Allana and Olivia spun to face Caden as he emerged from the Lifetree shrine.

Allana held her daggers at the ready, their edges glazed with poison, but Oli was all but unarmed, her shield mangled and her sword still lodged in Garol's corpse. The squire had settled for lifting her hands in a vague gesture of self-defense that made Caden smile.

Caden lifted his hands in a harmless motion as he emerged from the shrine, and both of his friends immediately winced at his appearance.

"Cadence!" Olivia burst out, rushing over to him. "What happened to you?"

"Caden," Caden corrected her gently, a resilience Surge the only thing keeping his voice audible. "Turns out, even at Apprentice level, trying to fight a hag by yourself is a bad idea."

The celestial was a collection of wounds. Half of his hair had been seared away by a gout of acid that had left his scalp scarred with mottled wounds. A trio of deep cuts had missed his left eye by scant inches and left a sheet of blood coating his face. The rest of his body was covered in similar scars, many of them showing the greenish-yellow edges of infection or even leaking puss, as the rot hag's attacks had begun to putrefy as soon as they landed.

Caden knew that Allana wasn't unaffected by his condition, but the girl was less distracted than Olivia, her eyes instead locking on the shrine behind him. "The hag?" she asked warily.

"Gone," Caden explained, his voice tired. "I held her off for a while, but once her ritual was broken and her proxy was dead, she pulled a fade, and I didn't have much left in the tank to try to stop her."

"Clearly," Allana observed. "You gonna die?"

"Doubt it," Caden told her, knowing from the girl's casual tone that she didn't think it was any more likely than he did. "If we didn't have a world class healer on hand, maybe, but I should be able to hold on til the Mendicant can have a look at me." A pulse of pain shot through the celestial, and he barely stifled a cry of pain. "Although I doubt it'll be very pleasant."

"So what now?" Olivia asked, looking between her friends.

"You two should probably go check on the town," Cadence suggested, his facade of confidence wavering as his resilience boon began to run its course. "I think I'm just gonna black out for a bit, if it's not too much of a bother."

#

The next few weeks passed quickly as the adventurers recovered and began to puzzle out just what had happened in the intervening time. Both Caden and Adeline survived their wounds–though they were laid up for days, even after the Mendicant's intervention. Both were left with a few new scars, and Caden had to figure out how to style his hair with half of it shaved off, but compared to what could've happened, neither complained.

Tenebres was missing for a time, but Allana and Tobias managed to hunt him down. While the rogue had been alarmed to see him slumped in the dirt of the woods surrounding Keystone, the boy had merely passed out from overuse of his new abilities, and was back on his feet the next day. His fiends had done the critical work of stalling the outsider offensive until Tobias had made it to Keystone and worked with the Mendicant to take care of the rest.

On the same morning that Ellevesa had enacted her ritual, Garol sent orders for his hunters and guards in every village to turn on the healers who had come to staunch the plague, and in many places, they had been successful. Though a few mages had managed to turn the tables on the traitors, nearly two-thirds of the Apothic Order healers dispatched to Valley Hearth had died in a single day, with the majority of the survivors having been in the Mendicant's hospital when the attack began.

The militia itself had been similarly savaged–already a shadow of itself after years of Garol's manipulations, less than a dozen hunters had survived their outsider allies suddenly turning on them, and again, most of those survivors had been those who had happened to stumble inside the haven of the Mendicant's reach. The young man Caden had imprisoned under the Lifetree was one of the few exceptions.

The traitors had all happily revealed what they knew of the plans, allowing the adventurers and their allies to piece together exactly what had brought Valley Hearth to such a critical tipping point.

As best as anyone could tell, Garol, along with most of his militia and several other key figures throughout Valley Hearth, had been working with Ellevesa, the rot hag, for over a year, possibly longer, as they set up large-scale fetter production, dosing entire communities with the drug to keep them docile. The plague itself had been entirely controlled by Ellevesa herself, first manufactured as a weapon to quietly remove those who refused to go along with Garol's ambitions then spread as a threat to show the impotence of the Crown.

As the more tenured hunters were killed off, Garol was able to install younger and more ambitious replacements, like Mett. Their plans, evidently based around the valley seceding from the rest of the Realm, hadn't planned for the King to actually take steps to help. The Apothic Order mages had been a problem, but one the conspirators were ready to overcome. The arrival of the Mendicant had been a significant obstacle, though, slowing Ellevesa's plans for months. As far as anyone could tell, she had called for help from her sisters, who the traitors referred to as the Coven of Whispers–but with both Hellesa and the fury hag to the north dead, help had only come in the form of Brisann, a mythic gifted who had been working with the coven for an unknown time.

The arrival of the adventurers had finally forced the conspiracy's hands, with hasty ambushes set up to capture or kill them while Ellevesa moved to the final stage of her plan. She had obviously never planned to actually support Garol's rebellion, instead simply using it as a cover for her ritual. Had her plans not been interrupted, a Chained World army would have occupied the heart of the Realm before anyone could've stopped it, damaging the supply chain that the bastion cities depended on while threatening Correntry, and perhaps even Westerlen and Emeston.

While Garol's death and Ellevesa's disappearance had weakened the plague, allowing the Mendicant and the remaining healers to begin finally making progress fighting the disease, the damage had already been done. It would take months for the population of Valley Hearth to overcome the effects of their long-term fetter use, and many would never fully recover. Worse, the approach of winter without any real hunters left meant that the Valley was critically exposed to the natural monsters that came with the coldest season.

Even if Ellevesa had been defeated, it would take years for Valley Hearth to reclaim any sense of normalcy.

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#

A week after the Battle of Keystone, Caden was moving about his inn room, preparing for his first day out of his sickbed, finally recovered from the after-effects of the Mendicant's healing.

His hatchet and shortbow had both gone missing in the aftermath of his capture, and until he made it to Correntry, he would have to make due with some mundane gear Allana had managed to scavenge up. That also meant that Caden had lost the last of the gear he had been given by his mother when he left Felisen. The bow she had fletched for him had been destroyed months before, during the fight with Hellesa, and now her rune-etched hatchet and carefully hoarded vitalwood arrows were gone too.

Their loss hurt, but Caden refused to let himself dwell on it too much. He had gotten most of the tears out during his prolonged bed rest.

Even with the forces of the Chained World defeated, there was still plenty of danger in Valley Hearth, as winter brought its usual influx of monsters. Caden's friends had already been out acting as replacement hunters, led by Adeline, whose higher level had let her recover much more quickly from her mauling. Now, it was time for him to join them.

The celestial paused, catching sight of his reflection in the small mirror next to his bed. Allana had tried to help Caden with his hair, but his fight with the hag had left it unrecoverably uneven, and the Mendicant's magic couldn't replace hair, apparently, leaving him with about half of his head bare.

It should've been ugly, but the longer Caden looked at it, the more he found himself liking the asymmetrical style of it. The celestial winked at his reflection, and only then did he turn to face the figure he had noticed behind him.

"I was wondering when you'd get around to paying me a visit," Caden told the innocuous man.

Tobias, the silver mage, smiled , the expression tight on his placid face. "We've all been busy."

"Oh yeah. Thanks for not interrupting my jam-packed schedule of crying and self-pity."

The man didn't acknowledge the joke, his steady eyes staying on Caden's. "I expect you have questions."

Caden rolled his eyes and continued going about his business as he spoke, buttoning on his vest and securing his weapons to his belt. "Sure. Let's start with why you showed up instead of Storyteller."

If Tobias was insulted by Caden refusing to look at him, he didn't show it in his response. "Storyteller was tied up with other matters. As my gifts give me a facility for moving about quickly, he sent me to intervene."

"Intervene how, exactly? I thought breaking that little tab he left me meant that he'd send me help, but I don't recall you helping me out of that hole in the ground."

"Your signal to him revealed the extent of the hags' plot here. I suspected, as a gifted with the echo, you needed far less help than others did. Had I come to simply rescue you, it's likely all four of your friends, and many others throughout the valley, would've died."

"Calculated risks," Caden observed sourly. "Sounds like Storyteller must've trained you a little more directly than he did me."

"I spent my first two levels traveling with him," Tobias agreed. "I was an Initiate, with my own gift of the wanderer, before he left me on my own."

Caden rolled his eyes. "Okay, then can you tell me why exactly you, and him, refuse to do anything like a normal person? Why is it everytime Storyteller tries to help, it's some overcomplicated nonsense like this?"

Tobias seemed to consider that for a moment, before answering, "Balance."

Caden huffed derisively.

"Very well," Tobias said. "How would you have had him respond?"

Caden finally turned to look at the bland man. "If it was up to me? I would've had him here, fighting, the way he can. This Chimera person Adeline faced, the hunters who captured me and almost killed my friends, Garol, Ellevesa, that whole raiding force. He could've taken them all, maybe without anyone dying."

"Perhaps," Tobias agreed. "He may indeed have been able to handle all the threats looming over Valley Hearth as easily as you claim. But what if he did? And what if something else then took a hand, because he had exposed himself here?"

Caden furrowed his brow. "Something else? Like what?"

Tobias's gaze hardened, and even if nothing in his mild, almost servile stance and expression changed, something about the man was suddenly very different. Cadence was reminded that, despite his unremarkable appearance and bearing, Tobias was an Expert level adventurer, one who had single-handedly turned the Battle of Keystone against the outsiders.

"You are right that Storyteller is powerful. Perhaps the most powerful man in the Realm, with one exception. But there are other forces out there that even he would not face without fear. Forces with gifts as potent as the one you share with him. Forces that could thin the very boundary between the worlds."

Caden blanched. "Like the ritual Ellevesa was enacting?"

Or even more than that, he realized. Just like the barrens, like the Cairn Glade. Those places where Storyteller had revealed magic so far beyond Caden's understanding that it was scarcely recognizable.

"Just like that," Tobias acknowledged. "Some of those forces took a hand in the battle–the ritual you mentioned gave Storyteller the freedom to take a hand here, but he had to keep his influence subtle, indirect. Some potions to ensure that the right people would be in the right places. A request from a man who could make a difference in some key fights."

"Then… what happened here wasn't actually as bad as it could've been? The plague, the hag, the raiders, all of that, it would've been worse if Storyteller had been here?"

"Imagine if, instead of a miasma and some gnolls, Storyteller's presence drew the attention of a greater monster who used the thinned space to enter Valley Hearth. Imagine if this place had become a battlefield between two threats capable of destroying entire cities."

Caden frowned. "Balance. That's what all of this has been? His wandering, always holding back, just trying to push people here and there, it's because he can't take a more direct hand?"

"Not without an equally direct response, no."

Caden turned away, considering that. For months, she had puzzled over Storyteller's behavior, concerned by how ruthlessly he had manipulated both Caden and those around him, pushing them around like pieces on a game board.

Now, for the first time, he had an inkling of why the enigmatic adventurer did things the way he did. But it wasn't all that comforting.

After all–what happened when one of those other forces acted in such a way that Storyteller did have to directly intervene?

#

The five adventurers received a missive the next day, sent via the spirit-hawk of a royal messenger. The missive held a request from the Knight-Radiant themself, requesting that they winter in Valley Hearth to help the survivors make it through the harsh season, something the group had already decided was for the best.

Further help was anticipated in the future, but as winter would soon make travel through the Realm difficult, none was expected until spring broke. Still, as Caden pointed out, after everything they had been through, a simple season spent monster hunting was, in many ways, relaxing. The young adventurers would have the chance to grow their skills against traditional monsters, under the supervision of two high-level allies, while also doing what they could to help the mauled region. And with a significant reward promised for their work by both the Argent Order and the Crown, even Allana couldn't find it in herself to complain about the circumstances.

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