“I’m just going to be blunt here.” Tenebres looked from the weary young hunter to the sullen, angry crowd. “What’s wrong with this village?”
The girl’s eyes went distant, and she simply shrugged. The motion carried a great weight of hopelessness to it. “We’re dying. Given another year, I doubt Geltis will still even be here.”
“But why? Surely just the clay pit drying up couldn’t have caused all of this.”
The young hunter looked up, and a certain wariness finally slid into them, reluctantly fighting through her obvious depression. “It’s complicated. But now… I think I need to ask you what you’re doing here, and where you’re going.”
Her words were tired, unsure. Her phrasing wasn’t some sort of ploy–she seemed honestly vague on her exact responsibilities. “I’m T-Seo. Seo, most recently of Emeston. I was heading to visit some family in Culles.”
The girl’s eyes narrowed slowly, but she didn’t even seem to notice the slip of his name. “Culles… You should change your path then, Seo of Emeston.”
A bolt of silvery fear shot through him. Ever since Sebastian’s letter had pointed them towards his old home, Tenebres had feared to learn exactly what had happened to it. He suspected that it had faced some dark days, but to have it so clearly confirmed… “Why? What happened?”
“I don’t know. That’s part of the problem.”
Tenebres’s eyes widened. “How can you not know? The village is only a few days' ride from here!”
“We first noticed it a year or so back,” the girl explained. Her eyes had lost the brief flicker of light that fulfilling her duty had inspired, despair sinking its claws back into her. “We hadn’t gotten any visitors from Culles in a while, and we feared something might be wrong. Elbert–he was the last of the potters that had stuck around–he got a bunch of the workers together and bundled up some food and supplies and went to see if they needed help.
“He never came back. None of them did. After a month, the old chief, Hessa, she took a couple hunters out to find out what had happened.” The girl blew a slow breath. “They didn’t come back, either. That’s when things really started going wrong. A few families decided to risk trying to run for it. We still don’t know what happened to them. Winter was hard, but we made it through. Only then… come spring… people started going missing from here, too. Agy, our best basket weaver. Harald, one of the loggers. Then the whole Shepp family, in a single night.”
Tenebres swallowed silently. That would’ve been around the same time as Kellen’s ritual, maybe a little before Tenebres came through here and caught that caravan… Could the cult leader have been working with someone else? Perhaps with the very same corpse hag that Tenebres now found himself hunting?
“We changed our patrols, going out more frequently,, trying to catch whatever was causing this disappearances, but then hunters started vanishing too.” The girl shuddered despite the warmth of the night. “Less than a month ago, there was this crash out by the edge of town. My brother and I, we ran to investigate it together–but when I got to the woodline, he was simply gone. And now… it’s just me. All the other hunters are gone. And… and…”
Her words faded. Not into tears, or shivers, but just into cold, simple, hopelessness. This girl knew, down to her bones, that she was going to die, and that there was nothing she could do about it. And yet… she was still trying to do her duty, futile as it was. Watching over the villagers, interrogating travelers, the things she knew she was supposed to do even if she didn’t quite know how.
Well.
That pissed Tenebres right off.
“What about the wardens?” he asked, thinking of the trio they had passed a few days back. “If this went on for that long, then they must’ve come through, right?”
The girl shrugged helplessly. “Some came through a week or two ago… but they said they were busy. Hunting bandits or something, but that they’d try to circle back. I just couldn’t… convince them.”
More like you couldn’t pay them off, Tenebres though, bile rising in his guts. Barnaby had said he’d be coming back through this way, after… after what, exactly? Had the wardens been after the same threat that loomed over Geltis and Culles? Did they know about the corpse hag? And what of the other villages? There were a few others in the area…
Tenebres started to ask the hunter about them, then faltered. He knew even without asking that it would be a waste of time. No doubt she and her predecessors had sought out every bit of help they could.
“Maybe my bodyguard and I can take a look around,” he tried to suggest to the hopeless hunter. “Maybe we’ll have some luck finding whatever it is that's doing this.”
“Don’t,” she said simply. “If you got here safely, maybe you can get out. Turn back. Before you vanish too.”
Tenebres’s skin prickled with gooseflesh. Mage’s name, this was getting creepy…
“I’m going to go get my friend, okay?” he told the girl. He kept his voice gentle, soft, the sort of tone you use to reassure a scared animal. “I’ll be right back, and we’ll figure something out.”
The girl waved a listless hand. She didn’t watch him go, too busy frowning into her mug.
Tenebres returned to the main deck of the Humps. While he looked for Allana, he absently cast his thoughts towards the flying eye. The little fiend was still active, still fluttering about the town, and still hadn’t seen anything alarming. At least there was that.
He and Allana caught sight of each other at the same time, and they hustled to meet each other. The girl held two earthenware mugs against her chest with one forearm, while her hands held a half-dozen skewers of… something. Carrots and potatoes, certainly, but the meat looked… not right.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
Not that Allana had let that stop her from scarfing down a piece. A lifetime in Lowrun had given the orphaned girl a bit of a unique palette. She was probably just happy it wasn’t seafood. For a girl born next to a bay, she really didn’t like fish.
“We need to talk,” Tenebres told her, his voice low.
The wraith girl finished chewing her nugget of mystery meat, swallowed, and told him, “Lead the way.”
#
“Well none of that is good,” Allana told Tenebres once he had caught her up.
“No shit.” Tenebres took a swig of ale, then winced. Even at its freshest, he doubted the drink would’ve tasted good, but the old ale had been mixed with dirty water to make something much worse than either on their own.
The boy looked back towards the crowd, frowning. He had led Allana to a space between two of the darkened kilns, rather than taking her right back to the young hunter.
“I hate this,” he told her.
Allana shrugged with the callousness of a person far too intimate with death. “People die, Tenebres. It’s not worth getting upset about.”
“But they shouldn’t,” he insisted. “Not like this, at least. Hunters, wardens, sentinels, knights… the whole Realm is supposed to be set up to save these people.”
“Only it’s not,” Allana replied frankly. “Did you ever see wardens out there in Emeston, crawling through the streets for monsters and necromancers? No. That was us.”
Tenebres frowned and nodded. “Us and Geoffrey…”
“Huh.”
Tenebres turned to look back at Allana, surprised by the sudden sound of her interest. Her face matched the sound–she looked puzzled, but startled, like she had come to an unexpected realization.
“Adventurers,” Allana observed. “They’re the ones stepping in to solve the problems wardens and knights and the rest of them can’t, right?”
“I guess,” Tenebres said, “that’s how the stories go.”
Allana furrowed her brow. “So if Geoffrey was an adventurer… what if that was just what he was doing?”
“What?” Tenebres asked, confused.
“Well, okay. The stories always pit adventurers against dragons and orcs and bandit kings, things way too big and strong for the others to handle. But what if that’s not all they do? What if the adventurers are the ones who step in wherever the established systems are failing? Whether that’s handling necromancers in the slums, or a darkmaw in the sewers, or hags in the deadlands?”
Tenebres frowned and turned back to the village. Could she be right? He had never heard this kind of thinking from Allana before, but… what she was saying did make a certain kind of sense. But then… “Shouldn’t the adventurers be here?” Tenebres asked. “By your logic, they’d need to come handle this.”
“I think they are,” Allana said, her voice oddly gentle. “If Sebastian, whoever he was, was an adventurer too, and he pointed us towards Culles, then…”
It finally hit Tenebres just what Allana was saying. “He knew about this. He sent us here to stop it… to be adventurers.” The boy ducked a little farther into the shadows, closer to Allana. The vivid violet of her eyes stood out in the dimness. “”Are you really okay with that, though? I know you didn’t want to be… like Geoffrey.”
Allana pursed her lips, the expression barely visible in the dim light. “I didn’t, and I don’t, want to be an assassin. I don't want to live just to kill, and I don’t want to end up dead at the hands of some asshole crimelord like Telik. But the adventuring part… that wasn’t so bad. Killing monsters. Saving people. That’s the sort of stuff I could get used to.”
“What happened to ‘it’s not worth getting upset about?’”
“It’s not,” Allana said simply. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to save people when I can.”
“Okay,” Tenebres said, pensive, nodding slowly. “Then… It’s not just about getting to Culles anymore and finding out what happened there. We know the attacks here started around a year ago. That would’ve been when I was still with Kellen’s cult.”
“In Culles, at least. Things got worse in the spring, right?” Tenebres nodded, confirming Allana’s guess. “We know the corpse hag fled Emeston a while back, but we don’t know exactly when.”
“It must’ve been around the same time as Kellen’s ritual,” Tenebres guessed. “If they really were working together, the hag must’ve planned to come here at the once Kellen gained command over the void. Between them, they could’ve taken over most of the deadlands before anyone caught wind.”
“But things didn’t work out that way,” Allana pointed out. “Kellen fucked up, and you got the void power instead. With him and his cult gone, the corpse hag had to change up its plans. It started getting more aggressive in the nearby villages, trying to take people wherever it could to make more undead to serve it.”
“Whatever is stalking Geltis,” Tenebres reasoned aloud, “must be a stealthy, fast moving undead, capable of quickly killing its prey and making off with the corpse.”
Tenebres thought back to the materials Geoffrey had given them, primers on the basic varieties of undead to study while they hunted Sloan. “A ghoul,” he decided.
“Yeah?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense. They’re made by necromancers with the gift of flesh out of battle-gifted corpses. They repurpose the lingering enhancement magic in the body, making a fast, strong, difficult to kill undead.”
“You said they sent hunters to Culles,” Allana suggested. “Would their bodies work for something like this?”
Tenebres nodded, increasingly sure of his guess. “Yeah… yeah, they’d be perfect.” The boy pushed off the side of the kiln he was leaning against, turning back to the well-lit deck. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“I have a few more questions for that hunter.”
#
Tenebres stared at the table the hunter had sat at.
The empty table.
“Fuck.”
The chair she had been sitting in was tipped over, and her mug lay on its side, watered-down ale dripping down onto the dirt underneath.
“Tenebres?”
“She’s gone now too…” His voice was a whisper, raw with pain. He remembered the despair, the surety in the girl’s eyes. She knew this was going to happen. She turned him down when he offered help, too resigned to her fate.
That’s when panic flared in the back of Tenebres’s head, an unfamiliar sort of animalistic, instinctual sense of alarm.
The flying eye. It had seen danger.
