It started with one death Deville never meant to answer for.

On the way to Kaleb’s lab, a Dranathess soldier got between her and the door – she drank him where he stood, lips against his throat, drained rather than cut, and left the body behind without a second thought.

Nobody realised what that meant until the screaming started: a creature killed by nothing but pure negative energy doesn’t just die.

It rises the next night as a wight – and everything a wight kills rises the same way, enslaved to the one that made it, spreading outward from a single body until there were sixteen of them descending on the village in one nightmare of a night.

The leader wore what was left of the original soldier’s armour the whole time; everyone who fought that night was fighting the very first casualty.

FILE NOTES

They hit fast and from above – a commoner hammering on the Moonlight Inn’s door with the things already at his heels, then a shattered roof window and several of them dropping straight into the taproom before the bar even finished emptying.
Krusha’s holy symbol turned several of them outright; Raven and her newly-bought enchanted shortsword accounted for the rest, then went back out to finish the ones that had bolted for the keep road, dragging fallen soldiers up as spawn along the way before they could be put down for good. What ended it, in the end, wasn’t the swords – it was the beheading.
Nothing about a wight stays dead from a sword wound alone; every single body had to be separated from its head before the village was safe, a grim, deliberate “cleansing” that left the innkeeper, Brent Spinner, matching heads to bodies by torchlight until dawn.

The village was told, officially, that a single risen Dranathess soldier – “a hideous lifedrinker” – slew the gate guards and came down on Arn Griishank alone, and that the Agents from the North saved the town from being wiped out entirely.

True enough, as far as it goes.

What it leaves out is Deville, Kaleb’s Project, and the fact that the “hideous lifedrinker” in question used to pour drinks at Lord Valden’s own table two nights before anyone in Arn Griishank learned the word “wight.”

STATUS: Filed under The Unknown as a species/incident record, not individuals. All sixteen accounted for and destroyed the same night – but the fact that one act of casual violence very nearly cost an entire village is very much on the record.