A.K.’s Advent 2025 – Day 3

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A Party Walks Into A Tavern
Part 3
Wholesome Worship Wreaking Woe

There were two rooms with two beds each at the end of the upstairs east wing, and Fiorella got them as close to perfect as possible. She only fretted a little over the orc fitting until she gathered a load of extra pillows to pad things out, but then the other beds looked sad in comparison, so she scattered a few frilly ones on those too. After lighting the wall sconces, placing pots of cedar shavings on the nightstands, and a warm honey cake on each headboard, she made up a spell on the spot for restful sleep and pleasant dreams to cast on the rooms.

Nothing happened, but Fiorella was satisfied well enough when the windows didn’t shatter.

It took only a little fussing, but eventually the party of four was settled, and their hostess scurried off to tend to other evening duties. The Fitzwright Inn finally fell quiet for the night, Fiorella nestling into her own room for the first time with a sense of accomplishment, and all of her guests lodged too far away from the basement door to hear any scratching.

***

Despite the exhaustion from the road and the achy eye from Drex’s fist, Valen Trueheart could only stare at the ceiling and do his own fretting. He plucked an excess pillow out from under his back, but the removal of the awkward lump didn’t relieve his tension. Cloying candle smoke and potpourri were thick in the air, and something sticky had gotten into his hair, but none of those things were really what kept him in a state of anxious wakefulness. The real problem was the lying.

Paladins didn’t lie. They weren’t supposed to anyway. But they weren’t supposed to be susceptible to dark magic either…

Yet Valen had lied, even if that lie was only the omission of a truth that hadn’t been asked after, and the weight of it sat heavily on his chest. The hefty lie wasn’t alone, though, a second weight just atop it if not attached by his conscience but by a chain. Tomorrow would be unpleasant at best and abominable at worst. Perhaps another failure or an accidental success but no closer to a resolution.

Through a small window, he could make out tree branches swaying in the moonlight. The Whispering Woods lay just beyond this inn’s back door, the only structure so close to the infamous forest and seemingly sound…save for the basement direrats and the walls’ antagonistic communication and the curious innkeeper.

Oh, the innkeeper.

Valen met all sorts on the road, but rarely did they speak of the realm the way she did. Of course, rarely did anyone use as many words as she did either, so maybe they just never got the chance, but it wasn’t only the cheerful way she described a wagon or a boat, but the genuine, fiery wonder that filled up her features like there really was some good left in the world after all.

And the look of her didn’t hurt either, eyes the color of warm honey, loads of flaxen hair that trailed down her back and swayed with each of her quick movements, rosy pink lips that framed an earnest, inviting smile…

I like her too.

“Don’t start,” he hissed under his breath and shut his eyes, willing himself to sleep.

***

The innkeeper did not have a bell to rouse her guests, but she did have a copper pan and wooden spoon, which was unfortunate for a plethora of reasons but especially because Valen had a splitting headache.

Paladins were used to aching heads as they were a frequent result of battle. They were used to silvery scars and slippy joints and twingy backs too, but those were more than a fair trade off for their lack of lopped off limbs and general impalement, a blessing from their gods. He could heal the wounds of others with minimal effort, and his own wounds closed up on their own, but the pain remained. Valen assumed the unseen misery was left behind because gods suffered none of it, so they only deigned to protect against what they could see, and a whole lot of blood was rather unambiguous even to divine eyes.

But this afternoon’s headache was special because it came with a voice.

That’s her, it said sinisterly at the sound ringing through the halls, and because Valen had an ominous feeling about what would come next, he resolved to ignore it. Sinister and ominous had taken up far too much of Valen’s vocabulary as of late, but there was no appropriate alternative, which was unfortunate because the voice liked those words.

Valen preferred to commiserate with Korthak over the innkeeper’s interpretation of a morning greeting, so he swung his legs over the bed’s edge with more effort than someone his age probably should have needed. Instead of the floor, though, his feet found an orc.

Both jolted, and then Korthak began apologizing.

“No, no, friend, it’s all right.” More carefully, Valen leaned down and offered a hand.

“It’s just…” Korthak looked about the small chamber from his spot on the floor where he had slept as close as possible without being a nuisance. “It’s just a new place.”

“I know.” The human hauled the orc to his feet, or rather leaned slightly back as the giant of a man made himself upright. And yup, there was one of those unseen and unblessed twinges, though the second twinge, the one in his chest when he looked at his friend’s face, was unrelated to injury. “You needn’t explain to me. If we all have to keep apologizing, we’ll never speak of anything else.” And as true as he knew that was, Valen heaved a sigh because he had a feeling—sinister and ominous both—he would be explaining and apologizing very soon regardless.

***

Fiorella gripped the broom and peered wide-eyed over her shoulder. “Are you ready?”

“Yes, madam, we are.”

Fiorella was not the most discerning woman. That is, she observed just fine, but she didn’t always extrapolate. She could observe, for instance, Sylvir the elf’s firm grip on his magical tome and the wild look to Korthak the orc’s black eyes, but she believed wholeheartedly that they were echoes of the paladin’s stalwart words.

Yet she did have a teeny, tiny inkling that something was wrong. It wasn’t the normal everyday wrongness that she’d been carrying around since before she even knew she could carry around things that didn’t fit into buckets. Nor was it the kind of wrongness one detected from the nervous fiddling a man might do with his dagger. This was a magical wrongness.

But Fiorella yanked the makeshift barricade from the basement door’s handle anyway because she really did need the cellar cleared of direrats, and also because she missed her broom.

Darkness gaped up at the lot like the cavernous maw of a dragon. Well, a fangless dragon with stairs for a throat and very little chance of fire at its end, so not really like a dragon at all, but to Fiorella the fear was all the same on account of nearly being eaten the last time she ventured cellar-ward. Direrats did not immediately storm the hall with their gnashing teeth and claws, though, and somehow that made things a little worse.

“Well?” She gestured weakly toward what she hoped would not be doom.

“Close the door behind us,” said the paladin, and he strode into the dark.

The others followed, and Fiorella wouldn’t have noticed that the orc was being pushed along by Drex if the black-haired man hadn’t turned to her just before descending and snapped, “Don’t you dare lock this fucking door.”

Fiorella watched the torch carried by Sylvir bob with each descending step, then eased the basement door shut behind them. She hugged her broom to her chest and decided to say a prayer. There were fifty-two gods to choose from, all of which she knew by heart including their domains, but the goddess of spring, Lyensia, popped into her mind first. She was powerful, holding court over a quarter of the pantheon, but nothing about her particular dominion applied: no one was being born, it was well past dawn, and spring was two seasons off. But Fiorella had just sent her brave heroes down into the earth, which was Lyensia’s favored element, so she figured some unraveled thread in her mind had made an unexpected knot and set to praying.

“Blessed morn, Mother of the Breaking Sky—er, I mean, it’s afternoon, but let’s just pretend. Hear my plea and deliver these men—well, they’re not all strictly men, I guess, and I didn’t even ask if that’s what they consider themselves, but I think you know I mean the warriors I sent into the basement. Um, deliver them from the earth whence they’ve gone on the safety of your wings, which I’m not certain you have, but I do like to think of you that way if it’s all right.” She grinned to herself at the vision of leathery appendages stretched across the stars with the sun trailing after. “Oh, and if it’s not too much to ask, please help me figure out the magic for the fireplace before it gets too cold. Let it be so.”

Fiorella remained still, eyes closed, broom gripped tight, and waited for a sign.

A scream echoed from beneath her.

“Actually, the fireplace thing isn’t that important—I’m sure I can come up with something on my own.”

Another horrified shout found her ears, and Fiorella began apologizing to Lyensia immediately. The basement ruckus only grew, as did the woman’s voice, adding increasingly substantial adverbs to her sorries as she paced slowly away from the door. She flinched at the next crash and listed off how she might make it up to Lyensia and all her minor deities. She thought of begging for the party’s lives, but didn’t want to give the goddess any ideas, then realized her thoughts probably weren’t as private as she hoped and tried to shut off her brain completely.

The door to the basement crashed open, and the orc came barreling down the hall. Fiorella plastered herself to the wall, narrowly missing a battle axe to the face and the door itself as it flew off the hinges, then blinked mindlessly into the gust he left behind. That mindlessness continued as she stepped back in front of the opening to stare into the inn’s depths and at the snarling, gnashing beast that launched itself up at her.

Fiorella screamed, and then there was blood.