Chapter 13: The Tavern at the End of the Blight

The first sign that Nate Mercer had made a catastrophic mistake was the smell.

It rolled out of the new building in warm, glorious waves—roasted meat, fresh bread, mulled spice, woodsmoke, caramelized onions, and something fruity and sharp that made the tongue ache before it even touched a cup. The scent drifted down the newly paved road from the fortress gate, over the cleared black soil of the Blighted March, and into the wilderness like a declaration of war against common sense.

Things came when they smelled food.

Sometimes those things were merchants.

Sometimes they were wolves the size of ponies.

Sometimes, if the day was feeling particularly disrespectful, they were both at once.

Nate stood in the doorway of the tavern with his hands braced on either side of the frame and tried to look like a man who had intentionally founded a border municipality in a cursed ex-demon kingdom and was not, in fact, one administrative error away from becoming mayor of a haunted truck stop.

The building itself was unfairly beautiful.

That was the problem with his skill. He could think, basic roadside inn, and the Divine Settlement interface would cheerfully interpret that as a masterpiece of frontier hospitality handcrafted by invisible unionized angels. Dark red timber framed broad windows of enchanted glass. Lanterns of smoky amber crystal hung beneath deep eaves, glowing softly despite the gray afternoon. A carved sign creaked overhead on iron chains: a road ending at a mug foaming over with silver light. Beneath it, in crisp letters burned into polished wood, were the words:

THE LAST LANTERN

“I still think that sounds ominous,” Nate muttered.

Lyris, standing beside him with a basket of polished tankards hugged to her chest, tilted her head. Her pale gold hair was tied back today with an apron ribbon, though two rebellious strands had escaped and curled against her cheek. She looked absurdly wholesome for someone helping open a tavern at the edge of a magical wasteland.

“It sounds romantic,” she said. “Very frontier. Very mysterious. Travelers will see it and think, ‘Ah. Civilization.’”

“Or, ‘Ah. The final drink before the flesh-eating fog gets me.’”

“That too,” Lyris admitted.

Behind them, a chair scraped across the floor hard enough to make the planks complain. Vexa had been told, very specifically, not to test the furniture with military force. Naturally, she had interpreted that as an invitation to arm-wrestle it.

“Sturdy,” the former demon general announced from the common room.

Nate glanced back. Vexa lounged astride a bench like a war monument that had decided to get drunk. Her crimson skin caught the lanternlight in warm copper tones, and one black horn ring glinted near her temple. She wore her dark hair tied high and practical, her sleeves rolled to the elbow, revealing forearms that looked engineered by a deity with a personal grudge against sleeves. The bench beneath her had survived, though it seemed spiritually shaken.

“That was not the test,” Nate said.

“It passed anyway.”

From somewhere in the kitchen came a dry voice. “An inspiring standard of evaluation. Shall I begin appraising our crop yield by hurling it at walls?”

Nate leaned to the side and peered through the pass window. Nysera, the dark elf botanist, stood over a row of simmering pans with an expression of cool disdain usually reserved for incompetent rivals and unstable fungi. Her silver-white hair was braided back tightly, her sleeves immaculate despite the battlefield of ingredients around her. Even in a kitchen, she managed to look like she was conducting forbidden research.

“If the wall grows from it,” Vexa said, “that would be useful.”

“I hate that you almost made sense,” Nate muttered.

He stepped inside and let the door swing shut. Warmth wrapped around him immediately. The common room glowed gold and copper under the lanterns, polished tables throwing back soft reflections. A stone hearth crackled on the far wall. The windows, lightly enchanted against the March’s chill, were clear enough to reveal the dark line of the road, the fortress towers in the distance, and the black, thorny horizon of the Blight beyond. It should have felt eerie.

Instead it felt alive.

That part got him every time.

A month ago, this whole stretch had been haunted ruin and miserable wind. Now there were curtains, clean mugs, a dartboard, a chalk menu, and a set of stairs leading to guest rooms that actually had mattresses. Somewhere along the way, his absurdly broken settlement skill had transformed survival into urban planning.

Which was still insane.

A translucent blue pane flickered into existence at the edge of his vision.

Municipal Asset Complete: Neutral-Ground Tavern

Designation: Trade, Hospitality, Information Exchange

Settlement Effect: +Merchant Attraction, +Traveler Safety Perception, +Rumor Flow, +Tax Revenue

Special Condition: Violence threshold reduced within recognized neutral premises

Warning: Rumor Flow may be unpredictable

“I particularly enjoy how the magic government system keeps phrasing my life as a warning label,” Nate said.

Lyris set the tankards on the bar one by one. “You said you wanted information. Information comes attached to people, and people talk better when you feed them.”

“Wise,” Nysera called from the kitchen. “And if they don’t talk, they can still pay.”

Nate moved behind the bar and looked over the room for what had to be the fifteenth time that morning. The casks were tapped. The kitchen was stocked. The signboard out front had been cleaned, rewritten, and cleaned again after one of the lesser imps had helpfully added “NO STABBINGS INSIDE” in dripping red paint.

He had left the sentiment off, mostly because it suggested there was room for negotiation elsewhere.

Outside, wheels rattled on stone.

All four of them froze for a fraction of a second.

Then Vexa’s smile sharpened. “Customers.”

Nate’s stomach performed a modest disaster.

The first arrivals were not, strictly speaking, the sort of clientele one hoped would define an establishment’s opening day. One was a human merchant in a mud-spattered coat, narrow-faced and sharp-eyed, with a wagon loaded under canvas and two guards who looked like they’d rehearsed distrust in a mirror. The second wagon belonged to a pair of dwarven traders arguing so loudly about axle grease that they failed to notice they had entered the former heart of the Demon Lord’s territory.

And behind them, because fate had a sense of humor, came three adventurers in mismatched leather and chain, swaggering toward the tavern sign with the unmistakable gait of men who believed every room they entered was waiting for their opinions.

“Good,” Nate said faintly. “A representative sample of everyone most likely to start an incident.”

“Smile,” Lyris whispered.

“I am smiling.”

“You look like you’ve seen a tax collector drown.”

“That is my smile now.”

The door opened. Cold air spilled in along with suspicion.

The merchant stepped first over the threshold, gaze skimming the room, the bar, Vexa’s horns, the hearth, the polished floor, then snapping back to Vexa’s horns. His guards’ hands hovered near their swords. Behind him, one of the adventurers let out a low whistle.

“Well,” the adventurer drawled. “Either we’re lost, or hell got renovations.”

Vexa stood. The room seemed to get smaller around her.

Nate spoke before anyone could decide on a regrettable direction. “Welcome to the Last Lantern. Neutral ground. Food, drink, rooms, and no one gets to start a holy war before supper.”

The merchant blinked. “You’re the landlord?”

“That remains, against all evidence, true.”

One of the dwarves shoved past him, beard braided with copper rings, face split in a grin. “If there’s hot food and a chair that won’t fold under Brott’s backside, I’ll call ye emperor.”

“That can be arranged,” Nate said.

His companion, broader and somehow grimmer, sniffed once toward the kitchen. “Smells expensive.”

Nysera appeared in the pass window like a judgmental apparition. “Then perhaps you should order quickly before your courage fails.”

The dwarf barked a laugh and slapped the counter. “I like this place already.”

Tension loosened by a notch. Not much. Enough.

Lyris stepped into the moment with a smile so bright and practiced that Nate briefly wondered if sainthood was just high-level customer service. “Please, sit wherever you like. The hearth side is warmest. We have stew, roast fowl, fresh bread, pickled root vegetables, pan-seared cave trout, and cider.”

“Cider?” one of the adventurers repeated. “Out here?”

Lyris’s smile gained a secretive curve. “A specialty.”

If Nate had possessed any survival instincts at all, he would have recognized that tone and intervened.

Instead he made the terrible choice to trust a saint candidate and a mad botanist collaborating on alcohol.

The room filled quickly after that. Word, it turned out, moved faster than carts. A pair of fur trappers arrived before the merchant had finished his first bowl of stew. Then two peddlers. Then a courier with frost on his cloak. A bent old woman driving six unnervingly disciplined goats tied them outside and came in demanding tea, which Lyris provided with such grace that even the goats looked soothed through the window.

The common room grew loud in layers—cutlery clinking, chairs scraping, talk rising and colliding overhead like flocks of birds. The initial wariness did not vanish, but it dissolved into something more profitable. People kept glancing around as if expecting the illusion to fail. It never did. The hearth stayed warm. The ale stayed cold. The bread arrived steaming. The demon behind the room was not, in fact, eating anyone.

Then Lyris served the cider.

She poured it from a narrow crystal pitcher into stoneware mugs, and the liquid within shone a pale amber-gold, throwing off tiny spirals of silver light like trapped fireflies. It smelled of apple blossom, honey, and fresh rain on warm earth. When she set the first mug before the skeptical merchant, even he hesitated before touching it, like he feared enchantment.

“It is enchanted,” Nysera said from the pass window, not looking up from slicing herbs.

The merchant’s hand stopped.

“Mildly,” Lyris added quickly. “It’s only mana-infused.”

“That is not a reassuring phrase,” Nate hissed.

“It’s delicious,” Lyris hissed back.

The merchant took a cautious sip.

His whole body went still.

The room, by some miracle of predatory social instinct, noticed.

He lowered the mug very carefully and stared at it as if it had confessed a family secret. “What,” he said hoarsely, “is in this?”

Lyris clasped her hands. “Wild orchard apples from the south slope, springwater run through a purification sigil, a touch of star anise, a little sun-honey, and a gentle mana aeration to brighten the finish.”

“She means she prayed at it while I fixed the fermentation,” Nysera said.

The merchant took another drink, longer this time. His suspicious face softened by entire years. “I’ll take a jug.”

One of the adventurers snorted. “Move over.” He grabbed the next mug from Lyris’s tray and drank with theatrical bravado.

His eyes widened. Then widened further. “By the Shield—”

His companions snatched their own cups before he finished.

In less than three minutes, the room was demanding more.

Nate stared at the bar where Lyris was suddenly working at a speed that suggested she had been spiritually preparing for this exact moment her whole life. “You made fantasy hard cider Red Bull.”

“It’s not hard cider,” Lyris said, affronted. “It’s a refreshing mana tonic for social enjoyment.”

“They’re vibrating.”

Indeed, the courier in the corner had straightened so completely that he now looked capable of delivering mail through a mountain. One of the trappers was recounting a story with such energized conviction that his own friend had begun doubting several years of shared memory. The dwarves were already shouting for a second pitcher.

“A side effect of elevated ambient vitality,” Nysera said. “Temporary. Probably.”

Nate slowly turned toward her. “Probably?”

Nysera sprinkled herbs over a platter. “If one is weak of constitution, there may be minor enthusiasm.”

“Minor enthusiasm is not a medical category.”

“It should be.”

The tavern became a storm after sunset.

Lanterns burned brighter against the deepening dark outside, and travelers kept coming. Some arrived because they had heard there was an inn. Others arrived because they had heard there was an inn in the Blighted March and wanted to witness the stupidity personally. A few came because they had heard there was a demon woman arm-wrestling people for free drinks, which was more than enough to fill a frontier road with idiots.

That part had started accidentally.

Or rather, it had started the way most disasters around Vexa did: with one reckless comment and a grin.

“Strong place for a neutral den,” one of the adventurers had said loudly, on his third mug of mana cider and first bad decision. He was broad-shouldered, flushed, and carrying the air of a man who had once beaten a local blacksmith’s son at a fair and built his personality around it. He planted an elbow on a table and looked at Vexa with the oily confidence of someone too ignorant to understand ratios. “Bet the demon can’t pin me.”

The room went quiet in that immediate, carnivorous way tavern rooms did.

Nate, carrying a tray of bowls, closed his eyes. “No.”

Vexa’s smile was dazzling. “Yes.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Neutral ground,” Vexa reminded him.

“That does not mean a gladiator pit.”

The dwarf named Brott slapped the table in delight. “It means fair competition!”