In the nightmare the golden light went out of Gazel while the monster pulled its claws back through his chest, so he hit the ground and stayed there under the blood coming off its hand.
'Please get up,' she begged, reaching for him with legs that refused to move.
The monster raised its claws again, then it turned an empty gaze on her.
"Gazel!" she shouted, her eyes coming open on firelight instead of a battlefield.
She came upright with her clothes stuck to her back, one hand closing on the blanket, though her breathing took a long time to slow.
'I am still alive,' she thought, before the grief arrived and pushed the panic out of its place.
Gazel had guarded her since she was small, closer to a brother than a servant, then he had died because she refused a direct order to run.
Nobody had ever paid that much for her pride.
'This is my fault,' she thought while the tears came without asking her first, 'I was too proud, and now he is dead.'
She cried under the blanket until her throat hurt, then exhaustion took the last of the sobs out of her.
The smell of roasted meat got through eventually, so she lifted her head to find out where she was.
'Where am I now,' she thought, wiping her face with the back of one wrist while her eyes went along the wall beside her.
Firelight showed a small cave with a low roof, closed off from the cold.
Across the fire a boy sat carving a piece of wood, while a beastkin girl worked through a strip of meat without looking up.
'Who are they,' she thought, pressing her back a little harder into the wall behind her.
Neither of them had done anything hostile yet, though the clearing had taken her trust for a while.
Hajin caught the movement, so he set the wood down against his knee before looking up.
"You made a lot of noise just now," he said, turning the knife over so the edge faced away from her, "are you hurt anywhere?"
She checked his face first, then the cheap clothes he had on, which told her nothing at all.
'Wait,' she thought as her brows pulled together, 'I have seen him already, today, in the street.'
The carriage had gone through the capital that morning, and a boy on the roadside had held her eyes through the window the whole way past.
The face across the fire was that boy.
"You," she said with her voice still torn up from crying, "you were standing on the street this morning."
"Small world," he said, picking up a stick to push the fire back into shape.
'She remembers a stranger off the roadside after all of that,' he thought, taking in the red eyes across the fire, 'which is better than I would manage.'
"How did I get here?" she asked, pulling the blanket up over her shoulders, "the monster, did you fight it?"
"Fight it," he said, with a breath that came out close to a laugh, "I picked you up while it was busy elsewhere, then I ran."
"I am not reckless enough to trade hits with something that talks," he added, setting the stick down across his knee.
The answer put the clearing back in front of her, so she looked at her hands.
"I see," she said, with her voice dropping off the end of it, "then the others, they are really..."
He did not need the end of that sentence to know what she was asking about.
'She is grieving,' he thought while her shoulders went down toward the fire, 'and losing the people paid to keep you alive is always the worst version of it.'
Comfort from a stranger had never once been worth anything in the first hours after a death, in his experience, so he let her sit with it while the fire worked through the dry wood.
At the corner of his vision the stream comments kept rolling past.
[ CringeSlayer91: ] man the princess looks wrecked
He pushed the panel further out to the edge, where it would stop sitting over her face.
[ ShadowMage44: ] you lifted her out from under that thing with it standing right there, i did not think we were getting out
'The knight bought her every second he was worth,' he thought, turning the wood over in his palm, 'so I only had to be fast at the end of it.'
[ NewViewer_02: ] wait who is she? did i miss the start
He had nothing for that question, so he let it run off the bottom of the panel with the rest.
[ ashley (Mod): ] let her process it, losing someone in front of you takes time to digest
'The mod has it right,' he thought, with the gold tag sitting there on the line, 'so nobody is getting a speech out of me tonight.'
He took a piece of meat off the flat stone at the edge of the flames, then he held it out across the fire toward her.
"Eat," he said, holding it steady until she looked at it, "you have been out most of the night, so your body needs something in it before we walk anywhere."
[ CringeSlayer91: ] nobody talks to royalty like that, this is scripted
She looked at the meat, then at him, 'he is being strangely casual with me,' she thought.
Anyone else outside the palace would have been bowing by now, or stammering through a title practiced once in a mirror.
He behaved as though a tired girl had turned up at his fire, which was jarring, though it was also the only thing she could have tolerated tonight.
She had no appetite for being handled like something breakable.
"Thank you," she said, taking it out of his hand without any hurry.
"My name is Hajin," he said, turning the piece so the knife had a clean angle, "and the one sniffing her dinner over there is Juna."
"I am not sniffing it," Juna said, glaring at him over the top of the strip in her hands, "I am checking that it is cooked through."
"You have checked it four times," he said without looking up from the wood.
"Because the last one was raw in the middle," she said, biting into it with some emphasis, "so I do not take your word on food anymore."
Didi watched them argue about a strip of meat, and some of the weight came off her while it went on.
"I am Didi," she said, then she made herself put the rest of it on the end, "Princess Didi."
"Well then, Your Highness," he said, still not looking up, "finish that and sleep, since we start back toward the capital at first light."
She ate the rest of it slowly, more from instruction than from hunger, until her hands were empty.
"Thank you," she said, quieter than the first time, "for the food, and for carrying me out of there."
He stopped the knife long enough to meet her eyes, then he went back to the wood without making her say any more of it.
'I am tired,' she thought as the last of the tension went out of her arms, 'and I would like to be finished with this day.'
The food with the fire behind it finished her off, so she pulled the blanket to her chin, then she was gone inside a minute.
Hajin listened to her breathing even out before he set the wood down beside him.
Juna had gone over sideways an hour ago, her tail folded around her feet.
'Long night,' he thought while rolling his shoulders against the stiffness sitting between them, 'so I close the stream, then I sleep until somebody screams again.'
He reached for the panel to shut it down, though it opened by itself first and pushed the chat out of the way.
The soft gold of the system turned over into a red that put colour on the wall behind it.
Hajin went still where he sat while the lines filled themselves in one after another.
[ Warning: Hostile Resonance Detected ]
[ Target: Princess Didi ]
'Hostile resonance,' he thought, with his eyes going over the second line twice, 'she has not done a single thing to me.'
The panel widened out, then more text came in under the first two lines and took the tiredness with it.
[ Target Bloodline Identified: Underworld King ]
[ Details: The Underworld King holds the realm-key power torn loose when the other gods betrayed, executed, and shattered the Goddess of Reincarnation. ]
He read the line twice over.
Then he turned his head toward the girl asleep under the blanket.
[ Recommended Action: Eliminate the carrier to prevent future threat. ]
'You have got to be joking,' he thought, with the fire going on crackling behind the red.
Didi turned over in her sleep, so the blanket came off one shoulder, then she settled again without waking.
"Not tonight," he said under his breath, reaching over to put the blanket back where it had been.
"I am not doing that," he said toward the panel, quietly, "so bring me a different option."
Nothing on the screen moved, so he sat there with the red on his hands while the fire went down.