“And I’m telling you, these screams kept me up all night. I must not have been the only person who heard this, and I’m very certain that this is not good for business,” Pirim whispered fervently to the tavernkeeper, who simply shrugged and washed a glass.

“A new arrival has no business telling me how I should or should not run my tavern. I’ve been here for years and it’s taken more than one sleepless night to survive in this forsaken place. Let me let you in on a little secret.”

The tavernkeeper leaned closer, his hot breath and beard getting much too close for Pirim’s comfort.

“This place is not like any other place in the known world. It hosts horrors, both human and inhuman. Due to this, my patrons do tend to get a little loud during the night. It simply is a side effect of living here. Perhaps the man you heard last night was infected or succumbing to the Influence. We’re all sick little sheep in this town, and you won’t be so unsympathetic when it’s your turn to be the one screaming in agony all night long.”

He let his ominous words hang in the air as he returned to washing his glass. He turned away from Pirim, snubbing her. However, as she backed away, she noticed something on his back. An unnatural bulge, hidden beneath his leather tunic. Then… it moved.

“You met my little friend? I call him Brandy,” the tavernkeeper chuckled. “Even someone who never crawls into the depths of this hellhole has a chance of getting a demonic parasite.”

“A… demonic parasite?” Pirim gasped with horror. The tavernkeeper laughed derisively.

“They really don’t tell you all the details out there, do they? I don’t blame ‘em. If they were honest about what goes down here… nobody would ever come.”

Pirim backed away as the bulge seemed to pulse, almost as it if was sniffing the air, drawn to Pirim’s own body, about to burst from the tavernkeeper’s clothes. He didn’t show it, but it was clear that the tavernkeeper was in immense pain whenever the bulge moved.

“I reckon I have a couple years before this damn thing takes me over completely. That’s what they do, you know. Once you got ‘em, you have to get rid of them fast, or else they take over so much of your body that removing it would kill you instead. I’m still holding out, though, in case someone comes up with a miracle cure. I don’t know about you, but even though that Azazael character seems like a quack, there might be a chance she can help us.” With that, the tavernkeeper turned back around and patted Pirim on her diminutive shoulder.

“So! Since I have a couple of years left in me, how about I give you a challenge. It’s very simple. Just outlive me. Go on over to the guild and talk to Barlon, who I’m sure you’ve met already. He’ll set you up with a bunch of other poor souls to go adventuring. Maybe then you’ll realize just how doomed you are. Ha! It’s always entertaining to see the newcomers’ faces after their first adventure…”

Pirim didn’t need to be told twice. Under the gruff but haunted gaze of the tavernkeeper, she absconded from the establishment.

Unfortunately, she found no solace in the hardened gaze that befell her when she entered the guild. Barlon sat behind a wooden counter, dented and chipped from years of wear. There he raised an eyebrow at Pirim’s expression.

“What is going on? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

Pirim had, in fact, seen a ghost, but ghosts were nothing frightening to her. Instead, it was that the implications of her decision to venture here were finally setting in.

“If you’re expecting sympathy for getting cold feet, you’ve come to the wrong place. However, if you’re looking to fight… I do have someone who is looking for a new member for their party.”

Barlon laughed, a dry laugh that sounded more like crying than laughing. He brushed what wispy hair still remained out of his eyes and adjusted his spectacles.

“Nobody expects to be the one who dies. They always go, ‘oh, such terrible things happen here, but they couldn’t possibly happen to me! I’d never be so foolish to become infected by a demonic parasite! No demon would ever catch me off guard, snuffing out my life in one singular strike, no, not me…’”

“It’s pitiful, really,” Barlon continued. “I have spent so many years witnessing the unthinkable, an old man like me needs a bit of humor in his life, no matter how twisted. I do not consider myself sadistic, but I do derive a certain joy of seeing naïve hopes and dreams crushed in the blink of an eye, just as mine were.”

“That would be the demon speaking for you,” a scathing voice called out from the darkness. Pirim whipped around – she had not noticed the presence of another. Barlon only smirked as he laid one elbow on the table and placed his head in his palms, content to simply survey the situation as it unfolded. Pirim instinctively backed up until she hit the edge of the counter with nowhere to run. Stalking towards her with a tall and lithe woman with angular features and jet-black clothing, dark as obsidian.

“I speak for myself and only myself,” replied Barlon coolly. The severe woman gave him a disdainful glance before perusing Pirim’s features.

“Hm. It’ll do. Come, Sim.”

At her behest, a hulking figure appeared in the doorway, a heavily armored man whose shoulders clipped both ends of the door frame. He was taller even than the woman, who was a little taller than the tavernkeeper and Barlon, and over a head taller than Pirim. As he came into the room, it was cloaked in shadow from his massive frame. He loomed over Pirim from behind the woman’s back.

Now that they were both close, Pirim could get a more detailed look at their appearances. The woman was wearing a leather cloak, dyed black, with long black sleeves and gloved hands that showed not even a modicum of skin. Her pants were the same, made of dark wool and covered in patches of variegated gray. She wore heavy furred boots with metal-tipped heels. The impacts of her boots against the wooden floor were like the heartbeat of a great beast. As for her age, she was well into adulthood, but while her facial structure seemed aged, her skin boasted no wrinkles, and her hair was a darker black than any elderly woman could have maintained. She could have easily been old enough to be Pirim’s mother, or young enough to be Pirim’s age instead. Her eyes were slit like the machicolations of a great fortress, her pupils the arrows ready to be loosed from the great vantage point that was her height. A woman of purpose and exacting efficiency.

The man… Pirim had a much harder time reading. He wore a full iron helm that sported iron horns, sticking up in the air like prongs of a pitchfork. The angular and geometric design of his helmet left only a horizontal slit for his eyes, which were completely hidden in darkness. Like the woman, not a single bit of skin was visible under his many layers of clothing – a full iron suit bedecked in a thin veneer of gold highlights and a painted coat of arms in the center that Pirim could not recognize. His pauldrons, while ornate, had been singed and blackened by some unknown assailant until the deer emblems that shone on its surface were molded into a misshapen effigy of their former glory. The armor was dented near the legs, scratched at the chest, and he walked with a limp that was still a limp no matter how thunderous his steps were. Someone had to be backing him, some noble house, but while his armor was exorbitant, its wear reflected the brutality of a bounty hunter. Of course, that was assuming he was human. His hulking, unnatural size, the empty hole where his eyes should have been, and the fact that he made not a sound with his mouth made it quite dubious to Pirim.

“Victoria. You are?” the woman said as she extended her arm. Pirim shook it tentatively.

“Pirim.”

“Good. This is Sim.” Victoria threw a backwards glance at the silent figure behind her. “I’m glad I decided to wait here today after I heard there was going to be a new arrival. It seems that you’re one of the few miserable sots in this town that hasn’t been tainted yet by the Influence. Fresh meat.”

Pirim nodded. She recognized when she was getting lectured. It was the wisest decision to just nod and smile.

“You know what the Influence is? Outsiders don’t know the full story behind what it actually does to you. If they did, there’d be widespread panic. But the first and most important thing you need to know is that it’s contagious. And since everyone here can’t leave, you either die or you get infected. If you get infected by the influence, you pass it on to any new recruit who wanders in here, and that’s where I come in.”

“You see, everybody’s getting desperate. They’re clamoring, stepping over each other’s’ toes for any help they can get. Help that comes in the form of you. No doubt you’d be getting pestered about joining any number of new teams if Sim and I weren’t here to drive them away. If you were naïve enough to join any of them, you’d probably already be infected by now. But since Sim and I have managed to stay clean due to isolation and our special practices… that won’t happen if you come with us.” She turned to Sim. “Anything to add?”

Sim simply shook his head.

“So, you’re going to make me join your party?” Pirim asked tentatively. She turned to Barlon, but he made no move to stop them.

“If you’re stupid enough to not want to join after all I’ve said, you deserve to become infected,” Victoria shrugged. “You don’t have a choice, unless you have a death wish.”

“Alright,” said Pirim. Though she did not want to acquiesce, it was like her words were being forced out of her and dragged out from under her tongue.

“Then I’ll sign you up with Victoria’s party,” Barlon said with a cavalier smile. “May I get your name?”

“Pirim.”

“Pirim…?” Barlon waited expectantly. Obviously, he wanted a surname.

“Just Pirim. I don’t think there are many people in this town who share my name.”

Barlon gave her a narrowed glance, but he seemed to understand. He drew from out behind the counter a great leather-bound book with pages as large as Pirim’s torso. Within tables upon tables of names – some ominously crossed out – Barlon found an empty space underneath Victoria and Sim’s names.

“Now, please come with me, Pirim. We have a room out back where I can conduct an interview and provide a private place to fill out your paperwork. We aren’t overly professional here, seeing as the urgency of recent matters make formalities a little frivolous, but we do need to have at least a basic understanding of who, what, and where everybody is so that we can organize volunteer efforts and manage expeditions.”

Victoria and Sim both took a seat on a wooden bench just outside the building while Pirim followed Barlon inside. There, he led her to a small wooden room with a few frayed banners and a desk stacked high with paperwork and lit white candles. There was an odd assortment of artifacts in the far corners of the room, presumably some sort of weapons retrieved from areas around the village. A much smaller table and a rickety wooden chair awaited her. Barlon took a seat in the desk, and began to ask Pirim some questions.

“Age?”

“A score and five.”

“Any living immediate family?”

“None.”

“I’m presuming that you aren’t of noble lineage, given that you didn’t announce your surname, but I just want to make sure.”

“No, my family was a moderately wealthy merchant family.”

“Any education?”

“Master of Arts, University of Walden.” At this, Barlon raised an eyebrow.

“Intriguing. So you learned how to read before me, I suppose. Even now, I can only read forms, names, and a few other basic things. I’m thankful I won’t have to walk you through the paperwork, then. We get folks from all over here, and not all of them are literate.”

Barlon continued to ask Pirim a few more basic questions before handing her a pen and a couple of empty forms. While waiting for her to complete them, he sat down heavily at his desk and began to attend to his own. Pirim gave him a few quick peeks as he remained focused on his work – perhaps he was infected like the tavernkeeper was? She tried to steal as many glances as she could without him noticing, but could discern nothing strange. Regardless of how abrasive Victoria had been, she did make a convincing argument. After seeing whatever was growing on the tavernkeeper’s back, Pirim did not want to suffer the same fate, especially if it meant a slow and agonizing unpreventable death.

Once Pirim notified Barlon that she had finished her forms, he gave them a cursory glance before guiding her back out towards the main desk. To the right was a cork board with clusters of papers hanging around what seemed to be a small-scale map of the areas surrounding the village. In total, there were seven clusters of papers situated around much more detailed areas of the map boasting sketched renditions of several structures and landmarks. Walking closer, she picked out a depiction of the undulating flesh tentacles of the Flesh Fields, and the salient red splotches of the Red Valley’s canopy.

She peered at the other landmarks. They were labelled in ink that had been smudged and faded over time, but she was still able to make out their denominations. Surrounding the village in what seemed to be a ring of nefarious dungeons were the Red Valley, the Flesh Fields, the Catacombs, the Forsaken Fortress, the Black Library, the Petrified Palace, and the Weeping Swamp. Near the bottom of the map, she spied the road that she had used to travel to the village marked in faint dotted lines.

“This is what we use to keep track of which parties are currently in which areas,” Barlon explained. “Right now, of course, your new party is stationed right here in Loxburg for recruiting. However, we mustn’t waste any time fighting back the evils that infringe upon our land, and thus Ms. Victoria will be beginning an expedition into one of these seven areas. Looking at the current lists… right now, we have three parties allocated to exploring each of the seven areas except for the Catacombs, which currently has two. I think that evens things up quite nicely, don’t you think? Since you seem to carry that skull around where you go… I daresay a place like the Catacombs suits you…”

“Speaking of which, I presume it’s something important, but I cannot contain my curiosity any longer. Just what is that skull for?”

“Materials for my profession,” Pirim replied.

“Which is? You deflected earlier.”

“Well, it is more like an area of expertise…”

“Go on.”

Pirim’s eyes darted from left to right. Victoria and Sim were still waiting outside, out of earshot.

“Why don’t I give you a demonstration?”

“Suit yourself,” said Barlon, though his eyebrows were furrowed.

From within the pockets concealed underneath her cloak, Pirim once again drew her mahogany wand, this time also procuring an odd dried mushroom as well. Barlon paused for a moment, then his eyes widened. He opened his mouth, but Pirim put a finger to her lips, and he suddenly realized that his voice had left him. Then, she drew the circle in the air again, connecting the letters within to spell out “forget” and adding the mushroom in the center. Finally, she finished the spell by drawing four smaller circles intersecting the outer larger circles, fine-tuning the specified period. Unsurprisingly, the spell did not have unlimited potency, and a mushroom of this size would only allow for a few minutes of lost memory. Once she finished the spell and the mushroom disappeared, Barlon was left momentarily stupefied.

“Hold on a moment, I was just… over there…” he mused to himself, but Pirim had already absconded and was closing the door from outside.