Master of Words, Mistress of Stone

[Pinions of Daedalion]

With many thanks to Karuka and Dawnmorrow, who helped proof-read and edit this manuscript before it was posted!

“See, this is why flesh isn’t suited to shaping,” Sigrun Kondrat remarked to nobody in particular. Stubby fingers worked her boomstick’s release mechanism. Springs snapped, and a heated metal casing whisked past her notched ears with the hiss of escaping steam. “It’s so... weak.”

Her cheerful brogue rolled down the slope of the dry embankment upon which she stood, through a night littered with the light of a waning half-moon. Drought cracks spread like tendrils of a spider’s web in the riverbed, a grim reminder to all who witnessed them of the toll that the Necromancer’s invasion had incurred. Once the Bards had sung of the farmlands between the Escaldor and the Elleduin as the breadbasket of all Althanas. Now, those rare travellers who walked the fringes of these newly-dubbed Eastern Plaguelands were far more likely to stumble upon a horde of wights than a farmhand or a herdbeast.

“Or a stray party of half-decomposed cadavers,” Sigrun continued the thought out loud. She had to pitch her voice to carry over the clamour of combat not a stone’s throw distant. “Wouldn’t you agree, Oby?”

Oby, or Obahyurur the Unwise, didn’t dignify her musing with an answer. Then again, when cornered by three zombies grasping and gouging at its body, even the most eloquent of speakers would have had trouble responding to such a half-articulated question. And Obahyurur, a black iron automaton two metres tall, was by no means an eloquent speaker. In fact, given that its creator had yet to decipher the mysteries of vocal cords or the means of infusing scrap metal with life, it didn’t speak at all. That didn’t deter its mistress Sigrun from yabbering away at it incessantly.

“Now, where was I?” She fumbled through her pockets for a spare cartridge, then remembered that she’d used the last one the day before. All she had left were the four on her belt. “Ah yes. Only amateurs work with flesh. Too easy to meld. Too frail for abuse. ‘Strewth!”

A grunt of effort rammed the wad of black powder and shot into place. She slammed the breech closed, tapping it once to ensure its integrity. Then the prosthetic iron fingers of her left hand curled around the dragon-belcher's oaken haft, bracing it in the direction of the walking dead grasping at her golem.

“Boom!” she called...

... only to realise that she hadn’t lit the fuse.

How could she forget? Not after two previous shots scarred the earth bank opposite! She’d even managed to blow the head from the first zombie before it had reached Oby, and its body still twitched spasmodically on the far side. Something in the star-speckled sky overhead crowed at her in raucous laughter.

“Oh shut up,” she told it, reaching into the pocket of her smithing apron. Her grimy hand re-emerged with a flint firestarter. She flicked it once to create flame, which soon took merry hold of the saturated hemp cloth, a small beacon of hope in the darkness.

“Boom!” she called again, and this time the boomstick responded to her touch.

Thunderous discharge tore the shadows asunder. Leaden fireball streaked through the night skies on a calculated ballistic trajectory, splitting them like a shooting star. Acrid fumes of smouldering black powder overwrote the noxious clouds of decay and rotten flesh.

The lighting was poor, but the angle good. The closest zombie lost its head in a disintegrating puff of blood and flesh, of shattered skull and splattering cranial matter. Its compatriot looked down at the sudden hole in its chest, the wound cauterised by a wreath of remnant flame. Promptly it collapsed to the pustulent ooze that seeped from the cracks in the corrupted ground.

That left just one shambler to face the dispassionate iron golem. The silvery splendour of its activation rune glowed across its beefy chest; ‘life’, it proclaimed to the world in the ancient dwarven tongue. But what Obahyurur granted to the undead construct flailing at its feet was not life. Sigrun had known the hypocrisy of the inscription when she’d carved it there. It spoke volumes that she didn’t care.

“Took you long enough, didn’t it?” she complained to her mute companion. Shouldering the steaming dragon-belcher across her back, she crossed the riverbed between them at an ungainly trot. The heavy leather apron she wore made it difficult to move with grace, and her legs were sore with the long journey south and east from Gunnbad. “Oh don’t mind that. It’ll wash off.”

She directed her last comment at the golem’s clumsy attempts to wipe dripping blood and gore from its immense fists. The pulverised remains of its erstwhile foe lay crushed into the dry earth at its feet.

“And you just had to go ahead and mash it into some sort of pulp, didn’t you. Even the elves wouldn’t dare serve this at one of their so-called banquets.”

Wrinkling her snub nose in a delicate grimace, she stepped with ginger care through the fleshy puddles of two of her opponents. On the slope above her, the headless third of their number still flopped from time to time like a fish out of water. But her interest lay in the unfortunate zombie that had taken her shot through the chest... the only one, in fact, with an intact skull.

“At least I only need two of these,” she grumbled, reaching down with pudgy fingers into a wide-open eye socket. She twisted, yanked, and then repeated the process again a hand’s span to the left. It took her five seconds to finish gathering the necessary ingredients.

“Well, that’s that,” she told Obahyurur, who was still trying to wipe its hands on the earth. Seeing as the golem’s arms extended twice the length of its stubby legs, a charitable person would likely have bet on it succeeding. But Sigrun had yet to work out how to design knees that would allow Obahyurur to bend over forwards without sacrificing bipedal stability. Thus every attempt could only end in dismal failure as iron palms swept over the riverside reeds. If the golem could manage an expression on its iron features, it might have been one of frustrated befuddlement. “Oh, Oby, stop that.”

Obahyurur turned to face her as she deposited her grisly trophies into her apron pocket. In turn she fished out a stained note of goat-skin parchment and a stick of graphite to accompany it. With swift exactitude she crossed out the penultimate item on her list, ending the stroke with a curled flourish. Then she peered close at the last line of the recipe.

“Hm,” Sigrun cogitated. “Now where in this blighted wasteland am I supposed to find the ashes of a long-lost muse?”

If only Obahyurur could have shrugged.

[Diadems of Promethion]

“But when that greedy thief got back to her lair and opened her pouch to check her spoils, boy was she in for a surprise!” The speaker paused for a heartbeat, letting the anticipation of his audience swell. He delivered the final flourish with all the joyous fanfare of an experienced raconteur. “The bard had replaced it all with lumps of coal!”

The cavernous common room erupted in raucous mirth. Bellowed laughter soared towards the naked, flame-scarred roof beams. Mercenary survivors of the strife in Scara Brae and Corone mingled with fresh elven graduates from the College Arcana at Beinost, fighting over the right to fresh wine. Many had long since lost their senses. Most would not recall the story he’d just finish telling. Four months after the Dread Necromancer’s defeat the Corpse War still threw up horrors that tested the limits of mortal sanity. Many of those who skirmished on the front lines could only find repose in the camaraderie and solace of taverns such as Tallman's.

“Drink, drink!” the call rose as one, flickering the lantern flames in its intensity. Alcohol flowed into golden goblets and pewter tankards: Coronian reds and Fallienese whites, Istralothian pales and Salvic darks. Some of the elves would grumble that human wines could never match the purity and palate of the Raiaeran vineyards of old. Many of the men of the south would miss the taste of the breweries of their homelands. But they drank their fill all the same.

The speaker walked amongst them like a veteran campaigner, bantering words and swapping drinks with aplomb. A stray observer would never have guessed that he had not once fired a shot in anger against any of Xem’zund’s minions. He greeted a drunken halberdier like a long-lost friend, though they had never once met before. He entered into discourse with a florid elf on the respective qualities of Radasanthian and Underwood wines, and how the latter held a slight bitterness to its aroma that reminded him of the lost vineyards of Tirinost. He perched on the edge of the counter and regaled a trio of half-elf Bladesingers with the tale of the Dawnbringers and how he had once polished Godhand Stryker’s left boot. Their merriment echoed through from walls of sculpted marble, through draughty windows into the swift-moving night.

Once upon a time, Nenaebreth had grown fat off the silvery birches of the Timbrethinil. Trade had flourished between the new capital of Eluriand to the west and the ancient capital and port of Anebrilith to the east. But the Dread Lich had found the town defenceless and ripe for plunder when marching north towards Trenyce from the Lindequalme. Its location had spared it from utter destruction, but only mercenary riff-raff had sheltered beneath its eaves after its capture. They had cared neither for its culture nor its ascetic qualities. Six months under their rule had left only the barest dregs still standing.

Then in the first days of the Spring of Retribution Dawning, the Legion of Light had defeated Maeril Thyrrian on the plains outside Nenaebreth. A day later, they moved in and liberated the town proper.

Encouraged by the new peace, by their ones and twos old faces had returned and new faces had taken up residence. The Elythian League recognised the strategic value of the town as many had done before, earmarking a small garrison to man the ruins of the central citadel and to patrol the surrounding countryside. Eventually they hoped to divert enough resources to make the land habitable once more. For now, a simple flag-bearing presence would have to suffice.

And thus a single banner, golden starburst on field of white, flew above a town of which much remained in ruin. The elegant wooden townhouses had disappeared in face of the need for fuel or barricade. Ash and rubble strew across the wide paved thoroughfares. Blood splattered the winding alleyways where both citizen and occupier had made desperate last stands.

The building now christened Tallman’s Tavern had begun life as a storehouse, one of the few stone buildings in the township proper. Thus it had survived the occupations in better shape than its wooden neighbours. Lantern light shone from gaps in its boarded windows, beacons of hope amongst the desolate remains of civilisation that had once been. It smelt of warm spice, of alcohol spilt on rich hardwood. It tasted of ambrosia mixed with relief and hope.

And in the midst of that light and merriment strode the speaker, a dwarf of shorn beard and dusky skin. He wore his silk shirt unbuttoned to the chill, such that said stray observer from earlier could pick out every strand of fire-red chest hair burning beneath the braziers. An ugly dwarf, flat of face and square of jaw, none could have guessed that from how his green eyes blazed in merriment and his sagging jowls spread laughter in their wake. Bulbous nose shone bright with one too many drinks, though that stopped him not from downing another ale to the victorious cheers of a pair of Scarabrian huntsmen. His name was Throld Sartet, lately of Gunnbad to the northwest and of Hamdarim far to the south. Those who knew his name decried him as the ne’er-do-well fourth son of the Sartet merchant clan. But all looked awaited in eager anticipation the next wondrous tale he would spin from drink-loosened lips.

His insobriety hampered not his powers of observation. In the corner of the room, isolated from the rest of the crowd by an invisible barrier, a single elf sat over his wine. His robes, gold-trimmed blue, marked him as a scholar of great learning. Throld sidled into the seat next to him without so much as a ‘by your leave’, waved to the bartender for another two of whatever the elf was drinking, and let out a belly-wrenching but polite belch.

“Now you, I reckon, have a story or two to tell.”

The elf, taken aback by this mangy dwarf’s forthrightness, fumbled for a reply.

“I... well...”

“Ah, let me guess.” Throld tapped the edge of his nose to the crowd and gave them a knowing wink. A number leaned close at the gesture, recognising another tale in the making. “You have so many stories that you could not possibly tell them all over the space of a glass of fine wine, or even a thousand glasses of fine wines. A learned scholar such as yourself, from the scribing halls of Anebrilith or of Istien herself no doubt... may the Ancients and the Star Pantheon both bless her memory... well, you must have memorised so many epic tales and legends of old!”

Mollified, the elf even managed a small smile. “A few, master dwarf. I am afraid that none would compare to your masterful tongue.”

“Ah!” Throld beamed from cheek to cheek as the bartender – a stout old man nicknamed Small Bob in contrast to his establishment – arrived with the drinks that Throld had ordered. The dwarf set one next to the elf’s half-full goblet, then downed most of his own in a single swallow. “A modest elf, in addition to an intelligent one. Perhaps, fine sir, perhaps.”

Brilliant green eyes glimmered as he leaned in closer.

“Perhaps if I ask you of the tale of the muse of epics, then, you will be able to oblige?”

The scholar frowned, thin lines creasing his sculpted brow. Flowing brown hair gleamed in the firelight. His blue eyes dallied in thought, completely unaware that a dozen patrons now clung to his every word. Even Throld seemed somewhat taken aback by the seriousness with which the elf considered the request. Something bright – hope, perhaps? – touched the depths of his ale-addled gaze.

“I cannot say I am wholly familiar,” the elf murmured at last, shaking his head as if to clear it of cobwebs. The crowd sighed in unison, tension released as one. Familiar disappointment flickered through the set of Throld’s jaw. “Except... I seem to remember hearing that very phrase in passing not so long ago. One of the battlefield scavengers to the east, who approached me upon seeing my robes in hopes of selling something that he’d found...”

He looked to the dwarf, only to find bright green eyes staring at him intently.

“Now that is a story I would pay to hear,” Throld rumbled in rapt murmur, all traces of insobriety and merriment lost. “Perhaps you would care to recount it for me?”

“An’ fur me?” a second voice, rough and ready, interjected to the sound of the tavern doors slamming open.

[Pinions of Daedalion]

With brawny belligerence she pushed through the crowd to where the elf conversed with the other dwarf, heeding neither muttered curse nor loud protestation. She might have spilt a few ales over undeserving trouser legs along the way, but she didn’t care. Obahyurur would have caused even further chaos if she’d brought him along with her, which was why he currently stood outside the window in the winter chill. And that was thoughtful enough of her, wasn’t it?

“I want to know more, too,” she said to them both, spelling the words out in their faces. In her experience, it tended to work out better for both parties if she pretended she was speaking to the clan idiot. Less puzzled looks, and more results.

It didn’t stop the elf from gaping at her in confusion. But the other dwarf recovered his composure with commendable speed.

“Gamut meliku, tan menu selek lanun naman,” he greeted her in their shared tongue. Good travels, may your forge ever burn bright. He’d pinpointed her as an artisan or a craftsdwarf, which made sense from his point of view. His glance at her mechanical left arm had given him the clue; in any case, he wasn’t far wrong. He switched to Tradespeak, so that the rest of the tavern could understand him as well. “Allow me to buy you...”

“Nai, taleweaver,” she cut him off in curt dismissal. Fixing the elf with her most polite glare, she rummaged through the blood-soaked trophies in the pocket of her smithing apron. Nearby patrons recoiled from the stench, some with enough violence to fall over backwards upon the hardwood floor. Even the other dwarf wrinkled his nose in distaste. The elf paled to the point that she feared he might faint on her, which didn’t bode well for the rest of the conversation. But having journeyed this far into the establishment it was easier to keep trying than to back away and have to find another source of information.

Her fingers grasped what she searched for. She retrieved the goat-skin parchment, smellier and more stained than ever, and shoved it in the elf scholar’s face. His ashen features turned an interesting shade of green.

“From the deepest, darkest depths of the Great Library of Ankhas itself,” she told him proudly, forgetting to enunciate her words in her excitement. “Or transcribed from it, at least. Look! The ashes of a long-dead muse! Did your scavenger say anything about...”

Something between the elf’s eyes rolling back into his head and the other dwarf’s emerald-edged glower warned her to stop speaking any further. She turned to find her compatriot’s bright red nose thrust into her face.

“Now, lassie. Look what you’ve done. After all the trouble I went through to get him to loosen his tongue. And he was just about to tell me something interesting, too.”

Obviously she had angered him, though she had no idea how. And he talked funny for a dwarf, as well. Almost as though he made a conscious effort to ingratiate himself to the skinny tree-huggers or the swarthy island men who shared the tavern with him.

Then it struck her that perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing from his point of view, given that he seemed genuinely irritated by something she’d done. Of a sudden she found herself wishing she’d brought Obahyurur with her after all. The weight of her boomstick slung over her right shoulder felt a lot more reassuring than it had a moment ago.

“Eh,” she shrugged. The tip of her nose wiggled as she took a stab at what had caused the elf to faint. “Not my fault he can’t hold his drink.”

Somebody in the crowd slapped his face with his palm. Another fought to stifle hysterical laughter. The mood swung away from violence, tension seeping away like tendrils of mist into the night. Tavern patrons all around her still kept a wary eye on the dragon-belcher upon her back and the stinking morass of her smithing apron’s pocket. But at least they no longer seemed so willing to beat her up at the drop of a figurative pin.

The other dwarf saw that too, and his heavy eyes sagged in thought. Then he grinned, bearish and wide.

“And the intrepid dwarf switches tactics. My offer of a drink still stands, my dear.” She bristled at that – he looked a lot older, but that didn’t give him any right to patronise her – but he continued in oblivious good nature. “Perhaps you would be willing to explain to me what that piece of parchment’s all about?”

Did he have some semblance of good taste after all? Then again, he did seem to know something about the so-called muse, so... She glanced at the unconscious elf, then eyed the other dwarf for a moment longer.

“Recipe,” she replied at length, unwilling to diverge any further details. For example, there was no need to tell him what the recipe was for. “Apparently I need the ashes of a long-dead... no, long-lost muse to complete it. So. What is a muse?”

The other dwarf frowned, leaning forward upon the stained table between them. It turned his entire forehead into a fascinating mess of folded skin. His breath stank of too much bad ale. She’d never developed any taste for alcohol herself, given that all it did was muddle her thoughts beyond use.

“If I were to, hypothetically of course, say that it was an old artefact of immense value to me...”

“An artefact? Really?” In an instant Sigrun’s mind leapt to the logical conclusion. She fumbled in her pockets for the stick of graphite she always carried with her, overwhelmed by the need to take notes and make calculations. She never noticed the stench that wafted from her lap, or the sudden exodus of other patrons from her immediate vicinity. “In which case if I burn it to cinders in a closed kiln, I should get a lot of ash, shouldn’t I! Affirmative! This is going to go so well, I can almost taste the success. Ooh, this is going to be so good...”

Blithe ignorance allowed the stunned disbelief of her audience to wash over her, a wave of anger over a rock of unawareness. She turned her attention to the elf, grey eyes glittering in eager greed.

“To the east, he said, didn’t he? Or was it west? Ooh, I hope he wakes up quickly so that...”

As if remembering something, she lifted her mechanical hand from the strap that held her boomstick across her back. A delicate flick of her wrist revealed a steel scalpel embedded in her index finger, its honed edge glinting in the dim light of the fires. Her voice echoed over the murmured conversation with cheer, an incongruous grin plastered across her features.

“Maybe if I cut off a nose, even just a little bit of his ear… maybe he’ll wake up and tell me what I want to…”

A moment of utter, total silence.

Something clicked against her temple.

[Diadems of Promethion]

Her sparkling grey eyes widened into the barrel of Throld’s own dragon-belcher. Vera, he called it. An ugly and squat contraption, its shortened stock resembled that of a crossbow rather than a true fire lance. He’d asked the craftsdwarves of his hold to rework the barrel twice so to make it both light enough and strong enough for his needs. Even then he had to heft its bulk in both hands and brace it against his chest. But he had little doubt about what it could do to her pretty face at such close range.

Drawing Vera on one of his own kin offended his sensibilities. Drawing her on another lady repulsed him even more so. But she’d already made it plenty clear that common logic didn’t apply. And he really didn’t like the way she had just threatened the elf with grievous harm.

“Lassie, might I suggest you step away from this table and out of this tavern right now.” He didn’t bother to disguise the gruff contempt in his rumbling baritone. “I don’t particularly mind you asking around for information, but I’m not particularly fond of murder. Or coercion at the edge of a blade. Or at the point of a barrel, for that matter, but we’ll let that slide for now.”

All around him the patrons stirred, some in shock, others in fear. But those closest to him, who’d observed the entire exchange and knew what was going on, fell in line behind him. A couple lay hands on swords at their waist, though they stopped short of drawing steel. The others took their cue and watched on impassively.

Not that his compatriot seemed to notice.

“Oooh, now that’s shiney,” she cooed, as though he held a gold ingot against her head rather than a weapon. She strove for a better look, but no matter how she craned her neck the hollow barrel followed. “How’d you do that? What’s its range? You must have sacrificed heat tolerance to get the metal so thin... but by Freyja’s right pap, that’s so...”

“Enough, says the dwarf with the gun.” Throld’s baritone could have cracked stone. He gestured towards the door with his free hand, somehow imbuing the gesture with courtesy that he no longer felt. “Let it also be known that I’m not particularly fond of people who can speak so callously about burning precious artefacts from a bygone age.”

“Why?” She frowned at him, puzzled. “That’s what the recipe calls for, after all. Hey!”

She directed her last exclamation at a pair of halberdiers liveried in the golden starburst of the Elythian League, just as they grabbed hold of her upper arms. They hoisted her up between them, one to each shoulder, and carried her towards the exit. Her boomstick swung from her shoulders like a poorly weighted pendulum, clattering in unruly aggression against stray chairs and knees. Her protestations fell upon deaf ears, and their grip remained stalwart no matter how she wriggled and fought.

“Hey!” she bellowed again, but neither her stout strength nor her prosthetic arm gave her leverage against her captors. “Wait! Why!?”

“Because to the people of this land, including my humble self, those artefacts represent something a lot more valuable than your recipe,” Throld called after her, holstering his weapon as she disappeared from sight. “And because the only thing we in Raiaera dislike more than a common thief is a desecrator! Am I right, ladies and gentlemen? Did we not all deal with the last one and his undead cronies?”

A genial roar of agreement rose from the low benches and the roaring fireplace, reverberating to the thundering beat of half-full mugs. Shadows scuttled in the hidden depths of the high vaulted ceiling, remnant nightmares of the abominations and atrocities that haunted the town. But for now the living drove back the horror, out from the eaves and into the oppressive night.

They could do little against the sheer emptiness of the corrupted devastation all around them. Yet they could keep on fighting to protect their little corner of the country, whether against the Alerians or the Plague Lords who would destroy it from without, or those insidious agents who would undermine it instead from within.

As for the dwarf-dam with her quirky curiosity, her belligerent ideas of how to ask questions of a stranger, and her sacrilegious proposal for treating a valuable artefact...

A night in the town gaol would do her a world of good.

[Pinions of Daedalion]

She landed hard, her backside grating upon a cell of sooty stone. The hands that had carried her, firm but unyielding, left her there in the night and the cold. Half a town from Tallman’s Tavern, amidst the hasty repairs of a fire-gutted holding house, only the whispers of a forlorn wind kept her company in nocturnal solitude.

Sigrun didn’t mind. Drawing a stick of soft lead from the folds of her apron, she started to scribble.

Her strokes lasted for most of the night. They ran without rhyme or reason across her emergency sheaf of goat-skin parchments. Then, where they ran out of space, they continued in blinkered absorption across the ash-stained stone walls. They’d relieved her of her boomstick, of course, and had chained her prosthetic arm to the wall to stop her from breaking free. But they hadn’t seen fit to take away the recipe clutched in her metal fingers, and from time to time she peered at it to confirm a fact or two.

By the time the dawn’s first light peered in from the barred slit in the grey stone above her head, she had reached her conclusion.

She still had no idea what the ashes of a long-lost muse were. Neither was she any closer to knowing how much artefact she would need to burn to complete her recipe. She now had a good idea of where to look, thanks to that elf. But she had no idea of the exact location, thanks to that dwarf.

Manacles clattered against her cold iron wrist as she slipped pencil and parchment back into her pockets.

Then she turned to the window, squinting in bleary concentration into the early morning sun. At the top of her considerable lungpower she bellowed a single name.

“Obahyurur!”

Silence stirred in the distance, early dawn-song interrupted by the awakening of soulless iron. She inhaled sharply. Damp mildew and ashen cinder suffused her lungs.

Dust billowed towards her on a steady path. Her foot tapped an impatient staccato beat upon the cold floor. Eyes the hue of master-worked mythril reached for the forge fires of dawn.

Thunder reached her ears, steady quakes through her feet that rattled her mind and set her teeth on edge. Almost here now, almost…

Then the wall to her right exploded in a shower of ancient stone and reinforced wood. Obahyurur’s silvery activation rune countered the sunrise in her eyes. Her golem rumbled a low greeting, drowning the raised alarms from the adjoining guardhouse.

With regal grace she stepped into the hole it had made, sniffing once to express disdain at its tardy arrival. Dejected, like a schoolboy told off by his favourite teacher, it followed her out into the streets of Nenaebreth. She led it on a strutting stride through the empty alleyways, winding back and forth beneath fire-gorged eaves and doubling back upon herself time and again. By the time she stood once more in front of Tapman’s Tavern, the sun had just about peeked its face above the hills on the eastern horizon. Shouts in the distance warned her of pursuit, but they had yet to cordon her off. She had perhaps a moment or two to pursue her only lead.

So this time, she didn’t bother with the niceties.

“Knock knock!” she called, as Obahyurur hammered one mighty fist through the oaken doorframe. Solid oak frame gave way like glass beneath a battering ram, sending a lethal shard-storm into the high-roofed den. Only blind luck saved her from racking up a dozen counts of murder there and then, thus turning into a true fugitive from Elythian justice. The tavern lay empty, devoid of souls after a night of hard drinking, and her loud voice had given Small Bob enough warning to duck behind his counter at the first sign of trouble.

“What in… arh!” he screamed, watching his precious liqueurs decapitated one by one beneath a sustained assault of broken wood. “No not the port, not the…”

He winced as the precious pre-War bottle shattered. “Stop it! What do you want!”

“The elf,” Sigrun called out in undiluted cheer, waving Obahyurur further into the premises. The golem stumbled clumsily through a low table, crushing a sitting bench in the process. Wine-stained wood wafted upwards in a cloud of splinters. “And the dwarf. The taleweaver. From yesterday. Now.”

Small Bob worked up enough courage to chance a quick glance around his cover. One look at the black iron golem wreaking havoc in his establishment, silhouetted by the halo of dawn and the ominous rune of bright silver glowing upon its chest, convinced him to duck back in unseemingly urgent haste.

“They’re not here anymore!” he shrieked. Words babbled from his mouth in desperate need to end the nightmare before it ruined his business beyond recovery. “The elf left at dawn for Winyaurient. The dwarf left even earlier, for the battlefield outside town. Said he’d be looking for something… arh! Please! Stop it!”

Broken glass clinked beneath Obahyurur’s iron sole as he stepped through the remains of the table. The floor creaked in ill omen.

From the doorway, Sigrun frowned.

“Oh do as he says, Oby. I won’t be able to pull you out if you fall through. Get back here.”

Her brow furrowed even deeper as she mulled over the barkeep’s words. Why would that taleweaver…

Of course. He wants the muse for himself. That dirty, cheating, whoring, drunken son of a castrated mule!

“Oby, follow me!” she snarled in strident command, spinning on her heel to face again the riotous tumult she’d left in her wake.

[Diadems of Promethion]

Burnt blood. Flesh, charred to cinders. A flood of death and excrement, pooling on his tongue. He fought and failed to control the heaving sobs in his chest.

Here and there rose the blade of a sword, the haft of a broken polearm, planted in defiance of ground defiled by necromantic corruption. Cold ancient iron, straight bladed and nicked where eons of abuse had taken its toll. The occasional glinting shard of dehlar or master-forged steel. But the scavengers had already picked this part of the battlefield clean.

Here and there stood a forlorn banner, tattered and singed in the summer breeze. Some had borne their sigils proudly once: the sunburst of the Legion, the winged sword of the Silverwind, the crossed hammer and axe of Karazund. Others had heralded an altogether more sinister army. Gruesome trophies – strings of hands, ears, and eyes – streamed in the place of tassels. Sundered manacles still drooped where flayed victims had once hung. Together both proud and sinister shared in their ultimate fate: to reach in hopeless futility for the high blue sky, the bodies of the dead heaped in putrid mounds at their feet.

Here and there and everywhere lay the bodies of the fallen, contorted in death spasm, twisted where flame had cleansed the corruption. Little of note remained, for the pyrrhic victors had carted away their fallen comrades and left for the crows the dead who had died again. But still the scavengers gathered, to pick clean what wrath and ruin had left behind.

His myrtle green eyes crawled over the death and the devastation, and he choked on a lump of solid despair. How many had died here? How many had forfeited their chance at life so that others might hope for the same? How few had survived?

His father’s spirit journeyed to the halls of the Ancients, the mortal windows it left behind glassy and opaque beneath the smouldering sky. With his dying breath he bound his sons to their oaths: they would recover the Daughters of Mnemosyne, the nine muses of Eluriand lost to brigands and thieves so long ago, or they would die trying. How many more lives would their quest claim, their patriarch only the latest to fall foul of the curse? How many more would they lose to the darkness of the surface lands, their sister only the latest casualty of the shadow and the flame?

Vision blurring with faith that lay in tattered ashes, he reached down to close the eyes of his sire.

Throld shook his head, clearing it of the conflating nightmares. The reputation of House Sartet had not survived the disgrace of losing the Daughters in the Black Desert during the early stages of the Corpse War. But its patriarch’s death and his sister’s abduction had occurred more than a year later, after the fall of Hamdarim to the south. Only in his hallucinations did they mutate into one. Only in the deepest darkest pits of his despair did he ever admit to feeling guilt and aye, responsibility over them both.

With weary resignation he rose to his feet, thighs cracking and knees popping as they took weight from his heels. His gaze reached out with a world’s weight of sorrow upon the desecrated battleground. Two years ago, the horses of the elnaith had grazed in peace upon these sparsely forested grasslands, while their breeders debated lineage and feed.

Little remained of such tranquillity now. The twin spurs of the Emyn Naug reached out on the horizon with embracing arms to haunt the piles of broken undead with a half-moon penumbra. In those hills his forefathers had established their outpost of Karazund, from which Raiaeran irregulars had launched their counterstrike against the Dread Necromancer. To the north stretched the ruins of Timbrethinil Forest, where the dawning sky wept like a foetid sore beneath cloud set ablaze by the watch-fires of the vigilant. Pools of arcane corruption cast a forbidding veil upon the lifeless arboreal husks, a curtain of miasma into which no sane mind dared to venture.

Doubtless he could weave a tale of it all. Once upon a time, he would begin, in the lands of hallowed Raiaera where the elf-lords dwelled. He would speak of the rise of the Dread Necromancer and the blight inflicted upon the land. He would speak of the heroes who had fallen in its defence, of the ancient swords and tattered banners left buried in the blood-drenched mud. He would speak of the desolation and the despair, the fields of dead beneath the flaming dawn.

Who would be the hero? The farmer’s son, perhaps, listening in attentive rapture to his tale? Or the village drunkard, needing but inspiration to drag him away from the ale? How many would he damn with foolish hopes of victory and glory? For how many more lives would his tales plant the seeds of salvations?

He exhaled again, packing his daemons back into the little box where they belonged. Another day, perhaps, they would re-emerge to haunt him again. Another day, perhaps, he would continue on his self-ordained path of equal parts damnation and redemption.

But for now he had an oath to uphold. A Daughter to seek.

He returned his attention to the filmy miasma upon the deepest reaches of Nenaebreth's battlefield, the dark sanctum dared by only the most foolhardy or the most desperate of scavengers. If he were to find what he sought upon this battlefield, it would be there.

With careful steps through the devastation, he began his search.

[Pinions of Daedalion]

“I’m looking for a dwarf.”

From the vantage of Obahyurur’s shoulder, Sigrun peered across a sea of flame-charred flesh studded with islands of ancient iron. Five tattered figures grovelled in the mud, their skeletal features streaked with grime, their knife ears obscured beneath waves of scraggly unwashed hair. Hardened by years spent scraping out a living from the dregs of death, their instincts screamed for subservience in the face of the imposing black iron automaton. Already, though, her willingness to ask questions gave the leader of the scavenging lowlifes some semblance of hope.

Emboldened, he chanced a rebellious one-eyed glance upwards.

“I’m looking at a dwarf,” he scoffed, legs tensed beneath his body to leap out of the way the instant her reaction showed signs of turning nasty. “A dwarf who seems to be compensating for…”

“I mean another dwarf,” Sigrun interrupted, unperturbed. The barbed vitriol aimed in her direction slipped through her mind without purchase, leaving behind only the irritation that she had to ask the same question twice. “Red hair. Dark skin. Eyes like a suit of armour. Sings stories like a thrush in heat.”

Her allegories made no sense to the elf on the ground. But his mind, honed for opportunity, missed not the fact that she wanted something that he could provide... whatever the lie, whatever the price. Sensing profit on the tip of his tongue, he leaned closer in conspiratorial connivance.

“I might have,” he whispered, eyes sliding shiftily across her face. They did well to hide the distaste. “What’s it worth to you?”

He leapt back just in time. Obahyurur’s silver arm scythed through the air where his head had been, impacting the muddy earth with enough force to send him to one bony elbow. Sigrun smiled her sweetest smile.

“Is your life price enough?”

Obahyurur scattered the grovelling scavengers through the cloudy noon-light with a second thunderous crash. One, too slow to scramble clear, screamed in terror as the automaton grasped her leg and hoisted her high.

“Or will you settle for a leg or two?”

Small and beady from her perch on high, her eyes settled once more upon the elf who had spoken. They missed not the bob of his throat as he swallowed his tension behind a facade of bravado and racial hatred. His face, cold and cruel, stretched taut over razor-edged cheekbones.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, you can’t just...”

Perhaps he meant to say something about carrots and sticks, Sigrun would think to herself later, but she was in no mood for protracted negotiations. Something cracked beneath Obahyurur’s iron grip, a sharp retort followed by agonised screams. Nimbly the golem shifted grip to his captive’s other leg, leaving the broken limb to dangle at an unnatural angle, like some gruesome trophy.

“One.”

Despite the plethora of flame-charred corpses that surrounded him, equally contorted in their death throes, the elf could not shift his gaze from his comrade’s injury. He did recognise that his three other comrades had abandoned him as swiftly as they could scurry from the scene.

“Okay. Okay, okay! Thayne, you’re worse than the elves! We saw a dwarf earlier. Headed south-west towards the desert, hugging the river.”

“The river?” Obahyurur shifted its weight, eliciting another ugly scream from its trophy. The tip of the she-elf’s toes dangled in limp pain, swaying in unseen time to a hypnotist’s pendulum.

“Meets the Red Forest after a day’s walk. No idea why he’d want to go that way, unless...”

“Unless?” The automaton’s activation rune glinted an angry shade of silver, chasing any thought of prevarication from the elf’s mind.

“Unless he was chasing after those black hoods. Didn’t say anything, don’t know where they came from or what they want, only that they arrived and departed within hours. Went to the very depths of this corrupted battlefield, far further than we dare go ourselves. As if they were searching for something, and found it. Then they came back and nicked our stuff as ...”

Crack. Scream.

“What was that for?”

Sigrun shrugged, her brow contorted in thought that far transcended the here and the now. Almost of its own accord her tongue replied to the elf’s furious query. “Dunno, really. Two.”

In emotionless apathy bordering remarkably upon nonchalant disgust, her automaton tossed aside its prey. It hit the ground with an ear-grating shriek that faded immediately into blessed silence.

“Guess you won’t be following me any more, though. ‘Strewth?”

Towards the setting sunset she turned her slave, and on her orders it started to walk once more.

[Diadems of Promethion]

The languid waters of the Elleduin, fed from the Lake of Gold and from its tributaries in the Great Forest and the Dwarf Hills, rustled in tranquil susurration through the tall reeds of early autumn. Where the crimson boughs of the Lindequalme reached towards the black desert sands of Tel Moranfauglir lay the last ford across the river. A grove of silver birches guarded a low island, cocooned by the benign flow of crystalline peace. There in the deep shadow nestled a temple to Aurient the Star Mother, dedicated to keeping the twin corruptions of Pode and Khal’jaren at bay.

In stealthy silence Throld slipped between the fallen pillars. Exposed to the elements and abandoned to the wilds, the spirits of the silent sanctum reacted with hostility to his intrusion, as if rejecting his presence amongst the elder seeing-stones. Even when he built a fire from stray driftwood and a flint from his tinderbox, shades of distant past loomed all around him in angry, but futile, threat.

Before long they spoke, blades of sound slipping in and out of ears long attuned to darkness.

“State your purpose, dwarf. Be quick about it, lest we feel the need to hasten the process by carving your tongue from your mouth.”

Throld grinned broadly into the deepening night. Myriad folds of flabby skin swallowed his eyes, leaving only the ruddy set of his broad nose as reference for his amused expression.

“I seek warmth in the evening chill, and light against the encroaching darkness. What else would I, a simple travelling story-teller, wish from these empty ruins?”

Whispers flittered through the shadows, as if a dozen shapeless forms held conference beyond the realm of what he could ken. He used the time to pull a small tin pot, a block of dried goat-meat, and a pinch of dried mountain herbs from his travelling pack. The sizzling scent of his dinner worked wonders in enticing a reply.

“Do not seek to deceive us, dwen’del. We have observed your clumsy attempts at tracking us since mid-noon.”

Peeled lips exposed a single snaggletooth, mirth exposed in a lone gleaming pearl amidst an ocean of pitted coal. One hand reached up to scratch the back of his head in abashed shame. The other reached once more into his pack. A handful of dusky beans joined the meat in his cooking pot, where they immediately began leaking oily juices that hissed and spat upon the warm metal. Only then did Throld deign to chuckle.

“That must have been quite a feat, master darthirii. The Sage himself would have found it difficult to pick me out from the black sands of his realm.”

For a minute or two only the silence of the abandoned night greeted his words. Then a stray spark of firelight glinted off the soot-dimmed silhouette of a long-barrelled musket, high in the gilded foliage overhead. Satisfaction suffused Throld’s barrel chest, and he allowed himself to bask in its warm embrace. One.

“It is true, I have been following you all day. I believe you have something in your possession that I desire. Armed with the blessing of the Mistress of a Thousand and One Masques, I am willing to negotiate for it.”

Throld felt their eyes narrowing, their brows furrowing. Now that he knew where one of the shades kept watch, he could follow their unspoken whispers to find the rest. The dense river shrubbery opposite, Two. A tangle of vines overrunning a mound of marble rubble, Three. The intersection of two carved pillars downed by the ravages of time, Four. An outcropping of jagged rock around which the current tinkled and swirled, Five. Add to them a pair of sentinels positioned on either bank to guard the approaches to the isle, and he arrived at a standard seven-elf Blackcloak squad.

To his surprise, they responded to his enticement with laughter.

“Not a Kachuck dwarf by your accent,” Four guffawed.

“Must be one of those renegades who sided with the Old Elves,” One replied, the tone of his retort warning the other to stay quiet. “Scout? Spy? Saboteur? Assassin?”

Throld turned away from his dinner, just long enough to incline his head to the unseen speaker.

“Then let us not tell the tale of a squad of Alerian Blackcloaks deep in Raiaeran territory, scrounging for artefacts of power in battlefields where the dead lie unburied. Let us not tell the tale of what a merchant dwarf from Hamdarim might be willing to offer in return for something that was taken from his family by the Necromancer before this war even started.”

A piercing whistle punctured the lulling cadence of his low murmuring: a sentry’s warning, signifying imminent danger.

“Let us instead tell the tale of a maiden with no manners, and her golem of black iron, and the night they decided to attack said merchant with no warning.”

A sudden explosion rent the darkness, and all fell into chaos.

[Pinions of Daedalion]

“Taleweaver! I’m here for you!”

The explosive shot hit the campfire dead centre, and she gave an involuntary whoop of delight. Charred and flaming driftwood arced through the night like miniature meteors, accompanied by a side dish of half-cooked meat and beans.

“Do you have the muse yet? Or are you going to tell me what you know?”

She felt rather than saw the barrel swing in her direction, the gaze of a cheap dark elf knock-off of a musket aligning upon the centre of her brow. Spitting florid curses that they would dare to aim such a shoddy weapon at her, she ducked back behind the meagre cover of her riverside boulder. At the top of her considerable lungs she shrieked,

“Obahyurur!”

The golem bounded from the tree line, dragging behind it the unconscious fool of a Blackcloak sentry who’d given her the opening to sneak up so close to the camp in the first place. True, the taleweaver had been the most engaging of distractions. And the dark elf was young enough to be on his first deployment this deep into enemy territory. And they’d almost outrun the legendary endurance of the dwarves in a forced march through desolate war-scourged lands.

But that didn’t mean she had any sympathy for stupidity. She’d knocked him hard enough on the noggin for him to see stars for a month.

Obahyurur had no such sympathy either. Expressionless, the golem hurled the poor Blackcloak head-first at the pillar behind which her target had sought shelter. Sparks of flame and shards of shrapnel ricocheted from his heavy metal plating as the Alerian muskets retrained on the new threat. They did little to hinder the golem’s advance, and nothing to prevent the unfortunate Blackcloak from impacting with enough force to crack skull and stone. A shapeless form leapt from the pillar as it crumbled, hitting the shadow-strewn ground with drawn steel as its comrade fell limp and lifeless alongside it. A heartbeat later the chiming ring of weapon-play entered her ears, and the taleweaver stumbled backwards parrying in frantic haste.

“Oh for curses’ sake, elf, does it look like I’m in cahoots with that maniac? I was trying to warn you of her approach before…”

Jade-green eyes went wide in face of coal black, warning the Blackcloak that opposed him to react. Obahyurur’s solid metal fist hummed through the air where they had just stood, sundering the earth with enough force to send them both stumbling. The elf regained his feet a heartbeat before the taleweaver did, but hesitation stayed his blade, giving the dwarf the chance to shout,

“My dinner, elf! She ruined it!”

Oh, shal…

Sigrun dove headfirst into the reeds at the riverbank. Just in time, in fact, before a pair of hot lead balls tore past and singed her left pigtail in their passage. She snatched at the trigger in blind response, but the shot went wild and wide into the night. Somewhere in a mile’s radius a starving jackrabbit jumped at a hail of buckshot, but that was none of her concern.

“Get him, Oby!”

The taleweaver didn’t have the muse yet. The dark ones did, the Blackcloaks with their shoddy muskets and their elitist airs. She’d heard little more than rumours about them in the mines of Kir Borim, whispers on the wind that hung like a cloud of doom over their heads. Behave, or the Blackcloaks would get you. Obey, or the overseer will tell the Blackcloaks. As if they would concern themselves with the affairs of one rebellious mining hold in the far north.

Still, she would at least now get to see whether the rumours held true, whether their skill justified the fear.

She inhaled, and her nostrils filled with rank mud and the stench of cordite. Stubby fingers, yellow with engrained sulphur, worked the release mechanism with practiced ease. Snapping springs whisked the empty metal casing past her notched ears, warm steam stinging the scrapes on her wrist. Something burned against her left thigh as she lined up the sighting mechanism. Sigrun ignored it with dispassionate ease, focusing instead on the muzzle flash imprinted in her vision amidst the shadow and the darkness.

She exhaled, blanked away the pandemonium of battle, concentrated. Then pulled the trigger.

A scream of pain rewarded her efforts.

Two down, five to go…

Then she realised she’d run out of cartridges.

Woops.

[Diadems of Promethion]

The golem thrashed about in violent rage, pulverising centuries-old stone with as much effort as it took a booted foot to snap a twig. But for all its intimidating furore it lacked a certain intelligence – or awareness, perhaps – that a lesser foe might have possessed. Engrossed in a deadly dance of steel and iron with Blackcloak bladesmen One and Five, it never noticed Throld sneaking off to the side.

Away from the melee he tried to catch his breath, taming the thunderous beat of blood through his head and acid in his lungs. One’s falchion had notched a deep scar in Vera’s oaken stock. Throld caressed the wound gently, rueing the gold pieces it would take to restore her to her former glory. His other hand reached towards his belt, to reassure himself that he had enough reloads to drive his insane stalker away if necessary. His best chance of negotiating with the Blackcloaks for whatever trophies they may have found upon the battlefield at Nenaebreth lay in ingratiating himself into their good graces. And that meant…

Cold metal pricked his soft fleshy fingers, accompanied by the soft sensation of well cured leather. A satchel, perhaps, the contents of which did not give way when he pressed down upon them. He recognised beneath his digits the solidity of stone, the groan of metal and glass thrown together without regard for safety, the gritty whisper of charred cloth.

My, what blessed luck!

Somehow he’d stumbled upon the very cache of treasure he’d sought to barter access to. Surely it couldn’t hurt if… after all, what they never learned… and it wasn’t as if they didn’t already have enough on their plates…

Muttering thanks to the Trickster he delved into the satchel, heedless of the clouds of chalky dust thrown up in the near distance. The screech of tempered blade on iron hide as Blackcloak battled automaton never even entered his ears. The quaking thunder of the golem’s fists hitting floor mattered not, nor the swirling mantles of conjured shadow as the elves danced out of the automaton’s reach. Only the potential of the prize he’d fought and scraped for mattered, the one he’d even gone to Ettermire and bowed down before an Ancestor-damned wyrm-woman for. Glinting greed gleamed in his eyes, and in the depths of the manufactorum-cured leather his potential treasures gleamed back.

A pair of Bladesinger’s bracers, priceless in the right hands whether Raiaeran or Aleran, jangled to the dusty earth by his knee. Throld gave them not a second glance.

The edge of a short dwarven killing blade, inscribed with foreign runes from neither Hamdarim in the south nor Gunnbad in the north, drew blood from his busy fingers. He tossed it aside with a vicious curse, ignoring the stinging pain.

A piece of tattered cotton cloth crumbled beneath his touch, of a silky weave he had not encountered before. Something tingled like static upon his fingers long after he’d dismissed it as unimportant, the last dregs of focused arcane will long since expunged.

A set of glass vials clinked beneath his grasp, filled with all manner of bloody liquids, soil samples, and particulates of unknown origin. Briefly he brought one up to the light of a burning brand, twirling it to get a better look. Daemonic essence? Lich grindings?

It didn’t matter. He sought something else.

Stone… stone…

His fingers touched upon cool limestone, etched with the weight of a thousand years of history.

And cold steel kissed his neck.