TIME August 6th, morning LOCATION Arn Griishank
BACKGROUND:
A night of undead violence had left Arn Griishank’s dead walking twice over.
The Agents had put every last one back down, and beheaded them all – but morning brought a village that hadn’t yet decided how to feel about strangers who’d just decapitated their own dead in front of them.
WHAT HAPPENED
The villagers gathering at first light weren’t grateful – they were furious, gathering outside the inn to bury two dozen of their own dead and looking for someone to blame.
The priest had barely started the service before a voice broke through it:
“Y’all know why we are here. Our families were murdered by the newcomers – and they still standing!”
Brent tried to talk the crowd down before it turned into something worse.
“Those creatures weren’t John. It wasn’t Annie or Bobbie Joe. They’d already been murdered by them hellspawn – I saw them grab Euan myself and drain the life clean out of him. Then he got back up as one of those things, I swear it by Heironeous.”
It wasn’t the ‘hellspawn’ the Agents had fought by the end, only what was left after something else had already killed and reanimated them – but grief doesn’t always listen to reason.
It was Lord Valden himself who turned the crowd, arriving at the mass grave on horseback to a ripple of surprised, unfriendly muttering –
“what’s he doin here,” “haven’t seen him for months and now he shows up”
and doing something none of the villagers seemed to expect: taking the blame publicly, in front of all of them.
“I have neglected Arn Griishank, and I have failed you, all of you, my wards.
I cannot undo what has been done.
The source of last night’s catastrophe was one of the Dranathess – a hideous lifedrinker who slew the gate guards and descended on Arn.
We have these Agents to thank, not berate. If they had not stepped up, this entire town, and the keep besides, would have been wiped out.
It would be a great honour if the soldiers lost in the fighting could be laid to rest alongside your own families and friends.”
Lord Valden, at the funeral
The crowd’s anger cooled, if not entirely.
When Krusha mentioned needing diamond dust for a restorative ritual on Raven, still weakened from Deville’s attack, Valden arranged the trade himself, adding two more small diamonds on top once he realised what the sword they’d carried was actually worth.
Afterward, Valden approached Raven privately – he knew about the stolen weapons, and raised it without any real complaint. The longsword taken from a Dranathess, the shortsword likely lifted from one of Kaleb’s own archaeological digs.
Fair compensation, he called it, for what his donjon had put them through. What he offered on top of that was quieter, and meant more.
“I wish you luck in your mission for Chuza. It sounds important, and your loyalty is commendable.
But – take it from someone who has been there – be wary of those in the higher echelons of the political realms.
Sometimes they use that loyalty against you.”Lord Valden, privately, to the Agents
Beloq – the archaeologist who’d been conspicuously absent through the entire ordeal – finally turned up at the inn afterward, entirely unbothered by the scorched wreckage around him and far more interested in where the Agents had gotten their ‘wonderful toys’.
“Take it you’re the Stardies from the North, eh?”
he asked, surveying the scorched wreckage with something closer to professional curiosity than alarm.
“Quite a stooshie here. You’re lookin’ a bit peely wally there, lass.”
A gruff, foul-mouthed Scot with an unusual vocal tic that peppered every sentence with profanity he seemed entirely unaware of – a condition, he insisted, rather than a habit.
He agreed to guide them into the deep jungle proper, toward Borthanza, with the frank warning that none of them had any real idea what they were walking into.