[game-notes version here]

XX.

Duskmarch 24, Goldday, Year 731.

When you get to the cliff’s edge, little mouse: Don’t jump.

The words of the blind seer Wink had been echoing in Alric’s mind since he’d approached the Starless Rift. Surely this moment is what she’d foretold. Did lowering himself precariously on a rope through the rain into the chasm constitute “jumping?”

Then her other words flooded in: Run or fight, but don’t jump into the darkness!  Run or fight? There was nothing to run from or fight on that barren ledge. So perhaps she had prophesied a different moment. Or perhaps she possessed no gift at all, and was simply mad, like Hadren Kelthorn. Alric ground his teeth and shook his head, frustrated by all he didn’t yet know. If he survived this trek, he vowed to spend his time better understanding the forces shaping the Redwood Marches. His lack of knowledge infuriated him. For the hundredth time, he wondered whether Hadren had discovered a second book of Orthuun, a hollow yearning within his seemingly empty chest.

Frustrated, he turned his attention to the present, terrifying moment. As soon as he’d built the courage to step out and into the crevice, it was as if his senses dulled. The rain became a distant patter on his hood, as if further away. The cold seeping into him ebbed. The damp, earthen smell of the Rift faded. It was quiet, but not a peaceful quiet. Instead, it felt as if someone had led him into a dark room, head covered and bound by gauze. Tension pulsed through Alric as he waited for some unseen horror to burst out of the shadows.

After a long, breathless journey, however, his feet touched the rocky floor and his shaking arms released the rope. Maelen was there, nodding grimly at him with torch held aloft. Vessa, meanwhile, moved to help him disentangle from the harness below his thighs and buttocks. He pulled his staff from where he’d secured it across his back. His lamed leg pricked with familiar pain, and he shifted his weight to the staff.

“Thank you,” he panted, looking around wide-eyed. His attention snapped to what looked like a pile of gore near Maelen’s feet. “What– what is that?!”

“Keep your voice down,” Vessa urged, then spat, “It seems our reckless leader may have been wrong about this place not having guardians.”

With horrified wonder, Alric approached the mess upon the cavern floor. It looked like someone had skinned an animal, taken out its bones, scattered the muscles and organs into a pile, and then charred it in several places. The smell—sharp and rotten—assaulted his nose and he covered his face with a wet sleeve.

“That’s enough from you,” Maelen hissed at Vessa. “It was no trouble.”

“Are you hurt?” he asked. When she shook her head once, Alric whispered, “What was it?”

She let out a sharp breath and shook her head once again, the gray lock of hair bobbing across her brow. “Don’t know. Smaller than a human, with no skin and full of sharp teeth. No eyes,” she looked at him meaningfully.

“More of Orthuun’s corruption,” Alric breathed weakly.

“Seems so,” Maelen confirmed in a low whisper. “Let’s hope it was the only thing down here.” From several paces away, Vessa scoffed and Maelen shot her a dark look. “Anyway, when I burned it, the thing just sort of… unraveled into that,” she jerked a chin at the grotesque pile.

“Fire then,” Alric nodded, rubbing his chin with his free hand. “Same as Sarin. Orthuun’s minions don’t like objects that shed light.”

Maelen looked at him for a moment, then grunted. He guessed she’d thought it was the heat of the flame that had killed whatever she’d fought.

While she processed this new insight, his own mind whirled. The zombies in Thornmere Hold had been ageless human guardians twisted by the presence of, she guessed, The Tome of Unlit Paths, and the chitinous monster likely had been a common spider trapped in the vault with it. What had this skinless thing been before its corruption? And what had corrupted it? Could there be another book down here, or was it something else? Perhaps some of the answers he craved existed somewhere in these deep caverns.

The thought caused him to look around for the first time and truly scan their surroundings. They stood upon a rocky dais littered with debris that he guessed had fallen when the Starless Rift opened from Hadren’s ritual. Maelen’s torch made dancing light that showed the dais dropped off to a larger cavern, but it was impossible to tell how large. He glanced up at the gray strip of clouded sky far above them and swallowed.

“Lad, light a torch,” Maelen whispered. “I’ll keep mine too. Vess, have your bow ready.”

Alric unshouldered his pack to gain access to his tinderbox and a dry torch. His numb fingers took far too long, but eventually the resin-soaked cloth wrapping ignited with a faint whoosh. A smell like smoke and tallow banished some of the stink of the thing Maelen had killed. He asked Vessa to hold the torch while he carefully repacked his travel gear, stood, and settled the pack upon his back. She handed it back without a word and smoothly pulled an arrow from her quiver.

“Let’s go,” Maelen urged.

With help from his companions, Alric half-stepped, half-slid off the edge of the dais and to the rocky cavern floor. He held his torch aloft, turning to examine the space. Ten paces above them, the crevice widened, creating a rough dome of black rock overhead. He felt as if he should be able to hear the storm overhead, feel the rain on his face when he stood beneath the gray line of sky above. Instead, the Starless Rift was almost silent beyond a steady sigh, like a breeze through alleyways in Oakton. Alric stayed close to Maelen as she stepped carefully around the perimeter, torch and mace in hand. Vessa crept behind them, bow ready and closer than usual to stay within the halo of light.

They discovered a cavern roughly the shape of a three-quarters moon, perhaps thirty strides from the wall they’d descended in each direction. Unlike Thornmere Hold, the space didn’t seem crafted; it was a natural cave system, quiet and cool, with shards of rock strewn about its hard floor. Alric’s ears strained, but he could hear nothing beyond that steady sigh and their own footfalls. Well, his and Maelen’s… he found himself glancing back at Vessa to make sure she still followed them and was somewhat startled each time that she was there, quiet as a thief.

“Do you hear anything?” he whispered at Maelen’s shoulder.

“Just the damned mace,” she growled.

He blinked. “What does it sound like?” he asked, unable to hear anything from the black metal weapon.

“Like it wants to fight,” she said grimly. He was about to ask what that could possibly sound like when she added, “Three passages. One’s as good as another,” and pushed past him with a hurried step. Grateful for the leadership, he followed without question. Dimly, he worried once again that his heart was not hammering with fear in his chest. It had been three days since the emptiness had stilled his heartbeat, and still no change or sign that it would return.

A short passageway through the stone led them to another cavern. Irregularly shaped columns of stone in its central chamber made the space feel at first labyrinthine. They moved around the right side of the first column slowly until it opened into a space larger than Oakton’s town hall. It was beautiful, in its way, the rock untouched and natural—a gray, earthen cathedral.

Just then, something squeaked shrilly, the voice echoing. Maelen grunted in surprise and took a step back, as if a spider had fallen on her. Before he could react, a small furred creature smaller than his palm scampered with tiny feet past him and back the way they’d come.

“Tatter!” Maelen swore quietly. “By the Rootmother, she just panicked. Vess, do you see her?”

“She left,” Vessa whispered back from the edge of light. “Ran right past me.”

“Never seen her do that,” Maelen grumbled, and looked with grim concern at her weapon. “Dammit. I’ll find her later. Mace is practically screaming, too. Everyone stay–”

She cut off as something shuffled unseen just beyond the column of stone ahead of them. Alric froze, holding his torch up towards the direction of the noise.

A snuffling sound, like someone with a congested illness, echoed softly in the chamber, followed by a sound like slapping pieces of wood together. Alric’s senses quested into the flickering torchlight, looking for some sign of movement. He heard a sliding, shuffling step much like his own, then more of that awful snuffling and clacking. He tensed, fingers going white on his staff and torch.

The creature that stepped into the dancing light was worse than any horror his nightmares could manifest. It moved like something in wracking pain, hands curled protectively inwards and back hunched, each step reluctant. Roughly the size and shape of Maelen, humanoid and broad-shouldered, yet composed of a mass of skinless muscle and organs, a riot of red, pink, and gray tissue with seemingly no organization other than legs, torso, arms, and head. The head, though, had no eyes, and only two long slits in the tissue for a nose. Its mouth was as wide as its head, hinged like a snake’s, with irregular rows of sharp teeth. Then Alric spied a second mouth, on one side of where its neck met shoulder. Both mouths clacked open and shut like doors left open in a windstorm, clack-clack, clack-clack. The holes in its head flared, making that mucus-laden snuffling. The… wrongness of the creature filled him, and in that moment he knew that he was witnessing something from another world, an aberration never meant for the Redwood Marches. This was not a creature twisted by Orthuun’s hand. It was a demon itself, spawned from forces he could never comprehend.

“Mother of Roots…” Vessa gasped behind him.

The thing snuffled and clacked again, then crouched as if a spasm of pain had overtaken it. Alric felt no pity, however, only revulsion. He took a halting step backwards, bile rising in his throat.

Then, like a rabid dog, the thing charged at them and naked terror threatened to paralyze his limbs.

When faced with the skratt horde, Alric felt as if he fought a dizzying, endless mass of claws and teeth. Yet those scores of creatures were nothing like the thing that launched itself at Maelen. He thought perhaps the horrifying creature was trying to scream, but instead a hiccupping, whistling sound filled the cavern, along with the clack-clack of its twin mouths. Maelen shouted a charge and stepped forward to meet it, and her first blow cracked the side of its head with a wet thunk so forcefully that it looked as if she’d broken its neck.

The aberration hit the cavern floor and, without a pause, launched itself again at Maelen. She had been ready for the first leap but not the second, and it was upon her. It moved at frenzied speeds, grabbing and flailing its limbs to position its body for bite after bite with those wide, sharpened maws. In a blink, it was impossible to tell where the warrior and creature began and ended, they were in such a tangle. Maelen’s blood flew in a wide spray, which only seemed to fuel the monstrosity’s madness. Again and again it ripped and tore at her, almost too fast to comprehend.

“I—I can’t get a clean shot!” Vessa’s voice pleaded from the shadows.

Setting his mouth in a grim line, Alric rushed towards the writhing, bloody mass that was Maelen and the creature. It was a creature of darkness, a minion of the Void… light should hurt it. He swung his torch back and forth in a warding gesture. But the speed and violence of its rage was such that he hesitated to get close. The flames flickered past, illuminating the fleshy, shining mass of the creature, but his torch never touched it. Maelen grunted and whimpered as it continued to tear into her.

All at once, the creature froze, its eyeless head whipping towards Alric. Maelen moaned in pain within the silence. Bloodstained teeth clacked.

He stepped backwards, holding his torch up like a ward.

“Don’t!” he yelled.

It leapt upon him. He felt a sharp series of ripping pains, smelled the rotting meat of the thing, heard its snuffling, panting whistle, and then…

Nothing.

Next: Carnage and Keys [with game notes]

[prose-only version here]

XX.

Duskmarch 24, Goldday, Year 731.

When you get to the cliff’s edge, little mouse: Don’t jump.

The words of the blind seer Wink had been echoing in Alric’s mind since he’d approached the Starless Rift. Surely this moment is what she’d foretold. Did lowering himself precariously on a rope through the rain into the chasm constitute “jumping?”

Then her other words flooded in: Run or fight, but don’t jump into the darkness!  Run or fight? There was nothing to run from or fight on that barren ledge. So perhaps she had prophesied a different moment. Or perhaps she possessed no gift at all, and was simply mad, like Hadren Kelthorn. Alric ground his teeth and shook his head, frustrated by all he didn’t yet know. If he survived this trek, he vowed to spend his time better understanding the forces shaping the Redwood Marches. His lack of knowledge infuriated him. For the hundredth time, he wondered whether Hadren had discovered a second book of Orthuun, a hollow yearning within his seemingly empty chest.

Frustrated, he turned his attention to the present, terrifying moment. As soon as he’d built the courage to step out and into the crevice, it was as if his senses dulled. The rain became a distant patter on his hood, as if further away. The cold seeping into him ebbed. The damp, earthen smell of the Rift faded. It was quiet, but not a peaceful quiet. Instead, it felt as if someone had led him into a dark room, head covered and bound by gauze. Tension pulsed through Alric as he waited for some unseen horror to burst out of the shadows.

After a long, breathless journey, however, his feet touched the rocky floor and his shaking arms released the rope. Maelen was there, nodding grimly at him with torch held aloft. Vessa, meanwhile, moved to help him disentangle from the harness below his thighs and buttocks. He pulled his staff from where he’d secured it across his back. His lamed leg pricked with familiar pain, and he shifted his weight to the staff.

“Thank you,” he panted, looking around wide-eyed. His attention snapped to what looked like a pile of gore near Maelen’s feet. “What– what is that?!”

“Keep your voice down,” Vessa urged, then spat, “It seems our reckless leader may have been wrong about this place not having guardians.”

With horrified wonder, Alric approached the mess upon the cavern floor. It looked like someone had skinned an animal, taken out its bones, scattered the muscles and organs into a pile, and then charred it in several places. The smell—sharp and rotten—assaulted his nose and he covered his face with a wet sleeve.

“That’s enough from you,” Maelen hissed at Vessa. “It was no trouble.”

“Are you hurt?” he asked. When she shook her head once, Alric whispered, “What was it?”

She let out a sharp breath and shook her head once again, the gray lock of hair bobbing across her brow. “Don’t know. Smaller than a human, with no skin and full of sharp teeth. No eyes,” she looked at him meaningfully.

“More of Orthuun’s corruption,” Alric breathed weakly.

“Seems so,” Maelen confirmed in a low whisper. “Let’s hope it was the only thing down here.” From several paces away, Vessa scoffed and Maelen shot her a dark look. “Anyway, when I burned it, the thing just sort of… unraveled into that,” she jerked a chin at the grotesque pile.

“Fire then,” Alric nodded, rubbing his chin with his free hand. “Same as Sarin. Orthuun’s minions don’t like objects that shed light.”

Maelen looked at him for a moment, then grunted. He guessed she’d thought it was the heat of the flame that had killed whatever she’d fought.

While she processed this new insight, his own mind whirled. The zombies in Thornmere Hold had been ageless human guardians twisted by the presence of, she guessed, The Tome of Unlit Paths, and the chitinous monster likely had been a common spider trapped in the vault with it. What had this skinless thing been before its corruption? And what had corrupted it? Could there be another book down here, or was it something else? Perhaps some of the answers he craved existed somewhere in these deep caverns.

The thought caused him to look around for the first time and truly scan their surroundings. They stood upon a rocky dais littered with debris that he guessed had fallen when the Starless Rift opened from Hadren’s ritual. Maelen’s torch made dancing light that showed the dais dropped off to a larger cavern, but it was impossible to tell how large. He glanced up at the gray strip of clouded sky far above them and swallowed.

“Lad, light a torch,” Maelen whispered. “I’ll keep mine too. Vess, have your bow ready.”

Alric unshouldered his pack to gain access to his tinderbox and a dry torch. His numb fingers took far too long, but eventually the resin-soaked cloth wrapping ignited with a faint whoosh. A smell like smoke and tallow banished some of the stink of the thing Maelen had killed. He asked Vessa to hold the torch while he carefully repacked his travel gear, stood, and settled the pack upon his back. She handed it back without a word and smoothly pulled an arrow from her quiver.

“Let’s go,” Maelen urged.

With help from his companions, Alric half-stepped, half-slid off the edge of the dais and to the rocky cavern floor. He held his torch aloft, turning to examine the space. Ten paces above them, the crevice widened, creating a rough dome of black rock overhead. He felt as if he should be able to hear the storm overhead, feel the rain on his face when he stood beneath the gray line of sky above. Instead, the Starless Rift was almost silent beyond a steady sigh, like a breeze through alleyways in Oakton. Alric stayed close to Maelen as she stepped carefully around the perimeter, torch and mace in hand. Vessa crept behind them, bow ready and closer than usual to stay within the halo of light.

They discovered a cavern roughly the shape of a three-quarters moon, perhaps thirty strides from the wall they’d descended in each direction. Unlike Thornmere Hold, the space didn’t seem crafted; it was a natural cave system, quiet and cool, with shards of rock strewn about its hard floor. Alric’s ears strained, but he could hear nothing beyond that steady sigh and their own footfalls. Well, his and Maelen’s… he found himself glancing back at Vessa to make sure she still followed them and was somewhat startled each time that she was there, quiet as a thief.

“Do you hear anything?” he whispered at Maelen’s shoulder.

“Just the damned mace,” she growled.

He blinked. “What does it sound like?” he asked, unable to hear anything from the black metal weapon.

“Like it wants to fight,” she said grimly. He was about to ask what that could possibly sound like when she added, “Three passages. One’s as good as another,” and pushed past him with a hurried step. Grateful for the leadership, he followed without question. Dimly, he worried once again that his heart was not hammering with fear in his chest. It had been three days since the emptiness had stilled his heartbeat, and still no change or sign that it would return.

A short passageway through the stone led them to another cavern. Irregularly shaped columns of stone in its central chamber made the space feel at first labyrinthine. They moved around the right side of the first column slowly until it opened into a space larger than Oakton’s town hall. It was beautiful, in its way, the rock untouched and natural—a gray, earthen cathedral.

Just then, something squeaked shrilly, the voice echoing. Maelen grunted in surprise and took a step back, as if a spider had fallen on her. Before he could react, a small furred creature smaller than his palm scampered with tiny feet past him and back the way they’d come.

“Tatter!” Maelen swore quietly. “By the Rootmother, she just panicked. Vess, do you see her?”

“She left,” Vessa whispered back from the edge of light. “Ran right past me.”

“Never seen her do that,” Maelen grumbled, and looked with grim concern at her weapon. “Dammit. I’ll find her later. Mace is practically screaming, too. Everyone stay–”

She cut off as something shuffled unseen just beyond the column of stone ahead of them. Alric froze, holding his torch up towards the direction of the noise.

A snuffling sound, like someone with a congested illness, echoed softly in the chamber, followed by a sound like slapping pieces of wood together. Alric’s senses quested into the flickering torchlight, looking for some sign of movement. He heard a sliding, shuffling step much like his own, then more of that awful snuffling and clacking. He tensed, fingers going white on his staff and torch.

The creature that stepped into the dancing light was worse than any horror his nightmares could manifest. It moved like something in wracking pain, hands curled protectively inwards and back hunched, each step reluctant. Roughly the size and shape of Maelen, humanoid and broad-shouldered, yet composed of a mass of skinless muscle and organs, a riot of red, pink, and gray tissue with seemingly no organization other than legs, torso, arms, and head. The head, though, had no eyes, and only two long slits in the tissue for a nose. Its mouth was as wide as its head, hinged like a snake’s, with irregular rows of sharp teeth. Then Alric spied a second mouth, on one side of where its neck met shoulder. Both mouths clacked open and shut like doors left open in a windstorm, clack-clack, clack-clack. The holes in its head flared, making that mucus-laden snuffling. The… wrongness of the creature filled him, and in that moment he knew that he was witnessing something from another world, an aberration never meant for the Redwood Marches. This was not a creature twisted by Orthuun’s hand. It was a demon itself, spawned from forces he could never comprehend.

“Mother of Roots…” Vessa gasped behind him.

The thing snuffled and clacked again, then crouched as if a spasm of pain had overtaken it. Alric felt no pity, however, only revulsion. He took a halting step backwards, bile rising in his throat.

Then, like a rabid dog, the thing charged at them and naked terror threatened to paralyze his limbs.

When faced with the skratt horde, Alric felt as if he fought a dizzying, endless mass of claws and teeth. Yet those scores of creatures were nothing like the thing that launched itself at Maelen. He thought perhaps the horrifying creature was trying to scream, but instead a hiccupping, whistling sound filled the cavern, along with the clack-clack of its twin mouths. Maelen shouted a charge and stepped forward to meet it, and her first blow cracked the side of its head with a wet thunk so forcefully that it looked as if she’d broken its neck.

The aberration hit the cavern floor and, without a pause, launched itself again at Maelen. She had been ready for the first leap but not the second, and it was upon her. It moved at frenzied speeds, grabbing and flailing its limbs to position its body for bite after bite with those wide, sharpened maws. In a blink, it was impossible to tell where the warrior and creature began and ended, they were in such a tangle. Maelen’s blood flew in a wide spray, which only seemed to fuel the monstrosity’s madness. Again and again it ripped and tore at her, almost too fast to comprehend.

“I—I can’t get a clean shot!” Vessa’s voice pleaded from the shadows.

Setting his mouth in a grim line, Alric rushed towards the writhing, bloody mass that was Maelen and the creature. It was a creature of darkness, a minion of the Void… light should hurt it. He swung his torch back and forth in a warding gesture. But the speed and violence of its rage was such that he hesitated to get close. The flames flickered past, illuminating the fleshy, shining mass of the creature, but his torch never touched it. Maelen grunted and whimpered as it continued to tear into her.

All at once, the creature froze, its eyeless head whipping towards Alric. Maelen moaned in pain within the silence. Bloodstained teeth clacked.

He stepped backwards, holding his torch up like a ward.

“Don’t!” he yelled.

It leapt upon him. He felt a sharp series of ripping pains, smelled the rotting meat of the thing, heard its snuffling, panting whistle, and then…

Nothing.

Next: Carnage and Keys [with game notes]

[game-notes version here]

XIX.

Duskmarch 24, Goldday, Year 731.

Maelen rubbed at her jaw, scowling. The rain continued in steady sheets, but she hardly noticed it anymore. She was soaked from crown to toe, past the point where a person could get any wetter. Instead, her attention was focused on the muddy ground where, less than a bell ago, a madman had butchered and arrayed dozens of corpses into a wide, arcane circle.

Except now, the ground was empty. No madman. No corpses. Not even blood remained, though the ground still showed the churned activity of boots and combat, the indentation of the bodies clearly visible until the rain soon washed it all away.

She voiced her thoughts aloud. “How is this possible, lad? What happened to them?”

Alric looked up at her, the top half of his face shadowed by the hood of his cloak. Something had been eating at the boy since their encounter with those damned wisps of gray light in the forest. He’d been more withdrawn, brooding.

He lifted one shoulder in a weary shrug. “Hadren cast something,” Alric said quietly. “Or, tried to. I don’t think the shadowed creature that you and Vessa described was his intent, or that globe of darkness. It’s like I told you, Maelen: The magic isn’t safe. It’s inviting a demon into you, every time. The ritual he and his followers used to open the Starless Rift must have made the forces even wilder, less predictable. Hadren paid his price for that.”

“Did he disappear, like in the Heart & Dagger? Or is he dead?” she asked.

The lad leaned onto his walking staff, sighing with a great cloud of mist in the cold rain. “I don’t know. What am I missing? Dammit all, I wish I understood any of this!” he burst out.

She saw the fingers on his hands turn white as he gripped the staff. Maelen approached, the churned mud sucking at her boots, and stood before him. She pitched her voice lower. “And the damned thing’s got its claws in you now, doesn’t it?”

Alric started, and this close she could see his haunted eyes within the cloak. He nodded jerkily.

“What happened to Hadren,” he said hoarsely. “It’s like a warning, Maelen.” The lad seemed like he was going to say more and then stopped himself with a shake of his head.

“You can’t destroy it? Leave it out here in the rain? Burn it?”

He swallowed. “I… I’ve tried. It’s demon-made.”

“Forget it, then,” she said with a swift nod. “Push those dark thoughts away, lad. Let’s go talk to Vessa and see about this crack in the ground, eh?” She clapped him on the shoulder. He stumbled, and she strode with purpose to Vessa. Her back was to them a bowshot away, standing at the edge of this Starless Rift that Hadren had opened.

As she approached, it was as if the sound of the rain noticeably lessened. More than that, actually… It was as if something pressed against her senses, muting smell, numbing her skin, smudging her vision. The rain became distant, like she’d stepped half out of the world. It was an uncanny feeling and reminded her of the moments before she succumbed to blackness with Sarin the Night Captain’s hand atop her skull. Maelen shuddered at the memory, gritting her teeth.

She checked over her shoulder to make sure Alric had joined them, and then said, “Well, that bastard Hadren took the bag of coin with him to the afterlife, if there ever was a bag. There’s nothing left from those cultists, and the lad doesn’t know where they went. What have you spied, lass?”

Vessa looked at them, her concerned eyes lingering on Alric beneath her own hood. “Not much to see, Mae. Just darkness. No telling how deep it goes.”

She examined the crevice’s edge. The earth around the deep crack was gone, exposing a black stone that shone wetly in the rain. Beyond the stone, there was simply… nothing. A yawning empty gash in the world. She could see no stairs or obvious way to descend the sides.

“Did you understand what he said, Alric?” Vessa asked. “About Saelith the Vanished?”

Maelen grinned. Vessa wasn’t the sharpest mind, but damned if she didn’t hear everything and never missed a detail. Her ability to recall those bits after hearing them, too, never failed to amaze.

Alric paused before he answered, tilting his head to consider it. “There is frustratingly little information about demons in the Inkbinders Lodge, at least the parts I can access. But the Tome mentioned them,” his fingers drifted to the closed satchel at his waist. “Orthuun’s generals. There are ten of them, it says, and they spread the Blind Sovereign’s will across the land. This Saelith must be one of them. Hm. Give me a moment,” he said, considering.

Maelen tried to catch Vessa’s eye, but the girl kept her attention on Alric tensely, like she was willing his brain to make the connections. So, Maelen waited quietly in the rain, looking out and over the broad gap in the earth. She wiped water from her face several times, trying to be patient.

Eventually, after enough time that Maelen became aware of her numb, cold feet, he cleared his throat. Hadren’s zombie had made his voice huskier with its strangling of him. “I’ll need to do some research back home to be sure, but I think the Lodge must have done battle with these followers of Orthuun many years ago. Thornmere Hold wasn’t built as a prison. It was a vault, for the Tome and your mace.”

“What does the mace have to do with it?” she asked, though she couldn’t deny the steady thrum of the weapon, growing as they neared this place. It had practically sung in her hands when she’d fought Hadren and his zombie. She could still feel it on her hip and hear its humming like a heartbeat in her ears, as steady at the patter of rain.

“You saw Hadren’s reaction. I think it must have been a weapon specifically used to defeat Orthuun and his minions the last time he plagued the Redwood Marches. Perhaps… Hm. Perhaps they were the ones who buried this Saelith the Vanished here. Perhaps there are more vaults, spread throughout the region, and more tombs. If that’s true…” his voice trailed off.

“Go on,” she prodded him.

“Can you imagine the implications? The Lodge spreading both the instruments of Orthuun’s return and defeat in hidden vaults? It… it boggles the mind.” It was the most animated Maelen had seen the boy in days, though it didn’t last. As soon as his enthusiasm had crested, it disappeared. He slumped his shoulders. “But again… I’m just speculating.”

Maelen was about to say something, but then he added. “I only wish… The blind seer, Wink… she said there were five books of Orthuun. Hadren must have possessed one of them, and that information was enough to locate this place and perform his ritual, but not enough to awaken the demon’s general. But what’s in the Tome that he needed? I wish we’d had his body… With a second book…”

“You’d be twice as cursed, lad,” Maelen said firmly. Alric straightened at her words but nodded slowly.

“You’re right, of course.”

“What now?” Vessa asked. “Why not throw the damned thing into the Rift and end this?”

“What?!” Alric choked, stepping back as if she’d struck him. “No– no, that would be catastrophic. We can’t bring Orthuun’s tools closer together.”

“Back to Oakton, then,” Maelen said with a shrug. “Damned waste of—”

“No,” Alric snapped, louder than she would have expected. “No. Thornmere Hold… there’s more there I didn’t read. And the forbidden stacks in the Lodge… I need access.” He thumped his staff into the mud for emphasis. His hood turned to the Starless Rift, staring down into its inky depths for several heartbeats.

For a moment, no one said anything. Over the rain and humming of her mace, though, she thought the lad was mumbling something. She took a quiet step closer, straining to hear.

“Don’t jump…” she could have sworn he whispered. It sounded familiar. Was it something the blind seer had said?

“Alric,” Maelen said slowly. “Lad? You’re not thinking of going down there?”

“It’s only…” he said, looking up at them. “If the sect of the Inkbinders Lodge truly banished Orthuun before and created these hidden vaults, wouldn’t it stand to reason that there’s more than just the tomb down there? Like Thornmere Hold, maybe there’s an instrument for defeating Orthuun. The Lodge may have spread these artifacts throughout the land.”

“Go down there?” Vessa half laughed. “I don’t think so.”

“Wait, lass,” Maelen held up a hand. “You think there might be more weapons? Chests of coin like the last vault?”

Alric spread his hands, another puff of mist as he exhaled. “I don’t know, really. It’s all just guesswork.”

“Mae…” Vessa said warningly.

“We may not walk back empty handed, is all I’m saying,” she said, rubbing her chin in thought. “Imagine the coin without our debts, lass.”

“Into the tomb of a… a… demon gang leader, or whatever?!” she pleaded in exasperation.

“Oh, Saelith is entombed,” Alric said hastily. “Saelith the Vanished should be no threat.”

“There, see?” Maelen grinned and began unshouldering her pack.

“It’s whatever’s guarding the tomb that’s the threat,” he added simply.

“This place was sealed in the earth, lad,” Maelen scoffed. “There wouldn’t have been any reason to post guardians too.”

Alric and Vessa exchanged a dubious look, but she ignored them. Instead, she began pulling gear from her travel pack. When she’d heard the name Starless Rift, she’d guessed they might be doing some climbing and had used the last of her coins for supplies. With calloused hands, unpacked coils of rope, rough iron pitons, a small hammer, and a grapnel hook—all cheap tools, but sturdy. She checked the rope for frays. “Good enough,” she mumbled.

Without further comment, she found a stable rock lip of the crevice and began driving pitons into the unnaturally smooth black stone, each hammer strike ringing strangely hollow. She winced at the noise. If there were guardians down below, they surely wouldn’t be surprised by their arrival.

“You don’t think there are stairs?” Alric said weakly as she began looping the rope through the pitons and tying a series of firm knots.

“Vess, see any stairs?” she answered without looking up.

“No,” she clipped back. Vessa was clearly unhappy about the decision to explore this place, but Maelen knew she’d accompany them. The thief was a mess in a lot of ways, but damned if she wasn’t loyal.

“There you go,” Maelen offered.

“But… what if there isn’t enough rope to reach the bottom?” he asked.

“Then we’ll climb back up and say we tried. Now shut up and let me work.”

She lost herself in her tasks, looping the rope into a harness that would bear her weight evenly on the descent, checking her knots and the pitons twice, and, eventually, lowering herself over the edge of the Starless Rift into the empty blackness below.

Maelen braced herself with boots against the wet stone and nodded at her companions. Vessa’s face had gone pale; she kept swallowing like she might be sick. Alric’s face was mask-still, drained of anything human, like he’d been painted into the scene.

“If you hear me yell, pull like the gods are whipping you,” she barked. “Once I’m down, Vess comes next.”

Without waiting for confirmation, Maelen began letting the rope out hand over hand, keeping her boots against the sheer stone wall, until the two companions had disappeared from view and the darkness swallowed her.

As she descended, the sound of rainfall ebbed quickly, replaced by the thrumming of her mace. The mysterious black metal practically vibrated at her hip, pulling her deeper into the crevice. The gray light of day shone from above, then that too was gone. Maelen paused, shifted her weight to pull out the torch she had waiting. Two strikes from her flint and the oiled end lit.

A few heartbeats later, orange light shivered across the black walls like something alive. How had Hadren planned to reach this place? Maelen snorted. He hadn’t been thinking clearly at the end. Faith made fools of men. In her experience, trust came in the form of a reliable weapon, of iron pitons struck into rock, and sturdy rope. What had the gods ever done for her?

Grimly, she continued down, moving more slowly now.

For a long while, Maelen lost herself in the rhythm of climbing. Step down, step down, let out rope and drop, look around, continue. No thoughts entered her mind other than ensuring her boots didn’t slip, her rope wasn’t snagging, her torch was held out and away from her. Eventually, however, she began to worry that perhaps she hadn’t bought enough rope, that her descent would end, dangling in emptiness, and they would all leave this place with nothing. Just as the worry began to build, however, her torchlight revealed a cavern floor below her. She grinned and eyed the remaining loops of rope, nodding to herself.

Her boots settled to the rocky floor. She untangled herself from the makeshift harness and tugged sharply on the rope. After several heartbeats, it began jerkily rising. Good.

The air was cool, and Maelen shivered. She was still soaked through from the rain, and though she wasn’t in danger of freezing to death, she had to clamp her jaw shut to keep her teeth from chattering. Would there be any wood down here, fallen from above, to build a fire?

Maelen slowly turned with her torch, getting her bearings. She’d set down upon a raised dais in the rock, not carved but a natural step, probably as wide as twice her height. There was a short, sharp drop off the dais to a wider cavern chamber beyond, and it was large enough that her torchlight didn’t show her its full size. The sheer, black stone wall she’d climbed down rose behind her. Maelen looked up, seeing a gray slice far above that was the clouded sky. It would be foolish to explore the cavern until Vessa and Alric had joined her, so she placed her back against the wall and waited.

Something moved in the darkness beyond, a faint snuffling, chittering noise. She froze and lifted her torch, her free hand pulling the mace from her belt as quietly as possible. Something was scampering around the base of the dais, quiet and searching. Slowly, slowly, she padded forward, mace in one hand and flickering torch in the other, towards the lip of the dais. The thing beyond had paused its movement. She heard the huff huff of what sounded like labored breathing. Perhaps it was a wounded animal that had fallen from the ledge above? But no, nothing could survive that drop. What could it be?

Her left boot slid slowly towards the edge. She leaned carefully forward.

With a high-pitched hiss like a teakettle, the thing below leapt at her.

Next: Frenzied Terror [with game notes]

[prose-only version here]

XIX.

Duskmarch 24, Goldday, Year 731.

Maelen rubbed at her jaw, scowling. The rain continued in steady sheets, but she hardly noticed it anymore. She was soaked from crown to toe, past the point where a person could get any wetter. Instead, her attention was focused on the muddy ground where, less than a bell ago, a madman had butchered and arrayed dozens of corpses into a wide, arcane circle.

Except now, the ground was empty. No madman. No corpses. Not even blood remained, though the ground still showed the churned activity of boots and combat, the indentation of the bodies clearly visible until the rain soon washed it all away.

She voiced her thoughts aloud. “How is this possible, lad? What happened to them?”

Alric looked up at her, the top half of his face shadowed by the hood of his cloak. Something had been eating at the boy since their encounter with those damned wisps of gray light in the forest. He’d been more withdrawn, brooding.

He lifted one shoulder in a weary shrug. “Hadren cast something,” Alric said quietly. “Or, tried to. I don’t think the shadowed creature that you and Vessa described was his intent, or that globe of darkness. It’s like I told you, Maelen: The magic isn’t safe. It’s inviting a demon into you, every time. The ritual he and his followers used to open the Starless Rift must have made the forces even wilder, less predictable. Hadren paid his price for that.”

“Did he disappear, like in the Heart & Dagger? Or is he dead?” she asked.

The lad leaned onto his walking staff, sighing with a great cloud of mist in the cold rain. “I don’t know. What am I missing? Dammit all, I wish I understood any of this!” he burst out.

She saw the fingers on his hands turn white as he gripped the staff. Maelen approached, the churned mud sucking at her boots, and stood before him. She pitched her voice lower. “And the damned thing’s got its claws in you now, doesn’t it?”

Alric started, and this close she could see his haunted eyes within the cloak. He nodded jerkily.

“What happened to Hadren,” he said hoarsely. “It’s like a warning, Maelen.” The lad seemed like he was going to say more and then stopped himself with a shake of his head.

“You can’t destroy it? Leave it out here in the rain? Burn it?”

He swallowed. “I… I’ve tried. It’s demon-made.”

“Forget it, then,” she said with a swift nod. “Push those dark thoughts away, lad. Let’s go talk to Vessa and see about this crack in the ground, eh?” She clapped him on the shoulder. He stumbled, and she strode with purpose to Vessa. Her back was to them a bowshot away, standing at the edge of this Starless Rift that Hadren had opened.

As she approached, it was as if the sound of the rain noticeably lessened. More than that, actually… It was as if something pressed against her senses, muting smell, numbing her skin, smudging her vision. The rain became distant, like she’d stepped half out of the world. It was an uncanny feeling and reminded her of the moments before she succumbed to blackness with Sarin the Night Captain’s hand atop her skull. Maelen shuddered at the memory, gritting her teeth.

She checked over her shoulder to make sure Alric had joined them, and then said, “Well, that bastard Hadren took the bag of coin with him to the afterlife, if there ever was a bag. There’s nothing left from those cultists, and the lad doesn’t know where they went. What have you spied, lass?”

Vessa looked at them, her concerned eyes lingering on Alric beneath her own hood. “Not much to see, Mae. Just darkness. No telling how deep it goes.”

She examined the crevice’s edge. The earth around the deep crack was gone, exposing a black stone that shone wetly in the rain. Beyond the stone, there was simply… nothing. A yawning empty gash in the world. She could see no stairs or obvious way to descend the sides.

“Did you understand what he said, Alric?” Vessa asked. “About Saelith the Vanished?”

Maelen grinned. Vessa wasn’t the sharpest mind, but damned if she didn’t hear everything and never missed a detail. Her ability to recall those bits after hearing them, too, never failed to amaze.

Alric paused before he answered, tilting his head to consider it. “There is frustratingly little information about demons in the Inkbinders Lodge, at least the parts I can access. But the Tome mentioned them,” his fingers drifted to the closed satchel at his waist. “Orthuun’s generals. There are ten of them, it says, and they spread the Blind Sovereign’s will across the land. This Saelith must be one of them. Hm. Give me a moment,” he said, considering.

Maelen tried to catch Vessa’s eye, but the girl kept her attention on Alric tensely, like she was willing his brain to make the connections. So, Maelen waited quietly in the rain, looking out and over the broad gap in the earth. She wiped water from her face several times, trying to be patient.

Eventually, after enough time that Maelen became aware of her numb, cold feet, he cleared his throat. Hadren’s zombie had made his voice huskier with its strangling of him. “I’ll need to do some research back home to be sure, but I think the Lodge must have done battle with these followers of Orthuun many years ago. Thornmere Hold wasn’t built as a prison. It was a vault, for the Tome and your mace.”

“What does the mace have to do with it?” she asked, though she couldn’t deny the steady thrum of the weapon, growing as they neared this place. It had practically sung in her hands when she’d fought Hadren and his zombie. She could still feel it on her hip and hear its humming like a heartbeat in her ears, as steady at the patter of rain.

“You saw Hadren’s reaction. I think it must have been a weapon specifically used to defeat Orthuun and his minions the last time he plagued the Redwood Marches. Perhaps… Hm. Perhaps they were the ones who buried this Saelith the Vanished here. Perhaps there are more vaults, spread throughout the region, and more tombs. If that’s true…” his voice trailed off.

“Go on,” she prodded him.

“Can you imagine the implications? The Lodge spreading both the instruments of Orthuun’s return and defeat in hidden vaults? It… it boggles the mind.” It was the most animated Maelen had seen the boy in days, though it didn’t last. As soon as his enthusiasm had crested, it disappeared. He slumped his shoulders. “But again… I’m just speculating.”

Maelen was about to say something, but then he added. “I only wish… The blind seer, Wink… she said there were five books of Orthuun. Hadren must have possessed one of them, and that information was enough to locate this place and perform his ritual, but not enough to awaken the demon’s general. But what’s in the Tome that he needed? I wish we’d had his body… With a second book…”

“You’d be twice as cursed, lad,” Maelen said firmly. Alric straightened at her words but nodded slowly.

“You’re right, of course.”

“What now?” Vessa asked. “Why not throw the damned thing into the Rift and end this?”

“What?!” Alric choked, stepping back as if she’d struck him. “No– no, that would be catastrophic. We can’t bring Orthuun’s tools closer together.”

“Back to Oakton, then,” Maelen said with a shrug. “Damned waste of—”

“No,” Alric snapped, louder than she would have expected. “No. Thornmere Hold… there’s more there I didn’t read. And the forbidden stacks in the Lodge… I need access.” He thumped his staff into the mud for emphasis. His hood turned to the Starless Rift, staring down into its inky depths for several heartbeats.

For a moment, no one said anything. Over the rain and humming of her mace, though, she thought the lad was mumbling something. She took a quiet step closer, straining to hear.

“Don’t jump…” she could have sworn he whispered. It sounded familiar. Was it something the blind seer had said?

“Alric,” Maelen said slowly. “Lad? You’re not thinking of going down there?”

“It’s only…” he said, looking up at them. “If the sect of the Inkbinders Lodge truly banished Orthuun before and created these hidden vaults, wouldn’t it stand to reason that there’s more than just the tomb down there? Like Thornmere Hold, maybe there’s an instrument for defeating Orthuun. The Lodge may have spread these artifacts throughout the land.”

“Go down there?” Vessa half laughed. “I don’t think so.”

“Wait, lass,” Maelen held up a hand. “You think there might be more weapons? Chests of coin like the last vault?”

Alric spread his hands, another puff of mist as he exhaled. “I don’t know, really. It’s all just guesswork.”

“Mae…” Vessa said warningly.

“We may not walk back empty handed, is all I’m saying,” she said, rubbing her chin in thought. “Imagine the coin without our debts, lass.”

“Into the tomb of a… a… demon gang leader, or whatever?!” she pleaded in exasperation.

“Oh, Saelith is entombed,” Alric said hastily. “Saelith the Vanished should be no threat.”

“There, see?” Maelen grinned and began unshouldering her pack.

“It’s whatever’s guarding the tomb that’s the threat,” he added simply.

“This place was sealed in the earth, lad,” Maelen scoffed. “There wouldn’t have been any reason to post guardians too.”

Alric and Vessa exchanged a dubious look, but she ignored them. Instead, she began pulling gear from her travel pack. When she’d heard the name Starless Rift, she’d guessed they might be doing some climbing and had used the last of her coins for supplies. With calloused hands, unpacked coils of rope, rough iron pitons, a small hammer, and a grapnel hook—all cheap tools, but sturdy. She checked the rope for frays. “Good enough,” she mumbled.

Without further comment, she found a stable rock lip of the crevice and began driving pitons into the unnaturally smooth black stone, each hammer strike ringing strangely hollow. She winced at the noise. If there were guardians down below, they surely wouldn’t be surprised by their arrival.

“You don’t think there are stairs?” Alric said weakly as she began looping the rope through the pitons and tying a series of firm knots.

“Vess, see any stairs?” she answered without looking up.

“No,” she clipped back. Vessa was clearly unhappy about the decision to explore this place, but Maelen knew she’d accompany them. The thief was a mess in a lot of ways, but damned if she wasn’t loyal.

“There you go,” Maelen offered.

“But… what if there isn’t enough rope to reach the bottom?” he asked.

“Then we’ll climb back up and say we tried. Now shut up and let me work.”

She lost herself in her tasks, looping the rope into a harness that would bear her weight evenly on the descent, checking her knots and the pitons twice, and, eventually, lowering herself over the edge of the Starless Rift into the empty blackness below.

Maelen braced herself with boots against the wet stone and nodded at her companions. Vessa’s face had gone pale; she kept swallowing like she might be sick. Alric’s face was mask-still, drained of anything human, like he’d been painted into the scene.

“If you hear me yell, pull like the gods are whipping you,” she barked. “Once I’m down, Vess comes next.”

Without waiting for confirmation, Maelen began letting the rope out hand over hand, keeping her boots against the sheer stone wall, until the two companions had disappeared from view and the darkness swallowed her.

As she descended, the sound of rainfall ebbed quickly, replaced by the thrumming of her mace. The mysterious black metal practically vibrated at her hip, pulling her deeper into the crevice. The gray light of day shone from above, then that too was gone. Maelen paused, shifted her weight to pull out the torch she had waiting. Two strikes from her flint and the oiled end lit.

A few heartbeats later, orange light shivered across the black walls like something alive. How had Hadren planned to reach this place? Maelen snorted. He hadn’t been thinking clearly at the end. Faith made fools of men. In her experience, trust came in the form of a reliable weapon, of iron pitons struck into rock, and sturdy rope. What had the gods ever done for her?

Grimly, she continued down, moving more slowly now.

For a long while, Maelen lost herself in the rhythm of climbing. Step down, step down, let out rope and drop, look around, continue. No thoughts entered her mind other than ensuring her boots didn’t slip, her rope wasn’t snagging, her torch was held out and away from her. Eventually, however, she began to worry that perhaps she hadn’t bought enough rope, that her descent would end, dangling in emptiness, and they would all leave this place with nothing. Just as the worry began to build, however, her torchlight revealed a cavern floor below her. She grinned and eyed the remaining loops of rope, nodding to herself.

Her boots settled to the rocky floor. She untangled herself from the makeshift harness and tugged sharply on the rope. After several heartbeats, it began jerkily rising. Good.

The air was cool, and Maelen shivered. She was still soaked through from the rain, and though she wasn’t in danger of freezing to death, she had to clamp her jaw shut to keep her teeth from chattering. Would there be any wood down here, fallen from above, to build a fire?

Maelen slowly turned with her torch, getting her bearings. She’d set down upon a raised dais in the rock, not carved but a natural step, probably as wide as twice her height. There was a short, sharp drop off the dais to a wider cavern chamber beyond, and it was large enough that her torchlight didn’t show her its full size. The sheer, black stone wall she’d climbed down rose behind her. Maelen looked up, seeing a gray slice far above that was the clouded sky. It would be foolish to explore the cavern until Vessa and Alric had joined her, so she placed her back against the wall and waited.

Something moved in the darkness beyond, a faint snuffling, chittering noise. She froze and lifted her torch, her free hand pulling the mace from her belt as quietly as possible. Something was scampering around the base of the dais, quiet and searching. Slowly, slowly, she padded forward, mace in one hand and flickering torch in the other, towards the lip of the dais. The thing beyond had paused its movement. She heard the huff huff of what sounded like labored breathing. Perhaps it was a wounded animal that had fallen from the ledge above? But no, nothing could survive that drop. What could it be?

Her left boot slid slowly towards the edge. She leaned carefully forward.

With a high-pitched hiss like a teakettle, the thing below leapt at her.

Next: Frenzied Terror [with game notes]

[game-notes version here]

XVIII.

Duskmarch 24, Goldday, Year 731.

Hadren Kelthorn stood in the rain, arms outstretched, his gap-toothed grin fixed in eerie welcome. From the hilltop, the three companions stared down, stunned by the scene below. Vessa had the keenest eyesight of the three of them, and yet her gaze kept skittering off the dismembered, robed bodies assembled into patterns in a wide circle around the man. Behind it all, a black crevice arced across the earth like an empty maw.

“Hadren, what have you done?” Alric called out, his voice rich and desperate.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Hadren cackled with undisguised glee. “I’ve paved the way! The Starless Rift is open because of what I’ve done!”

“He’s mad,” Maelen murmured for the two of them to hear.

“Very,” Vessa confirmed in a low voice. “How did he kill all these people?”

“Come!” Hadren called out jovially. “Join me, Alric! Let’s have a chat.”

The scribe—mage, Vessa reminded herself sharply—took a halting step forward but Maelen stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“Careful lad,” she growled. “Let us join you.”

He paused to look at her, hesitating. Then he glanced over at the grisly scene and nodded once. “We’re all coming!” he announced, and the three of them trudged through the rain, boots squelching.

Vessa clenched her jaw painfully as they drew near and the details of the massacre before them grew clearer. Men and women of all ages, all wearing plain, black robes spattered in gore. Many of the corpses were intact, but just as many had been hacked to pieces to form whatever symbols Hadren had used to… what? Cast a spell? Open the very earth into the jagged, yawning opening behind him? Most of the faces, she noted with disgust, were missing their eyes—black pits as if they’d been gouged with a hot iron. The rain could not wash away the stench; it only spread it: iron, rot, and bile. Vessa fought the urge to retch. She wanted to flee this place, to scrub it from memory.

They paused outside of Hadren’s circle, between two piles of bodies. Maelen seemed to appraise the dead with a calculating eye, but Vessa avoided doing so and instead studied the living man before them. He looked noticeably older than in the tavern, oddly, his hair thinner and whiter, his skin more sunken. Even still, Hadren was remarkably unremarkable to be standing at the center of such an impossible landscape of death and sorcery. He looked like nothing more than a laborer, one of countless populating Oakton’s streets. His hands were calloused and rough, bent by hard work as surely as his curved back. His face was sun-spotted and balding, and neither handsome nor distinguishingly ugly. Vessa would have passed him without remembering a single detail. Indeed, she had done just that two months before as the trio exited the Root Gate towards Thornmere Hold.

Hadren seemed amused by them not stepping into his gruesome circle. He grinned, eyes roving over Alric’s entire frame.

“Why?” Alric asked. “I don’t understand any of this, Mr. Kelthorn.”

“Mister, is it? Well, I suppose you’re recognizin’ my power, as is right. You see what I’ve done? Do you understand the implications, son?” He grinned proudly. “You’re looking at the man who’s gonna bring one of the Blind Sovereign’s generals back to this world.”

He turned, rain running off his sleeves. “Saelith the Vanished, The Touch of Orthuun, is buried there! He’ll be the herald of Orthuun’s return! By my hand! Soon the Blind Sovereign’ll blot out the sun, mark my words.” When Hadren turned back, he was beaming. “And I, Hadren Kelthorn, am proud to be one of the masons to make it so.”

Alric looked stricken. “Why would you want that? You’ve seen what his touch brings! Orthuun is a demon, of nothingness itself! He’ll destroy everything, shroud it in darkness! There will be no rewards for you aiding him, you must see that!”

Hadren scoffed. “That’s your problem, boy. You’re still trying to see. Faith is blind. That’s Orthuun’s gift. Look what faith can bring into the world!” he again gestured wide, taking in the bodies and crevice behind him.

“Besides,” he said, scowling. He seemed to be working hard to stay focused on his words, talking deliberately to Alric. “What have my peers done for me in this life? What have they done for you, Alric Mistsong? An apprentice scribe, toiling away and told what you can and can’t read? Do those ink stains on your fingers ever come off? Pah!” He waved dismissively. “You have that black bookbecause you want to know more than your guild is willing to teach you, eh? Erase it all and start fresh, son. Oakton has mistreated you as much as me.” His eyes studied Alric, roving over how he was taking in the nonsensical rant.

“You’re talking about the destruction of everything,” Alric pleaded.

Hadren sighed, a touch of sadness softening his madness for a heartbeat. He spit into the mud at his feet. “Well, you’re a disappointment, I admit. You’ve read the Tome, but not understood it. That’s clear to me.” Another sigh, and his eyes shone again. “I wanted you to see our greater purpose here, but I don’t have the time to educate you.” He held out a hand impatiently. “Give me the book and you can be on your way.”

“What about our treasure?” Maelen butted in. “You promised gold.”

Hadren looked surprised at the interruption, then winked at her. “So I did, so I did. Rest assured that I collected any remaining coins from all the followers and faithful before they sacrificed themselves to the Starless Ritual, Maelen Marrowson. You’ll have your coin, though… I’d spend it quickly.” He cackled suddenly, slapping his knee. “Oakton’s petty gods won’t be able to–”

Hadren’s voice cut off abruptly and he looked at Maelen’s waist sharply, squinting in the weather. “What’s that?” he pointed a gnarled finger at the warrior’s mace, nestled at her hip. “That… that… profanity cannot be allowed here! The Tome and that… abomination! Give them to me!” His voice cracked to a shriek. “Now!”

Hadren’s fervor and sudden venom was shocking, but not nearly as shocking as Alric. Something in him must have snapped. With a raw shout, he hurled himself at the black-robed man, trying to drive him into the mud. It might have worked, too, if Hadren had been as surprised as Vessa. Instead, Hadren snarled and knocked Alric aside with a push. The young man stumbled but kept his feet.

Maelen took the cue. With her signature roar, she drew the black mace from her belt and swept Hadren’s legs from beneath him. He went down awkwardly into the mud at Maelen’s feet, the breath whooshing out of him. Hadren looked up at her with a hateful look.

“You won’t be getting my mace,” Maelen snarled. “Take your book and be happy with it.”

“No!” Alric reacted. “We can’t! Kill him, Maelen!”

As Mae glanced at him, confused, Vessa saw Hadren begin a gasping chant, much like Alric when he’d healed Maelen. She didn’t know what spell the man intended to cast, but she supposed they wouldn’t like it, so she notched an arrow and let fly in one smooth motion. Vessa intended the arrow to pierce Hadren’s arm to the ground, but the rain and Maelen standing over him made it a difficult shot. The shaft sunk into his shoulder instead. Hadren hissed in pain and he cursed.

She hadn’t been fast enough. Even as the arrow struck and Hadren ceased his chanting, one of the corpses near Alric began to twitch. Vessa blinked as a black-robed woman pulled herself from one of the piles, her eyes burned out and black, her throat slashed.

“Alric! Look out!” she shouted in warning.

The dead, eyeless woman took a fumbling swing at the startled Alric, and he stumbled away. Vessa drew another arrow. Indecision stabbed through her—Hadren or the zombie? Then she saw Maelen bat Hadren aside with the head of her spiked mace. Her friend would be fine, she decided. Alric wouldn’t.

She let loose an arrow, but it thunked into the woman’s back without her slowing or even seeming to notice. Instead, the corpse lunged with surprising speed, wrapping her pale fingers around Alric’s throat. The dead cultist, mutilated face utterly impassive, squeezed, and Alric began sputtering and choking.

Maelen barked a harsh cry of surprise and Vessa glanced in her direction. Hadren, blood running down an arm that now hung limp at his side, was stumbling away, chanting again and with his other hand raised towards her. As she watched in horror, Hadren’s eyes turned utterly black. Dark oil began running down his chin from his chanting mouth, and then… his shadow loomed up behind him, like a thing alive.

Vessa expected the shadow to attack Maelen, but like Alric had said at the campfire—these men were playing with forces they apparently could not control. Perhaps Hadren Kelthorn had offended his demon god in some way, or perhaps the thing he summoned was fundamentally uncontrollable. Either way, the looming shadow fell upon the old man like a cat upon a mouse, black fingers outstretched like jagged claws. Hadren screamed, first in surprise and then in pain, and as he did so the shadow’s body expanded and consumed him. The darkness swelled, bulging outward like a living cloak. Hadren’s screams dwindled fast, falling away like a stone dropped down a well before the black shroud snapped shut around him.

Vessa was so horrified by the scene that she didn’t register that Maelen had moved to help Alric. The warrior brought her mace down again and again, crushing the animated corpse even as it wrung the life out of their companion. A particularly forceful backswing caught the zombie in the side and sent it flying away from Alric.

“Vess!” Maelen shouted in command. “Help, dammit!”

She shook her head and took aim. A single arrow pierced the woman’s skull, directly at the base where head met neck. Whether it was her shot, or Maelen’s continued battering, or perhaps Hadren releasing his hold upon the woman as he fought the darkness all around him, the dead cultist collapsed, again lifeless.

Alric sucked in deep breaths, looked wild-eyed at the growing, pulsing darkness, and yelled. “Run!”

They ran.

Maelen hooked an arm under Alric and hauled him up, half-carrying and half-dragging him as her boots tore through the mud. Vessa rushed to his other side and helped. The two women, pulling Alric between them, stumped through the rain, over the low hill they’d just crested. Vessa spared a brief look over her shoulder at the hill. The darkness was like a living thing—a pulsing, silent mass of blackness in the constant rain, and growing wider to consume the grotesque piles of cultists. She shuddered and pushed her legs harder to get away.

“How…” she panted as they stumbled over the hill. “Far… do we… go?”

“Farther,” Maelen growled, her thickly muscled legs pumping.

Alric regained his wits enough to move his legs, and though they could hear and see nothing behind them, they kept running until they’d crested a second low hill and dropped to the other side of it. There they collapsed, gasping, as the rain continued unceasingly.

“What… what was that?” she asked Alric. “What happened?”

Alric shook his head, still too out of breath to speak. After several attempts he managed to sputter. “Don’t know. He… the magic consumed him.”

“Quiet,” Maelen barked, and the three of them fell silent. Vessa and Maelen strained to hear anything but the rainfall and Alric’s labored breathing. They failed.

The warrior swore. “Vess, go look. But be careful.”

She nodded once and stood. Without a backward glance, she was moving as silently as her countless days of practice could enable. Stealth in the rain was theoretically easier than fair weather, except that the landscape was as blurred to her as anyone looking for her. It made judging places to take cover and hide trickier. Still, with the hills and scrubby trees, she moved wide, taking a less direct route than their retreat to come at the Starless Rift from a different direction. She found a low, rocky shelf of a hill and ducked behind it. Stilling her breathing and adjusting her hood to keep the water from her eyes, she peered around the rock.

Hadren was gone, along with the piles of cultist bodies in arcane symbols. She rubbed at her eyes, scanning. The ground where the bodies had lain was bare, scrub grass flattened by nothing. No blood. No limbs. No symbols. The rain fell upon an empty field, as if the massacre had never existed at all.

The Starless Rift was there, however, an ominous black scar on the plain between hills.

Next: Don’t Jump [with game notes]

[prose-only version here]

XVIII.

Duskmarch 24, Goldday, Year 731.

Hadren Kelthorn stood in the rain, arms outstretched, his gap-toothed grin fixed in eerie welcome. From the hilltop, the three companions stared down, stunned by the scene below. Vessa had the keenest eyesight of the three of them, and yet her gaze kept skittering off the dismembered, robed bodies assembled into patterns in a wide circle around the man. Behind it all, a black crevice arced across the earth like an empty maw.

“Hadren, what have you done?” Alric called out, his voice rich and desperate.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Hadren cackled with undisguised glee. “I’ve paved the way! The Starless Rift is open because of what I’ve done!”

“He’s mad,” Maelen murmured for the two of them to hear.

“Very,” Vessa confirmed in a low voice. “How did he kill all these people?”

“Come!” Hadren called out jovially. “Join me, Alric! Let’s have a chat.”

The scribe—mage, Vessa reminded herself sharply—took a halting step forward but Maelen stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“Careful lad,” she growled. “Let us join you.”

He paused to look at her, hesitating. Then he glanced over at the grisly scene and nodded once. “We’re all coming!” he announced, and the three of them trudged through the rain, boots squelching.

Vessa clenched her jaw painfully as they drew near and the details of the massacre before them grew clearer. Men and women of all ages, all wearing plain, black robes spattered in gore. Many of the corpses were intact, but just as many had been hacked to pieces to form whatever symbols Hadren had used to… what? Cast a spell? Open the very earth into the jagged, yawning opening behind him? Most of the faces, she noted with disgust, were missing their eyes—black pits as if they’d been gouged with a hot iron. The rain could not wash away the stench; it only spread it: iron, rot, and bile. Vessa fought the urge to retch. She wanted to flee this place, to scrub it from memory.

They paused outside of Hadren’s circle, between two piles of bodies. Maelen seemed to appraise the dead with a calculating eye, but Vessa avoided doing so and instead studied the living man before them. He looked noticeably older than in the tavern, oddly, his hair thinner and whiter, his skin more sunken. Even still, Hadren was remarkably unremarkable to be standing at the center of such an impossible landscape of death and sorcery. He looked like nothing more than a laborer, one of countless populating Oakton’s streets. His hands were calloused and rough, bent by hard work as surely as his curved back. His face was sun-spotted and balding, and neither handsome nor distinguishingly ugly. Vessa would have passed him without remembering a single detail. Indeed, she had done just that two months before as the trio exited the Root Gate towards Thornmere Hold.

Hadren seemed amused by them not stepping into his gruesome circle. He grinned, eyes roving over Alric’s entire frame.

“Why?” Alric asked. “I don’t understand any of this, Mr. Kelthorn.”

“Mister, is it? Well, I suppose you’re recognizin’ my power, as is right. You see what I’ve done? Do you understand the implications, son?” He grinned proudly. “You’re looking at the man who’s gonna bring one of the Blind Sovereign’s generals back to this world.”

He turned, rain running off his sleeves. “Saelith the Vanished, The Touch of Orthuun, is buried there! He’ll be the herald of Orthuun’s return! By my hand! Soon the Blind Sovereign’ll blot out the sun, mark my words.” When Hadren turned back, he was beaming. “And I, Hadren Kelthorn, am proud to be one of the masons to make it so.”

Alric looked stricken. “Why would you want that? You’ve seen what his touch brings! Orthuun is a demon, of nothingness itself! He’ll destroy everything, shroud it in darkness! There will be no rewards for you aiding him, you must see that!”

Hadren scoffed. “That’s your problem, boy. You’re still trying to see. Faith is blind. That’s Orthuun’s gift. Look what faith can bring into the world!” he again gestured wide, taking in the bodies and crevice behind him.

“Besides,” he said, scowling. He seemed to be working hard to stay focused on his words, talking deliberately to Alric. “What have my peers done for me in this life? What have they done for you, Alric Mistsong? An apprentice scribe, toiling away and told what you can and can’t read? Do those ink stains on your fingers ever come off? Pah!” He waved dismissively. “You have that black bookbecause you want to know more than your guild is willing to teach you, eh? Erase it all and start fresh, son. Oakton has mistreated you as much as me.” His eyes studied Alric, roving over how he was taking in the nonsensical rant.

“You’re talking about the destruction of everything,” Alric pleaded.

Hadren sighed, a touch of sadness softening his madness for a heartbeat. He spit into the mud at his feet. “Well, you’re a disappointment, I admit. You’ve read the Tome, but not understood it. That’s clear to me.” Another sigh, and his eyes shone again. “I wanted you to see our greater purpose here, but I don’t have the time to educate you.” He held out a hand impatiently. “Give me the book and you can be on your way.”

“What about our treasure?” Maelen butted in. “You promised gold.”

Hadren looked surprised at the interruption, then winked at her. “So I did, so I did. Rest assured that I collected any remaining coins from all the followers and faithful before they sacrificed themselves to the Starless Ritual, Maelen Marrowson. You’ll have your coin, though… I’d spend it quickly.” He cackled suddenly, slapping his knee. “Oakton’s petty gods won’t be able to–”

Hadren’s voice cut off abruptly and he looked at Maelen’s waist sharply, squinting in the weather. “What’s that?” he pointed a gnarled finger at the warrior’s mace, nestled at her hip. “That… that… profanity cannot be allowed here! The Tome and that… abomination! Give them to me!” His voice cracked to a shriek. “Now!”

Hadren’s fervor and sudden venom was shocking, but not nearly as shocking as Alric. Something in him must have snapped. With a raw shout, he hurled himself at the black-robed man, trying to drive him into the mud. It might have worked, too, if Hadren had been as surprised as Vessa. Instead, Hadren snarled and knocked Alric aside with a push. The young man stumbled but kept his feet.

Maelen took the cue. With her signature roar, she drew the black mace from her belt and swept Hadren’s legs from beneath him. He went down awkwardly into the mud at Maelen’s feet, the breath whooshing out of him. Hadren looked up at her with a hateful look.

“You won’t be getting my mace,” Maelen snarled. “Take your book and be happy with it.”

“No!” Alric reacted. “We can’t! Kill him, Maelen!”

As Mae glanced at him, confused, Vessa saw Hadren begin a gasping chant, much like Alric when he’d healed Maelen. She didn’t know what spell the man intended to cast, but she supposed they wouldn’t like it, so she notched an arrow and let fly in one smooth motion. Vessa intended the arrow to pierce Hadren’s arm to the ground, but the rain and Maelen standing over him made it a difficult shot. The shaft sunk into his shoulder instead. Hadren hissed in pain and he cursed.

She hadn’t been fast enough. Even as the arrow struck and Hadren ceased his chanting, one of the corpses near Alric began to twitch. Vessa blinked as a black-robed woman pulled herself from one of the piles, her eyes burned out and black, her throat slashed.

“Alric! Look out!” she shouted in warning.

The dead, eyeless woman took a fumbling swing at the startled Alric, and he stumbled away. Vessa drew another arrow. Indecision stabbed through her—Hadren or the zombie? Then she saw Maelen bat Hadren aside with the head of her spiked mace. Her friend would be fine, she decided. Alric wouldn’t.

She let loose an arrow, but it thunked into the woman’s back without her slowing or even seeming to notice. Instead, the corpse lunged with surprising speed, wrapping her pale fingers around Alric’s throat. The dead cultist, mutilated face utterly impassive, squeezed, and Alric began sputtering and choking.

Maelen barked a harsh cry of surprise and Vessa glanced in her direction. Hadren, blood running down an arm that now hung limp at his side, was stumbling away, chanting again and with his other hand raised towards her. As she watched in horror, Hadren’s eyes turned utterly black. Dark oil began running down his chin from his chanting mouth, and then… his shadow loomed up behind him, like a thing alive.

Vessa expected the shadow to attack Maelen, but like Alric had said at the campfire—these men were playing with forces they apparently could not control. Perhaps Hadren Kelthorn had offended his demon god in some way, or perhaps the thing he summoned was fundamentally uncontrollable. Either way, the looming shadow fell upon the old man like a cat upon a mouse, black fingers outstretched like jagged claws. Hadren screamed, first in surprise and then in pain, and as he did so the shadow’s body expanded and consumed him. The darkness swelled, bulging outward like a living cloak. Hadren’s screams dwindled fast, falling away like a stone dropped down a well before the black shroud snapped shut around him.

Vessa was so horrified by the scene that she didn’t register that Maelen had moved to help Alric. The warrior brought her mace down again and again, crushing the animated corpse even as it wrung the life out of their companion. A particularly forceful backswing caught the zombie in the side and sent it flying away from Alric.

“Vess!” Maelen shouted in command. “Help, dammit!”

She shook her head and took aim. A single arrow pierced the woman’s skull, directly at the base where head met neck. Whether it was her shot, or Maelen’s continued battering, or perhaps Hadren releasing his hold upon the woman as he fought the darkness all around him, the dead cultist collapsed, again lifeless.

Alric sucked in deep breaths, looked wild-eyed at the growing, pulsing darkness, and yelled. “Run!”

They ran.

Maelen hooked an arm under Alric and hauled him up, half-carrying and half-dragging him as her boots tore through the mud. Vessa rushed to his other side and helped. The two women, pulling Alric between them, stumped through the rain, over the low hill they’d just crested. Vessa spared a brief look over her shoulder at the hill. The darkness was like a living thing—a pulsing, silent mass of blackness in the constant rain, and growing wider to consume the grotesque piles of cultists. She shuddered and pushed her legs harder to get away.

“How…” she panted as they stumbled over the hill. “Far… do we… go?”

“Farther,” Maelen growled, her thickly muscled legs pumping.

Alric regained his wits enough to move his legs, and though they could hear and see nothing behind them, they kept running until they’d crested a second low hill and dropped to the other side of it. There they collapsed, gasping, as the rain continued unceasingly.

“What… what was that?” she asked Alric. “What happened?”

Alric shook his head, still too out of breath to speak. After several attempts he managed to sputter. “Don’t know. He… the magic consumed him.”

“Quiet,” Maelen barked, and the three of them fell silent. Vessa and Maelen strained to hear anything but the rainfall and Alric’s labored breathing. They failed.

The warrior swore. “Vess, go look. But be careful.”

She nodded once and stood. Without a backward glance, she was moving as silently as her countless days of practice could enable. Stealth in the rain was theoretically easier than fair weather, except that the landscape was as blurred to her as anyone looking for her. It made judging places to take cover and hide trickier. Still, with the hills and scrubby trees, she moved wide, taking a less direct route than their retreat to come at the Starless Rift from a different direction. She found a low, rocky shelf of a hill and ducked behind it. Stilling her breathing and adjusting her hood to keep the water from her eyes, she peered around the rock.

Hadren was gone, along with the piles of cultist bodies in arcane symbols. She rubbed at her eyes, scanning. The ground where the bodies had lain was bare, scrub grass flattened by nothing. No blood. No limbs. No symbols. The rain fell upon an empty field, as if the massacre had never existed at all.

The Starless Rift was there, however, an ominous black scar on the plain between hills.

Next: Don’t Jump [with game notes]

[game-notes version here]

XVII.

Duskmarch 21, Ashday, Year 731.

“Enough. Maelen, please. Let me see to your wounds.”

Alric kept his tone low and measured. He knew pleading would only harden her stubbornness and send her limping until the wounds festered.

All that afternoon and evening, she had limped alongside him, their shuffling steps for once matched in speed and rhythm. Inexorably, they’d marched west, out of the Greenwood Rise and into low, lightly forested hills. Twice, Maelen stumbled. When she caught Alric looking at her with concern, she’d scowled and sped up for a time. By the end of the day, however, the warrior had practically collapsed. Alric and Vessa made the camp near a hilly outcropping while Maelen panted that she would join them, “once she’d caught her breath.”  

“I’m fine. Wasn’t sleeping, just resting my eyes.”

Alric smirked. “Well, these burns look bad. I’ll cast a spell, like last time.”

She stilled then, studying his face. After a long, pregnant pause, she nodded.

“Go on, then,” she said, settling back down and closing her eyes.

Alric murmured the same half-heard words that haunted his thoughts—alien syllables he could never recall except when he welcomed the magic in. Once again, numbness crept from the crown of his head down his neck and into his limbs, like cold water filling his veins. By the time he could no longer feel his toes, the murmuring grew in fervor.

Maelen gasped, and both looked up, meeting each other’s gaze. The warrior pushed back the lock of gray hair that had fallen into her face and smiled at him. Then she examined her leg, where the worst burn had been. It was now a dull gray, like an old bruise, the skin otherwise unblemished.

“Thank you, lad,” she smiled, and stood easily.

Vessa had paused her careful stacking of tinder to watch. “That’s amazing, Alric,” she said, mouth hanging open and looking suddenly like a young girl.

He cleared his throat, blushing and looking away. As before, the uncomfortable tingling had begun in his limbs as he regained feeling.

Then he paused. Something was wrong.

“What is it?” Vessa asked, seeing his concern.

Alric waved a hand dismissively but stood slowly, taking stock of his body. Not all the feeling had returned this time. His limbs and torso still felt… deadened, somehow. Deep in his chest, a hollowness echoed, a missing rhythm he couldn’t name. Alric cocked his head, listening for it, and found only silence. Something had shifted. The magic—what he suspected strongly was Orthuun’s borrowed power—had changed him.

“It’s nothing,” he grinned, eventually, hearing himself force cheer. “I can’t fight, so I’m glad to be of some use to those of you who do.”

“More than some use,” Maelen chuckled, slapping him on the shoulder. He experienced the blow as… blunted. “We’re lucky you spent two months studying that book before we give it back.”

Vessa was squinting at him, her face appraising. He briefly caught her gaze then looked away.

“Yes, well. I need to make water, then we’ll eat?” The words had barely left his numbed lips before he spun and moved to be alone in the woods.

That night, lying awake beneath the quiet trees, Alric finally understood the hollowness in his chest.

His heart no longer beat.

Duskmarch 22, Wyrdsday, Year 731.

The next day was gray and forgettable. Cold rain fell, not as heavy as before, but steady enough to soak everything. Alric said nothing of his discovery: that he might already be dead, walking in borrowed flesh. But the realization made him distracted and irritable, and both Maelen and Vessa were quickly driven away from any conversation. The two of them fell into familiar banter while Alric pulled his hood over his bowed head and plodded dutifully wherever Maelen pointed.

He ate little that day but was more than a little relieved to find that he had an appetite, that his stomach growled from lack of food. He chewed his rations slowly. The jerky and oat cakes tasted dull, muted. Still, if he could feel hunger, perhaps his body wasn’t truly dead. What would happen if he continued to use his magic, however? It was a troubling question, and one his mind continued to grapple throughout the wet, muddy trek south.

The rain blurred everything. They trudged south through low ridges and scrub forests, where sandstone outcroppings loomed like old bones in the mist. Alric may have found it beautiful at some times of year, but all he focused on now was his own inner emptiness, the gloomy drizzle matching his mood.

That night, they found a rocky shelf that offered some protection from the wet for camp. The trees around them were scattered and smaller than the Greenwood Rise, but hardly enough to constitute a forest. By Wink’s instructions, they were a mere day away from Hadren Kelthorn and the Starless Rift. Maelen, still in rare good humor, wondered aloud what waited for them. Alric only muttered, his thoughts too heavy to share. The two women whispered after that, and soon it was time for sleep.

Duskmarch 23, Thornsday, Year 731.

“Shit!”

The curse snapped Alric awake. He flailed in his blanket, heartless chest tightening in confusion. “What is it?” It was lighter than night, he thought, as his mind took in his environment, but difficult to tell whether dawn had come because of the drizzle and heavy clouds above them.

Beside him, Maelen climbed to her feet, black mace in hand. She had taken to sleeping in her chain shirt, which Alric thought must have been wickedly uncomfortable. Better discomfort than death, he supposed.

Vessa hurled another curse, kicking something. “They’ve already gone! My pack’s torn open!”

“Who?” Alric blinked, still confused and not fully awake. He noted that his limbs still held that numb heaviness, his chest hollow. What did it mean that his heart wasn’t beating? One couldn’t live without a heart, could they? What had happened to him?

“I don’t… aargh! Rats, maybe. Or skratts again. They took some of the food and ran.”

“Not skratts, then,” Maelen grunted. “At least not the ones we fought in Vastren Hollow. Your face would have been chewed.”

“Well, they bloody well weren’t small rats. Something bigger. Maybe another kind of vermin. Gods damn these wilds! I don’t…” Vessa balled up her fists and shrieked into the gloom, stamping her foot.

Maelen crossed the distance between them and cuffed her hard on the shoulder. The slighter woman stumbled and looked up accusatorily.

“Shut it, lass. Screaming bloody murder isn’t going to help, just bring nasties to us. We lost some food. Nobody died.”

Alric grimaced at the comment, then pulled himself out of his morbid reverie to watch his companions. Maelen missed the point. Vessa wasn’t angry about the food—it was that it happened on her watch. Maybe she’d fallen asleep, or wandered away from camp at some point, or simply been distracted. Whatever the case, the thief’s keen eyes had failed to spot another thief, and she was furious with herself. Vessa Velthorn, Alric had come to understand, did not like to feel vulnerable.

“I was sick of oat cakes and jerky anyway,” Alric said into the terse silence. “Perhaps you can hunt us a rabbit or squirrel? I’d love a proper meal.”

Vessa looked at him and seemed about to say something wicked. She snapped her mouth shut, though, and rubbed furiously at her short hair. “Fine. Yeah,” she said. “I can catch us something.”

Maelen caught Alric’s eyes and gave him an approving nod. Then she turned to Vessa and said, “Good. That’s settled. Fix the packs, then we go see our friend Hadren.”

By the end of the day, the two women’s moods had flipped. Vessa stalked off ahead to forage and returned midday with an entire family of wild turkeys she’d found wandering amidst the shrubs and low hills. They paused to clean and cook them. Alric set aside his brooding to follow Vessa’s brisk instructions. The dagger felt heavy and alien in his wooden fingers, but she seemed pleased with his work. By the time they continued south, their stomachs were pleasantly full of meat, with enough left for dinner that night.

Unfortunately, the rain befouled Maelen’s attempts to navigate the hills. Had the weather been clear, she groused, finding the Starless Rift’s location would have been easy from a hilltop. Instead, they wandered aimlessly in the wet, muddy grasses, without a glimpse of Hadren or a distinguishing landmark of any kind. As the skies began to darken, she grumpily called for them to make camp. She gnawed her turkey by the fire, cursing the gods’ rain, a blind woman’s useless directions, and the endless gray hills. Alric and Vessa shared a smile at her ranting, and when Maelen saw it, she stormed off into the rain to… well, he couldn’t really make it out amidst the cursing and Vessa’s laughter. In any case, they slept wet and dirty that night. Alric focused hard amidst the dark and silence, but his heart remained still. Whenever he thought of using his magic, his mind winced away.

Duskmarch 24, Goldday, Year 731.

The rain only increased the next day, making Alric wake to Maelen’s curses. He couldn’t remember being dry after so many consecutive wet days, and a deep chill had settled into his bones to go along with the hollow emptiness left by his magic. All three of the companions broke their camp perfunctorily, with little conversation.

Though they’d vowed to explore the surrounding area for the Starless Rift and Hadren, the task seemed impossible given the weather. Vessa suggested that they wait out the rain, but Maelen shook her head at the idea. She kept glancing down at the mace at her hip, idly touching the weapon’s head almost as a habit, and said they needed to find the Rift soon. Alric wondered about that but was too lost in his own misery to question her.

So, without a clear plan, they began a trek through the overgrown ridges and craggy hills, the only sounds their squelching boots and the constant thrum of the rainfall. It was an aimless, fruitless morning of exploration, but sometime around midday Alric called the others to him with urgent waves of his hand.

“What is it, lad?” Maelen asked, looking like a drowned dog, her clothes soaked through and water running into her eyes. Vessa remained sheltered beneath her oiled travel cloak but looked no drier.

“I… hear something,” he said hesitantly. “Do you?”

The two women cocked their heads, concentrating. Vessa shook her head, but Maelen said, “Just the mace, humming as it does.”

“It hums?” Vessa asked, surprised.

“You don’t hear the chanting?” Alric asked urgently. They looked at him long and hard, pursing their lips, a clear sign they didn’t. He grimaced. “This way, then. Follow me.”

Though he almost always had quiet, barely perceptible whispers at the back of his perceptions these days, late in the morning a new sound had begun to overlay it, so subtly at first he wasn’t sure it was there. As they’d stopped to refill their waterskins with rainwater, Alric had recognized a voice, deep and somber, saying something just beyond understanding, though it seemed to be the same words or phrase repeatedly. When he turned, one direction caused the voice to raise its volume, just barely. It was in that direction he walked. With each shuffling, mud-caked step, it grew louder.

By the time they’d crested another low hill, the voice was distinct, not so much drowning out the constant whispers but somehow building upon them, like a background chorus to the repeated chant. The words, though, still eluded him.

Alric stopped with a start and shielded his eyes with a hand. Then he gasped.

They’d found the Starless Rift.

At first, he couldn’t make sense of it. Rain blurred everything into motion. Then the land itself resolved—a jagged scar stretching from the foot of a crag into the plain beyond. Wider than two humans laid end to end for most of its length, the rift was shaped somewhat like a crescent moon, black and empty like, well… a starless night sky. Even from this distance, Alric could sense the unnatural emptiness of it, an open wound in the earth needing to be healed.

Standing between the crevice and their hill was Hadren Kelthorn. He stood as straight as he was able with his bent back, his sparse hair plastered to his pale skull. Gone were the homespun clothes, replaced by dark robes as black as the Starless Rift.

What surrounded Hadren took Alric the most time to comprehend. Symbols were arrayed around him, like ones he’d seen etched within the vault of Thornmere Hold but huge, each one as large as the man at their center. The symbols formed a wide circle, black and bulky. Not carved, but built. At first, Alric thought they were stone. Then bile rose in his throat as he understood.

They were bodies. Dozens and dozens of corpses, all in black robes like Hadren’s, lay arrayed in patterned symbols around him. Alric thought that perhaps they were merely praying, but then he saw that Hadren must have needed to sever limbs or heads to create the symbols. Blood pooled around each construction, almost black in the weak, rain-clouded light, and Alric could see white flashes of bones everywhere. His mind reeled at the scene, skittering away from the mutilation and grotesquerie before him.

“By the Rootmother,” Maelen breathed, as she too made sense of it. Vessa stood motionless next to her, jaw clenched tight like she was willing herself not to vomit.

Hadren threw his arms wide in greeting, water spraying from the sleeves of his black robe.

“Welcome!” he called through the rain. “I’m so glad you made it.”

Next: Hadren Kelthorn [with game notes]

[prose-only version here]

XVII.

Duskmarch 21, Ashday, Year 731.

“Enough. Maelen, please. Let me see to your wounds.”

Alric kept his tone low and measured. He knew pleading would only harden her stubbornness and send her limping until the wounds festered.

All that afternoon and evening, she had limped alongside him, their shuffling steps for once matched in speed and rhythm. Inexorably, they’d marched west, out of the Greenwood Rise and into low, lightly forested hills. Twice, Maelen stumbled. When she caught Alric looking at her with concern, she’d scowled and sped up for a time. By the end of the day, however, the warrior had practically collapsed. Alric and Vessa made the camp near a hilly outcropping while Maelen panted that she would join them, “once she’d caught her breath.”  

“I’m fine. Wasn’t sleeping, just resting my eyes.”

Alric smirked. “Well, these burns look bad. I’ll cast a spell, like last time.”

She stilled then, studying his face. After a long, pregnant pause, she nodded.

“Go on, then,” she said, settling back down and closing her eyes.

Alric murmured the same half-heard words that haunted his thoughts—alien syllables he could never recall except when he welcomed the magic in. Once again, numbness crept from the crown of his head down his neck and into his limbs, like cold water filling his veins. By the time he could no longer feel his toes, the murmuring grew in fervor.

Maelen gasped, and both looked up, meeting each other’s gaze. The warrior pushed back the lock of gray hair that had fallen into her face and smiled at him. Then she examined her leg, where the worst burn had been. It was now a dull gray, like an old bruise, the skin otherwise unblemished.

“Thank you, lad,” she smiled, and stood easily.

Vessa had paused her careful stacking of tinder to watch. “That’s amazing, Alric,” she said, mouth hanging open and looking suddenly like a young girl.

He cleared his throat, blushing and looking away. As before, the uncomfortable tingling had begun in his limbs as he regained feeling.

Then he paused. Something was wrong.

“What is it?” Vessa asked, seeing his concern.

Alric waved a hand dismissively but stood slowly, taking stock of his body. Not all the feeling had returned this time. His limbs and torso still felt… deadened, somehow. Deep in his chest, a hollowness echoed, a missing rhythm he couldn’t name. Alric cocked his head, listening for it, and found only silence. Something had shifted. The magic—what he suspected strongly was Orthuun’s borrowed power—had changed him.

“It’s nothing,” he grinned, eventually, hearing himself force cheer. “I can’t fight, so I’m glad to be of some use to those of you who do.”

“More than some use,” Maelen chuckled, slapping him on the shoulder. He experienced the blow as… blunted. “We’re lucky you spent two months studying that book before we give it back.”

Vessa was squinting at him, her face appraising. He briefly caught her gaze then looked away.

“Yes, well. I need to make water, then we’ll eat?” The words had barely left his numbed lips before he spun and moved to be alone in the woods.

That night, lying awake beneath the quiet trees, Alric finally understood the hollowness in his chest.

His heart no longer beat.

Duskmarch 22, Wyrdsday, Year 731.

The next day was gray and forgettable. Cold rain fell, not as heavy as before, but steady enough to soak everything. Alric said nothing of his discovery: that he might already be dead, walking in borrowed flesh. But the realization made him distracted and irritable, and both Maelen and Vessa were quickly driven away from any conversation. The two of them fell into familiar banter while Alric pulled his hood over his bowed head and plodded dutifully wherever Maelen pointed.

He ate little that day but was more than a little relieved to find that he had an appetite, that his stomach growled from lack of food. He chewed his rations slowly. The jerky and oat cakes tasted dull, muted. Still, if he could feel hunger, perhaps his body wasn’t truly dead. What would happen if he continued to use his magic, however? It was a troubling question, and one his mind continued to grapple throughout the wet, muddy trek south.

The rain blurred everything. They trudged south through low ridges and scrub forests, where sandstone outcroppings loomed like old bones in the mist. Alric may have found it beautiful at some times of year, but all he focused on now was his own inner emptiness, the gloomy drizzle matching his mood.

That night, they found a rocky shelf that offered some protection from the wet for camp. The trees around them were scattered and smaller than the Greenwood Rise, but hardly enough to constitute a forest. By Wink’s instructions, they were a mere day away from Hadren Kelthorn and the Starless Rift. Maelen, still in rare good humor, wondered aloud what waited for them. Alric only muttered, his thoughts too heavy to share. The two women whispered after that, and soon it was time for sleep.

Duskmarch 23, Thornsday, Year 731.

“Shit!”

The curse snapped Alric awake. He flailed in his blanket, heartless chest tightening in confusion. “What is it?” It was lighter than night, he thought, as his mind took in his environment, but difficult to tell whether dawn had come because of the drizzle and heavy clouds above them.

Beside him, Maelen climbed to her feet, black mace in hand. She had taken to sleeping in her chain shirt, which Alric thought must have been wickedly uncomfortable. Better discomfort than death, he supposed.

Vessa hurled another curse, kicking something. “They’ve already gone! My pack’s torn open!”

“Who?” Alric blinked, still confused and not fully awake. He noted that his limbs still held that numb heaviness, his chest hollow. What did it mean that his heart wasn’t beating? One couldn’t live without a heart, could they? What had happened to him?

“I don’t… aargh! Rats, maybe. Or skratts again. They took some of the food and ran.”

“Not skratts, then,” Maelen grunted. “At least not the ones we fought in Vastren Hollow. Your face would have been chewed.”

“Well, they bloody well weren’t small rats. Something bigger. Maybe another kind of vermin. Gods damn these wilds! I don’t…” Vessa balled up her fists and shrieked into the gloom, stamping her foot.

Maelen crossed the distance between them and cuffed her hard on the shoulder. The slighter woman stumbled and looked up accusatorily.

“Shut it, lass. Screaming bloody murder isn’t going to help, just bring nasties to us. We lost some food. Nobody died.”

Alric grimaced at the comment, then pulled himself out of his morbid reverie to watch his companions. Maelen missed the point. Vessa wasn’t angry about the food—it was that it happened on her watch. Maybe she’d fallen asleep, or wandered away from camp at some point, or simply been distracted. Whatever the case, the thief’s keen eyes had failed to spot another thief, and she was furious with herself. Vessa Velthorn, Alric had come to understand, did not like to feel vulnerable.

“I was sick of oat cakes and jerky anyway,” Alric said into the terse silence. “Perhaps you can hunt us a rabbit or squirrel? I’d love a proper meal.”

Vessa looked at him and seemed about to say something wicked. She snapped her mouth shut, though, and rubbed furiously at her short hair. “Fine. Yeah,” she said. “I can catch us something.”

Maelen caught Alric’s eyes and gave him an approving nod. Then she turned to Vessa and said, “Good. That’s settled. Fix the packs, then we go see our friend Hadren.”

By the end of the day, the two women’s moods had flipped. Vessa stalked off ahead to forage and returned midday with an entire family of wild turkeys she’d found wandering amidst the shrubs and low hills. They paused to clean and cook them. Alric set aside his brooding to follow Vessa’s brisk instructions. The dagger felt heavy and alien in his wooden fingers, but she seemed pleased with his work. By the time they continued south, their stomachs were pleasantly full of meat, with enough left for dinner that night.

Unfortunately, the rain befouled Maelen’s attempts to navigate the hills. Had the weather been clear, she groused, finding the Starless Rift’s location would have been easy from a hilltop. Instead, they wandered aimlessly in the wet, muddy grasses, without a glimpse of Hadren or a distinguishing landmark of any kind. As the skies began to darken, she grumpily called for them to make camp. She gnawed her turkey by the fire, cursing the gods’ rain, a blind woman’s useless directions, and the endless gray hills. Alric and Vessa shared a smile at her ranting, and when Maelen saw it, she stormed off into the rain to… well, he couldn’t really make it out amidst the cursing and Vessa’s laughter. In any case, they slept wet and dirty that night. Alric focused hard amidst the dark and silence, but his heart remained still. Whenever he thought of using his magic, his mind winced away.

Duskmarch 24, Goldday, Year 731.

The rain only increased the next day, making Alric wake to Maelen’s curses. He couldn’t remember being dry after so many consecutive wet days, and a deep chill had settled into his bones to go along with the hollow emptiness left by his magic. All three of the companions broke their camp perfunctorily, with little conversation.

Though they’d vowed to explore the surrounding area for the Starless Rift and Hadren, the task seemed impossible given the weather. Vessa suggested that they wait out the rain, but Maelen shook her head at the idea. She kept glancing down at the mace at her hip, idly touching the weapon’s head almost as a habit, and said they needed to find the Rift soon. Alric wondered about that but was too lost in his own misery to question her.

So, without a clear plan, they began a trek through the overgrown ridges and craggy hills, the only sounds their squelching boots and the constant thrum of the rainfall. It was an aimless, fruitless morning of exploration, but sometime around midday Alric called the others to him with urgent waves of his hand.

“What is it, lad?” Maelen asked, looking like a drowned dog, her clothes soaked through and water running into her eyes. Vessa remained sheltered beneath her oiled travel cloak but looked no drier.

“I… hear something,” he said hesitantly. “Do you?”

The two women cocked their heads, concentrating. Vessa shook her head, but Maelen said, “Just the mace, humming as it does.”

“It hums?” Vessa asked, surprised.

“You don’t hear the chanting?” Alric asked urgently. They looked at him long and hard, pursing their lips, a clear sign they didn’t. He grimaced. “This way, then. Follow me.”

Though he almost always had quiet, barely perceptible whispers at the back of his perceptions these days, late in the morning a new sound had begun to overlay it, so subtly at first he wasn’t sure it was there. As they’d stopped to refill their waterskins with rainwater, Alric had recognized a voice, deep and somber, saying something just beyond understanding, though it seemed to be the same words or phrase repeatedly. When he turned, one direction caused the voice to raise its volume, just barely. It was in that direction he walked. With each shuffling, mud-caked step, it grew louder.

By the time they’d crested another low hill, the voice was distinct, not so much drowning out the constant whispers but somehow building upon them, like a background chorus to the repeated chant. The words, though, still eluded him.

Alric stopped with a start and shielded his eyes with a hand. Then he gasped.

They’d found the Starless Rift.

At first, he couldn’t make sense of it. Rain blurred everything into motion. Then the land itself resolved—a jagged scar stretching from the foot of a crag into the plain beyond. Wider than two humans laid end to end for most of its length, the rift was shaped somewhat like a crescent moon, black and empty like, well… a starless night sky. Even from this distance, Alric could sense the unnatural emptiness of it, an open wound in the earth needing to be healed.

Standing between the crevice and their hill was Hadren Kelthorn. He stood as straight as he was able with his bent back, his sparse hair plastered to his pale skull. Gone were the homespun clothes, replaced by dark robes as black as the Starless Rift.

What surrounded Hadren took Alric the most time to comprehend. Symbols were arrayed around him, like ones he’d seen etched within the vault of Thornmere Hold but huge, each one as large as the man at their center. The symbols formed a wide circle, black and bulky. Not carved, but built. At first, Alric thought they were stone. Then bile rose in his throat as he understood.

They were bodies. Dozens and dozens of corpses, all in black robes like Hadren’s, lay arrayed in patterned symbols around him. Alric thought that perhaps they were merely praying, but then he saw that Hadren must have needed to sever limbs or heads to create the symbols. Blood pooled around each construction, almost black in the weak, rain-clouded light, and Alric could see white flashes of bones everywhere. His mind reeled at the scene, skittering away from the mutilation and grotesquerie before him.

“By the Rootmother,” Maelen breathed, as she too made sense of it. Vessa stood motionless next to her, jaw clenched tight like she was willing herself not to vomit.

Hadren threw his arms wide in greeting, water spraying from the sleeves of his black robe.

“Welcome!” he called through the rain. “I’m so glad you made it.”

Next: Hadren Kelthorn [with game notes]

[game-notes version here]

XVI.

Duskmarch 21, Ashday, Year 731.

“Is it always foggy in the hills?” Alric asked. Maelen waited for complaint, but his tone was curious, not whining, so she held her tongue.

“Usually,” she said, stepping over a fallen branch. “Welcome to winter in the Greenwood Rise, lad. It doesn’t snow like in the capital, but you may not see the sun.”

“Mm.” He stepped over the same branch awkwardly, catching his robe on a twig. “I was just wondering how much Orthuun might be influencing the region.”

“What does the fog have to do with it?” Maelen asked, like he was being dumb instead of her.

“Well, it’s a form of blinding, isn’t it? He doesn’t seem to like sight, or much of anything, frankly.”

That gave her pause. The lad’s mind was always working out connections. “The Blind Sovereign, eh?” she snorted. “I think it’s just fog, not some demon of darkness.”

“He hates light and vision,” Alric said. “But he’s not a demon of darkness, exactly. It’s more like Orthuun is the absence of everything. He’s the void left behind when you’ve erased everything. Complete oblivion.”

“So, darkness,” Maelen grunted.

“No, no. You see…”

Abruptly, Alric stopped speaking and moving. Instinctively, Maelen did the same, listening.

The forest went still.

Then came the humming—low, steady, almost beneath hearing. For a heartbeat she thought it was her own pulse.

Then she realized it was coming from her hip.

The black mace was humming, low and in a steady beat. To Maelen, it felt like a warning. She pulled the weapon from her belt loop and settled the comforting weight of it into her palms.

To her left, Alric’s book pulsed with a faint gray light, each flare answering her mace’s thrum in perfect counter-rhythm. The wan book shed little actual illumination, which reminded her of Sarin the Night Captain’s eyes. That thought made a shiver run down her spine, and she shook her head angrily to focus. The lad wasn’t even noticing the pulsing light in his hand and instead was looking up and into the branches above. Maelen followed his gaze.

Through the fog drifted half a dozen gray wisps, glowing like the light from Alric’s book. For a heartbeat, Maelen imagined a vast Nightwight peering down through the mists. But these were only lights, drifting apart and circling with no pattern she could follow.

Sure enough, every time the lights ebbed, Maelen’s mace thrummed. It was as if they were two halves of a steady signal, or else calling and responding to one another. The lights bobbed and drifted ever closer, like dandelion seeds settling back to earth.

“What are they lad?” she whispered.

“Something bad,” he breathed. “Orthuun’s found us.”

Maelen brought two fingers to her mouth and blew a sharp whistle. Then she gripped her mace in two hands, ready for a fight. Though she didn’t know what harm a puff of light could do to her, Alric seemed spooked.

The eerie wisp drifted closer. One near Alric pulsed out of rhythm, then lashed him with gray tendrils of lightning. He gasped, body convulsing, as more orbs circled him in small, silent storms. His skin blackened where the light touched.

Then a jolt hit Maelen, her back arching against her will. It was a hurt like she’d never experienced, sudden and bone deep. She grit her teeth and roared a challenge, swinging her spiked mace at a sphere that had come particularly close.

Her black mace struck solid resistance, like hitting a soft melon. The orb reeled, wobbling drunkenly in the air. Just then a whisper in the air signaled one of Vessa’s arrows, piercing another orb. The shaft lingered mid-air, trapped in the ball of gray light. The lass had heard the signal and come running.

Maelen grinned viciously and spun to face an orb that had drifted close behind her. “Come on then!” she challenged.

For the next several heartbeats, Maelen swung her humming mace left and right, batting the soft, floating orbs away as they lanced her with small bolts of lightning. At one point, two floated away faster than they’d approached, and she figured they had gone in pursuit of Vessa and her arrows.

Maelen glanced at Alric, who had dropped to one knee while one of the lights crackled silent gray lightning into him. With a snarl, she brought her mace two-handed in a wide, arcing strike. The spiked head of her weapon burst the thing. It exploded in a puff of gray, wispy light, once again reminding her of dandelion seeds drifting in the wind. Then they were gone, and with it the offending wisp.

“Ha!” she shouted in triumph. “They can be killed, lad! Get up and fight!”

Another shock of pain lanced through her, and then Vessa was there, stabbing it with her shortsword, still holding her bow in the other hand. The sphere of translucent light stayed pinned on the blade momentarily, then floated drunkenly away, as if gaining its bearings.

Another orb floated out of the fog and woods over Vessa’s shoulder. The lass must have seen the look in Maelen’s eyes, because she spun with her sword held up just as it passed close enough to crackle with lightning.

Lightning slammed into her shoulder, then her leg. She staggered, grunting. Three gray lights circled, drawn either to her wounds or to the humming black mace in her grip. Her muscles trembled; every shock stole more of her strength.

The gray orbs again reminded her of Sarin’s eyes again—the same pallid gaze, the same soul-draining touch. She saw his gaunt hand closing over her skull, felt the weakness flooding her limbs. The memory pulled her down, down, down into that old darkness, until fury brought her back.

With a roar, she swung the mace with sudden speed, surprising one of the wisps of light. It burst into fading motes as her weapon struck it. Maelen continued the swing, spinning to hit a second orb. Pieces of eerie light shimmered in the forest and then were gone.

She settled the mace firmly in both her hands, turning to the last, pulsing orb. Maelen had lost any awareness of Alric or Vessa; it was only her against the vision of Sarin’s skeletal, pale face, with those gray lights where his eyes should be. She’d put out all but one of the eyes. The last one bobbed and danced in the air, sparks of lightning dancing off it.

“No more eyes,” she snarled, hefting the mace.

Lightning seared her ribs. She barely felt it.

“No more!”

She brought the mace down with everything she had. The orb bobbed to one side, but Maelen had anticipated it. The heavy, spiked head smashed the light into the forest floor. It burst. Gray light shimmered briefly in a wide circle around her mace and then died.

Maelen dropped to one knee, panting. Alric was there suddenly, supporting her.

“It’s over,” he said. “Let me see to your wounds.”

“It’s not over,” Vessa replied from behind her. “There was one more that went searching for me. I lost it, but it could find us again.”

“Help me up, lad,” Maelen hissed through gritted teeth. “There will be time for healing later. Let’s put distance between us and here.”

He seemed ready to argue but just nodded and pulled her to her feet. She noticed blackened marks on him, too, where the lightning had touched. Strong lad, brave and fierce. At least one of those orbs had died to him and the wild swinging of that stick he did. She or Vessa should probably teach him some proper fighting skills.

“Can you walk?” he asked, face a mask of concern.

“I can bloody walk,” she knocked his hand off her gruffly and straightened. The whole forest seemed to sway, but she shook her head and spit into the fallen leaves. “Let’s go.”

Orthuun has found us, Alric said. Maybe he was right.

They moved west through the mists, silent, waiting for the Blind Sovereign’s next move.

Next: When The Heart Stops [with game notes]