Best of all about recruiting fresh fodder to the party were the untapped pockets they brought. Absalon and the dwarf trio had money enough between them to pay for the chartering of a small galley out to Darom. That meant they could take the route Jason identified: they would sail down the Hepaz River, skirt along the Daromese Coast, enter the bubbling waters of the Sea of Shemesh, then sail northward to the town of Fa’hira.

That would cut short the time they needed to travel overland through the sun. And as they sailed west, and as the sun came to rest at its place directly overhead, Eris stood on the deck wondering why she had ever agreed to such a stupid expedition.

She thought about Rook. Rook, who still infatuated her. Rook, who she had made a deal with. Who she had no desire to betray or abandon. Yet shouldn’t she, if she stood nothing to gain and everything to lose? This was not ‘for him.’ This project was for his vanity. Some idiotic sense of justice. Pondering all that now made her hate him. Why could they not…

A man appeared at her side. Jason. He glanced at her.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

Now she was thinking how easy it might be to throw him overboard with a burst of energy. “I doubt that,” she said.

“You want to know why you’re sailing halfway across Esenia, to a place where all your skin is going to peel off, to fight a bunch of zombies, for the off-chance at killing a demon who was never any risk to you in the first place.”

She sighed. “I will admit all this did cross my mind.”

“Yeah. Mine too. So you want to know why I came?”

“Not especially. Some drivel about a guilty conscience, perhaps?”

He laughed. For a moment he hesitated to reply, but then he said, “If it’s between you and me, this whole thing is Astera’s fault. She’s the fuck-up. I’m just the scribe.”

“How convenient you might write yourself out of future histories.”

“Only if someone else composes them first.” Now he sighed, struggling to find the words for what he wanted to say. “I didn’t lie. I feel like shit for what happened. But the real reason I changed my mind is because of the money.”

A breeze of tepid wind caught Eris’ hair and billowed it out over the water. She looked at him. When she pulled all back to her shoulders the strands were hot against her fingers. “Money?” she said.

“No one knows it’s our fault to begin with. If we kill Arqa, we’ll be the biggest heroes since Serapion.”

“Your life must be dull indeed if the prospect of being hero in Arqa elates you. They may even pay us a reward in mud coins!”

“Arqa has girls like anywhere else. But that’s only part of it. Lord Arqa inherited a huge fortune from his family, but he hid it all away when he decided he preferred the kind of mercenaries who don’t need to be paid. No one’s ever found it.”

That grabbed her attention. “How huge?”

“Huge enough for you, me, and Rook.”

“I do not believe you. How are you certain? And even if it does exist, what if it has been raided already?”

He shrugged. “I’m just saying. You want to make a fortune as an adventurer? I think you should stick this one out.”

With that he departed, and she was left in relative solitude as the waves crashed against the ship’s hull.

The prospect of self-enrichment changed the equation. She cared little for accolades or adulation, but wealth could be used to fund her other interests, and was itself a wonderful thing. So it was she decided this expedition might be worth enduring after all. The scale tipped in Rook’s favor. Now her course seemed set.

All ten party members gathered on the morning of their final day at sea. Jason told a story that went like this:

Lord Arqa was a man who fell in love with an elf. This love was reciprocated, yet she refused his hand in marriage; she knew that his life would be to hers as a mayfly’s. Her heart would not be able to endure the pain of watching him grow old. It was for this reason that he set out in search of immortality. He found it, but as always in these stories, the blessing was not all he imagined it to be.

“He made a deal with a vrykolakas,” Jason said, “a kind of demon that lives in a mortal creature’s skin. They’re more common than you’d think, but most don’t make waves. They move in, take over, and adopt the personality of their host. Only I guess it turns out that Arqa was a real psycho, because it only took a few years after marrying his adoring elf wife before he turned into more or less what he is today.”

His ‘adoring wife,’ Daphana, realized what her husband had become. She led a group of adventurers ten strong on an expedition from Katharos directly to his keep. There they subdued him; but at the final moment, she proved unable, or unwilling (the sources didn’t say), to kill him. He was instead locked away in a vault that could only be opened through Manastone, the use of a special ring, and the reflection of Daphana herself.

“I guess the two of you share more than a passing resemblance. Or maybe all elves look the same,” Jason said to Astera.

Astera was staring at a ring on one of her fingers. She dipped her head.

“What happened to Daphana?” Rook asked.

“No idea,” Jason said.

“Might she still be alive?” Absalon said.

“This was centuries ago,” Astera said. “That is a long time to bear the guilt of driving her love to monstrosity.”

“I hope your research included more than fairytales,” Eris said. “Our task concerns killing this vampire, not putting it to sleep for bedtime.”

Astera stepped forward. “We sought you out because you have knowledge on the aether. Do you say now you have none?”

“Do not harangue me for not fulfilling your own fantasies of my abilities. I have never claimed to be a demonslayer, only that I have some experience in the manner.” Now to Jason: “I have read treatises on how to exorcise aethereal demons. They may be blown back to where they came with enough mana.” She ran a finger along the chain of the soulcharm on her neck. “We have seen terrestrial demons tapped and destroyed whilst inert. Yet I am not certain how one slays a vampire.”

Jason thought hard about how to explain this. “A vrykolakas is like a puppet. There’s Lord Arqa’s body, then there’s the demon pulling the strings. To kill the demon you need to peel away the puppet, like tearing away plates of armor, to expose the vulnerable meat inside. You’ll need enchanted weapons for that.

“As for how we lay bare the demon…I’ve made notes on a spell. It’s all over my head, but maybe you’ll be able to make sense of it. It’s not going to be an easy ritual. And even if we pull it off, we’ll need to lure him out into the sunlight.”

“Sunlight?” Rook asked.

“That’s what they say. The vampire’s true form is made vulnerable by the light of the sun, once his Essence is stripped away. That’s when he can be killed.”

“This vrykolakas chose Darom to make its home, where the sun always shines?” Absalon said.

“He’s not the smartest,” Jason said.

“That’s an awful lot to go wrong, lad,” one of the three dwarves said. “Why not bash ‘im in with a hammer and call it a day?”

“We tried that,” Astera said. “My sword was destroyed.”

“Gah! Ye didn’t use a dwarven weapon!”

Astera glanced at him. She opened her mouth to protest, but then she sighed.

“Astera has seen first-hand the need for enchanted weapons against this monster,” Rook said, “but there will be other targets for your hammer, Master Ras.” A signalman called out for land. Fa’hira approached. “Ready yourselves. I have a feeling we won’t be getting much sleep after we land.”

From this small and immiserated village on the coast the far-off walls of Arqa Valley could be seen on the horizon, blue and blasted in the blinding sunlight. Fa’hira had several dusty streets and a dozen buildings covered by awnings made from cactus carcasses. Pallid plants grew in spirals off into the desert and handfuls of animals, strange beasts like goats with white scales, glistened as they grazed at the feet of haggard shepherds.

Smoke trailed from a bonfire at the town’s outskirts.

Two steps onto solid ground and Eris already felt overheated. Jason had possessed the foresight to bring several white robes; at first she resisted, for they looked ridiculous, but as she felt the pale skin on her arms begin to sear and crack and melt beneath the sun’s rays, she gave in.

The village elder rushed out to greet them on the docks. He led them to the smoking bonfire, and at once Eris smelled the by-now familiar stench of burning human flesh.

Their elder spoke to Jason. Jason spoke back. Eris could have listened in by casting the Wisdom of the Sages, yet she found that she didn’t care.

“He says the dead have been rising for the last two weeks. They’ve had to burn everyone to be safe—even the stillborn.”

Presently more villagers came out to greet them, and they offered to them beasts of burden, water, food, and cactus fruit.

“They’ve taken refugees in from Arqa Valley. They think they’re next.”

“Have they been attacked?” Rook asked.

“Only once,” Jason translated. “But—”

He looked at the elder. Started to speak, then stopped, then looked again. He said something to clarify.

“He says a family was killed in their hut in the desert. Their throats were slit and all the blood was lapped up off the ground. Only the son survived—he saw it all. But—” Jason hesitated. “It wasn’t Lord Arqa who did it.”

“Who, then?” Rook said.

“A little girl with yellow hair.”

“It must be her,” Astera said. She breathed heavily. “There can be no one else.”

“I do not see why you are so surprised,” Eris said. “You did leave her rotting corpse at his feet—”

“Enough!” Astera said, and there was true fury on her face. Eris smirked, but she knew better than to tempt fate further.

Rook stared at the ground. He looked to Jason. “What does this mean?”

“I—I don’t know. He might have reanimated her, but—she wouldn’t need to drink blood. The vrykolakas uses blood instead of mana to cast spells, to raise the dead—”

“Aletheia was a magician,” Eris said.

“Yes, but—I don’t—”

“If you do not know, then stammering about it does us little good. Perhaps this new vampire is Aletheia, or perhaps ‘tis not—does our goal change? Does it matter how she came to be? Shall we stay here in the sun till we are cooked in our boots hypothesizing, or shall do what we came here to do?”

“This Aletheia—she is someone close to you,” Absalon said.

“Yes,” Rook said. “Lord Arqa killed her.”

“Then we will see her freed from whatever curse he has put on her. But your friend Eris is right—we must not lose track of our goal.”

“We won’t,” Rook said. He looked over the animals the village had gifted them. They were eager to assist the party in any way they could. Eris often found that the sight of a troll in one’s ranks inspired that degree of confidence, well-earned or not. “And now we know that if we fail, we’ll be failing her all over again. So let’s not waste any more time.”

"Agreed!" cried the dwarves. "Let's get this baddie, save the girl, and save the damn day!"

Astera stepped ahead of the rest of the party. "If only it were so easy," she said.

And with that, they set off.