The night passed in a series of shallow, dreamless dozes, each one punctuated by the snap of a twig outside or the mournful sigh of the wind through the broken battlements. I felt less like I was resting and more like I was marinating in dread. Every time I slipped toward real sleep, the memory of those blood-red symbols would flash behind my eyelids, and a low, psychic hum, like a distant power line, would thrum at the base of my skull. It was a constant, low-grade reminder that this place was tainted, and that some part of me was now permanently tuned to its foul frequency.

  By the time the first watery gray light of dawn bled through the arrow slits, I felt wrung out and brittle. Kaelen had already been up for some time, his silhouette a grim statue against the growing light. He hadn’t said a word, merely nodded at me when my eyes fluttered open. Bartholomew, curled into a perfect, fluffy ball of disdain, opened one emerald eye.

  “A thoroughly execrable night’s rest,” he declared, his voice a dry rasp. “This fortress possesses all the ambient charm of a charnel house.”

  “Tell me about it,” I muttered, pushing myself up. My back ached, my head throbbed, and my mouth tasted like I’d been chewing on old leather. “I feel like the ‘before’ picture in a mattress commercial.”

  Kaelen ignored our grousing. He strode into the courtyard, his gaze fixed on the tattered banner that still flapped over the main gate. It depicted the same stylized flame and spear, rendered in what I was trying very hard to convince myself was just dark red fabric. With a fluid, powerful motion, he drew his sword. The blade hissed from its sheath, catching the morning light in a sliver of silver. He didn’t use it to cut the ropes. Instead, he hooked the crossguard over the thick cord and pulled, leveraging his entire weight until the frayed rope snapped with a sharp crack.

  The banner of the Firebrand Cult fell in a heap of filthy cloth and bad vibes.

  Without a word, he dragged it back toward our dwindling fire. He tore a length of wood from a broken crate, using it to shove the wretched thing into the glowing embers. The fabric, greasy with pitch or something worse, was reluctant to catch at first. It smoked, stinking of rot, then suddenly erupted in a whoosh of greasy, black-orange flame.

  We watched it burn, a silent, impromptu funeral for a night of terror. The flames consumed the symbol, curling the edges inward until the twisting flame writhed and shrank into ash. It was a small act of defiance, a bit of symbolic housekeeping, but I felt a knot in my chest loosen all the same.

  “Spring cleaning, knight-style,” I said, my voice quiet. “I approve.”

  Kaelen didn’t look at me, but the corner of his mouth ticked upward for a fraction of a second.

  “The world has enough of their filth in it. This is one less piece.”

  “A futile gesture, but one appreciates the theatricality,” Bartholomew sniffed, meticulously washing a paw. “It changes nothing of the lingering corruption, but the smell can hardly be made worse.”

  Once the banner was nothing more than a black smear in the fire pit, we gathered our meager belongings. We didn’t linger. The sooner we put the Fort of Bad Juju behind us, the better. We left through a collapsed section of the rear wall, scrambling down a steep, scree-covered path on the opposite side of the mountain. It was a treacherous descent, all loose rocks and thorny bushes that snagged at my clothes. Kaelen moved like a mountain goat in chainmail, his steps sure and steady as he led Argent down the slope, occasionally glancing back to make sure I hadn’t pitched myself into a ravine. I, on the other hand, moved like a startled flamingo on a pile of marbles, skidding and swearing under my breath with every other step.

  After what felt like an eternity of controlled falling, the slope gentled, and we emerged from the mountain’s shadow into a wide, impossibly green valley.

  The change was staggering. Behind us was gray rock, death, and fanaticism. Before us was a Eldaria equivalent of the Shire from those Peter Jackson movies. A wide, slow-moving river snaked through meadows dotted with wildflowers. The air was clean and smelled of damp earth and clover. In the distance, the valley floor rose to meet rolling hills, their crests softened by a hazy morning mist. It was beautiful. It was peaceful. And after the oppressive claustrophobia of the fort, it felt completely, utterly wrong. My nerves were too frayed to accept tranquility at face value anymore.

  We walked for several hours, following the riverbank, the silence between us heavy with unspoken anxieties. Finally, Kaelen stopped beneath a sprawling willow tree whose drooping branches offered a modicum of privacy from the wide-open sky.

  “We’ll rest here,” he said, shrugging off his pack. “Eat something. Refill the waterskins.”

  I collapsed onto the grass with a grateful groan, my legs trembling from the descent.

  “Don’t mind if I do.”Bartholomew hopped delicately from my shoulder onto a sun-warmed patch of moss.

  “A far more civilized milieu. Though the sheer openness of it all is rather exposing.”

  He had a point. In the fort, the danger felt contained. Here, it could come from anywhere.

  I dug a piece of hard cheese and a stale biscuit from my pack, chewing on them without any real appetite. My gaze kept drifting across the valley, scanning the horizon for any sign of movement. Kaelen was doing the same, his eyes constantly sweeping our surroundings even as he refilled our canteens at the river’s edge. The man never seemed to relax.

  “So, what’s the game plan, coach?” I asked, trying to inject some levity into the air. It came out sounding more strained than I intended.

  Kaelen came back and sat down, propping his sword against the willow’s trunk. He took a long drink from his waterskin before answering. “The plan is as it was.”

  “So, backroads to the capital? Ye olde hill and vale express?” It sounded quaint. Deceptively so, probably.

  “Simply put, but yes. And we find some things for you to fight along the way,” he said, his voice low. “There is a town called Glenhaven about a half day’s ride from here. We’ll stop to resupply and continue from there. There is someone near there that I need to speak to.”

  Suddenly, his missing status made more sense. He wasn’t running; he was searching for an answer the capital had either forgotten or was too afraid to seek.

  “So the cultists in the fort…” I trailed off, not wanting to say it.

  “Were positioned directly between the northern mountain pass and Glenhaven,” Kaelen finished, his expression grim. “It’s unlikely to be a coincidence.”

  “Indeed,” Bartholomew interjected, stretching languidly. “This valley is not merely a geographic feature, Paige. It is an artery. A place where the veins of the world come together. From this valley, you can go almost anywhere.”

  “So this whole beautiful, pastoral valley is basically a giant intersection?” I asked.

  “In a manner of speaking,” the cat confirmed. “More than a dozen roads converge here, not least of which being the King’s road to the capital.”

  I looked at Kaelen, whose jaw was set like granite. He was worried. The knight who faced down monstrosities and walked into creepy cultist forts without flinching was deeply, profoundly worried. And that scared me more than anything.

  We sat in silence for a few minutes more, the gentle burble of the river a stark contrast to the tension coiling in my gut. My life had become the plot of a B-movie, and I wasn’t even getting paid.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  As I was wallowing in this particularly bleak thought, Kaelen stiffened. His eyes narrowed, focusing on something far downriver, in the direction of Glenhaven.

  “What is it?” I asked, sitting up straight.

  He didn’t answer, just pointed. I followed his gesture, squinting against the bright sun. At first, I saw nothing but the endless green of the valley. Then I spotted it. Thin, dark, and utterly out of place against the clear blue sky.

  A plume of smoke, rising slow and oily into the air.

  It wasn’t the friendly, white smoke of a cottage hearth. It was the greasy, black smoke of something burning that was never meant to burn.

  Bartholomew’s fur bristled slightly.

  “That, I fear, is not a signal of welcome.”

  Kaelen was already on his feet, kicking dirt over the embers of our own meager fire. He took up his sword, his movements economical and devoid of any hesitation. The brief moment of rest was over.

  He looked from the smoke to me, and for the first time, I didn’t see a knight or a grim warrior. I saw a man heading toward a fire he knew he couldn’t avoid.

  “It seems,” I said, my voice barely a whisper, a hollow feeling opening in my stomach, “we have an appointment in Glenhaven.”

  Kaelen didn’t waste words.

  “We ride.”

  His voice was clipped, a piece of flint striking steel. Argent, his warhorse, was already saddled and seemed to sense the urgency, stamping a heavy hoof in the soft earth. I scrambled up behind him and latched my arms around his waist. I really needed my own horse.

  “One hopes there is still a Glenhaven to which we might be appointed,” Bartholomew remarked drily, settling his fluffy hindquarters with a twitch of his tail.

  “Thanks for the optimism, doom-cat,” I muttered. My leather armor creaked in protest. It was a constant, chafing reminder that my life had gone completely off the rails. “A burning village was not on my bingo card for today.”

  We set off at a pace that was less a canter and more a controlled fall. The King’s Road, which had seemed so quaint and rustic an hour ago, now felt like a direct path into a special circle of hell reserved for people who didn’t floss. The gentle green valley blurred at the edges of my vision. All that mattered was the road ahead and the pillar of smoke that grew with every thunderous beat of Argent’s hooves. It was no longer a thin tendril; it was a thick, churning column, a greasy black finger pointing accusingly at the heavens.

  The smell hit us first. It wasn’t the honest scent of a campfire or a forge. It was the acrid stench of a world coming undone—burning thatch, roasting timber, and something like ozone and sulfur having a toxic baby. Then came the sounds, carried on the wind: the roar of a great fire, the splintering crack of beams giving way, and underneath it all, a chorus of faint, high-pitched screams. Human screams.

  My stomach, which had been a pit of dread, now felt like a lead weight. I risked a glance at Kaelen. His face was a mask of cold fury, his eyes fixed on the devastation ahead. The granite jaw was back, but now there were cracks in the stone. This wasn’t a monster in a cave or a cultist in a fort. This was his world, his people, burning.

  We rounded a final bend, and the full panorama of the disaster slammed into me. Glenhaven wasn’t just on fire; it was being dissected by flames. The charming, cozy village I’d only heard about was a Bosch painting come to life. Flames clawed at cottage roofs, turning homes into skeletal pyres. The air shimmered with a heat that made my eyes water.

  And then I saw them; the source of the chaos, the artists of this inferno.

  Darting through the streets, leaping from roof to roof, were creatures made of shadow and ember. They were roughly the size of large cats, sleek and unnervingly fluid, their bodies a vortex of darkness from which flickers of orange light pulsed like a malevolent heartbeat. Where their paws touched, fire bloomed. One scampered up the side of the inn, its claws leaving sizzling gouges in the wood, and a moment later, the eaves exploded in flame. They moved with a predatory, playful cruelty, their hisses and chittering sounds like the crackle of fat on a fire.

  The villagers were in disarray. A handful of men with pitchforks and axes were trying to form a line near the town square, but the shadow-creatures were too fast, too numerous. They weaved between the clumsy swings, their fiery touch igniting trousers and tunics. A bucket brigade snaked from the river, but it was a pathetic, futile gesture. For every doused patch of flame, three more erupted. Most people were just running, their faces smeared with soot and terror, clutching children or meaningless possessions as they fled the hellscape their home had become.

  “By the gods…” I breathed, the words stolen from my lungs by the sheer horror of it. This wasn’t a B-movie anymore. The budget was way too high, the special effects far too realistic.

  “Pyre-cats,” Bartholomew’s voice was grim, stripped of his usual verbose flair. He peered out of the bag, his green eyes narrowed to slits. “Lesser shadow demons. Nasty, brutish things summoned from the cinder planes. They are not strategic. They exist only to burn.”

  Kaelen brought Argent to a halt at the edge of the chaos, his gaze sweeping the scene with the practiced eye of a commander. He wasn’t just seeing the fire; he was analyzing it, finding the patterns in the madness.

  “They are being drawn to something,” he said, his voice a low growl. “They are not spreading randomly. Look—they cluster near the center, by the Town Elder’s hall.”

  He was right. While the fire was everywhere, the thickest concentration of the Pyre-cats was in the town square, swarming around the largest building, a stone-and-timber hall whose slate roof was somehow, miraculously, not yet fully ablaze.

  “So, what’s the plan?” I asked, my voice shaky. “Charge in, swinging? Because I have to warn you, my primary combat skill is ‘aggressive tweeting,’ and I don’t think they’ll be very intimidated.”Kaelen turned to me, and the intensity in his eyes was staggering.

  “The villagers need a leader. They need someone to rally them. I will be that person. I will draw the creatures’ attention.”

  “And us?” I gestured between myself and the cat. “What are we? Moral support?”

  “Those creatures are not the root of the problem,” Bartholomew interjected, his focus still locked on the Elder’s hall. “They are the symptom. Such a large-scale summoning requires a conduit. A rift. Something anchoring them to this plane. It will be near their point of focus. It must be closed.”

  Kaelen nodded, a grim understanding passing between the knight and the cat.

  “You and Bartholomew will find that conduit. The Elder’s hall. Get inside. Disrupt whatever is fueling them.” He unsheathed his sword, the polished steel a slash of cold moonlight amidst the firestorm. It hummed with a faint energy, a stark contrast to the chaotic heat of the Pyre-cats. “I will buy you time.”

  He didn’t wait for my agreement. Spurring Argent forward, he let out a battle cry that cut through the cacophony of destruction. It was a sound of pure, righteous fury, and it made heads turn—both villager and demon. Argent charged into the nearest street, a force of nature in steel and horseflesh. Kaelen’s sword became a whirlwind of silver light, cleaving one of the Pyre-cats in two. It didn’t bleed; it simply dissolved into a puff of oily smoke and dying embers.

  The effect was immediate. Several Pyre-cats, hissing with rage, turned from their work of arson and darted toward this new, shiny threat. The beleaguered villagers saw it, too. A flicker of hope ignited in their eyes. A knight had come.

  “Well,” I said to the cat in my bag. “He’s certainly got the ‘heroic distraction’ part down.”

  “Indeed,” Bartholomew replied, his gaze unwavering. “Which means our part of the stratagem is now active. Shall we, Ms. Hawking?”

  My heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. This was insane. I was a communications major. My idea of a crisis was a server outage during a product launch. But as I watched Kaelen put himself between a dozen flaming shadow-monsters and a terrified family, a strange, unwelcome feeling washed over me. It wasn’t bravery, not even close. It was a grim, stomach-churning sense of obligation. I was here. I could run, or I could do the one thing the giant, monster-slaying knight asked of me.

  “Fine,” I gritted out, “But if I get singed, you’re buying me new eyebrows.” I grabbed a heavy, discarded wooden staff from the ground—probably a broom handle in a former life. It felt flimsy and useless.

  “A most equitable arrangement,” Bartholomew said. “Now, stick to the shadows. Try to look like something that is not flammable.”

  With my useless stick in hand and a talking cat as my tactical advisor, I took a deep breath that tasted of ash and desperation and plunged into the burning streets of Glenhaven.