Reinald & Brigitte | Middle of The Night | 24th of Leaffall, 248 A.T.C.

The strangelings were gone, the dwarf disappeared, and with that the constructs had resumed their tasks as if nothing had happened, now receiving new instructions to 'end the experimentation.' Reinald, still running on the residual high of having improvised a minor religious event, moved freely among the construct's workstations while Brigitte kept her back to the wall and her eyes on Ella.

The Beast Within had been quiet in the chamber below. It wasn't quiet now. It had looked at Ella, the only 'problematic' witness to any of this... and arrived at a very simple conclusion. Brigitte gripped the wall and focused on breathing until the feeling passed, which it did, mostly.

What Reinald found at the workstations was enough to start filling in the gaps. Mushroom-based experiments, methodically run: rats in glass containers threaded with glowing fungal roots, calm where the roots held, dead where they didn't. A fish with red eyes throwing itself against its tank trying to reach Reinald, Brigitte recognized it as similar to the aggression during the incident at the Seahorse's Catch.

The constructs read and wrote down notes in a language that Reinald couldn't understand. Unfortunately, whatever language the constructs spoke, even Röka could not read it, and so by extension, Reinald couldn't read it either. The constructs were running tests — what the fungus did to creatures, how it spread, whether it could be controlled — as they continued their clean-up.

Reinald asked one of the constructs directly — are you trying to prevent the aggressiveness or induce it? — It processed the question with the patience of something that had all the time in the world and answered: "Experimentation requires results from both sides." The end goal remained, as ever, information it couldn't divulge to a mild acquaintance.

While Reinald moved among the constructs, Brigitte had pulled Ella aside and tried carefully to make the case for discretion. That what they'd found down here was bigger than a guard report. That the wrong people hearing the wrong version of this story before they'd had a chance to do something useful with it would hurt more people than it helped.

That she and Reinald were not, despite all what happened, the problem. Ella had listened with the contained expression of someone who had very strong feelings about honesty and was currently being asked to compromise them by a large woman she'd met three hours ago in a hole in a dam wall. She didn't say no. She didn't say yes either.

She clutched the necklace at her throat and looked somewhere past Brigitte's shoulder, and Brigitte came away from the conversation with the unsettled feeling of someone who had rolled the dice and had absolutely no idea what they'd landed on. But The Beast Within knew what had to be done.

One cart was being loaded with the aggressive fish. Three constructs were preparing to move. Reinald watched the cart begin moving toward the tunnel exit and made a decision. Brigitte noticed the carts too, pulled herself off the wall, and the two of them followed at a careful distance while Ella, still processing everything that had happened so far, trailed after them.

At the water's edge in the underground tunnel, the constructs tipped the cart without ceremony. Realizing that the poisoned fish could escape, Reinald reacted quickly. An eldritch blast sent the fish skidding back onto the shore before it could escape into the water and make its way back into the water reservoir of the Alluran Dam.

The two carts behind it dumped their boxes into the water before either of them could move, whatever was inside already drifting away toward the underground river, toward the city's water supply, toward people who had no idea any of this was happening. Reinald burned the fish and what remained of the fungal tendrils with it. Ella stared at the shore for a long moment and realized that... "All of this explained rather a lot, actually."

Whatever experiment failed, the constructs dumped in the underground river and moved on, no apparent awareness that the underground river connected to anything anyone lived near. It wasn't a poisoning campaign. It was an ongoing experiment with careless disposal. Whoever was directing the constructs either didn't know, didn't understand, or didn't care about the consequences.

Reinald and Brigitte realized that there was nothing more to learn here for now, and that it was time to return to the surface. Reinald, Brigitte and Ella reached the fifty-foot climb once again. The dwarf's absence nagged at them on the climb back up. The only apparent exit, the barrier, still remained active. So how could the dwarf leave? They climbed and didn't discuss it out loud.

Ella was still climbing when Brigitte heard it. Not a voice exactly — more like a pressure behind her eyes, a certainty settling in with the calm logic of something that had been waiting for the right moment. The Beast Within was not going to sit in jail, and without Ella, that would be much easier...

You know what you must do.

Ella's hands were on the edge. Fifty feet down was a long way. It would look like an accident. It would make everything simpler. Brigitte felt her own hand begin to move toward the thought before she'd consciously registered the thought was there.

She pulled it back.

The rage at the edges of her vision crept in and then receded as Ella's fingers found the top and Brigitte reached down — deliberately, carefully, with a hand that had just been trying to become something else — and pulled her up. Ella said something grateful that Brigitte didn't even register. The Beast Within said nothing for a long moment, and then, with the particular contempt of something that had almost won and knew it: coward. Brigitte straightened up and decided she'd been called worse. This was a victory over it.

...
The barrier was still up when they reached it — that same faint shimmer across the opening, pushing back when Reinald pressed a hand against it like touching still water from the wrong side. He called out to Rowan and Bramble.

Nothing.

Called again, louder, the sound dying somewhere on the other side of the wall in a way that suggested either nobody was there or nobody was answering, which weren't the same thing but felt the same from this side. Ella stood behind him holding her spear and saying nothing. Then, without warning or ceremony, the barrier simply dropped.

Reinald got down and went through the hole first. On the other side, he straightened up, dusted off what could be dusted, and took a few steps around the corner into the purification room — where he found Rowan and Bramble sitting against each other against the far wall, deeply, peacefully, almost aggressively asleep, Rowan's chin on his chest and Bramble's head tilted at an angle that was going to hurt in the morning. Whatever had happened to them while the three had been underground, it had at least been comfortable enough to sleep through. Odd...

...

Ella hit the sleep-inducing glyph the moment she crossed the threshold and went out cold, half through the hole, snoring loudly. Reinald spotted it too late to warn her.

A faint shape drawn in the wet soot on the floor. Throwing a book at it did nothing. He pulled Ella through by the arms and let her sleep on the purification room's floor. Brigitte crossed without incident, which struck them both as strange enough to note and too complicated to fully address right then. Rowan and Bramble were asleep against each other in the purification room, the bookcase back in place, the room looking almost exactly as it had before any of this started.

Before Reinald could begin working through the very short list of options available to them, Zinri appeared in the doorway, her head already in her hands, with the air of someone who had watched two people make a series of increasingly questionable decisions for several hours and had only herself to blame for not intervening sooner.

"You two are really not smart, are you?"

She'd put all three of them to sleep herself, and she was the one who'd triggered the barrier in the first place. She'd seen everything, she said. The tunnel. The constructs. The strangelings. The dwarf. The bracelets. The moment Reinald had summoned what she could only describe as an illusion of a glowing spectral fox into the middle of a standoff and somehow made it work. All of it, through the eye, start to finish. She'd seen quite a lot in her time and she was going to need a moment with some of it.

But what she kept coming back to — what she crossed her arms over and leveled at them with the focused attention of someone setting aside everything else temporarily — was the language.

She hadn't understood a word of what had passed between Brigitte, Reinald and the strangelings, and asked directly, "Why were you and them speaking in Luminary?"

What she'd heard in that chamber was something old, something that didn't match anything in her considerable frame of reference, and here was Brigitte — a surface dweller, by all appearances, with no obvious reason to know it — speaking it fluently enough that the strangelings had taken her seriously.

She wasn't asking as a threat. She wanted to know where it came from because Luminary was not a language you simply picked up, and the fact that it was being spoken under a dam in the West of The Whispers in Sevenfold Commonwealth, by someone she'd been watching through a scrying eye all night, had rearranged several things she thought she knew about the situation.

Brigitte didn't answer immediately, which was itself a kind of answer. When she did speak, she kept it simple and mostly true: she'd heard it before, recognized pieces of it, understood enough to follow.

Where from was a longer story than the situation called for, and one she wasn't entirely sure how to tell even to people she trusted fully, which Zinri — capable and apparently well-intentioned as she seemed — was absolutely not one of them.

Zinri held her gaze for a moment with the patient expression of someone who knew exactly what a non-answer looked like and was choosing, for now, to accept it.

Zinri filled the tunnel back in with an Earth spell and moved the bookcase, and was now fully prepared to chalk the entire incident up to a very elaborate shared dream for Ella, Rowan and Bramble, provided Reinald and Brigitte maintained a sensible distance from all three for the foreseeable future.

She retrieved her keys from Brigitte, collected the crystal that had slipped from Rowan's hand during his unscheduled nap, and listened while they explained what they'd found below.

The constructs, the experiments, the strangelings. The bracelets.
The threat to the city. The Remorhaz in the cube.

She'd heard of the bracelets. She didn't say where from. When Reinald pressed on who Zinri worked for, she deflected in the same tone as Brigitte and Reinald did earlier. Brigitte had noticed the sun symbol in the lining of her vest, which was the same mark she'd spotted drawn on the inside of the purification room wall, yet didn't make the connection.

Zinri sent them out the far side of the dam, reminded them they had never seen each other here, and added one last thing almost as an afterthought: if they were in the city, it might be worth keeping an eye on Rink's trinket shop. She didn't explain why. Then she closed the door behind them.

Outside, the night was quiet. They crossed the river, retrieved the horses from where they'd left them in the dark, and rode back to Needlethorne Farm without much between them in the way of conversation. When they entered the barn, they found someone else already fast asleep there — Pascal. Brigitte and Reinald decided that this was not the moment to discuss it. They found corners in the hay, didn't discuss anything, and took what remained of the night.

Reinald & Brigitte | Morning | 24th of Leaffall, 248 A.T.C.

It was Pascal who woke them — or rather, Pascal's complete lack of awareness that two people might want to sleep past dawn after whatever their faces suggested they'd been through. He was already up, already hay-dusted, already stretching his neck with the cheerful energy of someone who had slept perfectly well and saw no reason the morning shouldn't get started.

Roswyn appeared shortly after with a pan of pancakes and the apologetic warmth of a host who hadn't expected three guests and was quietly delighted to have them anyway. When Roswyn arrived in the barn, Brigitte and Reinald weren't there anymore, but she didn't push the subject. Reinald, only going on four very short hours of sleep, got himself up and pushed through, while Brigitte seemed fine. Bromm was already at the table with his drink, humming something to himself. During breakfast, Pascal asked if he could join Reinald and Brigitte on their travel back to the city, as without a horse the travel would take much longer. Reinald and Brigitte agreed.

The ride back toward the city was easy enough. Pascal filled the silence in the generous way that cheerful people do when they sense that the people around them have been awake too long: some Free Roadsman anecdotes, a digression about a cave that had sent a former adventuring partner slightly loose in the head, questions about stargazing. A mission in Fallowbrae gone awry, typical adventurer stuff...

Halfway back to the city, they decided to take a short break. It was quite close to where Reinald, Brigitte and Aveline had had their picnic earlier, and it was there that Brigitte found Aveline's satchel on the roadside... Had she dropped it? That doesn't seem likely.

She held it up without a word and Reinald came over, looked at it, and went very still in the way people do when something clicks into place that they'd rather hadn't. Aveline's bag. On the road. Without Aveline. The horse tracks nearby told the rest of it — pressed deep, angled wrong, stopping in a way that horse tracks don't stop unless something has intervened from above.

The peryton that was spotted in the area...

Reinald rushed into the forest following its tracks before anyone had formally decided that was the plan, moving with the slightly uncoordinated urgency of someone whose mind had arrived at a conclusion faster than his feet had. Brigitte handed Pascal the reins without explanation and followed after him into the forest.

Pascal watched them go, looked at the bag, looked at the tracks, looked at the treeline, and after a moment's consideration said that whoever that belonged to was probably gone, and that was just how it went sometimes on the road, which was genuinely meant as comfort and landed the way it always does when it's true. He tied off the horses and settled in to wait.

What Reinald and Brigitte found over the next twenty minutes was blood — a great deal of blood, from Aveline's horse — a tree with a cracked trunk, reins caught on a low branch above a small river, and a trail leading toward the mountains that gradually ran out of evidence. No clothing. No sign of Aveline, living or otherwise. After forty minutes, with the trail cold and Pascal waiting, they turned back.

The walk back was another twenty minutes of Reinald going over it in his head and arriving at the same place every time. The blood on the rock. The horse leg in the undergrowth. The reins caught on the branch above the river like something dropped mid-flight, because that was exactly what it was.

He knew what a peryton does with what it took. He'd read enough, studied enough, to know that what came back down was rarely the part you were hoping for. Aveline was sharp and capable, yet none of that changed what the evidence looked like spread across forty minutes of forest floor.

He'd been certain she was dead.

He was already beginning to arrange in his head the order in which people would need to be told, Pascal first, then Ervin and Victoria, and then eventually a letter to her father that nobody was going to enjoy writing, explaining that his daughter had ridden out on a business errand and that the road had not seen fit to return her.

Pascal was exactly where they'd left him, sitting on a roadside rock with the reins of both horses looped around one hand and the patient expression of a man who had decided some time ago that worrying was largely a waste of energy. When they came out of the treeline he looked up, read their faces, and arrived at the correct conclusion without being told.

He said it was a shame, and meant it, and then asked if they wanted to keep moving, because standing on the road wasn't going to help anyone. It was only when Reinald said her name — Aveline De Ragnaisse — that something shifted in Pascal's voice, briefly and against his will, like a floorboard giving slightly under weight it hadn't expected.

Neither Reinald nor Brigitte said anything about it. They'd only known him a day, which was not long enough to ask. They untied the horses and kept moving. About fifteen minutes further, around forty minutes from Allura's Haven, they came across a small Free Roadsman Camp that hadn't been there on the way out. Three large tents and a few carts. Probably in response to the peryton situation, Pascal suggested that they'd check in.

Reinald addressed the first free roadsmen he spotted, a large dragonfolk warrior named Blake with similar armor to Pascal's. When Reinald told Blake that a peryton might have attacked someone on the road, Blake pointed in the direction of the big tent, and Reinald and Brigitte rushed to it.

And they found Aveline inside, unconscious, her leg set in a splint, arms bandaged, a cleric tending to her. Blake told Reinald and Brigitte that she had dragged herself out of the forest at the edge of the camp in the middle of the night and collapsed. The cleric confirmed a broken leg, a head wound, and someone in her sleep muttering a name neither Reinald nor Brigitte recognized: Ariana.

It was a miracle that she was alive, yet Reinald and Brigitte also felt guilt — it had been their decision to let her go alone on the road. Reinald and Brigitte spotted Pascal receiving an earful from the camp's leader. A harefolk named Theodora. She had pulled him aside and said several things to him in a low voice that sent him scampering off to make himself useful elsewhere.

Reinald and Brigitte asked if they could borrow a cart so they could transport Aveline safely to the city. Theodora agreed that would be best, instructing Pascal to bring it back to their main camp outside of the city.

Reinald and Brigitte loaded Aveline with more care than the situation called for and less dignity than Aveline would have preferred if she'd been conscious, and took to the road. The ride back to Allura's Haven was quiet in the way that rides are when everyone is tired and at least one person is unconscious...

Reinald & Brigitte | Afternoon | 24th of Leaffall, 248 A.T.C.

The city was wrong in the way that only becomes obvious once you're inside it. Windows closed in the middle of the afternoon. People moving with their shoulders in. The particular kind of quiet that settles over a place after something has happened in public and nobody quite knows how to carry on yet. The incident at the Seahorse's Catch had left a mark.

They brought Aveline home to the Ragnaisse Manor, which struck Brigitte with the force of a physical object. She'd passed it from the outside before. That hadn't prepared her for the inside — the height of the ceilings, the quality of the rugs, the double staircase that existed for no practical reason except to be a staircase.

Matilda, the housekeeper, received the news of Aveline's condition with the contained alarm of someone whose job does not regularly involve alarm, and prepared the room while Brigitte carried Aveline upstairs and placed her on a bed with enough pillows for several people.

With Aveline safely at home with Matilda watching over her, Reinald and Brigitte agreed to split up for a while and to meet the following morning at the Drunken Phoenix. Pascal had already taken off with the cart, which left Reinald to deal with returning the horses to the Cerulean Compass and informing them that one of their rented horses had been taken by the peryton...

Reinald | Afternoon | 24th of Leaffall, 248 A.T.C.

Reinald went to find the head cleric from the ambassador's pier temple, talked him into a house call, and walked him back in time to get Aveline properly seen to. Outside the Ragnaisse Warehouse on the way back, Humble and Reggie were loading crates. Reinald informed them of what happened, and they had immediate questions — reasonable ones, since their employer was currently unconscious with a broken leg, which could affect the next contract signing...

Reinald explained what the peryton had done to Aveline's horse, but that she miraculously escaped. Humble, processing this for approximately four seconds, proposed that the three of them go hunt it immediately, on the grounds that a peryton's heart, feathers, and nails were worth considerably more than standing around talking about it — a prospect that tickled his hunter's fascination, both intriguing and unsettling. Reinald agreed in principle, noted that several other things also required attention first... Reinald escorted the head cleric back to the Ragnaisse Manor. The cleric tended to Aveline and promised to send someone to check on her every few hours.

Brigitte | Afternoon | 24th of Leaffall, 248 A.T.C.

Brigitte found Sonya at the Bubbling Cauldron, alone, making more potions in deliberate violation of Rhazeth's instruction to stay at the hideout, and entirely unapologetic about it.

The antitoxin she used during the incident at the Seahorse's Catch worked, she explained, but not fast enough and not completely. If she could get a sample of whatever was actually causing this, she could do more. Brigitte gave her the shape of it: mushrooms, fish, and some details on the experiments she'd seen below the dam. Sonya absorbed it with the focused attention of someone already thinking three steps ahead, gave Brigitte a potion for the road, and asked her not to mention to their father that she'd been here.

She decided to check in on the hideout. No doubt her room would still be occupied by Vesper, and Brigitte's suspicion of Vesper had only grown tenfold after the events of the last few days.

The hideout was quieter than she'd left it. Sloane was behind the bar doing something methodical and unhurried that didn't require explanation, and Beastie was rolling around the floor in the particular way that suggested either profound contentment or a complete absence of anything better to do.

Brigitte asked about Coldrock. Sloane's head tilted almost imperceptibly toward the Bright Lie, which was answer enough. She asked about Vesper and Rhazeth. Beastie pointed at the office door. Brigitte nodded, decided that was a problem for later in the evening, eventually leaving to rest at the Drunken Phoenix.

That evening, at the Drunken Phoenix, three Wolffolk were at a corner table. Brigitte watched from the bar and kept an eye on them. She noticed that Kaelis was still disguised as Fen'ryck. Cards between them, a drink in his hand, laughing at something with the easy comfort of someone who had spent his whole life being looked at sideways and now found a glimpse of another life. Kaelis had told her that he did not like pretending to be someone else, but now he seemed happy.

Eventually "Fen'ryck" said his goodbyes to the other wolffolk — job at the temple in the morning, something stable for once — and the two wolves sent him off with the casual warmth of people who had simply enjoyed his company, which seemed to genuinely please him in a way he tried not to show.

The harefolk appeared not long after, moving through the space with a quietness that had nothing to do with being small. She sat down with the two wolves. Brigitte noticed, but couldn't overhear. The conversation was low and brief, maybe ten minutes, and whatever passed between them stayed between them.

When it was done the harefolk shook hands with both wolffolk and left unhurried. Brigitte stayed at the bar and turned it over in her head. There was something about the way the harefolk moved. Not a face she recognized. Not a name she could place. Just the persistent, itching sense of something seen before...

Reinald | Night | 24th of Leaffall, 248 A.T.C.

Reinald spent the rest of the evening in the Ragnaisse Manor, waiting for Victoria, and gave her a full account once she arrived. He started with what happened to Aveline. Victoria grew exceedingly concerned knowing the peryton was becoming such a threat, but was glad to see Aveline safe.

Reinald began to recite everything that had happened. Constructs, experiments, strangelings, bracelets — omitting only the nature of Röka.

Reinald started at the farm and went forward — Needlethorne Farm, the dam, the cover story, Zinri and her floating eye and her keys and her complete refusal to account for herself, the storage rooms, the crack in the wall, the smell of the water that was wrong before it was obviously wrong. The tunnel. The pistons. The troglodytes and what they were doing that far from the depths.

He described the constructs carefully — the wood and metal construction, the way they moved, the odd way they spoke, the experiments laid out across the workstations. The aggressive fish with the red eyes. The rats threaded through with glowing fungal roots, calm where it held, dead where it didn't. The underground river that the constructs had been dumping their failures into, apparently without anyone directing them having considered where that river went. Victoria listened without moving.

When Reinald got to the bracelets she went still in a way that was different from her usual stillness, and he stopped. Victoria recognized the bracelets: tools used by the Cult of the Flamespawn, the same group she'd encountered years ago in Concordia.

"They are binding instruments," she said. The fire in them activates if the wearer disobeys, or tries to remove them, or simply becomes inconvenient. The kind of tool you reach for when the people you're using have no particular reason to cooperate.

She turned it over, what the cult was doing this far from Concordia, attached to the strangelings in a cave below the Alluran Dam, connected somehow to a shadowy harefolk...

They were mid-conversation when Aveline stirred — not waking, just shifting, her head turning slightly against the pillow. Both of them went quiet. Then, barely audible, barely formed: Ariana. A pause. Then, softer: Mother. Then nothing, her breathing evening back out into sleep. Reinald and Victoria looked at each other across the bed and didn't say anything for a moment.

The conversation shifted to Lewys. He was going to make an announcement tomorrow morning at Crow's Pier. A podium was already being assembled, and tomorrow morning guards were going to move through the residential streets encouraging attendance.

Victoria's thinking was to wait, see what he put in front of the city before deciding what to hand him — because what Reinald had brought back from that tunnel was leverage to push him to finally admit to her what was going on. Reinald suggested waiting until after the announcement.

Victoria wondered about this Zinri that he'd met. Unfortunately, Reinald didn't have many answers. Victoria theorized that they could be an independent agent from Eureka's Gem, or possibly even a Cursebreaker. But for now they were left without answers.

Brigitte | Midnight | 24th-25th of Leaffall, 248 A.T.C.

The hideout was quiet past midnight. Kaelis was at the bar with Coldrock, relaxed in a way Brigitte hadn't seen from him before — elbows on the bar, saying something that made Coldrock's mouth twitch. Brigitte sat down at the bar, joining their conversation.

Kaelis was talking about the wolves from the card game — something one of them had done, some moment at the table that had made the whole thing feel like an evening rather than an assignment. Coldrock was listening with the half-attention she gave things she found tolerable, which from Coldrock was practically a compliment.

He said they had a way about them — you sit down for a hand of cards and an hour later you're laughing and you've forgotten what you were thinking about before you walked in. He said it with mild bewilderment.

That he'd enjoyed it. That it had been a while since an evening had just been an evening...

Coldrock set a refilled glass in front of him without being asked and didn't comment. Brigitte looked at the bar and said nothing. Because the thing was — it was only possible for him here, like this, as someone else. And all three of them knew that...

Coldrock suggested that he'd better wrap this up — it wasn't smart to have 'strings attached' — which made Brigitte feel conflicted; all of this was somehow her fault, after all. Eventually Kaelis left for the night, said something about a visit to the temple in the morning, and headed out. Brigitte moved to the bar. Coldrock was already back to cleaning, not looking up.

Coldrock
What?

Brigitte
I need to tell you something.

Coldrock
Then tell it.

Brigitte
I met your sister.

The cloth stopped. Coldrock didn't look up right away. When she did her face was doing something complicated that she was working hard to keep simple.

Coldrock
What did you just say?

Brigitte
I was below the dam. There was a dwarf — masked, bracelet on her wrist. When we got the bracelet off and the mask came off —

Brigitte paused.

Brigitte
She looked like you. I asked if she knew anyone named Coldrock and she —

Something moved behind Coldrock's eyes. She looked down at the bar. Put the cloth down slowly, like she needed something to do with her hands. When she looked back up the flatness was back, harder than before.

Coldrock
What... What are you talking about! Hilde's been dead for two years.

Brigitte
She knew exactly who I meant. First thing she asked was whether you were safe.

Coldrock put the cloth down very carefully.

Coldrock
No... No. It can't be. You mistook someone else.

Brigitte
I didn't.

Coldrock turned away for a moment, just slightly, just enough, her hand still flat on the bar. When she turned back her eyes were locked onto Brigitte like a hawk on its prey.

Coldrock
I... I... You're standing in my bar telling me you saw my dead sister in a cave and I'm supposed to — what exactly?!

Brigitte
She said: "She'd know who to spare." When I told her you were safe, that's what she said.

Coldrock was very still for a moment. Then she came around the bar and went down the hall and started hitting Rhazeth's door with the flat of her fist.

Coldrock
Rhazeth! Open the door!

She kept banging.

Coldrock
Open the FUCKING DOOR! RHAZETH!!!

Brigitte followed. From the other hallway — Sonya, hair loose, half asleep, drawn out by the noise. Brigitte caught her eye and shook her head, once, firmly. Sonya hesitated, then retreated back around the corner, though Brigitte had no particular confidence she went far.

Coldrock hit the door again. Nothing. She stepped back and kicked the door in with her bare feet. The office was dim. Rhazeth was behind his desk, awake, with his palm against his head.
He looked at Coldrock, then at Brigitte in the broken doorframe behind her, and didn't say anything. Coldrock slammed her hands on the desk.

Coldrock
You told me!

Rhazeth said nothing.

Coldrock
You told me she was dead!

Her voice cracked once, hard, and then flattened back out.

Coldrock
I stood RIGHT THERE AND you told me!

Brigitte took a step toward her, put a hand on her shoulder. Coldrock yanked away from it with enough force that Brigitte went back two steps. Neither of them acknowledged it. Brigitte stayed where she was.

Rhazeth got up from behind the desk. Went to the cupboard in the corner. Came back with a bottle of old dwarven whiskey and set it on the desk between them. Then he sat back down and looked at Coldrock directly for the first time since she'd come through the door. Brigitte stood in the broken doorframe and said nothing. There was nothing to say.

Rhazeth
I thought she was dead too.

Coldrock stared at him.

Rhazeth
Until recently.