It was remarkable how a few pounds of hammered steel and a length of dyed linen could rewrite a man's entire existence in the eyes of the public.
When I had walked across Maribor in my standard traveling gear, shrouded beneath a frayed, nondescript dark cloak, especially without Epine, the commoners had looked at me with a quiet, lingering suspicion. They saw a large, pale solitary drifter, a potential cutthroat, or a sellsword to be avoided. My posture and my blade hinted at a higher standing certainly, but in the muddy, cynical reality of a Northern kingdom, hint and proof are two entirely different things.
Now, wrapped in a crimson surcoat with the polished demi-plackart gleaming beneath the soon to set sun, the streets opened up before me like the Red Sea.
Nothing said noble to the human mind quite like a grand, imposing silhouette and the sheen of expensive armor. I wasn't a drifter anymore. To every merchant, guard, and peasant I passed, I was a knight of means. Heads bowed automatically as I walked. Carts swerved into the gutters to give me a wide berth, and mothers gently pulled their children out of my stride with frantic, hushed whispers of respect.
They didn't see the corners Tholin had cut, they saw the shell, the proclamation of wealth and power, and as they had been conditioned to do for centuries; they worshipped it blindly.
As I left the pristine plazas of the upper quarters behind, descending the steep stone steps toward the lower districts, the illusion of Maribor's grand architecture began to fracture, the lower quarters felt like a completely different place altogether, a choked, suffocating maze living in the shadows of the walls surrounding the city.
The clean cobblestones gave way to a slick, treacherous soup of rotting straw, animal waste, and thick mud that threatened to ruin Tholin's pristine polishing with every step. The grand, sweeping stone manors were replaced by crooked, decaying timber tenements that leaned into the narrow alleys like the drunken beggars lying against them, blocking out what little twilight remained in the sky. Here, the air was heavy with the pungent, oily stench of cheap tanneries, roasting river-rats, and the damp, sour sweat of a desperate people.
It was a brutal, primitive world huddled beneath the shadow of wealth. And right in the center of the muddy crossroads, surrounded by a swarm of shouting fishmongers and ragged street urchins, sat the public notice board I had been looking for.
I walked the openings made for me in the press of ragged bodies, the imposing bulk of my new armor naturally forcing a gap in the crowd, they parted like water before a prow, giving my deep red surcoat a wide berth.mMy eyes scanned the chaotic timber structure of the notice board, navigating through the clutter of local commerce and misery.
The public boards in Maribor I was coming to find, were a proper mess of paper, choked with merchant handbills and desperate cries for attention. On the top left, a local alchemist had posted a printed leaflet shouting about a discount on premium leeches for bloodletting. Right below it, a tavern keeper had pinned a notice warning patrons that anyone caught throwing up in the hearth would be thrashed by the house bouncer. There were missing-pig flyers, recruitment posters for a mercenary guild heading south to Sodden, and a badly drawn parchment from a frantic mother offering two coppers for the return of a silver locket.
Then, my eyes locked onto an uneven, rain-smeared piece of parchment pinned right in the center with a rusted horseshoe nail.
It was an official notice from the South Ward Overseer, and the text immediately made my modern gaming instincts flare.
"WARNING TO THE CITIZENRY: By decree of the Warden, the public latrines and drainage vents along the Cloaca of St. Gregory are strictly closed past sunset. Seven souls have vanished into the lower grates over the past fortnight, leaving naught but their buckets behind. Witnesses report an unnatural, thick white mist rising up from the sewage trenches even on warm nights, accompanied by a strange, echoing mimicry of human voices crying for help from the dark. A negotiable reward is offered to any capable sellsword or capable interested party who can purge the drainage vaults of whatever foulness has taken root."
Voices in the mist, unnatural fog rising from the deep vents.
'Foglets? There's no way my luck is that good...and why would a group of them be doing under a city ? Something's not adding up here.'
I knew from firsthand experience Foglets weren't the type of monster to be too close to human cities; they were necrophages , creatures drawn toward corpses and places where death had accumulated in sufficient quantities. They were also highly magical creatures, capable of manipulating light and surrounding moisture to conceal themselves, distort their appearance, and create the unnatural fog from which their name came from.
That made the sewers beneath Maribor a possible hunting ground, but it did not make much sense for them be here, although a functioning city certainly produced plenty of dead things, but the constant movement of people, the limited supply of exposed corpses, and the lack of a large enough feeding ground made a permanent nest beneath the lower districts difficult to explain.
Foglets preferred places where death had already taken hold, rather than spending their time hiding beneath a populated city where hunters, sewer workers, and guards could stumble across them.
If several of them had established themselves beneath Maribor, then something had either driven them there or provided them with a reason to remain, despite my grievances I needed to test if my hypothesis about my gift in relation to chaos held true, I didn't just need a single target, I needed a group to prove the essence transfer worked. Smashing a whole nest of these things down in the dark would be the perfect testing ground.
I reached out, the steel of my gauntlets clinking against the damp wood, and ripped the heavy parchment clean off the board. The crowd around me fell completely silent, a dozen ragged faces staring at the tall knight in red who had just casually volunteered to go hunting inside the city's bowels.
The silence didn't last long. The moment the parchment parted from the wood, the peasants around me started exploded into a chorus of hushed gossip, their frantic whispers breaking out in a wave of thick Temerian accents.
"Gorblimey, did 'e really just take that one?" a man in a greasy leather apron muttered, nudging his neighbor. "The latrine notice? Is 'e touched in the head?"
"Since when did knights go crawling about in the shite to hunt mists and whispers?" a woman with a basket of turnips chimed in, her eyes wide as she stared at the anvil emblem on my back. "Ain't that witcher work? That's what them mutant freaks are for, innit?"
"Aye, maybe 'e is a witcher under that big shiny suit," a younger lad whispered, subtly trying to stand on his toes to get a look at my closed visor.
"Shush, ye daft sod!" the first man hissed, slapping the man upside the head. "Yiban, ye want to get cleaved clean in half for insulting a noble?! Use yer eyes, boy. Them mutant freaks don't go wearing grand, golden armor like that, they're all black rags and yellow eyes. That bloke's a proper sir."
"Proper sir or no', 'e goes down into St. Gregory's drain, 'e ain't coming back up," an old, woman added on. "The mist gets 'em all. Gobbles 'em right up, it does. Chokes 'em till they see ghosts, then snap!"
I ignored the commentary, folding the damp parchment and slipping it beneath the edge of my demi-plackart. I was just about to turn away from the board and figure out which direction led toward the municipal gatehouse when a small, sudden tug pulled at the hem of my surcoat.
I looked down.
Standing right beside my armored thigh was a little boy. He couldn't have been older than eight or nine, his face completely smeared with black soot and river-mud, wearing a tunic that looked like it had been stitched together from old potato sacks. His bare feet were caked in the slick, foul clay of the lower quarters, but his eyes were sharp, darting nervously between my steel greaves and my hidden face.
"M-mi lord?" the boy piped up, his voice cracking slightly through the damp evening air. He wiped his nose on a ragged sleeve. "Ye... ye took the warden's notice, aye? The ghost-mist in the drains?"
I leaned down just an inch, the oiled plates of my gorget sliding together with a soft, metallic hiss that made the kid flinch back a step. "I did," I said, my voice echoing hollowly behind the closed visor.
The boy swallowed hard, but greed or desperation quickly overcame his fear. He held up a filthy, cupped hand. "The Ward Overseer's gatehouse is a proper maze to find through these alleys, sir. Easy to get turned about or knifed by the dock-boys if ye don't know the turnings. A copper Groschen, and I'll show ye right to the Overseer's door, I will. I'll get ye there before the watch changes."
I looked at the child for a long, heavy moment. He was a proper product of Maribor's underbelly, with skin caked in a dark layer of soot, grease, and street filth that had long since stained his knuckles black. His ragged tunic was stiff with dried muck, and his bare toes were practically buried in the cold, clay of the crossroads.
Without a word, I sank down, my steel greaves dropping directly into the thick, treacherous mud of the lower district as I brought myself right down to the boy's eye level, the red surcoat pooling around my knees.
Through the narrow slits of my closed visor, I locked my gaze onto his. The kid tensed, his small fingers clenching into the fabric of his oversized sack-tunic as the imposing silhouette of a fully armored knight suddenly shrunk down to his size.
"What's your name, lad?" I asked, my voice vibrating softly behind the steel plate, stripped of its harsh edge.
The boy swallowed hard, his chest heaving under the dirt as he stared at the dark visor. He stuttered for a second, the words tripping over his teeth. "P-Pip, mi lord. Just Pip."
"Well, Pip," I murmured, tilting my head slightly. "Are you not afraid of me?"
Pip shifted his weight from one muddy foot to the other. His eyes darted toward the heavy scabbard at my hip, then back to the visor. A raw, painfully honest look crossed his soot-smeared face. "I am scared, sir," he admitted in a quiet, trembling whisper. "But... but I'm a sight more hungry than I am scared. My belly's been making more racket than a forge since yesterday mornin'."
A genuine smile broke across my face behind the helmet. I let out a soft huff of amusement and reached out, planting a heavy, steel-clad hand right on his shoulder. I didn't care about the grease or the filth that immediately transferred onto my polished vambrace. I just gave him a reassuring pat.
"You're a brave boy, Pip," I said, standing back up to my full, imposing height. The armor clicked and slid together smoothly as I looked down at him. "Lead me well to the Overseer, and there'll be a coin in it for your troubles. In fact, if we get there before the watch changes, I'll ensure there's a hot, proper meal in your belly tonight as well."
The boy's face instantly lit up, the terror completely evaporating from his eyes. His mouth fell open in a wide, gap-toothed grin as he gave a frantic, excited nod.
"Aye, sir! Right this way, Sire! Follow me, I know all the short-cuts, I'll avoid the tanneries!"
He spun on his heel and bounded into the narrow, dark alleyway like a hound off a leash, his bare feet splashing through the mud as he waved for me to follow.
As we walked, my boots, and his bare feet slapped rhythmic, wet cadences into the freezing mud. The narrow alleyways choked out whatever twilight remained, forcing us to rely on the distant, oily glare of tavern lanterns filtering through the gaps in the timber tenements.
"Tell me, Pip," I said, my voice echoing low behind the visor as I kept my stride slow enough for his short legs to match. "Besides what was written on that notice board... what have you seen around the drainage grates? What are people saying in the alleys?"
Pip didn't stop moving, but his shoulders hitched beneath his sack-tunic. "It's the breath of the stone, sire. That's what the dockers call it. Comes up out of the iron vents past dark. Smells like old river-rot, but it's thick as porridge. If ye get caught in it, ye can't see yer own hand 'fore yer face." He turned a sharp corner past a row of hanging cow hides, their metallic, bloody scent filling the air. "And the voices... my mate Toby swore he heard someone calling for help, 'e went down after the voice he did I told 'im not to... they found some of his clothes the next mornin'."
I looked down at the back of the boy's head, watching the way he instinctively dodged the deepest puddles and the jagged bits of discarded pottery littering the slum floor, a heavy suffocating knot tightened in my gut as I stared at his small, soot-stained silhouette. How many others were there exactly like him? Hundreds. Thousands. Cluttering the gutters of Maribor, Novigrad, and Vizima, completely invisible to the wealthy lords prancing around the upper plazas in gilded doublets.
A cold, sickening thought slid into my mind, bringing the memory of Orianna's immaculate, blood-scented salon crashing back into my head.
Back in the games, the player eventually finds out the horrific truth behind her estate: she runs an orphanage, feeding her wealthy aristocratic ego by saving dozens of homeless, starving street rats just like Pip. She clothes them. She feeds them, tucks them into clean beds with sweet lullabies, giving them a safe haven from the brutal realities of the Continent.
And in exchange, she takes her tithe. A few ounces of their blood while they sleep, using them as a private, living wine cellar.
It was a monstrous, stomach-turning reality. But as I looked at Pip--his ribs nearly visible through the gaps in his potato sack, his bare toes turning blue from the freezing Temerian mud--the moral absolute began to crack and splinter into an ugly, grey blur.
If Orianna were here, a kid like Pip would be warm. He'd have meat in his belly and a roof over his head...all it would take would be to trust the Bruxa wouldn't tear his throat out when she exacted her price for her kindness.
It was a hard thing to come to terms with. Who was doing more actual good for the children of this world? The monstrous, child-rearing vampire who kept them healthy for her own appetite, or the righteous human society that simply let them rot in the gutters?
I didn't have an answer. The hypocrisy of it tasted like ash in my mouth.
"We're nearly there, sir!" Pip's voice suddenly broke through my existential spiraling, his hand pointing toward a low, stone-reinforced gatehouse looming at the end of the alley. Two city watchmen stood by the iron-studded door, their halberds resting lazily against their shoulders. "That's the Overseer's lockup. You... you still promise there's a meal in it for me?"
I stopped in the middle of the muddy lane, looking down at his shivering form. "Where do you live, Pip? Who do you live with?"
"Just the other lads, Sire," Pip said, wiping a fresh layer of grime from his cheek. "We share a spot behind the tanneries, keeps the wind off our backs, mostly."
"How many of you?" I asked him.
"Five of us on most nights."
Hearing it was more than just one starving child, I let out a heavy sigh behind my visor. The image of Orianna's predatory sanctuary flashed in my mind again, a stark contrast to the brutal reality of five children slow-burning their lives away under a floorboard.
I knelt back down, the iron plates of my greaves hitting the now cobbled path. Reaching into my pouch, I pulled out a pair of heavy, gleaming silver lintars and pressed them into his small, palms.
Pip's eyes went completely wide, staring at the silver coins like they were a cluster of fallen stars. His chest heaved as he opened his mouth to gasp, but I immediately gripped his shoulder with my steel-clad hand, my voice dropping into a stern, cadence.
"Listen to me very carefully, a boy your size carrying a handful of silver lintar back through these slums is a dead boy. The first dock-thug or cutpurse who catches a glint of that will slit your throat just to see if you swallowed any more, hide them until you get home understand?"
Pip swallowed hard, his face turning pale beneath the soot. He nodded frantically, clenching his small fist tight over the silver.
"Stay right here," I commanded.
I stood back up to my full height and turned toward the gatehouse. The two watchmen were already staring at me, their eyes lingering on the deep red surcoat and the massive, runed sword at my hip. I walked forward with measured, heavy steps, letting the quiet authority of my armor do the talking before I stopped directly in front of the larger guard.
"Your name, watchman?" I asked, my voice smooth, quiet, and perfectly level behind the closed visor. It carried the chilling, unhurried weight of a lord who expected immediate obedience.
The guard blinked, straightening his spine as he nervously shifted his halberd. "Uh... Nicolas, Ser. Nicolas of the South Ward Watch. Something I can help the noble knight with?"
I reached back into my pouch, pulling out three gold orens along with a handful of copper groschen. I placed them firmly into his palm, my golden gauntlet closing over his hand with a slow, unyielding pressure that made the leather of his glove creak.
"You see that boy, Nicolas?" I murmured, leaning in just enough to anchor his attention. "You are going to escort him to the market squares right now. You will use this gold to purchase enough hot mutton, thick bread, clean clothing and shoes, to satisfy him and the five children sharing his lodgings. You will watch them eat, you will ensure they return safely to their quarters, and you will make it abundantly clear to the local scum that the boy is under your personal protection tonight."
Nicolas winced slightly under the iron grip, his eyes darting down to the heavy coin. "S-Ser, my apologies, but we're on official gate watch. If the Overseer finds the post short-handed--"
"I will need to insist on troubling you, Nicolas," I interrupted softly, my tone remaining entirely calm, which only seemed to unnerve him more. "If the Overseer questions your absence, you may tell him that a knight of the upcoming tournament qualifiers requested an honor guard for a matter of personal charity, and any coin left over is yours to keep, but hear me well: if I discover tomorrow morning that the boy was robbed, or that his companions went hungry, or you skimmed on the clothing, I will not seek out your Overseer. I will look for you and I assure you, Nicolas, I am remarkably talented at tracking people down, and far more difficult to appease than your captain."
The guard swallowed hard, the color draining from his face as he looked at the dark visor slits. "A-Aye, Ser. I understand. No harm will come to the lad, you have my word."
I released his hand, turning back to the trembling boy. "Pip. Go with Nicolas. Get your food, and clothing for your friends." I patted his shoulder one last time. "Tomorrow, after you've had a proper bath, and a change of clothes, come find me at the Silver Spoon Inn. I might just have an opportunity for you and your friends to earn some real, honest coin."
"Thank ye, Sire! Thank ye!" Pip cried out, a brilliant, tearful smile cutting through the dirt on his face. He scrambled over to the watchman, who immediately hooked a protective hand around the boy's shoulder, looking thoroughly eager to get away from the quiet, terrifying presence in red.
I watched them disappear down the dark alleyway, Nicolas checking over his shoulder twice to make sure I wasn't tracking them. Once they vanished into the gloom, I turned back toward the heavy, iron-studded door of the gatehouse. The remaining watchman practically tried to melt into the stone wall to avoid my gaze.
"I'd like to see your overseer in regards to this." I said showing him the notice.
Time to go monster hunting.
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Sagnix of MariborThe South Ward Gatehouse, Maribor
1253
I rubbed the bridge of my nose, the scratch of my quill against the ledger doing nothing to soothe the pounding behind my eyes. The parchment before me was a mess of uncollected taxes, complaints from the tanneries, and that damned stack of reports from the municipal drainage vents.
"Monsters," I muttered to myself, dipping the quill into the inkwell with a bit more force than necessary. "On the eve of the grandest tourney this province has seen in a generation. Bloody brilliant."
If the incoming public found out that the public latrines along St. Gregory's were actively swallowing people in the dead of night, the Duke would have my head on a spike before the opening tilts. I had spent the last fortnight doing everything within my power to ensure panic didn't grip the lower quarters. I'd shuttered the grates, ordered the night-watch to keep their mouths shut, and framed the disappearances as simple cutpurse violence. But a man could only hide a supernatural, whispering fog for so long before the commoners started whispering back.
I needed it solved. Now.
The trouble with witchers was that the freakish mutants were never bloody around when you actually had a contract that needed killing. There was no registry for them, no guildhouse to send a formal courier to, and no one living knew where their hidden mountain holds were, especially not after the failed purges in the north left them scattered to the winds. The only way to catch one was to slap a piece of parchment on a wooden board and pray one of them wandered through the gates before the bodies started stacking too high.
And that act alone already undermined my efforts to not spread panic, my only reprieve was the fact that the other districts did not much care for what happened in the slums.
But no mutant had come to complete the task, I was stuck hoping for a desperate, half-drunk band of local sellswords to show up and offer to throw their lives away for gold orens. If no one took the bait by tomorrow morn, I'd be forced to go groveling to the Castellan for a contingent of garrison guards. And I was entirely certain pigs would take flight over the palace walls before those pampered, velvet-wearing soldiers accepted a deployment to muck through the literal shite of the South Ward slums without making it difficult for me.
The closer the tournament date erred, the more it felt like I was staring down a localized catastrophe.
A sharp, sudden knock rattled the heavy oak door of my office, snapping me out of my grumbling. "What?" I barked, blotting the wet ink on the ledger with a piece of scrap linen. "I told you lot I wasn't to be disturbed!"
The door creaked open by a few inches, and the nervous face of Mikail, on of my watchmen peeked through the gap. "M-my apologies, Master Sagnix, truly but... well, someone's just come off the crossroads. They've torn down the St. Gregory notice, sir. They're here about the job."
I froze, the quill slipping from my fingers. A wave of profound relief surged through my chest, instantly wiping away the irritation. "Well, don't just leave them standing in the damp, you utter simpleton! Usher them in! Quickly!"
"Aye, right away, sir."
The watchman stepped back, opening the door fully to allow the applicant inside. I braced myself, expecting to see the usual sight; a scarred, desperate mercenary in rusted ring-mail, or perhaps, hopefully a grim, yellow-eyed mutant smelling of swamp water and old vinegar.
Instead, the silhouette that crossed my threshold made the breath catch squarely in my throat.
The man was massive, his tall frame nearly filling the entire doorframe, completely clad in an immaculate, heavy set of foreign-styled plate armor. A striking surcoat of deep, rich crimson linen fell over his chest, perfectly hiding the contours of his breastplate, and a heavy, sword hilt wrapped in pristine leather lay on his hip. The furnace light from the lobby caught the polished edges of his steel pauldrons, making him look less like a sewer-hunter and more like a royal champion who had accidentally taken a wrong turn on his way to the palace grandstand. He didn't say a word, his face entirely hidden behind a stark, closed golden visor that reflected the candles on my desk like a mirror.
I stared at him, my mouth opening slightly as the paperwork beneath my hands was completely forgotten.
My heart sank a fraction. Not a witcher, then. I had been praying for one of those freakish, professional monster-killers who knew exactly how to track a beast through the muck without blinking. A knight in grand, pristine plate armor was a proper vanguard for a battlefield, certainly, but a sewer tunnel? The heavy steel would rattle against the brickwork, and the muck would ruin that beautiful crimson linen in seconds.
Still, beggars couldn't be choosers, and the tournament was bleeding closer by the day.
"Right. Well," I cleared my throat, forcing my professional composure back into place as I gestured toward the empty wooden chair across from my desk. "Come in, then. Please, take a seat, Ser. I am Sagnix, the Overseer for the South Ward of the Grand City of Maribor."
The massive warrior moved with a fluid, uncanny grace that seemed entirely too quiet for a man carrying that much metal. He crossed the room, the heavy plates of his greaves shifting smoothly, and sank into the chair without a single creak of complaint from the timber. He didn't make a move to unlatch his helmet. He simply sat there, a faceless pillar of red and gold, and placed the weathered parchment of my notice onto the desk between us.
"Sir Matthias Harlow of Toussaint," he said. His voice caught me entirely off guard, it wasn't the gruff, gravelly bark of a common sellsword, nor the arrogant snarl of a local Temerian noble. It was a melodic, heavily accented echo that vibrated softly behind his closed visor, carrying a strange, foreign cadence. "It is a pleasure, Master Sagnix."
"Likewise, Ser Matthias," I replied, my eyes darting to the blank steel of his mask before settling back on the paperwork. "I must admit, you are not the usual sort of applicant to walk through my door for a task of this nature. Most men of your... obvious prestige prefer to leave the city's underbelly to the rats."
"A knight's duty does not stop where the cobblestones end, Master Overseer," he murmured, his hands resting easily on his lap. The tone was perfectly measured, carrying the exact sort of lofty, high-minded vocabulary you'd expect from a romanticized storybook champion. "If there is a foulness beneath the streets terrorizing the innocent and dragging children into the dark, then it is my solemn intent to rid this home of the threat beneath it. True chivalry demands nothing less."
I stared at him for a second, my cynical, bureaucratic mind immediately translating the performance. 'Protecting the innocent. Solemn intent. Aye, right, and I'm the Hierarch of Novigrad.'
He was on a glory hunt, the grand tournament was weeks away, the city was filling up with wealthy patrons, and this foreign knight wanted a legendary tale to attach to his name before he stepped into the arena. A dramatic story about purging a hidden horror from the dark sewers of Maribor would play beautifully to the crowds in the grandstands.
Well, I wasn't about to dissuade him. If his vanity kept my citizens from being eaten, and my head of a pike he could call himself whatever he well pleased.
"A noble sentiment, Ser Matthias. Truly," I said, leaning forward and tapping a finger against the notice. "But let us speak of the coin. The standard fare for this would be around sixty Orens. A respectable sum for a common laborer, but a man of your standing has... maintenance costs, I imagine."
"The maintenance of justice is never cheap," the melodic voice replied from behind the steel. "And the supernatural fog your watchmen described suggests a malice that will not yield to simple iron. That will barely cover the cost of the risk I am taking to cleanse such a nest."
We went back and forth for several minutes, dancing the familiar, exhausting dance of a city official trying to save a budget and a warrior trying to maximize his hazard pay. He was a passable negotiator, not a good one but neither was he the worst I'd ever met. In the end, we shook on a flexible contract of one hundred golden orens, with the strict understanding that the final ledger could shift depending on the exact number and danger of the entities he faced down there.
"Very well," I said, dipping my quill to sign the authorization slip before handing it across the desk. "The contract is yours. Prove the threat is neutralized, bring back something I can show the Duke's inspectors, and the treasury will square the account."
I looked toward the door and raised my voice. "Mikail! Get in here!"
The watchman scrambled into the room, his halberd nearly clipping the doorframe in his haste. "Aye, Master Sagnix?"
"Take Ser Matthias down to the primary drainage lockup near St. Gregory's," I commanded, waving a dismissive hand. "The one near where the baker's boy vanished. Open the iron grates for him, and stay out of his bloody way."
"Right away, Overseer" Mikail swallowed hard, casting a thoroughly intimidated look at the massive red knight rising from the chair.
Matthias stood to his full, imposing height, taking the signed slip and tucking it securely beneath his surcoat. He gave me a polite, dignified inclination of his helmet. "By tomorrow morning, Master Sagnix, your people will walk the South Ward without fear."
"I certainly hope so, Ser Matthias," I muttered, watching him turn and follow the nervous watchman out into the damp evening. "For both our sakes."
Matthias Harlow
The drop from the stairway was a jarring, heavy shock that reverberated all the way up through my steel greaves, but my inhuman constitution made it seem as though I had only just taken a step. The iron boots squelched deep into a thick, clinging layer of subterranean sludge.
I think I'm regretting this already.
I stood still for a moment, letting the hollow echo of my landing fade into the damp, cavernous expanse. The sewers of the Continent were a far cry from the cramped, claustrophobic pipe networks of modern Earth. Like Novigrad and Vizima, Maribor was a city literally built on top of a city, constructed directly over the massive, crumbling stone foundations of an ancient elven metropolis shattered during the human conquests. The tunnels down here were vast and cavernous, featuring soaring, arching brick ceilings and wide stone walkways flanking a central, rushing canal of black, stagnant filth.
It felt less like a drainage system and more like a sunken, forgotten highway beneath the world, old and spacious enough for a wagon to pass through with room to spare.
I drew my sword, the smooth shhhk of the blade slicing through the silence. In the gloom, the silver-alloyed steel caught the faint, distant trickles of surface light filtering through the overhead grates, its greater rune resting in a low, simmering state.
I closed my eyes behind the closed visor, attempting to lean into my vampiric heritage to map the dark. But the environment was an absolute assault on the senses. The oppressive, blinding stench of human waste, rotting river silt, and cheap tannery chemicals formed a thick, suffocating cloud that rendered tracking anything by scent alone completely impossible. Even with my enhanced physiology, the ambient air tasted like bitter rust and decay.
Worse still, my onyx ring thrummed softly against my finger, its protective ward continuously dampening my thirst, and with it my senses. I had to actively concentrate past the fog of the ring to tap into my senses. The dark shifted, bled of color, turning into a stark landscape of cold greys, deep shadows, and the thermal, sluggish pulse of the sewer's toxic current.
I spent about forty minutes like that. My boots clicked softly against the slick stone walkway, the heavy red surcoat brushing against the damp, green moss clinging to the elven brickwork. The vast tunnels seemed to stretch on in an infinite, maddening loop, the silence broken only by the steady, maddening drip... drip... drip of condensation from the ceiling.
But eventually the air changed, the temperature dropped drastically within a span of ten paces, a sudden, unnatural chill biting right through my heavy linen quilted gambeson. From the dark mouth of an intersecting junction ahead, a thick, milky-white mist began to roll across the stone path. It didn't behave like normal fog; it moved with a heavy, deliberate purpose, crawling along the floor like liquid spilled across wood, rising up in swirling, unnatural tendrils that instantly began to choke out my twilight vision.
My ears twitched. A sound cut through the ambient dripping a low, rhythmic, wet scraping noise. It sounded like a heavy, calcified claw being dragged lazily against old masonry.
Skrrrch... Skrrrch...
I gripped the hilt of my sword with one hand, my knuckles tightening against the leather wrap. As my intent shifted to raw combat, the greater rune inside the fuller flared to life, a sharp, cold blue light cutting through the creeping fog, illuminating the crimson linen of my surcoat in stark, eerie ripples.
I stepped into the mist, my movements slowing to a silent, predatory glide. The fog was growing denser by the second, swirling around my visor, compressing my field of vision until the cavernous walls vanished entirely, leaving me in a blinding, white void.
Then came a voice from behind me. "Help me... please... it's so cold down here..." It was a boy's voice, echoing hollowly from the left. "Help! Monsters! No! Don't! Please!"
A chill that had nothing to do with the temperature traced my spine. I didn't turn toward the sound, nor did I flinch. I knew exactly what game was being played, the stolen memories echoing in my head knew the rules by heart.
I had inherited the hunting instincts of a foglet when I took those memories, and I recognized the precise biological malice behind the trick. The creatures were setting the trap, casting their tangible, illusionary sound-bites to lure an amateur into a blind, panicked swing. They were waiting for me to overextend, to lose my footing in the muck, so they could materialize from the blind spots and tear into my exposed chest from the shadows.
It was a beautiful, predatory routine, but it was terribly predictable when you knew the trick. At me not taking the bait, a sharp, guttural growl vibrated through the brickwork beneath my boots.
Through a sudden, violent tear in the shifting mist forty paces ahead, the illusions fractured, and I saw them. A pack of elongated, hideous silhouettes hunched over the stone walkway. Their skin was a pale, sickly grey-green, stretched tight over emaciated, needle-ribbed frames. Long, disproportionate arms ended in jagged, obsidian-like claws that twitched in the yellow glow of their their bulbous, unblinking eyes that stared straight through the fog, locked entirely onto the man in red.
The mist surged forward, swallowing their forms once more as the creatures vanished into the blinding white, the wet scraping of their claws accelerating into a terrifying, synchronized sprint directly toward me.
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Authors Note: That's it for Chapter 28!
Sorry it took a little longer than usual to get this one out. I try to get at least two chapters out for each story every month, but at the same time, I really do not want to rush things just for the sake of hitting that number. I would rather take a little longer and make sure the chapter actually feels like it belongs in the story.
I did try to move the plot forward quite a bit here, while also setting up some things that will become more important later.
One thing I am a little worried about is how convenient it might feel that Matthias just happened to find exactly the kind of monsters he needed for his experiment. I do not want it to feel like I am simply handing him a free power-up because the plot needs him to get stronger, so I may have to tie myself into a few knots figuring out a believable reason for those creatures to be living beneath Maribor in the first place.
I also wanted to start developing Matthias's information network and show him beginning to realise that strength alone is not going to get him everywhere on the Continent. He needs people, information, connections, and eventually a way of knowing what is happening before it becomes a problem.
Another thing I wanted to explore was Matthias getting his first real look at just how uncaring this world can be toward the people at the bottom of society. He has obviously seen suffering before, but there is a difference between witnessing individual tragedy and actually seeing how deeply poverty, crime, hunger, and neglect are built into the everyday life of a city.
That is something I want to explore more as the story goes on, especially as Matthias starts becoming more involved in Maribor and the people living there.