Mudflower Nights

This story is set during the events of Jewel of the Endless Erg.

Krita’s job was nine-tenths boredom.

She was absolutely fine with that. Boredom was good, when you were a guard. Especially when you were working on a Yldivan merchant fleet on a multi-year mission to another continent.

Unfortunately, every tenth day decided to be interesting. 

Krita hated interesting days, unless it was her day off.

Most of those tenth days were a pretty dull and crass type of interesting. Break up a fight between merchants. Break up a fight between sailors. Break up a fight between merchants and sailors. Rescue some idiot who fell over the side of the ship.

When they were in port, the only real difference was the people in question were usually drunk. 

Especially the archmage. Veysa Stormcap might be professional, capable, and terrifying at sea, but the instant they tied up at dock, the weather mage would be finding her way into the nearest dockside tavern to drink her woes away.

And, somehow, Krita always ended up with archmage-wrangling duty.

Still, nine in ten of her interesting days were better than the tenth.

That last day— the one in ten of the one in ten— had an unfortunate tendency towards blood.

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The Gelid mudflats were a nasty, awful place, in Krita’s opinion. Largely due to, well, the mud.

The scholars claimed that the seas of Anastis had been hundreds of feet lower once, and that the mudflats had been part of a great river valley stretching from the heart of the great continent. Its floodplain stretched fifty leagues in each direction.

Now, though, it was a spike into the heart of a continent, where twice a day, apocalyptic floods raged back and forth over what had once been a river. Walls of water raced a dozens and dozens of leagues inland when the tide came in, and raced back out when it left. The old floodplain hardly rose higher than sea level until deep within the heart of Gelid.

When the sea was there, the water was filled with catastrophic currents, whirlpools, and undertows, where the seawater battled the great river flowing below. Only ships accompanied by water archmages could safely navigate it.

When the sea left, all that was left was a great, stinking plain of salt mud, with a shattered river cutting through it. Stranded fish died in the sun or clung to life in mud pools. Ocean fish died painfully in the freshwater of the river. Scavenging drakes and birds fed on the bounty in great shrieking clouds.

The river that cut into the mudflats was the greatest river in the world, and it didn’t have a name. At least, not once it reached the mudflats.

Even deep inland, its width was best measured in leagues, not feet. There, it had a name. It had a thousand names, ten thousand. A dozen names in every language. Its whims shaped civilizations, ways of life, history itself. Wars were fought entirely on islands within the current, never even coming in sight of the shore. It was more an inland sea than a river.

On the mudflats, the greedy ocean took everything from the river. Even its name. 

And it left behind detritus from the deep. Not just dead fish, but building-sized sea monsters, ancient shipwrecks, giant mats of seaweed, and other, stranger things.

No one should live in such a horrid place.

So obviously huge numbers of people did.

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The mudflowers were the only reason anyone could live on Gelid’s mudflats. 

Krita thought that mudflower was a horrible name for the only good thing about the mudflats.

The largest of them were as much as half a league across at the base, though most were only a fraction of that size. The immense, stationary organisms, neither plant nor animal, stretched hundreds of feet into the air. They resembled nothing so much as gargantuan alien pinecones, albeit squatter in profile. Their translucent flesh could be found in every color but yellow, and there were few sights more majestic than watching the sun shine through the colossal petals and their dangling tendrils as they slowly shifted and moved about.

Scholars claimed that there were ancient mudflowers buried in the seafloor, far past the mouth of the mudflats. That the mudflowers were one of the last vestiges of the world that existed before the labyrinths flooded the world with humans, dragons, sphinxes, and ten thousand other species. That, in ancient days, before humanity’s arrival on Anastis, before the land was half-drowned, the mudflats still existed, and that as the seas rose, the mudflowers migrated inland.

It was, frankly, amazing that people had ever thought to colonize the mudflowers towering above the mud and the floods. Not least because they were carnivorous.

Well, omnivorous, really. Not only did the mudflowers draw energy from the sun, and mana from the aether, the hanging tendrils scooped up endless stranded fish, dead seabeasts, and mats of seaweed. Not to mention anything unlucky enough or foolish enough to swim against the mudflowers when the tide was in. They’d happily carry incautious people up to be absorbed into the petals too.

So it was a bit mad that people had ever thought to live atop their petals. Someone must have been stranded on the mud flat, centuries ago, and been forced to take shelter from an incoming tide on some of the higher-up petals.

There were tricks to it that had been mastered over the years. The tops of the petals were safe to stand on, even build on, if you found a way to stabilize them and stop them from moving. The bigger petals were big enough and strong enough to support whole buildings, and alchemists and mages had long-since found ways to secure them. Pruning the tendrils hanging down from the petals above you was difficult, but not impossible, and had become a respectable profession in the mudflats. Then you just had to carve a spiraling road up the mudflower, in the flexible but tough outer flesh.

It didn’t really hurt the mudflower— most of their sustenance came from their lower, not their upper, petals, and the carved roads were hardly noticeable to an organism that impossibly huge. Some of the mudflowers even hosted proper cities on their petals above the floodline.

Argauta was home to sixty thousand souls, with enough docking petals for a dozen full trade fleets. Goods from all across Gelid could be found there, spices and spells unlike anything on Ithos. You could make a fortune in just a day’s idle browsing in the spice markets— what was common and forgettable in Gelid was rare and exotic in Ithos.

There was, however, one product that would never sell in Ithos.

Mudwine.

It was a legendarily disgusting liqour, made via even more disgusting means, and no one with any sense— or the coin to afford anything else— drank it.

So, of course, Veysa Stormcap delighted in chasing unconsciousness with it.

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Krita had been slowly nursing the juice of some over-sweet Gelid fruit as Veysa drank herself into oblivion from a clay jar of mudwine in the little tavern, the Rebroken Drum. It had a small flower petal to itself, set far above the bulk of Argauta’s population. Annoying as wind-blown sand to walk all the way up to, but its remoteness and small size made things easier for Krita— crowds were nothing but stress for bodyguards.

“’s a storm comin’,” Veysa muttered, then swigged from her mug again.

“So you’ve mentioned,” their translator Ren said. “A dozen times.”

Veysa held up an unsteady finger. “Wait for it,” she said.

There was a long, awkward pause, then thunder rolled over the tavern. A few of the customers looked up, but most ignored it. The bartender didn’t even react, just kept washing an emptied wine-bottle. There was good money in reselling them. Glass was expensive here, unlike in the Endless Erg, where glass mages and sand were more plentiful. 

Krita didn’t know how Veysa always knew when thunder was on its way— the weather mage only had wind and water affinities, not lightning affinities.

One wealthy-looking merchant flinched at the thunder, though his four bodyguards didn’t react.

Krita adjusted her thin cloth cap and eyed the merchant suspiciously, wondering what someone like him was doing in a bar this run-down. He didn’t seem to be slumming like Veysa— she’d wager money that the man was here for a reason.

One of the merchant’s bodyguards caught her eye and gave her a suspicious look. Krita grimaced, shook her head, and looked away.

Some bodyguards bought into the whole professional cordiality thing. Krita didn’t. The overwhelming majority of assassination were carried out by bodyguards, thanks, if nothing else, to simple proximity to the victims. Krita had only a handful of underlings she trusted to guard Veysa, and them not much. She certainly didn’t trust someone else’s bodyguards.

Krita turned away, stopping herself from rubbing the hollow hilt of her dagger, and kept running her gaze across the room.

Off in one corner sat a small figure, tucked away behind a deep hood. Dark hair trailed out of it, but whoever it was sat at the wrong angle for Krita to see their face. She did note, however, that the material of their cloak seemed to be some sort of silk— spider, perhaps? It seemed a little bulky for worm silk.

Two wealthy individuals slumming in a run-down hole like the Remended Drum was an odd coincidence, especially when one of them was Veysa, who was genuinely just looking to get drunk. Three was… a little alarming.

Krita frowned, but moved her gaze along. 

Her gaze lingered a while on a whipcord-thin battlemage. The man had several copper daggers and dozens of copper needles sheathed on the outside of his clothes, as well as a thick copper chain slung around his shoulder and torso several times like a bandolier.  

She spotted the sigil of a prominent local mercenary company pinned to the copper mage, and her frown turned into a scowl. Krita despised mercenaries— they would, almost universally, gladly turn on their employers if they thought the profits would be better that way, and even when they stayed loyal, they would flee the battlefield if it looked even remotely like it might go against them. Krita despised the stories told about mercenaries even more— most of them seemed to revolve around mercenaries who were strictly honorable, wouldn’t abandon a contract for any reason, and would never betray their patrons.

Krita had never once met that sort of mercenary in real life. She’d met some who seemed to want to be decent men, but it wasn’t a profession that allowed decency.

A more self-reflective part of Krita had, on quite a few occasions, noted that her own role of bodyguard wasn’t that far removed from being a mercenary, and that she was often forced to be less of a good person than she would prefer as well.

The mercenary caught her eye, and met her scowl with one of his own.

Krita grunted, looked away, and adjusted her cap again.

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The stages of one of the archmage’s benders were quite predicable to Krita by now. The length of each of the individual stages varied with the strength of the alcohol Veysa was consuming, but otherwise the stages came in a precise, reliable order.

The storm was still raging when Veysa finished the stage where she muttered sadly to herself about her wife and two husbands, back in Yldive, and moved on to unconsciousness.

Normally Krita would carry Veysa back to the ship at this point, but she’d rather not descend the sides of a carnivorous giant land jellyfish tree or whatever the storming mudflowers were supposed to be during the middle of a storm. She loved her hat, but its thin cloth wasn’t much good in this kind of rain.

Besides, Ren was decent enough company. He wasn’t actually needed as a translator— Krita spoke Samnic, the local trade language, quite fluently. She’d been on a half-dozen multi-year trade expeditions to Gelid over her career working for Yldivan trading concerns, and had picked up almost as many languages. She didn’t speak any of the dozen or so other common languages in the mudflats, but given the dominance of the Samn people in the mudflower cities, she didn’t need to. Everyone else learned Samnic.

Ren didn’t know Krita knew Samnic, though. It was an old diplomat’s trick— pretending not to know a language and needing to hire a translator was a good way to make others underestimate you and to give you more time to think during the translation process. It was a great trick for merchants and bodyguards as well.

Not least because it was a great way to know if you could trust translators and other local hirelings.

Ren, thankfully, had proved nothing if not reliable. Over-proud, certainly, but since his pride was centered on his honor, Krita counted it as a point in his favor. Even better, after the first time she politely turned down his advances, he didn’t keep pressing. 

And he was pleasant company, which didn’t hurt.

Best of all, he didn’t distrust her due to her affinity. Or, at least, he didn’t distrust her due to what she had told him her affinity was.

Krita didn’t regret her decision to wait out the storm until the glowcrystals went out, a moment after a burly laborer came in the door.

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The instant the Rebroken Drum went dark, Krita immediately launched to her feet and drew two of her hollow-hilted daggers. Finely-ground powder exploded from the narrow holes in the hilts, then surrounded Veysa, Ren, and Krita herself in a cloud that would warn her if anyone tried to move through it— not to mention giving anyone approaching them a really bad time. She sent another powder flying out of pouches hidden in her clothes, spreading it across the room in a delicate web of strands floating through the air.

She usually would have been careful to keep both powders spread out in the air, so the clouds would be as invisible as possible, but she focused on covering as much of the tavern as possible first, with the lights off.

For the moment, Krita ignored the other three powders she had hidden around her person.

Krita heard the sound of breaking glass, but ignored it as she scanned for threats. The merchant’s guards had drawn their swords, but they weren’t trying to do anything with them. The rest of the patrons in the tavern were shouting and yelling. 

Krita caught the sound of a choked-off scream for a moment, but before she could pin down its direction, the whole tavern began shaking. There was a cacophony of rending wood, breaking glass, and screams, and Krita was thrown off her feet. Debris went flying through her cloud, and she could feel Ren thrown off his feet as well.

The shaking ended as quickly as it began, and only a moment after, it ended, and the lights came back on.

The instant the light came back on, Krita spread out her cloud and webs of powder to make them less visible. She caught flickers of red from the corner of her eye as she did so.

Krita noticed five things in short order after that.

First, that the floor she was lying on was tilted upwards slightly, descending towards the stem of the mudflower. 

Second, as she rose to her feet, she noticed that the half of the tavern that extended out farther onto the petal had been broken apart and crumpled, with the floor closer to vertical than horizontal. About half of the nailed-down furniture had torn loose and fallen into a great heap, with patrons groaning and half buried in it. Other patrons still clung to the furniture that hadn’t torn loose, dangling or perching from what was now effectively a wall.

The third thing Krita noticed was the corpse of the wealthy merchant, sprawled out across his table with his throat cut, and his panicked guards menacing the rest of the room with their swords.

The fourth thing Krita noticed was the fact that the storm sounded muted and distant now.

The fifth thing Krita noticed was Veysa Stormcap.

She was still passed out entirely. The tavern ripping effectively in half hadn’t even disturbed her.

Ren rose to his feet next to Krita. 

“Oh, that is not good. That is very, very not good,” Ren said, his accent growing thicker than usual out of stress.

“What’s not?” Krita asked. “The fact that there’s a dead man, or the fact that the tavern just broke?”

Ren gave her a panicked look. “The petal just closed,” he said. “We’re trapped.”

Krita rolled her eyes. 

Trapped in a broken tavern with an unknown murderer. Today, it seemed, was cursed to be one of her especially interesting days.

“That’s not the worst of it, though,” Ren said. “The dead merchant? He’s a dragonback merchant.”

Krita’s eyes went wide at that.

Trapped in a broken tavern with a murderer, with a dragon that would be out for revenge the instant it found out about its partner’s death— and who would be unlikely to be particularly worried about who got in its way.

Definitely- and unfortunately- one of her more interesting days.

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Dragon society was, in one vital way, deeply different on Gelid than on Ithos. There were still rampaging draconic great powers, of course, elder wyrms and scaled archmages conquering cities and warring for territory. Flights of dragons still sought their own territory, nesting in weirs high in the mountains, magically-grown giant trees, or even in mudflowers like Argauta. Lone dragons joined the armies of city-states and nations still.

But there was another role for dragons to fit into on Gelid.

Merchants.

Over the centuries, a small network of dragon merchants had spread across the continent. They held little territory of their own. They had no subjects, only employees. They didn’t even have a strict hierarchy or organization among themselves, just a strict set of customs that had arisen over the centuries.

Yet they were, without question, the single mightiest economic force on Gelid. No one interfered with their business, lest they suddenly lose access to the draconic trade network. The dragon merchants tolerated small tariffs and fees, but would simply refuse to trade anywhere that passed those limits.

There were limits on their economic power, of course— dragons couldn’t feasibly carry bulk goods, so they tended to focus on higher-value goods, like spices, wine, ceramics, alchemical goods, enchantments, and countless luxury goods from across the continent. The dragon trade network was still prodigiously wealthy, though, beyond any organization on the Ithonian continent- not least because Gelid dwarfed Ithos in size.

By joining the merchants, by getting the merchant patterns engraved, and eventually inlaid, into their scales, the dragons were declaring themselves outside the games of the mighty— withdrawing from contention for territory or rulership. 

Each of them carried members of the smaller races on their backs with them, to act as their agents, to help load and unload their trade goods off their backs. And, leading their crews, they had a partner— a human, gorgon, or other smaller sentient.

A dragonback merchant.

And there was one rule, one dragon merchant custom that was better known than any other.

Kill a dragon’s human partner, and the dragon was going to get revenge.

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The two shades of red powder coiled throughout the room— the less dangerous everywhere, the more dangerous closer to Krita, Ren, and Veysa. Krita made sure to keep it away from eyes, noses, and mouths.

She only needed a single spellform to control it all— one that had taken her years to develop. Krita’s affinity was one that was used for combat surprisingly often, but few took it in the direction that she had, so she’d been forced to adapt the spellform in question from a sand affinity spellform. The process of adapting it for her affinity had been exhausting, frustrating, and regularly painful.

The spellform, in essence, directly linked her affinity sense to her control of the powder, allowing her to do far more independent tasks at once with it than a normal mass-manipulation spellform that applied the will directly to the substance of an affinity.

Next to her, Ren frantically tried to translate everything that was going on— the shouting of the dead merchant’s guards, the panicked confusion of the other customers, and the angry yelling of the bartender. 

Krita ignored most of it as she pieced together the scene.

Usually, she wouldn’t even try to get involved with this sort of nonsense— she’d just take Veysa and get clear of the whole mess. Between the petal closing and the inevitable wrath of the dragon, though, the only chance Krita had to keep her charge alive was making sure that the culprit was found— or, at least, that someone believable was framed.

The dragonback merchant’s throat had been cut, deeply and cleanly. There were no other injuries on him, or signs of struggle. 

The dead merchant’s guards had drawn their weapons or were wielding showy magic— two held swords, one had balls of flame hovering above his hands, and their leader had torn hundreds of jagged wooden splinters from the wreckage of the bar, and had them hovering in an aggressive formation above his head.

One of the four of them was the most probable culprit— always suspect the bodyguard first. She couldn’t spot any obvious clues, though.

Her gaze wandered over to the mercenary next. 

The thin copper mage had been seated in the part of the tavern that had broken in half and been lifted vertically. He hadn’t fallen, though— he’d crafted himself hand and footholds by burying his copper needles and daggers into the wall, and his chain swam defensively through the air in front of him, like some bizarre floating snake.

He definitely had the capability to have pulled it off— he could easily have sent one of his daggers flying over to the merchant when the lights went off, but why would he have stayed? It beggared belief that the petal closing had been a coincidence— Krita would eat a hat if the killer hadn’t been responsible.

She wouldn’t eat her hat, it was back at the ship, and anyhow, she liked it too much. She’d eat someone’s hat, though.

Krita looked away from the mercenary before he could spot her staring. She attached grains of red powder to each of his knives, needles, and links of copper chain, though, so she could track them all.

Regardless of who the killer was, it didn’t make sense that they would trap themselves. Maybe they’d only meant to disrupt the glow crystals, and whatever effect they’d used to do that had unintentionally made the petal close?

Unfortunately, Krita hadn’t the slightest clue how glow crystals worked, whether they were produced by alchemy, enchantment, or both. And she certainly didn’t know what would make a mudflower petal close. Used on a large enough scale, though, something like that could potentially destroy whole mudflower towns and cities, though.

She recalled that someone had entered just before things went dark— a burly laborer. She glanced over to see if he was still in the tavern— maybe he’d been responsible, and ducked out the door before the petal closed?

But no, he was still there, looking around frantically, as though searching for someone.

Krita scowled, and moved on to her next suspect, the slender rich person with the silk cloak. 

Said suspect was just picking themselves out of a pile of broken timbers, holding one arm close to her side. She was young, frightened-looking, and beautiful.

Krita, the bodyguards, and the mercenary all tensed up when the young noble cried out and started running across the tavern— several of the other bodyguard’s hovering splinters actually started to fly towards her before the bodyguard contained himself.

A moment later, the burly laborer at the door called out too, and ran to meet the noble.

Krita rolled her eyes, and moved both of them to the bottom of the list of suspects. Rich girl falling in love with a worker, probably met him either at one of her family’s businesses or while slumming with friends. Common enough story, usually went badly, though Krita idly wished these two well.

Not well enough to remove them from the list entirely, though. She wasn’t removing anyone from the list entirely.

Krita’s biggest problem is that she didn’t know anything about the dragonback merchant, nor why anyone would want him dead enough to risk his dragon’s wrath.

It was then that grains of her red powder began to impact something in mid-air.

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“They’re saying this isn’t the first time this has happened,” Ren said.

Krita took her attention away from the sporadic mid-air impacts scattered about the room for a moment. “What?”

Ren nodded at a couple older patrons next to them he’d been speaking to. “The tavern’s called the Remended Drum because the first owner didn’t pay to upkeep the enchanted anchors keeping the petal open at the original Drum, and it broke the pub. The second owner bought the ruin, fixed it up, then when his son took it over, neglected to pay for new enchanted anchors too, and it broke again. Then he sold the ruins, and the current owner bought it, but he hasn’t exactly sunk a lot of gold into it either, which is why they’ve been going through so many new employees lately. So this is the third time this ruin’s been broken, and the expected it, which is why they all usually sit on the stemward side of the building.”

Krita grunted. “That explains it. I’d wager that the killer used some means to temporarily interfere with the glow crystals, but weren’t expecting it to mess with the decaying… anchors, you said?”

Ren just nodded.

“Do you know if the merchant’s partner is engraved or inlaid?” Krita asked.

The translator nodded. “Engraved.”

Krita breathed a minor sigh of relief at that, and adjusted her cap. Dragon merchants marked themselves by carving their scales, but they had different ranks— the bulk of the merchants merely had merchant patterns engraved into their scales, but more powerful merchant dragons— whether it be power from wealth, size, or magic— had various precious materials inlaid into the carvings in their scales. Given how many scales a dragon had, and how many they shed each year, only some of which the merchants could reasonably recover, since scales were often shed during flight, it was a truly prodigious expense. The more valuable the material was, the wealthier and more powerful the dragon merchant. Even semi-precious stones indicated an absurdly wealthy merchant— precious metals or gems belonged to the merchant equivalents of great powers.

Krita was a lethally effective bodyguard, but she doubted she had a chance against an inlaid-scale dragon merchant. Odds were still against her even with an engraved-scale one, but she at least had a chance.

She brushed those thoughts from her mind— she could worry about future threats later. She fixed her eyes on the other bodyguards, who she still judged to be the most likely suspects.

If she were planning to kill one of her charges, a situation like this would have been ideal. Crash the lights, pull off the kill, then, when the lights go on and the clientèle of the bar start fleeing, blame it on one of the escapees. 

Only they hadn’t expected the petal to fold up and trap them all.

The leader of the bodyguards noticed her staring, and barked at her in Samnic. Krita just stared at him, and waited for Ren to translate, even though she’d understood the man just fine.

Ren gave her a nervous look. “He wants to know what your affinity is.”

Krita gave the wood mage bodyguard a slow, nasty smile. “Pain,” she lied.

Though it wasn’t much of a lie.

When Ren translated, most of the eyes in the building fixed on her. She smiled broadly, and ignored the increasing number of impacts she felt against her thinly dispersed cloud of powder.

Pain mages were rare, and the overwhelming majority of them, on Gelid or Ithos, became healers, helping dampen pain during healings and surgeries.

Those that became battlemages were overwhelmingly sadistic monsters who would use any excuse to hurt others.

One of the four bodyguards leveled his sword at her, but their leader held up a hand to stop him. 

Krita widened her smile even more, and reached up to adjust her hat again. “If I’d wanted your charge dead, it would have been much messier,” she lied.

The leader glared at her, but didn’t press the matter, and turned to interrogate the mercenary.

Half the room kept their eyes on her, though. Even Ren was giving her an uneasy look, and he’d known her for weeks now.

Krita ignored that, and focused her attentions on the impacts. They were spread out widely across the bar, and she couldn’t see what, exactly, her powder was slamming against. 

So she started mapping the impacts in her head, best as she could.

As she did so, they kept growing steadily more frequent, especially towards the center of the room. 

By the time the wood mage bodyguard had finished interrogating the mercenary, Krita was absolutely confident that someone was doing the same thing as her— monitoring the whole room with a cloud of some sort of dust. Which meant they were feeling her detection cloud, just as she was feeling theirs.

It was when she realized where the other cloud was absent that she realized what she was facing.

The other cloud came nowhere near any of the bar’s glow crystals, and, in fact, the overwhelming bulk of it was hidden in shadows— under tables, behind legs, and among the ruins of the bar.

The only reason to hide a cloud from light was if the light would reflect off it. She didn’t need to worry about that, because her cloud hardly looked different from regular dust.

There were a few potential affinities that sprang to mind, but one in particular fit the bill— a type of mage that was not only infamous for their lethal clouds of particulate, but for being able to use the substance of their affinities as deadly blades as well— perfect for taking out the merchant in the dark.

Glass mages. 

Krita immediately stopped breathing and held her breath. Even unprepared, she could hold her breath far longer than most people— she put in practice regularly, both in the form of regular exercise and diving practice in the water. 

She quite often needed to hold her breath, given her true affinity. And she most certainly didn’t want to risk getting glass dust in her lungs.

Still holding her breath, Krita slowly repositioned herself, so that she wasn’t in-between Veysa and any of the battlemages she could see— she didn’t want the archmage getting hit by any crossfire when Krita acted.

The other mage’s cloud was growing more active, and Krita caught sight of glimmers as it spread farther out of the shadows.

The glass mage was onto her, and she doubted she had long until they finished mapping out her own dust cloud. Unfortunately, their dust cloud seemed evenly distributed across most of the bar, unlike hers, giving the glass mage the advantage.

Krita’s lungs had started aching from lack of air, but she did her best to look normal, and desperately racked her brain, trying to think of who the threat might be. 

She casually moved her hand up to adjust her hat again, but took her time about it. It had taken her months after getting her hat to force herself to develop a tic of frequently adjusting it— it only took a few minutes around her for people to get used to her adjusting her hat, meaning they didn’t think anything was unusual about her doing it, even in tense situations.

Her eyes trailed over the mercenary. Over the four bodyguards. Over the rich girl and the burly laborer, seemingly oblivious to everything outside each other’s arms. She even eyed the nervous-looking regulars of the tavern.

Krita reached out to the hilts of her daggers with her affinity senses, and seized control of the powder hidden in the hollow hilts, and that ran in a thin, needle-like cavity far up the blades. She pulled on each gently with her magic, making sure they were loose in her sheathes.

She carefully ran over the clues in her mind, desperately trying to figure out who the glass mage was, as the aching in her lungs turned to burning from lack of air.

Ren said something to her, and she ignored it, just as she ignored the arguments between the dead merchant’s bodyguards, and the couple’s whispered affection— which, now that she thought of it, was rather bizarre, with a dead man just a few feet away.

Then, with a start, she realized who the killer was, and jerked her eyes away from the couple. In a smooth series of motions, she jerked the cap down from her scalp over her face; dove to the side, away from Veysa and Ren; and used the powder in her knives to sent them flying straight at the killer.

Straight at the bartender.

Unfortunately, the bartender seemed to have realized she was the one controlling the other cloud, and dove behind the bar at the same time as a dozen bottles behind the bar exploded into shards and went hurtling right at her.

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Krita took a deep breath through her cap as she rolled to the side, shards of glass burying themselves in the wall where she’d stood. She felt a deep sense of release as her lungs filled with fresh air, with no risk of getting glass dust in them— her cap was enchanted to serve double duty as a mask that kept particulate from passing through, allowing Krita to breathe safely even in the middle of a battle, when she often lost control of her clouds of dust, which were as dangerous to her as to anyone else. Not to mention, it was thin enough for her to easily see through.

Pulling it down too early would have tipped off her opponent, but now that it was down, Krita had the edge.

Her daggers missed the bartender as well, and even before Krita had come back to her feet she was already pulling powder out from the pores in the hilt and flooding the space behind the bar with it. 

The instant Krita came back to her feet, however, she immediately found herself needing to dodge again, because the bodyguards and the mercenary, already on edge, had started firing spells wildly at her, the bartender, and each other.

Krita snarled, and more red powder exploded out from pouches in her clothes. Not just the two weaker powders— she included the next two strongest ones as well.

She left the smallest, most dangerous pouch alone, though. She’d need to save that one for the dragon, just in case the bartender’s head wasn’t enough to satisfy it for the death of its partner.

Then she directed the new powders, as well as the powder already into the air, into eyes, noses, mouths, ears, and every other orifice she could find in the bar.

In less than a heartbeat, everyone in the bar except for Krita, Ren, and Veysa were choking, coughing, screaming, and weeping. The copper mage actually managed to send one more dagger flying, which surprised Krita— most mages had their spellforms collapse entirely when she hit them with her cloud.

She dodged it easily enough, though. The dagger was barely aimed, and she was still monitoring all his copper with her cloud. The mercenary didn’t try again— he was thrashing around in too much pain.

Krita had only halfway lied when she claimed she had a pain affinity. While her actual affinity was very different, her true affinity really wasn’t far behind pain affinities in their ability to cause pain.

Krita was a pepper mage. Her pouches and daggers? Filled with different varieties of dried and finely ground chili peppers, varying wildly in levels of spiciness, from the mild burn of the cloud she used to search and map rooms, all the way to the crippling, heart-attack inducing pain of the kraken pepper in her smallest pouch.

Pepper mages weren't uncommon, by any means, and they frequently worked as battlemages, but most of them used fresh peppers in battle, and openly advertised their abilities with bandoliers of peppers. They were fantastic for breaking up mobs and the like. Krita was definitely unusual in using dried pepper, and in hiding her affinity to fake a pain affinity, but the trick had proven its worth time and time again in battle.

Her clouds of dried pepper finished filling the space behind the bar, and the bartender, already writhing in pain, didn’t even have a chance to fire another volley of glass before her daggers slammed down into him.

Krita took a deep, clean breath through the thin cloth of her cap, and let herself relax.

-------------------------------------

Miraculously, no one other than the bartender died. Two of the bodyguards took injuries from copper needles, the mercenary had a splinter jammed into his leg, and one tavern regular tripped over a pile of rubble while in pain from the pepper cloud and sprained his ankle.

And no one threatened reprisals against Krita, after she threatened to make them feel that level of agony for the rest of their lives. Most of them were still in a lot of pain, even quite some time after Krita had removed the pepper dust from them all. Most of them probably assumed that her daggers were enchanted, as well, or maybe that she had an iron or steel affinity. After all, who would suspect of daggers flying due to peppers?

She couldn’t actually do that, but they all thought she was still a pain mage, and people would believe most anything about pain mages. Even if some of them had managed to spot her pepper clouds, they either hadn’t thought anything of it, or thought better than to say anything.

“How’d you know it was the bartender?” the lead bodyguard of the dead merchant asked.

Krita let Ren translate before answering. “Lots of little things. I heard glass break when the lights went out, just before I heard your dead friend call out in pain for a moment, and when I thought back, I realized that I’d seen him cleaning a bottle before the lights went out, and he wasn’t holding it afterward. One of the regulars mentioned that there was a lot of employee turnover, so it was likely that the glass mage got the job recently, and didn’t know the petal’s anchors were old and failing, so he didn’t realize that whatever he used to interfere with the glow crystal enchantments would also affect the petal. And, well… I’ve been a bodyguard for years. When I realized the bartender was the only one I hadn’t been considering as a suspect, that immediately set off bells in my head.”

The other bodyguard nodded, then offered her his hand. 

“Best of luck,” Krita offered the man as she clasped his hand. She didn't bother asking why the merchant had been murdered- it wasn't her business, and she wasn't interested now that the threat was over.

The wood mage gave a grimace and a shrug when Ren translated, then went off to tend to his employer’s body.

Krita and Ren grabbed new drinks from the bar— since the bartender had killed a patron, and because the owner’s negligence had destroyed half the bar, everyone had, without much discussion, decided that drinks were free the rest of the evening, and started serving themselves. It seemed only fair, after all.

They’d all likely be trapped here until the storm passed and the city’s mages could unfold the mudflower petal in the morning, so Krita grabbed herself another bottle of too-sweet juice. No alcohol or sleep for her, until she’d handed the archmage off to one of her other bodyguards.

As Krita and Ren returned to their table and sat down, Veysa let out a particularly loud snore. The archmage was still peacefully asleep, as though everything were right with the world.

Krita just rolled her eyes.