Part Two

Part Two exists in complete draft form, picking up immediately after Chapter Seven, though it has not been polished to the same finished, publishable state as Chapters One through Five. What follows is a restrained summary, not the chapters themselves.

The Road South

Brink leaves Scur’s cove and, within a day, falls in with two human mercenaries, Paul and Darwin, and a grieving widow named Elsie, weeping at her young son’s grave. A hunting spider that kills by inducing pure terror before striking stalks the group and is put down before it can reach Elsie.

The Body

Not long after, the party finds the body of an orchardist, David Goldstone, killed in a roadside ambush. They decide to carry him the rest of the way to Vanesville rather than leave him, out of respect for a custom about the dead that Brink does not, at first, understand: to Paul and Elsie especially, a body is a person, not a resource. Brink’s own suggestion, meant helpfully, that the corpse could be more easily transported in pieces lands as something closer to a violation, and Paul and Darwin’s trust in him takes a visible hit.

The Misstep

Trying to recover the ground that suggestion cost him, Brink slips away from the burial party under the pretense of privacy and instead circles back through the trees with his crossbow, planning to fire a near-miss at the group’s cart from concealment, then reappear moments later claiming to have driven off some unseen threat, restoring himself to hero status in one stroke. The shot goes wide of its mark. His retreat is clumsy. A single loud misstep gives him away, and he is caught, cornered, and accused as the shooter before the story he meant to tell is ever told.

Improvising under real pressure, Brink escalates rather than retreats: he shoots Elsie herself, a precise graze along the scalp he already knows exactly how to heal, and declares, in the same breath, that she has been replaced by a body-stealing “changeling.”

The Exorcism

What follows is entirely theater: Brink uses a preserved psychic-terror organ, harvested from the spider back in Chapter Nine, to manufacture a wave of dread that reads to Paul and Darwin as supernatural evidence, while simultaneously and secretly casting a real healing spell to close the wound he inflicted himself moments earlier. The performance works completely. A scene that should have ended in Brink’s companions turning on him for good instead becomes the moment they start trusting him without reservation, as the man who saved Elsie from a monster only he could see.

Vanesville

The frontier town of Vanesville introduces most of the site’s “Beyond Chapter Five” cast: Townmaster Benedict Crane, innkeeper Frank Garibaldi, the Shrine of Felicity’s Sister Tiffany, and Fairweather Depot proprietor Cass Hansen. Sister Tiffany sends Brink and his companions after Claudia, a banshee haunting the woods northeast of town who is said to know the location of a legendary mage’s long-lost spellbook, in exchange for a noblewoman’s pen recovered from a hidden tomb.

The Tomb

Along the way, Brink buys a case of dangerously unstable alchemical explosive off Cass Hansen at the Fairweather Depot, unrecognized junk stock she had been meaning to throw in the river, and it proves useful more than once before Part Two ends. Recovering the pen itself means sealing himself alone inside the tomb, deliberately, right after tossing the pen back through the closing entrance to Paul; framed in the moment as a miscalculated, near-fatal accident, complete with a dramatic, self-rescuing explosion to blow his own way back out, it reads, on a closer look, like more of Brink’s theater than an actual close call.