“Why am I the baby killer?” Dan asked Nora bemusedly. “You three killed more of the tiny ants than I did.”
“You’re the party leader.” Emily smiled with a shrug. “All our actions reflect on you. Ultimately, we are your responsibility. I certainly plan on using that to clear up some outstanding bar tabs when we get back to Morganville.”
“We’ve just completed a lucrative mission,” he replied, exhausted. “You’re each getting a sovereign plus commission. Shouldn’t that be more than enough to pay off your tab?”
“You’ve grossly underestimated how much she can drink.” Andrea rolled her eyes. “We haven’t been able to upgrade our gear in months because we’re always in debt to some barkeep or another. If it isn’t a bill for her drinking her daily bottle of rotgut, it was a bill for her getting into a bar fight and wrecking the place. I’ve seen her swinging a bottle in one hand and a broken chair in another well before the day laborers had returned for dinner.”
“You’re just a stick in the mud, Andrea.” Emily stuck her tongue out. “You won’t let me cut loose at all unless we’re out adventuring. It’s nothing but whining about collateral damage, costs, and risks. Half the reason I took a class was so I could have an excuse to engage in some good, old-fashioned, mana-empowered mayhem.”
“That’s it?” Dan cocked his head as he glanced at Emily. “Not the promise of riches, not to restore your family’s lost honor, not some impossible quest for revenge? You just want an excuse to get a little drunk and wreck up the place?”
“Is that really so bad?” She asked as she shrugged sheepishly. “We had a fairly conservative childhood, and Papa wouldn’t even let me ride a horse. I guess I’m just repressed or something. Andrea says I should probably see a therapist, but that seems like a lot less fun than throwing some asshole off of a balcony.”
“She actually threw the last therapist I hired off of a balcony,” Andrea interjected sourly. “I’ve more or less decided she’s a lost cause, and at this point, it’s more a matter of minimizing the damage she causes, rather than making any real effort to actually stop her.”
“What about you, Nora?” Emily asked cheerfully. “What drove you to take up a class and head out into the wilds?”
The ranger glanced up at the rest of the party from her perch next to the fire. Her face scrunched for a second before falling into pensive thought. Dan took advantage of the moment of silence to massage his temples. He wasn’t sure what caused his current condition, but he was more than sick of it. The worst of it was that, due to the local technology level, he couldn’t even take an aspirin for the splitting headache.
“Power, mostly,” Nora finally replied. “In this world, the powerful feast while the mundane starve. I grew up in a slum. Despite years of taxes being paid on time, the local lord cut corners and refused to pay full price for our town’s sanctuary runes. One night, they failed. We were hunted like animals by the monsters until night broke. I was only a girl when it happened. I survived by hiding in a wine cellar, rocking back and forth while waiting for the screams to stop.”
“Jesus,” Dan said bitterly. “That’s a whole lot to work through. I don’t know about Emily. Maybe Nora is the one who needs therapy.”
“Oh, it’s not that bad,” Nora stood up from the fire and took a couple of steps into the cave’s darkness. “It’s a harsh world, and there are countless stories just like mine. The rich cut corners and the poor suffer. It’s a tale as old as the mountains. The only proper way to break the cycle is to become powerful enough that no noble would dare step on you, lest you break their royal foot. That means money, and that means stealing mana for our classes from monsters. Now, are we going to start singing songs around the campfire, or are we going to head back to Morganville?”
Dan glanced at Andrea and Emily. Andrea shrugged and slung Emily back over her shoulder. He returned the shrug before taking up his own pack. Nora might have taken the conversation in a dark direction, but she had a point. There really wasn’t much of a purpose in lurking about the mine. They had all the silver that they could carry. It was time to sell what they had earned and invest it in better gear.
“Wait!” Emily shouted after them as they set out into the cave. “I thought we had the option of singing songs around the campfire? That sounded like fun to me.”
Both Dan and Andrea made a point of ignoring her as they walked away. It was a long hike back to town, and neither of them were terribly excited to deal with Emily’s antics the entire way. The only saving grace was that Nora’s mood had soured to the point that her usually-irreverent attitude had disappeared. Dan wasn’t sure he could take both of them at once with his splitting headache.
They exited the mine without incident, quietly selling the silver ore in their packs to the servants of the mine’s owner. After paying the twins and Nora, Dan received another six sovereigns. Good pay for a day or so worth of work, or so Nora said. Then, with fresh coins jingling in their pockets, they began the long walk back to Morganville. The journey was fairly uneventful with the handful of monsters Nora sighted running away before the party could get close to them.
Finally, they stopped an hour or so outside of town as the sky began to darken. Tanloff completely eclipsed the sun, heralding what the locals referred to as night. With practiced hands, Nora began placing the sanctuary runes in a circle around the party’s campsite. Before long, they were all illuminated by the indigo glow of the protective runes.
Unconsciously, Dan let out a breath of relief. The runes were brand new and hadn’t yet been tested. Deep down, he couldn’t help but have some anxiety that he had spent half of his sovereigns on a fake or damaged product. No one had told him what exactly came out during the brief night, but everyone seemed to agree that whatever it was could threaten even high-rank members of elite classes. All but the most foolhardy of adventurers would rely on the runes to keep them safe.
As far as Dan could tell, the runes could only be used every twenty to thirty hours, but for a brief, four-hour window, they would create an impenetrable barrier that nothing could pass. Once the runes were up, be they the weaker, portable runes used to protect a campsite, or the larger more permanent runes carved into the walls of the cities and towns, they stayed up. Anyone trapped outside a city stayed trapped outside. Without portable runes of one’s own, even being late to return from a simple errand outside the walls could be a death sentence.
Once the protective purple glow of the runes illuminated the campsite, Andrea quickly set up a fire and began cooking their dinner of stew while Emily polished her blade. As the camp fell into fairly routine behaviors, Dan found a rock near the edge of the runic barrier and sat down to look up into the sky.
It would be his first proper night, after all, and he was at least a little interested in the process. Already, the reflected light of Tanloff was mostly obscured, with only a sliver of the gas giant still visible as it passed between Twilight and Alpha Centauri. He looked up suddenly as a rock clattered under Nora’s shoes next to him. She took a seat on another rock nearby.
They both sat for a time, uncomfortable on the cold stone, watching the sky darken further. Dan shifted slightly to work a crick out of his back. Nora perked up at his sudden movement, then settled back into pensive silence once she realized he wasn’t going to speak. Finally, she broke the silence.
“It really is something, isn’t it?” she asked, gazing up at the rapidly-depleting gas giant in the dark sky. “I’ve only talked to a couple other travelers, but apparently most worlds don’t have something like this. One of them said it’s because we’re tidally-locked, constantly facing Tanloff. According to him, there’s another side of the planet with much longer days and nights because it’s either directly facing the star or completely dark. Apparently, the days over there are incredibly hot, and the nights are bitterly cold. He even told me that the night spirits probably originated over there because they can hunt for ten to fifteen hours straight, due to the much longer nights.”
“Do you know if any of that is true?” Dan didn’t even look at her, still staring up into the sky, trying to take in every moment of the strange phenomena.
“It is,” a different, masculine voice answered him. Dan whipped his head down to see Ishlar standing just outside of the camp’s sanctuary runes. The large man appeared to be completely healed, but his gaze was heavy with barely-suppressed anger as he stared at Dan and his party. Behind Ishlar stood another three people wearing armor with weapons in their hands. At least those individuals had the good sense to nervously glance at the sky as night approached.
“Nora,” Ishlar continued. “You broke a contract with me, then took money from me in a crooked bet. I’m here to take back what’s mine. You have some time before your runes run out, but when they do, there isn’t a town guard here to save you.”
“Ishlar,” she acknowledged evenly. “I didn’t break the contract, you did. I was a free agent the minute you left me to my death, and we both know the bet wasn’t crooked. You get excited, and you get in over your head; it’s what always happens. Your patron might let you get away with blaming everyone else for your lapses in judgement, but it was my life you risked. I’m not going to die on some excursion because a personal vendetta of yours caused you to take an unnecessary risk.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Nora,” the large man replied through gritted teeth. “You are going to die because of a personal vendetta. I know you just went to the silver mine. You’re either weak from the fighting or heavy with gold. As soon as your runes go down, I’m going to take that gold and your head. It’s what I’m owed, after all of the public humiliation you’ve put me through. I just wanted to offer you a couple hours to make peace with your fate.”
“Ishlar!” one of the men behind him called out. “She’s going to try to keep you talking until night falls and let the spirits do her work for her. We need to set up sanctuary before they come out, or she’ll win without having to draw a single arrow.”
Ishlar glowered at the campsite before relenting and stalking back to his own party. Only a couple hundred yards from them, their own purple runes sprang up, to the visible relief of Ishlar’s party. Dan chuckled to himself as he realized that they must have been setting up their own runes while Ishlar came over to taunt them.
“Davis was always a little too smart for his own good.” Nora spat on the ground, glaring at the rival campsite. “Ishlar has always been an easy-to-manipulate idiot, but Davis is usually nearby to keep him honest. He was too worked up when we challenged him to the arena for Davis to intervene, but usually he’s always lurking nearby to prevent Ishlar’s pride and arrogance from getting the better of him.”
“Honestly,” she sighed, “I don’t even really understand why he follows that oaf. Ishlar’s patron is powerful, but he doesn’t have a terrible amount of influence in Morganville. Really, he’s even a better fighter than Ishlar. For all of the brute strength he lacks, he’s much harder to bait with feints. If Ishlar can’t overpower someone in one rush, which admittedly isn’t terribly common, the idiot is almost always at a loss as to how to proceed. Davis, on the other hand, will stand back and carve you up.”
Then, a mournful howling echoed across the rocky plains of Twilight just as the last of the light faded from the sky. The only illumination came from the fires and twin set of sanctuary runes, almost like lanterns in the absolute darkness. Outside their circle of light came the hiss of movement as something large, unseen, and predatory shifted. Suddenly, Dan understood everyone’s nerves and concerns. For his first time outside the runes of a town, night had fallen.
