It had been almost two weeks since Elaina Woodlock had spoken to her sister. The conversation had been tense but only partially unpleasant. As much as Elaina was trying to leave things here behind, it was nice to see her again. Kaethe had a job for her, one that she couldn’t do herself for a multitude of reasons. Chief among them, though, was that Kaethe had been made a vampire a few years ago, and the place they needed to get into was particularly well warded against such creatures.

Willowridge had been the Headquarters of the Abyssals during the Zelmescan Faction War, a sprawling castle complex across the hillside in the southwest interior of the realm. In the war’s final years, when the Abyssals were on their last legs, they had abandoned it. Though it wasn’t known exactly why they had done so, most had assumed they couldn’t hold it with the remaining numbers they had and attempted to relocate to somewhere within their capabilities. But a significant problem that had just come to light was that things they’d left behind had begun to spill into the surrounding area.

That was the job: to go in and put an end to it. There was a large span of swampland between Elaina and Willowridge, and it had been raining almost the entire time she had been here in South Gate. She wasn’t afraid of getting wet, but multiple people had assured her in town that trying to slog through any swamp in the rain was a generally bad idea for one’s health, especially with this particular swamp. It was tainted, twisted by the fell energies leaking out of Willowridge even from here. The wildlife had warped into terrible fiendish reflections of their former selves. Worse still, true fiends from planes entirely outside this one had been spotted the closer one ventured to Willowridge. The Abyssals would have summoned these kinds of creatures, but there were no binding circles or rituals to contain them.

So Elaina was stuck here, watching the rain day after day from the window of the room she had at a local inn. She let out a dejected sigh, a wisp of ginger hair fluttering out of her face as she did. She pulled her gaze from the rain-slick street below and leaned back in her chair by the window. Beside her was a small table laden with supplies she had gathered in the first few days she had been here. When she’d arrived, she hadn’t had enough to continue traveling with but had plenty of coin to change that. The last job she’d completed had seen to that.

Elaina was sort of working as a mercenary, and though she’d not had many jobs under her belt yet, the last one had paid well enough. She’d served as a bodyguard for two women bringing supplies back to an estate from the town of Hallowell. Things had turned sour, but in the end, she had managed to crawl out of the situation with her life and the lives of those she had been hired to protect without losing any of the cargo. Though many would consider that a win, Elaina had been spending a lot of the downtime forced upon her by the weather thinking back on those events.

She had moments where she could only think of the passionate moments she had shared with both women and other moments where she was overcome with the thoughts of the men whose lives she had taken. She had thought she could easily justify a life taken in self-defense, but in the late hours, lying alone in the dark, she would see the eyes of the last man she had killed: Dieter. He’d led the little ragtag band that had come for her clients, and he had been the biggest challenge in the fight. Sadly, it wasn’t merely a defeat she’d dealt him nor a killing blow she had struck in a duel. She’d slowly had to drive a broken blade through his neck as they’d tumbled around in the undergrowth of the forest where he and his men had ambushed them. He didn’t go quickly or easily, and she’d watched as the life left his eyes.

Elaina had almost died that night, and the logical part of her brain told her there had been no other way. It had been him or her, and he had been the one to set those terms, not her. Still, it was an unclean kill, and it lingered with her no matter how often she tried to put the issue to bed. She was almost certain that Dieter would not have done the same had he been the one to emerge from the fight instead. He was a much more seasoned fighter than her. He had even been part of the company of mercenaries that had once worked for the Abyssals, the very same Abyssals who had abandoned Willowridge and created the problem she was sitting around waiting to handle.

The sudden sound of knocking jarred her from her mental spiral, causing her to jump slightly before turning to face the door.

“Who is it?” she called, not dressed enough to be comfortable simply opening the door. The redhead was wearing only a long tunic that came down to her thighs and not much else. But when silence was the only answer she received, she inched a little closer, taking her sword in its scabbard from the table with one hand.

“Hello?” Elaina called a little louder as she arrived at the door. With one hand on the doorknob, she leaned closer, pressing an ear to the wood of the door.

From the hallway outside, a small mousy voice spoke up, “Excuse me, Ms. Woodlock?”

Elaina let out a sigh of relief before she unlatched the lock on the door and eased it open a crack, “Hey, kiddo.”

Ayla was the innkeeper’s daughter, a young girl who appeared to be no older than eight years. Though, because she was elven, she could have been much older, Elaina wasn’t sure. But she was still a child by her people’s standards, which was all Elaina felt she needed to know. The young wood elf brought a small ashen gray hand up to her face to push a curly emerald green lock away from her large bright eyes.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” the little one apologized.

Elaina shook her head, “It’s alright. I’ve been up for a few hours. I’ve just been lazing about.”

“Oh. Well... Daddy sent me to bring you down. He wants to talk to you.”

Elaina’s expression turned concerned now, “I should be all paid up for the rest of the week.”

The elven child shrugged both shoulders, “Maybe? I dunno, he just told me to tell you to come down to talk to him.”

“Alright, tell him I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

With a quick nod of her curl-covered head, the elf child flounced off down the hallway to return to the taproom below to rejoin her father. Elaina sighed as she stepped back into her room, closing the door behind her. Now that she was looking at it from the door, she realized the room could use a little tidying up. There was dirty laundry in piles on the floor, unfinished food on the end table next to the bed, and the bed itself was unmade.

“Probably got complaints about the smell...” she muttered to herself. All this sitting around was not doing her mental state any good; that much was clear.

Elaina retrieved a set of clothing that smelled the least bad, spritzed it with a bit of perfume she had picked up in the market last week, and pulled it all on quickly. The result didn’t go exactly as intended. Instead of masking the smell, it mixed with it, making her smell like a prostitute coming off a long late shift. The light, sweet jasmine mingled with her natural musk in a distinctly unflattering way.

“Well, shit,” she grumbled. There wasn’t much else that could be done with her time. She would have to be sure she did some laundry when she returned. She checked herself in a small mirror next to the door to adjust her messy ginger hair.

It had been a while since she’d looked at her reflection. She wasn’t particularly pleased with what she saw in it. Her complexion was pallid and her eyes had dark circles underneath them. Her smell might not have been something she could effectively cover up, but this was. She reached out to one side of her face with one hand and stretched thin filaments of magical glamer across her skin. It was an easy spell, one she had performed many times before to replace a more typical and time-consuming beauty regimen. She had grown up with nearly nothing, so she didn’t know the first thing about cosmetics anyway. All she knew was how she wanted the result to look, and so long as she could hold that firmly in her mind, that was what she would get.

When it was done, the face that stared back at her from the mirror looked precisely like her old self, with the usual embellishments on her lips and around her eyes. It was a marked improvement and gave her a little boost of confidence she hadn’t even realized she was in desperate need of. After quickly adjusting her clothes one final time, she stepped out into the hallway and went down to the taproom.

Elaina had been to a fair amount of inns and taverns since she had left Zelmesca Falls, and they had been quite different from what she had seen here at the Marble Gallery. The proprietor had chosen the name for the remains of a regional breed of gargoyle that adorned the taproom from wall to wall. Whenever someone encountered the creatures on the road from the north, the remains could be brought here in exchange for a discount. In addition, the room was filled with finely crafted wood tables and chairs in a distinctly elven style that never seemed to age. All of it was lit with glowing gemstones set into fixtures on the ceiling and sconces along the walls.

As she entered from the stairs, there were only a few patrons populating the tables. She didn’t recognize any of the people, though this didn’t surprise her much with how little time she had spent down here since getting her room. Ayla scampered behind the bar as Elaina came into view, rejoining her father, Paeral, who was busy cleaning the countertop while business was a little slower.

“Ah, at long last. I was beginning to think you’d expired up there,” Paeral said without looking up from the counter.

“Sorry, I haven’t felt much like myself lately,” she explained, “And I guess the weather really hasn’t been helping my situation.”

He looked up when she finally sat down at the bar, “I can’t imagine it has. Have you eaten breakfast yet? Are you hungry?”

Elaina waved a hand dismissively, “I’m fine, thank you. Ayla said you wanted to speak with me, am I short on payment or something?”

The wood elf ceased his buffing of the countertop and slung the rag over his shoulder with a shake of his head. It was clear looking at him where Ayla got the majority of her looks from; they had the same hair and skin tone, “No, no, nothing like that. You’re still paid up.”

The redhead leaned forward against the bar, “So, what’s up?”

“I thought that with all the downtime you have on your hands, you could stand to take another job until things clear up.”

“How is this job any different than the one I’m waiting to do?” Elaina asked.

Paeral spread his hands a little, “So long as you aren’t going west, the flooding you’d have to contend with would be manageable. And what I’ve got for you would take you north instead.”

Elaina stared ambivalently for a moment as she considered. Getting out might do her some good, considering how she’d let the state of the room get and how she looked in the mirror. Allowing herself too much time with nothing to do had only caused her to turn inward, and she wasn’t doing well with that at all. Paeral saw it as well, it seemed, and the Wood Elf was trying to help her out.

“What’s the job?” Elaina asked, trying in vain not to let too much of her curiosity bleed through when she spoke. Paeral either didn’t notice or was too polite to let on that he did.

“I need you to determine what happened to an overdue caravan. I and a few others in town here rely on the shipments that come in on them for certain things we can’t get locally. We discussed it last night and decided the wait has been too long.”

Elaina tilted her head to one side to glimpse Ayla, who was shyly peering at her from behind the bar. Once the little girl saw that the redhead had noticed her, she ducked behind it again, vanishing from view. She turned her attention back to the bartender, “The guards here don’t do that sort of thing?”

“They do,” Paeral admitted, “But not until a certain amount of time has passed, which is usually too late. And even then, not until the rain lets up, which will almost definitely be too late. You don’t mind a little rain do you?”

“She fought a river drake in the rain and won!” Ayla said from somewhere behind the bar. The little girl relished stories that adventurers shared when they stayed at the inn, and it seemed as though she had overheard Elaina speaking to Paeral for a few days when she’d first got her room. But the little girl seemed to have forgotten the part where Elaina had only barely managed to survive that particular encounter. The story hadn’t been born of boasting but rather one that came about during a conversation about the unusual movements of certain species with an affinity for the water in the area.

“Well, hopefully, it won’t get as dangerous as all that,” Paeral admitted, spreading his hands, “Really, all we need is to know what became of the caravan. If you stick to the road, the danger should be minimal. If some tragic fate befell the caravan and you can report that back to the town guard here, they’ll likely make an exception and head out immediately. Then we should be able to recover whatever is left.”

“Sounds reasonable. What’s your offer of payment?”

The Wood Elf shrugged a bit as he thought about it, “Well, originally, we’d agreed that you’d get ten percent of whatever could be recovered, but I think I have something you might be more interested in.”

He reached down the front of his tunic, fishing out a necklace with one vibrant orange marble set into a gold fixture at its center, with another smaller one set at the end of a chain on the right. The color of the marbles appeared to swirl and move in subtle ways that one wouldn’t notice unless they were staring directly at them. The necklace’s chain was also gold, and other pieces dangled from it that looked as though they had also once held orange marbles of their own. He set it down on the counter between them for her to examine.

Elaina wasn’t sure why he thought she would want a busted necklace, but when she picked it up between two fingers, she immediately felt a slight hum of magical power within the strange marbles. She had never understood how she knew that sort of thing; it just came to her naturally. The more powerful the magic, the more quickly it came to her.

“What does it do?” she asked curiously, her emerald eyes now bright with curiosity as they darted between it and him.

“Necklace of fireballs, what’s left of it anyway. Used to be my wife’s before she passed.”

Ayla’s head poked up over the countertop again, her large eyes sparkling as she struggled to get a better look at the necklace. Elaina turned it over a few times, closing her eyes to let her woefully underdeveloped unseen sense for the magic do most of the work. She tuned out any sound she could, which was easy considering how few people were occupying the establishment at the time. The hum of magic grew slightly as she focused, slowly becoming a feeling of warmth that spread up her hand from her fingers. Then she started to feel the pressure within it, the power of the contained explosion ready to be let loose. Slowly, she opened her eyes, nodding her approval.

“They normally have a bunch of these on them, right?” she asked as she set it back down on the countertop.

“That’s right. She’d used the others up long before Ayla was born. I’ve been holding onto it this whole time for an emergency but never had to use it. I figure you’d get more use out of it, and it’s worth much more than anything that would come off the shipment.”

Elaina had to admit getting her hands on something like this would be a real treat. The amount of damage it could do was incredible if what she sensed from it was any indication. If she ever found herself in a situation as she had before, with her facing down several enemies at once, this would turn the tide of the battle in an instant. But the fact it had belonged to his late wife, and Ayla’s mother, sent a pang of guilt through her chest.

“I don’t know,” she said doubtfully, “it seems like too much. And it was your wife’s.”

Paeral waved one hand dismissively, “Nonsense, she’d be thrilled to know it was going to see some actual use instead of just sitting around my neck for years on end. She was that kind of person.”

As if to emphasize his point, he placed a finger on the larger marble and pushed it across the counter toward her, “Go ahead, take it. Just don’t pull one of the beads from it until you’re ready to toss it; otherwise, it will go off in your hand.”

Elaina reached out, taking it slowly, “You don’t want to wait until I get back with a report for you or something?”

Paeral pursed his lips and shook his head with a slight twinkle in his eye, “No need. Should you decide to go back on the deal, it so happens that I know where you’re staying.”

Elaina couldn’t help but let out an amused laugh, the first she’d given in weeks, “Yeah, alright. You have a point. You got yourself a deal.”

The two of them clasped each other’s hands and shook on it, the little girl behind the counter looking on in awe as if she was witnessing one of the many stories she’d heard before coming to life before her eyes.

Elaina pushed out from the bar and jumped to her feet, “Well,” she beamed, “Looks like I’m back on the clock!”