The morning after the badger attack was a study in grim realities.

  The fire was a pile of cold, grey ash. The sky was a bruise of purple clouds that refused to rain but promised nothing but gloom. And the mood in the camp was colder than the ash.

  I sat on a rock, finishing a depressing inventory of our packs. I stood up, my joints popping in the damp air, to address the team.

  “Alright, listen up,” I announced, trying to sound authoritative despite the growling of my own stomach. “I’ve just reviewed our supplies. After sharing with the villagers and… last night’s badger incident… the situation is critical.”

  I held up our remaining stores.

  “We are left with approximately half a wheel of cheese that is hard enough to use as a weapon, three strips of dried meat of questionable origin, a handful of nuts that Willow thinks are safe but isn't one hundred percent sure about, and…”

  I shot a pointed look at Elmsworth.

  “…whatever that is.”

  Elmsworth was sitting cross-legged, happily squeezing a tube of leather. A thick, glowing green paste oozed onto his finger.

  “This,” Elmsworth said with an air of wounded dignity, “is an alchemically stabilized, nutritionally optimized slurry of concentrated moss and lichen. It contains all the essential nutrients required for a full day’s march!”

  He popped the finger into his mouth and swallowed.

  HIC.

  A small, bright blue spark shot out of his nose.

  “It’s quite delicious,” he wheezed, patting his chest. “With a pleasant, earthy… and slightly radioactive… flavor profile.”

  HIC. Another spark, this one flying from his ear.

  Faelar, who had been trying to gnaw on a piece of the cheese like a dog with a bone, spat a crumb onto the ground.

  “It tastes like a bog ate another bog and then died,” the dwarf declared. “And it makes you sparkle. I am not eating sparkle-paste. I’m a dwarf, not a firework.”

  “We need meat,” Faelar continued, tossing the rock-hard cheese at a tree. It chipped the bark. “Real meat. Something that bled recently. Something with a soul I can consume to gain its power. Or just its flavor.”

  “He’s right,” I conceded with a sigh. “Our rations are critically low. We can’t march to Vorash on moss and good intentions. We need to hunt.”

  Liam was sitting apart from the group. He had the small, leather-wrapped whetstone Brenna had given him in one hand and a dagger in the other. He was working the blade with a slow, rhythmic shhhk, shhhk.

  He didn't look up. His voice was a low, professional murmur. “I’ll handle it.”

  “A hunt!” Faelar boomed, his mood instantly improving at the prospect of violence.

  He scrambled to his feet, armor clanking, stretching his massive arms until his joints cracked like gunshots.

  “Excellent! A fine morning for a bit of sport! The little elf can track it, and I’ll provide the… uh… percussive persuasion!”

  Liam finally looked up. He stopped sharpening his knife. His expression was a perfect portrait of suffering.

  “The last thing a hunt needs, Faelar, is a walking brewery crashing through the woods and frightening every animal in the hemisphere,” Liam said. “Your idea of stealth is an affront to the very concept of silence. You step on twigs that aren't even there.”

  “Bah! I’ll have you know my footfalls are as light as a… well, they’re not light, but they’re effective!” Faelar retorted, puffing out his chest. “I herd the prey! Like a sheepdog! But with an axe!”

  “I’ll come too,” Willow chirped, getting to her feet and brushing dirt from her robes. “Not to hunt, of course. That’s terribly rude without an introduction. I am going to have a polite conversation with the local fauna and see if anyone is interested in volunteering.”

  Liam slowly turned his head to look at me. His eyes were pleading. You see what I have to work with? his expression screamed. A loud dwarf and a gnome who wants to interview the lunch.

  I just shook my head. There was no stopping this train.

  “Fine,” I said, my voice heavy with resignation. “Just… bring back something we can eat. And please, for the love of the gods, try not to start a war with the squirrels.”

  The Great Hunt began with Liam trying, against all odds, to be a professional.

  He moved with a ghostly silence through the gnarled, sickly trees. He crouched low, examining bent blades of grass and disturbed earth. He found what he was looking for—the tracks of a deer. It looked scrawny, probably sick from the blight, but it was meat.

  He signaled for silence. He began to stalk, his bow drawn, moving like smoke.

  His efforts were completely, and predictably, undone by his ‘heavy support.’

  “Oh, the goblins of Mount Gathoong, their beards are all green!”

  Faelar’s voice smashed through the forest like a falling tree. It was a booming, off-key baritone that frightened the birds out of the canopy three miles away.

  “They pickle their toes in cheap, nasty latrine! And they eat all the bugs, and they drink all the slime! And they never, ever, ever pay for their crime!”

  Liam froze mid-step. A vein in his temple began to throb. The deer he had been tracking bolted, a flash of white tail disappearing into the gloom.

  Liam slowly closed his eyes. His whole body tensed with a rage so pure it was almost visible.

  He turned, his face a mask of forced calm.

  “Faelar,” he whispered, though the whisper carried the weight of a scream. “We. Are. Hunting. The general principle of which involves not announcing our presence to every living creature in the entire kingdom via a musical performance about goblin hygiene.”

  “It’s a classic sea shanty!” Faelar boomed, unapologetic. “Keeps the rhythm! Keeps the morale up! You’re too stiff, elf. You need to feel the music!”

  “We are not at sea! We are in a forest! A dead forest! And you are scaring away our dinner!”

  “Bah! It was a scrawny thing anyway! Barely a mouthful for me, let alone the rest of us! We need something with some real meat on its bones! A dire boar! A giant cave bear! Something that knows how to put up a proper fight!”

  “We are not fighting the food, Faelar! We are trying to catch it!”

  “What’s the difference?”

  While they were locked in their heated, whispered argument, Willow had drifted away.

  She found a quiet, sun-dappled patch of moss near a trickling stream that ran black with corruption. Despite the gloom, life persisted.

  She sat, crossed her legs, and placed a small offering of nuts on the ground before her.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “Hello?” she called out softly. “Is anyone hungry?”

  A moment later, a scruffy-looking squirrel with a twitching nose and a missing ear crept down a nearby tree. It looked at the nuts, then at Willow. It chittered warily.

  “Oh, hello there!” Willow cooed. “My name is Willow. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Please, help yourself. The blight hasn't touched these.”

  The squirrel snatched a nut. It chittered again, more insistently, gesturing with its head toward a burrow under a dead log.

  “Oh, my,” Willow said, her face softening into a sad smile. “Is that so? A rabbit? An elder?”

  The squirrel chirped a series of sharp, rhythmic sounds.

  “He’s in pain?” Willow asked, her voice trembling slightly. “His legs don't work anymore? And the blight is in his stomach?”

  The squirrel nodded—or bobbed its head in a way that looked like a nod.

  “That’s very sad,” Willow whispered. “But… does he know? Does he understand what we need?”

  More chirping.

  “He says it’s okay,” Willow translated for herself. “He says he’s tired of being cold. He says… he says he’d like to be useful one last time.”

  She wiped a tear from her eye. “Okay. Thank you.”

  She returned to the path, where Faelar and Liam were now arguing about the aerodynamic properties of throwing axes versus arrows.

  “Excuse me?” she said, her voice cheerful but edged with solemnity.

  They stopped.

  “Sorry to interrupt your… tactical discussion,” Willow said. “But I’ve just had a lovely chat with a representative of the local squirrel population. He says there’s a very large rabbit by the creek. He is… very old. And very tired. He is ready for his journey to the great carrot patch in the sky.”

  Liam and Faelar stared at her.

  Liam looked at the empty forest where the deer had been. He looked at Faelar’s unapologetic face. He looked at Willow’s earnest, tear-streaked smile.

  He let out a long, suffering sigh that seemed to carry the weight of all the world’s frustrations.

  “Fine,” he gritted out. “Let’s go talk to the volunteer rabbit.”

  It was, impossibly, exactly where the squirrel had said it would be.

  It was a huge, fat creature, its fur grey with age. It was sitting placidly by the stream, breathing laboriously. It didn't run when we approached. It just looked at us with milky, cataract-filled eyes.

  Liam nocked an arrow. His movements were filled with a grim sense of purpose. This was it. One clean, simple, professional kill to end this ridiculous farce.

  He drew the bowstring back to his cheek.

  “OI! RABBIT!” Faelar bellowed, trying to be helpful.

  He wound up and hurled a large, flat rock with all his might.

  “TIME FOR DINNER!”

  THWACK.

  The rock sailed comically wide, missing the rabbit by a good ten feet and hitting a tree.

  The rabbit, startled out of its peaceful reverie, bolted. For a dying creature, it moved with surprising speed, a blur of grey fur shooting toward the brush.

  “Dammit, Faelar!” Liam shouted, loosing his arrow. It missed by inches.

  The rabbit shot directly away from the creek—and ran straight into a simple snare of woven vines that Willow had quietly and expertly laid across the game trail a few minutes earlier.

  Snap.

  The vine tightened. The rabbit was caught fast, lifted gently off the ground.

  Faelar clapped Liam on the back so hard the elf stumbled.

  “See? Teamwork! You distracted it, I spooked it, and the little one caught it! A flawless execution! We’re a machine, lads! A well-oiled machine!”

  Liam slowly lowered his bow. His eye twitched violently.

  “I hate you,” he whispered. “I hate you so much.”

  The argument over how to cook the rabbit was, if anything, more passionate and far more strategically complex than any battle plan we had ever conceived.

  We were back at camp. The fire was lit—thanks to Faelar—and the rabbit was prepped.

  “It needs a spit,” Faelar declared, holding the skinned rabbit aloft like a trophy. “A roaring fire, a sturdy stick, and a constant, loving rotation. That’s how you cook meat! You honor the beast by sealing its juices in with the pure, honest kiss of the flame! It’s the dwarven way! Char on the outside, pink on the inside!”

  “You’ll turn it into a dry, charred husk that tastes of soot and failure,” Liam countered, his voice dripping with condescending pity.

  He was using Brenna’s whetstone to sharpen his skinning knife, the shhhk-shhhk sound punctuating his words.

  “A wild rabbit like this is all tough, stringy muscle,” Liam explained. “It’s old. It needs to be broken down. Jointed. Simmered for hours in a broth with the wild garlic we passed and those bitter roots Willow found. The slow heat makes it tender. It’s the only civilized way to prepare it.”

  Suddenly, Liam stopped. He looked down at his belt. His expression shifted from annoyance to disbelief.

  “Civilized?”

  The voice of Soul-Drinker hissed in his mind. It was a grating, metallic whisper that sounded like a blade being drawn across bone. Only Liam could hear it, which made his next actions look insane to everyone else.

  “The only proper way to prepare a foe is to consume their heart while it is still warm! To mock their fading life-force with your teeth! This boiling of flesh is a decadent weakness fit only for you soft-skinned surfacers! Eat the heart, elf! Do it!”

  “Oh, for the love of…” Liam muttered, glaring at his own waist. “I am not eating the rabbit’s heart raw. We are not savages.”

  “What was that?” Faelar asked, pausing in his search for a spit-stick.

  “Nothing,” Liam snapped, slapping his belt. “Just… equipment malfunction.”

  “You are both thinking like primitives!” Elmsworth interjected.

  The wizard was waving a piece of parchment covered in complex geometric diagrams. Nugget, now a mottled brown-and-green camouflage color, was perched on his head, peering at the diagrams.

  “Why would we rely on such crude, inefficient methods as open flame or heated water?” Elmsworth demanded. “It’s gastronomically barbaric! I propose a far more elegant solution!”

  He tapped the paper. “We can use a low-level transmutation spell to thaumaturgically deconstruct the rabbit's cellular structure and then re-constitute it into a series of nutritionally perfect, flavor-optimized protein cubes! I’ve already done the calculations!”

  He looked around beaming. “Each cube would contain the ideal ratio of proteins, lipids, and essential nutrients, with a flavor profile I have tuned to mimic roasted nuts with a hint of summer berries. No waste! No bones! Just efficient, cubic sustenance! It’s the future of culinary science!”

  Nugget clucked. It sounded enthusiastic.

  Faelar recoiled, clutching the rabbit to his chest protectively.

  “I am not eating a cube of rabbit,” the dwarf growled. “I have standards! A man needs to gnaw on a bone!”

  “But what would it feel like for the rabbit?” Willow asked, her brow furrowed. “Would it be confusing for its spirit to be turned into a cube? Circles are much more natural. Maybe spheres?”

  I stepped in before the argument could escalate to spell-casting. My head was pounding.

  “Enough,” I ordered. “There will be no cubes. There will be no raw hearts.”

  Liam looked relieved. Faelar looked victorious. Elmsworth looked crestfallen.

  “Liam is right,” I said. Faelar’s face fell. “It’s an old rabbit. Fire will make it tough as leather. We’re making a stew.”

  “Huzzah!” Liam muttered.

  “But,” I added, pointing at Faelar, “Faelar is in charge of the fire. You can make it as big and as roaring as you like, as long as it’s under the pot. Elmsworth, you will use a cantrip to ensure the pot maintains a perfectly even temperature. Willow, vegetables. I will supervise to ensure no one adds gunpowder or… cubes.”

  The compromise seemed to satisfy, or at least confuse, everyone into silence. The work began.

  As the rich, savory smell of the stew began to fill the air, a comfortable quiet settled over the camp. We sat in a circle, the firelight pushing back the encroaching dark of the blighted woods.

  Faelar, his belly rumbling in anticipation, leaned back against a log. He took a swig of water (grimacing at the lack of ale) and decided it was time for a story.

  “This reminds me of that time in the Undermountain,” he began, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial boom. “Me and old Borin, we were trapped in a goblin tunnel for three days. Nothing but a bag of rocks, a single torch, and one very angry cave lizard.”

  “Was this the same Borin who you claimed lost his arm to a mimic that looked like a treasure chest?” Liam asked, not looking up from stirring the stew.

  “No, no, that was Borin the Other-Handed. A fine dwarf, but careless. This was Borin the Beardy. Built like a boulder, that one. Anyway, we were starving. The lizard was lookin’ at us like we were snacks. We had no firewood, see? Not a stick. Just wet stone.”

  “A fascinating logistical problem,” Elmsworth mused, hiccups finally subsiding. “How did you generate a sufficient heat source for cooking without combustion materials?”

  “Ah, well that’s where Borin’s genius came in!” Faelar grinned, his teeth white in the firelight.

  “He noticed this one passage, see, where the air was warmer. Smelled like sulfur. Said a dragon must’ve slept there ages ago. So we lured the lizard into the passage, got it real angry—insulted its mother, mostly—and when it opened its mouth to try and bite Borin’s head off, it let out this little burp of gas!”

  Faelar mimed a giant lizard burp.

  “Borin, quick as a whip, held up his torch. Whoosh! The lizard’s own breath caught fire! We cooked that beast over a flame started by its own bad manners! Best lizard I ever ate. Tasted like spicy chicken.”

  Liam stopped stirring. He looked at the dwarf.

  “Faelar,” he said slowly. “That is, without question, the most ridiculous, biologically improbable, and physically impossible story I have ever heard.”

  “It’s true!” Faelar roared, slapping his knee. “I swear it on my beard! And the lizard skin made a fine pair of boots for Borin’s wife!”

  We ate the stew. It was magnificent. The meat was tender, the broth was rich, and for a few, glorious minutes, there was only the sound of satisfied eating and the crackle of the fire.

  Later, as the fire burned down to glowing embers, I took a moment to look at my team.

  Faelar was already asleep, his snores a low, rumbling earthquake that shook the pebbles on the ground.

  Liam sat apart, quietly running the whetstone Brenna had given him over the edge of his dagger. He treated the stone with reverence. Occasionally, he would whisper something sharp to his belt, arguing with the voice only he could hear.

  Willow was whispering a quiet thank you to the forest, burying the rabbit’s bones in the earth.

  Elmsworth was examining the rabbit’s skull, holding it up to the moon, muttering about cranial capacity.

  I took the first watch. I stood at the edge of the firelight, my spear in hand.

  The wind shifted.

  It came from the north, from the direction we were heading. It was cold. And strangely, it carried no sound. No rustle of leaves. No whistle through the branches.

  It was a dead, silent wind.

  I shivered. The Vorash ward-stone in my pouch pulsed with a steady, reassuring heat, a reminder of the danger that lay ahead.

  But for the first time on this long, blighted path, the warmth of the stone wasn’t the only thing keeping the cold at bay.

  I looked back at the sleeping misfits.

  “Sleep well,” I whispered. “It’s going to be quiet tomorrow.”

  hing keeping the cold at bay.