Disclaimer: I am not Lisa Stevens, Vic Wertz, Erik Mona, James Jacobs, or any of the other top brass at Paizo Publishing. I do not own Golarion. The following is fanfiction set in someone else's world.

Note: The following was written by me originally for a fanfiction contest on another fanfiction website. It went over the target word-count, however, and the trimmed down version which I ended up submitting never got anywhere. I publish below the complete original version. It is set on Paizo's world of Golarion.

Prelude:

Qadira, 2353 AR

"I admit that that is impressive." Prince Muzulir said, calmly studying the chess board. Outside the tent a storm of swans raged, honking and hooting through the camp, pecking at guards and servants and battering with wings as they wheeled, climbed, and dived. "Quite futile though, magician. My life is charmed, vouchsafed by an angel of the Dawnflower. You can butcher my servants all that you wish, but replacements are cheap and easy to find. Wild beasts cannot harm me nor even the tame pets of a petty conjurer."

The prince moved a piece on the board then turned the hourglass. The sand began to run the opposite way.

"Check, and mate in two. Your position really is quite hopeless, you know."

"Perhaps, your highness." his opponent, a man of greying hair who was dressed in the simple dark robes of a desert bedouin appeared to be studying the board, deep in thought.

"So, you will lose, and will summon the devil Arth'Raxerium for me, to barter your own life for a further three hundred years extension for my own?"

"Your highness has dwelt in luxury for many decades, maintaining the vigour of youth, wearing the finest silks, tutored by the noblest sages, and with assassins or mercenaries striking down those whom you perceived to threaten your path. You have forced deals from all manner of otherworldly creatures, to live this life in such security and power for so long. Has it never occurred to your highness that so many enemies in the outer spheres have you made that they might unite against you to bring you down?"

Outside the tent, the sounds of the struggles of the prince's retainers were dying away to croaks and death-rattles, as the music of the triumph of the whirling swans filled the air.

"I have powerful allies amongst daemonkind." the prince amiably replied. "I do not doubt that they view me as a servant or slave, and one to be sacrificed at some point if I get too full of myself, but for now they disrupt any such coalitions against me."

The magician moved a piece, and flipped the hourglass back over.

"You really intend to make me play this out to the end?" the prince quirked an eyebrow.

"Of course your highness; as you have taken the liberty of frequently pointing out during the three and a half hours since that most excellent lunch which you were kind enough to share with me, my very life is at stake here…"

Outside it was silent now, save for the sound of the swans, and in ones and twos occasional birds were starting to flutter into the tent. They perched seemingly at random, though kept their distance from the prince, almost as if warded away by an unseen barrier. The beaks and feathers of many were splashed with blood, though there was little indication that any of it might be theirs.

"Very well then." the prince pushed a piece forward, and turned the hourglass over again. "Whatever your next move is, you cannot now escape mate the turn after."

The magician studied the board.

"I must admit that there appears to be some element of truth in your highness' words. However, it is some time since anyone has beaten me at chess, and I believe that your highness has overlooked one possibility. What if my next move is to cheat?"

And he waved his hand, and with the exception of the king, every piece left on the board on his side was suddenly a queen, pinning the prince's king in the midst of a web of death.

"You lose, your highness." the magician rose to his feet and set the hourglass on its side. And suddenly, they were not swans in the tent, but beautiful women, their white robes smeared with blood and shining silver swords in their hands.

"Who? What? How?" Horror was written across the prince's face as his doom gathered all about him. "Oh, wait? You? But you're a legend, a fairy-story. You died centuries ago."

"True, I stepped back from meddling in the affairs of the world for a while, to spare myself being bothered by the unworthy and to have a little breathing space to enjoy the view. But you have sufficiently irked my Lady Salmutha to merit my personal attention, and sadly the pact you exacted from Sarenrae's servant will not protect you from my retinue. Within days those who arrive to investigate your absence from court will be writing stories and speculations about this occasion which will be retold and rewritten for centuries. Welcome to history, your highness." He gestured to the women. "Finish him."

The prince's scream echoed through the camp, the sound a man whose life is ending in mortal terror of the damnation to which he is being unexpectedly sent to face; then there was only the laughter of women ringing in the baking heat of the late desert afternoon.

Hunting Swans:

Absalom, 4635 AR

The sound of metal ringing on metal resounded as the pathfinder Venduras Kline took apart one of the Grand Lodge's training golems with a flurry of hammer blows. His dark hair damp with sweat he stood back, and leant on the sledgehammer, catching his breath as the animated suit of armour reassembled itself, before flexing his muscles and launching into it again with another series of furious attacks.

"Bad day, huh?" the blonde-haired, willowy, Daisy Fufflehorn looked in through the arched entry to the room.

"Bad does not even begin to cover it." Venduras smashed the golem apart yet again, then put the hammer down and turned to face his fellow Pathfinder. "A stupid, obstinate, woman – a mere apothecary at a backstreet store with less real lore at her fingertips than a novice Pathfinder – is getting in my way."

"The last I heard, you were headed out into the wilds of Varisia to look for one of those weird card-readers." Daisy said, coming in and sitting down on one of the room's marble benches. She made a patting motion on the bench, hinting she expected Venduras to come and sit beside her. He remained standing though.

"Oh her, yes: I found her. She was very cooperative and anxious to see me on my way. Pretty daughter, too – couldn't have been long a woman, though you wouldn't have known it from the outrageous way she flirted. Anyway: the harrow-reader told me she couldn't find the elf, master Sterfoel – not surprising he's so hard to track down by magic, given what he's reputed to know about a cabal of assassin-wizards – but that a woman in a theatrical venue in Whitethrone might know more about him. So off I toddled into the freezing north, and eventually tracked down the artiste the harrow-reader had talked about. She wasn't bad looking, either – looked to have more than a touch of fey blood, which wasn't surprising given she claimed that Sterfoel is her half-brother. She played all coy, and gave me a piece of paper with symbols on that she said indicated Sterfoel's location, and that he was holed up in a rural inn, somewhere, and needed a physician for the woman he'd run off with and got in a family way. And she said that there was only one physician that would do, and she lived in Absalom, and could read where the symbols said to go. Well I couldn't make anything of the symbols, so back down here I trotted, post-haste, to find the woman she'd indicated, and I finally ran her down this noon. Only I'm not interested in whatever stupid games and indiscretions Sterfoel has going on, so I told this herbalist that the paper was part of a wager from a fellow Pathfinder, and I would pay a hundred gold to anyone who could decipher what was on it. I just want to get to Sterfoel after all to find out what he knows about the cabal. And this infuriating apothecary", he slammed a fist against the wall in frustration, "told me that if that was all that I had to say on the matter, she wasn't going to spoil somebody else's fun. Then she pulled a crossbow out and invited me to leave when I tried to get more forceful in my line of questioning." He sagged now. "I'd borrowed a pair of enchanted lenses, and was trying like crazy to charm the woman into being more reasonable, but she must have clients in the aristocracy or underworld who pay for her to be protected, because as far as I could tell my efforts were sliding off her like cord off a greased pig."

At last he slumped, and sat on the bench next to Daisy, head clutched in his hands.

"What do I do, Daisy? I've analysed those symbols supposed to say where to find Sterfoel for magical writings and invisible inks, but discovered nothing. I called in a favour from a high ranking priest of Nethys, but for all his chants and prayers all he could tell me about them was 'a mystery of the night shrouded in secrets'. I've checked with the lodge's cipher and language experts, and they're all stumped. Is this all just a joke being played on me by a group of women in conspiracy with one another, or do an exotic actress in Whitethrone and a herbalist on the back streets of Absalom know a code which baffles the Society's finest? And how am I supposed to find Sterfoel now?"

"Can I have a look at those signs?" Daisy asked.

Venduras nodded, fumbled in his clothes, and passed over a crumpled piece of parchment.

"Here, keep it if it's any use, it's a copy. The original's somewhere safe."

Daisy looked at the symbols on it for some time, turning the piece of parchment occasionally as if in hope that viewed from a different angle it might make more sense.

At last she patted Venduras on the back.

"I haven't the faintest idea what they mean or say either, but I'll see what I can find out."

Making enquiries, it took Daisy very little time to locate the herbalist's shop where Venduras had been so vexed. A signboard 'Kathy's Herbs' announced the name of the business over the shop front, and a dark haired woman was outside, fixing up the shutters as evening drew in.

"Hello there. I'm a Pathfinder, Daisy Fufflehorn, and perhaps you spoke to one of my colleagues earlier. He may have been a bit ungracious." Daisy introduced herself. "I'd like to apologise on behalf of my colleague, and hoped that I might be able to explain things to the person whom he offended."

"Hah!" the dark-haired woman gave a short laugh. "I have met very few people in my life who could actually explain something which they had claimed that they could. Fortunately, if your colleague was the big fellow with dark hair, stubble, and mysterious wager then he saw reason in the tip of a crossbow bolt, and left before he could do anything I might have regarded as giving serious offence."

She fitted up another shutter.

"No, I can explain. I mean his brusque behaviour, and why he's so desperate." Daisy persisted. "You see years ago his sister Aramintha vanished, and he's never been able to find out for certain what happened to her. Lately he's come to believe a cabal of wizard-assassins called 'the swan hunters' were in some way involved – they kill people with specially trained birds and have a weird obsession with the story of the magician who beat Prince Muzulir at chess with the aid of a flock of swans. Anyway, at about the time she disappeared there was a note left at Aramintha's house quoting a line from an old play about the Swan Lord that these swan-hunters supposedly all love – and he's trying to find an elf who he thinks knows more about these wizard-assassins. It certainly sounds crazy I know – my colleague may be a little bit deranged himself after more than a dozen years spent seeking answers. But he's so desperate to find his sister, or what happened to her. Priests and oracles have never been able to give him any satisfactory reports, so he just keeps on chasing the mystery, unable to let go."

"If priests and oracles have never been able to give him any answers over a period of years, it says to me that either something so ghastly happened that they don't want to tell him or that she was made to vanish by something so powerful that all the prayers and spells of the casters of this age won't bring her back." the dark-haired woman snorted, putting up the last shutter. She turned to look Daisy in the face. "You care for him, this pathfinder colleague of yours?"

Daisy mutely nodded.

"Pshw." the dark-haired woman said, turning away. "Come inside and tell me what you know of what he really came this noon with those symbols about? That story about a wager was utter garbage."

Inside the shop, by the light of a flickering oil-lamp, Daisy produced the scrap of parchment and laid it on the counter, as if in the hope of getting a further explanation of what was on it. The dark-haired woman had locked the street door, and now stood the other side of the counter from Daisy, ignoring the parchment however. They stood in silence for a while, looking at one another – each willing the other to explain more – before Daisy caved in first.

"That's a copy. He didn't go into details. He said an actress or singer or something in Whitethrone gave the original to him. She said her half-brother, who's this elf, Sterfoel, he's so desperate to find, had eloped with a human girl and gotten her with child, and for some reason this girl needs you as a physician. She thinks that you will understand from those sigils where the elf and his lady-friend are. It's all rather confusing, and not much of it makes sense to me."

There was a further long silence.

"I am not some errand girl, even for the likes of her in Whitethrone or her half-brother.", the dark haired woman said at last, her emerald eyes gleaming for a moment.

"Oh, you do know what's going on then? It makes sense to you?" Daisy asked.

"The one your Pathfinder friend is looking for should have known better than to run off with a mortal woman like that." the dark-haired woman said. "That 'elf' clearly has little between his ears but air. No wonder his half-sister thinks only I will do."

"So, err, you'll help them?" Daisy asked.

"No." the woman flatly replied. "I help only a very few friends. I handle small commissions and trades otherwise, from those who ask me face to face. I will not go to them. I will not help them. Nor, given this afternoon's deceits, am I minded to tell you or your friend where the elf and his woman are. Your friend lied to me, tried to bewitch me, and finally assayed to threaten me. On point of principle I will not reward such abominable lack of etiquette with any assistance."

"Isn't there anything which I could do to make you change your mind?" Daisy asked. "I know my colleague's behaved badly towards you, but I haven't and I'm a Pathfinder too; I know things, I can find things out, I can do things or call in favours and get other people to do things for me. Aren't there rare flowers or orchids which you need which I could perhaps get for you?"

There was another silence whilst the herbalist considered. At last she answered.

"Understand that I do not cast spells, so if I play this game, then magical transport of some kind will need to be arranged to speed at least your colleague and myself to the location where this elf and his lady-love are currently camped out. I suspect that if your colleague is to present himself, he will be in a much better position to do so in my company and the sooner the better, since that will maximise his chance to look like a godsend to the elf he desires to talk with. I shall negotiate my own fee for my services from the elf, but conditional to my even going there, in your friend's company, are that before we depart your friend will apologise to me for his behaviour of earlier this day, that you will do certain very specific things which I will assist you in, and that you will persuade your friend to hand over to you his Pathfinder pin 'for safekeeping' before he leaves for any subsequent stage to his travels. Finally, if as I suspect from what you have told me the Swan Lord of old tales is a model to the wizards your friend believes are associated with his sister's disappearance I would caution him that I once heard something perhaps not known in Pathfinder Society circles: That, in the days before the Earthfall shook the world and many things changed or disappeared forever, a female demon lord named Salmutha had a fondness for swans."

"I've never head of any Salmutha, but I'll try to remember to pass that on." Daisy promised. "Now what about those specific things you want me to do?"

The dark-haired woman told her, and Daisy looked bewildered.

"I don't understand." Daisy said.

"I have played enough chess – seen sufficient of life – to anticipate that if your colleague follows this through that the end he finds will be bitter indeed. If you truly love him – are desperate enough that you will offer me anything to try to win my aid on his behalf – then this is something you should do as much for your own sake as his. I don't care what, if anything, you tell him about this agreement if you wish to go through with it. Those are my terms to you, and they are non-negotiable."

Galt

Several days later, in an inn in a rural backwater where the herbalist was now ensconced with Sterfoel and his wife, Venduras and Daisy were saying their final parting over the breakfast table.

"I still can't believe that she caved in like that. All it took was a few words from me, to smooth things over. I knew I was charming, and a smooth talker, but I didn't realise that I was that smooth." Venduras said.

"Venduras." Daisy said, whose heart now hid a number of secrets from him. "Be careful, please. For me."

"I'll be worried enough on account of my own skin, but you needn't fear that I won't occasionally keep you in my thoughts, my Daisy Boo. By the sound of it Sterfoel smashed most of the cabal anyway – he must be a terrific fighter, though no wonder he's in hiding – but he thinks there's an old temple or shrine somewhere he never tracked down that the grand-wizard of the order lived in. The elf's not sure if he got the grand-wizard or not in his attacks on the Swan Hunters, but he's given me the details of their lairs he did find and some clues as to where the grand-wizard's home might be located. I'll have to go and see what I can find." He made a face. "It's too much to hope I'll discover anything conclusive about Aramintha myself, but maybe once I've put these places on a map and checked that they're safe some Society casters can go out and work their divinations from inside any mystic shields protecting the locations; then maybe I'll finally get my answers."

Somewhere in Northern Garund

The massive red sandstone columns of the front of the temple supported a pediment carved in relief with a scene of what looked to be a dance of swans. Venduras, swathed in protective enchantments against the heat and glare of the desert sun, had distinguished increasing details of it as he approached the temple. Between glances at the temple he had constantly scanned the surrounding expanse of rocks and pebbles for any signs of an ambush on this final approach to the mountainside holy-place – or even that other people had been this way recently.

He had seen nothing. In three months of travels since he left Galt, he had found occasional dead bodies in places Sterfoel had said he had been and signs of looting and destruction, but little else. Maybe the elf had utterly destroyed the cabal.

At last he passed into the shade of the temple, and paused between two columns to admire the workmanship, and to try to hazard a guess at their age. There was more than a hint of magic in the air, and despite their seemingly unweathered state they might have stood here for any length of time. There were thousands of words carved upon them in languages he did not know, though he could recognise that many were inscribed in the runes of Thassilon or in letters in the mode of ancient Azlant.

Something about the timeless grandeur and elegance of this place recalled to his mind the fateful message on the scroll in his sister's dwelling. 'What if you could be beautiful and live for as long as you wished?' A line from an ancient play which had set him on the long trail that had led him here. Having seen some of their places of work he was starting to belatedly doubt why the wizard-assassins would have left a note like that if they had made off with his sister? True, he had seen plenty of evidence that they killed people and abducted victims for experiments and sacrifices – they also clearly were obsessed with one particular Qadiran fable – but leaving it as a deliberate clue or taunt to their activities didn't fit what he now thought of as their modus operandi. But, despite these late doubts, his Pathfinder gut said he had finally come to a place where his search for the truth about Aramintha's fate would end.

He headed further into the temple, bringing out a sunrod to provide illumination as he paced across the rough red floor – sandstone like the pillars and roof above. It seemed almost icy cool in here, out of the sun, and he thought if he paused and listened hard enough, he could hear the splash of water from somewhere much deeper within. He pressed on, out of the main entry hall and down a series of corridors, through rooms now no longer constructed of shaped stone, but subterranean ways hued from the rock of the mountain.

He descended a stair, and entered what seemed to be a shrine room, with a broad altar overlooked by a huge statue which seemed to be part naked woman, part swan. The white quartzite of the statue stood in stark contrast to the red rock otherwise all around.

And the scene subtly shifted, and the air shimmered for a moment as if with a mirage, and then a bearded man stood there in white robes, his face and hands tanned by the desert sun, and a long twisting rod of crystal in his right hand, easily three feet long, carved in the shape of very many swans. Though his hair was grey, he otherwise seemed in the prime of his life.

"Greetings, traveller. You have come a good many years and miles, crossing and recrossing two continents, to be at this place, in this time. Do you have any word of warding or of greeting to give to me?"

He spoke to Venduras in Taldane, but with an oddly archaic accent.

"I am Venduras Kline, Pathfinder." Venduras said, and a feeling of unease seasoned with just a little fear trickled down his spine like cold water. "I greet you in the name of the Ten."

"Ah, the Pathfinders and the Decemvirate." the man laughed. "You little dabblers of lore, running round gathering items and facts to please your ten masked masters – never stopping to ask why you're doing it, or what their ends might be? Perhaps that's just as well. Anyhow, what you have spent a good deal of time asking – time which might have been spent more productively looking to your own needs I must say – is about what happened to your sister? Don't worry. I forgive you the cult. They were misguided anyway – they never truly understood myself or the goddess – and you weren't the one to actually kill them. They thought of themselves as my servants, and I probably should be angry about their deaths, but I'm not – or at least not at present with you. Still, you have drawn more attention than was strictly desirable with your endless pokings and questions during the years, even if it was other minds that saw things and did the actual damage." From out of the air, like ghosts materialising into corporeality, swans were descending now, one after another to land on the stone and gather around the man.

And Venduras belatedly realised just who and what he might be in the presence of…

"You're the wizard of the legend, who beat Prince Muzulir at chess."

"Quite so" the man made a brief and mocking bow. "You have found me out. Only the stories which they tell these days aren't quite accurate. They make too much of the chess game, and speak of my handmaids as mere wild birds who distracted the prince at a crucial moment, not as living vassals of the goddess whose involvement was rather bloodier than even the most learned historian imagines. Oh. I have someone I believe you'd like to meet." He reached out and tapped one of his swans on the head imperially with his rod, and she honked in reply, then began to change, shooting upwards and shifting, until it was a woman dressed in white robes, with a sword sheathed at her belt, who looked back at Venduras. In shape and form, there was much about her that recalled to the Pathfinder his sister, a woman as young and vibrantly beautiful as she had been when he had last seen her so many years before, but there was something in her eyes which had changed and which was terrible for him to behold.

"Hello, Vendy, you silly old thing." The voice was hers, but mockery laced it. She was Aramintha, but she was become a beauteous monster, wild and dangerous.

"What in Desna's name have you done to her?" Venduras turned on the wizard – the Swan Lord – and for the first time since his sister had vanished the name of the goddess he had used to follow passed his lips.

"Desna won't help you now or here, my lad." the magician simply ignored the question. "This is a place of power dedicated to Lady Salmutha. But you won't have heard of her, I expect. Even the Pathfinders with all their books and troves don't know her anymore, or not as she was."

"Salmutha of the Swans? The demon lord?" Venduras tried to rally in the face of overwhelming catastrophe. "There's a herbalist of Absalom who knows about her."

"What? Who?" The man's composure suddenly cracked, and his voice shook with fury. The swans honked and hooted and clustered around him, and Aramintha looked bewildered. "Describe her to me."

Venduras described the dark-haired herbalist, whom he had last seen in the inn in Galt, and racked his mind for anything else he had heard from Daisy or otherwise learned of her.

"Her?" the ancient magician raged. "She should be long dead by now. How is She still alive?"

"Well she is." Venduras said. The lunatic who must have taken and corrupted his sister into the awful thing which stood there was fantastically old, fantastically powerful, a thing of stories, and one of the first things a Pathfinder learned was that you never argued with legends which turned out to be real without a lot of preparation and backup. Venduras hadn't a hope of killing him. But the man was in turmoil, and just the right word here and there and maybe Venduras could escape, report back, and rally the Society to hunt down and stamp out this monster or at least drive him somewhere a long way from the Inner Sea. "She's still alive and playing chess."

The moment the words passed his lips, Venduras knew that they had been the wrong thing to say. The Swan Lord turned towards him, and Venduras saw in his face that whomever he thought the herbalist was, she had not just beaten Venduras, but utterly humiliated him in every last chess game that they had ever played. The ancient wizard lifted his rod, and thrust it in fury at Venduras, and as white feathered death (and Aramintha) stormed towards him in a whirl of wings one consolation did occur to the Pathfinder: Somehow, he had hurt the wizard in his pride more soundly than any blade or spell which he could have brought to bear would have done. It would be a long time before his enemy could forget him – could forget this moment.

It wasn't much consolation, but if it was all that was there to be had it was what he would take, and Venduras Kline went down with a deliberately mocking smile on his lips.

Epilogue:

Absalom

Daisy woke up from her afternoon nap, and found that she had been crying in her sleep, and somehow she knew that Venduras was dead. She sat up and her glance went to the bedside table, where his Pathfinder pin lay, whilst her hands went to the as yet slight swell of her stomach. She didn't know if the dark-haired herbalist had been cruel or kind. Venduras was dead, and she was left with his pin and as a mother-to-be of his child…

Author Notes:

Salmutha of the Swans is back-story I invented for an existing canon deity for the purposes of this story. The actual story, besides being set in Golarion, is to some extent inspired by the themes and Tchaikovsky's music for the ballet Swan Lake.

Venduras Kline was originally envisioned as being pehaps an uncle from several generations back for the canon Pathfinder character Eando Kline.

Speladrin Kaltharûnír is a 'daughter of the morning' who occasionally wanders into one or another of my stories. She tends towards chaotic neutral (in gaming terms) alignment rather than the chaotic evil which daughters of the morning generally do. Her hobbies include playing chess, playing with people, and generally finding things to amuse herself with given she isn't actually bothered by ageing.