22nd October 2026

Part 1 of the TEST: Old Haunts series

TEST: Forty Friends and Nobody in Brill

At a quarter to eleven, standing in Mulgore among a great many large and gentle tauren, Blondage was informed that the fortieth faction in the world had decided it adored her.¹

The tauren were pleased for her in a slow, warm way that took some time to arrive. She thanked them. Then she found that what she wanted, more than the tauren or the cake that nobody had baked, was to tell somebody who had known her before any of it.

She took out her hearthstone.

¹ Exalted is the highest standing a faction can give. The game keeps count, and on this evening the count reached forty. ↩

---

Brill had not changed. That was the first thing, and the second was that Brill had not noticed she had.

The town sat in the evening murk of Tirisfal exactly as she had left it, which was some years and several continents ago: the same crooked roofs, the same smell of the graveyard leaning over the wall to see who had come in, the same lamp by the inn door that had been flickering since the Third War and saw no reason to stop. She had been new here. She had been very new, a priest with a borrowed robe and a jaw she was still getting used to, and she had sat in the corner of the inn and made a list of everything she was afraid of, and then a second list of what she was going to do about it.

The inn was Gallows’ End. The innkeeper was behind the bar, polishing a glass that had been clean for a decade, and he looked up at her with the professional blankness of a man who has served ten thousand of the recently dead and remembers none of them.

“Forty,” Blondage told him, sitting down. “Forty factions. Exalted, all of them. The Darkmoon Faire would name a ride after me.“

He said that was very nice, and asked what she was drinking, in the tone of a man who does not keep count of anything except the till.

She did not take it personally. She had spent a long time learning what people meant underneath what they said, and what he meant was that he was tired, that the inn was his, and that he did not like being reminded how long he had stood behind its bar. She could have told him so. She decided that was the sort of thing one does for money, and ordered instead.

What Blondage drank

She looked at the board behind the bar, and then into her own bag.

Nobody else in the bar looked round. A Forsaken in the corner, possibly the one who had been sitting there when she left, went on studying the grain of the table. Blondage raised her glass to him. He did not see it, and she toasted him anyway, on the principle that most people deserve it more than they are told.

---

She walked out past the graveyard afterwards, to the spot by the wall where she had once sat and cried for an hour without being able to say why, and found that someone had put a fence there. It was a good fence. She leaned on it.

In her bag, under the clams and the linen and a fishing catch she did not remember making, was a folded paper headed The Durnholde Challenge. She had accepted it years ago from somebody in Hillsbrad and never answered it, which was not like her, and she turned it over in her fingers with interest. People keep the things they mean to deal with later in the same place they keep the things they never mean to deal with at all.

She whistled up her ride.

---

She went up off the edge of Brill in a long climb and opened the throttle south, over the black pines of Silverpine, with the lamps of the town dropping away behind her like somebody else’s evening.

Where the evening went

• Down to the mill
• Answer the challenge
• Look in on the ruins

---

More in the TEST: Old Haunts series

---

What did you think?

Tell us what you made of this story. Your comment is read by the people who write and review the stories.

Last updated 23rd October 2026, 09:33