“Is campfire light good for giving haircuts?” Walter said, squinting a little too dramatically for Reeve’s taste.

“I don’t think the amount of light is going to save this situation,” Reeve said. She leaned forward, the stiff wicket of black hair, needles, sap, and twigs following her like a cartoon thought bubble full of crazy. She shook her head, producing a light tinkling sound as pine needles showered to the ground. “Hey, the pine trees broke my fall. I’ll take it. And come morning, I don’t want to be playing beauty school while trying to keep an eye out for those dragons.”

Standing next to Reeve, Dusk extended a slender pointer to touch a spike of the resinous mass. She shook her head and drew from a pocket at her waist a dagger of no more than three inches.

Reeve closed her eyes as Dusk began hacking roughly at the mess. “You up to talking about it now?” Reeve said.

Walter took a long breath, which, when he let it out, was slightly stuttered.

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“I can’t blame you,” Reeve said, “it’s your new record for consecutive deaths.”

“Could we please refer to it as consecutive reprawns?” Walter said.

“Respawns,” Reeve said.

“I imagine you can guess pretty well what it was like.”

“Lots of teeth?”

“Every time I appeared on that saddle.” Walter shuddered and looked like he might start vomiting again. “I’m going to have nightmares about that saddle. I did have a chance to say goodbye to my pony though.” He stared into the fire. “Well, part of the pony.”

“They eventually start eating the saddle and reset the spawn point?”

“No, the fire got to it.”

“They breathe fire?”

“Not that I know of, but at some point, I set the nest on fire.”

“You burned their nest?”

“That was part of the reason I was going to try to make a break for the edge that last time, when I respawned here and ended up running straight into your campfire. I was going to be running away from the fire toward where the nearest edge of the nest should have been.”

“What were you going to do if you made it to the edge? You were, like, hundreds of yards up, right?”

“I can tell you, from fairly extensive experience, that,” he glanced at the NPCs around them, “in this world at least, falling to one’s death is preferable to being eaten by a dragon. Though the dragon thing is also pretty quick. Most of the time.”