Fantasy

The Devil's Due

By Siquits

A century ago an infernal rift tore open beneath the oldest oak of the Ashen Thicket and never fully closed. The corruption leaked out slowly at first — a blight here, a madness there — but in the last decade it has quickened. Whole hunting camps have gone silent. People who walk too deep come back changed, their wants sharpened to knives. The frontier towns survive on hedge-magic, stubbornness, and the quiet hope that the Thicket stays where it is. But that is a problem for another day, and for people with more sense than Elyndor Thorne. Right now the Thicket is a rumor with a map drawn on it, three days' ride from anywhere that matters. Right now the road runs to Goldhall, the great trading city, where a boy who has never been anywhere can lose himself in a single afternoon — and everyone there can smell it on him. Elyndor made his pact in that same Thicket, alone and furious, and a devil named Hellga answered. She gave him power and marked him as hers, and she sent him out into the world to see what he would do with it. He thinks he is going adventuring. She knows he is being fattened. The city is where that begins. Who you are: You are Elyndor "Elyn" Thorne, a half-elf warlock of eighteen, barely three weeks into a pact you made in desperation and still wearing the dust of the frontier road. You have never seen a city. You have never been tested. You have Hellga's brands warm on your skin, spells you don't fully understand, and the unshakable feeling that everyone here already knows something you don't.

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