Rusk dressed Floumeré’s wounds, which were aplenty, and they had a chat at the very top of the volcano while zombies died permanently around them thanks to the lava she’d summoned. Miraculously or more likely thanks to Floumeré’s own will, Rusk was unharmed by both the heat and the smoke leaking out from the volcano’s spout.

“So this necromancer guy killed your father?”

“Yes. I would have taken my revenge ages ago if not for my presence being required here.”

Rusk didn’t understand.

“I keep the volcano from erupting.”

Well okay yeah that was a pretty good reason for her to stay. “How?”

“Did you not have a similar job back in your home forest?”

Rusk shook his head.

“It is conceivable that I could leave and the volcano wouldn’t erupt, but I’d rather not test it. Or at least, I’d rather not test it until now.” She looked down at the Sanctuary Stronghold and an emotion passed across her face that made Rusk wonder if she actually cared. “I fear my time here is at an end. I wonder if I am the only survivor. Besides you, of course.”

“Looks to be that way to me. Which is really fucking irritating considering I came here to learn from my betters.”

“They are not so better if they are dead.”

Rusk didn’t know if he wanted to consider that a fair or obnoxious point. Probably both. He settled for tightening her bandages one last time and standing to peer down the length of the volcano to the Stronghold. He couldn’t see much more than a vague wash of white stone from where he was standing thanks to all the smoke. “So it’s pretty obvious you’re keeping me alive up here. Thanks for that.”

“The moment you raced down to see if your friend was in danger I knew you to be of true character. You need not thank me for preserving it.”

“Anyone ever tell you you talk like a formal lady from the Kingdom?”

“No. I do?”

“Sort of, yeah.” The smell of death did not dissipate, even so far up the volcano, even when Rusk could swear the lava and the fire and the anger should diffuse it. Still it reached him. He wondered if he were under some spell himself. It was as if his emotions had shut down. As if he’d overloaded and could no longer function like a normal human.

Was this how monsters felt?

Was this where monsters came from?

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“You are troubled.” Floumeré stood wobbly but caught herself soon enough. She refused Rusk’s offer to help this time around. “I remember how I felt when my father was taken from me. It was as if all my emotions combined into one, as this lava rolls down the volcano and then fuses into black glass. Imperfections turned to purity. Only a calm to rise above the other desires.”

“That’s about how I feel right now, sure.” When she put it that way it sounded noble. “Think there’s any resources left down there? Or hell, any survivors besides us?”

“Perhaps.”

“Up for an adventure?”

“Not really. But it would be foolish not to try.”

They made their way slowly down the volcano, stepping over boiling lava. Rusk followed Floumeré for obvious reasons. He didn’t want to get burned. Or boiled. Or suffocated.

Having her around could be really useful, all things considered. And it didn’t hurt that she was pretty beautiful on top of it. In a violent fiery islander kind of way. A spark of something like emotion returned to him, thinking of her like that. He grasped it and held on with all his metaphorical might. Better to have this than be an empty shell of a person.

She doubled over, and he gruffly pulled her up by the shoulders. When she winced he gentled his grip.

“Perhaps I do require assistance.”

“Yeah,” he chuckled. “Perhaps. I’m sure they got beds down there, right?”

“I sleep in the volcano.”

Rusk nearly dropped her.

“It is true.”

“You’re fucking with me.”

“Perhaps.”

They reached the Stronghold without incident. Well, without incident besides stepping over corpses and being paranoid they’d spring back to life. One of them started twitching on the way down and Floumeré did not hesitate in pooling lava from a nearby crack in the earth right over the guy. Curiously his sword remained unharmed, and Rusk leaned down to pick it off the ground, finding that even though the metal should’ve burned him, it didn’t.

“Thanks,” he said to Floumeré, flexing his hand in surprise. Truthfully he’d picked it up without concern for whether or not it would burn him, but now that it was in his hands, red-hot and glaring, he wondered just how much influence Floumeré had over the area surrounding the volcano. Could she control everything? It wasn’t too farfetched. He did have pretty exact control over the Elva when they were working towards the same overall goal. He had to flow with it, but it also flowed with him. A symbiotic relationship. “So why do you suppose this blade isn’t burning?”

“Obviously because it was forged from a force much like that of my volcano’s fury.”

“Oh yeah, that would explain it.” Rusk berated himself for engaging in banter in the middle of such a discovery, and then remembered that besides the faint traces of Elva warning him of vague danger ahead, banter was all he had right now. “Can you tell what it can do?”

Floumeré shook her head. “I can only sense what the volcano is capable of, nothing more.”

“Finders keepers.” Rusk looped it through his belt and offered his arm again.

This time she took his help with a smile of gratitude. On they walked. Or, half walked half slid rather. The Stronghold was in ruin, and they had to navigate foundation problems as well as corpses who sometimes rose up to attack them. The main horde had been drowned in lava, but there were stragglers, and they were feisty.

Rusk took care of most, because that blade he’d stolen could do them more damage than whatever had caused their deaths. Whenever he sliced them they screamed. And then died their second death.

But the blade felt wrong, as if it were some abomination. Rusk wouldn’t have used it unless he had no other choice, and right now he didn’t. Mandy’s bow wouldn’t work on these guys and Floumeré though she held up a brave façade was clearly getting tired. Her fatigue rolled off of her in the way the volcano cooled underfoot, in the clouds that gathered overhead with the promise of dousing rain.