Chapter 99: Into Burk Town
The real distinction here was a matter of worldview. Evan looked like a native of this world, but he wasn't one, not truly. People born into it carried an assumption buried so deep they never questioned it — mages especially. They believed in element gods, or element angels, whichever name one preferred: beings who held true dominion over the elements, while everyone else merely borrowed that power with the elements' tacit permission. Naturally, that bred a kind of reverence toward the element gods. People were not gods, and something like an innate elemental spirit — a living embodiment of elemental will — was fundamentally beyond human reach. A person could only use the power. They could never truly master it. That belief sat so deep in the collective mind that no one even noticed it was there.
Evan carried no such belief. He'd never taken Hadir especially seriously, and the fact that he dared substitute the Black Lotus in Hadir's place already meant that, somewhere in his mind, he considered himself Hadir's equal — if not something standing over him. He was willing to challenge the very doctrine of elements, convinced in his heart that the elements themselves were only a surface appearance, that something deeper had to lie beneath them.
That single difference in perspective was already a step that could upend everything. Evan hadn't given it much conscious thought, and neither had any mage of this world — because in magic's earliest age, before elemental theory even existed, what account was there of elements at all? Only once magic reached its classical age did elemental theory mature — and in doing so, it had bound magic's development in chains no one recognized as chains.
Evan sank deeper into his own mind, losing himself so completely that the world around him began to dissolve into illusion — all of it unfolding within his mental sea, unnoticed by his waking mind. A long while passed before he opened his eyes again, aware that something about him had changed, though he couldn't say exactly what.
He checked the magical clock. Four hours had passed. Magical clocks hadn't caught on widely — ordinary people already had mechanical clocks that worked well enough — but a magical clock kept better time, which made it the more convenient choice for a mage.
Evan lay down and went through his nightly habit of reviewing the day, weighing what had gone well against what hadn't. The practice had sharpened both his thinking and his judgment over time.
When morning came, Evan rose, washed up, and ate breakfast. Jessica had already arrived by the time he was ready, staff in hand, and together they made their way to the school gate. Jessica found it a little strange that he always carried that staff with him, but she chalked it up to some personal quirk and thought no more of it.
A carriage waited at the gate — a four-wheeled coach drawn by two horses, or so it appeared. There was no driver, and the creatures pulling it weren't horses at all, but nightmares — magical beasts on par with unicorns in renown, arguably divine beasts in their own right, with intelligence high enough that a pair of them could pull a carriage with no driver needed at all. A single word of instruction was all it took.
Two senior students were already waiting there, both full mages at the fifth tier — one a wind mage, the other water. Ortlando hadn't come himself, but a staff member from the school's security office had, and he handed Evan a folder of documents before they departed.
Evan and the others boarded, and the carriage pulled away on its own, moving at an easy, steady pace with remarkable smoothness. Along the way, Evan asked the two students their names — Jaymes, the wind mage, and Peter, the water mage. Both of them regarded Evan with open curiosity, knowing him for a necromancer, while Jessica — a seventh-tier mind mage belonging to no elemental school at all, a rare classification — was skilled less in elemental magic and more in curses and contracts, making her an excellent summoner in her own right.
Evan read carefully through the documents in his hands, turning the details over in his mind before passing them along to Jessica. She skimmed them quickly and handed them off to the two students, who studied every line with far more care, taking their time before finally finishing.
"What do you two make of it?" Evan asked.
"The gathering team was six people, all sixth tier or above," Jessica said. "Nothing directly ties their disappearance to devil worship, but the timing is too convenient to ignore. There's no proof, though. This cult is unusual — a few months ago, nobody had even heard of it. Within just those few months, word of it has spread widely enough that even some Druids have gotten pulled in. This isn't going to be simple."
Jessica had only skimmed the report once, but she'd already grasped the shape of it. Evan found the whole affair suspicious in a way he couldn't quite pin down. He knew something of Ormani by now, and he sensed some thread connecting all of this back to himself, one he couldn't quite name. If Ortlando had handed this task to him specifically, the headmaster probably felt the same thread.
"The gathering team never even sent up a signal," Evan said. "They were close to the Druids' main territory, and it turns out there are devil worshippers among the Druids themselves — which led to a clash. Unfortunately, no one was left alive to question. Professor Jessica's right that these devil-worship gatherings are kept well hidden. Where should we start?"
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"Professor, according to the report, it was first discovered in a gamekeeper's cabin in Burk Town, in Granville," Jaymes said. "Two victims were found at the scene, sacrificed to the devil. The Druids examined it afterward — both under twenty, one man and one woman, pentagrams and demonic sigils painted across their chests and backs, and their souls gone entirely, likely taken by the devil itself. I think we should go there directly."
"I agree with Jaymes. Start the investigation from Burk Town," Peter said, and the other two nodded along. Evan nodded as well. "Then we'll begin in Burk Town."
Burk Town sat in a remote corner of the map, but it was a lively place all the same, with adventurers of every stripe making up a good part of the local scenery — and a good part of the local chaos too. It sat near the Gael Mountains, where the Creationist Church and the Druids had once fought a brutal war. Both sides had summoned creatures from other planes to throw into the fighting without restraint, and the fallout of all those overlapping planar projections had never fully settled. Even now, space in those mountains hadn't returned to normal. Walk through them, and no one could say when a rift might tear open — or when some creature from another dimension might simply drop out of the sky onto your head.
Strange creatures turned up now and then as a result, sometimes wandering down out of the mountains and into the town below. Across nearly a thousand miles of mountain range, no one could predict what might appear next, and adventurers flocked there hoping to strike it rich, with no fear of ever exhausting the supply — since these creatures came from somewhere else entirely.
Only a lucky few actually made their fortune. Most who went into the mountains simply vanished, whether devoured by beasts or lost forever in some rift to another space. Burk Town itself was a mess of overlapping authority. A local government existed on paper, but with adventurers of every background crowding the streets, officials had even been murdered on occasion. Combined with the town's position on the fringe of Druid autonomous territory, the plain truth was that nobody in Burk Town paid the local government much mind, and the officials themselves had gotten used to it — showing up mainly to collect taxes and otherwise staying out of the way.
That didn't mean the town had no order at all, though. Three factions held the real power: the Burk Protectors, a gang formed by the town's original inhabitants; the Gael Advance Corps, made up of adventurers who'd settled there over the years; and the Order Keepers, a smaller faction with Druid ties. Beyond these three, another dozen or so lesser gangs operated as well, and somehow, between all of them, a fragile balance had settled into a strange sort of order.
This was the place the four of them were heading toward now — and Evan couldn't help thinking it was exactly the kind of place devil worship would take root. He set the documents down. The gathering team had vanished from this very town. It wasn't Evan's first visit here, either — Hollingburton's name carried enough weight that the local gangs generally knew better than to provoke it. This latest trip had been prompted by word of a promising batch of materials: parts from creatures out of other planes, and, according to rumor, gemstones formed from a fallen angel's tears. And then — silence. No word from the team since.
The four of them watched the buildings pass by through the carriage windows. The streets had clearly never been planned, the roads uneven and cracked, and the buildings themselves looked like something out of Evan's past life — illegal add-ons stacked in every direction, oddly shaped structures wedged between two others, extra floors bolted onto rooftops, buildings jutting out wherever their owners pleased. None of it followed any design at all, and the streets themselves had twisted into something that looked less like a street and more like a length of intestine choked with growths.
The moment their carriage entered Burk Town, it drew every eye on the road. To the locals, it was simply too extravagant a sight to ignore — two towering, powerfully built nightmares pulling it, with no driver in sight, and behind them a broad four-wheeled cabin, luxurious without being gaudy, its surface carved with an intricate, old-fashioned pattern. Anyone with a trained eye would have recognized those patterns as magical script, layered thick across the entire body of the coach. Inside, a temperature-regulating array breathed out the faintest trace of cool air — too gentle to so much as stir a person's hair, yet enough to keep the cabin at the most comfortable temperature for a human body, something close to twenty degrees Celsius, by the measure Evan remembered from his past life.
Curtains hung over the windows on either side, allowing those inside to see out while keeping anyone outside from seeing in. A carriage like this stopped people in their tracks — who could possibly be riding inside? If it belonged to someone important, why was there no driver at all? And if it didn't belong to someone important, why was it being pulled by nightmares, of all things, in a coach this extravagant?
For a moment, everyone on the street fell into speculation, and the looks directed at the carriage carried every shade of feeling — eagerness in some, naked greed in others. The passengers noticed, of course, but paid it no mind.
The carriage kept its unhurried pace, and no one foolish enough to step into its path appeared. Anyone that reckless in this town would already be a corpse — and even those with less obvious intentions knew better than to try anything out in broad daylight.
Eventually the carriage turned down a wide side road and came to a stop in front of an unassuming triangular-roofed building, with nothing else standing nearby. This was Hollingburton's outpost in the town — established here long ago, given the importance of the Gael Mountains. Hollingburton's reputation was such that no one in town dared cause trouble for it, and the moment Evan stepped near it, he felt something in him settle. Here, at least, there were no lawless jumbles of buildings crowding every direction — a small patch of order preserved against the chaos outside.
Evan stepped down from the carriage, and someone was already there to greet them. "Welcome, sir and miss, representatives from our alma mater. I'm James, stationed here in Burk Town. Please, this way."
He was a handsome man, middle-aged, who had settled in Burk Town long ago. He led the way while a servant took the carriage off to the stables, and Evan's group followed James into the sitting room.