Chapter 3: The Economics of Desperation

Days later—or what passed for days in the perpetual fungal twilight of the Tangles—the trio moved through the vertical slums with the grim determination of rats who’d heard a rumor about a slightly less moldy crumb. Their diet had consisted of what Leo had come to call ‘wild root’—a catch-all term for any tuber that didn’t immediately induce vomiting—and their shelter had been a rotating portfolio of makeshift houses that seemed to have been constructed by architects with a profound grudge against stability.

The air, thick with spores and the smell of damp hopelessness, finally shifted. Not to anything pleasant, mind you. It shifted from ‘actively drowning’ to ‘chronically damp.’ This marginally drier section of the Tangles was marked by a slight decrease in dripping ceilings and a corresponding increase in the density of ramshackle structures. And there, wedged between a leaning tower of scavenged bark-stone and a stall selling suspiciously shiny mushrooms, stood the Bottoms Up.

The tavern looked less like a place of refreshment and more like a structural cry for help. It was assembled from mismatched panels of petrified wood, salvaged metal sheeting, and what appeared to be several old doors pressed into service as walls. A sign, carved from a warped slice of Bark-Scale, hung above the entrance, depicting a tankard that seemed to be weeping. The overall aesthetic screamed ‘temporary solution that became permanent through collective despair.’

Leo stopped, eyeing the sagging doorway. “It looks… sketchy,” he said, the understatement hanging in the humid air like a banner at a bankruptcy auction.

Elara, who had been moving with the stiff, offended posture of a duchess forced to tour a sewage treatment plant, let out a sigh that was practically a lecture in itself. “Sketchy is a charitable descriptor. The public houses in the mid-summit districts have marble floors that reflect the glow-crystal chandeliers. The air is perfumed with zephyr-blossom. The servers move with a ballet’s grace. Even my servants’ recreational taverns had better ventilation.” She delivered this not as a brag, but as a simple, tragic statement of fact, like noting that water was wet.

Kaelen, who had been walking point with the weary vigilance of a sheepdog herding particularly dim sheep, didn’t even turn her head. “You don’t have servants anymore, Elara. You have an empty stomach and two companions who are fighting off starvation. We have no choice. You are part of the tangle now”

The reminder was as effective as a bucket of cold Drip-Spring water. Elara’s shoulders slumped a fraction. The trio pushed through the uneven door-flap.

The interior of the Bottoms Up was a masterclass in controlled squalor. The air was a visible soup of smoke from a grimy hearth and the exhalations of its patrons. A motley collection of stools and barrels served as seating for a clientele that looked like they’d been rejected by a pirate ship for being too rough around the edges. A single, sickly Glowcap fungus in a wire cage provided illumination, casting long, accusing shadows.

Their target was the bar: a massive slab of what might have once been a support beam for something important. Behind it stood the bartender, a human man built like a sack of potatoes with arms. He was turned away, polishing a single, cloudy glass with a rag that appeared to be making it dirtier.

They approached. The bartender didn’t turn. He just kept polishing with monastic dedication.

Leo cleared his throat. “Excuse us?”

Nothing.

Elara tried a different tack, her voice adopting the crisp, expectant tone of someone used to being acknowledged. “We require food and information regarding possible lodging.”

The bartender’s polishing rhythm didn’t falter. He might have been stone-deaf, or he might have been practicing a form of zen indifference perfected over years of serving people who couldn’t pay.

Kaelen leaned an elbow on the bar, the plates of her scavenged armor clinking softly. “We’ve got coin,” she said, her voice flat.

That did it. The polishing stopped. The bartender didn’t turn, but his head tilted slightly, an ear cocked like a suspicious hound. It was the universal language of Jeff system: the faintest jingle of currency broke through even the thickest veil of misanthropy.

Leo fumbled in his pouch, his heart sinking as his fingers counted their remaining wealth. A few coppers, the last gleaming dregs of his life as a dyer in Arden. He placed them on the bar with a soft click that sounded obscenely loud in the quiet tension.

The bartender finally turned.

He had a face that looked like it had been used to hammer nails and then left out in the rain. His eyes swept over Leo’s threadbare clothes, over Elara’s stained but fine-cut tunic with palpable disinterest. Then they landed on Kaelen.

Specifically, they locked onto the jagged, sawn-off stumps of her horns.

A slow, unpleasant smile spread across his face. It wasn’t warmth; it was the grin of someone who has just spotted a flaw they can exploit. “Well now,” he rumbled, his voice like gravel shifting in a tin can. “Look at that. Tried to file down the devil points, did we? Thinking you could sneak in with the respectable folk?” He chuckled, a sound with no humor in it. “Won’t work, love. You can cut ‘em off at the root, but you can’t stop being what you are. It’s in the blood. Like thieving in goblins.” He delivered this last bit with the casual certainty of someone quoting immutable law, like gravity or bad luck.

He leaned forward on his massive arms, looming over the bar. “We don’t serve your kind here.”

The air in the tavern seemed to get heavier. A few patrons glanced over, their expressions ranging from boredom to mild interest in potential drama.

Kaelen didn’t flinch. She met his gaze head-on, her grey eyes flat and cold. “I stopped trying to fit into your little boxes a long time ago,” she said, her voice calm but carrying to every corner of the quiet room. “I’m not trying to be anything but what I am.” She leaned forward too, until they were almost nose-to-nose across the bar-top. “And I am proud to be a devil in a world run by worse.”

A beat of silence followed. The bartender’s smirk faltered, replaced by confusion and then annoyance. He wasn’t used to his bigotry being met with anything but shame or anger. Pride baffled him.

Leo saw their window. While the man was mentally recalibrating, he scooped up the coins from the bar and slid them forward again. “Three bowls of stew,” he said firmly.

The bartender blinked, looked down at the coppers as if seeing them for the first time, then back at Kaelen’s unwavering stare. The economic imperative wrestled with his prejudice. With a disgusted grunt, he snatched up the coins. “That’s for the food,” he spat. “You don’t have enough for a bed. Eat and get out.” He turned and ladled a greyish-brown slurry from a soot-blackened pot into three cracked wooden bowls, slamming them down on the bar with enough force to make Elara jump.

They took their bowls to an empty corner where a petrified root formed a crude bench and table. The stew tasted primarily of salt and an earthy bitterness that Leo decided not to investigate further. It was hot, though. In the Tangles, that alone qualified it as cuisine.

As they ate, Leo stared into his bowl, doing mental arithmetic with their vanished coins. “We can’t afford to sleep here,” he said quietly, stating the obvious to make it feel more manageable. It didn’t work.

Elara picked at her stew with fastidious distaste. Her eyes kept flicking to Kaelen’s horn stumps. Finally, her curiosity—or perhaps her ingrained habit of dissecting social anomalies—overcame her discretion. “Why did you cut them off?” she asked.

Leo nearly choked on a tuber. “Elara! You can’t just ask that,” he hissed. “It’s rude.”

Kaelen paused with her spoon halfway to her mouth. She looked at Elara for a long moment, then shrugged, a gesture that seemed to carry the weight of years. “When I was a child,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact, as if describing how she’d scraped her knee, “my parents sawed them off. They thought if I looked more… acceptable… I could get into one of Jeff’s merit schools for displaced non-humans.” She took her bite of stew, chewed slowly. “Spoiler: I didn’t get in. The schools were more interested in creating loyal Lackeys than educating refugees. Made me ineligible for any status career before I was ten.” She shrugged again. “Failed investment.”

Elara’s spoon hovered over her bowl. Her expression shifted from morbid curiosity to something more complicated—a flicker of recognition. The rigid caste system of the summit had its own brutal metrics for failure. “I… understand,” she said softly, looking down at her own hands—hands that had never done manual labor but were now calloused from climbing root-ropes and stained with grime she couldn’t wash off. “I tested for the Celestial Lyceum’s advanced diplomatic track three times.” She didn’t look up. “My test scores were exemplary. My family lineage was… adequate.” She swallowed. “I was passed over each time for candidates with stronger demigod patronage.” She finally met Kaelen’s gaze. “Ineligible for higher status.”

It was a small moment, barely a bridge across a chasm of difference—a high elf mourning her thwarted bureaucratic ascent and a tiefling survivor of ethnic cleansing bonding over systemic rejection. But for a second, Elara wasn’t lecturing about marble floors; she was just another person who hadn’t made the cut in Jeff’s grand, cruel sorting algorithm.

Then Elara saw the goblin.

Her head snapped up, her brief moment of shared humanity evaporating like water on hot stonegrain. Her eyes widened with reflexive alarm.

“Kaelen,” she whispered sharply, her voice laced with that familiar cocktail of distrust and prejudice she kept on tap like cheap gin. “There is a goblin entering the establishment.”

Kaelen didn’t even bother looking up from her stew. “We’re in the Tangles,” she mumbled around a mouthful. “There are lots of goblins.”

“No,” Elara insisted, her spoon now pointing subtly like an accusatory finger. “This one is looking directly at us.”

Leo followed her gaze.

The goblin who had just pushed through the door-flap was indeed looking at their table. She was young by goblin standards—a happy-looking adult female with bright eyes that seemed to absorb the dim light rather than reflect it. She wore practical clothing: a long skirt and vest over a simple shirt, but her arms were adorned with dozens of beaded bracelets, and layers of necklaces hung around her neck, small stones and carved bits of wood clicking softly as she moved.

And on her vest was a patch—a simple embroidered emblem Leo recognized instantly.

An intertwined root and a rising fist.

It was identical to the faded emblem on Kaelen's breastplate.

The goblin moved through the tavern with an unassuming confidence that seemed to part the gloomy atmosphere around her without effort. She walked directly toward their table.

Elara stiffened like she was preparing for an audit. Kaelen finally looked up, her hand drifting casually toward where her dagger hilt would be if she weren't currently holding a spoon. Leo just watched, feeling like an audience member at a play where he hadn't read the script.

The goblin stopped before them and smiled warmly—not showing teeth in challenge or threat but simply as an expression of greeting. "Peace on the roots," she said softly. She held her hands up briefly in front of her chest. Palms open. Nothing hidden. Her eyes were soft. They held no guile. Only empathy. Then those kind eyes landed on Kaelen's breastplate. They locked onto its central emblem. They widened slightly. Understanding dawned within them. Without another word, the goblin pointed directly at Kaelen's chest, then tapped an identical patch sewn onto her own vest, and sat down uninvited on their bench, as if joining old friends for drinks

The goblin’s smile didn’t waver at the trio’s varying degrees of alarm. It was the serene expression of someone who has seen far more threatening things than a suspicious high elf, a wary tiefling, and a human who looked like he was trying to remember if he’d left the stove on.

“I am Tula,” she said, her voice a pleasant, earthy contralto. Her eyes remained fixed on Kaelen’s breastplate. “You wear the sigil of the rising root. I thought… are you a sister of the Mycelium?”

The name hit Kaelen like a physical blow. Leo saw her grip tighten on her spoon until her knuckles turned the color of old bone. She carefully set it down in her bowl.

“No,” Kaelen said, the word clipped. “I’m not Mycelium. Mira… was.” She corrected herself with painful precision. “Is. She was a member. This,” she tapped the emblem on her chest, “was hers. She gave it to me… before.”

Tula’s head tilted, her empathy deepening into something more analytical. “But you wear her armor. You carry her symbol into dark places. You are not with them, but you are of them, in spirit.”

Kaelen shook her head, a sharp, defensive motion. “I was Collective. Joined when I was a kid, after Jeff’s enforcers turned my hometown into kindling and a lesson.” There was no pride in the statement, just a weary recitation of fact. “I left months ago to look for Mira. She… got lost down here.” The euphemism for addiction and despair hung unspoken in the greasy air. “I’m not part of any faction’s fight anymore. I’m just looking.”

Tula absorbed this, her gaze soft but perceptive. She saw the guilt in the set of Kaelen’s jaw, the protective hunch of her shoulders over the armor that wasn’t hers. “Mira is very important to you,” she observed, not as a question. “And you sympathize with our cause. The fight against the vertical tyranny is written in the tension of your body, even if you deny it with your words.”

Before Kaelen could protest this psychological dissection, Tula leaned forward slightly, her beads whispering secrets against each other. “Then I must ask a favor of a sympathizer. An urgent message needs to reach Malka.”

Kaelen recoiled as if Tula had suggested she juggle live blasting-powder. “No.” The refusal was immediate, absolute. “It’s not my fight. I have my own mission.”

“I understand,” Tula said, not pressing, but not retreating either. She shifted her focus subtly, including Leo and Elara in her orbit. “Malka is at our traveling stronghold. It moves, but currently it is near the Stonegrain Smelter—a Collective-sponsored outpost that processes Bark-Scale for their forges.” She said this with deliberate casualness, as if mentioning the weather. “The Collective and the Mycelium have a history of… mutual aid. Cooperation against common parasites.” She let that hang for a moment, then added, “If your path should take you near that sector, and if you were willing to pass a few words along, it would be a kindness. No more than that.”

It was an elegant piece of persuasion: low-pressure, logically framed, and dangling the tantalizing carrot of ‘Collective-sponsored outpost.’ The words ‘shelter’ and ‘aid’ began to glow in Leo’s mind like promising embers.

Elara’s spoon clattered against her bowl. “This is precisely the sort of entanglement we must avoid,” she hissed under her breath. “Associating with radical elements draws exactly the kind of attention we are fleeing.”

Leo ignored her, his eyes locked on Kaelen’s profile. He saw the conflict there—the weariness warring with a lifetime of ingrained solidarity. “Kaelen,” he said quietly, but with a firmness that surprised him. “She’s talking about a Collective outpost. A place that might have actual walls. And food that isn’t primarily regret.” He leaned in. “It’s the first lead we’ve had that isn’t just ‘keep walking until you starve.’ We should take it.”

Kaelen didn’t look at him. She stared at a knot in the wooden table as if it held the answers to all her problems.

“What’s the message?” Leo asked Tula directly.

At this, Kaelen finally turned her head away completely, presenting them with the rigid line of her back and the jagged stumps of her horns—a portrait of shame and guilt so potent it was almost audible.

“I will have no part in this,” Elara announced primly, as if formally recusing herself from a dubious committee vote.

Tula’s gaze moved to Leo, but her words were clearly aimed at the space between Kaelen’s shoulder blades. “It concerns the goblin from the cleansing sweep,” she said gently. She didn’t gesture, but her eyes flicked meaningfully toward Elara for a fraction of a second. “The father you encountered.”

Leo’s stomach, already unhappy with the stew, performed a slow, cold somersault. “I know,” he whispered.

The image was back: the glowing stones in the small fist, the wet-tear sound of magic turning inward. The silence afterward.

Tula saw the shadow pass over his face—the grief of a witness, raw and unprocessed. Her own expression softened further, becoming almost maternal. “It is not your fault,” she said, her voice dropping to a near-whisper meant only for their table. “You must understand this. What happened… it happens all the time down here. It is the system working as intended.” She paused, letting the grim truth settle. “He knew the risks when he took on his mission for the Silent Taproot.”

Elara, who had been pretending intense interest in a wall stain, suddenly perked up at this last phrase. Her head swiveled back toward Tula. “‘Knew the risks’?” she repeated, latching onto the words like a lifeline thrown to a drowning bigot.

Tula nodded, still looking at Leo with compassion. “Yes. He volunteered for a dangerous task because he believed in something greater than his own safety. That is why the Radical Mycelium does what it does.” Her voice gained a firmer cadence now, slipping from personal condolence into political conviction. “Our cause is not just about reclaiming stolen root-caverns where our ancestors cultivated glow-fungi gardens before Jeff’s castle was a twinkle in a despot’s eye. It is about liberation for all who are crushed under his boot. The human miner worked to death in the Bark-Scale pits, the gnome family evicted for falling behind on their sky-tax, the tiefling child mutilated for a chance at a school that doesn’t exist… and the goblin father delivering maps so others might find safety.” She spread her hands slightly, encompassing their ragged group. “The oppression is specialized, but the oppressor is the same.”

Elara seized on the first part like a dog on a bone, ignoring the rest of the ideological sermon entirely. A visible relief washed over her features, smoothing away the brief, uncomfortable wrinkle of empathy that had formed when Tula spoke of shared suffering. “There, you see?” she said, turning to Leo and Kaelen as if presenting a closing argument. “He was an operative. On a mission. He wasn’t an innocent victim of random brutality; he was a participant in underground activities.” She nodded to herself, rebuilding the comforting walls of her worldview with impressive speed. “The enforcers were simply performing their duty regarding a known security risk. Unfortunate collateral damage in maintaining vertical stability.”

It was breathtaking in its clinical efficiency. The complex tragedy of a father trying to save his son and failing was neatly filed away under ‘acceptable occupational hazard.’ His death was no longer a murder; it was a statistical probability fulfilled. The cognitive dissonance evaporated, replaced by the soothing balm of bureaucratic rationale.

Tula watched Elara’s mental gymnastics with an expression of profound sadness touched by weary amusement—the look a gardener might give a particularly stubborn weed that has learned to quote property law.

Leo just felt sick. He looked from Elara’s reassured face to Kaelen’s rigid back, to Tula’s knowing eyes. In that moment, he understood Kaelen’s earlier lesson on a visceral level: ideology wasn’t just something you believed; it was a tool you used to protect yourself from reality. Elara’s reality had just been sanitized and returned to her, prepackaged and blame-free.

And his own reality now contained a dead goblin child whose final act had been to try and wield magic he couldn't control—a metaphor so brutally apt for life in the Tangles it felt like a punchline from a cosmic sadist.

The stew in his bowl had gone cold and congealed, resembling nothing so much as wet mortar. He pushed it away. Suddenly, he wasn't hungry anymore. He was just tired, and angry, and very, very lost. But ahead, somewhere, there was apparently a smelter. And near it, a stronghold. And in that stronghold, someone named Malka. It wasn't much of a map. But in the Tangles, it was more than most ever got

Tula let the silence stretch, allowing Elara’s convenient rationalization to echo in its own emptiness. Then she continued, her voice returning to that matter-of-fact tone.

“His mission was for the Silent Taproot,” she said, and this time, the name made Kaelen’s shoulders twitch. “He was carrying a safe-route map to one of their way-stations. A new path, clear of patrols and sinkholes.” She looked directly at Leo, but her words were arrows aimed at Kaelen’s conscience. “He did not deliver it before the sweep. The map was lost with him. Now, others who might have used that path are in danger. Or trapped.”

Kaelen slowly turned her body back toward the table. It wasn’t a full commitment, but it was a seismic shift. The Silent Taproot. The underground railroad. The quiet, desperate work of smuggling refugees, information, and contraband through the roots. It was the antithesis of Jeff’s vertical control—a lateral network of hope. For someone who had spent her life in the Collective, the Taproot was legend and essential ally both.

“Malka needs to know,” Tula pressed gently, seeing the crack in Kaelen’s armor. “Not just that he fell, but that his task is incomplete. The thread is cut. The Collective and the Mycelium have a long history of… cooperation.” She used the word ‘cooperation’ like others might say ‘shared survival instinct.’ “Even if you are no longer wearing their colors, you can do this for a good cause. A necessary one.”

Kaelen looked down at her hands, calloused and scarred. “I can’t go back to the Collective,” she said, the shame raw in her voice now. It wasn’t just about leaving to find Mira; it was a deeper fracture, a failure Leo didn’t yet understand.

Tula nodded, not asking for the story behind the statement. Instead, she offered a different kind of persuasion. Her expression became solemn, her voice taking on a rhythmic, almost liturgical quality. “The chain that binds the root-dweller to his hunger is the same alloy that gilds the summit throne,” she intoned. “To break a single link is an act of personal defiance. To shatter the chain itself requires every hand, calloused and soft alike, to pull together. Solidarity is not a feeling. It is the hammer.”

It was a good quote. Punchy. Memorable. It had a certain rhetorical flourish that appealed to the part of the mind that enjoyed symmetry and conviction.

Elara, who had been mentally redecorating the cognitive prison she’d just rebuilt for herself, perked up again. Her analytical ear, trained on summit debate-society cadences, was tickled. “That’s rather elegantly put,” she remarked, leaning in slightly. “Which philosopher penned that? One of the Celestial Lyceum’s early materialist thinkers? I don’t recognize it.”

Kaelen, who had been wallowing in guilt, let out a short, sharp chuckle that was utterly devoid of warmth. It was the sound of cosmic irony being acknowledged. She looked at Elara, a dark amusement glinting in her grey eyes.

Tula smiled, a genuine, bright thing. “Oh, no philosopher from your Lyceum,” she said sweetly. “That is Malka. My leader.”

Elara’s face underwent a rapid transformation—from intellectual curiosity to dawning horror to deep, mortified blush. It was as if she’d just complimented the bouquet of a fine wine only to be told it was distilled from sewer runoff.

Kaelen’s dark humor found its voice. “Congratulations, Elara,” she said, her tone dry as Bark-Scale dust. “You’ve just appreciated radical goblin rhetoric. Next you’ll be admiring their interior decor. If you like that, wait until you hear her options on property rights and guillotines"

Elara opened her mouth, closed it, and settled for studying the grain of the table with unprecedented intensity.

Tula, having successfully disrupted another pillar of Elara’s worldview, pressed her advantage. “Malka is… not like other leaders. She is ancient. A powerful shaman who has seen the Log change over centuries.”

“Some say she’s a forgotten goblin goddess who chose to stay,” Kaelen added quietly, the legend rolling off her tongue with a mix of skepticism and respect.

“She has the wisdom of the deepest roots,” Tula continued. “And the strategic mind of a general who’s been fighting a guerrilla war since before your great-great-grandfather was a twinkle in a Lackey’s eye,” Kaelen finished. “Her goals for the Mycelium are…To be a toxin in his system. To slow the gears of his exploitation. A shipment goes missing. A quota goes unfilled. A whisper reaches a worker that they are not alone. We don't seek open battle—we are the rot in his timbers, the rust on his chains. Our goal is to make his control costly, unstable, and ultimately, unsustainable,” Tula concluded, with deliberate emphasis.

The word hung in the air. Radical. In summit parlance, it was synonymous with ‘unstable,’ ‘dangerous,’ ‘to be purged.’

Elara finally found her voice again, latching onto the one concrete thing she felt she could challenge. “Violent, you mean,” she corrected, her blush fading into prim disapproval. “Why must it be violent? Wouldn’t a non-violent approach be more… safer? More likely to garner sympathy from reasonable elements within the power structure?”

Tula didn’t get angry. She laughed.

It was a light, melodic sound that seemed utterly out of place in the Bottoms Up. Then, with a movement as fluid as water slipping between stones, her hand flashed to the side of her long skirt and back. For less than a second, a dagger with a blade of dark, polished bone rested across her palm. Then it was gone, hidden again.

The message was delivered without a word.

“The oppressor,” Tula said, her smile lingering but her eyes hard as stonegrain, “does not give away his chair because you ask nicely from the floor. He built the chair from your bones and padded it with your hopes. He likes it there.” She leaned forward slightly. “Sympathy from his ‘reasonable elements’ is just permission for him to oppress you in a slightly quieter tone of voice. Freedom isn’t granted. It’s taken. And if you are going to reach up and take it from Jeff…” She let the sentence hang, her meaning clear as Glowcap light. “…you had better come ready to use force.”

Elara stared at her, aghast. The bluntness of it was offensive to every principle of managed dissent and proper channels she’d been taught.

Leo watched this exchange—the ideological collision between petition and pistol—and felt the weight of their immediate, grimy reality settle back onto his shoulders. Philosophy was a luxury for those with full bellies and solid roofs.

“We need shelter,” he said, his voice cutting through the tension. He looked at Kaelen. “She’s right about it being our best lead.”

Kaelen held his gaze for a long moment. He saw the war within her: the desire to remain detached in her singular quest for Mira, versus a lifetime of muscle-memory that screamed solidarity, the hammer. She looked at Tula’s expectant face, at Elara’s fearful one, at Leo’s desperate but determined eyes.

With a sigh that seemed to deflate her entirely, she gave one short, sharp nod.

“Fine.”

Elara made a sound of protest that was quickly swallowed by Kaelen’s steely glance.

“We’ll take the message,” Kaelen said to Tula.

Relief washed over the goblin’s features. She didn’t offer thanks; in the economy of rebellion, this was simply a transaction of trust. Quickly, sotto voce, she gave them directions: a winding route through lesser-known root-tunnels, landmarks based on distinctive fungal growths and the echoes of distant machinery, culminating near the Stonegrain Smelter. The stronghold would be hidden, but they would know the signs—specific moss patterns on certain roots, a particular arrangement of glowing stones left as markers.

“Peace on your roots,” Tula said again as she stood, touching two fingers to her forehead in a gesture of respect—to Kaelen specifically. Then she melted back into the tavern’s gloom and was gone as quietly as she had arrived.

The trio sat in silence for another minute. Their stew was cold sludge. Their coins were gone. The bartender was pointedly ignoring them again.

Wordlessly, they rose and filed out of the Bottoms Up. The marginally drier air outside felt no more welcoming.

Their immediate goal had been forcibly shifted. No longer were they simply wandering deeper into survival mode, hoping to stumble upon charity or a crumb of luck. Now they had a destination: a smelter outpost sponsored by the mysterious Collective. And near it, a hidden stronghold of radical goblins led by an ancient possible-goddess.

It was, Leo thought with a grimace that might have been a smile in a kinder world, marginally better than nothing.

As they turned onto a sloping root-path that led away from the sad little tavern, Kaelen adjusted her breastplate—Mira’s breastplate—with a firm tug. The emblem of the rising root and fist sat squarely over her heart.

They walked into the deepening gloom of the Tangles, three strangers bound by necessity and a scrap of paper-thin hope, carrying a message about a dead man’s failure toward a legend who spoke in hammers.

Somewhere ahead, machinery groaned and fires burned in forges. Somewhere ahead was potential shelter.

And somewhere ahead waited Malka