We left off with a lot going on; let’s remind ourselves what is happening before we go on.

The kobakra is running at a speed enabled by its strange stilt legs. It’s nearly to the top of the rise, beyond which it can sense a feast waiting; but just recently a few gnats started piercing and burning and bashing and cutting it; not enough to slow it down, but it’s definitely annoyed.

Fyodor is just behind the kobakra, turning his barrel for another run at it. He’s got a club in one hand, a saber in the other, and he’s covered in cuts and welts from a recent hit by the kobakra’s tail. They hurt a lot, and the kobakra’s winding up for a second swing, but he took the first blow without any major wounds and while he’d rather not be whipped again, he’s also not too worried about it.

Oisha is falling from her previous perch above the kobakra. From that perspective she saw how the kobakra pulled its first blow to avoid whipping itself when Fyodor was touching its right flank, but he’s in the clear now and if she doesn’t distract the kobakra somehow she thinks her husband is about to be impaled by the many spikes and blades woven into that unnatural tail. That was her motivation in deciding to drop off her barrel, but now that she’s falling her driving urge is to not hit the rough stony ground; there’s a big furry back below her and she must land on it or— no, there’s no or: she must land on it!

Diego and Catalina are a little distance back off the kobakra’s left flank, feeling somewhat confused and very worried. First Fyodor charged the monster, vanished behind it, came out looking bloodied, and now he’s turning around while right in the middle of the tail’s reach. Then Oisha, who’d been flying high above the others, fell off her barrel and is now plummeting a distance she can’t possibly survive towards either a terrifying magical monster or a ridge made almost entirely of boulders. Who are these people, and what have they done with the social, proper, boring people they used to be? Much more importantly, are they both about to die?

Got the scene in your mind? Then let’s resume.

Oisha is falling much farther than she’s ever fallen before. There is a sense of weightlessness, but mostly a sense of too fast, not enough time, here comes the ground, I’m not aimed right, I’m going to miss, oh no on no oh no!

Catalina and Diego watch in horror as she drops not onto the kobakra’s back, as they had vaguely hoped she would, but behind the far side of its bulk. This does seem to have attracted the kobakra’s attention, though, for it lets out a barking chirp and suddenly veers to its right. Its tail, which had already begun a descent to obliterate Fyodor, is jerked to the side by this sudden course change, emitting half a dozen loud cracks as some of its many tips snap as they’re jerked about.

Fyodor, who had not seen his wife’s fall, sees the kobakra’s sudden veering only as a lucky break and races up to its right flank, pummeling it with club and saber. He’s feeling pretty good about this: it’s all working to plan! Better than plan: it’s not fighting back at all!

Diego, realizing he can do nothing for Oisha and that Fyodor’s attack can only succeed if the curse is confused by other attacks, tries to match the monster’s speed and shoots arrows into it between Fyodor’s swings.

Catalina lost sight of Oisha when she passed behind the kobakra and the kobakra veered and Fyodor charged—was that a grin on his face?—and she’s worried the kobakra turned to finish Oisha off or savage her body, so she races towards where she guesses her body would have landed. As she’s getting close enough to expect to see it she’s distracted by the kobakra letting out a loud, pained scream and again turning sharply, this time to the left to resume its original heading. After looking up to see what was the matter Catalina looks down again and scans the ground, but there’s no body. Where’s the body?

To answer this, we need to jump back just a moment to Oisha’s fall. She did not land on the kobakra as she had hoped, but she also didn’t miss it entirely. She fell within reach of its side and grabbed handfuls of fur with a vice-like grip born of terror. She was going so fast it burnt and ripped her palms and the first few handfulls tore right out of the kobakra’s hide, causing it to turn sharply towards her in a reflexive need to lessen the tugging. In a mad scramble Oisha grabbed more fur, then more, arresting her fall and then frantically but slowly scrambling her way up its side. She was almost tossed when the kobakra suddenly veered to the left, but she retained her grip and eventually found purchase on its broad back.

Catalina, not finding Oisha where she expected, flew further and upward to get a better view and soon saw Oisha there, most of the way up the kobakra’s back and pounding on in futile-looking fury. Diego was shooting arrows and, while she couldn’t see Fyodor around the kobakra’s bulk she assumed he was still riding its left flank as he’d been doing last she could. They were safe and engaged and she was needed in the fray. She pulled out another crystal and flew up off the monster’s right flank, mirroring her husband’s pose, and started loosing short controlled bursts of heat into its side, timing it so her husband’s arrows and her charms landed in an alternating rhythm.

It was in this configuration that they crested the ridge and came into sight of the town of Woodkettle. On the left flank, Fyodor on a barrel beating and cutting its side. Further out to its left, Diego on a barrel shooting arrows. On it’s back, Oisha pummeling it with foot and fist in some kind of frenzied rage. Further out to its right, Catalina blasting it with short bursts of magical heat.

The kobakra was not happy. It whipped its tail back and forth, sometimes stopping before it reached the two on it, other times connecting with them a little and its own torso more. It turned its head to try to snap at them, but they were out of reach. It lifted a paw to scratch them off, but its strange stilt-like leg meant the paw ended up nowhere near the attackers. Meanwhile, it was losing blood and its curse, pulsing defensive changes in a vain attempt to keep up with the varied attacks, was expending its power. It was loosing energy, its attackers could not be shaken, and there ahead of it was a source of energy, babies and toddlers and children aplenty. It gave up trying to shake its antagonists and put all its effort into covering that distance in as little time as possible.

With the renewed focus and the benefits of the downward slope, the kobakra gained speed. Soon the three on barrels fond their attention split between keeping their barrels moving fast enough not to fall behind and their ongoing attacks. Then Catalina burnt through her last heat crystal and had to resort to other, less effective charms. Then Diego noticed his supply of arrows was dwindling decided to take more time to aim each shot. Oisha started running low on energy and replaced her frenzied pounding with more targeted blows into arrow wounds and burn marks created by her neighbors. As each of them slowed, the curse focused more of its defenses on Fyodor’s attacks, which started hitting curse-hardened hide more often than flesh, so he too slowed, taking bigger wind-ups for less frequent but harder-hitting blows.

Through all this the kobakra neither fought back nor reacted in any other way. They had crossed more than half the distance to the town, and it showed no sign of slowing. It oozed blood from arrow wounds and saber cuts; it was dotted with burn marks and probably bruising under its madly-pulsing fur, but it did not slow. It ran past the groves and into the work yards. If it noticed the bait trail, it didn’t go there: it made straight for the largest group of children. Two score men with spears were ready to receive its charge. Behind them the others prepared to run, to scatter, but not yet, not while it is far enough to follow their movements. Soon, though, very soon—

Diego has shot his last arrow. Catalina has run out of anything like an offensive charm and the distractions she is trying now are not fooling the curse. Fyodor and Oisha are still attacking, but with just a few types of attacks the curse is able to protect against most of their effect. Ahead is a wall of spears, but the four know that once the first spear lands the others will be deflected harmlessly by the curse. They’ve lost.

And then the kobakra stumbles. At least, it would have been just a stumble if it had been proportioned like a regular beast. One of its front paws, weakened by reduced blood flow, doesn’t quote clear a log in its path. Its claws jam into the hard wood and are caught, swinging the paw back, all the way back. Its long stork leg, pulled back behind it, gets in the way of the hind paw which slips and comes down much too far out to the side. Unbalanced, the kobakra swings its tail out to counter the unexpected torque, but the tail lacks the mass needed to be an effective counter-balance and whips much too fast to one side, wrapping around a copperwood trunk and holding fast as dozens of barbs sink into the wood. The sharp jerk from the tail’s sudden halt pulls the kobakra up short before the entire tail rips from its body, trailing bloody strands that pull from its back. At the sudden release of the tail’s tension the kobakra pitches forward, face-planting in the yard and tumbling tail-over torso onto its back. Its immense weight is more than its neck can sustain during the somersault and breaks under the strain, and the kobakra is dead.

And what of Oisha, perched on its back? In the first tumble she was launched forward, flying through the air with nothing to hold on to. Fortunately Catalina, her offensive charms spent, had been moving forward and closer to the monster’s head to try to distract it. Seeing Oisha fall she goes into a dive and grabs at her, trying to pull her up before she hits ground. Unfortunately, Catalina is not very strong and hasn’t thought through what it means to catch a falling being: it means all the force of a falling body suddenly enters you arm. Catalina cried in pain as the force jerked her shoulder out of socket and kept crying in pain as it kept being out of socket afterward, but she did slow Oisha enough that all Oisha suffered was a few broken ribs, not a broken everything.

The townsfolk, once they realized the kobakra was actually dead, rushed out to meet the four and began tending to them as best they could. Fyodor was dripping blood from dozens of lacerations and as the adrenaline wore off and shock took over he felt light-headed and disoriented. Oisha had a few cuts from the tail (though nowhere near as many as Fyodor), and broken ribs from her fall, and the palms of her hands were torn and burnt and bloodied with kobakra hair mashed into them so deeply that it took more than an hour for the town’s surgeon to pick it all out. Catalina had the dislocated shoulder, which was easily fixed. She also had some gleam dulling from over-extending herself with the crystals; her left hand, which had absorbed their power, was numb and transluscent; her right hand, which had channeled it out, had little knobs all over it like over-sized taste buds or a forest of tiny warts; and the channel the magic had taken between them tingled and itched, but inside not on the skin. No one in town knew how to tend that, and while Catalina knew it could be tended by someone with the skill to do so she also knew rest would help, so as soon as feasible she went to bed and proceeded to sleep for two and a half days straight.

Diego alone was uninjured, and perhaps the least suited to being the uninjured one surrounded by convalescents. He played with Tina, talked with his daughter and son-in-law, visited his neighbors in their bandaged and recovering states, and by mid-afternoon he was done with all that. He inspected the dead kobakra, but it seemed to be rotting much more quickly than most corpses and there wasn’t much of interest to see. The next day he trekked back up the ridge, found where Oisha’s barrel had landed, and lugged it back into town. He asked about refilling the barrels, but the nearest active flight mine was more than twenty leagues up the road. He asked after new arrows, but they had to be custom-made because he was a Small, barely a quarter the size of the mostly-Large townsfolk. He asked about local hunting. He walked about the various groves and yards and watched people at their work. He toyed with some copperwood boards he got from the lumber mill, said I see why they don’t make barrels out of copperwood, the miller said yep; it’s fireproof but not very workable, Diego nodded, the miller nodded, and that used up their pool of conversation topics. He sat on a shelf in the kitchen as his daughter cooked and told her hunting stories and things that she and her siblings had done when they were young, but she didn’t attend very well, and it wasn’t the same as around a fire by a tent. He checked out the four barrels, pined over the eight lost in the wilderness, noticed a weakness in one barrel that he didn’t have the tools on hand to fix, and harrumphed to himself a bit.

Over supper the second day he was feeling restless. He really wanted flight; was there really none to be had within twenty leagues?

Not anymore was Dmitiri’s reply.

There used to be? asked Diego.

Sofia shook her head at her husband, knowing what Diego would do if Dmitri continued, but Dmitri lacked his fathers’ penchant for reading people and thought she just didn’t know about the old stories.

There used to be a full gleam mine four leagues north of here, Dmitri said. It was called Kettle Mine after Kettlebacher, the Gleam who ran it, which is why this town was named Woodkettle.

What happened to it? asked Diego, intrigued.

It ran out, said Sofia. I hear you went down to the lumber mill today, Papa.

No, said Dmitri, still not getting his wife’s effort to stop this line of conversation and start another, it didn’t run out, at least not completely. It was still pulling out enough crystal to stay in business when old Kettlebacher started acting strangely. The story is that he started only coming to town at night, rubbing soot on his face, saying strange things that didn’t make sense. They say after a few weeks of that he tried to kill someone, so they chased him back to the mine and boarded it up.

So, a gleam mine with a shadeling, mused Diego thoughtfully.

No, said Sofia, emphatically.

We killed a kobakra, said Diego. How hard can a shadeling be?

You got lucky, said Sofia. And even so Mama and Dmitri’s parents are still in bed recovering two days later! No way.

They’ll be up soon, said Diego.

And when they are, you can take the road around to go back to Goldknob the way we always do, said Sofia.

Dmitri, said Diego, ignoring this, thanks for the best news I’ve had all day.

Papa, no! I forbid you from taking Mama and the others into the shadeling mine!

Well, I guess we’ll see, said Diego. I think you asked about my visit to the miller? Well, I went there and saw his operation, and then I asked for a board. And when I looked at the board, you’ll never guess what I noticed…