TIME August 1st, deep night LOCATION Kenbro
BACKGROUND:
Avon’s body had burst open into something corrosive and alive on the tavern floor, and the preacher responsible for at least some of the night’s dead had just been quietly forgiven by the very people he’d hurt.
WHAT HAPPENED
Raven put the burning black ooze down with fire from a safe distance while Krusha and Ash kept well clear of its acid touch. It dissolved what was left of Avon along with a fair patch of the tavern floor before the flames finally consumed it entirely.
Ceph, watching the wreckage of his own saloon, muttered something about unholy practices of the Art – not entirely wrong, if aimed at the wrong target.
The Agents helped with the clean-up through what remained of the night, and by morning the truth of Kenbro settled in: the village was a community of KemerLexi faithful who genuinely believed these periodic ‘accidents’ were simply a trial of their isolation, not a curse worth fighting.
A funeral was held that day in the village’s old stone church – brief, raw, and strange in its lack of anger.
Johannes, the preacher, broke down more than once delivering it, clearly responsible for some of the dead in the room, and was still treated with the same respect as before.
Nobody there seemed to think that was strange.
They left Kenbro the next morning, the boy Damien – a tooth missing, nose freshly broken, still smiling – watching them go.
The trail south grew harder to follow with every mile, more fallen trees, less obvious path, ants and biting insects thick in every patch of undergrowth.
A cabin on a ridge offered shelter from another downpour – raised off the sodden ground, claw marks scoring the timbers, the wood rotted but the structure holding. Some of the marks were fresh, from whatever had been out there the night before.
Settling in by torchlight, something metallic caught the flame – a second look resolved it into an amber eye, blinking, breathing somewhere just underfoot.
Something had clawed out a hiding hole beneath the floorboards and backfilled it with soil and leaves to stay hidden: a wolf-beast that burst up through the boards mid-rest and very nearly took Krusha’s arm off before Raven finished it.
As it died, it reverted to human form – a man, naked, a patch of wolf pelt grafted onto his back with rough, thick lycan-hair thread stitched with a precision that would have put a seamstress to shame.
A chain around his neck carried a stamped coin, two-sided: a symbol the Agents had already seen once before, on Dranathess armour, and on the other face, a single name – Devon.
The path only got worse from there.
A day later, hopelessly turned around in identical-looking jungle, a scream led them to a recently cleared patch of ground – a huge, overgrown burial mound ringed by crumbling standing stones, and two Dranathess soldiers overseeing a hurried excavation with the help of two terrified native guides.
One guide was shot for trying to flee toward the Agents’ hiding spot; the other was executed on the spot for having seen too much.
Krusha, forced into the open, talked his way past the surviving Dranathess with a level of cold indifference that seemed to satisfy them more than any protest would have –
“it’s absolutely fine, we usually kill villagers too”
– and the soldiers moved on, dragging the dead guide’s body into the mound behind them without a backward glance.
Once they’d gone, curiosity got the better of the Agents.
Inside the tomb: bones scattered across the flagstones, a looted alcove, and – worse – a woven basket holding a dead infant, killed by a stray crossbow bolt meant for someone else entirely.
They laid the child and the two murdered guides to rest before pressing on south, toward the signpost that finally marked the edge of Lord Valden’s territory:
Arn Griishank.
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- Devon – a lycanthrope carrying a Dranathess-marked dog tag. Connection to the military unclear.
- Dranathess soldiers are digging up an ancient burial mound and killing witnesses to keep it quiet.