INTERLUDE: ANCIENT WISDOM.

Colm Kunhand.

Jasper Tibbs.

The captain of the Duchess Corrine, Miles Teadran, blew carefully to dry the latest ink marks in the tiny book his father had given him on the day he'd taken over command from the old man. He could remember the words that accompanied the gift with haunting clarity.

"Keep it on you, always. You’ve been on this ship long enough, you know that men will die at your orders. Your duty is to remember them, and this book is how you do it. One day you’ll wake up and find it's gotten too heavy to hold, like the names in it have taken on the weight of their owners and you just don’t have the strength to carry them all anymore. The day you can’t carry the book is the day you’re no longer the captain, and today I… I couldn’t lift it. May you be a better captain than I was, my son.”

A much younger Miles had sworn to himself that day that his book would stay empty. That as long as he had strength in his body and breath in his lungs, not one of his crew would die in the wilds.

The oath didn’t even last his first journey as captain.

Now, many years later as he watched the ink drying on the ever-growing list of his failures, he could feel it. The weight in the little book. He wasn’t done yet— not by far— but he would have to start looking for a replacement soon. Normally the job would go to his XO, but…

Miles glanced at the only other occupant of the cabin and his oldest friend, Tenner Grafton. The muscular man was glaring daggers down at the little book like he wanted to drag the two fallen crewmen back from death with his bare hands and berate them for failing to stay alive.

You’ll never stick around here without me, will you?

He slumped back into his chair— one of the few concessions to comfort he’d made— with a heavy sigh.

“Two men dead, three days lost and thousands of marks wasted because of one man’s petty greed. There’ll be hell to pay for this.”

Tenner grunted with dissatisfaction, grimacing like he’d bitten something sour.

“World’s going to shit, sir. Just like always.”

An involuntary chuckle escaped Miles’ lips at his XO’s frank assessment, but seriousness quickly returned.

“What the hell happened out there Ten?”

Grafton chewed his lip thoughtfully, the expression seeming out of place to anyone who didn’t know the man personally. He deliberately kept his appearance— and attitude— as brutish as possible. Many dismissed him as a common thug, which suited the first officer’s keen mind just fine.

“Kurkulakoa, the Windstalker. Normally has a territory around… here.” The man circled an area of the map on the table in front of them with one of his fingers— an area far from their current location. Miles frowned.

“The Windstalker? That’s a lesser lord, why was he so far from his claim? And encroaching on Telm’Urka? That’s suicide, the big lizard’s ruled this stretch for millennia, it would have slaughtered him.”

“Damned if I know, Miles. Between this and the Giants, that’s the second suicidal monster far from home we’ve run into and it’s only been a few days. Starting to wonder if that priest wasn’t wrong when he said something bigger was going on. Either way, I was pretty sure we were all dead this time. Guns would have barely tickled a land-god and the damn thing was a flier on top of that. Only reason it didn’t pick us off was the kid managing to get it real mad at him, something he’s got a talent for at least. Didn’t see much through the fog after that but… well, if the little shit wasn’t on the Path before, he damn sure is now.”

The captain grimaced at yet another reminder of the runaway highborn currently moonlighting as a ship’s mage on his vessel and ‘courting’— he used the term very loosely— his niece. He reached up to massage his temples and rid himself of a budding headache.

“Three weeks and he’ll be gone. If nothing else decides to bog us down, anyway. At this rate, we’ll be lucky to hit the border in a month. Has the guild dug up anything on him?”

“Not a sodden thing. Man didn’t exist before last week so far as all our records are concerned. Best bet is he’s some Enclave princeling in hiding for some reason. Even then all we’ve got is Bharty’s reaction to show that he has some affiliation with the Eldborn, but that’s more than the piss-all from everywhere else. Fat chance of getting anything definitive from them though.” Grafton bit off unhappily.

Relaxing back into his chair again, Miles couldn’t help but remember an old proverb.

Three Things You’ll Never Get:

Gold from a Dragon, a fair deal from a Witch, and a secret from the Enclave.

The Eldborn Enclave was quite literally a legend when it came to secrecy and reclusive behavior. If they decided you didn't need to know something— their default stance if you didn’t already know— then common knowledge was to just give up. Rumors abounded as to the fate of those who pursued the Enclave's secrets too far— though most simply disappeared. The majority of stories about them were made up or grossly exaggerated, but Miles had read enough reports to know that an army of shape-shifting eldborn assassins was a very real answer to the Enclave's privacy concerns.

“Damn.” He sighed. “Do you think if we tell Shani the boy’s an eldborn that she’ll keep more distance between them?”

Tenner gave him a flat look.

“Of course, sir. Young women are known for their careful thoughtfulness and reasonable consideration of their elders’ words. I’m sure if we tell her the handsome, mysterious, powerful young man who just came back a wounded hero and is obviously on the Path— might be a shape-shifter with connections to the reclusive Eldborn Enclave, that she’ll immediately agree to distance herself for her own safety. Our little Shani would never do anything reckless out of a rebellious desire for adventure. Nope. Quiet as a lamb, she is.”

Miles groaned and held his head over the table while Tenner burst out laughing.

“Cheer up, captain! She’s a smart lass, there’s no chance she hasn’t figured out most of it on her own already. Worst case, we can always dump him out with the villagers and wash our hands of him entirely. They seemed keen enough to have him for sure.”

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Hope briefly flared at the thought, but was ultimately quashed by reality as Miles thought the situation through.

“Crew won’t stand for it. Hell, the other ships won’t stand for it after he saved their crewmen.”

“Piss on ‘em.” Grafton snorted, reaffirming that he’d never have the mentality to take over the ship as captain. “You’re the Master of this caravan. If they don’t like your decisions, they’re welcome to make their own way through the wilds.”

“You know it doesn’t work like that, Ten.”

The man grumbled sulkily while Miles couldn’t help a smile at his surly friend.

“You do bring up another point though, what the hell are we going to do about—

His next words were interrupted by a tri-tone buzz of the alarm and the ship’s lights flashing a continuous yellow. The two men sat up in alarm as they recognized the unusual code.

“Foreign vessels spotted? Here??”

They both shared a worried glance before dashing out of the room and up to one of the observation decks. Their alarm only built as they arrived on deck and quickly put the entire caravan to battle stations.

Striding out of the mist were ships, first in ones and twos, then quickly in dozens. They were a motley collection of home-built hulls and clearly salvaged wrecks, most made of simple wood in stark contrast to the Duchess’ enchanted steel. The groaning and creaking of timber echoed through the fog as their stilt-like wooden legs worked to propel them forward in an almost insect-like manner. Each was covered in colorful paints and stretches of dyed cloth that almost managed to hide their rickety construction. Their sizes ranged from dinghies that could barely seat four, all the way up to a few old galleons nearly a third the size of the Duchess. But as the crew frantically prepared to repel a raid, the captain couldn’t help but feel like something was… off.

The people on board the approaching vessels didn’t hold themselves with pride like warriors or with the ragged hunger of raiders. They huddled together fearfully, clutching packs laden with belongings. The decks he could see were crowded with an unhealthy number of people, and while they certainly looked desperate, it wasn’t the wolf’s desperation of a raiding party. These were refugees.

“Well, I’ll be double-damned,” Grafton swore under his breath. “I’m seeing colors from over a score of villages here, this must be every living human in over a hundred leagues! Look—”

He pointed out at a line of banners strung from each of the approaching ships, a very conspicuous empty spot at the top of each.

“No god-signs. Not on any of them. I’d say they’ve been exiled but… Never so many at once. They brought the whole damn tribe with them.”

Teadran couldn’t help but nod and agree numbly, staring as the numbers kept climbing. There were easily over three thousand people here now, outnumbering their own caravan heavily. The approaching ships stopped at a somewhat respectable distance, though still within range of the caravan’s guns, and bunched up protectively around the older galleon-style walkers. A few minutes of frantic activity passed for both sides before a smaller vessel broke off from the group and made its way over to the Duchess.

“That’s close enough!” The captain shouted as the skiff drew near. “State your business or be fired upon.”

On the deck of the skiff, a figure stood from among the crew. They were dressed in dark robes, and black feathers had been bound into a poncho-like crow’s wings draped over their shoulders. The figure’s face was obscured by a mask shaped like a great heron’s skull, and Miles couldn’t help feeling uneasy at the resemblance to the very beast who’d just attacked his crew.

“We heah, by tha will o’ the great Telm’Urka.” The figure’s voice was masculine and raspy with age. He reached down and picked up a tattered black coat, stained with mud and dark blood.

“We heah for the God-Slayer!”

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The spear had always been her weapon of choice. Even as an emissary controlling the weapon telekinetically, something about it had spoken to her on a fundamental level. It was one of few areas now where she felt she could still claim some amount of mastery— even fallen as she was. The staff she’d been given wasn’t quite a spear per se, but it had brought a comforting measure of security she’d been lacking nonetheless. Which made it doubly disappointing when it failed to protect her.

Lyr’Rael screamed in helpless rage and fury as she spun the staff through the air, whipping it out with all the speed and skill she could muster, but she was a mere mortal now, and mortals had limits. So the annoying, biting, gods-damned-insufferable flies all dodged her swing with a lazy roll and flew right back towards her face with a whining buzz that set her teeth grinding.

There’s just no end to them…

Panting, she sagged in place, half-heartedly shooing away more of the little monsters that sought to add to her growing collection of welts and itching bites. It didn’t seem to matter where she went, there was always some new little vermin seeking to make the former emissary’s existence miserable in new ways. The swarms of bugs had set on her suddenly over the last few days of walking, and they hadn’t let up since. When she tried to sleep, she woke to find them crawling into her clothes. When she walked, they buzzed around her head and her hands in an endless whine that was slowly driving her insane. They swarmed her limited rations whenever she was forced by hunger to stop and eat. Her only consolation was the quiet coo of the songbird’s skull on her wrist, which had grown steadily more insistent as she (hopefully) approached her destination— the town of White Ford. She probably would have arrived already, but growing exhaustion sapped her strength and made the journey painfully slow.

So it was almost a surprise when the charm let out a joyous trill of birdsong and shattered into sparkling dust, the vague shape of a tiny bird flitting away and dissipating in the air. A brief surge of panic gripped her until Lyr’Rael lifted her tired eyes from the trail in front of her and saw a break in the trees ahead. The barest glimpse of regular structures was visible in the gap, and suddenly she was stumbling forward. Desperation brought new strength surging up from depths she didn’t know she had, and she practically tore through the last of the underbrush barring her way from civilization.

The abrupt change from the claustrophobic shade of the forest to a sunlit field was blinding enough to bring her to a halt, almost making her fall. When her eyes adjusted, she found herself standing on the edge of a cultivated field. Lyr’Rael’s experience with mortals didn’t extend to farms in any way, so she had no idea what was actually growing, but the orderly rows of leafy green plants stretched for kilometers to either side around a small town.

White Ford was a smaller town aptly named for the river crossing it existed alongside, a simple shallows filled with sun-bleached white stones that made crossing the wide river possible. The same stones had been used extensively by the townsfolk in the construction of the place, mortared together to form everything from their homes to the town’s sturdy-looking wall. It lent everything a pure, pastoral feel that made Lyr’Rael sag in relief. Even the incessant bugs drew back once she exited the forest proper, though now that she had a moment she could see the clear line of primitive warded charms that likely kept pests away from the crops.

Shouts drew her attention to the town’s gate, which opened for a patrol of mounted guards to ride out. A score of them made a beeline directly for her, and she suddenly felt an unfamiliar pang of fear.

I… I’m powerless. All I have is a stick and my own half-starved muscles. What if they— No. I am not afraid. I will live!

Her fists tightened in a white-knuckled grip on her staff and she forced herself to take a defensive stance despite her body trembling with exhaustion. The riders’ deer-like mounts swiftly bounded through the fields and covered the distance between them in moments, ringing her completely while she spun to try and keep as many in sight as possible. Her fear shifted to confusion when she saw that while they were surrounding her, most were facing the forest she’d just broken clear from and positioned to shield her from an attack.

“Are you alright miss? Is there anyone else?” A baritone voice asked urgently, and one of the riders dismounted, removing an older-style armored helmet and revealing a friendly face with a bushy beard as he approached her cautiously.

They’re… defending me?

The realization stole the last strength from her legs and she almost fell, but the man quickly stepped forward and caught her under the shoulder to steady her.

“S’ alright miss, I gotcha. Let’s get you behind the walls first and then we can talk.” The man said soothingly, and she could only nod in response. With a quick boost, she found herself mounted behind another rider as the bearded man’s voice called out orders, the group continuing to surround her defensively as they bolted for the safety of the town’s walls. The bounding gait of the creature below her was surprisingly smooth, and before she could even try to resist, she felt the releasing tension pull her down into an exhausted sleep.