FOR THOSE RETURNING TO THE SCAR…
Perhaps you’ve heard the tales of Sal the Cacophony. Wielder of the magic gun that brings ruin, destroyer of Lastlight, avenger of Stark’s Mutter, slayer of Vraki the Gate, and she who leaves only cinders in her wake.
Then again, perhaps you haven’t. Or perhaps you just don’t remember. I won’t hold it against you.
Bear with me, though. I was kind of drunk for a lot of it.
It all started when I was “captured” by one Governor-Militant Tretta Stern, a saltslick of a woman in the service of the Glorious Revolution of the Fist and Flame: the people who come in with big guns, kill everyone, and leave. On behalf of said people with big guns, she inquired what happened that led me to preside over such a ruin across the Scar and, I suspect more pressingly, what had happened to one of the soldiers she was intended to rescue.
I was on the hunt for certain wicked people—we don’t have time to go into all the reasons they deserved to die, but trust me, they did. Each of them a Vagrant who broke their oath to the Imperium—same as the Revolution, except big magic instead of big guns and, oh, they both want to destroy each other—in a bid to bring it to ruin, and led by the fiend Vraki the Gate.
Pursuing them led me to the door of my former lover, Liette, who had very good reasons to be a former lover and even better reasons not to help me, but what can I say? I’m just that charming, probably.
Together, we followed those people to a township named Stark’s Mutter, only to discover—after narrowly escaping gruesome death at the hands of lunatic zealots from Haven—that they’d summoned a horrific beast known as a Scrath that had promptly fled from their control. In an attempt to summon a new one and provide it a suitable host, they abducted children from Stark’s Mutter, and I was determined to kill them.
The, uh, names. Not the children. I saved those ones.
That led us to cross paths with Cavric Proud: soldier of the Revolution, future abduction victim and the object of Tretta Stern’s interrogation. After “borrowing” his vehicle and him—kidnapping is bad, sure, but I was in a hurry and I couldn’t fucking drive that thing—we followed their trail to the Weary Mother, a barge serving as the mobile fortress of the Ashmouths, the largest crime syndicate in the Scar.
It was revealed to us—after a thrilling battle—that Vraki had taken the children to a source of great power: the Husks, a battlefield so suffused with magic from battles between the Revolution and Imperium that he could draw from its latent energy to summon another Scrath. We found the town of Vigil, a former Revolutionary garrison that had been utterly destroyed by an Imperial Prodigy named Red Cloud—a mage who requires no Barter.
I knew it well. Because I was Red Cloud.
Once, anyway.
I revealed to Tretta my former identity as a celebrated hero of the Imperium and she was kind enough to refrain from putting a bullet through my head long enough for me to explain what had happened.
Vraki and I… we were once members of the Crown Conspiracy, seeking to overthrow the Empress and her non-magical son to replace them with a true heir. That all changed when it turned out the plot involved me being betrayed by him, by my friends, by my former lover—the other one—Jindu the Blade. They stole my magic. They took my power. They left me for dead.
And I was eager to return the favor.
Liette and I… we had a fight. She left at Vigil. I found more enemies there that led me and Cavric to the town of Lastlight, a great city built by an amazing inventor known as Two Lonely Old Men. It was a beautiful, magnificent town, a triumph of alchemy, engineering, and spellwrighting so majestic that even the Imperium and Revolution wouldn’t fight inside its walls.
In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have destroyed it.
But I did. To flush out Vraki’s associates. And it worked. I followed them to Fort Dogsjaw, a ruined Imperial fortress famed for being the site where the Imperial Mages, upon learning that the Empress’s son had no powers, rebelled and became Vagrants.
What happened was incredible. I fought Vraki and his followers, rescued the children of Stark’s Mutter, foiled Vraki’s attempt to summon an inhuman monstrosity, and narrowly escaped with my life.
It was thrilling. Incredible, really. Life-changing, epic, astonishing.
You should have seen it.
Anyway, I escaped to a ruined Lastlight, barely alive. With the help of Cavric and Liette’s timely return, I was able to escape back to the town of Lowstaff.
And I was followed.
Vraki and Jindu, eager to take vengeance, returned and destroyed the town… and so did I. I ruined that city, I killed people, I shook that region to its foundations. I left Vraki dying in his own dust, and Jindu, the man who betrayed me, the man who held my heart in his hands and put a dagger through it…
… I let him get away.
I don’t know why. To this day, I don’t know why. And neither did Liette. She left me. Again. I didn’t follow her. What I’d done to Lastlight, to Lowstaff… I couldn’t do that to her.
I hope she’s doing all right.
Tretta Stern, my captor, was ready to execute me, having gotten my full story. But an intervention from Cavric—who, as you can imagine, came to forgive me for kidnapping him—allowed me to escape.
And then he left, too.
And all I was left with was my namesake. The Cacophony. The gun that shoots magic, burns bright, and, sometimes, talks to me. And while Vraki and his underlings had been slain, those were only seven names on my list.
And thirty-three of them had betrayed me.
And so, in search of the others, I went out.
And that’s when things got worse…
ONE
LITTLEBARROW
The day the sky rained fire began like any other.
Meret awoke before the dawn, as he always did, to grind the herbs he had dried last week into tinctures and salves that would cure by next week. He gathered the medicines he needed to, as he always did—balm for Rodic’s burn that he had gotten at the smithy, salve for old man Erton’s bad knee, and as always, a bottle of Avonin whiskey for whatever might arise in the day—put them into his bag, and set out. He made his rounds, as he always did, and visited the same patients he always had since he had arrived in Littlebarrow three months ago.
The name was a little unfair, he thought. After all, it was a long time ago that a woman had built a shack to live in beside the cairn she had constructed for her only child. Since then, enough people had found it a good place to stop on sojourns into the Valley that it had grown to a township worthier of a name that matched its thriving circumstances. But as it wasn’t his township, he thought it not his place to protest the name, no matter how much he had grown attached to the place.
While it was nowhere near as big as Terassus or even the larger towns in the Valley, and it still had its share of problems, Littlebarrow was one of the better places his training had taken him. The people were nice, the winter was relatively gentle, and the surrounding forest was thick enough for game but not so much that larger beasts would come sniffing around.
Littlebarrow was a fine place. And Meret liked to think he had helped.
“Fuck me, boy, you missed your true calling as a torturer.”
Not everyone agreed.