Attica was the first city that Leon’s convoy came to in the Ilumerian Wetlands. It was positioned at the northern edge of a lake, surrounded by dense, swampy forest that reminded Leon a great deal of the Bull Kingdom’s Southern Territories. It was hot, humid, and rather uncomfortable; Leon rarely left the climate-controlled carriage after leaving the comparatively dry desert’s edge behind.

It was quite the stark contrast, going from near the edge of the desert and over the course of a single day finding himself staring out of the carriage window at deep swamp, and a large part of Leon was looking forward to seeing the end of the Wetlands as quickly as possible. Fortunately, now that they’d reached Attica, that meant that their time in an overland convoy had reached its end—at least, until they reached the Ilian Empire. They’d set out from Akhmim more than a month ago, and while it had been a comfortable enough journey, Leon was ready to be done with these carriages.

The city of Attica itself boasted a population of only about ten thousand or so, the surrounding land too wet and difficult to farm to support greater numbers of permanent residents. There were several thousand more temporary residents—mostly merchants moving about the Wetlands and their respective entourages—with the extra pressure put upon the city forcing it to import food. The swamps around Attica, and the Ilumerian Wetlands as a whole, simply didn’t lend themselves well to large permanent settlements, which Leon saw for himself along the road, with the farms few and far between. From what Leon could gather, Attica was essentially emblematic of cities in the Wetlands.

The city had been built upon great wooden stilts or stone pillars conjured by earth mages. The city’s ruling elected council had also invested in hiring several water mages to make sure that the city wasn’t flooded if their levees ever broke. Most of the buildings were only a single story, small enough to be cramped for even a single family, and built out of local timber. However, the larger buildings along the city’s one main thoroughfare were more heavily enchanted, and Leon could sense that most of those inscribed magics were related to protecting the buildings from water damage, which he could understand given their environs.

The layout of the city was chaotic; it was at the edge of a lake, but given the swampy nature of the Wetlands, the lake didn’t have a clean edge. There were swamps and large ponds scattered about the muddy terrain, making it essentially impossible for the city to be laid out in a clean grid. The main thoroughfare, maintained only by earth enchantments as far as Leon could tell, wound through these swamps like a slithering snake, giving the city a long, winding, and rather thin footprint.

Their destination was at the southern tip of the city, where the lake created a natural harbor for ships, though Leon noted that none of the ships eithers on the lake or docked in the harbor were even as large as a Legion war galley, let alone a Legion dreadnought, or even the size of the Heaven’s Eye yacht that had brought them from Ariminium to Akhmim.

Elise explained to Leon that the swamps and rivers that linked the Wetlands were much shallower than the Tyrrhenian River, meaning the ships had to be smaller and have a shallower draft. That here was an overwater route at all from Attica all the way to the Ilian Empire was practically a miracle, but Elise also told Leon that the Ilian Empire, Heaven’s Eye, and many of the trade cities in the Wetlands invested heavily in earth and water mages to ensure that those routes remained open.

Leon wondered why they didn’t use all of those resources to widen or deepen the water routes, but he supposed that there were simply other issues that needed those resources, and that simply maintaining the natural routes were all that could be done.

The convoy passed through Attica, the roads built on a foundation of magically-created stone to keep them free of the swamps. It was impressive work, but Leon didn’t have much time to appreciate it as the convoy went straight for the local Heaven’s Eye branch.

The Heaven’s Eye enclave occupied the largest district of Attica, and going simply by how many people the Guild seemed to employ within the city, Leon wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Heaven’s Eye practically owned the entire city. If they weren’t strictly apolitical, he might’ve even suspected as much. As it was, he guessed that Heaven’s Eye employed no less than a quarter of Attica’s inhabitants, operated numerous enormous warehouses down by the lake, and occupied more than half of the city’s docks.

With the ongoing war between Talfar and the Han Kingdom, Attica was the gateway to the Kingdoms in the northwest of Aeterna, and so Leon learned that the city was of great import to Heaven’s Eye. If anything went to or came from the northwestern corner of Aeterna, it was virtually guaranteed that it had to come through Attica first, and the Heaven’s Eye enclave reflected that reality.

Once again, Leon found himself, his family, and his retinue all getting settled into a guest house while Emilie and Damien Makedon arranged to continue onward over water. Since they couldn’t rely on a single massive yacht, they had to acquire enough smaller ships for their large convoy and ensure that those ships were properly supplied.

Heaven’s Eye, of course, had the resources for that, but getting everything ready took enough time that the convoy was given three days to rest in Attica, and Leon knew perfectly well how he wanted to use that time: hunting.

The first day, he spent entirely with his family, lavishing with all the attention they desired. But the second day, he decided to follow Emilie’s suggestion and look for any bounties Heaven’s Eye had on local monsters, rather than hunting without direction.

It took a surprisingly short amount of time to be presented with the biggest bounties that Heaven’s Eye had received, for the third-tier mage working the main desk took one look at Leon’s gold ID card and fetched her sixth-tier boss to walk Leon through their bounties. The manager then came to Leon with the two largest bounties that Heaven’s Eye was running on behalf of Attica’s council.

The first was immediately intriguing—it wasn’t a local beast, but something that had wandered into the area from the Screeching Desert a couple years ago, setting up its lair about sixty or seventy miles to the east and having enough of a liking for shiny things that it often raided some of the smaller villages in the Wetlands and was making some of the riverine travel difficult.

When Leon asked what it was, the manager replied that it was a basilisk, a large two-legged reptilian creature with the wings of a bat and the head of a snake. It was only a sixth-tier beast, but its venom was powerful enough to kill seventh-tier humans, and it possessed a great command over earth magic despite being a creature of the sky. What made the bounty truly concerning to the manager was that the last mage he’d sent after it was sixth-tier—and quite the skilled hunter, too—and she’d gone missing. That had been more than three weeks ago, though, so she was assumed to be dead at this point.

With his recent history with reptiles triggering some instinctive hatred, Leon couldn’t help but be tempted to just go after the basilisk first and foremost without even bothering with the other bounty, but he refrained from that temptation.

He was glad he refrained, for the second bounty was a creature that the bounty didn’t identify, but he strongly suspected to be a Gorgon. Several farmsteads had been ruined when the families that owned them were mysteriously turned to stone, without anything seemingly having been stolen from them or the farmhouses sustaining any damage. The only thing that pointed to the perpetrator being inhuman were prominent tracks discovered at the last farmstead of what seemed to be an enormous serpent, which mysteriously ended whenever they reached a large body of water.

Leon clenched his jaw reading that bounty. While the evidence that it was a Gorgon responsible for those attacks on the farmhouses was tenuous at best, he had a feeling that his suspicions were right—petrification was a rare ability, and as far as he knew, could only be used by a creature strong with earth magic, as an eighth-tier Gorgon would be. Plus, it would fit the large serpentine tracks left behind, too. This was a creature that Maia could’ve become had he never entered her life, and because he did, she now had a cure for Gorgonism, though that cure would leave any Naiad’s who used it sterile. Still, it was an alternative to Gorgonism, and since her aunt was able to cure herself of it, then there was a chance that with Maia’s help, he might be able to reach this Gorgon, too, and perhaps even gain a new ally.

But first, he would have to confirm his suspicions, and then convince her to stop killing people.

The first bounty was a tempting issue to solve, but the manager admitted that Heaven’s Eye would eventually be able to send someone to take care of this in time—though he made sure to mention that it had been years, and no one had been sent, yet—and while hunting a basilisk sounded like a lot of fun, Leon’s eyes turned once more to the second bounty. After a few minutes of thought, he accepted it, and returned to the guest house to speak with Maia.

—

The small boat slowly pushed through the swampy channels, making for the last place that had been attacked by Leon’s mysterious quarry. The boat wasn’t any larger than a rowboat, but that was more out of necessity than anything else, for the channels were narrow enough that anything larger would’ve placed undue restrictions on where and how fast they could travel.

Of course, with Leon and Maia being who they were, getting from place to place wasn’t much of an issue, but Leon didn’t want to waste this opportunity. He’d left his retinue behind so that he and Maia could head out on this bounty together, just the two of them. Risky, perhaps, but with the two of them, plus Xaphan, Leon wasn’t overly concerned, and he was perfectly willing to run away if things got hotter than they could handle.

But he wanted to spend some time alone with his river nymph lover away from everyone else for a while. He’d carved out time for Elise, recently, and he recognized that he needed to do likewise for Maia and Valeria, too. This bounty was the perfect opportunity, for he knew that Maia had some personal investment in the fate of Gorgons. And, as he expected, once he told her of the bounty he’d accepted, she almost literally dropped everything she was doing to accompany him out into the swamps.

After about an hour of pushing through the water, though, both of them were starting to regret their current situation. Everyone else was back in Attica resting, while they were in the middle of a dense swamp, hardly a romantic getaway. Maia even refused to enter the water unless it was unavoidable, the place was so dirty. The lake was better, but it had still been an opaque green, while the swamp water was a filthy brown, fiercely stank, and was filled with tall trees rooted down in the underwater mud whose higher branches grew in so thick that they almost completely obscured the sky from view. The resulting darkness wasn’t much of a problem for the two eighth-tier mages, but it certainly contributed to the feeling of grime that crept over their bodies.

And that was just the environment; Leon was constantly using his lightning magic to zap bugs that got too close, some no larger than a mosquito, but other unspeakably alien insectoid things almost as large as his fist seemed to rise from the swamps as they passed by, only to his lightning barrier. They just kept coming, though, and Leon eventually had to turn over control of the rowboat to Maia, letting her use her water magic to propel them onward while he concentrated on pathfinding and pest control.

Neither were having that much fun even though that was essentially the point of the expedition, and after they got off the lake and entered the swamps, there weren’t many exchanges between them.

It was with relief that they finally reached a strip of dry land—their destination. There were broken remnants of an old dock pushing out into the swamp, but it had been rendered unusable—and recently, by the looks of it. Maia was forced to push their boat onto dry land, though that was harder than expected, for the entire shoreline was nothing but mud that sucked at the bottom of their boat, stymying their progress greatly and further adding to their feeling of disgust.

Further from the shoreline was a fairly large fenced-in area had numerous fruit-bearing trees growing in a rough grid—the farm they were investigating. The family that lived in the adjacent single-story house had been found turned to stone about a month before, and to Leon’s knowledge, no one had been out this way in some time. The fruit, some kind of bright red citrus, seemed overripe, and many fruits had fallen naturally, and were now rotting on the swamp floor, swarmed by insects.

“Charming place,” Leon muttered, his eyes taking in the gloomy farm, only partially lit thanks to the cleared land around the house.

Maia remained silent for a moment, seeming almost unwilling to get out of the boat and into the damp, muddy ground. But then she took a deep breath and stepped onto the not-quite-dry land, the boots she wore squelching as if the muddy ground were complaining that it had to take her weight.

“Anyone who would want to live here must’ve been either without choice or insane,” Leon said as they walked further up onto the shore, desperate to leave the mud behind.

“Home is home,” Maia replied out loud, her crystal-clear voice ringing in Leon’s ears like the smoothest and most calming music. “They were probably locals who didn’t want to leave the place they’d known all their lives.”

“I suppose,” Leo conceded. He’d asked about these victims before leaving Heaven’s Eye, seeking any information at all that could help in his hunt. All he learned was that they were locals who’d established the farm about three decades ago, when the father and mother of the family were first married. Since there was so little farmland around Attica, the city government was usually quite generous with financial support for anyone willing to help clear land and set up any productive farms nearby.

The problem, though, was defending that farmland. Leon learned that apparently less than half of all farms established by the city that were more than an hour’s journey away survive more than a decade. Less than a tenth survive for as long as this farm did. Attica didn’t publicize those numbers too heavily so that potential farmers weren’t scared off, but they couldn’t hide the reality from Heaven’s Eye. That this family of farmers was attacked by a monster living out in the swamp wasn’t unusual—the unusual thing was that it took so long.

As they approached the farmhouse, Leon took note of a slightly overgrown firepit just outside of the main house, a stump for chopping wood not too far away, with a wooden lean-to about half-stocked with firewood that appeared to already be rotting from being left out for at least a month. The farmhouse itself was divided into two halves: the living area, and a storage shed. The living area was a single room, and while the door was closed, Leon could easily see inside with his magic senses—there were six beds against the far wall, with another firepit in the center of the room. There were a few tables, chairs, and a set of drawers. Two chests were near the door, but they were flung open and anything that they may have ordinarily stored had long been looted.

The storage shed, meanwhile, had rather clearly been ransacked, presumably by whomever had confirmed the deaths of this family, or whomever might’ve come here after hearing about the tragedy. There were about two dozen barrels in the storage shed, and a large rack to hold them on to keep them off the dirt floor. However, all of the barrels had been pried open, and some of them had been thrown to the floor—all of their contents, if they’d had any, were gone.

“Sense anything?” Leon asked.

“Nothing unusual,” Maia replied. “Not too surprising, though, my kind don’t tend to leave many magical traces behind.”

“Aside from the bodies.”

“Aside from the bodies,” Maia repeated.

“Should we count Gorgons among ‘your people’?”

Maia paused for a moment. “I think so,” she answered, though with great hesitation. “They’re unfortunate, but not lost. My aunt proved that. If we can show them that they can still be what they were meant to be, that they are not bound by their curse, then what difference is there between them and me?”

Leon smiled. “That would depend on them, I think. Your aunt, curse or not, lived in a place that had no real human settlement, aside from me and my father. Whatever attacked this place also attacked several other farmsteads. It took the initiative to attack humans—not to eat them or to drag them off somewhere. Just to kill them.”

Maia frowned. “I don’t think you’re wrong, but maybe we shouldn’t jump to conclusions? Let’s see what’s inside, first.”

Leon nodded in agreement, though both of them already knew what they’d find.

When they pushed open the farmhouse’s door and entered, in one of the corners waited the family. The mother, a fairly plump woman with a look of both fierce defiance and abject terror had gathered up the four children, ranging from about twelve to four years old, and was quite obviously trying to shield them from something coming at them from the door. All five had been turned to stone and were left where they’d been petrified, huddled in the corner, now eternally stuck in the state they’d been at the moment of their petrification: terrified, and trying desperately to hide from whatever it was that had ultimately ended their lives.

The father, meanwhile, was a little closer to the door. Unlike his family, he wasn’t huddled in the corner, but was closer to the door. Leon guessed he must’ve been trying to confront whatever had entered his home, but had been immediately struck down. It was hard to tell, however, because if his petrified remains covered the floor. It was clear that he’d been turned to stone before he hit the wood floor because his remains were in shattered pieces, but anything more than that was hard for Leon to tell due to the broken state of his body.

But his face was largely intact, and much like the family’s mother, it was now frozen in an expression of fear, shock, and desperation.

Leon sighed as he crouched down by the father’s remains, a cold sense of empathetic dread and anger blooming in his heart. A family, seemingly just living their lives as best as they were able, attacked and slaughtered in their own home. That was something he could easily empathize with, and while this bounty had just started off as something to kill time doing, and as something he and Maia could do together, he could now feel it turning into something different.

“… Let’s find whatever did this,” he growled. This was the fifth farmstead attacked in three months. Clearly, this wasn’t going to stop unless he and Maia did something about it.