Warmaker
Session: 2026-09-30
The scabbard came apart like wet bark. What was left of it had never been magic — just leather and rust holding on out of habit — and when it gave up, six pale stones dropped into the dirt at the bottom of the pit.
Moonstones. Fifty gold apiece. They went around the party the way bread goes around a table, and nobody made a speech about it.
Vath turned his over once and put it away. He was still thinking about the flowers.
The pouch sat in his coat where he'd left it, and every so often the smell found its way out — sharp, green, wrong for this coast. He had a name for most things that grew between Silverport and Vogler. He didn't have one for this.
He looked down at the three caskets again. Older than any settlement in Etheryn. Older than the idea of one.
"Victor," he said. "That one with the skull and the lilies. You have paper in that scroll case. Take a rubbing."
Victor looked at him like it was the first useful thing anyone had said all morning.
They gave the dwarf's armor one more look before they left it. Bone, the party decided, because it had to be something, and bone was the closest word. Nobody could make it mean anything past that.
Pedro stood over the hole in what remained of his clothes. The acid had left him more holes than shirt. Zephyr offered him something to wear.
"No, my friend," Pedro said. "You should just enjoy the show."
Cain was already working. He rolled the dead rats over the lip one at a time and let them fall.
"Throw the vermin in the hole," he said, to nobody in particular. "Keeps the bears and raccoons from spreading them all over the place. Keeps the kids from tripping on them."
Then he took up his shovel — the one that did more than a shovel should — and pushed the whole mound of dirt back where it had come from. The graves filled. The caskets went dark under it.
Vath watched the earth settle. It had held those three a long time without anyone's help. It could hold them a while longer.
The walk back was quiet. No tracks to follow this time, no broken trees. Just road.
They came out of the woods above East Point and Cain stopped.
"Something's afoot," he said, and pointed.
The turtle ship still sat on the ruined jetty, but it was bare now. Every plate stripped off its back, like something had been at it with a knife and a lot of patience.
Down in the village, people were mending nets. Someone was walking goats. A woman looked up from a line of washing and waved.
"You made it back!"
Vath asked about the ship.
"We stripped it," a young man said, pleased with himself. "Figure with those we can get further out. Fish like the Taurin do."
Pedro looked him up and down. "You are no Taurin."
The young man went a little pink. "Figured we could sail a little further out, is all."
They're already building on it. Not long ago this town was boarded inside a warehouse waiting to burn. Now it had plans.
"Elias is probably down by the boats," someone told them.
He was. A handful of men worked around the sunken hulls, and Elias stood among them with his sleeves rolled, giving directions he clearly didn't need to give.
Victor went to him first and told him all of it. The pit, the fight, the dragonborn that came apart in acid, the dwarf that wasn't. The caskets. He didn't trim any of it. Vath understood why — these people had earned the whole thing, not the comfortable half.
Elias listened to the end. "Thank you, young master," he said. "The spirits will rest easier."
Vath brought the sack over and opened it.
Elias looked in for a long moment. "Yup," he said. "That's him." He turned and raised his voice. "Finn! This is the mayor. Take him to go see Anna."
A boy came running, took the sack in both arms, and was gone up the path.
Elias reached into his fisherman's jacket and came out with a folded parchment, water-stained at the edges, sealed in wax. An E, with an arrow through it like a compass point. He tapped it against his palm a few times before he spoke.
"Would you mind bringing this to Thornwall Keep? Where the Paladin's rebuilding." He held it out to Victor. "That there's a full account of what happened in this town. All of it."
Victor put it in his pack. It would not stay a simple errand for long.
Victor pressed ten gold into Elias's hand — for the town, he said, and for its new mayor. Elias didn't argue the title. Then Victor asked whether there was anywhere in East Point to buy a knife.
"No," Elias said. "But here." He drew an old fishing knife from his belt, the handle worn dark, and handed it over.
Victor slid it into his waistband as if he knew exactly what he was doing with it.
Elias pointed them toward Mirna's and said goodbye.
They heard Mirna's house before they reached it. A steady clatter from inside, regular as rain on a roof. Sewing machines.
Fabri opened the door. "My big muscular friend! It appears you've made it back safely. We'll have some tea — Mirna! Mirna, your guests have arrived!"
From somewhere in the back: "Tell them to get out and come back tomorrow."
Fabri didn't miss a beat. "Well. I suppose we'll see you all tomorrow."
Pedro glanced down at his ruined clothes and shrugged. "Take good care of Mirna. I do expect to look amazing tomorrow."
"Are you going to take care of the animals, Fabri?" Cain asked.
"Absolutely."
The others had been eyeing the old warehouse for the night. Vath didn't want it. He'd smelled the inside of that building once already.
"Sleep under the sky," he said. "Better air."
Nobody fought him on it. They found a grazing field west of town and made camp there.
Pedro wandered off from the camp, down to where the docks were in earshot, and pinned a drawing of the dragonborn onto a large post. Then he went at it with his weapon, over and over, working the swing. The chop of it carried back across the field. After a while the others started timing their own strikes to the sound, half a joke and half not. Somewhere in the middle of it Pedro realized he'd been humming the whole time. An old habit from work, he said. He didn't stop.
Toward evening Marta Kell came out from the warehouse she ran, her daughter Elsie beside her, the two of them carrying a basket between them. Mutton. Potatoes. Fish. Fruit from somewhere nearby.
"These are for you," Marta said. She looked at the field, and then back toward the warehouse, and winked. "Can't say I blame you."
She thanked them again before she left. It sounded like the last time she expected to.
Vath sat by the fire with his pipe going. Victor came and sat beside him, plate balanced on one knee.
"How much better a man feels after a meal," Victor said.
Vath nodded. He took the pouch out of his coat and smelled the flowers again, close this time. Something underneath the sharpness. Bitter, a little. The kind of bitter that usually meant a plant was good for something.
Medicine. That much he was sure of. What kind, and for what, the flower wasn't telling him yet.
He put it back.
Elsie came across the field again in the dark with a cloth bundle. Dried smoked fish. Buttered rolls.
"Me mum says these are for you. For the road."
Zephyr thanked her. He'd been different these last days — steadier, surer of himself. Vath could feel it sitting next to him the way you feel a wall at your back. Protection coming off him like warmth off a stone.
"Good food," Victor said, to the fire. "And good company."
Fabri opened Mirna's door the next morning dressed louder than Vath had thought a person could dress. "Welcome! And good morning! Have you eaten yet? They really have fabulous fish here."
Pedro walked past him. "Mirna. I'm here for my big makeover."
Fabri came back with a platter of food and went off again for tea, so they had a second breakfast standing in the front room while the machines went quiet in the back.
Mirna came out. Pedro held up the garments she brought him like a man shown his own future. "This is exactly what I wanted."
"I'm a little out of practice," she said, and watched him undress the way a carpenter looks at a board, working out where it would need cutting.
"Alright, Mirna," Pedro said. "Let's turn me into legend."
It didn't need cutting. It fit.
When Pedro came back into the room, Vath could have sworn he heard drums. Lyres too. He didn't look around to find out where from.
Auburn leather boots to just below the knee, steel at the toes, buckles stacked up the shin. Steel kneepads. Black trousers. A red silk cape that caught the light like a coal, gold fringe and filigree, the edge trimmed in spotted fur. A championship belt. A chainmail top that stopped well short of his belly. A new hat, pink leather, buckled. His tattoos were glowing.
Cain clapped, and the sound came out of the walls three times louder than any two hands could make.
"Yup," Mirna said. "Some of my better work in the last ten years. Lucky I had those kneecaps."
Pedro paid her a hundred gold. "Always a pleasure, my friend," she said.
Victor considered his brother for a while. "Authority isn't a thing to be brandished," he said. "It sits naturally on your shoulders." And then, quieter: "You're the only brother I have. And the only brother I'd ever want."
Pedro didn't have anything to say to that. Neither did anyone else.
They said goodbye to Fabri at the door and took the road for Vogler. Two days.
The fork came up on them along the way — the same split in the road where they'd camped before, at the bottom of Herrod's Wood. Where the ground had shaken under them for a full minute and the birds had all gone at once. Where the skeletons had come out of the dark.
Vath smelled cooking before he saw anything.
In the field where they'd once made camp, someone else had made one. Olive-skinned men and women in jade-green robes sat around a fire. Behind them stood a covered litter, and around the litter, large shirtless men holding spears taller than they were. A thin man stood at the litter's curtain with his head bowed, speaking softly into it.
These were not people from Etheryn. Vath had seen their like before — Silverport was a port, and ports got everyone eventually — but not often.
The people at the fire had no weapons Vath could see. The spearmen had more than enough for everyone.
The thin man straightened and started toward them.
Pedro was already measuring the guards. Vath saw him do it, saw him come up with an answer he didn't love.
Victor stepped forward to meet the stranger.
"Greetings, warmaker. I am Zithar, the Speaker. Can you confirm that Land Ho lies northward up this road? We seek the house of Brookdor. For a friendly wager."
Victor glanced back at Pedro. "I think these people want to beat your record."
"I'm sorry to tell you, sir," Pedro said, "you are no match for the great Brookdor."
"Thankfully," Zithar said, "I am not the one who would challenge him. That would be the territory of my employer. I speak on behalf of the Bija."
Vath saw Victor's face change. He knew them: Maztecans — a realm south and west, far from here. Bija meant Lady.
Victor gave a short account of who they were. Pedro asked, politely for Pedro, what the Bija wanted with Brookdor.
Zithar's eyes went to Pedro's tattoos and stayed there. "Our peoples were once at war," he said. "From that war, our soldiers became great warriors. We come to his people as worthy and honorable opponents."
"Then you're in luck," Pedro said. "You stand before the man who bested Brookdor. I can provide the exercise. My friend Victorious here can provide the mental stimulation."
Zithar considered that. "Very well."
Victor took it from there. He introduced Pedro the way he always introduced Pedro — arms wide, voice up, every word a little bigger than it had to be — "Pedro the Pile Driver, Palchenko, Haladson!" — and finished it with a clap that came down like thunder.
The spearmen moved before the echo stopped. They were in a line in a heartbeat, points level. Zithar raised one hand and they held.
Victor bowed low and apologized. It wouldn't happen again.
"Just be glad it wasn't the tentacles," Pedro muttered.
Victor straightened. "You keep calling us warmaker."
Zithar pointed at Cain. At the armor. Among his people, he said, that was what warmakers wore.
Vath looked at the spears again. Seven and a half feet if they were an inch.
"Come to our fire," Zithar said. "We will share food and drink."
Victor looked back at them. "I don't think we have anything to fear here."
Vath went to the fire and lit his pipe.
Everyone sitting there stood up at once. Zithar said something to them, quick and complicated, and they answered, and sat back down. Nobody reached for anything.
There was a cauldron of stew going. Vath smelled it and went straight to it.
Spice he didn't know. Vegetables he almost did. A druid he'd met years back, from another continent entirely, had once described plants like these — the shapes, the colors, the way they cooked down. Vath had never expected to taste them. He ate slowly and paid attention to every one.
The guards stopped watching him so hard. A man who eats like that isn't planning anything.
Pedro had drifted closer to the litter. Through a gap in the curtain, a forearm — slim, hard with muscle, gold and jade bangles at the wrist. Fingers tapping against the frame. Bored.
Then hearing something, the fingers stopped.
The litter door opened and a woman stepped down. Long flowing robes from the waist, a dozen colors at once. A cropped top. Thin sandals. A headdress of feathers. Maybe five foot eight, and built like she worked for it. She looked at Zithar and said something short.
Pedro started to smile.
Vath watched Pedro's whole body go tight — that sense he had for trouble, the one that usually just hummed, was screaming. He smiled wider. He flicked the clasps on his new cape and let it fall, and started to flex.
The people from the fire stood and spread out into a ring. A hundred feet across.
"These are the terms," Zithar said. "There will be no killing. You will discard your weapons."
Pedro was already setting his down.
The woman walked into the circle. Pedro looked at Victor. Shrugged. Walked in after her.
The spearmen joined the ring. Vath and the others took their places in it too.
She went down onto her knees in the grass and looked up at the sky for a long moment. Then she turned to Pedro and lifted her hand. He bent and kissed the ring.
She walked ten feet away, turned, and dropped into a stance Vath had never seen before — low, balanced, still as a heron in the shallows.
She's done this a lot.
Pedro rolled his shoulders.