What have I done? We’ve stopped and everyone is talking about Klyce and taking watches and sleeping. Sleeping??? I can’t sleep. Oh Dawnmother! What have I done? Suddenly there is a lot of blood around Klyce. I only curl up further into the corner. So much blood on the ground and on our hands.

They set watches, but I only pretend to sleep when it’s not my turn. I’m on second shift with Gerhardt, but there’s nothing to see. And then there is a sharp pain in my back and darkness. When I wake up again, they’re all talking about the Zoo and the Refinery. Wait what? Apparently assassins came after us. The next tree is in the zoo, and everyone thinks the foundry is the only safe place to sleep.

We carefully sneak through town, just like we did all those times in the bubble, and make it down below the mana refinery. The disembodied head is still trapped in the bubble, thank the Dawnmother. We try for watches and sleep again. I still can’t, I keep seeing rocks blasting through skulls every time I close my eyes.

When everyone else has rested, we head up and out to the zoo. There are marching footsteps on the streets, so we keep to the sewers. This can’t be good for Klyce, but there’s nothing else we can do. The footsteps get louder the nearer we get to the zoo. When we get there, we try pulling out one of the massive sewer blocks to see if we can tunnel under the zoo. It’s too packed and heavy for our measly magics, we’ll have to go above ground.

Remy sends his lizard up to look around. People are packed into the nearby parks like cattle. Three people come out of the zoo, crawling with worms. They infect a crowd and head back inside. They’re trying to infect the entire borrough before we kill all the trees! We have to go now!

We pop up out of the sewer and make a run for the zoo wall. There’s no gate near us, so we scramble and scrape and jump and hoist until we all make it over. Klyce and I get shot as we’re the last two over the wall. If Klyce survives this, it’s going to be a Dawnmother Miracle.

Once we’re all over, we notice we’ve landed in an enclosure for something. A panther, it turns out, as it pounces. We beat it down in the normal fashion, getting some scrapes and bites for our trouble and then Klyce breaks open the door into the keeper rooms. Nat says the tree is in the center, and as we carefully approach, we see it’s the elephant enclosure. The tree is behind four elephants and beneath three levitating wizards.

One of them shouts for us to come out while the other two summon a whole mess of flying snakes. I cast fly on Maribeth and Remy, allowing him to go zoom face-first into the pile of snakes. The others fireball to kill them, but Remy is unconscious by then. I sneak forward, intent on the wizards, while Klyce starts wrestling elephants to death. When a wizard heads for Remy’s floating body, I start throwing rocks again, but I can’t managed to hit him. Eventually, Klyce finishes off the elephants and we finish off two of the wizards and the tree with lots of fire.

The third one is the one Klyce kept sensing at other fights, and he departs, saying he’ll see us at the last tree. Maribeth gets Remy down and we wake him up. He’s got a bit of goo in his ear, but he seems alright. We head back to the panther’s enclosure to rest, and when we finally leave the zoo, there are hundreds of dead outside in the parks. I just close my eyes and grab Nat’s elbow, like she used to do with me.