TIME August 1st, evening (continuing) LOCATION Kenbro, during the storm
BACKGROUND:
Something was very wrong with Avon, the missing miner boss, and the storm outside was only getting worse – along with whatever had come looking for him.
WHAT HAPPENED
The door came apart under a single massive blow, and what stood in the frame afterward was unmistakably a soldier once – Dranathess armour, a Talismonde tattoo – and unmistakably not human any longer.
It sniffed the air, fixed on the miner called Delta, and spoke in a flat, wrong voice:
you took something.
Krusha enquires if Kade knows about this. Raven uses her negotiating skills and longsword on Delta.
“Lexi’s balls what is that thing. It can’t be.. the patrol? How did it find us?”
Avon had stolen something. Something that they could sell. And this thing had pursued them. And killed half a dozen of their companions. That was a week ago and we lost it, doubling back and running circles before coming here.
The item was a heavy obsidian flask – something that moved, faintly, when Krusha picked it up to hand over as a peace offering.
The creature took the gift gladly enough, then turned on the miner nearest it anyway, tearing him open and eating what it pulled out with a horrified, repeated no even as it fed, as if some scrap of the man underneath was still watching itself do it.
Raven bravely indicates that she is leaving this madhouse and pushes out through the kitchen into the rain-soaked street.
Krusha followed the room’s vote and went out the front.
Outside, in a flash of the storm’s impossible purple light, Ash caught sight of a young boy in the mud calmly forcing his thumbs into a dog’s eyes – whatever was in the air that night, it wasn’t only affecting the obviously infected.
Two locals, Bert and Mary unlocked their door and took Raven and Krusha in. When the fleeing miner Kade came screaming behind them with the creature in pursuit, Bert and Mary let them stay on the condition Kade stayed outside. Raven made sure he wouldn’t be a problem for anyone, permanently, before the door shut and barred behind her.
The child finishes beating the dogs head against the porch.
The storm finally broke sometime after midnight, and with it, whatever madness had gripped Kenbro – villagers coming back to themselves in the street, horrified at what their own hands had done during the ‘accident.’
Bert’s matter-of-fact explanation made it plain this wasn’t the first time: we’d better clear up the mess… so many accidents… but it is the way of KemerLexi, and we must endure.
Back at the inn, Avon’s body was still convulsing, cracking, filling the room with the smell of burning meat. Ash and Krusha’s attempts to diagnose him only accelerated whatever was happening – his chest split open from the inside, and something black, viscous, and very much alive poured out across his corpse, dissolving his armour and the floor beneath it wherever it touched. Raven put it down with a well-aimed alchemist’s fire from a safe distance rather than let it spread any further.
Outside, in the muddy street, the preacher – blood on his beard, on his vestments, on his hands – knelt in front of the very girl whose sister he’d apparently killed hours earlier. She helped him to his feet instead of striking him down.
Neither of them said a word.
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- Kenbro’s ‘accidents’ are neither accidental nor new – the whole village seems to accept them as a fact of life during storms.
- Whatever Avon stole – and whatever it turned into – came from somewhere with Dranathess connections.