The night in the garden was rather uneventful, though expecting anything else with its guardian right by the camp would have been foolish. In exchange for the tasty stew to moisten its roots with and a conversation it had long yearned for, Kipouros granted the party his boon and promised them a restful night.

Of course, King and Leggy had no need for sleep, so they still kept their duty of feeding the campfire and making the bedroll Anastacia brough along redundant.

The necromancer herself dozed off almost immediately and slept peacefully through the entire night, whether it was because of the walking or the lack of sleep during their night in Crescent, it certainly hit the spot for her.

Emilia had a little more trouble to get used to the presence looming over them, but eventually she drifted to sleep much the same as her friend. She had tried to strike up a conversation with the wolf after Anastacia had fallen asleep, but while not hostile or even unfriendly, the beast clearly preferred speaking with the necromancer – perhaps because of it reminded it of its old master, or perhaps because the priestess had offered to fight it for no reason.

Neither of them had really considered when they would wake up. Usually adventurers would let the sun do the job or whoever had the last shift watching the fire would wake up the others, but the sun had no chance of finding its way to the ground in the garden, and the simulacra had proven less than reliable in measuring time. Luckily, Kipouros was as thoughtful as they came, and a haunting howl echoed throughout the forest mere seconds before sunrise.

Thankful of the gesture, the adventurers once again shared a decent portion of their morning meal with the tree and while they ate, Anastacia sat down on one of its massive roots and scratched away some of the moss that had grown on its ancient bark.

Eventually, they were forced to carry on with their journey, and leaving without being able to help the Kipouros weighed on Anastacia’s heart for the rest of the day as they walked along the ruined remains of a road, but at the same time, she did look forward to meeting the wolf again on their way back to Valor.

The second half of the road was unsurprisingly very much the same as the first one: a massive tree, after massive tree, after massive tree, after massive tree... While it was great for keeping up with the schedule they had planned, the party found the strange mentality the adventurers often gained over time whispering in the backs of their head; just walking was utterly and completely boring. They didn’t really want to run into any problems, but at the same time, a vicious troll or maybe an enchanted trap forgotten by a hunter would have done plenty to kill the monotony.

At the end of the day, just as the hue of the sunlight was about to turn red, the party emerged from the garden and was greeted by two sights: a massive gray monolithic structure that matched the other machine fortresses in architecture and was built into the side of a valley in the horizon, and a humble little town of maybe a hundred or two hundred people about a kilometer away from the forest.

“I take it that that’s Ruvenstead?” Emilia said and nodded towards the town. “Our mechanical friends don’t seem to be here yet, so lets just head into the town and get us a room at the inn.”

Anastacia stared at the massive Aureun structure in the distance, Kipouros had mentioned that it used to have lights on it, but now it appeared as nothing more than a gray pile of blocks, which may have been a recent development and related to whatever trouble this ‘Erratic Judgement’ had gotten into.

After no more than maybe a hundred meters of walking towards the town, along a sparsely used road that ran along the edge of the forest they had come from, the necromancer could feel something strange at the fringe of her range, in the direction they were heading to.

“Hold up, there’s fuckery afoot!” She warned her friends and skipped to the front of the party to take the lead.

“What is it?” Emilia asked and grasped the handle of her weapon as they began cautiously approaching.

Anastacia grimaced violently after sniffing the air. “Necrofuckery, someone has unearthed more than a few bodies here. I’m not sure why, but I think they’ve just sort of sprinkled the remains around there.”

Unlike in Crescent, the foul smell of rot in the air was strong enough for even Emilia to notice it after it had been pointed out. “Mind your language though.” She coughed and recoiled as a gust of wind suddenly intensified the stench tenfold.

“Really? Now?” The necromancer frowned and dug out the crumbled face covering from her pocket.

Emilia covered her face with her sleeve. “Yes now, timing doesn’t matter when it comes to proper upbringing. Your language has gotten out of hand recently, so from now on, every time you swear, I’m going to take a bit of your quest reward and use it to replace what I gave to the sisterhood.”

“You can’t just- Ah… You totally can, can’t you?” Anastacia sighed and considered investing in one more swear, but as they got closer to the town, her focus moved elsewhere.

Starting from roughly halfway from the forest to the town, the ground had been filled with shards of bone. Spread oddly evenly ten centimeters apart, a few hundred meters wide boundary of bone shards seemed to surround the entire town, at least from the direction they were coming from.

The age of the shards ranged wildly, but none appeared completely fresh, so they probably didn’t belong to the townsfolk themselves. From what Anastacia could tell without going too close, they hadn’t been prepared in any way either, it was as if someone had dug up an entire graveyard and chopped up the remains for purposes that weren’t entirely clear to her.

From so far away, she wasn’t able to tell if there actually was a necromancer still in town, but there certainly was the slight taint of their powers detectable in the shredded bones.

Sneaking a bit closer, Anastacia could see the remains of a dozen or so simulacra that had been violently torn asunder, leaving them incapable of moving. A few still had lights faintly shining on pieces of their armor, but even those were on their way out.

“Are those the ones who were supposed to meet us here?” The priestess worried and glanced at Leggy, who seemed rather indifferent about the demise of her kin.

The necromancer peered at the closest one she could find without disturbing the bones. On one of the pieces she could see the outline of the small slot that could either be filled with a core, like with King, or a meatball, like with Leggy. Though it was a bit hard to see in the quickly dimming daylight, she was fairly certain that the destroyed simulacrum had been activated with a core that was still firmly in the slot and kept the lights on the armor faintly alight.

“I’d say no. If I had to guess, these are some of the ‘hollow’ simulacra the speaking one warned us about.” Anastacia wagered. “But I wonder…” She mumbled, picked up a rock and tossed it into the bone covered area.

As soon as it touched a single leaf of grass, almost imperceptibly moving one of the bone pieces, a pulse of necromantic power emerged from somewhere in the town and coalesced the nearby shards into a spike that launched the rock so far up that it disappeared entirely.

Anastacia took a deep breath and sighed. “Well this is going to be a f- a ducking hassle…”

Gilbert woke to a headache he recognized immediately; it was not the first, second or third time he had been drugged out of nowhere. Thanks to that, he also knew better than to immediately flinch awake and gather the attention of his captors.

As he slowly came to, he remained as still as he could and gathered what information he could. His hands were tied behind his back, but his feet were free, he also had a blindfold on but nothing blocking his mouth. To him, this meant that his captors either were really bad at their job or simply didn’t care if he yelled.

He was leaning against a creaky wooden wall and sitting on a wooden floor of no particular note, but the first thing that told him his location was the smell. A faint mix of tobacco smoke and delicious food mixed with a whole lot of oil used for taking care of weapons and equipment – oil he used. Soon enough he could hear the cheery noises of other adventurers from downstairs. He was without a doubt still in his room.

Suddenly a familiar voice spoke with unimaginable amount of glee. “I still can’t believe you ate it against a waitress, are you sure you’re an inquisitor?”

Gilbert immediately recognized the speaker as Iris, the inquisitor he had met briefly only a few days ago. He had no idea why she would bother drugging him instead of just walking up and asking for whatever she needed though.

“I am the inquisitorial scribe, so please excuse my lack of martial might. It was you who said we cannot use necromancy here, so this is entirely on you.” Another voice spoke. Though not familiar, the accent was still unmistakably Mournvalleyan. The speaker was also a male, but in all honesty, sounded meek and frail. “Besides, do you have any idea how hard she kicked me? I could have died. There is going to be hoof-shaped bruise on my chest for the next ten years thanks to you.”

Iris chuckled and flapped her bone wings a couple of times. “It was funny regardless. By the way, Gilbert, we both know you’re awake.” She revealed and walked over to pluck the blindfold off him.

With his vision unhindered, Gilbert frantically looked around for Yulia, unable to find her.

The winged inquisitor sat down on the edge of Gilbert’s bed and patted something hidden under the covers. “Relax, I wrapped the lamb in here, so she doesn’t get cold. She’s a lot smaller than you, so it might take a bit for her to come to.” She calmed the adventurer cheerily. “Just out of curiosity, is she the one we talked about last time?”

Though still confused about what was going on, the old adventurer was relieved to hear Yulia quietly snore under the blankets. “Aye.” He nodded and started to work on loosening the ropes around his wrists.

“Nice, I’ll high five you when you get the binds open. I had to carry her around a bit because… well our plan didn’t quite work out – in case that’s not obvious, and there’s plenty to grab onto, if you know what I mean.” Iris smiled familiarly and made the whole situation even more confusing with her relaxed attitude. “Judging by how happily she just pranced into your room, I take it that my advice was helpful?”

“Iris!” The other captor hissed suddenly. “Why are you fraternizing with the prisoner?!” He asked without lowering his hood.

The cheery inquisitor rolled her eyes. “Man’s barely a prisoner; we’re in his room and he’s like ten seconds away from being untied. Considering our agreement regarding necromancy, I’d start being really nice to him right about now.” She explained before turning back to Gilbert. “And we’re buddies, right? We’ve been held captive together, I’ve mildly poisoned you and sown your thumb back together. Oh, and I put some ointment on the stiches while you were out! It’s healing very nicely.”

“Going to be straight with you now, Iris, us being buddies depends quite a bit on how well you can explain what the fuck is going on, and how quickly you’re going to do it.” The old adventurer said grumpily and tossed aside the ropes from his wrists.

“No!” The hooded inquisitor exclaimed suddenly and stepped between the two. “None of this! Absolutely none! Adventurer, you are going to tell me exactly what you know about The Violet Sect and you are going to do it now! Are you one of them?!” He demanded.

Gilbert slowly stood up and stared down at the inquisitor before him. Barely reaching up to his chest and obviously yet another case of malnutrition from Mournvalley, the hooded young lad wasn’t exactly formidable, but to the adventurer’s surprise, didn’t back down an inch.

“What are you even talking about? The Violet Sect?” Gilbert relaxed and scratched his head.

Iris pulled out a folded piece of paper from somewhere under her robes and showed it to the adventurer. Suddenly a lot of things made sense; on the paper was the emblem consisting of a compass rose and a skull half, the one he had scribbled on the ground the last time he had met Iris. The emblem must have been tied somehow to this ‘Violet Sect’ the other inquisitor kept going on about and Iris must have seen the one he drew.

It was a fair assumption they had made in that Gilbert might have had something to do with them, and were originally intending to question him about it, but something must have gone wrong.

“I fear you’ve been mistaken; I came across that emblem a while ago and have been researching it – or at least trying to, not that it has yielded anything…” He admitted and walked away from the confrontation to look for a pipe in his wardrobe.

“Yeah, figured as much.” Iris chuckled. “Please forgive Cobalt, he’s very far away from his precious little library and got beaten up by like the most helpless thing in the world. If you have a book or something, we can try rubbing it on him and see if he calms down.” She belittled her fellow inquisitor.

Absolutely furious by how little weight anyone was willing to put on his troubles, Cobalt flailed about for a bit before getting a word out. “You cannot just believe him like that! Iris, you are a terrible inquisitor! At least try to be inquisitive!”

“He’s right, you know.” Gilbert pointed out and grabbed his spare spare spare spare pipe. He sat down next to Iris and began filling it while mostly ignoring the fuming inquisitor in front of him. “But no, I don’t have anything to do with them. Basically, we came across some corpses that donned that emblem, and I’m just trying to figure out where they’re from. I can show you the location on a map, but why are you two interested in it anyway?” He said, choosing to keep out the baron of iron and Sylvia’s request out of the matter.

Likely noticing that his anger wasn’t getting him anywhere, or finally trusting his fellow inquisitor’s judgement on Gilbert, Cobalt pulled up a chair and sighed deep. “I am the inquisitorial scribe, and a big part of my duty is to watch over the grand library of Mournvalley. After we took over, I relocated it to our headquarters to reorganize it and take a look at some of the more interesting books it has to offer. While at it, I found a few tomes, all written by past inquisitors, that mentioned something called ‘The Violet Sect’ and it got my attention. Unfortunately, the newer ones, written by Amaranth of all people, all refer to a book that seems to be missing from the library. I have told all the inquisitors to be on the lookout for any mentions of them or this emblem – the lead Iris brought me was the first one I have gotten, so I may have gotten a bit too excited.” He explained and started to calm down. “None of this clears you off the list though, you might still be working for them, for all we know.”

The old adventurer took a hard look at the scribe while lighting his pipe. Regardless of how strongly against it Anastacia would be, it would certainly be beneficial for finding out more about the baron’s killers, if they made a temporary alliance with the inquisitors – assuming Cobalt was ever going to trust him. Luckily, he remembered something that might help.

“I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll get you your missing book and you tell me what you know about the folks who use that emblem, okay?” He suggested and blew some smoke at Cobalt.

The inquisitor laughed mockingly. “And how exactly are you going to do that? I have scoured every list, rummaged every hidden chamber and turned over every bookshelf in Mournvalley to find it. What sort of magic trick-“

Gilbert interrupted him. “Under Anna’s bed. Last time she came back from Mournvalley, she had stolen a bunch of books.”

Cobalt’s eyes widened under his hood. Without saying another word, he dashed out of the room and the sound of Anastacia’s door being kicked open could be heard soon after.

“Yay, surprise team-up!” Iris clapped happily.

The old adventurer spent a while making sure Yulia was actually fine, and as far as he could tell, Iris was telling the truth. He fastened the blankets on her a bit and turned back to the remaining inquisitor.

“So, about this drugging…” He brought up the matter again.

Iris slid just a bit further away and avoided eye contact. “Okay, for the record, I’m just here as a helping hand and this was mostly not my idea.” She smiled awkwardly. “So, once I got back to Mournvalley, I told Cobalt about your drawing and he immediately wanted to interrogate you. We had to wait for Anastacia and you to part ways again or she would immediately get on our case if we entered the city – honestly, we got a bit lucky that she left without you or we would’ve had to like drag you out of a camp during the night or something. Anyway, even with her gone, we still needed to be careful to not touch any one of you folks with necromancy, because if she found out about it, we’d all be dead. This led to some… logistical problems. We were going to get you out of here, even had an empty storeroom picked out here in the city and everything – it was going to be great!

“So, naturally, we climbed into your room through a window – you’d be surprised how often that comes up in our profession, can’t even remember the last time I used a door. Anyway, I hop on to your wardrobe with a needle and Cobalt will work as a distraction and I get to jump on your back, again, great fun! But instead of you, this chunky bundle of fun comes in and starts making noise. Cobalt tries to muffle the screams but gets kicked across the room because he’s made of paper like everything else in his library. Then I have to step in and jab the needle into her neck before I have the time to readjust the dosage I had prepared for you.

“Then you start rushing over and I have to grab a new needle while skittering back on top of the wardrobe to get a jump on you, which I did, because I’m cool like that.”

Gilbert kept quietly listening and puffing smoke every now and then. In his heart, he was glad that there were people who had it just as hard as he often did with his party.

“Then, I have three unconscious people to deal with and I didn’t even know how long Cobalt was going to be out.” Iris explained while barely breathing in between phrases, clearly at least partly reliving the stress. “So I have to start hauling all three of you to the storeroom. I toss Cobalt out of the window, because who cares at that point, and very delicately and gracefully lower the lamb out, like a beautiful flower she is, so that no harm will come my way later. Then I have to start hauling you out, but I run into a couple of problems. Firstly: I can barely move you, and secondly: you do not fit through the damn window.

“So, now that plan is scrapped, but I already have two people out in the street. So what I have to do is haul both of them back up through the window, which is considerably harder than going down, in case you didn’t know. Once that’s done, I’m starting to get pretty thirsty, so I head downstairs for a drink, but there’s no one I can buy it from!”

The old adventurer nodded and smiled. “At least you’re in great shape.”

“I know!” The inquisitor laughed. “Where’d that walking nightmare you call Anna go anyway? Is she going to be back soon? If so we need to get out.”

“Ruvenstead was where they wanted directions to.” Gilbert shrugged. “But I’m not supposed to know, I think.”

Upon hearing the town’s name Iris’ wings suddenly slumped down and she went pale. The usually carefree smile turned into a serious frown.

Cobalt had found what he needed and came back to Gilbert’s room, intensely focusing on the first chapter of the book he had found.

“Cobalt.” Iris said to get his attention. “Where did we send the warmaster to?”

The inquisitional scribe placed his finger on the page to mark the spot he was in and glanced up. “Maya? She should have been at Ruvenstead for a couple of days now. The scouts said there was, and I quote, ‘something weird going on with the sky.’”

“Cobalt. Anastacia is heading to Ruvenstead.” The inquisitorial saint said with clear fear in her tone.

Cobalt closed the book, stuffed it under his robes, walked over to the window to open it and jumped out, all in complete silence but in a great hurry.

Iris shot up from the side of the bed and briefly sat on the windowsill. “Ten minutes, pack what you need, find someone to take care of the girl, meet us at the gates. We’ll get you something to ride.” She said quickly and used her wings to pull herself out of the building.