At Hazel's suggestion, Guelder's team chose a different route than they'd done first time. Instead of a long hike in the mountains of Silverstep, they headed upstream along the Shrike, using the paved road built last year from Tuskdale to the point where the river met the South Rostland Road. They crossed the river comfortably, using the brand-new wooden bridge Guelder had built at Nettle's Crossing, now organised into a small settlement, inhabited by people displaced from the Gudrin's northern bank during the Bloom. Then all they had to do was cross the plains due east, until they reached the border guard post on the bank of the river Crooked, keeping watch at the western end of another bridge, built in cooperation with Varnhold.

  Those were the last people they saw underway.

  East of the Crooked, nobody came to escort Guelder's team to Varnhold Town, or to confiscate the map Hazel was frantically updating during their journey. The silent landscape was even more foreboding than Blackstones Ford had been at their first visit, with an execution in progress and a bunch of corpses burning in a wagon. And this time there was no Darlac to tease, either. Hazel found themself missing her. They sorely needed someone to mess with, to keep their mind off Guelder, who still seemed to be immersed in some inner struggle she was unwilling to share with them. They had to make do with Amiri, but that was not the same.

  The really weird part began when they reached Varnhold Town.

  The place was waiting for them with bated breath, devoid of the bustling life they'd seen there last time, but not completely dead, either. Quiet. Watchful. The wooden palisade surrounding the town was intact, but the gate to the south was thrown wide open. Time and again, Hazel's eyes caught a slight movement of a shadow behind a window, or a door, left ajar, being pulled closed from the inside.

  Unnerved by the eerie silence, Linzi set her mind on catching a button-eyed little rabbit she saw hopping across the street, hoping that the touch of something fluffy and harmless would ease her apprehension.

  Twang.

  A crossbow bolt whistled past Linzi's ear. The halfling froze in place with a welp. The rabbit leapt into a zigzagging dash and disappeared behind a fence.

  Twang.

  Valerie threw herself between Linzi and the invisible marksman, raising her shield just in time to block the next incoming bolt. Hazel took cover behind the corner of a building and readied an arrow. For some reason, Edrist Hanvaki followed them, probably thinking that the company of an archer would keep him out of the thick of trouble.

  He couldn't possibly have been more wrong.

  Had Hazel's keen elven ears not detected the sound of another person's breathing, nothing would have saved them from being crushed to pulp. The ranger disappeared in the last moment before a morningstar connected with their skull, right above Edrist's head. Hazel rematerialised at a few steps' distance, and released their arrow blindly towards the noise of the weapon smashing into the wall. As their gaze followed the missile, they saw a giant shape hulking above poor Edrist, who crouched down to the foot of the wall, trying to look small and harmless. At least it was an easy target. Hazel fired another arrow, and another. All of them hit true. The giant staggered and hit the ground – more exactly, Edrist.

  The unfortunate nobleman braced his head for the impact, and Hazel's face distorted into a grimace, anticipating an ugly scene. However, before the huge body crashed into Edrist, it somehow... deflated. Whether it was air or magic or pure malice that escaped from it, causing weird, spastic jerks, Hazel couldn't tell. In any case, the body ended up before Edrist's feet, reduced to the size of a gnome.

  "What in the nine hells...?" he muttered when he finally gathered his courage to look up. But Hazel paid him no heed anymore. They listened in on the din of the battle past the corner, and specifically, Guelder's voice as she uttered a sentence Hazel dreaded more than anything:

  "Leave one to me!"

  An invisible hand squeezed Hazel's stomach as shreds of memories from the monster hunt broke into their consciousness, overwhelming them with the imagined scent of blood and burnt flesh, accompanied by the unnerving chuckle of the old gnome that regularly haunted them in their dreams. Was it him again, this time multiplying and inflating himself? The balloon-like death of that giant looked grotesque enough to be the work of a fey jester. Would Guelder find herself face to face with an Eldest intending to prank her in the most cruel way imaginable? Be that as it may, Hazel would die before they'd allow her to get herself wrecked again for some stupid reason.

  However, when they emerged from behind the building, they saw that their worries had been unfounded.

  Two more gnome-sized corpses lay on the ground. Valerie and Harrim held down Amiri from both sides, waiting for her rage to expire so that she would be able to behave and follow orders again. The last enemy standing was struggling to break free from a jumble of vines snaking around his limbs. As a last resort, he released whatever it was that made him big. The force departed from him in a muffled whimper, but before he could turn his reduced size to his advantage, Guelder's mental command pulled the vines tighter around him. One reached up to his neck and coiled around it, delivering a message of subtle warning.

  "Let us have a little chat, shall we?" said the baroness, walking up to her captive.

  "No chat! The others will come and kill you all!"

  "Yes chat. At the moment, I am trying to decide between three types of thorns these vines could develop over the next minute. You have time to see sense until I settle for one."

  Edrist finally got over his scary experience and rejoined the party.

  "What the hell was this?" he asked from no one in particular.

  "Spriggan," said Linzi. "Essentially gnomes who lost their ability to feel joy. Sad, isn't it?"

  "Like Jaethal?" asked Amiri, still breathing heavily after her fit of rage.

  "Kind of. As far as I know, spriggan also like to torture people. It's hardly a mere coincidence."

  "So let me get this straight," mused Hazel. "Baron Maegar Varn and the glorious Varnling Host have been eradicated from the face of Golarion by... a bunch of depressed, inflatable gnomes? Linzi, make sure to compose a tavern song about this. This is your path to the bardic hall of fame."

  Meanwhile, Guelder was making progress with the interrogation. A vine had entered the captive spriggan's pointy ear.

  "Well, I think I will go with wild rose. You know, razor-sharp and hooked... So who are you and what are you doing in Varnhold Town?"

  "We did nothing wrong! You threw us out of our home cave, then followed us here to hunt us down! Of course we fight back! Filthy humans! Pfeh!" The spriggan spat towards her.

  Guelder deftly moved to the side, dodging the saliva attack.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  "Let me point out that I am an elf. Is ‘human’ your word for non-spriggan?"

  "No! ‘Human’ is our word for humans! I'm not stupid! Humans like... that one!"

  As the spriggan's head and limbs were immobilised by the aggressive plant, preventing him from making gestures, it was a bit hard to narrow down whom he meant.

  "The one in furs or the one in steel?"

  "Furs. Two dozen of them, led by a tusky green one. They took the caves by surprise, while we hunters were out. Killed our young and weak. We tried to force our way back in and took a bad beating."

  "So you came and attacked Varnhold Town instead."

  "No! It was all empty when we arrived!"

  "Oh, was it now?"

  "Makes sense," butted in Amiri. "Surely these wretches could not have conquered a town. Not if it had defenders in place. Even less if they'd had a run-in with my kind beforehand."

  Guelder fell silent, probably wondering the same as Hazel. How could two dozen Kellid get into Varnhold territory? The only answer Hazel could imagine was that they'd come from Iobaria, over Dunsward's eastern border. There was no way in the nine hells they could just have sauntered in from the north across Brevoy, or from the west across Nightvale, what with half of Kassil's troops stationed along the western border, keeping an eye on the river pirates, Glenebon and Pitax.

  Guelder waved a hand and the vines fell to the ground, letting the spriggan breathe freely and rub his limbs in relief. He looked around, tempted to run away, but the sight of Hazel's drawn bow dissuaded him from any sudden movement.

  "What is your name?" asked the baroness.

  "Vaga."

  "Take me to your leader, Vaga. And tell your companions to stand down. I mean, if you want to stay alive. My leopard has not had a decent meal for two days."

  Pangur suggestively flashed his fangs with a soft growl.

  The spriggan raised his cupped hands to his mouth and made a whistling sound not resembling any known bird call. Then he set out with tremulous steps ahead of the baroness.

  A raven the size of a hen observed them from the roof of the shrine of Erastil, cocking its head curiously. Guelder returned its glance, then closed her eyes, and her mind reached out towards the bird.

  No, no, no. Hell, no. Not again.

  Hazel crouched down to pick up a rock from the ground. They couldn't let Guelder lose her consciousness to a mental link with another bird amidst a gang of spriggan with anger issues. As it were, throwing a rock at the raven seemed a safer course of action than tickling the baroness at the risk of a claw swipe.

  A moment later Guelder's eyes popped open. She recoiled in horror, as if kicked square in the chest.

  "Thorns and bloody brambles," she muttered. "This bird... It is not even a bird but a piece of glowing darkness. Black magic. Insatiable hunger. Terrifying... I do not make sense, do I?"

  "You make perfect sense, Your Grace," chimed in Harrim. "I can sense the touch of Abaddon in this land. Ever so slight, and yet omnipresent. But that bird... it seems to be made of that touch."

  Their way led to the keep, more exactly, to the throne room. The captive went ahead to speak on their behalf, then returned to them.

  "Agai will speak with you," he said. "You can enter with two of your companions."

  "Thanks, Vaga," said the baroness. "Hazel, Valerie, with me. Amiri, Linzi, Harrim, Edrist, you wait here and stay out of trouble."

  In the throne room, a cosy fire was burning, made from boards pried up from the floor. Three original-sized spriggan stood around it, a bit taller and stronger than Vaga, roasting some sort of fowl meat on spits over the flames.

  "What do you want?" barked the one in the middle, probably Agai himself. "You've taken everything already!"

  "At the moment, I am the closest thing this country has to a ruler," she said, unfazed by the boldness of her own statement, "and I am here to set it all right."

  "You are not the ruler of this land."

  "I am his ally. He is in trouble, and I came to help him. Perhaps the plight of your people is part of the same problem. Tell me about it."

  "And why would I do that?"

  "Because I might be able to help you get your home back. You cannot stay here forever. The people of this town, battle-hardened men and women, will soon be back to reclaim what is theirs."

  Agai shrugged with a despondent face.

  "Fine. It was too good to be true anyway. Our home is an overgrown cave close to the source of the river that runs west. We lived there since time immemorial, hunting, foraging, minding our own business. Lately, we even started trading with the humans who settled down at the river. Furs for tools. Meat for bread. It was quite nice. So, obviously, it didn't last long."

  Guelder nodded in acknowledgement, apparently impressed with Varnhold's results in integrating another race into society. Hazel was less enthusiastic, and as they cast a side glance at Valerie, they saw her soundlessly mouth a curse. Inspired by her fruitful cooperation with Nok-Nok, Guelder had started a project for the integration of the goblins who'd survived the clashes with the field team and the militia during the Bloom. The bulk of the work fell to Valerie, who compared the task to hammering glass shards under her fingernails. However, now that Guelder saw an example of relatively successful coexistence with a race mostly known from bestiaries, she would never let go of the idea.

  Agai continued.

  "Then one day we returned home, only to see we had no home left. There were humans in our home cave. The bodies of our fallen were piled up at the entrance, like rubbish. We didn't make it past that pile. In size they cannot match us, but in strength and fury they easily do. We fled to the village to find help, but there was none."

  "Did the newcomers massacre the people of the village?"

  "No. It was just... empty. So we fled to the north and found this place. Also empty."

  "Do you like it here?"

  "Why do you care?"

  "Humour me. Do you?"

  "Yes and no. I mean, there is plenty of food and even herbs for healing our wounds. But... it's too big, too open, too fancy. Not the way our kind lives."

  Guelder flashed an understanding smile.

  "I can relate to that. Sometimes I, too, prefer an overgrown cave to a town. Which means we shall get you that cave back."

  Hazel frowned. Had she just implied that settling down permanently in Varnhold Town was an option? That would have been a lovely surprise for Baron Varn, indeed. To bad the spriggan didn't want it.

  Agai's suspicious eyes measured up the baroness with a hint of admiration.

  "You're not like them," he finally said. "Maybe I can trust you."

  "Give me three days. When that time is over, pack up enough food to see you through the journey and the first few days of getting your stuff together, and set out home. By that time, your cave will be ready to welcome you back. In exchange, I want you to guarantee safety and freedom of movement here in town for me and my companions, while we figure out the best way to help our allies. I need access to anything and everything."

  Having come to an agreement, Agai and his bodyguards left the throne room to inform their people about the plan, taking their dinner with them. Guelder and her team could finally start searching for clues.