TIME Late July, days 15-17 LOCATION The road south, toward Last Hope
BACKGROUND:
The Fekratt tribe had broken camp and vanished within the hour, leaving barely a mark on the ground where hundreds of people and head of cattle had stood the night before. The road ahead led into rain, and then into worse.
WHAT HAPPENED
The weather turned within a day of leaving the Fekratt – clear skies giving way to a steady, grinding rain that churned the road to mud.
The village of Nareen, when they reached it, had the wrong kind of quiet about it – conversations that stopped when the Agents passed, curtains twitching shut, children too subdued for children.
Whatever the locals thought of the tax collectors working the district on Lord Valden’s behalf, they weren’t saying it out loud.
A day on, the trail crested a hill over what had once been a village – The Last Hope, a weathered sign called it, with a hand-carved ‘2nd’ wedged in above the name.
It had been carefully dismantled rather than destroyed, structural posts left standing, everything else long since weathered away.
A stuck wagon at the edge of the ruins turned out to belong to William the Wanderer – a peddler of dubious religious relics with a genuinely wandering eye, whose horses were about to have their legs crushed under a cart sinking deeper into the mud with every panicked pull.
Raven talked the animals calm; between the Agents’ own horses and some patient leverage, the cart came free.
William, grateful, cooked lunch and made his pitch, not without first explaining the wandering eye and the gift that came with it.
“Didn’t always have the gift of the gab. Was when my father died – as he was dropped into the grave, his skill passed to me. A gift from the Lowered, you might say!”
Then came splinters of saints’ bones, a sword hilt supposedly strung with knucklebones, and, under the counter, small vials of something he called the blood of H’Esoos, said to cure or ward off disease and plague with a single drop.
Raven traded a bulb of Twitch for one, and William trundled off north.
They camped in the ruins overnight and pushed on toward Green Hell’s edge in the morning, straight into a fight that wasn’t theirs.
A band of orcs, painted and camouflaged, were closing on a pair of logging camp lookouts – not to kill them, it turned out, but to break an arm or a leg as punishment for logging.
The deforestation was starving out the local deer, poisoning them slowly on a diet of toxic leaves.
Jaxx, a 9′ giant of a logger with a magically reinforced chain-saw slung over one shoulder, held his own against the orcs without much concern for the fight around him, more annoyed at the interruption to his quota than afraid for his life.
Two of the orcs tried talking him down first, hands raised, warning him off – Jaxx just smiled and kept swinging.
“You’re welcome to try and stop me working when this is over,”
he told them, heavily accented but perfectly clear,
“but I’m more than able to rip your dicks off and make you use them as straws. If that’s what you want.”
The Agents waded in and evened the numbers, and once the orcs realised nobody intended to kill them outright, the fight cooled into something closer to a negotiation.
Krusha offered healing to the wounded on both sides – the orcs took him up on it warily, even handing over one of their own worse-hurt fighters to be healed alongside the loggers. A starved, opened-up deer carcass made their point better than any threat could have: the poison in the leaves wasn’t the orcs’ doing, and it wasn’t going to stop on its own.
The orcs withdrew rather than press the fight further.
Jaxx, for his part, seemed entirely unbothered by the whole affair and invited the Agents to share the loggers’ stew before they moved on.