”Care to explain what the fuck you think you’re doing?” Anastacia asked from the inquisitor whom she had pinned to the ceiling of the hallway. Beyond furious, she had tossed Teal about like a ragdoll a couple of times before even asking for an explanation. “The second I give you assholes a bit of trust, you start kicking maids like you owned the place.” She said and pressed him against the ceiling harder, making the wooden boards above him creak under the pressure.

Lady Helia had understandably fallen quiet and didn’t want to draw any attention to herself. She had some idea of how dangerous inquisitors were, and seeing one get thrown about like a piece of litter made her rethink her attitude towards the adventurer hired to keep the peace. Despite Anastacia’s initial display of power, the Ouan had thought it was a bit weird for the guild to sent such a runt to handle an extremely important quest, but seeing what exactly this runt was capable of, made her understand that perhaps it wasn’t a smart move to look down on her.

She still couldn’t see Anastacia all that well from distance, but even in the darkness that surrounded her, she could feel something powerful in the direction the adventurer’s voice came from. It may have been some of the overflowing and untrained necromancy that affected the Ouan ever so slightly, but Lady Helia had no knowledge of such things and simply assumed that Anastacia was no common mage.

“Could… could I be allowed to explain?” She finally opened her mouth when Teal’s bones started cracking along with the wood.

Slightly disappointed that the Ouan representative still had all of her clothes on, Anastacia turned her attention to her. “Yeah, sure. I’m not actually sure if he can talk right now or not.” She shrugged.

“Perhaps human adventurer Anastacia could release Teal first? I may be able to assure his innocence?” Lady Helia asked. From her intonation, one could tell that she was no longer quite sure about the adventurer being human.

The inquisitor hitting the floor made a bit of a crunching sound that would have probably bothered Anastacia if she hadn’t found out something interesting just then. “Just ‘Teal’ huh? So you two did get somewhere after all.” She smirked.

“Teal has seen all there is to see and known us in our purest form. Surely there is no need for act as if we were strangers anymore?” Lady Helia explained, referencing to the moment Teal was briefly blinded by the light.

“No, I haven’t.” The inquisitor coughed from the floor.

“That’s filthy.” Anastacia laughed before changing tone to a serious one again. “But we’re getting sidetracked. Why is he kicking Stel, when I sent her here just to get you two downstairs for lunch?”

“Does human adventurer Anastacia remember our complains about the canine beast? That horrid creature was clawing at our door once more, and as far as we knew, the beast was what Teal so bravely assaulted.” The Ouan representative explained while warily moving to help the inquisitor up.

“So you’re claiming magic hijinks?” Asked the adventurer skeptically.

Fortunately, mostly unharmed in any serious way, Teal coughed a few more times and stood up with Lady Helia’s aid. “That’s exactly what I’m claiming. I sensed nothing in the corridor, neither the wolf or the girl, and acted entirely on what I saw. I barely had time to look at it, but it was definitely a wolf, far bigger than normal and had what looked like thorns on it.” The inquisitor defended himself.

Anastacia’s jaw dropped when she heard the wolf from the tale of three hunters be get described in unquestionable detail. “Um… How well do you know this place’s history?” She asked and glanced at the maid, who appeared to still be too busy holding her knee and sobbing to care about what was being said.

“It’s a field? I assume there once was a forest that then got turned into a lodge, is there something to know besides that?” Teal said and tried the laugh, but it turned into coughing and chest pain before it even had a chance to begin.

Anastacia walked over to the injured maid and poked the bruised knee with her staff to cool it down, which both helped and hurt more at the same time, based on the wincing and whimpering it caused. “My loremaster is indisposed at the moment, so I’ll explain later. Let’s just say that I’ll believe you for now.” She sighed and pointed the staff at the two representatives she had recruited as assistants. “If there’s magic bullshittery going on, might be better to postpone lunch a bit more, until I’ve interrogated the high magister at least. You two can go and check on Farcie for me and squeeze him a bit – though based on how great things are going, he’s already dead too.”

Happy to hear no backtalk for once, the adventurer helped Stel back into her room and spent a while convincing that her knee was just bruised instead of ‘shattered’ like the maid herself claimed. However, it was still swollen and would probably make Stel limp for a few days.

After scooping some freshly fallen snow from the balcony and leaving it in a bucket for Stel to cool down her injury with, Anastacia took a couple of her spears and left to interrogate both Ilyu and Magnon.

To save time, she knocked on the forgemaster’s door and told him to follow her to the high magister’s room.

Magnon could probably pick up from the stern tone of the adventurer that something had changed, even if he didn’t have anything to do with it, but that remained to be seen.

Ilyu let them into her room without saying a word and sat down in one of the chairs around her coffee table while Magnon did the same, though he did take an entire sofa just for himself.

Anastacia walked around the room, acting like she was looking for clues, but in reality, she had no idea what to look for. There seemed to be far more personal items in the room than what the amount of luggage the high magister had come to the lodge with would have suggested, which meant that the mage was using portals to bring in things that the adventurer hadn’t been told about – both suspicious and potentially dangerous.

Much of the equipment was completely unfamiliar to Anastacia, but she tried her best to not show her utter lack of knowledge when it came to magic beyond just tossing a spell here and there, after all, she was supposed to primarily be a mage as far as anyone in the lodge was concerned.

One of the more interesting pieces in the room was a set of three metal plates that were mounted on thin, three-legged brass stands and could turn and rotate freely. They were arranged in a triangle with roughly two meters between each other and all faced towards the middle.

Anastacia tweaked one of the plates a fraction of a centimeter downwards, but swiftly pulled her hands off when the plate made a humming sound. As the humming intensified, a small black ball appeared in the middle of the triangle.

Pulsating faintly and warping the light around it, the ball grew a bit on every pulse until it was about as big as a human head. Though extremely suspicious, somehow the orb had an alluring feel to it, as if it was calling to anyone who stared into it for too long. Anastacia took a step closer to it and slowly reached towards it with her hand and was surprised to find out that it emanated heat, though not like a fire, but more like the body heat of a large creature.

The two representatives watched with great interest what the adventurer was doing but must have wrongly assumed that she knew what she was doing in the slightest, as they didn’t tell her to immediately stop messing with the orb.

Suddenly, the orb that began to look more like a tiny hole in reality, became a whole lot less appealing, as it begun leaking a thick, ink-like substance on the floor, creating a puddle that reflected no light whatsoever and appeared like a window to infinite darkness on its own.

Anastacia took a step back right when an inky tentacle, about the length and thickness of an adult’s arm, swiped at her from the depths of the orb, spraying a bit of the ink on her uniform. Having missed its target, it reached further out and tried to grab the necromancer.

“Aaaaaand none of that, thank you!” She said and hastily flipped the metallic plate she had fiddled with, hoping it would undo whatever it had done.

Luckily, it did just that and shrank down the black orb in a blink of an eye, however, the tentacle was left on the wrong side of reality and was cleanly cut off. Falling into the pool of ink, it splashed the surrounding area with the black muck. Despite being severed, the tentacle flopped around for a while, steadily slowing down and eventually dying as everyone in the room stared at it, without really knowing what to do about it.

Anastacia poked the dead appendage of some eldritch abomination with her staff to make sure it was actually dead. “I’m sure the maids will get that off the carpet…” She muttered and slipped away from the magical equipment. “Anyway, the portal to... octopus-nightmare seems to be in order. I would have preferred if you were to tell me about all of this though.”

“It is a current stabilizer; I just haven’t had the chance to tune it yet.” The high magister explained and used a napkin to wipe the corners of her eyes. “I wanted to use for figuring out what you are, but…”

“Ah yes, a current stabilizer. I just didn’t recognize it because mine is violet and a bit more compact.” Anastacia nodded and talked out of her ass. “And again, I’m completely human.”

“Can we maybe get this over with, you have a murderer to catch.” Magnon interrupted them and seemed to be either anxious or at the end of his patience.

Anastacia sat down opposite to them and put one of her feet on the table. “We can, I actually wanted to talk to you two first, but figured you could use a bit of time and there were some more obvious suspects I wanted to talk to first.” She said and monitored the diplomats’ reactions very carefully. “There are a few things I’ve figure out about Nikolai’s death: as everyone probably has figured out, he was poisoned.”

“With the coffee, right? Something was slipped into his cup?” The forgemaster asked and leaned forwards, demanding more answers.

“Yes and no. Right now, I’m fairly certain that the coffee itself was poisoned last night, but before you start to worry, you’re both fine. The poison used was likely something called divenum; an extremely annoying type of a poison that has two components, both beneficial on their own, but mix them up and you’ve got all sorts of trouble. It appears that Nikolai had gotten an injection of the first component, chiroptera, at some point, likely without him noticing it.” The adventurer explained, dug out a coffee bean from her pocket and tossed it on the table. “The entire serving of coffee was likely laced with the second component, thorp- tophr-… thropcillin, which does nothing much on its own, besides alleviating hangovers a bit.”

As soon as divenum had been mentioned, the high magister’s heart had skipped a beat or two, and she tried to sneakily glance at her crystalline ring a few times.

The necromancer noticed this and raised her brow. “Oh! And there’s one more thing about the second component I forgot to tell you about: It needs to be stored in ice.” She revealed and tapped on her own finger while staring at Ilyu.

Being able to put two and two together, the forgemaster raised his voice. “Ilyu, what have you done?!” He shouted and hit the coffee table, snapping the hardwood cover in two like it was nothing. “I know what you had in that ring of yours! If you had anything to do with Nikolai’s death…”

“NO! IT’S NOT LIKE THAT!” The high magister yelled and kicked the table half near to her.

“Magnon! Calm down and let me handle this.” Anastacia joined in and struck her staff on the floor. “Ilyu, show me your ring and start explaining.”

Ilyu took off her crystal ring and handed it over to the adventurer. It was indeed missing the icy crystal that had been on it when the high magister first arrived at the lodge.

Starting to choke up a bit, the high magister spoke up. “Yes, it used to have a tiny shard of thropcillin ice on it, but I swear it was only in case I personally needed it. I would never be reckless enough to just taint the entire batch of coffee with it, and I would NEVER use it to poison Nikolai! He was just as much my friend as he was yours.” She said to the forgemaster and almost started to cry again.

“So where is it then? Did you use it this morning?” Anastacia inquired further.

“No… When I woke up, it was already gone. Sometimes it melts if I don’t put it in its case for the night, and I barely remember last night.” Ilyu said and shook her head.

“Convenient.” Anastacia scoffed.

Magnon frowned and scratched his head. “Anastacia, did you ever follow up on that elf thing? Have you talked to Farcie yet?” He remembered the high magister’s drunken warning about not trusting the elf.

Having completely forgotten about it, Anastacia began to rethink her choice of sending Teal and Lady Helia interrogate the merchant elf. “Nnnno. I’ve been busy with trying to get the inquisitor and Lady Helia to bump uglies, then there was the whole gathering you didn’t help me at all in and then Fang got killed-“

“The war chief is dead?” Ilyu interrupted her by asking and seemed genuinely surprised, for whatever it was worth.

“Shit.” The adventurer realized what she had blurted out before she was meaning to. “Well yeah, he got stabbed a bit after the whole incident out there, and well… here we are.”

“You can’t possibly think that we had something to do with it, just because of what happened in the hallway.” The forgemaster protested and would have probably hit the table again, if it had been intact. “I was in my room, and you saw me go there!”

Anastacia shrugged. “Normally that would be pretty ironclad, but normally people aren’t friends with a high magister of Astra. I’d be surprised if one of these thingamajigs here wouldn’t allow you to remotely stab someone from your room, or would I find something like that if I were to search your room?”

Ilyu and Magnon shared a quick look that ended with the high magister nodding.

The forgemaster leaned closer to Anastacia to whisper. “Originally, once this meeting was to be over and done with, Astra was going to withdraw from the covenant if they didn’t manage to scare Mournvalley into giving them what they wanted with Toumarill and Ou. Vul and Vassund were then going the help them pressure the necromancers into giving up some of their secrets in exchange for aid whenever Ou would inevitably try to kill any and all necromancers they could.” He revealed and got up.

Magnon picked up a decently sized glass cylinder that contained a white crystal that was about the size of a fist and suspended by brass spikes from both ends of the cylinder. Both ends of the cylinder were sealed with more brass, fitted tightly over the glass and decorated with several strips of paper that were full of runes and attached to the brass with wax seals. One end had four sturdy legs the cylinder could be stood on so that it stayed upright and didn’t wobble about at all. The other had a handle it could be carried from and three brass bearing that had been embedded into the fittings so that they were able to spin freely.

“This is an astral projector.” The high magister said and swatted away the forgemaster’s hand as he was trying to fiddle with the bearings. “If attuned correctly by adjusting these three bearings, it can be used to project a transient version of your being into a desired location within a hundred meters or so. This projection can speak, hear and touch things to a degree without your actual body moving from its original location. If you search his and Nikolai’s room, you will find one in each. We were going to use them to discuss Astra’s change of allies in secret before…” She continued and began tearing up again.

Anastacia tapped at the glass and pretended to check a couple of the paper strips as if she knew what they did. “I see, but would this projection be able to stab someone?” She insisted.

Ilyu wiped her eyes again and sat back down. “Yes, but before you say anything more, this oaf can’t adjust them at all, so he really couldn’t have aimed his to the war chief’s room. More than a few years back, he tried to use one to sneak into the maids’ bath without asking me first at a summit we were both invited to, to this day he hasn’t told me where he ended up.” She said, causing Magnon to shudder and have some clearly uncomfortable flashbacks. “Last time we met Nikolai, a couple of months back, I gave him one and taught that aid of his to attune it, in preparation for this meeting.”

“Do you still think we had anything to do with either of the murders?” The forgemaster asked.

Anastacia thought about the situation long and hard, at least in her scale of thinking. The facts were that the medicine from Ilyu’s ring was of the very specific type needed for the poison and now gone, and Magnon did have the equipment needed to stab Fang without either of the necromancers present noticing it, even if he supposedly didn’t know how to use them. Compared to what she had gone to Fang with, the evidence against the two were exponentially more damning, but she still either needed actual proof or a bit of time to let her enchanted ring recharge to know for sure. “I’m lacking evidence saying otherwise – so how about you help me find some? I’ve yet to look into this elf angle, but unless Ilyu starts to remember what she meant last night, there isn’t much I can do.”

Magnon was clearly annoyed by the adventurer not believing him but couldn’t prove her wrong either. He sighed and looked around the room. “Maybe one of these baubles and trinkets can jog your memory?”

“No, we would need the high magister of dream weaving for that. I’m the high magister of arcane operations, so unless it’s about primal forces of magic, I don’t have the equipment or skills for it.” Ilyu admitted her inadequacies freely. Part of being granted the position of a high magister was accepting that their limited life span wouldn’t be enough to truly master more than a single, minute part of the collection of things covered by the concept of magic. “There is one thing though.” She continued and pulled out a flask from under her clothes.

“Some kind of memory juice?” Anastacia naively guessed.

Ilyu happily took a quick swig. “Quite the opposite. This is Kamivian moonshine. They might eat human faces, but they do know their way around a still.” She said and took another one, obviously happy to drink away her worries.

“Ah, drunk Ilyu might remember what she did last time she was drunk, it has worked before.” The forgemaster nodded.

Though it seemed like a thinly veiled excuse to get drunk again, Anastacia figured she could let it pass for now. “Seems like bullshit, but okay. Magnon, you’re responsible for her now, so don’t let her overdo it and only leave this room to tell me that you figured something out, otherwise I’ll assume you’re trying to escape and will act on it.” She instructed the forgemaster and stood up. “Also, I’m taking this.”

The necromancer picked up the astral projector and left the pair of diplomats to their drinking. Even if Magnon and Ilyu turned out to be behind one of the murders, they were in it together and it was probably safe to leave them in the same room – safer than leave a drunken mage alone at least.

After quickly checking up on Stel and hiding the projector in her room, Anastacia swooped by the kitchen to grab something to eat. The chefs, who had trained years to cook for some of the most important people of the world, were forced to watch in horror as the adventurer carved a fresh loaf of bread hollow and started to throw in random cuts of meat. Pieces of steak that cost more than several day’s wages for commoners were tossed in with bacon and meatballs, without any of the fine sauces or spices meant for them. One of the poor professionals almost cried as Anastacia asked him to give a rib eye steak another few minutes on the pan since it was left a bit raw and then cut away most of it because the parts with fat ‘seemed suspicious’.

With her newly butchered culinary abomination in hand, she headed back upstairs to see how Teal and Lady Helia were faring with the elf. She had every now and then checked that nothing too suspicious was going on, but mostly just picked up on Farcie steadily getting more and more nervous and panicky, which had probably more to do with the interrogators than anything else.

Just as she was about to reach the door, it swung open and the leaf-haired elf dashed out. He noticed the snacking adventurer and dashed to hide behind her.

“Save me from these ruffians and I’ll double your pay!” The elf pleaded and cowered in fear.

Anastacia tossed a bit of meat into her mouth and glanced at the diplomats, who had been in Farcie’s room on her behalf in the first place. “I don’t know, they look pretty annoying to deal with. Make it three times my pay and we’ll see.” She suggested just to see if she could push for more money.

“Fine! Three times your pay! Just get rid of them!” Farcie continued begging.

The adventurer rolled her eyes. “Did he do anything?” She mouthed to Teal, who shook his head. “Okay, that’s enough guys, stop bothering Farcie and move along.” She said with a half-heartedly serious tone and pretended to fend off the assailants while first pointing at her snack and then downstairs, suggesting that the inquisitor and archfurion visit the kitchen to get themselves some as well. To sell this lazy act, she tapped the floor with her staff as the two diplomats left.

“Are they gone?” The cowardly elf asked and lifted his head.

“Yeah, come with me and we’ll talk a bit.” Anastacia said and headed back to her room.

The elf followed almost uncomfortably close and kept worriedly glancing around until they closed the door and shut themselves into the safety of the adventurer’s room.

“Why is the poisoner maid here?” Farcie asked and pointed at the injured Stel, who had kept herself busy with a book she had managed to grab from the nightstand.

“My party leader once said that if a quest doesn’t end with a maid in your bed, you’ve failed the quest. I’m just getting that out of the way.” Anastacia lied for no particular reason other than she didn’t want to explain the whole story, though it really was something Gilbert had mentioned in the past. She sat down and gestured for the elf to do the same. “Why don’t you start by telling me what you told to Teal and Lady Helia.”

Farcie lurched into the chair opposite of the adventurer and nervously looked at the pile of weapons and the maid who had supposedly poisoned their host. The leaves in his hair had been bright green and fresh when he had arrived at the lodge, but now they had lost a lot of their color and were partly wilting away. His proud demeanor had wilted just the same and what was left was the behavior that of a scared rodent, constantly checking his surroundings and flinching at the slightest of sounds.

“I shouldn’t have come, I’m a merchant, not a diplomat.” He muttered and shook his head. “I sell grain and bulk goods; this is too much.”

“To be fair, I don’t think this is the regular diplomatic meeting experience.” Anastacia joked and finished her snack.

“We’re being killed off and you have the nerve to joke? The inquisitor told me about Fang and what happened to him.” The elf said and slammed her hand on the coffee table. “Don’t you see? The first one to go was the helpless old guy, then the elderly orc. What’s left now is an archfurion, a vice commander, a high magister, a vulcan and a literal inquisitor – it’s obvious that I’m the next one to go!”

Anastacia could definitely see his point, the only reason Farcie wasn’t the easiest target in the whole meeting was that he could at least run and escape. “That’s not going to happen, I’m here to make sure of it.” She said reassuringly.

The elf scoffed. “A fat load of good that did to Fang. I’m sorry but I don’t exactly trust you.”

“He’s right…” Stel suddenly pitched in. “You heard what Teal said: a wolf with a mane of thorns. The hag is coming back and Cottona isn’t here to save us anymore. We’re all dead.”

Farcie promptly stood up and headed to the door. “That’s it! I don’t know what she’s talking about, but I’m out. I’ll walk in the damn snow if I have to.” He panicked and only barely managed to open the door from all of his shaking.

Anastacia didn’t bother to chase him. The exit from the lodge was firmly locked and only people with the key were Nikolai, the guard outside in the stables and her, so Farcie wasn’t going to get far with his escape attempt.

“Did you have to do that?” She asked from the maid annoyedly. “This is just a bunch of diplomatic wankery at work. Besides, why would the hag return now and not like last week or something?”

“You people literally came here to argue. The hag is the spirit of discord so there’s no better way to revive her. Some books I have say that the type of entity the hag was doesn’t go away just like that, they go into hiding and resurface later. I also had an exchange of letters with a scholar who said that the land would need to be blessed to rid it from primordial spirits and the like, while he obviously didn’t quite get how big of a part Cottona played in Vassundian history, he did know his stuff when it came to the rest.” The maid explained and Anastacia could feel the flood of obsessed reciting what was about to be unleashed once again. “But I have this theory, where Lady Cottona didn’t actually die. I didn’t mention it before since it’s not what the carvings depicted, but you see, the original story was written in some old language that no one even speaks anymore, so it got translated more than a couple of times. So there’s a whole bunch of versions where the three hunters just parted ways because of their arguments got out of hand. And then there are a few stories from the hunter tribes of the nearby area that mention a silver-haired beauty who traveled the lands, vanquishing more than a few legendary creatures and ended up eventually becoming a goddess!”

“That’s dumb, people don’t become gods just like that.” Anastacia commented and waited for the elf to return.

“They do! If I could walk, I’d go to my room and get some of my research. I’ve found several instances where mortals have become gods and a whole bunch of other evidence. I’ve also got a ranking of which gods are more likely to be her. Her main traits were obviously battle prowess, beauty, purity and bravery, so she’d have at least some of them as her aspects. I’ve also taken into account any hunter gods from the area-“ The endless stream of borderline insane rambling came to an sudden end because of a less than manly scream from the great hall, followed by a massive crashing sound of something huge hitting the floor.

Anastacia jumped up from her seat and told Stel to lie low while she checked the situation. Of course, she could tell what had happened right away, but didn’t want to give any more fuel to Stel’s theory about the hag.

She was the first one to arrive to the hall, but only by a few seconds as Teal and Lady Helia rushed in from the kitchen. What awaited them was the chandelier, made from a set of gigantic antlers, that had hanged over the middle of the hall, laying down on the floor. Under it were the crushed remains of an elf, who had met an untimely but swift end on his way back upstairs.