The Emissary

by mildflower

When the Hero vanquishes the Wall of Flesh, the Guide comes back as the same person he always was. Except he isn't.

2. Chapter 2 - Of Thresholds Crossed

Author's note (Look, I've figured out how to add these!): I named a lot of locations in this chapter, but don't worry about memorizing them- they're not important or plot-relevant at all. I just needed a natural way for the characters to refer to places that are important to them/their histories in a conversational context.

Anyways- enjoy! Thanks for reading, thanks for the reviews/favourites, and please let me know if there's anything I can do better- I need critique and I have the feeling this chapter is lacking something, so please, tear my writing to shreds. (if you'd be so kind.)

Also- should I label the POVs? I'm not sure how clear they are.

---

"I am Cassandra—she who, without asking,

understood it all and still came to her fate,

I, Cassandra, full of visions,

who sees her own death without turning away,

and hears in the night the day that follows."

Gabriela Mistral, Madwomen

---

"Woah! Did you see how far down that glowstick went? I can't even see it at the bottom."

The Hero leaned over the edge of the tree hollow, marveling at how far down the trunk went. The opening they were peering over was close to the crown, and nearly the size of their home, but even that was comparatively small to the size of the tree in general. The cavern it opened into was enormous.

Enormous wasn't the proper word to describe it, actually—there were plenty of enormous trees in the woodlands they'd come from. They'd built their house out of an enormous tree.

This thing- being- stood on the mountaintop like a leviathan among sardines. The trunk of it alone had to have been a hundred feet across, and it only stretched upwards from there. Its crown didn't brush the cotton-colored underbellies of the clouds passing the summit—it soared high above them, colossal branches weaving around one another to shelter flocks of birds within an organic latticework. The echoes of their warbling were carried down by the wind, faintly audible even on the ground, but up close like this it was like listening to a disjointed (but enthusiastic) choir.

Surprisingly, it had been Wyatt who'd dragged them on the outing this time—he and the Hero had climbed to the summit of the mountain cradling their shoreline home, and had spotted the trunk of it disappearing into the cloud cover from the peak of the next one over. At the time, he'd excitedly spieled off something about historical texts inside that the Hero had gotten… most of.

A dwelling tree, he had called it. The seeds of it had been sown with Terrarian magic, enabling them to continue growing for as long as they weren't cut down. Originally, they had only been as tall as the canopy surrounding it, but over the years where the others had reached their natural height or rotted away due to disease, the dwelling trees only kept siphoning Terraria's magical pulse from the ground, growing larger and larger with the passage of time. They had once served as markers—visible only to those who had a keen eye for magical detection—for the treasures and passageways that were tunneled around their root systems.

Beside them, Wyatt grimaced.

"Yes," their guide agreed, before reaching out and tugging them back by their armour, "yes, I did. I was sitting right next to you. Don't fall into the tree hollow- if you thought the trunk was enormous, just wait until you see the tunnel system beneath it."

The Hero turned to look at him with a grin.

"Aww, are you worried about me- oof!"

Wyatt socked them on the arm, and the Hero felt the force of it bump them through the tin of their shoulder plate. For someone so slight, their guide had a grisly left hook.

"You're full of it. It would just be a shame to dent your new armor, is all… We still have rope left, right?"

"Oh, let me check."

The Hero wiped their brow with the back of their arm, but it didn't do much good—the dirt and sweat that had accumulated there was just smeared around by the metal of their gauntlet.

They retreated back from the opening, electing to sit down while they rummaged around their bag for the material. They weren't careful: it's not like either of them were in danger of falling off—they may have been perched on a branch hundreds of feet into the air, but it was wide enough across to support a small army.

"Oh, no, I think we used all of it climbing up here…" the Hero laughed awkwardly, before adding "Sorry, I guess I didn't pack enough."

Wyatt crawled over to join them, wrapping his arms around his knees. As he did, the Hero reclined, splaying out luxuriously next to him.

On a cloudless day like this, sunlight was able to shine through the leaves, dappling the brim of the Hero's hat. The wind was more violent at this altitude, and it was shaking the smaller branches and battering some of the unfortunate birds on them, but up here in the crown all the Hero could feel was a gentle breeze on their face. It was a nice respite from the tumultuous climb up.

The Hero turned to look at their guide, only to see him tipping his head back to feel the sun on his face. His eyes were closed.

"It's alright. We can just reuse the length I scaled to get up here," Wyatt replied after some time, cracking his neck, "though, I'm not sure how safe the trip down will be..."

The Hero massaged their wrist, and he glanced at them with a raised brow.

"I take it you're not keen on using your grappling hook to go into the hollow?"

Their face twisted at the thought, and they shook their hand out.

"I don't want to use this grappling hook to do anything," they murmured, "If I knew it was going to leave my hand so sore, I wouldn't have bothered making it."

The two of them had spent the better part of the day climbing up, and it was beginning to show: the Hero was rarely winded, but the strain of having to make their way up the tree with their grappling hook to secure the rope Wyatt would climb up left a dull burn in their shoulders that they were eager to shake off. Their hands, while not marred by the same rope burns that were on their guide's, were throbbing with a dull ache from suspending themselves on the grappling hook.

Concern flitted across Wyatt's face, and for a brief moment, the Hero felt a twinge of guilt for complaining.

"You're still going to be able to swing your sword around, right?" he asked, "There's no telling what we'll run into down there."

Ugh. Nevermind.

They were disappointed, but not surprised. Of course all he was thinking about was the scrolls.

The Hero rolled over onto their side with a dramatic flair, flopping their sore arm onto the branch between them.

"I'm injured, and all you can think about is how useful I'll be? That's cold, even for you." they moaned dejectedly.

Wyatt was not buying it.

"You're fine," he replied calmly, not bothering to look at them, "drink a healing potion if you're in any serious pain."

Wyatt turned away to root through his bag, and, like so many times before, the Hero was seized with the uncontrollable urge to mess with him.

With an agile roll, the Hero flopped onto Wyatt's shoulder, going limp. Unaccustomed to carrying anything heavier than a quiver of arrows as he was, their guide sank down easily underneath their weight.

"What are you- get off of me!"

"I'm injured, Wyatt. You're gonna have to carry me down there if you want to go exploring." they said.

Wyatt tried to push them off, but they only flopped down further, turning into dead weight.

"Like hell you are! If you don't- HERO- If you don't sit up straight I'll push you off of this tree myself!"

They crossed their arms mirthfully.

"Oh, really? Who'd be there to 'swing their sword around' then?" They prodded.

Wyatt attempted to crawl away on his hands with a strangled noise of annoyance, but didn't succeed. He may not have possessed the frailty his build implied, but it was still the Hero who had been carrying their supplies on their journeys; who had laid the logs of their home, who had chopped their firewood in the afternoons.

If Wyatt had been the direction behind the swing of a blade, or the strike of a pickaxe, it was the Hero's arm who had been lifting it; the one whose muscles strained with the force of cleaving the rock open. The heaviest object they had seen their guide lift in the past month was a stack of books.

That's what you get for making me do all of the work, they thought to themselves.

The Hero put a hand to their forehead for dramatic effect.

"Is that all you see me as, Wyatt?" they wailed, "As a sword for you to use? A pack horse at your disposal?"

They meant none of it, of course. But it was still a lot of fun.

"Stars above, why are you like this?!"

"I'm more than just my sword, you know. I feel objectified!"

Wyatt sighed, giving up. By now he had flopped limply onto the branch of the tree. The Hero was lying on top of him, making the two of them back-to-back.

"Hero, you know that's not-" his words trailed off, before he hissed in pain.

The sound sent a prickle of alarm through the Hero, and they scrambled off of him. The lighthearted air about them gave way to concern.

Shoot, too far.

"Sorry, I wasn't being- are you okay?"

The Hero had recoiled as soon as they heard the noise, but they were still watching him, trying to determine if they had caused- if Wyatt was injured. Wyatt got up into a kneel, looking over the backs of his own balled fists, before slowly uncurling them.

The color may not have been as startling as it would have been in full sunlight, but they could still see the red beginning to seep out of the rope burns he'd obtained earlier. The skin that had been rubbed raw had been scoured clean off.

The guilt that blazed through them was instant.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to- I forgot about- I'm sorry."

The rope burns! They were an idiot, how could they have forgotten about them?

They didn't look serious earlier, but they must have been scraped open while Wyatt was trying to push them off, grating against the jagged teeth of the bark. The Hero hadn't realized their armor was that heavy.

Wyatt had said something during their first weeks here, about learning to control themselves. At first they couldn't be certain if it was really because their capabilities truly were beyond human, or if their guide was just unwilling to admit his own lack of skill with the axe and sword, but. But they supposed it didn't matter—not if they were going to draw blood, either way.

Wyatt grimaced, but didn't raise his voice to snap at them.

He did something much worse, instead.

"It's alright, Hero. You don't know your limits yet." he said quietly.

He turned back around to them, giving them what they assumed was supposed to be a casual smile.

"I'm not upset with you. It's not your fault… So, er- stop doing that thing with your eyes."

"What? What thing?"

The Hero touched a gloved fingertip to their eyes, and realized that they had begun to tear up. They wiped it away with the back of their hand furiously.

"Whatever! I don't care about that," they blurted out, "Why didn't you tell me you were bleeding?"

Wyatt began to look uncomfortable, shielding his hands with his body.

"It's nothing to be concerned over. They're only friction burns." he looked at them quizzically. "Really, they're nothing."

Indignant fury bubbled up from somewhere within them.

"What do you mean, 'nothing'?! Your hands have gaping wounds now!"

Wyatt gave them an irritated look.

"Which can easily be mended. You're making an unnecessarily big deal out of this."

The Hero stared at him in disbelief. The guilt was quickly pulled under a riptide of exasperation.

"I'm not- it is a big deal! Doesn't it hurt?"

Wyatt's jaw tightened as he took his bloody palms, and dragged them across the fabric of his pants. Most of the dirt and blood that was caught in the wounds was wiped away, but the Hero watched his hands begin to tremble a little with the strain of it. If the Hero was being honest, the thought of doing that themselves made them a little bit ill. They were sure it must have burned.

"No. So stop being a child, and calm down." he gritted out.

The Hero opened their mouth, before shutting it again, trying to conjure up something to say to that. They couldn't tear their eyes away from the red staining the cloth of his jeans.

"I'm- I'm not being a child. You're being a child!" They said carefully, "You don't- you can't decide what is, and isn't a big deal, to me."

It wasn't the most articulate way of putting it, but they couldn't find the right words to say in the moment.

At that, Wyatt only turned away, electing to root through his bag for healing potions instead of further engaging them.

Their eyes narrowed—was he seriously going to try and douse his own hands just to prove a point?

The Hero sat cross-legged behind him.

"Give me your hands. I'll pour the potion over them."

"That won't be necessary," He replied rigidly, "I am capable of doing that myself."

The Hero's face flushed. Why was he being so stubborn?

They knew his injuries were their fault, but if he had just- told them they were hurting him, they reasoned, they would have stopped earlier.

At first being here had been a joyride: they could take out half of the forest in a day, or erect a new home in a matter of hours. Stretching their legs by jumping from treetop to treetop was nothing more than a game to them. They hadn't noticed it when they were on their own, but waiting for Wyatt to catch up to them during their expeditions after they'd found a pair of Hermes boots was- it was like they were playing tag with the wind, and Wyatt was stuck on the ground, watching them soar high above.

But- somewhere along the way, it began to make them uncomfortable, too.

"Difficult" wasn't the right word for it—what sent a chill through them was just, how easy it was, to brush up against things in the wrong way. To cause damage to them. The mushroom field incident wasn't the first of its kind—since then they'd razed forests and collapsed more cave systems than they felt comfortable counting.

A moment of silence passed, and they curled in on themselves, watching Wyatt from under the brim of their straw hat.

The anger began to ebb away. Into its place flooded concern, and then a quiet apprehension. The way his fingers slipped and caught on the tools and papers within was obvious—he was trying to avoid brushing his hands against the cloth lining.

'No'. What a load of...

If he was going to blame them, they thought, it would have been easier if he'd just say so outright. They could take an acidic jab or a yelling match. Anything was better than- than stirring in quiet resentment. Than being frozen out.

Something made a pit of ice form in their stomach.

What if one day they pushed too far, and ended up driving him away?

The thought made their insides churn. Having to figure out how the world worked on their own seemed daunting—but being left alone because they'd hurt the only person they could call a friend in it seemed so much worse.

Which is. Well, exactly what they'd just done.

"I'm sorry, okay?" they relented, "For messing up your hands… And for messing with you earlier. I know I can- go too far sometimes."

Wyatt turned back to look at them. His expression was unreadable.

"It's not that," he said, "It's-"

The Hero held out their hand, palm outstretched. A silent invitation.

Wyatt sighed, before scooting closer and putting his hand in theirs.

The Hero rustled around the pockets of their bag, before fishing out a glittering red vial and a strip of fabric.

They tugged Wyatt's hand closer, turning it up to the light as they dabbed at the remaining dirt away with the cloth. He winced as they brushed a splinter of bark out of it.

"I just- I thought I was getting better at controlling it." they muttered quietly.

"You are. It's a skill that takes time to master, just like any other. You're already better than you were when you got here. Remember how you used to butcher squirrels by running into them too quickly?"

The Hero grimaced at the memory.

"Well I was, hoping to forget that, actually…"

The Hero soaked the other side of the cloth in the potion and began to dab at Wyatt's hand.

"The point is-" Wyatt inhaled sharply as the hero pressed a soaked cloth to his palm, at the shock of feeling his skin begin to meld together again underneath it. After a moment, he continued.

"The point is, you haven't hit any in a while. If that's not evidence enough that you're growing into your role, I don't know what is."

"That's only because I'm careful now," they said with frustration, "Am I going to have to walk on eggshells for the rest of my life?"

Wyatt pursed his lips.

"I'm afraid so."

The Hero wilted. It wasn't fair.

"But it'll become easier with time," Wyatt continued, "At some point, controlling your strength will become second nature. You won't even realize you're holding yourself back."

"How can you be so sure?" they asked dejectedly.

Wyatt gave a knowing little smile, as he retracted his hand, switching it out for the other.

"Hero, have I ever been wrong before?"

The Hero began to clean out the wound.

Wyatt's hand trembled as the concoction did its work, and the Hero tilted their hat down further in an attempt to avert their gaze. It was making their own palms burn in sympathy.

"Sorry." they muttered quietly again. "Sorry for um, snapping at you. While you were hurt."

Wyatt gave them a flinty glare.

"Stop apologizing," he said sternly, "You're supposed to save the world. If you're going to be this much of a pushover forever, we really are doomed."

"Wh- hey! I'm not a pushover!" they declared, before softening it with "This time was just- on me, y'know?"

Wyatt's lip turned up, and he rested his chin on his other hand. Their face heated up as they realized he'd been messing with them.

"Oh, whatever," they huffed.

They let it go. They needed to ask him something.

"Wyatt, why didn't you just let me help you? It was upsetting enough to mess up your hands. And then you just, brushed it off, like it was nothing, and you made them worse…"

As they rambled, Wyatt's face began to fall.

"You said you didn't blame me, but then you wouldn't let me treat you, and- I don't know. It feels like you do. It kind of feels like you're punishing me, sometimes."

The Hero could see the guilt sweep over it in real time.

Good, they thought. It was bittersweet. Now you get it.

"No, that's not it," Wyatt said quickly. It took him a moment to gather his thoughts, but he eventually opened his mouth again.

"In the place I come from… help isn't freely given," he explained, "especially once you've incensed someone."

The Hero watched him as he spoke with round eyes.

Wyatt shifted uncomfortably under their gaze as he continued.

"I dislike- I mean- it's just common practice, to treat one's wounds alone. It's discomforting, for you to be in my space while doing so. That's all."

"... Where do you come from?"

The Guide laughed slowly, pulling his hands away.

He stood up, and brushed himself off.

"Nice try, Hero. I'm still not authorized to say that yet."

Of course.

They weren't expecting him to really tell them anything—he was always willing to fork over information about the world around them, but when it came to his origins he'd been unshakably tight-lipped.

Was it worrying? Absolutely. They weren't a fool—they had enough common sense to know that it warranted some suspicion. They'd been kept up at night when they'd first washed up onto the shores of Terraria, wondering if everything he'd told them was a lie: that the world wasn't really in any danger, that there was no grand cosmic battle they were destined to fight, that they were playing into some sort of game they couldn't pick up on.

But Wyatt had never been wrong before, and the Hero hadn't pinned him as… as someone who'd lie for no reason. Actually, they weren't even sure if he was capable of lying at all: he'd been shockingly transparent about his intentions and what he wanted them to do since the very beginning, to the point where the Hero had briefly and quietly questioned his sanity.

(It passed, of course, on the first night, when they'd seen the undead rise from the ground.)

Wyatt had never been wrong before—And neither had they been, about him.

From their spot sitting on the tree branch, the Hero considered pursuing that line of questioning. Pushing him for details. They could do it, too—hold the tip of their blade against his neck, demand a straight answer.

But if they were being honest with themselves, they wanted to put off knowing for as long as possible.

"Wyatt, you don't trust me with anythiiing," they drew their voice out, "C'mon, who would I even tell?"

Wyatt reached down, and the Hero took his hand, allowing him to help pull them up. The skin there was softer than it had been before- the healing potions had done their work and then some.

Whatever. They were playing into a game, whatever. So they'd have to figure out a way to control their strength—they resolved to worry about it later. What did the world have that sitting in the summer shade next to a friend didn't? For what possible reason could destiny not wait a little longer?

They could trust him. They wanted to trust him.

"I'm not authorized to say that either," Wyatt said, with a touch of amusement, "Now come on. If your wrist is alright, we've got a dwelling tree to explore."

---

The town the Arms Dealer had settled down in wasn't particularly nice.

Honestly, it wasn't—not in terms of build alone. He'd charted half of the map of Terraria and had actually struggled to name a bigger dump. The building style was brutalist, with most of the shops in town looking more like oversized wooden cubes than the rows of market stands that he was used to seeing in commerce districts near the mainland.

(Plus, they all looked the same. What, was the entire town built by the same person, with the same shitty taste in architecture? What kind of animal didn't even gravel the roads?

At least give the houses proper, slanted roofs, good lord, he thought. Falling rainwater would eat away at the wood paneling and cause leaks in a decade or so. Those leaks would bring mold, which brought rot.)

He felt solidly neutral towards its location—the mountain range cradling its western edge made it nearly inaccessible to the outside world, so they'd never have to worry about goblin invasions or law enforcement officials halting business. On the other hand, the Arms Dealer had already exhausted his list of potential customers in town, and with how difficult the passage through the mountains had been, he couldn't see new ones coming any time soon.

Being able to feel the ocean breeze on his face when he stepped outside was… nice, but there were plenty of seaside towns—with bigger ports, and easier marks to swindle.

(No one was ever able to tell the difference between lead and silver rounds with a nice coat of paint, he reminisced. Not until the next blood moon, anyways, but by then he and Bazdin would be long gone.)

After a year of trying to justify why he wanted to continue living here, he had given up, and accepted that maybe he just had poor taste.

Still, whether it was a noble's estate or a dilapidated fishing town, he was going to protect it. He had tried to, the previous day, when he and the Tavernkeep had led a half-baked inquisition against the Emissary that never came to fruition.

And he certainly didn't want to see it explode.

"BAZDIN!"

The Arms Dealer yelled at the Demolitionist across the empty town square from his hiding spot. Currently, he was crouched behind the walls of the dwarf's side of their joint artillery shop, peeking out of the front doorway. The Demolitionist popped his head up from behind a table on the opposite end of the town.

Well—"head" wasn't entirely accurate. He could barely see the dwarf's eyes peeking over the top of it, but years of target practice spent specifically aiming at the yellow hardhat had honed his eyes.

"BAZDIN! ARE YOU CRAZY?! THAT'S OUR HOUSE!"

He was referring to the rudimentary wooden structure that served as the forge he built his firearms in, the walls he concealed them behind, and the town's only inverted bomb shelter.

(The Demolitionist had insisted on having a place to store his explosives near the back of their shop. The Hero had hesitantly agreed, but only after lining the inside with several layers of dungeon brick.)

Technically, it was only the Demolitionist's in part—The Arms Dealer had furnished the store himself over the course of a few weeks, building secret compartments within its wooden frame he could stash his ammunition behind. When he was finished with that, he'd decorated it, grooming the structure into something that looked more like a quaint townhouse than a manufacturing site for illicit weaponry.

It was a habit he couldn't shake from his time in the larger port cities—the nicer the house, the less likely it was to be raided by the town guard.

Still, habit or not, he'd taken great pride in his work—and the Demolitionist had just tossed a fucking grenade right at the crown jewel of their home.

He dove into the nearest corner of the building, covering his ears.

The grenade exploded. This close to the blast, the subsequent shockwave was so loud that it made his eyes water, and he was flattened to the ground by the force of the wind. It sent the door off of its hinges, flinging it violently into the backroom and, judging by what sounded like an ensuing maraca concession, right on top of the stack of bait boxes he organized his bullets in.

The dust was beginning to settle down when he gritted his teeth, pushing himself up on unsteady hands. The noise of the explosion was nothing compared to how loud the ringing in his ears was now.

It was just a door, he reminded himself. It was just a door. He could reaffix it to its hinges.

He took a deep breath, trying to focus on the ringing. He made an attempt to remember what the Nurse had taught him about mindfulness.

Really, he should be glad it wasn't anything more serious. If it had landed on the wall he kept his guns hidden behind, he'd actually have a reason to be upset. It was just his ammo boxes- which were now undoubtedly strung about the floor in a chaotic mess, which would take hours to sort through even if the knockoff silver rounds weren't virtually indistinguishable from the real ones, and…

"BAZDIN! IF WE DON'T DIE HERE I'M GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU!"

"AYE," The reply came in a guttural yell from across the town, but he could barely hear it, "YE'VE BEEN SAYING THAT FOR THE PAST TEN YEARS, SHRIMPY!"

The Arms Dealer sunk into himself, pressing the back of his head against the wall. He had spent ten hours painting the patterns on that door. Ten.

After a moment, he found the resolve to scream back "DID YOU AT LEAST GET THE- THE FUCK HORSE? THE BLOOD PONY?!"

If anyone had asked him what the hell a 'blood pony' was yesterday, he'd have no idea what they were talking about. For the monster that had been terrorizing the town for the past hour or so, it was the most accurate descriptor.

It had broken through the treeline earlier, storming into town center at high noon during a bustling market day. It looked like a horse in the same way that a rabid wolf looked like a toy poodle: the thing was a behemoth, easily dwarfing the Arms Dealer at its shoulder height alone. Its coat was the color of bone, brighter than any diamond he'd ever seen with a holographic tint that was twice as reflective. Behind it trailed the pink strands that made up its mane and tail, which would have detracted from the frightening aura it had, had the Arms Dealer's vision not been sharp enough to catch the white roots.

It was not to be underestimated: it was either carnivorous, or enjoyed using the massive, spiraling horn on its forehead to hunt for sport—that shade of pink only occurred in the wild from being stained with blood.

They scattered like rats: the Nurse abandoned her stand outside of her office with a shriek as it sprang over them in a high arc, knocking a glass display of potions to the ground. The Tinkerer, who had been bartering with the Mechanic over the price of some miscellaneous object of science, immediately switched into panic mode to help the Merchant hobble over into the painter's studio. The Zoologist had all but scooped the Party Girl and the Stylist up and flung them into the tavern to keep their skulls from getting crushed underneath the thing's hooves.

It had the perfect timing, too: the Hero was off on another one of their day-long mining trips, and they weren't around to protect the town with their extraordinary strength.

He shook his head as he stopped that line of thought in its tracks. He was becoming far too reliant on their vigilance, and it made distaste curl in the pit of his stomach.

He was an arms dealer, for crying out loud. His job was to give teeth to the most dangerous men, women, and everything in between in the realm.

He had a stuffed pair of harpy wings in a storage cellar somewhere to commemorate the time he'd shot one out of the sky from the ground. He'd been back and forth through the Corruptive wastes, at regular intervals, and came back alive when no one else did—he could handle a fucking pony.

Besides- it was unfair, for the Hero to shoulder the burden of town peacekeeper. They could all afford to pitch in a little. Lighten the load, and whatnot.

"I'M AFRAID I DID NOT, SHRIMPY!" the Demolitionist replied, before adding, "BUT I DID SCARE IT OFF! IT'S NEAR THE OUTSKIRTS OF TOWN NOW!"

Fuck it, he thought, pulling a flintlock from the inside of his coat. The entire town had been locked in a stalemate with the thing as soon as everyone had run for cover, and it was going nowhere. Something had to give—either someone was going to land an astronomically lucky shot on the force horse, or get grievously injured trying. If it was going to be him, he reasoned, he might as well try and strangle his blood brother/adoptive uncle/parental figure/partner in crime for blasting the paint off his door before doing so.

Besides, his voice was starting to get hoarse.

(World below, he was a comedic genius. Why didn't he do stand-up?)

The Arms Dealer darted out of the Demolitionist's store, feeling not unlike a mouse scurrying out of a mousehole as he broke into a run.

As he went, he realized that the expanse between the shop, the Oak tree at the center of town, and the table the Demolitionist was hiding under was enormous. Had it always been this big? Or did it just feel that way now that he was running across it with death on his heels?

(Trick question—he knew the answer. The threat of death always exaggerated things.)

Come on, come on.

He was halfway to the massive Oak when he began to hear a grim braying in the distance. The familiar prickle of adrenaline, and something else, crawled up his spine.

"HURRY UP, LAD! YOU CAN MAKE IT!" the Demolitionist yelled, popping out from underneath the table.

He passed by the Oak, and caught a glimpse of the Dryad peering out from somewhere between its highest branches with those waxy, white pupils of hers.

"Be careful!" she hissed, "It's coming up behind you!"

If it was possible, he bolted faster. He'd thank her for that later.

He could hear the clopping of hooves from somewhere in the distance.

Almost there…

He was so close to the table.

"ANDRE! SHRIMP! HURRY UP!"

He dove to the ground, kicking up sand in his wake, but he managed to slide under the table just as the monster galloped into town square from behind the Artillery shop. The Demolitionist sputtered from beside him, yanking an untucked part of the Arms Dealer's coat into the shadows as he spat out sand.

"Good lord, kid, did you have to get sand in my mouth?" he asked.

He had spotted the beast, and he tried to lower his voice, but being quiet was never something he was great at. A product of working with explosives for a living.

The dwarf wiped his tongue on the back of a hairy arm, and the Arms Dealer got into a crouch. His eyes were still glued to the white horse at the center of town when he bit back with,

"Sand is the least of your concerns!", the Arms Dealer whisper-yelled, "Death will be a fuckin' mercy if you peeled the paint off my door, pal!"

The dwarf whistled.

"Door, schmoor. It can be replaced."

"Not the ten hours I spent painting it, you fuck! You could have killed me!"

The Demolitionist waved him off.

"Oh, relax! … I told you staying here was a bad idea, anyways."

The Arms Dealer took an empty magazine out of his gun, "What'd I say this morning, huh? You should have listened to me when I said I had a bad feeling."

There was an undercurrent of panic that had been brewing within him all day, but he hadn't been able to place why until the monster had stormed into town. Being in the beast's presence was like being struck by lightning: the fear made him electric; he was charged with nervous tension, from the soles of his feet to the ends of his hair, and he'd just knocked the pendulum that had been swinging between being frozen to the spot by the force of it and jumping into action firmly into the 'action' part.

The Dwarf wilted, making a clicking noise with his tongue.

It was actually him who'd identified what exactly the feeling was, when they had first met. The formal term for it was a sensing gift, and The Demolitionist had snapped him up as a business partner as soon as he'd realized Andre was essentially a walking monster detector. The Arms Dealer thought of it more as an over-glorified anxiety disorder with magical perks.

"Aye, ye're right about that. But what was I supposed to tell everyone? 'My roommate has a bad feeling about today, so ye'd all better arm yourselves or take cover!'?"

The Arms Dealer was still upset, but he relented.

Bazdin was right, after all—on the rare occasion that they'd stayed in a town long enough to see disaster befall it, they'd never had any luck trying to convince its citizens that it was coming on swift wings hours prior to its arrival.

It didn't matter where they were: they could have been cozying up to a noble in their estate or down on their luck in the sleaziest city tavern they could find. Sometimes he'd awaken from a restless sleep when the sensation would strike him, jolted awake by a tremor of alarm.

Others, his morning coffee would sour on his tongue as he'd feel a distant but unshakeable anxiety compel his heart to beat faster. It came and went throughout the day like the tremors before an earthquake, each wave of panic stronger than the last, until the mounting wave of fear crashed over him during the eleventh hour as whatever monster or demon or lesser god he had sensed descended upon the town to feast.

The cycle had repeated itself enough times for him to accept that his sixth sense was only useful for saving his own skin—and sometimes, not even that. It had taken him years to figure out how to move when he was paralyzed by the fear that came with it, to melt down the shackles it placed upon him into a knife he could arm himself with.

...But he figured that since he'd stayed in this town for so long already, it was worth trying again, anyways.

"So instead of warning everyone, you tried to blow up our shop?" he replied.

"Have more faith in me, lad!" the Demolitionist exclaimed, "I know where I'm throwin' my explosives. It scared off the hell beast, didn't it?"

'Lad'. The moniker was getting old- he was brushing thirty this year.

"Right, just like you knew where you were throwing that stick of dynamite back in Deshret?"

"Blistering barnacles! You blow off a man's leg once!"

The Arms Dealer turned to him.

"Once is enough!" he said sharply.

The horse whinnied from the center of the clearing. It was a dark, gravelly, sound. It reverberated within its chest cavity and came out like it'd been through an amplifier. The two of them turned their heads, looking towards the noise, and almost jumped out of their skin when they caught a glimpse of its pale legs trotting closer.

The Arms Dealer swallowed dryly. Each one of them was like its own marble column.

He and the Demolitionist went quiet, scooting closer.

"So," the Arms Dealer said in a hushed tone, "How are we going to take this thing out?"

The Demolitionist raised a brow.

" 'We'?"

"Of course we," he replied, "Do you think anyone else around here could possibly fight that thing off?"

"Oh, don't tell me ye're feeling responsible for these people now," the dwarf grumbled, "I knew teaching you how to read with philosophy was a bad idea. Where was this moral compass when we were running that accounting scheme in the capital?"

Andre rustled around the inside of his coat, feeling around for the shape of a magazine.

He didn't tear his gaze away from the monster as he slid it into his pistol with a faint click.

"That's different. People won't miss a few shillings outta their wallets," the Arms Dealer parsed out as he steadied his aim at the horned horse, "Being attacked by something like this can fuck someone up for life."

There was a bitter satisfaction, he thought, in knowing so from experience.

The Demolitionist gave him a side-eye.

"I would miss a few shillings."

"Yeah, because you're a cheapskate. Now help me think of a plan!" he whispered.

The white horse lashed its tail, prancing airily in a circle just thirty or so feet away from where the Arms Dealer and Bazdin were hiding. It was first instinct to stop breathing, but Andre knew better: he'd spent the better part of a decade shoving down his instincts into something he could work with.

He took deep breaths, trying to steady himself.

"Think you can shoot it from here? Peg it in an artery?" the Demolitionist said lowly.

The Arms Dealer didn't fault him for asking. That was his first thought too, but as soon as he'd fired a bullet at the thing from where he was concealed inside the Demolitionist's shop, he'd crossed it off of the rapidly-forming list of action plans in his head. The shot drew blood, but just barely—after grazing the horse's flank, it had ricocheted off of it and put a dent in the tin sign dangling from the Merchant's parlor.

"I could," he admitted quietly, "But I don't think it'd do any good. I already hit it earlier."

He spared a glance at the Demolitionist, and found that the dwarf's ginger eyebrows had shot up with alarm.

"Good heavens! And it's not dead?!"

The confidence his co-conspirator had in his aim made him swell with pride, but he didn't betray it in his face.

"No. Whatever it's made of, it's not skin- bullet bounced right off."

"I don't believe it!"

"Oh, yeah? Look at the merchant's sign, and be amazed."

The reply was unnecessarily sarcastic, but the longer he spent in the monster's presence, the more his fingers began to tremble with fear.

Sensing gifts like his kept people alive, until they didn't.

The Demolitionist stooped down to the ground to peer at it from underneath the table,

"Holy smokesI Ye're right! Thundering typhoons, I've never seen a horse that was bulletproof before."

"Fuck, right? I bet its hide is made to resist piercing damage. Your bombs might do the trick, but…"

"You don't want the town to go up in flames, eh, son?" the dwarf finished for him.

Andre was quiet.

"... Oh, alright, fine! I swear, I won't use anything bigger than a grenade. Ye're a real stick in the mud, you know that?"

The Arms Dealer breathed a sigh of relief.

"Thank you." he said quietly. It was rough, and barely parsed out, but he was working on it.

The two of them shifted in the dirt, lying low in the sand to get a better look at the beast. It was pawing at the ground around the tree, craning its powerful neck down to sniff at something lying in the grass. The image reminded the Arms Dealer, disconcertingly, of a bloodhound.

"Look at it, it's gotten a whiff of something," the Demolitionist muttered, "What do you reckon it is?"

"Hopefully not those fuckin' health potions Nurse Allison made. The last thing we need is for that thing to start healing itself."

The Demolitionist chortled.

"We're in a real fucking mess, aren't we?"

The Arms Dealer narrowed his eyes, straining his vision to catch a glimpse of whatever the horse was so interested in.

"Is that… the Angler's fishing pole?" he said quietly.

He couldn't be certain at first, from the shine of whatever was on the ground reflecting the sun, but when he shielded his eyes from the glare he could make out the carvings on it that distinguished it as the Angler's. It seemed as if the horned beast had caught an interesting scent on it, for it seemed to be trying to follow a trail with its nose to the ground.

He swallowed, praying the Angler had scampered off somewhere far away enough to not see. He loved that hook to the point of not replacing the handle when it snapped in half. It was a treasure, something the Arms Dealer had caught him whittling patterns onto when he thought no one was looking. It was more than a tool to him: he loved it enough to turn it into art, as childlike as that art might be.

The feeling was familiar. He'd had a gun like that once, too.

He wanted to look away as he saw the beast raise its hackles, before rearing up to stand on its back legs. The crunch of the rod being shattered underneath its hooves made his stomach drop.

Beside him, the Demolitionist sucked in air through his teeth.

"Oooh, the poor lad. He'll be crushed."

The Arms Dealer bit the inside of his cheek.

"It can be fixed." he replied roughly, beginning to get up from his crouch.

Right. There was no more time to lose. They couldn't wait around all day for the Hero to return, and there was no guarantee he'd have this chance again: if he didn't take action now, when the monster was idling in his crosshairs, he'd never forgive himself as a hunter.

The Arms Dealer aimed low to the ground, near the beast's legs, willing his hands to still.

If the reason why his previous bullet bounced off of its hide was because of the muscle underneath, he'd go for the tendons in its legs, where the musculature was thinner.

"I'm going to aim for its heels," he whispered. He wasn't sure if it could understand human language or not, but with monsters one could never tell. "At worst, it'll be scared off. At best, it'll be crippled."

The Demolitionist hummed in acknowledgement.

"Smart," he admitted, "But not smarter than blowin' the thing to bits. Get on with it, then."

The Arms Dealer held his pistol out at arm's length, peering over the rear sight. His finger brushed the trigger.

The beast was sniffing at the ground again, preoccupied, unassuming.

It was so close.

The Arms Dealer didn't dare exhale with the fear that it would throw off his aim.

He readied himself to shoot. He had no doubt he would land it; his marksmanship was always something he'd taken pride in.

...But before he could, a crossbow bolt soared across town center from the shade beneath a building to the right. He watched it pass by, an iron-colored bird taking flight, before lodging itself right in the flesh above the horse's front hoof.

The reaction was instantaneous. The thing reared back in pain, eclipsing the sun over the hook as it whinnied. The bolt had managed to part the flesh there, sinking into bone and ligaments and cutting the fleshy wires that made up its tendons.

The Angler scurried out from beneath the building, drawing his crossbow once more. The kid aimed the bolt that was already loaded at the beast once more.

"STAY AWAY FROM MY POLE!"

He screamed as he charged the beast, firing the second bolt.

Andre's heart stopped.

What was that IDIOT kid doing?!

The Angler was already small compared to most of the other townsfolk, but next to the horned horse he might as well have been a mosquito. If he were to get caught in its path, he'd be crushed under foot.

To his credit, the second bolt hit exactly where it was aimed at: it collided with the beast's hide, right against the skin of its neck.

The Arms Dealer scrambled out from underneath the table, running towards them. Bazdin yelled in alarm.

The Angler's bolt hit, but predictably enough, it didn't draw blood: it bounced off of the horse's neck like a trampoline, spinning away in a high arc through the air. The kid's eyes widened as he followed it, and he trembled, frozen to the spot.

The horned horse tossed its head from side to side. It couldn't afford to sit still anymore. It was getting ready to charge back at the Angler.

The Arms Dealer dashed in front of him, tackling the Angler out of its way.

The boy was knocked away effortlessly, kicking up sand as he slid back underneath the building.

How did Cassandra die, again?

The horse charged, ramming its horn through the Arms Dealer's shoulder.

---

It had been a week since it had become obvious that the Hero wasn't going to get any more days off.

They winced as the wing of their new adamantite helmet caught on a low-hanging tree branch.

They had never been able to keep up with trimming the shrubbery around the path to the mines, they thought with a grimace. They hadn't realized how irritating it would be to pass to and from them with a bulky set of armour on.

Wyatt had returned as the Emissary six days ago, and ever since, it seemed as if whatever mechanism the world was operating on had gone haywire. Since they'd pulled him out of the ground, the Hero had been so preoccupied with keeping a small infantry of new animals, monsters, and magical creatures out of town that they hadn't even bothered to follow up with him until he was almost inquisitioned by the other townsfolk.

(And even then, they hadn't gotten the chance to ask him what the terrifying twelve minutes the sun had blacked out that day was. It had descended upon the town like a harbinger, enabling every nighttime devil on the surface of Terraria to crawl out. They'd eventually gotten the information from the Tinkerer—a solar eclipse, he'd called it.)

What on Terraria was wrong with him?

They picked the twigs out of their helmet, cursing his stubbornness.

Was he trying to upset everyone?

"Wyatt, you have some explaining to do."

Stars above, they hoped they sounded stern enough. If they were being honest, the fight with the Underworld's grotesque wall had shaken them, badly. They'd barely been able to describe the thing to Nurse Allison as she was sewing their fingers back on, and the adrenaline that had been flushing their synapses all night was rapidly fading.

Wyatt looked up at them from where he was deposited on the ground, face twisted in confusion. The clearing where his grave was dug was a short distance away from town, surrounded by trees on all sides. The Hero stood right in front of him, blocking out the late-morning sun with their shadow. Around them both, the townsfolk—a disheveled, fearful crowd—were circled.

"What is there to explain, Hero?" he croaked out. "You've won."

Their stomach dropped.

If the fight with the wall wasn't nerve-wracking enough, upon their return, they'd found out that hell had broken loose last night—monsters no one had ever seen before had devastated the town, and they'd all watched from around the great oak tree as the Guide's cliffside home had caught alight in the midst of the calamity, blazing like an omen in the wind.

After the sun had risen and the wave of monsters that had razed them slinked off into darker parts of the forest, the townsfolk, too battle-weary to think clearly and too nervous to rest, began to speculate. The Hero hadn't wanted to believe that the three events of the night were connected, but—the fuchsias of the cloak their guide was donning were unsettlingly reminiscent of the wall they'd just fought, down to the mouths and eyes leering at them from its filigree.

The Hero wanted to grab his shoulder, to lift him to his feet, but…

The memories of last night were a fresh wound. They stayed away.

Wyatt got up, without anyone's help. He dusted himself off delicately, before standing up and meeting the Hero's gaze. They had expected that to look different too, but the way his face softened into nonchalance was the same as ever.

The silence that the Hero had broken was uneasy. It was quiet enough to hear the chatter of birds.

"Don't- don't play that game with me," they managed to parse out eventually, "What's wrong with your arms? What did I just fight in the Underworld?!"

Wyatt paid them no mind. Instead, he held his hands up to the light, eyes flickering back and forth as he trailed the newer, darker veins there. When he snapped back up to attention, it seemed as if he had come to a decision.

"Well, I suppose there's no point in denying you answers any more, is there?"

He delivered a pointed look at the Arms Dealer—and the flintlock he had his hand on—before continuing.

"I'll admit, you awakened the Wall of Flesh far earlier than I thought you would. My apologies for not telling you about the Doll earlier-" he said this with a slight declination of his head, "that was an oversight on my part. I'm sure the battle wouldn't have been quite as difficult, had you known what you were summoning."

He knew.

The emotional whiplash was instant. Betrayal blazed through them.

"What do you mean? Wall of- what?!"

Wyatt raised a brow.

"The Wall of Flesh. What you just fought in the Underworld. The creature that chewed up your hat and spit it out like a chew toy?" he clarified.

The Hero's pulse quickened.

How did he know about what happened to their hat? They hadn't told anyone about that.

They clenched their jaw, trying to re-focus. Something about how casually he was treating the situation incensed them. Did he not realize how much trouble he was in? How on edge everyone was?

How much they had just- been through?!

"Wyatt," they asked, trying to find a semblance of sanity within them, "Can you explain. Why you came back with a cloak, around you?"

Their guide paused before he answered, looking as if he was trying to remember something.

"I… Yes, I can. I'm afraid that I am… no longer the Guide."

The Hero could feel the confused, hostile stares the townsfolk were giving him on the back of their own neck. They knew they were all frazzled after the onslaught they'd faced last night, and that the only thing stopping everyone from collectively going home to collapse in their beds at the moment was the coffee the Tavernkeep had brewed, and an answer to the question of how much danger they were in right now.

Internally, they cursed their role as the designated authority. They couldn't find the right questions to ask, not when everyone was so tired and miserable and desperate to go home—part of them wanted to fade back into the crowd and turn the responsibility of asking the right questions over to them.

"...What I'm wearing right now is an emblem, of sorts. It marks me as a member of the Underworld Court."

Shocked gasps rang out from behind the Hero. From beside them, they heard footsteps on the grass as the crowd began to inch away.

Wyatt's voice was dampered by confusion as he continued.

"Actually, I'm not even sure what I am at the moment. I wasn't supposed to come back after you killed me."

Alright. The Hero did not put this lightly, seeing as how alarm bells had been ringing since last night, but that set off several alarm bells.

"Didn't you die in a house fire?" the Arms Dealer asked sharply.

"Something like that." The Guide answered, noncommittally in turn.

The Hero pinched the bridge of their nose. They were so tired. They had spent the first few hours of the night trying to impede the advancement of an indescribably hellish monster. They had made the long, uncomfortable climb back up to the surface, through Hell, because they lacked the foresight to bring their magic mirror with them.

When they had finally stumbled into town to get their wounds from the battle treated, instead of being greeted by the picturesque quiet of their seaside town at night, they had to duck out of the way of a flurry of bullets as the Arms Dealer narrowly missed the horde of zombies he was aiming for behind them.

Anxiety and caffeine had been having a cockfight in their brain for the past ten or so hours, keeping them awake, and the exhaustion was just beginning to creep into their bones.

A chorus of murmuring erupted from behind them. They heard a "What the hell is he talking about?", and various categories of "Are we safe, or not?"

Or two.

Or five.

"Okay, nevermind. Forget about the cape. Forget about the Underworld," the Hero backtracked, internally promising to wrestle the answers from him later, "Can you at least- just, tell us all if- Do you know what happened to the town last night? Why it was overrun with monsters?"

There was an unspoken meaning to the question. They knew the townsfolk would have added, 'And was it your fault?' if they didn't respect them too much to disturb the sanctity of the moment.

Wyatt straightened his back, smoothed his cape down, and addressed the crowd with a seasoned grace.

"...I'm sure all of you know about how Terraria's magical pulse has been on a steady incline in recent years. If any of you come from educated backgrounds, or have experience with the Capitol's schooling system, you'll know that people haven't always respawned when dying to the hands of monsters. As it stands, scholars haven't been able figure out why, but I happen to know."

The Hero could hear the Tinkerer whisper into someone's ear from behind them: "Not even the scientists from my homeland were able to figure that one out…"

Wyatt continued.

"The priories of the Lunar faith have felt it too—Magic was once so much more difficult to harness, but today there are colleges that teach it. It's not just due to scientific advancement- the world is changing beneath our feet. It's becoming more magical, more wondrous, more dangerous, at an exponential rate. Surely some of you have wondered why monster attacks are so commonplace now, no?"

The crowd shifted on their feet, wondering where he was going with this.

"There's more to it than that, but… The forces of order and chaos are destabilizing, rapidly. Magic is allowing us to arm ourselves better than ever, but it's also creating more monsters for us to fight. It's turning the wheel of progress forward, like an unsustainable fire—eventually, the world will burn out, and become swallowed by its own discord."

He turned to the Hero.

"Hero, you were right about the Wall being different from the other monsters you've faced. It is- was. Truth be told, it is only due to outside intervention that Terraria hasn't burnt out yet. Ours is a world on its last legs. When you vanquished the Wall, you also broke a barrier of sorts—a dam, holding back waters you weren't prepared to swim in yet. You mentioned a monster attack, earlier- that wasn't a targeted event. That was how every night should have been a long time ago, before the Wall was put into place, and how every night will be, from now on."

There was a pained quality to his gaze when he spoke again. His voice became much softer.

"The World is different, now. Things are only going to get more difficult from here, and you're going to have to work much faster."

Somewhere within them, a tiny flower of dread unfurled.

The crowd couldn't hold back their questions anymore. The explanation had confused some, caused others to nod solemnly along, and had incensed almost everyone.

"And why the fuck do you know all that, pointdexter?! -ow!"

The Arms Dealer's yelling was cut short by a swiftly-delivered jab to the ribs.

"Oh, so sorry about that Andre," the Mechanic said saccharinely, before looking up to face the rest of them.

Her eyes had bags underneath them large enough to warrant their own militias, and there were dark smears of oil on her face, but she didn't shy away when everyone's attention turned to her.

"Er- I would have phrased it in a nicer way, but… Andre is right. I'm not sure how believable that explanation was, but at the very least, isn't it really, really suspicious that he came back in that uniform?"

She paused to meet Wyatt's gaze, holding it steadfast, but looking more like she wanted to shrink away,

"And I have the feeling that he's not telling us the whole story."

The Clothier hobbled up to the center of the crowd next.

"If you'll all allow me to impart my piece," he began, "I can, at least, vouch for the validity of some of his explanation."

The townsfolk were rapt with attention as he carried on. No one dared interrupt an old man.

"When I was a boy, I watched my father die to forest slimes." he waved his hand here when he saw their faces twist in sympathy, "Please, no need for that. It was a long time ago- far longer than any of you could comprehend… We carved him a tombstone, and buried him, but he never came back. We didn't bother to check- back then, no one did. No one ever came back, under any circumstances, monster attack or not."

The Merchant added onto the Clothier's spiel.

"And I can vouch for the validity of friend Cedric's words. It's been so long that I hardly remember it, but back in my day, we didn't even have zombies! That's a real zinger of the modern age..."

Now that more and more people were speaking up, it seemed to give the Tinkerer the courage to do so as well. He skittishly stepped up to the front of the crowd, looking his newly-revived friend in the eyes.

"I'm not going to accuse you of anything, Wyatt. But- er, oh, now that I have everyone's attention," (here he laughed nervously), "I want to begin by saying that the people of my homeland are scientists. Inventors. Astronomers. They have access to technology that makes them, uniquely predispositioned to studying the natural world… to discovering truths about it."

His hands were shaking. Poor guy, the Hero thought. Public speaking was never his strong suit—he looked like he was ready to collapse.

"Granted, they're also morally repugnant imperialists, and a lot of that technology is stolen, but the point is- they have done extensive research into the mechanics of the respawn phenomenon. Before I defected, I had access to- to libraries upon libraries of research papers, of case files, on the subject. I read all of them—and never before, has anyone ever come back with new markings on their bodies. They don't even scar."

The Tavernkeep stepped forward, approaching the Tinkerer gently, and the pointy-eared scientist looked immensely grateful that someone else was taking the burden of attention away from him.

"Alright, Tinkerer. We'll trust your word on that. But what exactly do you think is going on here, then?"

The Tinkerer took a deep breath, before pointing at Wyatt.

"I don't think that that's Wyatt!" he exclaimed, "He may be in his grave, but coming back different is- it's impossible! He must be- some sort of demon in a skinsuit!"

Woah, what?! Where did that come from?!

Most people were just as alarmed as the Hero was (including their guide), but a few began to buy into the idea, making soft sounds of agreement.

"No, no!" Wyatt said quickly, eyes wide as dinner plates, "I assure you, I'm the very same Wyatt you all know. I suppose I'm just… different, now."

"Prove it!" the Tinkerer replied.

Wyatt opened and shut his mouth a few times, taken aback, before proceeding to do so.

"I know your favourite genre is paranormal romance, Tinkerer! I've seen the werewolf romance! It's right there on the bookshelf, you're terrible at hiding it!"

The Tinkerer's face flushed a brilliant azure blue.

A beat of silence passed across the crowd.

"...Well? Do we need to… cut him open, or anything?" the Tavernkeep prompted after some time.

"... I…" the Tinkerer shrunk back, ears drooping in embarrassment, "I may have jumped the gun. Perhaps we should wait a bit."

The Tavernkeep looked like he was about to say something more, but the Hero raised their arms in annoyance.

"Okay, okay, we're not going to cut anyone open!" they declared hastily, "Just. Just hold on a minute, everyone."

The Hero turned to Wyatt. They'd heard this explanation a hundred times before, back when it was just the two of them, living out of a wooden hovel. Nothing he'd just said was news to them, apart from what he'd mentioned about the Wall.

...And it wasn't what they wanted answers to, anyways.

"Why do you know so much about all of this?" they asked quietly.

They were sure he knew what they were talking about.

Wyatt laughed nervously.

"I'm," he began, "I mean, I'm not-"

His gaze darted to the townsfolk around them.

"I… I suppose… you'll just have to… trust me?"

The crowd exploded into an uproar. Voices rang out from every side.

"Seriously? No one's going to question how Count Bookcloth over here knows why there are more monsters now?!"

The Demolitionist's voice rang out.

"Time for that later, lad- we need to know how much danger we're in first!"

"Hold on, Bazdin, why should we even believe anything he says?!" The Golfer barked.

More voices erupted.

"Excuse me, but did anyone else catch the 'swallowed by its own discord' part?!"

"What does he mean by Underworld court? There are courts down there?"

"If there are, they need better designers. The dye job on that cape is hideous."

"Did he say every night was going to be as bad as last night-"

"He's lying. He's got to be, I don't buy it!"

"If you think he's lying, you didn't hear how bad the Hero's battle in the world below was. The Nurse had to reattach their fingers because of how tightly they were gripping their blade-"

The Hero watched in stunned dismay as hysteria sunk its talons into the entire crowd. The conversation had spun off in a dozen different directions, and they had no idea how they'd try to reroute it.

The noise was becoming a blurred jumble, a razor-sharp cacophony, and it was quickly becoming overwhelming. The collective voices scraped against their eardrums like sandpaper. They couldn't hear their own thoughts over the racket of the crowd.

In spite of how resolutely they'd been trying to avoid looking at it, their eyes were drawn to Wyatt's cloak. Covered in dirt as it was, it was still obviously beautiful finery: the edges were torn, but not frayed, which they knew was a rare quality in silk craftsmanship. When he moved to cross his arms, the fuchsias of it caught alight, turning the dull maroons into velveteen flame.

In the wind, it looked like it was moving. It looked like it was alive.

"How are we going to handle another attack like last night's? We barely survived!"

"We're not going to, if we don't do something about it!"

The Tavernkeep's voice was distinct among them.

"We need to construct some sort of barrier around town, to keep them out-" he said, with the dignified authoritative tone that bled into all of his words.

A breeze blew through the clearing, shaking the treetops and animating Wyatt's cloak to a greater degree. The torn crimson edges of it lashed back and forth, evoking images of the Wall they'd fought not ten hours earlier.

Of the massive, palpitating biomass that stretched from the floors of the lava pits to the ceiling of the underworld, hundreds of feet up; of its swarm of hungry mouths, of the raw, bleeding tendrils they were anchored by.

Their pulse quickened.

"Should we put torches up to keep the monsters out?"

"Aye! That's what we should have done at the very beginning!"

"We need to set up some sort of watch, too, for the threats outside of town-"

"Yeah, and for the ones fuckin' in it-"

The Hero's head was spinning. They blinked, and for a brief moment, in the darkness behind their eyelids, they could see it again: the monster in its hellish glory, the massive, veiny eyes, pupils darting back and forth like a ship sinking into a whirlpool. An unbelievably massive pink integument that was miles high, enveloping the horizon.

Their heart quickened, and they blinked again, and they were left standing in the center of a wailing crowd.

"I wasn't supposed to come back after you killed me."

"ENOUGH!" the Hero shouted over the caterwaul.

Everyone went quiet. The Hero's face heated up as they realized how loud they'd gotten. They softened their voice guiltily, before continuing.

"I mean- just. Enough. Enough of the hysterics, it's getting us nowhere."

They sent a flinty look toward Wyatt, "And enough of the talking in circles. Give me a straight answer, okay? Please?"

Wyatt's lips pursed. His eyes were begging them to let it go.

A part of them wanted to. It was the part that he'd found on the shores a year ago, the part he'd offered food and shelter and safety to—the sapling he'd tended to, the sword he'd sharpened.

But a larger part of them knew they couldn't afford to anymore. The town had grown too large, the riptide of danger too wide, the stakes too high, to wager on trust alone.

"Was it you that I was fighting… down there?"

Their voice quivered near the end.

Wyatt's face tightened.

"The monster you fought and I are one and the same. Congratulations, Hero. You've passed."

As the Hero walked past Wyatt's tombstone from the previous week, already becoming overgrown with weeds, they tried not to let their gaze linger.

Did it hurt when they'd sliced away his-

They cut off the guilty train of thought before it finished coalescing, and reminded themselves that- that he'd attacked first. That he'd kept things from them. That he'd dodged their questions and refused to answer and talked around in circles whenever they'd ask about what would happen when the Guide Doll went up in flames.

That he hadn't trusted them enough to tell them he wasn't even human.

A pang of sadness hit them as they remembered what had transpired the previous day, and they could feel their face turning red with anger.

"My job with you is done. You are free to do as you please. You owe me nothing."

That he had just. Thrown them away, like he was done with them.

Internally, they repeated it like a mantra: Whatever they had done to him, in self-defense, he'd deserved it.

They took a moment to lean against one of the massive oak trees they were passing by on their way to town.

Stars above, they wished that they could make themselves believe it. Who decided what someone deserved, anyways? Destiny? A jury? Themselves?

What was the morally righteous thing to do, here? Forgive and forget? That would only make him complacent in returning to secrecy, and entrench them deeper into the tired old routines they had settled in before. Should they choose their next course of action according to its future impact, then? Dole out a punishment drastic enough to force him to change?

They bit the inside of their cheek.

Action, inaction. Past habits, future effects. Neither option sounded particularly appealing to them. They didn't want to do either.

But did what they want even matter? Wasn't the point of moral righteousness to set one's own desires aside to do what was best for everyone else?

They had managed to assuage the hostility and fear in town the previous day, when they'd promised to talk things out with Wyatt, but you could still cut the tension in the air with a knife.

(Or in their case, they grimaced, remembering how they'd used the Muramasa to wave them off—a sword.)

The conundrum of how they'd go about quelling the tensions inside of town while managing to keep the hostile new creatures that had cropped up in the Emissary's wake outside of it was beginning to make their head hurt. They needed a break, and their desperation for a way to both ward off the combatants of their new world and detach themselves for long enough to sort out their own feelings on the matter drove them into one of the caves they'd used as an ore mine.

They'd gone in feeling like they were being pulled in every direction at once, and emerged, with a new set of armor, considerably more sane than they were when they went down.

They had a new resolve: they would protect their town, and the people in it, with whatever they had to give. To do this meant fulfilling the great plan that Wyatt had outlined, and to fulfill that meant lowering the Moon Lord into his cosmic burial place.

The thought of more fighting after their battle with Wyatt made them want to crawl into a hole, but they cared too much about the home they had built, and everyone in it, to do so.

Besides, they thought, If I don't, who will?

Over the past year, they had come to live with their strength. It meant walking on eggshells, handling things gently, considering the consequences of their actions a dozen times before they took them. They couldn't fully accept it—a part of them would always wish interacting with people didn't feel like playing knife tag with an animal so small it made you nervous.

But what was the point of having that strength if they didn't use it?

They had the unique ability, they recognized, to protect people. To build things for them. To- to make themselves useful, to them. If they were going to go to dark places, they reasoned, they were at least going to make sure it was so the ones they cared about could live in the light.

As they continued walking, the trees began to thin until they'd realized they'd come to the place where Wyatt had first taught them how to distinguish dayblooms from the weeds and grasses around them.

They stared. The clearing was just as bright and sunny as it had always been: an assortment of sparrows, blue jays, and doves were fluttering through the upper branches. The flowers, while not the same ones that were there seasons ago, were the same color as they'd been the previous summer.

Descendants, they thought, of the ones that were blooming last year.

It was like opening a time capsule.

In the exact spot that they had pulled the flower from that day, one of the white doves landed. The Hero watched it with wonder. It was a thing of beauty; the wings of the creature fluttered behind it like pristine ribbons on the wind. The feathers of its neck ruffled as it began to peck at the ground, and as it did, the rays of sunshine beaming down on it illuminated its feathers, turning it into a living silhouette.

The Hero didn't dare breathe. They could have only been five, ten feet away from it, but from their place in the shadows the bird was completely unaware of their presence. It hopped delicately from left to right, looking for seeds among the knotted weeds on the ground.

So clean, they thought, mesmerized. And so small.

They had known beauty in nature, but never before had they wanted to hold something so badly. To run their fingers through the feathers of a creature and feel its heartbeat.

They lowered themselves into a crouch.

Suddenly, the dove turned to them, watching them with wild eyes. The Hero's own widened with alarm, and they stood stock-still, unmoving.

They held the dove's gaze for what felt like an eternity. The ambient noise of the forest seemed to die down—it was as if they were the only two living beings in the entire clearing.

If I just, held my hand out, they wondered, would it-

Slowly, they extended an arm, reaching towards the creature. Their gauntlet was dappled by the sunlight, brilliant and shining. It made the vermillion hues of it catch alight.

The dove flew away, escaping to the highest branches of a nearby tree.

The Hero retracted their hand with a sigh.

They couldn't lie—the disappointment was crushing.

But- It was probably for the best, they reasoned, beginning to get up. That they didn't get too close.

They'd probably only end up hurting it anyways.

Moments later, an explosion rumbled in the distance, sending the birds flying away in droves. It wasn't powerful enough to make the ground tremor, but the Hero nearly jumped out of their sabatons when they realized that it had come from the direction of town.

They scrambled to their feet, breaking into a run onto the forest path.

The Demolitionist never troubleshooted new explosives anywhere around town—the Hero would know, considering they almost always went along with him when he did. There was always the chance that it was a faulty grenade dropped by the dwarf, but...

Their pulse began to race.

What if it's another attack, like what happened the night they'd beaten the Wall of Flesh?

They weren't willing to take that chance.

The run back to town felt like a small eternity. When they burst through the treeline, they were greeted with a sight they couldn't help but stare in horror at.

At the center of town, what looked like a massive, white horse was rearing back with a bray. It was beautiful—legs as delicate as flying buttresses propelled it up, and its mane and tail were ribbons on the wind.

As it reared, the Hero could spot a twisted horn the length of a small sword protruding from its forehead, reflecting the noonday sun like a brilliant, lilac mirror. The movement sprayed blood across the dust, and the Hero's sharp eyes caught the crossbow bolt buried above its front hoof.

The pale creature flinched as it was hit by another bolt, but it bounced off of the skin of its neck, ricocheting away to land in the grass a few feet away. As it backed away, the Hero's line of sight was cleared, allowing their eyes to lock onto the Angler.

The boy was a statue in front of the beast, hands trembling as he aimed his crossbow up to its face.

The Hero unsheathed their sword, bolting towards them…

...But before they had even broken through the buildings surrounding town center, the Arms Dealer darted out from under a table, shoving the Angler out of the way into the shadows beneath the wooden piers of a nearby shop.

The horse-beast charged, and it was too late—in one smooth movement, the Arms Dealer was skewered on its horn, tossed up into the air, and then flung to the side.

His body slid on the dust, crumpling up a good thirty feet or so away from the horned creature.

Someone yelled his name, and then from the very same table the Arms Dealer had sprung from, the Demolitionist leaped; tossing a bomb towards the ground the creature was standing on.

It exploded in a whirlwind of fire and noise. The aftershocks reverberated through the town, shaking the buildings in the immediate vicinity in their foundations. It was a direct hit—the white horse was knocked back by the force of it, and startled off by the noise; it ran in the opposite direction, but the Hero was there to stop it in its tracks.

With a slice of their greatsword, the Hero severed the thing's horn from its forehead, melting the keratin there clean off.

The Horse whinnied in pain and surprise, and it thrashed backwards before trotting away, eyeing the Hero.

They swallowed as it turned to face them, eyeing them with a malice that betrayed an unsettling amount of intelligence.

The Hero held out their flaming sword to the side, blocking the creature's exit. They didn't have the time to weigh the benefits of making peace with it—it was dangerous, it needed to go.

The Horse kicked at the ground with its back hooves, keeping weight off of its injured foreleg, as it inched closer.

The Hero wasn't afraid of it: not with the weapon they held in their right hand, or the adamantite armor they were clad in from head to toe. Not when they had put things much bigger than a horse into the ground.

They waved the fiery greatsword, trying to get the thing to back away from the flame.

It didn't: instead, the action seemed to enrage it, like a matador waving its flag in front of a bull. The horse charged, and the Hero forced their body to loosen, bracing themselves to swing their sword at the right moment.

At the last second, the Hero rolled out of the way, extending their sword out behind them. When the Horse charged, it tripped over the blade, and it stumbled into the dust on its side.

It wasn't enough to truly injure it, but the brief moment of contact was all the fire on the sword needed to catch on, and the Hero knew it.

The horse tried to get back up onto its feet, but it began thrashing in panic as the bleeding cut the flaming sword had left on its foreleg caught alight. The coarse hairs around the wound began to singe black around the edges, before the fire spread across its hide. It was catching alight like dry paper, and when the beast had finally managed to stand on its feet again, it was already devoured, from the bottoms of its hooves to the tops of its ears, in an inferno.

The pristine white fur covering its body was charred in seconds. It whinnied in pain, galloping wildly around the great Oak tree like a torch in the wind as the hairs of its mane and tail curled up in the heat. The sound resonated through the entire town, growing in pitch and then rapidly fading as it ran out of air several times, like the haunting reverberations of a clock tower bell.

After a few seconds, the fire cooled, but the damage was done—as it finally bolted out of town the same way the Hero had come in, bits of its flesh sloughed off and onto the ground from its skeleton in its wake.

The Hero stood there, gripping their sword until their knuckles turned white. The air was filled with a sulfurous miasma, before the wind began to carry the scent of smoldering flesh into town. They tried not to look at the piece of burnt skin that had fallen into the grass next to them.

What they had just witnessed was horrifying.

But they shoved the feeling down, resolving not to think about it—they didn't have the time to. Not when Andre was bleeding out.

They sheathed their sword, and ran over to where the Arms Dealer had fallen.

---

The Guide hated getting his hands dirty.

Even back in the Underworld, when he was still just a wall, he'd avoided the ash that stained the place from floor to ceiling like the plague. He'd hired cleaners for the building Hell's court met in like clockwork, and when they fell below his standards, he'd slithered in and dusted the place off personally.

(What? The Hungry were the perfect size for holding feather dusters.)

When he'd finally clawed his way up to the surface, the days he had to spend roughing it in a cave before the Hero had arrived were among the worst in his life—and that was saying a lot, considering he'd been around for a good few centuries. He'd had enough of waking up with sand in places he didn't know sand could get for a lifetime, and he was sure he'd have nightmares about the tiny, skittering, phosphorescent creatures that came out of the mud at night for years to come.

So one would have to understand, when elucidated on the depths of his hatred for getting dirty, why he was ready to risk getting skewered by a unicorn if it meant he'd get out of the muddy underside of the house he'd darted under an hour ago.

Something brushed against his leg, and it took all of his willpower to not scream and scramble into the open.

When the Hero had first built all of the houses, they hadn't thought about flooding. The Guide had pointed out that, as a seaside town, it was common sense to take precautions for dangerous weather conditions, and (correctly) made them start over from scratch—this time with piers underneath them for elevation. The piers left dark, damp expanses beneath the homes they lifted up, and while this wasn't normally a problem, they varied in size—some of the crawl spaces were spacious enough to house poker tables. The one he was stuck in was barely two feet tall, and narrow enough to press against his sides.

Although he didn't want to think of what unspeakable horrors were brushing against his foot right now (or about how much mud he was getting on his cloak), he would admit that the positioning of the crawlspace's opening gave him a clear view of town center—and the monster that was snuffling around it.

The Guide army-crawled towards the light, trying to get a closer look at the creature. As soon as he'd watched the thing leap over the Nurse's potion display, he'd deduced that it was a unicorn. He hadn't needed to see the massive tooth protruding from its forehead—unicorns were known for hunting small animal colonies within their very own burrows, driving them into hiding with aggressive peacocking before tearing into their dens with brutal strength.

The Guide could only assume the show it was putting on as it paced around town, knowing full well it could tear through the wooden buildings like paper and be done with it, could only be down to the pleasure it took in cruelty.

Gritting his teeth as he slid through a puddle, the Guide tried to focus his vision on what was going on in the center of town. The Arms Dealer had just made the mad dash past the Great Oak tree from the Demolitionist's artillery shop, diving under a table on the opposite side of town just as the unicorn emerged from behind the very building he'd darted out from.

Out of all of the days to come into town…

He cursed himself for picking the one day a dangerous beast had chosen to go human hunting to shop for groceries. He was already low on food, even before the Hero had gotten the better of him in the Underworld, but he'd truly been on the last stretch for the past day or two. He'd been eating nothing but the fruits the dryad had dropped off a week prior, and if he didn't go by the merchant's shop soon he'd be forced to start eating banana peels.

The Merchant had a strict policy of closing at seven in the evening, and the Guide had an inkling that it was put into place because the old man's nighttime wares were of the illicit sort, but he didn't bother wasting time thinking about it. After all, all it meant was that the Guide would, unfortunately, have to go into town in broad daylight if he wanted to get food.

That morning, he'd poured himself his strongest cup of black tea. He combed his hair, and made sure the sleeves of his shirt were properly cuffed. He thought about bringing his bow, but decided against it—opting for a smaller, less diplomatically offensive knife instead.

If he had to go into town, he'd use it as an opportunity to make peace with the other townsfolk, damn it!

...So he'd ended up sneaking around the shadowed corners of the alleys behind the marketplace, trying to avoid everyone.

What? They'd probably just try to gut him again, he rationalized.

It was the strategic thing to do. To wait for hostility to simmer down before attempting communications.

The unicorn was pawing at something now, trying to dig something shiny up from the grass. The Guide watched it closely. When it seemed content with what it had found, it raised its hackles, and stomped on it, crushing it underneath its front hooves.

From this far away, the Guide couldn't hear the noise of whatever was on the ground breaking, so he assumed it wasn't one of the Nurse's potions—those could be heard from a mile away. Hell, soldiers could probably use them in place of signal flares.

Suddenly, some fast-flying object caught the sunlight as it whizzed towards the unicorn from underneath one of the houses. The creature jerked back as it was hit, braying and thrashing around.

"STAY AWAY FROM MY POLE!"

The Guide watched as the Angler scrambled out into the open with a war cry, and his pulse quickened.

What was that idiot kid doing?!

The next series of events happened so quickly that the Guide had trouble determining the order they occurred in.

The Angler fired a bolt from his crossbow, hitting the beast again in the neck, but it was a rookie mistake—that was where the hide was toughest, and it ricocheted off, landing somewhere in the grass. When he realized his attempt to fend it off had been ineffectual, fear gripped the boy, and he stood frozen to the spot. As the unicorn reared back to charge at him, the Guide closed his eyes, looking away.

…Only to open them again as the Demolitionist's yelling filled town center with sound.

"ANDRE NO!"

Just as the unicorn pointed its tusk forward and began to charge, the Arms Dealer leaped out from underneath the table, knocking the Angler back underneath the neighboring building into safety.

But he wasn't fast enough to get out of the way.

The Arms Dealer was skewered on the unicorn's tusk, and the Guide watched with a mild sense of discomfort as the spiraling horn on its forehead pierced right through the gunsmith's shoulder and out the front of his chest. The unicorn raised its head, dragging the Arms Dealer's body with it into the air, before tossing it back and throwing the man into the dust where he crumpled.

The Demolitionist must have been hiding underneath the table with the Arms Dealer, because then a bomb—a real bomb, not like the grenade that was tossed at the unicorn when it was snuffling around the artillery shop—went off, right next to the foot of the beast.

The explosion was massive. The Guide plugged his ears and it was still loud enough to make them ring. It shattered the glass of every building in town square, and sent sand flying so high that it blocked out the sun above the Oak tree. The Guide could feel the piers of the house he was hiding under tremble.

When he'd come back to his senses and managed to hack the sand out of his lungs, the Guide took a deep breath, only to immediately lose it again at the sight of the person in town.

When the dust from the explosion had settled, the unicorn was already galloping away in the opposite direction, on fire. The flames engulfing it trailed behind it as it ran, long tongues singing the grass underneath its hooves. In its wake standing next to the great Oak tree was a broad figure, decorated in the most terrifying set of armor the Guide had ever seen.

They were staring at the charred path the unicorn left behind, but from this angle, it looked as if the darkness underneath their helmet was boring holes right into the Guide's hiding place.

(Which was impossible, because the Guide was cloaked in total darkness under the house. Right?)

The metal it was made of was a brilliant crimson, turned to flame in the sunlight as the cloud of debris cleared. The way that it was built made the person inside look like a great, hulking thing, all spines on the shoulderpads and wings on the helmet. It was enormous, and breathtaking—it looked like the kind of armor the knights war stories were told about would wear, fit for a warrior king.

It was also the colour of blood, and It made the Guide want to shrink back even further into the darkness.

When the Guide's eyes finally dared travel down to the figure's hands, he uncurled fists he didn't know he was balling. They were holding a flaming sword—the same one the Hero had used to slay him in the Underworld.

It was the Hero.

He breathed a sigh of relief, feeling the tension leave his body. It was only the Hero.

He didn't spend much longer hiding underneath the building. When the moment of stillness passed as the unicorn ran back into the woods, calamity broke out. The Hero and the Demolitionist immediately ran over to the Arms Dealer's side from underneath the table and across town square respectively, yelling as they tried to stop him from bleeding out. The Nurse threw open the door to her office, barking orders and pointing at the Arms Dealer's limp form.

After realizing that the monster wouldn't be making a return anytime soon, the townsfolk all tentatively began crawling out of the woodworks, flocking around the body of the Arms Dealer and bringing a lot of noise with them.

"Stars above! Andre, are you alright?!"

"Does it LOOK like he's alright?!"

Someone whistled nonchalantly.

"Good LORD! Look at the size of that puncture wound!..."

Several of them aided the Demolitionist and the Hero in their efforts to drag the injured sharpshooter into the Nurse's office. Several more began to affront them, and the Guide assumed they were scolding the half-conscious man for doing something so reckless. The rest began to gossip amongst themselves, checking up on their friends to make sure they were alright after the events that had just taken place.

Just like that, with the Hero's arrival and subsequent exorcise of the beast, the hour of peril was over. The townsfolk were all breathing a collective sigh of relief under the sunshine.

Well, all of them but one.

From where he was under the house, the Guide had resigned himself to waiting another day to go grocery shopping. As his gaze broke away from the commotion at the center of town, his sharp eyes caught the figure of someone crawling out from underneath the building the Arms Dealer had just knocked them under with his heroic sacrifice, in the opposite direction from town center.

The Angler got up on unsteady limbs, pulling himself up from the dirt. He took a moment to lean against the back of the house he'd hidden under, curling up on himself in the shadows, listening to the chatter of the town.

It seemed like he was in distress. Instead of deciding to join them, he elected to walk away towards the outskirts of town, making a beeline for the coast with skinned knees. He pulled his hat down over his eyes, head drooping.

The Guide crawled towards the light, being careful not to draw attention to himself as he methodically shimmied out from underneath the house.

Unicorns weren't the kinds of predators that strayed far from their hunting grounds. If one had made its way into town, it was because the Hallow was nearby.

If the Angler was still bleeding, the scent of that blood could carry on the wind, drawing the rest of the herd. The Guide would figure out where the Hallow had spawned later. If the Angler kept bleeding out like that, he might as well have been a walking signal fire.

The Guide dusted himself off, before scurrying into the shadows the Angler had just fled from.

He began to tail the boy.

---

"Gauze!"

"Aye, miss!"

"Disinfectant!"

"Aye, miss!"

"Sutures!"

"Aye, miss!"

"That's dental floss!"

"Aye, sorry, miss."

The Nurse pinched the bridge of her nose. She didn't have time for this, not when the Arms Dealer was bleeding out on her operating table.

The emergency room she'd set up wasn't anything like the ones she'd done her residencies in at the Capitol. It lacked the marble flooring that was standard for the city's medical schools, along with the drainage systems that were tunneled beneath them, meaning she'd have to scrub the trail of blood Andre had left away by hand. The walls were wooden, the shelves moth-eaten, and it was so cramped before she'd sawed open windows for ventilation that the only thing separating it from an over-glorified storage closet was the glass table she was operating on, and the lantern hanging above it as a surgery light.

No, it wasn't a nice operating room by any means. But it also wasn't the worst one she'd been in.

"Miss?" the Demolitionist asked tentatively as the Nurse began to stuff more gauze into Andre's wound.

"Seems as if Andre's… misplaced his… er, blood, everywhere."

She could feel the dwarf's eyes staring at the back of her neck.

"Oh, yes. Yes, he has indeed done that…" she breathed, eyes sweeping over the red pooling underneath the operating table.

The Nurse finished applying the gauze as she rubbed her temples, trying to steady herself.

"Bazdin, could you give us a moment? I'm about to sew his puncture wound shut and it's going to get real graphic in here."

After the Demolitionist, the Hero, and a few others had dragged the injured party to the backroom of the Nurse's office, she had ushered everyone out to give her some privacy. She'd said it was because she needed to focus, but she could stitch someone's arms back on with artillery raining down on her.

No—Andre would just hate letting anyone see him while he was so vulnerable.

The Demolitionist whistled.

"... Right! Sure thing. I mean, he'll be alright. Big wuss! It wasn't even that much blood." The Demolitionist said roughly, before adding,

"... He will be fine, right?"

The words were spoken casually, but the Nurse caught on to the unease they belied.

She didn't blame him. As often as people seemed to come back, the respawn mechanism was a capricious beast, and there was never a full guarantee that someone would be revived if they were buried.

Besides, she thought, it never got any easier to see your loved ones in pain.

Even if it was only temporary.

The Nurse turned to him with a confident smile as she wiped down her forceps.

"What, you think he won't be? I've seen worse than this from you, little man. He'll make it."

Crude as the reassurance was, it seemed to do the trick. Bazdin nodded, before stepping out of the backroom.

"Aye! Let me know if you need anything, lassie!" he yelled from the parlor.

"It's miss to you, short stack!" she yelled back, before closing the curtains dividing the front and back rooms.

From below her, lying flat on his back on the glass operating table, the Arms Dealer seemed to be truly losing it.

"Did I die and go to heaven?" he gurgled, craning his head to look at her, "Because I think I'm seein' angels."

(At least, that's what she thought he'd said. The blood he was coughing up made it hard to tell.)

"Jesus penis fuck, Andre!" she yelled, "Stop trying to talk, you're losing enough blood as it is!"

She scurried over to the supply racks lining the walls of the room, quickly gathering anything she'd need to treat him that Bazdin hadn't already laid out for her—scissors, check. Local anaesthetics, check. Surgical needle, check. Health potions…

Her hand almost reached for the bottom shelves where they were usually kept, before she remembered what had happened earlier that day.

They'd all been destroyed earlier by the horse-creature when it had leaped over her table. It would only take minutes to run and get more at the Merchant's shop, but she didn't know how many of those Andre had left to spare.

As she laid out the necessary instruments onto a medical-grade steel stand next to where he was laying, she took a moment to assess his current state.

Andre had turned his face away, sweat running down his forehead in bullets. His skin was cool and pale, and he looked like he was clenching his teeth. When she looked down at his hands, she found that one of them was gripping a fistful of the fabric of his coat, white-knuckled and wound so tight that it was tremoring.

The adrenaline must have been wearing off.

She'd seen plenty of injured people before— it was always ghastly on some level, but this was different. This was someone she cared about, someone she'd grown attached to. Watching the Arms Dealer recoil in pain as she reached down to touch the wound made her want to start hyperventilating. What if she didn't manage to save him in time? Has he already lost too much blood to be saved? What if he never came-

Nope!

She cut that spiral off halfway down and steeled herself. The operating room was no place to have a panic attack!

Her hands didn't shake as she peeled away the strips of fabric from his shoulder.

"Allison," the Arms Dealer gritted out, "Shoulder hurting. Real bad."

"I know."

He looked up at her with pleading eyes.

"Fix it. Please."

"I'm going as fast as I can. I just need to get these layers off before I give you a local, okay?" she spoke gently, "Stay with me."

She snipped away the fabric surrounding the wound with mechanical precision. In spite of all of the blood he'd spilled on the way here, she still felt a tiny amount of horror when she looked at the wound.

The horn he'd been speared with hadn't been that large, but when the beast had tossed Andre to the side like a sack of potatoes, it had forced his body weight to dangle from it in full, widening it further. The puncture she was looking at on his shoulder was the exit point, and the flesh around it was grisly and mangled by the trauma, painted with hues of organic matter.

If it had pierced a lung, he wouldn't have been able to breathe by now, but…

She could still see the white of his ruined clavicle when she peeked inside, and it seemed as if his shoulder blade hadn't been moved out of the way upon impact—the horn had gone right through, shattering it completely.

The Nurse swallowed. She couldn't imagine how it must have felt.

"Still there, Andre? Blink twice for yes."

Once she'd finally wiped the area down with disinfectant and administered the anesthetics, the Arms Dealer seemed to relax, letting go of the tension he was holding. His hand unclenched, and he stopped tensing the muscles around the wound so stiffly.

The drugs were doing their work, but now she had to switch her focus to a different problem.

The Nurse stared down at the shattered bits of bone in the wound.

How do I fix this?

On one hand, if she tried to take the time to graft every splintered piece of bone back together, Andre might bleed out and die during the process—and the chances of him respawning were always a gamble. If she stitched it close and tried giving him a healing potion to stop the internal bleeding instead, the bone fragments of his shoulder blade would undoubtedly be grafted together in a discordant patchwork of cartilage and osseous matter, and not even a respawn could fix that. He'd never move it again.

Brewing beneath the panic was a riptide of anger, and it swelled to the surface as her train of thought steamrolled into the long-term consequences of an injury like this. If his shoulder healed poorly, he'd lose his range of motion in that arm. If he couldn't move it, he'd lose the ability to aim, to draw designs for new weapons, to continue to practice the craft that he loved so much.

You idiot! You stupid, noble, heroic fucking clown!

She bit her tongue, chiding herself for getting upset during emergency surgery. She steeled herself—she was better than that.

Focus, focus.

She needed something that could adhere the bone splinters together quickly, right as she was putting them together, so she could move on to stitching and cauterizing the wound before he… exsanguinated. As she formed a plan of action in her head, she began to use the forceps to pluck some of the larger bone fragments sticking out of his muscle from his flesh, laying them out on the stand where she'd put her instruments.

"BAZDIN!" She yelled in the direction of the front rooms, not breaking away from her work, "I NEED YOU TO GET-"

"-Healing potions?"

He finished the sentence for her, stepping through the curtains with a crate full of them. Her relief was immeasurable.

"Oh my- Bazdin, you- you did your know?!" she sputtered.

The Demolitionist set the crate down at the foot of the glass table, right next to where the Nurse was standing. She was too busy to look him in the eye, but she hoped he knew she appreciated the gesture.

"Ah, I figured after ye're little stand was knocked over, it couldn't hurt to get more. Now hurry up and stitch my roommate back together! He aims with that arm, y'know!"

She could hear Bazdin's steps trail out of the room from behind her, and she was filled with a new determination. The situation was still dire, but at least now she knew what to do.

She felt the Arms Dealer's pulse beneath her fingertips. It was shallow, and unbelievably fast, but it was still there.

He must have lost three or four pints of blood by now, she thought grimly—and he was getting unresponsive. The number would be creeping into unsurvivable territories soon. She needed to hurry up.

"Come on, Andre, I'm not giving up on you…" she muttered to herself.

She smacked the side of his face, and his brows furrowed, but she could tell by the way he was staring directly into the lantern hanging above the table that he was somewhere else.

The Nurse wiped a bead of sweat from her brow, before taking one of the bottles from the crate and uncorking it with a gloved hand. From the table where her instruments were lying, she took a bundle of Q-tips and dipped them into the potion, and then she began to get down to business.

The process of gathering the fragments of bone embedded within his flesh and piecing them back together was a meticulous one. By holding two fragments together with the forceps, and dabbing the crack between them with a Q-tip, the two would be joined as the tissue regenerated. It wasn't dissimilar to gluing a shattered ceramic back together.

The shoulder blade hadn't been easy to repair, but all that she'd needed to put back together was the part shown by the entry wound—the rest might be fractured, but at least all of the pieces were held in place by skin and muscle. The clavicle had been considerably more difficult, seeing as it was in a dozen or so pieces, but she managed to repair that too before she began to stitch the muscules lining his ribcage together.

She was closing the wound in his skin when he regained lucidity.

"Allison? S'that you?" he slurred.

He was alive.

Her legs felt like they were about to give out.

"Who else would be poking around your insides?!"

The Arms Dealer cringed at how loud her voice had gotten.

The Nurse's voice softened as she tied the suturing into a knot, clipping the end of it with her scissors.

"Think you can sit up? I still need to sew up the entrance wound."

The Arms Dealer took a breath, looking like he wanted to say something, but he didn't have the energy to.

"Okay. Yeah, sure."

His face twisted, and he grimaced as he began to lift his head up off of the table. He heaved with the expenditure. Sweat ran down his brow. And then, he collapsed back onto it with a cough. It sent specks of blood flying.

"There, is that good?" he finally asked.

"...Andre, you didn't get off of the table."

"Oh."

The Nurse winced.

The glimmering red of the healing potion caught her eye, and she contemplated a course of action.

It was dangerous. She'd be gambling on whether or not she'd put the bones of his shoulder back together properly, but…

She looked down at the blood he'd just coughed up onto the table.

Just because the bleeding's not external doesn't mean it's not there.

"You know what? Take a sip of this before you try that again."

She took the last of the Q-tips that had been marinating in the potion she'd been using out, before holding the bottle up to his lips. She tried to hold his head up for him, but he waved her off, taking the glass bottle into his own hand as he took a swig.

She cut him off when he'd drained half of it.

"Alright, that's enough. I still need to check to make sure your shoulder blade's in the right position." she said, prying the glass from his grip.

The Arms Dealer gasped as it did its work, repairing the frayed blood vessels beneath his bruises and closing the scrapes he'd gotten from being tossed onto the ground earlier. He pushed himself up tentatively, sucking in a breath through his teeth.

"I think the locals you gave me earlier are wearing off."

"Andre, that's because the healing potion is repairing the damaged nerves around your wound. You almost died."

His face paled.

"Oh," he said quietly, before trying to laugh it off, "Well, wouldn't be the first time, right?"

The Nurse was quiet.

"Turn around. I need to see the entrance point." She said frigidly.

The Arms Dealer shifted uncomfortably, before doing what she said. When his back was facing her, she began to regret how harsh her tone had gotten.

...But then she'd remembered the buffoonery that had gone on two nights prior between him and Wyatt, and then how he'd brushed her off in front of everyone the previous day when he and the Tavernkeep had roused the mob, and then how he'd made the stupid, heroic decision to get lanced in place of the Angler.

She couldn't fault him for that last one, but she didn't want him to think it was—she didn't want to let him off the hook like that. She wasn't going to congratulate him for putting his life on the line, ever.

Her hand ghosted down the curvature of his spine, hovering over the wound.

"You think you can take your jacket off, or am I going to have to...?"

The Arms Dealer began to lift his injured arm, before tilting his head back, and cursing.

"Just cut it off."

It was one thing to see the blood stop flowing from his wounds, but seeing him up and moving around was a different kind of relief. She was sure he could feel her hands trembling now that she wasn't forcing them to be still.

When the entry point to the wound was exposed, she set her lips into a tight line. The flesh there had already been sutured closed by the healing potion, sealed shut with a thick coagulation of drying blood. She didn't dare move it—pulling away the fabric of his shirt had already disturbed the clot, and it was beginning to become damp again.

"Andre, I need you to lift your arm for me."

His head snapped up.

"What? Which one?"

"What do you mean, 'Which one?' The one I just operated on."

She couldn't see his facial expression from this angle, but she knew it wasn't good.

"My right arm? The one I use to aim?"

"Yes."

"The one that's bleeding out from the shoulder?"

"Yes."

"The one you were just rearranging, the insides of?"

"Yes, Andre, that is the arm I'm referring to."

The Arms Dealer took a deep breath.

"Alright. 'Course. You got it." he said, before raising his left arm.

The Nurse felt a flame of anger flicker within her. She wasn't in the mood for this.

"You know I wouldn't ask you to do something that would hurt you if it wasn't necessary, right?" she snapped, "What kind of doctor do you think I am?!"

At that, the Arms Dealer seemed to sober up. He put his face in his good hand, groaning into it.

"Sorry. I know that. It's just- damn, Allison, I almost died! Can you give me a minute?"

The Nurse felt the flame grow a little bit bigger, but she bit her tongue, trying to get her sympathy to outweigh it.

"I need to know if the bones in your shoulder healed back right. What if you're never able to shoot again?" she said angrily.

"I have my other arm." the Arms Dealer said plainly. "It'd be fine."

Her sympathy did not outweigh it.

"Oh, can you draw up blueprints with one arm? Cast iron with one arm?" the words came out quickly, and she got angrier and angrier as she said them. "We'll see how fine you are when you try to put your shirt on every morning. Hey Andre, why don't you just try aiming rifles with your mouth from now on while you pull the trigger with your one functioning arm?"

"What was I supposed to do?!" the Arms Dealer sniped, "Let him die?"

The Nurse bit her tongue. Distantly, she remembered that the entry point of the wound hadn't been sanitized, and she picked up an antibacterial wipe with her forceps and began to dab at the wound. The Arms Dealer was stock-still, but he hissed when the prongs of the tool inched too close to the blood clot.

"...Of course not." she added, after some time. "I don't know, Andre. I'm not letting that idiot boy get away with putting himself in danger, either."

A heavy silence hung in the air as the Nurse put down the wipe with the forceps, picking up a cotton ball instead. She soaked it with a healing potion before dabbing it on the wound—edges first, just like how she was taught. She watched the skin regenerate around the clot, contracting the edges, tugging them closer and closer to the epicenter of the wound like it was stitching itself shut.

"Why did he do that?" she asked quietly. "It's just a fishing pole. We could have made him a new one."

It took some time for the Arms Dealer to reply.

"It's important to him. There are carvings on it and shit."

The Nurse's brows furrowed in ire.

Dying for a fishing pole. What nonsense.

"Nothing's important enough to risk losing your life over." she said bitterly.

The Arms Dealer stiffened, before laughing hollowly.

"No, you're right. But he's just a kid. Don't think he gets that yet."

The Arms Dealer shifted, straightening up, before slowly beginning to lift his right arm to the side.

It went up like it was tied to the ground. His jaw tightened, and he didn't breathe as the limb went up at a grueling pace. The higher he raised it, the more it began to tremble, and he fought to keep it up in the air, to raise it just an inch higher.

Chest-level was his limit. He swore, and with a hiss of pain he let it drop back onto the table.

"You're sure you can't raise it any further? Try again."

"I did, but it's just- not working. I'm pullin' it up. But when I get halfway there it just gives out, like they're pullin' on something that's not there, or… yeah."

That was the only answer the Nurse needed. Her mouth went dry, and she set the forceps down onto the steel table, face twisting.

Shiiiiit.

She'd seen things happen like this before, on the battlefront. Injured soldiers who were wrecked on the inside would chug healing potions in a desperate bid to stay alive. It worked—they'd stop coughing up blood, became able to climb up to their feet and fight again within the hour. It happened again with every new injury, and again, and again, and each time they'd report feeling better than they had in years as they came down from the buzz, just as bright-eyed and able-bodied as they had been when they had enlisted.

But then something began to happen.

They began to fall ill. Fatigue, at first; an unwillingness to join in when the rest of a squadron was playing cards on uneventful nights. Then the intolerance for alcohol became evident: drinks rarely flowed freely on military bases, but moonshine did. They were no lightweights, but just a cup or two was enough to send them to the darkest corners of the encampment to hurl up their insides for the next day or so. Alcohol poisoning became a rampant cause of death.

So rampant, in fact, that when they'd buried them and realized they were just as dead as they'd been the night before at sunrise, their commanding officer had ordered them to perform autopsies on the bodies to ensure no foul play was afoot.

There wasn't. It was something far more insidious: when her team of medics cut the bodies open, they'd found that their insides had become a patchwork quilt of connective matter. The membrane lining their chest cavities had grown in size, like it had been trying to keep everything inside together with a pale, organic cocoon a solid half-inch thick.

Once they'd cut through that, they'd found that their organs healed well—exceptionally well, actually—but they were all lodged within nests of scar tissue, and most of them weren't in the right place. The esophagus in one with a collapsed lung had branched out to merge with his bronchi, explaining what the medical team thought had been a smoker's cough. The right kidney of another had, in the process of being speared with a sword, migrated towards her ventral side, becoming caught up in the small intestine and amalgamating with it.

The potions had repaired their engines, but it had put the gears back wrong—went inside and switched around the parts of the machine, set a biological mechanism of destruction within them, ticking away like clockwork that sped up with every injury.

And no one had noticed what a mess they'd become on the inside, all because the damage was out of sight.

Granted, these had all been severe cases—people who had gone through traumas that should have been utterly unsurvivable—but it was the exact same principle that had caused the Arms Dealer's shoulder to lose part of its function.

Before trying to use a healing potion, it was imperative that everything in one's body was in the right position—every bone in the proper place, every organ detangled from other organs. The potions would only heal where the body detected damage, but they were inexact, and were closer to an organic cement than a proper healing process. If a rib were sticking out of the skin, it would heal like that. So too did the same go for missing limbs that weren't reattached before a potion was downed, or eyes and ears that weren't in their proper sockets or canals.

In her panic, The Nurse had taken a gamble that the broken parts of the Arms Dealer's shoulder she couldn't see were all connected properly, and she'd lost. The bone was set for good, and so too was its damage.

This was it. She had done all she could, and it still wasn't good enough.

She put her head in her hands, trying to breathe in and regain her composure, but it didn't work. She'd held it together through the unicorn attack, through seeing Andre get human shish-kabobed, through grafting his shoulder back together.

You could have done better.

She started crying.

Andre turned around immediately, looking alarmed.

"Woah, hey- Allison, what's wrong?"

"You're not- you're not going to be able to fire with that arm anymore, Andre," she choked out, pulling at her hair, "The bone is set like that, now. It's stuck."

His face fell, but he steeled himself, reaching out to wipe her tears away with his good arm.

"Oh, whatever. I'll survive." He said crassly, before softening it with "Besides, there's no point in grieving for it now. It's gone, y'know? Fuckin', uh, nothing to me now. Whoosh. Just like that."

The Nurse pushed his hand away, wiping her eyes with her sleeve.

"It's not nothing. I know how much you care about what you do. I'm sorry I couldn't fix it."

She laughed bitterly.

"Some nurse I am, right?"

The Arms Dealer looked at her in stunned silence.

Just then, the shopkeeper's bell above the Nurse's office rang out, and the Nurse frantically wiped the tears off of her face with a coat sleeve.

The sound of footsteps crossing the floor and idle chatter rang out across the parlor, before the Demolitionist and the Hero poked their heads into the backroom.

The Nurse stared at them—wide-eyed, tentative, looking the Arms Dealer over for injuries. The Hero, carrying a carton of ale over their shoulder.

They stared back at the Nurse—dark trails of mascara smudged around her eyes, Andre's hand reaching out towards her.

"Er… is… now a bad time?" the Demolitionist asked.

The Arms Dealer's face contorted with disbelief as he processed the question.

"Yes, Bazdin! Yes, now is a bad time!"

---

As far as brooding spots went, the docks weren't a particularly bad place to go, the Guide thought to himself.

Currently, he was leaning against the wall of a wooden beach shack, peering at the Angler.

The boy was sitting on the shore with his knees tucked into his chest, staring out into the waves. The broken pieces of the fishing hook he'd tried so hard to defend were clutched tightly in his grasp, and the water was inching ever closer.

The Guide couldn't see his expression from this angle, but he wasn't shaking. He was, unsettlingly, quiet.

The Guide swallowed the odd pit of unease that was forming within him.

The Angler was many things. For starters, he was rude—he didn't think he'd ever heard the boy say please or thank you once in the past year or so. The Guide was actually fairly certain he didn't know the meaning of the words, considering how he'd never responded to either.

He was also conniving.

Seasons ago, before the Hero had found him washed up upon the sands, the townsfolk had fished for their own dinners. People carved their own rods and tackle from branches pulled down from the oak trees cloistering town, and used line supplied by the only Merchant in town. Over time, though, a problem arose: the line the Merchant stored in his warehouse became fragile and easily-broken. Seeing as none of the townsfolk had the prowess to spin their own, the number of people who were able to fish steadily trickled down to zero as their lines began to snap. At first, the Merchant had blamed it on supply companies switching over to cheaper materials to undercut their competitor's prices, but the Guide knew better.

It wasn't the fault of the supply companies—he'd watched the Angler cut a hole in the wall of the warehouse right behind the space the Merchant kept his string weeks prior. The opening he'd carved invited mildew from the outside to collect in the tangled nests of line, eating away at their structural integrities, weakening them over time.

It was when the entire town ran out of usable fishing line that the Angler capitalized on the situation, immediately—as the owner of the only functioning rod in town, he'd offered to fish in place of everyone else, selling the idea with zeal. The townsfolk would never have to waste valuable time sitting out at sea for hours again, waiting for some piecemeal minnows to bite. Not when they didn't have a choice.

And especially not when the Angler was simply better at it than they were.

The little brat made an ill-mannered vendor, and he'd hiked up the prices as far as he could. The Guide wasn't sure he knew what the term monopoly meant, but he was certain the boy would wear the badge with pride.

...But he had to admit, the shrewdness he'd shown was impressive. There were some Underworld demons that weren't that smart.

Yes, the Guide mused, watching the Angler from the shadows—he was discourteous, insolent, clever, and from what he'd heard of him, far too vulgar for his age. Whatever age that was.

But he was never quiet.

Not that the Guide was concerned, or anything. But he knew when people- humans- isolated themselves, when they began to behave in opposition to their natures, it meant that something was wrong.

A wave crashed onto the shore, sweeping over the sand and inching ever closer to the docks. The Angler was stock-still as the water went past him, carrying some of the blood running down his knees into the ocean as it retreated back out to sea.

The Guide padded over, carefully avoiding getting his shoes wet.

"It's not good to let blood flow freely, you know. Especially not into the water." He called out, looking out to sea.

The Angler stiffened, jerking his head around.

"Yeah, I know that, idiot."

The Angler turned his head back around, staring out to sea again. By now the sun was low enough on the horizon that it was gaining a red hue, and it made the water catch alight like brilliant, liquid glass.

"'Sides," he continued, "Salt water's good for it. Disinfects the wound."

The Guide crouched down beside the Angler.

"Ah, but you're not sitting here to disinfect it, are you?" he asked softly. "If you were, you'd be wading out to sea right now."

As soon as the Guide got close to him, the Angler bristled, jumping away like a frightened animal.

"What's it to you, creep?"

The Guide backed away, putting his hands up.

"Nothing. It's nothing to me," he said evenly, "But I have some bad news for you, if you think sitting out here with open wounds is a good idea… You didn't scrape your knees falling when the Arms Dealer pushed you, right? You've had these injuries all day."

The Angler scrambled to his feet, looking at him with startled eyes. The Guide's lip curled.

"So, I'm correct."

"How did you know that?!" the boy hissed, "What, were you following me, or something?!"

The Angler looked like he was torn between bolting and going for the Guide's kneecaps. The Guide backed away further.

Just as a safety precaution.

"I didn't. But the monster that just destroyed half the town is drawn to the scent of blood. If you were in the forest earlier today, and you were injured, it's entirely possible that what led it into town was the splatter trail you left behind on your way back."

The boy's face fell.

"You mean…" he began, but the question died on his tongue. He shook his head, seeming to steady himself, and pointed a finger at the Guide.

"No, you're lying. How the hell would you know that?!" he refuted.

The Guide swallowed the bitterness the words evoked, and continued speaking.

"I know a lot of things. For instance: that monster is a pack animal called a Unicorn, and the reason it destroyed your fishing rod is because it was trying to catch more of your scent. Bloodthirsty little hounds, they are…"

Then he stopped, because convincing his adult neighbors of his honesty was difficult enough, and the Angler was a child.

He switched tactics.

"Whether you choose to believe me or not, it's a good idea to patch up, no? The Nurse is rather busy with the… Arms Dealer, at the moment." He said, pulling a roll of gauze from the satchel underneath his cloak.

The Angler's brows furrowed in distrust.

"...And, standing out so close to the treeline like this, you might as well be a walking signal fire. There's no telling if your blood will draw the rest of the group into town." the Guide dropped casually.

The Angler's brows furrowed in distrust further, and then he inched closer.

Bingo, the Guide thought.

"Fine. Whatever. Give me the gauze, jerkwad."

The Angler made a wild grab for it, but the Guide held it out of his reach. He looked like he was ready to bite him.

"Wait!" the Guide ordered, "What are you, an animal? Go wash the blood off first!"

"Don't tell me what to do!" the Angler snapped, but he must have detected some sense in the words, for he scuttled off to the waterside anyways.

The Guide sighed, running a hand through his hair as he watched him wade out to sea.

If he was being honest with himself, the Unicorn attack was filling him with an unprecedented amount of anxiety. He wasn't exaggerating when he'd warned the Angler of their tracking capabilities—they could catch the traces of warm bodies from miles away on the wind.

And, he thought, idly watching the boy rinse his knees off with saltwater, they never hunted alone.

Nor did they stray too far from the sterile, iridescent lands they were bound to, which meant that wherever the Hallow had spawned, it was too close for comfort.

The Guide began running over his mental to-do list..

First, he needed to talk to the Dryad. Today had, undoubtedly, lit a fire underneath her—wherever she was in town right now, she was probably itching to leave to try and pin down the Hallow's exact coordinates. The only thing keeping her here was the fact that she was waiting on the Guide to drop off medical supplies for the journey there.

Which he fully intended to do, he reminded himself. Just as soon as he was certain the Nurse wouldn't throw him out of her office as soon as he'd walked through the door.

Then there was the matter of finding a way to warn everyone in town of the danger they were in without arousing suspicion. To do that, he'd have to wait until the Dryad came back with news of the Hallow, to give adequate reason for why he knew of its existence—but that could take months, depending on how interesting she found it.

No, he thought with a frown, it would undoubtedly take months. She'd spent a vast majority of her life studying the world's flora and fauna, but a few thousand years of watching the same creatures die out only to evolve once more got dry. She'd be captivated by the new biome, dangerous as it was, and had no real reason to come back to town with whatever information she'd gleaned save for the fact that the Guide had, cordially, asked her to.

A ludicrous idea formed in his head.

He could just alert the Hero to the Hallow's whereabouts.

...But that bridge was still smoking, and there was no guarantee they'd trust him, after his lie of omission about his past.

There was also no guarantee he could trust them to handle it. Was their new set of armour forged skillfully enough to prevent its insects from crawling inside? Had they bothered to upgrade their sword yet? Were they ready to face its denizens?

He rubbed his temples, running the mental calculations on the biome's fatality rate. How likely were they to die to the hands of the pixies? To the unicorn herds? Was today's small victory a product of luck or a sign that they were truly capable of surviving?

Right. Better to let the Dryad handle this one for now, fickle as she may be.

The Angler's voice snapped him out of his train of thought.

"I hate Andre."

The Guide stared at his back, watching the boy furiously scrub off the blood from his calves.

"...Apologies, but… who?"

The Angler's glare was thorny enough to take a little seriously.

"The Arms Dealer, stupid."

"Oh."

The Guide let out a tentative laugh.

"Well, that makes two of us, I suppose."

The Angler went quiet again, turning away. The Guide tried to search for something to say to that—something that was tactful enough to not scare the boy away—but he was drawing a blank.

So he settled, only slightly discomforted, with saying nothing.

The Angler piped up again when he began to rinse his skinned knees off with saltwater.

"I didn't ask him to help me. He's such an idiot."

"An astute observation."

"...And he's rude."

What was it they said about pots and kettles?

"Oh, certainly," the Guide concurred, "Why, I don't think I've heard that neanderthal say 'please' or 'thank you' since he's gotten here."

The Angler winced as he finally got the last of the dirt from his wounds moments later, scraping them open again in the process.

"I'm done," he said miserably, waddling back to shore, "Give me the bandages."

The Guide held them out to the boy as he walked over, bare feet leaving a trail on the sand that faded into a wash behind him.

"Here—gauze, to absorb the blood, and bandages to keep it still."

The Angler took them in frigid silence.

"You know how to apply them, right?" the Guide asked.

"Of course I do!" the boy snapped, "I'm not stupid."

"That's not what I was- actually, nevermind. Give them back when you're done, please, I'll be in need of them later."

The Angler plopped down onto the sand, stretching his legs out in front of him. He tried to harden his face, but still bit his cheek as he began to wrap the scrapes.

The Guide sighed with resignation as he watched the Angler put the bandages on underneath the gauze.

He sunk into a crouch, reaching down.

"Here, let me-"

The Angler slapped his hand away.

"I don't need your help." he hissed.

The Guide's eyes widened as he contemplated what he was about to do—before promptly smacking himself in the face out of embarrassment.

He'd gotten so used to the Hero bandaging up his own wounds that he'd almost forgotten how intrusive he'd found it, at first.

How intrusive it was, to go around asking people to trust them enough to do so.

The Guide backed away immediately.

"Sorry." he said curtly, rising to his feet.

The Angler looked up at him, eyes wide in what looked like surprise.

(Or was it fear? He still had difficulties telling them apart.)

"Oh- uh. Well. Yeah!" The boy jeered, wrapping the bandages tighter around his knee, "You should be sorry!"

"I… am? My apologies, for getting into your space like that. That was impolite of me."

The Angler's brows furrowed, and his mouth opened and closed like a fish.

Well. The Guide had exhausted his emotional index for the day. He wasn't exactly sure how to identify that one.

"Good!" the boy yelled.

"Indeed."

"Great, even!"

"Yes. Er, wonderful."

"Fantastic!" the Angler replied, aggressively tying the bandages in a knot. He stared at the gauze, as if he were trying to identify where it was meant to go.

"...Angler. The gauze."

The boy looked up at him with round eyes.

"It goes underneath the bandages." the Guide pointed out.

The Angler's face flushed.

"I knew that!" he said quickly, but began untying the knots of the bandages almost immediately.

The Guide sighed, watching the boy try and troubleshoot a simple medical procedure. And then found himself snickering at the absurdity of it.

"Undoubtedly. Is that why you tied it up like that?" he prodded.

"...Shut up."

The Guide got down onto one knee very slowly, taking great pains not to startle him.

"Why don't I show you how to tie that properly?" he asked, and when fronted with the Angler's scowl, quickly added "Not on your leg, but on mine."

"How are you gonna...?"

The Guide outstretched his hand, holding his palm up to the light.

"You can tie it yourself later, but for now, I'll need those for a moment. I don't have any more I can use to demonstrate, I'm afraid."

The Angler stared at him with some uncertainty for a moment, before he relented; placing them in the Guide's hand. When he did, the Guide bent down and wrapped the gauze over his own knee, holding it there with a thumb.

"The bandages aren't there to stop the flow of blood—that's the gauze's job. The bandages are only meant to serve as a means to fasten them in place." the Guide explained, securing the it with a strip of bandage.

A few moments later, the Guide had tied the ribbons up into an immaculate knot around his own knee. He held his hands away to let the Angler observe how it looked.

"Understand, Angler?"

The boy was staring at him calmly.

"Yeah." he said plainly, before catching himself and raising his hackles. "I mean, yeah! Obviously! It's not like it's a hard concept. Jerk."

The Guide refrained from pointing out that the boy hadn't understood it a few moments ago. He had a feeling it would only evoke more… prepubescent rage.

"Alright. Well, here are the bandages," the Guide said, untying them, "and here is the gauze. Use them as you wish."

Before the Guide could even finish unwrapping the gauze, the Angler had snatched the materials up, quickly mirroring the process the Guide had just shown him with flawless accuracy as he stuck his tongue out. In moments, he had identical knots around both knees, stopping the flow of blood.

Alright. He'd finished the task before the Guide could blink. That was new.

(And distinctly un-Hero-like. But the Guide shoved the comparison down when it made something bittersweet curl up in his chest.)

"...Any other injuries?" he double-checked.

The Hero, with their awful, reckless nature, taught him the importance of doing that.

Wait, no they didn't. Stop that, brain!

The Angler shook his head.

"Nope."

"You're certain?"

The Angler glared.

"What are you, my mom?"

The Guide stood up, brushing the sand off of his cloak.

"No. I suppose that'll be all, then. I recommend you head inside before nightfall. The light of the moon will keep some monsters at bay, but not all of them." he said, beginning to take a step away.

The Angler called out behind him.

"Hey doofus! What's the catch?!"

The Guide turned back around, regarding the boy with mild bewilderment.

"... Catch?"

The Angler got to his feet, jutting out his chest.

(Or at least, trying to. There wasn't much to jut out, considering how scrawny he was.)

"What do you want for helping me? Duh."

Oh.

Now that was- that was a familiar sentiment. The boy was speaking his language, now.

"I mean," the Angler parsed out with some desperation when he saw the Guide trying to repress a peal of laughter, "Come on. I'm not an idiot, Wyatt. Nothing is free. There's always some string attached, to it, or like, something someone wants you to do, so. Come on! Tell me what the price is!"

He would have taken the Angler up on that offer, once—because that was customary for the Underworld, with all of its pacts and bartering and demonic laws. Driven the hard bargain, because absolving someone of the debt they owed you when you could instead bleed them dry didn't make any logical sense.

But he didn't, because this was the Overworld.

Because it would have upset the townsfolk, if they'd caught wind of him bringing debts and bonds into what should have been a base human instinct to help those in need. Because that would make his continued existence here more difficult.

Because with how often people helped each other on the surface, trying to keep track of what and how much he owed would make his head split. Was making his head split.

No other reason.

"Nothing. There is no 'catch', Angler. This was… on me, so to speak."

The Angler's face flushed.

"I know how business works. That is such a load of bullshit."

The Guide raised a brow.

"You know how business works?" he threw back at him, "What are you, ten?"

"Eleven!"

The Guide waved a hand, growing impatient.

"There truly is no price, Angler. You owe me nothing. I will not ask for payment at a later date, nor will I recall a favour. The scale between us is evenly balanced."

The Angler looked at him skeptically.

"I know you're not as nice as the Nurse is. Why'd you even help me, huh?"

"Looking a gift horse in the mouth, are you?"

The Angler was silent for a moment, calculating something behind mistrustful eyes.

"Well... Thank you. I guess." the boy said quietly.

"You have nothing to thank me for. It made sense to patch you up, is all—in the vein of preventing any more unicorn attacks."

"...You're a real weirdo, aren't you?" the boy asked.

The Guide had heard that enough times from the Arms Dealer that it no longer fazed him. Actually, it seemed ridiculous, coming from someone so nonthreatening in comparison.

"I get that often. Farewell, Angler."

The Guide began to walk away, but the Angler caught the edge of his cape, stopping him in his tracks.

"Hey, Numbskull! Wait a minute."

Oh, Lord of the moon. What now?

The Angler looked up at him through the brim of his straw hat. It might have been the shadows casted over his face in the evening light, but his gaze was given an intense new dimension as he leveled it at the Guide.

"You… know things…" he stated, seeming to test the waters, "Do you know if, um… Andre's going to be okay?"

Oh, wonderful. The local firearms menace. His favourite subject.

"That's dependent on your definition of the word. He'll live for certain, and even if he doesn't, he'd come back since the unicorn is technically a monster. But if the Nurse decides to use a healing potion on him, his shoulder may be irreparably damaged."

Below the brim of his straw hat, the Angler's face twisted into grief, but he bit the inside of his cheek and stayed quiet.

"What do you mean, damaged?" he managed to parse out, after some time.

"Well, getting skewered from front to back typically causes great bodily harm. The horn could have hit a vital organ, and he'd have already bled out by now. If he's less fortunate, he'll still be alive, and it'd be up to the Nurse to graft the pieces of the bone back together…"

As he spoke, the Guide came to the realization that the Nurse wasn't going to be willing to leave it up to the respawn phenomenon to bring the Arms Dealer back—not when she wasn't certain he would, considering he'd died to something she'd never even heard of.

She'd almost certainly go for the latter course of action; try to repair the damage done herself instead of waiting for Terraria's natural mechanisms to do the legwork for her. If she used healing potions to speed up the process, any damage to the bone or muscle in his arm would be set, and that's how he'd come back every time from then on.

If the Guide had clarified that the Arms Dealer would come back…

Instead of frantically rushing him into the emergency room in a panicked frenzy, the townsfolk might have sat quietly next to him as he died. Instead of making the damage done to his arm permanent, they could have dug him up the next morning, no worse for wear.

The Arms Dealer's shoulder could have been irreversibly mutilated.

That could have been avoided, had the Guide told the Nurse that she could trust the respawn mechanism to sew up his muscles, to glue the broken shards of bone within together.

The Arms Dealer was now a less dangerous enemy.

This should have been a cause for celebration, but the realization only made him feel hollow.

The Angler brought his hands together in front of the Guide's face in a clap, and he was snapped out of his musings.

"Hello?" the boy said impatiently, "What's going to happen to him? Is he- will he be okay?"

The Guide stared down at the boy, weighing his options.

He could lie—feed him a gentle misconstruement of what was most likely occurring in the Nurse's backroom.

Or he could tell him the truth, and make sure the boy understood to not venture into the woods alone again.

The choice was obvious.

"No. That attack most likely crippled him for life. I doubt he'll have much movement in that arm from now on."

The Angler's face fell immediately—going from the pale shades of horror, to the twisted grimace of rage, until finally he'd yanked the brim of his straw hat over his eyes, obscuring the Guide's view of his expression.

Seconds crawled by like molasses pouring out of a jar. The Angler's fists balled up at his sides, and the Guide watched as he seemed to bristle with fury with mild alarm, but the boy's voice remained even when he spoke up again.

"You're lying."

When would people stop accusing him of doing that?

The Angler continued.

"You're- you're just saying that, right? So I'll stop going off by myself?"

Alright, thought the Guide, certifiably unnerved. This kid was certainly smarter than some Underworld demons.

The Angler brought his arm up to his face, wiping it furiously as he hid beneath the brim of his hat.

"Like I'd ever buy that!" he said sharply, "Andre's stupid, but he's not stupid enough to get himself seriously injured like that! You're lying!"

"I don't lie." he said icily, before adding, in an attempt to de-escalate the situation, "But if you're still skeptical, feel free to check the Nurse's office later today."

The Angler looked up at him, and the Guide finally caught a glimpse of his eyes below the brim of his hat. They were welling up, and he was furiously trying to keep them from spilling over.

"Shut up!" he choked out, "Of course you are! 'Cause why would he- why'd he do that?! I didn't ask him to!"

The Angler leveled a look of utter desperation at the Guide.

Angry tears were flowing from his eyes in rivulets, and his entire face were flushed an ugly shade of red. It was a grisly sight, and something about it clamped down on the Guide on the inside, vice-like and needle-toothed.

The Angler's voice raised a few octaves, and the Guide jolted.

"Did you see how worried everyone was?!" the boy whined, "I can't just go 'check out' how he's doing! Everyone's there, and-"

He gritted his teeth, staring down at his own curled fists with venom.

"-And they're gonna be so mad when they realize it's my fault!"

The Angler's legs gave out beneath him, and he sank down into the sand, curling up into a ball as he hugged his knees to his chest.

His weeping wasn't plaintive. A sob would wrack his body and he'd fight to keep it inside, holding his breath until he was red in the face. When he ran out of air, his tears would drip down onto the sand, and he'd let a chilling wail.

Whatever dam had been holding back the torrent of emotions that had been building throughout the day had broken, and he was engaged in an uphill battle to keep the waters from crashing down.

The Angler descending into hysterics—and how quickly the Angler had descended into hysterics—made the Guide's knees want to buckle. He took one step away, and then another. But the feeling of anguish the sight of the Angler's sorry state evoked only grew worse.

So he stepped closer instead, searching for something to say.

"Sorry, I wasn't being- are you okay?"

The Guide could feel the Hero's eyes on the back of his neck as he got up into a kneel, crouching on the branch on the dwelling tree.

The color may not have been as startling as it would have been in full sunlight, but when he turned his scoured palms over, he could still see the red beginning to seep out of the rope burns he'd obtained earlier.

Oh, good grief, he thought with a grimace. That was going to be a hassle to fix later.

The Guide turned to look at them. They were crouched behind him, looking at him with wide eyes, and it sent a shiver of discomfort up his spine.

"Sorry." they stuttered, "I didn't mean to- I forgot about- I'm sorry."

The Guide put his hands down on his lap, turning them over so they'd face the ground as his face fell.

He hated how often they'd taken to apologizing as of late. There was always something to atone for—for the tools the Guide had to mend. For the flowers they'd trample. For the dinner plates that'd shatter underneath their fingertips.

He opened his mouth to snap at them for the apology, but when he turned to look them in the eyes, he stopped in his tracks.

Their brows were furrowed together, and they were biting the inside of their cheek. It looked like they were on the verge of tears, and even he couldn't snap at that.

He bit his tongue, electing to say something gentler instead.

"It's alright, Hero. You don't know your limits yet." he said coolly.

He tried to give them a reassuring smile.

"I'm not upset with you. It's not your fault… So, er- stop doing that thing with your eyes."

"Angler," He said carefully, crouching down next to the boy, "I want you to listen very carefully to me. You weren't the one who broke the Arms Dealer's shoulder. This isn't your fault."

The Angler peered up at him through angry eyes, snot dribbling down his nose. Despite the tears, he still managed to look like a wild, indignant little creature. The Guide almost found it impressive.

"You said it yourself," he said miserably, "If I wasn't in the woods earlier today, the stupid unicorn wouldn't have come."

The bitterness of the statement was undercut by the Angler wiping his snot off on his shirt, but the point remained.

Perhaps he'd been heavy-handed with the scare tactics. The Guide backtracked.

"You couldn't have known it would be out there. It was an accident." he said gently.

"Whatever!" the Angler bit back, "It doesn't matter if I did or not 'cause Andre's arm is still screwed up now because of it, either way!"

The Guide tried to form a response to that, but before he could, the Angler went off on another spiel.

"And now- what if he's never able to shoot again? What if- people depend on 'im! No one else can use a gun like he can, and Hero can't handle keeping everyone safe without 'im, and-"

The Angler gave a heave before he began crying again.

"And I didn't ask him to do that! It's not fair! I hate him! I hate him!"

The Guide reached out a hand, tentatively patting him on the head as the boy sobbed on the ground.

"There there," he said, trying to remember what the Hero used to do to placate people. He wanted to grimace at how unnatural it felt. They made it look so easy. "It's… alright."

Even more surprising than his outburst was that the Angler didn't pull away from the touch. Or bite at it.

The Guide had no idea how many painfully awkward minutes had passed, but gradually, the Angler's sobs died down into whimpers, and after some time those died down too into quiet sniffling. By the time the boy's breathing leveled out, the sun had dipped below the horizon, leaving nothing but a fading red glow over the waters at sea. The Guide could feel higher waters lapping at his ankles as the waves began to inch closer—the distinct mark of sunset's high tide.

Now that the Angler had calmed down, and the panic at being confronted with his sobbing had passed, the Guide became acutely aware of the silence.

"You're right, you know." he said. The Angler sniffled, looking up at him curiously.

The Guide elaborated.

"It's just as painful to sacrifice as it is to be sacrificed for. I have an inkling that the Arms Dealer doesn't know that."

The boy was staring at him with rapt attention now, too tired to argue.

The Guide gave him a small smile.

"If it helps, I'm certain this isn't the first time he's pulled something like this. That idiot has a hero complex a mile wide." he said darkly, before softening it with "But his actions were his own. He chose to jump in the line of fire in your place. He can't blame you for that, and neither can you."

The Angler stared at him, calculating something behind exhausted eyes, but he said nothing in return.

"...Why did you do that, Angler?" the Guide breached carefully, unable to hold back his curiosity, "Trying to attack that monster was incredibly dangerous."

"... 'M not an idiot." he stated plainly, wiping his eyes. "I know how to use a crossbow. I thought I could handle it... I could have handled it."

"I was the one who got a shot in." the boy argued, lip curling up slightly in pride. His face fell as he kept talking.

"It had my fishing pole- it broke my fishing pole. I thought I could save it. That's all."

"...Is that possession of yours seriously worth dying for?"

The Angler leveled a glare at the Guide that could melt iron, and the Guide put his hands up, backing off.

"Alright, I understand," he said quickly, "So it is."

The Angler picked up the shattered pieces of the pole from the ground next to him before the waves could carry it off, staring dejectedly down at its parts.

It was truly, utterly broken. The handle was intact, but the main length of it was in six or so different pieces, with each end splintered so viciously that it was impossible to tell which part of the pole belonged to the next. The white line had been unraveled from the metal reel, which was made lopsided under the weight of the unicorn's hooves, and the hook was nowhere to be found.

Interestingly enough, upon close inspection, the Guide noted that the handle was engraved from end to end with carvings. They were rudimentary enough to be mostly incomprehensible, but he could make up some aquatic pictographs; an eight-limbed spider for a squid, a pointed ellipse for a minnow, some cross between a shark and a pig-beast. Two tall figures encircling a smaller one at the very bottom of it, symbolizing people.

"And it didn't even work. I could just. Glue the pole together- 'cause I've done it before- but I don't know how to make a new reel. I don't know where the hook is."

With some alarm, the Guide realized the boy's eyes were beginning to water again, and he scrambled to say something to stop him from bursting into tears for the third time. It was giving him a damn heart attack.

"It's repairable." he blurted out. "The reel is only a mechanical part. It can be fixed."

"How do you know that?" the Angler replied testily.

The Guide gave him a coy little smile.

"I know everything."

"Oh yeah? And where am I gonna do that, numbskull? It's not like Andre's going to let me use his forge any time soon, and he runs the only one in a hundred miles."

The Guide hummed, pretending to contemplate what the Angler had said for a moment.

"I happen to know of a forge you can use to do so. Near the mines, where the Hero builds their armor. I could show you how to smelt a new reel and hook. You could make an entirely new fishing rod, if you so desire."

The Angler raised a brow.

"You'll… The Hero isn't going to be mad at me for using their forge?"

The Guide's smile sharpened.

"They've got bigger things to be upset about."

The Angler opened his mouth to speak, but the Guide was faster, remembering what the boy had said earlier.

"There's always some string attached, to it, or like, something someone wants you to do..."

"It won't be free, of course. I'll teach you how to create a reel, and I'll provide any materials necessary to do so, but I'm not paying you to fish for me for a month."

"...Yeah, okay. Yeah. Fine. It's a deal."

The Angler seemed to have gotten all of the tears out of his system, and it filled the Guide with an immeasurable sense of relief. He stood up, shaking the saltwater from his cape, before nudging the boy to his feet too.

"Excellent. Now would you stop wiping your… snot off on your shirt? It's unbecoming of you."

The Guide fished out a handkerchief from his pocket, holding it out. The boy took it wordlessly, blowing his nose.

"You'd better keep your word, creepazoid," he said when he was done. "This is an official business transaction. I'll know if you try to… undercut me."

The Guide snorted.

"Do you know what that means?"

"Of course! Just… keeping you on your toes! Do you?!"

The Guide pinched the bridge of his nose, letting it go.

"Alright. Official business transaction it is, Angler. Just give me a day to get the alloys for your rod, and I'll show you the path to the mines."

"... Okay. Good."

The Angler used the handkerchief to scrub the trail of tears from his face before holding it out to the Guide.

"Do you want this back?'

The Guide cringed away.

"No!" he spoke quickly, "I mean- it's yours. Feel free to keep it."

The Angler shoved the strip of fabric into his vest pocket, sticking the tip of his tongue out as he buttoned the compartment closed.

"So." he said, trying to stand taller, "How are we gonna make this contract? Should we shake on it?"

The Guide stared down at his hands. They looked… sticky.

"...Does my word as bond suffice?"

The Angler shrugged.

"If you say so." he said, before averting his gaze.

"Um. thanks. Or whatever." he said quietly at the ground.

"I thought this was an official business transaction. No need to thank me if we're even, no? We're simply exchanging services."

The Angler's face flushed.

"Yeah, I knew that! It's- it's about professionalism!"

"Oh, yes. Very professional crying earlier." the Guide jabbed, but there was no spite in it.

The Angler kicked the Guide in the shin—hard enough to make a jolt of pain shoot up his entire leg.

The Guide yelled, crumpling to the ground in surprise.

"I WASN'T CRYING, NIMROD!" the Angler growled, bristling with rage, before running off into the direction of town.

The Guide watched the boy's figure fade into the distance, nursing his injured leg. It wasn't until the footprints he left behind were washed away by the tides that he let out a breath he didn't know he was holding.

The pain of the blow had faded enough to start walking, but the Guide elected to keep sitting on the shore for a moment longer. He tucked his knee under his chin, staring out to sea as the last of the day's light bled out of the sky.

He hadn't expected to be so perturbed by the Angler's crying. Truth be told, it was unsettling, the degree to which it horrified him. He'd seen tears before, but nothing so… visceral.

He thought he'd been shaken every time the Hero had cried out of guilt, but that was an easier kind of pain to deal with. At least the Hero hadn't looked like they were being eaten alive by their own grief.

What a strange biological mechanism it was, he thought, to feel the anguish of other people.

He stared at the waves. They were dark and glamorous under the light of a rising moon, tumultuous on the surface—even wilder underneath.

He could put a name to every creature that lived under them, every current rippling through the depths below. But that didn't mean he knew how to catch them, or escape them when pulled underneath a riptide.

He supposed he'd call what had moved him to help the Angler sympathy.

---

The Arms Dealer stepped out of the clinic's front door. The shopkeeper's bell pealed behind him. The wooden deck of the veranda creaked underfoot as he made his way across.

Allison was leaning against the railing on the other side, watching the sun set across the rooftops of the buildings across town square. It was at the hour where the sky was emblazoned with vibrant hues; fire-colored oranges sparkling on the skyline that faded to violets and dusky blues higher up on the horizon. The crooning of cicadas was a living susurrus in the background, but Andre hardly noticed them.

(Maybe that just spoke to how deeply they'd permeated his subconscious. Just one more reason he stayed out of the deep country. Fuck.)

She was rolling a cigar between her index finger and her thumb, sticking her pinkie out daintily as she stared vacantly ahead. The delicate arches of her hand contrasted jarringly with the size of the thing, until he noticed the nicotine stains lining the inside of her fingers, and the calluses on her palms from doing the legwork of refurbishing the clinic herself.

The sight made a pang of longing course through him. He could have probably watched the smoke rise and curl up around the moon for hours, sitting there in silence, listening for the sound of the gears turning in her head.

Like a fucking idiot.

He needed to move.

He crossed the deck to join her, pressing a chilled bottle of wine to her cheek.

She jumped, recoiling away from the sensation.

"Hey! That's cold! Knock it off."

She made a swipe for the bottle, but he held it just out of her reach with his good hand. The Nurse turned around to face him with a death glare, and he set it down with some amusement on the railing.

When he did, she extinguished the cigar on the wooden handrail next to it, leaning her back against the balusters as she turned the glass of it over in her hands.

"Where'd you get this? I don't keep alcohol inside."

"The Hero dropped it off. Said it looked like you could use it."

"Charmed. Bet they're just trying to make up for their unpaid medical bills."

But she still smiled wickedly, before pulling the cork off with her teeth, spitting it over the railing, and taking a long swig. When she was done, she slammed the bottle back down onto the railing with a sigh, wiping her mouth off with the back of her hand. The Arms Dealer felt something flutter in his chest.

"Oh, lord, that burns," she coughed, "Did the tavernkeep make that? It's awful. Tell him to start making fruitier drinks."

"Sure. Soon as the bastard gets too old to pop my head like a grape when I do."

The Nurse chuckled lowly, tracing the neck of the bottle with a lacquered nail.

"So, what's the deal, huh? Not joining those two inside for the party?"

She was referring to the Hero and the Demolitionist, of course. The Arms Dealer leaned on the railing next to her on his good arm, looking out at the darkening sky.

"Nah. They were just fuckin' interrogating me anyways."

The Nurse kicked her heels off, sending the fuchsia slippers sliding across the deck. The Arms Dealer could feel the wooden railing dip and creak under her weight as she hopped atop it, swinging her legs back and forth in a girlish manner.

"They were worried, sugar," she said sympathetically, as she settled onto the surface, "Everyone is. Well, was."

"That's what's pissing me off," he snipped, putting his face in his hands, "After everything that happened today, I just wanted to be left alone, y'know? Then there's two people getting up in my face when I just wanted to…"

"Be at rest?" she finished for him.

"Decompose."

Maybe there was a deeper psychological meaning behind why he wanted to go hide in a corner whenever he was injured. Maybe he didn't want to untangle that mental slinky right now.

She took a sip of the wine, eyeing him thoughtfully.

"That's just how people show they care. Seeing the people you love get hurt is a trauma, and that needs mending too."

The Arms Dealer chuckled darkly.

"If Bazdin cares, he's got a funny fuckin' way of showing it. Pretty sure he only came up here to make sure I wrote him into my will."

The Nurse said nothing in return, electing instead to watch the shimmering liquid spin around in the wine bottle, and it hit him just how pointed her comment was. He bit the inside of his cheek, electing not to open that can of worms. To not start fires in the metaphorical desert. It was something he was getting better at.

"... What were you thinking about?" he asked, trying to soften the roughness of his voice, "Before I came out here."

The Nurse leaned onto the veranda column next to her, pressing her shoulder onto the damp timber.

"I've been thinking about a lot of things." she replied.

Well that wasn't cryptic as fuck.

The Arms Dealer furrowed his brows as he watched her start tapping her nails onto the glass of the bottle. It was a nervous tic.

"...About the Dustmark Campa-"

"No," she cut him off, wrapping her fingers around the neck of it, "I mean- No, not this time. Do you remember what your life in the Capitol was like, Andre?"

"Uh… yeah, sort of. Kinda seedy?" he said with some confusion, before remembering she'd loved it there and retconning it. "In a good way. Pretty sure it's the biggest port city I've ever stayed in. Lots of good people. More good people doing, making, and transporting illegal shit. Why do you...?"

The Nurse laughed a little too loudly, and the Arms Dealer began to notice a glow on her cheeks that wasn't entirely natural.

"You must have stayed near the outskirts, then. I was… I went to med school downtown. The Capitol I knew before the war had guardsmen on every corner. Neoclassical architecture. Clean streets, with flying buttresses on everything. Always a new construction project going on… but you were right about the people. Lots of good people. Lots of bad ones, too."

The Arms Dealer turned his head to the side, leaning his head on his arm as she continued.

"But there were always a lot of them, everywhere you'd go. I think that's why most of them don't notice it—just how dangerous the world's become. Or why they're so willing to brush it off. When I was on the war front, I rationalized how many monsters we'd see on the… general amount of violence, out there. I thought they might've been attracted to the carnage. But then I moved out here, as far away from the border as possible, and it's even worse."

She stopped swinging her legs over the edge of the railing, going still save for the tapping of her nails on the glass. The Arms Dealer could pick up on the nervous energy that stillness concealed—she was lightning in a bottle, a fire starting in another room.

"I don't think it's just me being a metropolitan lady, either," she said, voice rife with nervous tension, "My family had a summer home in the country, when I was a kid. Real country. Deep enough into the woods that you could take a hatchet to a guy and even your closest neighbors wouldn't hear the screams."

"... Sounds pretty dangerous, Allison."

"Right? Except it wasn't. There were monsters, of course- always are- but we, my dads and sisters and I- we could handle them, with nothing but a shotgun and a few kitchen knives we had lying around."

The Arms Dealer could have pointed out that where she stayed probably wasn't real country, if they'd been able to protect themselves at all. That he was shaped by real country, raised between the teeth of its mouth; and that it was the reason why ninety-five percent of the Terrarian population clustered around the cities. That rich people didn't send their kids to places where they could be picked off by a swarm of soul-eating worms, or torn apart at the arms by the undead, or have their flesh melted from the sinew by slimes, or- yeah, he'd made his point.

But he thought he knew where she was going with this, and he agreed. So he didn't.

The Nurse took another swig of the wine with quivering hands.

"So if it's not the proximity from people that's making more of them spawn, and it's not the bloodshed, then it has to be this- this terrible world, that's changing. Getting more dangerous, right underneath our god-damned feet, just like what Wyatt said!"

Before the Arms Dealer could comment on Wyatt's general unreliability, the Nurse cut him off, speaking so quickly that he'd barely processed the spaces between her words.

"I- When I first moved here, I thought it'd be safer than the war front," she said, laughing in a manner that was growing increasingly nervous, "I thought maybe there were enough of us here to protect ourselves, but we're even more screwed than the Capitol's armies were! Are! At least up north we had weapons, and trained infantries. Look at what happened earlier today with that horse! We're sitting fucking ducks out here!"

Her hand was a white-knuckled claw, curled tightly around the neck of the bottle. She held it like a drowning man clings onto a lifeline; like how he held the grip of his firearms.

The Arms Dealer pushed himself up from the railing, hair standing on end.

Shit, shit. What was he supposed to say to that? That she was wrong? That she was right?

He'd never been good at this.

"Allison," he said, settling for wrapping a hand around the bottle atop hers, "I think you're getting a little too fucked up for this conversation. Let's, uh, put the drink down, for a second, okay?"

He became acutely aware of how course his palms must have felt, which naturally progressed to how soft her skin was in comparison to his own, and then the blood rushed to his his face and shit, was it fucked up that he was thinking about holding her hand while he was literally trying to pry the alcohol bottle from it?

"I think I'm the perfect amount of fucked up for this conversation," she snipped back, jerking the bottle away from him. "This situation is fucked up! The world is fucked up! The town dynamic's fucked up! Your arm is-"

She stopped herself before she could finish that sentence, and her face twisted in grief.

"Sorry," she said quietly, "You're right. I am getting a little too fucked up. You don't- you shouldn't have to deal with this. You're still recovering."

"It's fine, Allison. My arm's fine. It's-"

"Nothing?"

The Arms Dealer swallowed dryly.

"Go back inside, Andre. I'm scared. And tired. And so are you."

The Arms Dealer stepped away from the wooden railing, leaving the Nurse to sip on her wine in peace.

"...Can I at least have the wine bottle? Don't think it's a good thing for you to be drinking right now. Shouldn't have brought it out here. It might make your fuckin', uh, stress disease worse."

The Nurse gave him a disconsolate smile, swirling the red liquid around in the bottle.

"Stress disorder, sugar. But I… I think I need to. That monster attack earlier set something off, in me. I would have gotten some myself even if the Hero hadn't dropped this off. I'm not sure I can sleep tonight without it."

Well. He couldn't exactly argue with that, could he?

He ambled back over to the front door wordlessly, putting a hand on the brass knob without turning it. Despite the warmth of the lamplight glowing through the transom, the metal felt cold underneath his hands.

He took a chance, opening his mouth to speak.

"I might not even be alive right now, if it wasn't for you. You did what you could."

Short and sweet and to the point. Hopefully, what she needed to hear.

"So thanks. For saving me."

"... You don't know that I did." she replied.

Apparently, it was: he caught on to how fraught her voice was.

He turned back around, giving her a rare, gentle smile.

"Have I ever been wrong before, Allison?"

Maybe he was being an idiot, letting himself romanticize a woman who was a little too fucked up to love him back. Or maybe he was the fucked up one—too much of a quivering pussy to make a move, too unsure of what comes after to even know what to do next. Maybe he was fucked up for thinking he had a chance with her when he was too busy compartmentalizing his own mental baggage. Maybe he was fucked up for entertaining the notion that anything he had here was permanent at all.

Because he and Bazdin would just skip town once the war between the Capitol and the goblin empire was over, and the crackdown on illicit weaponry cooled off, right? It's not like there was any reason to stay in this fucking dump. It's not like there was any reason to stay fucking anywhere.

Bazdin said the people would blur together over time, but that was a lie. He remembers every face he'd ever seen. The spice trader who'd shown him how to build shelters in alleyways out of wooden planks. The carpenter who'd paid him too much of his own fucking paycheck an hour to paint doors. The fishermonger who'd taught him how to weave nets and set traps... The Tavernkeep who saved him pints on the house whenever he'd come through the door. The Nurse who'd saved his arm.

Yeah, they were going to fucking leave.

But for now, he was here. In this boring fucking coastal town with its stupid fucking architecture.

It was... okay. Maybe it was good. Felt weird. Felt fucking suspicious.

The Arms Dealer steps back into the parlor, letting the warm yellow glow of the lanterns inside cast a comforting light over him. A little while later, so does the Nurse.

---

The moon was already beginning to rise when the Guide had finally managed to make his way back to the marketplace—which was now empty, devoid of both people and consequently, the groceries he'd left his house to get this morning in the first place.

"Son of a bitch!"