Fire's estimate of two hours had proven to be fairly accurate. While in theory they could have traversed the distance much more quickly, they had stopped along the way multiple times to check for possible sightlines to the patrol's route. This was both to prevent them from being seen early and to be able to get an accurate idea of when the patrol would arrive by posting scouts in key locations.

The valley was densely forested and as the map had shown, gradually slimmed down into a canyon that nonetheless had a few trees growing in it. The air was nice and fresh, a good contrast to the shelter, despite Shadow's air purification spell it could get quite stuffy at times.

Fire pointed ahead. "Enough to make marching in formation difficult."

"Indeed, we'll let them march in far enough and then funneling them should be easy. You heavies and the ranged can hit them from the sides. We in flanking will prevent anyone who tries to run from doing so."

Further up the walls Fire could spot a few loose rocks but not enough to meaningfully collapse and block the way back. They'd have to get creative.

"What do you think? Explosives or just loosening up dirt further up? Explosives are quick and loud, but we don't know if they'll work. We have enough fast diggers that the dirt method seems preferable."

"I think you're right. Explosives are harder to conceal and less predictable. Maybe get Jennifer or Steve to dig around within the peaks until they collapse?"

Fire looked ahead into the canyon at the trees growing there. They were perfect for their purposes, not tall enough to span the entire width, but still old and heavy enough to crush someone.

He said: "Also thinking about having the trees all be in one area. If we have good timing, we can take out a whole lot of them. Spreading out the trees wouldn't work anyways, not enough people." Fire pointed at a range of trees. "Maybe from here to here. Maybe a bit further in."

"Yeah, have a few trees on either side of the divide cut. Create a tightly packed zig-zag shape. The more inconvenient the better."

The clouds passed and the sun was now glaring at them with its full force. Kay held up a hand.

"Want to change spots?" he grumbled, teeth gritted as he moved to pull down his goggles and found nothing there.

"The sun is quite intense here, yes."

They moved under the treeline and Kay pulled out two sticks of chalk.

"Choose, say, three trees over here, three on the other side?" he asked, eyes still squinted as though there was a sun right in front of him. He mouthed something and bobbed his head dismissively along to words Fire couldn't hear. He seemed to be talking to the Book.

Fire nodded. "Before it's time we can hide in the shrubs around here, if we put wedges into the pre-cut trees all it takes is a strike from an axe to have them fall over."

Kay agreed and they spread out to mark the trees. As Fire scraped chalk across the bark and set about establishing the wedge at the base, he heard Kay muttering more audibly. However, the discussion went, it ended with Kay catching his chalk on the bark and snapping it. He parted his lips to show a gritted lattice of teeth before he sighed "okay, you're right."

"Fire, do you have a second?" he asked in his most formal accent.

Everyone in the shelter was starting to get an idea of Kay's selection. He wore accents like outfits. This one was generally reserved for issuing orders. Upper-crust, with every syllable clearly separated.

Fire turned and nodded.

"So, funny thing," he laughed. "The Book's gotten it into its pages that I've been a little hostile recently. Perhaps, unfairly so…" he shuffled his feet and then continued in his natural brogue, "I agree. When you went out to set up the shelter, I said some things that were uncalled for. And then, instead of trying to resolve it I just doubled down. I wasn't mad at you, not at the heart of it, you were just there. I'm sorry."

That came out of nowhere.

"I mean, I'm still annoyed about the thing about you noticing the Ender and not mentioning, but I was going through something else, and I let that push me well beyond fair criticism. I was busy pitying myself, so I appointed myself the authority on who was allowed to be sad or not. Truth is, I don't know what you've been through, and I shouldn't have used your servant, sorry, server thing as an excuse to invalidate your experiences. It was shitty."

Fire said: "Thank you for coming forward with this. I tried to not engage in open conflict because it would have troubled the group but that also meant I couldn't really resolve the situation. I may or may not have thought some choice things about you in those situations but overall you were vastly more cooperative than antagonistic." He paused. "I'm not entirely blameless either. Back in that first little village where we talked about our past battles… how do I say this? Having lived as long as I have, it's sometimes easy to forget that I was young at some point. I believe back there we had fundamentally different perceptions, not just because of the difference in age but also because of coming from different worlds."

"Hah, it is easy to forget that sometimes," Kay said. "Different values, different eras, different societies. I understand where you're coming from about the youth thing though. Forgetting you were ever young."

He sat down against a tree and folded his arms over his knees.

"I'm twenty-five. I'm still young, but I have felt old for at least a decade. Do you know what I spent most of my teen-years doing, Fire? I was a cut-rate mercenary. A thug. I beat people, I robbed them. Sometimes I collected dodgy debts for Cossack and that was about as honest as I got.

"I started age fifteen. One time, when robbing a house, some servant popped his head in the door. He was no older than me. He looked like he was about to scream, and I didn't even hesitate. I hit him with a brick, Fire. I don't know if he got up again," he rubbed his hands over his face and sighed before looking up at Fire with pleading eyes.

"The Onslaught wasn't pretty, but it was a just war and it brought out some justice in me, too. It's the best I ever was as a person," he shook his head, "Now, here I am, age twenty-five, wondering if I'll live long enough to be that good again. I'm an old man already. I can only imagine how it feels with that amount of life lived."

Fire sat down against the tree opposite to Kay. "You know, when I said it was difficult to remember when I was young, I definitely didn't mean that I don't remember my younger years, quite difficult to forget those, just the feeling of having ever been young. But actually, I had most of my misery compressed down into a few years, hours even at the worst point.

"You see, I spent the first section of my life mostly content. I was raised by my uncle because my parents were nowhere to be found and my uncle refused to say anything. In my world most people go through formal education until they are eighteen, I was no different. It really started kicking off in the last four, my class was cutthroat and competitive, but we were the best our school had ever seen. To celebrate the bright futures, we had ahead of us we all went on a week-long trip."

Fire sighed. "That's where the descent begins. On the return trip I was the first to leave our common vehicle, but not before confessing my love to one of the girls in my class. She didn't know how to respond and there was no time, I accounted for that by slipping her a note. However, in the next fifteen minutes I went from uncertainly thinking of what her true feelings might be to watching her and everyone else I cared about from the school barrel off a bridge and down a hill. Nobody survived the crash. I could have been in there too had the circumstances been slightly different."

Kay had his mouth slightly ajar, and his eyes lowered to Fire's knees.

"That's awful. I'm so sorry."

"It was definitely the low point of my early life."

"And you still think about it, five thousand years later?"

The rays of the sun intensified briefly as dusk became full sunset. Light rallying one last time before it gave was to moonlight.

A smile crept up on Fire's face for the sheer cruelly comical unlikeliness of the events he was about to recount to Kay. "That wasn't the only thing that happened that day. When I got home and talked to my uncle about it, he finally decided to tell me the truth about my parents. Turns out I was the son of pretty much the two worst people of their generation. Before I was born there was some kind of big war in my world and without going into details, my parents were the ones supplying 'our' side with weapons. Not just regular weapons either, everything in the book, poison, psychoactive agents, you know the deal.

"The big swinging factor however was something they called 'fairy dust', a combat agent that would make entire strips of land uninhabitable. If you were exposed to it things would happen to you, things that nobody could explain. Some died because their bones suddenly collapsed on themselves, those were the relatively normal ones, I read reports of one man who had hundreds of flowers sprouting everywhere inside of him.

"Needless to say, at the end of that day I didn't know whether to feel sad, confused or angry. That was also the day after which Shadow's problems got bad. Before, she was just reclusive and quiet, would talk to me and occasionally our uncle. After that day she was terrified of anyone that wasn't me, wouldn't stop crying if anyone came even remotely close to her. I had reached a point where my knowledge and skill offered no way out. It's as if everything had conspired against us, like everything before that had just been the setup to some cruel punchline."

"Yeah, at a certain point you just tell yourself it's funny. That's what I did. You stop associating it with you and you just kind of drift on and on until you have this awful moment where you catch a glimpse, like a reflection of a reflection, and you realise all this hurt is who you are."

He let his hands fall to the sides and his breastplate clanked against the tree trunk. He raised a palm and lowered it as though that explained something.

Fire nodded. "I did something like that. Just pretended whatever I felt was happening to someone else while the 'real' me searched for a way to at least help my sister. That's what my motivator was, to at least help her. I went headfirst into higher education, plowed right through it. Filled any free time with physical exercise to keep my mind off things. That went on for what… eight years? Ten? Didn't have to worry about money since my war profiteering parents had left behind quite an inheritance. I eventually found the people who would eventually build the server, my world.

"That really was the point where everything got good again, the server was running, Shadow was happy, life was whole again. Just something was there that didn't belong. That 'someone' I had projected my emotions onto? He'd become quite real in that other world. Whenever I felt things like strong anger or sadness, he'd just… appear in my mind and drive me out for a while. He calls himself Claw, he's little more than a beast with how little mind-space he has to work with, but I still have to keep him caged. If you ever see my eyes turn black, that's him. If that happens, I suggest running, everyone else is just prey to him and he unfortunately retains my subconscious combat skills and has no morals or scruples to speak of."

"But he's under control now, right?" Kay asked, straightening his back up against the tree.

"He broke his chains while I was returning home, massacred a group of hunters who wanted my scales, I'm rid of him for a while. He should remain caged at least until the end of this war." Fire paused, contemplating. "If worst comes to worst, there is one weakness I have that you can exploit against Claw. If you manage to wound me with a silver weapon it'll paralyze me, it's lethal within an hour. Getting anything silver in contact with a wound has the same effect. If you manage to do it, I always carry a potion that cures the silver poisoning. I should be conscious enough to give it to you once Claw is gone." Another pause. "Just… make sure to keep it to yourself, it's a secret we Mencur-Besh keep well but I'm afraid I can not afford to in these circumstances."

"Okay, silver weapon. I'll remember that." Kay visibly lost tension and chuckled a little. "Sorry, I should be being empathetic, I just needed to figure out what I'm dealing with. Thanks for feeling comfortable enough to tell me all this, it means a lot to you, and I can assure you, it… it means a lot to me."

Fire got up from the tree again. "I've told a few bits of this to Destiny before to help bring her back. I think I'm over the trauma itself, the memories are just a bit stickier than I want them to be but the thing that really stayed were the mistakes I made. I had professional help available but didn't take it, I suppose in hindsight you always look like a bit of an idiot."

He offered a hand to Kay. "Anyways, we should get back to the shelter. Need to be well-rested tomorrow."

The sun was just about to pass below the horizon, but the heat remained.

"Yes, we do," Kay took the hand. "We're going to win this tomorrow. You're a good leader, and I'm proud to be serving under you."

He squeezed the hand warmly as he shook it.

They spent the return journey swapping a few more stories about the unlikely things life had thrown at them. When they arrived at the shelter a good deal of the leadership was sleeping already, however there was still laughter coming from somewhere around the front door. Fire and Kay went to their respective doors, wishing the other a good sleep with a quick nod.

As Fire lay in bed, he spent a bit thinking about what he had heard, maybe his cautious optimism for this effort was more well-founded than he had thought.