Phoenix Gardens was more than just a spa. It was one of the nicest places in Shadefall. Its grounds were meticulously maintained, full of manicured bushes and trees, babbling water features, and rock formation sculptures. Paper screens made up many of the interior walls, and each room features a dazzling mural of mythic birds in flight.
Attendants waited on guests hand and foot, taking coats, delivering snacks or towels, and helping to maintain the services on offer. There were manicures, pedicures, massages, facials, hot baths, and a sauna. Not only that, they catered to all skin and hair types, including scales.
When Xigbar saw it, he whistled with approval. "You're paying, right?"
"Of course," José assured. "I know one of the employees. She's offered me a lifetime discount for myself and anyone I want to bring."
"How'd you get that?"
"We were . . . close, when we were younger," José said. "Very close."
Xigbar chuckled, but Kaleb was less than enthused, and he renewed the protests he'd tried to raise back at the Maiden, before being loudly overruled.
"I don't know," Kaleb said. "You guys have fun, I think I might just go back to the hideout."
"My guy, your punching rock will still be there tomorrow," Xigbar said.
"I've already spent most of the day sitting around," Kaleb said, careful not to lob any blame at Xigbar for that, even though he wanted to. He debated for a moment how much of himself to share in order to explain himself.
Prove your worth.
"I'm not good with not doing something," Kaleb sighed. "I need a task. Some way to be useful. So if we still don't have any mission from Shen, I'd really rather just be preparing for when we do."
Xigbar looked at Kaleb like he'd just grown a third arm before shrugging and heading for the spa, but José stayed back. He gave Kaleb an inquisitive look that made the enziri feel like he was being mined for secrets.
"In my home country, there is a saying; strong winds are useless if the sails are full of holes," José said.
"Why would a sail be full of holes?" Kaleb asked.
"Many things can happen on the seas. Storms. Pirates. It is not a problem, as long as you take care of the sails during the voyage. Inspecting them. Mending the tears. Only when you sail endlessly, never stopping to make repairs, does a problem emerge."
Kaleb saw where José was going with this, and José could tell that he did. With a wide grin, he gestured to the spa. "What do you say we mend our sails?"
Kaleb wasn't overtly fond of boat imagery so soon after his last trip on one, but he did see José's point. He had to work hard. To prove to his new allies he was worth keeping around. To prepare himself for the Harvest's mission that had fallen to him. But work without proper rest and recovery wouldn't improve him, it would run him into the ground. This was as crucial to his role as training.
Once he put it to himself in those terms, he was able to follow José and Xigbar into the spa.
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Valerie looked over her shoulder at the street that would have led them to Phoenix Gardens, now slightly confused. At first, she hadn't known where was taking them beyond "somewhere fun." Valerie had never been to Phoenix Gardens, but she knew about it. Once she started to recognize the part of town they were in, their destination had seemed obvious.
But now they were walking past the way to the spa, and instead crossing into the threshold of what Valerie could only call the seedier side of Shadefall. It was a subtle shift. Buildings looked more worn down and less inviting. The streets developed more potholes, and tufts of grass grew from cracks and gaps.
"Are you sure we're going the right way?" Valerie asked.
"Of course I do," List said. "I come here all the time."
Valerie took another look around. Among other things, there was a man sitting in a gutter huffing something through a rag held to his face, a dragonblood cooking a skewer of some kind of meat over an open flame, and a trio of provocatively dressed gnomes standing on a barrel on a street corner, soliciting passersby of both genders.
"Where exactly is here?"
"I told you," List said as they approached a tavern with two boarded windows and a sign that hung sideways due to a broken chain, "it's a surprise."
Instead of walking through the tavern's front doors, List led them around to the back, where a man with pale purple skin and eyes like glassy black orbs was smoking next to a set of cellar doors. He grunted when he saw them, and tiny pinpricks of light danced in his eyes, light stars in the night sky.
List looked him square in the starry eyes without faltering. "Initiative."
The man gave the three of them a once over and scoffed. But he leaned over, and pulled open the cellar doors. Stairs led down into a dimly lit tunnel, and a muffled, almost rhythmic din filtered its way out from below.
Kiva's brow ridges lifted. "Is this what I think it is?"
List grinned. "Only one way to find out."
She sauntered down, Kiva trailing behind. With suspicions and worries rising by the second, and one hand on the hilt of her silvered blade, Valerie followed.
The oil lamps in the tunnel were guttering and filthy, casting only a faint orange glow, and it carried them down at a steep incline. The muffled din grew louder, to the point that Valerie could feel the sound in the walls as they walked. When List opened the doors at the other end, they were met with a wall of light and sound, and the smell of sweat and fried food.
A massive underground chamber opened up before them, tight stone brick enclosing them on all sides. A mix of oil lamps and lightstone hung from the walls and ceiling, encircling rows of rickety wooden benches arranged in tiers around a square stage in the center of the room. Bodies of every shape, size, and color crowded the seats, and now that they were in the same room, their cheering became deafening as it echoed off the walls.The central stage's edges were roped off, and an iron cage encased the whole thing, separating the audience and entertainment, and also sealing in the spectacle.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The largest human man Valerie had ever seen stood in the ring, blood running down his face and half of his handlebar mustache missing as he squared off against a man with green skin and gill slits along his neck.
The green man leapt forward, feet first, driving both of his legs into the bigger man's chest in a flying kick. The mountain of a man not only took the blow in stride, he caught one of the green man's legs. One handed, he hurled his opponent across the ring. He hit the iron bars of the cage so hard they rattled, and the crowd let out a collective "ooh" in sympathy.
"Ladies," List introduced, throwing her arms out, "welcome to Threesday Night Throwdown."
In retrospect, Valerie didn't know why she'd ever expected a spa.
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Phoenix Garden's motto was "You will feel reborn." And it lived up to that standard. In the halls of the spa, José, Xigbar, and Kaleb were treated to a five star pampering. The air was perfectly temperate, clean, and tinted with the smell of jasmine from burning incense. A musician plucked away at a stringed instrument, weaving a slow, relaxing song that settled the atmosphere with every note.
After being waited on literally hand and foot while enjoying a refreshing face mask made of a plant they had never heard of but smelled nice, the three young men found themselves lying on their stomachs, wearing nothing but towels around their waists as each of them received a full body massage.
Xigbar let out a shuddering groan of pure bliss as a woman's fingers effortless worked the muscles in his back without once hurting his scales or irritating the areas where they transitioned to more human skin. Without any real clothes on, the full extent of his reptilian side was on display. The scales that frame his face and back of his neck spread out to cover his shoulders, arms, and back. Not for the first time, he was glad that dragonbloods were so prevalent in Xykesh. It meant people actually knew how to treat someone with reptilian skin.
José was similarly enjoying himself. Unlike Xigbar, he looked as human as they came in a towel, with smooth, sun-kissed skin marked. And yet, he'd specifically requested a dragonblood masseuse. The others didn't understand it, but he enjoyed the unique texture of her hands, and sometimes in her technique, she would lightly drag the clawed tips of her fingers across his skin, sending a tingling shiver down his spine.
Kaleb, meanwhile, was politely smiling while an elvborn woman tried her best to get him to feel anything deeper than the brush of her hands on his back. It wasn't an unpleasant sensation—her hands were soft, warm, and lightly oiled—but it wasn't a massage.
It wasn't her fault. To the eye, Kaleb looked human, even if the brown of his skin was a slightly more earthen tone than normal. But there was an unnatural hardness to him that only grew more pronounced when he his body tensed, and his skin had a light roughness to it, like partially smoothed stone. He didn't just look statuesque—he felt like one.
Especially since, he had to admit, he was a bit nervous receiving this kind of physical contact from a stranger, and a pretty stranger at that.
"You're like a rock," she commented to cover up a grunt of fruitless effort. "Are you feeling alright?"
"Sorry," Kaleb apologized into his pillow. "I'm an enziri."
"Oh," the girl said, sounding both surprised and intrigued. "So, you're really like a rock."
Kaleb chuckled. "Yeah, I guess so."
The woman gave a thoughtful "hm," during which her hands glided far more slowly down the planes of his shoulders. "Wait here a minute."
Kaleb glanced back over his shoulder as the woman walked away. A few minutes later, she came back with what looked like a stone wheel in the middle of a rod. She put her full weight into that wheel, and when she rolled it across his back, he finally felt it.
His stonelike body finally gave under the pressure, the weight of his masseuse's whole body focused along the wheel. Tension from his nerves, and more he hadn't even realized had been there, forcibly unwound with each pass, making everything that had felt rigid and heavy become light and pliable.
She went harder, and it was like knots in his muscles uncoiled. He gasped, somewhere between pleasure and pain, and that gasp turned into a deeply satisfied groan. The woman smiled.
"Better?" she asked.
"Yes," Kaleb admitted. It was all he could get out before she rolled the stone across him again, drawing another grunt. He felt heat rise up in his face. He was definitely being louder than his friends. But it just felt so good for something to actually work his muscle tissue without jumping all the way to blunt force trauma.
"Let me know if there's anything else I can do for you," she said. "Phoenix Garden aims to please."
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"Oh, please," Kiva breathed, practically bouncing in her seat with her eyes glued to the ring. "Please, please, please—"
It had only taken a few matches for the dragonblood girl to lose herself in the energy of the crowd and spectacle of the fights. Now, she was like a child, giddy with anticipation for every move.
In the ring, a bearded fighter calling himself the Carpenter was scratching his chin and looking to the weapons his partner Chisel had brought for him to select from. There was a comically oversized mallet, a dull sword cut to resemble a meter long ruler, and a wood file the length of a dagger, all arranged on what looked like a freshly made table.
With a dismissive grunt, the Carpenter swept his hand across the weapons, scattering them all. Then he picked up the entire table, and slammed it down on his opponent so hard he broke it in two.
"Yes!" Kiva shouted, spilling their popcorn as she leapt up, cheering. "Fuck yes! Hit him again!"
"Fuck!" List swore as she returned to their seats, three paper wrapped churros in her hands. "What did I miss?"
If Kiva was giddy, List was ecstatic. The hellborn's face had been transformed by unbridled excitement from the moment they'd sat down, and in her eyes was a spark of something that could only be called dangerous. It was a tamer version of the wicked smile she wore in the heat of battle, but only barely.
"The Carpenter just smashed the Creature from Lochmire Bay with a table," Valerie said, calmly excepting a churro as all around her, the audience let out another cheer as the Carpenter grabbed one half of the broken table, and swung it at Lochmire Bay just as the man was staggering to his feet. "I think he's going to win."
"Oh, good," List said. "I thought I'd missed a whole fight."
This particular fight club had sprung up in the aftermath of the Pavers' exit from Shadefall. The guild had indirectly controlled the pit fighting scene in town for years, but when they left, a gap had emerged, and the West End Rumblepit had stepped in to fill it.
List had discovered it on a night out and returned several times since. The club ran various themed events and even storylines throughout the year to keep the offerings varied, but according to the hellborn, the best night was Threesday Night Throwdown.
Throwdowns always concluded the night with the Gauntlet, a fight where one of the club's biggest names would fight to see how many walk-ons they could take on in succession. Local legends had been born out of people fighters single-handedly besting fight after fight, until they ran out of challengers, or when a no-name walk-on managed to bring down a champion of the ring.
And while she was driven to the rabid excitement of her friends, Valerie was enjoying herself. The fighters weren't exactly skilled. Not by her standards. But they knew how to put on a show, play to the crowd, and fight with a kind of dramatic brutality that was impossible to look away from. The personas the fighters put on made it easy to find people to root for and oppose, even though she'd never heard of any of them before tonight.
This never would have been her first choice for "doing something fun," but all in all, it was a good show with good company, and that was nice enough.
"We can probably catch the next two before we have to get ready," List mused to herself.
It was like having a horse rear up in the middle of a ride. The world came to a abrupt halt, and Valerie's pleasantly relaxed mood evaporated in an instant, replaced with a knowing dread.
"Ready for what?" she asked.
"Oh, did I not mention?" List asked, voice thick with false innocence. "I signed us up for the Gauntlet."
And for the second time that night, Valerie wondered how she could have expected anything less.