They walked for three more days and nights, trading watches, the terrain thinning from forest into scrub and then into something drier and stranger still, low grey hills stitched with old, half-collapsed stone walls that had clearly belonged to something once and belonged to nothing now. The Stone Guardian and Wind Archer marched at the rear of the line without complaint or fatigue, and Remus found himself, more than once, glancing back at them with something close to pride, quiet and oddly personal, the pride of a man watching a design actually hold up under real conditions instead of just on paper.
Leo's silences had gotten longer as the days wore on, and his eyes kept finding the same stretch of horizon, east and slightly south, every time the trail crested a rise. Remus noticed it. He said nothing yet, filing it beside the rest of what he was collecting about the man, and kept walking.
They crested the last rise of the fourth day into a wide, flat basin ringed by low hills, and Fortress Genesis rose up out of the haze ahead of them, vine-choked and half-collapsed, a settlement grown up inside the bones of something older and grander that had clearly been built for a purpose nobody currently living remembered.
"This is it," Andrea said. "The ruins of Genesis. If the job posting's honest, the Basilisk's lair is somewhere in the old keep."
They found it easily enough, too easily, and what they found stopped all four of them cold in the doorway of the keep's central hall.
The Basilisk was already dead, its massive coiled body slumped across the flagstones in a state of decay that told Remus it had been dead for weeks, not days, the scales along its flank gone dull and sunken. One eye remained intact in the ruined socket, wrapped loosely in a scrap of old cloth as if someone had meant to take it and been interrupted. Around the corpse, arranged in a rough, unintentional circle, stood a dozen or more petrified figures, adventurers by their gear, frozen mid-stride, mid-swing, mid-flinch, exactly as the creature's dying gaze had caught them.
Remus walked the circle slowly, unable to stop himself, reading each stone figure the way he'd once have read a wreck report: a woman frozen with her shield already half-raised, a fraction of a second too slow. A man caught mid-shout, mouth still open on some warning nobody behind him had lived long enough to hear. A third figure, younger than the rest by the look of the armor, one hand still outstretched toward a fallen companion's boot, close enough to have almost reached it. Someone, somewhere, had waited for each of these people to come home, the same way his own mother back on the Southlands manor waited for letters from Gregory that never came often enough. None of that waiting was ever going to be answered now, and no amount of gold this contract paid out was going to change that particular fact for anyone.
"They never even saw it coming," Gregory said quietly, standing at his shoulder, all the earlier hunger for adventure gone out of his voice for the first time since they'd left Oldtown.
"That's usually how the worst ones go," Andrea said, without looking up from the corpse. "The ones you see coming, you at least get a chance to be brave about."
"What does this mean?" Gregory asked, quiet, his hand drifting to his sword hilt without seeming to notice he'd done it.
"It means someone beat us here," Andrea said, circling the corpse slowly, studying the wound pattern along its throat with a professional's eye. "Whoever did this took the magic core and the second eye, and left the first eye and the body behind unbothered. That's strange. Both of those are worth a fortune on their own."
"Maybe they didn't have time to finish the job," Leo offered, already crouched over a pile of dark, chitinous debris in the next chamber, poking at it with the end of a stick rather than his hand. "There are bodies through here. Orcs. Soldiers, by the gear. Recently dead."
"Orc soldiers?" Gregory's voice went sharp. "This far east, that's not scouting. The Orcs wouldn't dare send soldiers this deep unless they meant to fight somebody."
"If it's an act of war," Andrea said, "the first settlement they'd have reached from here is Hollowvale. We should assume the worst and go look."
Leo's stick stopped moving.
"There's no need to rush," he said, too quickly, too brightly, the anxious cheer of a man trying to steer a conversation somewhere else entirely. "It's nearly dark. We've had a hard few days on the road already. I think we should build a proper camp here and continue in the morning, once everyone's rested."
"There's nothing wrong with a supply run either way," Gregory said, missing the undertone entirely, already thinking practically. "We're low on rations regardless of whether it's urgent."
"I think we should vote," Remus said, watching Leo's face rather than the argument itself, and something about the particular, brittle way Leo held his own expression told him this wasn't going to be a vote about rations at all.
"Please, Master Remus," Leo said, and his voice cracked slightly on the second word, the anxious cheer collapsing all at once into something rawer underneath it. "I'm asking you plainly. We cannot go to Hollowvale tonight."
"Explain," Remus said, gently, because he already half-suspected the answer and didn't want to make the man say it in front of an audience if there was a kinder way to get there.
"I'm from Hollowvale," Leo said, the words coming faster now that the dam had finally gone. "Everyone there was so proud of me, the boy with the rare double class, the one who was going to make Lorekeeper and bring honor back to a town that's never had much of anything else to be proud of. I failed. I've been failing for years, drunk half the time, sleeping in alleys, and I told myself I'd sooner die than let them see what I actually became before I could walk back in wearing the title I promised them. I'm not ready. Please."
Nobody spoke for a long moment. The wind moved through the ruined hall and stirred the vines against old stone, and somewhere in the dark the Stone Guardian's shoulder-joints creaked faintly as it shifted its weight, patient, waiting for a threat that hadn't arrived yet.
"You shouldn't let what other people think of you decide what you do," Andrea said finally, flat and matter-of-fact, no comfort in it, only conviction. "But if anyone there says one word to mock you for it, tell me, and I'll deal with them personally."
"I disagree," Gregory said, quieter than usual, some old certainty of his own rising up behind the words. "I think you should be brave enough to let them see you as you actually are right now. Courage is the difference between boys and men. Hiding from people who loved you isn't going to make the shame smaller. It just delays the day you have to feel it."
"I plan to go back," Leo said, miserable, "once I've earned the title properly. Not a day before that. I'm begging all of you."
Remus considered the two competing pulls in the room, Andrea's blunt indifference to other people's judgment and Gregory's plain, earned conviction about facing things honestly, and weighed them both against the much colder fact sitting underneath the whole argument: however Leo felt about his hometown, an army that had left petrified corpses in its wake was moving somewhere nearby, and feelings didn't change what that meant for the people who happened to live in its path.
"We'll camp here tonight," he said. "But we're moving on Hollowvale first thing, whether you're ready to face it or not. If there are people there who need help, your comfort isn't the thing that gets to decide the timeline. I'm sorry, Leo. I mean that."
Leo's shoulders fell, but he nodded, and didn't argue further.
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