***Calvin Gadsint, Marquis, Prince Consort, Ravager****

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Calvin said, not even a little bit contrite as he wiped tears from his eyes.

“The thought of something hunting you just hit me right in the funny bone.”

“You’re not taking this seriously.” The Genosian shaman said, scowling.

“Of course not,” Calvin said. “I hate you.” Calvin glanced between Ella and Nadia, frowning. “I don’t think I’ve ever pretended not to. Have I?”

Ella sighed, leaning against the wall. “No. you haven’t.”

“Alright then, convince me to help a people I have a deep, abiding dislike for.” Calvin said, crossing his arms.

“Seven generations of service.” The Maje said, prostrating himself in front of Calvin. “We are as good as our word. If you can sure the land of this evil, we will serve you. Our children and their children, until the seventh generation.”

Calvin yawned.

“Please. The lives of my tribesmen are depending on me. There are no other allies to turn to.”

“Because you alienated all of them by eating them.”

The shaman deflated. “We pride ourselves on self-sufficiency. I’m sure to be ridiculed for coming to you. I brought my people here on false pretenses simply to ask for aid. I’ll lose my position. I’ll be cast out and unwelcome, but the thing that is stalking us is simply beyond any of us. It takes people in the night, it takes people in the day. A moment of inattention and a child can vanish from the arms of their mother.”

The Shaman ran out of words, shaking his head, seemingly lost in thought and sorrow.

“Did you say vanish?” Calvin asked. “Not ‘get dragged off’ or ‘eaten’, but ‘vanish’?”

“Yes.”

Calvin’s interest was piqued.

“Has anyone seen it?” Calvin asked. “Or perhaps remembered seeing it but didn’t think it was important until later?”

“No one has seen anything. There is no evidence to mark its passing. No memory of it.”

“Then how do you know it’s a living thing?” Calvin asked. “Could it be an Ability or spell seeking out and vaporizing people, or some kind of tear in reality that people keep falling through.”

The Genosian Maje raised his eyes and met Calvin’s gaze. “I hope you’ll trust me when I say that we know when something is stalking us. Evidence or no, we can feel its presence, hovering at the edge of perception. We’ve seen many Warped monsters find their way out of the south, but never anything like this.

Think it could be a Brain Worm?

Nah, they would definitely have seen it, unless it’s doing some real time-janky shit. Carefully avoiding people’s gazes doesn’t feel like it’s M.O.

“We can feel it’s corruption spreading from the south. Your own land, and that of Gadvera, aren’t much further away from the Deep Jungle than ours.”

I can’t help but feel like he put capital letters on deep jungle.

“This Deep Jungle,” Calvin asked with a frown. “Regularly spawns monsters?”

“Widowmakers, Kugeya and stranger regularly venture forward from that place.”

Is there another Siphon in the deep jungle? Calvin thought. It wasn’t as though humans were wagin war and killing each other by the tens of thousands in the remote jungle, leaving few reasons why the Warp concentration might be high enough to spawn monsters on a regular basis.

Siphons were an incredibly valuable resource, both for the Warp the generated, but also for the monster parts.

If there was actually a monster capable of vanishing so many people without being spotted, or if there was a siphon buried somewhere in the jungle, it would be more than worth Calvin’s time to find and kill/claim it.

Calvin tapped his finger on his arm as he contemplated.

There was, as ever, a very real possibility that he could die seeking profit, right here on the cusp of something great.

Balanced the possibility of losing everything he’d already made against an opportunity to get a new source of income and some new spell components while making some friends…

Calvin wasn’t sure which way he wanted to go with that decision until he glanced into Ella’s eyes. The feeling of her sister dying in her arms briefly travelled across the link between him and the towering genosian.

Ah, damnit.

“This whole seven generations thing doesn’t work for me,” Calvin said, waving his hand. Ella could feel through the Guya link that he’d already decided to help, and broke into a wide grin.

Her father didn’t know it, though, and Calvin wanted to get everything he could out of them. “Instead I want your word that your young people will spend their Forming days learning some new Skills. Chief among them Fishing and Animal Husbandry.”

“You want us…to become farmers?” Ella’s father said, the words dripping off his tongue with no small amount of disgust.

“I never said anything about farming. You don’t have to plant crops, I know you can’t eat them. You don’t have to clear land, either. I just want you to start breeding animals specifically for you to eat, and to aid in your daily lives. You could even breed something to help you hunt. Between that and increasing your options for food via fishing… Can you imagine if some genius years from now uses an Ability to create a creature that practically drips with meat created from consuming nothing but weeds, and your tribe is the only one that has it?”

“I…suppose those terms are acceptable.” He said.

“Oh, and I think this could’ve gone without saying, but I want to be absolutely clear. You don’t eat any of my people, ever again. Seven generations and beyond. If I see evidence of it, I’ll wipe the iron skin tribe from the face of Marconen.”

The shaman held his gaze for a full minute, his gaze roiling between emotions, uncertainty, fear and the desire to protect his people boiling against Calvin’s skin.

“Those terms are acceptable, but I won’t be able to convince them to accept them until after we’ve been saved. They are not in a mood to accept aid from humans, and until my gamble pays off, they will mock me for it.”

Calvin broke into a grin.

“I’m fine with that.”

What Calvin didn’t say was that he could easily enforce the bargain, whether they wanted him to or not. He’d be more than happy to do so.

Calvin debriefed Ella’s father until he knew as much as he did about this mysterious creature hunting them: not much.

He knew where the disappearances started. He knew that the disappearances were following them as they travelled northeast.

The fact that it followed them from place to place implied the creature or localized hole in space or whatever it was, was capable of moving. So more likely to be alive…or maybe they carried it with them?

“Just to be sure,” Calvin asked, holding out a hand. “None of your people recently found any mysterious artifacts and took it with you when you left your mountain?” Calvin asked, digging through his somewhat limited knowledge of cliché before he would believe for sure it was a monster no one had ever seen before.

No one even could see, according to the Shaman.

“I’ve neither seen nor heard of anything like that, and we’re travelling with nothing but our clothes and weapons, killing our food as we go. If someone had something unusual it would stand out.”

“Alright,” Calvin said, holding out his hand. “It’s a deal.”

The aging Maje shook his hand and shortly returned to his people, leaving Calvin there with his thoughts. Part of him still wanted to make the man into a smear on the stone floor of his tower, while the other part of him was looking forward to eviscerating this elusive creature and harnessing it’s abilities.

A very small part of him was pleased at his restraint and diplomacy.

Or maybe that was just Ella, through the Guya bond.

“A creature that grows meat and eats weeds?” Ella asked, draping her arm around his shoulder. “Isn’t that just a goat?”

“Hmm,” Calvin grunted, staring at the wall.

“What are you thinking about?” She asked, cocking her head.

“Which of my friends are the most disposable.” Calvin said, thumbing his chin.

If the creature was that hard to detect, there was a good chance it would snatch up someone before they could pin it down, which was unacceptable.

Calvin was pretty confident about his own chances, between Third Eye and his Tarak skin, he could probably pinpoint it fairly accurately.

Other people though…Lambs to the slaughter.

Definitely can’t have Kala come along. Goob either. Nadia’s replaceable so she can come…Baroke….Hmmm…maybe he can come. Baroke was practically indestructible.

“I’m coming,” Ella said, her tone steely as she looked down at him.

“Hm.” Calvin grunted agreement. He didn’t want to risk her life, but they were her people. Trying to stop her from helping them wouldn’t go well.

Now, how do I convince Kala not to follow me into the deep jungle, and convince her to take care of my legacy if I die?

He said as much to the Genosian savage who looked anxious to leave, pacing back and forth and grabbing her weapon.

“That’s an easy one,” Ella said with a shrug. “Just knock her up.”

Calvin tried, enthusiastically, but it didn’t work.

***Bekvah, Kala’s uncle, Prince***

“You signed up for the fun part,” He muttered, nursing his wounded leg. Between the broken glasses, gash on his thigh and the missing hand, he was practically an invalid, but despite all that, he was incredibly valuable as second in line to the throne of Gadvera and a powerful wizard.

“Damn right I did,” Jinnei said, the young woman peering out across the water at the port of Surrak, “I grew up at the feet of Surrak, why wouldn’t I want to take it back?”

Bekvah, having dealt a serious blow to Iletha’s industry not a week before, was planning on following up the first surprise attack with another.

For this purpose, they had bought out Jinnei’s crew.

The stolen fleet was sent home with skeleton crews along with the wounded and dead, while the remaining soldiers were given a single night to rest and sleep off the Break before they were bottled up again during their Forming Day and moved over to Jinnei’s vessel.

Thousands of young men had reached third and Fourth break in the attack on Ilestar, and Bekvah hoped to preserve their single day of accelerated learning for the attack on Surrak. Such a thing had never been done before, as the timing of a man’s Forming day was never guaranteed, and it couldn’t be preserved for more effective use.

Until Kala’s wedding gift.

I hope my charges get Skills like ‘City Liberating’, Bekvah thought, a ghost of a smile on his face. Hopefully freeing a city of innocents would be a good palate cleanser after the massacre at Ilestar.

Surrak was still under heavy guard, and while Iletha had been willing to let Gadverans dock for trade on account of their size and defences, Surrak would use the port trebuchets to sink any vessel that sported a crew of the dark skinned folk.

Jinnei’s crew were primarily Malkenrovian, with a few islanders and press-ganged ilethans thrown in for good measure. A Malkenrovian had lighter hair than An Ilethan on average, but with head wraps being common among sailors to ward off the hot sun, they looked exactly like Ilethans from a distance.

It was for those reasons that Karen’s Folly was allowed to dock.

The ship bumped up against the dock, and Bekvah heard the gangplank make contact with the wood, the soft hiss of ropes sliding against each other. Without wasting time, Bekvah held a squad container to his chest with his stump and twisted off the top of the first jar, then the second, unleashing the first two squads from their gooey prison.

“I’m not an eloquent man by any measure,” Bekvah said, scanning the tired men. “Not good at speeches and raising morale. But in this case, I don’t think I have to be.” He pointed his ruined arm at the familiar docks of Surrak.

“That’s your home.”

“Go take it back.”

What followed next was a battle for the history books, both in how short, brutal and exceptionally one-sided it was, and ultimately in how I marked a turning point in the longstanding rivalry between the two ocean nations.

The citizens of Surrak were not saved.

The citizens of Surrak were not there.

Upon breaking into the office of the man responsible for overseeing the city and reading his journal, Bekvah learned the horrifying truth: the citizens of Surrak had been shipped off to Malkenrovia to work as ‘slave labor’.

Even that would have been somewhat palatable were the distant country not teeming with inhuman monsters eager to burrow into a man’s brain.

They had been consigned to a fate worse than death by their captors.

I should have killed more of them, Bekvah thought, his anger briefly overriding his logic as his fingers whitened around the damning, half-burnt ledger.