Tongues of flame reached skyward, each one a crackling lash that threw off shadows in the deep dark of the brush.

  Spectres lurked there — things of fang and claw from times long past. Bronwyn wasn’t scared of them. Not anymore. It would take more than the weight of old failures to unsteady his footing.

  Still, he hadn’t taken off his armour. His blade lay naked in the dirt beside him — a rippling surface of bluish steel, glistening in the light of their campfire.

  There was a good reason for that. It had been two weeks since they’d left Earnsdale, the journey slowed by the roughness of the terrain and only a passable understanding of their surrounding landscape.

  In that time, they’d been tested on four separate occasions — small groups of beasts charging out of nowhere. The ambushes might have worked if they were weaker, but he and his team were not green, nor were they weak. They had felled the beasts with ease, yet still, the signs were concerning. The simple fact that they were attacked at all said something was amiss.

  Beasts, most of all, had a sharpened primal understanding of strength.

  They should have known they were outmatched and given them a wide berth — yet they hadn’t.

  He’d wished that they could have learned something from the ambushes, but so far, all they’d been able to tell was that some rabid madness had overtaken the beasts. Unlike what they’d expected, the small packs had been singular in species.

  Unlike the ravening hordes they’d heard tales of from the villages they’d visited — and from the warnings Kaius and his team had given — these were different. The creatures that had attacked them had differed with every ambush. Still, for all the lack of danger, and for all his veteran mentality, Bronwyn found it hard to deny the weight the ordeal left on him.

  With every settlement they visited, fear and despondency had grown thicker in the air, like some grand miasma wafting out of Strangspine to choke all who fell beneath its foul lair. There had been no excitement or smiles at the sight of Silvers come to investigate what the locals had fallen afoul of.

  No — there had only been eyes dull with despondency and frowns lined hard, biting back unspoken questions. They didn’t need to be voiced for him to know what they were.

  Why now? Why not a week earlier, when my parents in the next village over still lived? Why now? Why not when you could have saved my boy?

  Old questions. Familiar questions. But ones that never grew easier. Fate and opportunity were cruel things, he had found.

  He sighed, reaching for the teapot nestled in a pocket of glowing embers at the edge of their fire. The herbal bite of citrus and mint wafted in a steaming gust as he refilled his cup. It was clarifying as he sipped it, but not enough to banish his foul mood.

  They would hit Tyne’s Rest tomorrow, and the weight of that anticipation curdled in his belly. He knew what he would find there — devastation, impotent guilt, and his own inability to turn back the clock. Another regret. Another pack of ghosts to haunt his dark nights.

  A heavy silence in their camp was enough to tell him that his team felt similar. Dross had long since cleared away the remnants of their cooked meal — a simple fare of seared meat, bread, and cheese.

  Julis was doing his best to pretend to read some treatise on magic, his eyes sliding across the page only to halt and climb back up as he re-read a passage he’d only half paid attention to. Even Yanira, usually the most unflappable of them, had a hard line to her mouth as she ran a whetstone over an old hunting knife she used to eat.

  For all the circumstances bothered him — bothered them all — it was an old trial he was long used to. There was a method and a technique to nights like these. As much as he loathed to put in the effort when he would rather crawl under his cloak and stare sightlessly out into the black, he knew he could not.

  Morbidity dulled the mind, sapped will, and blunted blades more surely than anything else. They all knew it. It was impossible not to, after more than twenty years in the field.

  “Dark night it is,” he said slowly, chewing awkwardly through each syllable.

  Yanira snorted, a smile breaking across her features as she shook her head. “Really, Bron? ‘A dark night’?”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  He waved her off, unable to suppress his own small grin. “I’m not a bloody miracle worker. It’s the best I had in the moment, all right?”

  “A reasonable thing, considering the circumstances, I think,” Julis said as he snapped his book closed and leaned back on his arms. “It does get a bit old, doesn’t it?”

  Bronwyn grunted in unison with the rest of his team. The mage didn’t have to elaborate further. They all knew what he referred to — the death, the bodies.

  It was the one thing nobody ever wanted to do, that nobody ever warned you about when you became a Delver.

  Oh sure, you knew the risks, and by extension that you would face loss — that the chances of making it all the way to your peak or retirement without losing a teammate were slim. But those were warriors’ deaths, the heartblood of people who’d signed up for steel and violence. Not people just trying to live their lives.

  He’d signed up to the Guild for adventure and a place where he could grow strong — two things he’d found in abundance. Unfortunate that such a thing had come with an endless procession of graves, ones he could do nothing to prevent.

  Each and every one of them had experienced it. It was impossible to avoid after so long delving.

  They all had those long-toothed spectres lurking in the shadows — old nightmares that hounded them, waiting for a moment of weakness to take a bite. This job was already proving to be another one. Bronwyn only hoped it would be a mundane addition to his collection.

  As horrifying as the thought was, tragedy could become mundane.

  Dross shuffled back, leaning against the gnarled trunk of a tree with thin, spiny leaves. His hand dipped to his waist, pulling free one of the heavy broadhead bolts from his quiver. The ranger stared at the firelight reflecting off its head before he started to twirl it around his fingers.

  “I remember my first bad one,” the ranger said in a deep, gravelly voice. His words were halting and slow, as if dredging up the memory took physical effort. “My worst, really — though that might just be because of how green I still was. It was long before we met. I must’ve been what — low Bronze? Maybe still a Copper.”

  The rest of them quickly fell silent as they gave Dross their full attention.

  “It seemed like any other contract at the time. Unremarkable, beyond the fact that I remember it being quite good. Some vicious beastie — can’t remember its name, but it was all spikes and claws. A predator, large as a wolf. I think the contract warned us it had some minor nature magic, but we might’ve found that out later. Gods’, the team I was working with at the time — we were eager. The thing left tracks a mile wide, it was tough, the pay was good, and it was below us in level. Perfect for some coin. I remember being hopeful it’d be enough for me to brush up on a few of my skills.”

  Bronwyn could see the deep lines cutting their way into the ranger’s face as the man frowned. Despite working with Dross for over a decade, he hadn’t heard this one.

  That in and of itself wasn’t too surprising — they’d all forgotten more stories than most ever experienced. Still, for it to be the ranger’s worst, and so early in his career, he stayed silent, listening to the man’s tale.

  “How’d it go wrong?” Yanira asked, propping her elbow up on her knee as she rested her head in one of her hands.

  Dross kept twirling the bolt. “It wasn’t even the beast. We found it just fine. Our contract said it was lurking in a glade barely a day out of the city. No doubt a spontaneous awakening of a simple animal that had been missed. Still, its tracks were obvious — damn near scratched the hell out of anything it walked past. The fight took a while, with its armoured spines. My vanguard at the time looked like a pincushion afterwards, but we took it down. Problem came later. We kept following its tracks, hoping to find a nest or something. Always best to confirm we didn’t leave a litter behind to grow into another problem in six months.”

  The ranger paused for a moment, tapping his arm and thigh with the bolt.

  “You found nothing good, I suppose?” Ilias asked, prompting him at just the right moment.

  Dross shook his head. “Tracks led us straight to a farmhouse. The thing was using the place as a larder. The cattle were bad enough. The farmer was worse. But…”

  As Dross trailed off, Bronwyn saw the distant, hollow look in the man’s eyes as he stared out into the bush at the old shadows that lurked there.

  “I found a girl there,” he croaked out, a hint of hot frustration giving him a bit of fire. “Bastard of a beast had nailed her to the damn wall. Her legs were missing. Kill looked recent.

  Dross shook his head, shadows lapping at his cheek bones. “Still remember those damn blue eyes — staring at me like I’d killed her myself. All I could think was about how I might’ve spotted those eyes peering out the damn window at us if we’d just pushed on through the night, or hadn’t waited a few days to take the contract after spotting it on the board.”

  The ranger sighed. “I… yeah. You know.”

  There was nothing Bronwyn could do but give his old friend a slow, knowing nod. He did. They all knew.

  The weight of Silver was a burdensome thing. The very strength that elevated them, a curse in its own right. The more their capability rose, the greater their failings when it wasn’t enough. Fallen teammates. Lost charges. Simple collateral damage. They all left their mark.

  The silence hung for a moment before Yanira cleared her throat, prodding at their fire with a long stick.

  Bronwyn gave her his full attention. Moments like this were important. When he was younger, he’d thought dour conversation bad for morale, but he knew better now.

  Death was a reality that could only be bested by being brought into the open. Trying to shove it down and banish it to the dark only heightened stress and left wounds to fester.

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