Hands trembling, Talwyn fumbled the glowing teal green stone into her hip pouch. The stone golem's broad, stocky frame lumbered towards her, rocking and rumbling the carriage house with its heavy steps. "I don't suppose you guys know how to fight these things, do you?" she asked as she stumbled backwards, too distracted by the golem to avoid the twisted patch of straw behind her foot.

    The fear that wracked Talwyn's bones did not afflict Darius. Balancing against the quakes from the golem's steps, he threw his arm out around the sorcerer's waist to catch her fall. Founts of inspiration flowed from his confident gaze, the chill of their cool gleam matched by the heat that raced through Talwyn's cheeks.

    "Don't worry. We've broken a few golems down in our time," Darius said as he lifted Talwyn to her feet, keeping his hand on her waist. Once she had recovered her balance with a muttered thanks, he eased himself in front of her and drew his rapier. "Ready, Arlo?"

    Arlo snorted, juggling their hammer between their hands. "Just try not to screw this up, pretty boy."

    With a carefree shrug, Darius charged towards the stone golem, hopping to the side to avoid the construct's descending limb. The golem's body lurched to block the aisle around its feet, yet Darius darted over the shaking floor and leapt into a slick slide between its legs. Juddering and bouncing over the rough straw, he looked up through the beads of sweat that coated his brow, raised his chilling rapier, and pierced the golem right through a clay-like seam in its middle.

    The stone golem quivered, and a whirlwind of clear cold burst from its abdomen. Glittering frost-touched draughts billowed around the buried blade, sending cracks tunnelling through the golem's craggy body. As it lingered in the cold blast, thick ice blocks seized the golem's legs and hips to leave it stranded, helpless in the centre of the space.

    On cue, Arlo rushed forwards and leapt into the air, their mithril hammer raised. They sailed clear of the golem's flailing arm and, with a furious cry, brought their weapon down on its frozen waist. A bassy crash thundered through the air, and the construct's limbs shattered into a spray of ice-cold shrapnel that clattered against the carriage house walls. Without a struggle, the legless stone golem slumped to the floor, its head and surviving limbs hanging free.

    Darius sprung to his feet and drove his rapier through the slim seam between the golem's head and torso. As the frost spread, Arlo flipped their hammer in their hands and swung upwards, smashing the weapon into the construct's brittle face. Stone, ice, and loose gemstones flew over the dragonborn's shoulders, and a dry, bitter, earthy taste tainted the air in the debris' wake. The golem's remaining pieces crumbled, leaving a pile of rubble and thin dust.

    Skirting past the rubble pile that once constituted his foe, Darius swiped the coat of glittering stone dust from his jacket sleeve. "This way, quickly!"

    He took exactly one step through the chamber before his balance abandoned him. Underneath Darius' foot, a slender stone shard leapt from the ground and hurtled to join the heap of rock before him. Other cracked chunks levitated closer from all around the room, and the rubble pile switched and shifted into discernible appendages. With the scraped resetting of its green gemstone eyes, the stone golem rose to its feet once more.

    Her legs shaking, Talwyn looked to Darius for guidance, only for a bolt of his frenetic nerves to crash against her mind's walls. She reached out for him, yet a harsh metallic screech heralded a stormfront of dense, acidic, mustard-coloured fog that drowned her ears and suffocated her eyes into burning senselessness. When she regained her sight, Darius was gone. The entire carriage house was gone. She was stranded, choking in clouds of toxic miasma.

    Stranded, but not alone, as a familiar raging cry reminded her. "Damn it, I can't see shit!" Arlo yelled, the undaunted charge of their heavy footsteps oddly comforting amidst the chaos. They hacked up a sickly string of dry coughs, and when they spoke again, a hoarse wheeze took hold of their voice. "Screw it, I'm swinging blind. I know you're in there somewhere, assholes!"

    A swift flash broke through the fog, and the clang of metal on stone guided Talwyn to the edge of the clouds. There, as expected, Arlo reeled back for another strike, the muscles of their arms bulging with anger. Less expected, however, was the way their hammer bounced off the stone golem's body to leave them staggered off-balance. The construct hardly flinched at the blow, and it swept its arm forward to crack its open palm against Arlo's chest, sending them flailing across the chamber.

    Talwyn did not see Arlo land, but she definitely heard the crash of splitting wood, and the guttural cry the dragonborn gave out with it.

    With a splitting snap, a distinct dull blue spark called to Talwyn from the depths of the fog. Her scratchy eyes failed to find the light's source as it grew, brightening and widening until it unfolded into a dark metallic limb, broad, heavy, and swinging right for her. Stunned and dazed, she could only watch as the steel golem's fist battered against her body and launched her off her feet. Her back cracked against a wooden pillar, her throat burned with her pained cries, and a rough edge cleaved into her thigh. Under her dress' folds, hot, deep red blood flashed against her skin.

    The metal hand pushed through the fog again. Its uncurled fingers drove across the space, primed to seize Talwyn in its hold, and her ringing limbs lacked the energy to carry her away.

    She heard its approach before she saw it. A streak of pulsing purple energy scorched in front of Talwyn's limp body, and the wood and straw flooring prised apart as it hissed through the space. On winds of chaotic snaps and distant cries, a spiked skeletal wall heaved through the chasm, sprites of black necrotic energy highlighting its yellowed bones. The golem's hand thumped against the wall, its lunging grab thwarted.

    Behind the grotesque barrier, Kerensa's deathly pale hand landed on Talwyn's arm. "There you are!" she cried through the buzzing in her friend's ears. Black blood trailed from her cheek, yet her misty eyes honed in on the deep gash that stained Talwyn's dress a muddy carmine shade. "That looks sore, darling. Are you alright? Can you move?"

    "I'll be fine, but I'm not raring to go through something like that again," Talwyn answered as she pulled herself back to her feet, steadied by her friend's freely offered hold. Strained coughs tore through her throat as she looked around, the faintest glimmer of light from the far door cresting over the wall's spiked tips. "How are we going to get away from these things? They've got us penned in here."

    "And they're dreadfully persistent." Wiping a stray smear of black ooze from her arm, Kerensa searched for friendly signals through the slight gaps in the necromantic wall's bones. Tense strings knitted her brow tight. "You know, I've never seen a golem that can rebuild itself before. I'm not sure I'm a fan."

    The surrounding puffs of fog shuddered not with force or wind, but with anticipation. Like a relentless pendulum, the steel golem's arm whipped through the toxic air and ploughed into the wall, blasting it apart. Split bone shards sliced into Talwyn's flesh as they flew past, and a bitter, rotten taste infected her mouth.

    It was not a decision. It was not even a thought. It was raw emotion, a visceral manifestation of her purest will. It was her promise to protect Kerensa, made metaphysical.

    Talwyn threw her arms around Kerensa, squeezed her friend close to her chest, and fixed her eyes on the slim patch of floor visible beyond the wall. The golem's hand came back, swinging harder and faster, and words fled from Kerensa's mouth to flutter to the floor, far from Talwyn's hearing. She noticed nothing. She simply tapped into the profound magical energy welled within her and, with the lightest touch, bade the power to step them across the space.

    Suddenly stripped of weight, Talwyn cast herself and Kerensa into the torrents of ethereal energy that endlessly raced through the world. The same invisible strings touched her every fibre, yet this time they were less like tethers than guardrails, guiding her traversal without pulling her along. She was learning, and she would learn everything it took to keep her and Kerensa safe.

    Except Kerensa was not with her now. Where she had clutched the necromancer close, a large orb of perfect, ever-shifting white light flared between her arms. It strained Talwyn's eyes to stare at the orb, yet its radiant exterior provided a solid, sturdy surface beneath her fingertips. Whatever the sphere was, it shielded Kerensa from the blinding, dizzying power Talwyn unleashed.

    With inertia wrenching her gut, Talwyn's mass returned to her drifting form and dragged her to the carriage house floor. She angled her body to cushion the blow for her radiant sphere passenger, yet at some point amidst the blur, the orb had unfolded into her friend's shape once again. Kerensa was back in her arms, conscious and unharmed.

    The steel golem guard, however, effortlessly stalked the tail of their ethereal traversal. As it withdrew its hefty arm from the ruined bone wall, it craned its helm-like head towards the witches' new position, the surfaces of its gemmed eyes glowing a sinister green. Yellow-green strands of malingering miasma leaked from between its metal plates.

    Scrambling to her feet, Kerensa lobbed out two blasts of thick, bubbling shadow energy. The darkness spread over the steel golem's chest, plugging up the gaps in its body and cutting off the flow of toxic gas from within.

    The opportunity was brief, yet Talwyn's power would not be denied. Rising to her feet with her hands close together, she channelled her lunging lightning into a shifting, crackling ball. She stepped out and, with a tired grunt, tossed her electrical sphere at the golem. The orb flew, swelled, and swallowed the construct's chest. A damp taste filled the air, and with a fizzing snap, the sphere detonated with the force of a sweeping, shattering, teal green thunderstorm.

    Little of the steel golem remained intact. Blue-silver dust painted the quivering pillars, chunks of warped metal blew holes through the ceiling above, and scorched, shadow-stained plates collapsed into a heap where the construct had stood. Across the room, a spear-like steel limb protruded from between the stone golem's head and neck, jamming its body's movements.

    Dusting her ragged dress off, Kerensa tucked her stray hairs back into place behind her ears. "Exquisite work, darling. I'm so tremendously proud of you," she said through the creaks and complaints of the building's battered wooden frame. With the tip of her weathered sandal, she tapped a fallen piece of scrap metal, her eyebrows raising at a hole in the nearby wall. "And you improved the ventilation through this dump, too. Good thing, really. Heavy sweat and old hay is a...unique stench."

    "Try adding in a dozen overexcited foals hot off a run through the marshes," Talwyn said, wincing as she regained her balance on her wounded leg. Spikes of stress needled her mind, though only with the lulling of her own adrenaline did she realise the feeling was not her own. It lurked nearby, and it was powerful.

    Lethal, even.

    Talwyn hobbled past the paralysed stone golem, the pounding of her heart numbing her to the looming threat of the construct's limp arm. Sparkling and still, a frost-fogged rapier sat stranded among the wreckage, pieces of steel and stone shrapnel resting within its icy aura.

    As Talwyn's pulse quickened, a splitting yell tore through to her ears. "Fuck! The hell, shit-for-brains?" It was Arlo's voice, yet a wheezing strain tensed their usual unfussed character. Laid out across a pile of ruined wood, a wet, amber-hued stain lined the front of their torn jacket, its core obscured by their clenched fists. "What the fuck are you trying to do? Dice my guts up for stew?"

    "Believe me, that'd be a lot easier right now!" Blood streaked down his face and shirt, Darius hunched over Arlo's splayed body. White-gold energy resonated from his sullied hands onto the dragonborn's abdomen. "I could go faster, but I figured you'd like to keep your insides, you know, inside you."

    A moment passed before Talwyn's eyes made sense of the scene. Beneath Arlo's hands lay not a mere heavy slash wound, but six inches of a broken wooden pillar that pierced their back and ran straight through their gut. Rivers of their amber blood ran from the post's splintered base, the flow rushing faster with every flex of their broken body.

    Wiping his companion's blood off on his trousers, Darius cursed and pressed his hands around Arlo's wound. "Look, just slow down so I can try to keep you together, alright?"

    "Slow down?" Arlo gripped the protruding spike, their teeth gritted. "Fuck that."

    It was not emotion that besieged Talwyn. It was Arlo's very essence collapsing through never-ending circles of pain, pride, despair, and howling, frenzied rage. Lunge by lunge, inch by inch, the dragonborn fought against agony and anguish to lift themselves up the wood. A pool of shimmering gold life flooded over the floor, the air curled with their guttural screams, and Talwyn's mind fractured into so many fragments, all cast carelessly into the ether.

    All lost to darkness, far, far beyond her reach. 

    Well. Things have gone some kinda way lately. Who had overly aggressive reassembling golems on their bingo card? Arlo lore? Weird magic rocks?? Okay, maybe the rocks aren't so unusual, but this whole situation is definitely crazy. From the sounds of it, things are only going to get wilder as we go, too...

    Anyway, while we wait for Talwyn to wake up, who's up for some R&R? (That's 'Rest and Reconsidering Our Group's Life Choices', naturally.)

1. Talwyn's dream appears to be evolving, and not in any fun ways. Who was the figure that appeared in her dream and daydream? Or, more interestingly, what might they represent?

2. The ambivalence of returning home gets brought to the fore in these chapters, not least through Arlo's unwelcome return to the Maulers. What do you think qualifies as a home? What factors contribute to a definition of 'home'? Are homes inherently temporary?

3. We've been in this world for a bit now. Who's been your favourite character so far? Has anybody surprised you, among either the main or supporting cast? Is there a relationship that you enjoy seeing, or a character moment that stands out for you?