The Den That Held Virgil

The smaller entrance did not make the cave safer.

It only made the danger quieter at first.

Maine solved the darkness problem in the most practical and least dignified way available: he cast Light on Victor's wooden stump. With Victor's arm turned into a lantern, the party ducked into the den, trying to see enough to survive without announcing themselves to everything inside.

Nick looked in first and saw mushrooms along the cave wall, snow near the entrance, and a polar bear awake enough to be suspicious. It had heard Jonah's rock. It had not yet understood the party.

Ash entered next and immediately lost that advantage.

Snow crunched underfoot. The bear turned toward him. Ash raised his hands and tried to keep the moment calm, but the cave answered with a roar. He ran deeper, trying to draw attention away from the entrance and give the others room to move.

The plan became less a plan and more a series of careful mistakes.

Victor stayed near the entrance, sword in one hand and glowing stump lighting the stone. Jonah stepped in with his back to the wall and found that his white beard earned him one strange moment of recognition from the bear before it realized he was not a friend. Maine slipped in behind the others and, because Maine remains Maine even in a rescue operation, stopped long enough to gather cave mushrooms for Cynthia or Virgil.

The bear rose and roared hard enough to try to frighten them.

It did not work.

Nick walked past with the energy of someone determined not to be involved in the bear's feelings. Ash kept moving through the cave, following the space until the den opened upward. There, on an upper ledge, he found what they had come for.

Virgil was alive.

Barely.

He lay unconscious and bloodied, pale enough to make the rescue feel suddenly urgent. His face looked beaten. He did not answer when Ash called to him. Ash tried healing hands, spending what he had to give, but there was no visible change.

The mission had stopped being theoretical.

Cynthia's husband was real, hurt, and right in front of them.

Then the cave answered again.

A deeper roar rolled in from the main entrance, larger than the polar bears and angrier than the weather outside. A Yeti charged into its own den and found strangers standing near its prey, its bears, and its treasure.

Nick met it with fire and scythes, striking first while everyone else tried to understand how quickly a rescue could become a fight for the whole cave.

Virgil had been found.

Now they had to live long enough to carry him out.