You don’t hear much about Wyrmseat nowadays. It makes sense, those scalies were a major player in history going back as far as the records go, but they got a harsher deal than most when the Wall of Winter appeared. Three quarters of the country was lost to the blizzard along with all but one of their major cities, or that’s the official statement.

Personally, I think they doctored the numbers to make themselves appear less weak.

- Voxis Verygood on the state of Wrymseat

I was being watched. It was that same sensation that let me catch the first agent of the Vitorian Envoy making the hairs on the back of my neck stick up. The thing was, I couldn't be sure if I had suddenly developed a sixth sense, or if the two people shadowing my every step were just bad sneaks. They kept trying to blend into the crowd with manufactured characteristics that never quite fit, and when they looked at me it was with both patience and judgement.

Not the condescending judgement I was used to, to be clear. This was more the executioner’s sort of judgement.

I made certain to lock eyes with both of them and reflect their intent back at them as I went about the market. Normally I’d do more, but that wasn’t going to help me much here and the character of Envoy Amber was the kind that condescended to terrible sneaks. Humiliation would have to wait for now. The next time one of their agents made contact with me however, I was going to recommend those two for additional training.

But that was for the future, and right now I was trying to find a way to discreetly purchase something sweet. The problem with that was I couldn’t find anything that was obviously a sweet shop, and the smell I was familiar with was not the one of the many invading my nose from the air of the market. As near as I could tell there weren't any chocolate stores here. I suspected this was my upbringing in Veliki giving me unreasonable expectations once more.

While I became increasingly agitated, as actual frustration was outside my grasp for the moment, I purchased dried meats and fruits that I could use to replenish the trail mix Jevi had taken to requesting on our journey to Source. Along with other long life ingredients and general supplies that I foresaw us using. I didn’t have a rope, for example, so I bought a loop of quality rope from a store that I spied a man much larger than me buying such a rope from.

And a grappling hook, too. That one I weighed in my hand, wondering at how rezan might make it into a deadly improvised weapon. What I imagined was satisfactory, though it didn’t influence the purchase in the least.

I had just made a purchase for a whetstone to keep my kitchen knives sharp when I heard a loud, youthful, and enthusiastic voice call my name.

“Amber!”

I turned to see a crowd of people, none of whom were interested in me. Then I saw a gauntleted hand just barely waving at me from above those peoples’ shoulders. Finally, once the crowd parted, Weldon was freed to approach me. His sword on his back as it ever was, and his watermelon sized sack mysteriously replaced with a less large sack holding significant coin.

“Weldon.” I greeted once he was close, eyeing the sack. I suppose that explained why he didn't take the money from the bandits. Though not why he borrowed money from me.

“I heard about how yo-” He cocked his head to the side, listening to a person no one else could hear. “Huh. Okay.” His attention didn’t return to me, but he did frown. “That doesn’t make sense, though.” I waited. “Uh… if you say so then.”

Weldon looked at me. “I want to cheer you up!”

“Okay.” I said. “Leave.”

“Oh-kay!” Weldon turned around and started walking. He made it two steps before turning back around and returning to his spot in front of me. “I did it, now I get to make an offer. Here.”

He held out a piece of bread for me to take. It had white frosting on the top, and the smell made my teeth ache ever so slightly.

“Take it.” He urged, and I did so reluctantly.

“What is this.” I'd never seen anything like this before. He was clearly taking advice from his angel, and I suspected holy poisoning.

“Something that will help you get both feet back on the ground! Meta… Phorically? That is! It will make you feel better!” Weldon revealed, grinning at a job well done. Or a thoughtful gift well revealed.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Ah! You’re right!” Weldon leaned in close and whispered, possibly throwing his voice even further while doing so. “This place is open and people are around. I’m trying to consider other people’s privacy.”

“How thoughtful.”

“I know, right!?”

I glanced around. The two sneaks had changed locations, but were still there. Weldon had caused a little bit of a stir, but most people were beyond giving him the time of day. Only a few boys Weldon’s age were looking on with scowls that I couldn’t figure the reason behind.

The thought that I should think logically, rather than obeying the whim and influence of my current state of mind, did make itself known. Unfortunately, it was also ignored.

“Just use your normal voice and tell me what it is.” I told Weldon in the middle of a busy market.

“Well... it’s bread.” He said, careful to measure his volume.

I sighed and started to walk away.

“It’s very sweet!” Weldon continued. I paused. “You should’ve seen the place I bought it from. There was this whole menagerie of tasty treats. Nothing like what I saw in- where we met, I’m sure the owner of the establishment isn’t Chosen in any way, but I was still very impressed! I was looking for a chocolate maker, but that was all I could find. It’s pretty cheap as well!”

“You-” I tried to say, but Weldon was still spilling words from his mouth.

“So yeah, you can have all this back.” Weldon held out a mostly full coin purse that I had given him not three hours before for me to reclaim. “It was the least I could do since, well, since my debt to you keeps mounting! How am I supposed to be a paragon of justice if I am beholden to one that would rather not accept thanks from the heavens!? And then there’s…” He frowned, looking for the right words.

“The reason why you didn’t show up on that second day…” It sounded as if it pained him to dance around the point that way.

I quietly accepted my coins back. I’d count them later. “Thank you for your discretion.”

Weldon let out a dramatic sigh of relief. He must’ve been skirting the edges of his oath of honesty there. If he'd even sworn it yet. I found the ends of my lips were pulled back as I tried a first bite of the bread he bought me. True to what Weldon had said, it was very sweet. Especially with the small amount of frosting I had bitten away and was now chewing on. The experience was pleasurable, but not to any extreme.

But that was enough. I was enjoying this.

“Thank you for the bread as well.” I told Weldon before taking another larger bite.

“You are very welcome, fair maiden!” Weldon all but shouted.

I rolled my eyes as I chewed. Fair maiden. At least it wasn’t blushing bride. “Where did you buy this?” I asked once I was done with my second mouthful. The capacity to shove the whole thing down my throat was one that I just didn’t possess at the moment. This was nothing like when I’d eaten Epoch’s pancakes, which had fulled me up and made the time fly. I was taking my time to eat and the conversation suffered for it.

I immediately took another bite.

“At the bakery of... course...” Weldon and I both narrowed our eyes at each other as the… not quite vibrations in the world, but close enough, faded to nothing. “I wasn’t casting anything. It wasn't me.”

“Take me there.” I told him through a mouth full of mushy, half eaten bread.

The bakery, as Weldon had called it, was rather unassuming. I’d passed it by already today, but since the smell hadn’t been what I was looking for, it had been dismissed. Though, thinking back, I should’ve at least poked my head in to see what the strange smell was. I had been fixated on the idea of chocolate, or some other kind of hard candy that I knew to be a proper ‘treat’.

All that denoted the bakery as such was the sign with an artist’s impression of a loaf of bread cut in half. It didn’t even have a name that I could read going in. Inside was a small area for customers to stand in, a wide counter, and two servers on the other side that had access to the tilted shelves half filled with what I assumed were tasty treats.

Despite the strange sign that Weldon and I were here because of, I found my fingers playing with my coin purse. I wanted more of that bread Weldon bought me. I also wanted to try pretty much every single one of the other treats on display. Except for a circular piece of dough that had a hole in the middle, wasn’t glazed, and was coloured a sickly green.

Hmm… a conundrum.

I let Weldon do what he would while I closed my eyes and just basked in the atmosphere of this place. The roots of my teeth hurt just breathing, but it was a good kind of pain. There was constant chatter spilling in from the market, as well as the conversation between the customers and servers. Most of all was the smell.

Most of the time when I breathed in air like this, my appetite vanished into the void. Not this time.

There was also a tingle on the hairs on the back of my neck, though when I rubbed my skin, no hairs were standing on end. It was like a frisson ran against my spine without actually affecting me. I got the impression of…

My nose wrinkled.

...Farts.

Hells.

I stepped next to Weldon and spared a few seconds to listen to his conversation with the serving girl.

“-so you bought that girl back here, huh?” She sounded disappointed.

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“Amber really liked the pastry you sold me!” Weldon told her. “She’s been feeling really down today, so I thought I’d try cheer her up! But that isn’t why we’re here.”

She blinked. “Oh?”

Weldon looked around surreptitiously, and attracted stares from most everyone in the bakery. “Has anything strange been happening in this place recently?”

The serving girl rubbed her hands together as she thought. It was either her genuinely thinking about something while absently attempting to clean herself- the pastry I ate had been a little sticky, after all- or it was a phenomenal act. “I mean, Steele, that’s the baker, gets up before dawn every day to cook the things we sell. Once he’s done he goes elsewhere and doesn’t tell me where. ‘To live my life’ he tells us, but I think he just likes using the bathhouse while all the miners are still working.”

From that, I inferred that Steele was either a fantastic thief or a cultist of some kind. I was leaning towards the latter.

While Weldon was asking the girl about Steele, I went over to the boy that just finished with his customers.

“Hello.” I said.

He smiled back at me. “Hello. What can I do ya for?”

“I want to buy a lot.” I stated, spilling a few silvers out of my coin purse. I considered counting, then decided to leave them there.

His fingers twitched towards my money. “That’ll get you a lot off the shelves. What do you want? I can package whatever you don’t eat right away.”

I pointed at a roll that struck my fancy. “How much for that?”

“Three coppers.”

I pointed at another treat and found they all had similar prices, ranging from three to five coppers, and having them packaged only cost me a few extra coppers. In all, the boy got his grubby hands on all the silvers I showed, though they also left his hands to enter a strongbox on his side of the counter.

His eyes went a little wide when I started putting the pastries into my bag and just didn’t stop until everything was inside. That made me frown. I hadn’t realised that was so obvious, though I took the roll I’d first pointed at and bit into it while I produced yet another silver and placed it on the counter with a finger still on top.

“This can be yours if you tell me where the smell of farts is coming from.” I told him through a mouthful of delicious pastry.

The serving boy immediately started sweating. It was a hot room, but there was a certain kind of sudden discomfort I’d come to enjoy making in others. This was that. It was also damning.

“Uh- I- sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His words weren’t very convincing.

“Is that so?” I snaked a second silver next to the first. This was how bribery worked, right?

He licked his lips. “Look, The- the ventilation in here isn’t the greatest. Steele, that’s the baker, says wind ruins his baking. A-a-anything you’re smelling must’ve been left by another customer.”

This person was so bad at lying it was almost cute. I nodded and removed my finger from the silvers. Then I pulled my cloak to the side, revealing the badge on my belt that I hadn’t removed just yet. “Will you claim the same in the name of king and country?”

The serving boy went even more pale. “I-I-”

I pushed the silvers towards him. This was fun. “All I asked was where the smell of farts comes from. You can answer and… take the day off.” I considered winking, then passed on the idea. “This will be handled by tonight.”

His eyes were going all over the place. From me to something behind the counter, to Weldon who I walked in with, to the coins in front of him, to where my badge would be under my coat, to the serving girl, and finally back to me. “Um.”

“If you haven’t done anything wrong, then there’s nothing to be afraid of.” I told him when it was clear he was split between answering and not. “You haven’t, have you?”

He gulped. This guy definitely did something. “If… if I show you, will you promise my survival?” He asked in a low voice, leaning closer to me.

I took a bite of delicious pastry while my other hand dragged the coins back towards me. “That depends on what you show me. And I’ll have to insist you do show me now.” All of it said through a full mouth, of course.

“Right...” He looked down, contemplating his life choices I imagined. “Right. Meet me out back.”

“Of course.” I said, still eating. This pastry had what I believed was diced apple mixed into the roll, and I liked it very much. “Except, you’re not leaving my sight.” I opened the half height door used to separate the serving space from the customer space. “Weldon! I found something.”

“... but I still don’t get what that has to do with my lips…” Weldon realised I had spoken to him. “Yes! What did you find?”

I pointed at the serving boy. “This boy here is going to lead us to where that fart smell is coming from.”

“Fart smell?” Weldon frowned, then his eyes flashed white. “Oh…” At his new tone of voice, I put another point towards my cultist theory.

Suddenly I was no longer looking at a boy incapable of realising that someone was interested in him for more than his propensity for justice. Before me was a grim warrier, one who knew his duty, was willing to do anything to accomplish it, and was prepared for what that ‘anything’ could be. I wondered what it was like in his head, to be on a path that he was set and willing to follow to its end.

It didn’t matter. I ate more pastry to prevent myself from backsliding. “Come on.” I jerked my head towards the serving boy and we followed him towards the back of the building, stopping only to assure the other server nothing bad was happening. Yet. The guy we were following stopped by one of the many stoves in the back of the bakery, all of which were cold and marginally uniform. The one he stopped by was unassuming, like the store it resided in, though a secret compartment was revealed when the serving boy removed one of the bricks.

That sense of farts suddenly assaulted my nose in a whole new way. Only it wasn’t farts at all. This was sulfur.

Weldon flinched towards his sword, but I caught his hand and shook my head. His weapon was too big for this room, and I was sure that he’d break something in this glorious shop if a fight broke out needlessly.

Besides, I had my more appropriately sized sword on me and was more than capable of disabling any attackers. Then I’d let Weldon kill them.

That should get me around the curse of the damn deer.

Heedless of my inner monologue, the serving boy turned around having reached into the secret compartment, revealing a sizable red crystal that appeared to have rotted. About a third of it was coloured a deep opaque black, and tendrils of the colour were snaking into the rest of the shoddily cut gemstone. On what remained of the red crystal were familiar runes.

Conjuration runes keyed to the Nine Hells. And some relating to enchantment of the hypnotic kind. It was about as damning as you could get.

“This is… I don’t know what it is, but yeah, it’s the thing that smells of farts. No idea why.” The serving boy explained nervously. “It doesn’t really do anything. I just keep it here because the stove wall locks the smell away and I don’t have anything like that at home. And it seemed like a bad idea to bury it.”

He met my eye. “I’ve done nothing with it. I’ll just give it to you and we’ll forget about it. Ye- yeah?”

I glanced to Weldon to see what his take on that was. “You lie!” He declared.

I shrugged. The evidence pointed to that anyway. “When I was learning from Sage Irevan, he taught me a few things about fiend summoning. The first was, obviously, don’t do it, but the second thing was quite useful. A good binding on a devil and their powers will be scentless. You see, fiendish power corrupts when it makes contact with Santoria in the material plane. It transmutes dust in the air to sulfur, which smells like farts, and only escapes subpar bindings.

“Which means that that,” I gestured at the corrupted ruby the serving boy was holding after letting my words sink in, “indicates a devil probably exploited a loophole and killed their summoner, leaving this behind.”

Or that it was a devilish summoning key, meant for devils to summon devils. Meaning it was useless without any devils around. Or that a devilish soul was bound to it, though it would’ve been quite weak to not have fully corrupted its holder yet. Or that a wizard was practicing devil summoning, likely illegally. OR that an artificer was practicing with fiendish essence and this was the result.

There were hundreds of plausible explanations for this, and I hadn’t even properly analysed it yet. So I went with the scariest one.

It had the desired effect. “Tr-truly?”

“Indeed.” I said gravely, then took a final bite of my pastry. Disappointment from finishing it so quickly coloured my next words, which were spoken around the pastry, of course. “I’ll even be willing to bet the devil in question still has a connection to that. It’s likely listening in right now.”

The corrupted ruby was dropped as though it was suddenly flaming hot. “I- I didn’t know!”

“That is true.” Weldon said, stepping closer. “But that fiendish artefact has power you utilised. What was it and what did you do with it?”

The boy’s eyes flicked to me for some reason. “I- I- It let me be better! When I was around it… You don’t know what it’s like living with a s-stutter.”

That earned him a slap from Weldon. I was impressed the boy was being so physical. He was only a little stronger than me.

Then again. Metal gauntlets.

“You lie. You have no stutter.” Weldon snarled.

“I just want to talk to girls!” The boy shouted. Weldon blinked, then stepped back. Huh. Did that mean he was telling the truth?

Pathetic.

“So what did it do?” I demanded once the awkward silence had gone on for long enough.

“It… It comforted me. Bolstered me so long as I was near.” He confessed. “But I was never able to sleep with it around. That’s why I made…” He gestured weakly to his secret hole.

“Is that all?”

He nodded. I looked at Weldon to gauge his reaction, which was a mixture of disgust and satisfaction.

I crouched to pick up the corrupted ruby. A sour kind of Power thrummed under my fingertips on contact, and was subsequently ignored. “I’ll be confiscating this, then. In the future, do not use fiendish artefacts to try ensnaring the girl of your dreams. Based on my experience, the Heavens are much better at that. So long as you can convince them to be on your side, that is. Which will be difficult since you willingly used a fiendish artefact.” I blinked in surprise as the moment of power faded.

Had I just marked his soul like Lavina had done to me, only in a negative way? If I did, I wasn’t feeling guilty about it. He did deserve it, after all.

“I recommend a redemption quest first.” I continued. “And one last thing. Where did you get this?”

“Ah…” He blinked dumbly. “There was a trader that came through a month ago. He had a wagon, but when you walked in it was a display room bigger than this shop, filled with mirrors. That wasn’t even the strangest thing, the storekeeper was a reflection! He asked me what I wanted and put the ruby on a display piece in the mirror once I answered. And when I looked it was actually there! Of course I had to buy it!”

“What was his name?” Weldon demanded.

“Odraz. I think. Yes. The wagon was called Odraz’s Reflections.”

Interesting. “Well, thank you…” I realised I didn’t want to learn his name. “We’ll be off. My friend expects adequate contrition from you and I hope to never see you again. Good day.”

I walked out, pausing to give the serving girl a copper and whisper “Sorry about Weldon,” then took another pastry like the one I just had for services rendered. Once Weldon joined me ten seconds later, I turned to him.

“What are you going to do about the artefact?” He demanded.

I frowned, having just been about to explain. “I’ll tell you. First, promise not to bring up what is about to happen in the presence of Jevi.”

“Deal.” He said the instant I finished speaking.

I found one of my shadows and gestured him over. The look of panic that flashed across his face was chocolate for my soul, and I realised that scaring the serving boy as I did had all but completely returned my mind to normal. I’ll have to scare more people in the future. That was fun.

After no small amount of hesitation the shadow I was looking at decided to approach. His movement was staggered, but in a way that made him faster. He seemed to cross great distances in the moments where no one was looking at him, like when a woman passed between us. Soon he was before the two of us.

“Who are you!?” Weldon demanded, hand going to his sword, quite surprised by the abrupt appearance.

I held up the corrupted ruby. “This item has fiendish influence and can improve the charisma of someone bonded to it, going by the account of its previous owner, the serving boy in the shop behind me. It was hidden in a stove, likely for a month. As you can tell, it smells of farts.”

The face of the shadow told me that the last part was entirely unnecessary, meaning to me it was absolutely necessary. His nose had been wrinkled the entire time. In fact, everyone in the market was giving us a wide berth.

I tossed the gem at him. “I’m too busy to deal with this, meaning it’s now your problem.” Then shifted my coat for him to see my badge and I walked away. The shadow vanished just as quickly as he appeared.

“Wow!” Weldon exclaimed as he caught up. I used those few moments to eat more pastry. “I didn’t realise you were a spymistress! And you’re on the side of justice too!”

I glanced at him with a little amusement. Sure, I had reservations about where I found myself at the moment, but handing off problems was a luxury I hadn’t had in Veliki. Being called a mistress was neat as well.

“Best birthday present I ever received.” I agreed. My hand fell on the hilt of my sword under my cloak. Going into the bakery I’d expected to need it, and now I felt like something was missing. I wanted to hit something. “Hey, do you want to spar?”

\V/