“Hey Seo?” Allana asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “Was your village this terrible?”

  Tenebres sighed. “Not the last time I was there, but it’s been a few years.”

  “Huh.” Allana turned back to the village of Geltis. “Cus uh… this place is…”

  “Really bad, yeah.”

  It was far worse than Tenebres had expected. The Geltis he remembered from his youth was a thriving little village that had popped up around a clay pit, serviced by a small number of surrounding farms and a skilled cadre of hunters. The Geltis he encountered months before, on his way to Emetson, had been significantly worse off. Like an old friend made weak and feeble by time and disease, the village had withered in the years since the clay pit had dried out.

  If that Geltis had been a frail man, it was now a dying one. The farmland he and Allana had passed by throughout the day had gone to seed, overrun by weeds. In the village itself, it seemed just one in every three houses were still occupied, with many of the remainder showing signs of abandonment ranging from fire damage to collapsed roofs. The few people apparent on the streets greeted the pair not with eager waves but suspicious stares, hands lingering on the hafts of lumber axes, kitchen knives, and even rusty scythes as they walked by.

  There were two glaring absences among the village folk. The first was a lack of animals, from beasts of burdens all the way down to pets. What that implied, Tenebres didn’t even want to consider. The second was children, which was in its way even more damning. It took a lot to brave the roads of the deadlands, much less with children, but that the parents of Geltis had clearly been driven to risk them was obvious.

  “This is a bad place,” Tenebres said. “Something’s wrong.”

  “You think we should keep moving?” Tenebres could hear the reluctance and longing in Allana’s words. Geltis was their chance to sleep in an inn, in a real bed, and eat some hot food that Tenebres hadn’t singed over a campfire.

  “I don’t know…” Tenebres said with a sigh. It was nearly night already, and he’d be lying if he claimed he didn’t hunger for those simple luxuries too. “Maybe it’s still worth checking out the town’s inn…”

  A passing man huffed a grim chuckle as he passed by, but didn’t stop to explain himself.

  “Rogue’s shade, this place is ominous…” Allana muttered.

  #

  “Why did you stop here? Allana asked.

  Tenebres blinked, having a hard time tearing his eyes away from the burnt out hulk in front of him. This isn’t right.

  “Seo? What is it?”

  “This… this was the inn.”

  “What?”

  Tenebres looked around, ignoring Allana’s outburst. “Hey!” he called at a man sitting on the ground nearby.

  The villager looked up from the piece of wood he was absently whittling. He was an older man, with a dirty face and a dirtier beard. He didn’t bother responding, besides meeting Tenebres’s eyes.

  “What happened to the inn?” Tenebres asked him.

  “Fire.”

  “We got that,” Allana snapped at him. “When?”

  “While back.”

  Allana pinched the bridge of her nose. “Seo, you do it, I–I just can’t with this.”

  “Anyone set up to replace it?” Tenebres asked. “We were planning on stopping for the night, we were hoping for a bed and a hot meal or two.”

  The man blinked slowly. “Ol’Inerr managed to save a couple barrels of ale. He’s still got a stove too. So people he been feeding people what can pay, out by the Humps.”

  Tenebres blew a breath out his nose. That was… something, at least. “The Humps?”

  “The ol’kilns, what burnt out back when.” The man finished the sentence by spitting to one side, then turned back to his stick, apparently done with the conversation.

  “And beds?”

  The man didn’t look back. His knife idly threw up a sliver of wood, emphasizing his silence.

  “That was enlightening,” Allana muttered.

  “Good enough, I guess. C’mon. I think I remember where the kilnyard was.”

  #

  After a couple blocks of walking, Tenebres stopped, pulling Allana into the remnants of an abandoned house with him.

  Allana didn’t need much prompting. She peered out the vacant doorway quickly, confirming that they were unseen, and ducked in after him.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Something’s very, very wrong here,” Tenebres told her.

  “Agreed. I know you said these deadlands were bad, but…”

  “Never this bad. The people out here… they might be cut off from the trade routes, but that just makes them that much more resilient. They rely on each other more than any distant city. For things to be this bad… no one’s helping them, Allana.”

  The girl paused. Her eyes flicked back to the door, her posture screaming wariness. “What does that mean?”

  “Culles is less than a week from here, and there are a couple other villages scattered around too, all built around supporting each other. But Geltis has clearly been going downhill for a while without any help. Which means…”

  “The other villages can’t help,” Allana finished for him. “Why not?”

  “There’s only a few possible answers.” Tenebres chewed at his cheek anxiously. “And none of them are good.”

  “Okay… So what are we doing in here? Should we just keep moving?”

  “I think it’s still worth going to the kilnyard. If we’re lucky, we can find a hunter, someone who can tell us what’s actually going on around here. But first…”

  Tenebres blew out a breath, and felt the skin over his heart itching. He settled down onto his knees, closing his eyes to focus.

  “Seo?”

  “I want to make sure we’re watching our own backs.”

  He blew out another breath–then prodded at the dark power that dwelt in his chest.

  [Void Invocation] - Active, Summon - Open a gate and beckon a fiend to cross over. Nature and power of the fiend as well as ability cost varies based on the strength of the invocation. Sufficiently powerful fiends may be difficult to control. Moderate duration.

  Awareness attribute sacrificed

  Minor fiend flying eye successfully invoked

  It was an odd feeling, to sacrifice his own awareness. His skin suddenly felt cold and clammy from a sudden numbness, as if he had stood in the cold for too long. His tongue became leaden in his mouth, and there was an odd rushing sound in his ears, like he had stuffed them full of wax. When he opened his eyes, his vision was blurry and off-kilter. But for all that, he could function, if uncomfortably.

  Manifested in front of him, invoked by his mysterious gift, was one of Tenberes’s least-used fiends. Like a fist-sized eyeball wrapped in leathery skin, with a couple bat wings, the flying eye had little combat use. But it was a handy scouting tool, and one Tenebres hadn’t used nearly enough. While he couldn’t see through the eye itself, he could at least get a vague idea of the things it saw.

  Even better, unlike the imps, the eye had no malicious intent to it, just a vague sense of curiosity that paired well with how he planned to use it. Tenebres focused his blurry eyes on the thing, and imparted his desires onto it.

  That made for another odd experience. He had found that he couldn’t command his invoked fiends with verbal instructions or the like, but he could focus and direct them through inclinations. In the eye’s case, he directed it to fly about, staying near Tenebres but unseen, and watch out for danger. That felt like it was pushing the minor fiend’s pseudo-sentience to its limits, but after a moment, it took the direction, and the flying eye flapped out of the open doorway.

  “Well, that was disturbing,” Allana said conversationally.

  “Shut up. Let’s go get some food.”

  Tenebres stood up, then paused. After a moment of peering at the blurry wall, he asked Allana, “Which of these holes is the door and which is a window?”

  #

  The kilnyards had once been the thriving heart of Geltis. Central to the clay industry that supported the town, Tenebres remembered the half-dozen massive domes each worked by a handful of apprentices, overseen by the intimidating presence of the town’s master potter. That had been sometime ago though, and now, in the setting sun, Tenebres could see why the people of Geltis would dismissively refer to the kilns as “the Humps.”

  Only a couple were still lit, and even then, only with wood fires strong enough to light and warm the air around them, without the intensity needed to bake clay into ceramic. In the center of the yard, on a high deck that had once hosted pottery wheels, there was now a scattering of roughshod tables, each hosting a small number of the dirty, desperate residents of the failing village.

  “Go grab us some food?” Tenebres suggested to Allana. “I’ll find us a table.”

  The girl wrinkled her nose at him. Across the deck, behind a long table, a bowed woman and her stoop-backed husband were exchanging small coins for skewers of unidentifiable meat and earthenware mugs of supposed ale, likely watered down.

  “We’re not gonna get food anywhere else tonight,” Tenebres reminded her.

  Allana sighed. “Fine. Get us a good table, at least.”

  As Allana turned away, Tenebres arched an eyebrow, surveying the cluttered tables. “Sure, that’ll be easy enough…” he muttered after her.

  Tenebres turned his eyes to one of the less occupied tables, where a trio of dirty men sat, leaving half the tabletop unoccupied.

  “Excuse me,” Tenebres began, only to be interrupted.

  “Flog off, dandy,” one of the men growled. Greeted with suspicious glares, tinged with resentment, from the other two, Tenebres backed off without arguing the point.

  He had little better luck at the next table, where a woman greeted him by spitting on the ground at his feet, or at the third, where he was simply ignored entirely.

  “They don’t much like outsiders these days,” a voice softly observed from behind Tenebres.

  Not so long ago, Tenebres would’ve likely jumped and whirled around in his startlement, but that was before he spent months around a pair of assassins that seemed to consider sneaking up on their friends an old pastime. He still felt a bit of frisson spike down his spine, but he controlled his reaction, turning slowly to face the voice.

  It was no wonder he hadn’t noticed her. Only slightly cleaner than the rest of the townsfolk, the girl sat in the shadows farthest from the lit kilns. She had long, tangled hair the color of stagnant water, and her hunting leathers made her profession as obvious as her watchful air and the well-worn axe at her belt. That was no woodsman’s tool--it was a weapon.

  “You’re a hunter,” Tenebres said.

  She inclined her head gently.

  Tenebres took a step closer to her. The table the hunter sat at was otherwise unoccupied, and Tenebres tilted his chin to indicate one of the empty chairs. “Would you mind?”

  “Not at all.”

  Tenebres sat down gingerly, not taking his eyes from the young woman as he did. This close, he could see the sadness in her washed-out gray eyes. She was younger than she looked, very young indeed for her rank and the wariness in her posture. In fact, she was the youngest person he had yet to see in Geltis.

  Of course, she’s still probably a couple years older than me, Tenebres acknowledged to himself. She’s closer to Allana’s age. Even Tenebres sometimes forgot that he was only sixteen. He sometimes felt each of the years he had spent with the cult had aged him twice over.

  “Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”

  The girl gave him a weary smile. “Not at all. I suppose there are probably a few I should ask you as well.”