The expression on the Duck Brotherhood's faces when I turned in the lich goose mantle was spectacular. Their bills gaped open as the title appeared above my head: Duck Brotherhood Initiate.

"How? But it was supposed to be impossible!" the duck who had greeted me at the door cried. The other two shushed him, and they moved across the room into an impromptu huddle.

Did I mention that was his actual name? Literally, over his head, it just said "Greeter Duck," which made sense when I first got to the lair. I had thought once I was an initiate, the system would give them actual names. Nope. The flightiest of the ducks was still tagged "Greeter Duck." The other one was "Girl Duck" and the other drake was just "Duck #3." Ridiculous.

I couldn't make out their mutters, so I turned on closed captions. "He'll find out everything!"

"Hush. There has to be a way around this."

"He's only an initiate," Duck #3 said. "Surely he won't have to learn our deepest secrets until at least Rep Level 3, right?"

"I don't know!" Greeter Duck was on the verge of tears. Do ducks have tears? “I don't know! Nobody's ever gotten this far!"

"Look, the system isn't going to allow us to deny him the reward. We're just going to have to find a way to get him killed. We can't kill him directly anymore," the female duck said. The others all nodded their heads. I could see she was right. Their yellow dots had turned green to me now, and flagging combat against them would be impossible. It appeared the reverse was also true.

"We'll just have to keep giving him quests until one of them gets him killed, or until he runs out of time."

It was becoming increasingly obvious to me these were not NPCs. They had full awareness of who I was as a player, and the existence of a system governing everything. These were something else, and I wasn't sure what. I have a suspicion, but it didn't make any sense. I was going to have to get more information, and probably some advice.

I continued waiting for them with a bland smile on my face. They broke apart and approached.

"Congratulations, brother!" Greeter Duck said.

"Can't believe I have to call a featherless brother." That last was still too quiet for me to hear but I read the subtitles, and apparently that’s what Duck #3 muttered.

Girl Duck pushed the bigger drake aside and stepped forward. "Welcome! If you wish to proceed further in the Brotherhood, you must accept the challenges we give you."

Greeter Duck stepped forward. "Yes, yes, and the first one is to take a load of coal to the Kilns." The other two grabbed him and dragged him back across the room.

"We can't let him near the Kilns. He'll find out everything.”

"Sorry, I panicked. I just wanted to send him someplace where he couldn't possibly survive."

“But if he does—”

“He won’t.” That was Girl Duck, not the one who had talked about the kilns. She raised her wings a little, in an attempt to calm the others. “Look at him, he’s not even level two. You’re right. This will work. It has to work.”

I took the sack of coal from Greeter Duck. My map populated with a dot for the quest turn-in, a gray area that I hadn't yet explored. I set out with some trepidation. I kept the gear for the Goose Skeleton Bandit Set in a hotkey for instant equipping. That might come in handy later.

I moved down the road, which had the same sort of flavor as most of the rest of the world, wide pastoral lands and normal forest creatures. If I steered clear of them, they’d would leave me alone, aside from the occasional wolf that I had to avoid.

Then I crossed the shoulder of the mountain and everything changed. The difference was abrupt as a line drawn on the ground. One side was bland farmland, the other a blasted and desolate wasteland. The trees were burned-out stumps or dead charred trunks that just hadn't fallen yet. The ground was scorched and blackened and even the rocks looked a little bit melted.

My gamer-brain said dragon! and I looked around, including at the sky. A couple big ravens soared, and an ash-lizard poked its head out of a stump nearby. That was all.

Ahead rose a foreboding fortress. Its walls were black stone. The battlements had spiky crenellations like teeth jutting up towards the sky. This was clearly a different zone. Even though the fragment was using scaling mechanics, I could expect this wasn't a place I was supposed to be until I was higher level. Maybe the random encounters would scale, but there was no telling if the scripted story encounters would, or if there would be other mechanics that would require a higher level to survive.

I headed down towards the fortress, crossing a drawbridge over a dry moat full of spiky rocks. The guards at the door wore black scaled armor and bored expressions. They were clearly bird-people, but their armor concealed their forms enough I wasn’t sure what kind.

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"Halt! Who are you?" The first one who spotted me demanded, leveling his spear in my direction.

The next one gave him a dismissive wave. "Stand down, it's one of the Brotherhood. You got our coal?"

"Sure, but what is this place?"

"Welcome to the Kiln," the bored guard said as he waved me through. "Come on, get a move on. Fires are waiting."

I passed into the interior of the keep. It looked much like the fortress where I had almost been executed in the opening sequence, just a boring square interior with high walls all around. The big difference was that the walls were black and that one whole wall was made up of giant ovens. With a name like Kilns, I'd expected something fiery and made of bricks. I did not expect to find oversized ovens the size of houses and teams of bakers pushing a giant turkey carcass into the oven.

What the hell?

"Come on, quit your gawking and move forward. What are these? You didn't think turducken bake themselves, did you? Drop your coal over there." The guard behind me poked me with the butt of his spear and gestured at the far wall.

Along one wall was a giant pile of bags. When I examined them, they were clearly labeled as coal. Laborers were dumping bags of coal onto a pile while others shoveled them into an open furnace.

I went over and put my bag down on the pile as I studied the layout of the place. This was significant. Those turduckens were a serious threat. If they were mass producing them here, this must be important to a major plot line. The Duck Brotherhood clearly thought I wouldn't survive, although it wasn't clear what the immediate threat was.

I broke off my musings when I saw one of the guards up on the wall jerk up straight and then topple over. He landed up on the battlement out of sight and no one noticed. I quickly looked around for a corner. There were some wagons loaded with miscellaneous crates off to one side and I slipped over amongst them.

Then I studied the walls again. The battlement where the guard had fallen was empty. I couldn't see the body from my low angle and there were no other guards patrolling it. Have there been a minute ago? I thought so, but I couldn't be sure.

As I watched, a head popped up over the battlement and then ducked back down. Then two more appeared.

It was a party of adventurers. They kept low and worked their way down the wall before disappearing into a tower door at the end of that stretch of battlement.

I remained where I was hiding. A moment later they came out of the opposite side of the tower door. One of them drew back a bow and shot a guard farther down the wall. But still no one noticed. One of the adventurers, not the bowman, pulled out a lit torch. My eyes widened as I realized he was standing directly above the pile of coal.

Oh shit oh shit oh shit!

I took off running for the gate. As I reached it, the bored guard looked up at me.

"Thank you for visiting the kiln. Do come back with more —“

Boom!

Now I know in real life coal is not explosive. But any time there's a pile of something flammable and someone throws something flaming on top of it in a game setting, the consequences are not slow and not subtle. While the fireball might not have qualified as an explosion in the thermodynamic sense, it was a fast moving literal ball of fire. I was lucky to get out when I did.

The keep trembled and the ground shook as I dashed through the doorway. A wall of flame scorched the back of my neck and the air was full of screams of the burned and dying. A horrible smell of singed feathers filled the air.

I cleared the gate, sprinted across the drawbridge, and thought I might make it to the forest when I heard a distant cry, "Look out! The gravy!"

The entire universe exploded and the ground came up to punch me in the face.

I came to sometime later. Rok'gar and his two friends were leaning over me.

"Hey, he's awake! It is you! Colin, how did you get here?"

Staring up into their faces from my position on the ground, I could think of nothing witty to say.

"Uh, uh, what? How?"

"I think part of the battlement hit him," one of them said. He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. "That rock over there has blood all over the side of it."

"How did you catch up with us on the quest chain so fast?" Rok’gar asked. He frowned. "You were here to destroy the kilns, right?"

I tried to gather my wits, but —

“No way,” the bard orc said before I could gather my wits enough to respond. "We would have seen him in Whitefeather when we were doing the precursor quest." He orc looked at me suspiciously. "Why are you here?"

I rubbed my head and searched my inventory for a healing potion. I only had one, and it was Minor. That had been an oversight. I needed to stock up on potion ingredients as soon as I could afford them. I took the potion and my health bar started to recover. "I was just exploring. This place looked interesting, so I snuck in."

I realized that was a mistake as soon as I said it.

"You snuck in? You were inside there? No way. You're still level one. There's no way your sneak's high enough to get in there." Now the orcs with Rok’gar looked really suspicious.

I shrugged. "Hey, being sneaky's more than just skill points."

They all looked at me in disbelief. A moment later when they realized I wasn't going to offer any more explanation they seemed to lose interest.

"Whatever. Come on, man," the druid said to Rok'gar. "We gotta go turn this in. The clock's ticking."

Rok'gar looked at me with actual concern. "Are you all right? That hit on your head. Are you sure you'll be okay here?" He glanced around. There were no enemies in sight, and the fortress itself was a smoldering ruin. It was cracked open like an egg falling on the floor.

I shook my head. "No, I'll be fine. Thanks anyway."

“Sure.” The orc reluctantly turned away. He had seemed genuinely concerned for my well-being, and I was touched.

Still, I didn't want to let him in on my strategy. For one thing, I didn't really have much strategy and I didn't want to be mocked about that.

I was just going on hunches and methods I had used in the past for exploring the outskirts of a game. When you approach them by not following the main quest line, you often discovered new exploits. In a setup like this, the game was designed to look like an open world sandbox while still funneling you into the main line quests. The farther you stayed from those , the more things came apart.

With the orcs gone, I got out of there as quick as I could, making time over the mountain path back towards Driftwood. As I went, I took stock of what I had learned. Somebody was making Turducken on an industrial scale. Apparently players were on a quest line to get to the bottom of it or stop it, which seemed pretty typical.

What wasn't typical was the Duck Brotherhood, a band of apparent assassins who were not non-player characters, but something else, and they were involved, at least peripherally, in the creation of the Turduckens. But how involved were they? Providing supplies or were they a major player? And what was their angle? Who were they and what were they here for?

That's what I needed to find out. I suspected at the bottom of that mystery was the solution to the fragment, and the answer to why it had defeated so many before us.