Reeve awoke at the touch of a hand on her shoulder, the first light of day just beginning to compete with the stars still visible through the gaps between the crowns of trees high above. She nodded to Leaf, who was leaning over her, and sat up stiffly in the cold, dewy air. Dawn was scattering the ashes of the previous night’s fire as Dusk rolled a sleeping pelt. Walter was also sitting up, legs crossed, picking at the soles of his feet.

“Morning, Dad,” Reeve said in a whisper. “You OK?”

Walter nodded and pointed at his feet. “Needed to use the privy during the night,” he said, equally quietly, “and I must have walked through the clippings from your haircut.”

Leaning forward, Reeve could make out a black coating of hair stuck to the bottom of her father’s feet. “Sorry,” she said softly, “looks like you have hairy feet top and bottom now.” Her gaze became distant for a few seconds, then she waved a dismissive hand.

“Evie?”

“Two more of those port error messages. I guess from while I was asleep. Whatever.” She waved her hand again, rose, and began to pack the water skin and other few items she’d left out of her Inventory overnight.

Once all were ready, Leaf leaned close to Reeve and said, “Nyx can scout? I imagine her well suited for remaining unseen.”

Reeve nodded and, with a mental nudge, made the request. Nyx rose and padded away, quickly lost from sight, Reeve soon able to tell from her UI only the cheetah’s approximate direction and distance.

They set out in silence, Leaf leading, the honey badger at her side, Reeve, Walter, and the twins following. The trail ran gradually downward for the first hour, daylight rising as the party slowly descended. When the last of the dew was fading from its hiding places in the shadows, Nyx reappeared.

Reeve motioned the party to halt. Before giving Nyx her full attention, she snapped twice at her father and pointed to the ground where he stood. The two stared at each other while Reeve did a slow mental five count. Walter suddenly nodded enthusiastically and retrieved four stream stones from his Inventory. As he updated his spawn, Leaf and the honey badger moved a few yards farther up the trail to provide lookout, while Dawn and Dusk turned and backtracked a few yards as rearguard.

It took only a minute for Nyx to share with Reeve information on the terrain ahead, after which the cheetah turned and disappeared again into the trees.

A soft chime sounded.

Reeve bit the edge of her lower lip between two of her grooved yellow teeth and took a long, steadying breath through her nose. She opened the Party Log.

Reavyr (II) has died. Respawn in 30 seconds.

She let the breath out more slowly than she’d drawn it in.

A soft light began to illuminate the location still bounded by the stream stones. Once fully present, Walter stood, unmoving, and pursed his lips. He scratched his head through the bushy hair above his right ear and looked at Reeve.

Reeve raised eyebrows, shoulders, and upturned palms. “What happened?” She mouthed.

Walter returned the gesture.

Reeve opened the Combat Log.

A Level 9 Irimũ (leopard form) bites Reavyr (II) with teeth using Skull Crush Amplifier for 49 points of damage. Reavyr (II) has died. Respawn in 30 seconds.

“I told you to stay there,” she mouthed, pointing at the stones, which Walter looked at and then bent to retrieve.

Walter stood straight again and pointed to a tree several yards off the path. “I needed to use the facilitrees,” he whispered.

Reeve looked back to the twins in their rearguard position. “You couldn’t prevent that?” She said quietly.

“Whatever his past valor,” Dusk said, ”Walter has demonstrated a facility for stumbling upon, and perhaps even embracing, Death, wherever he might go.” Dusk looked thoughtful for a moment. “They seem almost soul mates.”

Reeve frowned and turned to walk toward Leaf, who, seeing Reeve coming, motioned her closer. When Reeve joined her, Leaf squatted and traced a faint impression in the leaves with the tip of one finger. “Elven-kind,” she said.

“Recent?”

“No more than a few days old.”

Reeve nodded.

“No signs of dragon activity here,” Leaf said, then rose, took up the point position, and proceeded down the path.

Nyx repeated her visitation every hour or so as the party walked on, speaking little but occasionally rotating rearguard duty to stay sharp. The trees spread farther apart, becoming as they did tall enough that their tops were obscured from sight. The underbrush thinned in the rain shadow of the massive boughs above, each of which was as large as a full-grown tree in most forests. From time to time, Reeve thought she caught a flash of orange out of the corner of her eye, but it took almost two hours of intense attention for her to catch a brief glimpse of the fox. Otherwise, the denizens of the forest, whatever they might be, remained hidden. As the sun reached its apex and found more frequent opportunities to fall upon the party through gaps in the towering canopy, they slowed to approach a small stream winding toward the north, its surface smooth as it ran lethargically from one dam of trapped branches and leaves to the next.

Leaf signaled a halt and squatted at the edge of the water, inspecting the damp earth for signs of passage. Reeve sidestepped past the twins as they shed their packs, looking back to her father as she did and giving a quick ‘stay right there, do not even think about moving’ point of her naginata and widening of her eyes and then joined Leaf next to the water.

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“Anything?” Reeve said, looking for signs and wondering how her Tracking skill compared to the fallen elf’s.

“No one has passed since the heavy rain we weathered in the gnome cave.”

“If elves were following this trail farther back, where did they go?”

“Where do elves always eventually go?” Leaf said. “Into the woods.”

Reeve rocked her head and looked over the undisturbed mud. She couldn’t argue with Leaf’s assessment. Shifting her focus to the stream’s surface, she leaned forward and looked at her reflection in the brown, tannin-stained water as it slid by. “Well, not bad. Kind of punk.” She raised fingers to her short, spiky black hair. “Oh.” The crisp points reminded her of the lacquer-stuff Mr. Jacobs next door once used to seal a wooden rocking chair he kept on their front porch. “May also be waterproof for a while,” she said, and sighed, looking across the stream at the path as it ran on through the forest. She froze. “What is that?” She said it only loudly enough for Leaf’s ears. The two squinted across the stream at the dull gray serpentine body that was slowly lowering itself from a branch some ten feet off the ground.

“Not a snake,” Leaf said. “It has limbs, I think.”

The head of the serpent reached the ground, and it released the rest of itself from the limb and fell into a heap that quickly contracted into an organized coil. The body was serpentine, but the elongated head appeared crocodilian to Reeve. A low hiss from behind caused Reeve to turn, naginata half-raised. The honey badger hissed again as it trundled passed her, splashing into the water to stand chest-deep near midstream and hiss at the creature, which remained still, coiled.

The hairs along the left side of Reeve’s body began to prickle with Nyx’s imminent return, and Reeve looked with concern downstream, sending a mental message to Nyx and hoping that the cheetah was close enough to sense the warning. Leaf shouted, and Reeve looked back across the stream. The serpent was almost to the water, and the speed with which it had launched itself out of its coil caused Reeve a moment of panic as she tried to get her naginata around to defend herself. The honey badger crouched deeper in the water. Approaching them with the speed of a racehorse, the serpentine creature raised its head off the ground and sprung out in a flashing arc over the stream. Knowing the reach of her weapon couldn’t protect the honey badger, Reeve waited and hoped the first strike against her father’s almost-companion wasn’t a killing one, but an instant later she found herself reflexively turning away from the light and heat of a ball of fire as it passed her from behind, close enough to blacken the shoulder of her leather tunic. The teardrop of fire met the striking serpent just in front of the honey badger, engulfing the serpent’s head in flames and causing it to recoil toward the far bank, the ungainly change of directly throwing it off balance and resulting in its writhing collapse into the water, flaming head disappearing first and long tail then being dragged off the bank to join it. Recovering from the anticipated strike that never landed, the honey badger sprang forward and the stream erupted into a white froth that hid the deathmatch beneath. Reeve waded into the water, her blade lowered and seemingly pulling her forward as though drawn toward her enemy. She was hesitant to lash out blindly, but uncertain who would emerge if she held back.

The fountain of spray began to calm, the surface of the water settling back to a smoothly flowing sheet, nothing visible of the combatants save a few partial coils of the serpent that slowly rolled over each other as bubbles rising to the surface became larger but less frequent. No one moved.

Staring past the unmoving members of his party, Walter felt in his chest a familiar tension that rose to his throat and flew from his mouth as a cry he didn’t register but that caused everyone before him to turn in surprise. By then, he was almost to the stream, a blade held tightly in each hand. Reeve was looking at him, eyebrows raised, mouth hanging open, but he saw only the serpent that was drowning his companion. Reaching the stream bank at full sprint, he launched himself bodily toward the visible coils that continued their ever-slower rotation.

Reeve, having taken a moment to process that it was her father who’d just unleashed the fiercest, weirdest battle cry she’d ever heard, watched the halfling leap from the bank and fly, arms extended like a superhero, a yard or two over the stream before landing face first in the water next to her leg, disappearing under the huge splash-back that followed his belly flop. Glancing back to the now nearly still coils, Reeve reached down, pulled her father out of the water by the suspenders, and held him there, hanging horizontally.

“Uh, everything OK?”

“No, I’m not OK!” Walter said, sputtering and coughing up brown stream water. “It’s killing her.”

Reeve nodded. “Yeah. I was afraid of that too for a second there. But, you ever seen a vid of a honey badger fighting a snake?”

Walter looked over his shoulder at his daughter, water running from his hair down into his eyes. “No.”

“Come on. Let’s make sure she’s OK.” Reeve swung him up in an arc and then dropped him down onto his feet in the stream. Not letting go of his suspenders in case the gentle current somehow found enough of his legs to push him over, Reeve took a few careful steps, guiding her father to find stable stream rocks each time he put weight down on a foot.

The body of the serpent, which had lain nearly still for a few seconds, began to slowly move as they approached, and Walter raised his blades. At the bank just across from them, the crocodilian head appeared out of the water, and the honey badger, gripping the body just behind the head, clawed its way up onto the bank, where it released the neck of the dead creature, took a few steps, and fell to her side. Reeve hoisted Walter and took long fast steps through the stream, her shins throwing up great sheets of water with each stride. Navigating around the submerged body of the beast, she dropped her father onto the bank and then stepped out of the stream. Ignoring the serpent, Walter took unsteady steps and dropped to his knees next to the honey badger.

With her naginata, Reeve prodded the mangled neck of the serpent where the honey badger had torn away so much flesh that the vertebrae and the severed trachea and esophagus were easily spotted. “She OK?” Reeve said.

“She’s breathing, but it looks like she was bitten. Maybe a few times.”

Hearing sloshing, Reeve turned to find Leaf stepping up onto the bank with the twins right behind. “Leaf, your knowledge of beasts is better than mine. Can you learn what you can from this thing? Particularly if it’s venomous?”

Leaf nodded and Reeve turned again as she felt Nyx approaching. “Hey, girl. We’re OK. What—.“ Reeve fell silent as she received a series of images from Nyx.

Leaf slid her cudgel back into her cloak and squatted beside the serpent, starting with an inspection of the creature’s head and then moving down its body, pausing as she went only occasionally to examine a set of small limbs or other less-obvious anatomical features. Reeve carried on a silent exchange with Nyx, trying to understand what she was seeing from the cheetah’s reconnaissance.

“It is venomous,” Leaf said, returning to stand at the serpent’s head, “though I cannot divine the nature of its venom, or of the creature itself. Its mana is likely not aligned with fire, based on its susceptibility to the fire that smote it.” The fallen elf squatted again and examined the creature’s fangs. “Vial?” She said, turning to Dusk, who stepped forward and offered an empty vial. Bending to pull a fang forward, Leaf knelt with one knee on the back of the creature’s head and held the vial beneath the fang. A mercurial liquid fell in large drops, quickly filling the vial. Leaf handed it to Dusk, who provided another empty vial before capping the first.

As more vials were filled, Reeve continued her silent exchange. But, suddenly understanding what Nyx had seen, Reeve turned to the others. “We need to go.”