The animals started acting wrong on the third day, and they got wronger from there.
It began small. A stray dog fell into step behind me for three streets, silent, matching my pace, gazing up with a devotion that made my skin crawl. Then, at the market, a scatter of beetles on a stall's awning arranged themselves — briefly, unmistakably — into a perfect ring pointed at my feet before dispersing. Then the Split Barrel's ancient tomcat, a creature that hated everything with breath, took to sitting outside our door all night like a tiny, furious sentry, facing outward. Guarding.
"They can feel you," Lila said at breakfast, scribbling furiously in a grubby notebook she carried everywhere. "Low-level creatures. Your aura reaches them before it reaches anything with a mind to question it." She looked up, eyes shining. "You're a lantern, Adrian, and every moth in the district can see the light. The little ones just want to be near it."
"Can I turn the lantern off?"
"Absolutely not. It's who you are." She said it like a compliment.
"It's a problem," Vera corrected from behind her tea. "A discreet Demon King does not accumulate a following of wildlife. We need to know how far this reaches, and we need to know now, before someone notices the town's stray dogs have started worshipping the boy in pajamas."
The System, as ever, was one step ahead of us and twice as smug.
[Rank F contract available: Investigate anomalous beast behavior in the Ashlow woods.]Reward: 20 copper.]
"It gave us a quest to investigate me," I said.
"The System's efficient," said Lila. "Deeply rude, but efficient."
The woods east of Ashlow were wrong in a way I felt before I understood. It wasn't that there were more animals. It was that all of them, every one, was oriented the same direction — toward me, the way iron filings point at a magnet. A fox watched us from a log without fleeing. A pair of does stood frozen in a clearing, ears forward, trembling, not with fear exactly but with something more like anticipation. And then a stag stepped out from the treeline, a big one, easily two hundred pounds of muscle and antler — the kind of animal that should have bolted at the first human scent — and instead of running, it walked toward me, stopped six feet away, and slowly, deliberately, folded its front legs and knelt.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
"Okay," I said, backing up. "Okay, that's— that's too much. That's a lot."
Bruno, of all people, was the one who went quiet and serious. He crouched by the kneeling stag, keeping a careful distance, his usual grin gone. "My grandmother used to tell stories about the Demon King," he said. "The old one. She said the land itself would lean toward him. That beasts came to him the way water finds the low ground — not because he called them, but because he simply was, and they couldn't help it." He looked up at me, and for the first time since I'd met him, there was something in his face that wasn't friendship. It was awe, and it was a little bit of fear, and the fear was worse. "You don't scare me, Adrian. I want you to know that. But this—" he nodded at the kneeling stag "—this scares me. A little."
I didn't have anything to say, because it scared me too.
[Contract complete: anomaly documented.]+20 copper. +30 EXP. Rank F: progress 58%.][Advisory: your presence measurably disrupts the local ecosystem. Discretion strongly recommended.]
"'Discretion recommended,'" I said to the box. "I'm standing in a forest in pajamas while a deer bows to me. How exactly do you propose I be discreet?"
"Technically," Lila offered, "those are pajamas from another world, which is arguably the least discreet garment in the kingdom."
On the walk back, Vera set a hard pace at the front, jaw tight, thinking. I caught up to her.
"The circle in the cellar," I said quietly. "Now this. Vera. What do you know that you're not telling me?"
She stopped. For a second — just a second — she looked like she might actually tell me. Her mouth opened.
Then her eyes went past my shoulder, to the road ahead where it met the town gate, and everything in her locked rigid.
"Later," she breathed. "We've got a bigger problem right now."
I turned to look.
At the gate of Ashlow, dismounting from a white horse so clean it seemed to belong to a different, better town, was a woman in gleaming plate armor. On her breastplate, catching the last of the light, was the emblem of the Heroes' Guild — and something else beside it, a sunburst I didn't recognize but Bruno clearly did, because he swore under his breath.
"An inspector," he muttered. "Guild and Church credentials. Those don't come to Ashlow. Not ever. Not for anything small."
The woman lifted her head and swept her gaze slowly across the muddy little town, unhurried, thorough, like an auditor pricing a building she intended to condemn.
And for one impossible, ice-cold instant, her eyes found me. And held.