Night had settled like an enormous black curtain, slowly swallowing the earth whole.
The last traces of sunset vanished behind the distant mountains, and cold darkness claimed the world completely.
No moonlight graced the sky that night, only scattered stars flickering in and out of view between heavy banks of cloud.
The mountain wind carried a thread of chill as it swept across the wilderness, raising a low, mournful howl that mingled with the distant cries of wild beasts deep in the mountains, enough to make anyone shudder.
The whole world sank into a silent, oppressive darkness.
About a mile and a half upstream from Cadiа Village, a small campfire danced and flickered in the night.
Its orange light pushed back the surrounding darkness, the lone point of warmth and brightness in that desolate stretch of wilderness.
Sparks crackled and popped every now and then, each small sound crisp and distinct in the stillness of the night.
Felix sat beside the fire, a delicate silver bracelet resting in his hand. Its surface was etched with intricate magical runes that caught the firelight and glimmered.
"Raygore, come here. I'll clean your armor."
With heavy, rhythmic footsteps, Raygore moved silently to Felix's side, his massive frame casting a deep shadow in the firelight. Dark bloodstains still clung to his black iron visor, and dried crimson had worked its way into every gap in his armor.
Felix fastened the arcane bracelet around his wrist and murmured an incantation.
Cantrip: Prestidigitation!
Pale blue magical light poured from the bracelet like a gentle current of water, wrapping around Raygore's body.
Wherever the glow passed, the blood vanished without a trace. Raygore hadn't accumulated much to begin with, and a single casting was enough to leave him spotless.
His black plate armor recovered its metallic sheen, and the visor gleamed as though freshly polished.
"Melina, you're next," Felix said, gesturing her over.
Melina stepped toward the fire. Her condition was considerably worse. From head to foot, nearly every inch of her clothing had been soaked through with blood. Layers of dark red crust had dried and hardened in places, some of it clotted into thick, solid patches.
"Dear me," Felix said, shaking his head with quiet resignation. He knew she had fought her way through a brutal battle today.
The first casting of Prestidigitation cleared most of the blood from her upper body. The second took care of her lower half and her hands. The third finally scoured away the most stubborn crusted patches entirely.
"There." Felix withdrew the bracelet and looked Melina up and down with satisfaction, running his fingers along the seams of her mail to make sure everything had been fully cleaned.
For their camp that night, they had chosen a spot by the riverbank upstream from Cadiа Village.
The village itself was littered with corpses and thick with the smell of blood. Come nightfall, that kind of environment was almost certain to draw undead, the sorts of skeletons and zombies that thrived on death and decay. Staying there was out of the question.
The air upstream was clean and fresh, far from the shadow of so much death, and it made for an ideal place to rest.
All five members of the Ice Hawks Company sat gathered around the campfire: Felix, Raygore, Orum, Ronald, and Melina. Each face was drawn and solemn. The firelight leapt across their features in shifting patterns of light and shadow.
A heavy quiet had settled over the group. Everyone seemed lost in their own thoughts, and no one broke the silence.
What they had faced that day had been genuinely terrifying. If Orum and Raygore hadn't broken free of the illusion when they did, the rest of them might well have ended up like the old knight Muller, heads taken off while they lay helpless and unconscious. That thought sent a cold wave of dread through Melina, Ronald, and Felix alike.
"Come on, everyone, cheer up!"
Ronald spoke up suddenly, his voice cutting through the gloom. As a cleric of Lathander, he was always the most spirited member of the group, and lifting morale was something he did naturally.
"We're all sitting here in one piece, aren't we? Look alive!"
He pulled a cast-iron pot from his pack and set it over the fire with practiced ease. From his pack he produced strips of marinated great-horned ox meat and dropped them in one by one. The pieces tumbled through the foaming liquid, and before long a rich, enticing aroma was rising into the night air.
For this batch, Ronald had gone heavier on the spices, knowing the extra heat would help drive off the chill of the night.
The pot soon filled with a deep, amber-colored broth, bubbling and steaming, impossible to resist.
"Ahaha, dinner's ready!"
"Come on, everyone, get some!" Ronald produced wooden bowls and ladled out a generous portion for each person.
"Eat well and stop overthinking." He pressed a bowl into each pair of hands as he made his way around the fire.
Orum took his bowl, felt the warmth spread from the wood into his palms, and raised it to his lips. The spice hit first, sharp and immediate, then came the deep, savory richness of the meat. The hot broth moved through him, and the cold that had settled in his bones began to ease.
The others drank as well, and gradually the tension in every face began to soften. The weight that had hung over the camp lifted, dispersed by the warmth of food and fire.
"This is so good. Ronald's cooking has gotten really impressive," Melina said quietly, a note of genuine warmth in her voice.
"Of course it has!" Ronald patted his chest with a proud grin. "I'm a professional."
The mood lightened considerably after that.
When the bowls were nearly empty, Felix raised his eyes and looked around at his companions. "Let's talk about what happened today," he said. "It seems everyone was caught in the illusion. We all experienced something like a dream."
He pressed his brows together, choosing his words carefully. "I felt as though I were living inside a beautiful dream. I was completely absorbed in it, cut off from any awareness of the physical world around me."
Melina hugged her knees and spoke in a small voice. "I dreamed about my mother. She was alive, holding me the way she used to when I was little."
Ronald nodded. "I dreamed about childhood, back in my home village. There was a friend I used to play with, and I got completely lost in it. I couldn't pull myself away."
Raygore said nothing. He gave a slow, quiet nod to indicate he had experienced something similar.
Felix gathered their accounts and sat with them for a moment. "It seems the illusion worked by showing each of us whatever we longed for most deeply."
He looked into the fire. "What exactly is this dark god that was sealed inside that wooden carving?"
"I have the answer to that, Captain," Orum said.
He then gave his companions a thorough account of everything he had experienced inside the spiritual realm, sharing everything he was able to without holding back.
When he finished, silence fell over the group.
Even the well-traveled Felix stared at him wide-eyed. "A high faerie? The one behind all of this was a high faerie?"
Ronald set down his bowl. "I assumed it was some kind of dark cult, or maybe a fallen mage. I never imagined it would be a faerie out of legend."
Orum nodded. "Korlindra treated all of it like a game. The villagers, the merchants, the adventurers, all of us included. To her, we were nothing but pieces on a board."
Felix let out a slow breath through his teeth. "Reckless indulgence and total disregard for consequence. That does sound like the fae."
The revelation that a high faerie named Korlindra was behind everything in Cadiа Village also neatly explained, at least in everyone else's minds, why Orum had never fallen under the illusion's control.
As far as Felix and the others could reason, Orum was a pact-bound champion of Vilanestrae, the forest faerie goddess, and since his power and Korlindra's shared a common origin, it made sense that Vilanestrae would have shielded him from fae magic of this kind.
The logic felt sound to everyone present. It wasn't correct, but Orum had no intention of correcting it.
"On a somewhat different note," Felix said, shifting the subject with a mildly sheepish air and rubbing his temple, golden hair catching the firelight, "in my dream, I saw images from my childhood. My family was happy, all of them warm and kind toward one another."
Melina glanced around, then bit her lip.
"I saw childhood too," she said softly, eyes beginning to glisten. "My father and mother were still alive. They were holding me and singing a lullaby." She drew a breath and held it, fighting to keep her voice steady.
"I thought it was real."
Ronald sighed. "Same for me. I dreamed I was a child again, sneaking into the back courtyard of the church with my old playmate, stealing the ceremonial bread, and getting chased by the nuns. Those days were so carefree. I couldn't help being swept away by it."
He turned to look at Raygore with open curiosity. "What about you, Raygore? What did you see? And how did you manage to break free? Your willpower is something else."
Under the curious gaze of every member of the Ice Hawks Company, Raygore went still.
His broad frame sat like a dark fortress in the firelight. The eyes hidden behind his black iron visor seemed to be fixed on something far away.
Several seconds passed.
"I saw my wife and daughter," he said at last, in that low, flat voice that never wavered. "They are dead."
The words landed on the group like a thunderclap in a clear sky.
The fire crackled. The night wind passed through. The camp went absolutely quiet.
Ronald's smile froze in place. His bowl stopped moving halfway to his mouth. "Then the way you broke free from the illusion was..."
"I killed them."
Raygore set his wooden bowl down.
The dull knock of wood against the ground echoed through the silent camp, and every person there went rigid, as if struck by lightning.
His voice was perfectly calm. Calm in a way that reached into the chest and turned something cold there.
Orum felt the words hit him like a physical blow. He looked at Raygore in disbelief, struggling to comprehend that this half-orc warrior had found his way out by doing something so brutal, so absolute.
He could not begin to imagine what it would take, inside an illusion as vivid and real as Korlindra's, to make yourself kill the people you had been longing for most.
What kind of resolve did that require? What kind of agony had to be endured in order to do it?
Orum felt his heart clench. He looked at Raygore sitting there like a fortress of black iron, and somewhere beneath all that stillness he thought he could sense it: a furnace of rage burning beneath thick ice, white-hot and barely contained.
For a person like that, more often than not, it is the fury of revenge that alone sustains a person through an ordeal no human being should have to face.
"By the Lord of Dawn," Ronald murmured. The last trace of his smile had gone.
In that moment, he regretted asking. Deeply, intensely regretted it. What had he done, if not rip open a wound and grind salt into it with both hands?
His face filled with guilt. He opened his mouth, tried to find something to say, and found nothing.
Felix exhaled slowly, his expression grave.
He knew Raygore's past. He knew what the man had lost.
Beside Orum, Melina had gone rigid with shock, arms wrapped tightly around her own knees, her body trembling slightly.
"All right," Felix said, his voice breaking the stillness and steering them elsewhere. "Let's talk about what needs to be done to close out the situation in Cadiа Village."
He spoke steadily. "The majority of the villagers who had fallen into madness have been put down. Only a handful of children, too young to be affected by whatever that madness was, managed to flee into the mountains."
His tone remained level, as though recounting something distant and impersonal.
"There are no survivors left in the village."
"Muller and all of his armed retainers are dead."
Felix continued, "We need to get a new message to Viscount Marfaux and have him send other constables to recover Muller's body. The viscount will need an explanation."
"Does that mean we're sending someone back to Port Zobek?" Ronald asked. He had pulled himself back together and was already thinking practically.
"No need." Felix shook his head. "Muller was carrying an arcane communicator linked directly to Viscount Marfaux. All it requires is a charge of magical energy to transmit a message straight to the viscount."
"That saves us the trouble of an entire day and night of travel back to Port Zobek."
"I'll give the viscount a full and accurate account of everything that happened in Cadiа Village. After that, we wait in the area for a few days."
Orum's brow furrowed slightly. "What about the micro-dungeon mentioned in the contract, the one supposedly overrun with goblins? Was that something the villagers invented? There's no goblin nest out here?"
Felix shook his head. "Not exactly. According to the mission files, Cadiа Village did submit several fresh goblin ears as evidence, which means goblins have genuinely been active in the surrounding area."
His expression became more serious. "It's quite possible that a small dungeon actually does exist somewhere near Cadiа Village. The villagers may simply have used it as a legitimate-sounding pretext to draw adventurers in."
Felix laid out the next steps and gave the group his instructions. "Once Viscount Marfaux's constables arrive, we'll survey the surrounding area and search for the dungeon's entrance. That's always been part of the plan, the secondary reason we came out here in the first place."
Deep into the night, the campfire burned low, reduced to a small, steady flame that cast a faint warm glow and held back the damp of the dark.
Inside his simple bedroll, Orum jolted awake with a start, eyes snapping open.
Both of his hearts were hammering in his chest, strong and urgent as a war drum.
He looked up and found the night watchman, Ronald, staring back at him with an expression of bewilderment.
Ronald's face was taut. "You felt it too?"
Orum nodded. He had felt it clearly: a strange, resonant pulse.
From somewhere far to the southwest, a ripple in space had suddenly surged outward. It spread like the rings from a stone dropped into still water, rolling outward in expanding waves that washed through Orum's mind.
It came from the exact direction of the Black Gate.
Those with sharper sensitivity would have been able to detect a force like that.
Orum looked back at the camp where Raygore, Felix, and Melina still lay sleeping, their breathing slow and even, completely undisturbed by the spatial disturbance.
Orum's own perception was not especially keen, yet some instinct in him registered a peculiar connection between himself and the Black Gate, one that made him unusually attuned to its state.
The source of that strange spatial ripple was almost certainly the royal court mage who had traveled from the capital.
Unease and wariness settled over him.
He couldn't know for certain whether the legendary mage's power had made the Black Gate safer or more dangerous. There was no way to tell from here.
At least for now, he was a long way from it, hundreds of miles at least. He could watch from a safe distance and see what the Gate became, whether anything strange emerged from it.
At the thought of what might already lie beyond the Black Gate, the wasteland overrun with monsters it may already have become, Orum quietly closed his hand into a fist.
He would find out the truth about the Black Gate. And he would find out what had happened to Earth.