When the young dwarf pulled Anthony aside, he thought he was going to hear more of her litany against his supposed military choices. So he let her have the moment. He had adopted her into the group.
She was still struggling. Anyone on her position would still be struggling.
"Valerie, we had to abandon Heirisburg. We didn't really have a choice. We are not a military strike force. We might be strong but there's only fifteen of us and it'll be far worse if one of us falls and becomes a zombie. You and I both know that whatever that was is far more terrifying than we could be at our best. And even if I'm wrong which yes I might be wrong, I don't doubt it. If I'm wrong? We're still alive. And you know what? There was a big chance you could have all died there. You could have gotten your rage out, trying to get revenge on some dumb dragon. I'm not here to get revenge."
He paused, taking a beat to accentuate his point.
"I'm out here to survive! We can't survive if all we do is try to defeat every monster that comes across our path. You're still thinking tactically. I need you to understand our strategy is to get as many cards as we can, get as powerful as we can and get the fuck away from all the zombies. That is it. And I understand you're pissed at me. If that was Brooklyn? The place that I'm from? I might think twice about leaving. But there is nothing that we can save. There's no one there that we can help. Everyone there is already dead. This leaves it to us the living to carry out their wishes. Do you think that they want you to die for a lost cause?"
Valerie looked down. The circles around her eyes hadn't disappeared yet and were on full display. Perhaps they had gotten lighter, but they remained.
"No."
"Do you think that your parents would have wanted that?"
"No."
"What do you think that they would want you to do in this situation?" Anthony said.
They had commandeered the building in the center of the field barracks to have their talk. Lots of small tables and chairs divided up into several large connected rooms gave them an opportunity to be as disconnected as they would be.
"They would- they would have wanted... What does it matter what they would have wanted me to do?" She said, tears streaking down her face. "I saw them turn before I locked them out of the cellar. One second, my dad was himself all jovial and happy about giving me grandfather's class card; the next-he was turning. I didn't know what to do, but we had opened the cellar door. I panicked and went in. When they didn't respond and started scraping at the door... I didn't know what to do. I had to run his rapier through their heads, through the small openings that they made. Whoever did this, they killed my parents and then made it so I had to kill what became of them."
The sobbing broke, a dam finally giving way to an engineering inevitability. Anthony put a hand on her shoulder.
He was wary of taking over the discourse. He wanted her to express herself and let it out. After she pitched a fit over his decision to leave the most decent thing she did was wait until they had gotten settled at their new destination. The caravan had been calling it Camp Delta as in dwarves, but it had an official title that was about ten syllables too long for anyone to really be interested in in learning.
Right now? It held his family. That was all that mattered.
He wasn't going to endanger his new family for the sake of some dwarven ideal that he didn't even aspire to. There was no Valhalla for Anthony. If anything, Noverria was his Valhalla, this whole world a reminder that he was on his second life and not guaranteed a third one. He hadn't died in battle and been reborn. He really hoped that he hadn't passed during a delivery, but he wasn't entirely sure any more.
Her hand squeezed his.
Still, he really wished that she would be able to hash it out with Sonya. She had a lot more time working in structured therapy groups. Just because Anthony was trained to spot postpartum depression and refer onward didn't mean that he was an expert. He was an expert but he didn't take them to the psychiatrist. He didn't take them to see the therapist. He just referred onward.
This was different.
There's only so much he could do for someone that wasn't willing to help themselves. He was worried that Valerie would get to that point really soon.
He needed to ask the question.
"Valerie, were you thinking about ending your own life?" He said.
The tears stopped momentarily as she looked up to lock eyes with him.
"Before we met you, what were you doing? Because the situation is so dire and hopeless that you could never have expected rescue. So I'll ask again. Did you have a plan?"
He was surprised that the intensity of her gaze softened.
She nodded once again hiding her eyes as she looked downward. Well he had asked the question. She had said yes which was usually the point in which he would hand off care to somebody else.
He intended to do what exactly? Link her up with Sonya who she was fighting with? Maybe he needed to talk to Sonya after this for his own mental health. If he had to see a therapist to be a therapist then he would. It wasn't like he had many options. There was no one to hand her off to.
Whatever had caused the apocalypse? He couldn't fix it. But this one little girl? Who was really trying her best to adapt? He could be there for her.
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"Valerie. Hey. I just want you to know that I'm here for you and I would rather have you alive. I know we just met but seeing you here? It gave me hope that we could actually do something good in this world rather than just lurching from conflict to conflict. I-"
He was surprised at the ferocity of her heart. But he knew that when the teenager came in for a hug?
He took it.
Just like he had done with his own son.
And his other rule for dealing with his sons?
He always let them let go first.
So they sat there crying together for a long time. He got caught up in it. She got caught up in it. And pretty soon. He was really wishing that they had the lake. There was a small stream nearby but it was only calf height.
It would have to do if he ever let go.
He just had a feeling that she needed this right now so they just stayed there. He didn't really have anything else to do that night. There were no movies showing. Finley had promised to give them a story about tinkers. Borgan and Song were going to perform something as well. They needed some practice. Everyone was excited for those things, except for Valerie when she had pulled Anthony aside.
She was still struggling. It had been only a day since she had been on Mork's door.
"Thank you," she said, withdrawing.
He let the silence do what it did. In her case, he wanted her to do the classic thing where she couldn't take any more silence. Her crying had stopped, but the volume was less.
"There was this secretary at the academy. We all knew that she was there for more than one reason, but I never really figured it out until Mom and Dad started fighting. That's when she showed up more often to ask me questions and she always had a scone or something like that. It was always so innocuous and I always wondered if she was there on purpose to be my friend or if the school had sent her to me? Do you know what I mean?"
Anthony nodded.
"But she sounds like you sound. So now I think that she wasn't there just as a secretary. And right now I really miss her cookies. There was just something about that. Thought about how I'm not expendable or I shouldn't just throw my life away to kill a dragon or any of this. I didn't want to die. I just wanted it to be painless. I was in so much pain."
"You didn't want to be in pain anymore. That's understandable," he said.
"It's just that I spent my entire life preparing to join the Irumian military. I had it all mapped out. I was going to become a colonel like my father. I was going to marry a librarian like him as well. There aren't that many male librarians in the military library system, but I would find a good one. And wherever we went? We would go together. Now there are-none of that is possible."
"We've got to make a new path," Anthony said. "I think that with your brilliant mind, you can help us find a way to save this continent."
She gave him a fair bit of side eye.
"In fact, I think that everyone here is counting on you."
He let that sit for a minute.
"I'm counting on you," he said. "With your help we can do this."
He could deal with a teenager arguing about plans.
"Thanks. That means more than you can imagine."
"Now, how would you like to hear a story and perhaps a song from the best bards on the continent?" Anthony said, moving to stand.
"What makes you say that they are the best bards on the continent? That's oddly specific," Valerie said. "On what basis are you making this claim?"
"On the basis that they are the only two bards left and both are traveling with us. It's going to be the best show as well by that logic."
"Has anyone ever told you that you might be a terrible dad?" She said.
She wiped back the ugly tears.
"Remind me to tell you later about my midwifery business that I ran with my son. Come on, let's go hear a story. It might get our mind off things."
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"It's really a shame that she doesn't want to deal with you. You would be much better suited to deal with this than I am. And then there's a whole thing about you both being female and that'd be great for her. But-" Anthony said, leaning back into Sonya. She put a finger to his lips.
"It doesn't matter who you are. She understands that you are going to help her. That's what she needs right now. Whether it's me or you, it's immaterial. It's cute that you think otherwise though," Sonya said, snuggling a bit closer. "These dwarven cots really aren't built for two people are they?"
Anthony had to agree. After Finley told a story about a Tinker girl who went an adventure, the orcs sang a ballad. Anthony had not paid much attention to the words.
He couldn't keep his mind on the present.
Instead, he just listened to the beat for a while and he really enjoyed himself. There were several points at which he looked over to Valerie and she was smiling and that made him feel good. Sonya sitting next to him and holding his hand the whole time made him feel giddy like he was a school boy again. Then there was the cleanse skill which made him smell like a school boy again.
"They are pretty odd. Do you have any thoughts about today? Anything I could have done better?" He said.
"Well, the good news is that we're all alive. The bad news is that we're not really close to a city that we were in. But I understand that things could change, and the gate spell changes a lot," she said. "I can feel what did they call it- the world line? I could make a portal back to the academy if we wanted."
"Oh that's great. I like how you can connect things like that. Maybe we could connect our faces a little bit later?" He said.
"Maybe. What woman doesn't dream of being taken on a long journey through foreign lands? And having that journey be punctuated by extreme violence. At every turn? You know what? I think I will take you up on that offer," she said, leaning down to kiss him.
"It's such a strange world. It's like the end of their world in the beginning of something new and it's just so beautiful that we're here to witness it," he said.
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In the morning, the beauty of Camp Delta was laid before them. They were able to hide the wagons easily by the buildings while they figured out if they were being followed.
The place shut down when it wasn't in session. Since they were not scheduled to go to the field for another two months, there was nothing for them to do there. No zombie dwarves haunted the halls.
There was running water but only a small stream's worth. It wasn't enough to give someone a wonderful shower. It was enough to put their feet into.
Anthony called for a day of rest and refitting. After the previous days departure he wanted to make sure that every one was at their peak. Around noon, he intended to send Sonya back to their previous campsite to see if anyone had left anything. It was unlikely but possible.
There was a large cache of maps that Valerie pulled out for Bob, Finley and Anthony. They spent all morning going over the maps of the local region as well as the larger maps of the Kingdom and the continent. Many parts of the map were incomplete, much to Anthony's chagrin. Finley knew some of these roads very well and he explained how several of them were not really worth traveling, except in this exact circumstance where they wanted to avoid anything that could have been turned into a zombie.
It was there that they started to blot out their course. Valerie had an ability to combine maps that she saw into a more holistic overlay. Once she had the overlay, she was able to project it for everyone else.
By mid-morning, she was able to project a map of the entire continent and then zoomed down to their level at three different resolutions. Finley love the idea of resolutions and like the map. Unfortunately it was not going to help him get better at what he wanted to get better at.