The woman who would found the Order, she looked around and she saw this happening, and she knew sure as certain the world would slide back to the Brink if we weren’t careful. That humans, as well as being kind and careful, are lazy and greedy creatures, and the dark days could easily be brought back again through the actions of a few. And she saw that no one was doing anything about it and no one would do anything about it. There was nothing they could do. Laws hadn’t been made to stop that kind of thing yet, because everyone thought people would just keep being good, but the storms had been so long ago that the threat seemed distant. There were only laws about treating people kindly, not what to do if folk didn’t. And she didn’t want to leave it so long that Smog Sky would send her own storms and Rising Tide sweep away the innocent along with the guilty.

So she went after the first and worst of them, a man trying to bring back the lost age of steel towers and trees cut down for paper to pay to cut down more trees, a man trying to build a tower taller than anything else in the land. And she murdered him in his bed that night. Fierce and savage, like it was an animal that did it. And she wrote on the wall in his blood: We still remember.

And that was the first leader of the Order of the Vengeful Wild.

There’s more formality to them now and more they can do, and they are a needed thing, like the doctors that heal your hurts, little one. But never forget that they started same as they still are, that night in the ever-ago, all bathed in vengeance and blood.

- An old folktale, as told by Basma of Hollyhock

Orfeus treated her wounds that night. First things first. She had to take care of her body, the best weapon she had.

As she entered the house, she automatically moved to hang her cloak up on the hook. Her hand felt around at the empty space above her back and she scowled.

She poured a cup of water from her house’s tap and drank it down, cold and clear. She poured and drank another. She poured one more and set it aside, and then she filled the kettle and set it to boiling. As it went, she set a stool by the table and gathered what items she had.

The house she grew up in back at Hollyhock had a better kit than this, even though her mother Maylis had been more a brewer than a proper healer. Orfeus still had respectable stores: a length of clean gauze bandage, rubbing alcohol, needle and fine thread if it got really bad, plus some shelves of dried herbs in small glass jars which had likely lost their potency.