Quinn brought us through the winding halls of Castle Cael. Seeing it from the outside, I'd expected something more decrepit, but the interior of the ancient redoubt turned out to be clean and well furnished. We passed by empty suits of armor, polished and festooned with the Falconer sigil, rich tapestries, and various forms of art spread across the castle's many corridors.

Lord Orson, it seemed, was something of a collector.

I lingered by one work. The painting, tall as a man and dominating one wall between two pulled curtains, showed a knight brandishing a broken spear as a dread wyrm threatened her, curved teeth flickering with sickly flame.

The image didn't seem fashioned to glorify. The knight looked old, tired, and afraid. The dragon was an enormous thing, its jaws large enough to swallow the warrior — no larger than my thumb in the image — whole. The beast was a thing all of cancerous scale and bursting horn, wreathed in fire and the souls of its victims, stylized by the artist as disintegrating skeletal shapes.

I inhaled deeply, and for a moment found I could smell the sulfurous reek of it, hear the painful grinding of its ill-formed mass.

I had never laid eyes on a dragon. It was a memory of older knights, echoing through the power sewn into me.

Quinn made a noise of impatience. "No time to dally. You'll have plenty of time to enjoy the art, I'm sure."

Catrin had noticed my pause as well. "You alright?" She muttered.

"Fine," I said. I breathed in deep, working to refocus myself on the present reality.

As we went further on, I noticed a distinct lack of guards. Besides the empty armors, there were no true knights or sentries wearing the Falconer sigil. The castle lay eerily empty, for all it seemed regularly maintained by servants. I didn't see any of those, either.

The sense of dread I'd felt below had faded as well. Even still, I remained tense with nerves.

Quinn eventually brought us to a large set of doors. Here he stopped, nodding to the ostentatious portal.

"Dining hall. Baron's other guests are in there, waiting on his pleasure. And here, I must leave you."

He gave a mock little bow, to which Catrin rolled her eyes. She went to the doors, though Quinn gestured for my attention before I followed.

"Not going to ask your story, stranger. All the Baron's guests got one, and they're all fit to give me bad sleep."

I grunted a noncommittal reply. I knew what this man was, and didn't like lingering so close to him. With my not quite natural senses, I could detect the faint odor of rotting bones and grave soil on him, for all he looked like a well groomed fop.

Quinn glanced at my guide, lifting an eyebrow. "Odd to see her taking a risk for a stranger. You one of her regulars or something?"

I frowned. "What do you mean?"

Quinn's eyebrows lifted further. "What, you mean you don't know?"

"Hey," Catrin said from the doors. She'd cracked one open, and waved for me to follow. "This thing's heavy, come on."

I left the Mistwalker behind to follow her, putting his words out of my mind. Catrin ushered me into the dining hall.

It was a theatrical space, meant to express the power and lavish taste of the castle's lord. A tall flight of stairs led up to an upper balcony set just below a row of narrow windows paned in foggy glass, reflecting light from the chandeliers hung from the high ceiling. A long table dominated the room.

The baron's guests waited for us inside. Not all of them were human.

As Catrin and I entered, a silence fell over the hall of the sort that occurs in the midst of an interrupted discussion. More than half a dozen figures sat at seats around the long table, their arrangement seeming random and casual, many of the chairs left unoccupied. A score or more could have been comfortably seated there, and the hall itself was large enough for a more formal gathering, making the room feel cavernous and empty. Shadows clung deep to every corner.

Eyes turned to me as the door shut at my back. Catrin paused next to me, eyeing the gathering with a cool indifference, though I didn't miss how she went tense at my side and didn't approach the table. I stood there, draped in my red cloak, waiting for this strange drama to play out.

"Catrin!" A shrill, hissing voice cut the brooding silence. It came from an old woman clad in an archaic gown of deep maroons and velvety blacks. A high collar supported by metal spikes enclosed her long neck, making her seem like some regal vulture. An elaborate headdress crafted from ivory secured her thin silver hair.

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"Lillian," Catrin replied neutrally, sniffing.

The old woman sat near the head of the table, just by an empty seat very much like a throne. She leaned forward, revealing almost black teeth. "Why, my dear, I thought you'd decided these meetings bored you. What brought… ah, and who is this?"

Her eyes, which had sclera yellow as a ghoul's teeth and irises so faded I couldn't tell their original color, flickered to me. Her nostrils flared beneath a hooked nose, as though she were inhaling my scent or preparing to charge.

"This is Alken," Catrin said, waving a hand at me. "He's here to see the baron." She glanced around, frowning. "Where is his lordship, anyway?"

"Fashionably late." Lillian enunciated the words with a distracted air, her eyes having never left me. I felt a distinct discomfort from those bloodshot orbs. They were corpse eyes, even more than Vaughn's or Darla's had been. "Why don't you take a seat, dear? You and your… friend."

Before we could, a snort came from a man sitting across the table from the old woman in the red gown. He was clad in simpler garb, all greens and browns like a hunter. He even wore a tricorn low over his shaggy blond hair, shadowing his eyes. He had pushed his chair back and kicked his feet up on the table.

"Hold on a breath." The hunter glared at me with one piercing hazel eye through the shadow of his pointed hat. "I wasn't told there would be any other voices at this council. I know who everyone in this room represents, except this one."

He nodded to me. The rest of the guests stirred, including the woman at my side.

Two figures made into twins by their matching black robes and cowls whispered to one another, the hems of their hoods nearly pressing together. A dark-haired, heavily bearded man in sooty armor at the far end of the table from Lillian ignored everyone, focusing intently on the plate of meat in front of him. He ate loudly and messily, heedless of the hush that'd fallen over the room.

He'd been eating since I walked in, and hadn't even seemed to take a moment to catch his air.

There were others. A thing out of nightmare sat in the deeper shadows opposite the table from the door. He had gray-green skin and a malformed aspect, with a lumpy head that merged with a neck that vanished into a formal aristocratic outfit very much too small for him. The ensemble was held together by crude stitchwork and ill-matched pieces of salvaged cloth, for all he looked like some eccentric aristocrat. His hands ended in four long, gnarled fingers tipped in green nails, and green were the glassy orbs of his eyes as they peered at me from the gloom.

Instead of buttons or lace, his bright doublet was sewn with pieces of bone.

An elf? Some lord of Briar, or perhaps Bane? Or a changeling?

Either way, he flashed sharp teeth at me in a threatening snarl.

Monsters. In that room I stood surrounded by monsters. Even, I suspected, of the human variety.

A rumbling, basso growl rippled through the room. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and my muscles went tight with instinctive fear. A heavy foot came down on the floor, large enough to make the stones of the ancient castle shudder, as something enormous emerged from the shadows between two columns.

This one had not been sitting at the table, but lurking beyond the chandelier light. I turned to face it as its bulk strode forward.

Calling it big would be like calling a redwood tall. A hulking mass of muscle more than nine feet in height approached me with steady, thunderous steps. Its skin was the color of old rust, and it was clad all in heavy furs and hides, a few pieces of metal sewn here or there. They seemed more decorative than functional. Skulls, some human, hung from a heavy belt.

The hulk's brutish face wasn't quite human. It had a simian aspect, with a slightly elongated muzzle and a sloping forehead. Its features emerged from a neck set lower on its torso than a human's. Deep-set yellow eyes — piss yellow, ringed in deeper orange — burned with a manic, violent intelligence.

Catrin shifted away from me, having gone utterly silent when the beast had emerged. I took a step back as well. I couldn't help it. The fear I felt was primal, instinctive, woven into the fabric of my blood and bones.

Prey animal fear. There were few things in all the Alderes more deadly than a war ogre.

A city garrison worth of muscle and pent up rage loomed over me, wrought in dark laboratories to dominate ancient wars. Yellow eyes burned like the cores of candle flames, scorching me with malice.

The ogre leaned forward and sniffed. Then it growled again.

"He smells of sun stained groves and gilded trees." His voice rumbled in my chest, more something I felt than heard. Again, that rippling growl filled the room. "He reeks of elf."

The room became very still. My attention remained fixed firmly on the monster in front of me.

I didn't mean monster in the poetic sense. Ogres are, to put it mildly, nightmares. Bred in dark lands in dark days in distant edges of the world beyond the shores of Urn, they had been made for a singular purpose — to kill, and to do so without restraint or mercy. They lived for a very long time, every year of that centuries long life dedicated to the arts of violence.

Worse, some of the skulls the ogre wore belonged to its own kind. Its craggy exterior, marred by countless scars, hinted at a long and terrible succession of battles it had won.

I sensed this particular ogre was old. No runt of the litter.

"Elf friend," the ogre accused. It bared wolf's teeth the color of iron. "Spy."

I've been in danger many times in my life. I have escaped death by the narrowest of margins, danced with it, befriended it, even gone beyond its threshold.

Few times have I been as near to it as in that room.

All eyes fixed on me, bright and predatory within the deep shadows of the dining hall. Sweat beaded on the back of my neck, even as I remained very aware of how injured I was, how little strength I had left.

Foolish. Coming here had been foolish. I hadn't expected to meet an entire gathering of rebel leaders, for that had to be what this was. Remnants of the enemy who hadn't been slain or cowed during the war. Those who continued to defy the rule of the Accorded Realms, the Aureate Church, and the remaining Seydii elves who'd survived the Fall.

Recusants. My enemies, one and all.

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