The tavern Skyl built was perfectly ordinary—plain brick and stone, plain timber, stacked into a plain little building.
But he meant to make it anything but ordinary. The method was exactly what he'd explained to Dumbledore: spread a legend until the tavern birthed a thoughtform, then find a way to grant that thoughtform magic.
In doing so, Skyl wasn't only exploring the mysteries of thoughtforms—he was trying to glimpse the true essence of magicka itself.
And the first step was to make the Three-Cups Traveler's Tavern famous. Its story had to spread—until it became the kind of widely known fake "unsolved mystery" the world argued about for decades.
Skyl opened Mora's Black Book, searching for melodies like a gale and downpour—songs born at the moment their owner was torn by violent contradiction, when life and death hung by a thread. When someone is cornered by danger and despair, if they can suddenly find a warm tavern, safely drink a bowl of hot soup, down a cup of strong liquor, and have a conversation with the people inside that changes their life… that kind of story lodges itself in the mind. The longing it creates endures like a gemstone.
Dumbledore arrived at the tavern on the first day of Christmas break. It had been less than twenty hours since the place officially opened, and the room was filled with friends who'd come for the opening celebration.
He sat by the hearth with a mug of mead, stretching out his frostbitten feet toward the fire. Savos Aren saw it and poured a little potion over them, curing the chilblains in an instant.
Dumbledore asked why Skyl had opened the tavern here.
Skyl said it was because this was the first stop. Very soon, the first true guest would come knocking.
…
Fabian Bauer was forty-three this year. Married, with two sons and a daughter, he lived in a village near Nurmengard, farming for a living and taking seasonal work in the city every summer.
His hometown didn't have much worth bragging about, but the transportation was decent—and WWII-era military installations were everywhere around the village. A German battalion had once been stationed there. Later, the Germans were gone—not driven off by Allied planes and tanks, but vanished all at once on some unknown day.
Local legend said a witch lived in the forest. Every night she hunted with a pack of dogs, and every few years she would appear in the village and take a young virgin as her successor—an ancient tradition said to have endured for a thousand years.
One day in December 1944, several German soldiers caught a Jewish girl playing alone in the woods outside the village. On the way to send her to a camp, they shot her dead. That night, the German camp erupted with the sounds of fierce fighting and shrill screams; explosions shook the mountains. By dawn, after the silence returned, villagers notified a nearby partisan unit. Scouts went to check—and found the camp completely empty, with dolls in German uniforms scattered everywhere.
People said the witch had turned the soldiers into toys. It sounded ridiculous. Younger generations never saw any witch come to claim a successor, so they decided it was all the old folks' nonsense.
Not until the Lockhart information catastrophe—an abnormal event that swept the world this past August—did the villagers finally believe that magic truly existed.
Some people from the village went into the city and loudly promoted their local legend. Starting in October, tourists began arriving in what had once been a quiet little place, searching for signs of the witch. Fabian and the other men saw profit in it, so they volunteered as guides—leading travelers to visit the old German camp and telling those ancient stories for a hefty fee.
The business was decent at first, but competition became brutal. Soon, villagers trying to outdo one another led tourists deeper and deeper into the forest; some even took them all the way to Nurmengard, that gloomy fortress. Fabian's business crashed. His wife complained that he refused to take those rich, gullible tourists somewhere more remote, and that he didn't even have the talent to spin a few sensational tales to draw crowds. She called him an idiot who could starve while standing on a mountain of gold.
Fabian's late father had been one of those partisans, commanding five soldiers. In January 1945, he received orders to take his team to a train station east of the village to observe German military movements. But while crossing a stretch of pine forest, they became lost in a sudden fog.
"I saw the witch. She was young and beautiful," his father told Fabian when Fabian was still a boy. "She said, 'You have trespassed in my home. There are six of you—half will stay, and half may leave.' …In the end, only I walked out. Because of that, I was treated as a traitor and deserter, and I was nearly shot by my comrades. It wasn't until March 1945, when the Soviet comrades arrived and the partisan unit disbanded, that I made it back to the village."
Because of his father's warning, Fabian had always feared wizards and refused to lead tourists into real danger.
But faced with a fleeting chance to make money, Fabian's principles lost to reality. He decided to search for the witch his father had met. Digging through the storage cabinet at home, he found an old WWII military map his father had used—the scouting route marked clearly from start to finish. Fabian's story quickly caught the interest of more than a dozen tourists. With camping tools and filming equipment prepared, they set out on an "expedition" as Christmas drew near.
It turned out that whatever wizard lived in that forest did not like being disturbed.
After a day and a night of hard travel, Fabian successfully led the group to the legendary witch's cabin. The place was extremely well hidden, tucked into a valley. The entrance was choked with thorns and jagged rocks. By his father's account, this path was already considered easy to walk—Fabian couldn't imagine what the partisans had gone through back then.
His plan was to look from a distance and leave. But the tourists' curiosity boiled over; they insisted on going up to knock. He couldn't stop them.
The one living in the wooden cabin was an elderly woman—white hair, skin like parchment, a withered, skeletal look.
Smiling pleasantly, she turned the Muggles who'd delivered themselves to her door into dogs. Living, breathing people became nothing but shepherd dogs that could only bark. The witch flicked her wand, and an invisible whip cracked down on the transformed tourists, lashing them until their hides split and bled.
Fabian was terrified. He'd been standing farthest away—so he was the fastest to run.
But when he finally stumbled back to the village, filthy and half-dead with exhaustion, he found the old witch waiting inside his home.
"Little lamb," she crooned, "where do you think you're going, dear?"
Three battered shepherd dogs crouched beside her. Fabian's youngest daughter was tied up with rope—and right in front of him, she too was turned into a dog.
"That leaves only you," the witch cackled.
…
Near the Three-Cups counter was a small stage, set with a dozen instruments. Mora's Black Book lay open on a music stand. A bard, pleasantly buzzed, stepped onto the stage of his own accord, lifted a lute, and began to play from the score.
Urgent notes rang out through the tavern. The lute prowled the suppressed lower register, sounding like a lone tree struggling against a storm. Moonshadow, who'd been chatting with others, was drawn toward the stage; she sat at a small piano and answered with a hair-raising, wicked melody, like a bank of dark cloud chasing the lute's fleeing line.
Other guests joined in. The Dragonborn took up the drumsticks, pounding out the rhythm of desperate flight. And the demigod Ranni's puppet body—bearing two pairs of arms—played violin and viola at once, the strings cold, sinister, and merciless.
The dwarves, flushed with drink, set down their cups and listened in sudden silence. The music's bleak, frightened refrain sounded like a deathbed lament—someone was about to die a violent death. Someone was hunting him.
At the composition's most dreadful, towering moment, it suddenly turned—shedding its chill cruelty and becoming light and wandering.
The drums had been chaos, but now the runner had found shelter, and the rhythm steadied. The lute had been drowned beneath the piano, but now it rang clear again. The string-born storm became an easy, gentle breeze.
Brows that had tightened around the room slowly eased. Dwarves began to hum an ancient song under their breath, praising fine drink and the master of the feast.
And within that relaxed melody, the tavern door was hammered hard—someone yelling, "Help! Open the door—quick!"
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