“They killed my wife and son! Burned my farm. My daughter succumbed to the cold while fleeing and I lost three fingers and two toes!” he shouted, holding up his left hand.
“Our village tried to fight back. We numbered barely a hundred but there were only a few of them, come to pillage our food stores like any common raider. They did… something. Magic. The young men defending our village turned to gold and started attacking each other before turning on the rest of us.” The woman choked on a sob. “Only six of us made it to the next village over.”
The reaction of the crowd shifted. The undercurrent of anger still swept through the people. This time, it was accompanied by a sense of awe. Everyone knew that large burgs between the border and Cliff had been targeted. It was tragic but expected. Hearing that the invaders were targeting even small villages with their strongest magic sent a wave of shock.
Edvin, dressed in tattered clothing, let the silence hang for a few moments, making sure the feelings settled into the crowd. “I have a friend in the manor guard,” he said slowly, rubbing his hands together before holding them out over the open flames.
Today, following along with Arkk’s plan to stir up some discontent, he was out in the largest of the temporary shelters outside Cliff City. Tents dotted the landscape, built all along the road that led to the city’s gates. The materials for building the tents had come mostly from one of the wealthy merchants in the city. Donated freely. An act that allegedly earned the merchant a little ire from the Duke.
When he had come here a week prior, Edvin had fully expected a need to lie, cheat, and steal to convince people to rise against the Duke. There was anger here. He knew that going into it. But it was one thing to be angry, it was another thing entirely to do something with that anger.
And yet, the Duke was practically doing all his work for him. Between word getting out that he would rather let the people who had traveled all this way die of the winter’s cold, handing out insufficient scraps of food from his storehouses, and the vastly unpopular move of proclaiming publicly his new alliance with Evestani, Edvin was honestly not sure he needed to be here at all.
It wasn’t just the people out in the tent city either. He had been inside the city during his week here. Even though the normal citizens of Cliff hadn’t been directly affected by the war—they had yet to see the massive armies cresting the distant horizon—the sea of refugee tents on their doorstep was enough to know just how poorly everything had been going, how much destruction there had been across the entire Duchy. The guards were even less thrilled. Although soldiers were ultimately paid by the Duke, thus working for him, they were still people. Citizens of the Duchy like any other.
And the guards were a little more informed than the regular citizens. They knew of the losses suffered throughout the Duchy. The ones remaining here had seen others shipped out to fight the invaders. And now…
“The manor guards are gearing up for another of the Duke’s lavish parties,” Edvin said, voice deliberately soft and controlled. “A lot of you aren’t local, so you might not know, but the Duke used to have a big party every few weeks with merchants and travelers and anyone wealthy or interesting enough to catch the Duke’s eye. Tons of fine food and drink, looted from the taxes and tributes the Duke enforces on all of us. Everyone wearing pure silk dresses and clothes the likes of which we’ll never touch in our lives.
“He hasn’t had one since the war started. The last one had some uninvited guests show up. Assassins from Evestani. Killed half the guests and almost killed the Duke himself.” Edvin let out a cool scoff. “Now, my guard friend tells me that the top name on the guest list… guess who?”
Edvin let the question hang. Even if some village idiot had survived and made it here, he doubted his implications would go over anyone’s head.
“We’re starving out here and he invites the enemy to share bread and wine?”
“More than bread, I imagine,” Edvin said. “Pies and cakes and meat by the cartload. Shimmering ale served in crystal glasses. Plates encrusted with gold. Think of the largest festival you ever had at whatever tiny village you came from and you’ll be close to what the Duke feasts on every night. So for a special occasion like this, you probably can’t even imagine how excessive it will be.”
A discordant grumble swept through the crowd with Edvin’s words. He suppressed a grin, masking elation at stringing the crowd along with rubbing his arms up and down. It helped that it really was freezing out.
“I don’t know about the rest of you all but my mother always said not to shake hands with a man who just tried to stab you in the back unless you want a knife in your chest.”
“Good riddance,” someone barked out. “I’ll attend the funeral just to piss on his grave,” he said, earning a few chuckles.
“Ah yes. I doubt anyone will be upset to see him go. But the problem is his guests. Evestani comes in here with the guards swinging open the gates for them—”
“My burg, Tweeden, opened the gates for them,” one woman said, scratching at an eyepatch that covered one side of her face. “I heard the guards were killed and replaced with Evestani. They killed half the people—anyone who resisted—and took all the food for themselves. When starvation set in and people got desperate, they killed them as well. A few of us slipped away in the chaos.”
Edvin nodded his head. Although irritated at being interrupted, the woman’s story illustrated his point perfectly. “Evestani kills the Duke and takes over. Then what happens to us? At best, they ignore us fleeing elsewhere. We run, find somewhere new. The winter is almost over so maybe we survive in the short term, but we’ve got no time to build houses and till fields while running. What kind of crops can be grown in time to survive next winter—if we even make it to then.”
“That’s the best option?” an older man asked.
“There are other ideas,” Edvin said with a shrug “Maybe the Duke himself forces us out tomorrow—or just tries to kill us—not wanting Evestani to see our… unsightly camp. At worst…”
“At worst,” the same woman said, “they kill us on their way into the city just because we’re camped out front.”
That morbid thought left another silence in its wake as people considered what they had just heard. It didn’t last long, quickly devolving into questions of what could be done.
“Should we run now?”
“If you want to lose more fingers and toes.”
“We can work the fields once the ground thaws. Building up here—”
“Work for Evestani?”
“They killed my family!”
“Or the Duke?”
“Bastard!”
Edvin sat forward, hunched over the fire as the flames around him grew in intensity. He had said his part for now. Too much too soon and a fire would smother. He had to stoke it properly, feeding it the right amount of fuel at the right times until it turned into a raging bonfire the likes of which could burn down cities.
He would move on to one of the other main groups around the tents today. Tomorrow, a stop inside the city to meet with a few of the angrier groups of people, stoking their flames.
For now…
“What’s going on here? Is everyone alright?”
A familiar voice cut through the arguing, stalling his carefully stirred fire. He glared up at the woman with striped tattoos. Katja, the bandit lord of Porcupine Hill, was the other prong of their plan. Seated atop a small cart loaded with supplies, she smiled down at the group with the fakest, cheesiest smile Edvin had ever seen her wear. He was fairly certain that she only smiled for real when watching her enemies flee from the desert wurms.
Despite the fake smile she wore, her appearance sent relief through the crowd. In the week since she had first appeared here, Katja had become well known. Her distinctive appearance, the hulking Horrik always at her side, and her odd ability to gather up spare bits of food, blankets, and medicine for anyone who asked had made her beyond popular out here in the tent city.
Sure enough, she set into asking if everyone had everything they needed for the next day or two. Enough blankets, clothes, and food. With Arkk’s backing, she could get just about anything delivered within a day.
She was necessary, even if Edvin didn’t like her presence here. Still, she could have let the fire in the people burn for a little longer before she came to squelch it with her relief.
Then again, she also presented an opportunity.
“Katja!” Edvin said, enjoying the brief moment when her smile cracked and her true nature glared through.
She hid it well and quickly, smiling once again though a little more strained. “Yes? Edvin, was it?”
“You can get just about anything, right?”
“I have my contacts,” she hedged. Edvin had heard commentary in her wake, suppositions that she was some kind of outlaw. Nobody cared enough to make a fuss, however. Not as long as she was the best thing to have happened to this camp since it sprung up. “Evestani has started moving around again, making it a little harder to get some things…”
“I don’t need anything much. Maybe a sword? A pike or spear? Even a dagger.”
Katja stared at him, confused for just a moment before her eyes roamed over the rest of the crowd he had been speaking with. “Most weapons are being used, if you know what I mean. Why do you ask?”
“Just got to thinking about how safe we are and how safe we’ll be in the future. Not sure whether to be more scared of enemies afar,” Edvin said, waving his hand out toward the greater Duchy, “or those closer at hand.” He gave a pointed nod of his head toward Cliff’s main gates.
Katja crossed her arms, humming as she thought. “I… might be able to scrounge up a few weapons. Maybe some armor as well, if you’re interested.”
“Am I? Hell, even if I’m lucky and don’t need them, I’m sure I can sell them for a pretty coin later on.”
Nodding her head, Katja said, “I’ll see what I can—”
“Hold,” the woman with an eyepatch said. “If the offer is open, I wouldn’t mind some gear myself.”
“I can use a bow,” someone else said. “For hunting, if nothing else.”
“Me too!”
“And me…”
Katja held up her hands, placating. “Alright, alright. I’ll speak to some people. It might not be fast, but this war has left a lot of unused equipment in its wake. I’m sure some of it will have fallen off some carts transporting it around.” There was a bit of discomfort at the idea of looting the bodies of soldiers. Katja expertly swept that away with a direct look at one of the people around the camp. “Cearl, how is your daughter? Do you need some more medicine?”
And just like that, she was back to the revered figure that she wanted to be seen as.
Edvin scoffed as he stalked off. There were other flames to stoke.
Some people saw a fairy’s wings and assumed they could fly like harpies. That wasn’t true. Harpies had light, weak bones and large wings in place of humanoid arms that let them power through the gravity holding them to the ground. While small and lithe—roughly the size of gremlins, though not as stocky generally—fairies had thin wings that were narrow and flimsy. Their wings could move fast enough and in a specific pattern to create a small pocket of air as a buffer between the fairy and the ground. In other words, they hovered.
In Leda’s view, hovering was not a glamorous form of travel. Someone who spent time training up their hover could outpace a human for a short time but harpies and even horses were faster while humans would catch up once a fairy tired out.
Knowing and having made friends with a few of the Duke’s harpies in the menagerie, Leda sometimes daydreamed about what it might be like to soar the skies. Legends passed down in fairy communities of ages long past—before the Calamity struck—said that fairies could use magic to augment their flight, carrying them through the skies faster than hawks. It always sounded so thrilling.
Now, numb fingers dug deep into the icy scales of a dragonoid’s shoulders while the wind whipped her blue hair into a flurry, Leda could confidently state that flight was overrated. She was nestled between two massive wings on the dragonoid’s back. They swept up and down, beating down equally massive amounts of air. Every thump sent deep reverberations through Leda’s small body, threatening to throw her off the dragon. Only the thin straps of a hastily constructed leather harness kept her from falling to the ground down below.
The fall might not kill a fairy. Although she couldn’t fly, she could slow herself enough that she should be able to walk away with only minor injuries. That wasn’t to say that she would survive. Protectors down below might not take kindly to her presence in their world.
She was supposed to be scouting right now, looking for any landmarks or areas of interest. Leda could barely keep her eyes open. They were moving so fast that the wind had dried her eyes out and made them itchy and raw if she tried to look.
“Arkk was right. There is really one out here…”
Despite the wind’s roar in her ears, the dragonoid’s cool tone wasn’t much different than if she had been sitting right next to Leda. “One what?”
The dragonoid didn’t respond. She banked, dropping Leda’s stomach.
“There.”
Despite the itch in her eyes, Leda forced them open.
The desolation of the Underworld surrounded them. Everywhere she looked, it was the same, dirt desert that was all around the portal. Leda had no idea how far they had traveled but it didn’t look like that desolation ever changed. The only thing of note on the horizon was a tall tower of shadow. A little plot of land that the orange light above the hazy clouds just couldn’t touch. Though she hadn’t seen it up close, she heard that the village near the portal was somewhat similar.
The odd thing was that they were headed directly toward it. “I thought you couldn’t see!” Leda shouted over the wind.
“I see what I need to see. The Stars, though different in this world, guide me.”
Leda had no idea what that was supposed to mean. All she knew was that the tower in the distance was quite rapidly growing closer. It was a simple tower of shadowy stone, but its base was odd. Like it hadn’t been built where it now stood and had rather moved there. For such a tall structure, that should have been impossible.
But Leda had seen several impossible things since being rescued from the Duke’s menagerie. Even before, with that fissure in the sky.
The distant tower wasn’t so distant at all, anymore.
The dragonoid still barreled onward, not slowing.
Leda’s fingers, numb from the cold of the dragonoid’s icy scales, clung ever tighter. “We’re going to crash!”
The moment she spoke, the dragonoid angled her wings. Leda found herself pointing straight up at the sky, rushing higher and higher as the shadowy stones of the tower swept by underneath them. They crested the top of the tower, soaring high over it. Something in the air must have alerted the dragonoid to that fact for, without a word from Leda, she adjusted her wings again, stalling their climb and dropping them back downward.
The pair landed atop the tower with a thump.
Leda, arms shaking from the flight, unlatched the harness. She dropped to the smooth, shadowy stones without even trying to catch herself. Why she had ever thought going flying would be fun was a question she couldn’t begin to answer. Not just flying, but flying with a blind dragonoid. It was lucky they hadn’t crashed into the building. The dragonoid might have been fine, they were true monsters, but riding on her back, Leda would have been battered and broken by the bricks.
And they still had to go back… Would the blind dragonoid even be able to find the way?
Shuddering, Leda picked herself up, standing. The dragonoid stalked around the flat roof of the tower, head down like she was staring at the structure below them. Although the bricks looked like they had been cast from molten shadow, they were solid and hardy to the touch.
“Do you see a door? A hatch?”
Leda looked around and started to shake her head in the negative until she realized that the motion wouldn’t be seen. “No. Just flat bricks. They all look like they’re made of shad—”
The dragonoid didn’t wait for her to finish. She lifted a foot and slammed it back down. The entire tower shook and trembled but the stone remained firmly in place, even after the dragonoid continued stomping on the roof. Leda worked her wings, bringing her to a slight hover to keep from losing her footing because of the shaking ground.
“Magically reinforced. Someone is actively using it? Or is the magic in the air keeping it active? It seems inert, but…”
“What?” Leda didn’t understand a thing of what was being said. It was clear the dragonoid knew something.
Figuring she would be blown off again, it came as some surprise when the dragonoid turned to her. “This is a mobile fortress. A machine of war.”