Chapter 7: Pest control

Chapter 7

Pest Control

The guild captain limped into the Rusty Compass at midday, leaning on a cane he obviously pretended was decorative, and ordered the ale everyone had been telling him about.

He looked older than Roen expected from the letter. A tall man,in his mid-thirties, broad-shouldered, with a face made for laughter that wasn’t laughing now. He had visible muscle under his clothes. His left leg dragged a bit, a bad old injury that hadn’t healed right, Roen had seen too many of those and knew that they usually end adventures and start desk jobs. The guild pin was on his collar, and he carried himself like someone who used to be fast, rushing and fighting though the pain as if to prove he still was.

Roen set the ale on the bar. Garren drank it, and his eyebrows rose about half an inch.

“The rumours undersold it,” he said.

“Thank you. They usually do.”

“You’re the new owner, right, Roen?”

“That’s me.”

“Garren Holt. I run the guild branch.” He set the ale down and looked around the common room, taking in the trade board, the merchants at their tables, the general atmosphere, and, of course, the busy merchant who was making it all happen. He nodded once, slowly, as if something he’d been suspecting had just confirmed itself. He turned back to Roen and said:

“I sent you a letter.”

“You did. I haven’t seen anything unusual on the south road. I’m a simple innkeeper; my business is in town, not outside of it.”

Garren looked him over for a long moment, slow and careful, like someone who’d spent years judging monsters and mercenaries and figuring out which ones might try to kill him, which some had tried doing. “I write the simple innkeeper with a reason,” he said, “because usually innkeepers hear things. Every rumour in a town like this passes through a bar before it reaches the guild hall. Gregor, the previous owner, couldn’t tell you what day it was if you spotted him three guesses. You’ve been open three weeks, and half the town already eats here and more importantly drinks here, which means you’re paying attention to something he wasn’t.”

“It’s good for business to pay attention to your customers.”

“Good. Then pay attention to this.” His voice stayed steady but grew more serious, like he’d been carrying the bad news all morning. “Two farms south of town have been hit, the livestock torn up, not eaten, just killed and left. The tracks don’t match anything we know. I sent two of my people. They came back pale as milk and refused to return.”

Like the ground was breathing, Roen thought. That’s what Milo said.

“Have you heard anything? What do you think it is?” he asked, in the neutral voice of a man making conversation.

Roen didn’t hesitate in his answer and said, “Honestly? I have no idea. No one has said anything, but if I were to guess, maybe something got pushed out of the Dusklands. Sometimes, that happens when the border moves. Or it could be something worse. Monster, perhaps, I have seen some nasty critters on the road.”

Garren tapped the bar. “I’ve posted a bounty. Five silver coins for confirmed information, one gold for a confirmed kill. Minimum Silver-rank adventurers, but I recommended Gold. The problem is, I don’t have any Silver or Gold ranks. Just one nervous Bronze and two part-timers who’d have trouble in a bar fight, and my own leg hasn’t been good for field work in five years, so ”

“Sounds like a problem.”

“It’s a problem that’s getting closer to town. The second farm was a mile north of the first.” Garren finished the ale, paid, and stood. At the door he paused. “It’s funny. Three years I’ve run this branch, and the biggest problem we’d ever had was a wolf in a chicken coop. Then you open up here, and suddenly the south road gets interesting.”

“It’s a coincidence, I – we, take responsibility for the trade but nothing else.”

“Sure.” His smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “ Please, if you hear anything, you know where to find me. People’s lives and livelihoods are in danger.”

He left, and the cane tapped a steady rhythm across the cobblestones until the square swallowed the sound.

Sera, who had been working at her table through the entire conversation without appearing to listen, spoke without looking up.

“He doesn’t believe you.”

“Nope.”

“Joining a long list.”

“Yup.”

Am I truly this unbelievable?

• • •

Milo arrived at three, later than usual, coming in through the kitchen door rather than the front because the kitchen was where the food was, and his navigation instincts were currently calorie-oriented.

He was a bit quiet. He wasn’t upset, as Roen knew what Milo’s upset looked like by now, and this wasn’t it. This was tighter, as if he were thinking through a problem and didn’t like what he was finding.

“How’s the farm?” Roen asked, sliding the usual plate onto the counter. The stew of the day, bread, and an apple. The apple had become a ritual, and Milo always ate it first.

The stew went untouched, which was unusual enough to count as a warning.

“Something got into the goat pen again.”

“When?”

“Two nights ago. Didn’t take anything, didn’t kill anything. The goats went crazy. Brick was screaming like a mad drunk and almost broke the fence trying to get out.”

Brick is the goat he actually likes, Roen thought. If Brick was panicked, it wasn’t a fox. He would headbutt the life out of a fox.

“Did you see what It was?”

“No. By the time I got outside, it was gone. But the pen smelled wrong, like heated metal in a blacksmith shop and wet earth after rain, and the ground where it had been standing was dead, the grass was…killed in a circle.”

Roen put down the glass he was polishing and looked at the boy across the counter. Milo was tearing his bread crust into tiny pieces but not eating any of it.

A Shade Wisp would leave dead grass in a circle. Roen had seen the pattern a thousand times in his first life. The trouble was that Wisps didn’t come this far north for another few years. The Dusklands border was supposed to stay like this for a while, and to be honest, it would take at least a few decades to reach here. A “thing” that should have been someone else’s problem in a different decade had instead chosen Milo’s goat pen.

“Did you tell anyone?” Roen asked.

“Who would I tell? The guild?” Milo’s voice took an edge. “I went there last month about the sounds. The woman at the desk said I was probably hearing badgers.”

Kel. The one who was scared, so the fear has made it easier to brush off a farm kid than deal with what was really out there.

“Stay at the inn tonight.”

Milo looked up. “What? Why?”

“Spare room upstairs, third door on the left. Stay tonight, go back to the farm in the morning.”

“I don’t need your pi…”

“Milo.”

The one word, quiet but final, in the voice of a man who wasn’t making a suggestion. Milo chewed his bread and swallowed.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“…One night,” Milo muttered.

“One night.”

• • •

He waited until the inn was asleep.

Milo was in the spare room with the door closed, and within a few minutes of lying down, his breathing had gone deep and even, the breathing of a boy who’d been running on fumes for weeks and had finally found a surface that wasn’t a thin mattress in a cold farmhouse. Sera’s lamp had been off for over an hour. The common room was dark and still, the banked hearth throwing a faint orange across the floorboards, and the threshold ward hummed its quiet nothing as Roen pulled on his coat and slipped out through the kitchen door, locking it behind him.

The south road was pale under a half moon and entirely empty. The farms on either side were dark, and their windows had their shutters closed. The air was cold enough that his breath came in faint streaks in front of him. It smelled of earth and frost, with something else beneath it, a thin coppery metallic undertone that didn’t belong in the air of a healthy world. Nobody went south to the edge of the farms after dark anymore. By sundown, Garren’s warning had reached every kitchen, tavern and room in Millhaven, and every door in town had been barred earlier than usual.

Roen walked past the last farmhouse and past Milo’s land, the small scrappy plot with its leaning fence and its goat pen, and a single lantern still burning in the farmhouse window where Milo had left it lit out of habit, or hope, or some combination of both.

He kept going.

The road grew narrower, the farms fewer, and the land grew rougher, with rocks and scrub sloping toward the distant trees that marked the edge of the Dusklands. As he walked, the air felt heavier, not the way it felt when very humid, just weighted. It pressed against his skull, making breathing feel like a privilege rather than a right.

He knew the feeling, it was the corruption of aether seeping north, towards the town, through the bedrock. He had walked through this kind of contamination before, in his first life, in the years after the Calamity, when whole provinces had felt this way. Faint, here. Like standing downstream from a cracked pipe rather than the river itself. But unmistakably present, and unmistakably this far north.

He stopped in the middle of a fallow field, closed his eyes, and extended his senses outward along a slow, careful thread, like a lead for fishing being pulled by a seamstress through the air, then through the earth itself.

For a moment, everything was as it should be: the deep, slow turning of the earth, the roots of the grass, slowly pulling water and minerals into its blades, the cold, mineral weight of stone under the soil. And then alongside all of it, a second rhythm… It felt wrong. Unnatural, and sharp where it should have been curved, as if it was pulling the life out of everything around it.

Then he felt something else, thirty paces south, low to the ground, drifting through the grass without urgency because nothing out here was supposed to be able to threaten it.

Roen opened his eyes.

The Shade Wisp came into focus at the edge of his vision, gradually taking shape like smoke, then fading away, about the size of a large puffy dog and translucent enough that the dark grass behind it showed through its body. It had no face. There was only a core of pulsing dark wrapped in an outline that suggested a body without committing to one, and the grass beneath it withered as it passed, blades going pale and papery at the edges. The air carried that coppery taste of damaged Aether, sharp enough to register from ten paces away.

It sensed him and turned, the dark core flickering brighter as it recognised something richer than goats and groundwater, and the slow drift became a purposeful one.

Roen stayed where he was.

He couldn’t overpower it, even if he wanted to. He didn’t have enough reserves for that, and the walk home would leave him drained if he tried. But he had precision, he’d always had that from the very beginning, even when he had nothing else. Against a Wisp, precision made for a clean fight if you knew where to aim.