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The locals swarmed the man and his wares like hungry locusts. They brought out handfuls of silver coins to bargain with the merchant, which he found odd since in his experience the locals mainly bartered with each other rather than use any hard currency. He only needed to take one look at the coinage to know exactly what they were, and it did not please him. Silver Dinars, the currency of The Guild.
The Guild is the single largest organization in all of Creation. It's a conglomerate of people from all walks of life united under a single, sacred goal: The acquisition of wealth. The Guilds tendrils reach all across the four directions, wherever profit can be made, or wherever they can create a market for their wares. The thing is, while the Guild deals in practically everything in existence from the mundane to the arcane, its princes and factors are known primarily for peddling in the two most needed, basic things. Flesh and recreation. Wherever the Guild rears its ugly head, slavery and drugs soon follow. It starts innocently enough, with them selling only things the locals need but once they get a foot in they'll start pushing these more profitable things as the need for cheap, expandable labor and addiction have a way of fueling themselves. The dinars he sees are nothing more than the seeds passerby Guild merchants have sown. Summer Valley is too small to be profitable, for now. But should it flourish it'll try to siphon off its wealth and prosperity like a parasite.
However that is not why he was wary of the Guild. The real problem with them was two-fold. First, The Guild will trade with anyone who is willing to bargain. Gods, Demons, Fae, the Dead, it mattered not to them. One monster's coin is as good as any other. Some of the things they are rumored to practice are enough to make even the most jaded Dynasts stomach churn, such as selling slaves to the Fae, then buying back the same soul-devoured bastards and selling their blood to ghosts and meat to demons, all after the mindless husks were used to breed more slaves of course. And the other is that the Guild was powerful. They were good at what they were doing, and even if one or two merchants always failed, the Guild was simply too big, too influential and too necessary to fail.
Jet walked up to the merchant's small caravan of wagons to look at his wares. He had a great variety of stuff to sell, from hand-woven rugs to exotic spices and precious metals. None of it was all that impressive. At least to him. Nothing he had could even be compared to merchandise from The Blessed Isle. But the locals were enamored by it all. Men sought to buy fine tools that Bear could not, or could not afford to forge and women looked greedily at the pretty foreign dresses and exotic perfumes they could use to pretty themselves up with for the sake of attracting the lads. What stuck out to Jet however were the things in the cart at the end of the convoy. People wearing tattered rags and bound in shackles.
