Kline had made more than one mistake by attacking the spider. Demons fed on one another, and the boy had been tainted by his time inside the spiritual plane. Now, that seed of demonic influence was drinking in a tide of corrupted Essence.

He groaned and thrashed on the ground, spitting up blood as his internal organs shifted. Nic winced. When he’d evolved, he’d done so by connecting with the Bloodline Sea, his consciousness not experiencing the changes unfolding across his body.

Kline was feeling every bone in his body melt and reform. He was only silent because he had no lungs to scream with.

At the same time the world around them was growing more real. Whatever subdimensional space they’d been dragged into by the Nightdoor Spider, they were escaping now that it was dead, bleeding back into reality.

“Is he gonna…” Norman watched with horror, his lips curling back to show his yellow smoker’s teeth. “Because if its gonna end with him braindead, well, we could do the job now…”

“He’ll live.” Nic said through Inkspur. “He won’t be happy with how he ends up, but he’ll survive.”

There was a pause.

“I guess…” Nic pointed out. “There is a way for you to become a monster after all. You were marked by the spider so it could feed off you, but if you found another demon, you could turn the tables. Eat it and become one…”

“Think I’ll pass.”

The boy groaned in misery, pink froth spilling from his mouth.

Nic considered. It was torment just listening to Kline suffer, and he did have a power that seemed to interact with Demonic Essence. It was worth trying…

He lowered a hand onto the boy’s back as the miserable, half-shaped thing in the grass writhed and shivered. His aura slowly fed downwards into the skin and muscle, and Nic tried to draw one of the marks floating around his cultivation core down the pathway, luring it with Essence.

After all.

All things had an opposite reaction. If the Aleph marks within him could exert a pull on his Essence, enough Essence could pull the mark in the opposite direction.

He just had to be careful not to shatter the boy’s meridians and kill him. In a sense it was good they were both demons now, because it meant their Essence was closer to compatible…

The mark fell into the boy’s core and there was a sudden, sharp gasp. The singular letter of the Concept of Aleph let out a deep chime, like the chanting of thousands of bestial voices in unison for a single syllable, and the boy’s cells resonated with it.

Blood oozed from his skin in thick, dark blisters, then solidified. Coins. The scales that formed on his skin looked like darkened gold coins.

For the first time since the transformation began, Kline spat out a gasped word.

It was a curse, because obviously, but it was a sign of improvement.

---

While they waited for Kline to recover, Nic returned to the cave. The spider had said there were living people inside and he intended to find them.

The first people he found were emphatically not among the living. They had been drained dry, and their corpses were thin and empty. Nic tried to pull one free of the silk it was wrapped in, and the hand he grasped caved in without resistance, crumbling to flakes of something halfway between leather and paper.

He moved on, pausing to slice down some of the silk and wind it into bundles to store in his bag. Deeper within there were cocoons rising from the floor like silk blisters, bulging with the shapes of curled limbs. Runes marked the outer layer. Nic grasped the tiger’s tooth he used for crafting and sliced them open carefully, peeling the people within out in a tide of foul-smelling yellow liquid.

Several of them were already showing signs of demonic corruption.

As he laid one body out after the next, they began to wake, rubbing their eyes. Nic left Inkspur to explain the situation as he returned to the cave entrance and began to hack apart the spider’s corpse.

It was messy work but he cut quickly and efficiently, opening the shell and prying through the organs until he found what he needed. The silk and the poison glands. Further in was a wriggling vein that contained many half-developed larvae, and Nic didn’t hesitate to stamp them out.

As the people emerged into the light, Norman had Kline up and about, shifting the boy to sit under the shade of a nearby tree.

Kline had changed. His face had dark, leathery skin, with a vertically split upper lip that revealed small teeth set into vivid pink gums. Cat-like eyes stared at Nic. He was lanky, tall, with backwards bending legs, and almost every inch of him was covered with ancient golden coins, layered together like scales. In fact, that’s what they were, with only the appearance of riches. Sharp feline ears extended from his bald head, his hair fallen away and replaced by thin grey fur.

Nic thought it could be worse. He was still roughly humanoid.

But the boy wasn’t talking. Watching his eyes flinch away from meeting the stares of the people coming out of the cave, Nic could only feel some sympathy. He was stuck-up, arrogant, and dumb, but…

Well Nic had been too.

Most of the other survivors had only been corrupted a little. They had horns prickling from their heads, or changed eyes, in the most extreme cases patches of scales. So long as they didn’t absorb any more Demonic Essence they’d remain as impspawn, sometimes called tieflings. Nic had been born as one.

“Let’s make some introductions…” The old man said.

One by one, Nic was carted in front of each of the people who had emerged. Some of them were crying, others had gone pale, but Norman slapped each on the shoulder and seemed to be able to draw them out of their stupor a little.

“This one‘s Emma. She didn’t take a Shard yet, been trying to convince her…”

“... Melville. Sharp guy. Got some kind of knack for making little sculptures out of clouds…”

“Kiana. Best cook I’ve ever met. Not sure what kind of power that is, but she’s got it…”

Nic perked up suddenly, looking at the slender woman with her mop of curly chocolate hair drawn back behind a yellow plastic band. She was looking back at him with immense skepticism.

“You have a cooking Shard? How does it work?” Cooking was…

One of the fundamental arts of the cosmos. Spirit chefs were like half-alchemists, able to prepare herbs and other medicines to draw out their strengths, and mix them together into nourishing forms. The only step they were missing was the ability to process those ingredients through cultivated flame to make pills.

Still, they were respected by everyone.

And especially by anyone who wanted to found their own Settlement.

“I smell things.” She waved her hand, and then, realizing a little more explanation might be expected, added, “I can sort of sense when something’s meant to go with something else, just by sniffing it. Or when the food’s just right.”

“She’s real useful figuring out what’s poison, too.” The old man added.

“That too.” She grinned.

“Nicolas...” Sofia started up, but Nic was way ahead of her.

“That’s a strong talent.” Far stronger than the Natives could imagine. “We could use your help at Winterhome.”

But before he could focus on winning her over, Norman was calling him over again.

“Now, this here’s Ruben. He was in charge of, I guess, settling matters between folks? He was the one to come to when you had a problem. Still is, I hope.” Norman dug into his pocket for a cigarette to offer the dark, broad-shouldered man who sat on a log, wringing the spider’s bile out of his shirt.

Ruben was handsome in a rough way with a greying beard and mustache, and he smiled as he offered Nic a hand without hesitation. “Howdy there, cowboy. I think your dragon gave me your elevator pitch. Little lizard’s got a future selling car insurance.”

Then he wheezed at his own joke, a smoker’s cough tinging his laugh.

“Oh, he’s not a dragon, and he doesn’t need his ego preened any.” Nic said.

And then glanced over at Inkspur.

The little bastard was refusing to translate that.

Nic rolled his eyes. “Inkspur, tell him I don’t think his people are going to survive out here much longer. Today has to be a warning.”

Ruben nodded. “I know. I’m willing to come along, if that’s what people choose.”

“About that.” Nic’s attention was brought back to Kiana as the chef cleared her throat. “I’m not sure about this, Norman. I mean-” Her eyes darted to Nic, and she addressed him directly.

“I’m thankful. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think you’re leading us into a trap, or that you’re a bad guy. I know we’re not strong and I’ve come real close to dying, so I know we need help. All of that.”

“But…” She was being very careful with her words. “I think most of us chose to stay here because its small, and because there’s nobody really strong here. Some of the people in the other camps got way too much power way too quickly and people I knew, people I trusted, got ugly just as quickly when they realized they were in charge.”

“I get a good feeling from him, Kiana…” Norman added. But if Ruben seemed to trust the old man’s intuition, the cook clearly did not.

“I get it.” Nic said. “And I’ve been there. It’s not about whether I’m a good guy or a bad one. It’s that I have all the power and I could decide to be either one, any time I want.”

She nodded, slowly.

“Which I can’t really change, I guess. Somebody’s gotta kill the things that are hunting in the night, and you will be hunted. That spider marked all of you…”

People in the crowd were still touching their faces, examining the strange growths of horns and scales that had distorted their old, familiar features.

“And more like it are coming. But I’m not going to say you should follow me because you’re afraid. I’m going to promise you that, in two weeks, I can teach you how to use your powers, and defend yourself. If you still want to leave after that, then that’s fair.”

“Sofia.” He whispered. “What’s the name of that Shard she has? And the cloud-sculpting Shard too…”

As Sofia fed him the answers, he pointed to Kiana. “You have a Fragrance-Seeking Shard, right? I know how it works and what it’s meant to do. You… Melville… you have a Weathercrafting Shard, yeah? You could do more than make statues with that. You could rain down lightning.”

“Your Shard isn’t meant for healing. It’s for assassination and hunting…”

“You, you’re in a bad situation now, but that Shard will help when you get a second one to pair it with…”

One by one, he went down the line. It was working. Even the ones who weren’t convinced were surrounded by people who were, and the flock as a whole was moving towards his side.

Kiana remained. A stubborn rock in the flow, her arms crossed.

“How do you know all this?” She asked.

Nic just grinned. “Well, I’ll tell you in two weeks, how about that?”

Walker on the Path of Ancient Kings

Set yourself against the world and become the mountain that holds up the sky.

Requirements to advance your Settlement are as follows

+ Forge an alliance or conquer a Vassal (0/1)

+ Conquer eight Territories (1/8)

+ Gain 100 citizens (39/100)

+ Build three Territorial Arrays (0/3)

Three of the four must be completed before the path is open.