It was a month after the fall of Ebolt. The thirtieth night. Even with the full Diamond Moon in the sky, the dusty plain was cloaked dark save for the single island of orange light Grim sat in, nestled near the top of one of the rocks spread in lines over the plains.

Ten men sat at a table made of a single flat rock. They lit their perch out on one of the rocks with a circle of torches, and placed their weapons down on the ground at the edge of the circle of light. They had pulled back their hoods, and poured out wine cups. Eleven cups, with a gap where one cup rests. Grim was among them, the assassin lord sweating despite the cold air. He had been told to sit next to the empty spot, on the most exposed part of the rock. A matter of faith in his own report, so they said.

“Will he really sit with us? Or slay us all?” One of the other elders asked. Grim knew a few names but couldn't place them with faces. This was one of the highest gatherings they had done in his time.

A more burly one snorted, finger tapping the rim of his cup while his eyes glanced into the dark around them. “I think we'll hear him. The report sounds like a one bladed babe's first report. He cannot be that skilled.”

The eldest of them, the grand elder, had been too weak to walk up the path on his own. Grim did not understimate the man despite that, as he was still possibly the greatest poisoner to ever spit into a cup. The white haired man shook his head as he had all day. “I did not think I would have to choose between a short oath and the long one in my lifetime.” His eyes betrayed how eager he was to see The Shadow itself.

“There is work, and there is faith.” Grim said, hands moving into a pocket to feel the folded scrap of parchment. The message had come with one of the 'girls' left behind by The Ogre. The false moon had spoken to their oracle. True Shadow walked the world again.

They had argued what it meant, if they could trust the source, but the signs and codes were true. It asked them to hold a circle, and that the shadow itself would come to them. They were killers, yes, but there was a point to everything. A hint at salvation that would one day arrive. Grim supposed many of his peers did what they did for simple money and power, but one didn't need to climb the guild nor seek the mysteries to become a rich assassin in their order.

Grim himself was wealthy, enough to go off to some corner of the world and live comfortably through the rest of his elongated middle age and into the time when men wither and dry up. He certainly could have said no to The Raven, and let some lesser blade deal with the man. Until he got the missive, he had considered the entire enterprise a waste, black coin be damned, and was considering giving the price back and walking away.

Now? The false moon had spoken. The true shadow was here. The avatar who will extinguish the current age and birth a new one. They were to open an invitation to a thing that had been killing them up and down the plains. If it wanted to gut them, it could now, and their order would likely grind itself apart. Grim found that oddly more worrying then death.

One of the elders who had been in Old Osteria, Serkal, had thought the message foolishness, and gone hunting a week ago in the night. He was found dead by The Shadow's spear from behind three days ago. The look of boredom on his face told them everything they needed. He had been taken completely off guard.

“What advancement do you think he is?” One of the elders asked quietly.

“You mean, what level, Tefril?”

“Start the ritual. Drink.” Another cut them off, the voice curt. Grim shrugged, and sipped his wine cup, then passed it to the side. He took the cup from the empty seat, and the grand elder passed his to the empty spot. It was an old ritual, called an assassin's trust. The next person called out “Pass.”

Another called “Drink.”

So they went. Drink. Pass. Wait. If they wished to destroy one another, it was a time to do so. He had done this ritual twenty times. Never with an empty place before, but at least four times with a poisoning and three of them with more than one death. To partake in the sweet wine of killing others was to also accept their own inevitable deaths. On the other hand, there was The Wanderer, a human who had come and gone in history for over three hundred years. Grim suspected this 'Shadow' was one and the same. The thing hunting them spared villagers and farmers and the camp followers. A killer of killers. Perhaps it was a trap, and they had been outmaneuvered the same way they often did their own prey.

The sips of wine Grim took guided his mind away from the circle, from looking too long at the dark the torches barely held at bay. Was death inevitable? Every man dreamed, and many a wise man was made a fool seeking eternal life. Look what that had done to the elves.

He raised the cup he was going to drink from. “To us fools.” He toasted, and more than a few cups went up, a few lips curled into nervous smiles. He sipped, and passed his goblet along, but as he was reaching for the next one, he saw that a figure the size of a hippo had filled into the space next to him. In the torch light, the only thing Grim could see of the man's face was the whites of his eyes. From the looming shadow, huge hands took the cup and daintily the man drank, then passed his goblet to Grim.

A terrifying mountain of a man, yet he had slipped into their midst and sat without making a sound. He sipped, wondering if he would drop dead from The Ogre poisoning him. He could see the man's conveyance now resting on a rock. He heard a raspy gasp, and for a moment worried someone had decided to add poison this night of all nights. Instead, the eldest pointed a thin finger in his direction. “The Mountain!”

The huge figure smiled, eyes glittering with the torchlight around them. He made a few signs in the assassin's hand signals, pointing at his head, sealing his hands like a treasure chest, his tongue out then a spitting motion and a wiping of his mouth: 'You remembered me, young Bitter Tongue.'

Serkal laughed, coughing a little. “It's been forty years since I had that name, yet you look the same. Do you know the shadow that stalks us?”

The large man nodded. His hands went to work. 'My friend. The Wanderer. Awakened.' He made a gesture like 'world core' which Grim didn't understand.

A few of the assassins were sweating, possibly from the mention of The Wanderer from a man as imposing as The Ogre. Some of Grim's brothers had been common criminals before they reformed. The Wanderer was a boogie man to any sort of wrong-doer, and while Grim held that his profession was honorable in some ways, in others they were the sort of men who had died in droves to the mysterious figure wandering Nel'Ferral for years. The guild had always instructed it's members to drop what they were doing and leave whenever he showed up.

An elder nearly at Serkal's age and experience stood up. “We should not be here! The Wanderer can smell guilt!”

The big man made a sitting motion. His hands worked expertly, showing off his talent for the assassin's hand signs. He made motions of a hunter dropping all his arrows but one, then firing high, and a field of dead: 'He only cares about stopping The Raven's army.'

Grim did not comment that, at the moment, more than a few of them might well as be a part of that army. One of the others nodded. “The Raven is a man of the times, a locust feeding on what was left of the old order. The world has been changing. The oracle last month announced the old age is over.”

A younger man grumbled. “I had always said you old farts needed to step away from tradition!”

Someone else laughed once. “It's all you have when chaos is everywhere. Even the empire is falling, something our fathers thought would never happen.”

The Mountain smiled. His hands outlined a little kid. 'How's the little scamp (The Oracle) doing?'

Serkal shook his head. “Her hairs turn gray, Mountain. The moon spoke to her. True Shadow walks with us. Is that your man?”

Grim watched The Mountain look up at the moon, his eyes narrowing as if two pieces of a puzzle had been made whole. His movements were more than deliberate as his fingers mimed an arrow hitting an eye, sort of like saying something very, very, slowly and carefully and emphatically. “Definitely.”

Everyone was quiet. “Then what does the True Shadow want from us?”

The man grunted, then his hands moved again. A wolf walking into sheep, biting the farmers neck, then slipping past the sheep again... 'When he makes his move, let him. Do not fight him. Do not hinder him.'

The youngest elder raised his hand. “Do you ask us to put aside our vow to serve? Grim has been paid a part of the First Shadow.”

The Mountain stood, finishing the wine from his goblet, then reached to his side and pulled out a pouch of holding. Grim saw the spell-weave, could see that it was like a bag made from the same paths he saw when he shadow stepped. The Mountain turned the bag over, pouring out hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of raw blades of the first shadow.

If a gathering of assassins was quiet by nature, even Grim was stunned at the silence around the table aside from the sound of endless black coins hitting the stone. The amount of money the Raven had from plundering Osteria might be worth ten of the black crystals to a buyer who understood what it was, a pure infused shard of essence. The huge man's bag of holding kept spewing them, enough to fill a cart.

When the last of them dropped, Grim guessed that there was something like a ton of the stones sitting on their table. It would take their best assassins a thousand years of killing to earn that much, if Grim had thought there were enough black coins in the world before this man's stunt.

One of the other masters was sputtering. “Where did... How?!”

The large man smiled, and made a gesture of a candle cupped and snuffed out, then spread his arms wide as if tossing riches to a crowd. 'The True shadow's generosity is endless... you are welcome!'

Serkal bowed, putting his head to the table, then lifting it. “Mountain... I had long suspected you were the guild master, before you left.”

Grim saw the big man acting bashful. 'It was nothing.'

“I know now that you were, since Geskal told me that you told him you might be back. What can we ask but where shall our blades go, King of Blades, The Mountain of Bodies, friend to the True Shadow?”

The man laughed a little, the sound nearly silent, and held up a hand, holding it for a moment then made a little bland face and saluted. Grim could see he looked happy, his eyes sparkling as he signed, 'Please, all that praise will go to my head. Just think of me as... another grunt.'