Grub walked quietly through the village beside Wrighty. The one-armed Sky-Fallen looked everywhere at once.
"Huh..."
"This place is actually pretty nice."
Grub nodded. "It grows on you."
Ahead, a food cart near the village center was somehow still operating.
The owner, a stout woman with tusks and flour-dusted arms, had emerged from the civilian shelter the moment the all-clear sounded and set up shop as if a battle hadn't just torn through her front yard. Grub respected the dedication. War or no war, people needed to eat.
He ordered two Winged Boar dogs using the small wages Morrigan had allocated him from the Guardian fund. The pay was modest, a recognition of his role in fortification and trap design rather than formal membership. Several Guardians had vocally objected to the arrangement, arguing that a former traitor shouldn't draw from their budget. Morrigan had told them, in her exact words, to shut the fuck up and deal with it. Urgor had similarly paid Luthiel for her forge work, though that arrangement drew fewer complaints since nobody wanted to upset the only blacksmith for miles.
After Wrighty tried a free sample, Grub's modest wages became significantly more modest.
"Sixteen more."
"Sixteen?"
"They're incredible, Doc. Like, genuinely incredible."
Wrighty scratched his cheek.
"I've been running for like...I don't even know how long."
"I'm starving dude."
Grub sighed. "…Fine."
The pale boy stared at the stack of Winged Boar dogs piled in Wrighty's lap and tried not to calculate how many days of pay he was watching disappear into a bottomless stomach. The dark-skinned boy sat beside him on a stone curb outside the shop, bandages wrapped around his torso, his weighted staff resting against the wall behind them. Debris from the battle still littered the streets, but the foot traffic had already resumed as villagers emerged blinking from the shelters into the smoky evening air.
Grub bit into his own dog quietly, chewed, and glanced sideways at Wrighty.
"So. Where do we start?"
Wrighty swallowed an entire dog in a single gulp, barely chewing. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and grinned.
"Well, Doc, I can't lie. You seem a tad bit happier now."
Grub frowned. "What?"
"You were quite a bit more reserved before." Wrighty tilted his head, studying Grub's face with a perceptiveness that most people didn't credit him for. "More closed off. Kinda like talking to an awesome brick wall."
Grub shrugged and took another bite. "I don't know what you're talking about. I'm hardly the poster child for social confidence."
Wrighty chuckled. "You think so? If this was before, you wouldn't have even responded to that. You would've just stared at me until I changed the subject."
Grub opened his mouth to argue, then closed it. He sat with the observation for a moment, turning it over without committing to it. Wrighty tossed another dog into his mouth, content to let the silence do its work.
Is he right? Am I different?
The thought connected to something deeper. His Nihil had been empty for most of his time at the village. Without Nihil pressing down on his emotions, without the grey fog muting everything, he had been more... present. More responsive and willing to engage.
Even now, as he had Nihil in him, he felt a tad emptier in the emotional department.
Were those moments the real him? Or were they just what happened when he was out of his Forte?
He didn't have an answer. So he took another bite and moved on.
"How is everyone at the Ridge?"
Wrighty perked up. "The Ridge? Oh, you mean the village. Right." He grinned proudly. "It's going great, man. Everything has been looking up since you took care of the giant grub and left."
"It's officially called the Kingdom of Eden now."
Grub raised an eyebrow. "Kingdom?"
"Well, it's not massive or anything. But it's growing. New buildings, proper structures, farmland." Wrighty counted off developments on his fingers, which meant he ran out of fingers quickly given that he only had five. "Five took the reigns as leader. Gravel works as sort of a co-leader alongside him."
Grub processed that. Gravel as a leader made sense. The man had been organizing the survivors since day one, barking orders and maintaining structure when everything else was falling apart. But Five stepping up was unexpected. The quiet, polite boy with the high-collared jacket and the bronze skin hadn't struck Grub as the leadership type when they had briefly interacted at the Ridge.
"Really? Five is the leader?"
Wrighty nodded enthusiastically. "He's great at it too! He seems to know so much about everything. That's actually why he was chosen."
Grub looked at him carefully. "What did he teach you guys?"
"Oh, all sorts of things." Wrighty grabbed another dog and gestured with it as he spoke. "Anima, for one. He taught us what it was and how it works. He also taught us about anomalies, like that snake creature I killed back there." He pointed vaguely toward the battlefield. "He was the one who set up trade lines with some nearby settlements. We even have crops growing in proper fields now, thanks to his planning."
Grub's eyes narrowed slightly. Trade lines, crop planning, anima theory, anomaly classification. That was an extraordinary breadth of knowledge for someone who had supposedly fallen from the sky with no memories, just like the rest of them. Very impressive.
"You said the Kingdom is growing," Grub continued, keeping his voice neutral. "How? It's only been a few months."
"Well, babies aren't born that fast, obviously." Wrighty laughed at his own joke. "But other survivors heard about us and came to join. Some were living alone in the wilderness. Others had formed small groups that weren't working out. Five would lead expeditions to find them and bring them in safely."
Grub nodded slowly. Each answer raised another question, but he kept them behind his teeth for now. Five knowing about Anima and anomalies was suspicious. Five having the organizational skill to build trade infrastructure was suspicious. Five leading rescue expeditions with perfect success rates was suspicious.
Grub could easily tell from his time with him that Five was intelligent. Very intelligent.
But this...
This sounded almost too convenient.
But Grub hadn't been there. He didn't have enough information to draw conclusions, only suspicions. And suspicions without evidence were just noise. Perhaps Five had simply adapted.
"That's good to hear," he said carefully. "How did Five learn all that?"
Wrighty shrugged with his one shoulder. "He would go off by himself sometimes. Disappear for a day or two, then come back with new information. Maps, survival tips, knowledge about the local wildlife. So I figured he was scouting or something."
Or something.
Grub filed every detail away without comment.
"There's a lot more," Wrighty continued, "but that's the general picture. The village is becoming a real town. Maybe even a real kingdom someday." His expression brightened further. "Oh, and Five took your warning seriously. He has Sheath and his team running perimeter patrols and expeditions to keep the area secure."
Grub remembered Sheath. The tall, angry boy with the slicked-back hair and the rune-covered sword. Overly chivalrous. Not particularly bright. But dedicated, and skilled enough with that blade to be genuinely dangerous. He wondered how much stronger he had gotten.
"Though Five also seems pretty focused on finding Eerie," Wrighty added, almost as an afterthought.
That detail snagged Grub's attention harder than the others. Five specifically searching for Eerie. The quiet, red-eyed boy who appeared and disappeared without explanation. Whose presence carried a coldness that Grub had never been able to articulate.
Why Eerie specifically?
Another question without an answer. Another thread filed away.
Grub finished his dog and wiped his hands on his pants. Despite the suspicious details, genuine relief settled across his chest. They were alive. All of them. The Ridge survivors had built something real in his absence, and the people he had worried about in his quieter moments were thriving.
He turned to face Wrighty directly.
Wrighty suddenly added, "oh! Yah, Shiela wanted to come too, but Five insisted she stays in the kingdom. So she wanted me to say hi."
"Oh, that's nice. All of it sounds great. Really." He paused. "So why did you leave?"
Wrighty's chewing slowed. He looked at the half-eaten dog in his hand, then back at Grub. A lopsided grin crossed his face and he punched Grub lightly on the shoulder.
"To find my best friend, obviously."
Grub winced from the "light" punch and rubbed his arm. "Why, though?"
"Because you're awesome, dude!" Wrighty's enthusiasm was immediate and entirely sincere. "You beat the grub. You survived the Leviathan. You figured out how to navigate this insane world before any of us could even pronounce the food." His dark eyes shone with admiration that Grub found deeply uncomfortable. "I really think you're amazing, man."
Grub looked away.
"...I'm really not."
"You are."
Wrighty answered immediately.
"No question."
He happily devoured another Winged Boar Dog.
Grub said nothing. Instead, he watched Wrighty gulp another dog, the compliments bouncing off his emotional armor without quite penetrating it. Or maybe they were penetrating and he just didn't know what to do with the feeling.
Wrighty swallowed and continued, his tone shifting to something more contemplative.
"Plus, I wanted to go out on my own for my own reasons. And I figured, who better to do it with than you?"
Grub frowned. "What reasons? What happened?"
Wrighty's expression changed. The ever-present grin didn't vanish entirely, but it softened into something thinner. His dark eyes drifted toward the horizon, unfocused, and a shadow crossed his features that looked foreign on a face built for sunshine.
"I kind of want to know who I was," he said quietly. "Before all of this. Before the fall. What my name was. What I did. Whether I was someone worth being." His voice carried a vulnerability that Grub had rarely heard before.
Then Wrighty took a breath and the vulnerability retreated behind something harder.
"But it's not just that."
Grub waited.
"You know how I said everything's been incredible since you left?" Wrighty set down the remaining dogs and folded his arm across his knee. "That's true now. But it wasn't always."
His jaw tightened.
"Soon after you left, the bone monster came back."
Grub stared at him. The warmth of the reunion cooled by several degrees as Wrighty's dark eyes met his, carrying a weight that hadn't been there when the conversation started.
"Tell me everything."