A bead of cold sweat rolled down Kinjo’s temple.

Alive, yes, BEEADDLEDRUNG thought. But she doesn’t know. No, she knows nothing. Finale put her out. Still, he considered that Pennybard may have been right when he advised burning the corpses dead where they lay. The imp was right far more often than he deserved to be. At the time, BEEADDLEDRUNG had thought to increase his notoriety and renew his name, but now it seemed he should be doing the opposite. The dissonance in these motives, both of which tugged evenly at his nerves, made him feel fettered. He now seriously began to consider himself a prisoner among the humans.

“Kinjo? Hello, Kinjo?” Shut your mouth! Leave me to think! The voice sounded muffled as if trying to reach BEEADDLEDRUNG through a wall of water.

“Kinjo? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…” Alma said. She supported Kinjo’s body with her own, as he looked on the verge of collapse. His eyes were wide and feral and his breath was labored. Elli watched, hesitant to speak fearing his words would only hurt.

The physical contact tore BEEADDLEDRUNG from his thoughts, though it did not bring him much peace. “I do not want to think about her right now,” Kinjo spoke.

Alma looked sorrowful, but another emotion flickered in her eyes that BEEADDLEDRUNG couldn’t read. “I understand… it’s wrong of me to hope for that while I know so little, and especially to try and drag you into it…” She smiled weakly. “We’ll see how things play out. Someone should be coming home, though.”

“Hmm,” BEEADDLEDRUNG purred. He wouldn’t pay this subject any more mind so long as he could manage to avoid it. “Elliother, you must find a registrar for me so that I can go out on a bounty. Will you do that?”

Elliother choked.

The bogeyman realized he might have made a mistake in his delivery. His temper was muddling his performance. Was he too forceful?

“Elli-other?” Alma asked slowly, furrowing her brow in contemplation. She looked at the boy and he shrank further into his cloak in fear. The name was familiar to her, seemed important, and yet she couldn’t recall why or from where. “What a unique name,” she severed her stream of thought. Perhaps it would come back to her some other time.

Elli let out a slow breath as the tension drained from his body. BEEADDLEDRUNG was confused, and cared more about having his question answered than understanding the gritty details of this interaction.

“Yes, I can find us a registrar,” Elli responded with a mousy voice. “Why don’t we get going now?” It seemed they were both in a hurry.

“Good,” BEEADLEDRUNG responded, satisfied. He lifted a leg in an awkward motion, a footstep, and stumbled on it. Alma stood still and looked dejected.

“Alma,” Kinjo managed before slinking out of the crossing with Elli at his side, “please do your best to keep them from asking me too many questions. It is painful to remember.” The skin-thief left with a sour taste on his tongue, but Alma nodded with a determined gaze. She couldn’t understand what troubled Kinjo so deeply, but she would nonetheless try to mitigate it. Still, as she watched the two depart, her determination was marred with guilt.

“When you return, meet me in the little joint next to Hund’s Arms.” Talking like this made her feel nostalgic. “I’ll wait for you there.”

Kinjo acknowledged this by waving without turning. Or perhaps BEEADDLEDRUNG was waving a claw in dismissal.

—

Elliother and BEEADDLEDRUNG exchanged few words on their trek to the city’s edge. Elli sheepishly offered directions now and again, and the bogeyman took these into his head and turned each into a mantra as he stomped his fleshy feet down the winding roads past many strange and uncouth humans. He had a goal beyond the city gates and he could stall within no longer until it was accomplished. So strong was this purpose that drove him that his chin might have been poised at a fixed angle for the whole walk if it weren’t for the thorn at his side. It burned within its cage so the bars grew hot and the heat insulted Kinjo’s skin, which looked fragile and milky to BEEADDLEDRUNG. But it was his skin now, and Pennybard would not relent.

BEEADDLEDRUNG halted abruptly in the street. Elli made it a few paces ahead before he noticed. “Kinjo?”

“Excuse me,” Kinjo said emotionlessly. BEEADDLEDRUNG remembered a stranger’s words from the night before. “I’ve gotta piss.”

After nestling himself between some dry, decrepit buildings, the bogeyman removed the cage from his belt and fumbled it in his hands before admonishing Pennybard. “Cool yourself! You have done well to be silent until now. What is the matter?”

The imp took a deep breath so that his crimson chest ballooned and grew pink before letting out a rush of words. “Stupid, insolent humans. Dastardly, treacherous, things. I can’t say a word or they’ll turn it against me! Godsdamn them.” Then he cursed in the guttural, fiery language of his kind.

This outburst was surprisingly cathartic to BEEADDLEDRUNG, as he mostly agreed with what was said, but his sympathy was misplaced — Pennybard looked at him in a rage. His beady eyes were wrung tight and his forked tongue drooped out as he scowled. “Spare me your commands, master. What oaths have you made while I’ve been quiet? What power have you given them over us?” The bogeyman almost felt that he deserved this judgment. “Don’t you plan to sell me for your freedom, Kinjo, as they’ve told you to?” The imp turned again to silence after this as he waited for a response.

“No. You were right, good pet,” BEEADDLEDRUNG said with an effort, “I should have killed them all. But it is too late now.” Pennybard’s indignation didn’t lessen, but he looked to calm down somewhat. “Did you not yourself advise me to blend in? I am blending in.”

Pennybard spat out a spot of soot. “Yes, you are blending in, my lord, and well. Too well. There have been moments where one might mistake you for a human indeed.” Coming from Pennybard, this was an insult of the highest caliber. “Don’t let them tempt you into their lowly schemes! Remember the reason you came here at all! You should blend in, and well enough not to be caught, but don’t forge unnecessary alliances.”

BEEADDLEDRUNG’s heart sank back into shadow. Of course! His purpose had been arrested by the angst the city had caused him in his new skin. He’d been so desperate to avoid scrutiny that he’d forgotten to look for a specialist while he had the freedom to. Now he’d gotten mixed up in some plot, he’d become a prisoner at heart, and it almost seemed he wouldn’t get the chance to have Finale examined, to find the hero, and to die. He renewed his tears from earlier as he accepted Pennybard’s reproach. And yet he could not forget the voice, the searchlight, the strange and foreign thoughts which tickled his brain, the bars set around him.

“What should I do?” BEEADDLEDRUNG asked.

Never before had the bogeyman so directly and defenselessly asked Pennybard for guidance. It was a sort of surrender.

The bat revelled in this state of power. An opportunity to skew his captor’s will was a rare and savory treat for him. If the situation were less complicated, he might have jumped for joy. Even now he couldn’t help but smile.

“Go ahead and take that bag outside the city on some silly quest. Keep playing your part, kind Kinjo, until they really do trust you. Let them grow to depend on you.”

BEEADDLEDRUNG raised his head.

Pennybard sneered. His gaze was cast into the aether. “And then we will betray them to the merciless and hungry flames of Ignis’ promise.”

In that moment the imp’s wings looked ready to engulf the surrounding buildings, but then they were small and leathery again. BEEADDLEDRUNG thought his pet’s hatred to be novel, but he took some of it to heart, and it blended with the motive which had been driving him towards the outside of the city: hunger. Human, BEEADDLEDRUNG thought, perhaps addressing the body he wore to see if it could respond, or perhaps stating the name of the mantle he was burdened with.

Something was stirring deep inside his belly.

—

It turned out that Kinjo did need to piss.

Elli’s eyes lit up once he returned. “You took a while, so I thought you might have left…”

Kinjo took a deep breath. “Well, I had been holding it in,” he said, “and I had to figure out how to use that thing.”

Elli laughed, but was then surprised to see that Kinjo bore a grave expression. He looked as if he’d resolved in his heart to perform some great and deadly task.

“Don’t worry,” Elli offered weakly. “I’m sure they’ll be out of resource bounties, but the most we’ll have to worry about is a two-bone rating.” He assumed his partner was afraid to face the outside world again after the horrors he’d been subjected to there.

Kinjo gave a half-smile, and the two continued along the last few pockets of buildings toward the place where a registrar was supposed to be. Soon they arrived at a plaza framed on three sides by peculiar structures and on one by a stretch of tall grey wall. Among the structures was one like a big tree stripped of its bark. As he drew closer, BEEADDLEDRUNG saw that what looked like branches were closer to fingers — it was a large, whittled wooden hand twisting its fingers up toward the clouds. Lanterns hung from its digits on weathered ropes and swung in the breeze.

“What is that?” Kinjo asked.

“Oh,” Elli perked up, “that’s a house of ritual. Some of the prisoners are classless when they arrive, so I guess there need to be a few places where the ritual can be performed.”

“Ah, of course,” Kinjo noted. BEEADDLEDRUNG figured that he’d never understand the strange culture he’d been immersed in at this rate, so it would be best just to feign prior knowledge.

Elli stopped and pointed at another building that lay ahead. “There’s the registrar…”

Its thick foundation of stones looked ancient and stalwart, but the stories and wings of wood and brick had been reconstructed or added upon so many times that it seemed more like a stockpile of materials than an architectural installation. Based on the traffic which filtered in and out through a number of wide doors, it looked like many prisoners might live and operate completely out of this building. But the prisoners, diverse and rough in appearance, only comprised some of the traffic. Concentrated here were more bodies wearing the garb of the city guard, undoubtedly at various levels of its employ, than BEEADDLEDRUNG had yet seen. It was an area which in younger days he would have referred to as an enemy base.

Kinjo looked reluctant. “Are we going in there?”

Elli winced. “Well, we need to if you want to take on a bounty…”

BEEADDLEDRUNG put on the dour face he wore for serious hunts.

“Alright,” said Kinjo.

It was easy to get in. Not too many paces, some brass handles to pull on, bodies to shuffle past. He was blinking a lot, maybe because humans did that and he was a convincing human now, or maybe because chopping up his vision into thin slices made the time go by faster. In any case, it was easy, but now the two stood before the registrar itself, which the building was really just a sort of container for, and things seemed to get harder. The routy passersby became quiet in this chamber, a large cylindrical room with a half-dome ceiling. It had the kind of acoustics that singled out every noise and enhanced its volume, so that each cough or snuffle was a nerve-wracking attention-drawer. The floor was a black and white tile checkerboard, and all along the walls, ragged slips of paper or cloth were tacked or posted that bore job descriptions, bounties. Prisoners tore them off and brought them to the thing which sat in the gloom at the center of the room: a being of black, branching metal or stone atop a tall throne like a statue of a fey king of old: a registrar.

That there were, assumedly, multiple of these kings housed amidst the ramshackle cityscape and amongst the rough-hewn rabble made BEEADDLEDRUNG rethink his position once more. This was not a person in black regalia like the many he’d seen, nor even a stoic sentinel in sable armor; it was perhaps human, maybe long ago, but only beneath layers and layers of steel and ash. Humans were weak creatures — this BEEADDLEDRUNG knew. He spared the inhabitants of the city because they were, for the time being, useful to him. Their lives were essentially forfeit, and if he pleased he could formally adopt the whole city. He’d done something like that before without much trouble, right?

The registrar approved or rejected bounty applications with a subtle motion: a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. It did not speak. If it had eyes, each could see the whole room without turning on its invisible axis. Its thorny, coronal helm did not flinch or arch. The figure looked neither bored nor attentive, neither slothful nor dutiful. It looked like death, alluring and terrifying.

Pennybard buzzed against Kinjo’s waist. BEEADDLEDRUNG looked down, wide-eyed. Hide me! mouthed the imp, his earlier proud demeanor forgotten, his color drained. The bogeyman turned toward the walls, removed Pennybard’s cage from his belt and slowly lowered it into his green undercloak. He held it close like a precious, fragile ornament. Elli looked sheepish as he returned from the bulletin wall with a bounty, but he wasn’t shocked like BEEADDLEDRUNG was. He’d known about this?

The boy looked concernedly at Kinjo and gestured toward the registrar. There was a line before it, but it moved quickly.

Blink.

Pennybard could see his master’s goosebumped skin in the dark. He felt the shadow of his contract surround and choke him, and yet he felt safer hidden against his captor’s chest than out in the open. As the searchlight of the Tower of Watch meandered along the terrain outside the city, and moments ticked by, something was stirring deep within its walls.

Blink. Blink.

Already at the front of the line?

Elli masked his worry as he faced the registrar and displayed the bounty.

[Hunt: 10 Goblins in Northern Farforest. Reward: 25 stars. Provisions provided. Rating: Two-Bone.]

The registrar examined the two partners and took note of their numbers.

Kinjo clenched his teeth as the figure, for the first time, turned its head. Its attention flared and pointed at him like a shiv readied to pierce.

[PRISONER NUMBER 13:

YOUR PARTY WILL BE UNABLE TO COLLECT REWARDS PENDING YOUR QUESTIONING.

THIS HOLD HAS ONLY BEEN PLACED ON YOUR ABILITY TO COLLECT REWARDS. IT DOES NOT INHIBIT YOU FROM COMPLETING BOUNTIES.

APPROVED.]

The voice in BEEADDLEDRUNG’s head could have come from nobody but the figure before him. He had found a target for his frustration! And yet he only nodded, turned, and walked away with Elliother as the statue raised its thumb. All his body hair stood at attention. His mind was blank. The inner realm where only his thoughts should proliferate had been trampled and defiled by someone else’s. He felt castrated; human.