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.
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 Moonlight Inn was the only game in town, run by a barkeep named Brent Spinner with a bottomless well of folksy sayings and a policy of not asking questions.
An archaeologist named Beloq, currently absent, had left word he might be able to help – assuming he ever showed up.
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.
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.