After checking the area, I stood my body up, and walked it with me to the edge of our campsite. And in a low hollow at the edge of my range, I conjured something new. Something muttonous. As many sheep as I could manage, all standing in the woods with no clue how they had gotten there. I left them there, downwind of our camp, and I went back to my bedroll. Time to see how well this plan works.

  The morning dawned slowly, and most of the people I'd brought with me woke before sunrise was finished. As exhausted as they all had been, twelve hours of sleep is enough that they were ready to do it again. Winter nights are long nights at this latitude. I carefully negotiated my essence handoffs so there would be no interruption, folding my soul back entirely into my body and mind so that all parts of me would wake up together.

  "Ah, refreshing!" I declared, kipping up. I headed for the bushes that had been designated the "girl's bathroom", and took care of my business. And with a quick detour, I checked on the sheep. They were all gone, leaving only footprints and blood. Perfect.

  I strolled back in, beaming to everyone. "So, I'm gonna get plenty of warm water going, we can take care of breakfasts, and see about getting this show on the road!"

  "When do we get there," Licard asked, as if I haven't discussed this.

  "Mid-morning," I said. "We're actually only a few miles away."

  Kimothy was folding up his bedroll and making it look harder than I've ever seen. He braced his knees on the bundle and gave a curious look. "Is that really how it works? You don't give us directions to find the place, you just happen to know that we will find it in the mid-morning?"

  I was laughing while I assured him that yes, that actually is exactly how it works. Fine by me if they think this is the vagaries of divinely-visited prophetic visions. But rather, when you perform this quest, you always wander the jungle for one whole day from early morning to evening and camp out, and then find the village at mid-morning of the second day. Without exception. Some of the dialogue options indicate that you're wandering lost, sometimes you're trying to find your way out, some of the dialogue options have you actively searching for something or another. But unless you've got the ranger class, you find the village in mid-morning.

  Nux Gysmo stood and stretched. "If liminally boring lakes for slim anointing shit?"

  Larianne scowled, and started tying her hair up in a messy bun. "Does anyone else find it really irritating when he does that?"

  Licard was doing pushups. We're on a treasure-hunting monster-slaying expedition and he's doing morning calisthenics. This fucking guy. He looked up at her, then Nux, then back. "I think it probably annoys him more than it does anyone else."

  Larianne glared at the Madman, and fluttered her nails in a sweep of sharpened edges. "I'm not sure about that." She was watching Nux's neck and clicking her nails, time for me to intervene!

  I was casting my mana through the essences to muster my spells, and started with something dramatic, summoning up enough water to fill a shower stall, standing upright in a column in the air. I heated it until it steamed against the air, then I took a deep breath and stepped into it, clothes and all.

  Everyone was staring at me when the water suddenly spun around me, whirlpooling in place, and then I stepped out the other side, clean as could be, energized and refreshed. "Ah!" I said. "Who else wants a turn?"

  After a day of hiking and a night sleeping rough, everyone took a walk though the Natalie Harigold Instant Shower-Matic, which was able to get about 75% of the dirt and crud off of us without anyone getting undressed. My hair still did not feel right, and it's not substitute for a real shower with soaps and products, but it's better than nothing by a long shot. And, it erased any chill left over from sleeping on cold ground. I threw that water out, and gathered fresh real water out of the air moisture to refill canteens with. Conjured water for baths, collected water for drinking. Otherwise bad stuff happens.

  We broke out food, and ate quickly. I assured them we would be at our destination before lunch, but if we did not finish quickly we would probably need to eat lunch there, so don't go through all of your supplies, all right?

  Sir Maspers used a small, very sharp knife to cut an apple into strips that he ate slowly. "Any chance we could find something to eat when we get there? On-site resupply?"

  "Hard no," I said firmly. I craned around for everyone's benefit. "If we get there and you think you found something to eat, no you did not. I want to be very clear about that!"

  A round of nods. I think Quarl wanted to ask some followup questions about that, but he was caught up chewing that hardtack stuff they sell to adventurers who don't know better. It takes like ten minutes to chew a mouthful of that stuff. If anyone else had questions about the on-site food resupply situation? They would understand soon.

  I took a moment to admire my own good fortune. They were not pestering me endlessly for details. I had managed to impress on them that some things they were just going to find out for themselves. They trusted me to have it under control, without hounding me over this. It's good to develop a reputation for secrets, sometimes. Secrets and accuracy.

  By now the ground was almost ice-cold, having lost its warmth over the long night-time. We were all ready to be gone from this campsite, and I started most of them on their way. Most of them were already alert for danger, Nux was still scribbling in his notebook. I held Kimothy back however.

  "Hey. I need you to do me a favor. It's a strange one."

  "I expect nothing less," he chuckled.

  "I want you to conjure as many geese as you can, and leave them in this clearing. Have them stand around and act nonchalant, no matter what. Don't dispel them, just leave them be, until I give you the signal."

  "What's the signal?"

  I gave him a flat look of mixed disappointment and disbelief. "Now. I'll yell 'now, Kimothy', when it's time. I'm not going to use codewords."

  He looked a little amused and a little embarrassed. "Oh. Yeah." He turned and gave a nod, and our campsite was filled with big long-necked waterfowl that waddled around and honked softly to each other. We walked away from them, and moved into the snow-dappled forest, with the skywhale-haunted skies.

  Quarl was out in front again, marching point and keeping watch. Kimothy moved up near Licard, and Sir Maspers dropped back to march next to me for a little bit. He considered starting with small talk, but with a shrug he jumped right in. "So I was talking to Licard."

  "Yes?"

  "You still had that poison in your blood and your brain when you snapped out. We were doing a lot to help you, but... you did break out of that trance on your own."

  "Oh?" I blinked in surprise. "I was sure the healing did it."

  "No, he was working on that for a while. And I've been... well, I've accidentally gotten dosed like three times, and bless that healer for being quick and efficient. It's powerful stuff. I know that those hallucinogens are difficult, very immersive. But you broke out. And Nux seems to be entirely immune. Fortu was... experiencing difficulties, but he did not seem to be hallucinating, just obsessed with something he could see but not say. I'm trying to work this out. These toxins, they're a mystery, and I solve mysteries. I'm an investigator with the Royal Cavalry Guard, after all."

  He means that he works for the king's secret police. "And you think I've got part of the answer."

  "You have to, right?"

  "I dreamed a different place. Something that wasn't even familiar to me. Someone else's life, something dusty and decayed. A whole lot of stories all mashed together. They weren't nice. It was tragic, futile. It was sort of like having an ordinary life, but.. only in an awful and stilted way."

  "What brought you out of it?"

  "I don't remember," I shrugged. "I think I was getting married?..."

  He considered. "Odd. You'd think that symbols of commitment in a hallucination like that would reflect giving up and allowing the delusions to take over. Was that what it felt like?"

  "I don't think so," I said. "I can kinda see the sort of story where getting married in a drugged dream is like giving up and letting the hallucination take over forever... but this was not that. There's another aspect." I remembered the dreary setting, the sense that I was not in control, the belief that I was pushed into things.

  "So who were you getting married to? In your hallucination-dream?"

  "I don't know," I shrugged. "It doesn't matter. He didn't matter. It wasn't about that, it was just about the act of being married." I frowned. "Not the wedding, but... the whole life that came after."

  "Hmm," he said. "I've been watching around. Kimothy got brushed by a leaf and was almost immediately incapacitated. Larianne is almost as immune as Nux, Tiviti almost as much so. But Thumper is very susceptible, even more than I am. I know there's something relating these. A pattern there."

  He moved up, and Nux dropped back. He handed me his sketchbook.

  I flipped pages. I checked his math. "Oh. Oh, I see," I chortled. "Yes, this is exactly why I asked you to come along."

  He tore out those pages and handed them off, before admonishing me: "Wind among theater, damn he's lovely chugging fairy mulch. Everyone suffers for it, every time."

  "Thanks for the tip," I said, with a weak smile. "By the way, when we get to the bad guys, I'm gonna put an axe in your hand. When that happens, you don't need to hold back at all."

  "Fear hat wheelie hot rear woolly?" he asked me, and I had no way to answer a question like that. He tried a few more phrases, but each one was less comprehensible. Sometimes his words are weird but comprehensibly part of a sentence structure, other times it's a genuine word salad. And then, when he's discussing weapons and violence, he is almost articulate.

  I think that the less violent his intentions, the less he's connected to reality. There's no way to check that, but it matches all the facts I've collected. I developed that theory early, and nothing has contradicted it.

  The group ahead of us was slowing, stopping, bunching up behind Quarl. I checked the sun position. I'm not a farm girl, I just play one in minstrel's songs, but that looks like a midmorning sun to me.

  We looked through the wiry shrubbery, down at the hollow below. A clearing two hundred yards across, barely big enough for the village that made it up, almost half that space was taken by a huge sinkhole that fell away into a profound darkness, with a frozen river that poured immobile into those depths. The temple on the far side of the village rose up, and the mud-brick huts clustered tightly to its base, shabby and miserable. People thronged below, bright and vibrant from this distance. There was a lot going on, a real buzz of activity, but from here there was not much detail.

  "Barbarian village," I said quietly. "All right, we don't have a lot of time, unfortunately. No scouting, no extensive planning. We've arrived in time to help, but not enough to do this cautiously. We go in loud. Make a good aggressive display, let the noncombatants get out of the way, and then it's just us against the bad guys. We're headed for the top of the temple. Go!"

  And while they slid down the edge of the sloped crossing, I marked the main points of interest. The main trail through the village, the point where the river entered the sinkhole, and then the step-sided pyramidal temple on the far side. Below me there were shouts of anger. Quarl's crossbow clanged. Moments later there were screams of outrage. I flung myself forward off the edge, flying down to catch up with my team.

  The scrum was in full swing, picket-guards of the barbarian village were hand-to-hand and toe-to-toe against Thumper, Tiviti, Larianne, Sir Maspers and three giant geese. Tiviti's sword was glowing red and left smoking trails in the air, she chopped down against the knapped-stone axes of her opponents and smashed apart their bone-and-leather shields. Thumper killed an enemy with a precise jab, then reset her stance and did it again. Sir Maspers was facing more than his fair share, but fighting defensively- he was not fighting to kill but to keep pressure off the others so they could thrive. Larianne was a hellcat, her talons carving through everything in front of her, and only the need to not get surrounded was slowing her down- she wanted to leap forward and find the next enemy but if she stepped out of line she'd get hit from all sides. The geese were doing surprisingly well, vicious animals even before they were scaled up to the size of a horse. Licard was in the back, throwing rocks over his teammates to try to injure or distract the barbarians. He really did not come equipped to help out during a fight.

  Sir Maspers saw me enter the fray, and called over the clash of weapons. "They're not listening to reason! Just immediately attacked!"

  I guess you can't expect people raised in the midst of monsters to have a finely-honed sense of restraint and hospitality when new people come out of the wilderness.

  And I turned my attention to the barbarians themselves: lean and wiry, muscular without a spare ounce of fat. They had brightly-colored hair and wildly-colored eyes, their skin was multi-hued and often carried fanciful designs under their threadbare and too-thin clothing. They were sickly-looking and hollow-eyed, but they fought with expert training, sharp coordination, and a courage as if pain was an old dear friend and fear a total stranger. Their weapons were primitive, their energy was dangerously manic. And no matter how many were slain, the rest just seemed more eager to come at us. At the back was a barbarian corpse with a crossbow bolt sticking through his chest, dressed in robes that probably indicated a caster of some type. Quarl had chosen that one to die before the fight started in earnest.

  "These are not noncombatants!" I called out. "Kill or be killed!"

  This first group was numerous, and strong- and I had definitely overestimated my party's ability to take them on alone. They were going to need my help. I conjured a steel spear for myself, and channeled the lightning energy into myself. The world slowed down almost to a stop, air like thickened treacle. I moved forward, my weapon trailing a few fat snapping sparks.

  At these speeds I could inflict many cuts and wounds, but I did not have my steel-essence strength, so I would not deliver any conclusive blows. Still, I moved down the line, stepping only into the air I've thinned and cleared, and stabbed out. I did not go for kill shots, those would not work with my Strength, and I did not go for distracting painful wounds because the barbarians did not care. I jabbed at them wherever I could, and used the steel spear to carry a bit of a levin charge, shocking them with a stunning sting. Over and over, electricity crackled down my spear, and I was able to tag six of them before I had to stop and relax my speed, breathing heavily.

  I could hear the difference in the battle immediately, six enemies that froze, that hesitated, that lost their limbs for a moment, and were struck down instantly. Medium-voltage electricity is a great way to make people lock up for a couple of seconds, and locking up for a couple seconds is a good way to turn the tide of a battle. As if he understood my tactic, Nux moved in, carrying his stungun, and with his long arms he reached under Larianne's elbow to zap the guy she was fighting, buying her a chance to get the kill shot as well.

  It seemed like it only took a second for the fight to turn from a pitched battle between us and them to a deadly silence with my friends and love interests standing over the bodies of the dead, dying, wounded and disabled, those who could no longer threaten us. As loud and immediate and close as hand-to-hand combat is, the moment it ends is always weirdly hushed, like the eye of a hurricane.

  "That way," Sir Maspers gasped, jabbing a pointing finger down the main thoroughfare, and we charged up the mud-paved street. I glanced over my shoulder- the cold-mud huts behind us were disgorging a flood of noncombatants: the elderly, children, pregnant women, people with dire injuries or deformities. They were scrabbling in the mud, with knives, right where we had fought. Every one of them starveling, gaunt to skeletal, and wild-eyed. They fell on the dead with open mouths and flashing stone blades, cutting away parts and feeding themselves as fast as they could. It was gory, visceral, and repulsive. It was a vivid reminder that we could not afford to be felled here.

  I hated knowing that I would see this again and again in just a couple more years.

  Speaking of that, we still had to push forward, and get to the real threat. Picket guards protecting the village from outside threats is not our real problem here, not by a long shot.