Midnight Madness at Joat's Den

Chapter 1 opens with a scene-setter that tells you everything you need to know about Athas. The twin moons have set. The sky is black. The heat of day has turned to bone-numbing cold. And the first thing Abbey tells us is the law of this world: nothing changes. What was will always be.

Except that’s a lie. And everybody knows it.

The World After the Dragon

The Dragon is dead. This massive ancient being that used to demand a yearly levy of living sacrifices from every city-state. Just gone. Three sorcerer-kings died with it. Tyr has a citizen’s council now instead of a tyrant. Anarchy rules in Balic, Raam, and Draj.

But in Urik? King Hamanu came home, climbed his highest tower, and mind-blasted every citizen with a speech that basically said: “I survived. You will obey me. Change will not disturb fair Urik.”

And the people of Urik responded with a hymn of praise. Ten thousand voices, singing together, because deep down they knew the truth. While Hamanu held the city in his taloned grasp, they had nothing to fear but him.

I love how Abbey handles this. It’s not that the Urikites are stupid. They’re practical. The sorcerer-king has kept them alive for a thousand years. His cruelty is predictable. The alternative is what happened to Balic, Raam, and Draj. Sometimes the devil you know is the one you pray to.

Joat’s Den

After curfew, the city belongs to street scum and templars. And there’s one place where the templars go to forget who they are: Joat’s Den. It’s carved out of a corner of the customhouse, run by an old dwarf who’s been serving the cheapest booze he can find for decades.

Tonight it’s broy, a fermented kank nectar drink that makes people quietly melancholy instead of rowdy. Joat prefers broy nights because nobody breaks the furniture.

A young templar is playing pipes made from erdlu wing-bones, filling the place with sad music that has every off-duty templar staring at the stars. It’s a weirdly beautiful moment in a story that’s about to get violent.

And there, at a corner table, sits our guy. A brawny templar with a mashed nose and scarred lips, hunched over a wax tablet, copying script from parchment scraps. Joat doesn’t know his name on purpose. He just notices that the man seems to be teaching himself magic on the sly.

That’s Pavek.

The Raver

A woman screams somewhere in the night. The templars exchange glances. Murder. Nobody moves. Then a second scream. This one is pure rage, and it’s getting closer.

A man crashes through the beaded curtain of Joat’s Den, covered in blood, swinging a jagged blade, raving about the sun eating his brain. He attacks the musician first, slashing his arms. An elf templar goes after the madman with punch-knives, stabs him in the flanks. Blood everywhere. The wounds should be fatal.

But the raver doesn’t go down.

He breaks free, kills the elf, and stands there bleeding from wounds that should have dropped him minutes ago. Something is very wrong. Someone shouts “Mind-bender!” because that’s the only explanation.

This is where it gets intense. The templars pull out their medallions, those baked clay discs with Hamanu’s face on them, and invoke their king’s power. Golden eyes appear in the sky above the open roof of Joat’s Den. Joat closes his eyes because no man can see those eyes and hope to live.

Flameblade. Five templars channeling the sorcerer-king’s magic. Pure fire.

It works. The raver dies. But here’s the disturbing part: the spell should have reduced him to ash. Five templars channeling flameblade together should have left nothing but a grease smear. Instead, there’s a mostly-intact corpse of a starving man lying on the floor.

And when Joat opens the dead man’s mouth, his tongue is soot-black from tip to root.

Laq.

What Is Laq?

Nobody knows exactly. It appeared after the Dragon’s death. People stop eating, stop sleeping, lose their minds, and die with black tongues. Rumors say it’s some kind of elixir the nobles cooked up to make slaves work harder, but it got out of control.

The templars at Joat’s Den are rattled. Not just because of the raver, but because Pavek says something that makes it worse: “Never been one this hard to kill before. If it’s Laq, something’s been added. Something’s been changed.”

Changed. The worst word you can say in a city where the king has decreed that nothing changes.

Pavek Investigates

While the other templars argue about who’s going to report this mess to Hamanu, Pavek slips out. He heads into the squatter’s quarter to find the woman whose scream they all heard earlier.

He finds her. Neck twisted so brutally her face is pressed against the ground. The raver killed her before he burst into Joat’s Den. Pavek moves her gently, closes her mouth and her eyes, waits for his nausea to pass.

Then he hears something in the shadows. A small sound. He lunges and catches an armful of boy.

“Leave her alone!” the boy sobs, punching Pavek with tiny fists.

Pavek tries to explain that questions need to be asked. The boy goes limp and wails. And Pavek, this big ugly templar who forgot the words for compassion years ago, just squeezes the kid against his chest and thumps him on the head. Because he thinks that’s what his mother did, once or twice.

When the boy finds out Pavek is a templar, he punches him below the groin and runs. Not far, though. The footsteps stop in the shadows.

Pavek leaves some coins in the dirt for the boy and hoists the dead woman across his shoulders. He’s got a plan. Not a great plan. But a plan.

This chapter does so much work. It establishes Urik as a city where even the enforcers are miserable. It introduces Laq as a threat that’s bigger than anyone realizes. And it shows us that Pavek, for all his rough edges, is the kind of person who hears a scream in the night and actually goes to find out what happened.

That’s going to cost him everything.

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