When I wake up, I try to roll over onto my drums, but Priya stops me. What? I open my eyes. I’m roughly where I had been talking to my warrior friends, but laid out in the grass, with a pillow under my head.

“Wha?” My morning eloquence hasn’t changed a bit

Priya answers patiently. “We won. The fight is over. The slaves survived. Miguel’s fine. Carter’s a darned hero. Danae and Goro are great. You’re their new favorite person.”

I look around, and find everyone that she mentioned. “How long was I out?”

“Four hours.” According to Frodo, she’s off by twelve minutes and change. “We had to stuff you full of thaums to keep you breathing. Danae and Goro were right behind you. You were going through your reserves at a prodigious rate.”

“How? Wait. Stop. What about Tim and Dr. Jones?”

Goro pipes up. “Danae and I swept the area. We found no one alive. We even had Carter fly up and do a high circle looking for escapees. He didn't see anyone either.”

This is becoming a whole Q and A session, but I have so many questions. “How are the slaves?” That one I ask quietly.

Priya answers quietly as well. “They’re as damaged as you told me earlier. But, they’re not dead, they’re not dying, and they’re physically healthy enough. They should recover with counseling and exercise.”

That’s a relief. I didn’t screw that one up. Finally saved someone. Wait. "Is there even counseling in this world?"

"Cerberus does have some psychologists. I met a couple working medicine in town across the last couple months. The people you rescued should be able to recover the rest of the way with time, and they can get the help."

I suppose that's as good of an answer as I'm going to get, so I move on. “Why’d it take you so long to come get me?”

“What do you mean so long? We moved faster than we should have. Almost got killed by a family of giant scorpions as we hurried here. Would've died too, except for Danae."

“That doesn’t make any sense. I told the other group a week ago. When did you hear?”

“Three days ago. We left within twenty minutes of finding out. And we were able to convince these three lunatics to help us in the twenty minutes it took us to start heading your way.”

“It took you three days to get here?”

“Three days of travel, day and night, no breaks. Miguel was a trooper with his buggy. Goro is just fast, and Danae fed her horse thaums.”

“How’d it take you three days? Randi and I ran it in an hour.”

“We’re clearly not in the place you got kidnapped. We’re seven hundred miles from Cerberus. Northwest.”

“Bullshit. That’s impossible. Randi and I only ran thirty or forty miles.”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Were you conscious the whole time after you were captured?”

“Come to think of it, no. I was blacked out for a while there.”

“They must have knocked you out, and kept you down for their trip. That leads into my question. Tell us what happened.”

I take half an hour to tell the story of the last subjective year or so. I start with Randi and our run. Then I talk about the bargaining with Charles, and the slow improvements I was able to make for the slaves. I talk about their scheme: what little I knew of it anyways. I talk about Danny’s mushrooms and the air density trick that Carter managed to fix. I talk about Charlie’s sleep magic and Tim’s time magic, and then about trying to learn them along with the others I failed at. I bring up Sharon's polymorph, and the three stooges who had to make the pillars to support the underground cavern. I talk about the party walking nearby, and my weeks of waiting for someone to come save me after the three weeks I’d expected it to take. I even talk about what I did to head off opposition as the team came around the corner. Along the way, during my story, Miguel wanders over to listen, and so do the other three. I get confused a few times, but manage to get the story out in my own way. Piyu suggests I put it to music. I say that her suggestion stinks, while trying not to think about the lyrics too much.

We succeeded in freeing the slaves, and we succeeded in freeing me. The cost was higher than I would’ve paid. We lost Steve. Every time someone tries to bring it up, Miguel, Priya and I all get choked up, so we stop talking about it for now.

The trade was worse than that, though. Sharon, Tim, and Dr. Jones are all missing. None of us are trackers. They have a head-start in some direction, and got away. Maybe Tim and Dr. Jones died under the hill, but it’s likely they didn’t, and managed an escape. I think it’s worse not knowing. Eventually, we start in on getting ready to go.

Now that the heroes have saved the day, the real work begins. Goro stacks zombie parts and burns them. Danae helps. Miguel works on collapsing the hills, but we’d really need a real Geomancer to do that well. Carter flies around scouting, while also having fun in the air. Priya tends to the slaves’ health, and everyone else’s needs. Carter the hawkman shows me how to grab the thaums from a dead human. It’s basically like a dead monster, but you get all the value of the stuff in their pockets as well as all their self-investments.

The zombies total out to one yellow thaum between them, for like three hundred of them. The six dead slavers each had about sixteen yellows. We take that entire bundle, along with the fifteen that I got from my part playing along and split it among the slaves. A hundred and twelve, divided thirty-seven ways is not a lot, but it is three yellows. That’s more than one apiece. It’s nothing like a repayment for torture and years of slavery, but it’s better than nothing.

After cleaning, burning, and destroying everything we can, we have to figure out how to get a crew of almost forty psychologically damaged humans back to Cerberus. We decide that Miguel will make a giant cart, and between his magic, Danae’s horse, and Goro’s muscle, we can go about as fast as we would while walking.

I figure I can also up the speed with my time drumming, but when I try, I can’t find the rhythm. That’s wrong. I can find the rhythm; It’s a beautiful rhythm. Even thinking about it, I’m entranced. I just can’t find the flow of time in the rhythm. I was lucky, I guess. When I saw the flow in Tim’s magic, I was able to grab it, and make it my own. But in an hour of trying with no Tim, I can’t find the magic.

Chronomancy-free, we get ready to start our journey back. Rather than being an hour run from home, like I’d thought this whole time, I would have to run for eight or ten hours at marathon speeds to make it back. And of course if I’d been doing it, I’d have been so lost I’d never make it.

I make sure to get my shower and drums before Miguel collapses the slave area. I put my Taiko away as well. Then, before we go, Miguel, Priya and I play a farewell to Steve. American Pie is the only song we all know that works, but it works as a funeral dirge for our friend the musician. Then Goro lights him a funeral pyre, not wanting Dr. Jones to get hold of his body. Then we head out.

As we walk, I'm thinking: My team covered seven hundred miles in three days to save me. The team I told about the slavers made it back to Cerberus from my horrid directions in three days as well. I’m impressed and touched, at least until I think about Steve again, at which point I’m fighting tears. I owe this group my life. All five of them.