"Connie--she's--" I pointed behind me, back to where Constitution grappled with the biggest and most hideous Pang I had seen so far, one to dwarf the others. Its pallid tongue coiled around her arm, billowing steam. A sickly colored liquid hissed against her slab plates. Without a helmet, the huge woman was uniquely graceful with gritted teeth beneath a buzz-cut that obscured a mohawk shape. She looked in control, almost, disappointed in an errant child rather than defiant.

  "Yes yes," said Strength, and bounded (a term I don't use lightly, but that's what he did) without effort across the gap, over to the walkway. He beheaded the alpha Pang before it realized he was there, which is not something I realized was an option with a blunt weapon. The body splashed down next to the other Pang corpse floating in the water, and Constitution uncoiled the tongue from her arm, the limp remnants of its head dangling and slack-jawed.

  Constitution sucked air in through her teeth. Infection-hued venom ate away at her flesh before our eyes, vaporizing dermal layers. I could hear the sizzle of it eating into her. She held a clawed hand out within the gauntlet.

  "Oh god," I said, helpfully.

  "It'll be," she croaked, then winced and squeezed her eyes tight. Her nostrils flared as her breathing became rapid and noisy. Her face was a mask of excruciation.

  "No it won't," I said, anticipating her next words. "Connie, you're hurt."

  "It will be okay," she said, the words just barely squeaking through her throat. "In a few minutes."

  "This is ridiculous," I said. "Don't you have a healing potion or something?"

  "A what?"

  I threw my hands up in the air. "Listen, I get it. You're the caretaker. Constitution, the one who they have to get through to get to us, right?" She watched me. "But you can't take all the damage."

  "Why not?" I could smell the creature's toxic ejecta destroying her body right in front of us. Strength watched me, utterly impassively.

  "You're a team. Two parts of the same... thing." I was trying to explain something I didn't even remotely understand, and yet it felt true. "how can you be the one to take all the punishment?"

  "Well normally," boomed Strength's voice, inadvertently echoing through the chamber, "you would heal her."

  "I--what? Me? I don't know any... do I know any healing spells?"

  Strength shrugged and bent his knees ever so slightly, leaping up the walkway steps, something else having caught his attention.

  Constitution watched me with a furrowed brow. Why did I get the sense she was mad at me for understanding something?

  Chains hung at an angle from the dark ceiling, big industrial-strength loops of iron dangling or pulled taut against the top of some kind of oblong cargo container, the size and shape of a semi truck trailer. It swayed above the water with the delayed motion of something very heavy. Did I hear it slosh?

  "Listen, hon," said Constitution, her voice returning, barely. "You'll figure it out one day, on your own time. Until then, we've got work to do."

  "You can't just do that," I said. I walked over to her, standing in a cloud of atomized iron and skin and blood. Red skin hissed beneath reddened iron. She didn't want to touch it, didn't want to move. Her wound was so bad I could taste it in the air.

  I closed my eyes, reopened them, controlled my breathing. An internal glance, as it were, at the spark gnawing away at the thought of the Captain was spinning and sparking, an alarm clock trying to go off. I turned away from it, and listed. Water, chains, cargo....

  The room came to life with golden light. "Oh," said Strength in the condescending way that only the ridiculously strong can, "look at you. That is great."

  The lantern hung and the staff hovered. I stood and Constitution waited.

  "So like... what do I do? Is there a chant or something? Or do I just say the spell name? Or what?"

  She executed a single-shoulder shrug, a slight scraping of one pauldron over supporting plates. "You're the expert. But, really, hon. Don't push yourself. Like you said, it's your first day on the job."

  She was letting me off easy. My face burned. It was a certain kind of condescension from a friend, or at least an ally, that I couldn't stand to be a part of. She wasn't expecting anything of me. Lady, I made you. Or, not exactly, but I made the guy who you are part of, or represent part of, or...

  The point was, yes, it may be my first day doing this work that I had never actually agreed to do, but I wasn't an intern or something like that. I was me. I was one of them. I was Wisdom. The wise one. Not the strongest, not the most resilient--not by a long shot--but certainly the wisest. Or at least, I was supposed to be.

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  What classes healed with wisdom? Clerics and druids, right? To be honest, I was not a wealth of information on this stuff. I had limited space in my brain for details. Not like Teo. Teo could remember mechanics. he internalized sets of rules, was able to generally adapt them for interesting classes and scenarios, and looked them up anyway just to be accurate. He had a severe case of DM brain and the rules were the lore were the story. Not me. The second I play a few minutes of a new character in World of Warcraft and all my retained D&D knowledge gets punted out of the nearest ear. Even Dane and Suresh and Kris had their face in their hands, despairing over me trying to remember key names from the properties I enjoyed, like "Arthas" or "Severian" or "Guts."

  Constitution had healed me before, but she didn't really make the pain and injury go away--she'd taken it on herself. Not good enough.

  I opened my palm, and opened my mind, and opened everything I could think to open. I listened for... something?

  I raised my hand a couple inches away from Constitution's ravaged skin. She did not flinch. I'm sorry to say that this form was based on nothing, just the pure Hollywood vibe of what it seemed like a healer ought to do.

  I channeled. Nothing came. I ordered myself to be a conduit for whatever healing energies swirled around out there, in the, y'know, the everything. Nothing conduited.

  "Huh," I said, and looked at my hand like a malfunctioning device. "Well."

  "It's okay, hon," said Constitution, her face blanched with pain, her arm shaking.

  "I'm so... I'm sorry." I said.

  She shook her head. "I'll be better soon," she said, grunting against the unmitigated agony.

  "The problem," cracked an authoritative voice, sharp and orderly, "is that you're going about it all wrong." A big man, calm and with an air of command, strolled across the adjoining catwalk. His wet boots were more polished than Torm's, and over his white shirt was a dark blue coat lined with brass buttons. He carried a hat in his hands, clasped behind the small of his back.

  "Who's there?" Constitution called out, her voice quavering. My lantern burned brighter, whether from some subconscious command or desire from me, I did not know.

  The shadows drew back from his face last. A half-second before it did so, fully, that delegated spark deep in my mind completed its work, snapping through a final membrane of secrets. A small compartment in my mind, whether physical or symbolic, flooded with light.

  "It's the captain," I said. Small sparks floated down around me. No--on closer inspection, rather they were petals of insubstantial gold. They fell around me for a moment, and were gone.

  The captain stepped into the light, my light, with a smile. "Indeed, Aspects." His hair was the short, stiff bristles of a career naval officer, graying but vital. He did not seem to have a mohawk per se, but his clipped hairstyle was leveled longer in a streak down the center, suggesting one. An orderly lightning bolt tattoo crossed over one, the eye, from forehead to hard cheekbone. His skin was weathered from years of standing on, I had to imagine, the topdeck of ships and observing. There was no other badge of his office other than his hat, at least, not one I could see.

  He was a big man, the kind of build that you either feel compelled to obey or flee. His posture was disciplined, his chin high, his steps even.

  "The problem," he repeated, "is that you have to just let it happen. True wisdom," he said, his toothbrush eyebrows narrowing toward me with a piercing look, "comes from without. How can you see it with all that light?" He brought up his wide captain's hat to shade his light from my admittedly harsh lantern.

  "Uh, sorry," I said, bumbling openly. I twisted the lantern around looking for a means of adjusting its intensity. "There's probably a knob, or like--"

  "Why you are dry?" said Strength from above.

  The captain's toothbrush eyebrows rose. "Is that the lord of all Strength I hear?" Okay, point taken, it was still too bright. There was no knob on the lantern. I just lowered it, but I did not feel safe making it disappear. (And also, I didn't really know how. So far it had only happened to me, or else I had forgotten it and it dissipated.)

  The captain clanked closer. There was something in his facial features, something under the hair and eyebrows and short beard, some kinship with Strength. It was an inkling, and I couldn't be certain.

  Strength was still fussing with the great metal latches holding the hanging cargo closed tight.

  "Why you are dry?" he repeated. "At bottom of boat. During sinking ship?"

  "You've heard that the captain goes down with the ship, yes?"

  "Open this," said Strength. "You have key?"

  "With all respect and deference to my lord of Strength," he said, bowing deeply, "it will not be so."

  Strength stood up stiffly. Constitution waved him back with her good hand, shaking her head.

  "What is this?" I asked, low on patience myself. "What's in there?"

  The captain turned to me, a tight-lipped grin on his face. He closed his eyes. Something harried him like flies, dark and purple-hued, a swarm of little shadows--but no, not flies. They each were floating downward, gradually, back and forth as they twisted and writhed. He was being showered in dark petals, coming from nowhere, some sticking to his wide shoulders on their way toward the ground they never met. He opened his eyes and a darkness shone from them, a deep umbral hue beaming like the reverse of light. Not shadow, not like the absence of light, but an aggressively shining depth that darkened anything it was cast across.

  "I see it now," he said. "I see his purpose." One whip-cracked syllable of laughter erupted from him, even that seeming to be an indulgence. If I had expected a villainous cackle, I was disappointed by his naval discipline.

  "Is Hit Point, yes?" said Strength. "I already know, but you should still say it." His cudgels were in hand.

  "A hit point?" I asked. "What, like, the actual... thing?"

  The captain smirked, one-sided. "This is your Wisdom?"

  "Oh my god, give me a break," I said. "It's my first-" Two broad, slightly curved blades snapped into his the captain's hands. I hadn't even seen him put his hat on, and he was running toward me.

  "Wiz!" shouted Constitution. In what I assumed would be my final thought before being slain in the depths of a sinking ship, I thought it was nice that she had a nickname for me. Or maybe she was just being practical.

  Strength sailed through the air like a boulder from a trebuchet, nearly breaking the catwalk. Water surged beneath him. I was confronted once again with his broad back as he swung at the captain.