Something in me sat differently than it had before Yomi's grid, and I want to try to describe that honestly rather than just note it and move on the way I'd already caught myself doing once or twice.
I was dead calm where fear should have been standing.
My friends had been in trouble, and I had already failed to protect the one home I'd had, so getting stronger, even at whatever cost it kept quietly asking of me, had stopped being a choice I was making and become simply the only remaining direction left to walk in.
A few strange shapes moved through the trees ahead of me after an hour of scouting. They gave off a faint reddish hue in the near total dark, human enough in shape, upright, with real arms and legs, but that was where the resemblance stopped meaning anything comforting. Their jaws hung too wide for their own skulls, packed with teeth that didn't fit properly, and their eyes had been sewn shut with something dark and old, leaving them to shuffle forward with the loose, mindless drift of things that had forgotten they were ever meant to walk with purpose.
I split into two duplicates of myself, the most I could manage, and scattered in three directions at once, loosing arrow after arrow as I ran. The shots bounced off their hides like pebbles off a wall, which told me plainly enough that they were as blind as they looked and hadn't reacted to the sound of the strikes at all.
A little magic behind the next one opened a real wound in one of them, though it still gave no sign of noticing I existed. Their numbers, once my eyes adjusted enough to count properly, ran into the dozens: some tall, some barely child-sized, some gaunt and some grotesquely swollen, and a coil of something twisted deep in my stomach at the thought that every single one of them might once have been an ordinary person before whatever had happened to them happened. A larger shape further back, tinged violet where the others ran red, let out a shriek that cracked through the tree line, and every red shape within earshot surged forward at a speed none of them had shown a moment before, tearing straight past the spot where I'd actually been standing a few seconds earlier.
That was when it clicked. The violet one was directing them the way a hive directs itself around its queen. The red ones couldn't see a thing.
They tracked by fear instead, and whatever fear their queen was feeling in that moment, they inherited wholesale and acted on immediately.
I tried to leave the forest and lead them off toward open ground where I'd have room to actually use range as an advantage, but the queen shrieked again, closer this time, and the whole red tide changed direction on a dime and came straight back for wherever I'd just been standing, ignoring my afterimages completely because my afterimages, whatever else they could fake, couldn't fake being afraid.
This time I couldn't shake it. Whatever had climbed up my spine stayed there, and they read it perfectly, correcting toward my real position again and again no matter how many decoys I threw between us. I fought until I ran fully out of mana and nearly out of arrows both, managed to wound one enough to matter only to watch the wound close itself back over within seconds, and came within a breath, twice, of one of those long taloned arms finding me instead of empty air.
Just as I'd decided, with a strange, floating kind of calm, that this might actually be how the night ended, the sun finally cracked the horizon, and every last one of them turned as one and melted back into the treeline like they'd never been there at all.
Bruised, hollowed out, and barely upright, I made my way back to the gate, where the same haughty voice was waiting for me.
"You survived," the voice said, and for once it actually sounded surprised rather than merely put out.
"You sound far too shocked about that," I said.
"Will you let me in now?"
Part of the gate lowered, and I finally got a look at the man behind that voice: tall, hook nosed, a permanent grimace carved into a face that had clearly decided, a long time before I ever showed up, that the world existed mostly to disappoint it.
The tavern in the farming village of Daenia sat mostly empty through the whole first day I spent there, the locals too frightened to venture past their own front doors, waiting for word that whatever ringed their town had finally been dealt with. It gave me time to get to know Alfred, the barkeep, along with his wife Hilda and their daughter Elin, a quiet girl of about ten who spent most of that day drawing careful chalk pictures of horses on the tavern's flagstone floor and refusing, on principle, to let anyone step on them.
Alfred used to be a mercenary out of Corvane, or a sellsword, as they were less politely known: a man who killed whoever he was paid to kill and didn't spend much time asking after the details. He'd killed Hilda's father on a contract once, and through some twist of fate neither of them ever fully explained to me, ended up falling in love with the daughter of the man he'd murdered not long after, and married her once she was carrying Elin. He'd taken what money remained from his old life and turned it into this tavern, and become a barkeep instead, and by every account he gave me, a considerably better one than he'd ever been a killer.
"I was terrible at first," Alfred told me, refilling my cup though I hadn't asked him to.
"At being a father, or a barkeep?"
I asked.
"Both, lad," he said, laughing the deep, worn laugh of a man who'd clearly told this exact story more than once.
"Used to drink what I was meant to sell to the customers and stumble home drunk near every night for the first year."