Dawn came in quietly, the sky turning from black to a pale bruised grey by the time the trees thinned out and the ground beneath the horses' hooves shifted from packed dirt to something darker and harder, like earth that hadn't seen rain in a very long time.
Then the cave appeared.
It sat at the base of a low rocky rise, wide-mouthed and still, surrounded by white boulders the size of small huts that caught the early light and threw it back in dull flashes. A wooden sign hung crooked above the entrance on a rusted nail, half the letters faded but still readable.
CAVE MRELLIE.
"Seems we're here," Liz said tiredly, sliding down from her mare and rolling her shoulders. Two days of riding had settled into her bones and it showed.
"I can see that," Marcus said.
He tied Dusk to a nearby tree and stood at the cave entrance for a moment, looking at it without moving. The air around it was different, heavier, the way air felt before a storm except there were no clouds and no wind. Just stillness and that particular pressure that meant something was present that preferred not to be found.
He turned away from it.
There was enough he didn't know about himself and this power without walking into a dark cave half exhausted. He'd rather know what he was working with first.
"System," he said quietly.
The blue window appeared instantly, hovering at chest height, casting a faint light across his face that Liz watched with wide eyes from where she was untying her pack.
Marcus looked at his own reflection in the glowing surface. He'd almost forgotten what he looked like. Younger than he felt. Same eyes though, flat and steady and carrying something behind them that had no name.
Lucas, he thought, and didn't say it out loud. If he's somehow in this world too, he'd look the same.
He pushed the thought down and read the window.
STATUS
Name: Marcus
Rank: SSS
Class: Summoner
Active Summons: 1/ ****
Equipment: Devil Loom Coat
Innate Ability: Nullify lethal damage once per encounter.
He looked at the coat. Ran his thumb along the sleeve. The hum he'd felt when he first put it on made more sense now, it wasn't decoration, it was the enchantment sitting quietly inside the fabric, patient and waiting.
"Knew this wasn't ordinary," he muttered.
The window dissolved.
He looked over at Liz. "We camp here tonight. Go in tomorrow when we're not running on nothing." He nodded toward the treeline. "Find something to start a fire with."
"Yes mas—" She stopped herself, catching his look before he could say anything. "I mean. Yes."
"Marcus," he said flatly. "Not Master. I'm not running a household and you're not a servant. Call me that again and I'll leave you outside with the horses."
She pressed her lips together against something that might have been a smile. "Understood. Marcus."
They gathered wood from the treeline and got a fire going between two of the white boulders, where it was sheltered from the open air. Liz spread leaves across a flat section of ground on both sides of the fire, the closest thing to a bed the situation allowed, and they settled down facing each other with the flames between them.
Marcus looked at her in the firelight. He hadn't really looked before, not properly. Sharp features, capable hands, eyes that were always moving and cataloguing things the way his did. She was striking in the way of someone who had never needed to think about it because there had always been something more pressing to deal with.
He was aware, in an academic sort of way, that he was staring.
Me. Alone with a woman. Camping. He turned it over once in his head with something approaching private amusement. Back where he came from he'd never had the space for any of this, too poor, too busy scraping together coin as a knight to think about much beyond the next job and the next meal.
Liz shifted and moved closer to the fire, and somehow in the process ended up closer to him as well, her shoulder pressing lightly against his arm.
"I think I'm warmer this way," she said, and the way she said it was almost innocent and not quite.
Marcus felt something that was absolutely none of his business at the current moment, cleared his throat once, and rolled over to face the opposite direction with the focused energy of a man making a tactical decision.
"Get some sleep," he said. "Tomorrow's a long day."
She laughed once under her breath, quiet and warm, and said nothing else.
******
Koookooo
The bird sound hit them both at the same time.
Sharp, strange, nothing like any bird either of them had heard before, cutting through the early morning quiet like something mechanical trying to imitate nature and not quite managing it. They were on their feet before the echo finished, hands up, eyes scanning the tree line and the rocks and the cave entrance.
Nothing. Just the pale white light of early morning sitting over the boulders and the dead ash of the fire between them.
Marcus exhaled slowly and looked up. The sky was fully light.
"Morning already," he said.
Liz was already rolling up her makeshift bed and tucking it away. She seated her new sword at her hip and slung a round leather pack over her shoulder, the one she'd taken from her saddlebag the night before. Her movements were clean and practiced, no wasted motion.
Marcus reached for his waist automatically. His hand found nothing. His body had expected a sword that wasn't there and the absence registered like a missing step in a staircase.
"Muscle memory," Liz said, watching him. "You've carried a sword for a long time."
"Something like that." He pulled the Devil Loom Coat straight and looked at the cave entrance.
"Stay close. Don't explore on your own and don't touch anything you don't recognize."
"Understood."
They walked in together.
The darkness swallowed them gradually, the morning light reaching in only a few feet before giving up entirely. Liz produced a small fire stone from her pack and struck it twice and the resulting light pushed the dark back enough to see several feet in any direction.
What it revealed made her stop walking.
Skeletons lined both walls of the cave entrance, dozens of them, slumped against the rock in various positions. Some still clutching weapons. Some face down on the cave floor. All of them long dead, the bones bleached white and smooth, and above them all sitting thick and undisturbed in the stale air was the smell of old death, dry and acrid and absolute.
"What in the—" Liz started.
"Don't stop moving," Marcus said.
His voice was flat as always but his eyes were already moving across the skeletons, counting, assessing, noting the weapons they'd been carrying and the direction most of them had fallen. Whatever had killed them had come from deeper inside the cave.
And whatever it was, it was probably still there.
He stepped over the nearest skeleton and kept walking.