Fire in the Trees
The Tamarack Stand was wrong before they were close enough to see it clearly. The smell came first — a bad sweetness, wood rotting from the inside out. Then the trees came into view.
They were dead in the specific way of a disease rather than drought: bark split in long vertical lines, inner wood bruise-dark, branches hanging limp. The dying had spread outward from some central source like a stain. You could trace the radius if you walked the edge.
Arya raised her hand and read the residue in the air. "Evil magic," she said after a moment. "Someone's been doing ritual work here. The corruption goes into the soil. It's spreading."
"Toward?" Elaazar asked.
She pointed east. Toward the mountains. She left it there for now.
Cylia, who had been watching the tree line, went still. "Company," she said.
Two cultists emerged from between the dead trees at a patrol's unhurried pace, then stopped when they saw the party. A moment of mutual recognition. Then they ran — not in a panic, but with the directness of people with a destination.
Arya recognized it immediately: they're not fleeing, they're leading. "Don't run after them," she said.
They ran after them.
The dead trees blurred past on both sides. The path curved in ways that didn't quite match the geometry of pursuit. Sounds came from the wrong directions. And then the cliff appeared — a solid rock face, a dead end, with the two cultists nowhere to be seen and two more waiting at a narrow gap in the stone.
The gap was blocked. The way back was on fire.
They'd lit the treeline while the party was running — a thin line of flame moving inward through the dry corrupted wood, smoke thickening fast in the enclosed space. The cultists at the gap watched with the calm of people who had done this before and expected it to work.
Arya was already reading the cliff. Stone has its own logic — faults, separations, places where pressure built and released over centuries. She found a low angled crack in the rock face, wider on the left side, tighter on the right: enough for a person, moving carefully, facing inward.
She pointed. "There."
It was not a comfortable few minutes. The passage was cold and close and completely indifferent to urgency. They went through one at a time — Cylia first, then Arya, then Elaazar, who exhaled everything he had because the passage demanded it. The smoke was at chest height when he came through.
They emerged on the other side into clean air and a lot of coughing.
The cultists who had been blocking the gap had left. The job was, from their perspective, done.
The hobgoblin was in a clearing twenty minutes' walk from the cliff face, suspended in spider silk between four trees, working at it with systematic fury. He was large, military in build, and in no mood to acknowledge the indignity of the situation.
The spider was gone — Arya checked. The webbing was an hour old at most.
Cylia drew her blade and cut him down in three strokes. The hobgoblin dropped, landed on his feet, and straightened himself with the pointed dignity of a man who has decided that nothing that just happened is going in his personal record.
He looked at the three of them. Hobgoblin culture ran on a strict accounting of obligations — being freed was not a social pleasantry, it was a transaction, and the books required settling.
"One favour," Arya said. "When we call it."
The hobgoblin held her gaze, then nodded once. It was not a warm nod. It was a formal one, which carried more weight.
He walked away through the dead trees without giving his name, with the stride of someone who knew exactly where he was going.
"We'll need that," Elaazar said, watching him go.
They mapped the Stand on the walk back — the radius of the rot, the cultist patrol route, the location of the gap in the cliff. Arya noted everything with the thoroughness of someone who'd been trained to record what she observed, not what she expected to find.
The corruption in the soil had a direction. The same direction as Xanthe's hut. The same direction as the mountains.
She marked it on the map and kept walking.
Next episode: The party goes back to the hermit's hut — and Cylia agrees to stay for supper.