The Ghost's Crusade

Chapter II: Akkali

 ... Baedorn, Oribian

Close-up, Baedorn looked almost exactly as it had ten years ago when Akkali last departed the city shackled to her former master. She had come to find most humans, particularly the rich ones that found themselves at the top of their particular dominion, were not overly inclined to change things they thought worked perfectly fine. It could be glaringly apparent to the rest of the world that their system was broken, but so long as they remained firmly at the top, they tended to remain willfully oblivious that they were, in fact, nothing more than fat flies ruling over a pile of horse dung.

The city itself looked as though someone had erected a series of uneven but thick walls to serve as a basin, then upended a sack full of mismatched houses and stables inside just to fill up the empty space between the three gates. It was always bleak in color and damp with fog that rolled in nightly from the marshlands to the east—not exactly the type of place one would willingly travel to given a choice. The outskirts of the city smelled quite the same, too—like moldy wet bread and pig shit. There were fewer crows pecking at the corpses of convicted cutthroats swaying from the gibbets along the main road into the city, but other than that, it appeared not to have changed at all.

Baedorn was famous for its impregnable walls which had stood against more than a dozen attempted invasions over the past century; they did nothing if not keep everything unwanted out. Its surrounding countryside was just as infamous for the legions of loosely aligned cutthroats and professional highwaymen, most of which had been booted out of the city, and all of whom fell upon on anything they came across carrying so much as a copper bit like ravenous vultures to strip them clean of anything salable.

That they had made it all the way to the southern gate without once having been accosted by even a small group of foolhardy raiders made her worry. The Grand Gate, as it was usually called, was the largest entrance into the city and nearly all of Baedorn's trade passed through it—the road leading up to the archway of granite was usually crawling with beggars, pickpockets, and even the occasional bandit disguised as a crippled traveler. Today, there was not a single body outside the walls that wasn't dead or on guard duty.

Her traveling companion seemed equally uneasy. Drystan was more familiar with the city-state than even she was given the frequency of Antenox's dealings with both Baedorn and its northern neighbor and he looked none too happy with the lack of banditry. While the man was hardly what she could call a vengeful person, he likely had been wanting an excuse to smash in a few heads after their mark had escaped them in Gendelheim. If there was one thing he hated with a passion it was failing to finish a mission he had set himself on. Between the two of them they had wasted upwards of an entire month tracking down the man who had been pilfering dead bodies from crypts and coroners. Loosing him in an air shaft down into the Shalewarrens after nearly being blown up by an improvised barrel bomb was a failure of ridiculous proportions, the kind which neither he nor his partner could really stand.

Akkali, on the other hand, never found herself wanting for an excuse to perform some sort of physical violence. Her people had been suffering at human hands for generations; the way she saw it, every skull she cracked and neck she snapped was a grain of sand towards leveling the scales of celestial justice. Just as irritated about having wasted her time as Drystan, she had decided a few days prior that the first person to look at her wrong was going to involuntarily end their day with her fist to their face. She had been planning on those faces belonging to highway bandits and was now sorely put off that they had not even once been accosted so she could vent her frustration.

She cast a sidelong glance towards the Inferi. “So... demons. You don't say.”

“Well something's obviously not right.” Drystan yawned in boredom, looked over at her, and said in an exaggerated drawl, “Don't feel like no deeemuns though.”