I often stared into the distance, unaware of my surroundings, as I obsessed over avenging Charitybelle. On one such occasion, during dinner, Fabulosa caught me gathering wool during a dinner in the town hall. She addressed an issue we’d avoided for weeks.

  “Are you thinking about Winterbyte? You hadn’t mentioned her since….”

  I finished her thought. “Since we’d last seen her?”

  Fabulosa nodded.

  What could I say? Thoughts of vengeance stewed—a compulsion to set the world back in balance. The gnawing irritation that Winterbyte still walked the game world preoccupied my thoughts.

  I did not lie to Fabulosa. “I’m killing her when I get the chance. The game plan is to balance the books with whatever means are available. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m ready for anything.” Fabulosa said so without her usual braggadocio or daredevil eagerness. She looked committed, and I loved her for it. Our stare became a pact to avenge our friend at all costs. “Any thoughts on how to go about it?”

  I grunted. Since returning to Hawkhurst, a new spell appeared in my available spells list.

  Until I saw it required a sustained channel, I considered ways of using it to navigate dark areas or fight while blind. I had high hopes for any spell that required 20 ranks of magic, but the requirement to maintain concentration all but eradicated its utility in combat. It had player-versus-player implications without range limits, but the interspecies prohibition eliminated its potential against Winterbyte.

  I gave Fabulosa the spell’s details. “I think it’s an endgame spell for the contest. It’s a tier 1 revelation spell, so it’ll be available to everyone skilled in light magic.”

  Fabulosa sighed. “I reckon Crimson doesn’t want the contest to run forever, and I’m inclined to agree with them.”

  I put my spoon down and considered how to locate Winterbyte. Maybe Ruk and his thugs in Tully’s could track her down, but I couldn’t trust them, not even for coin. We couldn’t parade through kobold territory looking for her. No one spoke kobold—or gnoll, for that matter. We didn’t know enough about gnolls to expect them to give us our adversary’s whereabouts—even if they knew of her comings and goings.

  Fabulosa interrupted my thoughts. “I considered getting a bloodhound. Tardee’s pet followed me for miles.”

  “There’re no dogs around except Mugsy, and the only thing he has a scent for is table scraps. Maybe we’ll pick up one on our next shopping trip?”

  Fabulosa feigned interest in her food. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a plan for later, but the trail will be cold. And owning a hound doesn’t give us a free pass through kobold territory.”

  “Or gnoll country. Who knows how gnolls would react to humans walking around with a trained canine.”

  “What about Beaker here?”

  The griffon looked at Fabulosa at the mention of his name.

  “Oh, him? We might use him for recon, like Chloe, but I don’t know when he’ll fly. I’m keeping him summoned so he’ll grow fast.”

  Fabulosa rested her hand against Beaker’s beak to calm him. “He’s doing that, for sure. Mrs. Berling’s fattening him up good. Isn’t she, Chickers?”

  My Familiar cocked his head again in response to his nickname.

  “I doubt he’ll ever grow big enough to carry me. His mom looked horse-sized, but I didn’t know how much of her bulk included feathers.”

  “Even if we went through kobold country, are the gnolls on the other side of the Highwall Mountains?”

  I shrugged. “We don’t even know if the Highwalls are traversable. For all we know, the kobolds could have dug tunnels for the gnolls through the mountains.”

  “At least gnoll tunnels will have headroom.”

  A long silence followed. Neither of us offered ideas. We saw no way of finding Winterbyte if she didn’t want to be found.

  Fabulosa tried to resuscitate the conversation. “Blane and Bernard are coming along. We could recruit them if we ever get a lead. And you know Yula is game for payback.”

  I grunted. My idea of revenge didn’t involve the community. I preferred to keep it between players.

  Fabulosa tried a different tack. “Maybe we don’t have to find Winterbyte. If she wants the relic, she’ll come to us. She seemed chatty enough—but maybe she wanted to distract us from her traps.”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “If she comes to us, we won’t have to worry about a bunch of traps lying around. Besides, Compression Spheres won’t be as effective on flat terrain.” Waiting around to be attacked wasn’t an appealing strategy, and proactive measures always felt better.

  The dinnertime discussion with Fabulosa drove me to ponder other issues. The topmost problem concerned the possibility of another contestant taking the relic. Players were greedy, creative, and tenacious. If Winterbyte enlisted others in her quest, it might jeopardize Hawkhurst. While training sufficed against weaker forces, our survival against players couldn’t depend on the town’s combat skills.

  Because we had two roundhouses, I alternated my evening fireside chats to avoid policy questions. Everyone wanted access to the governor, but I was not too fond of inquiries putting me on the spot. There were no “after hours” for a governor. Citizens had 24-hour access, leaving me alone only during my training hours in the battle college.

  Greenie worked at night, and Fabulosa spent evenings with Dino, leaving me as the sole authority. When people gathered around me, I used the opportunity to pump them for information about magic items.

  At one such fireside chat, I sat down with Rory, the town’s chief blacksmith. “Is there a way to destroy a high-level item?”

  Rory raised his chin and eyed me as if I suggested desecrating his forge. “Aye. What for would ye want to do something like that?”

  “The relic we found had a curse. I want to stop it from falling into anyone’s hands.”

  The room looked at Rory for an answer. I wasn’t, for once, the target of everyone’s gaze.

  In the pause, Fin Hornbuster spoke up. “Cursed! Well, now. The trick with working with cursed items is that the wrong hands include your own, init?”

  I squinted to show I wasn’t following his point.

  Rory balled his fist. “I could drap me hammer on ‘naer anything, but it’d take a pure eejit to try it on a cursed item. You’d need someone like Angus here.”

  Angus waved his hand. “Ah, gowan, ye yappy dog.”

  Sobering up, Rory returned to the issue. “Unforging a magic item is a pure hard go, but a cursed one? Stubborn as a crabbit mountain goat. In order to destroy, ye needs to move it. Then its in yer possession, eh?”

  I leaned toward Rory. “So just moving it causes a person to be cursed?”

  “Aye. I says best to steer clear, Guv.”

  Angus sat up. “That’s no advice, Rory! The Guv needs to know how to destroy it.”

  Rory pounded his fist. “And I says it’s easier to hew me own anvil than break a cursed item. Ye cannae touch ‘em, ye dunderhead, lest ye be accursed yerself!”

  I followed his logic. Rory needed to possess the relic to unforge it. The item controlled its possessor and might have prevented him from doing so.

  Angus’s brother, Fin Hornbuster, spoke up. “Now, just hold on! I know a way about it.” His announcement drew everyone’s attention and quieted this brother and the senior blacksmith. “And I reckon the Guv’s the one who can do it. Ye don’t need to touch something to blast it with a rune.”

  His boss, Rory, shot him an incredulous squint. “Sparks and embers! And what do ye know about runes?”

  “I recall Uncle Orson from Grenspur. He broke a diamond into wee chips with runes with naught more than the command of his voice. He told it were a simple matter of choosing a word.”

  I turned to him. “Simple?”

  Angus nodded. “He spoke magic codewords and kaboom.”

  Winterbyte’s rune triggered a destruction function in her tunnel trap. Not only had I copied it, but I also re-scripted it to activate on my command instead of proximity. Making a rune to trigger by voice worked around me having to touch the relic.

  Cursed items presented gamers with a decision to hobble themselves in exchange for bonuses. If games allowed players to circumvent an item’s penalties, it defeated the spirit of cursed items. RPG rules couldn’t afford to be flexible. Some games considered touching them as ownership—otherwise, players would just wear gloves. They could toss them onto an unsuspecting enemy’s lap like a hot potato or tote them around in containers for emergencies.

  Controlling an item’s whereabouts equated to possessing it. I dismissed scenarios of dragging the relic around by a rope. Any amount of influence on the relic should render me susceptible to the demon’s influence. If I couldn’t move the relic, I had to destroy it.

  Destroying an object with magic required its true name, a lesson I learned after learning to Read Magic. But I focused on the item’s description so much that I couldn’t remember what the game called the relic. It involved something like the Cursed Band of Arcane Something. Or was it The Cursed Crown of Something? It contained a pearl called the Artilith—could my rune substitute its name for the relic? Would destroying the Artilith release the demon?

  Angus interrupted my concentration. “Ye see, Rory. Guv’s already aiming to strike a blow! Me answer served what he needed, init? Ye see now, why ye should listen to me more?”

  “Listen to ye more? With all yer bletherin’, yer bound to be right once in a mountain’s age. Even a blind smith draps a square hammer once in a while.”

  I tuned out the squabbling, jokes, and laughter, pulled out my notes, and considered runic solutions. While I’d rearranged the syntax of Winterbyte’s tunnel trap to make it my own, creating one from scratch involved engineering and creativity, which wasn’t my specialty.

  For the first time since we returned from the dungeon, it felt like I had a purpose. If avenging my girlfriend lay beyond my reach, destroying what Winterbyte sought might suffice. As the only person in town capable of reading and writing runes, it became my project.

  Runes puzzled me. Couldn’t they become overpowered? Couldn’t players copy and paste them in their spare time and activate them all at once during battle? I didn’t know, and it seemed an easy exploit, so I bent over the task of studying them.

  I first learned demonic protection circles weren’t malleable—I couldn’t swap demons for another species. Without demons, I couldn’t test tweaking the runes, nor could I valid alterations or instill them with magic.

  I had the most luck with Compression Spheres runes—which worked by location. Winterbyte’s size prevented a single air blast from bouncing her, so I hoped multiple hits might affect her. But it dismayed me to learn my spell’s cooldown started after a rune’s activation, dashing ideas of copying and pasting Compression Spheres into a combined super-blast.

  The last rune we came across involved a trap that had killed one of the gnolls. It took time to imbue runes with mana, and its trigger worked by touching an object, so I couldn’t figure out how to set it off by voice. Worse still, the most damage I could inflict amounted to Imbue Weapon, a measly 30-something total.

  Even if I could copy and paste it, tossing it at Winterbyte wouldn’t work because touching it activated the damage. Like the trapped plate, it needed to work by location.

  A stray leaf or animal could set it off. Runes worked best indoors or in controlled environments. How could I use this against Winterbyte? She undoubtedly had Detect Magic. If I drew her toward any trapped building, she’d become suspicious and likely sniff out subterfuge.

  After resolving that I didn’t need runes to kill Winterbyte, I put away my notes. Even without Fabulosa, I felt confident I could defeat her with my melee skills.

  I contemplated my options until Beaker started making a racket. Besides his court jester duties, one of Beaker’s roles became that of a town crier. His noise served a purpose. The screeches broke up the conversation, reminding everyone of the importance of a good night’s sleep and that work awaited tomorrow.

  At dusk, Beaker became his loudest. His parrot-like blares near-deafened those nearby. His instincts told him to call other griffons to come home to roost for the night. “It’s time to return to the nest!” He did so naturally, and no training, treats, or rebukes could silence him.

  He also crowed at daybreak, but not nearly with the same gusto as his time-for-bed cries. His alarms became common reference points for everyone’s routine and schedule. When he started making noise, everyone went to breakfast.

  The following morning, I woke hours earlier than usual, before daybreak.

  Beaker shifted his weight, fluffed his feathers, and ignored my departure. He cooed, chirped, and hooted as he slept, but the soft noises didn’t bother anyone in the roundhouse.

  Though dark, the eastern night sky brightened to the yet-to-be-risen sun, Puros. The two crescents of Laros and Owd softly illuminated the mountain peaks. The moons overlapped like a Venn Diagram, teasing me with ideas that the schools of magic had formal subsets. Yet lunar positions and phases held no sway over spell casting.

  After reflection, I returned to the roundhouse and spread my parchments across the breakfast tables. Other awake citizens included Rocky and Mrs. Berling, who busied themselves with meal preparation, so the dining tables offered plenty of space.

  Reviewing notes about making runes, I focused on my new mission—destroying Winterbyte’s relic.