#either that or cast silence so he can scream into a sending stone at caleb

[rainbowcaleb]

where is Essek in all this? personally I think he cast silence on himself and is currently screaming into a pillow of his robes

[punishandenslavesuckers]

Mollymauk Tealeaf wakes up in a grave by the road ten years after he died. Things have gone a bit wrong since then and he might be the only one who can set things right… since it’s the Mighty Nein themselves who’ve gone wrong. AU: Where Molly comes back to yell at his super-powered Level 20 friends. (AO3 - part1) (AO3 - part 2) (AO3 - part3) (AO3 - part4)

Molly hits the ground. Not hard, but he hits the ground, like someone dropped him gently. The grass cushions his head, presses into the nape of his neck. For a moment he lies there blinking. The air’s warm, his jacket pooled underneath him, his fingers slack in the silk and embroidery, one knee bent up while he lies there breathing. A silver bowl of moonlight hangs full in the sky above him and the sight feels so familiar, so comforting, Mollymauk feels a sting suddenly of homesickness and relief he hadn’t been previously aware of.

He sits up slowly.

There’s a person with long black hair sitting cross-legged at his feet. They’re hauntingly pale, beautiful, and familiar. Their armor bristles with raven feathers and shines in places but consumes the light in others. Their cloak gathers as shadow on the ground beneath them and they’re looking at Molly with an expression he interprets, faintly, as the sorrow of bystanders. A helpless empathy. When Molly just stares blankly at them for a full ten seconds, they get up and move to kneel beside him. When he doesn’t knowledge the move, the stranger touches his shoulder. Gently. Like they might brush a wound. 

“Hey,” says the stranger.

“What happened?” Molly rasps. He presses palm to his face, realizes there are tears on his cheeks. “Shit.” Molly wipes the dampness with the back of one hand, swallowing. “Why did he do that?”

“I don’t know,” says the stranger. “But I’m sorry.”

“Heh, I thought I was supposed to fix things.” He reverses his hand, finishes drawing off his tears with the heel of his palm. “He looked… he knew I was me. I could see he – fuck.” Molly drops his face briefly into his hands, breathes, drops his arms again. “What the hell was I supposed to do?”

The stranger shakes his shoulder until he looks up at them. Their eyes are dark, holding his gaze fully, drawing him in with physical gravity that pulls Molly’s head to the left. They touch the side of his face with the back of two fingers and before Molly can wonder what they’re doing… the façade buckles a little. Their brow knits with a phantom pain. 

“Do you want to stop?” they ask.

“What?”

“I’m your guide and your guardian, Mollymauk Tealeaf. I can do either. Just say which.” And when Molly just stares, confused, he goes on urgently, “I’m tasked to you. I’ll guard you here while you fight on… or I’ll take you up right now and guide you back to the Moonweaver. It’s your choice, alright? Always. I’m with you either way.”

Molly slips a wry smile. “I can’t stop. Not really.”

The stranger, who Molly knows now is certainly a reaper, falters. Then sobers.

“No. Fuck that. You can stop. You don’t have to do this –”

“No,” Molly says. “I have to.”

There’s a pause. “What do you want to do?”

“Give me a minute. Do we have a minute?”

“We always have time here.”

Molly pulls his legs up a little, arms draped over his knees, staring down the slope of the hill to the quiet meadows beyond. When this goes on long enough, the raven knight takes a seat beside him, mimicking his posture, and likewise waits in silence. Eventually, because it seems like the thing to do, Molly tips over slightly so he’s leaning on them, his cheek resting against their shoulder. The feathers tickle a little. The stranger doesn’t seem bothered.

“Oh, fuck me, I guess.” Molly sighs and sits up again. “Alright. Send me back.”

“Hey,” says the raven knight. They move to kneel in front of him, taking Molly’s face gently between gloved hands. They slap him gently on the cheek and smile. “Just stay alive.”

“Easier said than –”

They grab his shoulders and shove Molly straight down to –

 Molly jolts alive, hard, sucking a loud, ragged breath. He’s lying on his back in the sand and someone is cradling the nape of his neck, a hand pressed against his chest. It takes a dizzy moment for the stars to clear from his eyes and his vision to refocus, the face overhead sharpening slowly and for a strange moment Molly is baffled by the anxious pink and gray firbolg that clarifies over him. He’s not sure who else he was expecting though.

“You’re okay?” Caduceus says sounding shaken.

“I am?” Molly says.

Caduceus ignores his question.

He makes a hand motion, says a word, and presses his thumb against Molly’s forehead. It’s familiar. Molly recognizes the Death Ward magic as it takes root in his soul again. A warm net to pull him back from the cold. It’s only then Molly notices that Caduceus is bleeding from the forehead, red slick soaking the downy fur from his right temple to his throat. He doesn’t seem bothered by it.

“Are you okay?” Molly manages.

“That’s a funny thing to ask considering you were dead a minute ago.”

“Yeah. Funny that. Ugh. My head’s ringing.”

“Yes, being dead will do that,” says Caduceus and then he pushes Molly down in the sand. “Can you just hold still for a minute?” He waits to see if Molly resists. “Okay. Thanks. Just need to do one thing…”

His hand withdraws and he yanks a pouch from his belt. There’s pre-mixed vial of what looks like ground red crystal and spice which he crushes in his palm, ignoring the blood it draws. He uncorks a flask of what must be holy water and pours it over his closed fist, then he starts to speak. Molly feels the air… twitch, then shiver, then hum. Caduceus is completely thralled by the spell, speaking non-stop, softly, eyes closed. Steam rises off his closed fist.

Which is about the moment Molly hears something explode.

He sits up on his elbows and looks past Caduceus.

There, sitting on the beach and glowing faintly, is a large pale dome of solid magic. At its center is Caleb Widowgast. He’s looking very, very harried. He’s pulled a scroll from his pocket, has it open in front of him as he reads it, mouth moving, glancing distractedly up from time to time.

It’s admirable concentration considering what’s going on outside.

Yasha – lovely Yasha whom Molly knows best from the road, from nights under carnival tents, and the chaos of circus lights and laughter – is presently a screaming pillar of lightning. She hovers a full twenty feet above the beach. Her wings are out, but they don’t move or seem to carry the air beneath them. Rather, sheets of shadows are spread like the thin skin along their frame of bone, sparking with black necrotic energy. In Yasha’s fist is the massive black sword he saw before.

She’s presently hammering her sword against the top this dome.

Which doesn’t fully encapsulate the scene, because every time she swings the sword, the air ignites at the point of impact, detonating outward in a furious wind that tosses Yasha’s hair and knocks sand across the beach. She’s hitting the shield so hard, with such force, Molly can feel it in his bones it would cleave stone like butter. The air stinks like ozone and the cold tang of necrotic magic. Over and over and over she hits, tireless, machine-like. Psychotic.

Molly’s never seen her like that before.

“I said don’t move,” says Caduceus, starting Molly out of his horrified trance.

The firbolg firmly plants a hand against Molly’s chest and thumps him flat on his back again in the sand. His other hand, the one he used for whatever spell he was casting, is empty and covered in ash. He peers down at Molly, frowning.

“I’m serious. Don’t move.”

Molly gives him a baffled look and hisses, “You want me to play dead?”

“Yes.” Caduceus rather industriously brushes Molly’s hair into his face, ignoring his sputter. “Stop.”

Molly obeys mostly because he’s too indignant and confused to be contrary. Caduceus looks over his shoulder toward Yasha. She’s breathing heavy, bare shoulders heaving, having swung back in the air to wind up for another attack. But the moment she sees Clay she freezes.  As if she’d been waiting for him to signal her… and the cleric shakes his head.

Son of a bitch, Molly thinks and starts to get up, but Clay gestures and Molly feels the familiar seizing wrench of Hold Person, the spell latching into his spine like a creeping vine around his nerves. Molly still manages to snarl, struggling invisibly against the enchantment, through his teeth.

“What the bloody fuck are you doing?”

“I’m sorry,” Caduceus says beneath his breath, “but she won’t win if she doesn’t keep her rage.”

Molly immediately looks (with just his eyes) to Yasha. She’s still floating aloft but is shaking her head frantically. She presses her fists to the sides of her temples, the sword in her hand like it weighs nothing. Her face contorts with silent, animal agony and for a moment she curls in on herself. Then she screams.

Lightning strikes and burns the beach bone white and in the split second between one moment and the next, her hands slam into the dome, her sword pinned flat against it.

“CALEB!” Her voice is deafening. She slams her fists against the barrier, screaming, “WHAT DID YOU DO!?” Then almost sobbing, “WHY!? WHY DID YOU DO THAT?”

But Caleb doesn’t seem able to answer. He’s frozen, staring up at her through the shimmering pane between them, just watching the fallen aasimar as she wails. As she hunches like she’s wounded, her fingers digging into the layer of magic and sparking with current where she touches it. She stares down through it like glass in a shop front to the man who just killed her friend and for a moment, there’s nothing but the sound of the ocean on the shore.

“Drop this spell,” Yasha says.

“So you can kill me?” Caleb asks, almost in wonder.

“Drop this spell,” Yasha snarls. Her eyes ignite. The sword in her fist reacts to her and the blade flares, burns white phosphorous bright and becomes blinding shard of pure bottle blue starfire. Yasha’s eyes are composed of the same arrested lightning. She rears back and slams a fist into the dome. She screams, “DROP THIS SPELL AND FACE ME!”  

“You’ll forgive me,” Caleb says. “You’ll forgive me when I get Beau back.”

Then the scroll in his hand disintegrates.

Immediately, a screaming tear opens with a crack in the air to some 200 meters behind the dome and disgorges a massive, howling, two-story tall mass of rust-red muscle and bone. Giant gorilla-like arms slam down, driving enormous twin pincers into the sand. The beast pulls itself from the hell dimension it was summoned from, its head a horror of distended fangs and a crown of jutting horn, fiendish eyes burning red in deep sockets of bone. The air goes sour with the stench of the fire plane before that brief, shrieking window tunnels shut behind it.

And then there’s a glabrezu standing on the beach.

“Oh,” says Caduceus. Then, “Darn it.” He brings his wrist to his mouth, speaking into the charm on his wrist. “Yasha. I just cast Forbiddance on the ground around Caleb. Sorry. I didn’t want him to run.”

“Height?” comes Yasha’s voice, distracted.

“Sixty by sixty by ten.”

“Good. No matter what he says, you keep him here for me.”

Yasha looks up from the dome, staring at the snarling pit-beast across from her the way you look up when a door opens in a room, then she looks back down into the dome where Caleb is still looking up at her. Her palm is pressed still against the barrier and from there she pushes gently off its surface. She floats up and back, until she’s over thirty feet up. Her sword hangs by her knee.

“Keep your wall,” she says. She grips the hilt of her blade and black veins begin to pulse slow from her eyes, spidering her face in dark capillaries. “I am deathless, Caleb! You can run if you want but I am coming for you!”

And then she vanishes. A lightning strike of magic leaves an after image. She reappears simultaneously directly in the air above the glabrezu. Screaming, she slams her sword point down straight into the top of its spine. The sky splits again and a bolt of lightning forks from the sky, jagging to the hilt of the sword like a grounding rod and the glabrezu howls. Yasha tears the blade free just in time to be backhanded by a gigantic forearm, the force of the blow sending her in a rocketing trajectory straight into the side of a cliff-face 200 meters out. She craters through the rock like a meteorite… then immediate wrenches herself out from the rubble.

“Caduceus,” says a Caleb’s voice suddenly, distracting Molly from the extremely upsetting vision of his best friend fighting a pit fiend. “Dismiss your spell or I’ll summon something actually dangerous and I’ll put it right on top of you. You have ten seconds.”

Clay blinks, one long ear flicking up slightly. “Hmm. No.”

Then, clearly from the pendant, “You think that casting ring makes you powerful? I gave it to you, Caduceus. Don’t try this.”

The firbolg shrugs. “Killing me won’t dispel the effect. Do it if you want, but you’re not teleporting away now.”

There’s a pause.

Then Caleb says quietly, “You want her to kill me, Clay?”

Caduceus says nothing and across the beach, Yasha dives out of the sky. She rips her sword across the titan’s back with a massive two-handed swing that knocks it staggering into the sea. Lighting strikes again, illuminating it as Yasha cleaves her blade down again with such monstrous, unfathomable force it splits one giant clavicle, snapping ribs as it carves down. Blood floods the waves. Her wings flare, dripping blood and sea water.

“You think I won’t kill you too?” Caleb asks, ignoring the battle entirely.

Caduceus kneels there. Says, “You just killed a dear friend. I don’t think you’ll kill another.”

Across the beach, Caleb slams a fist into the inside of the dome wall. “Drop the spell, Caduceus! Don’t make me hurt you!”

“No,” says the cleric.

“You were never one of us,” Caleb hisses. “You were just Mollymauk’s replacement. I killed Molly! Do you understand? You think I won’t kill you too? Because let me tell you: of all the Nein, I’ve always found you the most expendable.”

Caduceus’ enduring calm seems to flicker, for just a second. “You don’t mean a word of that.”

“Drop the spell or I’m going to –!”

The gunshot rings out across the beach.

There’s an impact against the top right of the dome, a spark of arcane light that implodes to a single, burning singularity… then the bullet unleashes a wave of arcane power that Molly cannot identify and the dome shatters. No. It disintegrates. Caleb lunges back from the wall, stumbling. As he dome falls, a fresh shield of blue magic spins up from his hands… just in time as the second gunshot puts a slug into the magic at Caleb’s knee.

He looks… honestly, devastated.

“Nott?” he rasps.

The third gunshot ricochets off the shield and Caleb immediately starts to run. As he does, the makes a two-handed gesture, presses his hands to his chest and – with sudden and a shocking burst of speed – sprints straight to his left.

Caduceus immediately says a spell word. Caleb shouts one back. Nothing happens. Caduceus lunges to his feet then. The firbolg’s voice, usually so steady, takes on a sudden lion-ish sub-vocalization and he roars, “STOP!”

And Caleb, seized by the sudden arcane command, doesn’t quite stop… but he trips, staggering, forcing his way through it...

The fourth shot hits him in the back of knee.

So he doesn’t make it to the edge of the anti-teleportation field. He goes down.

Nott appears then, as if from thin air, on a cropping of rock about twenty meters away to Molly and Caduceus’ left. She’s standing up, her hood sliding from her hair as she shells a spent cartridge from the chamber of her weapon, the long metal barrel weirdly matte in the half light of the coming dawn. Her eyes glow slightly, lantern yellow as the wind buffets her hair around her small, round face. For a moment she just stands there, unmoving, listening to Caleb scream though a shattered kneecap.

Through the communicator, Molly can hear Caleb wailing, over and over, “Why?” Saying Nott’s name and just, “Why are you with them?!”

“I’m sorry,” Nott whispers. She’s shaking. “I’m so sorry, Caleb.”

Then she turns and immediately shoots Caduceus. He wasn’t expecting that so it nails him, easily, in the upper right torso and puts the firbolg down like a sack of bricks. Clay hits the sand on his back, crying out just once, his long body curling instinctively in the sand. He clutches at his ribs, at the collar of his armor, choking as shell-shocked lungs fail to draw in oxygen. There’s no blood though. Just the airless stunning effect of being shot, almost point blank, through his armor.

Nott is sobbing at this point. She’s doubled over, her weapon still braced against her shoulder. Two teammates felled in less than ten seconds and she’s weeping.

Clay’s hold person charm unlatches itself from Mollymauk’s spine about then.

“Nott,” he says immediately. He pushes himself into a sitting position. “Hey, Nott? Nott, it’s okay. No need to get dramatic. Okay?”

Her head snaps up. She stares down at Molly from her sniper’s perch.  

“Molly?” she croaks. Her eyes are the size and shape of two coins in her face.

“Hi,” he says. “Please stop shooting people?”

“How are you not dead?” says Nott. She sounds like she’s in shock. “He… he killed you. You’re dead. No one can survive that.”

Molly tries to be calm in the face of his own rattling terror. “Clay brought me back again.” A beat. “I think.”

“You can’t… that’s not… You can’t do that! No one can–!” Nott’s eyes go wide, horrified. “You have to stop Yasha,” she whispers, dread welling in her pretty gnomish face. “You have to stop her! She’ll kill him! She’ll kill Caleb! Go! GO RIGHT NOW! PLEASE! I know he hurt you but–?!”

Molly is already on his feet.

He sprints, bee-lining it straight toward the water, a blur of magic-accelerated tiefling as Nott’s enchanted rings launch him at twice his usual speed from a runner’s crouch toward the shore. He glances, just once, in Caleb’s direction as he comes parallel and sees the wizard staring at him. Time slows, not truly but in that infinitesimal second of recognition Caleb’s face is rigid with shock, confusion, and a strange undercurrent of terror as the thing he just killed goes running past him. Untouched. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but Molly thinks he looks a little relieved.

Then Molly keeps running, headlong into the sea.

“YASHA!”

Beyond the breakers, he can see: The glabrezu is dead. The enormous mass of its body floating like a whale corpse in the waves. Yasha is literally kneeling on top of it. Screaming and covered in gore, she just keeps hacking, each blow spraying another burning gout of blood. Soaking her hair, covering her shoulders, her armor, dripping off every line of muscle. Lightning flashes in the distance, illuminating the waves around her, shining off the blood that coats her skin so thoroughly she herself looks like a flayed thing tearing into the corpse. Some primal aasimar instinct driving her into a frenzy against the hell-spawn.

Molly hits the water, wading out to his knees in to shallows.

“YASHA!” He cups two hands around his mouth. “STOP!”

She freezes halfway through a downswing, startled from her killing. The sword drips in her fist. She turns to face him, her soaking hair swinging heavily from her head. Her eyes, burning like twin suns, seem to extinguish when she sees him. Molly drops his arms and waits. He watches her stand to her feet on the mass of demonic flesh beneath her. She bends at the knees, then launches into the air and in a single arching bound is propelled the full distance.

She lands heavy in the shallows, clumsy in her haste. She drops her sword and it blinks away.

“Molly?!” She sprints toward him, water splashing up behind her. “Mollymauk!?”

She slams into him before he can reply, instantly closing him in a blood-soaked bearhug that staggers them both for a moment. He ignores that and grips hold of her armor, fingers digging into the sticky hot slick. Her hair is a stinking, sulfurous rat nest of gore against his face, but he ignores that too. Her fists are knotted in his cloak and in the back of his hair, gripping so tight it hurts a little.

“He killed you.” She’s whispering frantically. “He killed you again. I thought…” She makes a strangled noise. “I didn’t think how much worse the second time would be.”

“I’m okay, Yasha. Alright? Come back to me for a second.”

She makes a gutted sobbing sound. “Don’t do that again!”

“I’m really trying, dear.” Molly’s throat feels raw. He grips at the leather straps that crisscross her back, breathing slowly. “Hey, don’t kill Caleb. I know he did that business back there but don’t. Alright?”

“Okay,” she whispers. “Okay, I won’t.”

Molly glances over his shoulder.

Caleb has dragged himself another ten meters on his elbows through the sand. He has some kind of glowing stone in his fist and he’s looking at the pair of former carnie performers standing together in the ocean. Yasha’s cradling Molly’s head against her shoulder. The waves fill Molly’s boots with sea water. The cold doesn’t bother him because Nott’s enchanted earrings stave off the chill. Caduceus’ Death Ward lays warm in Molly’s chest. None of that seems like much protection against the echo in Mollymauk’s head – the one with a hand on his shoulder and a hand over his heart saying, softly, regretfully, “Die.”

But Caleb just lays back, his head falling in the sand like he’s very exhausted… or like a man who’s giving up on something. He grips the stone and in a flash of blue light, he vanishes.

And Molly feels something small, something loadbearing inside him, fracture.

“Shit,” he mutters into Yasha’s shoulder. He grips her tighter. “Fuck.”

If she feels him shaking she doesn’t comment. She just pulls closer until the tremor subsides.

Eventually, they walk out of the ocean.

  “No, no, no,” Molly says, rushing up and shooing Nott away from Caduceus.

She’s currently helping the cleric sit up, gently, looking very, very sorry about shooting him with her rifle, but upon seeing Molly’s furious approach, she hops back like a startled hare. Molly stomps across the sand and with zero preamble seizes the front of the fibolg’s armor and yanks him very, very close. Almost nose to nose. Molly grins because he’s still nerve-shot and full of adrenaline and but also, he’s so angry he could bite something. A presumptuous fibolg will do.

Smiles are just the intermediary step to biting.

“You want to explain what the hell you did back there?”

Caduceus seems confused. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, no,” Molly grits, still smiling. “Don’t do that. I don’t take very kindly to people making assassins out of my friends. So let’s try that again.” Molly shakes him a little. “Why the hell did you fake my death?”

“You weren’t fake dead,” Caduceus says, puzzled. “You were actually dead, Mollymauk. I have to revive you. I don’t understand –”

“That’s not what I bloody mean and you know it. The moment I woke up, you cast a spell to trap Caleb on the beach. Then you told Yasha I was dead. You held me down to do it.” Molly glares. “If you want my friends to kill someone in my name, then you better do it when I’m actually dead. Not a second before. You understand me?”

Nott looks at Caduceus.

“Is that true?” she whispers.

Caduceus says nothing. Then, “I didn’t want Yasha to kill him… I just wanted him wounded.”

“Well, okay,” Molly says brightly. “That’s fine. Considering he literally talked me to death, I think wounding him a bit is warranted, but I think that’s something you need to tell your teammates. Why is just telling them not an option?”

Silence for a moment. 

Nott and Yasha look at Caduceus and Mollymauk can feel it like gravity getting denser as they do. Two of the strongest women in the realm deciding what terrible thing they might be doing in the next thirty seconds. 

“Because,” says Caduceus blankly, tiredly. “Nott loves Caleb. She loves him more than anything, in fact. She ran the moment he appeared, like I knew she would, because she didn’t want him to know she’s not quite on his side anymore.” He glances toward Yasha. “You swore to never use your battle trance again even on enemies, much less a friend. I’m sorry, but we need the Deathless Storm. We need Nott the Brave. Caleb Widogast is beyond us otherwise because you know, this time, he was holding back because he loves us. You know that.”

Yasha, standing off the side now, unfolds her arms from where she’s had them crossed over her chest. She is literally covered from head to foot in demon blood, her pale mismatched eyes bright spots in a canvas of wet red gore. Her face is blank as she moves forward. Her wings have faded but there’s a nimbus of darkness still along her shoulders, behind her teeth, and living in her stare as she kneels down and takes Caduceus’ left forearm in her hand and pulls him nearer.

He doesn’t resist her.

“You tricked me to break my vow?” she whispers.

To his credit, Caduceus looks pained. “Yes.”

“We are out here for the purpose of killing friends and you made me believe I’d lost Molly again… so I might kill Caleb too?” The empty horror in her stare is fathomless deep, her soul living out this dark alternate universe where Molly didn’t get up in time and she stood over Caleb Widogast’s corpse on a beach. “Do you think I would have survived that?”

“You’re strong, Yasha. You –”

“I am not strong!” she cries, grabbing him now by the shoulder as well, forcing Molly to let go and withdraw. She pulls Caduceus close, shaking him. Yasha’s eyes are running over now, a wildness in her that cracks her voice. “I am not! I ran to the storm because I could not face what happened after Thrazidun!I could not face what I did! I became a monster because I am not strong and you almost made me one again, Caduceus?!” She shakes him harder, mouth twisting. “Why?”

Clay seems frozen, paralyzed by the yawning wild grief in Yasha’s face. “I’m sorry. I – It’s just so important we don’t fail. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry isn’t good enough!” Yasha grabs him by the back of the neck, bloody fingers digging into the pink mane at the base of his skull. She yanks him close, pressing them forehead to forehead and she says, ragged, “I need to trust you! You’re our healer. I need you to be the one that takes care of us, Clay.”

“You can trust me,” Caduceus whispers. “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”

“Swear to me!”

“I swear, Yasha.”

And that seems to be enough, because Yasha makes this raw, animal sound and pulls the giant firbolg into a bone-crushing hug, getting blood all over him but he doesn’t seem to care. He goes rigid for just a moment, then wraps his arms around her and Molly sees a faint shimmer of healing magic start up in his hands, then spread across Yasha’s back, smoothing away scrapes and cuts along her arms, closing a gash on her brow. Yasha’s eyes are twisted so tightly shut, tears running clean tracks through the blood to her chin.

“We can’t fall apart,” she rasps.

Caduceus’ calm is very much gone. He grips her tight. “I won’t let that happen. I won’t. I’m sorry.”

It’s quiet for a moment. The ocean waves roar steadily in the distances, rolling relentlessly and indifferently forward while they struggle through a moment of terrible uncertainty – each looking at the other and wondering what terrible thoughts might be racing behind familiar eyes. The silence goes on for a while, the pale glow of coming sunrise expanding across the horizon in pale purple and pink.

Then, very quietly, Nott says, “So that’s still the plan?”

Everyone looks at her. She’s sitting cross-legged in the sand, shoulders slumped, head bent.

“I mean… I knew it was, but if Yasha is saying it out loud then it’s real, isn’t it?” She wipes her face with one hand and sniffs. “No point hiding it from Mollymauk. He’s already died again in the name of this thing we’re doing, so let’s be clear.” She looks up at Molly. “We’re bringing the others together because it took all of us to kill a god before. It’ll probably take all of us to do it again.”

Molly shakes his head.

“I don’t…” He looks back and forth among them. “You mean…?”

Yasha is not looking at him. Caduceus and Nott are watching him though.

Molly, who is covered in blood and four times dead, sitting on a battle-blasted beach and so emotionally spent it feels like there shouldn’t be a drop of feeling left in him… he feels a sting of panic looking into their sober, battle-worn faces. His instinct, immediately: To run away from it. Yell at it. No. Absolutely not. No. But in the face of their scars and the history of violence ten years old at this point, he feels paralyzed by the weight of everything they’ve done without him.

He’s suddenly a million miles away from the three warriors sitting on the beach with him.

“We have to kill Beauregard,” Molly says, finally. “That’s why Caleb tried to stop us. Because you’re coming for Beau.”

Go to part 5