The Broken Sky [Campaign Preview]

The deer had been bleeding for half a mile.

Lady Nandar could tell by the way the droplets fell - heavy, arterial, darkening the loam between the roots - that the arrow had found something vital. Not the heart. If it had been the heart, the animal would have folded into the bracken within a hundred yards, and this chase would already be a memory. Something else, then. A lung, perhaps. The deer was drowning from the inside, and it didn't know it yet.

She moved through the Ardeep Forest the way she moved through libraries: quietly, purposefully, with the particular patience of a woman who understood that the thing she was looking for would not come to her.

"It's slowing." Thelios appeared at her left shoulder without sound, which was one of the things she paid him for. The elf's eyes - pale as birch bark, restless as water - tracked something ahead that she couldn't yet see. His hand rested on the pommel of the short blade at his hip, not from any expectation of danger, but because that was simply where his hand lived. "Perhaps forty yards. It's standing."

"Standing is bad," said Harn Breakbear, crashing through a low branch behind them both.

Thelios closed his eyes briefly, hiding his frustration at his lady’s guest.

Harn was not, by any measure, a quiet man. He was enormous - thick through the chest in the way of men who had spent decades hauling themselves up cliff faces and across rope bridges over screaming gorges - and he moved through wilderness with the cheerful indifference of someone who had survived too many genuinely dangerous places to worry about a few twigs. His beard was the colour of an old fire. His laugh, when it came, could startle birds from their roosts.

Lady Nandar had liked him immediately.

"Standing means cornered," Harn Breakbear continued, keeping his voice low now, at least. A poor attempt at stealth. "Cornered means it turns. You want me in the front?"

"I want you behind me," Nandar said. "Both of you. I can give him what he needs - quickly and with mercy."

She nocked the second arrow herself.

The deer was a young hart - not the great stag she'd hoped for, but respectable enough, his velvet antlers still soft and asymmetrical with the season. He stood in a slant of afternoon light that fell through a gap in the canopy like something deliberate, almost surreal like a painting. His sides heaved.

His dark eyes found her, and in them she saw neither rage nor pleading - only the enormous, uncomplicated act of dying.

She drew. She breathed out.

The arrow took him through the throat, and he went down without a sound.

They dressed the kill by a stream while the light faded to amber and the insects started their evening chorus in the reeds.

Thelios worked with efficient economy, his blade tracing lines that Nandar had seen him trace a dozen times.

Harn had produced, from some deep, well-sewn pocket of his travelling coat, a flask of something that smelled like scorched wood and cost more than a decent horse.

"A colleague in Triboar sent me a letter this week," Nandar said. She was cleaning her hands in the stream, watching the thin red ribbons of blood disperse and vanish in the current. "Third one this season. They want access to my archive again."

Harn frowned. "Oh? History or astronomy?"

"History." She accepted the flask when Harn offered it and took a considered sip. It burned pleasantly, with layers - smoke, then something almost sweet, then an aftertaste like cold iron. "He’s asking about my documents describing the Old Wars. He believes what I have will reference something - something obscure, yet important."

“Is your colleague always so vague?” Harn asked.

“No. Which worries me. Vagueness suggests they haven’t uncovered new historical details or some old trinkets.” Her eyes grew cold as she took another mouthful. “It must be something powerful. Dangerous. And he thinks my archive contains a key detail in understanding it.”

Harn lowered himself onto a mossy stone with the careful movements of a man whose knees had seen far too much action. "And is he right?"

"Almost certainly." Nandar handed the flask back. "But that's not what concerns me." She paused, watching a water-strider navigate the surface tension near the opposite bank. "He’s found weapons before. Almost died a dozen times after digging up something cursed, trapped or undead. Still, he’s never written to me like this - never with such vague, yet urgent enquiries."

Thelios glanced up from his work. He said nothing, but he was listening. He was always listening.

"I don’t like the timing," Nandar continued. "Two unusual things in my life in as many months. I've been charting the astral skies every clear night for eleven years. There's a pattern - or rather, there's a disruption of a pattern.” She turned to face him, her eyes heavy. “A star is missing, Harn. Gone. Plucked from the inky velvet blackness like it never existed."

Harn was quiet for a moment. This was, she had come to understand, how he processed things that surprised him - by going briefly still, like a bear pausing mid-stride to taste the air.

“And you think they’re related,” he said. “Your friend’s mysterious archeological find and your missing star.”

Nandar shrugged. “I hate coincidences. They’re sloppy.”

“And here I am, enjoying your hospitality. That’s not a coincidence either. You think I might know something.”

With a gentle tilt of her head, Nandar conceded his point. “And I’m right, aren’t I?”

Silence, broken only by the gentle trickle of the stream.

"When I was in the Spine of the World," he said at last, "five years ago - the expedition to recover the Icelost Athenaeum - the Uthgardt guides we hired abandoned us on the fourteenth day. No argument. No warning. They simply broke camp before dawn and were gone." He turned the flask in his hands. "I always assumed it was superstition. Local omens, that sort of thing. The closer we got, the more they squirmed and muttered - until, one night, they left us behind." He paused. "Saved me from having to pay them in full. Besides, it didn’t matter - even without our guides, we succeeded. We found the library. The books were…” He shook his head as if trying to dislodge a stubborn memory. “Doesn’t matter. Inside the library, there were murals. Very old. Before the Old Wars, possibly.”

Thelios continued to say nothing. Lady Nandar said just as much.

“The murals depicted the hierarchy of the six mighty races of giants. Did you know it’s been unchanged for millennia? Storm Giants ruling over all of giant kind, then as they do now. Cloud Giants serving as their lieutenants. And so on, all the way down to the Hill Giants. But, supposedly, it hadn’t always been like this."

"Supposedly," Nandar echoed. A question dressed as repetition.

"There was another mural. Older. Showing a different hierarchy of giants - I think. It was hard to make out." Harn set the flask down. "Defaced, not by time. By intent. Something had taken a very large implement to this old mural and had removed it. Chiselled it out." He looked at her steadily. "I brought rubbings of what was left. I've shown them to six scholars across three cities. From those six scholars, I got eight different theories. The only thing they could agree on was the old mural depicted a constellation incorrectly."

The stream moved quietly between its banks. Somewhere above the canopy, a nightjar had begun its churring call - early for the hour, or late for the season. Nandar wasn't certain which.

“A star was missing,” Nandar said. Not a guess. A statement.

Harn shook his head. “No, not missing. Somewhere it shouldn’t be.”

"Show me the rubbings when we return," she said.

"I was hoping you'd say that."

Thelios stood, wiping his blade clean on a fold of cloth. He looked at neither of them when he spoke. "I have a cousin," he said, in the careful tone of someone volunteering information they weren't asked for, "in Everlund. She runs a cartography house. She sent word two months ago that her clients - merchants, mostly, running the northern routes - were reporting giant attacks. Frost Giants and Fire Giants are both moving out of their territories. They haven’t attacked any towns or villages that my cousin knows of, but they are slaughtering anything that gets in their way.”

The three of them were silent.

"When was the last time two giant races went on the warpath?” Lady Nandar asked.

Harn Breakbear didn’t have to think for long. "The Third Century of the current era. About 500 years ago.”

The light was fading faster than it should have been, or perhaps she was only imagining it - the late afternoon always seemed to accelerate in the forest, the trees drinking the last of the sun before it reached the ground. She looked up through the canopy at the narrow aperture of sky above them. Deep blue now, shading at the edges toward violet, and against it, the first tentative star of evening burning with a cold clarity that she couldn't quite place.

She knew every major star by position and cycle. She had charted them for eleven years.

It was supposed to be part of a cluster of three stars, all bright enough to be visible even at this time of day. Now, it stood in the sky alone, with a second star struggling to shine against the still-bright sky.

There should be a third one joining them soon, pale against the other two. Her missing star. It would never come.

It was such a small thing - one star out of thousands, and not even a spectacular one at that. But for a star to disappear… and for the star she could still see to flicker like that…

She looked at it for a long moment. Then she looked away.

"We should head back before full dark," she said. Her voice was entirely steady. "Thelios, can you manage the deer?"

"Of course, my lady."

They began the walk back toward Nightstone through the deepening dusk. Harn told a story about a monastery in the north where the monks had kept a cosmological orrery of such precision that it could predict eclipses four hundred years in advance - a story she suspected was half true and twice as interesting for it. She listened, and laughed in the right places, and kept pace with him along the forest path.

Above them, through the breaks in the canopy, the stars were coming out one by one.

And somewhere in the vast, cold machinery of the spheres, in the high places beyond human reckoning, in the halls where ancient covenants were kept and divine hierarchies held the shape of the world together - something that had held for an age beyond memory had already come apart.

Lady Nandar simply wished she knew what it meant.

Part II: The Whisper of Bones

Thelios stopped walking.

It was not a dramatic thing. He did not raise a fist or hiss a warning. He simply ceased moving, mid-stride, with the absolute stillness of a man whose body had made a decision before his mind had finished the thought.

Lady Nandar stopped two paces later, reading him the way she'd learned to read him over four months of his employment - the set of his shoulders, the angle of his chin, the fact that his hand had not gone to his blade but instead hung loose and open at his side, which was worse.

Harn stopped too, the hart's haunches across his shoulders. He was a man who had read other men in dangerous places for thirty years. He didn't ask.

The forest was making noise. That was the problem. It should not have been making this much noise - the small, continuous percussion of something moving through undergrowth to their west and slightly behind, trying to pace them without crowding them, trying to stay at the edge of perception.

Amateur work, Nandar thought, and then revised the thought immediately.

Not amateur.

Deliberate.

Letting themselves be heard just enough to herd.

She gestured to her ear and then away from her head. Elves?

Thelios shook his head.

That was a problem. Thelios had proven himself to Nandar many times over, but she’d originally hired him for his elvish blood. The elves of Ardeep would occasionally object to her hunting trips in “their” territory. Having one of their kin to parley was a proven strategy.

But if these weren’t elves…

She gestured to the trees, then lifted her palm. How many?

Thelios held up four fingers. Paused. Added a fifth.

He unslung the deer from Harn's shoulders with a single gesture and let it down into the ferns without sound. Harn's hand had already found the short axe at his belt. He hadn't carried a sword for twenty years — swords snagged on things, he'd once told her, and in tight places you needed something you could use with your elbow bent. She believed him.

She nocked an arrow. Her skill was as a hunter, not a warrior. Still, quarry was quarry. If it came down to it, she could take her prey down, even if it fought back.

Thelios pointed: north-northeast, between two stands of silver birch where the undergrowth thinned and the footing would be cleaner. A route, not a suggestion. He was already moving.

They ran.

Not panicked running - nothing so wasteful as that. Thelios set the pace, a controlled lope that ate ground without sacrificing quiet, and he navigated them through the forest's structure with the instinctive fluency of a man who had spent decades in places that wanted to kill him.

Left - around the exposed root system of a fallen oak.

Right - away from the creek bed where the mud would hold their prints and slow their stride. Through a dense stand of bracken that would force anything larger than them to go around.

Larger than them. That was relevant information.

She heard the first one perhaps two hundred yards into the flight - a sound like a bull going through a fence, something very large moving very fast and abandoning all pretence of stealth.

Then a second just like it.

Then, horribly, the toneless rhythmic chanting of a voice behind them that raised every hair on her neck without her understanding a single syllable.

"War cry," Thelios said, not breaking stride. "The hunt is over and the battle begins."

"How far to the road?" Harn said.

"Too far."

They burst through a curtain of hanging moss into a small clearing - a natural bowl in the forest floor, perhaps thirty feet across, ringed by old growth that pressed in close. Thelios pulled up short and turned, and Nandar understood immediately:

He'd chosen this.

Not ideal ground for them, but terrible ground for five. They couldn't be flanked easily. The trees at their backs were too closely spaced to rush through without slowing. He had given them a fighting chance, which was not the same as a good chance, but was what they had.

She took position at the tree line, three paces back from the open ground. Harn rolled his shoulders once, shifted the axe to his right hand, and planted his feet in the way of a man who has decided that this is the place and there is nothing further to discuss.

They came out of the dark between the trees like pure nightmares.

The first orc was enormous - taller than Harn by half a head and built with the mad excess of a creature born for one purpose. Ash-grey skin mottled with old scarring, tusks yellowed and notched, wearing armour that was half scavenged iron and half bones that once belonged to folks just like them.

The orc warrior cleared the tree line at a dead sprint, his war cry charging at Thelios moments ahead of his club.

Thelios was not there when it arrived.

He'd stepped inside the rush with the elegance of a man who had trained for fifty years to do exactly this - one step left, weight dropping, the short blade coming up under the swing of the orc's massive club. The blade skittered off the armour but the elbow he drove into the creature's throat did not skitter, and the orc went briefly sideways.

Briefly.

Nandar put an arrow into the second orc's shoulder as it cleared the tree line and it barely noticed. She adjusted, drew, and sent another arrow into the meat of its thigh, and that it felt - it stumbled, slowed for a moment, and Harn was already moving to meet it with the axe low and his head down like a man walking into a gale.

The sound of that collision was something she would not entirely forget.

Two more orcs came from the right flank - she'd anticipated left - and for a moment the clearing was pure chaos, blades and bodies and the wet percussion of violence, and she did what she could.

Arrow into the back of one orc's knee, forcing it to one leg where Thelios, bleeding freely now from a cut above his eye, could work it. She drew her hunting knife for the fifth - smaller than the others, faster, scarred in the particular way of someone who'd survived countless fights rather than won them through size - and it looked at her and made a decision she was grateful for, turning instead to Harn's exposed back.

She put her last arrow through its ear from eight feet.

Three orcs down. Harn had dropped his orc into the ferns and taken a hit across the ribs for the effort, a glancing blow from a stone-headed maul that had staggered him but not ended him. He stood now with blood on his beard that wasn't all his own, breathing hard, circling back to the fray.

Thelios and the largest orc were finishing what they'd started.

She couldn't have described it well afterward. It was too close, too fast, too ugly for her eyes - too used to reading in her library - to see. She knew the orc landed a blow that should have killed the elf outright - the club catching him across the left side with a sound like a tree-limb snapping - and she knew that Thelios went down on one knee in the mud and stayed there for a half-second that seemed to last considerably longer.

She knew that from that position, with one arm hanging wrong and his breathing reduced to something ragged and insufficient, he drove his blade upward with everything he had left.

The orc fell.

Thelios did not get up.

The clearing was quiet except for Harn's breathing and the distant, indifferent commentary of the nightjar.

Nandar moved to Thelios and crouched beside him, and she looked at him for a moment and then looked away, because there was nothing to be done and she had always been practical about what could and could not be changed. His pale eyes were still open. He had the satisfied expression of a man who had won.

"Good man," Harn said quietly. It was an inadequate thing to say and entirely true, and he said nothing else. Then he heard something and lunged, reaching into the trees with a beefy hand.

The sixth orc stumbled out of the trees.

She had not seen the shaman during the fight, which she now understood had been the point. He had watched. He had waited. He was old - the only way wild orcs got old, by outlasting everything that tried to kill them - and small for his kind, compacted by decades into something dense and deliberate. His face was a cartography of old violence: a scar that had taken his left eye and left behind a milky ruin, ritual markings cut into his cheeks with something finer than a blade. He carried no weapon she could see. He carried instead a bundle of bones strung on cord, and they rattled softly in the still air as he regarded her across the bodies of his warriors without particular distress.

Decrepit as he was, he was still strong enough to wrestle free of Harn’s grasp. Or maybe the man had let go of him.

Harn raised the axe.

"Wait," Nandar said.

Harn waited. She could feel him waiting with his whole body, the way a door feels when there's wind on the other side of it.

She straightened and faced the shaman. Her hands were not shaking. She was mildly surprised by this. "Nightstone has made itself clear," she said. Her voice came out steady, which she was grateful for. "Your people are not welcome in these parts of the forest. We enforce the boundary with blood - orcish blood. So tell me." She gestured at the bodies around them - at Thelios, at the five dead orcs, at the torn-up clearing that had been a peaceful piece of forest floor an hour ago. "What was this for?"

The shaman looked at her for a long moment. His surviving eye was black and sharp, and it moved over her face with an assessment that unsettled her more than the violence had - an intelligence behind it uncommon among his kind, cold and entirely unimpressed by her title or her composure.

When he spoke, his Common was thick but serviceable. "The bones said you would die." He tilted his head slightly. "They have been saying it for weeks. Every throw. Every fire. The lady of the village dies soon." He rattled the bundle at his hip without lifting it - a small gesture, almost contemplative. "Your death is written in the near time, woman. I took that to mean our victory here." Something moved across his ruined face that was not quite a smile. "Instead, you die by what is coming."

The clearing was very quiet.

"What's coming?" Nandar said.

The shaman looked at her with something she could only read as pity - the exhausted, unsentimental pity of someone watching a person walk toward a chasm they can't yet see.

"The sky is wrong," he said simply. "The old powers are moving. Ancient voices whisper, who were before your kind built your first wall." He glanced upward, through the canopy, at the dark clouds beyond. "The sky is broken and the lady dies soon." He brought his gaze back to her. "The bones do not lie. Not about this."

Harn stepped forward and buried the axe in the shaman's skull, seeing no reason to extend the conversation.

The walk back to Nightstone took two hours.

She carried one of Thelios's blades after giving the elf a quick burial. Far quicker than he deserved. The deer, too, was abandoned to rot wherever they had dropped it.

Harn carried the other blade and didn't mention his ribs, though she could tell from the way he was breathing that at least one of them was cracked.

Neither of them spoke for the first hour.

The forest moved around them with its usual vast indifference, and the stars came fully out, and the one that was not where it should be burned steadily in the dark above the tree line.

"Primitive divination," she said eventually. Not to convince Harn. Possibly not to convince herself.

"Absolutely," said Harn.

A pause.

"He wasn't wrong about the sky, though," she said.

"No," Harn agreed. "He wasn't wrong about that."

They walked on. The lights of Nightstone were visible now through the last stand of trees - warm and yellow and reassuringly solid, the torches on the gatehouse burning in their brackets, the windmill turning slowly against the dark. Her home. Her archive. The accumulated record of eleven years of careful observation and scholarship.

"The rubbings," she said.

"First thing in the morning," said Harn.

"Tonight."

He looked at her sideways. Then he nodded. "Tonight."

She did not look back at the forest. She did not want to look at the star again. She walked through the gate and into the light of Nightstone and told herself that she was not afraid, and that orcish bone-throwing was superstition, and that the architecture of the cosmos did not come apart - it had rules, it had structure, it had the deep grammar of ancient order that she had spent her life studying and trusted more than she trusted almost anything.

The heavens were too old and sensible to go changing on her like that.

She told herself all of this with considerable conviction.

She didn’t entirely believe it.

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