Kulrod the Beastkeeper of the Eastlands sat before his cairn. Surrounding him were his beasts, hideous monsters raised from the dead by his foul sorcerous blood magic. There was the Whisper Boar, a beast whose lungs had been punctured by the spear that killed it and could now only wheeze. There was the Grey Cat, a thin ragged mountain lion whose decaying skin was crawling with flies. There was the Spider Cloak, newly remade after Alphon Thar of Karasar had drowned the old one. Then there were the Vultures, dead things that perched atop the cairn peering down with their empty eyes.

Kulrod sat before them all, his great sword across his lap, his wings sprouting behind him, having bent Feather, the Sword of the Sky to his will. He looked down at the messenger who walked slowly up to him, looking as imposing as possible. The messenger was unconcerned, he had seen many things far more imposing than that.

“The Arbiter sends her summons,” the messenger began. “To the Council of Ten.”

Kulrod nodded slowly, he had been expecting this for quite some time. What he had not been expecting was the messenger. “I will be there swiftly. But we have not been introduced, may I ask what is your name?”

“I am Eisen, the Messenger,” the messenger responded.

“You are not a sorcerer,” Kulrod observed, looking at the man’s eyes which were brown.

“No, I am a mere human,” Eisen replied.

“Tell me, Eisen, why is it that a human messenger such as yourself was sent rather than a sorcerer? Surely a sorcerer or sorceress could have travelled faster.”

Eisen’s face did not move, it remained calm and passive as it always was, but inside he grinned. “Before you joined the council we had a sorcerer called Ghizeth the Hasteful. He was killed by a medusae and so we extended an invite to you. He used his magic to train his muscles and lungs to enable him to run as fast as possible. Faster than a horse, faster than a falcon, some say he was faster than a bolt of lightning. But he was not faster than me.”

Kulrod raised his eyebrow sceptically.

“I am the messenger sent to retrieve all nine other sorcerers for the council and I will do it faster than any of them possibly could.”

Kulrod scoffed. “My dear human I have Feather, the Sword in the Sky, it grants me wings. You cannot possibly be faster than me.”

Eisen’s inner smile grew ever wider. “The Tower of the Arbiter is far away. But the other nine sorcerers are farther still. If you can reach it before I contact all of them and return then perhaps I must concede your superiority.”

Kulrod was growing incredulous now. “You cannot possibly do all that faster than it takes me to fly to the Tower of the Arbiter.” He flapped his enormous wings and took off, hovering briefly above his beasts. Then with another mighty flap that rustled up the dust and dirt of the ground he disappeared into the sky.

Eisen let a small smile break out onto his face. “Oh, but I can.”

The village of Renshaw sits across from a small forest filled with twisted trees and bright flowers. The inhabitants are blessed with excellent weather and fertile crops and in exchange they send Grisselda with a basket of foodstuffs and liquor to the small homely cottage in the middle of the forest. There she speaks happily with Orlok the Blind before giving him the basket, taking last week’s one and returning merrily to the village. Orlok is friendly and kind to the townsfolk but most of them are afraid of him for the gaping holes in his head where his eyes used to be. Some say the crows that frequent the area are his real eyes, they say that he sees all they see and that he is watching the town from afar for some nefarious purpose. There are few visitors to the area and fewer still know anything about crows but every once in a while, Armin, the veterinarian will visit and he will note that these crows have eyes much brighter than any ordinary crow’s eyes. Eyes that are strangely gold.

In truth Orlok is a sorcerer who cuts out his eyes each week and puts them into his crows. Each week his eyes grow back again only for him to remove them before Grisselda arrives. He watches over the village and uses his sorcery to ensure peaceful weather and a calm harvest, never telling of his macabre practises with the crows.

There is a knock on his door and his crows see the messenger standing there. He opens it and welcomes him in.

“I cannot stay long,” the messenger says, he still has seven more sorcerers to visit all before Kulrod reaches the Tower. “But the Arbiter summons you for the Council of Ten.”

Orlok nods. “It will be interesting to meet that new boy. The Beastkeeper aye. Has he figured out my trick with the eyes yet?” But the messenger is already gone. Orlok sniffs in annoyance and begins to pack his things for the long journey.

The ocean raged beneath the endless storm and the captain screamed at his men to hoist the sail, to lower the sail, to row harder, to stop rowing. In the midst of it all the messenger moved. He had not been on the ship when it set sail and he would not be on it when it made port, if it ever made port. But he was on it now, and he was carrying a box. There were a lot of boxes and barrels and drums on the ship and someone hiding behind another one was barely noticed in all the chaos. As he wove through the fray he thought that perhaps Kulrod would be better suited to delivering this message, he wouldn’t have had to go through all these extra steps. The messenger shrugged, it didn’t matter, he’d done this many times before, he was becoming practised at it now.

He reached the side of the boat and waited as the ship rocked in the waves. Waited, waited, until they were right over where he needed them to be. Then he threw it, and the box crashed into the sea, disappearing immediately and sinking as its heavy load dragged it to the ocean floor.

Bara saw it sinking, a black smudge in the black ocean. She stood up from her rocky seat and drifted over toward it, weighed down by the jewellery she’d crafted. Jewellery that was impossible to wear on the surface where it was too heavy but not down here. She looked up as she drifted along the ocean floor and found the ship. It was possible that they were simply losing cargo by accident, or dumping it for some other reason, but she doubted it. Boxes that sank like that were often for her.

She reached it and broke it open with a rock, inside was an anchor with a note tied to it. The Arbiter was summoning her again. She cast off her jewellery, leaving it by her cave, and willed the rushing water to send her speeding away.

Above her the captain breathed a sigh of relief as the storm mysteriously moved off.

Eisen trod carefully, sensitive not to walk on any of the many mushrooms blooming across the ground. This was where things started to get truly impressive, Kulrod had a long way to go before he could match the presence of the next few sorceresses.

Emani was tending her Red Scorn mushrooms when he found her. She’d made him learn the names of all of them at one council meeting and he hadn’t had the courage to refuse, besides it might come in useful someday. The Red Scorn mushrooms didn’t look much like mushrooms, more like an explosion of spiralling blood, frozen in soft mushroom form. Emani’s long fingernails carefully guided away the growths that threatened other fungi and from her hands dripped the water she had turned her blood into. She grew her favourite fungi on her body, nurturing them with her own flesh and blood, turned through sorcerous magics into all that they needed.

She heard him approach and stood up to look down at him, towering on a carpet of swaying tubers, her eyes cold and heartless, surrounded by her crown of fungi. He was a human, an animal, and therefore, to her, a disappointment. Less disappointing than most though since he knew all the names.

“Red Scorn,” he indicated, hoping to curry favour by demonstrating his memory.

She smiled but it only made her look more cruel. “The council is summoned?” she asked and he nodded. Then he left, as fast as he could and for him that was saying something.

The worst part, Eisen thought, for fetching Loraila, was the screams. The stench of the bog he could handle, the sticky ground and looming danger of quicksand he was okay with. The silent shadows that lurked in the trees and the whooshing ones that soared overhead he could ignore. But the screams, they were just too loud, too horrible. Some of them were human, men she fed to her monsters after she’d lured them there. But some were the screams of the monsters themselves, monsters that had failed to come out right and were in constant pain. Those were the worst screams Eisen thought, those were the ones that made him almost turn and leave. But he didn’t, he was the messenger, and he had a message to deliver.

Loraila lived in a cottage as well although hers was sunken into the mud and had one of the winged beasts scowling on top of it. Inside there were tunnels and warrens dug into the mud and filled with all manner of her human and inhuman experiments. When the winged beast saw him picking his way out of the trees it howled an inhuman howl and the messenger stopped to wait. That was the other thing he disliked about Loraila, she made him wait. He could go into her cottage to get her, but he wasn’t going in there unless he had a quick way out and of course, as luck would have it, he didn’t. So, he waited and eventually she emerged.

As mad bog witches went Loraila looked relatively normal other than being covered in mud, blood and no clothes whatsoever. She was a sorceress, so she wasn’t old or ugly but Eisen still found her incredibly unsettling. The huge butcher’s knife she was holding and the unidentifiable monster perched on her shoulder didn’t help.

“You have been summoned by the Arbiter for the Council of Ten.”

Loraila nodded vigorously, upsetting the monster on her shoulder. She did everything vigorously, much to the concern of Eisen. He began to pick his way away from the cottage while she went to go get cleaned up. Surprisingly she relished her chances to go out with the other sorcerers and always dressed up for the occasion but Eisen could never unsee her manic depravity no matter what nice clothes she was wearing.

The pyramid was huge and Eisen swore it got bigger every time. Luckily with his methods he never had to navigate the whole thing, quickly reaching the chambers of Pyra, the Scarab Queen. The guards, their armour ornately decorated with scarabs eventually let him into the huge throne room. The vast ornamentations of scarabs and suns stared down at him and Pyra sat high above him, decked out in her full arraignment of robes and jewellery and headdresses. Her golden eyes matched perfectly with the gold of her clothes and throne room and pierced deep into him.

A servant wrapped in a robe offered him some water but he brushed them away, he had a schedule to keep, and it was hot here. Far too hot for him to want to stay long.

“The Arbiter summons you to the Council of Ten,” he said in the local language, struggling his way through the pronunciations. He was good at it by most standards, but Pyra’s standards were far from most.

“I will make haste,” she replied in the same language.

“But my queen,” one of the nobles standing around began. Eisen hadn’t even noticed them before, such was the glory of the throne and the queen. “We have yet to settle the disputes with-“

The queen raised her hand for silence and the noble stopped. “I will not be gone long and the meetings of the council are far more important than any disputes with our petty neighbours.”

Eisen backed away while they were distracted and disappeared out the corridor, he had been in the pyramid long enough.

The clansmen sat in the rain huddled muttering to each other as they cleaned off their weapons. They muttered about the clan, they muttered about the chieftain, and most importantly they muttered about the Breygas, their rivals who were finally weakening. They muttered about the war perhaps coming to a close and about returning to see their families again.

One of the watchers saw a rider atop one of the peaks beneath them, outlined against the dreary misty sky. The other watchers gathered and readied their weapons, it was one rider, there was no need to alert the whole camp.

The rider crested another peak and this time they saw his full silhouette and the great bearded axe he carried. He was coming on full speed but they were still unconcerned, they merely dug in their spears and braced for his impact. They got it.

Almost all the spears impaled either him or his horse but that seemed to be of little concern to either of them. With several spears protruding from him the rider cut down the now unarmed watchers and rode all over them. Then he carried on into the camp, one of the watchers cried a warning and the camp rose to meet him but he relished it. Ripping the spears from his body he leapt into the fray and swung about with his axe. The clansmen were hardened warriors and many of their strokes found home, a normal foe would have fallen many times over but he didn’t fall.

They began to press in on him, trying to surround him in a wall of shields but he was too fast, too strong, too ruthless, as he laid into them. There were shouts and screams and wails of pain but eventually all grew silent as the man walked slowly back to his horse, decapitating a groaning survivor on the way. He pulled some spears out of the horse who looked at him with dead glassy eyes, it was long dead too, just like Kulrod’s beasts.

He spun around to see a lone figure standing in the middle of the camp looking at him. He dropped into a throwing stance with one of the spears but the figure spoke first. It was a strange accent for the language but he spoke it almost flawlessly.

“The Arbiter summons you to the Council of Ten, Breyga Forebear of the Clan.”

Breyga lowered his spear and nodded. “Messenger,” he said happily. “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

“It’s been eight years.”

Breyga chuckled. “I am old messenger, old enough to remember when-“

Eisen left before he could begin another one of his ridiculously long stories. Breyga didn’t care and told it anyway.

The Culler sat atop the mountain in her monastery surrounded by the silence in which she meditated. She had no hair or clothes apart from her brown robes tied to her waist with a simple chord. Despite being one of the most powerful sorcerers in the world she had nothing, for that was what she wanted, nothing.

The messenger walked through the plants in the mountains to the monastery. It was strange hearing no birds singing, no cicadas chirping, no animals of any kind. They didn’t call her the Culler for nothing.

She heard him of course, he would have ruined her meditation no doubt. Something that was only slightly worrying. Luckily, she seemed nice and showed no outward signs of wanting to cull him. Personally he didn’t think she wanted to be a part of the council as it interfered with her meditation but her and the Arbiter were old friends and the Arbiter insisted he fetch her every time.

“I am summoned?” she asked, not moving from her seat on the floor.

“Yes,” Eisen replied nodding even though she wasn’t facing him. She didn’t move so he turned and left, trying to be as quiet as possible.

The last message, Eisen knew, even Kulrod could not deliver. For Thagred, the Mole, lived deep deep underground. Technically Eisen could get there if he really wanted to but he never had. His family had been messengers for generations and one of the fundamental tenets they’d passed down was to never make Thagred think his underground fortress wasn’t completely secure.

It wasn’t of course, but Thagred wasn’t exactly sane and shattering his illusions could only have bad results. So instead Eisen’s ancestors had set up a different system.

He walked up to the solid stone bell with the stone circle beneath it. The stone circle was beginning to show cracks, he hoped he wouldn’t have to spend the next eight years replacing it. The circle was only the top of a pillar that went far into the earth. Not all the way to the fortress of course but still very far. Replacing it was a nightmare.

Eisen checked the sky, it was night in this part of the world, but he could still read the stars to determine the time. It had been less than an hour since he’d met with Kulrod. He grinned his rare smile.

He pulled a lever and the stone bell slammed down onto the pillar shaking the earth. He heaved it up and did it again, and again. The bell was heavy, and he was already exhausted, so he heaved it up one more time and locked it in place. Then he rested for a few minutes, feeling the pain in his arms subside. Being a messenger didn’t usually involve such physical labour. He stood up and stretched then walked for about a minute, arriving at the Tower of the Arbiter on the opposite side of the world and opened a book to wait for Kulrod.

The Arbiter sat at the council table, the deck of cards before her. She wore mundane clothes and had mundane grey hair. Her face was lined as even for a sorceress she was old. Slowly the council began to arrive.

Kulrod, Beastkeeper of the Eastlands walked in looking annoyed about something. Orlok the Blind followed, one of his crows perched on his shoulder. Next came Bara of the Deep, still dripping wet from her underwater home. Behind her glided Emani, Garden Tender, her fungal body towering over them all. Loraila, Nightmare Breeder, came next, wearing an elaborate white dress with white jewellery that was probably made of bone. Following her was Pyra, the Scarab Queen, she had dispensed with her usual extreme clothing for a slightly more reasonable travelling outfit, still arrayed in gold though. Next was Breyga, Forebear of the Clan, finally finished his story and the long journey here. Then the Culler, walking lightly and smoothly to her seat, the others only shying away from her a little bit. Then Thagred the Mole, rough and dirty with a ragged black beard and his bag of chisels and tools strung across his shoulder.

“Welcome,” the Arbiter said when they were all seated. “Thank you for heeding my summons.” She began to deal out the cards, they were ornate cards, old cards, cards full of magic. When all the cards were dealt the Arbiter turned over the first one.

Monolith

The sorcerers looked closely at the card. The Monolith represented strength and endurance it was said, but there were dark undertones to monoliths. Kulrod turned over the next card.

Bird

The sorcerers eyed each other now, but they said nothing yet. The bird represented freedom and expression, some of them were more interested in that than others. Orlok turned over the next card.

Bird

They all moved but the Culler moved fastest.

“Snap!”