“We’re all hurt,” I said. “Let's just all go our separate ways.”

“Your false king lied to me. It’s a matter of honor now.” Malworth replied. “And now that I know how bad off you are, I will hunt you relentlessly.”

“We tried to resolve the peacefully. We could have lived together.”

“More lies. These lands were once ours. Another king stole them away. There can be no peace. But you… I will let live. Give me the egg.”

I didn’t even know what the egg was. I wasn’t about to make a deal with him behind the backs of my friends. At best, I would look bad bargaining to save myself and not the whole group; at worst, I’d be a traitor. I did, however, want to know what it was without Malworth discovering I had no idea.

“Why do you want it?”

“You speak my language but know nothing about us. There is more to a people than just words.” Malworth spat.

Of all our starting gifts, only Max’s had any real utility. Slade played his guitar on occasion. Emma had burned her security binky in what Slade had called a moment of growth. I’d nearly forgotten about mine, but now I was curious. Malworth used Max’s sword as a crutch, balancing himself on it, obviously wounded with it.

“I apologize for that,” I said earnestly. “You’re right. We should have learned more about your culture before making empty promises.”

Malworth looked at me with pure hatred, “More empty words.”

We’d had a chance to create a real union and forge peace. Instead, we blundered through it, making promises we couldn’t deliver to a culture we didn’t understand. The goblin king and all his kind were right to be angry.

“How can we atone this mistake?” I asked.

“Only with blood,” he replied. “I will hunt your false king down to the world's end. I will cut his throat and watch him die in my hands. All who defend him will die. I will not stop until all humans perish. Only then will we have the peace that was promised.”

Reconciliation was impossible. I looked now at Malworth with new eyes. He would never stop in his quest to kill us, and I had no means in my hands right now to put a stop to it. We would part ways here. We would heal, and so would he. Once he was back in health, his crusade would start, and many many people would come to awful ends. I wanted to step forward and put an end to his threat, but knew he had the tools to kill me in his hands. I had nothing but an egg.

Looking past him I could see his army just a few miles away. There was something else too, a cloud of dust coming toward us on the road. Squinting, I saw a pack of swiftscales with goblin riders approaching us.

Malworth laughed, “My scouts. And your doom.”

I turned and ran towards Springfield. I’d only gone about a hundred yards when Princess galloped back for me. Mounting up, I took a last look at Malworth, kneeling wounded, with Max’s sword as a crutch. I rode Princess back to town as fast as possible.

Things had not improved in my absence. All three of them were grievously wounded. While my bandages had kept them from bleeding out, their conditions had not improved.

“We’ve got problems,” I said, joining the others.

“Worse than Emma?” Max asked. Emma looked like she was fitfully sleeping, with an occasional cough that trickled blood.

“Goblin scouts are collecting Malworth right now,” I explained quickly. Slade nodded with half-lidded eyes. “He’s sworn to kill us all. To the ends of the earth. He specifically called out Slade.”

“Figures,” Max laughed. Then added jovially to Slade. “Your big loud mouth is getting us all killed.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Slade said with a snicker.

Was this a guy thing? Laughing in the face of a situation that wasn’t just grim but absolutely deadly. I snapped, “Guys, keep it together. We need to…”

I was at a loss. We needed to do what? This was all turning into such a huge shitshow that I didn’t even know where to begin. Try to evacuate everyone in their current conditions? Try to heal everyone and delay running? A half dozen of one and the same of the other? My head was swimming in which direction to go first.

“Victoria!” Slade barked. I blinked and looked at him. “See if you can find more plants like the bandages. We need something to get Emma out of this condition. If she can heal again we can get out of here.”

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I nodded. Okay, it was a shit plan but it was a direction. “Yeah, I’ll see what I can find.”

“Hey,” Slade continued. “You’ve got to hurry though. They’ll send scouts to surround us and cut off escape. So you’ve got to make it fast.”

How could he know that? I was about to ask, but Slade could tell and beat me to speak, “First-person shooters. I would do that if people were trying to escape an objective.”

I nodded. That made sense. His game specialty. It probably did fit this situation.

My first instinct was to run and start looking through every building for any sort of apocalypse, someplace that might have the herbs I needed. As I stood up, though, I realized that running around headless would waste a lot of time, especially when I had a skill that would do all the work.

“Directions, pharmacy,” I said to myself.

A glowing trail appeared. Without pausing, I followed it. This was my new GPS. The glowing trail took me to a general store. I raced past the counter to a hastily looted storeroom. Mining picks, shovels, plows, and other heavy items were all left behind. The glowing path took me to a corner where a wall of drawers looked very much like a library index card catalog. Some of the drawers were open, some had been pulled out to crash on the floor. There were some that were untouched.

I yanked a drawer open and found it stuffed with dried grasses wound in a coil. I had no time to identify it, so I tossed it in my inventory. The next couple of drawers were the same, with herbs of various types that I grabbed regardless.

Pulling a drawer open, I saw something that made me want to cry out in relief. A small bottle of bright red syrup. There, sitting snuggling in the open drawer, was a healing potion.

Bottle in hand, I fled the store, abandoning any further search. This is exactly what we needed. About this time, I remembered we’d found healing potions in the past but had given them all to Emma. With her not responding, it was impossible to get into her inventory. We’d have to carry a potion ourselves in the future to avoid this type of ridiculous oversight.

“Hold her head back,” I barked at Max as I uncorked the bottle and brought it to Emma’s lips. I cautiously poured the contents into her mouth, partially afraid she’d spit them up or cough them violently across me.

She gulped, then reached up, grabbed the bottle, and sucked hungrily. Emma was no longer coughing or sputtering. I watched her health bar fill in from a sliver to a quarter full. She was still hurt badly, but she was now sitting up and looking at me with lucid eyes.

“Can you heal?” I asked.

Emma nodded, “I need rest but I could do a group heal.”

I breathed a huge sigh of relief when the air around us filled with floaty lights, and I watched everyone's health bar fill up. I was the only one at full health. Everybody else was in the half-ish area. It was still better than death’s doorstep.

“We need to ride. Now.” Slade said. “The goblin army is not far off. They can have this town completely surrounded within the hour.”

“On it,” Max and I yelled in jinx. Max dashed to the town stables while I whispered to myself, “Directions, closest horse.”

I followed the glowing path and found Slade’s horse, Midnight, chewing grass behind one of the homes. When I got back to the group Max had returned with a stray that had somehow been missed. Neither Sweetgrass nor Thunderhoof were anywhere to be found, not were there any other pack animals.

“We’re going to have to make due.” I explained to the group, then asked the stray horse, “What’s your name?”

Meadow turned out to be a sweet, if small, horse who’d somehow been overlooked in the panic. She belonged to the blacksmith’s wife and was purely a luxury.

“Three horses, four riders,” I said. “The horses may not be able to bear us for any length of time.”

“Why don’t you and Emma ride together?” Slade asked.

“Because together, we’re still more weight than she can bear for long.”

“Why don’t you ride on Midnight then?” Slade said, looking at the horses. “He’s big, that’s why I picked him originally. Can Princess handle my weight?”

I chatted with the horses about this arrangement. Midnight was just like his owner, cocky and self-assured that he could take two small female humans with no problems. Princess agreed to take Slade but demanded a thorough brushing and washdown when we got to the next town. I agreed wholeheartedly. Meadow was relieved she’d have the smallest man-human on her back, not the big one.

With that all sorted, we set out just as the sun was halfway to the horizon. The shadows grew longer, and we rode. After about an hour, I could see dust clouds up ahead. We were catching up with the fleeing townsfolk who’d departed earlier.

When we were a few hundred yards away, I noticed they were stopping, unmounting, and preparing to camp out for the night. That, I thought, was a terrible idea.

“We should keep riding,” Max said.

To my surprise, it was Slade who disagreed, “We can’t leave them to fend for themselves. We’ll join them and make sure goblin scouts down take advantage of them. We caused this after all.”

Technically no, Slade caused this, but in his one moment of charity, I wasn’t going to crap all over his parade. And frankly, we all agreed, these townsfolk wouldn’t stand a chance on their own. Max pointed out that they weren’t real, but it didn’t sway any of the rest of us.

When we approached Slade called out, “Hey! What are you doing? You can’t stop.”

“We need to camp for the night.” An elderly man called back.

“Goblins are nocturnal,” Slade explained. “They’ll be on you quick if you rest now.”

This convinced them to abandon the notion of camping for the night. There was some complaining about traveling in the dark until Max cast a light spell on the end of a long branch and attached it to the horses pulling a wagon. They moved out, but we’d spent a wasted half hour herding these folks back together and getting them on the road again.

Darkness cloaked the land as the sun drifted under the horizon on our left. I had no idea how far to the next town, but the fleeing villagers said we should get there about midnight if we drove hard. Hard driving sounds good to me, I just wanted any place with walls and an army to counter the one chasing us.

In the second hour of darkness, I could hear the sounds of riders coming up behind us. Even squinting I couldn’t see anything in the moonless dark. Emma had dozed a little while I held the reins of Midnight, but I doubted her slumber would be restful enough to renew her spellcasting. I prayed I was wrong as I heard the noises growing louder behind us.

When the goblin horn blasted, it was so much closer than I could have imagined. The raiding party hit us from behind at a speed I had a hard time imagining.