Corbin followed Findell after their meeting, while Kyessy went and got herself another tavern room across from the room she hadn’t slept in previously, and asked the tavern keeper to safeguard this knowledge away from Findell and his merry band of conspirators. The tavern keeper didn’t mind this at all, given that his wine and beer reserves had just been plundered by the magistrate for no actual reason, and the keeper hadn’t been paid for the honor.

Findell wasn’t difficult to follow (and neither was the flame-haired warlock), but Corbin’s concern was whether Serrell would notice him in his spying. It was safe to assume that if she had spells or items to hide herself from Inspect, she had spells or items to keep an eye on possible tails or surveillance. He soon lost access to Kyessy’s arsenal of abilities, what with her being out of range. The card had leveled up several times, but it still wasn’t enough.

Corbin Dogherty, Raven Familiar

Masterpiece, Level 4

Shared perception up to 200ft (+20 per level)

Speak to master telepathically up to 90ft (+10 per level)

Channel master’s abilities up to 60 ft (+10 per level)

Sympathetic HP loss up to 60 ft (+10 per level)

Fascinating. And flattering. Nobody had called him a masterpiece… ever, as well as he could remember. Well, he swooped back into range, flipped his Luck of 20 into Perception with his Versatility, though he was beginning to think Luck was the most important attribute he had.

Findell headed for a random building off the central square area, looked around for anyone, then whirled around in search of Corbin.

“Too late bucko,” he muttered from the safety of a tree branch. “It’s perfect hiding weather.”

Then, satisfied he wasn’t being followed, the magistrate turned left, made for a small shack butting up against a wizard’s walled compound, and pressed a series of stones in a specific order. The side of the wall fell to liquid, melted down and reformed as a series of steps turning immediately to the right and away from the wizard’s house. Findell glanced about one last time and disappeared down the stairwell.

It wasn’t impossible to remember the combination of stones that made up the code in the wall here, but it wasn’t easy flapping your wings and darting in to tap against them with your beak, and even if it didn’t do any damage, it hurt your face. Still, though it took some time, he eventually pecked the correct combo and thanked his lucky stars when the wall melted soundlessly. Without much light, the subterranean secret passage didn’t illuminate much… he was sure he’d given himself enough time so Findell wouldn’t see any stray moonlight enter the underground passage.

From there it was all a matter of waiting, hopping down the dressed stones that composed the hallway, and checking for traps periodically. At one point he realized he was standing on a pressure plate when it suddenly lit with a bright yellow glow beneath him. This was attached to a pin that would release something else that now glowed with malefic yellow: a huge stone hovering in a section of the passage with an unexpectedly higher ceiling. Joke was on them though, because he didn’t weigh enough to trigger the trap. He almost had a LOL over it, but decided against betraying his position before he got within eavesdropping range.

Another trap, a good thirty feet on, came in the form of a tripwire. He had to flap over this one, and hoped the sound of his feathers wouldn’t give him away. He prepared to flee and waited, but when a minute passed without any indication he’d been spotted, he hopped on.

Eventually the hall lightened. He came upon a stairwell, and flapped up to the door.

“–wasn’t my choice, was it?” Corbin was sure this was Findell’s voice.

Grotok came next, sounding spiteful. “Awfully convenient that you’re the one on the receiving end of the ritual.”

“Awfully jealous of you to mention, my good man.”

“It would be awfully inconvenient if no one heard from the town magistrate ever again.”

“That will be difficult when the Five decreed no permanent death.”

The warlock was in the room with them. They’d each approached this place, some cellar in an innocuous part of town, and met up here with no one being the wiser. None except Super Corbin, investigator and all around good guy… er, bird.

“Enough. You two sound like schoolchildren,” she said. “I chose Findell with good reason. I need you on security. If we get the bird in the circle, he’ll be harmless. Meaning you stay on hand to deal with any brand new complications that might threaten the ritual while I perform and the magistrate remains in the circle. So your job then is…”

Grotok sounded like a middle schooler who’d been caught by surprise. “We kill the ranger?”

“No you idiot,” Findell said. “You were just saying it’s impossible to permanently kill someone. Kill her and she’ll have a motive to stop us. I suggest we give her a quest, or just buy her off. She clearly doesn’t want to be around that ridiculous two-winged abomination. Once they’re separated, he won’t be a problem, and she won’t be around.”

“And then the ritual,” Grotok said.

“Which means just two more loose ends to tie up,” Serrell said. “First we turn aside the army I just destroyed before they can attempt to capture me again, and make extra sure they get the hint to leave Densmeer alone…”

A crimson eye appeared in the middle of the door. It dripped and burbled with the same blackish purplish ichor he was familiar with: Serrell’s aura. He flapped upwards immediately, cursing and swearing, but another spell shot out and grabbed onto him. He flapped even harder, but the brick-colored ball of magic allowed him to get absolutely nowhere.

Fear flared all through him.

“Kyessy they got me!” he shrieked through the psychic link, but there was no way she was within ninety feet of him.

The door opened and all three of them stood there glaring at him. It wasn’t just Serrell; all three of the conspirators had gold threads running through their auras like marble tile made of melted wax. Whatever Serrell had all up in her, Findell and Grotok had it too.

“It looks as though we have a third loose end,” Serrell said.

***

Corbin awoke on the roof of the tavern, from a big fat splat of rain falling directly on his face. He didn’t know what was wrong until he got to his feet and shook himself free of rain, only to have more of it splash down onto him. It wasn’t a big deal, honestly, given he was a bird, and therefore naked, and his feathers were water resistant if they weren’t waterproof. His head throbbed as though someone had come along and beaten it with tiny hammers– from the inside. His skull felt fragile, like too much sunlight was going to dissolve his brain from the inside out.

Lucky for him, it was overcast and rainy.

“Bird!” he heard in his mind, and a thrum of pain accompanied it. “Where are you? What happened?”

“What happened?” he repeated. “I… must have gotten drunk.”

Silence for a few moments. “Drunk.”

“I have a horrific hangover.” His stomach didn’t feel queasy though. He did flutter down under the roof overhang and perched himself on a windowsill, pointed in toward the gloomy tavern interior, rather than the blinding, painful overcast sky.

“After the surveillance.” She stared at him.

The surveillance. What surveillance? He couldn’t remember anything after the festivities last night, fireworks he thought. Everything after that was a blurry mess. No, wait…

“Yes, right! I remember.” His voice was too loud even for his ears, so he took it into their telepathic contact. “I followed… Findell.”

The magistrate and townsfolk were delighted to see them, and loudly announced as such every time Kyessy passed any of them. This did not help his pounding head.

“I followed Findell… home. He went home. I tried to find Serrell and Grotok, and only found the sheriff at his post. Sleeping.”

She sniffed, which told him nothing.

“Are we… are we leaving today? We have a quest, right?”

“Yes,” she answered. “However, we’ve promised to attend more fun and games in our honor.”

He groaned in pain.

“Agreed. I think we should–”

An explosion rumbled throughout the town.

It felt like fireworks were blasting in his head as well. Kyessy got them oriented, and he squinted at the attack. High over the walls, a fireball exploded against some blood-colored magical sigil, which flared to life and vanished with a few dribs and drabs of liquid fire dropping to the ground below. A bell began frantically tolling, and people immediately boiled out of every building in sight. Many of them were clutching helmets to their heads with shield and weapon under their arms, while their wives or children followed after them with uniforms and bits of armor in their arms. The town went from quaint, idyllic square in a refreshing rain to pandemonium in seconds.

Everyone was flooding away from the town square except the two of them, and Magistrate Findell. The foppish half-fae held a magic device in one hand. Over his head, a magic umbrella hovered in place, following him along and shielding his carefully maintained, awful hair from the rain.

“Just the people I’d least wanted to see,” he said drearily.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Corbin asked.

“I’m so terribly sorry,” he said. “The military unit responsible for capturing our dear Serrell has returned.”

“She did murder them all and put them back where they’d been asleep at the time, miles closer to your fair town and your dear Serrell.”

“Yes, well, we’re all adjusting to the appearance of the portal and the changes it has brought.”

“Well, no need to apologize,” Kyessy said, which was definitely different than what Corbin expected. Though honestly, she was delighted to learn she didn’t have to be the focus of more fun and games this evening.

“Might I prevail upon you to begin your quest a day early? Without a belly full of our prized sinterberry shortcakes from Donut’s Bakery?”

“I have questions,” Corbin said. Was the owner of the bakery really named Donut? Was it a nickname? Did that person come from earth, through the portal? Or if not, how did one get the name Donut? He could have sworn he’d seen a woman doing the baking, a squashy faced block of a felinian with pure white fur. No, now thinking back on it, he’d definitely seen that face on a painted signboard, with a tiara on.

Even through the telepathic barrage, Kyessy ignored him and focused on the mission, which would get them out of this place, if only for a short time. He could feel the relief flooding through Kyessy at the thought.

“We’ll depart immediately,” she said, and headed directly back toward the tavern.

“We don’t need anything from the tavern,” he told her.

Five minutes later, she had packed a fair amount of food for the journey and left the tavern keeper entirely too much money for the inconvenience. Serrell found them at the southern gate of the town, looking grim. Her normally flaming hair hissed and sizzled as the raindrops smacked into it.

“I hate rain,” she muttered, then waved over toward the gate. “I’m going to bring down the wards over this section of the city for ten seconds. You’ll need to make it forty yards in ten seconds.”

“What happens if we don’t cover that distance?” he asked, still too fuzz-brained to remember she could understand him.

She leveled a damp stare on him. “The wards will obliterate anything sapient with infernal damage. You’ll be dragged to the lower planes by things with more mouths and tentacles than brains, and tortured for the better part of eternity.”

“Is that all?”

“And… go.”

Kyessy bolted out of the gate the moment the wards crackled and the lights turned off. Corbin wasn’t ready for this, flopped to the grass, and flapped his pained head upright, struggled a bit, and finally got flying. How many seconds had passed?

He heard the electric crackle before a dark roar started up. He chanced a look back, and saw one ebony tailfeather fluttering toward earth, before a ghostly red tentacle reached out, opened up a lamprey mouth, sprouted another mouthy tentacle out of that first mouth, and snapped up his feather.

So she hadn’t been kidding.

A half hour of traveling with her Longstrider ability active had them turning left and away from where any of the Fellwroth outriders might be. Another hour later, the rain intensified and had Kyessy soaked to the bone.

Before them, for a little while anyway, the trees fell away and left them overlooking a vast expanse of water-filled plain, disappearing into a curtain of gray, rainy mist. Clumps of grass stretched up almost six feet, things that were sort of like cattails bowed under the rain, and something shuffled away from them, off one of the little humps of earth and into the water.

“Swamps,” he said. “The clogged sinuses of the planet.”

She snorted quietly, an action that for anyone else was probably just like doubling over laughing.

“Sometimes you are tolerable indeed, bird.”

She’d been characteristically silent throughout the travel, up until they ran into the edge of the fens. Or rather, The Fens.

“Why don’t these fens have names?” he asked.

“Things with names tend to come to life. Names warp things,” she said.

“How do you figure?”

“A thing begins to become the shape of its name. A silly name begets a silly person. Have you ever met someone named Dug? Silly by nature. A dire name, however, spells doom. Take Corbin for instance.”

“Seems like the farther you get from civilization the more you turn into a comedian. So you think if I call these the Giggle Fens…” he trailed off.

“They will inspire anyone to fits of insanity and laughing themselves to death.”

“A Staypuft Marshmallow Man conundrum.”

She shrugged, apparently not ready to engage him in any earth-based inside jokes.

“Okay, so… marsh yims first?” he asked. “Or should we be looking for relks?” He had this. He was a natural at this new world with its dumb lack of names. If he’d been reading this, he definitely would’ve made a note to write the author and tell them how lazy the naming conventions were here.

“We’d need to find a nest first… and then make a plan. With the security backup from Grotok we might have been able to handle a distraction, hit and run. This way we’ll have to figure out another way. I don’t relish the idea of drawing them out five or ten at a time and hoping to survive.”

“Ah… right.”

“We need to know more about echocrystals. They shouldn’t be available out this way, as far as I understand.”

“And that means… what exactly?”

“We’ll have to head further south, and make contact with the echion. They should have the information we need.”

And that was all the explanation he was going to get.

The fens grew into thick swamps the further south he surveyed. Kyessy couldn’t use Longstrider here, outside of the forest, which made going slow. Great big trees standing on tall root systems were blanketed with beards of moss, and the land disappeared at various points, reappeared, and was swarming with life. Off in the distance he spotted even bigger trees, the Titanic of flora. It was very much like the patch of swampland they’d crossed through initially, when he discovered he was a shroom terminator. They once struck out over two hours to the east at the sight of a yim hive, a mountain of dried mud clinging to a downed tree. Apparently this was called magewood, and took an exceptionally long time to decay. It was also the wood of choice for crafting wands and staves for wizards, sorcerers, witches and warlocks, but also excellent for a species of giant insects who built their hives out of regurgitated mud in a place with shifting tides. The dead trunk was easily forty feet high over the water line, and the yim nest another fifty on top of that. Corbin spied a creature like a wasp and a termite and a scorpion all melded together, watching them from the top of this mud spire. It had to be at least three feet high, the size of a doberman pinscher, but constructed of nothing but the capacity for murder.

“How many of those things will live in a nest?” he asked.

“Upwards of a hundred… possibly more. They’ve probably built the queen’s lair into the spire, away from the water, but the hive might extend all through the trunk of the magewood.”

“So all the wax… is inside there?”

She nodded. “We’ll see if we can level up before we start getting the squads of soldier yims after us.”

The wax was going to have to wait.

“Understand something, bird: these three already have all the components they need to transmute you back to your original form.”

He chewed on that for a little while, while scouting from the air and checking for submerged blaskarands or tenrills. They had yet to run into a fetterer, and now he was honestly curious.

“This is a suicide mission then,” he told her later.

“That’s right.”

“That warlock could’ve killed us and didn’t. It must be bad public relations.”

“Public relations…” she said, and now it was her turn to chew on information.