La’Var was like the uncle Adria never had, the carefree, low-risk adventurer one half of her wished she could be and the goblin she had the most trust in. The shadows of the mead dungeon and the lack of expression changed the hunter. Now, he was the goblin who held the power to destroy her perfect life.

Adria stared into the hunter’s eyes, stuttering. No matter how hard she tried, the right words refused to come to her tongue. A moment later, she couldn’t bear looking at La’Var and closed her eyes.

Her arm that the hunter held began to shake as Adria contemplated: should she tell him what happened in the night? Should she reveal her identity?

“Oh no, no, no,” the hunter whispered. “I didn’t mean to scare you like that.”

Adria’s eyes snapped wide open and she raised one of her eyebrows.

“You think I need to know how or why you ended up in the middle of Gothsin forest in the middle of the night?”

Adria nodded. And La’Var laughed.

“Not at all – each one of us has our little secrets,” he said. “Especially me. I use quite a few baits and traps and knives that… Well, how do you say this… They’ve been very outlawed in these lands and if the wrong people saw my inventory, I’d end up the scared boar running for his life through the woods.”

The hunter cleared his throat and held Adria’s other hand.

“What I’m trying to say: I want to help you and exorcize those damn spirits. The inn is my home too and I don’t like some phantoms going through my stuff.”

Weight lifted from Adria’s shoulders.

“I… Alright,” she said, smiling subtly. “I don’t even feel any pain or anything from this cut, but if it’s that bad, do your thing. Heal me. And… You know, I didn’t mean to get possessed, alright?”

“Tell me who in the world wants to get possessed?” La’Var laughed.

The hunter knelt beside Adria and started cutting off the tiny branches stemming from her wound.

“One thing that I miss about the north is the forests. There are no berry trees, no swarms of insects, no noises. They’re just peaceful wastelands with the occasional beast thirsting for your blood.”

“That’s exactly one of the reasons why the north isn’t a place for me. You can go on glorious hunts—which you will not hear the end of when things calm a little and we’re sharing a pint—but there is no action, nothing interesting in a hunter’s day-to-day business. There, you enter the woods, grab a deer and leave. Here, you enter the woods, fight off an infestation of wasps, cure a spider bite and get your ass whooped by a deer, which for some reason has three eyes and the might of a small army.”

Adria’s eyes narrowed.

“I will never understand that.”

Then, she bit her lip and kicked the floor as La’Var started pulling out a branch from the depths of her arm.

“You know, your case is a real classic,” he murmured to distract Adria from the sting. “Go to a forest, get into some trouble with ghosts, get possessed, go to some place and accidentally release them -- I’ve seen it a million times. Very uninteresting. Not entirely unexpected.”

“If you’ve seen it happen before, then you must know how to exorcize the spirits too.” Adria grunted.

“If I didn’t, I’d let you slap me for calling myself a damn hunter! Actually… there are hunters like that these days. Some rookies in the woods don’t even know how to prepare a three-rope trap for Black Fangs! Ah, you don’t need my rambling…”

“It was different back in your day?”

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“Like day and night! Anyway, I come from hunters who were taught how to deal with spirits: first comes the hard part — you find the source of the possession. From there on it’s as easy as luring a drunkard into a tavern.”

The hunter cut off the final, tinniest branches with utmost precision, then popped open a bottle of clear liquid. The smell of spirit pierced Adria’s nose. She shivered. The hunter’s gaze dropped and she understood all she needed. It wouldn’t be pleasant and she would need to hold on.

La’Var held the bottle over Adria’s arm. With the other one, she held onto a mead barrel and took a deep breath.

La’Var poured the clear spirit.

Adria’s arm burned and stung at the same time. She clenched the barrel. Pieces of wood crushed under her hand. The pain began spreading, moving up to her shoulder and into her torso. She couldn’t bear it and would’ve done anything for it to stop after a second. But the pain only got worse, even as La’Var stopped pouring.

Tears welled up in her eyes. Her cheeks turned red.

Adria couldn’t hold it in and opened her mouth to scream.

Suddenly, La’Var’s eyes widened: he snatched her and embraced her, and… She screamed into his chest. The hunter’s muscles muted the sounds of her agony. After a minute, the pain subdued.

The hunter let go of Adria. Whilst she wiped her eyes, he wrapped a bandage around the wound. Then, he handed her a pair of unmarked potions. The pink one tasted of oranges while the green one had a bland flavor.

Adria hugged La’Var. Smiling, he disappeared from the mead dungeon to search for the source of the possession and to let Adria finish cleaning up. After she tossed the broom and the bucket in the filthy corner, she filled up three pints.

Adria served Benedictus Lucanus, picked up a few orders, handed out meals to customers and returned to the mead dungeon, where La’Var waited.

“How do we find where the spirits are?” Adria asked.

“The same way you hunt,” La’Var said. “First, we retrace your path from last night and search for clues. Hopefully, they’ll lead us to the meat!”

Adria nodded. She hurried around the dining hall, taking a plethora of orders as more and more customers flooded in. After an hour of serving meat and mead, no new faces entered through the doors and no hungry eyes stared at her, waiting for her to approach them.

It’s calm now. Adria gestured to La’Var to follow her. If any new orders come around, the witless will deal with them.

They left through the steel front doors and hiked to the edge of the border of Saint Goblin’s Inn, where Gothsin Forest began. She led La’Var along the path she’d ran the night before, past graves and tombstones.

The hunter inspected every step of the way.

Adria stopped in the middle of the graveyard, around a dozen meters away from the entrance to the tavern. There, a patch of grass was trampled. The place where she’d tripped and gotten possessed by the spirits. She explained what happened there to La’Var. The hunter got lost in thought for a minute before circling the place, inspecting every nearby tomb, checking behind every blade of grass. Apart from looking, he smelled and listened closely, seeming to enter a sort-of hunter’s hypnosis.

Another minute passed and he broke out of it, and looked at Adria with disappointed eyes.

“Nothing here,” he said and dropped a carved-out finger bone. “Still, we’ve got to mark this place -- it might be crucial to our hunt.”

“If it isn’t here, then it’s… In the dining hall,” Adria mentioned and waved after herself.

They returned to Saint Goblin’s Inn and she stopped at the place where she had sneezed, then at the point where she passed out. Once again, La’Var inspected every crack in the floor, licked surfaces and smelled around.

“Too many sounds, sights and smells in this place,” the hunter said. “There might as well be clues all around here, but they’re drowned out by everything else… Say, when you ran into those spirits, did they tell you anything? Do any details stand out about them? Anything that could lead us in the right direction?”

Adria dug deep into her memory and opened her mouth…

The lanterns began swinging. The crosses of the religious among the dining hall crowd began to jangle. The witless goblins entered a frenzy.

“Speak of the deer and the deer shall show up,” La’Var uttered. “Something triggered those spirits to break through Saint Goblin’s prayers…”

“This isn’t the spirits’ doing.” Adria eyed Benedictus Lucanus.

The regular was downing his last pint. His eyes gleamed with fear and worry. And the fingers of his left hand were casting a spell. You can’t escape northerners, can you? Adria thought.

The doors to the inn swung open. Four Black Ice Bastion banners walked inside, each of their steps silencing the crowd, like an orchestra's conductor's final swing. By the sides of the black-armored men, hounds strolled, now with jangling chain collars. Adria's eyes arose.

The Band of the North, she remembered Black Ice Bastion. At the forefront of the legendary group walked yesterday's patron. This means the Liar replaced Bleaksa... He replaced a member of the Band of the North... Oh, Twenty Gods...