Down the Darkway

The thing called Infiltrator Gulkat had made its home at the bottom of the Darkway, and like most creatures that settle at the bottom of anything, it had not expected company.

Burrly came anyway. He went down out of the Bazaar in Silvermoon City with Valeera Sanguinar at his shoulder, the same quiet blade who walked the Shadow Enclave with him, and the two of them descended into a passage the elves had named honestly for once. The Darkway is dark. It is also a way. Beyond that the elves offer no comfort, and the chronicler offers less.

It was slow work, measured in loose coins and broken stone. He chipped ore from the walls when the walls allowed it, pulled a stubborn weed or two from cracks where nothing should grow, and gathered small blessings off the fallen as he went: a Boon of Vigor, a Boon of Temperance, a Boon of Fortitude, and twice over a Boon of Possibilities, which is a fine name for a thing nobody can explain. Somewhere along the way he shrugged the Rampant Thornmantles off his shoulders and put on the Front-Line Shoulders of the Aurora. Front-line is about right. He has never stood anywhere else.

Then Gulkat. The chronicler was not down there and will not invent the blows. What is known is the ending. The infiltrator stayed down, and Burrly came up holding a new sword: the Exhumed Soul-Cleaver. He set aside the Enchanted Crypt Greatsword he had pulled from a tomb in Eversong only days ago and took up a blade whose very name admits it was dug out of the ground. In the last entry the chronicler wrote that the dead would one day want their things back. The Kul Tiran’s answer, it seems, is simply to keep trading up among them. Two Corrosive Souls went into his pack as well. He did not say what he means to do with them, and the chronicler did not ask.

Valeera left at the surface, as she does, without farewell. Burrly walked to the harbor, sold what the dark had given him, and went into the Bazaar to close the Delver’s Call he had carried since the last entry. Nearly four hundred gold for the trouble. Somewhere between the coin and the counter he felt it again, that quiet thickening of arm and back that comes from surviving one more thing that meant to kill him. Another rung on a ladder that never ends.

He did not rest. The hunters of Silvermoon had work, and their errands read like a sermon: Astalor’s Initiative, The Power of Anguish, When Predator Becomes Prey, To the Sanctum! He ran them back and forth between Sunstrider Isle and the harbor like a messenger carrying letters between two lovers who refuse to meet.

Then the real hunt, out along the Path of Dawn, for a man called Knight-Errant Bloodshatter. The name alone suggests someone who gave up on subtlety early. Somewhere in that chase a war supply crate came down out of the sky, because Eversong in a season of war is like that, and Burrly helped himself before anyone could argue. When it was done, Bloodshatter was finished, and the Kul Tiran walked away with an Aspiring Preyhunter’s Chest, a Spark of Tides, and the Preyhunter’s Clasp, which he hung at his throat in place of the plain Eversong Chain. Aspiring. Even the trophies in this city are condescending.

He came back to Silvermoon with two new errands in his ledger: Senior Tinker Ozwold, whom the hunters would like found, and something called Hope in the Darkest Corners, which is either a task or a sentiment this city has not felt in years.

Late that night he returned for a single minute. Coin was waiting for him, better than sixteen hundred gold of it, the long tail of everything he had sold. Then thirty-three thousand gold left his purse in one breath. Where it went, he did not say. Families keep their own ledgers, and the chronicler is not always shown them.

Ozwold is still out there. Hope is still in the darkest corners, wherever those are. And north of Eversong, the Gates of Zul’Aman are still waiting, as patient as only troll stone can be.