There were very few people left in Jillin, and they seemed mostly disinterested in the appearance of a new Thane. Saul was careful to leave them to themselves as much as possible. He was not about to walk into their lives and start telling them what to do—that would have been a recipe for disaster.

Instead, he and his friends moved into a big, empty house on the outskirts of the town, stabled their raptors in a barn next door, and set to work.

For the first few weeks, they did not make much progress. The residents had given up on trying to do any large-scale productive farming. Instead, they subsisted on growing food in the little plots around their houses, and on the tiny supply of wheat that was stored up from a previous year’s harvest and had been put by.

This would not have worked, but there were so few people in the town now that they were able to eke out a meager existence in this way.

Something about it did not add up.

Why, when things were going okay in the rest of the borderlands, had this town been so spectacularly neglected?

Why were there no responses to the calls for aid that had been sent?

And why were the people so despondent?

They seemed to make no effort to improve their circumstances. All were hollow eyed and without enthusiasm, moving with a despairing air through the motions of a monotonous existence. Even where circumstances were strained elsewhere in the region, it was nothing so bad as this.

One of the first things Saul discovered was a total lack of any game in the woods nearby. In any other woodland at this time of year he would have expected to find deer, boar, rabbits, hares, and birds of all kinds.

Instead, he found nothing. Even the trees seemed depressed.

“This is ridiculous,” Zorea said at the end of their third attempt to hunt in the forest. “There are no animals in the woods, no fish in the river, and no spirit in the people. I can feel a miasma of some kind of influence here in the village, and in the surrounding land, but I can’t pinpoint its source.”

“We’ll have to take a different approach,” Saul said.

So, they tried a different approach. They got on their raptors and rode twenty miles upcountry, until they were well out of sight of Jillin.

Here, they did find game. They hunted and caught two deer, brought them back, stored one, and roasted the other over a fire in the center of Jillin marketplace.

That got the inhabitants’ attention. They came around and ate the roasted meat, and their eyes looked a bit less hollow. But they barely spoke, and after they’d eaten, they wandered away, looking lost.

This strange reaction alone would have been enough to confirm to Saul that there was something dark and deadly at work in the town of Jillin. The next morning the signs grew even more obvious.

Saul rose early, drilled with his sword as was his habit, and then went round to the cold store where they had stored the rest of the meat. As soon as he opened the door, the foul stench of putrefaction hit him like a blow.

“Ugh, what in the…?”

He stepped back, caught a breath of clean air and then stepped in again, conjuring his Light Globe spell as he did so. The light floated into the air above him.

Even the luminescence from this light spell seemed dimmed. There was no question about it, the magic was slightly less powerful here than outside.

“What’s that smell?” Brand’s voice said from outside. He stuck his head in the cold store, choked and pulled it back, then reappeared with a rag over his face.

“It’s the meat we put into storage last night. Look.”

Brand did as Saul said. The sight was horrible.

The deer had been killed and butchered less than a day previously, and it had been stored overnight in a room with thick stone walls and no windows, specially designed for the storage of meat. And yet the carcass was bloated, the meat black and writhing with maggots, and the stench in the room was like a corpse that had been left in the hot sun for a week.

They stood regarding this horror for a moment, before they heard a gagging sound from outside.

“That’ll be Zorea,” Saul said in a tight voice. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

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Half an hour later, they sat on a grassy bank a mile from the town. The sun gleamed through white clouds and birds sang happily.

“The weather is nice here,” Brand said. “I could have sworn that it was horrible back in Jillin.”

“As would I,” Saul said. “And it’s been horrible ever since we got there, no matter what else is going on outside. The town is under a curse, there’s no other explanation. How else can we account for the strange behavior of the inhabitants, the feeling of desolation in the place, the total lack of any game in the woods, and now this episode with the meat?”

“But how do we track the source of the curse down?” Zorea asked.

“Well, well, it’s good to have it confirmed, at least. As for how we can track it down, I have an idea about how we might go about that.”

Saul summoned the Workshop and, in a moment, he, Zorea, and Brand stepped into the magical crafting space. They had never gotten any satisfactory explanation as to why it had appeared so differently when they’d been creating the Portal Sigil.

The only reason they could think of was that the Portal Sigil had been a unique, location-specific crafting item, and for that reason, the System manifested with a different appearance to normal. Whatever the reason, it was an interesting phenomenon, and a reminder—if one was needed—of the strangeness and surprises that the System might still have in store for them.

“It’s different again!” Brand said.

He had not seen the snow-covered crafting environment that Saul and Zorea had gone to when they’d created the portal sigil, but he’d heard about it. Now, he walked in amazement through the Workshop as it appeared this time.

Zorea stepped out warily by his side, but soon she too was captivated by the new manifestation.

Saul smiled at his friends’ enthusiasm and took a good look around for himself.

The Workshop appeared as if in a woodland clearing. The trees that ringed around the clearing were unidentifiable. Their trunks were oak-like, but their leaves were like mountain ash and their hoary bark glowed a dark, ruby red. As Saul drew closer he saw the green of the leaves speckled with little flecks of silver and gold, like mica in rock.

The illumination was dreamlike, as if the golden hour of evening had arrived at the height of afternoon. Between the trees, low branches twisted together like groping hands.

All the familiar landmarks of the Workshop were still here, however.

In the center, the Skill Tree glowed and pulsated with its usual ethereal, other-worldly light. Its shadowed branches reached up into the air with their many small and strange leaves all wreathed in shadow. The tree seemed bigger than usual and swayed more than before.

Saul looked at the top level on the trunk spells—the magic of Glade.

“Come, my friends,” he said, recalling Zorea and Brand’s attention. “It’s time to make a bit of progress.”

When he’d leveled up to 19, there had been a shuddering of powerful energy through the Workshop, a rumble of potential through the space that promised something significant to come. Now, he felt certain of it as he approached the Resource Table, gathered his Gold XP, and crafted his Level Up Sigil.

Brand and Zorea stepped back in amazement and sudden fear as Saul absorbed the Sigil. There was a hot surge of white energy, blasting out from Saul’s chest as he absorbed the Sigil to himself.

He was blinded for a moment. Hot pain rushed through his body, tracing hot wires under his skin. His head flared in a sharp, blinding agony in the center of his brain.

He saw in his mind without any doubt whatsoever, the thin wires and central head Sigil of the System. The System was what he was feeling, the System flowing through with energy, running with unbridled power for a moment… overloading?

The thought came to him with a stab of fear and Sarkur’s honeyed voice echoed in his memory.

“Of course, it may have a few issues to be ironed out…”

Issues that would cause it to become overloaded and kill or maim its user?

Issues that would cause it to stop working at all?

But no. The moment passed, and Saul was left standing in the glade manifestation of the Workshop, his breathing heavy, his whole body tingling as the overload of power settled.

“Woah,” Brand said. “That was something else. I felt that.”

“You and I both,” Saul said. His voice was steady, and he was glad of that. “The power of the System can be a bit over-enthusiastic, it would seem, but I’m all right now. And you?”

Zorea and Brand both nodded. “There was just such a huge surge of raw magic when you absorbed your Sigil,” Zorea said. “It almost overwhelmed my sense of magic for a moment there, but it’s calmed down now. What’s next?”

Saul moved over to the Resource Table and gathered up his Arcane Dust. As he moved them from side to side, the shimmering gold stuff inside the vials sloshed back and forth.

He moved to the Sigil Crafting Table and placed the Arcane Dust on the appropriate section. Then he gathered up the Green XP coins which had been steadily accumulating since they had unlocked the ability to create potions. He placed these with the Arcane Dust vials and ran through the options to create the spell unlocking Sigil that was required to unlock the School of Glade.

The red crystal globe at the center of the Sigil Crafting Table glowed, and green mist rose around it. The Sigil rose up through the smoke, glowing like heated gold and wreathed around with green like creeping vines.

“The Glade Sigil!” Saul exclaimed.

He stepped forward and gripped the golden object. Brand and Zorea fell in behind him as he approached the skill tree.

He placed the Sigil onto the top sphere on the trunk of the Spell Tree.

The Sigil flowed into the sphere. The spell sphere spun smoothly, and green light shone suddenly brought from it then dimmed to a steady glow as the spell activated and the new school of magic became available to him.

The clearing around them shivered suddenly, a strange, swift motion running through it as the magic of Glade came into being. Saul felt the new spells appearing in his inventory, but before he could examine them properly something else caught his attention.

It was the Anvil, the one he had crafted the Squad magic Sigil with. The Anvil he used to craft the unique portal Sigil too. It thrummed like a great engine somewhere far away.

He approached with his friends at his side and set his intentions at the Anvil. The options appeared above the device immediately.

New Unique Sigil available: Level 20

Select: Craft Specialist Sigil (Squad) (x1 available)

Select: Craft Spell Combination Sigil (Solo)

Saul looked at his friends and then selected the first option, Craft Specialist Sigil. He did not know what it would do, but it represented a step up in his mastery of the System.