Closer now, the direhound lunges and its jaws close around a gray leg. He drops the torch to the ground. He has now run past dry ground, and the torch goes out in the mud.

Ooliri falls to the ground beside it.

He cries out — but it sounds like… pure surprise? Not pain. Quessa gets to the edge of the gully and she jumps.

She doesn’t land well. Her legs fold under her and sharp gravel bites into her chitin. Her abdomen curls up and keeps the wind in her, mostly, and she pushes to her feet. Ahead, the direhound is pulling on the nymph as he struggles to crawl away.

Quessa twists through a couple of tarsigns to cast a riftlight. Didn’t want to fight in darkness.

That catches the direhound’s attention. It drops the gray nymph, and rounds instantly. It growls for the first time, looking at her. She has time to cast one spell before it’s on her.

(“I have an idea,” Ooliri said.)

She makes the signs, and struggles with a sympathy lock. There’s not much nous in the brain — but there’s something strange about the direhound — so she tries aiming the spell at the heart instead.

⸢Nouform: Bedaze!⸥

One moment where the direhound seems to stagger or stop. Quessa thinks it might have worked. And then the beast shrieks, and charges at her. She’s knocked off her feet, hitting the gravel hard and squishing her abdomen. The direhound swipes with a claw and she’s rolling out of the way.

There’s no space and no time to make tarsigns. She has some control of her enervate — could she do a sealless bane blast? Even a unshaped discharged might be enough to get her out. Cold nerve flows through her coils, and—

⸢Bane blast!⸥

It’s not her. Before she can manage anything, the gray nymph is there, determined glower making his face unfamiliar to her. He holds a baton with one bandaged foreleg and the other has a palm pure black, darker than shadow. A one-handed baneblast? She couldn’t do that.

As Quessa scrambles to her feet, the nymph is swinging his baton. It hits the muddy bone armor of the direhound with a massive crack, more force than a tiny nymph like him should be capable of. What was under those bandages?

Knocked back before it gets up, there’s finally some distance between them and the snarling beast. The gray nymph moves, sidestepping. He’s interposing himself between the dog and her, and Quessa’s confused.

“You should run,” he says. “I’ll try to hold it off.”

“Why?”

She hears the smile on his palps. “Well, wardens save bugs.”

“We had a plan. We were going to end this.” She’s fishing a bottle from her bag — the makeshift explosives. One of them had been smashed broken when she fell, and the shattered glass cuts her soft chitin, but she finds one intact. Umbrasulphur match lit, and she primes the bomb and tosses it.

The direhound flinches away from it — does it recognize what it is? — and starts moving towards the two nymphs even before the thing explodes. It gets a few steps before glass shrapnel flies everywhere. Quessa is holding a foreleg over her eyes, and feels shards cut into it at the same time as there’s a canine yelps.

When she lowers her foreleg, she sees the eyeshine of the direhound, and it’s not looking at her. It’s looking at the gray nymph.

“Oooliri,” it whines. That’s his name, isn’t it? “Nooo.”

“Are you — can you understand me?”

It’s distracted, Quessa thinks. Make the signs, mold black nerve, sympathy lock with the heart —

⸢Bedaze!⸥

Whatever sound it’s making stops, dying in the throat. The direhound staggers under Quessa’s spell and shudders rattle the bones of its armor.

“Now!” Quessa scratches.

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The gray nymph glances back at her, features knitting into a frown of confusion.

Nothing the nymph himself could do, she realizes. His torch had been put out. But she still has some matches. Her hand reaches into her bag, frantic despite the bite of shattered glass. How many seconds until the direhound shrugs it off? At the same time, her green eyes cast about the shadowed gully, searching for a glint of reflected moonlight.

Let’s see… the nymph ran west, past the trap, but then the hound had turned back to attack her. The oil would be… behind them!

“After me,” Quessa urges, turning and hoping the gray nymph is right behind her. They run. She clutches her matches tight in her right hand.

Behind, they hear the direhound’s paws slapping through the mud. Quessa’s footing is sure, but the other nymph is slipping in the patch of oil. She half-turns to grab a flailing foreleg, to pull him with her left foreleg. He staggers, half-carried and then one quarter-carried as he finds his feet.

Light flickers at the top edges of the gully and along the walls it crawls downward. What… oh. The ants are having the same idea.

“We have to get out of here, come on.” They need to climb, or they’ll burn with the direhound. She turns sharply enough that the other nymph’s grasp is ripped from her, and he stumbles even as she makes a quick tarsign. Enervate flows to her four feet, and she’s walking up the gully wall.

Looking back at the top, the other nymph isn’t with her. Still at the bottom, slipping again and again on the muddy incline.

He doesn’t know how to wall-walk. Terror grips her, stills her.

But it’s just a gully. You can climb it without spells, and he’s managing it. Sparing one moment to breathe out, Quessa starts making signs.

The direhound had been behind them too, but even having caught up, it isn’t attacking the gray nymph. It’s clawing at the gully wall too. But they can’t let it escape.

⸢Umbra form: Melter ball!⸥ Her hands spit out a tiny enervate projectile (pathetic compared to what Yanseno can do). The direhound gives up climbing to dodge, and it only hits a leg, but the beast whines and backs down. Which is just what she wanted. Furry, mangy feet are splashing in oil now.

She weaves more signs, several more, a longer invocation than any other spell she’s cast today.

She’s not supposed to cast it, not without supervision. Could she even manage it? It takes her multiple tries even in the calm of practice, never mind this frenzy.

Focus. No fog, no doubts, no failure. She already ruined this plan once, hadn’t she? She can’t let the direhound escape again. Ooliri needs her to do it, the ants needs her, she needs herself.

She felt the buzzing in her abdomen, felt it running down her coils, stringing in the way black nerve was cold. She felt the umbraplasm kneaded into long filaments. She felt the hard, hook-like teeth of the spellform prepared in her palms, nearly bursting with energy.

⸢Copper form: Electrostun!⸥ She pulls back her foreleg and then throws it out, flinging the hook out to latch onto her target.

It’s enervated, first and foremost, so even when it hits bone armor, it liques and pierces through to secure itself in bloody meat. A line pulls taut, so dark to be invisible in the night, but it connects Quessa and the direhound, and it means pain.

The buzzing current within her lances down the filament. It’s visible as flashes or sparks in places where she failed to knead the filament perfectly.

But it’s over in a second. The current hits, and the direhound cries out, an awful whining. But the hard part had just begun. To do this technique right, to do more than inflict a bit of a shock, she modulates the current. She breathes to maintain the right rhythm. If she doesn’t mess this up… the beast’s muscles would spasm and contract uncontrollably. It’d be paralyzed.

It is paralyzed. Legs fold underneath it as it fights to move under the electric assault.

The ants are almost at the edge with the backup torches now. They would do this.

And then, almost at the top of the gully, Ooliri grabs the edge and the dirt gives. It crumbles in his grip. He slips, and he falls, tumbling back down into the oil, into the pit with the direhound.

The ants with the torches. The direhound held in place. The oil, glinting in the moonlight. Ooliri, about to burn.

Quessa has only a moment to make a decision.

But it’s the same decision she made at the start.

She ends the technique, releases the current, letting the filament snap and fall away into nothing. She crouches, and angles herself for the gray nymph’s prone form. She had awful constitution, awful coordination, but could she leap down there just quickly enough to grab him and drag him out before the flames consume the both them?

Maybe she’d deserve it, anyway. If she made him die.

Her legs coil like springs under her, tense as they can get—

And the direhound moves before she does, free of the stun. The beast lunges for the nymph in the dark, and wet jaws close around his warden barding.

It lifts, and, paws audibly scrambling the oil and in the mud, it runs. It flees, stealing Ooliri, saving Ooliri, just as the torches fall and the oil goes up in flames at last. It escapes, and they’re both safe.

Quessa doesn’t know if she has time to think about what she does. She’s already crouched. She’s already coiled tight, ready to leap.

So she leaps. Into the gully, just beyond the flames.

Not beyond the heat, and like the first time she jumped, she falls gracelessly into a heap. For a second she lies there, cooking right beside the blazing flames, before she musters will to roll over and get up.

She glimpses the barely recognizable grimy white form of the armored beast disappearing in the distance, and she starts running.

It hurts. It’s hot and still bright even as she escapes the flames. Why—

She still had the matches in her hand. They’re in fire now and now they’re burning her. She drops them and shakes her hand, enough to throw off her stride and stumble even as she runs.

Quessa has horrible constitution. She can feel her tracheae straining just tens of strides into the run. Her distance from the direhound only grows. She’s slowing, legs in pain and her breaths turning to wet coughs.

She can still see the look on the gray nymph’s face, imagine it even as he retreats from view. What is his name? She was so scared for him, and she tried to save him, and this was all for, she was trying to, he was important, somehow, wasn’t he?

He’s gone.

She was running after him, chasing him, so she keeps doing that. She’s slowed so much she might be walking now. Walking and panting. She’s slipping in puddles and wet muck, and pushes enervate into her legs, hoping the adhesion is some help.

She doesn’t have much enervate left. She must’ve been fighting, casting so many more spells than she should.

The walls around her slopes down and the gully widens. It’s a pond or bog, ferns and shrooms rising from the wide mess. She’s lost sight of whatever she was chasing and now she doesn’t know which way they even went.

She falls down, legs feeling so soft and so slippy and so dirty that they might as well be mud at this point. She doesn’t bother getting up and now just rolls over and stares up at the sky. There are no stars, just the obscure clouds blanketing everything by the bright moon.

Where is she? What was she doing? Why does she hurt? The fog is closing in, blanketing everything. Her tarsi move in practiced motions, making signs, but it doesn’t work, because one of her hands is terribly burned and hurts so much. She can’t make signs. The black nerve within doesn’t move. She’s powerless and choking in the fog. It will close over her and take away all the bad memories, and maybe it would be good to lose this pain. Or…

All Quessa knows is she lost something. Everything went wrong, and it’s her fault.

She is alone in the dark of night, and she cries.

Is someone coming to save her? (Like she failed to save… someone.) She knows she should remember, there was a name that didn’t escape her even despite the fog, but it never got this bad, she was never unable to make any signs, unable to make the fog go way.

She lies there, staring up into a cloudy night sky, trying to remember.

Maybe hours passed. No one had come yet, and she’s lost in vague impression of memories, searching, grasping.

There’s a gunshot, distant but not distant enough. She’s so deep in her memories that the sound doesn’t even stir the hope that it should.

No, she hears a different masculine voice.

“One bullet for each traitor. No more, no less. Remember that, child.”