The palace, and its various grounds and peripheral buildings, would have alone been larger than any town that Styk had ever seen. It wasn’t so much that there were a huge number of buildings—though between the stables, the lauded merchants, the armourers and the various servants’ quarters, there was a huge number—but that the buildings themselves were larger than any of those Styk had seen before. The sheer scale came with a substantial benefit, however: with so many people hurrying or milling about the palace grounds, we were more likely to blend in. This was what we decided: we would hide in plain sight.

Already, Arzak gloated, her ball gown would come in handy; if we were going to look like the sorts of folk who belonged in a palace, then we’d need to look the part. This lead to Val buying a dress of her own—a blue number, her professed colour of choice—as well as buying me a waistcoat, shirt and dress pants. These clothes didn’t seem to fit me at all, but the man in the shop told me “that is the style”, and I was forced to go along with it.

After Val handed over the money to pay for all this stuff, I realised I’d one day need to ask her where all the coin had come from. More and more I was starting to wonder whether she was so keen on heists not for the novelty, but because they were a way of life for her.

As we strolled back towards the palace, Val starting to find her slim dress as confining as my waistcoat, we made an effort to walk as though we had a lot of money. To my mind—and Arzak agreed with me on this—I thought that looking rich was more to do with having a straight back and holding your head high, though Val was more of the opinion that it meant scowling at everyone. We settled for doing both.

Obviously we were doing a good job, because the crowds of locals sometimes parted before us, the working classes of Auricia so conditioned to make way for their supposed “betters” that they almost jumped to one side when they saw my waistcoat.

Val stopped at the side of a main road not too far from the palace and suddenly turned to me. She licked her thumbs pretty substantially and then started fussing with my hair.

‘Oi, what are you—’

‘Your mop is giving us away,’ Val said, wrenching the hair back. ‘We need you looking like you have servants to tend to this kind of thing.’

‘Are you offering to be my servant?’

The witch kicked me gently in the shins.

‘Oi!’ I said again, this apparently being my word of the day, but when I looked up at Val, I realised she was staring at something over my shoulder. ‘What?’ I asked, turning.

I turned to see a shop with a queue of a few dozens people formed outside, many of them craning their heads to see if they’d be getting inside any time soon. But it wasn’t this that Val was staring at, I realised. She was staring at the banner above the shop, which read: GRAND OPENING: TED’S CONFECTIONARY EMPORIUM.

‘Oh, no…’ I mumbled.

‘You don’t think…?’ Val said.

Arzak looked at us, then at the shop, then back at us again. ‘What wrong? Hungry?’

‘You remember those cursed sweets we had?’ Val asked her. ‘It was a guy named Ted who gave them for us. Blamed us for his stall getting beat up. But surely he wouldn’t be here, would he? How could he be? How could he have the money for all of that?’ She nodded at the store.

I remained silent, having no answer for her. And then, against my better judgement, I made for the store, Val and Arzak following at my heel.

A tiefling man dressed in black stopped me at the door by placing a hand on my chest. ‘You not see the queue, pumpkin?’ he asked, the “pumpkin” bit delivered in a particularly sarcastic tone.

‘We’re old friends of Ted’s,’ I told him. ‘Here to wish him well. And spend some coin on his big day.’

‘Oh yeah? And how many times do you reckon I’ve heard that today? You want in, then you get in line, alright?’

‘If you know Ted as well as I do, then you’ll know—’

‘I don’t,’ the tiefling said.

‘Sorry?’

‘Don’t be.’

‘No, I mean, you don’t know him?’

The man sighed. ‘I’m hired by the day. Just met the guy this morning, so—’

I groaned. ‘Oh, screw this.’ Turning to Val and Arzak, I asked, ‘You both ready?’

They responded by taking a step to stand in closer to me.

‘What are you—’ the tiefling started as I raised a hand to gestured to the busy shop behind him. I didn’t hear the end of the sentence because I opened a portal beneath us, and Arzak, Val and I fell through it, landing in the store proper. Though the Tamed Portals passive meant that my portals’ glows were only 50% reduced, this was enough that three people appearing out of nowhere didn’t seem to attract the attention of many of the shoppers. Perhaps that was due to the colourful and eclectic array of sweets piled in stacks on tables in front of them, however.

‘Wow,’ Arzak said. ‘Pretty. I think Lore like this.’

‘He would,’ Val said, plucking a sweet from a nearby stall and moving to plop it into her mouth. I slapped it out of her hand. ‘What was that for?’

‘He enchants them, remember?’

‘Some of them, yeah. I don’t think he’s putting the black market enchanted ones out on display, though, is he?’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘You really wanna take that chance?’

Val, midway into reaching out for another sweet, reluctantly pulled her hand away. ‘Fine.’

‘So,’ Arzak asked, looking around the room. ‘Where this—’

‘You,’ a familiar voice cried out.

Val and I turned slowly, to see him standing there. Ted. The Ted we knew.

‘You!’ Ted cried out. ‘How did you… How did you find me? How did you track me all this way? How did you…’ He blinked. ‘Guard! Guard, chuck them out!’ But over the din of the shop being absolutely packed with customers, the tiefling could neither see nor hear Ted.

‘We didn’t track you anywhere,’ Val said. ‘We just came across you. How can you be here, anyway? Last time we saw you—just a few months back—you only had a cart.’

‘A damaged cart,’ I reminded him.

The young Ted glared at me. ‘Are you here to do the same to my shop? Cos I got spells built in, you know. Came with the lease agreement. If you—’

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‘We’re not going to attack your shop,’ I said. ‘Look, we’ve never attacked you or your stuff. Lambkin attacked your cart—’

‘Attacked my cart trying to get to you!’

‘And I seem to remember you immediately selling me out to him, yeah? And you poisoned us!’

Ted rolled his eyes. ‘Oh a bit of watery vomit, big deal. You’ll get over it.’

‘Wolves were attacking us when the effects hit,’ Val said.

The shopkeeper glanced at Val, his cheeks flushing, and then his gaze dropped to the floor. ‘Well… I’m sorry about that. But you’re here now, you’re alive, and you need to get out of my shop.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘you gotta tell us. How did you get here? Did you steal?’

‘No, I didn’t steal!’ Ted retorted.

I held up my hands in surrender—a mannerism I’d picked up from Val. ‘No judgements here, alright? I just—’

‘If you really have to know, I got a lot of experience a few months back. One of my enchanted sweets. Someone must have used it to off someone powerful, cos the amount of experience changed my life.’

I eyed Val, who was pressing her lips together to suppress a laugh,

‘And then, suddenly I can make the best sweets in the Tundras. So I figure why not go where the money is? And obviously the money is in the Goldmarch, cos…’ Ted trailed off when he caught sight of Val trying not to laugh. ‘What?’

Val pointed a thumb at me. ‘Him.’

‘What about him?’

‘It was him.’

‘Him what? Him who…’ Ted paled when he realised what Val was talking about. ‘No. No, I refuse to believe that. Can’t be him. Anyone but him.’

‘It him,’ my orc friend offered. ‘I Arzak, by the way. It nice to—’

‘Go on then,’ Ted said, cutting Arzak off. ‘Who did you kill? A baron? A duke?’

‘A Player.’ I thought I’d said it quietly, but apparently not, because a good dozen or so heads swivelled to look at me. Open a portal at their side, and they don’t care, but talk about killing a Player…

Ted turned to soothe the crowd, waving them down with a sheepish smile on his face. ‘He’s joking! He’s joking, everyone!’ He turned back to me. ‘You can’t make those kinds of jokes. Not in the Goldmarch. You’ll scare off my customers. No, worse—it’s treason, so you’ll get killed.’ He hesitated on this point for a moment. ‘Worse for you, I mean. I don’t care if you get killed.’

‘Who’s joking?’ I replied, this time actually making sure to talk quietly.

Ted, incredibly finding it within him to grow paler still, paused for a moment, before waving us through a door at the back of the shop. Passing through the threshold, we found ourselves in a stock room, the walls lines with jars of sweets and confectionary ingredients. While Ted fussed with closing a jar he’d left open, Arzak leant in close to my ear.

‘He handsome,’ she whispered. ‘Maybe young, but handsome.’

‘OK?’

‘He handsome and he like Val.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’ I asked.

‘Is competition.’

I blinked at her. ‘Arzak? Shut up.’

The orc smiled a knowing smile, but let the matter drop.

‘I’m handsome too,’ I mumbled, and immediately recognised how pathetic that was, so I was glad when Arzak didn’t seem to hear it.

Finally, Ted turned around, glancing at the door to make sure Arzak had shut it behind her. ‘So you’re telling me… All this, my whole fortune… it’s built on the death of a Player?’

‘Fraid so, buddy,’ Val said.

Ted gulped.

‘Players not good though. He not innocent. He—’

Again, Ted interrupted Arzak. ‘I don’t care about that. I care about my life.’

‘We aren’t going to go about advertising it,’ Val said. ‘It’s not like anyone’s gonna find out.’

‘Well, hold on a minute,’ I said, cutting in with a raised finger, sensing the opportunity for a little light extortion. ‘We won’t tell anyone, as long as…’

‘Oh, no,’ Ted mumbled.

‘As long as you help us break in to the palace record office,’ I finished.

‘Oh, that’s even worse than I was expecting. More treason? Double the treason?’

‘Can they double-kill us?’ I asked. ‘No. So it’s still just the regular single treason, when it comes to sentencing.’

Ted glared at me as though this didn’t reassure him in the slightest. ‘I will do no such thing.’

In answer, Val strode over to the door, flung it open, then cupped her hand to her mouth as though she was about to shout something.

‘Wait!’ the shopkeeper cried out. ‘For the love of the Architects, wait.’

Val, with a quick smirk in my direction, closed the door again.

‘I don’t know how I’m supposed to help you,’ Ted said, turning away and placing his hands on the edge of a worktop, one that was covered in a dusting of sugar.

‘You can start by telling us about the palace,’ Val suggested.

‘What would I know about the palace? I’ve only been here a couple of weeks, and it’s not like I’m rich enough—yet—to be hanging about with royalty, is it?’

The witch pointed to the door, which seemed to make Ted rapidly reconsider.

‘But… I know that Amira isn’t back until tomorrow. She’s out on some diplomatic mission, overseeing some deal with some Tundran lords or something, I don’t know. But this helps you—it means that if you go today, you’re not gonna see so many guards. Better for sneaking, right?’

‘Right,’ I agreed, with a nod.

‘Good, so you can be on your way, and—’

‘No. No, that’s not helping us. We need more than that.’

Ted cast his head up to the ceiling and muttered a silent prayer. ‘Alright. Alright! You want me to help, then I’ll help.’ He reached down into a cupboard and plucked from it a bag of sweets.

‘This isn’t—’

‘You’re holding, there, hundreds of gold. Some of the best enchantments in the city, and in confectionary form. Lemon sherbets of lightfoot, rosey apples of voice throw, tintdrop, invisibility sticks—those taste like liquorice, they’re good—and a good deal more. All the information is in the pack.’ He gestured towards the door. ‘And now, I think, we’re even.’

"Styk"

Level 12 Bladespinner

Base Stats:

Vitality — 28

Intelligence — 124

Dexterity — 51

Strength — 54

Wisdom — 32

Charisma — 21

Skills:

Worldbending — Level 30

Knifework — Level 23

Identification — Level 10

Stealth — Level 9

Needlework — Level 9

Abilities:

Slice — Slice the enemy for physical damage worth weapon’s base damage and additional damage scaling on [STR].

Stab II — Put your weight behind your wielded blade and force the tip through tougher hides and armour. Damage scales on [STR], increased by an additional 20%.

Execution II — Attack a target while undetected for +200% damage.

Closed Reach — Bend reality to narrow the gap between blade and target by up to 8 inches. Uses mana.

Mana-Fuelled — Passive. Optionally, use mana in place of stamina to activate Knifework abilities.

Execution II — Attack a target while undetected for +200% damage.

Local Portal II — Create a portal to another location within current range of sight or within a ten yard radius. Uses mana/second.

Portal Slice — Passive. Portals can now be spawned within non-sentient objects. Doing so slices through all objects that are not reinforced by magic.

Tamed Portals — Passive. Increased efficiency of portal magicks means that your portal glow is reduced by 50%, making them less likely to be detected by enemies.

Ash Husk — Convert your flesh to ash, strengthening it against flame for ten minutes. Gain 50% resistance to fire attacks.

Shrill Perimeter — Create a perimeter wall of 20 foot radius, invisible to all but those adept in magicks. If an enemy crosses this perimeter, this spell releases the shriek of a banshee.

Warped Shield — Passive. If an enemy strikes you with a low-level melee weapon, Warp Shield automatically activates to open a portal that deflects this attack. You must not have any portals currently active. Uses mana on activation.

Stealth Attack — Passive. 50% boost to damage when unnoticed by enemy.

Stitch — Create a basic stitch in common fabrics. Ability scales on [CHA].

Basic Cloth Armour — Craft basic cloth armour, quality dependent on materials, time and skill level.

Active Effects:

Legacy of Sisyphus:

XP gain increased by +900%