Darrow's eyes widened. Damian's eyes widened, and the [shared fear] skill screamed at both of them. Then, in that moment, the world froze around Darrow as he moved, but he knew he couldn’t make it in time.

  He was too slow. He couldn’t forgive himself if this happened, not in front of him. Damian’s hand tried to move, but he knew at this rate the dagger would pierce his throat before he could move his hands to grab it. What was Darrow going to do without him, alone? It would be devastating for him.

  Then there was Aunt Cass as well. He couldn’t leave all of them behind. Maybe they shouldn’t have come here to this meeting. An assassin. They had both been foolish. He had been foolish.

  And his father. It had been a long time since Damian had thought of him, on that cold night, on his knees, hugging both of them as he died. Their father had given them the [Mourn Twin] class. How would Darrow level without him holding one end of their class? Too many thoughts. Too many memories, and they all flashed before him, dreams of him and his brother. If he died, he knew... some part of him knew Darrow would feel it more than anyone else.

  Just when they both thought it was over, Arden hesitated, then, without missing a beat, he jumped back and away from the kneeling Damian.

  Arden had to react fast. He stepped back and, in the same motion, blocked the dagger. That was most definitely thrown with a skill, he thought. Any slower and he would have lost an eye, or worse.

  Arden looked up, and he saw another assassin step forward. It was rare to see two assassins in one place, and most times assassins of their level meeting meant someone was about to die. He couldn’t see a face, but the long hair and the way she carried herself told him she was a high-level assassin, and her red eyes fixed on him.

  “What do you want?” Arden asked, and she narrowed her eyes at him. He wasn’t ready to fight another assassin. The twins were trouble enough. If he had to fight an assassin on top of that, he knew he couldn’t win.

  “I have been sent for them.”

  “Who sent you? Was it the Gallery?” Arden asked, his eyes narrowing.

  “No. My master,” she said, which meant that some noble or powerful individual had sent another assassin after the twins.

  Arden froze in place. His dagger was still clenched tightly in his hand. As far as he saw it, it was a stalemate. His eyes flickered to the satchel he had come for, then back to the assassin. She looked at the satchel, then walked over to it and grabbed it.

  She looked at the magical contracts inside, grabbed one of them, and tossed it toward Arden. Arden snatched it out of the air. He looked at it in confusion, then back up at the assassin.

  “That’s what you came for, isn’t it. Get out of here before all the assassins on this side of the bridge find out you have no master and hunt you down.”

  Arden clenched his jaw. He looked down at his binding magical contract, then back up at the twins, and he hesitated. He looked at her, then stepped back slowly, and vanished into the shadows.

  A moment later, Darrow groaned in pain. Damian turned to him as he pushed his body up, and the assassin turned and studied them silently.

  “You’re bleeding,” Damian said.

  “Yeah, I know,” Darrow said, and he grabbed his nose, lifting it up to stem the bleeding.

  The assassin who had just saved their lives still said nothing. She watched them look each other over, then once they were done, they turned to her.

  “So what do you want, lady,” Damian asked, still feeling around for any broken ribs. She looked at Darrow, then Damian, and she seemed to note how similar they both looked.

  “My master wishes to meet you two.

  "And the bag," Damian asked, trying to get a measure of the assassin.

  "I will return it to you once you have spoken to her.”

  Darrow looked around. He looked at Damian, then back at the assassin.

  “And where is your master?”

  “She is in Mistwall, the City of Mists.”

  From the fight in the dungeon, where they had to fight a dungeon boss, which resulted in them getting paid less than they deserved, to finding Elora’s father and rescuing him from the ritual magics Lord Greldo was using to turn people into revenants, Damian and Darrow didn’t know what to expect next.

  They were placed into a carriage that came around the corner of the alley, and in moments, they were off to the neighboring district state.

  ---

  It had taken the spirit-drawn carriage two days to get where they were headed. They travelled on a long stretch of cobblestone road surrounded by a large empty swath of land to even reach the district proper, and that's when the district showed its quirk. If a living bridge was what they were used to seeing, a city covered in mist was something else.

  The morning fog hung thick over the Mistwall district. The carriage wheels squeaked faintly through the wet cobblestone, and Damian was curious, to say the least.

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  There was the sound of trickling raindrops, and Damian hesitated before looking outside. If there was anything outside, he couldn’t see it in the thick swirling mist, something that made him clench his jaw tighter. They had never been to other cities. Aunt Cassandra had never let them out of her sight.

  Darrow wasn’t that worried, or he pretended not to be. He lounged back in the carriage seat beside him and proceeded to wipe condensation from the carriage glass. It was at this point that they realized how different the city district of Mistwall was from Principal City. The mists seemed to swirl and twirl like a living thing. It moved around the carriage, and whenever they made a turn, the path seemed to clear.

  Damian felt that the fog was definitely magical, or it was a skill someone was using to obscure the entire city. The few people they passed seemed to whisper to one another, or it could have been the fog that made everything seem a lot quieter and a lot more unsettling. They passed by a moss-covered street, and the mist seemed to react, the lantern exposing a clearing filled with people.

  Damian saw only a few gardeners tending to some plants, and Darrow, on the other end of the clearing, saw a pair of elvish workers lifting boxes into another wagon. But what had them both feeling uneasy were the fey-like figures in the mist, faces that looked directly at them before disappearing into the distance.

  They turned out of the clearing, and something stood tall in the distance. Damian exchanged a look with Darrow, and his brother swallowed deeply. The bulge in the distance was more than an estate. It was a castle. It was large enough that even from this far away, they couldn’t mistake it for anything else, and not even the fog obscured it.

  The closer they got, the more they realized how everything seemed to be centered around the Castle. The Emberfall castle

  “Why does it feel abandoned,” Darrow asked the woman who had rescued them and now was escorting them to see her master.

  The woman, the assassin, just looked at him. She frowned and looked out the window in the next moment. In the distance, the carriage ran past a guild building in the city's square that looked more populated than all the others. This was the Mistcurvers Causeway, a mage guild and one of the premier adventurer guilds of the city. In that part of the city, they caught sight of the large spire of the guild, and the entire place was filled with lights and noise.

  Darrow shifted nervously in the carriage, then he looked up, but the assassin didn’t react. In fact, she hadn’t said a word over the two days they had traveled by carriage to meet her master.

  “So will we be getting a tour after we finish meeting your master?” Darrow asked, and to no one’s surprise, the assassin remained quiet.

  Darrow coughed awkwardly, then bumped Damian in the shoulder. “She is a professional?”

  Damian just felt like covering his face the more Darrow kept speaking. That didn’t last long, because a few moments later they came upon the only well-lit road in Mistwall that led to the massive silhouette of the castle growing larger in the distance.

  The closer they got to it, the more intimidating the entire thing made Damian feel, tense and awed by whoever was living inside. Darrow, on the other hand, gulped audibly.

  “Ah, your master… is she friendly? Is there a way we should behave,” he asked as his eyes panned around the castle and the structure they were approaching.

  “How is there a castle in this place? Isn’t it against the law to build something like this.”

  “Yeah, this place is bigger than any estate in Principal City,” Darrow added.

  The castle towered upward, walls rising high enough that they resembled those of the giants of the past. They were solid. In fact, Damian wondered if they had been built by the humans who occupied this district, or maybe the half-giants had once ruled this city. They wondered if the person who ruled this city was indeed a half-giant.

  “We are close,” she said.

  Darrow yelped in surprise. He hadn’t expected the woman to speak at all. They both hadn’t.

  “And what does your master want?”

  “My master will be waiting for you inside. You will speak to her, and you will understand.” she said this like it was a statement and she was addressing her lessers.

  Her voice was still flat and controlled. They hesitated, but soon enough they looked outside as they approached the ominous-looking iron gate.

  The spirit horses came to a stop by the gate, and the knight at the gate shifted. The figure guarding the gate walked out of a small side door, and to no one’s surprise, he walked over and looked inside.

  With how odd everything had felt and looked, they really shouldn’t have been surprised to see a half-giant inspecting them through the small window. This half-giant wasn’t normal. He was old, but the largest by a long mile that the brothers had come across. He had a thick whitish beard and was dressed in full knight armor of the old kind.

  The single knight stepped to the side, and the spirit horses moved forward and toward the castle.

  “Have you ever seen a half-giant that large?”

  “No. Must be old blood,” Damian said.

  Darrow’s eyes, however, lingered on the half-giant’s back as he shut the great iron gate behind them. The carriage rolled into the open castle courtyard, and like any courtyard of a wealthy noble, it was glamorous, with statues everywhere, but apart from that, the place was empty.

  Darrow felt it more than he saw it. Even Damian wasn’t so blind as to miss the fact that there were no servants, no activity, just an ominous sense of an abandoned castle. Even the wind seemed silent, and that was something, since they had seen figures even in the mist that was carried along by the wind.

  They stepped forward and stepped out of the carriage, and it felt even more silent than before as the noises they made echoed off the walls.

  “This place is unsettling,” Damian muttered.

  “I told you to get a cloak,” Darrow muttered back, the chill soaking into his cloak.

  They came to a stop in front of the large, slightly opened doors of the castle, and they really came to appreciate the size of it. It wasn’t long after that that they found themselves following the assassin through the large, empty hall. Their boots echoed in the silence, and they grew more and more uneasy the longer they went without coming across anyone in the castle.

  “Where is everyone,” Damian asked after they had come across no other people or servants.

  She didn’t answer. In fact, the red-eyed assassin didn’t even slow her step.

  Finally, they made it into the large throne room, and to no one’s surprise, even this place was eerily silent. The assassin, on the other hand, wasn’t feeling the way they were. She stepped forward and started looking around as if for a lost child.

  Damian sensed nothing. All he saw ahead of him was an empty, silent room with an empty throne.

  Darrow was tense, however. His increased senses were picking up breathing. He looked right, then left, but no matter what he tried, he couldn’t see anyone. Even worse, the breathing didn’t sound like that of any man or woman. In fact, his [altered awareness] told him it sounded like that of an animal.

  Darrow very slowly, and very carefully, looked up in the direction the faint breathing was coming from, and he froze.

  Up, high in the beams of the throne room, four separate eyes stared back at Darrow, and he stopped in his tracks.

  There was a lynx of an unnatural size that lazily sat up there and blinked silently down at them. It growled in a low resonance, and that’s when Damian also followed his eyes as they both looked up.