Chapter 28: The Lights of Candlemere¶
Prologue — Grotdor, Pentarch of Flame¶
The chair came around to me with the spring, the way the charter says it must. A year of Athanor on its feet. A year of houses raised, of stockyards walled, of grain hoarded against winter and the river kept open. Not my work alone — nothing here is one man’s work — but a year, and the chair came around, and they handed it to me with that small ceremony Linzi has been quietly building into our customs. I took it. The work was the work.
I did not want it. I want flame in my hands and a clean line of fire, not a stylus and a wax seal. But want is a child’s word, and my family taught me what it bought. So I took the chair, and I sat through the morning’s reckoning, and I watched the others do what they do best. Perry counting roofs and roads. Rust calling for a festival — a holiday, of all things — and the kingdom roared for it. Stormflames, Linzi calls our citizens now. They had a name in their mouths and dancing in the streets, and Athanor felt, for a moment, like something larger than five tired heads bent over a map.
I missed twice on the morning’s aid to Valerie. The chair did not save me. The kingdom marked the misstep, and Linzi added another shadow to our young ledger when her surveyors lost a wagon train in the southern marches. We mended what we could before the day was out. You don’t burn such things away with apologies. You burn them away with the next clean strike.
And then the others looked east, toward the dark place in the middle of the lake. The lizard king’s warning still in their ears. Of course we go there. Of course. Heat answers what cold cannot. Hold — then burn. Clean and quick.
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I. The Chair Comes Around¶
Stormfire Reach — 1st of Gozran (Apr), 4711 AR
Spring came to the Thorn River the way spring always came to Athanor — reluctantly, in fits and starts, with snowmelt running brown past the new piers and the warmth never quite settling before the next cold wind found it. The capital had grown through the winter without slowing. Half-timbered houses stood where canvas had stood at the close of autumn; the smoke of new hearths laid itself in long ribbons along the bowl of the river. On the morning of the first of Gozran, exactly one year to the day since the founding charter had been pressed into Brevoy’s wax, the Pentarchy convened beneath the painted timbers of the council chamber for the second annual reckoning of their reign.
The chair turned. That was how Linzi had begun to say it, in the pamphlets her chapbook-printers were now distributing along the river roads — the Pentarchy’s ceremonial High Pentarch chair rotating among the five seats by the charter’s own clock, first among equals, never sovereign. The first year had belonged to Dravyn, whose runic precision had set the tone for a young state. The second now passed to Grotdor, Pentarch of Flame, who accepted the honor with the dry economy of a man asked to hold a torch he had not asked for. He spoke few words. He inclined his head. He took the seat at the head of the table and let the work begin.
Valerie, the Pentarchy’s Chief of Staff, set the morning’s correspondence at the foot of the table and stepped back to her place along the wall. The other Pentarchs took their seats. Perry, ledger already open, the geometry of the month’s housing notes arranged before him in the meticulous columns no one else at the table could match. Dravyn at the long end with the day’s schedule of magical surveys traced in spidery script along the margin. Rust at the far end with Dog curled at his feet, the wolf’s ears twitching at the sound of every door. Elroy, occupying half a bench by virtue of shoulder breadth alone, a hammer-sigil bright at his collar. Harrim and Linzi present in their offices. The doors closed. The year’s second cycle of governance began.
It would prove to be a long month. The capital had grown enough through the cold season that overcrowding in Oligton — the riverside settlement north of the capital, where new arrivals had been pouring in faster than walls could be raised — had begun to make itself felt in the kind of tavern-grumbling that no Pentarch could long ignore. Perry took the matter as his opening task, the way he always did. The treasury would be opened. The houses would be built.
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II. The Long Work of Gozran¶
Stormfire Reach and Oligton — Gozran (Apr), 4711 AR
Perry spent the first week of the month at Oligton’s northern edge, walking the urban grid with the surveyors and pinning the new residential block precisely where the river’s bend turned the wind in summer and broke it in winter. Construction crews were on the foundations before the seventh day. Within a fortnight, the smell of fresh-cut pine hung over the settlement’s northern quarter like a benediction, and the families who had spent the winter in canvas tents began to move into walls and hearths. The grumbling in the taverns eased before the month was out. Perry, when one of the foremen thanked him for the planning, only made a small adjustment to his ledger and made the dry observation — to no one in particular, since no one had asked — that a roof seemed to solve a great many things that were not, strictly speaking, roofs.
Elroy, who held the General’s portfolio, turned his hand to the kingdom’s lumber stocks. The second wave of housing slated for Wyrmwatch in the eastern wetlands needed timber that the kingdom’s sawyers could not, that month, supply alone. He rode out to the western trade roads to negotiate with the freelance lumber traders working the Murque — and the negotiations went sideways. The first price returned was higher than the treasury could justify; the second offer, after Elroy walked the bargain twice around the camp, came back exactly the same. The kingdom got one wagon of lumber for the price it had hoped to spend on three. Wyrmwatch’s second housing block would have to wait.
“Yeah — I just fucked our turn.”
— Elroy Jenkins, in council
He returned to Stormfire Reach with a thunderous laugh and the news, and the council adjusted. Rust, who had spent the back half of the winter quietly planning a civic anchor for the capital’s growing crowds, brought forward his Festival Hall. The work came together with the kind of efficiency that even the foremen later struggled to explain. Half the lumber set aside for the construction came back to stores; the timber rose from a foundation in the new district’s western lot in a matter of weeks, and the Pentarchy found themselves, by mid-month, in possession of a hall large enough to host the kingdom’s first civic celebration. Dravyn, meanwhile, traced the runic geometries of a Planning Office onto a foundation two blocks east — a building that would, within a few seasons, become the administrative spine of the capital’s expansion. The geometry of urban planning, he reflected privately to Perry over the survey table, was not so different from the geometry of the glaive.
The diplomatic ledger, meanwhile, was not idle. Dravyn dispatched a formal envoy southwest to the iruxi village in the central Tuskwater — the lizardfolk king whom the party had only weeks before extracted from the grip of a deceiving wisp. The mission went better than the council had dared hope. The envoys returned with a folded green-and-bone token and the iruxi king’s formal acknowledgement of Athanor’s right to the river’s eastern shore. Trade would follow, the envoys reported. The fish-and-clay arrangement Elroy and Grotdor had sketched in mud at the door of Vesket’s hut would now be drawn on parchment. Perry made the note in his ledger and underlined it twice.
Rust, in the meantime, attended to the kingdom’s three active trade agreements with the practiced ease of a man who had been moving merchant gossip and freight accounts since before any of his current companions could read the script in which they were written. Perry took up the commodities exchange and converted a surplus of lumber and stone into the kind of working capital that the next month’s ambitions would require. By the time the ledgers closed at the end of the second week, the treasury held more coin than it had held at any point since the founding.
Not all of the morning had run clean. Valerie, attempting a delicate piece of statecraft on the kingdom’s behalf, had asked Grotdor to lend his attention as aid. Grotdor was rarely diplomatic and never enjoyed being asked to be — but he had taken the chair and the chair came with its work. He fumbled the moment. Twice. By the time the matter was resolved, a small current of grumbling had settled into one of the southern districts, the kind of friction that did not yet have a name but that the experienced administrator could feel in the back of the neck. Valerie absorbed the misstep with her usual composure and went directly to the social channels she had spent the winter cultivating; by the day’s end the friction had quieted and the southern district was, if not warm, at least no longer cold.
“Valerie — let me take that. We are not doing well this morning.”
— Grotdor, after the second misstep
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III. The First Annual Founder’s Day¶
Stormfire Reach — mid-Gozran (Apr), 4711 AR
Rust had planned the day quietly. He was not the sort to make speeches — he preferred to set the kindling and let others bring the fire — but he had been gathering the small details of it for weeks. The hour of the bell. The order of the procession. The musicians to be paid out of the public welfare funds. The barrel-tappers and the spit-roasters and the unsung backbone of any holiday: the women who would manage the children when the wine got loose. By the time the new Festival Hall opened its doors on the agreed morning, every block of Stormfire Reach had bunting hanging from its eaves, and Linzi’s chapbook-printers had distributed broadsheets to every tavern between the capital and Oligton announcing the first annual celebration of Athanor’s founding.
The Stormflames — as Linzi had taken to calling the citizens, the word having spread from her pamphlets into the common tongue with a speed that surprised even her — came in greater numbers than the Pentarchy had imagined possible. The Festival Hall, designed to hold the largest civic assembly the capital might require, overflowed before the bell’s second toll. The streets outside ran with music. The fishermen of the Thorn brought up casks of the river’s springtime catch; the farmers of the southern marches sent up wagons of the season’s first lamb. Dwarven brewers from Oligton wheeled in barrels that smelled of malt and pine smoke. Dancing began before noon and did not stop until well past the last bell.
Grotdor watched it from the dais with the wariness of a man who had not, in his earlier life, been at many parties he had enjoyed. But the longer the day went on, the more the wariness eased. The Stormflames were not performing for the Pentarchy. They were celebrating themselves. A year ago, most of them had been refugees from Restov, drifters from the frontier posts, families who had walked the long road from Brevoy with their entire lives in a single wagon. Now they had walls. Now they had a name. The Pentarchy had given them no obligation to celebrate; they had chosen to do so on their own. That was the thing Grotdor watched from the dais and slowly, against his nature, allowed himself to believe in.
By dusk, the bonfires along the river had grown into pyres the size of small houses. Elroy was somewhere in the crowd — his unmistakable laugh carrying across half the district whenever it broke loose. Perry stood near the back of the hall with a small cup of cider, watching the geometry of a celebration with the same calm attention he gave to crime scenes, and noting, without quite meaning to, that whatever else Rust had planned for, he had planned correctly. Dravyn was where Dravyn always was at such gatherings: against a column near the back wall, silent, the runes of his armor catching the firelight in a way that the more drunken Stormflames misread as approval. He let them misread it. Some things did not need correction.
The Festival Hall stood after the day was done. The bunting was taken down. Linzi’s chapbooks would carry the day’s images for months afterward, into every settlement on the kingdom’s rolls and many that were not. Athanor had a holiday. A year had been earned, and acknowledged, and recorded in the kind of memory that does not depend on parchment to keep its shape. The mood of the kingdom lifted by degrees that even the most cynical clerks in the trade courts could not pretend not to feel. Whatever the next months brought, the settlers had been reminded, by the unanimous applause of their own throats, that they had made something.
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IV. Borders, Banners, and the Trolls’ Long Shadow¶
Athanor’s southern and northern marches — mid- to late Gozran (Apr), 4711 AR
While the capital celebrated, the realm grew. Dravyn dispatched survey teams south to the long-vacant tract of land that the council had for months referred to in private as the donut hole — a single unclaimed march that had sat awkwardly within Athanor’s southern reach, neither bandit ground nor Athanoran, surrounded on every side by the kingdom’s own border cairns. The surveyors found nothing they did not expect: a stretch of rolling hill country with thin soil and a single freshwater spring at its center. They drove the boundary stones with the same precision the Pentarchy had come to recognize as Dravyn’s signature, and the march was added to the rolls before the second week of Gozran was out. The kingdom’s map, for the first time, showed no gap.
Grotdor, in his standing role as Warden, turned his attention to the hill country east of the capital, where the second farmland of the season had been planned. Hill farming was harder labor than the plains — the soil thinner, the terraces more difficult to grade, the slope unforgiving to anyone who had not worked it before — but the families who had taken the contracts had asked for hill ground, and Grotdor was not a man to second-guess people who knew their own work. He oversaw the survey himself, walked the ridge lines with the foremen, and signed the parcels into the registry by the end of the month. The naming committee proposed several entries to honor the Pentarch of Flame, but Grotdor declined all of them in turn. The settlers could name it when they had grown something on it, he told them. Until then it was a working name and a working farm and nothing else needed saying.
Harrim, Viceroy and the Pentarchy’s gloomy cleric of Groetus, took up the parallel work to the southwest — a stretch of fine flat plains along the Murque’s northern bank where the soil was deeper and the labor easier. Elroy rolled out the project on Harrim’s behalf, and the planting went in without complaint. Harrim, when asked at the council table how the new fields would fare, gave the kind of theological non-answer that only a dwarf cleric of the end of all things could deliver. The farms went in regardless. Groetus’s silence was, in its way, a blessing.
On the warfare side of the ledger, Grotdor turned the next morning to assisting Elroy with the kingdom’s newest recruiting effort. The misstep of the morning had not, this time, repeated itself. Grotdor’s preparation for the muster was so disciplined that by the time Elroy walked into the recruiting tent, the line of volunteers was already three hundred strong and the General had to do little more than thump the appropriate chests and approve the appropriate banner. The new unit was christened the Wyrmwatch Stalkers and based out of the wetland settlement of Wyrmwatch — a skirmisher company, fast and light, the kind of force the capital’s heavier regiment could not be spared to provide. Athanor now had two armies in the field.
“GLORIOUS!”
— Elroy Jenkins, at the muster
Linzi, Emissary by appointment and chronicler by inclination, undertook the day’s second magical survey — a parcel north of Wyrmwatch that the Pentarchy had marked for forestry expansion. The work went badly. By the time the survey teams limped back to the capital, one of the wagon trains had been lost to a flash flood along the Murque and three settler families had to be relocated to Stormfire Reach to recover. A small stain settled onto the kingdom’s record — the kind of incident that, left untended, would breed rumor and recrimination. Perry stepped into the matter directly, opened the treasury, and rode out personally to settle the relocations and clear the survey line. The march was claimed in the end, and the settler families were rehoused, but a residue of the misstep would carry into the next month for the council to address. Linzi accepted Perry’s correction with the grace of a chronicler who had been corrected before and would be corrected again, and the work continued.
And then, as it had done every month since autumn, the troll problem returned. The reports came in along the western roads in the closing week of Gozran — fresh sightings of Hargulka’s raiders along the Narlmarch border, scouts moving in formations they had not used before, the smell of hide and rot drifting eastward on the warming wind. Grotdor, as Warden, walked the borders himself. The first patrols he led did little but stir the brush. He pressed harder. Before the month closed, the Pentarch of Flame had personally chased two war-bands back into the Narlmarches and burned their forward camp at the treeline. The trolls were held at the borders. The worry, however, was not banished. It would return next month. It would return every month until something more lasting was done about the king at the western end of the forest — and that, the Pentarchy knew, was a matter no patrol could settle.
When the council’s ledgers closed at the end of Gozran, the books read the way Perry had quietly intended them to read all along. Two new marches added. Two new farmlands established. A residential block and two civic anchors built. The Oligton Stockyard, framed in the previous cycle, completed under Grotdor’s engineering. A new army in the field. A new diplomatic relationship opened. A holiday declared. A treasury more flush than it had ever been. Athanor, at one year old, was no longer a kingdom that needed to apologize for being young.
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V. To the Haunted Isle¶
Candlemere Lake — late Gozran (Apr), 4711 AR, twenty hundred hours
With the month’s governance behind them, the Pentarchs turned east, where the council had quietly agreed they would suspend their administrative cycles for as long as it took to push the next set of exploring through. Two threats sat on the council’s table as the cycle closed. One was westward, in the Narlmarches, where Hargulka and his trolls would have to be reckoned with by force. The other was eastward, in the middle of the Tuskwater, where the lizardfolk king’s parting warning had been explicit: whatever spirit had nearly destroyed his tribe had come from the dark island in the middle of Candlemere Lake. Do not go there, the king had said. The Pentarchs went.
They reached the lake’s southern shore in the long blue evening of the month’s last full day — the kind of dusk in which the line between water and air thickens into something almost solid. Fog had risen off the Tuskwater’s surface and hung along the reeds in stationary banks; the lake itself lay flat as beaten pewter, broken only by the slow ripple of fish too deep to see. Past a quarter-mile of open water, the island’s silhouette rose into the haze — a low reed-choked hill at the center of the lake, with the broken cylinder of a ruined tower at its summit, perhaps forty feet of jagged stone where some forgotten architect had once raised something taller. Even at this distance, the tower carried the wrongness the lizardfolk had described. The air was colder around it than the weather warranted. The fog around it moved against the wind.
Dravyn unrolled a scroll he had set aside for exactly this purpose. He read the runic glyphs into the air with the measured precision of a wizard who did not enjoy wasting prepared magic, and the arcane footing took hold across the company as the last vowel left his tongue. The party stepped onto the surface of the lake and walked. The water held them. Somewhere along the crossing, Rust drew a small surge of borrowed life around his shoulders — ten warm points of shimmering vitality at his small frame, a precaution he could feel he was going to need. Dog padded between them, the wolf’s breath ghosting in the cold air. Nobody spoke much. The fog grew denser as the island approached.
The dilapidated wooden pier extended from the island’s southern shore exactly where the iruxi king had warned them it would. They moored against it carefully — the timbers were rotten in places, swollen in others, and at least one of the planks gave way under Elroy’s weight without warning. Past the pier, perhaps a hundred feet inland through dense suffocating greenery, the ruined tower rose. At its base bobbed a faint yellowish-white light. Elroy bent his senses to the smell of the place and reported, with the slight disappointment of a man who had hoped for more, that it smelled only of brackish water and old reed. He raised his shield and pressed forward.
The first attempt at sight came up wanting. The fog turned everything to outlines. Perry stopped, focused, breathed once, and brought his investigator’s discipline to bear on the haze. The clarity came to him all at once — the bobbing light at the tower’s base resolved into the unmistakable shape of a glowing, flaming, half-translucent skull. A will-o’-wisp, just like the one they had killed in the lizardfolk village. And to the east, in the dense undergrowth, something crackled. Something larger was lurching toward them through the trees.
Perry, working quickly with the tools an investigator of the Lepidstadt school kept on his person for exactly such moments, brewed a sharp tincture that pulled the night into focus through one drop on each lower eyelid. Elroy let out a low growling shape-shift that drew him into the hybrid form he reserved for hunts in the dark — wolf-eared, broad-shouldered, the scent of the air suddenly threading through his nose with a precision his eyes could not match. The growl was answered. A soft, sad, weeping sound rose from somewhere in the trees, and a second light lifted from the dark. Two wisps. Not one. The keening called the night to attention, and behind the party, where the path met the treeline, a massive vine-tangled silhouette stepped from the undergrowth and brought with it the wet hollow lurch of something that had been waiting on the island far longer than anything had a right to wait.
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VI. The Lights and the Shambler¶
Candlemere Island, southern pier — late Gozran (Apr), 4711 AR
The fight broke open the way all the worst fights on the island’s southern pier had likely broken open for the trader and her doughty employees who had built it half a century earlier and never returned to the mainland to tell the story. The smaller wisp surged forward in a bobbing arc and lashed at Elroy first — twice — and both arcs of static went wide into the fog. The larger of the two glowing skulls, the elder light, hung back a moment longer, choosing its target with the slow calculation of a predator that had hunted humans for longer than humans had named it. Then it darted forward, and the arc of electricity it loosed against Elroy was a thing none of his preparation had been ready for. The bolt found the gap between his shield and his pauldron and tore into him with the kind of force that would have killed a smaller man outright.
“I don’t think it pays to block the big hits anymore.”
— Elroy Jenkins, taking the strike
Elroy absorbed the full blast with a roar that startled the reeds at the lake’s edge into stillness. The elder wisp pulled back, dimmed itself like a snuffed candle, and vanished into the fog. Rust’s cold-iron needles, his first response, hissed past the smaller wisp into nothing; he covered the miss with a quick force-shimmer of protective magic and called Dog forward to where the threat had last been seen. Dravyn, glaive already in motion, traced two quick runes in succession that drew the world into a faster cadence around him and steered the angle of his next swing along a line of arcane certainty. His blade carved through the bobbing shape of the smaller wisp and bit deep, and the creature shrieked in a way that was not air. Step no further, his runes seemed to say. The runes did not need to be loud. They only needed to be true.
Elroy followed, his bastard sword cutting a clean second wound across the smaller wisp’s glow. He banged his blade against his shield with a thunderclap that rattled the rotten timbers of the pier and bellowed the wisps and the half-glimpsed monstrosity in the trees into recognition that he, Elroy Jenkins, was the threat they should be measuring. He then turned his nose to the woods. The elder wisp had gone invisible — but Elroy’s scent did not need eyes. The light was gone; the cold smell of the thing was not. He held the line.
Perry, the elixir already taking hold behind his eyes, ran the first thread of analysis across the smaller wisp’s form. His investigator’s mind cataloged it in a single clear pass — no resistances, no weaknesses worth naming, just a brittle aberration with a high guard and very little hide. The crossbow shot he loosed went wide, but the information he had gathered passed back to his companions in the silent shorthand of a fighting party that had learned, over many bad evenings, to trust Perry’s reads. Grotdor, who had been watching the elder wisp with the patience of a furnace waiting for its draught, called the elements to his hands. A lance of cold sleeted out of the night and caught the elder wisp dead-center, and a tiny darting shape of flame followed in its wake — a small bright thing that arced through both wisps’ positions and left a trailing line of persistent fire in the air behind it.
And then the Shambler came out of the trees. Thirty feet of vine and root and stinking matter, lurching forward in a wet hollow rhythm that bypassed sense entirely and registered straight as wrongness. It struck at Dog twice with the lash of a great vine-arm. Both swings whistled past. The first exchange ended on that note — the Pentarchs braced, the Shambler thwarted, and somewhere in the fog above them the elder wisp invisible and waiting.
The second exchange broke the shape of the encounter open. The smaller wisp, recovering, drifted toward the Shambler and — deliberately, with the unmistakable intent of a creature that knew exactly what it was doing — struck the vine-beast with a bolt of electricity. The Shambler drank the lightning. A shimmering crust of borrowed life rippled into being across its surface, and a crackling vigor rolled along its vines that quickened it visibly. The Pentarchs realized, with the kind of cold dread that arrives in any combat too late to act on, that the wisps were not fighting alongside the plant-horror. They were feeding it. The trio was harder than the sum of its parts.
Rust pivoted instantly. He directed his next magic at the Shambler’s mind — a pulse of divine pressure that found whatever passed for consciousness inside the tangle of vines and rang against it like a hammer. The borrowed life took the worst of it; the wound to the thing’s sense of itself remained. Dog’s bite followed in the same breath, the wolf’s jaws closing on a vine-bundle and shearing through to whatever core lay beneath. Dravyn, hasted and fully into the work now, unfurled the spell he had been holding back — a burst of arcane fire that drew the moisture from everything within ten feet of its center and kindled what remained. The Shambler, plant that it was, took the worst of the burst and the persistent flame that followed clung to its vines and would not be shaken loose. The elder wisp, less lucky, took the full measure of the persistent fire as well. Dravyn closed by laying a hand across Elroy’s shoulder — a warm surge of restorative magic that closed the worst of the electric burn and lifted some of the weariness from the General’s frame.
“There, little buddy.”
— Dravyn, healing Elroy mid-fight
Elroy paid the wisp’s arrogance back with interest — a second clean cut across the smaller wisp’s glow that left it visibly fading. He banged the shield again, redirected the Shambler’s attention onto himself, and in the same breath bellowed a demoralizing taunt at the wounded wisp in Common. The wisp understood him. The wisp was, briefly, frightened.
“Your day is gone! He will never be doctor to me. He’s Mr. Wisp.”
— Elroy, demoralizing the wisp
Perry, free of the moment’s noise, threaded a fresh thought through his investigator’s framework, drew a vial of acidic ammunition from his belt, and loaded the breech of Infirnis with a click that was almost lost beneath the Shambler’s wet lurching. The shot was perfect — exactly where he had aimed, exactly as deep as he had intended — and the smaller wisp dropped to a single flickering point of light, acid steaming along its half-translucent edges. Grotdor, who had been considering whether the wisps’ electric gift to the Shambler could be stripped back out of it, found the right rule pressing against the wrong answer and pivoted. He shaped a thirty-foot cone of disciplined flame and loosed it across the wisps and the Shambler in a single sweep. The smaller wisp, already on the edge of nothing, guttered out like a candle in the wash of fire. Clean and quick.
“Clean and quick.”
— Grotdor, after the smaller wisp
And then the Shambler answered. With the crackling quickness of its electric feeding, it had a fourth swing in it where there should have been only three, and the strikes came up dark across the party. Dog took a vine-lash across the flank and dropped to half. Elroy took a heavy hit. Dravyn took a hit. Rust took the worst of the sweep — a crushing blow that his force-shield absorbed half of and his own body absorbed the rest, the shield magic breaking under the strain. Then a vine coiled around Elroy’s waist and lifted him from his feet, and the Shambler’s final lash at the hanging Pentarch came up short. The exchange ended with Elroy dangling in the grip of the vine-beast and the rest of the company still standing, and the Pentarchy reckoned for the first time that night that this fight was not, in fact, going to be the kind of fight one walked away from with only a story.
The third clash was worse. The elder wisp, still invisible, struck the Shambler again — another surge of borrowed life crackled across the vine-beast’s surface, another renewal of the unnatural quickening. Rust’s healing magic reached Elroy at range and dragged the General partway back from the worst of his wounds. Dravyn, hasted, hit hard with his glaive but missed twice. Elroy strained against the vines — a clean and powerful escape — and the vines held him anyway. He had only one strike left, and he made it count: a final hero’s exertion drew the angle exactly where he wanted it, and the bastard sword opened the Shambler’s side from shoulder to hip in a long red arc of slashing devastation that finally registered as a wound the thing could not simply ignore. The Shambler bled. The Shambler felt it.
“He raises my shield and taunts his ass. — Only my ass. Not my head, not my face, nothing else. I’m dangling upside down. I can only see his ass right now.”
— Elroy, mid-encounter
Perry, working from rangefire now with a borrowed thread of divine guidance, found his shot true. Grotdor’s fire kept coming — another small darting shape of arcane flame arcing through the Shambler’s tangled center, an elemental jet of fire as a close-coda — but the Pentarch of Flame had already begun to suspect, with the long even exhale of a man whose tool was answering him slower than it should, that fire was not the answer this thing required. Then the Shambler struck again. Vine-lash. The whole sweep of the strike came at the party in a single brutal storm. The first arc found Grotdor across the shoulder with a devastating economy of force that nearly folded the kineticist over — ribs cracked audibly, the breath left him in a single hissing exhale, and the air around him shimmered with heat that he was no longer entirely in control of. A heavy hit on Dog. A ruinous blow swept toward Dravyn, and Elroy — still grabbed, still hanging in the vines, but watching the geometry of the strike unfold — planted himself in the path of the killing swing, taking the wizard’s damage into his own body with a roar that was three parts pain and one part pure pride. A second catastrophic strike came down on Dravyn next, the runes of his armor flaring as the blow drove him to the last guttering edge of his strength. And then a final terrible arc came in, this one aimed at Rust, and Elroy intercepted again, dragging himself bodily across the line of the vine’s sweep and absorbing the strike meant for the small goblin healer behind him.
“Yeah. I kept the healer up.”
— Elroy, after the second interception
Elroy collapsed. He hung in the vines, broken, the last thing the wheel of cruelty had asked of him taken with a thunderclap of resolve. And Rust — wounded himself, his force-shield long gone, his small hands shaking on the dogslicer he had drawn for what he had no business thinking would be a melee swing — Rust spent his last breath of will. The Life mystery answered. A warm bright surge passed between the two Pentarchs — a martyr’s exchange, the goblin oracle pulling the killing weight off the General and into his own small frame. Elroy came back to consciousness with the same body and most of the same blood. Rust took the wound that would have ended his friend, and stood there with his last breath catching in his throat.
“Just because that sounds fun.”
— Rust, after the martyr’s exchange
The Shambler, still in motion, coiled a second vine around the wounded oracle and pulled. Rust and Elroy were both now locked in the vines, hanging at the Shambler’s flank, the moment frozen on a tableau that anyone watching from the lake’s shore would have called the last image of a doomed party. But Rust was not done. He drew the dogslicer and missed twice — the small blade was never made for what he was asking of it — and turned his last word into a directive at Dog instead. The wolf bit deep. The Shambler hissed something that was not language. One more strike like that, the thing seemed to gasp, and it would be done.
Dravyn stepped forward. He had finished the previous moments at the last guttering edge of his own strength. He had used every prepared spell he had spared for the day and several he had not planned to use. The wizard who did not waste motion did not waste this one. The glaive caught the dying glow of Grotdor’s flickering aura along its etched runes and came down in a single clean arc — the angle chosen for him, the strike measured to its mark, the geometry resolving as it always had to resolve when a Runelord put his mind to the work. The blade bit deep along the Shambler’s last good vine, and the wound it opened did not stop. The Shambler shuddered, its borrowed life and its persistent fire and its crackling electric vigor all stripped away at once, and the geometry of its vines came apart in the wet hush of falling matter. Combat closed.
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VII. Breath at the Pier¶
Candlemere Island, southern pier — late night, late Gozran (Apr) into early Desnus (May), 4711 AR
The night fell utterly silent. The Tuskwater’s surface had not moved through the whole of the encounter; it did not move now. The fog had thickened into something almost tangible. The smaller wisp’s glow was gone, the elder wisp’s presence — which had guttered out in an earlier flicker when the persistent fire finally finished its work — was likewise gone. Where the Shambler had stood lay a wet heap of severed vines, sap-streaked and steaming. No bodies. No items. Nothing the wisps had been worth retrieving.
The party lowered Elroy out of the dead vines with care. Rust was on his feet but only because pride had been holding him there — the small oracle slumped into the sand at the pier’s edge and laid his hands flat on his knees and breathed. Grotdor, blackened with his own soot and the Shambler’s drying sap, took a long even exhale and acknowledged, without quite saying so out loud, what the encounter had taught him. Heat answered — but not when the answer had already been heard. He filed the lesson with the other ones his family had given him through pain, and did not waste time on regret.
Perry, who had spent the second half of the fight picking his shots from range and was the only Pentarch standing without a fresh wound, accepted the company’s gentle ribbing with the equanimity of a man who knew what the ribbing was for. He had not recognized the Shambler in time. He admitted as much, made a small note in his ledger that next time the Recall would come first, and let the matter drop. Elroy had been saved twice. Rust had given up the closest thing to a death he had ever come, and was now pale and steady-handed in the sand. Dravyn had finished the fight at single digits. Grotdor had been knocked to half by a single critical strike. The party had survived by the thinnest of all possible margins.
“Everybody but me has a heal.”
— Elroy, cheerful in the sand
They took the next twenty minutes at the pier. Rust’s field-medicine — the small careful work of a healer who had spent more of his short life on the wrong side of a battle than any goblin in the Stolen Lands had a right to — closed the worst of the wounds. Dravyn’s remaining restorative magic finished the rest. Perry produced a pair of potions from inner pockets that no one had been entirely sure existed. Grotdor mixed his cool-water balm from the second fork of his elements and laid the soothing relief across the shallow burns on the wolf’s flank. Dog, by the time the work was done, was wagging — with the absent dignified slowness of a wolf who had survived something he could not name but trusted the rest of the pack to remember on his behalf.
The tower waited a hundred feet inland through the dense suffocating vegetation. The path wound up to it from the pier in a narrow weed-choked line that the wisps had been quietly maintaining as their hunting ground for longer than Athanor had been a name. The crumbling forty-foot ruin no longer had a light at its base. It still had its silence — the unnatural cold-around-it, the wrongness of the air, the conviction that something inside it had been watching the encounter at the pier with the patient interest of a thing that did not need to intervene. The Pentarchs gathered their wounded and their kit and turned, for the moment, away from the tower. They would rest. They would mend. The tower could wait one more night.
Behind them, the lake lay still. Out west, in the Narlmarches, Hargulka’s lair sat on its rising ground and would, in time, draw the kingdom’s answer to it. Here, on a reed-choked island in the middle of the Tuskwater, the Pentarchs had drawn an answer of their own to a question the lizardfolk king had begged them not to ask. The wisps were ash. The Shambler was vines and sap. The tower remained — dark, silent, the air around it carrying its old patient wrongness — and somewhere inside it, the rest of Candlemere’s long-buried secret continued, as it had continued for a thousand years, to wait. Athanor was one year old. The furnace was lit. The heat was rising. The next part of the work was still ahead.
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