06/29/2026: Impossible to Tell

Sound travels strangely in the fissure between Malbolge and Maladomini — every clash of steel, every furious roar, bounces off stone until it’s impossible to tell where the battle actually is. Kiki, Vali, and Thunk are hurrying back from their errand to retrieve the truck, now shrunk down and cradled against Kiki’s paw. The distant echoes of combat put new urgency in their steps.

Sound, being sound, travels in all directions. Someone else trapped in this narrow purgatory hears it too. Curious, he comes to investigate. Cautiously.

Gearloose descends the shack’s ruined stairs one careful step at a time, boots finding each board before he trusts it with his weight. Above him, the cockatrices roost, shifting and muttering in whatever passes for sleep in a creature that turns flesh to stone. He leaves the Valkyrie behind in the dark — his own mech suit, sleek and swift and utterly wrong for stealth. This is not a fight for something that clanks.

What he finds below stops him cold. Three figures, caught in various stages of ruin. Two have already gone to stone completely, expressions frozen somewhere between surprise and fury, forever. The third is still flesh, still fighting, buried under a wheeling storm of grey wings and beaks. A barbarian, from the look of him, swinging his battle axe in wide furious arcs and bellowing at the sky like he means to out-shout the creatures attacking him.

Clear of the roost at last, Gearloose lifts both hands. Three darts of shimmering force streak out one after another — three Magic Missiles — each finding its mark mid-wingbeat, each trailing fire as it strikes home. Three cockatrices shriek and scatter.

Below, Borark fumbles for the Drunkard’s Cudgel, thinking to set the sodden club ablaze with his tinderbox and turn it into torch and weapon both. But through the red haze of combat, one thought manages to surface: the Cudgel will burn too. He shoves it back into his belt with a curse and draws out the stone raven instead — the one he’s carried since Malbolge, for reasons he couldn’t have named at the time. He waves it overhead, awkward, half-panicked, in what he hopes passes for a bird’s greeting.

It works. Several of the cockatrices peel off, wheeling back toward the cabin, deceived into believing one of their own has called them home.

Gearloose breaks into a run toward the barbarian, still pinned by the last of the flock. Borark snatches a cockatrice clean out of the air by its legs and swings it like a club into its companion — both birds reeling now, dazed, wings beating out of rhythm. He runs them through, one after the other, on the end of his javelin, and hurls the bodies out over the cliff’s edge into the dark below.

“Little help?” Borark grunts, looking down at legs gone the grey of old riverstone.

Gearloose skids to a stop beside him, staring at the effects of the petrification. “That’s — that’s not good.”

“No,” Borark agrees. “It is not.”

⚔

Then the truck arrives. Finally.

Kiki, Vali, and Thunk round the bend at last, the truck shrunk small enough to fit in the crook of Kiki’s arm. One glance at the wreckage on the bridge — stone bodies, scattered feathers, a barbarian rooted in place — tells her everything she needs to know. She hefts it and lobs it forward, clearing the rickety bridge entirely. It lands beyond, hitting the ground in a crack of dispersing magic as the truck shakes off the three Shrinking spells at once, snapping back toward its true size.

Thunk swings onto the ladder and climbs down fast, murmuring the words to Minor Restoration twice, back to back — enough to undo the damage clawed into petrified Reklaw and petrified Arman. He turns to Borark last, already knowing what he’ll find. The barbarian’s legs, stone to the knee, stay stone. Thunk shakes his head, empty-handed. No more arcane energy left to spare. For now.

And so Borark is stuck on the ledge, half a statue, with only the unfamiliar gnome for company.

Above, on the far side of the gully, the truck finishes unfolding itself back to full size with a shriek of expanding metal. Reklaw doesn’t wait for an invitation — he hauls himself up the ladder and drops behind the ion cannon in one motion. He fires. The front of the wooden cabin simply stops existing, vaporized in a wash of searing light.

“My mech suit!” Gearloose wails, whirling back toward the shack he abandoned on the stairs, the Valkyrie still sitting exactly where he left it — presumably now somewhere in the blast radius.

“I’m sure it’ll be alright,” Borark says, entirely unbothered, still half stone. “You’ll see.”

But the barbarian and the artificer both squint into the destruction, waiting for the smoke to clear before they can be sure.