I’m writing this inside the hut. I don’t know if I’ll get to finish it.
We made a mistake. We said it out loud, actually. Nothing bad happens in the tiny hut. More than once, like saying it enough times would make it true. The hut is mine. I cast it. It’s a dome of force, opaque from outside, lit inside with fairy light from little jars, and I was so pleased with it. We glamped. That’s the only word. We were glamping in the Feywild and we thought that was fine.
We didn’t set a watch.
I woke up first. Good ears. A voice, outside, maybe thirty feet off.
Please help me. I’m lost. I don’t know where I am. I promise no one will hurt you.
I woke Daisy. Just for the company.
Then the same voice, same words, same tone, from the other side. Different direction. Another figure emerging from the dark. Then a third. A fourth. By the time we were all properly awake there were six of them, then more, stepping out of the treeline one at a time, all saying the same thing.
I cast Zone of Truth over the nearest ones.
They didn’t stop. Didn’t falter. No one will hurt you, no one will hurt you. Either they believed it or the spell simply didn’t touch them, and I haven’t decided which is worse.
Daisy flew up to get a better view and came back with news. No stars. Just black above us, pressing down, and thin white threads, spider-silk, running from the back of each figure up into the dark. Like every one of them was being held on a string.
Gloom tried talking to them. To his credit.
They walked faster.
Bawbaggins, and I say this with genuine admiration, decided his best contribution was to stay in his bed and shoot strings through the hut wall. The dome lets things pass outward. Nothing comes in. So he lay there, pulling the covers up between shots, and picked them off one by one. When you cut the string the body just drops. Limp. Like something leaving it. We had a system for a while.
Daisy found the ceiling. He flew up, reached the black above us, thirty feet, and then his hand hit something. Warm, he said. Fleshy. He shocked it.
The whole thing shuddered.
Then the sky made a hand and knocked him out of the air.
He went down outside the hut. I couldn’t see him, no darkvision, but I heard it, and Gloom saw it, and I pointed myself toward where I thought he’d fallen and breathed fire through the wall. Gloom aimed my head. We’re a good team when we need to be. We caught two of the figures near Daisy, dropped them.
We also caught the tip of Daisy’s tail, apparently. He didn’t mention it until later.
Gloom went out to get him. Ran through all of them, there were so many by then, crawling over the dome, hammering on the outside. He grabbed Daisy by the tail and dragged him back in. Gloom came back looking considerably worse than when he’d left. He didn’t complain.
Daisy is on the ground. He’s breathing. He told us, when he could speak, that he’s spent his whole life dreaming of dragonfire and the world ending, so a sky trying to eat him barely registered. I believe him. He doesn’t frighten easily.
The rhythm we had broke down after that. Too many of them. Eight or nine new ones every time we made a dent, emerging from the black at the treeline, strings already attached. We kept shooting. I kept breathing. Bawbaggins kept not leaving his bed, which was, genuinely, the correct call.
And then the sky opened.
Not the black pressing down. Something underneath it. Below the ceiling we’d been poking at. A mouth. Rows of teeth. Descending.
No one will hurt you.
The weight of it hit all of us at once. Even Gloom took some of it, though less than the rest of us. The figures outside kept chanting. The mouth came down around the dome.
The hut holds. My hut holds. I keep telling myself that. It’s impervious to crushing. I know the spell, I cast it, I know what it can and can’t do. And so we are, technically, safe inside the mouth of something that has swallowed us whole.
The men are still out there. Drumming on the outside of the dome. I can hear them.
No one will hurt you. No one will hurt you.
I keep thinking about the first voice. Before any of the others. It sounded lost. It sounded like something that genuinely needed help, and I heard it, and I woke Daisy, and I stayed inside the hut.
I wonder if that was the right choice.
I wonder if any of this was.
The hut holds. Daisy is breathing. Gloom is ready. Bawbaggins is, presumably, still in his bed.
If someone finds this before you do, Mum, please make sure it gets back to the Grove.
I tried.
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