Camp Willow was burning and so was Marshank, but at least there was music.

Tullgrew coughed, heaving the smoke out of her lungs, and she collapsed against the hard rubble of the fortress. Her head swam, and she felt ash and iron dripping out of her mouth—maybe it was from her mouth; it was in her nose too, but it was also down her arm and all over the place on everyone, so it really didn't matter where it was from—and there was burning twine cutting into her paw. Tullgrew looked down and realized a fist was curled around her sling. A scarlet line was running down through the creased fingers. Tullgrew noted they were hers.

Somebody was singing. Whoever it was, they had a good voice. Tullgrew closed her eyes, blinking the grime out of them as she slumped against the shattered piece of fortress wall, and she dryly noted that some of the screaming and thwacks of slings hitting bodies and bones breaking went along with the tune. Didn't sound like any song the Rambling Rosehip Players would want to play.

There was more hacking and coughing as a blackened, trembling figure collapsed on the rubble pile next to her. Tullgrew couldn't tell who it was before they lifted their head and she saw their brown eye in an exhausted, ash-stained socket and their perked tufted ears. Barkjon.

Barkjon stopped trembling after he'd finished hacking up tar. Tullgrew watched a lumpy figure stagger on on the distance. She thought it was Hillgorse at first as her vision blurred, but he was dead, so there went that. But she did miss his hoarse voice, Tullgrew decided, and his steadfast way of telling them to keep going in the morning and he smelled like poppy seeds when he wasn't covered in dust… Perhaps it was another hedgehog? She watched the figure stagger on, and the plump figure shattered, weaving, and she realized it was a hare filled with arrows. Oh. Bellaw.

"It's the end, isn't it?" Tullgrew said. Barkjon blinked his hooded eyelids. Only one socket held an eye.

"Yes," he said.

Tullgrew watched the flames flicker over the pools of blood, discarded weapons, and spilled water. There was still more screaming as parts of the wall came down and arrows thudded into the ground, and battle cries of vermin and woodlander alike mixed. She noticed a lump on the outskirt of the battle, thrown to the side with a bloodied neck and jaw, and she distantly made out the singed hood and blank eyes of the body. Keyla.

The voice kept singing, high and ragged and sweet over the sounds of the chaos, and Tullgrew could hear the screaming from the vermin forces as someone yelled something about the tyrant's head being taken, but things were getting more and more distant in her ears. Felldoh wouldn't have approved of this, Tullgrew thought, of just laying down while the end came—he and Martin would have been gnashing their teeth and still trying to stagger up—but right now, it was just her and Barkjon, and they could rest. Tullgrew made herself sit up. She chuckled in the back of her throat at the image of their faces and tasted a clot of blood.

"Well," Tullgrew said, taking Barkjon's paw but firmly clenching to her sling with the other, "then let's watch it burn together."

Barkjon gave no reply. His eyes were glazed, but Tullgrew felt his paw tighten around hers, and the flame spread over the spilt oil and blood as the singer of the song hit her most melodious note and screams of victory and loss echoed across the rock.

The two sat back and watched the world come undone.