Asitha already hated mages. This was maybe not fair, most of them never cursed the world to die slowly, and suffer and corrupt on the way down. But it did kind of loom large.

Now she can add "those three threw me through a portal through, looked like at least five different places in succession, dumping me out on... wherever this is".

She lands sprawled, weapons still drawn but tucked inward to avoid slicing herself up. When she looks around...

Well, either she just got landed in the middle of Faerie, which might exist, or this is the most absurdly peaceful place she's ever seen. She sheathes her swords, tries to smile, and looks for someone who's noticed her arrival.

Several people have noticed her arrival and are reacting surprisingly calmly. 

The children are being quietly and determinedly rounded up, which is not an easy task as they all want to gawk.

One teenage girl took off running immediately, back up to the cluster of buildings, yelling "Visitor! Through a portal!"

She is being approached by a couple of people, one gentleman who is taking some kind of leather tool roll off his belt and looking at her carefully like she might be some kind of wounded wild animal, and one lady who is smiling widely and generally trying to put her at ease.

"Welcome to Foundhome, did you come through the Gate? Is there trouble coming?" asks the lady.

"And are you hurt at all?" adds the man.

There are also distinctly a few people who have picked up spears from the undergrowth in a stealthy fashion and are trying to look unthreatening but ready for that to change if necessary. 

Okay, these people speak the trade-tongue. That's... probably faeries. This does not look like it's the Cursed Empire and who else would speak Imperial?

"Uh, 'the Gate' sounds more intentional than this. A few outlaw mages sent me away, I don't think they were aiming anywhere but 'not bothering us'. I don't think they were spiteful enough to send anything chasing me, they didn't seem bloodsoaked."

Think, what do you have to do in a faerie story? Maybe she can wait and see?

"Hmm. If they opened the Gate there must have been a conjunction, which means something interesting is going to happen here." 'interesting' is definitely not being considered as a positive quality in this sentence. "Well, I'm Rhyssa, this is Davyd, and I expect Allegra will be along in a minute and be rather better at answering your questions. It doesn't look like they left the gate open so you might have a long walk back - if you don't know where you were sent, we're in Miaren."

Davyd seems almost disappointed that the surprise visitor isn't obviously injured, and starts to roll the tool roll up again. From a glance at it, the contents are small knives on varying length thin handles, a mirror on a stick, and several kinds of moss.

One of the other women steps closer. "I could have a quick look to see if there's a closed portal I can operate? Don't worry, I'm casting on the air, not on you." She waits for a moment to see whether she is going to startle the visitor by starting an incantation. 

Faeries, faeries... Don't tell lies? Be polite, by someone's standards of polite? Wait, friendly(?) mage, that should probably come first.

"I don't know enough about magic to understand that, ma'am, but casting on the air shouldn't trouble me. Thank you for the warning."

Then she turns back to the one who gave her name.

"Nice to meet you, Rhyssa, Davyd. I'm Asitha. I'm afraid I've never heard of Foundhome or Miaren, but I thank you for the welcome."

"Hmm. Does 'Navarr' mean anything to you? 'Anvil'? 'The Empire'? I suppose that one's a bit generic if you're in fact from very far away..."

The supposedly friendly mage starts waving her arms around as if drawing patterns in the air. "I examine the weave of magic, I follow the pattern, the pattern is everywhere, the pattern is here, I perceive the patten..." She repeats this a couple of times, then looks disappointed. "If there was a portal, it can't be opened from this side," she reports.

The girl who ran off comes back onto view escorting a middle aged lady with a burn scar on her left cheek, a thorn tattoo above her left eye, and a stylised fountain tattoo down her right cheek. The lady is using a thick quaterstaff which has silver veins and autumn leaves growing from it as a walking aid.

She also doesn't immediately appear to have any of the plant like properties the rest of the inhabitants have. 

"No, no, and, as you say, generic. The region I usually travel in is generally called the Cursed Empire. I think it was the Kalassian Empire before the curse? We're speaking the imperial trade tongue, as far as I know, but I haven't heard of anyone sending traders in or out, and you're," she gestures vaguely at the people, looking healthy and calm, "not looking at all cursed to me. Though I don't know much about the plant thing, perhaps you're all faeries and curses can't touch you."

The lady fetched from the village joins them.

"Hi there, I'm Allegra, and for my sins I'm vaguely in charge of this Steading. From what I just overheard, not actually a visitor from Anvil, somewhere more far-flung? Are you happy standing around out here or would you like someone to invite you in for tea?

You have not landed in a Realm of magic as far as we're aware, we just have a reputation for being a good place to be a Briar."

Okay, that's... probably good. Also confusing. But good.

"Would you mind explicitly confirming that you're not faeries? As I recall, they can't tell lies, and I am, actually, somewhat concerned about the idea. I'm content standing around, but I would be delighted to have tea."

(Asitha has had tea twice in her life, both times when meeting with the same client, who is probably the richest man in the Cursed Empire. These people don't even consider it special? Hells and torments, they must be rich.)

"We are not what we might call fairies, but it's not a very common term and people mean a lot of different things by it - we're humans, some Spring touched.

Unfortunately we can very much lie, although I don't tend to make a habit of it these days, far too confusing trying to remember what you said to who.

Hyly, can you fetch us some tea? And maybe a chair and a little table, I have the feeling we might be a while."

The enthusiastic runner who fetched Allegra looks at a couple of the other younger people, in what is clearly trying to look like a lot of people working around the stream and definitely not a crowd overhearing Allegra talking to the interesting visitor, and a couple of them head off with her back to the buildings. 

"Well, if you can lie, you're not the thing I was worried about," she says with a more genuine-looking smile, "And saying you can lie would be a lie. So probably I am just very, very far away. I've never heard of 'Spring touched' or 'Briars'."

"Hmm. You probably have different names for the magical realms? I know the Grendel do, although I can't remember what they call Spring. It's the realm of life, I suppose - but with all the negative as well as positive correlations, the state of nature, predation, decay, as well as healing, fertility, natural vigour?"

"...don't think we have a name for that at all. Or any idea that it exists. Maybe mages do, but they're... one in a thousand, probably, and insular. Most people will go a lifetime without seeing magic done or being affected by it, other than the curse. I'm very well-traveled and have seen a lot of strange situations, and even I've never seen anything like that."

"Ah, right. If you don't have much magic, it makes sense that there wouldn't be many lineaged people.

You've mentioned a curse a couple of times now. Would you mind if we checked you over to see what it's doing, if it's still active on you? I can't do it myself, but the Winter coven will be very excited to have an interesting curse to look at."

The three young people are on their way back, with two folding chairs, a little folding table, and two wooden cups of something warm.

"If it was completely gone, I'd probably be collapsing, there's a perverse blessing for violence, to try to make us awful to each other even as everything collapses. But - wait, hells, actually we should do that before anything else. I might be contagious, that's why everyone else stopped trading with us." 

"Okay. Shall we get a little way away from the stream, then? If it's going to be suddenly extra contagious that will definitely happen during the ritual and I'd rather it was at a nondescript patch of forest than my mana site.

Hyly, sorry for the change of plans, set these up for when we get back and send at least half a dozen of our Winter mages out back to find me?"

Allegra props up her staff in her elbow, accepts both cups of drink, and offers Asitha one. It is a green tea rather than a black tea and has no additions.

"What do you already know about the curse, so we can prepare appropriate precautions if possible?" 

Allegra seems to be taking this very calmly, but everyone else distinctly backed off when Asitha mentioned potential contagion.

"There's a few stories about how exactly it was created. Might be a death curse from a mage directly executed by the Empire, might be a coven of mages who wanted revenge on the Emperor for persecuting mages in general, but everyone agrees it was some kind of revenge. The effects are that ordinary bodily needs don't quite sustain us. Food doesn't fill you, water doesn't quench your thirst, sleep doesn't quite rest you. The only way to get them to work properly is blood. You can get along with freshly-killed livestock and either drinking the blood directly or rubbing it on your skin, but it takes a lot of livestock, and it has to be immediate and direct - wielding the blade that kills them yourself. Drawing blood from other humans - intelligent nonhumans are complicated - takes a lot less, and you don't have to kill them, but you can't take your own and if you don't extract it painfully you have to use it like animal blood, fresh and warm. If you murder someone, though, you're free of the curse entirely for several days, even if you don't touch their actual blood. And if you kill many people, it lasts even longer, and you stop needing sleep, food, or water at all. We call that being 'bloodsoaked'. Long-term bloodsoak makes you sort of feral, angry, destructive, and short-sighted. I haven't entirely avoided that, travelers aren't trusted to take many jobs other than violence, but I'm still relatively sane."

"Well, at least you've come to the right nation," deadpans Allegra, "We do blood magic and everyone else thinks we're feral already. As long as everyone can just stand in a circle and daub each other with their blood, we should be able to deal with it if it gets to us; that's pretty much what the Winter ritualists are about to do to investigate it."

She does start moving off at a tangent to the buildings, though, towards a less travelled part of the forest edge, and gestures that Asitha should follow.

"If we're very lucky it's lost its connection to whatever is sustaining it and it'll burn itself out in the standard curse duration of a year, which should give you enough warning without causing more grief for the rest of us."

She follows along.

"Well, you certainly know much more about magic here than anyone knows back- back there. I'm not that optimistic, it always feels like it's intelligent enough to spot people trying to find a cheat and twist itself to stop them, but I'm no mage or scholar. Still, hopefully it was laid down geographically rather than contagious, that's the other theory."

"It's not really a cheat, is it? It's just that we're a people who are used to sacrifice. It's kind of our thing. Everyone else tends to think it's us being awful to each other already, but... there are things that are important and if all it takes is a little blood, that's really not much."

Allegra goes a few steps into the trees, but not far enough that people won't be able to spot them on the way from the buildings.

"Do you have an example of a way it's twisted itself in the past?"

"There was something where someone tried snapping the spines of... I think it was pigs... and then bleeding them slowly, because they don't die quickly that way and someone had determined that flaying a horse alive was more helpful than killing it cleanly. But by the end of the month the benefit they expected just hadn't materialized, like the slow death only helped when it was painful. Not like its rules were changing while we looked, but that it was set up so that it didn't just demand blood or death, but suffering and sadism."

"Oh, right, that should be something we understand how to deal with - that's just It's Not A Proper Sacrifice, our magic does that too, sometimes."

A motley collection of Spring-touched individuals is making their way out of the buildings towards them, presumably the 'winter coven' that Hyly was rounding up.

"Okay, so how this is going to work is - I'm going to tell all but six of the coven to go away, they will argue about it for a while but I don't want this on more people than it needs to be on - they'll make a circle around you, and - how do you feel about getting their blood on you? They can do it without that, but apparently it's easier if they can draw the patterns on you, rather than just on each other. They'll be casting Wisdom of the Balanced Blade, it's a standard curse divination, should tell us where it comes from, what it does, if it has a natural duration, if there's something that can be done to break it early - and if anything will make it worse."

"I'm definitely not going to be precious about touching blood, they can go ahead. That all makes sense. Should I put aside the enchanted equipment while they work?"

"Your choice; it shouldn't interfere if it's anything like our magical equipment, if it's also cursed then it might be confusing to look at multiple curses at once, but they should be able to target you personally specifically rather than any of your items.

I'm going to step out and head them off a moment, I'll be back when I've successfully picked a ritual team."

Allegra heads back out of the forest and has a brief argument with the incoming people; they clearly all want to be part of the ritual and are happy to take any associated risks. It only takes a couple of minutes for her to dispatch enough of them back towards the buildings and come back with six.

"I'm actually going to stand well back during the ritual itself. This is Angie, Gysha, Caz, Leylyn, Juny, and Pylan," she points to each in turn, "and they'll take a couple of minutes to do the ritual, then either wave me back over if it's fine - or already too late - or explain the results to you and work out what to do if it's not."

"Hi," says Angie. "Apparently you're not squeamish?"

"I've been cursed all my life to need blood to sustain myself, I'm certainly not squeamish about this. Nice to meet you all, I'm Asitha."