The routing was simple and methodical, and that only made it worse. Every path and house in Izozkia were cleared. Everyone they encountered was killed with a horrid, vulgar simplicity.

Dorothea was in the middle of wondering if Shark would understand the chaotic amalgamation of feelings the day had brought when, in a burst of flying debris and soil, a howling wind blew apart their surroundings. She shrieked as Rhys grabbed onto her, his magic slicing pieces of building that sailed through the air to crush them.

Reinforcements, as she’d thought possible. But if the enemy was here, then what had happened to Shark, Cerid and Ariana?

“No way,” she whispered. Shark wouldn’t fall like that. In her fear of the opposite, she stopped moving.

“Snap out of it!” Rhys ordered. “I’ll handle this, just run!”

Well of course she wasn’t going to do that, not unless he agreed to come with her. This wind magic had already killed Rhys once, and the Ghurian soldier Wesley had returned with a vengeance. Given the direction of the wind, she judged him to be northwest of where they were facing. They needed to talk a plan out, and they couldn’t do that with this carnage whirling around them. When she put a hand on his arm, Rhys’ eyes widened with alarm.

“Don’t—” he cried out, but the hands of time had already been turned back, the two of them going to where they had stood ten minutes before, all deaths still accounted for.

She didn’t give him time to dwell. “Listen. Much as we hate it, we can’t go back to Udara with nothing to show.” Scrambling, Dorothea tried to make the best plan she could. They were beyond talking things out today; she had to accept that. “Two options. We pinpoint his location and I reverse time so we can intercept him before he has the chance to attack. We keep trying until we can somehow beat him or get him to stand down. Or we find a place to hide and wait for him to do whatever he’s doing, and then I come out and repair what’s been destroyed.”

“I’ll fight him head-on while you find somewhere to hide.”

No way he didn’t know as well as she did that that was a horrible idea. “I have to use Eternal Rosemary for us to win, Rhys. There’s no getting around it now.”

“You don’t,” he insisted. “Not if you run.”

“Well, I don’t intend to go anywhere without you,” Dorothea stated. “So which is it? We both go or we both stay?”

“You go and I stay.”

They didn’t have time for this! “Stop being so stubborn! Tell me exactly how you’ll win then, especially without my help. His attacks can cut right through yours, both of you know it, and it’s doubtful you’d be able to get him with your freezing trick while he’s in the air lashing out at you. He also won’t give you the chance to use his ice magic against him anymore. You’re at the disadvantage.”

After glaring for a few tense moments, he swore under his breath. “I know where we can go.” Taking a sharp right and keeping a firm hold on one of her wrists, he guided them back towards the entrance. Though Dorothea half expected him to take them up to one of the watchtowers, Rhys instead headed towards a small hut that was nestled against the wall, hidden in a small copse of trees.

Inside it appeared to be nothing more than a sparsely furnished sitting room. A beat-up couch sat beside a table that held a bowl of lemons and a fearsome chopping knife. Dorothea’s eye was drawn to a plywood fixture on the wall opposite the doorway. From silver pegs hung tools of all sorts: pliers, a short saw, hammer, mallet, rope, twine, odd clamps, doodads with rotatable parts… Sharkie would know what they were all actually called.

Rhys veered left to a lengthy floral tapestry, flinging it aside to reveal a staircase. After he gestured for her to descend, a sharp scent started to tickle Dorothea’s nose. It was a bitter, stale odor that grew in intensity the further they went until they had emerged into a different room. There was a vacant chair in one corner, and that was all.

“Rhys…?” The unknown purposes present here were making her skin crawl.

“Just keep going.” Another set of stairs took them down to a long hallway filled with narrow cells. The floor of each cell angled downwards to meet in the middle at a small drainage grate. At this point, even Dorothea couldn’t remain ignorant as to the nature of this place.

“Is all this a…a big torture chamber?” she whispered.

“We call all of these rooms collectively the Catacombs,” Rhys explained. “There’s one in Udara too. Prisoners are kept here. Interrogation, whatnot. You can imagine. But, er, try not to.”

“Gods…” She imagined that the next pit would have raw skeletons dangling on hooks from the ceiling, bloody handprints dragging in streaks along the walls, but it was nothing so cartoonishly horrid. The final descent led them into…a bedroom?

It was beyond jarring. From a canopy bed flowed a frilly white overhang, and white lace pillowcases stood out glaringly against silky hot-pink covers with endless rose applicades. The walls were lined to the brim with shelves of delicate porcelain dolls staring blankly out from beneath bonnets and feathering eyelashes.

Somehow this was the worst one yet. “Why in the name of the Gods is this here?” Dorothea demanded in a squeak.

“Would you rather sit in one of the other rooms?” Rhys asked.

“Not, uh, not particularly…” The others were so real; this one at least flabbergasted her enough to make it more bearable.

“I don’t know how long we’re going to be stuck here. You might want to get comfortable.”

She followed suit as he sat with his back against the door. “You say that like either of us could.”

“Point.” They were still, so still as they listened, Dorothea with her head bowed towards her chest and gaze trained on her clasped hands, Rhys looking forward with his eyes narrowed in concentration.

It came less quickly than anticipated, the smash and crash of Izozkia’s destruction. Wesley was checking for survivors, Dorothea realized, whereas he hadn’t originally. Likely in the first go-around he’d seen them from his high vantage point while using his magic to vault in and had decided to strike while he had the drop on them. Now he would witness the full extent of what she and Rhys had done.

The passage of time felt separate from them due to their position underground. When the destruction started, she only realized she was jumping at the sounds when Rhys’ fingertips brushed her forearm. She looked up to meet his questioning gaze and nodded; she was fine. After she returned his expression, he nodded too. That exchange was all they needed, and they returned to listening, waiting.

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After a particular eternity, the crashing gales faded. With another shared glance and a nod, they agreed that Dorothea’s role was to begin. The very building they had hidden in had been destroyed. Rhys seemed to worry about being buried beneath the rubble for a few moments before remembering it was of no consequence to Dorothea. He watched, marveling as pieces floated back to their original location in time’s rewind.

They stepped into the ruins, bathed by a waning sunset. Every dwelling down to the last splinter was put back together to perfection. The watchtowers stood tall once again, flowers and trees creeping back into life. The corpses, she had to ignore. They had been sliced to ribbons by Wesley's magic. More than once, Dorothea’s boot came down on something soft, slippery and wet, and she swallowed down bile and self-revulsion while forcing herself not to look.

As reversing the time on objects without a life force was easier than those with, it took far longer than it had in the original battle at Izozkia for the same symptom of a nosebleed to appear. Though she tried to hide it from Rhys, he noticed when she ducked her face to her sleeve. “Time to take a break,” he said grimly.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” She tried to sound confident, but exhaustion leaked through. Rhys remained silent even though his dissatisfaction was emanating.

The nosebleed only got worse as they moved on, rising in its profusion as it gradually blended with dizziness. When the last scar in the ground had been closed, the last brick righted, Dorothea dropped down to sit with a gasp. It had been a long time since she’d had to do so much repair; not since a particularly savage snowstorm several years ago in Sirpo had so much needed mending.

Rhys bent down next to her. “Just breathe. Tilt your chin up to stop the bleeding. Or was it that you’re not supposed to tilt your head back…?” He peered in when she kept her head bowed, hands covering her nose and mouth. “Hey. Are you okay? Woah!” he gasped when she pushed him away and rose onto her knees with her hands splayed on the ground.

The feeling of her stomach flipping and then gathering a heavy mass at its bottom before sending it upwards in a bitter rush tore through Dorothea. A clear puddle of vomit rushed up her nose to choke her as she bowed her head over the mess and retched. Dimly, she felt Rhys gather her hair.

When she sat back, gasping and wiping at the wetness around her mouth and nose and the cold sweat on her forehead, he searched her eyes with bewildered concern. “Is this always what it’s like…?”

Dorothea grasped her left wrist with her right hand to try and get both arms to stop trembling. “Don’t worry, I’m fine. Let’s go.” Taking a break here wouldn’t help. The only thing that would was a long rest, and they’d been away from Udara for too long in the first place. Sunlight had faded from them now, leaving the sky a tapestry of dark navy with hues of violet.

“Are you sure?”

“We can’t stay here.”

“Tell me if you need a break.” He pulled her up and kept a cautionary hand hovering near her back as they trudged onward.

The steps were always the same. Nosebleed. Dizziness. Vomit. Loss of consciousness. Recovery. Rinse, repeat. Until the day her body didn’t recover, like her mother’s hadn’t. Until the very day she shattered from the inside out.

But she wasn’t the only one in pain right now. “I’m sorry. It happened to you again…” Just like six years ago with Sharee, he had gone in and killed and gained new burdens. If they didn’t figure something out, this cycle would only continue, not just for him but for everyone.

“It’s okay.” Rhys’ voice was so gentle that it made her want to cry. Did he ever spare any of that gentleness for himself? “We’ll make it through.”

So they would keep going with no other solutions? That hollow way of living couldn’t be her answer to Gren Fall’s words. But was there a different answer out there, and could she grasp it with her meager strength if it appeared? How could both sides get what they needed?

Wait. Gren Fall. If Wesley had come to aid his allies as they were under siege, then didn’t it reason he wouldn’t have come alone?

“Rhys, we need to go check on…”

But he’d stopped moving, freezing in his tracks under the archway that served as the entrance into the fort.

“Ah.” Gren Fall was sitting on the ground next to the dead bodies of Shark, Cerid and Ariana. When he saw Rhys and Dorothea, he hopped to his feet and brushed himself off. “So. Am I to take it this is your answer?”

Dorothea was barely conscious, much less alert, which didn’t help in the face of a man she was instantly convinced was about to kill them both. All she managed was a choked stutter.

He stayed perfectly still, but the knives resting in their holster upon his thigh glinted faintly with threat. “Is it?” he pressed without inflection after a few long beats of silence.

“I…” Dorothea croaked. “I don’t know what the answer needs to be,” she said truthfully. “No matter what choice we make, someone gets hurt. I… I don’t know if there’s another way.”

“I see.” He turned to look over his shoulder. “Wesley, come on.”

The grinning boy’s advance from the darkness made her tremble. “Wait, please! Please, just… I don’t know anything. Give me time to figure this out. Not a lot of time, but a little bit.”

“I say we kill ‘em,” Wesley suggested with a smirk.

“No.” Gren put a hand on his comrade’s back, and Wesley heaved a sigh. “I know it might come to that. But not yet.”

Not yet. If Gren Fall earnestly decided not to hold back anymore… The disaster that would bring on Sacer would far eclipse the epidemic.

So why hadn’t he destroyed it all by now?

Even someone like me wants to avoid killing when he can.

He was just one person. He didn’t know the way forward, same as the rest of them.

“I’ll find the answer,” Dorothea promised. “I’ll find it soon. I promise.”

He met her eyes across the clearing. “Okay.” Then he looked down at her dead friends. “Sorry. They wouldn’t listen.”

Dorothea could imagine the scene easily. Not many people would stop to hear someone like Gren out rather than immediately going for the kill. The only reason she’d listened to him previously was because she’d been too scared to move.

“I understand.” Nine months gone, then. Why was she so fragile? Why couldn't she do more? She promised answers, but the odds of her body even letting her were… No. She had to believe there was a way. “I… I’ll get back to you soon.”

Gren searched her face, and Dorothea found herself holding her breath. There was something about him, not caused by fear or intimidation, that made every nerve on her body feel electrified. She wanted to believe that his strength and the chance he’d given her could amount to something.

“We don’t have much time,” he said quietly. “This is the last chance I can give you.”

Dorothea nodded, and Gren dipped his head before he and Wesley vanished into darkness.

Rhys staggered as the tension left both his and Dorothea’s bodies, and he let out a long, uncharacteristic string of curses. Dorothea stumbled to Shark first, letting out a sob when they jerked back to life.

“It’s okay,” they said, immediately moving towards comforting her. “You’re okay, we’re okay, that’s all that matters.”

“Shark…!” she sniffled. “I-I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have left you alone!”

“It’s all gonna turn out okay, but we’ve got more to do. Come on, Thea, take it second by second if you have to. You’ve got this.”

Even such little words from them gave her endless strength to keep going. She crawled to Cerid, then Ariana.

“I am sorry,” Cerid said ruefully. “Because of our failure, you have had to…”

Ariana nodded. “Me too. Er, I’m…sorry.” The words sounded like they were incredibly hard to say, so Dorothea appreciated them more because of that.

“It’s okay,” she assured them. “I’d do it again, as many times as it takes.” She wanted to protect them. Finding something worth giving your life for… Was that what living was meant to be? Was that…maybe how her mother had felt?

Shark wrapped an arm around her waist to help her stand. “Come on, I’ve got you.” Like that, she was hoisted into their arms and the group began the long trek back to Udara.

This was only one step, Dorothea knew, in the larger battle that awaited them. The suspicion she’d been feeling dormantly since speaking to Gren for the first time that what form that struggle took depended on her actions had bloomed into certainty. Yes, the future was uncertain, and she had to find a way to change its course completely.