After a woodland creature I'd rather not describe in detail, I finally traded the sword back for a bow, my actual preferred weapon, and kept a dagger at my hip strictly for emergencies. I had used a bow, once, because it let me not have to look at what I was doing to something while I did it. By the time Yomi put me up against the golem, I was using it because I could simply kill more efficiently that way, and the two reasons shared nothing but the draw of the string, and I noticed the difference and did not know what to do with noticing it, so I did the thing I was apparently becoming very good at doing instead.
I set it aside and kept moving.
The stone golem stood taller than my grandfather's barn had, slow enough that I could read every one of its blows a full second before they landed, and strong enough that a single successful hit would have ended the whole exercise permanently. I emptied Volley into it first, a few hundred arrows fanned out thin and weak, most of them glancing harmlessly off its hide, and I nearly gave up on the whole approach until I noticed one shot, thrown almost at random, had punched a real gap through its chest where the others had only scratched. Not luck.
A seam in the stone, hairline thin, that every other arrow had simply missed by inches. Once I found it, I poured everything I had left into that single point, and watched the whole enormous thing come apart into gravel and dust around a wound the width of my own fist.
"That's the last one," Yomi said, subdued, once the dust had settled.
"I'm not allowed to spawn anything stronger than a golem.
I hope you're not angry with me."
"Why would I be angry?
You saved my life.
You did more for me in here than anyone's managed to in a long while," I said, and meant it, though some small ungenerous part of me was already doing the arithmetic on how far a golem's worth of strength would actually carry me against whatever Corvin Ashe turned out to be, and not much liking the answer.
She smiled at that, small and real.
"I have to find my friends now," I told her.
"I promise I'll come back and play with you when I can."
"That's what you always say," she said, and her voice cracked upward into something closer to a shout before I'd even finished processing the words.
"You never do.
I thought that now that there were two of you, one of you could finally stay and play with me."
"What do you mean, two of me?"
I asked, my pulse climbing all over again.
"Just leave!"
she screamed.
That was the last thing I saw before everything went dark again.
I had a bad feeling the moment I opened my eyes.
I was lying flat on the side of a road, and I knew it was the real ground of Aftermath and not Yomi's blank little pocket world before I'd even fully sat up, because a wind was moving over me, actual wind with a direction and a temperature and a smell of woodsmoke and turned soil to it, nothing like the airless stillness I'd just come out of. I had no idea how long I'd been gone. Days, maybe.
My hands, when I looked at them, had new calluses on them that hadn't been there before Yomi's grid, and a scar along my forearm from the imp's dagger that had already gone pale and old-looking, which told me it must have been longer than it seemed.
The road ran east to west in front of me. I picked the direction with fewer trees crowding it and walked until I found a small farming settlement, ringed with a hasty fence of sharpened stakes and a lookout tower that hadn't been built by anyone with real carpentry training. Whatever these people were afraid of, they'd clearly decided it was worth losing sleep over.
Whatever this was, I did not like the shape of it.
That unease sharpened into dread when the wind shifted and brought me the flat metallic smell of blood, along with long drag marks scored into the dirt of the road, though there wasn't a single body or dropped weapon anywhere to explain either one. Just blood, and the marks, and the particular silence of a place that had recently decided it wasn't safe to make noise anymore.
Archers trained their bows on me the moment I reached the gate.
"Identify yourself," a voice called down from behind the fence.
"We've no room for strangers, not at this hour."
"It's still light out," I said, looking up at a perfectly ordinary afternoon sky.
"Nevertheless, you'd best be on your way, stranger," the voice said, curt and unmoved by the sky's opinion on the matter.
"What's the fastest way to Corvane?"
I asked, since it seemed as good a direction as any and I had nowhere better in mind besides finding Namey and the others.
"There is no path to Corvane at the moment," the voice said.
"Only fools try the roads while monsters are about."
"Tell me about the monsters."
"Don't trouble yourself over it.
I've sent for adventurers from the guild there already," the voice said.
"Survive the night, and you may be allowed through come morning."
"What if I dealt with them myself, before your adventurers even arrive?"
"Then I was right about you being a fool," the voice said, not unkindly, "and a very specific kind of one at that.
Head south, toward the forest.
It won't take them long to find you there, if that's truly what you want."
"Can you tell me anything useful about them at all?"
"Good luck," the voice said.
"May Vessalinne save your soul, whatever's left of it by morning."
By the time I reached the forest, the light had gone fully out of the sky, and the silence there was absolute in a way that pressed on my ears almost like the ringing after the Lanternwood Bow's biggest shots used to. No crickets. No frogs.
Either everything that made noise for a living out here had already been killed, or it had learned better than to advertise itself, and either possibility left me far from reassured about my own decision to be standing there at all.