AGORA is the last, the final 'short' story in the second Goose chapter - the one which I knew I wanted to close with, but didn't know what I wanted it to be. I had elements from the Good Nazi, in which Kay & Co. help a stationed German solve a murder in a remote mountain French village; I knew I wanted to include the story of a woman who started a whole civilisation by paving a circular yard in the middle of nowhere to inspire an agora, a marketplace for the local villagers... And I knew I wanted to close with The Orc and Kay spending a month travelling through various coastal landscapes, gravitating towards a mountain where he finally figures out the whole point of his actions.
Merging these... layers ... melted into a story of Kay and the Orc following the map left behind by the missing ranger Tovelyn, to come upon a village where a small girl has been killed. They are asked to help find the wrongdoer, which they do, but also find that there is an underlying dark magic in the soil, being awakened by the Orc's recent actions and spilling from the ancient ruins of the old marketplace. They use Kay's parlour trick to scroll down the time line, to travel a thousand years back to find the source of darkness and see if that will change anything. (Kay knows it won't, but he needs to know for sure.) They dow well, magic is removed, in present time the murder has still occurred for different reasons, if in a roundabout way still connected to the Agora. The Orc asks to travel further to the very origin of the mosaic to kill the woman, later they manage to find a peaceful solution and simply talk her out of starting it all. Again, of course, it changes nothing. The Orc goes home to finish his war once and for all and Kay makes sure that, curse-erased from memory, Tovelyn will not be forgotten.
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