My world has two moons. Apparently, it used to have three, but that’s a story for another time. One of those moons is alive with the same magic that suffuses the land, making it gleam bright in the night sky. It is the larger of the two, dominating the firmament, almost a second world hovering in the night above my own. I hear elves live there, and other things. When I was a boy, they would come down at times in silver chariots and shining coaches to dance in the glades and forests with their cousins.

They stayed in their cold kingdom above in recent years, and who could blame them?

The second moon is dead, a corpse hanging sullen and gray in the sky, more distant than its neighbor and lacking the soft luminescence of Od. It rose high tonight, enjoying a rare dominance. Wil-O’ Wisps and ghost lights drifted through the trees, melding with the wan illumination of the Corpse Moon high above. Beneath its baleful eye, nine feet of muscle and anger strode down the forest road.

Karog stopped, glowering into the deeper shadows ahead of him. Beneath his ragged hood his eyes, yellow and ringed with red, suddenly widened at the same time his slit nostrils flared. “I smell you, Elf Friend.”

I stepped into the moonlight, blocking his path. I wore my armor beneath my red cloak, my pointed cowl up, and had my naked axe on my shoulder. He’d be able to see the auratic gleam of my golden eyes beneath the shadow of my hood, no doubt.

“We were interrupted earlier,” I said to him. “There are things I want you to tell me.”

Catrin and one of her fellow wenches, one she trusted, had observed Karog in the Backroad. He’d stayed a while, drank some mead, talked to no one, then abruptly left. She’d followed him from the shadows, using her dhampir ability to swim through darkness to keep me appraised of his whereabouts. After that, all I needed to do was get ahead of him and wait.

Karog lowered his head, baring his wolf’s teeth. His breath sent out a great gust of frost into the frozen air. “You are a fool. And I will tear you limb from limb.”

I glowered at him, matching the hate in his eyes with my own. “I haven’t forgotten your part in what happened at Cael. You and I have a debt to settle.”

Karog let out a single snort. Then, without warning, without so much as a shifting foot, he charged.

Nothing that big should be able to move that fast, but the ogre’s speed was explosive, and disconcertingly quiet. He didn’t draw the weapons he’d used inside the inn, only rushed me with bare hands and preternatural fury.

But he didn’t take me by surprise this time. I swept my axe down to one side, passing it from left hand to right, and focused on one of the golden ghosts in me.

As I’d told Emma, phantasms are gestated inside the soul. Will, imagination, experience, trauma, hate, love, passion, death, birth — these events define the memory, and the world remembers too. Impactful events can leave scars on the soul, the world, and time. Sometimes, through happenstance or design, these can give birth to an Art.

Magics are born through the confluences of souls, and they don’t always take form. When they do, they can fade as fast as the vessel that gave them life, whether it’s an emotion or an inspired idea. Artists and craftsmen are just as likely to wield their aura as warriors.

Even still, the lack of consistency can make battling with magic difficult. That is why constructs like the Alder Table were made — a repository for magical techniques, a reservoir of memory.

An arsenal of weapons.

My axe, the Doomsman’s Arm, shone with a sudden gleam of amber radiance. The dark oak of its haft crackled as it grew some, extending its length, a little tree gaining a simulacrum of life. The weapon was made for the same purpose for which wizards carve staffs or wands — as a channel, a focus. My magic coursed through it.

Karog closed on me, his eyes like burning candle flames, his teeth bared in savage bloodlust. He towered over me, and I knew he’d turn me into a bloody smear on that road easy as he would a fly. I didn't shift my feet, didn't so much as flinch -- the technique I used would dissipate into useless glitter unless I held my ground.

When the ogre came within a second of barreling into me, I slammed the bottom of my weapon’s elongated haft against the ground. A flower of golden light bloomed to life around me. The petals of that gilded flower formed a floating sigil, part auremark and part something much older.

Karog struck the sigil, and stopped cold. A moment later, and the glowing rune began to expand, forming an even more complex shape. The mercenary slid back several steps, struggling, sharp teeth bared in a bestial snarl, bloodshot eyes so wide I thought they’d pop out of his skull. The ogre let out a roar, pushing against the solid light, and for a moment I thought he’d break through my phantasm with sheer brute strength.

Not impossible. Magical techniques are only as strong as the will of whoever employs them, as their faith and focus. I poured all of mine against his, standing solid as a gilded statue on the forest road.

The floating sigil erupted, scattering into amber petals. The entire forest rang like a great bell had been struck, and Karog went tumbling back head over heels, sending up a cloud of dust and forest detritus. He landed in a heap, trailing smoke. A moment later, only the stars and dead moon lit the world once more.

“That’s called the Aureate Repulsion,” I told him, staring at his limp form with cold dispassion. “Hurts, doesn’t it?”

A rumbling growl tore at the air. Karog lifted himself to his hands and knees, trembling — not from pain or fear, but anger. He spat out his next words along with a glob of blood. “Pain is old hat to me, paladin.”

“How about love?”

Karog froze, still propping himself up on his hands. His eyes went down to the shadows pooling beneath him.

A pale, pretty face emerged from the shadows beneath the ogre. It rose up, like a mermaid out of a darkened lake, set in an expression of drowsy contentment. Two red eyes swirled like bloody abysses, huge and full of sanguine allure.

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“How about want?” Catrin murmured, her lips peeling back from sharp fangs in a dreaming smile. “Is that old hat to you, kin fomori?”

She still wore the blue dress and red bodice from earlier, but in the moonlight and liquid shadows it seemed the most comely of elfin garb. Pulled low around the shoulders, the dhampir's pale skin shone from slender neck to the tops of her modest breasts, glinting especially bright down her long arms as they rose as though to cup a lover's face.

She'd always been pleasant to look at, pretty in a way that might attract attention in small towns or rural villages. In that moment, she looked like something out of a dream as she brought all her half-dead charisma to bear, using the same arcane glamour wielded by faeries and fiends alike.

I swallowed, turning my eyes away from the dark pull I felt from her. It felt as though she were the center of a drowning whirlpool. We’d discussed the plan, and I’d agreed to it, but seeing her employ her vampiric powers like this still disconcerted me. And, part of me realized in that moment, it excited me too.

Dangerous. I buried that thought down deep.

Karog recoiled as though from a flame, standing to his full height and taking a step back to avoid Cat's reaching hands. He grunted, letting out a beast’s snort, but didn’t seem able to tear his eyes away from the dhampir as she lifted herself out of the liquid darkness. She stepped forward on a bare foot, her blue skirts swishing to and fro as she advanced with an unhurried inevitability.

She’d tried to entrance me like this once before, the night we’d first met. I’d been able to break free. I might have a magic particularly apt for just that sort of thing, made for it in fact, but that didn’t mean Karog couldn’t drive out the seductive voice in his head. I watched, fingers tight on my axe, ready for things to go wrong.

Finally, Catrin stepped very close to the ogre. Karog had a naturally hunched posture, almost simian, and had crouched lower as his eyes had grown lidded with a sudden drowsiness. He watched the scene before him as though in a waking dream, his mouth hanging slack, a bit of drool running down his chin. He swayed very slightly, like a tree in wind.

Then, casually, Cat reached out with a single finger and touched him on the brow. “Sleep,” she murmured.

And Karog fell, slamming against the road with over a thousand pounds of earth-shaking weight. A moment later, his chest began to heave rhythmically.

“How long?” I asked her, not taking my eyes off the unconscious ogre as she moved to stand next to me.

Cat pursed her lips. “He’s got an angry mind. Ten minutes?”

“If you ever try that on me—”

“Don’t lay down ultimatums,” Cat warned me, meeting my eyes. Hers still swirled vermillion, her power churning strong enough to tug at me even with that casual eye contact. “We’re good, big man. Best leave things as they are.”

After the heated place our conversation in the inn had gone, I felt that was fair. I nodded. “Let’s get him bound up then. Once he wakes, we’ll start getting some answers.”

Cat frowned. “I meant to ask — how are we going to keep him from moving? You’d need a galleon’s worth of rope, or a gaol. He’s a war machine, Al.”

I lifted my axe, studying its gnarled haft. Probably good I didn’t let her drink my blood earlier, I decided. “I have a way to keep him immobile for as long as we need,” I said.

Cat frowned, but didn’t question further as I stepped forward. I lifted the axe and prepared to awaken the Art bound within the weapon. It would transform the axe, or more precisely the cursed branch its handle had been fashioned from, into a Malison Oak in return for my blood. I’d trap Karog in the tree, and then we could ask him as many questions as we wanted, for as long as we wanted.

Something rustled the undergrowth behind me. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, my instincts shouting, and spun. I swung my axe an instant before a spike of black metal would have punched into my skull, batting it away in a brief scatter of sparks.

The creature holding the metal spike flipped back, landing lightly on the edge of the road. Clad in a tattered cloak with a heavy mantle, it looked small, almost childlike. A lumpy peasant’s hat with a wide brim obscured its features. It chittered through the mask of shadow beneath that hat, lifting the spike of black metal it had tried to stab me with in a hand wrapped with thick layers of brown cloth.

Catrin cursed, reacting a moment after me. She spun, and quickly saw the same thing I did — more figures in ragged clothing filled the woods, crawling out from behind trees and through undergrowth. Some clung to trunks or hung from branches, like apes, or…

Insects. I recognized one of them from the Backroad earlier that night, a thin figure in a dark hooded cloak with a pointy cowl similar to mine. I could just make out serrated mandibles beneath the brim of that hood, which clicked hungrily at me.

“Headsman,” the one in the pointy cowl chittered. “The mercenary is not for you. Walk away.”

I ran my eyes over the surrounding forest. There had to be at least thirty of the crawling figures, all dressed like poor travelers. I suspected the forms beneath were far from human. I heard buzzing whispers, clicking calls, the dull vibration of insectile wings.

“Alken…” Catrin drifted closer to me. She’d drawn her knife, a gift from the same faerie lord who’d given me my black armor. The dagger, wrought from a rare metal known as Rendsilver and sometimes Banesteel, stood out in the night like a shard of the night sky, deeply dark with a silvery tint. “What are they?”

“Irks,” I said. “Wicked elves.”

“Briar?” She asked.

“Probably wyldefae,” I said. My aura wasn’t warning me of the thorny malice that marked Briar Elves. “Couldn’t tell you what breed.”

Elves are not homogeneous. It’s more a human term, a catch-all phrase for the mystical, semi-immortal beings who dwell across the lands. Many appear like beautiful humans with pointed ears and other whimsical features. But they'd chosen those forms, deciding in long-ago times to live alongside humans in shapes pleasant to all eyes.

But just as many, if not most, look like nothing human at all. Trolls, goblins, giant spiders, wolfweres, some giants, and many stranger things are all technically also elves. Mix in the fact that they can change their form over their immortal lifetimes, through whim or odd happenstance, and things get even more confusing.

Many are predatory, dwelling in hidden realms or deep corners of the Wend, utterly hostile to humans. That was what we faced then.

Catrin and I stood back to back as the woods came alive with giant buzzing wings and eerie chittering voices. I felt her slim back press against mine, felt her fear. I half closed my eyes, finding that metallic calm inside of myself, and spoke aloud in a quiet, assuring voice.

“We are going to be alright. Have courage.”

Catrin shuddered, half in revulsion and half in relief, as my power rippled outward with my voice. The darker part of her nature didn’t like the touch of my sacred magic, but I’d hoped a minor Cant of Courage wouldn’t hurt her. I felt her steady.

“Thanks,” she said. “Handy trick.”

“Not just a trick,” I said. “A promise.” I turned my attention to what I assumed to be the leader of the irks then. “I don’t seek any quarrel with you or yours.”

“Yet you have one, Headsman.” The hooded creatures voice had an eerie buzzing quality, each syllable interspersed with loud clicks of its mandibles. I couldn’t quite tell, but the mouth behind those mandibles looked disturbingly human. “Karog’s life belongs to us. We will feast on his flesh and marrow. Stand against us, and we will have your essence too. Yours, and the Keeper’s plaything.”

Cat scoffed. “I’m nobodies plaything, Chitters.”

The entire horde buzzed angrily, the sound of it impossibly, horrifyingly loud. The irk leader let loose a rasping cackle. “No, I imagine this fallen knight is yours… many have grown tired of your mischief, Catrin of Ergoth.”

I didn’t much like where this conversation was heading. “I’m not this mercenaries ally,” I said to the swarm. “We just need him to answer some questions. Whatever quarrel you have with him, I’d ask it wait.”

With an almost lustful savor, the insectoid elf drew a long, curved blade from beneath his cloak. “He will never speak again. Kill them. All three of them.”

The swarm charged.