Leon would have been in good spirits and been able to laugh at himself a little if he hadn't been hanging upside down for several hours. As it was he fumed silently as Gwaine and Merlin seemed to debate whether they were going to let him down at all.

Then the torches flickered in the wind, and Merlin, bless him, insisted on the most sensible course of action.

Gwaine laughed nervously as he eyed the torches. "Yeah. Sure. Alright." he said. "Don't take your eyes off those gnomes—I'm going to cut him down. Elaine, catch the great lump for me, will you?"

Gwaine, his eyes still on the other half of the gnomes that Merlin wasn't watching, started to untie the vine-snare as Elaine strode forward. Leon looked at her upside-down face with worry. "Lady Elaine, it's not safe for—"

He was cut off, very abruptly, as Elaine took hold of him, turned his head slightly downward, and kissed him on the mouth. She was, just like last time, at the perfect height to do so, but there was some considerable amount of urgency in the kiss that made her fingers tight at his jawline and ears, pressing his lips into hers (not that he could have shied away, anyway). Being kissed upside-down was not the sort of thing he had in mind when he had just been rescued from being eaten alive. Having her nose and hot breath pressed into his cold bearded chin, her lips inverted against his while he stared her right in the throat, felt highly immoral and utterly wrong. But the thrill that went through him at such a strange kiss, with his senses heightened and his body still high on terror, was absolutely electric. He would never, not in a hundred years, get a kiss like that again.

She pulled away from his lips and he sank like lead—both psychologically and literally as Gwaine lowered him down to the ground, into Elaine's arms on the now-cold earth below. "Are you alright?" she asked, worry in her every feature as she propped him up.

"Y-yes, of course," he managed. His blood, now pumping the right away again, left a feeling of fizzy light-headedness.

"Good," she said, and kissed him again. She had been holding back with the last kiss, and now he felt her tongue and teeth and other things he did not have any experience encountering besides his own. He gave a tiny bewildered moan of pleasure.

"Far be it from me to keep you two from getting interesting," Gwaine said in affected tones of pomposity, "But could you finish eating him alive when we're back at the castle, and help me by keeping those gnomes from stealing the horses?"

Elaine blushed quite deeply and practically dumped Leon on the ground in her hurry to stand up and face the ceramic terrors. Gwaine, taking the opportunity of free eyesight to roll his eyes, pulled a sobering Leon to his feet.

"Can you walk?" Gwaine asked. Merlin was off kicking ceramic gnomes into the trunks of nearby trees with satisfying crunches of ceramic. Now and then he said something under his breath, which Leon promptly tried to ignore—he hadn't heard Merlin curse before and wasn't in a mood to find out what Gwaine had managed to teach him now. He tested his leg and nodded before he turned his eyes on the gnomes, just in case Elaine or Merlin blinked involuntarily.

"I was trying to lead them away from the castle," he said.

"Ah, see, I knew you could be stupidly reckless in a pinch," Gwaine retorted smoothly. "Now we're out in the middle of nowhere, with torches that shouldn't be going out but just happen to be doing so!"

He shouted that last bit, and Leon raised an eyebrow. "Why shouldn't they go out? It's windy."

"Come on, Camelot torches ought to be made to withstand a little breeze," Gwaine countered without missing a beat. "I'm sure you had a good plan, but we'd better get back to the castle."

Leon nodded. "Merlin, help Elaine with her horse, we'll watch them."

Merlin, looking frustrated, turned away from gnome-punting and helped Elaine mount before he went to his own horse.

"Up you get, Leon," Gwaine said.

"Mount up, I'll watch them," Leon replied.

"Leon, you know that normally I'd listen to you—"

"—You wouldn't—"

"But I'm in charge of this mission, and I've got to get my ladies to safety."

As one Leon, Merlin, and Elaine turned to Gwaine and said, "Who are you calling 'your ladies'?"

That's when the torches went out.

...

Gwaine blinked, to make sure that wasn't just a trick of his eyes somehow and, was, in fact, just his luck. A flash of lightning bathed the clearing in light for a second only.

"Merlin..." Gwaine ground out.

"I know, I know, I'm trying!" Merlin hissed back.

"Easy, it's not his fault," Leon said, fortunately misunderstanding what Gwaine had meant. "It's all right," he went on, way too calmly, like a father talking children down off a fright. Gwaine flinched and turned, as something brushed past him in the dark. "We just have to get on the horses and—"

"Nyeeeeehh!" Studly screeched—Studly, who never, as a rule, screeched or showed any signs of panic—leading the other steeds to practically wet themselves. In the darkness, they knew nothing but a flurry of hooves and screaming horses. Elaine was shouting. The horses snapped free of their posts.

In the next flash of lightning, everyone saw the horses tearing off towards Camelot, with Elaine along for the ride. Leon shouted after her.

Only Gwaine saw what scared them.

"Uh—boys?"

With every flash of lightning, more gnomes gathered. Gwaine turned his back to Leon and Merlin, like keeping eyes on their targets in the dark would help at all.

"Damn! Now we'll have to make it on foot," Leon didn't curse often, but he had waited until there were no ladies present, which was kind of cute.

"Boys?" Gwaine tried again, his agitation growing.

"We can't see anything in the dark," Merlin punctuated warningly. "We should get out of here."

Multiple, separate, tiny breezes whipped his cloak around his feet. It sounded and felt like the forest floor was crawling with insects. But he couldn't see.

"Merlin! Leon!" Gwaine snapped.

Lightning flashed again, and the brief revelation wasn't pretty.

Tiny ceramic faces twisted in grotesque delight, arms outstretched. There might have been a hundred of them, all around, in a tightening circle, above them in the trees. Gwaine smelled burning.

And in the following crash of thunder, Gwaine's first thought went to Merlin, so he grabbed the warlock by the shirt collar. As the thunder echoed back, Gwaine realized that was stupid, and he had to reach back to his other side to grab Leon's arm—Leon, who was in far more danger than Merlin, being of noble blood.

And as they were plunged into darkness and silence once again, Gwaine realized—or rather, you know, admitted, now that it was staring him in the face—that he was, if you wanted to be technical about it, noble, too.

"Oh, hell."

...

The torches had gone out, and no amount of spell-casting or muttering or cursing under his breath would relight them. It didn't stop him trying one last time as the lightning flashed and they all caught a good look at the gnomes, poised in the split second of almost-daylight brightness to attack. Merlin nearly jumped out of his skin when Gwaine grabbed the collar of his shirt, thinking for a moment that the gnomes were trying to get him out of the way.

This had really gone downhill quite quickly, he thought, jostling into Gwaine and Leon both as something brushed against his leg. Something else landed on his foot and he kicked at it, hearing the satisfying smash of ceramic on a tree trunk several feet away. But in another flicker of lightning, he saw that the circle had closed, and when the lightning flickered out, he felt more weight on his feet and was nearly toppled over as Gwaine ran into him, apparently trying to get away from his own assailants.

Merlin glanced around a bit frantically. If it came down to it, he could probably cast a spell to kill the gnomes- but there was certainly no way Leon wouldn't notice, and that would cause endless problems. It would still be better than his two friends ending up as burned husks, though, and after only a split second's thought, Merlin was fully prepared to do something—anything—that might at least slow the gnomes down, and took a breath in preparation to speak.

Off to his right, in front of Gwaine, a large number of gnomes exploded. Or, rather, it sounded like they exploded. Gwaine jumped back from the sound, collided with Merlin's arm, and Leon had to grab them both to keep them from falling as Merlin yelped and stumbled back. A moment later, more gnomes exploded in front of where Merlin had been standing and in front of Leon, and shards rained down on their heads from the trees. For the next few breaths, there were only the sounds of ceramic clattering and smashing, while the three men tried to protect both themselves and each other from this new, unidentifiable threat. More lightning flashed, but they saw nothing helpful, not even shards of the gnomes, which appeared to have disintegrated into piles of sand.

One of the torches, discarded when it'd gone out, flickered back into life and Merlin jumped forward to grab it from the forest floor, then held it up to look at Gwaine and Leon. The forest was still disconcertingly silent, except for the soft crackle-pop of the single torch. There was clearly still something out there, because something out there had utterly destroyed the gnomes…and if it could destroy the gnomes, the chances that it could do the same to them was pretty high.

"Out of the frying pan…" Gwaine muttered, and Merlin had to agree with him.

"Nothing nearly so dramatic," a voice said from the shadows in the trees, and all three of them turned, the two knights stepping forward and Merlin falling behind them—not for protection, but in case it became necessary to throw out a quick spell without hopefully being noticed.

Smiling, as if amused by the reactions of those they'd just saved, a group of druids stepped from between the trees and regarded Merlin, Leon, and Gwaine.

"You may put your weapons away, I believe. They will not be coming back," the eldest of them said, and then nudged a pile of sand with his foot and added, under his breath, "Horrid little monsters…"