week or so. I can’t be arsed with anything big right now. Please?”
Geasi opened her mouth but nodded. Melly shrugged at him while rubbing Elene on her velvety head.
The next morning, seated at an inn counter, Rick laughed, raising two small pieces of paper. “Bro, bro, we finally got the tickets!” Melly sighed as he descended the staircase from the lodgings.
Rick chuckled all by himself, beckoning him like his hand was going to fall off. “Come on, let’s watch, shit, shit, shit. Villa’s finally come.”
Melly glanced behind him at the lumbering Elene, who descended by hopping two steps at a time like an obese, sluggish frog. “Thought you said we needed a break,” he said, sharing a smile with Rick over her.
Rick nodded heavily at the bartendress, who smiled and gave a flat-backed nod. “I got good sleep. I wasn’t able to sleep yesterday on the ship, but fuck, we’re here, and the bed’s so good.”
Melly put his hand to his lips as if resting something between them. “Much better?”
Rick stood up, laying his hand flat on the counter. “Definitely.”
Elene sat down on the stool beside him and bent over, drumming her fingers on its legs. When she peered under it, the world had turned upside-down. The piercing sunlight, like a world-swallowing yellow lamp, cast shadows and bent-square-shaped glittery sand on the walls. The green of sun-pierced leaves extending into the window hued the gloom.
Geasi and another member, Leo, went inside. “You guys, have you seen the thing outside?”
Elene looked up and waltzed to the doorway.
Outside—beneath the white bruises, blue blisters, and black forcemeats tucked into the mountainous cloud flotsam adrift in the skylight environs, with the scattering of a few frozen wisps—a row of sun-bathed linear leaves shimmered and glowed along the sidewalk. The distorted shadows of leaves shaped like upside-down eggs blotched a wall remnant strewn with rubble and rubbish. A bird flapped heavy and thick under a mango tree’s sun-cowled shadowy undersides. Someone sat atop a green bed’s coping stone with legs crossed, palms resting on his thighs just above his knees, taking pressure off the midpoint of his slouched spine.
In the distance, the blue-hazed, grayed-out, fuzzy and humpy ridge of a mountain cut across the horizon. The saturated, textured, shaped leafages nearby overspread the rest.
Robed goblins and humans proceeded down the street.
Elene scrunched her brows inward and flared her nostrils, deep wrinkles forming in her face, a bit of teeth showing, jaw stiff and almost veiny. Her eyes narrowed into sharp slits edging the black knot across her nose bridge.
Melly and Rick, one sitting, the other standing, looked on stone-faced at the surfaces as her sniffles carried through the room.