Lenore Wraithwhisper woke from a fitful night of sleep. It had been four days since she’d had her last conversation with the Demon Lord Astrid, who’d agreed to start sending her more troops to bolster the ranks at Grenus’ Hovel. The place had been aptly named, a tiny outpost in the middle of nowhere, outside of the official borders of the Great Demon Empire and inside the territory of the territory of the Kelvach Clan, a nomadic group of humans that had mostly seen them as a harmless lot not worth wiping out.

After a bit of effort and a lot of luck, Len had managed to open up trade relations with one of the clanspeople, a pleasant man named Balar who didn’t let a lot about himself be known, but had proved a reliable source of needed supplies in exchange for their own meager mining results. It had helped her complete her one major achievement at the hovel: the creation of a small greenhouse.

Ordinarily, that accomplishment wouldn’t be all that impressive, but when combined with one of the resources already at the Hovel’s disposal, a young Herbimancer named Marble, it had allowed them to vastly improve their food production. Prior to Len’s arrival, the young woman had spent most of her energy each day coaxing plants to life long enough to scrape together a meager harvest, then having to watch them die immediately because of the harsh northern climate of the territory. Now that THAT problem was solved, Marble was able to spend a few hours each day tending to the crops, gathering the harvest, and then got to experience a brand new concept for her: free time.

The reality of the Hovel had been rather ridiculous when Len had arrived. A dedicated few handled the bulk of the labor, barely keeping the place afloat, while any number of others just sat around all day waiting to die. That was the thing about the Hovel. It was intentionally dysfunctional. Anyone sent to the Hovel was sent there as a final destination of punishment for those not quite worthless enough to execute but not worth anything resembling redemption. The place was never staffed to a meaningful degree, and it was only supplied with the barest of resources that could never meet the demands of survival, let alone conquering the land.

Len’s position was one she’d assumed was meant to serve the same function: be out of the way and die without causing the Demon Lord any trouble. It had turned out that she was right about the first part, but very wrong about the second. Though her initial interactions with Astrid had been less than cordial, the Lord had actually taken a liking to her. This ‘banishment’ was definitely to hide her away, but more as a temporary solution than a permanent one.

As for Len’s own intentions, she wasn’t the sort to leave a situation in chaos. She used what meager authority she had (and the trio of Goblins beholden to her) to force a semblance of order on the camp and get the layabouts to start earning their keep. It hadn’t been a total challenge, the glassblower Ramus had been won over to her side as soon as she’d managed to acquire some sand from which he could begin working his craft again. She’d arranged for a part of the mine to be cleared out so he could work relatively safe from the shifting winds and biting cold and he’d been happy.

She’d also managed to bring her friend Kilareth Bloodsipper, Kila to anyone who hadn’t pissed her off, to the Hovel, getting her to abandon her duties, her forgemaster, and her home all with the promise of work. It sometimes amazed Len what a good friend she had in Kila.

Kila also happened to be the only living soul who knew Len’s biggest secret: that she wasn’t really Lenore Wraithwhisper. She still had no idea how it had happened, but she knew wholeheartedly that she was from the planet Earth and that where she came from, demons, Orcs, magic, and creepy shadow beasts with a tendency to pop in at inopportune times were the stuff of fantasy.

That was another wrinkle: Pitch. Pitch was some sort of shadow beast that she’d made a pact with that she couldn’t remember, and who granted her a bit of its power in exchange for… entertainment. It was a broad enough category that Len often wondered what it really was after, but for the moment it seemed amused enough to stick around. That power, called Flagellation, also came with the lovely gift of agonizing pain that almost knocked her out every time she used it, and left her with debilitating headaches for the days that followed, so she did her best to avoid it entirely, but it was an ace in the hole that had already saved her life on several occasions, so she couldn’t just ignore it.

The most recent time it had done so had been when she dealt with two traitors: Venar and Tess. They’d been the hunters for the Hovel, not so much permanent residents as occasional visitors that would drop off supplies that they’d gathered. The problem with that was that Len had discovered that a good amount of those supplies were looted from local humans. Not the main Kevlach humans, but rather banished individuals living outside the protection of the clan. Their last victims had been a pair of farmers with a daughter.

Not content to simply kill all three of them, they’d executed the adults in front of the child, then sent the child to try and kill Len as a sort of resignation stunt (Len still wasn’t exactly sure why they’d thought that had been a great tactic, but she’d had a slightly different focus when she’d talked to them).

The girl had been appropriately bloodthirsty at first, trying her best on two separate occasions to take Len’s life, but failing and getting caught on the second attempt. It had taken some effort to convince her that the rest of the Hovel had no idea of the other two’s actions and to lead them to the culprits to bring them to justice.

When they’d arrived, it had been a hard-fought battle. Venar was felled outright, but Tess had been defeated without taking her life. Keseryn had barely been convinced not to take the life herself, and the choice had been left to Len. Even though she’d wanted very badly to snuff the traitor out, she’d held back at the last moment, leaving her to mend in the house of the people she’d slaughtered with her own banishment, and the promise of a swift death if she ever showed her face again.

That hadn’t been enough to earn Len a reprieve, though, for as soon as she’d returned, she discovered that another band of Demon Army troops had arrived in the territory. Better armed, better trained, and with an apparent thirst for bloodshed. With her own limited crew, she’d have little option but to accede to any demands they made unless she acted fast.

Given her own intentions for the local humans, having them slaughtered by an upstart captain was out of the question. She’d gotten permission from Astrid to act as she saw fit (apparently, the Lord was none too fond of the young Orc) and granted more troops. Many more troops, in fact. Astrid had decided to load the camp with three dozen more recruits for Len to command. Given that she’d only wanted one dozen at most, this wasn’t ideal, but at least she’d managed to bargain for a staggered delivery.

With all that rushing through her head, Len supposed that it wasn’t any wonder that she was suffering from restless nights. She glanced over at the sleeping form of Keseryn and smiled slightly. That, at least, was a good thing she’d been able to do since getting here. Taking the girl in, and keeping her safe was the least she could do under the circumstances, but it felt damn good all the same. She supposed she didn’t really deserve that feeling, but enjoyed it nonetheless.

She’d been wracking her brain over what to do with these mounting problems. The more troops would be a godsend and, though she’d objected at the time, 36 more bodies to handle the workload would make a lot of difference. They could do things like post proper guard, arrange shift rotations, massively boost the productivity of the mine and local forestry efforts. But it all came with the extreme caveat that they had a deadline.

She had no way of knowing what timeline Captain Claymar was working on, but she needed to thwart him before his conflict with the humans got too extreme. Balar hadn’t given her a lot to work with when it came to details, but Astrid had given up quite a lot of intel. Apparently Claymar had a over 100 droops under his command, all proper warriors eager for combat. She didn’t really know the exact nature of the Kelvachian population, and hadn’t been able to get them to share many details. She understood that they were typically nomadic, but beyond that? No clue. She doubted that even a society dedicated to picking up roots and moving as needed would be able to out-pace a proper military force.

It was frustrating trying to game out solutions when she had so little information. She’d have to see about visiting the clan herself, there was nothing else for it. She’d had Moe out scouting for her, keeping an eye out for any movement, but he hadn’t had anything to report. She wished she had more to work with here, but that was about it. It had been five days since Balar’s last visit, and she was starting to worry that he really wouldn’t be coming back, but she hoped she’d been able to convince him to at least give it one more shot. Even though they’d bolstered their supplies, she really didn’t want to lose that trade resource.

On the whole, Len felt like she should be a lot more discouraged than she actually was. The situation was far from ideal. Dire, really, but on the average, she felt like she’d had worse come her way. The optimism was a strange feeling, if she was honest with herself. She’d spent so much time desperately scrambling for a place in this world and now she had it. It wasn’t a great place, literally called a Hovel, but it was a position of just enough power that she felt like she could actually build upon it. Claymar didn’t understand what a mistake he’d made coming into her territory, and there was a part of her that was really relishing the idea of helping him realize the depths of that mistake.

That just left the problem of figuring out HOW.