The first crusades had begun with a divine mage called Ignatius Lumier, the direct descendant of a dominion, some seventy years prior. Ignatius followed the god Osurehm, as his father was a dominion in his service. Despite presiding over the season of summer and the entirety of the concept of honor, Osurehm was still a lesser-known god at the time for reasons that were almost entirely titularly-based, but, to be fair, most gods were lesser known when the pantheon was stuffed with one hundred and forty-two of them, not to mention the fact most had such silly names. However, two decades of rooting out the worst of the necromancers and dragons had afforded both Ignatius and Osurehm notoriety, the love of the people, and a crown that really only worked for Ignatius since he had the head. For Osurehm, a very large and very opulent temple was built, which is almost as good as a crown, and some say is even better.
The crown was inherited by Ignatius’s son, Auberon, also touched with divine arcana and a zest for destroying evil. Osurehm kept the temple since gods live a lot longer than men, for eternity it can be argued, if not measured, and the people came to the conclusion that he should have probably been worshiped in place of Tarwethen, the previously most-worshipped deity on the pantheon, all along. Tarwethen, the god of winter and wealth, had risen in renown in a slightly similar way a century or two prior when another divinely-blessed mage had crusaded against an infestation of fire rocs. Since neither god seemed to have anything to say about the switch, as was the norm since the gods stopped visiting earth and communicating directly with its creatures after The Expulsion ten or twenty thousand years prior, Osurehm ended up sticking.
Like his father, Auberon’s adeptness with the Holy Light of Osurehm made him beloved by the masses who were thrilled with his efficiency at wiping out evil. That is, until he met an early and tragic end at the hands of a demon.
Auberon left behind a son, Archibald Lumier, coronated on his fifteenth birthday, a short week after his venerated father’s death. Youth didn’t delay Archibald’s adoption of the family businesses of both ruling and exorcising, and his divine powers were said to be stronger than his father and grandfather combined. Whether it truly was strength or simply the efficiency of the divine mages who came before him, in three short years, the good king hunted the last slivers of evil to the farthest reaches of Eiren, and it slunk back into the shadowy places, the uninhabitable quags and desolate karsts and forsaken wastes. There, evil was left to fester beyond where the Holy Knights of Osurehm patrolled, and Archibald maintained his oath to the people of Eiren for nearly four decades that for as long as he reigned, darkness would have no place in Eiren.
But evil still wormed its way into the realm, though its face was often unexpected, a truth some of its inhabitants knew all too intimately.
Amma supposed it was morning though the sun never rose on Aszath Koth. Vapors off the mountain range and rumors of an infernal miasma sought to keep the city shrouded in a constant haze, but that was just as well—she didn’t want to be seen here anyway as humans had no place in the city of monstrous beasts.
Body stiff, Amma unwrapped her arms from about her knees and eased the tattered cloth she’d hidden behind to the side. The storm from the previous night had ended, and she actually managed a smile as she slipped off the barrel she’d curled up on for the night. Things might be looking up.
Landing right down in a murky, grey puddle, a shock of cold drove up through her body, followed by a wave of nausea from the smell. On second thought, upward may have been a too-lofty direction for things to look. Perhaps things were actually, well…parallelto the day before. At least she had been lucky enough to hide herself away overnight and stay relatively dry until now. An inn would have been better, but the keeper of the only one she could find was a creature with long, spindly limbs, big batwings for ears, and skin tinged green—a goblin, she thought, though she had never seen one before. He offered her a room for half off with a shifty smile, but from what Amma understood, goblins sometimes ate humans. Half off sure sounded good unless it was one’s limbs.
Amma adjusted her cloak’s hood as low as was practical and tugged a sagging cowl up over her mouth and nose. Together, they worked to obscure her face and block out the stench of the city, but she feared her identity, the human part of it at least, still wasn’t well hidden. She had only seen perhaps two other humans since crossing the unpatrolled gates through the mountain pass into Aszath Koth. One had donned a crimson robe, head shaved to a scarred-up scalp with purple circles under his eyes. He had gripped a thick tome in bony hands as he hissed out a ceaseless string of nonsense words and wandered about. The other had been a woman selling pelts that didn’t smell properly skinned. She hollered about the end times between sales pitches. “Annihilation is nigh!” she shouted in a creaking, leathery voice. “The harbinger of night eternal and civility’s destruction lurks at the corners of the realm, biding its time until the hallowed son releases it to reign again! Buy two rabbit skins, get a chipmunk pelt for free!” Spattered with the dried blood of what Amma hoped was her occupation as a furrier, her dark hair was in wild knots, and her layers of clothing had likely never seen a wash.
But nearly three weeks into her journey, Amma feared she wasn’t faring much better, and try as she might to accept it, the ickiness was getting to her. Not something she would have otherwise chosen to wear, at least the over-sized tunic had been a crisp, clean linen when she donned it, but now it was stained with mud and sweat and even a little blood. The breeches, which had to have the waist secured with an extra tie and the excess length stuffed into the tops of borrowed boots, were torn up one leg and sagging quite uncomfortably. Amma chastised herself silently yet again for not bringing needle and thread to at least patch things up. Perry would not want these clothes back regardless, even though she would be relieved when she could finally return them to him.
She only had to accomplish this first, butthiswas no simple thing. Traveling alone had been dangerous, and leaving home had been complex, but none of it would compare to what waited for her today. So close to her goal she could almost smell it, if it smelled of urine and rot and perhaps spiced pork, she took a regrettably deep breath and crept to the alley’s end to peek out into the street.
Aszath Koth was already alive with a handful of creatures going about their dark deeds, selling stolen goods, completing illicit chores, getting breakfast. Amma winced at the pang in her own stomach, pushing it aside to focus on finding the mysterious temple. The route to what she sought, which roads to follow and which cities to pass through to find the gates to Aszath Koth, had been in a restricted book at the Grand Athenaeum, but the book did not include a business address for the exact building she needed—that was, apparently, too proprietary. Some kind of direction through the city, at least, would have been nice, but for that, she would need to ask a friendly face—one that didn’t offer to take her there themselves for a lewd price.
Gripping the hilt of the dagger she kept holstered about her thigh, concealed under the excess of her tunic and her cloak, she slipped out onto the street and, fighting against everything she’d been taught, hunched her shoulders and kept her head down. It was easy enough in early morning to blend—even the monstrous creatures in Aszath Koth seemed bleary-eyed and malcontent to start the day—and she marched herself deeper into the city.
Meandering around a divot filled with murky rainwater, a pair of scaled, child-height creatures waddled in the opposite direction, chatting in clicks and garbles. Unlike most of the other beings she scampered past, these two were short and squat and perhaps less dangerous, so she tugged down her cowl to offer them a cautious grin. One simply glared back, dark eyes beading, and the other showed her all of its jagged teeth at once, set into a long, reptilian snout. When it bit at the air beside her, she jumped, and both creatures devolved into throaty laughter.
Amma pulled her cowl back up and hurried away, taking a blind right down another cobbled street. Only a hairless man walked the road. He had pointed ears like an elf though the similarities stopped there, blue-skinned, yellow-eyed, and fang-toothed. Amma averted her gaze and scurried with a purpose in the opposite direction.
Of course she would find no friendliness here: the city had once been ruled by a demon, summoned to earth by those who were undoubtedly vile and nefarious. Though that demon had been thwarted by King Archibald over two decades ago, Aszath Koth remained a bastion for the dark and deceitful. Amma had been too young for memories when the demon had marched on Eiren’s capital, but just the thought of it made her shiver. Her home, luckily, had remained out of evil’s path, and when she had been to Eirengaard years later, she had been fortuitous to never see any fallout from the demon’s attack on their realm.
Digging into the small satchel on her hip, Amma pulled out the last of her salted meat and took stock of where she had ended up. The cobbled road was wide enough for a cart, its buildings almost normal looking without scaled or furry creatures wandering around, though they were being held up questionably, leaning a bit too far to one side with windows that didn’t properly latch. Without signs or barrels of goods, or rather,bads, outside, she assumed she’d come upon residences.
Ripping off a piece of the dried beef and working hard to chew at the sinewy leftover, she cast her gaze up to the spires of a fortification that loomed over the rest of the squat city many blocks off. It was ostentatious enough to be the temple she sought, though from where she stood, there was no sign to clarify. Not that a sign would necessarily help: the few she’d seen had been a mix of images, a language she didn’t know, and a smattering of poorly spelled words in the common tongue, Key. She was smart enough to figure out an image of what she thought originally was a pipe, a sideways squiggle with a star in the center, and the word “bred” meantbakery, and another word “smyf” accompanied with a crude burnished blade meantarmory, but she didn’t see the symbol for the temple that had been in the book in the Grand Athenaeum anywhere.
At a loss, she began to make her way toward where the castle-like building loomed, glad to be taking herself farther from the increasingly busy main road. With the absence of many voices, vendors, and carts, there was a new sound, though, a dismal baying. When she glanced around for its source, she noted that none of the other creatures ambling out of their homes paid the noise any attention, not even commenting that it pierced the ears irritatingly or that it sounded pained.
Concerned for whatever could be crying like that, and interminably distractable when her nerves were high, Amma followed the noise to a sleepy set of narrow roads and then around the corner of a patchwork building with a thatched roof. The noise stopped, and she thought she lost whatever had been howling until she noted a form in the shadows ahead, squat down beside a bundle of fur.
The figure was much larger than the little, squirming creature, and Amma’s heart leapt into her throat, mind pinging back to the dark-omen-spouting woman and her pelts. A hand reached out, gripped the furry bundle by the scruff of its neck, and lifted it from the muddied ground. Four little paws and a tail, black as midnight, dangled from the large hand, and it squeaked out a pitiful meow. Amma could not move though she wanted to both flee and intervene, but there was nothing she could do, the flash of red was too quick, and it was over in an instant.
She threw a hand over her mouth to stifle the gasp that came out sharp and loud anyway. Eyes snapped to her from the shadows and held her in their gaze. The figure set the creature back down, but it wasn’t limp as Amma expected. Instead, it stretched its skinny legs and chirped with a vigor it didn’t have moments prior before darting off down the alley and deeper into the shadows. Without taking its gaze from her, the figure stood up out of the darkness.
Amma took an instinctive step back though she was already at the far end of the alley. Tall but not as hulking as some of the aberrant beings she had seen earlier, and pale but not ghostly like the mad priest at the city gates, what stood before her was a seemingly normal, human man, only the third she had seen in Aszath Koth. Though with his head tipped down, glaring at her from under a furrowed, dark brow and swathed entirely in black from his cloak to his boots, he certainly looked as menacing as any of the monsters around.
Then he whipped away to leave through the opposite end of the alley.
“Wait!”
He stopped.
Gods, what in the bright goodness was she doing? Just because he was human, and just because he helped that cat, didnotmean he was going to be kind.
Into the quiet of the alley, his voice swept over her, smooth but with a commanding bite as he glanced back over his shoulder. “Well?”
Amma snapped back into herself, dipping her own head with narrowed eyes, trying to make her shoulders as wide as possible and dropping her voice as low as it dared go. “Tell me where the Ebony Sanatorium of Malcontent can be found.”
His eyes darted skyward for a moment and then back to her. “The what?”
