TIME Early August LOCATION Arn Griishank
BACKGROUND:
A burial mound, an executed guide, and a dead lycanthrope with Dranathess connections – and still no sign of DikDik.
The signpost for Arn Griishank was at least a destination.
WHAT HAPPENED
A couple of locals fell in step with them well before the village came into view, a shade too eager to help.
“Y’all OK there? Visitors to Arn? Prolly lookin’ for a place to stay – the Moonlight Inn is the best, well, only inn here. Just goin’ there ourselves. Let us escort you…”
Whatever the offer was really about, the Agents kept them at arm’s length and pressed on alone.
The smell reached them before the village did – rot, thick and pervasive, coming off a field of workers moving with the same stiff, lurching gait, flesh visibly peeling from exposed skin. Zombies, tending crops in the open air like nothing was wrong with the arrangement at all. A closer look, and a word from a local too unbothered to lower his voice, filled in the rest: condemned criminals, repurposed rather than executed outright. Whoever had decided dead men make adequate field labour hadn’t felt the need to ask anyone else’s opinion on it.
Arn Griishank itself sat in a depression under a hillside keep – a played-out mining village clinging on well past the point its mines had anything left to give. The village’s fortunes read as plainly as the mine behind it: three generations of the Valden line had worked this ground, gold first and then a thinner seam of silver once the gold ran dry, until the current Lord’s own son died chasing one last promising sink and the mine shut for good not long after. What was left of Arn Griishank got by on fish, cattle, and whatever the jungle didn’t actively try to kill them with.
The Moonlight Inn was the only game in town, run by a barkeep named Brent Spinner – a man with a bottomless well of folksy sayings, a policy of not asking questions, and a blunt honesty about his own cooking that turned out to be entirely deserved: hard bread, a lukewarm soup, a stew of meat nobody volunteered to identify, and ale good enough to make up for the rest. He overcharged them on the bill without much shame about it either.
An archaeologist working the ruins to the south found them before they found him – Beloq, by name, dropping uninvited into a spare chair at their table with the breezy confidence of a man used to being tolerated rather than welcomed. A nervous condition tripped his tongue into something considerably ruder than he intended whenever he got excited, which was often, and he apologised for it more or less constantly without ever quite managing to stop. Once the worst of it passed, he turned out to know the region better than anyone else in the room – the local insect life, the honest explanation for the zombie-worked fields (“not townsfolk, thank Lexi – that would be a different kind of bad”), and a working theory that whatever was driving Kenbro’s “accidents” was a parasite not unlike the kind that marches ants to their own deaths. He’d had an audience with Lord Valden himself not long before, though the Lord’s household hadn’t seemed especially sorry to see the meal cut short.
Rumour in the inn painted a grim picture: taxes climbing, the Lord himself an increasing recluse, genuine fear reserved not for Lord Valden but for his ‘Overseer,’ a Dranathess officer named Kaleb who wandered the village with total impunity.
Soldiers passing through recruited local young men for some unspecified nighttime ‘exercise,’ paid well and clearly dreaded in equal measure. Three of them came through the inn that same evening to collect on it directly – jostling, cheerful, calling two waiting village lads up from their table by name. The third stayed seated a moment longer, a hand on his friend’s arm and a low word of warning that got waved off before it finished. Paid up front, already spent twice over, there wasn’t much room left to change anyone’s mind.
That evening, a messenger arrived with an invitation nobody could easily refuse:
Lord Valden requested the pleasure of the Agents’ company for dinner, at the keep, that very night.