Eferail saluted to the prince's ward."Good day, good Ser! I would like to speak with Prince Arterius."

"Ser Eferail, this has been the sixth time that you're here," sighed the ward, obviously irritated with the knight's tenacity. " You should know by now that the prince is currently unavailable."

"Ser Stolas, I'm afraid I cannot go back to the Crescent Isle empty-handed," the knight insisted. "This is a matter of importance!"

"Importance or nay, the prince is currently not available to entertaining audiences!"

"Even if that's coming from Lord Prestonheim? His godfather?"

Stolas looked around and gestured the knight to come closer. " Nay means nay! If you're not the Imperatur or his younger brother, then I won't let you in."

"But this is a matter of--"

"Everything is a matter of great importance," Stolas said dryly. " Besides, you can give that letter to me, so I can hand it over to the prince." Stolas reached his hand for the letter.

"I cannot, good Ser," Eferail shrugged his shoulders and sighed. "I have been tasked to deliver it straight to the prince's hands. I think it meant, only he can take hold of it." He bowed to Stolas and left the Palace.

As what Ser Stolas mentioned to him, he has been in the capital for the past six days. Six days of fruitless effort and wasted time. It has been 10 days since he left the Crescent Isles, and he can feel the pressure weighing on his shoulders. Lord Prestonheim is waiting for him to give the good news, and he has to deliver.

He walked by the bustling streets of Arteria. Horse-drawn carriages filled with textiles, food, exotic armors and slaves congested the roads going to the city. It looked like there's a huge bazaar going on at the center square.

It has been half a month since their battalion left for the Crescent Isles, and he hoped he could stay a little longer there. Eferail hated the loud noises. The shouting men and clacking of horse hooves sounded irritating to him, like flies buzzing on his ear which comes a plenty here. He hated Arterius for that. It was too noisy for his liking, and yet here he is, on a mission at the city, that he loathed so much.

Another carriage passed in front of him. It was filled with slaves fresh from the Eastern Forest. Elves and dwarves were delivered in swarms to the city center for auctioning. He scoffed at this idea.

If all men are truly free as the Prinicpalia's scholars claimed, then why is there slavery? He cannot wrap his head around it. He shrugged his head as he continued to think about the irony.

Suddenly, he felt someone watching him. He looked around and saw people doing about their own things. But he cannot shake the feeling of someone spying on him from a distance. Eferail took the initiative, and tried to blend in with the crowd. Pulling up his hood, he squeezed himself into the sea of people walking towards the bazaar, hoping to shake off his feeling.

The tightly-knitted crowd proved to be hard to navigate. Eferail tried pushing and shoving poor passersby as he tried his best to pace faster to shake off his looming sense of some prying eyes.

Finally, he managed to find a narrow pathway between a pottery stall and a knife stall. He slid into the small alleyway at the back of the stalls and made his way into the dark, winding path. He paused and looked back to check whether his hunch was right--it was indeed.

Two hooded men followed him into the claustrophobic walkways. The shorter man, held a small crossbow on his hand while the taller one, had a bronze-plated scythe with Western Inscriptions inscribed as runes into the crescent blade, running towards him. That's when he realized who they were.

"Mongrels," he murmured. He stretched out his right hand towards them and chanted. "He who rules the land of the cold I call thee to grant me power--Ice form number 3, Winter wall!"

Suddenly, the air droplets began to solidify and formed a thick ice wall between him and his attacker. As his pursuers were at bay, Eferail decided to make a turn towards the city slums, ditching his gray hood for a tattered and dirtier one, hanging from one of the houses he passed by.

He ran further down the street where the houses became sparse as he moved further. He ran another half ildwyrm distance before he was stopped in his tracks by a big cemented wall around 15 footlings high. It was the end of the road for him. He glanced back to check if his pursuers were still around, luckily they weren't. But with a risk getting caught, Eferail has to do what he has to do--find a way out of there.

Using his prowess with earth elemental magic, he drew a crack in the wall enough for him to slide into the other side. After making his way to the other side, a foul-stenching air immediately assaulted his nose. It smelled so bad, that it was enough to make him gag, but his pride of being a knight forced that urge back.

Eferail, set his sights at the place he found himself in and had a grim realization of where he is. The desolate part of the city filled with disease-ridden people, the Sanatoria. This part of the city has been perpetually closed due to the fear of the diseases that might spread the healthy populace.

It has been said, that whenever a state-sanctioned doctor diagnosed you with contagious maladies, such as leperosa or the black bulbous, you get thrown to rot in this part of the city. The Principalia believed that the high walls were enough to protect them from the spread of these diseases.

There were even times when people, usually the common-folk, are thrown here by the elites just because they talked out of line or just because they didn't like them. These highly influential people usual bribe the guards to do this dirty work.

To blend in, Eferail used a glamor spell on himself to look exactly the same as the people living there--rotting with their facial features twisted by the disease. With his disguised in place, his next objective is to find a way out of that sickening hellhole.

Luckily, he was well-versed with the city's maps. As a member of a house dedicated to serve House Prestonheim, he emerged himself with the city's information and maps, so that he could be useful to Lord Prestonheim when it comes to city patrols and navigation.

He recalled the sewage system that spreads throughout Arteria. He remembered one waterway that flowed away from the city is located below the Sanatoria. He ought to take that route instead of either going back from where he came from or by risking himself opening another crack in the wall as it might alert the guards.

All he had to do, is find the city's drainage system. He had to walk across the foul-smelling streets riddled with rotten corpses and people close to becoming like one. The piles of dead bodies heaped like a huge building in the center square. Ashes and dust filled the ground and air.

He recalled that the guards usually burn the mountain of corpses once a month by making a contained pyre. It was a harrowing and grisly place to be in. People living there can no longer be distinguished by their facial feature, because their nose or ears had fallen off their faces or because of the sheer amount of bulbous deforming their faces. Their hands usually lacked fingers and some had a mishappen appearance due to the growing number of warts in their joints.

Eferail has to find his way out fast, or else he might end up along with rotten bodies of this cursed place.