No matter what he did, the cold always managed to find Poranus Hean. It crept under his door frame no matter how he covered the gaps. It swirled down his neck, no matter how tightly he wound his scarf. Despite the thick, woollen gloves that he wore, his fingers still shook with it.

In all his life, from downtown in Havercroft as a youth, living above his mother’s dress shop, to his first post in the north, the magister had never experienced such a persistent and insidious chill. Any attempt to flee or protect oneself against the frost only seemed to invigorate it. He was slowly becoming convinced the climate in this gods-forsaken place was alive, tormenting him for its own amusement. No magister had set foot this far from Kenmor in over a hundred years. Perhaps the land itself had grown to reject his kind.

Poranus rubbed his arms and scowled. If Cragwhistle didn’t want him, then the damn place would have to get over it. In a fit of pique, he’d committed himself to this posting, so now he was stuck with it for another six months, minimum.

“Lutin! Get in here, you miserable worm!” the magister bellowed.

There was a timid knock at the door.

“Did you call for me, magister Poranus?”

“Obviously I did!” he roared. “The walls are as thin as a caterpillar's anus, don’t pretend you didn’t hear me!”

“And h-how may I serve you today?” that soft voice stammered from behind the door.

Poranus felt his eyes might boggle out of his head with rage. He tried to modulate his tone, but sounded as if he were being strangled around the neck.

“Get. In. Here. Lutin,” he gargled.

“E-excuse me,” came the reply as the door slowly creaked open and the thin-faced manservant poked his nose through the gap. When he surmised that the magister was somewhat calm, he relaxed a little and entered fully, standing straight, his hands clasped before his midsection.

The way he shifted his feet ever so slightly from side to side, with an air that nobody could see him, reminded Poranus of nothing so much as a mouse. It infuriated him.

“I’m cold,” he ground out. “Fetch more wood for the fire, and I want to see that oaf Ortan in here before the hour is done.”

Having dealt with the servant without resorting to threats of maiming or losing his temper, Poranus was quite satisfied and sat behind his desk, intending to see to his papers.

Cringing in the doorway, Lutin, like an unwelcome fart, remained.

“I’m ever so sorry, magister,” he said, almost whining, “but the villagers insisted they have given you more than double the normal household share of firewood. There is precious little to be had, and it isn’t yet winter, so they are extremely reluctant to let people have too much.”

The mage slammed his hand down on the table, his expression twisted with rage.

“Those damned peasants,” he roared, “have no right to deny me anything. If I want their dead grandmother's corpse in my bed, they say ‘thank you, sir’ and clean my sheets the morning after!”

He grit his teeth and tried to calm his breathing. He’d been right to demand a magister be sent out here, these people knew nothing of the proper respect due to his station, nor the authority he wielded. It shouldn’t be surprising, this place hadn’t seen an official of the Baron’s court in gods know how long. As far as he’d been able to determine, no taxes had been levied here in five decades, and they were lucky if the marshals visited more than once a year.

As isolated as an island surrounded by a permanent storm, Cragwhistle and other villages like it were more disconnected from the rest of the Empire than Poranus had imagined was possible in this day and age. The thought of these tiny pockets of surly, uneducated and illiterate people, unaware of their place within the greater workings of the province, let alone the Empire as a whole, was baffling.

At least here, all of that was bound to change. With the opening of a rift, slayers would come. When slayers arrived, magisters would come. The wealth extracted from the rift-kin would bring merchants and traders, eager to collect the wares and transport them to richer markets, which meant roads, inns, stables and wagons. Slayers needed weapons, healing, entertainment and food, which would bring restaurants, taverns, hospices, brothels, farmers and more. With the influx of population, civilisation would come knocking also: taxes, law, a permanent slayer keep, with an official residence for a magister.

Of course, it would be decades before all of that was realised, but Poranus drew some satisfaction looking at the sullen faces of the people here, knowing their attitudes would soon change for the better.

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“Go out there, and return with wood for the fire, or I will burn you, Lutin,” he finally managed to say. “Then I will go into the village personally, I will return with wood even if I have to tear it from someone's house with my bare hands. Understood?”

The servant nodded jerkily before he turned and rushed out the door, barely remembering to close it behind him in his haste. The magister sat still, his trembling hands laced together under his chin as he struggled to regain his equilibrium.

It hadn’t been that long ago he’d been in council at the highest levels in Kenmor, representatives of the major houses sat around the table with him. Due to his own temper, he was now here, in this frozen hellscape, trying to bring order and dignity to people who resolutely did not want it.

Infuriating. Every minute and every day was infuriating. If it went on like this, he didn’t know how much more he could take. After delaying and slowing his travel by as much as he possibly could, his arrival several months ago had felt like the knot finally being loosed on the gallows.

“Put it out of your mind,” he spat, trying to invigorate himself. “No point whining over it like a sewing girl with a pricked thumb.”

The stack of official documents in need of review was depressingly thin. Such and such a team with such and such as members sortied toward the rift, report included. Such and such a team engaged in a defensive action outside the wall, fighting off kin, then collecting such and such cores and sundry resources, which were sold for such and such, with assistance from team who cares and team nobody important.

With such weak monsters coming through the rift, only a handful of bronze teams were necessary to maintain the equilibrium. For a magister of his calibre to oversee the administration was an extravagant waste of talent.

With a sigh, he diligently went through each document, noting the dates and intensity of each engagement, along with the resources gathered. Regardless of how demeaning it was, Poranus intended to complete his role flawlessly, as well as engaging with his primary purpose for coming to such a remote location.

The rebellion. Rumblings of it had been heard even in the capital, completely ignored by his colleagues. If evidence of such an uprising could be collected anywhere, it would surely be here. As of yet, he’d seen no evidence of any kind hinting at an organised rebellion. The slayers here were young, barely out of the academy, and the bulk of the people were stone miners, shepherds and carvers, hardly the sort to attempt to overthrow the baron. They might glare and spit behind Poranus’ back, but that was simply because nobody had whipped them for disrespecting their betters in generations. All of that would change.

He leaned back in his chair, papers momentarily forgotten as he gazed up at the thatched roof of his abode thoughtfully. The house had been ‘donated’ for his use as an official residence and office upon his arrival, and despite being one of the best constructed in the village, it was woefully insufficient.

There had to be evidence somewhere. Before he was done, he had to take something back he could shake under those idiots on the council’s noses, something that would stir them to action. Communications of some kind, proof of weapons being smuggled, or illegals fighting the kin. Perhaps he should go through the villagers and see if anyone unbranded had been involved in the battles. Some of them had achieved a surprising number of levels fighting the kin after the rift had opened, which had been revealed upon his arrival and collection of official status readings. If he were to perform another reading, perhaps he would shake loose a few people who’d gained more levels lately than they strictly should have?

It was a thought worth pursuing.

There came a soft knock at the door and Poranus grunted, lowering his gaze back to his paperwork.

“Come in, Lutin. Throw it straight on the fire and then get out. I’m busy.”

Frequency and intensity of kin attacks on the walls seemed to be almost stable, and the reports from observing the rift itself suggested that it wasn’t growing much anymore. If equilibrium had already been achieved, then that was a good thing. The province was stretched to produce enough slayers as it was. They were running out of grist for the mill, so to speak. For now, Cragwhistle would serve as an ideal training ground for weaker teams before they would be sent to more established rifts.

He scratched a few notes into his official records as the figure of Lutin entered the chamber and moved toward the fireplace.

For the most part, the boar-like kin carried only the weakest grade of cores and little in the way of useful components, but the ice-creatures were better. Considering how weak they were, they tended to hold low-eight to low-three cores, which were worth a decent amount for bronze teams. The Empire’s hunger for cores was insatiable, and apparently, a few teams had begun to see signs of crystalised magick in some of the caves higher up the mountain, which could also prove profitable.

Suddenly, Poranus reeled as something battered into his mind. He fell to the side, papers flying as his hands jerked and twisted against his will.

He snarled.

“You think I didn’t know you were there? That worm Lutin always shuffles his feet.”

The magister fought to bring his body upright, pushing back against the weight that sought to smother his thoughts. He glared at the cloaked figure across the room, one hand extended towards the desk.

At last, someone had acted directly against him.

With a rictus grin twisting his features, Poranus slowly forced himself to standing, pushing back against the pressure, gaining ground millimetre by millimetre.

“You and I, are going to have, a long conversation, after this,” he ground out, straining with every fibre of his mind.

The cloaked figure watched him, seemingly unperturbed that he was losing the battle of wills.

A fool, then. Trying to dominate the mind of a magister? Poranus and his brothers were the masters of that game.

Something blurred in the doorway, and he barely had time to recognise the flash of steel in the dim light before pain erupted in his hand. With horror, Poranus glanced down to see three fingers had been severed from his right hand, rings still glittering on the lost digits.

The weight on his mind suddenly doubled, and the magister felt himself begin to buckle under the pressure.

“A little harder, without the ring, isn’t it?” the cloaked figure said quietly. The hand tightened into a fist. “Let’s see how strong that Will really is.”