I heard a small noise coming from one of the corners that I thought was unoccupied. A small door opened in the side of the wall, almost like a slightly more narrow version of a wood panel door that would be in front of a sink. I saw a hand, and an eye. Someone was peeking out.

It was a wrinkled face, slender. A woman? "Vwimis ni" Lyre said. I hadn't even noticed her come inside. The woman didn't say anything as she crept out of the hole, worriedly looking around as she slowly emerged. She saw the blood dripping from my fingers and the dead animal whose neck I penetrated slumped against the wall. She looked nervous, looking around. "Ouya iye a'gkm". Lyre said something else to her. The woman nodded, like she was saying 'thank you', and cautiously started putting the chairs and tables back in place.

That's when she saw the woman I had failed to save. I guess I was standing in a way that my legs blocked her vision of the woman. She started crying, and ran up to her. I backed out of the way so she wouldn't trip over me. The old woman held the younger old lady in her arms, cradling her. I looked at Lyre, and let my understanding of the situation and confusion of the relationship flow into her. I also noticed in my peripheral vision that Dulcet and Shore were outside, not knowing what to say to the villagers gathered around them, who looked rather upset. I'd let Lyre deal with this woman while I went and dealt with what looked like a mob.

"Ouena sua'an na'u'eh seh? Gu-aenee oralaasen squem lerehs elrog we supposed kalni garma worse than nesem iye"! One of the old men was saying something, and surprisingly I actually understood a few of those words! Either he was starting to understand and use my language, or I was starting to understand his and it was automatically translating inside my head. The few words I did understand, and the people's demeanor, coupled with my knowledge of history both from textbook and first-hand perspectives, I knew what they were saying, sadly enough.

"I couldn't stand back and do nothing. In my previous life, things like this happened in the distant past, and I know what will happen here later. Whether I acted or not, it wouldn't really make much of any difference, even in the short term. Knights would destroy peasant villages, doing inexcusably evil and vicious things and be rewarded for it. I assume that these creatures were sent for something you couldn't physically give them, and they counted it as disobedience because they're too stupid or removed from the general populace to know how the world actually works. You would be annhilated no matter what you did or didn't do." I don't know how much of my words were understood, if any. Shore was holding his arm, but I knew why.

The hoe was laying nearby, blood spattered a little bit up the wooden shaft. Well, more on the dirt covering it and not on the wood itself. Lyre was hugging the woman inside the tavern... inn? I should figure out what it was. The quiet woman was the other woman's sister, and they had tried to hide in the cupboard hole together, but when the beast entered, a quick decision had to be made to either have both of them caught, or only one of them. The quiet woman had kicked the cupboard door shut with her heel after spinning around and using her dress to cover the door not yet closed all the way.

The man was saying something else, but I ignored him. I went into the... boarding house, I guess, and picked up the dead woman, putting my hand on the other woman's shoulder beforehand. I wanted her to understand what was going on, and really hoped gestures and behavior was enough. I picked up a cloth that was hanging over a chair as well as I could while carrying the woman in both arms. I laid the dead woman down where the crowd had gathered, next to the dead man who gave me bread, and put the cloth over his head so we didn't have to look at what had happened. I pointed at them, and picked up my hoe and hit the ground, digging a little bit, then pointed at the people again. "Do you bury your dead? If you do, where is your cemetary?" No one seemed to understand, and my children certainly didn't. Back at the cave, bodies were dumped wherever and consumed by the Yuck, eaten, or both.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

We drider helped the humans... we learned they weren't actually human. There was a species in a game I played that looked human, but weren't- they had gemstones in their chest which acted like hearts, or something. The game had a few ways you could complete it- various special storylines that would get you to beat the game and you only had to complete one of the three of them. One story was about dragoons, one was fairies, and one was the story associated with these gem-hearted people. That was the storyline that brought a tear to my eye and got me to start crying the first time I finished it. The jewels these people had weren't anywhere as big as the ones the game race had; it was only about a third the size of their sternum, and in the same place, kind of like a pendant. Anyway, we helped the villagers in building two small wooden piles. It looked a lot like I once imagined Native American funeral pyres would look. It took most of the day to get them set up properly, since the people didn't want to use their firewood stocks and we had to wander around in the forest to find more. A few of my other children came by since we were taking so long, bringing us some millipedes along with the supplies.

Including myself, there were five drider and about twenty... bejeweled? I'd need to know what they were to say better. There were children mixed in with the elderly, and a couple adult females. I hadn't seen any of them before, and had wondered where these age categories were! I almost thought it was nothing but a retirement village but that didn't really make much sense for the time period and social level. I hadn't seen where they came from, but I assumed they came from the very few houses that were there since they probably didn't come from the boarding house. All of the visitors to the village, being my family and I, only saw them when the pyres were lit. The fires blazed in the night, and the people watching were holding each other, many crying, and a lot of the young children not understanding what was going on, but they knew what they were supposed to do.

I thought it was about time to leave, so I just tapped each of my children on the shoulders and elbows gently, nudging them to look at me. I made sure we had picked up the things we brought with us, but also the weapons and bodies of the disgusting filth we had killed. I started walking back home, going down the pathway between the two field-type farm areas. My lantern lit the way well enough in the immediate vicinity within the forest, and it wasn't long until I saw the web Aneis and some of the other drider had nearly finished making. We could edit it later, but right now we just needed to get home. Burial, funeral, and wake rituals weren't always meant to be open to the public, and I didn't want to offend anyone.

The commander's body was stripped of its metal armor, and the others were unequipped as well, but far more gently. It wasn't out of respect- not even slightly. It was for the reasons of showing my children how armor was made, and from what kinds of materials. We would be needing things like this soon, so we should probably have a good template. When I was in the modern age, I had gone to a Renaissance Pleasure Faire, and was a novice blacksmith we had a working billows and actual coal forge, so that was a good experience. When I was in high school, my school luckily had a metal shop and an auto shop next to it. I worked the forge, smelting aluminum car parts into ingots and work hammers. I had taught myself to sew by hand as well, using fishing line and leather scraps from a craft supply store to enhance military clothing. When I was in the Medieval era, even that kind of armor was far too advanced or expensive for someone like me to have gotten or had any experience with. Well, hopefully it would be better than learning from scratch. Sometimes being taught wrong was worse than knowing nothing- my old university taught me that without trying. Companies would see where I got my degree and would turn me down right away because it would be harder to retrain me than train someone without a degree.

All of this only really meant that I could only do my best to protect my family with everything I knew and could do- and hope that my research and experiences were beneficial instead of catastrophically misinformed.