Rusk didn’t realize he had fallen asleep until he awoke to Loretta rousing him. Luckily nothing attacked during the night and the crusader had been chased off effectively, but Flow had a strange look about her upon waking. Rusk thought he recognized it. Hesitation? She expressed her second thoughts during their march toward the safe house while the deadness of the forest turned gray the air.

“I do not wish to harm your king,” said Flow apropos of nothing.

“Then why are you with our cause,” snapped Loretta.

“Loretta please,” said Rusk. “But I’m curious the same. I was under the impression you out of all of us wanted him most dead.”

“I want the necromancer dead. Not the king. To harm another country’s king would be an act of war.”

“Fair point,” said Felix who was looking not much better than before and coughed between his words. “But in this case it would seem splitting hairs. To get rid of the necromancer is tantamount to ridding this country of its ruler.”

“You think King Ehrryn is a figurehead,” said Loretta.

“Perhaps.” He doubled over and wheezed, then erupted into a coughing fit.

The conversation ended there, but as they made camp for the night having covered less ground than intended, Rusk wondered if Felix might have been on to something.

Felix grew paler by the fire. They hadn’t found anything to eat in the dead forest, and hunger was taking its toll on all of them.

“Necromancers are salt in the earth,” said Flow, and her eyes caught the reds of the fire. A shadow of her old forgotten power. “This forest reminds me of Sanctuary’s scourge. It is unsettling.”

“You’re free to go home,” said Loretta.

“What’s your problem?” asked Rusk.

Loretta crossed her arms with a shrug and didn’t answer.

Felix nodded off and nearly fell into the fire but Rusk grabbed him by the arm and laid him down gently.

“He needs a healer.” Even Rusk was beginning to worry over whether Felix could make it through the journey to the safe house along with the rest of them. “Okay, that’s it. We’re heading out. Screw waiting for daylight. We’ll walk through the night. Or I will, if you two aren’t up for it. But Felix needs better shelter than this.”

Flow gathered her meager things and snuffed out the fire. She kicked the loose dirt over the pit and it took on the appearance of volcanic ash for a split second in Rusk’s vision. Loretta also gathered her things while Rusk hoisted Felix onto his back and fussed with his quiver and bow to make sure he could still quick draw it if need be.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said the forest all around them. Rusk had never heard the voice of nature in any physical sense aside from his inner ear hearing the Elva from time to time, but now that it was echoing around he recognized the voice as not the voice of the necromancer but that of the dead portal itself. He didn’t know how he knew. He just knew. And on that note it sounded like a genderless version of Elena’s speech pattern. Not for the first time, Rusk wondered if she’d been swallowed, or if this was just how the portal chose to anchor itself in the physical realm for the moment before them.

“Do what?” asked Rusk as his comrades spun around themselves trying to find the voice’s source.

Flow stopped first. She pointed to Rusk’s bow, which was halfway drawn, an arrow already knocked. Unknowingly, the arrow he had at the ready was the Dragons Knock. When he exchanged it for an ordinary wooden arrow, not even one pulled from the Elva, the forest’s voice abandoned them never to return.

“Well that was weird,” said Loretta.

Unnerved, Rusk ushered them both forward and told them that no matter what to keep moving. The wouldn’t stop until they reached the safe house. They would move as steadily and quickly as they could on empty stomachs with the burden of Felix on Rusk’s back.

Their hike was long but in the end fruitful. For at daybreak they reached the safe house just in time for Felix to awaken.

He peeled his eyes open and asked where he was and what the was doing on Rusk’s back.

Rusk laughed and set him down, making some comment about Extra Heroic Exercise that was not received well by the girls.

Inside a clearing was a hut made of rocks. Crinkly dead leaves formed its roof. When they entered through the stone threshold, a cot of blankets made from yarn and stretchy dead roots interlacing all knotted to form a pile of nested beddings awaited Felix, who plopped down with all the enthusiasm of a weary traveler. Some of his color had returned after resting on Rusk’s back and absorbing some of the Elva energy Rusk carried around him like a cloud, but it wasn’t nearly enough to revitalize him back to full health. Rusk was thankful he didn’t look quite as close to death anymore, especially when their surroundings made it difficult to focus on anything but the desaturation of lifeless earth. Rusk was also thankful the girls had forgotten their squabble, or else put it aside for later, and were digging around the hut for supplies. Or that’s what he presumed they were doing.

Each of them poked at different corners until Loretta gave a gigantic huff of frustration and stood with her arms in the air as if she’d come upon a terribly annoying discover.

“Great,” said Loretta. “We’ve been robbed. Our food stores are gone. And so are our weapons.”

Felix crumpled into a ball on the nest of stretchy vines and blankets weaved from yarn. He looked very much like he had just thrown in the towel and just given up, but only for a moment. He ran a hand across his face, got himself together, and then announced.

“Then we get more supplies.”

Rusk volunteered despite having not slept.