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Beau skids down the hill, slamming her bo staff across the back of one of the troll's skulls. It goes down almost without a fight, and she normally would celebrate that but all she can think about it the sickening crunch of Caleb's ribs and the way he'd gone limp and disappeared from her field of view. The hillside is a sticky, slick mess of mud and troll blood, the grass trampled beneath their feet.
"Caleb, man, you alive?" she calls out, heart pounding in her throat. "C'mon, asshole, say somethin'!"
She hears a pained noise off to her left, like a dying animal or a beat to shit wizard. She almost stumbles over herself in her haste to investigate the sound, silently begging Caleb not to be dead. She can't bury any more friends, not so soon after Molly. She thinks it might break her. He's lying in the mud, red hair almost brown with how caked it's become, presumably from him rolling down the hill. She has a flashback to when they all met in Trostenwald, how dirty he'd been. How he'd worn it like a disguise. He doesn't do that anymore, at least not any more than the rest of them do. He's on his side, curled in on himself and wheezing quietly.
"Hey," she says, catching his arm when he lashes out wildly, eye glassy. "Hey, man, it's me. It's Beau."
He blinks, still breathing fast and pained, but his eyes are no longer fogged over. "Beauregard," he wheezes. There's a little bit of blood in his beard.
"Yeah," she says, "Yeah. Don't move. I'm gonna get you to Jester. You'll be okay."