What a time to be alive. Or dead? Or not quite dead? Or not quite alive?

Whichever one of them I was, what a time to be it.

The city was on fire, the balm of hot air and ash being dragged up into the air, driving people from their homes into streets packed with undead and monsters. People fled to the countryside, the guards were holding narrow corridors open, and the city’s noble scion had been wounded.

He had been wounded and cared so little for it that he decided the best use of his possibly limited time left in this world was to complain about how poorly we were helping him along.

“You know, for a [Noble], you’re a real whiner,” I grumbled.

“It’s not my fault the two of you have the coherency of a herd of untethered oxen,” he griped, “And you're sweating like one-two.”

“You have cold sweats, too,” I hissed, panting as we walked, Strause and I taking more than our fair share of his body weight.

Keeping a man as upright as we could was a hard thing to do. It would have been easier to lay him flat on a plank, but he had been willing to take a bit of pain to get there faster, but here we were, him whinging as we walked down the street. Then there was the problem of lifting him because to keep a man straight while upright, you needed to lift the bastard in question. I could lift him. I was taller than him. Strause was not, and there the problem lay.

The shorter man was doing his darndest, the sketchy look on his face never wavering, not even as beads of sweat flowed into his eyes, but his face couldn’t make up for his thinner frame and shorter stature. A giant personality was not a giant where it mattered, for a strong personality, did not a strong shoulder make.

“You're rather hefty,” Strause said in a tone that betrayed his effort, “It's those long days in your office, I think. You need to get out more.”

Clause started indignantly, but I quickly followed, “He is deceptively heavy. I imagine even without his remaining armour… Certainly doesn’t help that he’s dead weight.”

“This weight isn’t dead yet. And I assure you, the effort of lifting me is half the armor’s fault,” Clause muttered tiredly with a hissing wheeze. “Though the other half is the expected exertion of lifting a man of my stature.”

“Well endowed, that’s my brother,” Strause said cheerfully, his words bringing a smile to my face and a flush to his brother's.

“I- Oh, would you two stop that? I could do without the two of you acting like… Like…” He said, grasping for words.

“Like [Plebes]?” I offered.

“Yes,” he finished, apparently no more to say on the matter.

“Well,” I told him contemplatively, “We could always leave you. We could go on our way, let you down one last time, as it were.”

“Ehh,” Strause said, “I don’t know that I could. I think my hand is stuck to his armor. It’s quite warm despite all the lubrication we’ve added.”

He said it in line with the joke my suggestion was, but he looked to me and seemed to will me to not keep doing it. I couldn’t tell why he gave me that look, but he did, and when it came to reading the situation, I trusted the guy who could read the room. And the street. And. Well, he could read a lot more than the room was the point, and if he could do that, there was no doubt a reason for it, even if I couldn’t.

“You could always carry him,” I told Strause, “Raise him up, all on his own. I wouldn’t mind letting my arms rest a moment.”

“I’ll make sure to tell my sister about your devotion to the cause,” he told me, hitting my weak spot.

“Would the two of you speak properly and stop talking about me like I’m not here?” Clause asked, clearly annoyed.

“No!” the two of us said, united in our grief of dragging Clause and unwilling to tell him anything.

Clause, as a [Noble] might, spluttered indignantly as if the very idea of no was an affront to his sensibility and honour. He spluttered with dignity, which was something I didn’t think was possible, splutters were not a dignified thing, but he managed to get it across.

And that was how it went. Despite our quibbling, sweating, general displeasure, and pain, we got on our way. Step by step, cobble by cobble, and rasping hot breath by rasping hot breath, we made our way down the street.

It wasn’t even a long street, which was the sad part, but it took us forever. His weight was a massive drag, but the moisture, spurred by Anna’s storm and the fire and heat, made the armour slippery, and Strause couldn’t just heft his brother with his arm. Clause could walk, and he did, but the weight of standing hurt him fiercely. Despite his pain, he kept walking, his feet barely touching the floor or holding any weight, but it made the difference between exertion and pain, so it was worth it. Honestly, if Clause didn’t have his feet on the ground, I didn’t think we could do it, not with Strause.

Hells, if Clause and I were lifting him, I bet we could do it without a problem. You could fit one and a half of him inside his brother and probably still fit some more in, it was obvious one of them had gotten all the veggies, and it wasn't Strause.

But despite the constant annoyance, and Strauses effeminate arms, we managed.

We reached the previous guard post, which had a few civilians with them; their faces turned to take us in, did a double take, and turned back before letting out a shout, but we did our best to not get held up by them.

Then, with a few of them escorting Clause, we began our way towards the inner gate, dragging Clause's bleeding body before his house guard, who impassively took a gander at the two of us.

“Do I need his woundedness here to let me drag him in, or are we good to enter?” I asked the one closest to us.

I could see him slowly raise one eyebrow, taking in the situation at hand before his buddy snapped his fingers, gesturing toward Clause's chest.

“What caused this then?” he asked, drawing the eye of my guard, who impassively took a curious gander before letting out a whistle.

“That looks like it’ll put hair on your chest, that’s for sure. Can’t tell what it was, but it's certainly not a normal blunt weapon,” he said to his companion.

“I can see that,” he said, cuffing his companion's arm before asking Clause, “Can she enter, my lord? Either of us could carry you if you’re so inclined.”

“She’s… fine. Let us in before I bleed out on your boots, gentlemen,” Clause told them before sliding into a wet cough.

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“Ribs and lungs,” the other one said thoughtfully as if his liege lord's condition was a puzzle.

“Very well, my lord,” the other said, stepping to the side to let us pass quickly, followed by the second.

We passed them, but behind us, I heard one of them say, “Didn’t he leave with a chest plate?” One of them asked.

“Yes… Oh!”

“Oh? … OH!”

The two of them quieted down as we left, having come to some conclusion that did not matter to us.

Clause's cough was getting worse, as was the wound, his blood drip, drip, dripping onto the path, speeding as the clothes reached their capacity to hold it and formed droplets across the hem of his cloth.

He was less lippy now, less lippy but fading, and despite the weak link not being me, I still put in extra effort and came to a stupid realization.

“Strouse hands off, I’ll take him from here,” I told him, reaching around to heft him up by the armpits and activating [Bundle] to carry him.

He stopped dripping blood, and as I hefted, he remained in the same upright position.

I didn’t trust that my skill was somehow saving his life, not for a moment, but it stopped the blood from leaving his body.

I packed that away in case I needed to carry water in a cloth sack or cover up a murder, perhaps.

“You’ve been able to do that the entire time?” He asked.

“Fuck off, now’s not the time,” I hissed, my arms already tired.

I stepped, letting [Toil] keep me going now that it was me carrying stuff and not a person.

Half walking, half waddling, I carried Clause faster on my own, sucking in breaths.

Up the path and to the moat, we crossed to the city's second gate and did a second song and dance routine with a second set of guards. They were on high alert. Guards manned the walls, looking out and up, out and down, and just plain out. They no doubt saw us coming, but those at the gate didn’t comment.

Strause got ahead of me, greasing the wheels to get us in as Clause blearily maintained his consciousness, and we finally got into the courtyard. The moment we did, I carried Clause like a rag doll in front of several of his sworn defenders while Strause fled through into the manor house.

I held him there, unsure of where to go or what to do with a human-sized bruise. A bruise that was also likely bleeding internally and whose lungs were apparently filling with fluid from blunt force trauma.

At least that explained the wet cough.

The guards, who, last I had seen, were playing card games all day, were ready for a gate to one of the hells to tear open. They were not laid about casually but dressed in varying well-fit armours, hands placed where they could draw blades or poles leant against themselves, and the courtyard was more of a rallying yard. Moving to one of the tables that now held a weapon rack stocked with half a dozen different arms, arrows and lengths of the bow, I waddled up to the emptiest rack, shimmied it over, and put down Clause with a sigh of relief.

I sat my ass down on the lawn and lay flat, sucking in breaths, the jostle causing Selly, who had begun to wilt again, to complain against her treatment, but I was too out of breath to complain back.

It was cooler here, the heat blocked by the two sets of walls and the river of a moat that flowed around the bailey. While I breathed, my senses relaxed, my focus spreading from the effort of hefting Clause.

Letting myself relax as much as I could, I took in the sky above.

Or the lack of sky above because the smoke billowed in toward us, and up, blotting out the sky.

I also felt a tingle as I felt out, recognizing a similar flow of mana. It pulled in as the hot air raked across the city before billowing up and in. It felt counterintuitively like a warm summer breeze crossed with a warm winter heart, balmy in both a good and bad way. It felt warm, like being immersed in a warm tub of water, the kind where you come out feeling like you transmuted a pound of dirt, dust and grime for the sensation of clean, but it was also the feeling of holding a metal pot or kettle by the handle, a hot buzz felt through the tips of your fingers in just the right way to feel uncomfortable.

There was also a moist buzz in it that brought to mind the smell of wet earth, though I couldn’t tell if that was right.

The man was being drawn in, drawn across the walls, drawing heat and what I had to assume was air mana. It was being drawn into, or rather drawn toward, the rooftop where it eddied and twirled, buffed away by a small cyclone of power.

The inner twirl slowed as it moved toward the center; some fraction of the mana spat skyward far faster than it would be otherwise, streaking up and out of my range of perceptibility like falling stars in miniature, just going up instead of down.

It took me a moment to realize that whatever was going on was Anna’s doing. Feeling toward the gathering power, there was a complex weave of power that I couldn’t even try to parse.

It was like a complex diagram that circled around a central point on the rooftop, and it did not function as I knew magic to function. The pattern was fueled by Anna, from the feel of it, as was the draw, but much of the spell was slowly filling the cyclone.

“Land, how far along is the storm?” I asked it, my mind reaching out to my familiar, friendly Genus Loci.

The land let out dribbling noises, an image of clouds condensing overhead. Ash lay heavy with a film of warm water, bleeding heat before whispering into the foggy steam that flowed into itself, drawn into fine strings and fluffing up like wool.

Notably, it did not answer in broken words first. It also didn’t answer my question; it just bombarded me with senses. I repeated my question a few more times before it realized I was asking for words, not images.

“The sky is sticky,” it answered finally, a tempest worth of fury, distilled and bottled into the few words like the finest bunkroom moonshine, volatile and decidedly gleeful.

Taking a moment, I parsed what I felt from it and found myself slightly confused.

“You want it to rain, don’t you?” I asked it, “Why? Normally, you wouldn’t care about a fire.”

“Not my wildfire,” it thought at me, images of dry undergrowth burning out to make way for more new growth, breaking its thoughts with the meaningless fire. It explained in the only way it could how it was started, not naturally, but by beings that had attacked a friend and one of her [Druids], how they had caused harm to the land and sickened her.

There was glee in the idea, a feeling like the land was licking her fingers before snuffing this tiny candle in spite of sending a shiver down my spine and making my hair stand on end.

Brush my hair with my fingers, carefully tickling my scalp with my nails and pulling Selly to my front as I regained my breath, my muscles slowing their ache. Belatedly, I realized my hair had gained faster than it should and managed a sigh that I would need to get it cut again.

At least this time, I know a [Barber], and I probably won’t cry like a baby.

With all hope, I would only need to get it cut after we got back from Anna's southern trip.

“Makes sense. Thank you for helping Anna,” I told her.

The land gave a feeling I could only imagine as a toothy grin before pulling back. I sucked in a big relaxing breath, ignoring the bustle in favour of watching the aetheric winds of my magical sight, drawn in, buffeted out and in and out and in toward the spell, flecks shooting into the black of the sky along with a swirl of slow wind that suggested how the sky should move.

I guess it helped that the person wielding it was a [Druid]. The amount of mana it called was orders of magnitude more than either I or I could possibly bring to bear, but because Anna was a [Druid], she could offload something like this to the land, and it could handle the heavy lifting.

My focus cast wide noted an outlier, and my focus was pulled to it. The magic bobbed around within the manor, coming closer and closer. It was being carried by a person who stood next to a hollow man.

Intrigued, I flicked my eyes toward Clause and checked on him, checking with my new [Gaze of the Coming Spring], and found blooms of death mana in him. They grew slowly, inching over his body in a slow ebb, his body fighting his wounds, trying to hold the line.

Strause was coming back; good timing. He would either be malformed by the injury or die from it without proper treatment.

I sighed and told Selly, “I’m going to get up now, but I’ll lay you down on a table. So you can relax, ok?”

She murmured something about tables being hard, and I reached down and plucked some short grass and clover and stood, laying them down on a table before laying Selly down, her head on red clover, the tiny red flower-like a pillow.

She mumbled but relaxed when she realized she was lying on bedding.

I turned in time to spot Strause and an older man. He was dressed well, but he was no servant. He had a likeness of [Scribe] but one of a higher station.

A visiting lay noble perhaps, or an uncle, though he bore little resemblance to either of the men.

I paid less attention to him than I probably should, however. My eyes were not drawn to him but to what he held in his hands.

He carried, clasped in both hands, a bottle that glowed with magic in both hands. It was mesmerizing because it was not just glowing to my magical senses but to my mundane eyes.

Carefully, I let my curiosity get the better of me. My hand moving through the air, I quietly spoke, "[Inspect]", and my eyes nearly boggled out of my head as I realized why Clause had been so insistent at returning here.

He was going to do as the rich so often did when faced with an issue where a lesser remedy would do. He was going to throw money at it.

Or, more accurately, a Healing Potion, and not a cheap one.