The morning in Uwendale arrived not as a dawn, but as a grey continuation of the previous night. After the culinary spectacle known as 'The Brown Stew of Sadness', I had low hopes for breakfast. I was rewarded with bread hard enough to be used as a whetstone and tea that tasted as though it had been strained through a guard's sock. The forced silence of the inn was punctuated only by the sound of resigned chewing. Morgana, sitting opposite me, ate with a calmness I could only attribute to centuries of meditation or a complete absence of taste buds.
We were planning our logistical escape from the town buy provisions, avoid patrols, and most importantly, speak to no one when the bell in the town square rang. Not the bell that marked the hours, but the bell for 'pay attention, you depressed citizens, we have an important announcement'.
The market square was already a zoo of silent conformity, but the presence of the guards in their shining armour and expressions like they'd smelt something foul added an extra layer of tension. A captain with a chin so large it seemed to have a life of its own climbed onto a crate.
"Attention, citizens of Uwendale!" he boomed. "We inform you that the East Road, leading to the Granite Quarries, is temporarily blocked! A vile creature, a fierce and dangerous monster, has been attacking travellers and poses a direct threat to the safety of us all!"
A murmur of genuine fear and poorly disguised curiosity rippled through the small crowd.
"But fear not!" Captain Chin continued. "The Uwendale Guard is working tirelessly to contain the threat! To that end, a small 'public safety maintenance' fee will be instituted, to be collected from all shops and homes to fund our heroic efforts!"
I looked at Morgana, who only narrowed her eyes slightly.
"'Fierce monster and an extra fee', eh?" I whispered to her, keeping my face straight. "Loose translation: our guards are scared of an angry badger, but we've figured out a way to make some coin from it. The monster probably has seven heads, each with a built-in collection box."
She gave me a look that clearly said, 'shut up, but you're not wrong'. The compassion in her eyes, however, wasn't for the merchants being extorted. It was for the 'monster'. She always did have a soft spot for the misunderstood. I, on the other hand, was just bored, and government-sanctioned fraud was far more interesting than the price of turnips.
[Analysis: unconfirmed threat. Absence of verified reports. Narrative pattern consistent with state-sanctioned extortion with 82% certainty. The remaining 18% is divided between genuine military incompetence and collective stupidity.]
We decided to conduct our own 'investigation' under the guise of buying supplies. Our first source of intelligence was the tavern, obviously. There we found the Drunken Traveller, a man who seemed to be made of ale stains and regret.
"I saw it!" he declared, his breath a biological weapon. "With me own eyes! The beast! Big as a house! And… and it breathes fire! A blue fire!"
"Blue?" Morgana asked, sceptical.
"Blue as your little girl's eyes!" he said, pointing a trembling finger at me. Captain Chin, sitting at a nearby table with his cronies, gave the innkeeper a nod, who promptly refilled the drunk's tankard.
"If blue fire existed as a biological weapon, the Noxian arms industry would have patented it and launched a line of portable dragons by now. This one is being paid to sing," I murmured.
Our next stop was the Herb Seller, a lady who seemed suspicious of the sun itself. "A monster!" she squawked. "Stole three of my best goats last week! Without a trace!"
While she was distracted, I took a look behind her stall. The goats' hoof prints were quite clear in the dry mud, and they led… directly to the back of the butcher's shop. The same butcher's shop Captain Chin had just left with a parcel suspiciously shaped like a leg of goat.
"The monster seems to have a name," I muttered to Morgana, nodding with my chin. "It's called 'greed with a lovely mint sauce'."
The climax of the rumours came from a Dramatic Old Man sitting near the temple, describing the terror to a circle of wide-eyed children. "...and its scales shone like a thousand swords in the sun! It was an ancient dragon, sent by the gods to punish this sinful town!"
I discreetly noted in my book: Official version from the local church. Translation: the collection plate is empty. Needs a divine nudge.
By the end of the day, we had a collection of descriptions ranging from a 'shadow with tentacles' to a 'boar with wings'.
"So," I said to Morgana as we walked towards the gates, "our options are: a sinful dragon, an ambitious butcher, or a drunk with a very colourful imagination. I'm beginning to think the angry badger theory is the most plausible one."
Morgana, however, looked thoughtful. "Glowing quills..." she murmured, recalling a detail the drunk had mentioned between swigs. "That… that reminds me of something."
The road was deserted, of course. We paid the safety fee with two copper pieces, which I found to be a delicious irony, given we were the only real 'threat' around and we were paying for our own inconvenience.
After half an hour's walk, we found the first real clue. It wasn't a track or a footprint, but a scar on the land itself: a freshly cleared glade where the vegetation was dead and the ground grey and lifeless. In the centre lay the giant stump of a pale, twisted tree. I recognised the wood at once.
"Petricite," I murmured to Morgana. "They're cutting down the ancient trees."
The absence of life, the void that petricite leaves in its wake when harvested. It leaches the ambient magic, killing the land around it.
The second clue was an abandoned cart. The cargo of food was overturned. But only the fruit and vegetables had bite marks. The cured meats and cheeses were untouched.
"Oh no," I commented with as much drama as I could muster. "A terrible carnivorous predator with an insatiable lust for… melons. We are doomed."
It was then we found the quills. Glistening, almost crystalline, stuck in the bark of a tree at my head height. Morgana picked one up carefully. "I knew it," she said, her voice low. "It could be a Glimmerquill."
Before she could elaborate, we heard a noise in the woods. A branch snapped, followed by a dragging sound. A moment later, a patrol of guards came running out of the forest, led by Captain Chin, all of them pale and panting.
"The Beast!" one of them yelled. "It's coming!"
They panicked, forming a rickety defensive line with their spears. Suddenly, from the bushes, emerged… a chicken. A very large and cross-looking chicken, its feathers ruffled, which happened to reflect the sunlight in a strangely bright way.
I couldn't help it. A sound, something between a choke and a laugh, escaped me.
The moment of comic relief lasted exactly five seconds. Right behind the chicken, the real creature appeared. It was huge, the size of a bear, covered in long crystalline quills that glowed with a soft, internal light. It huffed, not in anger, but in irritation, and shook its body. One of the quills came loose and flew through the air, embedding itself with a thump in a guard's wooden shield, where it pulsed gently. The guard looked at his shield, looked at the creature, and fainted.
Morgana, however, was watching the creature. "It's not aggressive," she murmured. "It's lost. Frightened. And annoyed. They must have destroyed its den with the petricite logging."
The remaining guards, recovering from the shock, started to play the hero, advancing with their spears. That's when I lost my patience.
"Hold on!" My voice rang out clearer and louder than I expected. Captain Chin spun around, irritated. "Let me get this straight," I said, crossing my arms. "You destroy its home with your illegal logging, then you get scared when it shows up confused and lost. Then you invent a story about a 'fierce monster', charge your own people a 'safety fee', and now you want to kill the only real victim in this whole story just to look like heroes? If incompetence were a form of magic, you'd all be S-Class Mages."
The silence that followed was glorious. Morgana shot me a look that was a perfect mixture of 'I'm proud of you' and 'I'm going to throttle you later'.
Before the captain could explode in righteous fury, Morgana stepped forward, holding up a hand. She didn't speak to the guards. She spoke to the creature, not with words, but with an emanation of calm, a wave of empathy that softened the air. The light in the Glimmerquill's spines dimmed, its huffing turned to a low grunt. With one last disdainful look at the guards, it turned and vanished into the forest, following a path Morgana had subtly shown it.
Back in the town, the guards, of course, changed the narrative. "Thanks to our bravery," Captain Chin declared in the square, "and a mysterious intervention from a benevolent lady, the road is now clear!"
The legend began to grow right then and there. As we were leaving, a child came up and handed Morgana a small wildflower, a silent thank you.
"Congratulations, anonymous heroine," I muttered as we left through the gates. "I, on the other hand, will stick with my official titles: food critic and chief chronicler of human stupidity."
Back on the road, now free of both monsters and guards, Morgana finally turned to me.
"You have a dangerous way of speaking the truth, Azra'il."
"It's the only way I know," I replied, adjusting the wooden jian on my back. "Next stop, another 'terrifying monster'? I'll bet you two coppers it'll be a duck with an flammable sneeze."
Morgana laughed, a genuine, free sound that seemed to echo down the empty road. And, for the first time, the adventure began to feel a little less like discomfort and a little more like… fun.