The Man Called V.

They picked up in Saltmoor at dawn, for the meeting they had been dreading and half-hoping for. Randy, Biz, Flint, and Worm went to face the collector who calls himself V.; Aelion kept his own counsel and stayed behind.

Inside Octavian Drell's warehouse, V. spoke of items in places he cannot go, and offered payment for retrieval work — an ongoing arrangement, with no strings visible. He never once demanded that anything be handed over. But something about the man left the room colder than it had been: his stillness, the way he arrived as though the air itself had flinched, the way he studied each of them in turn. He shook Randy's hand on a tacit agreement that they would consider the proposal, and left as ominously as he had come. Drell all but threw them back out into the daylight. They regrouped outside, some of them badly unsettled, and made the only call that felt right: leave Saltmoor behind and head up the coast toward Steamveil.

The road north was uneventful at first, and gave way to a deer track. The tide-flats lay silent, the pools among them missing the usual clatter of gulls. On one of those pools they noticed an oily sheen spreading across the still water. The wind shifted southward into their faces and carried with it a low mechanical hum that had no business anywhere near a coastline.

Further on they entered a pine forest and crested a rise, and found the druid circle they had been seeking — under attack. A huge coastal bull elk was tearing through the camp in a mad panic, its eyes weeping the same oily sheen that fouled the tide-pools, the animal reeking of hot metal. The druids were scattering: an old man bellowing at the beast and trying to wrangle it, a young archer up in the branches of a pine loosing arrows to keep it off the huts.

They read the situation quickly and accurately, and set out not to harm the frantic animal. Flint spoke with it and learned that what looked like fury was pain, and set about calming it. Randy and the older druid closed the distance and got a lasso around its horns, holding it steady while the other druids roped it down to the trees. Between the two of them, with the rest of the party helping where they could, the great bull went down alive, breathing hard, the sheen slowly draining out of it. The druids were profoundly grateful, and tended Randy's wounds.

With the elk laid low, the circle's leader, Bracken, welcomed Flint as one of their own. Afterward the elder sat them down and named what was killing the coast: a poison creeping down from an old machine-place further north, a ruin the druids themselves will not go near, worsening with every season that passes. He asked them — having just watched their prowess and their restraint — to go north and stop the blight at its source.

Gathered in Bracken's hut, Flint asked whether anything like this had happened before. Bracken pulled a well-made sickle down from the wall and told an old folk tale passed down through his family. Long ago the works to the north seeped a similar poison into the region. The leader of their circle, who bore blue crescent birthmarks, walked north alone to the source of it — and, as the tale goes, rather than killing whatever she found there, she silenced it. She came back bearing a sickle that shone faintly blue. "It's been ages since it's shone, if it ever had at all," he said, as though still waiting on the moon to turn. Then he put the sickle in Flint's hands: if there was any truth in the legend, he should have it, just in case.

They spent the night resting easy under the Saltwood's care, swapping stories under the stars and watching the wild-shaped wolves play among the pines.