David sat on a piece of torn fuselage. The metal was warm. A few paces ahead, Mia was talking to Rhea. He’d stopped listening. Jamie was nearby, hunched over a block of ice, trying to carve it into something. The cursed spear was stuck in the ground next to him. David had taken it from Mia, told them he knew what its curse was. Each had balked at the details and looked at him as though he was mad for even wanting it. David hadn’t pushed his mana into the cursed weapon yet. He would.

  He thought about the spear’s description—a weapon that could hit things that weren’t all the way here. That was useful. He thought about Corbin’s loud rules. He thought about the ogre’s den, a place he’d seen in an illusion and now had to find. These were problems. They sat in his head, waiting.

  David watched Jamie try to carve the block of ice. It was supposed to be an ice sculpture of Cinder, his demon. It looked like a lumpy bear with mange. The kid’s tongue was poking out in concentration, like this was arts and crafts hour.

  Around them, the camp hummed. Someone laughed by the fire. Mia braided a strand of her hair. It was calm. It was a calm that set in when people forget where they were.

  They’re treating the most dangerous place in this dimension like a Holiday Inn, David thought. The observation was dry and flat in his mind. They thought this was peace. Instead, it was what happened when you turned your back on a lion because it hadn't eaten you yet. It was one of those perfect, strings of days you had right before everything went straight to hell.

  A feeling sat in his gut, a cold, hard knot. It was the same feeling he’d get back on Earth when a meeting was too smooth, when a deal was too sweet. When a month was too perfect. It was the prickle on his neck for a threat he couldn't see yet. It nagged at him. It wouldn't shake loose.

  It pissed him off. This complacency was a vulnerability. Their vulnerability was his, by proximity. He was surrounded by people having a picnic on a minefield, and the sheer, stupid normalcy of it was the most dangerous thing in the clearing.

  It was unacceptable. He had to fix this.

  Movement drew his eye. A small, compact shape detached itself from the shadow of the wreckage and moved toward him. It was the Scottish Fold cat. It walked with a straight-tailed, businesslike gait, its flat face set. It carried something in its mouth, something small that wriggled and emitted a high, furious squealing.

  The creature was the size of David’s palm. It had two nubby horns, leathery wings plastered to its back, and a sputtering, flickering crown made of tiny flames atop its head. It was a demonic thing, pure and simple. David peered at it. He sensed no soul, not even a simple one.

  The cat walked right up to him. It didn’t look at his face. Its amber eyes were fixed on a point near his boots. It paused, opened its mouth, and let the creature fall. The tiny demon hit the dirt with a soft plop and immediately began scrambling in a circle, its fiery crown guttering, its squeals sharp with outrage. The cat then sat down, turned slightly away, and began meticulously licking a front paw. The offering was complete. No ceremony, no demand for thanks.

  “Hey,” Jamie’s voice cut in. He was still frowning at his melting ice bear. “What’re you doing with my cat?”

  “It’s not your cat, Frozone,” David said, his eyes not leaving the squirming, crowned thing. “What’s up with the snowman? And you seeing this?” He pointed at the tiny, fire-crowned demon.

  Jamie glanced over. “What, the dirt?” He squinted, then shook his head and went back to smoothing a chunk of ice. “The man’s going senile at thirty. That’s rough.”

  Thirty? What the hell did this kid see when he looked at David?

  “I’m not thirty.” David said. “Worry about your snow goon, Olaf. My eyes work just fine. You hit thirty, you can start diagnosing people.”

  The cat had finished its delivery. It sat a foot away, washing its shoulder, utterly disinterested.

  The tiny demon was the size of David's palm. It had two short, black horns curving from its forehead. Leathery wings, like a bat's but scaled down, were plastered tightly to its back. A crown made of fire sat atop its head, a single, cohesive band of flame. Its form was solid and detailed. It scrambled on the dirt with tiny, clawed feet, struggling with apparent injuries, and its squeals were sharp with fury.

  The thing on the ground had no soul. He could still feel that absence. What it had was a dense, violent concentration of demonic energy. His Aspect showed him something else entirely. It was a swirling, compressed storm of color—sickly amber light threaded through with bruised purple and veins of deep, predatory black. The colors surged, threading inwards with a harsh, relentless rhythm and complex pathways that reminded him of his own, yet far denser.

  David focused his mind. His Oracle Aspect activated. A gray, text-filled panel unfolded in his vision, overlaying the squealing creatures strange inner form.

  [Essence of a Corrupted Cthonic Naiad.

  Status: Indignation.

  Description: A rare elemental spirit, a Corrupted Cthonic Naiad. A Spirit of torment and pursuit, a being of The Scalding Expanse, the land between two rivers: an elemental that has become a Cthonic demon sometimes associated with burning decay. They signify burial, pressure, inevitability. And flock to death. Naiads are nature spirits bound to elements, sometimes found in powerful places with potent concentrations of energy. Uncommon, A naiad can be corrupted, becoming predatory, or poisonous — still bound but no longer benevolent. This one has been corrupted, and now embodies Depth rather than surface. Darkness rather than growth. Pressure rather than stability. They exist in a separate plane. Their presence changes environment and reactions. They behave like their element, not living beings but Liminal, unbound forces.]

  The cat stopped washing its paw. It looked at David. Its eyes were a deep, burning amber, almost maroon. A faint, shifting light glowed in its pupils, like coals stirred by a draft. Were its eyes always that color? David thought. The question was a simple observation.

  This cat was smart. Unusually smart. It had brought him a condensed knot of demonic energy. It knew he could consume that energy. This was an offering. A meal it could not eat, delivered to someone who could. The cat assumed the meaning was self-evident. David found himself agreeing with the cat’s assumption.

  He reached his hand down toward the scrambling naiad. The creature shrieked. David reached out and grabbed it. He pressed a single fingertip against its burning crown of fire, and pulled with everything he had, his Energy Affinity turning voracious.

  A surge of raw, violent power ripped out of the tiny form. It flooded up his arm, into his chest. The sensation was a scalding, satisfying rush of raw violent potency. His internal reserve of demonic energy swelled, ticking upward with a solid, heavy feeling of increase. The naiad popped out of existence. A wisp of dark ash drifted down, smelling of a buried forge and deep, dry soil.

  He looked at the cat. “That was a useful gift,” David said. His voice was dry, even, but the meaning was clear.

  He felt in a pouch at his belt. His fingers found a strip of dried meat. He held it out. The cat sniffed the air once. It leaned forward and took the meat delicately from his fingers. It chewed, watching the camp activities with those strange, glowing eyes. David reached over and gave its head a brief scratch. His fingers felt dense, corded muscle under its soft fur. The shifting fire in its pupils pulsed once, slow and deliberate.

  He leaned back on the fuselage. A cat that brings me demonic elementals, he thought. A cat that might be eating these things too. That could explain the new muscle, the sharp intelligence in its gaze, the clear change in its eyes. It was changing. Growing. It could be evolving.

  The cat finished the treat. It gave its shoulder one last, efficient lick. It stood, turned, and trotted off toward Mia, its tail held in a high, confident arc. David watched it go.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  A useful friend to have. He wondered what it would bring him next.

  David’s thoughts turned over the facts. Jamie can’t see it. The Aspect says it’s corrupted, attracted to death. Cinder’s right here. Cinder is death. Maybe that’s the draw. The logic was clean. It made sense.

  The bad feeling in his gut didn’t budge. It sat there, a cold, solid lump of wrong.

  Fine, he thought. Paranoia it is. It was a simple, functional mindset. He sent out a silent, mental command, fueled by nothing but that pure, pragmatic suspicion.

  His giant magic wolf, Fenrir, still wrapped in its flawless invisibility, rose from its resting place and padded to his side. His demon, Cinder, unfolded from its stone-like watch and moved to stand behind his other shoulder, a silent tower of horned shadow and vicious reverence. From its post at the camp’s edge, the hobgoblin elite ceased its patrol and trotted over, its crude armor making soft, clicking sounds.

  David sat on a strip of fuselage that had peeled open like a tin can, knees apart, elbows on his thighs. He kept rubbing at the heel of his palm with his thumb, over and over, as if he were trying to erase something that wouldn’t come off.

  Rhea stepped away from her protégé, without announcing herself, and lowered herself to sit beside him. She didn’t look at the wreckage first, or the smoke still caught in the branches overhead. She looked at him.

  “You look like you’re thinking about something bad,” she said. “Or something worse than bad.”

  David huffed a quiet laugh through his nose. “That’s a pretty wide range.”

  She let that pass. After a moment, she said, “Chloe levelled her healing.”

  He shifted slightly, attention settling.

  “It works faster now,” Rhea went on. “She got something that can stop bleeding outright. She has to keep her hand on the wound to keep it from getting worse. That’s how Theo’s still alive.”

  David nodded once. Faster response, sustained contact, hard stop on blood loss. Good, he thought. The walking hospital’s shaping up nicely. Give it time and I can start charging. He didn’t say any of it.

  She reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out a cigarette. It was bent, the paper creased, like it had been carried around for a long time. She rolled it between her fingers, not lighting it yet.

  David glanced at it, then at her. “You smoke?”

  She shook her head once. “I quit years ago.”

  “Then why—”

  “Mara’s,” Rhea said. She didn’t explain further. She tapped the cigarette against her knuckle, then held it up between them. “Last one.”

  She lit it, took a shallow drag, and immediately winced, coughing once into her sleeve. She didn’t try again. Just let it burn.

  They sat in silenced for a moment, the forest pressing in with its constant noises—wings, leaves, something heavy and too big moving farther off, beyond their sight line.

  David broke first. “They’re getting soft,” he said, nodding toward the camp, barely visible through the trees. “Too comfortable.”

  “They’ll survive,” Rhea said. She exhaled smoke away from him. “We’re all very focused on surviving. Everyone here is adapting. All it’ll take is one herd to hit the wall.”

  “That’s kind of the problem.”

  She didn’t argue. She watched the cigarette burn down, ash lengthening. When it bent, she flicked it away and crushed it under her boot.

  “You’re thinking about leaving,” she said.

  David stiffened. “I didn’t say that.”

  “You don’t have to.” She glanced at his hands. One of his fingers twitched, a small involuntary jerk from the residual power he’d pulled from the elemental, still running rampant. His Demonic Energy Manipulation let it run free, the raw energy, moving to join his circulation. She reached over and pressed two fingers against the side of his wrist, right where the tendon ran.

  “Hey—”

  “Hold still.”

  She increased the pressure, watching his face, not his arm. He hissed, jaw tightening.

  “Okay,” she said, easing off. “Still there.”

  “What was that for?”

  “You keep flexing without meaning to.” She wiped her fingers on her jeans. “Stress does that. So does nerve damage. Yours is the first one.”

  Actually, it’s all the demon stuff turning my body into something that won’t get immediately eaten, he thought. David swallowed and held back the truth. “Comforting.”

  She shrugged. “Usually accurate.”

  He stared out at the trees. “They want to wait. Fortify. Count supplies. Pretend nothing else is happening until it comes to us.”

  “And you don’t.”

  “And I don’t,” he said. “People are missing. People are dead. If we just sit—”

  “We get picked off one by one,” she finished. “Yes. I know the argument.”

  “You sound like you agree.”

  “I do,” she said. “I also understand why they don’t.”

  He looked at her then. “You?”

  She leaned back, bracing herself with her hands on the fuselage. For a moment, her gaze went unfocused, not distant exactly, just occupied.

  “I’m a nurse, you know,” she said. “Back home.”

  David blinked. “You’re kidding.”

  “No.”

  “But you—” He stopped himself from saying she didn’t act like someone who saved lives for a living, then considered his own profession and tried again. “You don’t… talk like one.”

  She snorted, quick and sharp. “Neither do half the nurses I know when they’re not at work.”

  That tracked. He thought about the way she’d moved after the crash—ever since—counting breaths, checking pupils, cataloguing injuries without drama. He felt a brief simmer of embarrassment for not seeing it sooner.

  “When I was a nurse,” Rhea said, “families didn’t fall apart the way people imagine. Not usually. They clung to small, practical things. A chair pulled closer to the bed. A schedule taped to the wall. Someone insisting on brushing a patient’s hair even when it didn’t matter anymore. I used to think it was denial until I realised it was all just… work. The little things was how they stayed upright.”

  She looked up at David’s demon, the scales and towering form standing still as stone, her thoughts all murder and carnage, then Rhea continued.

  “This is the same.” She gestured vaguely toward the camp, the clearing, the half-built wall. “They’re not giving in. They’re choosing something they can touch and improve. The wall is hope. The clearing is hope. Even you are, whether you like it or not. Some people look at you like you’re one of the wall’s blocks. Jamie watches you like you’re proof this place can still make sense—that’s why he’s trying to build that ice version of your demon.”

  Huh? That little twirp looks up to me? Since when? David thought, incredulous, before letting her continue.

  “He wants a demon of his own, like you. They all want to be capable of keeping something alive, or at least intact. It might not look brave from the outside. It might even be stupid. In fact—I know it is. But a few people here are still fighting. This is just the shape their fight takes.”

  Huh. So that’s her read. As a nurse, Rhea understood crisis more than most. Loss. Grief. Rather than cave, they were fighting back in their own way. The wall was hope. David was a block in the wall. People carving ice statues of demons was hope. It was all just ‘work’.

  Regardless, David still thought it was stupid. He didn’t sign up to be anyone’s wall, or hope for that matter. He certainly wasn’t prepared to die for it. His paranoid call to surround himself with his thralls was clear proof. Hope or no, he wasn’t interested. It’s still just sitting in a room waiting for the ceiling to fall in.

  “You being a nurse, despite your silence this whole time—Mara knew,” he said.

  Rhea nodded. “She liked that I could make decisions without asking how people felt about them.”

  “She trusted you.”

  “Yes.”

  The word landed hard between them.

  “She died because we waited,” David said. She died because she was a liability, he thought.

  Rhea didn’t correct him. She shifted closer, enough that their shoulders brushed. She didn’t pull away.

  “She died because everything here is wrong,” she said. “Waiting didn’t help. Running wouldn’t have guaranteed anything either.”

  “But you still think we should move. Like me.” At least someone in here has brain cells, he thought.

  Rhea didn’t respond. “Yes,” she said. “But not in the same way.” She turned slightly toward him. “They’re all scared. Some of them see you as a risk. Corbin and Evan’s do. Not because you’re careless. Because you’re willing.”

  “To do what?”

  “To do anything, get your chest blown apart by a floating priest, walk into a warlocks burning fire. Face a warg the size of a house alone,” she said, simply. “If it means answers. Or leverage. Or a way out. I think it scares them. They think you’ll get people killed.”

  David didn’t deny it. But he found the part about getting them killed deeply ironic. He would literally watch this place crumble and push the blocks if it meant he’d survive. But based on just his actions since they’d landed, If anything, he was the one that had kept everyone alive.

  “And you?” he asked.

  She was quiet for a long beat. Then: “I don’t want you to die.”

  The bluntness of it caught him off guard more than any speech would have.

  “That’s… direct,” he said.

  “I don’t see the point of dressing it up,” she replied. “I watched Mara go and never come back in under a minute. I know exactly how fast people disappear here.”

  He felt his throat tighten. “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I.” She stood, brushing leaves from her pants. “Which is why I’m telling you this.”

  She met his eyes, steady. “If you go against them, they won’t stop you. But they won’t back you either. And if something goes wrong, they’ll blame you. Even if they were wrong to wait.”

  “That’s unfair,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  She hesitated, then added, “If you go… don’t go alone.”

  He was going to say ‘I’m not alone,’ but then he studied her face, searching for irony or distance. There was none.

  “You’d come?” he asked.

  “I don’t like wasting people,” Rhea said. “Especially ones who are still useful.”

  He smiled, despite himself.

  “There it is,” he said. “That clinical bedside manner.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Get some rest, David.”

  She walked back toward the camp, then paused.

  She turned to leave, paused, and glanced back. “And stop sanding your hand down.”

  He looked at it, flexed his fingers once, deliberately, then let them rest. “I’ll invoice myself.”

  Rhea snorted despite herself and kept walking.

  David stayed on the fuselage, sorting the implications, then stood as the others arrived—already adjusting the plan.

  Through Jamie’s big mouth, the group had caught wind he’d was going to take the spear. But that was fine. He’d planned for it. It would be a good opportunity to test their stock and see how far each person was willing to go.

  Everyone wanted to know what each weapon could do. How cursed each thing was.

  Looks like show-and-tell is back on the schedule, he thought.