”That went pretty well, I’d say.” Anastacia proudly declared the moment she and Iris stepped out of the blacksmith’s shop.

Still with a leftover haunted look on her face from having to perform a quick check up on the dwarf with Armaata breathing down on her neck, Iris respectfully disagreed. “We were almost killed by some kind of an insane nightmare creature, that is in dire need of therapy by the way, probably got our souls molested somehow, not only failed to deal with the said beast but made a deal with it that forces us to continue working with it and didn’t even manage what we went there for!”

“The key word is ‘almost’. No one died.” The adventurer shrugged.

“We went into a regular shop, dying shouldn’t even be on the table!” Iris almost screamed and grabbed Anastacia by the collar of her violet cloak.

“No one died.” Anastacia repeated, still perfectly content with what she considered a success.

Iris let go of her and leaned against the shop’s wall to calm down. “You need help, and higher standards.” She sighed already exhausted by what was supposed to be the first stop of their outing. “Why didn’t you just kill it? You had weapons right there and surely it would have been better to not have that thing around?”

“Why would I have? That’s just what muses do, so it’s not like she could have helped herself. The blacksmith didn’t ask me to do that either, nor was there a quest about it. Even personally, I’d much rather see what comes out of it.” Anastacia explained her view on the matter. As far as she was concerned, having Armaata around could be useful, and it means she isn’t wreaking havoc elsewhere. “That and I wasn’t in control of that situation at all. Attacking a muse is beyond pointless and she could have killed us in a heartbeat, had she actually wanted to do that.”

While Iris let out her frustration as a muffled scream into the sleeve of her robes, Anastacia started plotting their course through the area. Their first stop hand ended happily with the muse agreeing to let the dwarf sleep off his exhaustion and later leave the shop for food, but they still needed to go and shop for some necessities and hire a courier. Neither of the tasks was supposed to be terribly exciting, but then again, visiting a blacksmith wasn’t supposed to be that either, so the adventurer gave her cleric a moment to gather herself.

Something, however, bothered her slightly. “Do you want to tell me why you have metal wires coming out of your soul or whatever?” Anastacia asked.

Iris lifted her head. “Why do you even think I would know? I can’t dissect a soul, much less diagnose one even if I could. Maybe souls are supposed to do that, what if you’re the odd one out here?”

As much as Anastacia would have wanted to refute that, she knew exactly how much hers had gone through in the last months. “Mine’s probably in a hundred pieces and held together with an old potato sack at this point. So, you know what? – fair.”

When the adventurer arbitrarily decided that their break had gone on for long enough, she started heading down the largest street that led out of the square, the one that would eventually lead to the guild offices. Iris begrudgingly followed her, fearing that the all-expenses paid-part of their agreement would no longer be on the table if she started being difficult. The shops along the main street were heavily aimed towards adventurers about to leave on quests and mostly displayed goods more useful on the road than in the city. Some of them could have possibly carried a few of the things Iris needed, but Anastacia insisted that she wanted to visit a particular shop she had heard ‘carried anything and everything between the mortal and divine planes’ – whatever that could have possibly meant. However, what the main street had, was the office of a courier company that handled most of the deliveries for the city’s adventurers.

As they casually made their way onwards, Iris got her first proper look at the dozens of adventurers heading in and out of the guild office. From her experience in fights, she could immediately tell that each one of them was at the very least a troublesome foe, just from the way they carried themselves as well as the equipment they openly carried in the public. However, the most striking thing about them was the sheer variety. On her inquisitorial travels, she had seen many different kinds of people, but never even a fraction of what Valor had to offer in a single place. Despite having grown up in the same human-only environment as Anastacia, Iris had considerably more knowledge on the various species outside of the more common ones and so could tell that almost every nook of the world was somehow represented by a wandering mage glued to a display window, an armored warrior reading through a quest notice or some other type of adventurer going about their business.

“How nice.” She absentmindedly said and smiled.

“What is?” Anastacia asked and tried to track where Iris was looking.

“The people.” Iris explained. “It’s a stark difference to the admittedly pasty folks back home. I do hope I live to see the day Mournvalley is more like this…”

The adventurer stopped to appreciate scene as well. “Is that one of those ‘goals’ or ‘plans’ you were talking about?” She asked, genuinely a tad curious. Anastacia hadn’t really paid mind to what the new rulers of Mournvalley were about, as long as it didn’t concern her, but since the opportunity was there, she inquired.

“Very much so. Coquelicot gave us two ideals to uphold in her… absence. First: in Mournvalley, ruling should be done by the most powerful necromancers – and second: necromancers deserve better.” Iris stated somewhat proudly. “Both sound absolutely horrible, but aren’t all that bad when explained. About the first, that’s just how it has to be with necromancers. According to boss, weak leaders amass pointless wealth to feign strength, while strong ones can simply show it when required. On a more practical note, if the most powerful necromancers aren’t already in power, they will simply take over because there’s no one to stop them.”

“You guys clearly weren’t chosen because you’re great at what you’re doing, so I suppose that makes sense that it’s a power thing.” Anastacia rudely pointed out.

“Yeah… Honestly the others are pretty good by now, it’s just me fucking up things now…” Iris sighed and resumed her explanation. “But anyway, the second ideal we are supposed to be working towards is simply put just about making necromancers normal people in the eyes of the world. We’ve spent millennia as the boogeyman, Mournvalley is poor by any standard and we know next to nothing about other cultures around the world. So, the point is to do what we can to open up, do something so that people would actually want to come and visit, maybe eventually move in…”

The adventurer let out a snarky chuckle. Somehow, she had trouble believing such a cozy idea was anywhere near what Coquelicot had originally meant or that it had any real chance of coming true, even if the new inquisition didn’t crumble.

The slightest ridicule was enough to break Iris’ poise and her mood sank. “You could at least act like I have a chance to make this work. I could’ve just stayed in bed and kept kicking myself if I wanted to feel like crap… At least there wouldn’t have been muses to almost kill me there.” She mumbled with a defeated tone and continued walking down the street.

Even through her distaste for Mournvalley and just general crudeness, the interaction let a sour taste in Anastacia’s mouth. Usually when she was being an ass, people had a comeback or just shrugged off her comment. She didn’t really know what to do with someone who couldn’t even take banter anymore and had to just shut up.

They walked in an awkward silence for a couple of minutes until they reached the courier company’s office. Not really knowing what to say, Anastacia watched as the look on Iris’ face grew darker and darker as she no doubt dwelled in the hopelessness of her situation. She thought about apologizing for her rudeness, but didn’t get the chance before Iris escaped inside.

The office was fairly cramped as far as businesses went, consisting only of a tight, almost corridor-like room that led from the door to a simple counter. Both walls of the room were lined with countless packages, parcels and stacks of letters in neatly organized piles all the way from the floor to the ceiling. Walking between them was just a bit daunting and one had be wary of not letting their clothes or equipment tip over anything. Behind the counter was a visibly groggy young elf, who had obviously been woken up by the necromancer’s entrance. His green uniform was reminiscent of the purple ones worn by the guild officials, though disheveled and in a dire need to be pressed.

The elf hastily moved aside some of the papers in front of him and did what he could to fix his appearance. “How can I help you?” He asked drowsily and yawned.

“I would like a letter to be delivered to some associates of mine.” Iris said and stopped in front of the counter.

“That can be arranged… I think.” The elf muttered, took out some kind of a paper form and began filling it. “By letter, do you mean a message, invoice, manuscript, invitation, diploma, missive, report or advertisement?” He listed off things from the form. “Or ‘other’? There’s a box for that as well.”

Iris was a bit baffled by the question. “What does any of that matter?” She asked.

“It’s on the form, it matters. Every delivery gets a form and the form must be filled for every delivery. I don’t know who made the form or when or even why, but it always needs to be filled.” The clerk stated with a strangely high amount of conviction in his words – clearly, the form was going to be filled.

“O… okay. I guess it would go under ‘other’ since it’s orders.” Iris reasoned and pulled the sealed letter from under her robes.

The elf filled in the information and moved to the next part of the form. “It just says ‘description’… of what? You?” He puzzled, somehow confused by the paperwork he should have had experience with. “Would you be offended if I put down ‘frumpy but should clean up well’?”

Still a bit rustled by the previous encounter, ‘frumpy’ was a fair way to describe the necromancer’s condition. “I think it means the item to be delivered…” Iris suggested.

The clerk frowned, scribbled over what he had written and added ‘paper, flat’ after it. For a while he struggled to come up with a third word to describe the letter before writing ‘folded’ onto the line and moving on to the next line. “Name? Have you given it one? Seems a bit pointless but okay. Oh wait! Maybe I should put mine here… or maybe the person the letter is for? Or from? There’s also a second line under it, like it’s asking for two names.” He attempted to decipher the form.

“Well, my name is Iris, in case it fits somewhere in there.” The necromancer sighed.

“Just ‘Iris’? You need to have a last name too. I’m not sure why your name even matters, since you have to pay before the delivery anyway, but if we’re going to put it here, we might as well do it properly.” The elf reasoned and seemed to randomly pick one of the two lines to write the name on before turning back to the necromancer and staring at her expectantly.

“That really is it though. I’m part of this team of color-coded people and none of us have any names besides a shade of blue. It’s a whole thing, trust me.” Iris tried to explain her lack of a last name. Of course, in reality she had a normal name from the days before the inquisition, but it was extremely against the rules to use it. For inquisitors with families, it provided some security and image wise it was very important that all the deeds any given inquisitor wanted to be known for could be summed up in a single word. The names of the red inquisitors were still spoken in hushed tones, since all of them brought forth memories of a variety of horrors. Similarly, the blue inquisitors wanted their names to bring up ideas of stability, hope and progress. It’s also worth noting that Iris in particular found her real name embarrassing.

The elf didn’t seem to be able to figure out if he was being messed with or if the claim was genuine. “Does this team of yours fight crime or something? Sounds kind of childish.” He asked.

Iris wasn’t sure how to answer. One could certainly say that bringing order to a nation was fighting crime, even if that involved kidnapping, occasional assassination and other questionable parts of inquisitioning. “…Technically, I guess?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Anastacia exclaimed after her patience started to run light. “Just put down anything. Nine out of ten people in this city use a fake name anyway. Do you think I sign everything with ‘Anastacia Mournvalley’?!”

The elven clerk stared at Anastacia in silence as his hand slowly moved to write down the name he had just heard.

“Don’t put that in there!” The adventurer rolled her eyes.

“I already wrote down ‘Mourn’.” The elf admitted. “Would ‘Mournalley’ work?”

“It’s not terribly original but it’ll do for now. You can just put down your own name on the other line there.” Iris agreed to finally make some progress with the form.

The elf, apparently named Micah, happily wrote down his own name and started to inspect the next part of the form. He checked some boxes, occasionally glancing at the letter in Iris’ hand. Anastacia hadn’t had a reason to send anything out of the city, so she didn’t really know if this was the usual quality, or lack thereof, of service or if it was Micah’s first day on the job. The elf somehow didn’t seem to have a grasp on the company’s own paperwork, but knowing it was all probably guild mandated, the adventurer had a fair amount of pity for him.

“Recipient and destination?” He suddenly asked.

“Complicated, I’m afraid. I’m not the spymaster so I’m not privy to who is posted where and when, only the locations…” Iris admitted and only then realized that she would probably be burning a scout hideout by sending a courier to one instead of going there herself, and that would come with some kind of repercussion later on from Duke, the inquisitorial spymaster. However, she figured it would be better if no necromancer saw her in her sorry state and that Duke would accept that as an explanation. “Do you have a map of the area north of here?”

Micah sighed audibly and turned around to take something out of a large cabinet behind his chair. With a great deal of effort, he hoisted up what seemed to be a large stack of papers from one of the shelves. The counter almost gave out under the weight of what must have been hundreds of pages worth of paper as he slammed it down. Seeing it better now, the necromancers realized that it wasn’t a stack of anything, but a massive sheet that had been intricately folded countless times to fit into a wad the size of a large tome. Fully unfolded, it would be easily larger than the office.

“Really now?” Iris asked and tiredly stared at the elf.

“The others are all out of service.” He shrugged and started to painstakingly unfold the map.

The court cleric rubbed her temples, trying to understand why sending a letter was so difficult. “How can a map be out of service? They’re literally pictures on paper.”

“How should I know? I’m not a map scientist, I just work here.” The elf disregarded the perfectly valid question and kept folding open the map. Parts of it quickly flopped over the edges of the counter and based on the few landmarks Iris could see on it, they were nowhere near Valor.

“Do you? Do you work here?” She asked, starting to get a bit frustrated before joining in on the unfolding.

In the end, it took all three of them to fully unpack the massive map inside the cramped little office. Being several meters across in both directions, it was obviously meant to be up on a wall somewhere and not to be used as quick reference. The information it provided was extremely accurate however; the width of the roads, condition and weight limits of bridges, navigability of rivers and terrain types were all marked in great detail – and all of it was entirely useless for their purposes. Valor turned out to be roughly in the middle of the whole thing and the exceedingly clear scale of the map gave the necromancers a chance to appreciate the sheer size of the walled-off city as it utterly dwarfed every single capital depicted in the areas around it.

“There.” Iris finally declared and pointed at a woody area maybe a day and a half of travel away from Valor. “A few minutes from the road after the bridge here, there’s an abandoned trapper’s cabin I want you to deliver the letter to.”

Micah took note of the location and lacking a name for the place or other reference points, drew the directions onto the form as best as he could – which was not well. As soon as that was done, he set aside the form and started to lethargically fold the map back up, something which seemed like it would no doubt take at least twice as long as spreading it out in the first place.

Iris lifted up a part of the map where she knew Anastacia had been buried under. “Do you think we could go back to the immortal nightmare beasts? This is starting to be worse.” She asked, not as jokingly as one would think. “I feel like there’s a better chance that the muse will deliver my letter if we ask nicely than these folks.”

“Many people wonder how adventurers can face any foes without fear, some think we’re all just insane or suicidal. The truth is that we’ve lived through the paperwork in Valor. Nothing scars a person like eighteen hours of filling forms to be approved to fill some more forms, or numbs the soul to all fear like hearing you made a mistake somewhere and have to redo it all.” Anastacia said without a morsel of jest in her voice and with a cold, vacant look in her eyes.

After several failed attempts, the map was finally semi-successfully folded into a single stack, which was noticeably larger than it had been before. The elf hoisted it back into the cabinet behind him and sat back down to catch his breath. He then made some slight additions to the instructions and checked a few more boxes.

“Anything else the courier should know before wandering into the woods to find these ‘spies’?” He asked after moving on to the next part of the form.

Iris took a bright blue napkin from her pocket and placed it down on the counter along with the letter. “Couple of things. They should have this on their person, as visible as possible. Otherwise, they’ll get knocked out and taken prisoner on sight. More importantly, and I can’t stress this enough, the first thing the courier should say when confronted is: The third whispers under clear skies. If you’ve got the right people, they’ll answer with ‘The seventh will listen’ – but remember: no greeting, no gestures, just say that, hand over the letter and back away, slowly – like from a bear.”

Micah took notes with the same unimpressive accuracy as he had noted the directions with, which didn’t exactly fill Iris with confidence, but she figured that as long as the courier made it into the general area and had the letter, it would reach the right hands. Failing to comply with the Mournvalleyan scout etiquette would win them a few nights in a cell and maybe a bit of light interrogation, but that was the courier company’s own fault as they were the ones who chose to staff this particular elf.

“… and avoid bears… Got it.” He incorrectly noted, almost certainly causing some manner of future trauma to the unlucky courier who would pick up the letter. “Now there’s just one more thing.” The elf said and glanced down on the form. Whatever he saw confused him even more than the previous questions had, and he had to reread the entire form as well as check the backside for any kind of clues that would clear his confusion. “It just says ‘Yes’ and has a box next to it.”

“What?” Iris failed to understand the problem before taking a look at the form herself.

At the bottom of the page, below the delivery details but separated from them with a line, was simply the word ‘Yes’ as well as a small box by it that suggested it could be checked. There were no context clues or other markings to explain it, and the other side of the paper was blank – to the necromancers’ relief. She suggested that it could have been a printing error, but every other form the clerk could find was identical.

Iris turned to Anastacia. “Do… do I want ‘Yes’?”

“Just take it. What’s the worst that can happen?” The adventurer advised.

“I don’t know! Based on how this has been going so far, he’s actually some kind of an otherworldly horror and checking that will seal a deal where he gets my soul!” Iris exclaimed her worries, accidentally knocking down a stack of parcels with her hand. “Or it could be the opposite for all I know!”

“You’re stressing way too much about this.” Anastacia shrugged. “We already made one deal with an immortal god-beast thing today, what are the chances that we would run into a second one?”

“It has been less than a day since when we met two literal gods!” Iris almost screamed.

The elf behind the counter was barely following the conversation at this point. As the two necromancers kept bickering about the possible life-altering implications of a checkbox at the bottom of a delivery form, he calmly opened his backpack, took out the sandwich he had prepared for lunch and started to munch on it.

“Fine! Check the damn box!” Iris yelled and slammed her fist on the counter, finally making a decision after several minutes of agonizing over it.

Micah bit into his lunch once more before answering. “Can’t, I’m on a break. Guild mandated stuff, you know.” He said as crumbs fell onto the form, which already had some mysterious stains on it.

Iris’ weakened powers flared out to a level Anastacia hadn’t seen them reach ever since she lost her wings. The outburst lacked direction and wouldn’t have achieved much even if there was any ill will behind it, but it did show that there was still fight in the inquisitor. For the entire time the elf slowly ate his meal, Iris leaned over the counter and murderously stared at him. Anastacia wasn’t entirely sure, but she could have sworn that the temperature of the room slowly increased as minutes passed.

Finally, after a wait that felt like an eternity, Micah used the blue napkin given to him to wipe the corners of his mouth, picked up his quill and made a small check mark that almost missed the entire box. “There we go, the form is now filled. All I need now is the payment and I can give your letter to the first courier that comes by.”

Slowly calming down, Iris regained her composure. “How much?” She asked and immediately chocked on air when the elf pointed at a large chalkboard on the wall to his left. The price to have a single letter delivered was firmly out of her price range, even if she still had her full inquisitor’s budget. “Anastacia… I didn’t know it was that much. I can just go there myself, it’s not that far…” She uttered, only to choke for a second time as the adventurer poured a seemingly random number of gold coins onto the table without a second thought, kicked over one more pile of packages to get back for the pointlessly complicated and time-consuming process and walked out without a word.