And then the evening stopped being an evening.
They came INTO the tavern. Out of the dark and through the door — fae dogs, BARGHESTS — and I would like to report that I remained calm and methodical, and I cannot, because I once wrote in this very ledger that the adventurers are a herd of orange cats sharing a single brain cell, and I stand by it, and that night I was one of the cats.
Here is what I actually did, and I have decided to be proud of it. I do not fight. I SPOT. The fighters, who are magnificent, have a magnificent habit of all facing the same direction — and barghests do not extend the courtesy of arriving from the direction you are facing. So my contribution, for great stretches of that fight, was to notice the NEW ones — coming through the other door, out of the other shadow, at somebody’s undefended back — and to run about the room screaming for help at the top of my considerable voice until somebody with a sword faced the right way. I am told I was audible. I am ALWAYS audible. That night it was a tactical asset.
Between rounds of that: the work. Heal Wounds on Rascal. A cleanse on Lome. Another on Rom.
And then the moment I have filed and re-filed and cannot make sit flat. One of them stopped in the doorway. It did not attack. It raised a hand, and it POINTED — at Felix. At one person, out of nine. It wanted him, specifically, and it made that want known.
We said no. That is the whole of what happened, and I want it recorded with the plainness it deserves: they could not have him. Not while any of us stood there. It got no explanation from us, and we got none from it.
We killed more of them. But the group got separated in the dark, and we LOST RASCAL, and I want to be honest that I did not know for some time whether that sentence was going to stay as short as it is.
Somewhere in that same chaos, something none of us could see took VAELIEN — reached out of nowhere and rifted him clean away, mid-fight, gone. He was back by the end of the weekend, whole. Nobody has yet explained to me where he went or what took him, and I have a page waiting.
At some point in all this, something reached out of the dark and made ME terrified — properly, uselessly terrified, the kind where the hands stop working — and Ariana cleansed it off me and put me back together, and I have not adequately thanked her.
Later — properly later, deep into the night — we followed the fighting OUT. Into the woods and the dark, and out there it was not only the dogs any more. Different beings entirely, of kinds I never saw well enough to catalogue, which frustrates me considerably more than the danger did.
And that is where Panlan did the most Panlan thing imaginable: he walked over and TALKED to one. Simply walked toward the enemy, in the dark, and had a conversation. We were told to hold. We were told to put our lights out. So we stood in the black and waited while, somewhere ahead of us, Panlan chatted with a thing we had been fighting all night.
He came back and said we should not go any further. Danger ahead. I asked what else he had learned and I did not get a full answer, and that conversation is now lost, which as an archivist I find worse than the barghests.
The group came back together eventually. Rascal, I am relieved to record, was fine — though I never did establish how, and I have left a space for it.
I went to my tent with ink on both hands and did not sleep especially well.
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