The dry, cracked ground of Danet crunched beneath the rhythmic footfalls of the ten person crew. Bone white Danetian birch trees, grouped in groves like leafless graveyards, towered over the group as they made their way up the forested hills away from the Forked River. The trees above stretched high like skeletal fingers grasping toward the sky, futilely ending fifty feet above the crusted dirt. Sunlight flickered through the trees as if the explorers were behind prison bars, only capturing small glimpses of sun between the gaps in the trees. To the south, past the treeline, a vast expanse of empty land unfolded before them, dotted with crumbling ruins, rolling hills, and the occasional lone white birch.
One of the noble girls, Ysmena, fell back from the group to walk alongside Ioren. Her pack was unusually full. Ioren wondered what excessive items the newcomers had brought with them. Things like hair brushes, extra clothes, eating utensils or pillows - items that would seem essential to everyday life - were nothing more than cumbersome weight in a Finders pack. Over time a Finder pared down their items to the barest of essentials that they could live with.
"Why did we abandon the barge early?" Ysmena asked Ioren as they walked. Linoor and Thorne had taken the lead ahead of the group in order to scout and wayfind, while the rest of the group walked alone or in pairs in a sparse collection behind them. Walking too close together was an easy way to get everyone killed.
"Barges rarely leave Yasha's Step. Thorne said there were no Vanguard missions down the Fork today, which means we were being followed," Ioren answered. He didn't meet the eyes of Ysmena as he spoke, instead choosing to scan the landscape for signs of anomalies. He had never been to this region, preferring the southern coast or the central villages, so he kept his head on a swivel.
"Couldn't it have been a coincidence?" Ysmena continued.
"Sure. Maybe it was a coincidence," Ioren admitted. "Are you going to take the chance that it's not, though? Especially with five of you nobles out here. Easy targets for siccs, or even hired assassins. The laws of Havan don't apply out here, and the civilized politics of your world are toothless. Taking chances in Danet is a good way to get killed."
"Siccs?"
"Scav killers. It's a Vanguard term they use to describe lawless killers that stalk Danet, preferring to kill Finders than scavenge ruins. They mark it on their official maps with 'SK', which is where sicc comes from." Ioren felt a bitter taste in his throat as he explained it.
"They sound like terrible people," Ysmena said.
"The worst," Ioren agreed.
He let the silence hang between them for a time, preferring to keep his ears open for an errant branch crunching, or the sucking sound of a gravity pool. Ahead some of the other Finders had paired off to chat, as was usual during the hours-long hikes that were typical of Danet. Ioren noticed Ardenel and Onepath, 'Onep' for short, he says, both walking alone at the front of the group, heading toward where they had last seen Linoor and Thorne. Just ahead of Ardenel was a scorched patch of ground.
"Stop!" Ioren yelled out. Everyone immediately stopped in their tracks, causing Elune to tumble into the dirt. They turned to look at Ioren, who was quickly advancing toward Ardenel at the head of the group.
"What is it?" Ardenel asked, a quaver in his voice revealing his nerves. Ioren walked up beside him and opened the small pouch full of wrapped, sharpened nails on his leather chestpiece and pulled out one of the nails. He kept the wrapping on and flicked it forward into the scorched area. The wrapped cloth instantly flared up before turning to ash, and the nail became white with heat as it seared a hole into the ground.
"Heat patch," he said. "A few more steps and you'd have been cooked."
The group gathered around behind his back to look at the nail, now hissing with incredible heat just five steps ahead of them on the blackened ground. From where they stood, the air still held a morning chill. Someone gasped.
"We were almost barbecue," Dal said from behind.
"Good work," Ardenel choked out. Sweat beads had formed on his forehead. It was difficult knowing you very nearly stepped into your own demise; Ioren remembered the feeling well from his first few excursions with his mother and her Vanguard team.
"We have to move fast to keep out of sight of our tail, but don't move so fast that you miss obvious signs like this," Ioren said as he pointed to the blackened dirt. "Anything that looks strange could mean death. Avoid it."
The nobleman swallowed and nodded before continuing onward. The rest of the group followed him, giving a wide berth to the heat patch. Ioren closed the metal button on the quick-release pouch on his chest and stared into the center of the heat patch. The nail he had thrown was gone now, disappeared into the grave it had burned into Danet.
---
Linoor stood at the top of a rocky cliff that overlooked the crumbling village below. There was no Yashan Gate in front of it. She scanned the area with one eye closed, the other behind her monocular.
"No Greys that I can see," Linoor said out loud.
"That's a nifty artifact you've got there," Thorne said from his crouched position a few feet away from Linoor.
"Yes," she agreed. "I won it in my first adult tournament in Capira three years ago." She left out the part where she had spent weeks afterward playing with it and neglecting her training. The monocular was a cylinder with glass lenses inside that allowed you to see extremely far away. Not only that, but it displayed a small red pattern along the bottom of your view. Linoor had learned pretty quickly while playing with it that the pattern represented distance.
"Capira, now there's a city I'd love to see," Thorne mused from his perch. "I hear you can get lost in the massive buildings there and never find your way out."
"You are far more likely to get lost in the throngs of people than any building," she said, remembering her home city. The chatter of the open-air marketplace surrounded her as the scent of street vendors cooking filled her nostrils. Her fine boots clacked along the marble walkways of the royal palace, on her way to accept her championship honors.
"Hey, can you look at that building all the way to the north?" Thorne interrupted, snapping Linoor back to reality. She swiveled her head toward the north entrance to the village, still looking down the monocular.
"The collapsed one?" She asked.
"Yeah. See how the wood collapses toward the middle, like a sinkhole? Doesn't it look strange?" Thorne added. Linoor opened her other eye and saw Thorne leaning forward, his hand shading his eyes from the sun, straining to look into the distance.
After returning to her monocular's view, Linoor did pick out some worrying aspects of the building's collapse. The roof was wooden, yet none of it had rotted, and the way it collapsed in a strange spiral pattern reminded her of a bowl of water after you removed the plug at the bottom, as if everything had been pulled down to a single point.
"Gravity pool," she said. She swallowed to clear her dry throat. "We must steer very clear of that one."
"I think that's a solid plan," Thorne agreed. Linoor collapsed her monocular in on itself and replaced it in her gambeson's side pouch before turning to leave. Thorne stood up with a groan as his knees cracked loudly and followed.
The rest of their group waited in a small depression among the white birch forest behind the cliff. Ardenel stood up and greeted Linoor as the scouting pair returned. Linoor noticed the scav Ioren standing as a sentry in the rear of the resting group.
"Report," Ardenel demanded expectantly. He was working on his tone, but he still occasionally grated Linoor's nerves.
"Below lies the ravine village we passed on our return trip to the Step," she said. "Once we pass through this village and exit the ravine we will have arrived at the landing area for barges in front of Riverstop Keep."
"Excellent," Ardenel said as he took a drag of the tobacco roll in his mouth. He had been unnaturally reserved during this trip. Linoor noticed this was his third roll he had smoked already. He turned to face the rest of the scav group before making an announcement. "Get up, we're moving. Once we pass through the village here we will arrive at Riverstop. We will make rest there for a sleep before heading to the keep."
The group had already risen before he finished and started their trudge down the hill ahead of them, following Thorne. Linoor noticed a stark difference in this group from their previous party. The others had feared Ardenel and his threats as if he were the Red King himself. Yet this party acted on their own more often than not, seemingly recognizing his inexperience and instead looking to the Vanguard member, Thorne, and that other scav, Ioren. Where those two moved, they also went. She was thankful for this, too, as it seemed Ardenel could scarcely command his own body right now.
"Ardenel, are you well?" She asked him once the others were out of earshot.
"Great, couldn't be better," he said quickly as he took another drag of his roll. The ember reached his pinched fingers and singed his skin, causing him to drop it with a yelp. He continued as he stared at the black patch on his fingers. "Almost became a steak back there, while you were scouting. Well-done, too, not rare. That one scav, the one with the glasses around his neck, saved me just in time."
"He has become a valuable asset," Linoor agreed, wondering what silent horror nearly befell Ardenel.
"I guess I'm a little rattled. This place isn't the glorious new world that we hear of back in Capira."
"'Grand stories gain new adornments with each telling,'" Linoor said.
"Where's that one from?" Ardenel asked.
"An old teacher of mine," Linoor responded before continuing down the hill after the group. Ardenel rubbed his chin and followed, mulling over the words.
The village before them lay between two rocky walls that formed steep cliffs on the east and west sides. Two main roads ran parallel north to south, with crumbling buildings on either side. The gravity pool lay at the end of the eastern road, so, as agreed, Thorne took the group down the western road.
Linoor watched the dark windows of the village as the group approached from the south. The first time she and Ardenel had passed through this ravine after their failure in Riverstop they were too desperate to worry about their safety. She and Ardenel had not stopped a single time during the exhausting ten hour march back to the Step that evening. However, today was different. Their slow-moving group was an easy target for anyone lurking in the shadows, any anomaly of Danet waiting to burst out from behind a collapsing doorway.
She scanned the rooftops on either side of her as they entered the village. There were too many hiding spots to watch them all, and the interior of the decaying buildings were dark enough to hide any number of surprises. Most of the group ahead of her walked along easily, oblivious of the possible threats that surrounded them. Even Ardenel seemed nervous as he thumbed the pommel of his blade at his side.
A flash of movement crossed a window on the second story of a building to Linoor's right, causing her to stop and place her hand on her gauntlet blade.
"What is it?" Ardenel asked ahead of her, unsheathing his sword prematurely. "Is someone up there?"
Linoor stared into the clear blue sky above. No clouds to cast shadows. No birds in Danet. Maybe a collapsing board?
She looked to the group to find the experienced scav, Ioren, only to find him missing. Something was amiss. Suddenly Ioren's vigilance and experience seemed more suspect than reassuring. Had he betrayed them?
"Thorne!" Linoor yelled out. The rest of the group stopped as the Vanguard officer ran back to her at the rear. "Movement, there," she whispered while pointing to the window from before. "Also, we are missing one of our own."