The dungeon draws the broken. They batter their fragile bodies against it unto their ruin. Devereux knows this. He has seen it happen again and again. Yet it is not the rending claws nor the butchering maws that deal the most damage. The wounds of the body can be repaired: the cuts stitched, the bones set, the venom drawn. The body heals out of instinct, but once the mind is torn it stays that way. 

Devereux has watched those around him fall to the monsters of the ruins, the weald, the warrens and the cove, but far worse are the fiends that await them when the battles are done. He has seen fearsome warriors slain by the banes of the mind: addiction, melancholy, phobia, grief. They say music and laughter are balms for the troubled soul, but they do nothing for him anymore. He is becoming lost.

‘Let me tell you a story.’ Devereux takes a slug of throat-rotter and drops the flagon, which lands with a crack before rolling off the stage. ‘You got these four heroes, and they go into a dungeon to fight monsters. Why just four? I dunno.’ He shrugs. ‘That’s just the way we do it. Just four. Oh hey, here’s an idea, why don’t we all go in at the same time, like an army?’ he says in a high, childlike voice. ‘Nope. Four. Only four. We send four and they send four. That’s how we do it. But if we all go in at once we–Shut up! FOUR! Just four!’ 

He struts to the side of the stage and looks out into the darkness. ‘Man. Four heroes, against a whole dungeon full of nasties. No wonder we just get straight up murdered, huh?’ 

‘But what can we do? We’re heroes, right? WE ARE THE FLAME! Except when we’re on our backs in the blood and the guts. Not so much then, huh? Hey, you know I was part of the team that took down the Shrieker, right? Yeah. That was one hard fight. But I don't like to crow about it.'

Devereux places one hand in front of the eye holes in his mask to shield his vision from the bright lantern light. He peers out into his audience, but observes no reaction. 'Tough crowd, huh?'

The wind picks up and blows against Devereux’s cockscomb hat, setting the little bells ringing, but that’s the only sound, just a faint little tinkling, certainly no laughter in the space beyond the footlights, not even a polite tittering. Dead silence. He takes a little bow and looks around by his feet for more ale, is disappointed. 

‘So you don’t like jokes, then, huh? Well, man, that is going to be rough for all of us, let me tell you.’

He grins and rolls his eyes, shakes his little jester’s wand a little and then throws it behind him. He walks off to the wings, picks up a bottle of something and swigs it, then throws it off stage-right, where a beat or two later it can be heard smashing against something hard. ‘Pretty sure that was lamp oil,’ he says, grimacing and retching a little. ‘Anyhoo. So, jokes aren’t your thing, huh? How about I tell you a story then? A story about a girl and a guy and another girl and another guy. But this isn’t a love story, if that’s what you’re thinking. I mean, who has time for that? Sure as hell not me. No, this is a story about courage and bravery and cowardice and weakness. You know, regular stuff.’

‘It starts in the tavern, my story, as lots of stories do.’ He sits down on the edge of the stage and takes a deep breath. ‘There I was, at my table in the corner, enjoying some quiet time. Just me and my old friend alcohol. It was early morning, and alcohol and me had been there since the previous night. We were winding things down by then, and I was getting ready for a good day’s sleep, when I heard someone clear their throat. And there was a lot to clear in this throat. This was a big throat. I looked up and saw her, Goddard. She was not as good a friend as alcohol, but she was handier in a fight. Covered in woad tattoos and wrapped in brown fur from some poor beast she’d slaughtered. Thighs like tree trunks, arms that could lift boulders like they were a bag of feathers.’

He smiles to himself, not that anyone sees. ‘Got a job for you, says this big hunk of meat.’ 

‘I replied that it was so nice to see her, of course, nice guy that I am, and it was then I saw the three of them standing behind her. Rookies. Little kids out to play. She told me they were fresh off the stagecoach and needed showing the ropes. Get them blooded. were her words. Yeah poetry, aint it?’

‘So I told her alcohol and I were a little busy and I suggested she take them out. I mean, Who better to polish the green off the rubes than the queen of the helions, right? But that was a no go. She just smiled a big smile full of filed-down teeth and told me to sober up and get out there. Then she left, and it was just me and the rookies.’ 

Devereux looks up at the sky, at the stars shining in the black, briefly wondering how many of them are in fact comets full of eldritch horrors hurtling in his direction.

‘So this grave robber says: You going to sing us a song, then? She was as pale as the corpses she manhandled and had a wicked smile. The younger me might have liked her, but I know better than to like people. You like people, then they go and die. That’s the rule. So anyhow, I took them out, just like Goddard wanted.’

‘The grave robber was called Audrey,’ Devereux says, and he pauses, briefly losing his focus. ‘With Audrey was an arbalest whose name I didn’t even bother to try to remember and a crusader in shiny, box-fresh armour whose name I never even knew. It was my job to lead these children into the mouth of madness, hold their hands as we danced a tango with death, and make sure they crawled out of whatever hole I dug for them with most of their blood still in circulation. Bruised and battered, yeah, but alive and a little less green, a little more hardened to the horror.’

He lifts his mask and scratches at the three-day stubble beneath, briefly fingering an old scar that runs along his jawline. 

‘So I led them up the path up from the hamlet to the ruins. Regular pied piper I was, taking the kids up the mountainside to oblivion. You don’t talk much for a leader, Audrey said, as we climbed towards an opening in the crumbling stone. I’m not your leader, I told her. I’m just a guy in a funny costume. He’s more the leader type. I gestured at the crusader, and I asked him his name.’

‘The warrior spoke, but his voice was so muffled by his helmet I couldn’t understand a word. Well then, Fnlffrrr, I said, and Audrey laughed. I kind of hated her for that. You’d best take that big blade of yours out of its little sleeve and get in this hole, I said to the crusader. Audrey went next, and then the arbalest. I took the rear. That’s really my natural position, don’t you know.’ 

He looks down, holds out his hands in front of him as if he has never seen them before. There is dried blood on his gloves. He has no idea whose.

‘They did pretty well, my little rookies,’ Devereux says, wistfully. ‘We marched through the gloom, and when the bone nobles and their warriors came rising from their tombs, we showed them what was what. Fnlffrrr really did act like a leader, taking blows from those skeletons and giving plenty back, and Audrey sliced and diced with the best of them. Even the arbalest loosed a few good shots, trembling though she was. We made good progress, picked up some loot, and I sang some stupid songs and told some stupid jokes, and I think we all felt strong, like real heroes, and that we were all, all of us, without a doubt, making it home. But life is just a matter of waiting for the next shitty thing to happen.’

Devereux gets to his feet and begins pacing up and down the stage, the memory causing an almost physical pain as he dredges it out of himself.

‘So it all went well, super-duper fine and dandy. Right up until we found the altar.’ His voice is low, too quiet for anyone even in the front row to hear. ‘Yeah, one of those altars.’ he says. ‘I told them not to touch it. I said it loud. They all heard. But the arbalest couldn’t take her eyes off the thing, and there was me, not taking my eyes off Audrey. And by the time the arbalest put her torch down towards the altar it was too late. I don’t know why she did it. She wasn’t the bold type, but something made her reach out and trigger that thing, some little fracture in her character, some little weakness. And that was it. From that moment, we were fucked.’

He stops and looks far, far into the distance, beyond the stage and beyond the lights of the hamlet, beyond the estate, the night, the world. He looks like this for a good few minutes, looks beyond the veil of the world. It is by no means certain he will ever move or talk again.

‘Everything went dark,’ he says, his voice breaking a little. ‘And I knew what was coming. The tentacles, the eyes, the yawning mouth and its razor teeth. Oh yeah. There were no jokes for me to tell then, no songs to sing. I’d seen this thing once before, and that was enough. It came lurching towards us out of the black, and we were just four little dead people standing in a row. But Fnlffrrr swung for it, and Audrey too. The fucking idiots. The arbalest just stood there, lower lip trembling like it was about to fall off. I told everyone to run. They didn’t listen. Fnlffrrr went down first, like the hero he was. I think I said something about the tentacles, but no-one heard. Did I say anything at all? Did I whisper it? Then Audrey went down, and it was just me and crossbow girl. She turned to me, eyes all wet with tears, like I could do something. I just ran.’

He sighs. ‘You know, I really did think she would follow.’

Devereux’s whole body slumps like his puppet master has let go of his strings. Behind his mask, his cheeks are wet and his eyes are closed.

‘Bet you were expecting a punch line after all that, right? Like it was all leading somewhere?’ He smiles bitterly, and waits a beat, then another, and then another. He shakes his head and grins beneath his mask. No punchline comes. There is nothing except the vast emptiness between Devereux and his audience, nothing but the dark, empty space beyond the stage lights, where nothing stirs, nothing talks, and certainly nothing laughs. 

‘Oh, so you want the funnies, huh?’ He shouts and picks up another bottle of lamp oil. ‘Here’s one for you. One of my old pa’s favourites in fact. The Heir goes to a doctor, and he says, my leper has no nose. The doc says, how does he smell? And the Heir says awful!

He grins beneath his mask again, not that anyone sees it, and then he hurls the lamp oil out into the dark. It smashes somewhere far away and bursts into flames, a little fiery star in the night. ‘Laugh, goddamn you!’ he says ‘Laugh!’

He picks up another bottle and then another, hurls the missiles out into the gods, creating more miniature blazes that flash in the void and then are gone. 

‘Laugh,’ he says. ‘LAUGH! I’m the jester. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you see me. LAUGH! LAUGH! LAUGH!’

He crushes the last of the bottles in his fist, the glass stabbing through the fabric of his thin gloves, and falls onto his knees on the stage. He watches his blood, drip drip drip, onto the wooden crates beneath him, and suddenly he feels what a cold night it is, how the chill steals beneath his clothes and bites hard into his bones.

‘That was quite the performance.’ 

Devereux looks up and sees Goddard. She is standing just behind the lanterns, her glaive slung on her back. She pauses there for a moment before she steps up, the wooden slats creaking beneath her weight. ‘Come on,’ she says, and she kneels down beside Devereux, puts her arms around him. For a moment, Devereux thinks she is trying to get him to stand up, but then her right arm sweeps his legs and the helion just picks from the ground like a lost child. He doesn’t object. He lets it happen. He needs someone to carry his weight for a while.

‘You cut yourself,’ Goddard says, matter of factly. ‘Let’s get you to Junia.’ 

Goddard steps off the stage, such as it is, and moves beyond the guttering candles below it. She walks through the darkness. Devereux lets his head fall against her chest, and he closes his eyes. They pass by row after row of crude graves, some stones with rough engravings, some branches tied into crosses and driven into the earth, some helmets in the dirt, some blades buried in the ground with their owners. He thinks of the names of some of them: Woodville, Corbet, Montfort, Audrey. The ones he knew well, the ones he hardly knew at all. The ones he loved. There are so many of them now, and there will only be more as the campaign wears on. They pass beyond the lich gate of the graveyard and onto the path that leads back to the hamlet. In the dark forest, something unnatural howls, but as his friend carries him back to the light, Devereux begins to feel something that has eluded him for a long time. He laughs a little, the sound muffled by the helion’s furs, and he tries once again to think of a joke.