Session 01 — The Pushes

The walls have always held. That is the first thing every child in Caligo learns. The walls have always held. The God-King made them. The Garrison watches them. The Inquisition guards what lives inside them. Beyond the walls there is nothing — only ruin and the patient, ancient things that walk through fog with intention. This is the covenant. This is the law. Most people believe it. Some people, in cellars and back rooms and candlelit corners of the outer ring, have stopped believing entirely. Tonight, five of them are waiting in a room above a soap maker's shop.

I. Above the Soap Maker's Shop

The rain had not stopped in three days.

It came down on the canton of Wickward the way rain comes down on places that have given up arguing with the weather — slow, persistent, indifferent to whether anyone was still trying to live beneath it. The cobblestones of the outer ring took the water and gave it back as reflection, lamp light fracturing into long broken streaks that pointed nowhere. The watch bells of the outermost wall rang the hour. No one was on the street to hear them.

Above the soap maker's shop, in a room that smelled of lye and rendered fat soaked so deeply into the floorboards that the smell had become part of the air itself, five people were waiting.

The shutters were drawn. A single lamp burned on the table, low enough that the corners of the room kept their darkness. The chairs did not match. Through the gaps in the shutters, thin slivers of lamp light from the street cut into the room and lay across the floor like blades dropped and left where they fell.

The contact was late.

Jorath Hroth'Dar stood beside the window because the ceiling could not accommodate him sitting fully upright. Seven and a half feet of pale blue skin and white constellation tattoos, billowing white hair and a beard the color of cloud. He wore leather armor with no sleeves and a blue cloak that had been damp since dusk. In his hands was a slate tablet etched with stars. Every few minutes he raised it to the slit between the shutters and aligned it against the night sky, as though checking that the stars were where they were supposed to be. They were. He sighed.

EMBR sat in the corner. He had been told there was a chair there; he was not entirely sure the chair could survive him sitting on it, and so he sat the way a Warforged sits when he has not yet decided to commit to the structure. Seven feet of dark wooden skeleton plated in weathered steel. The left arm — not his original — was wider than the right, glossed in pearlescent black chitin, its fingers ending in points that did not quite belong on a hand. The left eye matched the arm. It was the only part of him giving off light, and it flickered: green, then red, then green, on a rhythm that had nothing to do with breathing because EMBR did not breathe. The war hammer rested head-down on the floorboards between his feet. He held the handle high, like a man holding a question he had not yet decided to ask.

Vivienne Ashworth sat across from EMBR and was the only person in the room who appeared to be enjoying herself. She had brought a book. She was reading it. She was also, by some sleight of hand that none of the others had managed to track, producing small sugar-dusted biscuits from somewhere on her person and eating them with the focused contentment of a woman attending an afternoon tea that had been moved, by some clerical error, into a back room above a soap maker's shop. Her dress was black and white and immaculate. Her hair was up. The Ashworth brooch — open book over crossed keys, silver — sat at her throat where it could be seen and noted by anyone who came in the door.

She had not looked up from her book in twenty minutes. She had not turned a page in ten.

Valdren Zau'tar sat at the far end of the table, where his eyes could cover both the door and the window. The drow paladin had on the blood-red plate he was always on. He did not own clothes that were not the armor. The war pick — long crimson haft, intricate gold inlay, head crusted with old dried blood at the seam where the pick met the hammer — leaned against his knee and his hand never quite left it. He sat the way men sit when they have learned that letting their guard down is how children disappear. His face moved very little. His eyes did not stop moving.

Rookk had finished his ale and was staring at the bottom of the cup with the patience of a man who has decided that wishing for more might be the difference between getting it and not. Six and a half feet, green-grey, bald, a long silver-green braided beard. His armor had once been army-issue. The black paint was wearing off in patches where it had been hit too many times. His longsword and spear leaned against the wall behind him in arm's reach. He turned the empty cup slowly between his hands. He did not look at the others.

Outside, in the rain, somewhere in the canton, the Inquisition was moving. They were always moving. That was the point of them. The garrison kept the walls; the Inquisition kept the people. The garrison was bored. The Inquisition was thorough.

The door opened.

The five of them flinched, none of them visibly, all of them in the same way — a tightening of the hand, a shift of the eye toward the weapon. It was not the contact. It was the proprietor of the shop. Edra, with her smile and her reading-your-mind way of standing in a doorway, asked Rookk if anyone wanted refreshments.

Valdren raised a hand to wave her off without raising it enough that anyone outside could have seen the motion. Jorath asked her to wait — I'd rather keep my head clear tonight. Rookk slid the empty cup toward her without a word.

She brought back a full one. She glanced at the street through the slit in the shutters before she set the cup down. The glance lasted half a second. She nodded to herself, satisfied, and disappeared back down the stairs.

The lamp guttered.

The door opened again.

This time it was him.

II. Thresh

Thresh entered with rain in the seams of his coat and a woman and a child behind him.

The tiefling courier looked like a man who had spent a long time being looked at by people who wanted to look at him for the wrong reasons. His horns had been filed flush with his skull — a practical concession, he had told Vivienne once, to reduce harassment. It worked. From a few feet away, in a low light, he could almost pass for human, if you did not know what to look for, and if you did not look long.

He shut the door behind him. He walked to the window without speaking and closed the shutters fully, dampening the last of the lamp light that had cut through from the street. The room contracted around the table.

He turned.

Valdren stood and walked to him. He did not say anything. He simply stepped into Thresh's space and stopped, the way men stop who have learned that the first move in a negotiation is to make the other person take the second.

Thresh extended his hand.

Valdren took it.

The handshake looked like a handshake. The resistance had not bothered to invent a flourish or a code; they had done something better. Inside both their palms, beneath the skin where no Inquisitor's eye would ever find it, a tattoo bloomed — invisible, blood-marked, written years ago in a process no member of the resistance discussed even with other members. When two of them met, the marks recognized each other. A faint glow passed between the palms, just enough for the two of them to see, just enough for confirmation.

The glow faded. Thresh released the hand. He looked at the other four.

Hello, all, he said. Apologies for keeping you waiting. Had to do a little doubling back in the streets. The Inquisitors are a little too active tonight.

He stepped aside.

The woman and the child came in from behind him.

Maret was a half-elf in her early thirties whose face had been built for laughter and had stopped being asked to do that work some years ago. Her clothes were soaked through. Her boots had failed somewhere in the last block. She held her daughter's hand the way you hold a hand when you have spent every night of the last year preparing yourself for the night someone will come to take the hand away.

Sable was six. Maybe seven. Half-elf like her mother, all wide eyes and damp curls. She was looking at the floor. She was holding the hem of her mother's dress in her free hand and trying to hide behind it. The way she stood in the doorway suggested that she had spent the last year being told, in many small ways, that being seen was the worst thing she could possibly be.

Thresh introduced them. May I introduce Maret. And her daughter, Sable.

Maret raised her free hand. The wave was small and apologetic. Sable did not raise her hand at all.

Thresh did not waste time. They've been having a little bit of issue with Sable. She's showing signs of innate and uncontrollable magic. Her mother fears she'll be swept up any day now. We need you to transport them to your friends.

He looked at Jorath.

Jorath understood. The friend was Orvin. The destination was Heron. The work was a short walk and a long risk.

Maret was watching Vivienne, because Vivienne was the one in the room who looked like she could ruin you in a drawing room and walk out the other side smelling like sugar. Vivienne had finally looked up from her book. The shift was subtle. The eyebrow rose. The book closed without a sound. Her face transformed, in the space of a single breath, from polite boredom into something warmer and larger than the room required.

Oh, it's so good to see you, she said, and rose, and extended her hand to Maret the way a lady of standing extends her hand to be taken and kissed. Maret did not know what to do with that. Maret took the hand. Vivienne squeezed it briefly, and let it go, and crouched.

Sable, she said. Down at the child's eye level, with the kind of focus that adults rarely deploy on children. Do you have a little gift, just like me?

Sable looked at her mother. Her mother gave a small, fearful nod. Sable looked back at Vivienne. She did not answer.

Vivienne smiled.

She raised her right hand, palm flat. And beside it, in the air, a second hand appeared — a translucent, ghostly thing the size of her own, hovering in the empty space where a hand should not have been. She tapped it gently with her own, the way one might test a piano key. The little hand drifted across the room, on no errand of physics, and stopped in front of Sable. It hung there. Waiting.

Sable raised her own hand.

She gave it a high five.

The little ghostly hand bobbed in the air, satisfied with itself, and faded as Vivienne let the spell go.

Sable looked up at her mother. She's like me, she said.

And then she got excited.

Behind Sable, Rookk's mug — which Edra had just refilled and Rookk had not yet picked up — lifted off the table.

It rose three feet straight into the air. It traveled, end over end, across the room. It struck the wall above the door with a wet crack and shattered, splashing ale across the wood paneling in a long arc of dark wet that began at head height and ran down to the floor.

Sable's hand flew to her mouth.

I'm sorry, she whispered. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Jorath was already moving. He had been sitting; he was already on one knee in front of her before the ale had finished running down the wall. His size was the problem here — looming over a frightened child was not the move — and he reduced himself to her level with the practiced patience of a man who had counseled small things back from worse panics than this. The fingers of his right hand twitched in a small gesture older than Caligo. The ale on the wall and the ale on the floor and the ale across the wood paneling reversed itself, drew up, drew together, animated under his druid's hand into a shape: three concentric rings of liquid, rendered in dark stout, standing on the table in front of her. The rings of the city, drawn in ale by a druid who could speak to water.

He pointed.

We are here, he said. He tapped the outermost ring at one point. And we are going here. He tapped a different point on the same ring.

Sable forgot to be afraid for a moment. She looked.

Across the room, Valdren had moved his fingers in a small motion of his own. Dancing lights appeared above the liquid map — four small motes of warm yellow, drifting in a slow circle above Jorath's three-walled rendering. He had been raised in a church and was not a wizard by anyone's reckoning, but he had a few small spells in him and he knew when to spend them. He spent one here, on a child who had just broken a mug.

Sable looked at the lights. She looked at Vivienne. She looked at Jorath.

My mom, she said, in a voice softer than the rain, she says I have the pushes. That's what we call it. It's the pushes.

Maret, behind her, had her arms wrapped around her own chest. Her face had gone through several different shapes in the last ten seconds. The final shape was not relief.

So, she said. Her voice was very level. You all must be pretty good. If you feel comfortable whipping all of those spells around in here.

EMBR, in the corner, said nothing. He had been silent throughout. His eyes still flickered, green and red and green. The hammer between his feet had not moved.

He was not sure he had been part of what just happened. He was not sure he had been allowed to be.

Thresh cleared his throat. So, he said. As I was saying. This needs to be done rather quickly. Maret was telling me her neighbors have grown a bit suspicious. And though I don't suspect many of them would say much to the Inquisitors — you can never be too careful. People may not believe in the covenant, but they do believe in the few pieces of silver that come their way for reporting a magic user. He looked at Maret. He shrugged, gently, an apology shaped like a fact. Can't blame them. But it's dangerous. And you all need to get going.

The room got smaller.

The party began to move.

III. The Disguise

They left the soap maker's shop by ones and twos, the way resistance operatives always leave anywhere. Edra waved them off without questions. The walls had ears. Some things did not need to be said.

The rain came back the moment they were under it.

In the alley behind the shop, in the lamp-broken cobblestone shine, Valdren spoke a word into his palm and Argentus unfolded out of the air. The destrier was silver-grey in the lamp light, his eyes intelligent and patient, the smell of ozone clinging to him for the half-second before the world remembered that horses did not smell like that. He was a nightmare, technically. He was a friendly nightmare. He bent his head down to let Sable touch his muzzle, and Sable — who had spent the last six months of her life being told to make herself smaller — looked into the eyes of a thing larger than her and laughed once, quietly, as though she had forgotten she was allowed to do that.

Valdren whispered something into the destrier's ear. Take care of these two. Guard them if anything happens.

Argentus understood. He always understood.

Maret was helped up first. Sable was lifted up behind her, small hands gripping her mother's coat. The two of them, on a horse that was not entirely a horse, surrounded by four armed strangers and one armored monster, were going to walk through the rain to a stranger's safehouse in the next canton over. This was their life now.

Vivienne moved up alongside the horse before they set out, and stopped, and turned to Maret. Her hand rose to her own face.

I need to do something, she said. Don't be alarmed. I want Sable to see it.

She looked up at Sable.

Watch what this can do, she said.

She closed her eyes.

She spoke a word — just a syllable, half-breathed — and her face changed.

It was not a transformation in the sense that her face stopped being a face. It was a transformation in the sense that the face was no longer hers. The same general shape. The same height. A woman of Vivienne's age and bearing, who could walk through a checkpoint and not be Vivienne Elise Ashworth. The skin was tanner now. The features softer, more rounded. The hair was still hers, still up in its elaborate Ashworth braids — the braids were not a part of the spell, the braids were a part of her. But the face above them was someone else's, and the someone else was who the world would see tonight.

Disguise Self. One hour duration. A spell slot well spent.

Maret gasped, lightly, with her hand to her mouth. Sable looked down from the horse with the wide-eyed wonder of a child being shown a kindness she had not been promised. Across the alley, one of the lamps closest to her flared. The flame in the lantern grew an inch and brightened the cobblestones beneath it for a moment, just a moment, and then settled. Vivienne saw it. So did Sable.

Sable's hand went to her mouth.

I know, Vivienne said gently. I know it's exciting. But for right now, I need you to stay very calm and very quiet until we get to a nice, nice hiding spot. Can you do that?

Sable nodded. She bit her lower lip and nodded.

EMBR — still silent, still flickering, the war hammer in his hand and the eyes still uneven — fell in at the back of the formation. The clank of his every step was a metronome the rain could not quite drown out.

Nice and quiet, Vivienne said.

EMBR's voice came up from his throat without his mouth moving. A bass like a bell rung underwater.

Nice and quiet, he said. Meanwhile, you hear that clank on me walking behind you.

Vivienne did not answer. She put her hand on Maret's hand where it rested on Argentus's neck. All for her, she said. And the formation began to move.

Up above them, in the night sky between the clouds, a hawk — Jorath's familiar for the evening, a brief creature that would not survive past dawn no matter what they did — circled in lazy, deliberate loops, watching the alleys ahead for what the lamps could not see.

IV. The Stockade

They moved through Wickward by the routes the hawk gave them.

It was not the route the patrols would have walked. Jorath's bird had a wide view and a druid's pathfinding instinct, and the canton on a rainy night was a place of negative space — patrols had abandoned the corners where the lamps had burned out, had pulled back to the warm guardhouses at the gates, had let whole streets go unattended because their boots were getting wet and the Inquisitors weren't watching them right now. The party slipped along the edges of those streets in the same way that water slips along the edges of a leaf.

They turned a corner.

The alley opened onto a square.

There was a stockade in the middle of the square.

It was the old wooden kind — two heavy panels of plank hinged at one end, with three holes cut through for a head and two wrists. A man was in it. He had been in it for a long time. His legs had stopped holding his weight, but he could not fall because the panels held his neck and his arms in place, and so he was suspended there in the rain, half-kneeling on cobblestone, his head bowed, his hair plastered flat across his forehead, the rest of him gone slack the way bodies go slack when they have run out of choices.

A placard hung from a nail above his head.

FAILURE TO REPORT SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY IN THE HOME.

The square was empty otherwise. The party stopped at the mouth of the alley. Argentus, behind them, did not move; he had taken his cues from Valdren and knew not to clatter on cobblestone he had not been told to clatter on.

EMBR moved forward.

Valdren saw it half a second before he should have. He had been watching EMBR for half a mile now — had watched the eye flicker, had watched the chitinous arm tighten and relax, had watched the head tilt at things the rest of them passed without comment. He had seen this shape before in a man.

EMBR walked into the square.

He stopped in front of the stockade.

The man in the stockade did not look up. His eyes were open. They were not seeing. They were focused at a point beyond EMBR's face, beyond the rain, beyond the square — at something that was nothing, or possibly at the inside of his own skull.

EMBR looked down at him.

The walk had circled the man. They had seen his front from a distance and his back from up close, and his back was where the shirt had been cut away, and his back was where the lash marks ran. There had been dried blood across them once. The rain had un-dried it. It ran now, down the seams of his ribs, off the small of his back, into the cobblestones beneath his knees, in long pink ribbons that pooled and drained away.

EMBR's left eye stuttered.

It went red.

He reached out his left hand — the wide one, the wrong one, the one that did not belong on him — and gripped the padlock on the side of the stockade.

He pulled.

The lock rattled. The wood of the panels groaned. The whole structure flexed. The lock held.

He pulled harder. The wood began to scream.

Behind him, fast, almost too fast for the rest of them to register, Valdren moved.

Valdren did not run. Valdren walked, with purpose, and crossed the square in three long paladin strides, and put his hand on EMBR's shoulder. The plate on his gauntlet rang dully against the steel of EMBR's chest piece. The contact was light. It was the lightness that made it a command.

Hey, Valdren said. His voice was even. We can't risk this. We're trying to protect these people. We gotta stay focused.

EMBR did not let go of the lock.

He did not let go of the lock.

His left arm tightened on it. The chitinous fingers crushed the padlock further — not yet enough to break it, but enough to leave the metal misshapen, the iron deforming under a strength that should not have been possible from fingers that size. The veins in the arm, the ones that were not veins, pulsed faintly red beneath the chitin.

His right eye — the green one, the calm one — was still calm.

His left eye — the foreign one — was the color of a forge.

Valdren did not move his hand.

Seconds passed. The rain ran down both of them. The man in the stockade exhaled, faintly, on a breath like paper.

EMBR's left hand opened.

The padlock, bent now, half-crushed, swung loose on its loop and stilled.

EMBR turned. He did not look at the man again. He walked back across the square to where the party waited. The flicker in his eye slowed back down to green, then red, then green, on the rhythm that was not breath.

Valdren walked after him. As they fell back into step, Valdren raised his hand once and rested it briefly on the steel of EMBR's back — a fraction of a second, and then gone.

It kills me too, Valdren said, low enough that only EMBR could hear. I want to help him. But we can't.

EMBR did not answer.

At the head of the formation, Maret had drawn Sable into her chest. She had positioned the child's face into the wool of her own coat, with one hand pressed flat against the back of Sable's head, in a way that was meant to suggest she was offering shelter from the rain. She was not. She was a mother putting blinders on her child so the child would not have to see what was on the cobblestone behind them. Every one of the party was old enough to know the difference.

The party walked past the man.

They walked past him.

The hawk above them, in the night sky, made no comment. Hawks rarely do.

V. Across the Wall

Wickward's gate was lazy that night.

The rain was holding. The shift change was wrong. The garrison was understaffed, half-drunk, and convinced — by long practice, by the absence of anything ever happening at this gate after midnight, by the simple human preference for being indoors — that the smart move on a night like this was to look at the inside of the guardhouse and not the outside of the canton.

The party walked through.

They did not run. They did not crouch. They walked, in formation, around a horse carrying a half-elf woman and a half-elf child, like any other small caravan exiting the canton on legitimate business. The guards at the gate glanced up, saw nothing alarming, and looked back down at the dice on their table.

The edge of the world opened up.

The wall behind them now, the canton receding into rain-dim lamps and steeping smoke. In front of them, the long road into the wilderness between cantons.

The fields stretched out — long grass whipping in storm wind, low rolling country with no shelter from anything for the next several miles. Every so often, when the clouds tore open and the moon broke through, they could see how far the world went. There were ruined homesteads in the distance, dark shapes against darker grass — the carcasses of people who had tried to live outside the cantons in earlier centuries and had not been allowed to. The kaiju had taken them. Or the Inquisition. The result was the same.

Argentus's hooves struck wet earth and then wet road. The party walked with him.

Valdren was watching everywhere. Vivienne was beside Maret, hand on her sleeve. EMBR was at the back, and the rhythm of his footfalls was deliberately slowed now — he had noticed that the steel-on-stone clank of him was a sound that traveled, and he was minding it as well as a seven-foot Warforged could mind anything.

Jorath was the one who looked up.

He looked up because the wind had shifted, and the rain had thinned for a moment, and the stars were briefly visible. He looked up because he could not help it. His eyes went black — not the polite, druidic, occasional black they normally went, but a deeper black, the kind that anyone who happened to be watching from a window would have noticed and remarked on, except no one was watching from a window. The slate tablet in his hand grew warm.

The stars said nothing in particular tonight.

But the hawk, which had been spiraling steadily over the road, suddenly broke pattern.

It dropped lower.

It cried once.

Then twice.

VI. The Ash Walkers

The thing came out of the hedge at Rookk's right.

It was the size of a horse. It was reptilian — flat and long, with hide the color of wet grass and bark, its scales so close to its surroundings that it had been invisible from twenty feet. Its eyes were on the sides of its skull, set wide, and they reflected the druidcraft light from Jorath's tablet in two yellow disks that flicked open and then closed. Its tongue licked across its own eye.

Then it screamed.

The night cracked.

The thing came out of the hedge at speed. Rookk had half a heartbeat to register predator before the rest of his body registered now. His longsword came off his back. His feet planted in the mud. The wet grass behind him broke under his weight as he braced.

Valdren had already turned his head. Initiative, he barked, and the word was a command the way only a paladin can issue commands, and the party arranged itself around the threat in the time it took to draw three breaths.

EMBR did not draw a breath.

EMBR did something else.

Across the road, the Warforged's eyes — both of them now, the right and the left, the human-sized and the wrong-sized — flashed to red. Not the slow flicker that had been with him all night. A solid burning crimson, like furnace doors that had been kicked open at once. The chitin on his left arm pulsed visibly, the dark veins beneath it suddenly running with light, like a circuit being completed. His mouth opened and the inside of his mouth was full of teeth that had not been there before — mandibles, razor-edged, hinged outward from his jaw on each side in a way that no manufacturer of warforged could have designed.

He grew.

The skeleton of dark wood that ran inside him cracked audibly. The plates of steel along his shoulders shifted to accommodate the new geometry. Where he had been seven feet of construct, he was suddenly eight and a half. His war hammer, which had been correctly sized for him a moment ago, was now lighter in his hand than it had any right to be.

He roared, and the roar was the sound of a mechanism rending itself open from the inside, and he charged.

He charged directly over Vivienne and Rookk. He did not go around them. He went over — eight and a half feet of construct vaulting in a single motion across the line they had formed — and brought the hammer down on the Ash Walker with the full weight of his charge and his rage and whatever the other thing inside him was.

The hammer met the Ash Walker's skull.

The Ash Walker went backward through the hedge it had come out of. Bent the hedge. Snapped the branches. Came to rest five feet further back than it had started, its hide caved in along one flank where the hammer had landed, blood beginning to drip from beneath one eye. The eye twitched. It was not dead yet. But it was no longer in control of the situation.

Rookk, beside the place EMBR had vaulted over, registered that he had not been hit by a Warforged at full charging speed and decided this was a gift to be acknowledged later. He moved south. He had heard a second sound — fainter, closer to the hedge on the other side — and the second sound meant a second one, and he had no intention of being the man who let Maret and Sable get flanked.

He took a defensive position between the south hedge and the horse. He raised his longsword.

He waited.

Vivienne had not moved.

Vivienne was still beside Argentus, and Sable was on Argentus, and Sable was very small and very pale and her eyes — her eyes — were doing the thing.

Sparks were beginning to crawl off her skin.

Sable, Vivienne said, in the warm clear voice that had not changed since the soap maker's shop. She stepped in. She put her hand on the child's leg where it gripped Argentus's flank. Her other hand came up and tilted Sable's chin so that the girl was looking at her face and not at the dying Ash Walker thrashing in the hedge five feet away.

Sable. That is a lovely blanket you have. Where did you get that? Did your mother make it for you?

Sable's eyes were full of light. Literally. There were small bursts of brightness flickering at the back of her irises, the way you sometimes see lightning behind a cloud — far off, contained, not quite ready. Her mouth was open. She was very nearly hyperventilating.

Sable. Tell me about the blanket.

The sparks lifted higher off her skin. They were no longer skin-level. They were rising. They were beginning to scatter, fall through the rain, fizzle.

Oh, Sable whispered. My mom made me this blanket. It's my favorite blanket. And I —

Her eyes darted past Vivienne to the hammer.

The hammer was dripping.

Sable, Vivienne said. She did not turn her head. She did not move her hand from Sable's chin. Sable. Look at me. It's nothing. It's just a little lizard. We have a couple of big strong ones who will take care of it. Don't you worry. Tell me about the blanket.

Sable's eyes came back to her.

Tell me about the blanket.

The sparks did not stop. But they slowed.

Behind Vivienne, Jorath was no longer beside Argentus. He had moved south, toward where Rookk had set up his guard, because he had felt the wind change in a way that wind does not naturally change. And so the second tongue — the long whip-tongue with the barbed hooks along its length — came lashing out of the south hedge at him instead of at Sable.

The barbs sank into his arm.

Jorath felt himself yanked, hard, off-balance, the strength of the pull comparable to a draft horse he had once tried to wrestle in the high pastures of his youth and lost to. He braced.

He held.

He did not move.

The second Ash Walker, in the southern hedge, was not pleased.

VII. The Pushes

Valdren walked.

He did not run. The northern Ash Walker — the one EMBR had hammered through the foliage — was wounded and pinned and waiting to die. Valdren had been a paladin long enough to know that wounded things take from you only what you give them, and rage given freely is the difference between a kill and a casualty.

He walked across the road. EMBR was still over the lizard, hammer raised for another strike, the red of his eyes the only color in the dark.

Valdren reached the Ash Walker's flank.

He kissed the head of his war pick.

He brought his shield up off his back and banged it against the head of the pick the way a man rings a bell to call his god to the work. The metal sang once, briefly, beneath the rain.

He brought the pick down.

The pick side — long, narrow, blood-crusted — entered the Ash Walker's skull above the right eye. Bone broke around it with the wet snap of a small twig. The lizard's body went rigid. Its remaining eye filled with blood from the inside, in a single fast bloom, the way a glass fills when you tip it. The blood overflowed and ran down its face. Its jaw opened on its final breath and shut on nothing. Its body slumped, and twitched once, and stopped.

EMBR, who had been about to bring his own hammer down, did not.

EMBR turned.

EMBR's left eye went brighter. The red of it intensified to the color of an arc-weld. The mandible teeth flexed in his mouth. The chitin on his arm grew tighter around the hammer's haft.

He screamed at Valdren.

He screamed in his face — a sound that had nothing in it of language, the sound a forge makes when something inside it cracks. The kill had been his. Valdren had walked up and taken it.

Valdren did not flinch. Valdren had been screamed at by holier and worse. He met the red eye with his black one.

Done, he said. Move.

EMBR's mandibles retracted. The red did not fade — not yet — but his hammer lowered. He turned. He registered, with whatever inside him passed for the order of operations, that the dying creature behind him was no longer dying because there was nothing left of it to die from, and that there was another one in the south hedge that was still trying to eat Jorath.

He started south.

Behind him, Argentus shifted under Maret and Sable. Valdren whistled — sharp, two notes, cover — and the destrier moved without being told, walking around the body of the dead Ash Walker to put Valdren's plate between himself and the rest of the threat. Argentus had been to enough battles with Valdren to do this on his own. He did it now.

Across the road, Sable's eyes were full of light.

She was looking at the dead Ash Walker.

She was looking at the dark spread of blood that had pooled out of its eye onto the road.

She was looking at the second one in the hedge, which had wrapped its tongue around a druid she did not really know but had decided she liked, and which was beginning to drag the druid backward into the brush.

Vivienne's hand was still on her chin.

Sable, Vivienne said.

Sable did not hear her.

The sparks lifted up off the child's body. They no longer fizzled out at shoulder height. They rose. They drifted up into the rain, like embers from a fire much larger than the fire that had made them, and they did not die in the wet air the way they should have died. They burned.

Vivienne saw, very clearly, what was happening.

Vivienne turned her head — only her head, only an inch, only enough to call across the road — and she did not raise her voice. She did not need to.

Get her clear.

Maret was already moving. She had felt the heat at her shoulder before her mind had named it. Her hands closed around Sable's small ones, dismounted them from Argentus's reins, and pulled her daughter into her chest. She turned the horse with the pressure of her thighs the way she had not ridden a horse in a decade and would not have remembered how to. Argentus, who took his cues from many sources tonight, accepted the cue and walked them away from the road, off into the shoulder where the long grass began.

Vivienne stepped back from the road herself.

Sable —

Sable opened her mouth.

She did not know what she was doing.

She did not know what was about to happen.

She was a child of six or seven years old who had been told her whole life that what was inside her was wrong, and what was inside her was now flooding outward without her consent, and she could not stop it any more than a dam can stop a flood that has finally found its crack.

The light in her eyes leaked.

A point of brightness — small at first — formed in the air in front of her, two feet from her face, hanging unsupported in the rain.

It got brighter.

It got larger.

The rain around it began to hiss.

Vivienne saw the shape of what it was going to become. She had read about it. She had practiced spell forms in the deepest rooms of the Ashworth archive that had similar geometry. She knew the name of what was about to happen, the way one knows the name of a country one has only seen on a map.

Fireball, she breathed.

The point detonated.

It detonated downward, by some grace of accidental geometry — toward the road, toward the dead Ash Walker, toward the empty stretch of grass where there had been nothing alive to kill. A bloom of orange and white that took with it a tree on the verge, the body of the first Ash Walker, the body of the half-eaten thing in its stomach, twenty feet of hedge, a section of road, and one hawk that had spiraled too low to look at what was happening to its druid.

The wave of heat broke over the rest of the party as a flash of dry air and pressure that lasted less than a second and pushed the rain sideways.

The light died.

The rain came back.

A crater stood smoking on the road. Sable, in her mother's arms, was crying. Maret, with her arms around her daughter and her face against the top of Sable's head, was not. Maret had spent her tears for the year, and she had spent them on this fear, and she had nothing left to do tonight but breathe.

In the south hedge, the second Ash Walker — which had been about to swallow a druid — released the druid. It had seen the light too. It hesitated.

It hesitated, and that was the last decision it ever made.

Rookk crossed the distance and put his longsword through the side of its neck, deep, all the way to the cross-guard. Jorath, free of the tongue, dropped to one knee and brought the side of his slate tablet down on the creature's skull with all the weight a Goliath of his size could put behind a piece of stone the size of a small headstone. The skull caved. The Ash Walker shrieked, and the shriek died into the rain, and the Ash Walker died with it.

The two of them looked at each other across the body.

They did not say anything.

Behind them, EMBR was standing over the second corpse. His mandibles had retracted. The hammer was lowered. The eyes were still red, but the red was fading at the edges, back to orange, then to yellow, then to the green he was supposed to be. His size was beginning to recede. The cracking of his skeleton retracting was less violent than the cracking when it had expanded.

He looked, in the rain, like a man coming back to himself.

Across the road, Vivienne was walking toward Maret and Sable.

She was not running.

She had decided, before she had taken the first step, that she was going to walk toward this child like nothing extraordinary had happened, because the worst possible thing in the world for Sable to learn in this moment was that what she had just done was extraordinary.

She reached them. Sable was still buried in her mother's coat. Maret looked up.

She's all right, Vivienne said. She's all right.

Maret nodded. Maret could not speak.

Vivienne crouched beside the horse. She put her hand, very gently, on Sable's back.

Tell me about the blanket, she said.

Sable, into her mother's coat, with her face hidden and her hands locked into fists at her chest, whispered something Vivienne could not hear.

Vivienne stayed where she was. She waited.

After a long time, Sable said it again.

My mom made me this blanket.

I know, Vivienne said. I know she did. Tell me what color it is.

VIII. Heron

They cut the bellies of the Ash Walkers open before they left.

This was Jorath's idea, and he was the only one who insisted on it, and the rest of the party knew enough about druidic instinct to leave him to it. He sliced the first one along the ribs and found a stomach mostly empty — long-digested, the meal a week old. He sliced the second one along the same seam and a smell came out of it that he registered, with the part of him that had grown up on a Glade, was not a smell that came out of a normal predator.

Inside the second Ash Walker's stomach was an unsettling amount of human hair.

He did not say anything to the rest of the party until they had ridden a half-mile further into the dark. Then he said it.

Valdren listened. Nodded. Did not speak.

Maret, on the horse, held Sable tighter.

They walked.

The road bent. The lamp light of Heron came up out of the dark, faint and yellow, the canton's outline visible only because its lamps had not yet been put out for the night. The walls of Heron were a joke. They were what Vivienne had read described, in some old text in the family archive, as the visage of a wall — built once, never maintained, holes in them in three places where the wood had dry-rotted through. Good for keeping out the smaller beasts on a quiet night. Good for nothing else.

The garrison at the gate was not lazy tonight.

The party stopped on the road.

I would not recommend we go through the gate, Jorath said. If we can nip over to a shady part in the wall, I can get us all over.

There were no dissenters.

They skirted the canton along its outer edge until they found the section of wall that had failed the worst. It was dry-rotted, slumped at the top, half its original height. From the inside it would have looked like a wall. From the outside, in the rain, it looked like a suggestion.

Jorath stepped up to it.

His Goliath blood was the racial trait people remembered him for. Most people remembered the height. They remembered the eight-foot frame. They did not always remember that the height was — in some literal sense — a starting point.

He grew.

His skeleton expanded a second time tonight, although this time without violence — a slow, druidic stretching, his arms lengthening, his shoulders broadening, the stars on his arms shifting like the constellations were moving across an enlarging sky. He stopped at fifteen feet. He raised his hand. He spoke a second incantation. Enlarge layered on top of the racial trait, and he grew again, the second growth less elegant than the first but compounding. Twenty-five feet. Twenty-eight.

He stooped down to the party.

He looked, for a moment, like a giant out of an old story — pale blue skin in the rain, white hair plastered to his head, eyes glowing faintly with the residue of two spells, the silver star-chart slate held in a hand the size of a manhole cover.

He picked up Argentus.

He picked up Argentus, and Maret, and Sable, in a single careful scoop, and lifted them over the wall and set them down on the other side.

He picked up Rookk next. Then Vivienne. Then Valdren, who allowed it without comment.

Then EMBR.

EMBR was the heaviest of them. EMBR's left eye flickered red as Jorath bent to lift him, and for half a second Jorath wondered whether what was inside the Warforged was about to react to being grabbed by something bigger than itself.

EMBR — softly, almost too softly for Jorath to hear — knocked his own temple with the back of his right hand.

Don't get jealous, he said.

Then he let himself be lifted.

When he was on the other side of the wall, Jorath dismissed Enlarge. The race-bound large form faded a moment after. He wild-shaped into a squirrel, scampered up the broken wall in three bounds, leapt down on the inside, and resumed his normal eight feet of pale blue and constellations.

Behind them, the wall stood as it had stood. No one had seen them.

In front of them, Orvin's repair shop waited.

IX. Orvin

Jorath knocked the way the resistance had taught him to knock. He cast druidcraft — a small spectral effect, two faint fairies, dancing on the windowsill. They drifted up against the glass, and through it, and into the front room of the shop, where Orvin had been sitting on a stool waiting for them.

The door opened the width of an eye.

The eye, behind it, was the eye of an older gnome with a few grey hairs and a great deal of patience.

It blinked. It widened. The door opened the rest of the way.

Oh, ever safe, this guy, Orvin said, with the smile of a man who has been alone in a shop for too long on a rainy night and is genuinely glad to see people he likes. He extended his hand to Jorath. Jorath, in his excitement, met it with too much grip.

Orvin winced and laughed.

Careful there. That's all right. Please come on, come in. That rain is terrible tonight.

They came in.

The shop was a working shop. Counter in the back. Service board with prices behind it. Shelves of small parts and repair stock against the walls. The kind of place a man might come on a Saturday afternoon for a hinge replacement and never suspect was anything other than a place that sold hinges.

Orvin ushered them past the counter into the back room where he lived. Two bowls of soup sat on the table, basking in the candle light. The room smelled of broth and pipe smoke and old wood. It was warm. It was the first warm thing the party had touched in six hours.

I'm so glad you all made it, Orvin said. Please, ladies, please take a seat. I am Orvin. It is a pleasure to meet your acquaintance.

He shook Maret's hand. He stooped down a little to shake Sable's, which was easy because she and the gnome were of comparable heights, and he gave her a rub on the head with a hand that had never been used unkindly. He invited them to eat. Maret sat. Sable sat. Sable was still trembling, but the trembling had a different quality now — the trembling of a child who has been told, by people she has decided to trust, that she is safe.

Orvin stepped aside. He looked at the party.

So, he said. How was it all out there? It sounds very exciting.

EMBR's mandibles were gone. His eyes were green. The red was a memory.

That was fun, he said.

Orvin laughed.

That's right, that's right. I'm sure you did have quite a bit of fun doing that.

Well, EMBR said. Lefty did.

Orvin's eyes flicked to EMBR's left arm. His smile did not change. Orvin had been around long enough to know which questions a host should not ask.

He turned back to the room. You all didn't happen to see much out of the ordinary as you were on your way into town, did you?

Vivienne, who had finally let her face go back to itself an hour ago when the spell wore off, smiled the warm small smile that her brother Percy had once called her I am about to lie to you very well smile.

Nothing but a delightful bit of fauna, my dear, she said.

Orvin smiled back.

Delightful, I'm sure they were. But, no. The fauna notwithstanding. No people wandering about. No commotions. No anything of that sort?

Nothing, said Jorath, between us crossing the wall and reaching this place.

EMBR considered for a moment.

You saw a guy in the stockade, he said. That was fun.

Then, quieter: Well. Not fun for him.

Orvin's smile did not change. But it stilled.

X. The Shadow of the Raven

While Maret and Sable ate — slowly, very slowly, the way you eat when you are not sure your stomach remembers what to do with hot food — Jorath asked Orvin for the use of a flat surface.

He laid his slate down on the table beside the soup bowls. He pulled small things out of a pouch at his belt — glass shards, a fish bone, dried seeds, the small accumulated debris that any druid worth his stars carries for moments like this. He cast them down onto the wood beside the slate, and the debris fell in patterns that should have been random, and was not.

Blue wisps of magical light began to lift off the scattered pieces. They drifted across the surface of the slate, drawing lines, drawing connections, drawing the kind of constellation lines that only the eye of a druid in communion could read.

The lines settled.

Jorath read them.

His brow furrowed.

He read them again.

He stood very still for a moment.

The rest of the room had not been watching the ritual closely until they saw him stop. Vivienne caught it first. She had been pretending to read a book, again, the way she pretended to read books — and her eyes left the page when his shoulders changed.

What does it say, she asked.

Jorath did not answer immediately. He pulled his eyes from the slate.

He looked at the four of them. He looked at Maret and Sable, who had not stopped eating because the children did not want to embarrass the adults by noticing.

The star suggests, he said, slowly, that perhaps a sign of ill omen is to come to pass soon. It's hard to say whether or not Maret and Sable, and all of us, will be caught up in it. But it's foreboding.

He turned to Vivienne.

There was something in his face that might have been the dry beginning of a joke if the room had been a different room and the night had been a different night.

And you called this a crock of —

He did not finish the sentence.

He did not finish the sentence because, outside, in the rain, in the dark, on the cobblestones of Heron, the world began to move.

It was a sound first.

Hooves. Many hooves. The percussive, ordered, military hooves of horses that had been trained to keep step with each other. Beneath the hooves, wagon wheels — heavy iron-rimmed wheels, wagons not meant for trade — turning on cobblestone in a tempo that was not the tempo of merchants moving goods.

The sound was not on a single street. The sound was on every street.

Orvin's smile vanished.

Valdren was at the window before Vivienne had finished closing her book. He pulled the shutter back a fraction of an inch — only that, no more — and put his eye to the gap.

The street outside was full.

Carriages — pitch black, with silver wheels and silver dormants on the horses, the silver catching the lamp light in long bright streaks — were moving down the cobblestones in slow procession. Not one. Not two. A column. There were more behind these, and more beyond those, and on every alley off the main road another column had begun.

Inquisitors sat on the carriages. They wore the dark greatcoats of their order. On the lapel of each coat, in the lamp light, a small silver brooch glinted: a raven, wings spread, eyes empty.

Valdren did not move.

Behind him, in the warm room with the soup bowls, Rookk had stopped pouring himself a glass of Orvin's hidden gnomish liquor.

Valdren spoke without turning. His voice was very quiet. Vivienne had to lean forward to hear him.

These are the same ones, he said. That came for my family.

Orvin had gone the color of his bowls.

Valdren watched the columns for another long moment. He watched them begin to put up barriers — saw horses; portable wooden stands; chains being unloaded from the back of one of the wagons. He watched the precision of it. The practiced way it was unfolding. He watched, with the particular clarity of a man who is finally seeing the thing he has been chasing for twelve years, and who has been trying his whole adult life to imagine what he would do when he saw it again, and who now realizes that the answer is nothing.

He realized it was not the house. It was not Orvin's shop. It was not any single building.

It's the whole canton, he said. The whole canton.

He squeezed the haft of his war pick once. Then he released it. He turned from the window.

He looked at the room.

He looked at Maret, who had set her spoon down very carefully.

He looked at Sable, who had her mouth full of bread and had not understood any of it yet.

He looked at Orvin, whose hand was tight on the edge of the table.

He looked at Jorath, whose star chart still glowed faintly with the line of the prophecy. The line was still readable in the dim light.

Poor little innocents, it said, get caught in the shadow of the raven.

Outside, the carriages settled into their positions.

The barriers locked into place.

The first chain rang against the second chain on the cobblestone.

A canton, once it went through quarantine, was no longer officially a canton.

That was what the law said.

The rain kept coming down.

End of Session 01.

Next: [Session 02 — ???]