Kelvun removed the wide-brimmed hat to wipe the sweat from his brow as he gazed out at the broken, brick-red badlands in the distance. The hat was ugly, and he’d refused it the first day because it in no way matched his riding outfit, but once it had started warming up, and they’d run out of shade he’d changed his mind. The heat shimmer made the boulder-studded hills waver uncertainly, he was glad to have it. Even its shade didn’t help him to spot the last outpost of civilization they’d see until their return trip.

They were meant to reach Holt sometime around sunset. According to what people said, it wasn’t much. The village was just a few farmsteads and animal pens clustered close enough together to merit a farce of a wall that would keep the creatures of the night at bay. He had no idea why anyone would choose to live out here when they could live close to the river or Fallravea, but he supposed that some people just liked to suffer.

This part of the county, in the dry lands, dealt mostly with sheep herding and cattle driving. Maybe that was easier than spending all day tending to your fields, and that made up for the stink. Kelvun hoped to never find out about more of the profession than that. The horse he was riding was bad enough.

It would make for good bragging rights at least, he thought, trying to look on the bright side. To say that he’d been all the way to Holt at the edge of the disputed lands. To be so close to the Woden Spine Mountains that they seemed to touch the sky. Neither of his brothers would be able to say that. Even with that feather in his cap, this still seemed like a complete waste of his time. The expedition would have functioned just as well without him. He was only here to curry favor with his master, and his father, he supposed.

Lord Gavin was an afterthought, though.

He’d already forced Kelvun to endure a month and a half of boredom on that boat ride, which would have been a complete waste of time that he could have spent carousing and gambling were it not for the …thing he’d found in the swamp. That had been the only valuable part of the trip, and now he was traipsing across the backcountry, between villages so small they were scarcely worth the name. They would have both been complete wastes of time if it weren’t for the darkness and its promises.

With a bland smile pasted to his face while he looked into the distance, Kelvun let those dark thoughts tumble through his mind. He had no way to know if the spirit would keep those promises, or if they could even be kept. All he had were a few words and the occasional vague dream, but as always his mind returned to that moment.

There was a sense of power there. True power, and it dwarfed anything that he’d ever experienced before. All the stories said that something dark and terrible dwelled in the swamp, so there was every reason to believe it would do what it said as long as Kelvun kept up his end of the bargain.

It was an uncertain reward, but for Kelvun it had cost very little so far. If the darkness didn’t do as promised, then the only thing that it had cost him was a little blood on his hands from the murder of the buggerer that Kelvun had been planning to make disappear somewhere before Tagel anyway.

He shrugged mentally, and stretched. No matter how often he reviewed his situation, he reached the same impasse. Even if patience wasn’t exactly one of his strong suits, he would just have to wait. His impatience wasn’t exactly helped by the vague dreams the swamp sent him. The dreams promised blood and fire, but the only thing they ever found on this interminable trip were hot days and dull nights.

He passed the time listening to the knights that were here to protect him. Their colorful jokes and war stories were far more interesting than the cartography lessons he was supposed to be studying with the mapmaker and the surveyors. Those had been deadly dull and almost put him to sleep in his saddle. A count needed to know nothing about optics or lines of declination. That was what he paid people like this to know!

Even interesting stories grew dull after hours of listening to them, and eventually the most interesting thing to Kelvun was the promise of roast mutton and a safe place to lay out his bedroll. Almost lost in the last flickers of the blood-red sunset were the unimpressive walls of Holt, only a few miles away. Sometime in the next half an hour, they would be safe inside them to recover after their two-day-long ride. At least that was the plan until they saw the fires and heard the screams.

Suddenly the night was broken by gouts of flame bursting from the dark to attack the sod walls of the structure, shortly after that the town’s small church bell started to chime a shrill warning. The village was under attack by something that could wield magic.

“My lord,” the eldest of the knights, Sir Farvus said. “We should withdraw, or at least wait until we have some idea of what’s happening before we join in the fray.”

“We’ll never find that out from here,” Kelvun said, continuing to ride forward. He didn’t need to know anything else. This was it. This was the fire and blood he’d been promised. The dreams had told him it would be an easy victory against a scattered opponent. The dreams hadn’t quite specified who that opponent was exactly, but he was sure it was no more than a small band of bandits.

“We need to—” Sir Favrus began to patiently repeat himself.

“Men!” he shouted, “Our people are under threat. We were told to avoid danger, but not to retreat from saving our fellow countrymen!”

The line brought up a few ragged cheers, but most of them stayed quiet. They knew that the old knight lecturing him was the one that was really leading the expedition. That was why Kelvun intended to force his hand. “We ride for Greshen,” he yelled, drawing his sword and digging his heels into his horse’s sides.

The darkness had planned all this, and he knew they would follow to protect him. He had nothing to worry about.

Krulm’venor was outraged that it had come to this, as its minions crossed the plains to the settlement. In the fading hours of the day, they were intensely vulnerable, but there was nothing for it. The awful Black Teeth and their hideous yellow totems had taken over everything worth taking in the hills, and the only prey left lay in the farms and settlements of the human lands. The Burning Skulls no longer stood a chance against their own kind, and numbered barely a hundred anymore.

Without meat the tribe would never recover their numbers, and without blood the spirit’s mana would soon run dry. Once the tribe was without fire, they would be devoured by their enemy within a week, and the fire spirit would finally be reduced to nothing. For an entity like it that was almost a century old, the very idea of being snuffed for good was intolerable.

So Krulm’venor was forced to do desperate, stupid things. At least thanks to its tactical brilliance they’d been paying off though.

For the last few weeks they had raided the smallest, farthest ranches with full war bands of over 30 warriors. The prey had been caught completely unaware and was easily overwhelmed with almost no losses. The human settlement though would be more challenging. Even once the fire spirit had decided that his tribe should take it and burn it to the ground, the chief and shaman had resisted his decision for days, until they had been sufficiently tortured in their nightmares to do as they were bidden.

This time they marched to war, not just against a larger, more fortified enemy, but one that was a full two days from their prime warren. It was a desperate gambit, but Krulm’venor was confident they would succeed. By bringing both war bands to bear, they could pit three shamans and almost sixty warriors against what would be perhaps fifty humans, many of which would be the weak delicious creatures that they called women and children.

This would be the victory that would set the Burning Skulls back on their proper course. This would be a night of violence and brutality that would make the stars quail in terror at the ferocity of goblin fury!

The attack started off better than it could have hoped, and the war bands snuck from the farmhouse they’d raided the previous day to the walled village as the blood-red sunset slowly faded to ash gray and coal-black. It was a good omen if ever it had witnessed one.

The humans had barred their gates, but the thick bricks of dried sod were scarcely a barrier for its warriors, and a few fireballs quickly weakened their pitiful defenses before the guards could even bring their crossbows to bear. It would have been a quick, clean kill, but then out of nowhere the warriors came from the night with sword and lance like they’d been waiting for this somehow.

It was a replay of the marshland rout all over again after that.

The ground was splashed red here and there from fallen men, but green blood ran freely too. Suddenly, while the war band’s best warriors were already inside the battered walls, and tearing at the soft underbelly of men, a line of warriors on horseback was making for the vulnerable shamans with no way for the fire spirit to save them. Few goblins were killed with the humans' weapons. They didn’t need to be. The most dangerous steel on the battlefield that night were the horseshoes of their mounts. The warriors that were not crushed or kicked to death were soon running in fear.

Krulm’venor used the last of his strength to try to force the warriors that remained to hold the line. Even with the loss of half their number, they still outnumbered the humans, but it was all for nothing. The goblins were ruled by fear now, rather than by rage or hunger. More than anything, they wanted to live. That made the stragglers easy to cut down, by the small force that was exterminating more and more of them by the second.

As the last few goblins were cornered and put to the sword in the walled village, all the small fire spirit that had once been so much more had to show for it were a few small fires on a handful of buildings. These could quickly be extinguished once the fighting was done. Then it would have nothing. Nothing but a few small goblins that were too puny or weak to fight with the war bands, and a vein of gold it would never have the strength to properly mine.

One by one each pair of eyes that it could see out of were eliminated making it feel ever smaller. The rage and humiliation was bad enough. Worse than that, though, was not knowing how all this happened. There was some critical piece of the puzzle here, and Krulm’venor was unable to determine what it was. In the end, that one galling fact burned inside his dark heart even more than the humiliating loss he’d endured: he didn’t know what had made it happen.