Chapter Text
If Nott designed an anti-social fortress, she too would fill it with stairs.
Nothing puts people off more than flights of stairs. Standing at the bottom and looking up just fills anyone with such dread. No one likes stairs.
These are thin ones too, with stone steps that dip in the middle from foot falls, and wooden ones that creak in a different spot each time. The walls are overgrown with weeds and moss and a weird sticky moistness that sticks to spattering of fur on her ears. She and Caduceus have exchanged enough grimaces of disgust between them that Nott thinks they’ve reached a new level of friendship based on that alone.
And they’re man sized of course. No one ever really builds things with small people in mind, halfling and gnomes and kenkus.
And goblins. No one ever builds things with goblins in mind.
The narrow winding stairs led the Nein in circles around the towers and ramparts of the fortress. Never quite getting in the building itself, and it was slowly driving them all mad. Beau had already attempted to scale up to the roof and got nothing out of it but a haze of fog and a wet ass from missing the landing back down.
Nott really was struggling with the steps though, not that she’d tell anyone out loud. But more than once Caduceus would have to haul her back to her feet, her bare feet on the stone steps numbingly cold.
He gave her a pat each time.
But her knees had started to ache from lunging upwards only half an hour in, and she kept tripping over her drooping tail. She wondered, not for the first time, how much life expectancy she had left. Goblins didn’t live all that long after all, not nearly as long as halflings. She had been a young halfling though, barely an adult when she died, the barkeep still called her merch fach when she bought drinks.
Caleb though she was young when they met, though she never shared her age, mostly for lack of knowing it.
She thinks he thinks she’s older now he knows Veth was married though. With a little boy of her own.
She isn’t though, still feels young and unmoored and like solving all her problems by running away from them. Which, she supposes, has worked so far.
Except now. Where she ran so far ahead of the others, she’s no longer with them. She laughs at herself, a solemn giddy thing high on adrenaline and nerves and thinks maybe if she’d slowed down in this maze she wouldn’t be stuck alone.
A clatter further up the spiral steps caught her attention and she backed up into the shadows. Her knees protested a crouch, but they held steady when she settled her crossbow across them.
A stone step, maybe fifteen feet away crumbled at the edges and granite tumbled towards her frozen feet.
Silence.
Stalking ahead had been a bad plan, invisible had been even worse. A tripped wire, a flash of light, and Nott was thrown across the hall away from her family, a heavy stone wall between them suddenly, silent. She couldn’t hear them on the other side, cut off yelling and curses as the trip wire triggered something or other to start a fight.
She was beginning to hate magical towers.
‘Wizards,’ she thought with the same tone her mother donned when her brothers got too muddy in their fights, ‘have too much time on their hands.’
She wondered if her wizard had noticed she was missing yet. Caleb would know, Caleb always knew. She twirled her message wire between long spindly fingers, pulled it taught and tried one more time.
‘Caleb?’ She whispered, ‘Caleb can you hear me? You can reply to this message.’
He didn’t. Because of course the wall of a magical monster hunter was magic resistant.
Of course, she was separated from her friends in a place with a variety of rooms dedicated to goblin head trophies.
Fuck, she thought.
Then, for good measure and some moral support, FUCK
The clattering sounds again and reminds her she’s not as alone as she thought and far more like to die for it. It sounds like a cane, lopsided footsteps on stone, something metallic dragged behind it. The wizard they’re after probably.
Her ears fold back against her head and crease up against the stone wall. She doesn’t fancy being a head on a plaque. Doesn’t understand why they had to take this job in the first place with so many of them looking exactly like this guy’s potentional murder victim. Even Fjord had looked disturbed by the stories the village told about this guy, and he liked to make a habit of looking impassive during job hunting.
Fuck she thinks for a third time, and directs it at wherever Fjord might be.
The sound gets distant, and when it disappears altogether Nott stays crouched and jittery.
She wants her flask. Left it with an irate Beau, who told her in no uncertain terms if she fucked up a trap in this fort, they wouldn’t be able to save her.
‘It’s built to kill people like you.’ Beau had announced and put emphasis on people even though Nott knew she meant monster. ‘If you get hurt, we have no idea what’s gonna happen.’
‘Splat.’ Jester offered humorously, but she’d practically been buzzing with nervous energy, tail swishing. ‘But we’ve got healers, two! We’ll take care of everyone.’
Doesn’t matter anyway, Nott bemoans and finally tucks her useless message wire into her belt, can’t fucking find me now.
She laughs again, and it’s stringy and shrill and all too animal and she stops before it gets too echo-y.
When it becomes obvious there’s no way she can stay where she is and still be found by her friends, she takes cautious steps up the spiral stairs.
They’re still cold on the soles of her feet, damp and almost sticky. She pulls her tail up and off it, tucks it awkwardly into her belt and the tufted ends stick out like a bunny’s tail under her cloak.
Can’t be sneaking when her tail is lazing behind her with the chill.
----
‘This fucking sucks.’
Caleb nods along to Beau’s third claim of the minute. They’re traipsing around in the dark now, wary of lights and sounds. Beau’s using their staff to waft at the empty air in front of them, and Fjord’s bringing up the rear with sword at the ready, a limp in his step from the constructed metal monster that jumped them in the hall before. Caduceus and Jester and in the centre, all too valuable to be in direct line of fire, and somehow, Caleb is still between them.
Squishy, is what Nott calls him. ‘Squishy and Weak.’ though he knows she knows he’s capable. It’s a little bit like being Frumpkin, doted on needlessly.
He tries not to think too much of Nott at the moment. Tries not to think of cold hands and warm hugs and braiding hair in the early hours of the morning. Tries not to think of nights spent with Frumpkin in his lap and Nott at his back, of tails curled around his ankles and her things scattered in his pack.
He’s not very good at not thinking about Nott.
Especially because he realised, just thirteen seconds ago, she isn’t with them.
He slows fingers working at the scarf around his neck in something he recognises as a nervous habit he’s picked up from his little friend, ‘Beau?’ he asks, and it hangs in the stagnant air around them like a noose.
‘Ya?’
He wrinkles his nose at her shoddy attempt at his accent, ‘is Nott up there with you?’
There’s a long silence, too awkward to be good. Beau has stopped moving, and the group slowly halts behind her, bunching up on the staircase like eavesdropping children.
Beau shimmies into his vision, googles glinting soft pink light from Caduceus’ staff making her look just the wrong side of crazy. ‘She not with you?’
‘If she was with me,’ he says, overly patient, ‘I would not be asking where she was.’
‘Was she in the fight?’ Fjord calls up from behind. ‘I don’t remember her being, y’know, helpful if she was.’
‘She was,’ Jester jumps to defence, skirts rustling as she turns to poke playfully at Fjord’s armour, ‘she went ahead, right? To scout.’
‘Yeah, but did we see her after that?’
‘No? I didn’t I mean. We should have head counted damn it.’
‘I thought she just went ahead. Or hid.’
A shifting weight behind him remind Caleb that breathing is helpful in tense situations, and the glimpse of Caduceus’ damp grey fur reminds him, unhelpfully, that both their healers are here.
And Nott is decidedly not.
As the other’s start recounting their steps, Caduceus leans down and stares at Caleb. Doesn’t blink for a very long time.
Caleb stares back.
Reminds himself to breathe.
‘Would message work.’ Caduceus says loudly. ‘see if she’s nearby?’
Caleb nods emphatically, fumbling with the wire in his front pocket already. He’s turning in a circle, slowly repeating the phrase ‘Nott are you okay?’ into the tinny wire.
At every degree he’s met with silence.
‘Let’s keep going then.’ Fjord decides after a very long very eery quiet that Caleb stands completely still in, hoping that maybe, maybe if he stops completely, he’ll hear little goblin steps hurry up behind them.
He continues to stay still as Fjord comes up to him and Caduceus, looking distinctly more ruffled than he likes to on a good day. He puts a heavy hand down on Caleb’s shoulder and squeezes it.
It’s too big and firm, nothing like Nott’s excited grips on his collar when she’s clambered onto his shoulders.
He wants to brush it off.
He lets it stay. Only because his two hands are holding his message wire and letting go means the message spell failed. Means Nott is too far away to hear him.
‘Look, Caleb,’ he says and Caleb raises a brow at the authority in his voice, ‘We already guessed all the tunnels and things here leads to the guy’s main hall right?’
‘Herding.’ He says disgustedly.
Fjord’s face twists at the word, but he nods anyway, ‘yeah, and so wherever Nott’s gone, she’ll end up right where we do.’
‘If she’s not already died.’ Beau adds up ahead. It’s not cruel, not meant to be at least, but it rubs Caleb the wrong way anyway, and he jerks out of Fjord’s hand and marches up ahead of them all.
Behind him, Beau says for the fourth time in as many minutes, ‘this fucking sucks.’ And Caleb is inclined to agree.
----
Nott hates stairs.
Hates them. The next set of stairs she climbs, she’s burning them behind her. In fact, she’s not going to climb them.
She’s going to get Fjord to carry her up them. If he can, she ammends, then thinks on it more. Her ankle clicks on the next step and her limbs feel suddenly too hot with annoyance.
She’s going to get Jester to carry her up them.
The clattering of uneven metallic feet still sound up ahead. She’s following at a steady distance, close enough to tell which inane set of stairs they’ve clambered up or down, but far enough to feel safe.
But the stairs are getting sturdier now, worn in the same specific place. She takes a moment to investigate them, run fingers over the stone and take note of the nicer architecture. The corrider’s that have widened comfortably, lined with thin carpet and the beginnings of simple art hung on the walls.
The head of a gnoll, impaled on a plaque greets her round the next corner. She raises her crossbow at it at first, heartbeat thudding so close to the surface she feels it in her throat.
It doesn’t slow down when she clocks that its already dead.
The real monster is still around the corner. And she’s getting close. Prizes and spoils begin to line the walls, and the stairs even out. Long corridors begin to take shape, doors materialise on the sides.
The first Orc head she sees, wide eyed and gaping, nearly has her throwing up. The skin is similar to Fjord’s, a rich teal green gone grey with death.
She closes her eyes and stumbles up a staircase lined with tiefling heads. Can’t not see Mollymauk in them, drenched in blood and rain and pride and so fucking helpless in front of her. Her claws find the braid of silken thread and small barely there beads tucked in her haze of hair by the tiefling, mere days before he died.
She does throw up at the end of that corridor, a strained quiet retch.
Gods she wants a drink. More than one.
The clunk of feet stops. Echo a little wherever they’ve stopped.
A hall she’d bet. Filled to the brim with animal and monster heads. A hunter’s showroom.
She shudders at the thought of any of her friend’s in there.
She tries one last message, tucked behind a practical looking chest of drawers, and of course it doesn’t work.
She’s curled her feet up under her, and half convinces herself this is a good place to sit and sleep and maybe pretend she’s not here anymore.
In the dome, piled atop the Nein with Fjord’s hand in her face and Jester’s tail curled around hers.
In a tavern, tucked into clean sheets across from her wizard, a cat lazing at her feet.
In Veth’s bedroom, her old one with her husband on her chest and her son in the room across.
A horrid scrape fills the corridor. Metal on stone, grinding. Its shrill and long, and she has to fold her ears over themselves to keep it out. Scrambles at her hair to pull it further over as the shriek persists. It crawls over her spine, pulling at the hair on her neck and leaving a bitter shiver to wrack her core.
It won't stop. It’s louder. The same single note.
It won't stop. Digging deep into her cloak she shuffles back, desperate to get away. The chest she’s leant up against quivers as she slams her back into it, and topples when she scrambles straight over the top, claws leaving long splintering gashes in its side.
It won’t stop.
She’s hurrying down the corridor now, body alight with pain as the shriek gets louder, louder still and sticks to her bones.
It hurts.
And then.
It’s gone.
She’s run into a room. Stumbled through the door with her elbows, and fallen into a heap on the floor, clutching ears too big for her hands. Blood sticks to her fingers, leaks between the crooked joints like some macabre syrup. Though it should clog the sounds around her, a whirring buzzing whine is still clear, as if it’s in her earlobes themselves.
And there’s a man. Wizard. Monster hunter. A dipshit with an ego and a fortress full of stairs.
Short torso, broad, with a cane in his left hand and a heap of artificed metal at his waist. His legs are too long for his body, lean and fragile and shifting, coils of spell work and springs wind around them, bright at the joints and dark molten metal where the muscles should have been.
Nott can’t do a single thing when he leans over her, pulls her own hands from her ears and whispers into them, oh so fucking politely, ‘Found you little one.’
----
They hear the shriek before they reach the hall. It’s an inhumane sound, as if someone’s ringing every last grind from an unoiled cog, over and over and over.
It goes too loud and long, and they’ve stopped for Caduceus’s sake mostly, sensitive ears twitching with every step they take towards it. He’s collapsed against the corridor entrance now, Jester flapping around him trying to heal, but he’s pushing her off and away. The rest of them, unwilling to spilt up and with their own hands clamped tight over ears, are crouched nearby in a half protective semi-circle around their clerics.
Caleb thinks of Nott’s sensitive goblin ears. Swivelling even when she dozes in carts. Sends all his faulty prayers up to whichever god seems likely to listen that it’s not her whose triggered this noise.
The message wire is still firmly in one hand, scratching at his earlobe when he breaths in.
The noise cuts out as suddenly as it began.
Caduceus slumps to his knees. Jester is on him immediately, practically shoving a healing word onto the firbolg, squishing his cheeks in a way Caleb knows the firbolg usually hates. In the stark silence all they can hear is Caduceus’s panting breaths and Jester’s grumbling help.
Beau lowers her hands first, shaking her head like it’ll get rid of the ringing. ‘The fuck was that?’
Fjord is pointedly looking straight ahead down the hall, away from the line-up of four gnarly looking goblin heads snarling out into the dark beside the group. ‘Trouble.’ He says lowly and does not elaborate.
There are plaques beneath the heads, names and titles that Caleb would rather not know. They’re shiny, polished. This fucker cares for them, like trophies.
His thoughts conjure up a plaque of its own, brass and polished, cruelly labelled Nott the Brave.
Veth Brenatto it rearranges itself to and he feels sick to his stomach. Hates that his first thought is that that name is wrong. Hates that he hates it, because it isn’t, and it’s a very lovely name and of course it is because its Nott’s.
A grown catches his attention, pulls it away from the shadowed heads on the wall and back to the group. Caduceus is up now, knees creaking but he bats Jester back with a loose wrist. His fur, damp from the dark stone stairwells and the fog that clung to it outside, it damper now with blood and sweat.
But his eyes are bright. Angry.
He too stares at the goblin heads, with a mix of disgust and fear and sadness.
Caleb imagines the cleric wants to wreath them in wildflowers and lichen, bones folded up in beds of moss.
Bias wars in his own thoughts, that these creatures are cruel by nature, something Nott assures them of often, at her own detriment. But he thinks perhaps they should be laid to rest with some quiet. He never liked keeping trophies of kills.
As Caduceus reaches forward, a spell on his lips already, his ears perk again.
Someone screams down the corridor.
Shrill and long.
Caleb knows this sound all too well.
They’re all running, shoulder’s knocking into each other in their hurry, before Caleb’s even registered the high desperate cadence of the sound, the guttural choke of Nott in pain.
----
Nott thinks she’s taking being stabbed, incredibly well.
Fire builds up in her chest, streams down her veins and set her fingetips ablaze as she scrabbles at the hand keeping her down. It’s cold, clammy on her wrist but holds them firmly like they’re nothing but twigs. The other hand, pressing the blade down, down into her chest is shaking with excitement. It gleams in the man’s eyes, a sharp cruel shot of adrenaline that makes the unnatural yellow of them bright and predatory.
She goes to spit in his face, kick his balls or whatever is down there in the churning machinery, but misses as pain ebbs down her limbs and catches at the spit in her throat.
‘You’ll make a lovely addition,’ he murmurs, too close. There’s so much room around them, but he’s here, with his breath down her throat like a gag, ‘so young. So pretty for a goblin.’
She’s not young. Not for a goblin.
She chokes down a cry, twists on instinct and the blade catches on bone.
She’s screaming again. It wrenches at her jaw and her teeth feel sore with the sound.
He’s laughing. His mouth is too wide for his face, an unnatural yellowish blush across a perfectly chiselled nose and she wants so desperately to break it.
They struggle with each other for another split second, but he’s heavy and pleased and she feels pinned like a butterfly in a glass case. Being leered at for fun.
His arm is flesh though, and it’s pushing down to her face, closer and closer as a toothy grin takes her vision. And words are whispered into her bleeding ears again, teeth rattling, ‘Scream again won’t you, love. I want to meet your friends.’
She bites him.
He lets go with a shocked cry, gives her just enough room to twist and roll from under his weight. The dagger jerks at being pulled from his hands but stays in her chest and it feels like someone’s doused her in ice as sharp shivers rock up and down her small form. She pushes herself onto her feet, pulls her tail from her belt and feels a little more balanced. Yanks her crossbow from its holster and levels it between the guy’s eyes.
It's unsteady. She won’t shoot straight she knows, but it’s enough of a defence to feel like she might live after this. She backs up to an armchair in the centre of the room, puffed with stuffing. It’s easy to cling to, claws dragging in the tweed fabric covering it, and she somehow finds herself atop it, clutching on the upholstery with aching feet.
He pulls back and up from a disturbingly large puddle of her green tinged blood on the floor. At full height he’s surely three times her own. He isn’t grinning anymore
Someone kicks in a door to her left, a blue blur skidding in. The man, machine, barely has a moment to look before a fist is smashing into his cheekbone, and he’s knocked a couple feet back.
‘My friends,’ Nott snarls at him from her perch. She tries to add to her voice the lilting showmanship of Mollymauk’s charming lies but its choked with bile still in her throat and what comes out is more like a smoker’s grate, ‘here they are, fucker.’
‘You called?’ Beau spits and slams the butt of her staff into the guy’s collarbone. A loud crack reverberates and Nott grins a bloody grin as the guy howls in pain.
The rest of her friends spill into the room, Fjord then Caduceus then Jester and fucking finally, illuminated by the beginnings of a fire in his hands, her wizard.
They make eye contact over Jester’s horns, and for a moment the warmth running down her chest isn’t blood, but something deep and tangled. Something umistakably Caleb shaped, and she slides down the chair back and rushes at him.
Magic explodes around them, Fjord is yelling something and metal clangs on metal, but Nott meets Caleb half-way and flings herself at his knees.
‘Liebling.’ He breathes into her hair, nose buried deep in the crook behind her ear, hands pulling her neck close close close.