She sat with Sharp Tone in Warfstead, the largest port city in the Far Coast, in a tavern by the name of The Tradewinds, the most popular stop for sailors and merchants alike. Music played in the afternoon, poetry in the evening. The moon had risen, and special performances from singers flooded the building with soft melodies.
"I'm not meddling, Sharp," Fiora told her friend. "Mages and aristocrats complicate business. Common folk just want monsters killed, simple as that."
"It's good money," Sharp explained for the third time that night. "The stallion's paying four hundred to lift a curse on a town house. Plus, some mage students wants to study curse magic, and will pay another two hundred to see the after effects of the curse."
"Usually includes some sort of wraith or specter," Fiora said, eating from her bowl of berries and drinking apple cider.
He shrugged. "Beats cleaning baykoks off the battlefields."
Fiora gave an unpleasant grunt at the mention of the beasts. New, in terms of hunter experience, but apparently present in ancient myths and folklore. Only the Dragon Arts, the first school of monster hunters, had records on them. And as far as Fiora knew, they were not eager to share.
They were similar to Corpse Eaters in some respects: attracted to corpses, and easily mistaken for undead ponies. However they were often pale grey or brown, with skin thin and translucent enough to reveal the white bones underneath.
From what she had seen, their bodies lacked most things needed for living, such as internal organs. But baykoks were always surrounded by an intense magical presence, and despite their translucent, pale appearance, their eyes shined red, bright enough to cut through even heavy morning fog.
Given that they were easy enough to kill by cutting off their heads, as their necks were no stronger than that of a pony's, Fiora guessed its was the eyes that stored the magic that fueled the lives of baykoks. Their tendency for murder, completely disregarding the flesh of the already deceased, also prompted her to believe they fed on the magic of those they killed.
In the background, singers switched and the old stallion whose voice reverberated in a low hymn was replaced by a young, shapely mare whose voice, surprisingly, was adored more than her figure.
"I'll think about it," she told him, thinking to the fifteen baykoks she had to kill just to pay for her meal and a room at The Tradewinds.
It was late, and though she had a bed just a few floor up, Fiora wanted to walk the streets of the city without the glares at her horn and wings. She said goodnight to her friend, who was leaving in the morning for a request from local lord, and headed for the door.
"By the way, about getting your named changed," said Sharp Tone just as she was about to leave.
Fiora raised a brow. "Yeah?"
"Clinging to village contracts isn't just a preference," he told her. "When we say we move on, we have to act like it too."
Fiora didn't reply, only nodded.
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Night silver's properties are useful to a monster hunter. It repels magic, but more importantly, it vibrates slightly from the force of that repulsion.
Fiora could feel the night silver in her blade trembling the sheath. Using her horn, she could feel the magic much more intimately, but with risk of exposing herself to the curse's magic.
"Just try not to break anything," the client had said, a wealthy trader who had amassed enough wealth to purchase his permanent residence in the port city, adding local tariff protections to his list of privileges. "I paid a lot from the house. Even the woodwork is antique."
Her sword was specially made by her, tempered by not only a forge but her own magic as well. Though night silver in its solid state was a natural enemy to magic, when heated to near melting point it could attune to certain magical properties. Fiora could sense her own aura in the blade, and its reaction to magic was a safe extension of her own senses.
"Before you return to your client, do allow us to survey the cleansed area." The students of Warfstead's magic school were tolerated only for their understanding of defense against curses and black magic.
In return for such tolerance, the twelve horned mutants that made up the mage college defended the city and its surrounding farms from witches and supernatural forces. A much cheaper option than monster hunters.
"You must understand, mutant to mutant, that we need data on this curse," one student had explained when Fiora resisted his professor's request. "We will pay you. Without that new data, our college risks losing funding from the governor."
She had standards as a professional and was expected not to allow strangers to access her client's property, but there was nothing she could do if they collected data once she left.
It wouldn't take more than a hour to trot over to her client, but she could stop and get her herb pouch filled up on the way. Do some other shopping too.
The curse was strong, centered at a point that seemed to move around the house. Fiora looked around. The ground floor had a dusty but nicely furnished kitchen and dining room. The stone around the fireplace was room temperature, but still warmer than the cool stone around it.
"Something sat here," she talked to herself. "Warm bodied."
Yet there was no fresh food, or any other sign of inhabitants. The rest of the house looked abandoned, as it should have. She ascended the narrow stairway to the study and master bedroom. The curse grew stronger.
Fiora opened her saddlebag and took out a flask of night silver dust -finely ground, powdery shards. Alone, they wouldn't have reacted to the latent magic of the curse, just as night silver never reacted to trace amounts of magic within regular ponies. But her aura inside her sword shook slightly, and she could feel the subtle reactions to the magic around her.
Her vision, enhanced by training and mutant magic, picked out every detail on the second floor, but there was nothing in sight around where the night silver reacted the strongest. She tried going upstairs, but could already feel the energy draining.
She looked around again, harder this time. There was a chest that had shifted; she could see that the floor was dusty save for the a little sliver of wood floor that was once covered by the chest. She also saw the wear on the floor by one of the bedroom doors.
The door was poorly built and scraped against the floor slightly, but if it had been abandoned for some time, the scratches would be covered in dust just like the rest of the floor. Instead they were fresh.
Fiora walked slowly over to the night silver on the floor that made her sword hum. The low drumming of the steel blade gave away where the source of the curse was. If she couldn't see anything, then there was only one option.
Her wing flashed for her sword and hacked through the wooden walls, sending splinters flying.
"Geiss!" shouted a young voice.
She stopped and sprung back. Looking into the hole she had made, there was a young filly curled up inside. Her coat was a light grey, her ragged mane a silver-blue shade. On her right shoulder was a glowing mark resembling the silhouette of a humming bird.
"Strange," she said to herself. "Only the source of a curse gives off magic. Unless, this girl cursed herself?"
"Geiss," repeated the filly, pointing to the room behind Fiora. She turned the handle, but the door was barred by something behind it.
The little filly crawled out of the hole and stood close to Fiora, pointing at the symbol carved into the door frame. Fiora looked and it was the same as the hummingbird on the girl's shoulder.
"Did you curse this door?" Fiora asked, unsure of what she meant. She shook her head, pointed to the whole Fiora had made, and then back to the door.
"I suppose that's one way of knocking," she retorted, aiming her strike at the center of the door. "Stand back."
She raised her sword, but the strike that landed wasn't the edge of her blade. The pommel at the end that balanced the weapon was etched with the same glyphs on monster hunter horseshoes. As most hunters weren't mutants, they relied on glyphs for basic magic attacks.
The pommel crackled with a bright yellow energy and burst through the door. Fiora suffered the only drawback as her weapon shook in her wing's grip. The night silver in her blade would tolerate her magic, but not the magic of another spell. She waited a few seconds before the reverberations died down enough to return the blade to its sheath.
"Okay, let's see what's-"
Fiora tensed as she saw the room packed with bodies. Some mummified like they were drained of all fluid. Others just skeletons stripped of flesh. But most were regular corpses, chopped up and piled into the back of the room until they flooded the whole floor.
"Geiss!" exclaimed the filly, running in like a child eager to show its parent a drawing.
"You?" Fiora asked in disbelief. "You killed all these ponies?"
She nodded. The filly hopped to a small table filled with framed pictures and balanced them all on her back surprisingly well. She ran out of the room and hung up the first picture she had on the wall by the door.
Fiora didn't know what else to do but look at what she was doing. She certainly was hesitant about killing a cursed filly. If that really was all she was. All the pictures seemed to be in the same spot, but the ponies changed. They were all families, some with two parents and a foal, one with one father and three colts. There were others as well, and they all sat at the fireplace while they were painted.
In total there were seven family portraits. Fiora started to notice that the clothes in the pictures looked exactly the same as some of the clothes the corpses were wearing. Some kind of possession curse, she figured, one that compelled the victim to protect the area that the caster felt attached to. But why a child?
The filly walked back into the room, wrapping her hoof around Fiora's and dragging her in. She resisted, pulling back, but the filly jerked her in with a phenomenal show of strength. There, above the table, was a charcoal sketch of a filly sitting at the the fireplace.
Crudely drawn, the fireplace was only recognizable because Fiora had seen its shape in all the other paintings. Equally obscure was the filly, which she guessed was the cursed victim before her, but it was impossible to tell from the misshapen circles and crooked lines that made up the sketch.
The only clearly defined thing was the symbol of the hummingbird. It was drawn behind the filly, just as the parents in the frames who were painted with their child in front of them. The hummingbird, drawn dark red with a mix of charcoal and blood, was triple the size of the filly. Multiple hummingbirds were drawn inside the main outline as well, each smaller and nesting inside of the larger one.
"What is this?" Fiora asked. More than anything else in the room she was horrified of the fact that she had never heard of or encountered such a curse. But there was one thing she recognized. The drawing was on velum, old velum made from the hide of a vurm.
Vurms, large unwieldy beasts. Cousins of dragons, but far bigger and deadlier, vurms were long since dead, their kind completely extinguished by teams of monster hunters eager to split the pay. The only surviving vurm to her knowledge was killed by her own hoof, nearly a century ago. This velum couldn't have been made recently, Fiora thought. A dead vurm stirred noise among hunters. It had to have been hundreds of years old.
"You're some kind of ancient curse?" she asked the filly. "Are you even a pony?"
The filly shrugged and just replied, "Geiss."
"Alright, Geiss, how would you like to go on a trip with me?" Fiora suggested, kneeling down to talk to her. "There's a place I know of for... peculiar ponies. It's called Bach Kha'mohrgen, but mutants call it home."
There, in her eyes, was a flicker of recognition. "Home," repeated the filly. "Geiss, home."
"Sure," she said, taking the filly's hoof. "We can leave and start going today."
"Leave?" asked the filly. "Geiss!"
She tore her hoof away and bashed her head into Fiora's chest. Even with armor, the blow knocked her back with such force she struggled to keep her footing, stumbling out of the room of corpses in the process. She was up against the stairs the next instant, not even realizing the next hit.
Fiora ran up the stairs into the attic; bare and stale, the featureless top floor had nothing that could help against the child.
"I would've thought she'd have a doll or something," she wistfully mumbled. Fiora turned to parry the filly's charge up the stairs, but she was a gust of wind, blurring by her and appearing behind her in the attic.
"Moving like a humming bird," Fiora grunted in realization that she'd have no chance to match the filly's speed. She raised her horn and blazed the room with streaks of fire, devouring wood as a ravenous wolf would devour a corpse. But again, the cursed child bore another surprise.
She circled the room, stomping dead the fires with her swift hooves at such a speed that the blast of wind she generated struggled to keep up. Fiora backed away down the stairs, her sword extended in front of her. The point of the blade acted as her shield, but Fiora knew that if the filly chose to, she could move so fast around her that the sword was just an afterthought.
Two hits knocked her down to the ground floor, throwing her with such force that the hard wood floor shattered. Fiora used her wing to pull a flask from her saddlebag, but the filly appeared before her, and in a flicker, pushed her into the fireplace.
But she had to drink the potion for any chance to survive this encounter. Fiora wanted to throw up at the pain of her ribs contorting and bending and snapping inside her chest, but she forced herself to swallow the liquid before the cursed filly could land a second blow, which didn't take long.
The potion, brewed from wight and specter essence extract and laced with night silver, shielded the user from magic. A useful thing, considering her plan. The filly stopped her assault and stood watching Fiora as like nothing was happening.
"Geiss, leave, home," she said, and then pointed to the hummingbird mark on her shoulder. "Geiss."
Fiora took the opportunity to scorch the house once again, but not with a rampant blaze. She ejected glyphs and wards of fire that burned themselves into the wood. The burns took shape even as the filly put out the flames.
Fiora drew magic to her horn, her body threatening to rip itself apart as the night silver reacted to the spell, but she pressed on and focused her magic into the symbols. Glyphs and wards powered up, crackling lightning and thunder around the room. Wood splintered and shot from all sides.
Fiora covered herself with her wings, but could hear the filly get hit by an arc of magic and get flung into the dining table. In seconds the glyphs and wards lost their charge. Fiora doubled over in pain and spewed the potion back out before it destroyed the magic in her body.
In the center of the room was the filly, her neck a gash cut open by a stray piece of splintered wood and her spine sticking out of her back. Fiora sighed, accepting the fact she had killed the filly.
But her body twitched. As if willed by another force, her corpse repaired itself, closing the wounds and repairing the spine. Fiora stared the entire time--two minutes of watching a dead body pull itself back together. The filly went limp after that.
Fiora rushed to her side and checked her body. There were signs of internal bleeding and rips throughout the muscles, but she could see the healing process taking place already.
"Every pony at Kha'mohrgen has to see this," she muttered, carrying the filly on her saddlebag. She winced, her own internal injuries crying out, but drank a pot of a viscous healing concoction and continued out the house.
Outside were four scholars, horned mutants all of them, standing in eager waiting.
"We were on our way when we saw the commotion you caused," their professor explained, seemingly indifferent to the pony Fiora was carrying. "I assume the curse is dealt with?"
He rolled the sac of coins around in his hoof, waiting for an answer. Fiora snatched the coin and stuffed it in a saddle pocket.
"Just be quick," she told them, leaving quickly before ponies saw her carrying a body. The mark was unknown, so all it would look like was a mutant carrying the corpse of a dead filly.
She collected the pay from her client, emphasizing the hazardous nature of the curse and that damage was inevitable, while leaving out the part where the cursed victim was a filly, changing the story with a rare specter instead. She collected the coin, feeling the weight of the total six hundred coins.
Enough to repair her armor and weapons, buy herbs and equipment for potion brewing, and a hot bowl of oats. She said farewell to the client bluntly and left the city, retrieving the cursed girl from the bushes she had hid her in, and made for the road as soon as possible. Hot oats and working equipment would have to wait until she could make it to the castle of mutant monster hunters.