Wooden wheels creaked as the carriage rolled to a stop. Even before its motion had ceased, the side door had opened, and a fresh-faced young man had alighted upon the dirt. He absent-mindedly brushed the dust from his city clothes, a subconscious habit he’d picked up in his time at the libraries of Cloisterkeep.

The driver raised an eyebrow as the passenger pulled his leather traveler's bag from the roof. "Are ye sure ye wish to be stoppin' here?" He nodded out at the darkening forest only thirty feet distant. "We'll be in Lyramore by tomorrow afternoon, where ye'll find flagons and wenches to yer heart's content." After a second glance at the man's apparel, he added, "Or, well, books. I s'ppose I know a bookworm when I see one."

The last embers of the setting sun faded, and glowing black clouds hung like soot over the horizon. The carriage’s two horses shivered and snorted. They did not like to linger here, this close to these dark woods.

"No thank you, kind sir," returned the man in a crisp accent obviously imported from the Scimitar Coast. Such lands were several weeks' journey to the west—far further than the traveler’s small bundle would suggest.

"Well," continued the driver, "ye've paid yer fare, so it's no matter to me, I s'ppose. Still, the Gray Forest can be a dangerous place at night, fer one such as yerself, with no room or board fer miles—"

"Oh, there's a town just nearby," smiled the young man. "It goes by the name of..." Here he brought up the tattered blue tome from his shoulder satchel and let its pages fall open where they might. He squinted in the light of the carriage's lantern. "By the name of 'Bane or Boon' apparently."

"Bayn o'Boon!" the driver corrected. "Aye, there's a small town just a few miles north o’ here, on the other side o’ those trees. Farmers, mostly. I don't know what sort o’ welcome ye be expecting there, though. There's no tavern. None o’ them can read. An’ truth be told..." Here he bit his lip for a moment. "An’ truth be told, it'd be best if ye stayed away from that neck o’ the woods this time o’ year. An’ that's all I have to say about that."

"Oh, I think I'll be fine," the man returned. He'd finished strapping his luggage to his back—a bag that could not have held much more than a single night's change of clothes—and lit a hand lantern of his own. Taking up his walking stick, he proclaimed, "I've been told I'm expected."

"Oh, ye have family out this way?"

"Not yet," the man grinned, before stepping off. Soon, he was little more than a bobbing mote of light between the dark upright fingers of the shadowy thicket.

The driver shook his head to himself. "Yer funeral, I s'ppose." He gave his reins a jerk, and the carriage continued down the road.

* * *

“Bayn o’Boon!” distant voices called.

As the traveler stepped from between the parting trees to where fields of freshly-harvested rows crisscrossed the landscape like puzzle pieces, arrangements of happy orange lights beckoned. The driver had spoken true: the few visible farmhouses sat well away from each other, at the center of their own plots of land. The town center was little more than an intersection of dusty paths worn wide from use. And yet people had gathered here, around a small bonfire lit for some local celebration.

The traveler neared the temporary stalls and stands that had been erected, identifying each in his mind. This one sold glazed apples affixed to sticks. That one offered baskets of homemade toffee candies. Another promised games of chance, where stacked squashes could be knocked down with a well-aimed ball. Such diversions would have been better placed in a busy city’s center, like that of Lyramore, or even his own birthplace of Greatwater. Here, they seemed needlessly extravagant.

“Bayn o’Boon!” a young boy shouted, rushing up to the traveler. He halted abruptly a few steps away, his tiny eyes widening visibly behind a homemade cockatrice mask. “Oh!” he gulped, spinning and sprinting back towards his family. “Mom! ‘Nother one! ‘Nother ghost!”

“No ghost,” the man assured, following slowly behind. He held up his palms in the flickering light—or as best he could, while carrying both a walking staff and lantern. “Just a traveler. My name is Alexis. I’ve heard stories of your town, and I wanted to see it for myself.”

The light conversation at the festival stopped instantly. Two dozen faces, each painted in their own unique designs or hidden behind cobbled collections of hen feathers and heather flowers, swiveled to face him. Alexis held his breath at the sudden shift, and the town seemed to hold it with him.

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Then a laughing voice rang out to him from the other side of the small crowd. “Oh, me too!” Dodging nimbly between the townsfolk, a lady painted entirely in orange and white hues danced his way. The fine quality of her costume easily outshone the shabbiness of the others around her. Strands of hay gave the impression of whiskers, fluffy cloth triangles stuck from her head like cat ears, and a long bushy tail followed behind—

Alexis blinked his eyes and looked again. This was no costume. “You’re a…catfolk,” he named. He had heard about these upright felines that walked like humans, but only from the books he’d consumed.

“No, I’m Rock,” the catfolk answered. She had a mug of cider in one hand and a half-finished apple in the other. “Rock-in-Water. Because I swim like one.” She laughed.

Around the two, the villagers visibly relaxed. Whatever had stuck in the back of their throats had subsided, and they returned to their general merriment.

Rock took another bite of her treat and chewed it with a loud open mouth: her feline molars were not as adept as a human’s. “What’s your name?”

“Alexis,” the traveler answered. “Alexis Farskies.”

“You look young.”

“I’m twenty-four.” Alexis smiled thinly. This was not the first time he’d heard this particular sentiment, nor likely the last.

“Is that old for a human? I can never remember. I have enough of a time just telling all of you apart. Are you actually a human? Maybe you’re an especially tall dwarf, or an elf with roundy ears. Do you have any kits? Grand-kits?”

“No kits—er, no children,” Alexis smiled.

“No litters at all? Wow, you are young! So! You’re a stranger. I’m a stranger too. That makes two of us. But now we know each other’s names. So! Now we’re not strangers anymore.”

“No, I suppose not.” Alexis was beginning to tire of these rapid, scattershot thoughts. When he had worked as a scribe in the libraries of Cloisterkeep, he had existed for days at a time in a cocoon of silence, broken only by the scratch of his pen and the occasional cough of another Avowed. “I must confess I hail from lands much further away than this, and I know no more of this town than its name. Do you know what this celebration is about, or why carriages refuse to stop anywhere nearby?”

“They do?” Rock repeated, apparently aghast. A piece of unfinished apple fell from her open mouth. “Smilodon! I didn’t know that! I was just walking east, and here it was!”

“Walking east? Through the Gray Forest? By yourself?”

“It’s less gray and more slate colored, if you ask me.”

“But why?”

“I dunno.” The catfolk shrugged. “Got bored, I guess. It’s a catfolk thing.”

* * *

Alexis wasn’t sure if all catfolk were easily distracted, but this one certainly was; and she bounced from stall to stall, enchanted by the shifting shadows of the firelight and by bright balls speeding through the air. At one point, Rock pulled Alexis to a table where a pumpkin and a knife challenged each visitor to carve the most fearsome visage they could imagine, but her attention wandered as soon as the insides had been scooped.

“The pumpkin is actually a kind of fruit, and technically a berry,” Alexis explaining, reciting one of the many bits of trivia he’d acquired via his previous profession. He traced two eyes and a nose across the surface of the gourd. “What do you think about this sort of face—”

Rock was no longer next to him. In her place, a trio of children giggled at him before darting away. The catfolk was already across the way, at the mask-making booth, balancing chicken feathers on her nose before blowing them off again.

“Now don’t ye go worryin’ yer pretty head over a tabby,” said the lady managing the pumpkins. “Not even a cat knows what it really wants, dontcha know. Six times going out, seven times comin’ in again, so they say!” She laughed at this regional turn of phrase.

“Yes, well,” replied Alexis, “I’ve not had much experience with felines. We usually tried to keep them out of the libraries—the small ones, anyway. Bad for books and inkwells.” He began cutting out the triangles that would complete the Jack O’Lantern. “Is this your town’s Highharvesttide celebration? It’s a very late one if it is; a full three tendays past.”

“Aye, it’s, uh…it’s a special night fer us.” The woman’s head swiveled away from Alexis, her eyes scanning the crowd like a frightened doe. “Some say the veil betwixt the light an’ the shadow is weaker on this night. Some say the ghosts o’ the dead walk freely among us, in disguise.”

“Ah,” Alexis nodded. “That explains why the little boy fled from me, at first.”

“Aye, it’s a fer honorin’ those who’ve gone before. Fer rememb’ring friends passed on. An’…” Here her eyes darted fearfully back and forth among the masks of the villagers, as if she might find one she could not recognize. “An’ fer a warning.”

“A warning? What sort of warning?”

There was a crash, and a scream. The bonfire at the middle of the roadways suddenly roared, an inferno leaping high into the air like a hellish conflagration. Shapes moved within the torrent of flames, shapes that seemed to dash and dance with devilish abandon. At one point, a woman’s face leered out at them, around whose head danced a mane of flames.

Then, from within the depths of the heat, a loud and grating voice boomed out: the voice of a witch.

“Bayn o’Boon! What’s this I see? A bane fer you, a boon fer me!

“Did ye think to keep me stilled? A spirit walks where’er she wills!

“The chill of death gives but penury, when none doth keep thy memory.

“An’ since that night, ten times ye’ve blest yer favored departed, but not the rest!

“An’ still I see, like embered coals, the shame that lurks within your souls!

“So now’s the end fer ‘bane’ or ‘boon’…From grave’s dark depths, I send thy doom!”

Something clamped down hard on Alexis’s left hand. The pumpkin that had, till now, shown no resistance to his surgeon’s scalpel now fastened itself to him, as if the hole were a mouth and his arm a morsel.

Around him, other pumpkins twisted and stretched. Vines burst forth from their stems, carved expressions contorted maliciously, and flickering candles placed within swelled in anger. The flames of the bonfire itself lashed out, eager to devour any who strayed too close.

Doom had come to Bayn o’Boon.