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Curator Meltissa Jane - Estfold/Dimmik Borderlands

They followed the tracks a full thirty hours behind the foreman and his empty train. The tracks cut along the hills, weaving back and forth, on a gradual uphill slope. They couldn't walk directly on the tracks, or they'd be spotted instantly by a patrol or when they neared the mine. They walked along the hills instead, near the tops, where the ground wasn't too steep, but with their heads well below the ridgeline. The going was difficult at times, and it was slow, but they were in no danger of losing their way.

They spent days in that rough terrain, crossing it at a fraction of the speed they could have by using the rails. The area was once riddled with mines until a drop in demand and a rise in monsters made mining unprofitable. The line they followed at a distance was the main artery that once served all the mines in the area. Sidelines split off, sometimes south toward Dimmik, or sometimes north toward Estfold. Despite the many possible routes, they never faltered. Even from a height, it was clear which path was maintained and which wasn't. They simply followed the line where the ties were even and the rail unbroken. Eventually, they reached a point where the arterial line west was in disrepair, and the side track going north was whole. That was the turn-off that took them back across the border into Estfold.

Twice, they feared they would be discovered. The first time was when the tracks crossed a deep ravine. They didn't spy any watchers, and going around the obstacle could take days, so they elected to risk the bridge. Cadmius led her down the hill, picking a careful trail as much for the horses' sakes as their own. He took them close to the bridgehead and then behind a rockfall to watch and listen.

It was good they didn't step onto the tracks just then. They heard steps in the distance, only one at first, hard hooves on gravel and rail ties. Cadmius calmed their horses, who were trained to be quiet and still when ordered. They waited for what seemed an exceptionally long interval for the sounds to pass them by. As the hooves grew closer, they caught other sounds with it: a chorus of raspy breaths and the shuffling of exhausted feet. There could have been a dozen of them, or only three. Meltissa couldn't tell from behind a wall of rocks, and Cadmius's emphatic grip on her arm told her not to look. 

When the unseen adversaries came by the point in the road nearest Meltissa and Cadmius's hideout, the wind brought to them a rank stench of unwashed bodies, wild animals, and something worse. A part of her, deep and primitive, urged her to flee. Every nerve she had wanted to scream, get up, and run. Only Cadmius's hand kept her in place. Meltissa shut her eyes tight enough to make phantom lights appear, while she waited for evil to pass.

And pass it did, with the thud-thud noise of heavy hooves on wood echoing along the ravine as they crossed the nearby bridge. She discovered she was shaking, her skin slick with sweaty fear. She dared to open her eyes and saw Cadmius, slightly raised from his crouched position, with the eyeglass pressed to his face. Having satisfied himself, he wordlessly handed it to her. She stared at the telescope, unsure if she wanted to see. But he pressed it on her, so she took the instrument and stood just high enough to peer over the rockfall and look. 

They were faced away from her, so she could only see their backs, but they seemed much like the previous group on the train. These were closer and easier to make out in the telescope's narrow view. It was another of the mountain rams, the curve-horned sheep Dimmik was famous for, made monstrously large. The rider was in a similar mold as the earlier foreman, but, as it was closer to her, easier to make out. Its muzzle was misshapen, and when it turned its head, she saw it had two eyes on one side of its face. What she thought was a dark cloak from a distance seemed less like cloth and more like night itself, fanned out to protect the creature underneath from the powers of light. Behind it straggled a dozen humanoid figures. They were dressed in rags inundated with stone dust, and most had bare feet. Their gray skin and lank hair spoke of many days spent underground. Each was armed with a rough spear tipped in jagged bone.

The two watchers stuck to their posts and waited a long time, until the sounds of the troop's passage were gone, and then a good long while after.

"What was that?" she asked in a low voice, when she dared to speak.

"An evolved mana beast," he whispered back. "Intelligent. Cruel. Capable of enslaving people."

Meltissa's class was Scholar, but in her youth, she had explored the northern continent with her Battlemage friend and a coterie of associates. She knew about evolved mana beasts.  "I can see that, but I've never felt that fear effect before. Do you know its type?"

"I didn't see any ears or fur, so it might be reptilian. I'm more worried that there are two of them. That means there could be a leader."

One intelligent monster was bad enough, especially if they had the power to coerce or enslave people. But she had never heard of such monsters forming gangs, taming monsters, and enslaving people.

"Yeah," he grunted as he stood. "I'm breaking church and imperial seals by telling you this, but I think you need to know. It wasn't mana beasts that defeated us in Garem-Da. It was a kingdom of mana beasts. For some reason, the leaders never crossed the water into Restoration, but they sent enough monsters to drive us out. If they have a foothold here, then I'm worried."

"We can't move yet," Meltissa decided. The most important thing to do now was to give another report, with her best estimation of their position. That way, if they died, then the army still had a clue where to look. She could guess where they were, based on the length of time they had traveled, but measurement beat estimation.

Cadmius understood what she wanted without being told, and dug into his magically expanded saddlebags to withdraw a hard wooden case. He pulled from it a compass, a rod of stiff metal, and a book. While Meltissa composed her report, he searched for a span of level ground soft enough to drive in the rod. He checked it twice to ensure it was plumb, then used his compass to draw a line pointing south from the stake. He was relieved to find the rod's shadow a few inches short of high noon – it meant they hadn't lost their chance to give an accurate location.

His location kit came with a wind-up clock, but Cadmius didn't try to keep it synchronized with Imperial time. Its main purpose was to accurately tick off minutes. He wound up the clock to its recommended tension, but didn't release the catch. It wasn't time yet.

Meltissa sent her report from her tablet to her liaison with the IEF and alerted them to an impending location request. The tablet system's map-and-pin system was unreliable around the fringe townships to begin with, and the two of them were beyond even that point. The only way to get an accurate location was to measure it themselves.

As the sun approached its highest point and the shadow shrank to its shortest, Cadmius released the clock's latch and called out, "begin," which Meltissa relayed over the tablet. The recipient marked the exact time on a clock synchronized with imperial time and relayed the answer back to her. At every minute mark, Cadmius pushed a small divoted stake into the ground where the rod's shadow ended. He did this minute by minute, until the length of the shadow was growing instead of shrinking, indicating they had passed noon.

"Fifteen and a quarter minutes," he said at last, and set to measuring the angle from the point where the shadow was shortest to the top of the rod. The exact time of noon gave their longitude. The angle to the sun gave their latitude. The IEF referenced the numbers in their charts and sent back a set of coordinates which, if the measurements were precise enough, should be within a few miles.

Meltissa, to nobody's surprise, had to double-check their work with her own copy of the sun charts before she was satisfied.

"Sinter," she said with a slight moan. "That's the nearest town. I thought we traveled farther than that. It's been a while since I tromped through so much wilderness."

She sent her confirmation and signed off, and they resumed their careful march. They used the bridge and then moved away from the tracks at their first opportunity. It wouldn't pay to be seen or, worse, get into a fight when they were supposed to be scouting.

Their second scare happened shortly after they discovered the mine. They left the horses downslope while they crept to the top of a hill to look over the other side, where industrious sounds reached them from below. The tracks went around the hill they were on, and ran up to the mine from another direction. From their position, they could see much of the above-ground operation.

It was a pit, carved into the mountainside like a god had scooped out a handful of the world. Occasional tunnels formed dark holes in the pit walls. There was no sign of the half-dead slave workers or their darkness-cloaked drivers. However, the monster rams were conspicuous. They pulled carts of ore around the mine and powered grinders that turned large chunks of ore into crushed rock. The crushed rock was lifted by a conveyor belt and dropped into waiting train cars.

All the workers they could see appeared normal, even through the telescope. They were dirty from their work, but they weren't barefoot, and they looked healthy. As evening shadows darkened the mine, a bell sounded, and they left, walking in a large group, talking rough and loud. They piled their tools in a shed and wandered down a road, presumably toward their homes. The animals, meanwhile, were set free, without any attempt to pen them up or care for them in any way.

Meltissa and Cadmius debated in whispers whether it was better to wait and see what the night would bring or carry on to Sinter and investigate the town while pretending not to know strange activities were afoot. They were still deciding when a sound from Cadmius's horse alerted them to the presence of strangers. They stalked downhill to their mounts and, not seeing anyone near, Meltissa relaxed. Perhaps another animal was near, and the horses smelled them.

A shift in the wind brought with it a rank smell.

"Weapons," said Cadmius, drawing his sword. With his free hand, he untied his shield from where he kept it behind his saddle. Since they were scouting, he wasn't fully armored, but his leathers were reinforced with steel in vital places.

Meltissa drew her pistols from Personal Librarian, praxes that could duplicate a Rock Shot spell with some added elemental energy mixed in, ice in one hand, light in the other. "We're riding out of here," she decided.

"Don't," Cadmius countered her, which was rare for him. "They want to drive us."

In the descending gloom of night, figures with spears separated from shadowy trees and converged toward them. Meltissa didn't wait, but started firing, alternating one hand with the other. The weapons were quiet, but the conjured missiles made plenty of noise when they hit something. The enemies came at them silently, their limbs uncertain, but their spears looked deadly enough. She hit one in the chest and another in the guts. The first fell, but the second only staggered. Her next round was a near miss, and her fourth was a headshot. The brain-dead enemy went down.

Cadmius stood where he was, close enough to protect her. "They don't feel pain," he observed, as calm as if they were planning their next campsite.

"That's never good," she agreed, and fired a few more times. The closer they got, the easier it was to aim. But there was an obvious downside. "They're about to overrun us," she said nervously.

"They're not. Don't worry about the center. I've got it."

Meltissa got several rapid shots off at the spearmen on the far right, obliterating three heads, before the bulk of them came within reach, spearpoints first. Cadmius cut through several shafts with a single swing and caught two more points on his shield. He shouted bravely and stomped the ground, and every spearman's head turned toward him.

She took careful aim with her pistols and felled two more with headshots. One of them was a woman, which would normally have shocked her, but she was too occupied to consider it. The easiest way for her to enact violence against these people was to assume they were already dead, or very nearly so, and their execution was a mercy.

Cadmius blocked and parried several thrusts, shifted aside with two short steps to get a better angle, and loosed a blast of force from his shield that knocked down all his remaining opponents. He didn't follow through with killing blows, but preferred to let Meltissa shoot them.

"Found you!" he yelled and stepped in front of her with his shield held high as a pair of spikes clanged off the metal. Then he was thirty feet away, dashing between trees, shield and sword pointed forward. She heard sword strike flesh and shield break bone, followed by an inhuman hiss.

Motion on the ground in front of her reminded Meltissa she had enemies to deal with, and she shot them all, starting with the ones who tried to stand up first. Their heads fractured with a crack, and half-exploded with meaty wet splashes.

Cadmius sauntered back to the horses, wiped his blade clean, and tossed aside the cloth. "Reptilian," he said, "but nothing I recognize. The body hasn't fully dissipated yet, if you want to look at it."

He frowned at the blade where the mana beast's corrupted flesh had caused a minute amount of pitting. "Don't touch it." From where she stood, Meltissa could see a patch of wilting plants. The area of corruption was spreading around the body. 

Suddenly, she was sick. She hated fighting people, and she hated mana beasts. Cadmius didn't try to help her or hold her hair, thank the gods. He just handed her a canteen of water when the sickness passed.

"I found the pit traps they tried to drive us into. We should be careful around here – there might be more. Do you want to go into Sinter, or skip it and meet up with the army?"

"We're going to Sinter," she declared. "Let's find the main road and approach from there."