The cavern chimed as footsteps echo among the earth.
Sawyer did not look back as he carried the woman out of the nest. Her weight was light in his arms—too light for someone who had lived as long as she had. The tunnel narrowed as it rose, stone giving way to packed earth, the Song pulling inward around them as if reluctant to follow. In front of him, muddling the light, movement gathered. Footsteps. Voices. Another group returning. The whistle rang, slow and even, and let the melody settle into a soft, sustained thread—gentle enough to pass for a mother's embrace. Starting from the front, the goblins fell like dominoes in Sawyer's wake.
Sawyer shifted his grip, drawing the woman closer until her head rested beneath his chin. Her fingers twitched once, then stilled as he lifted her higher with one arm, the motion practiced, careful—measured so her weight never dragged, never jarred. The melody held. It lay across the tunnel like a blanket laid with intent.
His free hand found the hilt.
Steel whispered out, quiet as breath. He did not stop walking.
The first goblin lay slumped against the wall, mouth open in a half-formed sound that never came. Sawyer stepped past the body's reach and ended it with a single, economical motion, blade guided by memory rather than sight. He did not look down. He kept his eyes on the pale seam of light ahead, where the tunnel thinned and the air changed.
Another lay face-down in the dust, limbs folded wrong, chest rising slow and unaware. A step. A turn of the wrist. The blade returned to neutral before the body understood it had been addressed. The melody did not waver. Neither did his pace.
He adjusted the woman again when the ground sloped, angling her away from the wall so her hair would not brush stone. Blood darkened the floor behind him in brief, precise shapes that the darkness quickly swallowed. There was no rush to it. No anger. Only continuation.
By the time the cave began to breathe daylight, the passage behind him had gone quiet in a way that could not be mistaken for sleep. Sawyer sheathed the blade without ceremony. The melody thinned, then slipped away.
Outside, the air was cool and honest. He stepped into it without slowing, carrying the woman into the morning as if nothing inside the dark had ever asked him to stop.
The forest received him without comment.
Leaves muted his steps. Moss softened the weight he carried. Light filtered through the canopy in broken panes, pale and indifferent, touching his shoulders and slipping away as if unwilling to linger. Sawyer moved between trunks and roots with the same steady pace he had kept underground, the transition from stone to soil changing nothing about the set of his shoulders or the line of his breath.
The woman's arm swayed as a breeze threaded through the trees. He tightened his hold instinctively, noticing his grasp getting weaker. His breath warmed the cold morning air. It was the only warmth he noticed.
The Song was back. Quiet and heavy.
It stretched across the forest in long, cautious lines. It did not brush against him. It did not try to measure him. It followed at a distance, as if unsure of its own safety.
Sawyer let it be.
Branches brushed his sleeves. A bird startled from the undergrowth and vanished in a flutter of sound. Somewhere far off, something heavier moved, unaware and unconcerned. Life continued, balanced and intact, asking nothing of him.
He did not look back.
The path ahead was unclear, but that had stopped mattering. Step after step, the forest opened just enough to let him pass, then closed again behind him, swallowing tracks, swallowing echoes. By the time the trees thinned and the light grew steadier, there was nothing left to mark where he had come from.
Only that he was still walking.
Only that he had not put her down.
The forest did not answer his thoughts.
It only gave him space to have them.
Sawyer walked until the rhythm of his steps became something he no longer consciously measured. Left. Right. Breath. The woman's weight remained constant in his arms—an unchanging truth anchoring him to the present while everything else drifted backward into the dark he had left behind.
He had learned the truth.
Not rumors. Not fragments. Not a convenient story shaped to justify fear.
The whole of it—raw, grotesque, and irreversible.
He had learned what the goblins were before the world taught them to become what they were now. What had been taken from them. What had been twisted until only instinct remained. A wound so old it no longer remembered being anything else.
And knowing that had not stayed his hand.
He replayed the nest without meaning to.
The way the Song had screamed there—not in warning, but in recognition.
The way memory had flooded him, violent and intimate all at once.
The certainty that settled in his chest the moment understanding completed itself.
They could not stop.
They could not heal.
They could only repeat.
Sawyer's jaw tightened, just enough to register. He adjusted his grip on the woman again, not because she moved, but because he had.
He had slaughtered everything inside the nest.
Not in frenzy.
Not in panic.
Willfully. In sequence.
He remembered the resistance more than the killing itself. The way some yielded to inevitability and others fought back in vain. The way silence returned too easily afterward. What disturbed him was how for a moment—he could not see faces. He refused to notice.
And the woman—
His steps slowed, then resumed.
He had let her bleed.
The fact sat in him without dramatics. Without denial.
Blood could be stopped. Pain could no longer be endured. But time—time did not wait for moral accounting. Slowing meant staying. And staying meant more silence in a world that does not welcome it.
Sawyer exhaled slowly through his nose.
What must be done. What he didn't.
The phrase returned again and again, stripped of comfort. It no longer sounded like duty. It sounded like inevitability wearing a cleaner name.
If mercy only delayed suffering—
If understanding did not change outcome—
If allowing life meant condemning others later—
Then what, exactly, was he preserving by hesitating?
The forest creaked softly around him. Trees shifted in the wind. Somewhere, water moved over stone. None of it judged him. None of it absolved him either.
He looked down at the woman for the first time since leaving the cave.
Her face was slack with a blank expression, color leeched thin. Blood had soaked into the fabric at his forearm, dark and cooling. His thumb pressed gently against her shoulder, grounding—to wake her, to confirm.
Her body was still here.
Unmoving.
Sawyer kept walking.
Not because he believed himself right.
But because stopping would mean admitting that understanding had changed nothing—and that was a truth he was not yet ready to face.
The forest thinned ahead of him.
Canvas and wood replaced bark and leaf. The smell of smoke—old, guarded—cut through the damp earth. Sawyer slowed for the first time since leaving the nest, not from fatigue, but from awareness. Voices carried now. Sharp. Fractured. The sound of people who had been waiting too long without answers.
The wagons stood in a loose defensive ring, lanterns lit despite the morning. Adventurers moved along the perimeter in short, restless paths—hands on hilts, eyes scanning tree lines that refused to explain themselves. Someone was arguing in a low voice. Someone else had climbed atop a wagon for a better view. The Song pressed tighter here, heavy with concern, threading through tension that had nowhere to settle.
Sawyer stepped into view.
For half a breath, no one noticed.
Then Agnes did.
She turned sharply—then froze. Her eyes stared unto Sawyer's before dropping to the woman in his arms. To the blood darkening his sleeve. To the way his shoulders sat too straight, too still, as if he were holding himself together by force alone.
"Sawyer?" Her voice cut through the movement like a snapped cord. "—Sawyer!"
The camp reacted instantly. Weapons shifted. People turned. A path opened without anyone meaning to make it.
Agnes crossed the distance at a near run, stopping just short of him. She didn't reach for the woman. Didn't touch him. Her eyes searched his face instead, quick and sharp, as if checking for cracks.
"Are you—" She swallowed. Tried again. "Are you alright?"
Sawyer looked at her.
The question did not land where it should have.
"I found her," he said. His voice was steady. Even.
Only then did Agnes move. She stepped in, hands coming up carefully, testing weight, balance—her ranger's instincts shifting seamlessly into triage. As she took the woman from him, her fingers brushed the blood at his forearm. She flinched despite herself.
"She's—," Agnes said, too quickly.
Someone ran. The camp surged into motion, relief and fear colliding all at once.
Sawyer stood where he was, arms slowly lowering once the weight left them. They felt lighter than they should have. Empty.
Agnes hesitated, then looked back at him. Really looked this time.
"…What ha—" she asked quietly. Before a small voice cut her off.
"Mama?"
Sawyer's gaze drifted past her, to the young girl clinging to Aluna's side. His mind then went back to the time where the sunlight reflected in the fields paled in comparison to the bright smile she showed the world. A time mother and daughter faced the world together.
The Song pressed in.
Harder.
It did not hum. It did not guide. It crowded—a weight behind the eyes, a tightening around the ribs. Faces blurred first. Not vanished—just… smoothed. Features lost their edges, mouths moving without shape, eyes becoming pale impressions where meaning should have been. Agnes spoke again, but the words arrived stripped of sound.
The girl said something. He could not see her mouth move.
His hand lifted.
In his vision—too sharp, too close—his fingers surged forward and closed around a child's throat. Skin warm. Fragile. The grip tightened without anger, without hesitation, the way one tightens a knot that must not slip. The Song roared approval and denial all at once. The fields burned white. The smile collapsed.
Sawyer gasped.
Reality snapped back with the violence of a pulled thread.
He was standing exactly where he had been. His hands were empty—open at his sides, trembling just enough to notice. The girl was still there, whole and breathing, staring up at him with wide, uncomprehending eyes. Aluna's arm wrapped around her instinctively, drawing her closer.
Sawyer took a step back.
The Song recoiled, then surged again, insistent, confused by the refusal. He swallowed, forcing breath down into his chest until the pressure eased a fraction. Faces began to return—edges first, then detail. Agnes's concern. Aluna's stillness. The child's fear, real and unimagined.
Aluna looked at him then. Really looked.
Her voice was gentle. Careful.
"Is she—"
"I'm sorry."
The words left him clean and final, severing the thought before it could finish forming.
Aluna closed her eyes.
She tried to guide the girl away, but she bursted through and turned to run towards her mother. The girl slipped free from Aluna's grasp with a suddenness born of small bodies and desperate intent. Bare feet struck packed earth as she ran, calling out again—louder now, hopeful in the way only children could still afford to be.
"Mama?"
She reached her mother's side and dropped to her knees, hands landing clumsily against cold fabric. She poked once. Then again. A little firmer the second time, as if correction alone might fix what was wrong.
"Mama, wake up."
Nothing.
Her smile lingered for a heartbeat longer than it should have, frozen in place by expectation. Then it wavered. Cracked. She leaned closer, pressing her forehead against her mother's arm, listening for something she had always been able to hear before.
"Mama…?"
Time stretched.
The girl shook her gently now, impatience bleeding into worry. Her voice thinned. Each call came quicker than the last, piling up without answers to hold them.
"Mama. Mama. Mama—"
Her hands balled into fists, gripping cloth that did not warm beneath her touch. She looked up, eyes searching the ring of adults for confirmation that this was part of a game, that someone would laugh and say there you are.
No one met her gaze.
Understanding did not arrive all at once. It seeped in, slow and cruel. The smile slid from her face as if it had never belonged there. Her breath hitched. Once. Twice. She tried again—one final shake, harder than before, anger slipping into the motion.
"Wake up!"
The cry that followed tore free of her chest without permission. It climbed in pitch and volume, breaking into a wail that did not ask for comfort, only demanded that the world undo itself. She pressed her face into her mother's side, sobbing, shoulders shaking with denial sharp enough to bruise.
"No—no, you're just sleeping—please—"
Hands reached for her. Careful. Reluctant.
Aluna knelt and tried to draw her back, murmuring soft words that could not land. The girl twisted violently, slipping loose again with a strength born from terror. She turned and threw herself forward, wrapping her arms around her mother as if proximity alone could keep her there.
The wailing rose, raw and unfiltered, ripping through the camp and settling into every space silence had tried to occupy.
Sawyer stood where he was.
The sound hit him harder than the Song ever had.
The Song fell silent again—watchful, wary.
And Sawyer did not move, he was confused.
The sound just kept ringing and ringing in his ears. Only this time it was not the Song.