The Curse of Arcadia

John had December waiting on the counter when they walked in, and didn't wait for either of them to ask before he picked her up.

"Saved the best for last," he said, turning the bow so it caught the light. December looked less like a weapon and more like a sliver of frozen moonlight bent into a crescent, limbs curving forward so far the tips nearly touched — pale, smooth, almost translucent at the edges, more like something carved from ice than any wood grain. "Three enchants, like I told you — [Silent], [Freeze], [Absolute Zero]. Draw strength alone should feel like a different weapon compared to whatever you've been running."

Aria took it like she was afraid it might dissolve if she held it wrong, testing the draw once, twice, something unguarded crossing her face at whatever she felt in it that Kaelid couldn't.

"It's perfect," she said, quiet.

"Not perfect," John said, echoing himself from a few days back without seeming to notice, "but pretty dang close." He waved them both toward the door before either could get sentimental about it. "Go on. Get out of my shop before I start charging rent for standing here admiring my own work."

***

Kaelid found Yami at the top of the tower the next morning, mid-morning light doing nothing to soften the permanent chill radiating off him.

"Taking a few days," he said, before he could second-guess how to phrase it. "Job came up. Goblin cave, west of here."

Yami didn't say anything for a long moment, arms crossed, gaze still fixed south toward the mountains like the words hadn't fully registered yet.

"How many days."

"Three, maybe four. Hard to say exactly."

"Three days you're not swinging a sword." Yami finally turned to look at him, something flat and unimpressed in his expression that Kaelid had learned to read as displeasure long before the man ever raised his voice about anything. "Progress doesn't wait for you to go make money."

"It's the job. Can't build a life on training alone."

Yami held the look a moment longer, then turned back toward the mountains without further comment — which Kaelid had also learned, by now, to read as the closest thing to permission he was going to get.

"Four days," Yami said, as Kaelid turned to leave. "Not five."

"Wasn't planning on five."

"Good."

***

They left Avalon's north gate an hour later, packs heavier than they'd been in weeks — Death and Taxes at Kaelid's hip alongside Mercy, December slung across Aria's back, the goblin job's original posting folded and tucked away for reference.

Ten to twenty of them, holed up in a cave. Ten silver a head, plus a bonus for new nests.

"You're doing the math already, aren't you," Aria said, not looking over.

"Little bit."

"Greed's a sin, you know?"

"Hey, that's harsh. It's a good number to know before I walk into a den of goblins and risk my life."

She didn't argue that.

***

The trip out took the better part of a full day — eight hours of steady walking before the terrain even started to change, open plains giving way slowly to scattered treeline.

They found the first pair of goblins a few hours in, scouting ahead of the main group rather than holed up — which meant the fight came fast and ugly rather than on their own terms, both goblins already charging by the time Aria's first arrow found the lead one's throat.

The second broke off toward Kaelid instead, crude spear jabbing wild, and he sidestepped it clean before Mercy opened its throat in the same motion — faster than it should have been, a full week of nothing but forms and swings finally showing itself in something that actually mattered.

Huh. That felt different. That felt right.

Aria dropped two more over the following hours — one at a range that would've been an impossible shot with anything else she'd owned, the arrow catching a fleeing scout clean through the back of the skull from a distance Kaelid honestly couldn't have guessed at without watching it happen.

"Okay," he said, staring at the body, then at her. "That bow is insane."

"December's not normal." She was still grinning at her own bow, turning it over like she hadn't fully processed owning it yet. "I didn't even lead the shot right, and it still landed clean. This is a different bow, Kaelid."

"Careful. You're gonna make me jealous of a bow."

"You should be."

The forest announced itself late in the day, well past the point their legs had started complaining — trees packing in tighter on the horizon, canopy thick enough ahead to swallow whatever light made it past midafternoon. As they closed the last stretch, the trunks resolved into something stranger than distance had let on: every one of them scorched black, bark burned dark as char like the whole forest had survived some fire that should have killed it outright.

That can't be right. How are these trees still alive?

But the leaves stayed green overhead regardless, full and healthy despite the blackened wood beneath them, and here and there fruit hung heavy on branches that had no business supporting anything at all.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

"Fire didn't kill this forest," Kaelid said, half to himself. "So what did that to the bark?"

"No idea," Aria admitted, eyeing the nearest trunk. "Whatever it was, the trees didn't seem to mind much."

"We camp here," he decided, already scouting the treeline for something defensible. "Push in fresh tomorrow."

***

They didn't reach the forest proper before dusk caught up with them, and neither of them liked the idea of pushing into unfamiliar tree cover in the dark hunting a cave they hadn't even found yet.

Aria took first watch without being asked, bow across her knees, December catching what little firelight they risked.

He fell asleep faster than he expected to, and didn't dream about anything at all.

***

They pushed into the forest the next morning, the same scorched-black trunks pressing closer now on every side, the wide, safe distances of Avalon's plains fully behind them.

Kaelid stopped walking.

"Hold on. Got something for you."

She turned, surprised, as he dug into his pack and pulled out the second dagger — Taxes, sheath and all — offering it across without much ceremony beyond the offering itself.

"...What's this?"

"Yours, if you want it. Figured it out on the walk here, actually — December's incredible, but she's not built for what's about to happen the second something gets inside your draw range. This is." He shrugged, a little awkward about it now that the moment had actually arrived. "Dense forest, close quarters, things that don't wait politely at range for you to line up a shot. Wanted you to have something for when that happens."

Aria took it slow, turning it over, testing the balance the same careful way she had with December.

"You already had a matching pair," she said. "Just — giving one away?"

"Wasn't much of a decision, honestly." He rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly finding the treeline very interesting. "Made sense. That's all."

She didn't say anything for a moment, just looked at the dagger, then at him, something unreadable and a little too warm crossing her face before she shook it off.

"Thank you," she said, simple and real. "I mean it."

"I'm only loaning it to you." He grinned, deflecting the way he usually did when a moment got too sincere for comfort. "Turns out I'm capable of being nice sometimes. Try not to spread that around, though — ruins my reputation."

That got a real laugh out of her, and the forest felt a little less unfriendly for it.

***

It didn't take long to find the cave once they were actually looking — a dark seam in a hillside a half-mile past where the trees thinned into rockier ground, goblin tracks churned thick in the dirt leading straight to the mouth of it, thick vines hanging low across the entrance.

"That's it," Kaelid said, crouched at the treeline. "Posting wasn't lying about the size, at least."

Aria nocked an arrow, not yet drawn. "Loud, or quiet?"

"Quiet, if we can manage it. No sense waking the whole tribe at once."

***

They pushed past the vines into pitch dark, Kaelid's eyes slow to adjust, until a faint glow resolved out of the black ahead — old, dim light bleeding from a crystal embedded somewhere in the ceiling.

Glowstone. Aria mentioned that once. Didn't say it'd look like this.

The tunnel opened into a wide, perfectly circular chamber, black stalagmites hanging overhead like teeth. Eight goblins lay sleeping on crude beds of grass and foliage, scattered across the room — five clustered near a tunnel branching left, three nearer a second passage straight ahead.

Two ways out, besides the one they'd come in through. Neither one looked like it led anywhere good.

Kaelid turned to Aria, voice dropped to almost nothing. "Stay here, take the closest ones first. I'll work to the far side. Once you see mine drop, that's your signal."

She nodded, knuckles white around December's grip.

He picked his way across the chamber slow and silent, boots finding stone between patches of grass, until he reached the furthest sleeping goblin.

Lucky day. Let's keep it that way.

The thrust took it clean through the skull before it ever woke — the same motion he'd drilled a thousand times over on Yami's tower, finally used for something other than empty air.

Aria's shot landed in the same instant, the sound of impact and the goblin's dying shriek arriving almost together. The rest jolted upright at the noise, scrambling for weapons that weren't in reach yet.

Kaelid was already moving. Mercy caught the nearest one mid-lunge, a wide horizontal cut that nearly took it clean in half. Aria dropped a second, then a third, the chamber filling with noise and torchlight and the particular chaos of eight things waking up to find themselves already dying.

The fifth goblin got a blade up in time — Kaelid ducked under the wild overhead swing, drove Death into its ribs on the way past, and felt the [Rot] take hold almost instantly, blackening flesh spreading from a cut that shouldn't have done much on its own.

"Six!" Aria called, already drawing again.

"Seven." He finished the rotting one off, more mercy than necessity at this point.

The eighth broke for the left tunnel instead of fighting, and Aria's arrow caught it before it made three steps.

Silence settled over the chamber, broken only by both of them catching their breath.

"Eight," Kaelid said, doing a slow count of the bodies. "Matches what we saw sleeping."

***

They looted what they could — cores, a few usable fangs — and it was only once the adrenaline started fading that Kaelid actually looked at the two passages instead of just past them.

Something's wrong with both of those.

The straight-ahead tunnel radiated a stillness that had nothing to do with temperature, old and heavy in a way that made something instinctive in his chest want to be anywhere else. The left one wasn't much better — quieter than it should have been, dark past where the glowstone's faint light gave out.

"We should scout them," he said, without much conviction behind it.

Aria studied the same darkness he was, arrow still loosely in hand. "Should, or want to?"

"...Should. Doesn't mean I want to."

Neither of them moved toward either one.

"There's no telling what's down there," Aria said finally. "Ancient glowstone, tunnels nobody's touched — that's not first-job territory, Kaelid. That's the kind of thing that gets people killed for no good reason."

He didn't argue. The bad feeling sitting in his gut agreed with her more than his pride wanted to admit.

"We leave them," he said. "Report it, let someone stronger deal with whatever's actually back there."

They made camp in the corner nearest the entrance instead, taking turns keeping watch through what was left of the night — Kaelid standing guard first while Aria slept, four hours by his own rough count before he woke her to trade places.

He'd barely closed his eyes when a sharp boom jolted him upright, Mercy half-drawn before he even fully registered being awake.

Aria stood in the tunnel mouth, bow raised, two more goblin scouts collapsed headless in front of her — stragglers who'd wandered too close to the cave overnight and paid for it.

"Couldn't sleep anyway," she said, already moving to collect the cores. "Figured I'd make it count."

She added them to the pile, doing a final tally with obvious satisfaction. "Five on the way here. Eight in the chamber. These two." She grinned. "Fifteen, total."

Fifteen goblin cores, Kaelid thought, hefting the considerably heavier bag once they'd both eaten and packed up. That's real money. Finally, that's real money.

It should have been enough.

It wasn't.