Reud strides through Littlestream, ignoring the shocked whispers of its inhabitants. Their attention isn’t on him, however. Instead, their focus is wholly on the contents of the cart being pulled along in his wake.

A few steps behind him walk Bo and the new skeleton, Tel, pulling a wooden cart. On that cart, dwarfing it entirely, lies the remains of a huge magical stag beast. Not that it is all that easy to recognize it as such now. His two servants mutilated the beast during their fight. Now it looks like nothing more than a vast mass of charred flesh and bone.

Across the square the Mayor, Graham, bustles towards Reud, his face worried.

“My lord Reud.” Graham calls. “You’re causing quite the panic in…” He trails off as he gets closer and takes in the remains of the beast. “Idia protect me, what have you brought into my village?”

“Your rampaging beast, killed as requested.” Reud says.

“This is…” Graham quickly recovers. “Well, in that case, on the behalf of the whole village I thank you for your help. If you’ll come with me, we can handle your payment.” Graham goes to turn around then stops. “Though, if I could request one more thing from you, my lord?”

Reud nods his head.

“Could you dispose of that?” He gestures at the vast mound of flesh. “It’s unsettling the villagers, and I’d like to have it as far away from here as possible.”

With a thought, Reud orders the skeletons to take the corpse outside the village. If Graham didn’t want it, he would be more than happy to make use of it. Reanimating a giant stag beast like this? Excitement rises within him as he considers the possibilities. What did its bones look like? Would he need to modify his standard animation spell to account for four legs?

“My lord?” Graham’s voice snaps Reud from his thoughts.

“I’m sorry, my mind wandered for a moment. Could you repeat what you were saying?” Reud says, feeling his cheeks heat a little as he realizes the man had been talking.

Graham adjusts his floppy hat, hiding a frown of annoyance. “I was saying if you could follow me, we can talk in my house.”

Reud gestures for him to go ahead, and together they walk across the square. As they pass people some of them wave to him, whilst others avoid his gaze and hurry in the other direction. Over the past couple of weeks in this village, Lilia and Reud had tried to connect with the villagers. Small favours here and there. Most of it done by Lilia, of course. She really had a way with people. The results of all that effort had been better acceptance by some of the village, though there were still some that stubbornly avoided all contact with the pair of them.

From what Reud could gather, these people were divided into two camps. The first was those that thought that the killing of Telac would bring the wrath of the Duke down on their heads, and avoided them in the hope it would aid their case in such an eventuality. The second camp was those who had lost children or family members to the Seekers. It seems they did not trust anyone with even a hint of magic as a result. An attitude that would likely take a long time to change.

Graham pulls open the door to his house, leading Reud through a low doorway into a large sitting room. A number of large, cushioned chairs ring a circular table. Along the far wall a number of cabinets stand, including a shelf laden with books. All expensive goods. This was a room meant to project wealth and power. Reud looks at Graham, calculating. The man was richer than he had originally judged.

Graham strides across the room and begins to dig through a cabinet. Reud settles himself into a chair, looking over at the shelf laden with books. The tomes have titles like The lineage of the great houses of Rudase, and On the classification of winged creatures. The quality of the bindings, the decoration along the spine, would put each one easily around the forty crown range.

“Here you go, my lord.” Graham finally says, pulling a small purse from the cabinet. “Five crowns as payment for ridding us of the beast terrorizing the village. You also said you wanted some information as the rest of your payment?”

Reud accepts the purse, gesturing for Graham to seat himself in one of the other chairs. “I heard something very curious recently. Apparently, the Seekers have taken a lot more children from this village than the others. Even a pair of twins this very year. I was interested in why this village has managed to attract so much more attention than the rest.”

Graham slumps, his face filling with sadness. “It really is terrible, so many of our children taken. Over the last decade we’ve lost seven. Though, your information isn’t quite accurate. We aren’t the only place affected. Aldsville, Eastrest, and Nileshurst have been similarly unlucky.”

“Really?” Reud exclaims, unable to keep the shock from his voice. “So many! What is going on around here?”

Graham looks confused. “What do you mean, my lord?”

“Well, the number of children with enough affinity to be detected by the Seekers. It’s high. Far too high.”

“Is this unusual, my lord?” Graham asks. “All the villages along the Great North Road are similarly affected. Only the smaller, more remote villages, have been spared. Though, I don’t have as close a relation with those places, so they may just be hiding such information from me.”

Reud rubs his temples, thinking. What exactly connects all these places? “Yes, this is very unusual. Pretty much unheard of, in fact. The fact that this phenomenon has occurred is fascinating to me, and any information you can give me will settle the remainder of the bounty.”

Graham sits back in his chair. “I’m not sure what else I can tell you, my lord. The Seekers come, ask questions, then take some children. Their reasoning for doing so are a mystery to me.”

“How about the parents who recently lost the twins. What can you tell me about them?”

“Cecily is a lovely woman, a real beauty of the village. A very talented seamstress, she performs custom work for the merchants in Avonford.” Graham points at his sleeve, decorated with intricate needlework. “This is some of her work. Sadly, since the loss of her children her mood had darkened. I hear she barely ever emerges from her home now.”

“How about the father? Can you tell me about him?”

Graham looks awkward. “We do not actually know who the father is. Cecily has been extraordinarily tight-lipped on the matter. It is assumed the children are the result of an ongoing dalliance with a spoken-for man, but we honestly have no idea.”

Reud sits forward. An unknown father, maybe that was the link? “How about the other families that have lost children. What can you tell me about them?”

Graham strokes his long beard. “There was Linota and Fulk, lovely couple, but sadly the wasting cough took them both a few winters past. Before that Roesia, she just arrived in the village one day, already with child, and stayed. After her child was taken she took her own life. Before that… I’m sorry, my memory fails me.” Graham stands and walks over to the cabinet. “If it pleases you, however, you could look through the village records yourself.” He pulls out a heavy tome.

Reud smiles, accepting the tome from him. “That would please me, thank you.”

Opening it, he begins to flick through. Each page is filled with neat rows of tiny script, detailing major events in the village's history. Weddings, funerals, new arrivals, departures, and more are all detailed. After each year of events, comes a detailed accounting of the taxes paid by each resident. Reud skips through the tome, checking the dates. The records go back over half a century.

Graham’s eyes bore into him, making Reud uncomfortable. How was he supposed to focus with this man staring at him the entire time?

“This is quite detailed.” Reud says, looking up from the book. “It will take me a while to go through, and surely you have more pressing matters to attend to? There’s no need for you to watch me.”

Graham shifts uncomfortably. “You are right, my lord. However, the records. If anything were to happen…”

“You can trust me with this, I will treat it with the utmost care.” Reud says.

“I don’t…”

“Please, go do your duty. Once I am finished I will return it to the cabinet and leave your house in peace.” Reud smiles. “Have I given you any reason to distrust me?”

Graham shakes his head, obviously wanting to argue but holding himself back. “As you wish, my lord. In that case, please excuse me.” He stands, bowing deeply, before walking out of the room, throwing reluctant glances back at the tome.

With the man’s stare no longer distracting him, Reud turns his attention back to the book. The entries paint a picture of a relatively normal village, modest in population and income. The mortality rate is depressingly high though. If only they had a biomancer - or a healer, as the mages specializing in repairing the body were otherwise known - the ailments that claimed so many of these lives would have been simple to cure. Before the war, biomancers would compete against one another for the prestige of being the person to cure the deadliest diseases or heal the gravest wounds. They would travel from village to village, curing people along their way. Just another thing that Lightire ruined.

Reud continues to read through the book, stopping at the entries for the birth of Cecily’s children. Just as Graham had said, the space for the father was blank. A couple of years before that his eyes spot more names, Linota and Fulk. Their son was taken almost immediately after his tenth birthday, the same age as the twins.

Reud skips through the book, looking for the boy’s birth. And there it was, Hamo, born to Linota and Fulk. A few lines below it however, was a curious entry. A mere few months before was an entry for the marriage between Linota and Fulk. A rushed marriage to ensure the child would not be born out of wedlock?

As Reud continues to read through the records a picture begins to form. Eleven instances of Seekers taking children are detailed, each child taken within a couple of months of their tenth birthday. Of the eleven parents, six of them have no father listed, and three of the remaining couples rushed into a marriage shortly before the child's birth.

Closing the book, Reud stands and rubs his neck, stiff from sitting hunched over the tome for so long. A curious pattern was emerging in all this, but to be sure he would need to investigate the other village’s records and check that they display the same traits.

***

Pulling his cloak tighter around his body to stave off a chill breeze, Reud heads north out the village, towards where he sent Bo and Tel with the stag beast corpse.

The soul of the former tax collector was adapting well to the reanimation, the new name and the removal of most of the man’s memories stopping the worst of his violent tendencies. It seems that it had been worth spending the time to reanimate him as a greater undead. Still, Reud would need to keep a close eye on the new skeleton to ensure he didn’t regress to old habits.

Reud passes out through the wooden gates and into the woods, heading north. Unlike the land south of the village, the land up here isn’t used for fields, instead being dominated by dense forest. Three leagues north of the village lie the ruins of Srinaber, where he had spent the majority of the last few centuries. The villagers consider the ruins to be cursed, inhabited by demonic servants of Vistol, into which anyone who ventured within would never return. They even refuse to grow food too close to the old city, for fear that it will be similarly cursed. A caution that may have been valid centuries ago, when Lightire magic still infected the land, but no longer. It did, however, help keep people away from Reud, letting him focus on his research.

The clash of metal on metal filters to his ears through the undergrowth, mixed with the faint sounds of a woman’s voice. As Reud gets closer to the source of the noise, the voice gets clearer. Lilia’s new voice. It’s been so long since he’d heard her original voice that he couldn’t even remember what it sounded like. He was slowly getting used to her new appearance, and bit by bit his memories of her from before being replaced with memories of her now. One day, would he forget the old Lilia completely?

Shaking his head to clear his mind of those insidious thoughts, he steps around a tree and emerges into a clearing. Lilia stands over Rachel, the young woman lying on her back, her face red and glistening with sweat. Rachel raises her torso into a crunch, her body shivering with the exertion, before collapsing back down onto the grass.

“Feel that pain! Feel those muscles! That is where you need to hold strength. The power in your strikes comes from your core.” Lilia clenches a fist in the air. “If you hold tightness there, you can project strength through the blade.”

Reud gives her a little wave when she looks up, catching her attention. The stern instructor look disappears, replaced with a radiant smile. “Have a short rest.” She says to Rachel, before walking over to him.

Stopping in front of him, she places her hands on her hips, replacing her smile with a mock frown. “And what do you think you’re doing here?”

“I was just wandering through the woods and heard some sounds.” Reud says, trying to look sincere.

Lilia raises an eyebrow. “Go on.”

“Someone could have been in trouble, I had to investigate!” Reud continues.

“Right. And the fact we were training here never came into it?” She says, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

“You were? I didn’t know. What a coincidence!” Reud exclaims, putting a hand over his mouth in mock surprise.

Lilia looks at him for a moment longer, fighting a smile. Reud tries to keep his face impassive as well, but the sight of her trying to hold a frown is just too cute. Stepping forward, he wraps her in a big hug.

“Get off me! I’m covered in sweat!” She protests, making no effort to extract herself from his arms. In response Reud squeezes her tighter. A moment of weak protesting later she is hugging him back just as fiercely.

“How goes the training?” Reud asks her, finally releasing her. “It looks like you’re working the poor girl to death.”

Lilia lets out a silvery peal of laughter. “She was the one who wanted to increase the intensity. Besides, once she works herself to the edge of collapse, I just infuse her with a pump of mana, and let that repair her muscles.”

“You can do that? I thought you had to be a biomancer to… well… heal people.”

“This isn’t healing, it's more accelerating the body’s natural healing processes. A common training method back in the academy, at least in the warriors. Not that you would know, you weedy mage.” She pokes him playfully in the arm.

Reud lets out a laugh, the familiar expression bringing back old memories. In the academy the rivalry between the warriors who focused on body strengthening magics, and the mages who focused on ranged attack magics, was the focus of most of his educational life. Countless competitions, pranks, and challenges between the two divisions was what helped shape him into the mage he was today. And besides, the rivalry between the departments was what pushed Lilia and him together originally.

A softness on his lips breaks him from his memories, as Lilia gives him a quick kiss.

“How goes the winning over the villagers?” She asks.

“Oh, right!” Reud pulls out the pouch of coins, giving it a quick shake to jingle the coins inside. “Our first payment. Though, I also found out something a little odd.” Reud tells Lilia of all he found from the records.

Lilia smiles at him. “You really do have a talent for finding mysteries everywhere don’t you?”

“What do you mean? I was just curious as to why-” Reud protests.

“I wasn’t telling you off. I love your inquisitive nature.” Lilia says, laughing. “Go on, investigate. Uncover the truth. Solve the mystery.”

Reud smiles. “I’ll need to ask around in the next village over, Aldsville. Did you want to come along?”

Lilia shakes her head. “I have a responsibility here. You go.”

“Are you sure - aren’t you a little curious?” Reud asks.

“I’m sure you’ll tell me everything there is to know once you figure it all out.” Lilia steps away from him, pulling an arm across her chest into a stretch. “I’m still trying to get used to this body, and I took her as a student.” She gestures to the young woman still lying panting flat on her back. “You know how seriously I take that.”

Reud smiles, she really was her old stubborn self. He could never change her mind once it was made up. “Okay, I’ll leave tomorrow morning, and be back by the evening.”