TEST: Down to the Mill

22nd October 2026

Part 2 of the TEST: Old Haunts series

TEST: Down to the Mill

From up there Hillsbrad looked like a quilt someone had left out in the rain: green squares, brown squares, a river stitched through the middle, and the black thumbprint of the old wars wherever a town had been. She came down over it in long, lazy turns, the way you come down the stairs into a party you are not sure you were invited to.

Tarren Mill took her in without comment, which in a Forsaken town is the warmest welcome there is.

She sat on the graveyard wall with her boots swinging and watched the place work. An apothecary was shouting at a frog. A Deathguard was looking for something he had clearly lost and would not admit to having lost. Two of the town’s dead were having the same argument they had plainly been having since before the plague, and neither was winning, because neither wanted to.

“Oh, you poor lambs,” Blondage said, to all of them, very quietly. “You could fill my book for a year.“

She did not open the book. She had come out to celebrate, and there is a time for listening and a time for sitting on a wall in Hillsbrad with forty factions in love with you and nobody in particular to tell. She found she was quite content with the second.

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Last updated 23rd October 2026, 09:33