Arlyle held up the badger, glaring at him. “Who are you? Who sent you? How do you know I exist?” “Ari!” Bethany gasped. “He wants something!” Arlyle snapped. “And seems to know who I am. He even knows my nickname!” “I said it!” Bethany said. The badger gurgled something. Arlyle looked at him, and realized she was squeezing too tight for him to breathe. She loosened her grip, and he repeated. “Thelonius Bricklebook, the fourth.

Several hundred miles away, Arlyle, the Scourge of Darrenfell, was chuckling. It was an evil chuckle, or at least as evil as she could manage in recent days. To passerby it might sound just a tiny bit malicious, or only kind of evil. It did not help that she was three feet tall, and was best described as the cutest death goddess of vengeance one could ever see. Still, she chuckled. She was going to

Rafe snorted. That myth. “Don’t be crass!” Greta shot back. “This monster is the very reason for the Order’s existence. Without her cataclysmic past, there is no Flawed Snowflake. And the world very well may be lost to darkness.” The half-elf wanted to retort. Or, more likely, he wanted to sigh and continue on in silence. But even he could not pretend to be bored about this. It was the foundation of the very Order