“I presume, young as you are, you’ve prepared a will in advance?”

The elderly man’s voice, sonorous like the creaking of a wizened oak, broke the tepid stillness of the night. Through the shattered glass window, Pirim gazed, watching the blackened pebbles pass her by underneath the wagon’s wheels. She turned sleepily to meet his gaze from the exposed seat ahead.

“I have nothing left to give, and no one left to give to,” said Pirim. Under dim candlelight, she stroked the tempered forehead of the deer skull she kept against her chest. “I did write a will once, but the primary receiver… it seems I have long outlived her.”

“Ah. So this foray is personal, I assume?” the old man wheezed. He adjusted his spectacles on his gaunt face before cracking the whip once more. Pirim said nothing. “Or a more nihilistic venture, perhaps?”

Pirim did not deign to answer. Instead, she peeked her eyes over the windowsill of the coach to view a flickering flash of blue beside the road. Another specter - this time, a middle-aged man with a bandaged, amputated arm and a scraggly graying beard. No other phantoms stood beside him. Another family bereaved, separated by mortality. He stood, frozen in time, waiting for a carriage to pick him up. A carriage that would never come.

“No, that wasn’t you, Yuka, I’m sorry,” Pirim whispered under her breath into the skull’s eye socket. It echoed around, her billowing breath heating up her chapped lips. “One day.”

The scarred horses in front snorted. There was a farmhouse up ahead, but it was already looted. Its ominous frame stood dilapidated in the moonlight. There was no light nor life within its chambers. Its thatched roof had already been torn to pieces, revealing the wooden rafters underneath like a skeleton of a decaying corpse.

“I knew the inhabitants once,” the old man reminisced. “Acquaintances, however. At times I wonder if such a fleeting memory was a trick of a light, if this house had always been ruined. It seems nothing more than an idyllic fever dream, the time before the invasion.”

“The Influence isn’t as terrible further back, where you picked me up. Where I was raised, you could still see the sun,” said Pirim.

“Ah, that’s right. It must be because I’m trapped here that my perspective is so narrow. And now… you will suffer the same fate.”

“I understand,” Pirim said with a sigh. She drew her hood further over her eyes, the stark shadows caused by the lantern she had placed on the armrest intensifying the angles on her face. She fiddled with her necklace that was befitted with precious stones.

“Because this area has been so thoroughly permeated with the Influence, anyone who visits here cannot leave for risk of infecting others. Whether you came here for heroic purposes, or for a quiet end, that fact remains the same. I hope at least, that someone as young as you had the time to experience childhood before the world turned dark.”

The old man’s face betrayed his words, there was no hope at all behind his bespectacled gaze, for he knew the truth. Pirim had only just ventured into adulthood, and yet, her face was gaunt, her skin sallow. Purple rings of fatigue hung from her eyelids like ornaments. Her posture was less that of a human and more that of an amorphous blob, a shadowy sack of flesh hidden behind a raggedy black cloak. The skull she clutched so tightly was an implicit reflection of her demeanor. Death hung around her like a curse; she even smelled of death and all its nefarious affairs.

“You are a mage, correct?”

“Better to call me that, yes,” Pirim replied, but she did not look him in the eye. Instead, she answered the skull she called Yuka.

“While I am the sole carriage driver offering trips to Loxburg, I also act as the village’s guildmaster. You can say that I doubly send people to their doom.”

“You’re a hard worker indeed,” Pirim said with empty enthusiasm.

“I manage the parties. Once you secure a room for yourself at the inn, you may come to me so that I can find an appropriate band of adventurers for you. It won’t be the last time we talk.”

In truth, Pirim was an occultist, a witch, but she preferred the term mage. Especially near areas more drastically affected by the Influence, paranoia and fear ran rampant. Tolerance towards witches who drove the corruption back only extended as far as their successes. The moment they faltered, their powers were not seen as weapons against the corrupt – they were seen as catalysts for destruction.

“We will be taking the safest route to Loxburg, but that will not leave your eyes invulnerable to what you are about to see,” said the old man.

“To the west lies the Red Valley, where even the trees drip with blood. Though we will be skirting around it, you will be able to see it to your left. While there will be no hiding from the horrors within its depths, if you are a little faint of heart, I suggest you avert your gaze.”

Pirim was overcome with morbid fascination, the same unquenchable thrum that rippled through her body whenever she was met with a corpse. She peered outwards to her left, staring through the dark. The moonlight from above illuminated nothing but the purple-lavender mist that surrounded the carriage and turned every distant tree to a writhing silhouette. She smelled the Valley before she saw it. Then, she tasted it. The acrid tang of iron pierced her senses as the crimson trees came into view.

“Help us, please!”

“Save me!”

“Don’t leave me!”

Out from underneath the canopy came a group of younglings, all doused in a faint blue glow. Pirim’s heart sank when she heard the cries of the children. A small girl and two small boys wearing farming clothes, the last thing they donned before their untimely demise. She already knew the cause of death – an innocent venture into a decaying forest, seeking nothing more than simple fun. They must have had no idea what kind of dangers were waiting for them. That naivety cost them their lives. The difference between them and her was nothing but luck. It chilled her to think how her face could have easily been one of theirs, pleading with her to save them as the carriage drove on hurriedly, leaving them behind to dissolve into oblivion.

Pirim looked up ahead, but the old man paid the spirits no mind. Like all others, he remained unaware of the creeping ghosts mewling at his turning wooden wheels. The horses trotted onwards, and Pirim averted her gaze to avoid watching the reaching hands of the children slowly and hopelessly lower into the mud.

For the next hour or so, the Red Valley with its lurching trees reached ever so invasively towards the shattered glass windows of the coach. Pirim shifted herself from the left side of the coach to the right side, but that did not dissuade the smell itself from creeping in. Unlike the deathly stillness of the long road until this point, the Red Valley was teeming with malevolent life. Distant twisted howls and the rumble of fungal hosts dragging their decaying bodies against the wet earth abounded.

“Thankfully, the monsters that inhabit the Red Valley rarely venture outwards from the comfort of their domain. Perhaps the forest cover is essential to their survival?” the old man pondered. Perhaps, like Pirim, he was resigned enough to his fate to not be so bothered by his vulnerable position atop the carriage seat, or perhaps he was experienced enough to know how to dance around death’s clutches. Regardless, his composure remained intact as he drove the carriage along the winding, bituminous road.

“Now, to your right are what have been recently dubbed the Flesh Fields,” he said with a derisive laugh. “If you thought the stench of the Red Valley was bad… you might want to grab a bucket as we approach this area.”

Pirim, with morbid curiosity, gazed upwards out of the window to see the serpentine archways and moldy mountains of rotten skin, muscle, and bone adorning the polluted wheat fields beyond. They stretched onwards like leviathans in a sea of mud, undulating to the horizon.

“Once, Loxburg had a flourishing crop. An abundance of wheat and grain, which spurred gluttony. It appears the demons took advantage of this luxury, as now the fields are full of bulging and expanding corpses, and the residents of the poor village are starving. I’ve visited the farmsteads out here once, and even the great mill. The situation has worsened, though, and such areas are now inaccessible to unarmed individuals.”

“Have you lived here long?” Pirim asked. The old man sighed with a melancholic air. Wistfulness wisped out of his misty breath.

“All my life. I’ve outlived so many younger than me. Maybe if I had their youthful valor, I could have stood stronger, more upright, back then. Now my bones are too weary to fight, and instead I must teach, and ride. Part of me envies those with the power to hope. To laugh in the face of doubt.”

Another long period of silence passed, before the rancid stench of the Flesh Fields began to slowly abide and the disheveled gates of the village came into view past the shroud. There was a wooden sign, its silver veneer long stripped. It read the village name in letters once proud, now pitiful. Loxburg. The home of the damned.

Behind makeshift wooden scaffolding, three men worked at a grisly beast as large as a small house. It lay on its side, rapidly decaying and filled with swords like a pincushion. The unsanitary puddles of blood below it rippled as the men worked. Though such a beast would normally be enough to feed the entire village, only a few handfuls of the flesh were edible – the rest, such as the diseased skin and hide, would have to be put to weaponry and armory purposes.

A lone spirit sat on a bench, watching the men work. Perhaps a life lost to provide such a meal? The spirit lit a cigar and reclined, eyes tired and mourning even in death. A sordid state of affairs.

The village itself was composed of damaged buildings, boards replacing many shattered windows. Half of the buildings had long been abandoned by their original owners, those who had fled or perished in the endless battle. Now, they were storages or secondary graveyards. Houses for spirits, the largest number Pirim had ever seen in one place. Almost half of the beings she saw as the carriage drew into the village center were tinged with that forsaken blue.

“This is a cursed place indeed, Yuka,” she whispered. Though they could not hear nor communicate with her, the spirits’ heads all turned to silently greet the new arrival. She could read their faces. Apologetic for the horrors she would inevitably come to know.

“Let me ask you one thing,” the old man said as he brought the carriage to a stop. The center itself was dimly lit, leaving his eyes still in shadow as blackened pits of despair. “Did you come here out of hope?”

Pirim turned slowly to gaze at her skull. Battered as she was… a cold fire still burned within. She nodded.

“Then may fate give you what I cannot. My name is Barlon Mannister, Guildmaster of Loxburg. I hope you find what you’re searching for, whatever that is, even in this dismal place.”

“Pirim,” Pirim replied in earnest. She shook his crumbling hand. “Thank you kindly.”

In some odd superstitious show of acknowledgement, Barlon drew a coin Pirim had paid him with and bit it solemnly. Then, which a lurching gait, he stumbled his way back towards a building as wizened as himself – the guild hall.

Pirim sighed as her body suddenly felt the effects of what it had witnessed bring it downwards like some invisible anchor. The air was clouded with dust and soot, and travelling throughout the night had left her yearning to close her eyes. To the inn she went, dragging her feet along the soil.

When she opened the doors, she was greeted with the sight of a few small groups of two or three adventurers huddled around tables in hushed conversations. They paid her a cursory glance, before determining she was nobody of interest and resuming their conversations. However, in the center of the room, there was an odd sight that did catch her eye instead. A heavily bandaged and grievously wounded man lay slumped over on the wooden chair, his arms dangling over the armrests. He was barely clinging to consciousness, while a dark figure in a hooded cloak bent over him, squatting on top of the table like a bird on a perch.

“That right… mhm… just three, and I’ll show… for my tonics…”

The most saliant aspect of this figure, however, was not her peculiar posture or motions, but the large and pointed bird mask that extended from her face like a leather beak. Pirim had seen these masks before, and they were usually a bad omen – wherever plague went, the masks would follow. But it was clear that Loxburg itself was a cesspool of plague, so it followed naturally that it would be filled with plague doctors.

“Oh thank you! Thank you so much,” the injured man wheezed. A faint glimmer of light shone from deep underneath the plague doctor’s tinted goggles. With all the grace of a vulture, the doctor straightened herself up and rose to full height, towering above the rest of the tavern’s patrons thanks to her stance on the table. From behind, the tavernkeeper gave her a cursory glance, looking her up and down, but he did not admonish her for standing on his table. Instead, his gaze was curious, as the plague doctor prepared to announce something.

All the heads in the tavern turned towards the plague doctor at the injured man’s exclamation and her sudden movement. Now that her cloak hid less of her body, Pirim could analyze how she stood – like a bleak flamingo, with hardly any weight on her right leg. Perhaps it had been injured? The way she stood seemed precarious, off-balance, as if her center of gravity had been shifted somehow.

The doctor’s beak turned, swiveling around, surveying the room. Pirim felt a chill as it passed over her for a moment, then left her. As she faced Pirim, Pirim could see that underneath the cloak and robe were belts and satchels all containing a number of vials filled with strange green liquid.

“I don’t expect any of you to know who I am,” the doctor rasped in a husky voice. “Being isolated from the rest of the world, and all that. But do not worry, for today the disease and ailment that has plagued your village for far too long will be abolished by my trained wit and practice.”

The strange doctor nodded silently to herself, as if she was her own audience. Her voice was mechanical, stuffy from the mask that muffled it. It also had a distinct whispery quality to it, as if she was speaking out of the corner of her mouth.

“You may call me Azazael. I come with a degree from Florington University, and I’ve concocted several special tonics aimed at treating demon-born illnesses in particular. It is my area of expertise, after all. This ramshackle town is long overdue for a professional of my caliber.”

The response was mixed. Some gave “Azazael” nothing but a disbelieving smirk, while others had desperation in their eyes.

“This young man here,” (Pirim didn’t consider Azazael’s injured patient very young at all) “will be my first subject. You will all see how his flesh knits itself back together once more in the morning.”

Azazael paused for dramatic effect, but no cheers erupted from the crowd. In tenebrous candlelight, Pirim snuck past the commotion as Azazael let her hands droop in slight disappointment. Now that the gazes were eventually starting to shift away from her, she instead bent down and whispered something in her patient’s ear.

“Welcome to the Fleeting Owl,” the tavernkeeper said in a low, rumbling tone, as Pirim approached. He extended his hand, but Pirim did not shake, lest he be appalled by the pallid condition her hand was in and the cold, corpse-like aura of her skin. Her voice was purely businesslike as she kept her head low.

“…Well, yes, we do have a room open. That’ll be five silver palms.”

Pirim dug out the silver palms from deep within the inside of the cloak. In a flash, she dumped them on the table, quickly retracting her hand so that it was nothing more than a blur of ivory white. The tavernkeeper raised an eyebrow, but he was used to all sorts of idiosyncratic folk, brought in to assuage the ongoing invasion, so he paid it no mind. He simply shrugged and offered Pirim a drink, to which she politely refused. He held out the room key, but Pirim simply stared at it. Getting the message, he laid it on the counter for her to pick up with a cloaked hand.

“Be safe out there,” he said in a friendly whisper, but it carried a grave undertone.

“Will do.”

Pirim made her way past the tables, slinking forth like the shadow of a black cat in moonlight. She climbed the rickety, half-worn stairs to the second floor where the rooms were. For a town this size, the Fleeting Owl featured a few dozen. She found her room and opened the door.

While she was by no means a noble, her living conditions were far from shabby. This squalid shack, however, boasted spiderwebs as decorations and dust over every surface. She sniffed the sheets to make sure they were sanitary, but doing so was performative. In reality, she did not care whether the sheets were immaculate or bloodstained, it mattered not. After such a draining journey, she would have slept soundly on a pile of bones. After shedding the pack that she carried with her and setting her skull on a nearby bedtable, she collapsed face first on the fur pelt blanket. She rolled over. She spread her legs and arms wide, taking up the entire width of the bed as she lay on her back.

“It sure is worse out here than I thought,” Pirim said to Yuka, who did nothing but sit idly on the table by the flickering candle.

“Yes, the Flesh Fields were particularly abhorrent. I don’t suppose that’s where your spirit rests, hm? I hope I don’t ever have to go there… the smell was enough to make me want to vomit.”

Pirim sighed as she turned to face the skull, suddenly realizing something.

“Oh! You’re right, Yuka. How could I forget?”

Groaning with the effort, Pirim dragged herself out of the bed to undo the latches of her pack. Digging deep within, she found her mahogany wand. With it, she stepped to the door and drew a circle in the air before the door frame. As she did so, the circle filled with glowing light in several lines, as if drawn with chalk. The outline of an alphabet arranged in circular formation appeared, and Pirim traced the word “ward” out with her wand. Then, she drew out a small stone – tourmaline – from her cloak and placed it in the center of the circle. The lines glowed a bright red before the circle vanished, the stone with it.

“There. Now we won’t get any unsavory guests in the middle of the night.”

Right as Pirim uttered those words, an unholy scream echoed throughout the halls of the inn, coming from only a few rooms over. The sound startled Pirim as she jumped and almost knocked over her skull from the table. She cursed under her breath.

“What’s going on?” She strode towards the door to investigate, but then quickly thought better of it. Opening the door could leave her vulnerable, even if she had a protection spell on it.

The scream belonged to a man; she could tell that much at least. Perhaps a middle-aged man? Maybe he was being attacked, or worse… she hesitated. Should she come to his aid? No… there were already quite a few people in the inn. The inn drew adventurers from faraway lands, people who were expecting a fight in the first place. They should be able to deal with it. Besides, she was much too tired, and it was much too late. She flopped back on the bed, this time burying herself under the covers.

The man screamed again, louder this time, with newfound vigor. Pirim took an unused pillow and placed it over her head. The noise was agonizing. Despite every muscle in her body begging for her to sleep, she simply could not. Her ears would not let her. The man screamed once more.

“What an abominable welcome…” she muttered to herself. Based on what she had seen in the tavern… perhaps it was Azazael who was doing something to that poor old miserable soul? She did tell him to come to her room to be “healed,” but it sounded like he was being tortured instead… how pitiful.

The screams continued, unrelenting. Whatever treatment Azazael was offering, it seemed to be much worse than any injury that man had sustained. And not only was it unbearable for him, it was unbearable for Pirim as well. For hours and hours he continued onwards, his voice growing hoarse and cracked from his terror, but that did not dissuade his vocal chords from crying out in agony. It was not until the morning sun, still hidden by ashen clouds of dread, began to rise, that Pirim finally passed out from exhaustion in her new home, and her final resting place.