Goltburg

  Some sixty miles north of Saxmoor y the Great Dividing Range. A long, snaking mountain range that marked the beginnings of the Bordernds. Once, there had been many prosperous towns clustered around the three or four passes through the mountains. The communities had grown fat on the vast quantities of gold had once flowed along the railroads that had snaked their way up through valleys, crossed gorges on massive stone viaducts, and cut through sometimes hundreds of meters of rock and stone.

  But that had been before the Fall of the North, which had shaken the Middle Realms twenty-five years prior, and which had seen the north subjugated beneath the cw of the most dangerous weapon ever produced by the Underworld: the Shardforts.

  Thankfully for the Middle Realms, after their successful lightning campaign, the infernal forces had fallen to infighting, with the Shardkeepers staking out territory and squabbling amongst one another rather than marching on a divided south.

  Now most of those passes had been rendered impassable by colpsed cliff-faces and wyrd-cursed battlefields, and those ways through the jagged mountains were all but abandoned. Railways that had once seen dozens of trains a day were overgrown, their rails rusting and long grass growing beneath the rotting sleepers.

  After retreating from a fog-choked Saxmoor, Marci and the rest of her party had beat a swift, and hopefully stealthy path northward for the now-small town of Goltburg.

  At the very slow ndwalker pace that the rest of Marci's party required they arrived just as the sun was setting on the seventh day after leaving Saxmoor. What had once been a bustling city of some fifty thousand souls now held less than four hundred. Most of the farms around it were abandoned and overgrown, recimed by twisted and gnarled growth, and ringing with the strange cries of strange beasts that had made their way over the Dividing Range in the years since the Fall.

  Marci, who was sensitive to such things, could feel how the nature energies of the pce had been disrupted, how the ley-lines were torn and ragged, and how energy was bleeding, ever so slightly, north-north-east.

  The only inn in town didn't have rooms for travellers, leaving them to camp in the abandoned, overgrown city Common. There were a few signs that some of the farmers who seemed to have been driven out of Saxmoor were trying to resettle in the town, retake some of the nd from the twisted wilds, but there were few people indeed who willing chose to venture this far north.

  "Where did you hear about this tomb, anyway?" said Marci as she sat on a chair she'd found in a nearby abandoned house, warming her hands on the fire made from broken and shattered timber.

  "Crence had a contact at the Academy," said Of.

  Marci scoffed. "Crence."

  "There was a royal survey done a few years ago," continued Of. "The then Prime Minister wanted to 'rejuvenate the northern reaches of the realm.'" He snorted. "He was out before they even finished the survey. Thing got filed in the archive, never even got presented. But apparently there is a tomb, north-west-ish of the town, up a gcier. It's steep, we'll probably need you to do some scouting from the air."

  "I can already feel where it is," said Marci, turning in the direction of the ever so faint pull of energy. "It's got something that's drinking energy. Faint, but it's there."

  Of frowned and looked at the others.

  "Is the Friend Of sure this is a good idea?" said Tissa from her spot very close to the fire. She shivered. "This pce is Ungodly. We are afraid."

  "Chin up there, m'luvver," said Gillian, putting a hand on Tissa's arm. "We've been in plenty of spooky situations before."

  "We do not like it," said Tissa, shaking her head. She took a deep breath. "But we will stand by our friends! Always!"

  "I'm almost sure no one else has been through there," said Of. "We'll have first pick."

  "Lucrative," purred Anke from where Marci was not looking at her sit in Of's p. She giggled, Marci scowled. She knew it wasn't mature of her to be possessive about her ex; he was right, it was none of her business if he chose to date an objectively awful person. After all, she had been the one who had been so scared about messing things up that she'd pushed him away when he'd wanted to get serious.

  "I'm going for a fly," she said, standing up and fring her diaphanous wings.

  "In the middle of the night?" said Of, looking up from where he'd been smooching. "Well, OK, be careful?"

  Marci grunted in response and took off, shooting up into the cool autumn night sky. Tissa, who was the sort of person who remembered random information even years ter, had known Marci's measurements, and had somehow predicted that Marci didn't have her old gear anymore. That was good, in that she wasn't going to have to go dungeoneering in a blouse and short blue skirt.

  Instead, she had a supple leather jerkin beneath a simple, lightweight steel breastpte, a hooded grey mantle cut to not interfere with her wings, canvas trousers, sturdy boots, and tough finger-less gloves. It wasn't as good as what she'd had before, and she didn't have much in the way of resources to spruce it up much with enchanting, but she'd put some temporary bewitchments on it, and would be running the 'Wizard Armour' spell when she was in the tomb itself.

  It was a bit tight around the middle, but it was warmer than her blouse as she flew up and over the town, ascending higher and higher until she came to a hovering stop a few hundred meters up. Beneath her the city was rgely dark, with just a few pools of light here and there.

  Further out she could see several farms lit up, houses and usually one or two watchtowers gleaming in the darkness. But they were few and far between, and most of the ftnds at the edge of the Dividing Range's foothills had been recimed by the twisted wilds. All dark, but for the shining silver of the moon and, in one pce, just a little way beyond the furthest farmstead, a flickering orange light. A ntern, moving through a forested area.

  Frowning, Marci peered at it for a moment, before deciding to investigate.

  As a fairy, and a wizard, she wasn't that scared of wilds. She could fly high enough that even the sturdiest longbow couldn't hope to reach her, and was fast enough that she could run away from a rge swathe of hostile flying beasties.

  Her wings were virtually silent as she moved towards the ntern light. Once or twice, she lost sight of it beneath the canopy, but only for a few moments before she spotted its flickering once again. A figure in a dark cloak came into view as she drew closer, moving with purpose between the shadowy boughs: elven, female. She spied a longsword at her hip, indicating that this wasn't just some lost soul, but someone who was out in the dark forest for a reason.

  It wasn't illegal to hang about in spooky forests, nor was Marci the most w abiding of fairies, but something about the whole situation made her intensely suspicious. There were plenty of abandoned houses in the city that one could use for a secret rendezvous, why go so far out?

  In the distance there was a lupine howl. Marci slowed, trailing the woman as she made her way deeper and deeper and deeper into the forest. Finally, the figure arrived at a small clearing that featured some kind of weathered, ancient looking standing stone—likely a shrine dedicated to the local Gods of the Old Faith that the human's Church of Revetion had never entirely managed to stamp out.

  The elven woman, who Marci could now see was red-haired and very young, perhaps not even twenty, and had a particurly manic gleam to her eye, moved to the stone and drew out a dagger, sshing herself across the palm before pcing it upon the stone and beginning to chant in what Marci recognised as Infernal.

  Infernal was the nguage of the Underworld, a subterranean nd far beneath the Middle Realms inhabited by demonkind. They had battled the dwarves of the Seven Holds for millennia, and but had been rgely unknown beyond the occasional cult begun by some demon that managed to make it to the surface. That had all changed with the Fall, and as a Wizard who had grown up in the wake of that conflict, she had studied Infernal extensively to understand the rge volume of captured spellbooks.

  Demons had magic. Advanced magic that in many areas outstripped the Middle Realms. Much of it was banned, but many of the improvements that had spurred the ongoing 'manufacturing revolution' was down to things that schors like Marci had discovered pouring over the Infernal literature.

  She could read better than speak it but knew enough to make sense of the woman's repetitive chant.

  "Oh, great master, by blood I call you, by blood I beg audience."

  Well, that was more or less it. The elf's pronunciation was terrible, and she was using the accusative case instead of the dative with the verb 'call.' But that was fine, because words by themselves had no power unless you were Fey, they were simply a mnemonic for the very simple signalling cantrip Marci could feel her casting.

  The stone seemed to be doing the heavy lifting, taking up her magic and using the woman's blood as a source of energy to send a signal out into the aether. The woman repeated her spell a few times, before taking away her hand and withdrawing a bandage. She sat down on a nearby log, wrapping her hand in a roll of linen as she waited.

  Marci alighted on a nearby tree-branch, some fifteen meters off the ground to wait herself.

  And wait, and wait, and wait.

  What must have been an hour passed, and Marci was just starting to doze off when she felt a sudden influx of energy, channelled through the stone, and a moment ter a towering, muscur, horned, and red-skinned figure dressed in what could charitably be called fetish gear manifested in the clearing. Except, no, she realised after a moment. That hadn't been a teleport, it was a projection, ever so slightly transparent and immaterial.

  "Ms. Vos," rumbled the demon. "You are three days te."

  "Apologies, Lord Fallon," said the elven woman, 'Ms. Vos,' falling to one knee. "To come sooner would have compromised my cover. I have the report."

  Marci narrowed her eyes. Everyone knew that the demons had spies in the Southnds, since even the disorganised southern kingdoms and republics had spies in the Northnds amongst the ensved poputions. Novels about demon agents and plots and conspiracies came out at a rate of hundreds every single year, and one didn't need to look far in any major city to find a py on somewhere that featured infernal agents as a plot point on any given night.

  But to actually see an agent giving a report in the wild was something that Marci had never suspected she would just stumble across.

  "Pce it in the bowl," he said, gesturing to a very small offering dish that Marci had missed in the gloom.

  "Of course, my lord," said Ms. Vos, pulling out a rge scroll from within the folds of her cloak and extended it reverently. "Of particur note is-"

  Marci's Concussive Bst, a 'less-lethal' rank three spell, picked the elven woman up off the ground and hurled her against the shrine hard enough that the stone cracked, and the demon lord's outline flickered.

  "You were followed!?" roared the demon. "By a wizard!?"

  Ms. Vos, battered and bloody, picked herself up with surprising speed and drew her sword which ignited into green fme, looking around wildly for the source of the magic.

  "In the air, you idiot!" snarled the demon, pointing straight at Marci. "A fairy!"

  The elven woman reacted with surprising speed, and sshed her bde, releasing a crescent of burning green hellfire straight at Marci.

  Still, out of practice or not, Marci was a Wizard—capital W. No shitty two-bit infernal weapon was breaking her shield.

  The fire washed over a concave shell of azure energy, and Marci responded with another concussive bst that smashed Ms. Vos brutally into the ground. Her bde flew from her hand, along with the scroll.

  Freed from the thaumturgically thorny problem of 'ownership' that grasp implied, it was easy for Marci to point a finger and summon the scroll through the air and into her outstretched hand. Well, it wasn't that easy, it was a rank three spell, but Marci managed.

  "No!" roared the demon. "You incompetent fool! Retrieve the report, at once!"

  "Yes, my Lord!" croaked the injured elf, lunging for her sword and sending another pulse of hellfire screaming up at Marci.

  Marci shielded it again, and the follow up firebolt that was rather inexpertly thrown at her.

  Marci considered slugging Ms. Vos with another bst of concussive force but then decided against it. Although she had gotten into fights with plenty of people, and even once or twice used lethal force, it wasn't something she did lightly.

  Besides, she had the report, the scroll, and all it would take to deny whatever the elf remembered getting back to her demon master was a fireball aimed, not at the elf, but at the standing stone.

  The ancient shrine exploded it a roar of fire, and the elf screamed in rage and anger as the image of the demon lord vanished.

  "No! Lord Fallon!" she screamed, dropping her bde and pawing at the smoking stone, great tears flowing down her face as she howled in rage and grief, scrambling through the rock as if she hoped to find him somewhere in there. "No! Master! Master! Where are you!? I need you!"

  Nuts. She was clearly nuts. Marci was gd she hadn't turned her to ash. The poor girl just needed a good role model or three.

  "Err, well… I'll just be going then?" said Marci, flying slowly upwards.

  "This isn't over, wizard!" screamed Ms. Vos, snatching up her sword.

  "I think it… is?" said Marci, gesturing with the scroll down towards the ground. "I mean, you're down there, I'm up here…"

  The elf sshed at her again. Marci shielded the hellfire.

  "I'm not a hack, you know," said Marci as she continued to fly upwards slowly. "That isn't going to work on me."

  "Come back here!" screamed Ms. Vos. "Face me! Face me!"

  "Bye!" called Marci.

  Some wizards would have killed the elf, Marci knew. But while Marci was self-conscious enough to know that she wasn't exactly the most responsible of people, she already had the blood of three people on her hands, and she had no intention of adding a fourth.

  Sure, those three might have been self-defence, but she still saw their faces when she closed her eyes. Hopefully, without a connection to her demon master, the elvish woman would rethink her life choices and choose something better. Because everyone deserved a second chance.

  And if not… well, Marci was no executioner.