The incessant whine of mosquito-like bugs and other such irksome irritants filled the damp air around Autumn as she fought her way through riotous blooms. All around her, the floruit of bright alien colors and blossoming flowers threatened to steal the path from beneath her very feet.

Doggedly, Autumn pressed on through the efflorescence, following a pirate’s practiced footsteps.

Liddie had braved this leafy overgrowth a few times already. So it was with confidence that she now skillfully led Autumn along a pre-marked route towards a grim battlefield unseen.

Neither had spoken much since they’d departed the safety of their encampment. Not so much as to avoid being overhead by the denizens of the lush fey jungle, but because they could scarcely hear themselves think over the raucous cacophony of buzzing insects, croaking frogs, roaring beasts, and mayhem of bird calls, let alone converse with one another.

Thankfully, the closer they got to where the battlefield lay, the quieter it got, the creatures lurking in the jungle wisely fleeing such a dangerous direction, unlike the foolish pair.

Autumn swatted at the bravest bugs swarming her for the umpteenth time today as she followed in Liddie’s wake. Neither Pyre’s alchemical insect repellent nor her own aura of fear could dissuade these nuisances from their suicidal assault.

Bored out of her mind, Autumn spoke into the growing lull.

“So, what’s it like being a pirate?”

Liddie snickered at Autumn’s question. “That’s your opening? Trying to dig up my tragic backstory, are you?”

Blushing, Autumn glared sullenly at the back of Liddie’s head. “So? I’ve never met a pirate before. Did you want me to ask something deep and meaningful off the top of my head?”

“No, no. It’s fine, I’ll talk — you can stop glaring at me now,” Liddie chuckled, raising her hands in surrender.

“How can you tell? You didn’t even look.”

“I feel it in my bones,” Liddie shuddered, before turning to wink at Autumn. “Besides, I’ve ample experience with cute girls glaring at me. I’ve honed it into another sense.”

Autumn rolled her eyes. “Can you just answer the question?”

“Sure, sure. What did you want to know?”

Mulling over her thoughts, Autumn spoke slowly. “You said you grew up in Brokenship Bay, right? What’s it like?”

Liddie grimaced, spitting off to the side of the path. “A shithole — that’s what it’s like. Port Brokenship is a loose collection of shitty homes, shops, and far too many taverns and brothels ruled over by even shitter gangs. And atop that shitpile of epic proportions is another shithead that calls themselves a ‘pirate king,’” she sneered the name.

“It’s not a real title,” Liddie shared at Autumn’s questioning look. “Not really — more of a bought one like a merchant king. Not that’d you’d live very long if you said such in the bay. There’s a fair bit of murder and extortion that goes into electing a new king after the last one ‘accidentally’ fell onto their blade a couple of times or took a tumble off their balcony — also somehow ‘accidentally.’”

“And you never tried out for the position? Weren’t you some kind of pirate hero or something?” Autumn asked curiously.

Liddie snorted. “Me? In charge of that corpse pile? No. Not for me. I like my back unstabbed, thank you very much. Plus, you kind of need a pirate ship to be a pirate captain, and only pirate captains have a chance to be a pirate king. It’s in the name.”

“Right. Yours sunk. The…Drunken Naive, was it?”

“You remembered? Good on you, I guess,” Liddie shrugged. “Yeah, it sank. Taken down to the depths by Ol’ Shipeater himself. All hands lost, even me at one point. Had to carve my way out from his insides.” She punctuated her statement by drawing and playfully slashing her mithril blade at an imaginary kraken.

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

Liddie sighed sadly as she resheathed her blade. “Yeah, she was a good ship. I still miss her.”

Autumn stared blankly at the morose demoness. “I meant the crew.”

“Oh them? They were scum — I’m glad they're dead,” Liddie said heartlessly. “More glory and gold for me. And I get to tell the story how I like it without anyone to say otherwise,” she winked.

An awkward silence stole over the pair.

Keen to move on from that grim topic, Autumn returned to the previous conversational thread. “Uh, so that’s where you grew up? Port Brokenship, I mean. It sounds terrible.”

“Eh, it wasn’t all that bad. Not good, but not completely awful. I have fond memories of watching the treasure-laden ships returning to harbor, their hulls low in the water. Of how the crews would wash upon shore like the endless waves, pockets full of gold ripe for the picking. Oh, don’t look at me like that — they were going to piss it away in the taverns or whorehouses anyway. I was doing them a favor by keeping them away from those vices.”

“I wasn’t judging,” Autumn said judgingly.

Liddie squinted at Autumn before huffing. “Well? What more do you want to know?”

“Oh, umm, how did the port get so—”

“So fucked?” Liddie finished for her. “You see, the bay was once a penal colony for the empire’s undesirables — its political exiles and criminals. Over time, those same criminals and their descendants turned the bay into a pirate haven, sheltered as it is by a chain of harsh islands dotted with caves and jagged rocks. The Devil’s Teeth, we call em’. Crews will strike out from the bay to raid the waters of the Western Depths and the Kraken Strait.”

“And the empire hasn’t tried to clear it out?”

Liddie smirked. “They tried. It didn’t go well for them. Without the navigational charts the pirate captains guard zealously, the empire navy ended up just adding more ships to the sunken graveyard. And even if the empire could afford to send troops overland, they’ll never find all the caves and hideaways the pirates would scurry to. That sort of attrition warfare would take decades to resolve. Maybe even centuries.”

“What about adventurers? Do they ever get hired to do something about the pirates?”

“Eh, sometimes,” Liddie gestured vaguely. “Every so often a captain or two might run afoul of someone important and get a bounty put on their heads, or some hotheaded adventurer might take it upon themselves to venture there for justice or some such nonsense, but most of the time it’s just not worth it. After all, if adventurers cared for war, we’d be soldiers.”

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Autumn hummed. “I’d suppose you’d know. Um, I have to ask, but what were the mermaids like? Were they like the naiads only with fish tails?” she asked sheepishly.

“How would I know?” Liddie said casually as she weaved around a tree blocking their path.

Autumn hurried to follow her. “What? I thought you said you got rescued by mermaids?”

Sheepishly, Liddie looked away, rubbing the back of her neck as she avoided Autumn’s questioning stare. “Ah, I might’ve fibbed a bit. You know, to liven the tale up a bit? It’d be less impressive if I told everyone I got cast adrift for days out on the brine. Being saved by beautiful, gracious mermaids makes the tale more fun, right?”

“So, you lied?”

Autumn tried not to sound too judgmental, given her own recent history with lying.

“Ahaha, yeah~” Liddie sighed. “Actually, the truth is, I got picked up by a mermaid, just not the beautiful type. A slaver ship called the Mermaid’s Chain found me days into my isolation. They captured me. I…I don’t want to talk about what I saw aboard, but needless to say, it and its crew never made it back to their harbor,” she said grimly before smiling ruefully. “Not really a tale I like to tell, so it’s nicer to say I got rescued by beautiful women instead.”

Autumn didn’t know what to say to that.

Thankfully, blessedly, she didn’t get the chance to.

Just as Autumn was about to speak, a shrill caw split the air, stealing the words from her tongue.

Liddie glanced sharply towards the sudden sound, holding up a hand to signal for silence. After a beat, she whispered to Autumn. “Sounds like we’re there. Follow me.”

Autumn did so.

Stealthily, she followed in Liddie’s wake as they crept towards the growing cacophony thundering in the distance. The cries of crows grew louder and louder as they stalked towards the source till the murder’s call was nearly all Autumn could hear.

However, under it all beat a steady thrum of combat. The clang of striking blades and rattling shields. The roars of beasts and men and bugle calls. And the ever-present stench of death.

They’d found war.

Before long, all that separated Autumn from the carnage was a lush treeline.

Pushing a leafy frond aside, Autumn got her first look at the battlefield awaiting her.

A craterous landscape stretched on impossibly to the far horizon, undulating across a myriad of twisted biomes and warped terrains. Deserts of shifting, sun-blasted sands scoured flesh from the bones of those foolish enough to brave it. Forests of burning, shattered trees stood a silent, deathly vigil over nature’s grave. Swamps, choked by blood and festering corpses, buzzed with the drone of wicked insects as they gorged on the bounty violence had provided. Enormous rocky crags lay littered with hundreds, nay, thousands of ruined fortresses of wood or stone, like so many shattered teeth. And through it all, flooded trenches weaved, carving their way through the muddy, blood-soaked earth — for all the good they’d done the defenders.

The Wild Hunt had come in hard. With surprise and speed on their side, the vicious riders had scythed through the hag’s amassed forces with ease, shattering their forts and fortresses with might and magic in hand while an enormous elvish host of bannermen, infantry, and archers followed in their wake.

Yet, their furious advance had quickly stalled once the hag’s own host had rallied.

And what a host it was.

Hateful Redcaps danced and sang as they wetted their caps with immortal blood. In green hand both, they brandished crude blades of coldest iron that sought to cruelly carve and cut. Amidst the vile horde’s revelry, their larger kin roamed — wicked Bugbears with razor claws, surly Ogres wielding broken trees like massive clubs, and even a Troll or two rampaged through this mostly sunless realm.

Yet this was not all the foul hag Mildred had mustered for murders of crows clouded the skies.

The furious flocks of enlarged, twisted corvids clashed with untold wings of vicious harpies high above, raining down blood and bodies onto the bleak battlefield below.

Under the grim crimson rain, grotesque fusions of man and feathered beast fought.

Maddened eyes shone malevolently above gleaming beaks flecked with fresh elvish blood. Their feathered arms stank of pus and rot as sharpened scythe-like blades emerged from their swollen flesh, bolted painfully to their hollow bones. With warbled calls that decried their insanity and fury, they flung themselves recklessly at the elvish host’s wall of spears and bellowing warhorns.

The more Autumn looked, the more such abominations she saw.

Glancing around in awe and terror, she saw Black Griffins winging through the air, tumbling down in screeching fury as they locked themselves talon-to-talon in death spirals with their natural-born cousins. She saw a Crowkatrice’s baleful gaze turn many a beast, goblin, and elf to stone in an instant before a Wild Rider’s lance found its bulging throat, ending it with an ear-splitting cry. She watched as multi-headed Corvid-Chimeras lashed out their insanity with warbling cries at friend or foe alike while ghosty crow-specters reaped whirlwinds of death through the packed elvish ranks with gleaming cold-iron scythes.

And throughout it all, all the carnage and death, hordes upon hordes of baying crowhounds clawed and snapped at the feyhounds packs that met them in equal ferocity.

The collected fury of an unnatural war rent the air with its discord.

Looking beyond that haze of death, beyond the lines of graveyard spears, Autumn saw a hill that shouldn’t be. It stood alone. Untouched. Sheltered from violence by twisting magics and dark spells. And upon its rise sat a wretched home like a sore — a cancer on reality.

The Hag’s abode.

Their destination.

“We need to fight through that?!” Autumn hissed in disbelief to Liddie, struggling to be heard above the roar of battle.

Liddie nodded. Leaning closer to Autumn, she spoke into her ear. “Yup! It’s suicidal, right? Want to just pack up and go home?” she asked hopefully, despite knowing the answer was otherwise.

Autumn shook her head. “No! We just need to plan and—is that a fucking Crow-Hydra?!”

The pair stared in disbelief at the massive, multi-headed beast rampaging through Fey lines, its many beaks snapping down at the Wild Riders harassing it.

“Sure looks like it,” Liddie drawled. “What would even call something like that? A Crowdra? Hydrow?”

“Nevermind what it's called! How are we meant to fight something like that?!”

“We don’t. We just need to get there,” Liddie pointed to the impossible hill. “I’ve been watching it for a few days and nothing has breached it yet. No beasts, no fey, not even a falling body. Once we're in, we should be safe.” Liddie paused. “Well, relatively safe, given who lives there.”

“Right. So our plan, as I understand it, is to weave our way past two massive fuck-off armies, climb a hill that should be, and somehow breach a shield we know nothing about that’s specifically designed to keep things out?” Autumn spoke tersely. “Sounds easy.”

Liddie shrugged as she scooted back from the treeline. “Never said it’d be easy. All the planning stuff is all you and your big girl. Me? I just steal stuff. Want something stolen? I’m your gal, but until then, you deal with it. You’re making a war-wagon, right? Just make sure it can get us through that mess.”

“Oh, sure! It’s easy when you say it like that,” Autumn snarked as she followed Liddie back to camp, casting one last look at the carnage beyond. “I’ll just whip us up a tank, shall I?”

“Sure, sounds fun.”

As the adventurer pair quietly slunk away, bickering goodnaturedly, a pair of summer eyes watched them go from afar. They burned bright with fury and desire. For a moment, they moved to follow only for a gauntleted hand clad gay in green to clamp down upon their owner’s shoulder, pinning her in place with the strength of a thousand men.

“Yet is not the hour of retribution,” spake the green-clad knight. “Wait a moment hence, for your deferred punishment is mine to oversee.”

“Punishment?” Growled the summer-eyed maiden. “None hath decried punishment upon I! Doth thee dare to lie?!”

The knight spake not to the barks of the maiden, only watched as the witch departed from afar.

Heaving a felling axe upon war-clad shoulders, he spake to the air, to the gloom, to the witching hour. “Soon, the hour cometh we shall meet. Where shalt thine deeds lie then? Thou whom betrays fate. Whom spits in destiny’s eye. Shall I be thine foil, thine test. Nay, come, I shall await.”

“Make thine first swing count — there shalt not be another.”