Chapter 26: The City and the Cave¶
From the Field Journal of Perry Marlowe, Pentarch of Inquiry¶
Mother said that faith without action was merely sentiment. She was a wood elf druid of Erastil — chose a halfling alchemist for reasons I have never entirely understood — and she taught me, through long afternoons in our garden, the difference between worship and stewardship. Erastil does not require temples, she said. He requires that someone remember why the temples were built. I have carried that distinction with me as long as I have carried anything else she gave me.
A year ago this month, almost to the day, we stood in a clearing in the Greenbelt and watched a cursed bear collapse into an old man’s skeleton with a look of peace on his face. The man had been a Taldan priest, last keeper of an Erastilian shrine, and he had broken under the weight of his own watchpost — surrounded by trolls and kobolds and boggards he had not been sent to fight, abandoned by a homeland that had decided the frontier was no longer worth holding. He lured a grizzly bear into his clearing and sacrificed it in the name of “any who would answer the call.” His god did not answer. Something else did. He spent two centuries as the warden of his own betrayal, until we put him down on a wet morning in Pharast (Mar) of last year and the clearing began to breathe again. I sketched the restoration plans the same evening. I had been waiting since.
I rode south alone, but for two pack mules and the bound copy of the Restov chapter-book Mother had annotated in her cramped elven hand. I had carried it unopened in my saddlebag for six years. I opened it on the road. The march had been claimed the previous month; the temple itself I had not visited since the day we killed the cursed guardian. The clearing had changed in our absence. Where the ground had been bare and bone-dry, it was thick now with new grass and the early shoots of returning wildflowers. The pool that had run black with algae for two centuries ran clear. A pair of jays argued in the upper canopy as I dismounted, which was the kind of detail I had not allowed myself to anticipate but which I noted with the precision Mother would have insisted upon.
The cliff was as I remembered it: three hundred feet across, a hundred feet high, the great elk’s face carved into the western rock with weathered patience, the antlers descending from the brow to frame a fifty-foot cave-mouth at the base. Ancient stone pillars stood at the clearing’s perimeter, half-swallowed by the thorns we had not had time to clear on our first visit. The moss-encrusted steps to the cave entrance ran with new lichen. The whole place looked, accurately, like a shrine that had been tended by no one for two centuries and gently reawakened by the death of one cursed bear. Restoration would be the next step. That was my work.
I had brought masons. Six from Olegton, a team of carpenters from Stormfire Reach’s new district, and two of Bokken’s apprentices for the cleansing of the pool. We cleared the thorns by hand and by careful flame, leaving the ancient pillars standing and the older root-systems undisturbed. We raised the moss-eaten steps and reset the stones the centuries had loosened. We restored the elk’s brow where weathering had bitten too deeply into the original carving — the masons matched the antler-line within a quarter-inch by the third day, which was finer work than I had any right to ask of frontier hands but which they delivered without complaint when they understood whose face they were repairing. The pool we drained and refilled from the brook above the clearing, and the algae did not return. The water ran clear within a day of its first refill. My engineers had not predicted that result. I declined to explain it to them.
What I could not do alone was the consecration. The original rites were Erastilian in their structure but Taldan in their idiom, and Taldor’s frontier ministers had practiced a form of the faith that had not survived even into Mother’s training, let alone into mine. I could read the inscriptions. I could not perform them. I sat beside the antlered altar for two days with the chapter-book open and the cave’s cold damp breath over my shoulder, and I read every margin Mother had ever left me, and the rites would not come.
Dravyn arrived on the third day. He read the inscriptions in under an hour — the runelord’s facility with old languages always startles me, even when I have prepared myself for it — and what I had taken for liturgical confusion in the original consecrators was, he explained with his particular flat clarity, a deliberate compression of three older rites into one. The Taldan ministers had known something about Erastil that the modern clergy has forgotten. They had known him as a god of frontiers, not of farms. The rites, properly understood, worked. By dusk on the third day the pool ran clear under the new sun and the wildflowers had begun opening at the antler-base; by morning, birdsong I had not heard in any of my prior visits had returned to the upper canopy. Should a settlement ever rise in this march, the temple will receive it as a free shrine — which is the kind of mathematics, as it happens, that Mother would have approved of.
She always said that faith without action was merely sentiment. The fallen cleric, two centuries dead, had learned that lesson too late. The original consecrators had known it from the beginning. The work was less restoration than recognition.
That, I think, is also a phrase she would have endorsed.
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I. The Conclave at Stormfire Reach¶
Early Calistril (Feb), 4711 AR
The first day of Calistril (Feb) broke cold and clean over the Tuskwater. Snow lay thin across the rooftops of Stormfire Reach, and the Thorn River ran iron-dark beneath a brittle skin of ice along its margins. The barges had been pulled up since Kuthona (Dec); the dockhands kept their working hours short and their hearths long; and in the conclave hall above the council stair, the Stormfire Pentarchy gathered for the first working session of the new month.
The hall was warm in the way that civic chambers manage at midwinter: the great hearth at one end fed steadily by the stewards, the heavy curtains drawn across the narrow windows, the air thick with beeswax, hearth-smoke, and the faint vegetal scent of new parchment. Five Pentarchs took their seats around the long oak table. Linzi the Emissary brought her satchel of correspondence from Restov, Varnhold, and the trading houses. Harrim the Viceroy occupied his usual corner with a stack of Olegton survey notes already half-unrolled. Valerie, Pentarchy Chief of Staff, opened the master ledger and uncapped the standing inkwell with the brisk efficiency of someone who had been preparing for the meeting since before the sun was up.
The agenda was Perry’s, drafted across the previous week and pinned at the head of the table for amendment. The treasury had been swelled by the prior month’s accounting — a clean upkeep, no consumption strain, the kingdom’s reputation rising by an honest measure as work crews finished the late-Abadius (Jan) commitments. There were nine working hands’ worth of effort to allocate across the month, and the Pentarchs intended to use every one. Stormfire Reach’s growth alone was a signal that the council had hit its stride: the residential blocks of Block Two were filling out with families who had wintered in tents, and Perry had drawn out a timetable that, if it held, would cross the threshold from town to city within three weeks.
The plans were ambitious. Perry walked them through it in his methodical way — Olegton’s expansion, the temple in Tiressia’s march waiting to be properly restored, the trade work with the Sootscales and the Rostlanders, the road network threading toward Wyrmwatch from the southwest, the standing matter of the troll sightings on the northern frontier that had begun to recur with monthly regularity. He did not raise his voice. He rarely did. But by the time he had finished, the council understood that the month was about to be busy.
Dravyn signed his name to the charter for the day, the runelord’s draconic features unmoved beneath the hearth-light, and the meeting moved into its working phase. The agenda would expand. It would also contract — work plans always did, when the Stolen Lands had their say.
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II. The Yield of the Month¶
Calistril (Feb), 4711 AR
Calistril’s work was uneven, and that unevenness would be remembered as faithfully as the triumphs. The month began strongly. Harrim, with his usual fatalistic mutter, oversaw a row of houses in Olegton’s second block — a long line of timber-frame dwellings rising along the rise above the old trading post, hammers ringing from dawn until dusk through the cold dry air. By the end of the second week, families who had wintered in canvas lean-tos along the river bank had walls and hearths and roofs. The block filled out. The blacksmith took a permanent shop. The general store widened its eaves. And on a sharp bright morning in mid-Calistril (Feb), when the new houses opened their doors for the first formal market day, Olegton crossed the threshold from village to town. The transition was quiet — there was no ceremony, only the smoke of new fires and the smell of fresh bread from a baker’s shed that had not existed the month before — but the consequence was real. The settlement now had its own administrative shadow, its own fledgling civic apparatus, its own claim on the Pentarchy’s attention.
Stormfire Reach’s expansion came next, and it came on Rust’s hands. The goblin oracle had not been the obvious choice to direct urban construction, but he had a steady eye for what work crews needed and a healer’s patience with their injuries, and the result was the kind of building campaign that crew foremen would speak of for years afterward. He laid out the new district along the river’s south bend, supervised the framing personally, and the houses rose with such efficiency that half the lumber and fittings the Pentarchy had earmarked for the project came back unspent. By the third week of Calistril (Feb), the new block was complete; by the fourth, the families had moved in; and on the day the last roof was hung, Stormfire Reach itself crossed the threshold from town to city. The capital’s administrative reach extended outward by a third, sweeping Olegton and the new farmland into its formal embrace. “Well, then,” Rust said, scratching Dog behind the ears as the council reviewed the survey lines. “Not bad for a goblin and a wolf.” Perry, for his part, caught himself in a moment of private regret — that he had not seen the speed of the milestones coming, that he would have sited Stormfire Reach further from Olegton had he known how quickly the two settlements would press up against each other. He logged the lesson. The next settlement would be spaced with more deliberation.
The Temple of the Elk was a more delicate labour. The march containing the ancient Erastilian shrine had been claimed the previous month, but the structure itself — defiled in ages past, its consecrators long dead, its rites half-remembered — required specialized knowledge that Perry, for all his Folklore training, did not entirely possess. His first attempt at the work foundered on a doctrinal knot he could not untangle alone. Dravyn answered the difficulty in his own way: with arcane research that committed a small portion of the kingdom’s reserves to a Supernatural Solution, the runelord laying out a runic schema that bridged the gap between what Perry knew and what the original consecrators had practiced. The two of them worked the restoration together in the second half of the month — Perry walking the perimeter with his ledger of feast-days and forgotten rites, Dravyn tracing sigils into the cleansed stone — and when the work was complete, the antlered altar stood again in clear morning light, the pool below it ringed with grass that had not grown there in three centuries. The temple would now serve as a refuge to any traveler in its march; should a settlement ever rise in that ground, the temple would function as a free shrine within it. Perry, examining the elk-headed altar at the end of his work, allowed himself a rare moment of quiet satisfaction.
“Curious. The original consecrators understood Erastil better than most modern clerics. The work was not so much restoration as recognition.”
— Perry Marlowe, on the restored Temple of the Elk
The territorial work was Dravyn’s. The runelord dispatched survey teams into the march south of Tiressia’s Grove early in the month, and the boundary-walk came back so cleanly that an entire additional region’s worth of work unfolded at no further cost. The Magister put that bonus into roads — two stretches of forest road cut through difficult terrain, threading southwest from the Grove toward Wyrmwatch, surveyed with arcane precision and finished with such efficiency that the road crews could have laid twice the length without strain. Rust then marked out a second march by his own magical means, expanding Athanor’s claim by one further square in the same direction. By month’s end, the kingdom extended two full marches further south than it had at the start of Calistril (Feb), and the road network was beginning to look like a genuine system rather than a collection of cleared paths.
Grotdor took the southern plains in hand. The plot south of Olegton — flat, dark-soiled, drainage running clean toward the river — had been eyeing cultivation since the thaw of late Abadius (Jan). The kineticist’s first attempt at organizing the work was a disappointment; he committed a measure of the Pentarchy’s reputation to a second effort, and the second swing landed clean. Settler families staked out the new plots, ploughs bit into the cold spring earth, and the Pentarchy christened the holding “Oleg’s Bounty 2” — a continuation of the naming convention from the autumn. “Just put Oleg’s name on everything,” Rust observed, “so he’s immortalized in ways he never wanted.” The original Oleg, who had not asked to become the axis of a regional economy, had stopped commenting on the matter weeks ago.
Trade work threaded through the rest of the month. Linzi, working through Perry’s office, dispatched envoys to Varnhold, the Rostlanders, and the Sootscale Kobolds, formalizing the three trade agreements that had been the season’s quiet diplomatic project. Perry allocated a portion of the treasury to secure favorable terms; Linzi rode the routes herself for ten days; and by the time she returned, the agreements were signed and the first caravans were already on the roads east. The Pentarchy could expect a meaningful infusion of resources at the start of Pharast (Mar) — coin, ore, lumber, stone — enough to fund the next wave of construction without strain. Grotdor, meanwhile, signed a stone manifest with the Sootscale partners, moving four cartloads of quarried stone south through the foothills in exchange for a queued share of next month’s revenues. The kineticist initialled the parchment with the spare disciplined neatness that everything he did seemed to acquire.
“Heat answers. So does stone.”
— Grotdor “the Burninator” Phlogiston, signing the Sootscale stone manifest
Not everything held. The second house build of the month — Harrim’s, this time in Wyrmwatch — was a calamity. The first attempt collapsed in a tangle of warped lumber and cracked foundations; a second effort, paid for in burned political capital, fared no better. By sunset on the day the framing crew gave up, the lot was rubble, and the displaced laborers were grumbling about wages and theft in the swamp-edge taverns. Crime in the kingdom ticked upward as a direct result, and an attempt to address it through Linzi’s chapbooks and street-corner orators became a public embarrassment when one of the broadsides was misprinted with a libelous description of a respected merchant. The setback drove unrest higher rather than lower. Linzi accepted the failure with a tight-jawed silence; Elroy, ever ready to defend a friend, clarified loudly to the table that the misfire had not been her own hand. Perry, reviewing his own reputation work that same week, discovered he had directed his effort against the wrong category of ruin altogether. “Curious,” he murmured, examining his notes after the fact. “Crime would have been the correct target.” He had attended instead to Corruption.
Elroy’s publicity office never went up. The General had set out to commission a small civic announcement house in Stormfire Reach’s new district; the announcement went unwritten, the office unstaffed, and by the third week the timber that had been earmarked for it had been quietly redirected to other use. Valerie, Chief of Staff, attempted her own reputation campaign against the slow-creeping decay of the kingdom’s older infrastructure, and that effort fizzled as well. “Burn the werewolf,” Perry offered drily, glancing toward Elroy after the third reputation campaign of the month had collapsed. “At least we can blame him.” By month’s end, three of the Pentarchy’s quieter ambitions had failed cleanly — and the council had taken its lessons.
The month closed with two events worth remembering. The first was an omen of unusual generosity: a sudden absence of intrigue and machination across Athanor’s diplomatic horizon, coinciding with rising public approval — a confluence that, properly leveraged through political work, could shave both ruin and unrest from the books in a single stroke. The Pentarchy chose to bank the moment rather than spend it. None of the council’s training lay in the politics of states; better to hold the omen in reserve until it could be cashed at advantage. The second event was less generous. Troll sightings on the northern frontier — the recurring murmur from the marches beyond the Tuskwater’s western reach — demanded the Pentarchy’s monthly attention. Grotdor, as Warden, marshalled the kingdom’s frontier patrols personally, riding the perimeter with three squads of light cavalry and a half-dozen of his own kinetic apprentices. The borders held. The worry, however, could not be entirely tamped down; a measure of unrest rose anyway, as it would every month until the underlying troll problem was confronted in the field rather than merely watched.
By the close of Calistril (Feb), the ledgers had been written and the work logged. Stormfire Reach was a city. Olegton was a town. The Temple of the Elk stood restored. Two new marches had been added to the kingdom’s territory and threaded with road. Oleg’s Bounty 2 was sown and waiting for spring. And the trolls remained, somewhere in the western dark, biding their time.
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III. South of the Tuskwater¶
Mid-Calistril (Feb), 4711 AR
With the conclave’s books closed and the resource-revenues queued for Pharast (Mar), the Pentarchy returned to the field. Two squares of unexplored country lay south of the river — one east, one southeast — and after a brief consultation around a campaign map at the new pier, the council elected to push southeast first, scouting toward the Tuskwater’s far shore. The river would have to be crossed eventually. For now they followed the southern bank along an old game trail, the day warm and humid in a way that felt out of season for late winter, the green light of the canopy dappling down through the leafless upper branches as if the season itself had been confused.
They came upon the brook first. It ran clean from the rocks, threading down through moss and flat shale into a small pool beneath an overhanging cliff face. And then they smelled it — rank, wet, mildewed cloth and bad breath and something organic and recently dead — drifting from a cave mouth that opened in the cliff above the brook.
Elroy paused, hybrid features twitching. The Pentarch of Valor had been afflicted in the late autumn — the curse from the Wyrmwatch hermit had taken root despite Bokken’s best efforts — and on the first night of Calistril (Feb) he had let himself shift fully for the first time since the moon had turned, taking the wolfish form deliberately rather than be taken by it. The shift had carried over into this morning’s scouting. He stood now at the head of the trail in werewolf hybrid shape, jaws open, the imprecise scent of the cave hitting him like a wall.
“Dog,” he rumbled to Rust’s wolf companion, who had paused beside him with hackles already lifting, “is this what you smell ALL the time? How do you HANDLE it?”
Dog made no reply. Dog had better sense.
The grass thickened unnaturally as they approached the cave mouth — patterned in a way that spoke to long habituation, to creatures that had walked the same approach for years. Then the bones came into focus. Teeth. Fingers. Ribs. Broken and gnawed and ground into the moss until the moss itself was half-skeleton. A more recent corpse lay near the cave’s entrance, half-eaten, the tooth marks suggesting something pug-shaped and persistent. Perry crouched at the edge of the bone-strewn ground and studied the patterns the way he might have studied a crime scene: the distribution of the kills, the age of the deepest bones, the fact that nothing seemed to have displaced whatever lived here.
A wheezing snort from the cave. Then a porcine grunt. A chubby, vile, green pig-thing trotted around the rock face on stubby legs, ringed with orange pustules at its head and shoulders, glowing eyes lolling in their sockets, tongue dangling. It looked, briefly, almost adorable. Then the rest of it registered, and adorable was not the word.
Perry’s mind clicked into place, eyes never leaving the creature. The match came easily — a trollhound, troll-kin, regenerating, weak to fire and electricity. “There will be more.”
Dravyn had already begun his preparation. The runelord traced a sigil along the inside of his glaive, drew arcane reserve into his own flesh, and the runes on his armor flickered with a brief violet pulse. Behind them, from the southern brush, a second snort answered the first.
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IV. The Hateful Hermit and His Dogs¶
Mid-Calistril (Feb), 4711 AR
Elroy moved first. The Pentarch of Valor scrambled up the five-foot ledge to the cave’s lip in a half-bound — the climb difficult in his hybrid form — planted himself at the threshold, and slammed his shield against the stone with a thunderous howl that announced his presence to anything within a quarter-mile.
“COME ON THEN! Step BEHIND me, lads — I’VE GOT THIS!”
Three trollhounds answered the call. They came snapping up the slope from the cave’s interior, jaws clicking, heavy bodies low to the ground. Elroy met them shield-first.
Then the foliage south of the party erupted. A wild-haired bearded man burst from cover with a savage shout — pale-eyed, foaming-mad, blowgun raised — and a poisoned dart cracked through the air toward Perry. “Get away from my dogs, you sons of bitches!” The dart took Perry in the side of the neck. The Graveroot poison flooded his system; he held against it on the second attempt at the resistance, but the wound itself was real, the venom burning through the muscle. Perry’s hand was already on his alchemist’s vial-belt by the time the shout finished. He smashed a Lesser Smoke Ball at his own feet, vanishing into a five-foot cloud of concealing fog, and noted aloud — to no one in particular — that the hermit was the priority.
A third trollhound burst from the southern brush at the same instant and barreled into Dravyn from his blind side. The bite was savage — the runelord’s protective reserve absorbed half of it but the rest punched through — and only the False Vitality he had cast at the trail’s edge kept the wound from being worse. He turned in the bite, glaive sweeping, and carved a clean runic line across the trollhound’s flank.
“The angle belongs to me. Step no further.”
Rust answered with cold-iron needle darts, three slivers of metal that punched into the same trollhound’s hide, and a snapped command to Dog. The wolf bounded into flanking position and closed his jaws on the creature with bone-crushing precision — a clean kill, the trollhound’s head lolling, regeneration disabled on the spot.
“Dog does not like the abomination of his species,” Rust observed quietly. “This is not a real dog.”
Grotdor’s kinetic aura flared into life — a halo of disciplined fire emanating from his stance — and a quick lance of flame pinned the corpse to the ground long enough to finish what Dog had started. The kineticist strode forward, tried a second blast on a different trollhound, and missed wide. “Clean and quick,” he said to no one, and reset his stance.
Three more trollhounds — Overemotional, Modest, Adept — closed the distance and circled Elroy’s shield-wall, snapping at his armored flanks without finding any opening. A fourth, called Fantastic in the register Perry had begun keeping in his head, joined the dogpile. Elroy stood at the cave mouth like a one-man rampart.
The second exchange tilted further. Elroy swept his longsword across the Fantastic trollhound in a wide horizontal arc that bit deep into the creature’s ribs, then followed with a second strike at penalty that scored well enough to leave the trollhound staggering. “GLORIOUS!” he boomed. “By the BEARDS of my fathers, you fat little dogs, have you no SHAME?”
The hermit turned his attention to Rust. “You GODDAMN goblin! Get out of here! I’ll skin you ALIVE! I’ll wear you like a coat!” A wave of focused hatred washed over the goblin oracle as the cannibal locked his eyes on him; Rust’s will held against the worst of it, but the distraction left him exposed. The hermit strode forward, raised his blowgun, and landed a brutal critical strike through the seam in Rust’s armor. Rust’s constitution shrugged off the Graveroot venom. The wound itself, however, was no small thing — a deep puncture that left the goblin’s robes wet with blood.
“My skin won’t fit you,” Rust replied evenly, blood already seeping through his robes.
“I’ll make it stretch!”
Perry assessed the hermit through the smoke. He took a measured beat, the kind of clean clinical pause that had defined his work for as long as anyone had known him, and turned the moment into a study rather than a strike. He read the cannibal’s frame: the heavy hide and rough mail, the way the man carried his shoulders, the protective angle of his blowgun arm. The match returned in his head — chaotic, evil, human, harder to crack than the trollhounds had been but not impossibly so. He brewed a Cat’s Eye Elixir with a second versatile vial, drank it down, sharpened his vision through the concealing fog, and loaded Infernis with a standard bolt. The shot struck the hermit cleanly, opening a bleeding wound in his chest. “Hypothesis confirmed,” Perry murmured, already reaching for a second cartridge.
Dravyn drew on his bonded weapon to recall a previously cast spell, raised his hand, and unleashed a Lightning Bolt down the line of trollhounds — a long lance of arcane current that split the air with a sound like the world cracking. Three of the creatures were caught in the discharge: the Overemotional took the worst of it head-on, the Edgy and Orderly catching the edges of the strike, and the regeneration of all three was permanently disabled by the electricity. The runes hung in the air for a moment afterward, glowing faintly violet.
“Wrath is a tool,” Dravyn said quietly. “So is geometry.”
Rust commanded Dog into a flanking strike on the Adept trollhound that had emerged from the second ambush; the wolf’s jaws crit hard, tearing a deep wound. Rust then strode forward and loosed a second volley of cold-iron darts that further bloodied the creature.
Grotdor opened his stance into a Blazing Wave — a wide cone of channeled fire that swept across the dogpile and caught Elroy in friendly fire. “Hold,” the kineticist warned, and released. Five trollhounds were caught in the cone; two took the full force of the burn through hide gone instantly black, three twisted aside fast enough to take only half the heat. Elroy shrugged off the lick of flame across his armor with a grin. Grotdor reactivated his aura, put a quick blast into the Adept trollhound to keep its regeneration shut down, and pivoted.
The wounded trollhounds regenerated at the top of their next turns, troll-blood reasserting itself on the creatures whose regeneration had not been disabled, and the Overemotional struck back at Elroy with a savage critical bite. The General’s body shrugged off the Bloodfire Fever — the curse already in his blood having no purchase for a second infection — and absorbed the wound on muscle and pride.
The third exchange was Dravyn’s. The runelord unleashed a second Lightning Bolt, the line carving through Edgy and Fantastic trollhounds; both collapsed where they stood, regeneration disabled by the electricity, the air thick with the smell of seared meat. Dravyn followed with a Sure Strike–augmented glaive thrust that ran the Overemotional through clean — the blade emerging on the far side, the creature’s body falling sizzling to the cave floor.
“Dog. Pig. Troll,” Dravyn murmured. Three confirmed kills in a single span.
Rust flanked the hermit with Dog and called Crisis of Faith down on the cannibal’s mind — riddling doubt, half-felt accusations, the weight of a god’s silent disapproval. The hermit’s will held against the worst of it but the spell still scoured him for honest mental damage. “Your mind is about to be all over the place,” Rust said. “Easy now.”
Grotdor moved into position and began an intricate spell-trace with the deliberate care of someone who had practiced the gesture in private. Fire drew itself in the air at his bidding — a stylized double-S shape, a triangle of smaller triangles, a wing-and-arm flourish, two angular bases — and resolved into a sigil that was, even by the standards of fire-magic, deeply unfamiliar. “From the other world,” Grotdor intoned, deadpan, “known as Frog Dog.” The Flying Flame swept through three trollhounds in a single arc; the Orderly, already gravely wounded, was incinerated outright, regeneration burned out, scorched bones falling against the cave wall.
The fourth round was the worst. The Modest trollhound regenerated and lunged for Grotdor, jaws closing on empty air as Elroy threw himself between the bite and his kineticist with a shield-rim intercept that took the strike on his own ribs. The Adept trollhound regenerated and crit Rust hard — a brutal tearing wound through chitin and cloth, the goblin oracle held to consciousness by a thread of will. Then the hermit found his angle on Elroy: a whip-strike across the face for clean damage, a second sickle-strike that came down with savage finality, and Elroy’s shield rose in time to absorb part of it but not all. The shield itself was scored deeply at its rim. The cut tore through his forearm. Elroy’s strength gave out at last; the werewolf form gave way; he reverted to humanoid shape, unconscious in the moss.
Perry shot the hermit through the back of the head.
It was not even a difficult shot. A measured beat, Infernis loaded with a basic bolt, clean line of sight from the smoke he had cultivated for three rounds. The cannibal’s body slumped forward over his sickle, deader than a doornail. “How do you want to do this, Master Perry?” — the question hung in the air for a moment, the way questions sometimes did at the end of a fight.
“It’s right through the back of the head,” Perry replied.
He reloaded with acid ammunition and put the second shot into the Adept trollhound, persistent acid eating into its chitin. Dravyn’s glaive came down on the Modest trollhound for clean damage; a follow-up Blazing Bolt missed entirely on every ray, but Vengeful Glare flared in his violet eyes and the trollhound ignited from within, persistent fire consuming what remained of its regeneration.
“Wrath is patient,” Dravyn said.
Rust, finally unable to ignore his own wounds, turned his healing on himself; divine vitality flowed warm through his ribs, restoring him from a thread of consciousness to standing readiness. He commanded Dog forward, and the wolf finished the Adept with a clean tearing strike.
“This abomination of a dog,” Rust said quietly, “just needs to go away.”
Grotdor stepped to the angle, channelled his aura back into life, and opened a final Blazing Wave on the last regenerating trollhound — the Modest, clinging to a single point of life. The cone of fire ate the rest of it; when the smoke cleared, only a charred outline remained on the cave wall, a Burninator’s signature in soot and shadow.
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V. The Cave Held Quiet¶
Late Calistril (Feb), 4711 AR
The combat ended with the cannibal hermit slumped over his sickle, every trollhound a smoking pile, and the cave silent but for the drip of the brook and the hiss of cooling fat. The smell that had drawn the party half a mile along the south bank had begun, almost gently, to fade.
Rust pivoted to triage at once. He knelt beside Elroy first; the General’s chest was rising and falling but only barely, the werewolf form surrendered, the wounds raw beneath the torn mail. Rust’s first attempt at the work was poor. He committed a measure of his own resolve to the rework, drew a second breath, and the second swing landed clean — a long warm surge of healing that flooded through Elroy’s wounds, knit flesh beneath cloth, brought the General’s eyes open with a rumbling, half-articulate complaint. He had been calling for a medic from the dirt for some minutes before consciousness fully returned.
“Now THAT,” Elroy boomed, sitting up against the cave’s stone, “is what I call HEALING. Marvelous!”
The same surge closed Rust’s own wounds and patched Dog’s torn flank as well. By the time the light through the cave-mouth had turned the late afternoon gold of midwinter, all three were on their feet again. Elroy’s shield, scored by the hermit’s sickle along the rim, would need attention; Perry made a note of it.
The hermit’s stash inside the cave proved a thinner trove than the bones outside had suggested. A lesser Healing Potion, claimed by Grotdor; an Invisibility Potion, also taken by the kineticist with a quiet nod of practical interest; and a treasure map, drawn on greased leather, that Perry studied for less than thirty seconds before identifying it as a lead to a march the party had already explored months earlier. A dud. “Happens to the best of us,” Grotdor offered, with a kineticist’s even acceptance.
The cave itself, despite its grim foundation, was sound. The trollhounds had been cleared; the hermit was dead; the surrounding bones told no tale of any rival predator that might have displaced him. The party agreed that the cave would serve as a defensible camp for the night. Rust tended the lingering wounds. Perry catalogued the day’s findings — the trollhounds’ confirmed weaknesses, the hermit’s poison, the fact that a feral cannibal had been operating alone in a march no one had claimed. Grotdor banked the embers of a small fire at the cave’s mouth. Dravyn took the first watch, glaive across his lap, the runes of his armor glowing faintly violet in the dimming light.
The cannibal was dead. The kingdom was a city. And as Calistril (Feb) gave way to Pharast (Mar), Athanor stood closer to the next milestone of its young life than it had ever been — a nation that had grown faster than its founders had perhaps intended, but that had grown nonetheless, and that would carry the lessons of a hard month into the warming season. Outside the cave, the brook ran on. The bones in the dirt remained where they had fallen. But the story they told had ended.
What came next would be a beginning of its own.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
— End of Chapter XXVI —