Ashes at Ratchet's Edge
Four days had passed since High Pouna last stood beneath the hot sky of the Barrens, and when he returned it was to Ratchet, the goblin port where the sea met the dust. The docks there groaned under crane and crate, the wooden walkways crowded with the bustle of a town that never slept and never stood still, goblins hauling cargo between ships that called from across the water and wagons bound inland. Smoke rose thin from the machinery along the wharf, and beneath it all the brine of the sea mixed strange with the dry red dust that drifted in from the plain beyond.
He came and went from that harbor town four times in quick succession, as if testing the ground beneath him before committing to the road, each return finding him again among the planks and noise of Ratchet. No blade was drawn, no words exchanged worth telling; it was a short while spent at the edge of the Barrens, the heat shimmering off the distant grass beyond the town's rough palisade, the cry of gulls mixing with the clatter of goblin engines.
The day's work was brief, little more than a breath taken before the longer road ahead. When High Pouna at last stood still, it was there in Ratchet, the sun hanging low enough over the water to lay gold across the waves, the plains of the Barrens stretching pale and dry beyond the town's edge. Much still waited on him out there: Mankrik's wife still unfound, the Troll Charm ungathered, Boulderslide Ravine and the quilboar camps beyond it untouched, and further still across those sun-cracked flats, more roads he had yet to walk.