The satisfying thwap of an arrow sinking in heralded the death of the last frostshrub. Cadence blew out a breath and lowered her bow while she scanned the little clearing where the three had started their fight.

She and Allana had handled the dozen minor monsters that had charged them, a mixture of snow-white powderhares and ice-rimed frostshrubs–the latter effectively oversized hedgehogs, with quills like shards of ice. Surprisingly fast, the dire vermin posed little threat to the two experienced girls, and they had made short work of the handful of ice-aspected monsters.

Meanwhile, Tenebres, still trying to get the last of the experience he needed to push his gift of the void over the line, was directing four of his fiends at once in a fight against the lesser ranked leader of the monsters. Cadence had never seen anything like the lean, nearly-person-sized hare before, but Allana had named it an "icemaw," a reference Tenebres apparently understood as he faced off against it.

It was a dangerous looking monster, but Tenebres had faced it down gamely, using his muscular green imp and tentacular fright to bind the thing's paws while his flying blue imp and fire-breathing red imp menaced it. He even chipped in with his own magic, hurling slender bolts of kinetic energy that pierced its snow-white fur like arrows–a new spell he had gained at Apprentice level, Cadence could only assume. That still left her with at least one question, though.

"How's he still standing with that many imps summoned?" Cadence asked Allana. Though the two could've helped their friend, he clearly had the icemaw under control, and they wanted to give the boy the chance to get some much-needed experience for his gift of the void. "Normally even a couple summonings have him exhausted.

Allana gestured with her chin. "See the body at his feet?"

Cadence tilted her head, but looked more closely, and noticed the body of one of the bright white powderhares, as Allana had indicated, laying on the ground in front of the boy as he fought. "Yeah?"

"He has this ability–I've only seen him use it a couple times, because it's tricky and doesn't do much damage, but if he can kill something with it, he gets a big buff to his physical attributes. It lets him invoke a bunch of his fiends without paying the price."

"Sacrificial Victim," Cadence muttered. She had almost forgotten about the ability–it was the same one she had copied in her doomed fight with Hellesa, her last ditch effort to kill the hag. Unfortunately, the corpse hag was apparently immune to the dark damage the attack relied on, and Cadence had nearly gotten herself killed in the attempt to use it.

The celestial felt a little shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. She didn't like to think about her fight with Hellesa too often. The surging power coursing through her body, elevating her to something so much more than she was. The rush of all of her friends' abilities bursting out of her. The look of surprise on Hellesa's face when she found herself in danger.

Seeker. The name that had felt so right in the moment.

Cadence tried very hard not to think about that fateful fight, but with how often she had been thinking about Storyteller lately, it was unavoidable. Was that how he felt, all the time? Was that why he held himself at such a distance?

"Nice," Allana breathed. The faint praise got Cadence's attention, and she looked up just in time to see another of those slender force bolts pierce through the top of the roaring monster's mouth and finally put it out of its misery.

"Allana," Tenebres called, "can you wrap it up?"

Two of Tenebres fiends–the red imp and the tentacular fright–had been destroyed near the end of the fight, but that still left two others. A considerable weakness of Tenebres's powerset was that his fiends couldn't be ordered away. They lasted until the time in their invocation ran out, or until they were killed.

In the space of an exhaled breath, Allana simply appeared behind the green imp, her dagger stabbing down into its head before it realized she had arrived. The blue imp turned to flee, taking advantage of its wings and speed, but Cadence had already sent two arrows after it, and with it distracted by its fight against Tenebres's control, it had little chance of dodging them. One took it in the back, the other in its head, and it dissolved away before it even hit the ground.

Tenebres blew out a breath as the imps returned to wherever it was he summoned them from.

"Did that do the trick?" Allana asked.

Tenebres's eyes took on the unfocused look of someone reviewing soulsight notifications, then he shook his head. "Not quite yet, no."

Allana rolled her eyes while Cadence walked over to join them. "That was good," she observed. "A lesser monster and a dozen minor vermin, all killed without any of us taking a real hit."

Tenebres frowned as he, too, surveyed the little clearing that the road passed through. Still dusted with frost from the morning, tinting everything a soft white, it was now splattered in the bright red blood of all of the monsters and littered with their corpses. "This is weird though, isn't it?"

"What do you mean?" Allana asked.

"We didn't provoke them or anything. We just passed by this place and suddenly we're being attacked."

"That's how monsters work," Allana pointed out. "They just sort of attack."

"But why didn't the hunters get them?" Cadence asked, following Tenebres's train of thought. "This is a main route from Keystone to like four different villages besides Cobble. So why were we the ones to take care of them?"

"Maybe they spawned this morning," Allana suggested. "We did have a coldsnap."

"That icemaw though, or whatever you want to call it, that didn't spawn overnight. That would've taken weeks, or months, to grow that large," Cadence mused.

"Like the darkmaw," Allana muttered.

"Hmm?"

"One of the monsters we killed in Emeston," Tenebres explained. "Let's get moving. We can tell you about it while we walk."

Cadence cast a final look around the monster-strewn clearing, and nodded her agreement. Now that the fight was over, the carnage was… difficult to be around. At times, it was easy to forget just how violent they all had the ability to be.

#

Hunger magic. Cadence mused on that while they walked, processing Allana and Tenebres's story of the horrifying darkmaw they had fought. The celestial knew better than most the various forms of magic that caused natural monsters to spawn throughout the heartlands.

Life magic was the most common, but it only produced aggression in the cases of pests and weeds, creating the common, but minor, bramble-spawn and dire vermin. The majority of life-aspected monsters, often called arcane beasts, were simply animals who lived long enough to absorb a large chunk of life-aspected magic, making them larger, smarter, and more magical, but not otherwise changing their habits. Elder stags and oracle owls were both far from unheard of back in Felisen.

Storm and frost monsters, though seasonal, were much more common threats during the summer and winter. Reflecting the tumultuous nature of the magic they absorbed, those types of monsters were almost always aggressive, but they were known factors, spawned by weather events that allowed hunters to usually plan around their appearances. If you got a snow storm or a sudden coldsnap, you knew that there would be frost monsters to hunt down. Fire monsters, though more rare and dangerous, were equally obvious when they were spawned. It was hard to miss the kind of wildfire capable of releasing a cinderwolf, after all.

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Hunger and rage magic, generally called the wild aspects of magic, were often considered the most dangerous. Both were common in many natural animals, and both could be stoked to magical levels by countless events. The accidental death of a cub could drive a mother bear into a rage-aspected transformation, while even a minor change in an ecosystem could produce enough hunger-aspected magic to produce a lesser monster.

Even worse, hunger was such a common driving motivation to many small animals that any dire vermin could potentially become a lesser hunger-aspected monster if they had access to a major source of magical energy–be it a natural coalescence of ambient magic, a large number of potent reagents, or the corpse of an arcane beast–or even a gifted human.

To the best of their knowledge, the darkmaw Allana and Tenebres had fought spawned from a hunger-aspected rat devouring the corpse of a lesser spider, but that didn't mean the same was true of the icemaw. There could, for example, have been some reagents missed by the villages' foragers during the summer and autumn, as the valley's hunters were distracted by the plague. Or, perhaps, the body of a gifted killed by the sickness had gotten dug up by the industrious dire vermin.

Or a hunter had been killed by the hag and their body was left to rot until a vermin found it.

Cadence gritted her teeth. The deeper they got into Valley Hearth, the more questions they had, with no answers in sight.

#

To Cadence's disappointment, though not to her surprise, Cobble provided no answers they didn't already have.

Cobblestone, known simply as Cobble to many of the valley's residents, was a typical village by the standards of Valley Hearth. Surrounded by acre upon acre of carefully cultivated farmland, the village itself was little more than a few dozen homes, with another couple dozen scattered throughout the farmlands in little clusters.

The most notable building in Cobble was the Festhall, a massive, long building at the northern end of the village, made of considerably more solid timber and stone than the simple thatch and wood that was otherwise common throughout the village. The building served simultaneously as a dining hall for the villagers, a shelter from monsters and storms, a rest stop for visiting traders, a warehouse for surplus crops, and a business for the village's leading citizen.

Fest, the hall's namesake, reminded Cadence of Old Man Callahan in Felisen. Hale despite his advanced age, Fest was the wealthiest man in Cobble, and one of the wealthiest in all of Valley Hearth. He owned not just the Festhall, but a portion of all of Cobble's fields, and his brewery allowed him strong trading connections in Correntry.

Cobble was closer to Keystone than Oli and Adeline's destination, and the trio reached the outskirts of the village by late afternoon. Even tired from the road, though, the adventurers quickly came to the conclusion that there was little to learn here, no matter what the Mendicant had claimed. The fields were already barren, their crops harvested for the season, and most of the farmers moved with the same despondent lack of energy that seemed to be the norm throughout Valley Hearth.

Cadence found herself shaking her head as another villager walked away, having provided only a few mumbled, tired answers to their questions about the earliest days of the plague.

"I always heard Valley Hearth was a beautiful, bountiful place," Cadence said to the others, her words muffled through the cloth mask she wore over her lower face. The masks, like the charms worn on their wrists, were enchanted by the Mendicant themself with a combination of life magic and runes that they claimed should forestall any infection. "In Felisen, the start of winter usually meant a festival of some kind–a celebration of a year's work finished, and a final bout of relaxation before the hunters started their most dangerous season."

"It was the same in Culles," Tenebres said. "Maybe it's the sickness? I mean, if it's as bad as we heard, everyone here has probably lost some people to it, and between the casualties and those being cared for in Keystone, I'm sure everyone had to work that much harder to get the crops in. Look at the fields–I don't even know how they managed to get them all in before the first frost."

Cadence nodded, accepting the answer–but something still felt wrong.

Fest himself proved as jolly and gregarious as his name implied, but he was equally bereft of answers. "Well, I'm pleased to hear you want to help, but I don't know what you're hoping to find," the portly man told them when they told him why they had come to visit Cobble. He looked unnerved by the masks, as he wore no visible protection of his own, but he was otherwise as welcoming as Cassian had promised.

"Anything you could tell us about the circumstances surrounding the first infections would be helpful," Tenebres told him. "Visitors, events, any circumstances that might help us track down a source."

"A source," the man asked, alarm obvious on his face. "You think someone might be behind the plague?"

"We don't know," Cadence jumped in, trying to calm the brewer. "But the healers suspect the plague might be magical in nature, and that means there might be some sort of natural manifestation that caused it. That's what we're looking for."

"Anything would help," Tenebres repeated.

Fest's eyes went distant and thoughtful for a long moment before he replied. "How about I take a look over my records, see if anything jogs my memory? Perhaps you can join me and we can talk about it over dinner–my hall is the best place in Cobble for travelers to stay over!"

"That would be great, thank you!" Cadence replied, feigning a smile to hide the vague sense of unease growing in her chest. "We'll see you then."

The last stop Cadence insisted on was to see the hunters that protected Cobble. "If anyone knows what's going on around here, the hunters will know," Cadence reassured her companions.

Unfortunately, the village's four hunters proved to be less than ideal sources of information. All of them were young–the oldest a few years older than Allana, the youngest the same age as Tenebres and Cadence.

"If there was any manifestation causing the plague, don't you think we'd have noticed?" the oldest asked, his aggressive tone catching Cadence by surprise.

"I don't mean to imply anything," Cadence backpedaled, startled, "it's just–"

"Just what?' Just that some wandering vagabonds think they know better than the hunters that actually keep this valley safe?"

"Not at all, I'm sure you do, but–"

"We did kill a lesser monster on the way here that you staunch guardians apparently missed," Allana commented dryly.

Cadence winced, and the oldest hunter spun on the rogue, his hand falling to the haft of his axe. "Excuse me?" he snarled. "What are you trying to say, eggplant?"

Allana's lip twitched in an expression of distaste much more subtle than the argumentative young hunter's, and Cadence didn't need a gift to feel the potential violence in the air.

"I'm saying–"

"Nothing!" Cadence broke in again, putting herself between the muscular young man and Allana. Behind her, she heard Tenebres drag Allana back. "My friend just wanted to let you know about a monster we encountered on the way, a powderhare that had made it to lesser rank."

"Then maybe you and your friend should learn to speak with some Warrior-damned respect when you're talking to your betters."

Cadence felt a familiar sullen resentment flare in her chest at his words. She blew out a breath, her eyes not flinching from the hunter's as she did, and she managed to reply, through gritted teeth, "We'll keep that in mind. Have a good evening."

The young hunter kept his eyes on her, his gaze dark and threatening, for a long moment, then he turned to leave. "Let's go," he told the rest of his little cluster of young, male, hunters. "And you," he called back over his shoulder, "be careful. The heartlands are dangerous lately. You never know what you could run into on the road."

Cadence rolled her eyes–and desperately threw out an arm to slow down Allana's desperate charge forward.

"I'll show you dangerous!" Allana called after him. "Just you fucking wait, asshole!"

The hunters laughed to each other, the sound harsh and mocking, as they continued on their way, leaving both Cadence and Allana stewing with irritation.

"Well," Tenebres said with a sigh, "that could've gone better."

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