Chapter 40 – Roses and Dust
The tunnel swallows us in damp silence, broken only by Perri’s uneven breaths and the faint drip of water on stone. I stop short of the threshold where light fades into pitch and crouch behind a cluster of rocks. Kit and Raka stay even farther back. They know this is her fight.
My voice stays steady, even though my heart is pounding like war drums.
“Perri. Eyes forward. Ears open. Staff up. These things will smell fear, so don’t give it to them.”
She nods too fast, ears twitching like nervous antennae, tail quivering behind her. Through the bond I feel the shape of her thoughts anyway.
What if I fail? What if I die?
You won’t, I murmur back across the bond, warm steel under the words. Because you’re ours. And we don’t break.
She inhales sharply, nods again, and steps into the dark. The sound changes immediately. Distant yips like cruel laughter. The scrape of claws on stone. Shadows twitching at the edge of the torchlight.
Somewhere ahead, a pebble skitters.
Then the first hiss.
The kobolds are hunting her.
It happens fast. A blur of scales and rusted iron tears out of the dark, teeth bared. Perri squeaks and thrusts her staff like a spear. Sacred Flame erupts, searing across the kobold’s chest, but not before its blade carves a shallow line across her arm.
She cries out and grabs at the wound. Blood darkens the white fur there.
Every part of me screams to move. To kill. Arc Lightning crackles against my fingers before I force it down.
This is her fight.
Ed doesn’t move either. He just stands there like a twisted statue, roses trembling with some alien patience.
“Shield, Perri,” I snap.
She flinches, breath catching hard, then throws up Radiant Shield just as another hiss cuts through the dark. The barrier flashes into place, trembling with the force of the next strike.
“Good. Hold it.”
Her hands are shaking now. Tears cling to her lashes as she presses trembling fingers to the wound. Prayer of Healing answers in a soft spill of radiance, sealing flesh even as her breathing comes ragged and uneven.
Another hiss.
Another shape moving in the dark.
This time she doesn’t freeze.
She sidesteps, turns with it, and Sacred Flame catches the kobold full in the chest. It goes up screaming.
Her first kill.
She stares at the smoking corpse like it’s a mirror showing her someone she doesn’t know yet.
Then her jaw sets.
“Good,” I whisper. “Again.”
What follows stops feeling like a first kill and starts feeling like a descent.
The cavern keeps feeding them to us in ugly little bursts, one from a side tunnel, two from behind broken crates, another shrieking through the dark with a rusted blade over its head. Perri learns fast because she has to. Sacred Flame becomes less prayer and more reflex. Radiant Shield flashes up just in time often enough to matter. When she gets clipped, she hisses, heals, and keeps moving. I call corrections from the dark. Ed keeps to her flank like a funeral given teeth, only stepping in when the line is truly about to break.
Bit by bit, the panic burns down into something harder. She stops staring after every body that falls. Stops freezing when the blood is kobold instead of slime. Starts listening to the cavern the way a hunted thing learns to hear hunters, claws on stone, breath in the dark, the scrape before a lunge.
Once, a kobold comes at her from the side and she turns on instinct, staff swinging first, Sacred Flame following a heartbeat later. It dies screaming. She doesn’t.
And that’s the danger.
Because the deeper we go, the better she gets. And the better she gets, the easier it is to forget she’s still a Level 7 who only made it this far because Ed keeps turning the worst mistakes into survivable ones.
The tunnels narrow. The air gets fouler. The yips ahead stop sounding scattered and start sounding organized. We’re past the edge where a rookie should’ve turned back.
The cavern shifts tactics.
This time they come in a pack, four of them, one bigger than the rest with a jagged helm of bone lashed to its skull.
Too many. Too deep.
A normal Level 7 has no business being this deep, and we all know why she is. Ed let her climb faster than her nerves could catch up, pushing her farther than a rookie should ever survive in the hunt for XP. Now the cavern is finally throwing something back that matches the shortcut.
Perri backpedals fast, breath coming ragged, chanting spell after spell as torchlight flashes across wet stone. Sacred Flame bursts one across the shoulder. Another catches fire at the edge and keeps coming anyway, shrieking through the smoke. She’s buying space, not winning it, and we all know it.
Radiant Shield blooms a moment too late, and the spear still punches deep into her thigh.
She screams and drops hard.
Every part of me surges forward on instinct, heart detonating in my chest. Ed is closer.
It’s like watching a storm made of roses, thorns, and bone.
Vines burst from Ed’s ribs with a wet snap. Thornlash. One kobold is yanked clean off its feet so hard its spine arches in midair before the thorns tear through its middle and spill it open across the stone.
Another darts in low and buries a jagged knife between Ed’s ribs. He doesn’t even flinch. He just turns and takes its head off with a clawed backhand, green venom flashing slick in the torchlight as the body stumbles two more steps before collapsing in a red spray.
The cavern fills with the sick perfume of crushed roses and fresh blood.
Perri is still down, hands slick, trying to drag herself backward as the other two close in. Ed steps over her like a wall given hunger.
One spear glances off bone, then punches deep through the thorns wrapped over his shoulder, pinning part of him in place for half a heartbeat. He tears himself free with a splintering creak that sets my teeth on edge, then drives a knot of snapping vines straight into the attacker’s chest. Ribs burst outward. The kobold folds around the impact and hits the floor twitching.
Then the big one lunges.
Its spear drives straight through Ed’s torso.
This time even he stops.
Just for a second.
The bone-helmed kobold snarls and tries to wrench the shaft loose, but Ed grips it instead, white claws tightening until the wood splinters in his hand. He snaps the spear in half, drags the kobold close, and Rose’s Embrace closes like a vice around its skull. Bone caves. Teeth spray. Something wet and dark splashes across the rocks.
Then he sways.
Perri, panting and bleeding, crawls toward him on one knee, Radiant Shield flickering weakly around her. Her little hands glow as she presses them to the broken cage of his ribs, Prayer of Healing pouring out of her in a frantic spill of light. It does nothing. The magic sputters uselessly against bone and roses and whatever dark miracle keeps him moving.
“Ed,” I choke, already stepping into the torchlight.
He turns his skull toward me. For one impossible heartbeat, those empty sockets hold something vast enough to hurt.
Then, in a voice like a leaf torn by winter wind:
“...Love.”
And he comes apart in a spill of roses and dust.
Perri sobs.
But she doesn’t stop.
She spins from her knees, eyes blazing, staff coming up in both hands as light tears out of her like dawn breaking through stone. The last kobold hisses once, too late.
Sacred Flame.
It explodes in holy fire.
Silence crashes down after it.
Perri kneels there, blood-streaked and shaking, her tiny chest heaving, tears mixing with sweat and soot. Then, somehow, she forces herself upright and looks at me.
Changed.
“I... I did it.”
The HUD blooms.
Perri – Level 8
I don’t even remember crossing the space before she’s in my arms. I haul her tight against my chest, trembling, filthy, alive, and press my mouth against her hair.
“Damn right you did.”
The cavern mouth yawns behind us, belching a cold draft that tastes like failure. No one speaks for a while. Just the crunch of boots and the soft slap of Perri’s bare feet against the stone road.
The sound is wrong.
It’s missing the gentle scrape of thorns.
Then she stumbles, and I lift her into my arms before she can fall. Her leg won’t hold weight, and her hands are still trembling too hard to cling to me properly. Her little body is warm against my chest, but it shakes like a leaf. Her wide eyes stare past my shoulder at nothing.
“I don’t... I don’t want to go back,” she whispers, voice barely there. “They were everywhere. The smell... the screaming...”
Kit meets Raka’s eyes over my shoulder. Through the bond I feel the same ache moving through both of them, anger at the world, at the system, at the path we chose anyway.
I keep walking, jaw tight. The words sit in my throat like stones before I finally force them out.
“It gets easier,” I say. “Not easy. Never easy. But easier.”
Perri presses her face into my shirt, muffling a sob. Her fingers clutch at the fabric like it’s the only solid thing left in the world.
“I was so scared...”
“We know, little rabbit,” Kit murmurs, close enough that her tail brushes Perri’s ankle like a ribbon of comfort. “But fear didn’t stop you. That matters more than you think.”
Raka’s voice comes out rough, but there’s a tenderness under it that still catches me off guard. “You fought. You bled. You stood back up anyway. That’s pack, Perri. That’s family.”
Perri doesn’t answer. She just breathes in those shaky little gasps, like each one is its own fight. Through the bond I feel all of it at once, exhaustion, shame, grief, and somewhere under the wreckage, the smallest spark of pride.
I lower my head, voice dropping until it’s just for her.
“You didn’t fail. You survived. And Ed...” I swallow hard. “Ed made sure of that because he believed in you.”
My arms tighten around her.
“So do we.”
For the first time since leaving the cavern, Perri lifts her face. Her eyes are red, her cheeks streaked with dirt, but in that tiny, trembling smile, I can see the ember in her glowing a little brighter.
“Do you... really think I can do this?”
I stop walking and look at her, really look at her, as the torchlight flickers across her silver-white hair and those long, twitching ears.
“I don’t think,” I say quietly. “I know.”
She bites her lip, then nods. Not strong. Not steady. But it’s a start.
Kit steps in first, gently taking the hand still clenched in my shirt and squeezing it in her own. Raka comes up on the other side and rests a clawed hand on the little bunny girl’s knee, grounding her back into the world.
Then the four of us keep walking.
The apartment is quiet. One oil lamp burns low, casting golden puddles of light across the floor. Perri is finally asleep, curled small and fragile in the center of the harem bed, clutching a pillow like a lifeline. Raka sits on the edge of the mattress, broad shoulders hunched, watching over her with that wolfish protectiveness that has become second nature.
I linger in the doorway for a moment, just taking it in, the strange little family I’ve built. Then I slip out onto the balcony, the night wind curling through my hair and carrying the scents of the town with it: smoke, spice, a hint of rain.
I brace my forearms on the rail and stare out over the rooftops. The memory of today sticks like iron in my teeth: the panic in Perri’s eyes, the red smears on her fur, her scream when the kobold spear sinks deep into her thigh.
Did I do this?
The thought churns in my gut until I almost don’t hear the soft pad of feet behind me.
“You’re brooding again.”
Kit steps into the moonlight like a wraith in silk, barefoot, wearing one of my shirts loose enough to hang off her like it belongs there. Her tail sways slowly behind her as she leans on the railing beside me, eyes glinting silver in the night.
“You remember your Level 8 day?” I ask without looking at her.
She snorts. “Do I? Thought I was going to die in that hellish cavern. You saved me with a Thunderwave, and I was so mad at you for doing it.”
That pulls a quiet, bitter laugh out of me. “Yeah. Feels like forever ago.”
Kit tilts her head, studying me. “You’re thinking about the witch again.”
I don’t answer right away. When I do, it comes out as a lie that isn’t entirely a lie.
“One step closer. Every level Perri climbs, every day we survive... we’re one step closer to facing her again. Risking everything.”
The words come out clean. Cleaner than the guilt underneath them.
Kit’s hand slides over mine on the railing, warm, firm, grounding. “And Ed?” she asks softly.
I swallow against the tightness in my throat. “That’s two of my girls he’s saved now. You and Perri both. And he didn’t hesitate either time.”
Kit’s ears flick back. There’s something tender in her voice when she answers. “You treat him like he’s one of us.”
“He is,” I say, sharper than I mean to. Then softer, “He may not be flesh and blood, but hell, Kit... he fights for love. That has to mean something. It does to me.”
Kit leans in until her shoulder brushes mine, her scent soft as lilacs after rain. For a while, neither of us says anything. Then, in a voice like ribbon easing loose in the dark, she whispers:
“Then let’s make sure his love isn’t wasted. Let’s make sure none of ours is.”
I turn to her. Moonlight paints silver across her cheekbones, catches on the shape of her mouth, and something hot and quiet coils in my chest at the promises waiting in her eyes.
When I kiss her, it isn’t fierce or urgent. It’s slow. Lingering. The kind of kiss that feels more like a vow than hunger.
When we part, she rests her forehead against mine, purring low in her throat.
“Come to bed, Master,” she murmurs, voice heavy with warmth. “Tomorrow, we start again.”