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The barn was, without a doubt, a less than ideal spot to spend the night. The inside of it was damp and drafty, freezing streams of water trickled from the rafter beams, and the cold seemed to claw its way in through every gap in the warped slats of the walls. Then again, outside of the barn could currently be described by the words “storming”, “thunderous”, and perhaps even “gale force winds”, so no one was feeling inclined to go look for somewhere better.
Ariel, Dayereth, Kava, Ollie, and Quinn sprawled on the mildewy hay bales, trying to get comfortable. They had cleared a space in the middle of the floor and after nearly half an hour of trying to light some of the damp straw, Ariel had kicked it aside in frustration, ignited her enchanted sword, and put it on the floor instead. Dormwyn, her elemental companion, danced merrily in the flames that flickered along the blade, so at least one member of the party was happy.
The five of them passed around a wineskin of cheap scumble while Quinn put some dried jerky and rations to boil in a pot over the sword. The surface of the blade wasn’t flat, so he had to balance it somewhat awkwardly with one edge of the pot on the hot metal and the other on the ground. It rocked dangerously every time he stirred.
“Well isn’t this just dandy,” Ariel said, speaking up to be heard over the howl of the wind outside. “I can’t believe we’re storming the castle tomorrow in this fucking weather.” She frowned. “Uh, pun not intended.”
“This weather? This weather ain't nothing!” Kava grinned at her from across the room, the flickering light illuminating each one of her draconic teeth. “We’ve dealt with way worse. A hot meal and good night’s sleep, we’ll be raging to go. Pun definitely intended!”
There was a crack of lightning and they all jumped.
“Ah, fuck,” said a quiet voice. Quinn was nursing a burn on his hand, and half of the thin stew was slopped across the ground. Ariel stuttered an apology about her sword and Dayereth reached forward to check the burn but Quinn waved them both away. “It’s fine, I’m fine, it’s only a flesh wound. Sorry about dinner.”
There was a murmur of reassurances from everyone that it was fine, cold jerky sounded pretty good right now and anyway, this wasn’t the worst meal they’d had on the road so far, not by a long shot! But before long it died down and the sounds of the storm took over once more.
“Maybe Ariel has a point,” Dayereth volunteered after a while. “We won’t be able to see anything in this rain, and I don’t favour our odds at aiming spells in this visibility either. Perhaps we should put off the mission for a few days until conditions improve?”
“You know we can’t do that,” cut in a voice from the shadows. Ollie had wedged himself against one of the wooden columns a ways from the fire, and was idly shuffling a deck of cards from one hand to the other. He had been nearly invisible in the gloom until he had spoken up, and the shadows threw a grisly cast on his pale face. “Once this clears Frerendrar will be on the move again, and take the Cloak with him. I’m not letting it get away from us this time. It’s too late to take the easy way out now.”
Kava snorted. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m looking forward to smashing some heads around. Who’d want to do things the easy way? I say bring it on.”
“No, Ollie has a point…” mused Ariel. “Do you guys ever think about it?”
Four questioning faces looked back at her.
“The easy way out, I mean. None of us had to follow the quest all this way, and goodness knows it’s brought each of us a lifetime’s worth of grief, at least.”
“I’m surprised to hear this line of thinking from you of all people, Ariel,” said Dayereth coolly. “I would have expected your, hm, tendency towards heroic ideation to protest at its mere consideration.”
She sighed and rubbed her face. “It’s not a crime to wonder--call it an academic curiosity if you must. And I certainly don’t regret the choices I’ve made. But it’s not like there weren’t other, happier paths open to us. So why didn’t we take any of them?”
The question seemed to stir something among the gathered company. For a few moments there was only the sound of the crackling sword and the storm outside. Then Ollie spoke up.
“Well I guess it’s easy enough to see what my ‘other path’ was. When a Goddess of Death opens a glowing door into heaven and tells you can follow your family into eternal happiness through it, I’d call that an ‘easy way out.’” He chuckled darkly.
“But you didn’t take it,” said Dayereth.
“And I’d say I made the right choice, wouldn’t you? If I’d gone through that door I’d never have learned what assholes my family all are--and that we’re not even related by blood! Can you imagine spending an eternity with my bullish cousins and that shit excuse that calls himself my dad? Better that I’m out here with you guys, forging my own path for a change.”
“Your mother is there too,” Quinn pointed out.
Ollie stared at the wineskin in his hand for a moment, then took a long draught. “I suppose she is.”
“I could have gone with Shamesh,” said Kava, somewhat wistfully. Shamesh was the rebel dragonborn who had rescued her from servitude as a child and raised her in his fighting ways. “Remember when we met him down in the Piccaran Tunnels? I could have joined him, and helped him face down the four Dragon Lords once and for all. Think of the glory we’d win together! The ass we’d kick!”
“I’d hardly call hunting down some of the most powerful and ancient drakes in the world ‘easy’,” laughed Ariel, “but I do see how that might have suited you better than our current quest.”
Kava sighed. “I’m not like you guys, with your fancy thinking about things. You know, like figuring out what’s right and wrong. Everyone knows the Dragon Lords are tyrants and need to be taken down. But here, with everything that’s been happening… it gets complicated.” She hugged her knees.
“We are doing the right thing,” said Ollie fiercely. “The Raven Queen chose us as her champions.”
“But if I’d gone with Shamesh then I’d never have fallen into those ruins in Jescattot… and then Zirlarq wouldn’t be living in my brain, and I wouldn’t be putting you all in danger…” she started to look panicked, as she always did whenever someone mentioned the evil presence that had taken up residence in her mind and made her lash out in violent fits of rage.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Quinn soothed her, walking over to place a comforting hand on her hunched shoulders. At his touch, the spines that had bristled with agitation on the back of her neck relaxed back into place.
She took a deep breath and continued. “...still, I don’t think I could’ve actually gone with him. With Shamesh, I mean. When we found out he’d been working with Silhobar… well, I guess I realized that there were secrets he was keeping from me too, and that just because I love him doesn’t mean I can trust him. So that’s that.” She put her chin back down on her knees.
The rest of the party exchanged impressed glances. That was unusually introspective for their barbarian friend.
“We’re glad you’re here, Kava,” Quinn said.
“Yeah, what would we do without our strongest party member?” Ariel ribbed her with an elbow.
This earned a weak smile from the dragonborn. “Prolly get your asses kicked.”
They were interrupted by another clash of thunder, after which Kava took the chance to turn the conversation again. “What about you, Dayereth?”
“What about me? Hmm, I think my path here was fairly inescapable, truth be told. My commission as an ambassador of Methulasel, which I am honor bound to complete, was to investigate the interruption of the Raven Queen’s cycles of death and rebirth, and this brought me to you all. And once they decided I had failed my task and exiled me… well, all the more reason to continue traveling with friends.”
Ariel waved this away. “Any obligation of ‘honor’ dissolved the minute your employers tried to fire you by way of murder. You could have left all this adventuring behind and opened that tavern you’re always talking about. Between the five of us we have enough gold to buy the Proud Pariah ten times over. Or open a competitor, if you prefer.”
The eladrin shook his head. “Doing that still would have gotten me named Traitor by the Elven Council. In their eyes, I still would have failed in my duties, the only difference would be that I would be failing by choice, rather than by incompetence. And of course, the only reward for traitors is death.”
“We’ve fought off all the hitmen they’ve sent after you so far,” pointed out Ollie. “No reason we couldn’t do the same in a comfortable city instead of in the middle of whatever den of monsters the gods have seen fit to send us to this week.”
“Oh yes, I’m sure that’s extremely conducive to the schedule of a small business owner. Trivia night on Tuesdays, and Team Fighting Off the Eladrin Murder Snakes on Thursdays.” He gave a wry smile, and it was only because they knew him so well that they could see how much pain he hid behind it. “No, I don’t think a quiet life was ever an option for me. I will either have to see this quest through to the end, or else die trying. The latter option is certainly the ‘easy way out’, if you will, though however much it may have tempted me lately, you courageous fools seem to think it’s worth walking the more difficult one through to the end.” After this speech he bowed his head and busied his hand with mending a patch in his cloak he had been working on, clearly not wanting to pursue the topic any further.
Ariel opened her mouth to protest--probably with something dumb and cliche about forging ahead on through life’s trials--but Ollie cut her off. “Well that’s us, but what about you Ariel? You asked the question in the first place.”
Ariel frowned. “I know I did. But I’ve never really thought it through before.”
“You had other options, probably more so than the rest of us,” Quinn pointed out. “A home to go back to, for one.”
“Clear Creek? I suppose I could have stayed there and worked with my dad in the mines… I mean, there was the whole ‘getting run out of town for rabble-rousing’ thing--”
“If we can afford to buy a bar, we definitely have the gold to smooth that kind of thing over,” Dayereth interjected.
This made her crack a smile. “I guess we do. But I couldn’t have stayed there, really. Tiny mining town like that? I love Clear Creek, do anything to protect it, sure, but I nearly burnt the place down by the time I was twelve and ran away more times than I can count.”
Ollie raised an eyebrow and spun a card over the back of his hand. “If you had wanted adventure, you could have kept working for--what was her name again?”
“Miri Nockturne,” supplied Quinn, a quiet bitterness in his voice. He and Ariel had some shared history with the noblewoman who ruled the city of Rosekeep--for Ariel, she had been the generous sponsor of the peasant girl’s formal magic training; for Quinn, she had been at the center of the scandal that resulted in his exile and fugitive status.
“True, Lady Nockturne would have had plenty of uses for me. I’m sure it would have been an exciting life with a lot less, ah, independent thinking required. Quinn, what was that you said her daughter called me… ‘one of Miri’s little wind-up soldiers’?”
Quinn shrugged. “A jealous girl’s words, not mine.”
Ariel nodded. “But that has the same problem. It was too confining… I can’t just do what everyone else tells me is right. No, if there was a point I might have left this quest… it would have been when I met my dad.” Her eyes looked a little too bright in the dim firelight.
“You mean Covole. The ELEMNT agent.” Dayereth’s voice was sharp.
“I mean my dad, Dayereth. My birth father. I’m not getting into this with you again.” This had been a divisive issue in the party for some time. A few months ago, they had met a genasi man claiming to be her long-lost father. Ariel had been overjoyed, but her friends had remained skeptical, and they were particularly wary of his ties with a group of genasi political dissidents. Freedom fighters, Ariel called them. Terrorists, insisted Dayereth.
“I just… I could have actually gotten to know him better, and my heritage too. And working with ELEMNT would be making a real difference--you know, actually force the Empire to change. Carve out a space for us genasi to be free and safe.” Dayereth stifled a snort and Quinn shushed him.
Ollie cut the deck he was holding and checked the card--the ace of hearts. “Sounds like a real happy ending. For an idealist, maybe.”
“Yes, well… I guess I couldn’t ignore the bigger problems. If the Raven Queen is threatened, that puts everyone in danger.”
“So now you get to play hero for the whole world.”
“If you insist on framing it like that, sure, yeah. I do want to be a hero--because heroes help people!” She thumped the hay bale she was sitting on in frustration. “I know you guys think it’s silly of me, but there’s a reason people write ballads and stories about great heroes. It’s because they don’t usually get happy endings or easy ways out. So at least people can bother to remember all the sacrifices that they made to make the world a better place.” She took a deep breath and glared at them all fiercely. “So yeah. I guess I’m here because it’s where I can do the most good, and I guess if I’m still alive I’ll worry about being happy after the world is saved.”
Silence met this little speech. Kava clapped a little, but dropped off quickly. Dayereth stared into the flickering sword, Ollie shrugged and went back to his cards.
“I guess that just leaves me,” said Quinn into the silence. Suddenly the focus of the room was on him. Quinn didn’t talk much about his life before they had all met, and even after traveling together for so long they still knew little about the events that had led to his exile from the capital of the Canter Empire.
“Well… yes. But you don’t have to share if you don’t want to.” The intense curiosity of Ariel’s gaze gave lie to her words.
Quinn sat back on his heels and stared at the ceiling. “Hm… my troubles caught up to me long before this quest started, so it is not as if I had many other options to fall back on.”
“Don’t you have a sister back in Canterol?” asked Kava. “Maybe she could have hidden you…”
“Aiding me would have been a jailable offense. I could never ask that of her.” Quinn sighed. “I suppose my best option would have been to leave the Canter Empire all together, maybe gone to Brashold or snuck over the border into Kochtarn and started a new life where nobody knew anything about me… I was half way considering that when I ran into you all.”
“That sounds incredibly lonely,” murmured Ariel.
“Oh yes. But it also would have been so easy. Not having to look out for anyone but myself, not having to learn to trust again… Yes, as empty as that life would have been, I think solitude would have been my escape.”
He smiled sadly at their stunned faces. The thought of selfless Quinn, their healer, who always had a kind word of comfort, who had sacrificed himself time and time again to keep them all alive on the battlefied--dreaming of a life cut off from any kind of friendship or connection? It just seemed so wrong. “Quinn” asked Ollie, voicing what they were all clearly thinking, “by the Raven Queen’s dark shadow, what on earth happened? Back when you got exiled?”
It was a long moment before he answered. “I gave up everything I knew to help a friend. Then she turned on me, and let me take the fall for her. Because, from her perspective, it was the easier way out.”
Rain lashed the barn and made the wood groan. The sword illuminating them all flickered and dimmed. Ariel cursed quietly and crouched down to renew its enchantment.
“Well,” said Ollie, as light flared up once more. “There it is. I guess we’re all here to stay, for better or worse.”
“I like to think it’s mostly for better,” Ariel amended.
Dayereth gave a rare smile. “I wouldn’t do it with any other fools but you.”
“Amen!” roared Kava. “Now let’s kick some ass at that castle tomorrow!”
“Agreed,” said Quinn. “But we should get some sleep first--after we’ve had something hot to eat. I think I managed to save enough of the stew for us each to have some.”
Outside the storm raged on, but for the rest of the night, the inside it didn’t feel nearly as cold.