TIME August 5th, night LOCATION Arn Griishank, then the Moonlight Inn
BACKGROUND:
Kaleb had fled with Karver and a stolen storm-orb, a demon had gutted Lord Valden’s donjon, and the Agents had barely made it out with their own equipment.
Arn Griishank’s night wasn’t over yet.
WHAT HAPPENED
Retreating to the Moonlight Inn seemed like the safest option, wolf howls trailing them from the treeline the whole walk down.
Brent had their rooms ready – already paid for a month, courtesy of Kaleb’s own standing orders, ironically enough.
Morning brought a summons back to the keep. Lord Valden, freed of Deville’s influence, was a different man entirely – hollowed out, staring at ledgers bearing his own seal for transactions he had no memory of authorising, his coffers emptied to fund a project he now realised he’d never understood.
He didn’t place them at first –
“You look familiar, have we met? I’m sure we’ve met – we had dinner?”
and when the shock gave way, it curdled briefly into accusation before the apology came.
“Have you come here to gloat? Were you working with this Overseer Kaleb?”
A breath later, he caught himself.
“My apologies. I am responsible, and I must step up to the mark. It’s just… quite overwhelming.”
“My name and seal is on these ledgers, but I don’t remember signing them. My people bled dry to pay for all this – all this crap I bought that I don’t even recall wanting. I am responsible. I must step up to the mark.”
Lord Valden
He offered what thanks he could – water purifiers, mostly, which landed about as well as might be expected – and confirmed the worst of it through his own household staff: Karver had been seen changing into a massive wolf-creature before fleeing the stables entirely, and every soldier who’d arrived at Arn Griishank since May had left with him.
They weren’t coming back.
May was when it had all started, as it turned out – the month Kaleb brought Deville in specifically to keep the Lord charmed and out of the way, freeing himself up to focus entirely on the Project.
Told plainly what that Project had actually produced, Valden didn’t try to minimise it.
“Some abomination of a creature, a troll I’m advised – poor thing impaled into the wall, its flesh grown over the very nails holding it there. And those half-dog, half-man things. I don’t know what Kaleb was up to, but there is no excuse, no reason, to do that to human beings. Even for the King. And my own signature is against every one of the deeds.”
Word came that the two stolen weapons taken from the mound and the fight with the Dranathess soldier could be identified; Valden confirmed the shortsword’s local craftsmanship readily enough.
Come nightfall, though, identification of blades became the least of anyone’s problems.
A commoner burst into the Moonlight Inn in a panic – something had happened to two of the villagers, and there were ‘dozens’ more of them coming.
The door barely held before wights – risen dead, hollow-eyed and howling – came through the tavern’s own skylight and the barred door both at once.
It was a brutal, close-quarters fight through the wreckage of the inn – fireballs, Krusha’s holy symbol turning several of the creatures back at the door, Raven cutting down whatever came close enough to reach.
Krusha’s own holy symbol – “the De-Wighter,” as it was inevitably nicknamed afterward – sent three of the creatures howling for the door in outright terror before he’d even swung his mace.
At one point, mid-fight, he tried vaulting the bar to flank a wight the way he’d seen Raven do it a dozen times – and, mid-air, found the ice block, bucket, banana and cooking oil someone had left in his path, going down head-first behind the bar to a spectacularly ungraceful crash.
He stood back up hoping nobody had seen it.
Everybody had.
Villagers caught by the wights’ draining bite went down and rose again themselves within moments, forcing the Agents to fight their own dead neighbours in front of a horrified Brent.
A handful of the undead broke and fled toward the keep rather than stand and fight, catching and draining three soldiers along the way before the Agents caught up and finished the job for good.
By the time it was over, every wight in Arn Griishank lay properly beheaded on the muddy path, left for what remained of their families to find in the morning.
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- The wight outbreak traces back to the soldiers drained by Deville.