TIME Early August, that evening LOCATION Lord Valden's keep, Arn Griishank
BACKGROUND:
An invitation to dinner from Lord Valden himself, delivered by a messenger with an unsettlingly toothy smile – not the kind of summons the Agents felt they could turn down.
WHAT HAPPENED
The carriage that collected them had no windows and no visible wheels, gliding a couple of feet above the mud on some unseen enchantment.
It delivered them, locked the whole way, into the courtyard of a keep that favoured function over any real opulence – dim, sparse, and clearly past its better days.
Two Dranathess soldiers fell into step at their flanks the moment they stepped down, and from the donjon’s own doorway came the man they answered to – broad-shouldered, a square jaw, and a pair of piercing yellow eyes that didn’t sit quite right on a human face.
“I am Poruchik Karver,”
he said, flat and unhurried.
“The Lord will see you now. Follow me.”
Dinner itself was dominated less by Lord Valden – a weak, splint-legged man leaning on the table for support – than by the woman seated at his right hand.
Deville.
Strikingly, distractingly beautiful, with two subtly different shades of green in her eyes, and entirely too interested in Raven’s weapons for comfort.
Overseer Kaleb sat at Valden’s other side, watching everything with a cold, clinical attention that didn’t match his host’s rambling small talk.
Weapons came off at the door first, Deville handling the job herself – turning Raven’s silvered blade over with real appreciation, tracing a finger along the edge.
“Hey, buttercup – expecting witches in these parts? Or maybe wolves…”
Nobody caught the warning in it until considerably later that night.
The conversation circled without landing anywhere useful – a probing question about the purple lightning, a mention of the burial mound, careful evasion about the Agents’ actual mission.
Deville deflected on the Lord’s behalf more than once, calling their cover story a
“little white lie, sugar,”
and Valden himself seemed too dulled by whatever medicinal smoke he was enjoying to notice or much care.
Kaleb filled one of the table’s quieter stretches with an unprompted lecture on parasites – ants driven to climb and lock their jaws in place until they die there, a wasp larva steering its host through a slow, unknowing execution – before turning the thought directly on Krusha.
“If you are not visibly in control, but underneath just a witness to your own actions – are you accountable? Or technically insane, unable to control what you do?”
Overseer Kaleb, to Krusha, over dinner
The dinner wound down without incident, weapons returned at the door, and the same locked, windowless carriage carried them back toward the Moonlight Inn – until it stopped abruptly partway down the path, the driver’s excuse about a loose harness cut short by the sound of him galloping off alone into the dark.
Wolves came out of the treeline in numbers – not natural ones.
One of them landed on the carriage roof directly overhead, claws punching straight through the wood into Krusha’s chest with an audible crack before he could react.
That settled it – he shattered the door bar from the inside and the Agents fought their way out onto the path, cutting down one beast after another as Ash dropped a fireball squarely onto the carriage roof and the wolves still clinging to it.
More kept coming from the woods faster than they could be killed, and eventually, badly outnumbered, the Agents did the only sensible thing left: they yielded.
A voice they recognised – Poruchik Karver, arriving to survey his pack’s handiwork – sounded almost impressed at how hard the fight had gone before the Agents went down.
“A special treat, arranged by Kaleb.”
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- Kaleb arranged the wolf ambush personally – this was never really a dinner invitation.
- Deville’s true nature and interest in the Agents remain unclear.