Wondering why she isn’t dead yet, Fresh opens her eyes and stares at the broad, metallic surface that has appeared before herself. A giant, dark-cobalt armored back, belonging to a man who can’t quite contain his excited, heavy breathing. She breaks, her voice shattering like so much ice and glass. “Why aren't you running?!” howls Fresh, feeling her broken shoulder painfully snap back into place from the restorative magic of the befouled lantern floating at her side, as she pushes herself forward from the glass-sign of their store that is pressed between her hurt back and the rubble of their home in the north.

The stones beneath his boots crush into brittle fragments as he presses his weight forward against the golem, as he holds the blade of the sword, which runs lengthwise down the span of the ice-golem’s arm, firmly in place. His eyes shine out of the shadowy gaps of his metal helmet, as he turns his head only slightly to the side to look at her distraught face.

Shamrock says nothing and lets go of the sword, his armor falls to the ground in an instant, shattering apart with nothing left inside to hold it together, as if the body inside of it had simply vanished into thin air.

Knowing that she is about to to die, Fresh looks up in fear towards the ice-golem that is about to crush her. But instead, she sees a muscular, dark-elven woman, wearing a red wizard’s hat that has, oddly enough, a large mushroom-cap as its brim.

“LET GO OF ME!” shouts the woman and Fresh feels her body lurching to the ground as something cracks against the side of her chest. The air leaves her lungs as she falls to the dirt, holding her aching body. The dark-red wizard reaches over her, grabbing the glass sign from the ruined store and taking it with herself as she runs off into the darkness.

Fresh gasps for air, but she can’t quite seem to find any. Her eyes and her lungs burn as she feels around herself. She’s trapped inside of something. A tube. No, a chimney. Looking around, she tries to squeeze her arms free but they won’t move as she’s firmly lodged inside of the stone chimney. She’s stuck. A voice comes from below.

“Ah, wait, I’ve heard of this,” says Jubilee, stepping into the fireplace beneath where she’s stuck. They look up the chimney, straight towards her. There’s no way they can’t see her here if they’re standing just beneath her. “The shaft runs up along the walls of the other rooms. If you light this, I’ll bet you anything that the walls across from the stairs up there will start getting hot.”

“Jubilee!” yells Fresh, but she just listens as a pair of boots walks away, holding a conversation with someone that isn’t her. Jubilee had seen her, but didn’t say anything. There’s no way they couldn't have seen her from down there.

Everything erupts in fire and Fresh closes her eyes, only opening them a moment later as she feels the constraint on her clothes become tighter from the front. Opening her eyes again, she looks at Basil who is standing there before her, behind the counter of their old store in the north.

“They told us two to watch you,” confesses Basil. “The clergy. So we did and then he.. he..” Basil sniffles, fighting it all back. “When you offered me the position, they told me to take it to keep a closer eye on you,” she concedes. “But I did it because I wanted to know.” Her voice cracks. “I wanted to know if you..” A thread on Fresh’s robe pops as it snaps from the pressure of the priestess’ tugging hands that are wrapped around her collar. “I wanted to know if you killed my only friend!” cries Basil, looking up at Fresh with an expression of pure, contorted suffering before she starts howling.

“Oh. That,” says Fresh, lifting a hand to her own throat in surprise at the words coming out of her mouth. “Yeah. We did that,” admits Fresh.

“W- what?” asks Basil, her eyes going wide as her trembling hands let go of her.

“Yeah,” repeats Fresh. “Right through the throat,” she explains, running her fingernail over Basil’s shaking neck, feeling the frantic beat of the priestess’ heart through the single digit that touches her body like the fang of a viper. “Well. The first one was. The other cuts, well.. we couldn’t leave anything behind, you know?” she asks, as if it were obvious. “We’re professionals, Ba~ sil~!” she says in a sing-song tone.

Basil screams and charges at her, but before she can make contact, Fresh sits upright in her bed, panting and gasping for air.

Of course, it was all just an odd dream. One of those nightmares that she gets sometimes, even without the fountain lending a helping hand. She looks around the room, checking all the beds in the darkness from her corner, making sure that they’re full. They are.

Fresh lowers her head back down, hiding it under her pillow so that she doesn’t wake the others up with her crying.

Sure, it was just a dream. But in a sense, it’s also more than that. This journey of theirs has been a lot, to say the least and she herself was entirely unprepared for it from the beginning. This strong emotionality that she has managed to foster with her new family has, of course, not been given to her for free. She had to earn it with blood, sweat and tears. But at the same time, she also had to pay tolls that were of a less physical nature. In a sense, those traumatic experiences that her mind is always subconsciously processing is what makes her more like her friends than ever before. None of them are ‘clean’ or whole and all of them are broken in a way.

Her bed shifts as something heavy sits down on the side of it. Looking out from under her pillow, Fresh stares at Shamrock’s back as he sits on the edge of her bed. He isn’t looking her way, he’s just sitting there, staring out towards Basil or his own bed.

Hiding her face one more time to get out the last sniffle, Fresh scoots closer towards him, pulling her blanket along with herself. She presses her stomach against his back and pulls in her knees, touching his right side with them as she essentially wraps herself around him from behind. Pulling the blanket back over herself, she places a hand on him.

“Thanks, Shamrock.”

“Sleep,” is all that he says, nodding and Fresh obliges, closing her eyes and she finds that in that next portion of the night to come, that there are no monsters that manage to find her in her dreams. They had all been killed already.

The man is an enigma to her in one sense and in another sense, he isn’t. Jubilee, the demon, has clear reasons for their personality being what it is. Basil, the priestess who belongs to a kinder world than this one has reasons for the way she is as well. But Shamrock?

Even in her sleep, she feels the lurching of his armor as he sits there, breathing so loudly that she is sure, in her sleep-addled half-waking state, that a gale is blowing in through their home.

Shamrock is.. well, that isn’t important, what Shamrock physically ‘is’ beneath the armor. But what he, the man from the sect, is as a spiritual entity, that is an enigma to Fresh. Shamrock serves the witch’s sect, he serves her because he wants the world to be lighter.

But why?

What does he gain from it? What does he hope to reap as his reward?

He breathes again and in her strange half-dream, she feels as if she were aboard a boat and his exhalation had caused a great tide that lifted her higher and higher up atop the ocean, which is made entirely out of a fuzzy, blue, blanket.

Or is that, the lightening of the world, the reward itself?

But why would he even want that? After all the things he’s caused himself to endure by wearing the armor, after all the maliciousness he receives by the people surrounding him, why would he want to make the world lighter? For them? They’re not worth the effort, are they?

The ship lowers back down as the blanket-ocean returns to a normal height.

Fresh looks over the ship’s railing, glaring at the blanket that has dared to defy her. She puffs out her cheek at it, making a display of her dominance. The blanket, knowing its place, quickly expands itself outward and pushes the ship back up again towards the lofty heights.

She sighs. Being party-leader is really exhausting work.

The odd night does eventually come to an end and when Fresh awakes to the morning sunlight, shining in through the balcony, she finds that Shamrock is still sitting there, not having moved an inch.

Feeling her stir, he turns his head and nods to her, rising to his feet without saying or remarking a single thing and as the day would go on, he wouldn’t say a single thing to Basil or to Jubilee either. It’s not that this ‘sleepover’ is a secret of some kind, but rather, it’s just not something he would ever feel the need to talk about at all.

She slept bad, so he came over to help her feel better. That’s it. That’s the entire calculation. Just like he would do for Basil, as evidenced by the dream-sheep he had gifted her back in the west and as Fresh is sure he would do for Jubilee as well. It’s as natural for him as it is to drink water when thirsty.

Fresh wonders again, as she stares at his broad back with her blurry eyes, as he vanishes into the kitchen, why?

It’s driving her crazy, honestly. Especially after the whispers from yesterday. Why take the risk? Why carry the burden? Why put yourself in harm’s way to help a world that its people itself clearly don’t care about?

Shamrock is the first one awake and she watches from her bed with groggy eyes as he puts on a comically dainty apron with a giant chicken on its front that Jubilee had made and, while everyone else is still in bed, he sets to work on making breakfast by himself.

It’s not like it’s his turn to make breakfast. Somebody else could do it. But he is there. Breakfast needs to be made. He can make it. It would help if he made it. That’s all there is to it.

It makes Fresh feel bad, honestly. Sure, she has problems, but so does Shamrock and in light of that, there he is, not having slept through the night, making the world ready for them to inhabit, while she is still laying in her bed.

Fresh clenches her fists, determined to do her best today. She throws off her blanket and jumps to her feet with vigor, getting changed and then neatly making her bed. Getting ready for the day, she then rouses Basil, violently jumping into her bed and tickling her first thing in the morning. The priestess howls and makes a hasty escape, apparently having dreamt about water a little too much in the night.

“Sorry!” calls Fresh after her, heading to Jubilee’s room and knocking on the door. “Jubilee! Good morning!”

“Fuck off!” calls a groggy Jubilee.

Fresh smiles, heading to the kitchen and bumping into Shamrock from the side, on purpose. “Can I see your project today?”

“When it’s done,” says the man and she smiles.

A scream comes from downstairs. Basil.

The bowl that Shamrock is stirring drops in an instant as Shamrock rushes to the door with Fresh in pursuit. Jubilee’s door opens behind them. They tear open the stairwell door and look down at it together, seeing Basil standing at the bottom.

In between them, in the middle of the staircase, on its way up towards them, is a very grody, damaged, scorched, broken and mangled stuffed thing, covered in muck and grime and the befoulment of many seasons. There, before them all, stands a stranger, familiar to only two of them, in a sense.

The little teddy-bear with green eyes that Fresh had gifted Jubilee back in the north stares up their way and nods once, locking eyes with Fresh.

Fresh blinks, deeply confused, but then nods back, not wanting to be rude.

The pact had already been sealed long ago.

Razmatazz

-) AHA! The long-term plotpoints are long like you wouldn't believe. (The bear was given to Jubilee in chapter 94, if you want to go back)

-) You might not like dream chapters, dear reader, but I hope you have come to understand their importance by now

Thank you kindly for reading!

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