The year is 630 of the Second Mundane Age, the date is the 4th of the month Akleth, in the great kingdom of Rodoria. It is a country founded on the first day of the current age, a country built upon the ruins of the nation once known as Gazzeralesh, and one of the most influential countries in the central northern part of the continent of Kirirak.
The country is divided into ten duchies, each one the domain of a separate duke: Wenal, Nemhim, Seclyr, Zerul, Relimon, Anaxim, Pelgaid, Etlon, Fokon and Gilmah, nestled around the colossal Center Lake. Each duchy has some autonomy and are governed by their duke, but all the dukes answer to the monarch, who reigns as the ruler of all the kingdom.
It is a country stricken with plague; for 11 years the terrible disease known as the Withering has ravaged Rodoria, during which it has killed 2.5 million people, or about one fourth the population. Among the dead was every immediate member of the royal family, leaving the Rodorian throne empty for the first time in over six centuries, and sending the Rodorian duchies into civil war as they each vie to assume the throne. As the armies turn on one another and the enforcers of the law, the Fadewatchers, find themselves divided by the fracturing of the kingdom, lawless ruffians, wicked schemers and terrible monsters thrive as the opposition against them weakens.
It is a dark time in Rodoria, and looks only to get darker, as both the Withering and the civil war continues to sunder its people.

Our story, however, begins much smaller than that. In the eastern part of Rodoria, within the duchy of Nemhim, sits the small barony of Borstown. An unremarkable hamlet to look at with a population of less than a thousand souls, Borstown sits at a crossroad about 80 km southeast of Nemhim City.
Many small homes are lined up neatly along the dirt roads that act as the main thoroughfare of the town, humble and unremarkable places for commoners to live. It is about an hour before noon, and though the year is transitioning into autumn, the day is bright and warm under a mostly cloudless sky. Children are playing in the street, and adults are out working either in the fields and pastures closer to the actual crossroad at the center of town, in the farmlands that dominate the landscape to the south and west of the town, or out working in the forest to the east, either collecting firewood and timber or hunting game. The air is full of shouting, swearing and laughter, carried by a gentle, chill breeze.
Here, since about two months ago, the lady of the hamlet has sent out a call:

My name is Baroness Vela Bor. I’m the last surviving member of my party of adventurers, the Melody of Freedom. I had a lot of adventures, collected a lot of treasures, but now I’m getting old and I have no heirs. I’m too weak to do much myself, but I invite any active and prospective adventurers to pay me a visit at my manor in Borstown, Nemhim, so I can get to know you. At worst, if I don’t think you’re cut out for making Reniam a better place, I offer free food, drinks, a place to stay in my home and advice. At best, if I think you can carry on the adventurous spirit of me and my friends, I have a lot to give you out of all the riches, equipment and spellbooks my party collected over the years.

Since then there has been a continuous trickle of from all over Rodoria to this insignificant little town of people seeking to visit the baroness. Some wish to take advantage on the aging noblewoman, hoping to deceive her and take as much as they can get of her wealth. Others come with a genuine hope to begin adventures of their own, or to obtain aid that will let adventures already in progress continue and succeed. Others yet may be here out of sheer curiosity; to see what this strange baroness is like to make such a strange offer, or to see what kind of people will respond to her call. Even people who came just in the hopes of filling their bellies or being able to brag about having rubbed elbows with a baroness were welcomed in. So far every visitor to her home of Bor Manor, many dozens of them, has been fed and given a warm bed to sleep in for their stay, but have left empty-handed, rejected by the former adventurer.
The trickle has just started to slow, as more and more people start to suspect that Vela Bor may never deem anyone worthy heirs of her and her party.

It is on this day, at this time, we find some of the latest applicants come to meet the baroness.

Along the main road, a short ways southeast from the crossroad, the ascended deigan Lhirinthyl reading in the back of a stagecoach while the true deigan Deo'irah has just arrived by the front door of the local healer's house: a small unassuming cottage with a herbal garden in the back and two apple trees in the front on either side of the short gravel-strewn path leading to the door. A signpost at the corner of this path and the main road declares it as the “Borstown Healer and Pharmacy”.
Even at a glance, however, it is clear that something is awry. What appears to be the broken handle of some long tool or weapon lies discarded in the grass by the path, and both the grass and gravel have spots that are red rather than green or gray. The front door is not only open but broken, the wood splintered near the handle and hangs askew from its upper hinge, seemingly torn off its lower one. The place lays in silence.

Just a short ways up the road from there, at one corner of the crossroad, the human knight Sir Yanin Glade and his equally human squire, Jordan Forthey, are in the process of checking in with the local Fadewatcher station and barracks. It is a elongated, plain wooden building with a small gravel-strewn yard beside it, decorated with several racks of wooden practice weapons, some basic dummies and a line of archery targets. On the end of the building, above the entrance, the wall was decorated with the eye of the Fadewatchers.
The wide double-doors stand closed before the two travelers with no Fadewatchers in sight. However, here too they might notice small splotches of red on the ground and on the handles of the doors. Sounds of panicked voices can faintly be heard from inside, along with the telltale groans and wails that told of wounded.

Just past the crossroad and down the road to northwest, the half-palanter Madara was just leaving the shop of the local carpenter, declared by an ornate, well-carved wooden sign out front as “Prooga Carpentry”. The building itself was probably no bigger than the surrounding residential buildings despite serving not only as the carpenters workshop, but also a store for selling furniture, wooden toys and various little knickknacks, so it had been no surprise when the interior had proven rather cramped.
The inventory of the store had been of middling quality, no worse than one would expect but also unremarkable. The furniture was mostly plain and utilitarian, if sturdy, and the toys had been simple and unimaginative. The most interesting and unique things for sale in there had been various carved wooden goods in the theme of the most significant event in memory of Borstown: memorabilia of the fight between the Melody of Freedom and the Nemhimian Prooga. The shelves had been stocked with carvings of prooga in varying sizes, stances and quality. Some of the best ones had been surprisingly detailed, even getting some of the texture of the fur to express through the wood.
As she left to head for Bor Manor, Madara would soon reach the crossroad and have a direct line of sight to the Fadewatcher station.

Going back to the crossroad and down the southwestern road instead, just a little ways away from the Baroness' home of Bor Manor, the Dark One Nabisisstra Rhe'anyl Qelarn – a rare sight that earned curious stares and surprised whispers everywhere she went – was visiting what the storefront sign declared as the “Borstown Winery”.
It was a fairly large and relatively well-maintained and decorated building, with the front door having scrolling in the style of grape vines, and a large window on either side of the door that gave a good view of a store with shelves full of bottles of red wine. Most of the building was not visible from there, but it was probably a fair guess that those would be the facilities were the wine was actually made. Behind the winery was a large field with rows of grape vines, and crowds of people in the midst of harvesting and tending the vines or carrying baskets of dark-red grapes.

Finally, going back to the crossroad and in the opposite direction, to the northeast along the road through the small forest that cast the land there in sun-speckled shade, the nightwalkers Sir Freagon and his page, Jaelnec, were just getting to where the trees started thinning and the first residences marked where nature gave way to the artificial. Slightly uphill compared to the rest of Borstown, the two of them had a mostly unobstructed view of the entire hamlet.

None of these groups are aware of each other yet, but they will be soon. They are all here to meet Baroness Vela Bor for one reason or another, merely the last in a long line of hopeful visitors. Yet something is different on this day; something strange is afoot in Borstown. Whether these people know it or not, their adventure is about to begin.

The half-palanter looked out of place in the small shop of both furniture and assorted knick-knacks - a slender yet strong figure in an almost immaculate dark green tunic weaving through the cramped interior of the shop with an odd kind of meticulously rehearsed ease. Even with a backpack slung over her shoulders and apparently heavy pouches tied to her waist, there was nary a sliver of fabric brushing against the wares. Long, slender, spidery fingers tracked the items on display, the ends of her pointed and oddly glinting - perhaps lacquered, or at least oiled - fingernails almost, but not quite touching the surfaces of the more finely crafted pieces.
Always almost. Perhaps it was a generalized mutual respect towards craftsmanship in any form, for she herself was a seamstress and a seller of assorted special wares. She preferred if people weren't overly handsy with anything on display, either. No matter how much you washed yourself, skin was inherently a bit oily. Fabrics, paper, wood, they all soaked it up, just a little. And more expensive pieces could have hundreds of contemplators who didn't quite want to take the plunge.
It was perhaps in stark contrast, then, that the very same half-palanter was also a somewhat accomplished surgeon. Same general concept, she would say. Just messier. Much, much messier.

Madara had in technicality little use for furniture made so far from her little town - not that of the ordinary variety, anyway -, but there was little to peruse in this quaint little village with, indeed, less than a third the houses of her hometown and none of the benefits from the added trade and business due to the transit between Nemhim and Wenal city. Some market stalls, someone to fix your plough, a herbalist, a winery (for later, either to celebrate, or ... just because) this here carpentry store and, of course, the main aim for this detour.
Would anything come of that? Maybe, maybe not, but there was no do without try and you had to go out of the way if you wanted more supplies beyond what traveling merchants offered nigh free of additional effort (but not free of sometimes rather excessive monetary cost). The two she left behind could deal with that and anything else usually expected of her just fine.

The small figurines of prooga displayed next to chairs, spinning wheels and other utilitarian items seemed almost as removed from the place as she herself, all traces of the original event they were commemorating long gone, but as it appeared, not quite forgotten. Well, at least one in the village had been then and there. Someone had taken the time and effort to painstakingly carve even the hair on some of the wooden prooga. Idly, she wondered if the same hands had crafted the sign above the door.
How long had it been, now? Perhaps enough to be not quite as early in the morning. Palanters tended towards nocturnality and slept little. Humans ... not quite so. She wasn't entirely certain on which side penin fell, but heavily suspected that it was closer to the latter, especially in a village as human-oriented.
A politer time for unscheduled visits, it would be. Without further ado, the ever so uncanny woman slipped out without making a purchase, straightening her shoulders and preparing to brace herself. But ah, it was actually quite mild now, almost warm, quite unlike the earliest crack of dawn.
With long, measured strides, she headed down the street, fully intent on just making an appointment out of herself.

There were sparse people wandering on the streets, minding their own business, and she would have reached her destination just the same, too, if it weren't a small bit of something particular catching the front and center of her field of vision just as she was taking the right turn that would have led her straight to Bor Manor, necessitating a pause and a quick side-step onto the grounds of whichever villager just happened to have their house across the street from both the inn and the guardhouse, and behind a carriage parked there.
The tall, armored man approaching the Fadewatcher Station? He quite very definitely had a hand on his sword. A smaller guy - also armored, but resembling a Fadewatcher in his attire, albeit not bearing their tabard - was facing the street. Well, something was definitely happening, and it might just come to be that her services would be needed even before she got to where she was headed. Not that she'd be intervening just yet, oh no - she had no intentions of engaging in open combat with two professional-looking armored swordsmen with just teeth, nails and a dagger.
She could fight, if need be, but she was not a fighter, and it would be terribly unproductive if the only person in vicinity who knew how to attach a tendon to bone or sew a jugular back together before you bled out got her hand lopped off during the first stage of the conflict. It was only practical that she simply resolved to protect herself rather than rush headlong into ... whatever was actually about to go down in there. Surely, no one would aim to ambush a guardhouse through the front door, the very people who you'd usually go to in case of an armed break-in, in the middle of a village, with just two people?
The smaller guy might have noticed her already, for better or worse, as for a moment he appeared to look straight at her. Oh well.

---

The sun approached its zenith with the same languid pace as the ox-drawn stagecoach made its way across the dirt road, with a lack of clouds that seemed to make the brightness of the day feel more crisp and vivid than normal. From atop a little perch in the front of the stagecoach the true deigan Deo’Irah sat, dressed in Reina’s white as usual, looking ahead towards their destination. At this distance away she could see only the endless expanse of farmland and the tiny outlines of structures around them, but already her mind wandered towards what precisely they were growing. The usual staple crops for the area, of course, but she could spot a glint of colour towards the horizon that suggested a fruit of some sort–and the neat lines of the crops suggested to her perhaps something trellised. Grapes for a winery were not uncommon in these parts of Rodoria, and the unseasonable warmth of the day filled her mind with images of peasants carrying baskets brimming with fruits. A small smile crept across her face at the thought, but a sudden jolt from the stagecoach snapped her from her brief reverie and she turned back towards a door that had just opened itself from the sudden jolt.

“Lhirin, look up.” she said, quite certain he’d be too absorbed in a text to even notice that it’d happened, and unwilling to stop moving to do it herself. She waited for the telltale rustling but didn’t hear anything, and so she tried again in a different language–Fermian, this time–and waited for him to verbalise his recognition of what she’d said.

Ruffled feathers shifted faintly in the wind as the other deigan raised his head, blinking briefly and raising an eyebrow as he glanced Irah’s way. Lhirin, her companion–travelling and otherwise–gave her a questioning look, tilting his head faintly before he sifted through his memories. “Mmn,” he said in a sound of acknowledgement, before whispering a brief phrase under his breath, his fingers deftly weaving through the air.

Wind picked up, answering his Arcane call and pushing the door closed just hard enough to force the latch back into place properly. “Sufficient?” He asked, dismissing the cantrip without much thought as his hand went back to the page of his book, though his eyes remained on her. For once his eyes were not in that strange too-wide gaze that he so often displayed. Instead, Lhirinthyl was entirely relaxed, enjoying the unseasonable warmth and the faint breeze as they made their way to….mmm some hamlet or another. Bor? Borstown, he recalled almost immediately as he tried.

Lifting his other hand he smoothed some of his black rimmed feathers down, their orange-gold hue shimmering faintly in the light. Finally–after staring at Irah perhaps a few moments too long–the Ascended Deigan turned his gaze out before them, noting the fields and the buildings in the near-distance. “Ah, nearly there,” he commented. With a slight nod, he briefly marked his place in the book with a downwards blink, and then closed it and stowed it on the bench beside him. In a ritual of sorts, Lhirin patted himself down, checking his forest green cloak for spots and wrinkles as he smoothed things down.

Irah preferred he be at least somewhat presentable whenever they rode into some new little facet of civilization. It was no trouble at the end of things, though he sometimes had to remind himself why she cared about such things as appearances. Hygiene made some sense to him at least, even if he frequently had that slip his ever-busy mind.

Once satisfied that his feathers and clothes were in working order, not terribly stained or marred by the road, Lhirin surveyed their surroundings once more. The mage’s hand came to rest on the sheathed blade at his side, fiddling with the crystal formations of the hilt.

“A good day,” he said idly, “Yes?” He said it in the same way someone else might ask ‘do you agree?’

Irah’s ears picked up on the faint mumbling of something arcane, and at that moment she knew that finally he’d heard her and the task was in hand. By the time she’d finished the thought to herself the wind had picked up and returned the door to its rightful position, and she turned around to give Lhirin a brief smile. The words “Thank you” had scarcely left her lips before she caught that his focus was rapt upon her, though his focus lacked some of the wildness she’d grown accustomed to.

She was just about to ask him if there were something in particular when he spoke about their nearness to the little town, and Irah’s head swivelled just a tic before returning to Lhirin and meeting his gaze with her own. Silver irises met the rich ruby of Irah’s own, and though both of them were fairly at ease there was still an intensity to each of their gazes that many would read as tense or even worse–but Irah broke out into a wide smile and nodded, suddenly making the decision to hop down from the driver’s seat and walk alongside the ox.

“Armos…” she muttered to herself, placing a hand gently upon the wiry fur of his head, and he turned towards her briefly in recognition. He let out a soft sound–soft for an ox, at least–and continued to trudge forwards diligently. She reached into his saddlebags and pulled out a slightly worse-for-wear apple that they’d picked further down the road, and withdrew a knife from a pouch strung at her side. She quickly segmented the apple, certain to discard the seeds, and fed the slices one-by-one to the ox, who seemed to react very positively to the little treat that she’d offered it. She left two slices behind, though, and ate one herself before passing another through the open windows to Lhirin.

“Yes, I think so. Not long now until we meet the baroness–though the fellow we ran into did intimate that we’d have just as little luck as everyone else who’s passed by.” she began, a note of something close to prickliness in her voice, “... but then again, how many deigan will have come this way? It’s little wonder she’s yet to judge any of the short-lived ones worthy–they have to spend so much of their limited time simply staying alive… Though what was it he said they were famous for? Having killed a… what was it, Lhirin? A… prooga, I think?” she continued, the prickliness evaporating as her thoughts moved towards more pressing issues–like their imminent arrival.

Watching Irah as she hopped down and fed Armos, Lhirin smiled to himself slightly, before his gaze wandered back to the approaching village. A funny expression that, after all, it was them who had approached and were approaching the village, rather than the alternative. Nonetheless, they grew nearer by the minute and eventually, Lhirin decided to extricate himself from the ‘coach as well. Landing aground, Lhirin checked the sheath at his side once more, securing it with a hand, even as he noted the comfortable weight of Sulooth in their quiver-like case on his back. While this village would ostensibly be entirely safe, Lhirin always preferred to be amply prepared and while he didn’t explicitly need either his runeblade, its sheath, or Sulooth to effectively protect himself, having them was a comfort. Besides, they had incredible utility when utilised properly. “Yes, a Prooga. Massive things, covered in hair. Claws like daggers, strength like a boulder bearing down on you.” Lhirin nodded to himself, satisfied with his explanation.

“Mm. Impressive,” he pondered aloud, coming to walk on the ox’s other side. “…for a shortlife, very impressive.” He left it at that, fidgeting with the hilt of his runeblade as he surveyed their surroundings again.

When Lhirin didn’t take the slice of apple offered to him, Irah did not bother pointing it out to him: he knew the apples were in the saddlebags, if he wanted one he could get one himself. With an easy smile she popped the piece into her mouth without another thought and stared straight ahead as she listened to her companion speak. He had little to say in this instance, but Irah thought to herself how his idle musings were often quite a strangely comforting thing–much better than the meaningless drivel she endured among the peasants whose lives she laboured to help make worthwhile. Intelligent conversation was not often found outside of metropolitan areas, after all–and though she did find great value in her work improving the lives of others, she did not see for one second why she had to go without to provide for them when she could simply bring the conversation along with her.

“Killing one is no mean feat–especially if one believes the embellishments that so often get added to stories. I think the Baroness’ well-lived life will prove a fortuitous omen for us both, should we earn her esteem–perhaps we can get her to regale us with the truth of the tale, hmm?” Irah began, talking less out of having anything to say and more to fill the space before they arrived at their destination. The rest of the walk was over fairly quickly, and the ox-drawn cart with two deigan (one who, at first glance, looked Ascended and another obviously True, no less) drew stares from the assorted townsfolk going about their business. Irah’s smile widened automatically, a reflex at this point, and she made certain to wave to the children raucously playing in the street as she passed by. Though the townsfolk seemed to be going about their tasks with some sort of regularity, Irah could sense something not quite right about the situation–there was something of a charge to the air, the dedication with which the townsfolk went about their tasks was a little too intense.

As they continued to travel down the long road Irah’s eyes continued to scan the little houses and the people milling about them, occasionally meeting their gaze for a moment before pulling away. She did not have to turn back to know their gazes would linger over long, though as she heard someone begin to say “Reina’s…” her head automatically swivelled towards them, and her gaze met theirs just as they continued with “... floppy tits!” Irah’s face suddenly dropped from mirthful to intense, her eyes narrowed ever-so-slightly, and the corner of her mouth twitched slightly. It was evident at that point that the white of her robes and the disapproval of her expression were admonishment enough, however, and it was to a background of mumbled and sheepish apologies that the duo would find themselves approaching their destination of the Healer’s House.

Lhirin, for his part, only peripherally heard the crude verbiage as he was spending far more of his attention not-so covertly observing the peasantry—mmmn, townspeople, he corrected. Irah had been trying to teach him etiquette, and while much of it had not sunk in—or wasn’t actionable due to his…particular sensibilities—some of it was useful enough.

For example, he knew not to call members of the other races ‘shortlives’ to their faces. “Mm, poor taste,” he half-muttered as his attention briefly darted to the villager who had uttered the phrase. He noted Irah’s response and filed it—and the phrase—in the list of things he would never say in her presence. Not that he had much desire to do so to begin with.

After a few minutes, Lhirin hopped onto the stagecoach and went inside, retrieving one of his books—a large tome with a name on it that implied it was filled with stories—before deftly finding his way back aground. This time he’d landed on the same side of the ox as Irah.

Approaching her casually, he lightly patted her back—the act gentle and reassuring. It was as if he were belatedly apologising on behalf of the humans. Coming to walk alongside her, Lhirin opened his book—despite its weight—and began to read.

Though Lhirin was secretive about its true contents, Irah would know by now that the entire tome was written in code. The fact that it read as a series of folk tales and other such things was just a cover. How Lhirin was able to divest any meaning from the thing was a marvel on its own, but then most would suppose that a great deal of the things Lhirin did casually were somewhat miraculous in their way.

As she felt the warmth of Lhirin’s hand upon her, Irah reached out her own and gently rested it against his hip for a moment before continuing onward. The first thing she noticed as they travelled the street was the door, half-torn from its hinges. At that moment she walked forward much more briskly, not quite breaking into a jog, and then noticed the other bits of evidence: the wooden haft, broken and splintered… and the blood. Splotches of it everywhere, strewn across the gravel and clinging from the blades of grass like some macabre dew–her eyes widened at the scene, the implication immediately obvious: combat of some variety had happened. Her mind drifted immediately toward those that must be injured, and her gaze scanned around to work out where on earth they might be. The townspeople were now back to their usual routines, so whatever had happened was not quite recent--but recent enough the blood hadn’t dried. Irah called out to Lhirin and beckoned him closer with her hand, not turning to even look at him, as she approached the house gingerly. She first examined the door, trying to divine some sort of pattern to the splintering that could give her an idea of what precisely might have torn it off its hinges–and then her mind wandered to the weapon, cast aside along the path. As she moved to enter the building she turned around to Lhirin, briefly stopping in her tracks.

She made a couple of quick hand gestures, pointing towards the various pieces of evidence she could see, before speaking: “What do you think happened here..? Combat, naturally, but… how many? Who were the aggressors?”

With that done, and Lhirin’s attention directed to the appropriate place, Irah began to step forward into the house, trying to avoid touching anything as best as possible and taking a look around her for any more evidence to add to Lhirin’s calculations.

Catching his name, the silver-eyed deigan glanced up from his book, his eyes narrowing to a sharp focus for a moment before they widened. Not in shock. Not in surprise. They widened as the relaxed air about him dissipated entirely, replaced by a rapt attention that would cause discomfort in almost anyone it was turned upon. It was not intimidating, but uncomfortable instead.

Fortunately, he was not looking to settle the nerves of a stranger, but rather to take in as much information as he could. Gently he laid a hand on the ox’s side and made a small sound. The ox planted its feet and began to graze on whatever grass it could reach. By that point Lhirinthyl had already walked past it—having cast his research tome back into the stage with a casual muttered use of ‘Bound Blade’. The animal was already a distant memory as his eyes swept and darted between the details of the scene laid out before them.

Blood spatter, splintered handle, a door hanging on one hinge, knocked askew? Battered down? The blood was yet to dry. The violence had been recent. Lhirin’s hand slipped to the hilt of his runeblade and found purchase.

What was that in the grass? A gardener’s tool? A weapon? “Be careful,” Lhirin said in Ghazerashei, but he did not follow her immediately. Instead he began a whispered chant, weaving his free hand in small, tight glowing runes in the air. Focusing, he cast a spell.


Lhirin wanted to know if magic had been involved and if traces of it remained as that would tell him how much danger might yet be present. Beyond that, Lhirin scanned the area, looking for any additional details that the average person might miss or consider incidental. Were plants damaged by a struggle, gras pushed down in irregular areas by footfalls. Further blood? What was the directionality of the blood spatter? Foot or boot prints? Dirt in strange places? Any materials or substances that might have been out of place. Strange smells or tastes in the air?

Anything.

"This is the place?" inquired the voice of Jordan Forthey - a young guy atop a sorrel horse. In addition to the white linen shirt, grayish pants and brown boots any old peasant might wear, he had donned a slightly bleached blue-green gambeson and the cuirass, faulds and tassets a keen eye might recognize as being identical to many of those handed out to Fadewatchers, just without the tabard they typically displayed when on active duty, and leading along a bay pack mule that was nearly as big than the slight horse the guy himself rode on, and sturdier still.
"Yes," responded the other man, this one astride a large white gelding, about the length of a horse ahead. Not only did the other man seem much more blunt and laconic from the brief exchange, but he was also a much more imposing figure, both tall and fully armored - helmet and all - in a much better quality steel, clearly bearing the viper-and-falcon heraldics of a family of some note from Etlon.
"Looks ... smaller than I expected for a detour that long, I guess? I mean, not that I'd really have been in many estates besides the Glades' one." That one was more of a heavily guarded mansion, with a number of associated auxiliary buildings in the vicinity that directly belonged to the estate, and had their own workers employed by them. And then several dozen surrounding farm buildings in addition to those, scattered out among the fields. This one was more like a little village, buildings all neatly lined up against the road, with the manor just one of many on the same dirt street, just a little nicer, fenced in, and well, much bigger. "Sir," the young guy added after a pause, remembering that they were no longer alone on the road as some kid gawked at Sir Yanin Glade's big white "warhorse" and scurried off.
"Tareon is a warlord. Baroness Vela Bor is a retired adventurer." The statement was delivered matter-of-factly, as if this info alone was enough to explain everything. That was about par for the course for the young guy's master, who himself was not that much older under the helmet. Either he was arguing with someone, or particularly exited about something, or speaking just to fulfill a duty ... or you had to pry every single thing out of him separately.
Even the reasons for coming here in the first place were somewhat occluded. The most he could get out of his master was that there was something he needed to figure out ... and rather than show up at the Glades' mansion, where he was not bound to be welcomed (by his father, Sir Tareon Glade, anyway - Jordan thought Sir Jeran actually liked him, and the others either didn't care or just didn't want to piss Sir Tareon off), or try their luck with either of his older sisters in Zerul and Relimon, he might as well pay a visit to someone who was willing to invite them in. Granted, not them specifically, just any ... adventurer.
Not that Jordan would complain - they had pretty much taken a single day off from being guards or training for the past two years, so some change was nice. Now he could travel and train rather than patrol and train. It appeared training was not optional even on the move. Not that he'd be surprised after three years of what felt like disappointingly little progress, but ... his right shoulder still hurt from yesterday, for starters. And his left shin. And probably a few more places, though those were harder to tell over just muscles being sore from training and riding for so long alike.
"We will be stopping by the Fadewatcher Station before paying a visit to baroness Vela Bor," Sir Yanin suddenly interjected Jordan's mental recounting of every single place in his body that hurt. Did he decide that because he just happened to see the long wooden building with the sign of the Fadewatchers coming to sight, or?



For the most part, he just wanted to know if this place had gone to shit just like everywhere else, legendary ex-adventurers or not. The roads were probably the least safe they had been in the last two decades and trustworthy men were too few, too far, or too weak to do enough about it. Not that he alone could do much about it, either, even if he didn't have his own personal demons and shortcomings to deal with.
Good memory, attentiveness, quick thinking and and outright extraordinary fighting ability were ultimately still limited. Very few actual problems consisted of armed humans conveniently lined up for mostly fair combat one or two at a time. Disease, toxins, being doused in oil and lit on fire, just blowing up the entire damn building, nonhumanoid threats, famine, total war, being ambushed while trying to sleep off exhaustion, pick your damn poison...
Politics were bullshit he could only figure out by watching people and their interactions for a long time, and then what? Who was going to listen a less favoured son of a minor noble? You could be a bloody mind-reader and expert negotiator and still someone figured out a way to remove you if they didn't like what you were advocating for.
It was always bastards like his father who found ways to stick around. No desire to be like that man. No ability, either. They, however, both knew that if the old Glade were to ever raise a sword against the Viper of Glades, he would die - and since killing him would have been too obvious, he was simply made unwelcome in his childhood home. He was worried about his oldest brother. Too nice of a guy to be allowed replace Tareon. Might have had something happen to him already if Manin hadn't just coincidentally gone and gotten himself killed first. His mother was not in a much better position. The others? Yanin guess they were less likely to be in the way for the time being.
All that aside, their colleagues were probably the closest thing to implicit allies they had, the couple family members who tolerated Yanin, and he didn't wish to drag into further mess if he could help it, notwithstanding. Even if they couldn't be as selective with whom they recruited as during better days ... it stood to reason that the odds were at the very least better than average.

The streets looked normal, if a bit empty, presumably because a lot of people were either in their respective workshops or out in the fields busy harvesting crops. A couple people glanced in their direction, but they always did. There had, indubitably, been a number of opportunistic odd folks going through coming through here ever since the open invitation went out, but in spite of that, they - or at the very least he - stood out enough.
Even so, his eyes behind the visor were constantly scanning the street, as if he were still on patrol. There was no reason trust this place - or any open area. And since he apparently lacked the innate ability of most people to simply know what anyone he was staring at felt unless they were expert at hiding it, the best he could do to make up for it was watch the people, too, and remember what they did.
There were no Fadewatchers in sight, not even as Prince, the knight's big white steed, came to a halt next to their building, impatiently huffing, stomping his hooves and shaking his head. A handful of kids were watching nearby, a few people were still on the street, there was no generalized panic, yet trouble was there before they had even arrived.
"Something is wrong," he stated, still trying to cover anything out of place in the broader vicinity, looking for anything else out of place in or near the adjacent houses, people who should not be there, watchers, ambush.
The horse danced around himself even as the man did so, making a nearly full turn before being urged behind around the corner into the year so that Yanin could dismount with a distinct clink of metal and loosely throw the reins around whichever object was closest. More for show rather than effect - Prince was quite capable of getting loose if something threatened him. Or biting off the ear of anyone who wasn't either Yanin himself or Jordan trying to touch their things.
Jordan followed suit. Yanin didn't particularly know yet if he would have been more useful on the ground or horseback, but...
"There is blood on the ground. Fresh." Red, semi-coagulated clumps of sludge left behind where the fluid could seep into soil and stone, not browned and flaking away. And there would usually be at least someone out at this hour. There wasn't. "Watch my back." Jordan was fumbling something, but dropped it to follow him back around the corner, to the double doors of the main entrance.
There had been some detective work in the past two years. Other things, you could fill in just by logic. Why was there blood outside? There didn't seem to be enough commotion for something dramatic - even a farmer injured by shrapnel while splitting rocks was bound to generate a spectacle in such a small place -, yet someone had gone in bleeding, or left bleeding.
Was there a distinct trail like someone shot or stabbed might leave? High marks of fresh, violent injury? Someone had said that if you lost half the blood in your body, you still had some chance of surviving. That was a lot of blood if it was distributed over a floor, even more so if it was a quantity that would definitely kill at least one person. Something else entirely? Acid? Acrid smoke? Anything but the scent and sight of blood itself?
As he neared the doors, faint sounds could be heard. Groans. Wails. There might not be enough time. The bloody fuck was going on in there? The voices were several. It kept feeling like the street was too peaceful for an overarching threat, for multiple someones to have escaped in while painting the ground. So what then? Something exploded in someone's face? People came in and attacked, with the last one stabbing whoever was in front of the door, dragging them in before anyone noticed, and neatly closing the door behind? Not enough time to analyze it properly when whatever was the cause could still be in there, continuing to do harm. He gritted his teeth, his right gauntleted hand wrapping around the handle of his sword so he could draw and parry with it in a single move. The left one grasped the handle of the door.
"Keep from line of sight of the door," he noted to Jordan, who side-stepped and turned just in time to see a woman in green tunic promptly slip behind a carriage across the street.
He'll be leaving the door between himself and whatever was inside for now. He was trying to listen keenly to whatever words might be possible to be made out from inside, but it didn't give an absolute guarantee whether the first one out would be a foe, an injured person trying to escape, or something else entirely. The door itself seemed strong enough to take a blast of some strength.



Jordan looked from the carriage, to the kids on the street, to the surrounding houses, to sideways at Sir Yanin Glade and the ... muffled noise from behind the door. Even with just two or three seconds of hearing it, the... Well, he should probably get the civilians out of the way, just in case, he guessed. So much for vacation.
"Uh, kids? You should go," he instructed, loud and clear, if a tiny bit more shaken than he would have liked, his right hand straying near his hip in reflection to Sir Yanin even as his left vaguely motioned sideways, move along. "Go tell a healer to come here, I think we'll need one soon. Something ... not very nice is going on in there."
Next to him, Sir Yanin had moved in position behind the left side of the double door, skipping a beat - presumably to let the onlookers to actually scatter. They were both on the same side of the door, so his master was next to his left shoulder. A louder wail made the squire flinch.
"Actually, I think we might need several healers, if they're not all in there trying to help people already."

The wait was over. If the door was not locked or barred, Sir Yanin would tear it open as he stepped backwards, ready to face whatever was or wasn't inside.
Maybe it would all be for naught. Maybe it was all over and all that was indoors would be just a couple injured avid complainers, a healer that couldn't find fresh bandages or boiled water and a couple farmers who had seen what went down and were rather animatedly trying to convey its horrors. In which case they would have just opened the door a touch too aggressively, no harm done, they could all sigh a sigh of relief.
At worst ... well, they were as prepared as they could be in a dozen seconds.

With both of the deigan travelers examining the scene, each perceptive and intelligent in their own way, it was not too difficult to deduce a general state of affairs and series of events.
Lhirin's casting of elucidate revealed that the only magical energy glowing in the area was what he was spending on the spell itself. Whatever had happened here, it did not appear that magic had been involved.

Looking at everything else, a vague outline of the situation began to crystallize for the two of them:
The door to the healer's house had been beaten in from the outside, and the pattern of cracks in the wood seemed to suggest that it had been smashed in by multiple impacts side by side. It was not localized enough to suggest the use of an actual battering ram, nor did the door seem sturdy enough to call for such measures. It rather seemed as though someone, perhaps multiple someones, had destroyed it just by repeatedly throwing their body-weight against it.
Outside the house the tracks were chaotic, overlapped and made it difficult to follow any one set of specific tracks. It was clear that there had been at least a dozen people here in fervent motion, boots digging up ground and kicking up bits of grass and soil.
Blood was similarly going this way and that in the area, having been splattered and sprayed over the ground in a way that clearly suggested that fighting had happened here, with numerous injuries. There were also four much more localized puddles of blood in places where the grass had been flattened top-down rather than in any particular direction, in ways that seemed to draw a contour that could be a close approximation of a humanoid figure.
Combined with the other signs of a skirmish having taken place, it would not be a stretch to deduce that the broken wooden handle on the ground was either from a spear or another polearm that had snapped during the fighting, though it appeared the weaponized end of it had been carried away.
Two distinct trails seemed to leave the scene: one that seemed to have fewer drips of blood along it and thus be less obvious that lead around the right side of the healer's house and seemingly toward the forest to the northeast; and one that was much more obvious owing to the smears of blood along the ground starting at the puddles, suggesting that bodies had been dragged along that path. This trail headed up the road to the northwest, toward the crossroad.

Pushing aside the broken door hanging off its hinge, Irah would see that the inside the house was remarkably mostly intact. A small table and a chair seemed to have been knocked over near the door, but there was no blood inside the house. Otherwise the house was about what one might expect from the home of a healer and pharmacist: a pleasant, if slightly cramped, space in the front to live and receive patients, and a combined workshop and storage in the back, with cupboards and cabinets lining the walls and a table with quite a kind of assembled alchemical equipment that would be quite familiar to Irah.
All of the cabinets and cupboards were open, however, and many of them seemed to be empty. Otherwise the interior of the house seemed untouched.


Yanin listening at the door would not hear much in terms of voices other than the sounds of pain and injury he had already identified at first. After a couple of seconds, however, he might have been able to hear the sound of quickened footfalls on a wooden floor for just several seconds, followed by a male voice, muffled by the door, seemingly speaking in a soothing, if panicked, manner.

The children being addressed by Jordan – five human children, seemingly with ages ranging from around eight to thirteen – stared at him with nervous fascination, though none of them seemed particularly inclined to follow his instructions to leave.
When Jordan mentioned bringing a healer, the presumably oldest child – a thirteen year old boy – sniffed loudly before bluntly stating: “The bandits took our healer. There's no one to get.”

Yanin yanked the door open and revealed the interior of the station. The interior itself was somewhat familiar to him, standard as it was for this type of minor Fadewatcher station: the end furthest toward him was occupied by tables, chairs and a fireplace that was faintly smoldering, but practically burnt out. On the right side of the room there was also a stairway going down to a basement. Past this living area were the rows of beds lined along each wall.
Blood dotted the floor in here in varying degrees, most of it in relatively sparse drips, others in more worrying, larger and more frequent splotches, and others yet that seemed smeared from a body being dragged. The smears seemed to mostly go from the door Yanin had just opened and down the stairs.
Six of the fourteen beds arrayed in the other end of the barrack were occupied by people, many of which were still in partial armor with only obstructing pieces having been removed, with bandages covering various wounds. Some bandages looked fairly clean still, others with dots of blood. A few bandages looked as though they had been soaked through entirely. While four of the six were making noise and gently writhing in place, the last two – the ones with the most obviously drenched bandages and mattresses – lay completely still.
A seventh figure, a young man that looked to be in his late teens or early twenties, was on his feet, drenched in sweat and in the middle of changing a bandage of one of the wounded. He was still in his almost gear, including the tabard with the Fadewatcher-insignia on it, though he had discarded his helmet and gauntlets for the moment.
The intact-seeming Fadewatcher jolted upright when the door was opened and stared at Yanin with eyes wide in panic, looking as though he might burst into tears at any moment. “Please, no more!”

The kids were in no apparent hurry to leave, and the street remained bizarrely calm in stark contrast of the surge of rushing blood in his veins. Only when given distinct instructions did one on them speak up: “The bandits took our healer. There's no one to get.” Looked barely teenage - and on a normal day, he would probably be chastised for slacking off from picking potatoes. One could only hope that these kids weren't sticking around here because their parents or older siblings were Fadewatchers...
Sir Yanin tore the door open, ready to act if need be, but nothing burst forth. Jordan had reflexively taken a couple steps forward, half-turning his head, white-knuckle gripping his sword, yet his master didn't draw his, but rather seemed to merely assess the situation for a second or two.
Jordan released a breath and the hilt of his sword, and seemed to visibly relax a little, even as he continued to check the street every couple of seconds.
"Bandits?" he repeated, "Did any of you see what happened and how many there were, and where they went? Or if they are still in the area?" He should probably try not to ask all the possible checklist of questions at once and give them time to answer.
Someone - a young male voice - was now pleading inside the guardhouse, seemingly with Sir Yanin who had now moved to effortlessly fill the entirety of the left half of the double door. He couldn't exactly see past him, but there were definitely injured people in there.
"Eh, we are Fadewatchers, too, just usually in Brow's Nest, Etlon..." It probably made them as qualified as any other, since it seemed that the local Fadewatcher department was pretty much out of commission. There had to be something that could be done. If they didn't have a dedicated healer, then anyone who knew how to tie bandages in place would help. "Did- could anyone bring any supplies left behind? Or any bandages from surrounding houses with a few people who could help with tying them in place. Someone who has been a midwife, maybe? If it's reasonably safe, anyway." He was still saying too many things at once, wasn't he?
He sighed. "We can help you to find your healer, I hope." If said healer is alive, anyway.



Nothing. For a second or two, Yanin remained in the cover of the door, gaze attempting to pierce into the comparatively dim interior. Just about, he made out that nearly everyone in the room was down, and the last one had been startled off from fumbling with one of them. Two strides closer, and he was in the doorway, continuing to survey the situation as his eyes adjusted.
“Please, no more!” plead the only Fadewatcher that seemed to have remained standing.
"I am not a foe," the knight replied, still with a tension in his voice and seemingly ready to draw his sword.
Slowly, as if expecting danger to be lurking under any bed, chair or table, he began, eyes more often than not drifting to the stairs, noting the position of any bit of furniture, and blood-splatter. It looked like the aftermath of a massacre. But not one that took place here. Had been long enough for someone to at least try to bandage the wounded. Why would they have just one witless Fadewatcher trying to take care of six wounded, a couple of which did not look so good...
"Is there anyone else in the building?"



She was not going to apologize for good hearing. Bandits? Kidnapping? Looked like the two swordsmen were rather late to the party. And it was particularly their healer that had gone missing. What a coincidence.
Brushing an imaginary mote off her shoulder, the half-palanter stepped out from behind the carriage she had been using as a makeshift cover.
"You sure did give me a bit of a start, there," she made a vague gesture at the sword at Jordan's hip he had been clutching at just moments ago, "but I should be able to help. I am Madara, a surgeon in my hometown." Among other things.
"Right, the young guy muttered, dubiously looking over her, but evidently deeming her trustworthy enough. "Sir, Is it safe in there?" he asked the door.
"This room seems to be," a different male voice - presumably the big guy in full armor - replied.
Taking it as permission to approach, Madara strode over to the door, much like the knight before her briefly stopping at the door to assess the situation and carefully fold back the sleeves of her tunic.
"I might still need those extra bandages," she noted to those behind her back, her natural tendency to gesture kicking in, as even while she was busy pinning her sleeve to her shoulder, she still managed to hold up a finger. "Would someone kindly light the fire and get some water boiling? And bring a light; my sight in dark is not poor, but I a nightwalker I am not."
By the time she was finished pinning her second sleeve up, she was done running her little preliminary triage and moved in after the knight - "I'm here to help," she would assure the frayed Fadewatcher, but only in passing -, first opting to take a closer look at the quiet ones.
Dying just happened to take too much energy for any to be left over for being noisy, so quiet was sometimes a bit more concerning. Some people were unfazed by nature, others were too shocked to do much, but yet others ... had no more do
left in them. It was those that needed help the fastest, if there was any help left to give.

Several of the children shook their heads no when Jordan asked about the bandits, and the oldest boy said: “It was in the night. We di'n't see anything. No one's telling us anything.”
A moment later when he mentioned bringing more supplies, the boy spoke up once more: “I think they already took what they could from Bren's house, and people come with more from time to time. It's been hours.”
Finally, when Jordan mentioned finding their healer, another child – a girl that looked about nine years old – spoke with a halting, nervous voice: “I w-... I want Bren back. Bren is... Bren's nice.”


The young Fadewatcher seemed to relax a little when Yanin declared himself to not be an enemy, though he still looked nervous and exhausted. “Y-yes,” he replied when queried about whether there were anyone else in the building, “he's –”
At that time a second young man, looking only a little older than the first, also in Fadewatcher gear and decorated with his very own faintly blood-speckled bandage on his left upper arm, came trudging up the stairs from the basement with a bundle of cloth, likely bed-sheets, under one arm and carrying a basket with several brown jugs in the other. He looked a little calmer than his younger colleague, but also a little paler and just as sweaty.

The newcomer seemed surprised to see Yanin, and even more so to see Madara abruptly push through and announcing her intent to help. Despite how evidently unnerved he was, however, he quickly set down the things he was carrying – what was intended as improvised bandage-materials and four jugs of ale – and wordlessly went about following Madara's instructions, tending the fire and preparing a pot of water for boiling.
The younger man stood clumsily from his kneeling position, his body trembling, grabbed the lantern he had had sitting beside him and bringing it to provide what light it could for the half-palanter.

As she examined them, it quickly turned out that the two quiet ones were still for a reason: neither of them was breathing and there was no heartbeat. Even at a glance, Madara's practiced eye would likely recognize that, among several less severe wounds, one had bled out from a cut across the inner thigh and likely had a severed femoral artery, and the other seemed to have expired from a stab-wound in the abdomen.

If it had, indeed, been hours, then it would explain why the streets seemed comparatively calm. Winter was coming and the crops didn't harvest themselves. Whether the kids were here because they wanted to be here or because their parents definitely didn't want them that far out of the village on that particular day was anyone's guess. He didn't think he wanted to explicitly ask if someone they knew was known to be injured or killed... It might come up, anyway, but still.
"Was anyone or anything else taken, besides the healer?" Or injured, or killed, atop of whatever poor Fadewatchers were there fast enough to try to intervene. "Or do you know of anyone who might know more of what happened? Besides our colleagues in there, I mean."
What manner of bandits would break in just to get the healer and no one else? Not riches or ... unless the particular healer was also the kind of herbalist that could make potent toxins and other substances of questionable legality, or someone had a personal qualm of some kind against her. If it was a matter of one of the bandits own needing a healer, surely they would have tried to make them come with more peacefully ... unless they'd tried to, and failed spectacularly?
A girl piped up, mentioning that "Bren" - presumably the healer - was nice.
"Ah? What are they like?" Might learn something, might not... But in any case, it would be awkward to stand in silence and stare at a number of upset yet anticipant kids until Sir Yanin decided he would be better used elsewhere or dismissed to do whatever.



Evidently satisfied that there didn't seem to be any threats or items amiss on the ground floor of the guardhouse - if the dead and wounded could be counted as "not amiss", and in the absence of a second floor above (they'd have seen if there was anything notable on the roof), he seemed to intent on giving the lower floor the exact same kind of see-over, and headed downstairs to check everything there, too. Maybe he wasn't the most talkative sort, or just one who preferred to see everything for himself rather than take someone else's word.
(Bloody dragging marks? Had they taken the definite dead there? Caught someone?)

The quiet turned out to be the worst kind of quiet - not calm, not asleep, not even in shock or unconsciousness, but they apparently had ceased to be among them. Likely a while before she set foot inside. If they had breathed their last breath within her sight, maybe she could have attempted something, but it looked far beyond her - or any mundane's alone - ability already.
If she wanted, she could mostly tell how long it had been since someone died, from blood following gravity, from cooling of skin, from stiffness settling in, from natural breakdown laxing it, and finally putrefaction rotting the body. (Incidentally, an experienced butcher would, too. Perhaps not the stages of subsequent detrimental decay, but the initial states would be quite distinctly familiar.)
Gut wounds tended to be a bit of a wash even if she were there in time. At the end of the day, some parts of anatomy simply were significantly messier than others, and did no good inverted into the rest of the body. So all that could be done was to clean up things the best you could, bring out any anti-infection and anti-inflammatory stuff you had, and hope upon natural healing and pray to whatever gods bothered listening.
In a cruel twist to it all, unless one of the bigger blood-vessels in the area were also nicked, gut injuries also often took a long time to kill - hours, days even. Plenty of time to lie curled up in pain and contemplate your mortality while someone else scurried about to see if they could procure a very potent magical healer in time.
Femoral artery injuries were the exact opposite in many ways - you had to act fast, in many cases faster than it took to run a few hundred meters to fetch someone and back, but they were comparatively easy fix. You could hold off the bleeding enough with heavy pressure - enough pressure to leave deep bruises and hurt like burning iron pressed into one's flesh - but not with bandages. Simple bandages did almost nothing to stop that much blood.

If someone had known to ask, there might have yet been hope for this one.

"May Reina have mercy on you," she muttered under her breath, with her hand lightly on the dead man's shoulder. Or the Wanderer take good care of you, as the case might be; a human would have had to be steadfastly determined to not let go for more than a dozen minutes after the heart had stopped. Maybe a bit longer if freezing or drowning.
She wasn't the most devout follower, but many people had unwavering faith in their chosen deities' aid, and even so, it never hurt to ask, at least for things what were beyond what she could do. Maybe some days they were merciful, as they were supposed to be. Maybe they granted some of that mercy upon those she could help no more. And just maybe, they would give a second chance to someone who would otherwise have none.
There was a slight pause, perhaps of contemplation, or maybe to see if this day would be one of those miracles happened, Reina willing, but if nothing occurred, Madara moved on to whoever of the four downed seemed the next worst off. She was not finished here either way.
There was no need to say why she was moving on to those awake enough to pay attention to what she was doing, if they weren't aware of their fates already. Those who weren't well enough probably could do better without knowing just yet.

“I dunno if they took anything,” the boy mused, sniffing loudly again and wiping his nose in his sleeve. “But I heard old Lady Bor's guys tried to help. They might know something.”
“Bren's nice,” the girl reiterated shyly to the question. “He always smiles and everyone likes him. One time Dad broke his arm and Mom and Dad got really sad because Dad couldn't work right and they didn't have money, but Bren fixed Dad's arm anyway. Then Mom baked him a pie, and Bren let me have a piece.” She smiled.


Entering the basement, Yanin would be faced with the usual storage facilities these kinds of barracks had attached to them, which were usually basements like this or separate shacks to the main building. All manner of items, from equipment to food, oil and miscellaneous supplies were arranged either on wooden shelves, in crates or in barrels that lined the walls of the small subterranean room.
What was different about this basement compared to those of other Fadewatcher stations was that another four figures were laid out on the ground side-by-side, hands folded over their chests. All four of them lay perfectly still, and it was likely not difficult to deduce that they were all dead. Three of the four were in Fadewatcher uniforms, while the last – a man in his forties that looked quite well-groomed compared to the rest, at least for a corpse – wore no identifying heraldry and brigandine rather than the coat of plates assigned to rural Fadewatchers.

Just as unusually and immediately obvious was a pile to the left of the stairs of what seemed to be another six armored bodies that had seemingly just been dumped off the side of the stair. None of them seemed to have any heraldry on them either, and there was no discernible pattern in what armor they were wearing.


The other four seemed much better off than the two who had expired. They were all injured in somewhat debilitating ways: one had a head-wound and likely a severe concussion; one appeared to have likely sustained tendon damage from a slash across his right shoulder; one had lost four fingers on his right hand, leaving only the thumb, and seemed to have a broken jaw; one had a nasty gash across his left calf; and the last seemed to have a compound fracture in his right arm.

While serious, none of it appeared to be immediately lethal, at least.

---

The first thing that Lhirin noted was that it was an absolute disaster of evidence. Blood here, trampled grass there, a battered-in door. Still, despite all that, it didn’t take Lhirin terribly long to absorb it all, nor did it take more than an errant thought for him to dismiss his spell. Rising from a crouch, Lhirin took it all in for perhaps thirty seconds, before following the trail of blood visually back to the crossroads. Turning he noted the direction of the other trail. Part of him wanted to follow it further, but he decided it would be unwise.

Turning his gaze to the weapon he observed its likely nature, then headed towards the building’s interior where he’d seen Irah go. He ran a hand over the splintered wood of the door and frowned. Wasted craftsmanship, a shame. Calling out, Lhirin attempted to get his companion’s attention.

“Come out,” he said, projecting his voice through the house even as he walked back over to the road, looking closer at the blood trail. As he waited he considered past encounters he’d had on his travels, trying to remember why this felt so…familiar.

As Lhirin took his time to ponder and scrutinise and consider in that way he was so proficient in, Irah began to speak under her breath–quiet, confident, and quick. Words very familiar to her indeed, for they were the means to call out to an angel across the divide, and invite them into Reniam–accompanied by a few gestures that, combined with her somber expression and downturned head, would likely give the townsfolk who might be able to observe her the impression of an exotic prayer and little else. In her mind the word formed as naturally as breathing, and as she exhaled she spoke it aloud: ”Kinder…”. It seemed it was time to play the part of the dutiful priestess, for lives were potentially at stake–and it mattered not to her whether the source of Reina’s mercy was hers directly or filtered through one of her angelic host: what mattered to her is that Her mercy was brought into this world and the suffering of the innocent ameliorated. The sensation of the spirit joining hers was at once familiar and surreal, but she paid the sensations no mind as she turned to exit, stepping past Lhirin briskly just as he asked her to join him once more.

With a warmth like sinking into bath-water that was just at the verge of transitioning from comfortable to uncomfortable, somehow both pleasant and painful at the same time, the divine creature dubbed Kinder by its summoner settled into Irah’s form, its spirit immediately and easily assuming a passive and cooperative role as soon as it recognized what was happening.

“Deo’irah? How can I be of assistance?” it asked quickly, its voice pleasant, melodic and faintly feminine inside her skull. The angel was quite used to being called for medical emergencies and knew that there was likely little time for pleasantries if its services were required.

Rather than attempt to lower herself to crude verbiage, Irah simply shared directly with Kinder her memories of the past few moments, and let them feel the burgeoning urgency that swelled within her chest. Once she’d shared all of the information they’d been able to glean, her thoughts began to form words in her head as she began to act, and Irah did not stop for a moment as she rushed herself towards their belongings. Armos regarded her idly as she brushed past his white fur, clambering into the stagecoach in order to find the nested wooden boxes she used as an icebox. Irah extended her will out, carried by the magical energy she let seep from her very being, and as it extended towards the boxes the ice that’d been slightly melted by the unseasonal warmth began to freeze once more. She reached in to grab the two small vials of pulpy liquid–the aforementioned leftover healing potions–that may well save the lives of those injured in whatever happened here. By the time she’d managed to climb back out of the wagon, she was face-to-face with Lhirin again, and she motioned for him to lead the way.

“Do you know where they took the wounded?” she asked, displaying the two vials to him clearly in her right palm. She and Kinder both knew the perils of the divine taint, and they’d need a safer means for injuries that weren’t immediately critical.

Lhirin watched her, sensing a change about her person, one that always made his inquisitive mind curious. Still, now was not the time. “I have a hypothesis,” he said with a nod, expression serious as he led Irah forth. The ox could stay where he was for now, the big animal and the wards on the stagecoach would keep their things safe. Besides, now that he had an understanding of the situation–or at least he thought he did–Lhirin had made a measure of sense out of the behavior of the villagers. No greetings, the one man swearing, then immediately capitulating at the first sign of hostility? This village had suffered some kind of an attack. Recent, but not so much so that the entire village was awash with panic–not that such a thing would do them any good. He thought it sensible that they were going about their business rather than dwelling in the past.

“Blood trail leads back towards the crossroad,” Lhirin clarified after a brief few moments of silence as he continued on. His hand remained on the hilt of his runeblade, even though he was fairly certain that the immediate threat had passed. “There was an attack…perhaps a kidnapping,” he mused aloud, “...one is certain, the other I am not so sure of. Though it is either that or the assailants left wounded.” Lhirin’s eyes narrowed for a moment in thought before widening again as he peered about.

He was looking for any other possible evidence of an attack while they made their way to the crossroads.

Irah’s mind wandered to why he might have suggested a kidnapping, but as he elucidated the thought she found herself readily able to follow it with what they’d seen. Entry had clearly been forced, nobody was present, and there was a trail leading into the forest. It wasn’t one of the wounded dragged towards the crossroads, so reason stood it must either be the healer or their wounded… but why, in that case, was the place as tidy as it was? Perhaps they’d gotten into a skirmish, gotten enough soldiers wounded enough, and taken the healer by force to help recover their losses and hinder their enemy’s plans. A foolish proposition, to Irah’s mind, as it was quite easy to debilitate an individual subtly under the guise of healing–and any trained in healing knew that it was a precarious and fickle mistress, and even idle negligence could be deadly. Still, it was unlike most people to think too much about the consequences of their actions, and the desperate even less so. It seemed to her that everyone in Rodoria was a great deal more desperate than the last time that she’d visited, though that was some time ago now given the troubles that seemed to be engulfing the country.

“I’m inclined to agree with you on the kidnapping–you’re usually right about these things, if occasionally misdirected.” she began, quickly pointing to the Fadewatcher outpost just ahead of themselves where it appeared others were now congregating: several animals appeared to be stationed outside, loaded with gear. Other adventurers heeding the call? Perhaps not–it was a Fadewatcher station, and though the young human guarding it lacked their customary tabard Irah had spent more than enough time passing through Rodoria to recognise a Fadewatcher’s outfit when she saw one. She turned to Lhirin and muttered quickly in Gazzerashei: “Fadewatcher, but no tabard. Two loaded horses. Curious.” as they continued to bound closer toward the station.

Merely nodding in reply, Lhirin followed her lead as they approached the man guarding the door to the outpost. Sensing no imminent danger, Lhirin gave Irah a pointed glance, one that she’d seen before. It simply indicated that it was her turn to handle matters. After all, she was the social genius, between them... and his input was likely to be... poorly received.

Irah’s approach to the door was halted by by the little gathering that she could see occurring, with the perhaps off-duty Fadewatcher talking to a number of children about… the healer, it appeared. Well. If even the kids knew their healer was missing, perhaps it’d been longer than she thought–but she had very little time to consider the implications and instead saw fit to approach the group, clearly displaying the two little vials in her hand.

“You, Fadewatcher–forgive my brusqueness but there isn’t time to dally. The injured appear to have been brought inside, yes? Are we in time?” Irah directed towards Jordan, craning her neck to try and look him in the eyes. Her body language was quite clear–let me in, before it’s too late–but she nevertheless recognised that she would be unable to physically extricate him from the entrance without the situation escalating into something neither of them would want and so awaited his response somewhat impatiently.

The first assumption had been accurate. The otherwise perfectly average storage space had been turned into a temporary holding cellar for the dead. All human, all armored. The usual faint mix of grains, fabric, maybe a bit of moisture and the vague hint of something molding was overshadowed by the distinct scent of blood. There was a heaviness to places like that that even Yanin could pick up on, at least when alone. Other people distracted from the impression, but just by himself... Eyes could see people, but there was no motion. There were bodies, but no warmth. There were others, but the only one you could hear was yourself.
He had no personal bonds to these specific individuals, and hence there was no sadness, no mourning, yet it felt wrong on a very primal level, and he didn't like it. The best he could have described it as was 'a distinct sense of he should not be here'.

But there were reasons to be here beyond checking if this area was currently safe. Four of the bodies down here were lined up neatly, three of them Fadewatchers. Yanin didn't touch the bodies, merely kneeling in front of them and observing for a handful of seconds. The fourth was quite unlike. Civilian? Someone off-duty? One of the targets of the attack? A passerby who intervened or a private guard? From the placement and care of positioning, it stood to reason it had been someone on 'their' side.
There didn't seem to be any distinct signs of magical or otherwise atypical method of attack - only injuries from regular old melee and ranged weapons. He could ask the minorly injured Fadewatcher upstairs for confirmation. It was a good idea to learn who - or what - you were up against, the sooner the better, especially if trouble were to make unexpected return.
Other dead had also been brought here, unceremoniously dumped into a pile of corpses. The other side of the equation. Six of them, once you tried to count the bodies and respective limbs, variably equipped and not discernibly marked. Common criminals wearing whatever armor and weapons they could loot or buy? The cheapest mercenaries someone could find? Unfortunately, the dead couldn't typically speak, only give some clues.
Anything else on them that might have indicated who they were and what they had wanted? If there were any obvious pouches or pockets to check, he would, otherwise...
Time to return among the living, at least for a bit. The living could often give answers faster.



"Right; we will pay Lady Bor a visit once things have calmed down here," he replied to the notion of her men had attempted to lend their aid. As they had already intended to, before discovering the local division of Fadewatchers in figurative shambles... This was one seriously botched mess...
The girl took to recounting what she knew of Bren ... of a smiling, charitable man.
"He does seem kind. Can he do magic?" Jordan asked, even as a rather distinct couple on the street drew closer. Distinct, for they were a deigan couple, and in particular a true deigan - who were reasonably uncommon sight - and an ascended, no, ascended-true mixed-blood deigan, which was considerably more rare still.
From what little he knew of deigan culture, the fact that ascended deigan had done their best to genocide all of the true deigan race was one thing he was aware of, atop of many of them holding grudges for long and once adults, living unaging seemingly until something just took and killed them.
There was that, and also the fact that they appeared to be headed in their direction, rather than past them. The male eventually fell back, but the female continued forward, if anything only hastening her pace.
“You, Fadewatcher – forgive my brusqueness, but there isn’t time to dally. The injured appear to have been brought inside, yes? Are we in time?”
Another healer? She had the garb of Reina's follower, at least - and a rather tantalizing version of it, too - and appeared no more overtly armed than the previous woman who had made her way over. Would it really have been so long that someone had, magically or by rider, managed to summon healers from nearby settlements, too?
"Were you called-" Never mind. She seemed intent to push through, doing her best to look him in the eye as she proudly demonstrated two small vials in her hand, as if expecting him to immediately know what the fluid within did. She seemed genuine enough, and if this was a deception, it was the most blatant one he had seen to date. Jordan appeared slightly taken aback as he scrutinized her. "At least some of the injured, yes." He didn't know yet if any of Vela Bor's men were hurt or killed, and if so, whether they'd have been brought here or to the manor. "It had been hours before we got here not long ago. A surgeon from another down arrived just a couple minutes ago." She might have overheard enough to realize the local healer was missing in action, if whoever might have summoned her hadn't mentioned it already.
With this, he took a step back, keeping one eye on the newcomer and trying to see into the interior of the guardhouse over his shoulder with the other. There were two local Fadewatchers, one accompanying the surgeon kneeling next to one of the wounded, the other preparing something at the fireplace. Thankfully, his master made a reappearance from the basement, so Jordan referred to the Reina's follower and raised an eyebrow.
Sir Yanin looked at two of the occupied beds the surgeon was not at and shrugged. Barring any protests from the healthier local Fadewatchers, Jordan looked fully at the deigan woman and took a half-step to the side.
"I reckon you can go in," he noted, glancing back at the kids - and then the male deigan lurking behind.



Alas, no miracles occurred. Quietly and without much fuss, she tallied up the rest of the apparent injuries on the remaining four who were neither dead nor immediately dying, quietly half-asking them to let her look at them, half simply informing them that she was doing. Two slashing wounds, one hit to the head, two shattered bones (she didn't touch quite yet), missing fingers...
Slashes were comparatively easy to repair, though she might have to pull some tendons or muscle together - she could help them keep most of the function of their respective injured limbs - fingers could be sometimes sewn back - worked quite well with palanters, sometimes with humans, too - but not when they'd have been lost outside for hours, so it'd just be a matter of fixing the skin over the injury the best she could. Reassembling shattered bones was not her particular favourite, but she'll make do. Head injuries were the hardest to do much with, and most unpredictable the worst way possible. Scalp injuries bled a lot, but weren't overly dangerous, it was potential fractured skull and swelling she was worried about.
She'll fixing the injuries one by one, and afterwards seeing to additional medicine that could be drank with tea and actually getting them comfortable. They were still half in armor.
Most of her skill relied on physical reassembly and various chemicals derived from plants and creatures. If so desired, people could also seek magical healing to finish the job afterwards - aside of the most potent, radical forms of it, magical healing was complementary, not an equal or a substitute to surgery, nor was the latter only a means to make one survive for the first.
As a lot of what magical healing did was to mimic and accelerate natural healing, hence it was entirely possible to get a much worse result with magic alone - even leave someone unnecessarily crippled. On the opposite side, only cleaning and stitching flesh together still left a lot for time to mend. But bring the two together, reassembly first, a level of magical healing attainable for most people after? Everything clicked together. Everything was in its rightful place, the mage saved their energy, even divine taint was not much of an issue if you only had a hair-thin gap to bridge. Quick. Efficient.

Madara knelt next to one of the wounded - the one with a slashed shoulder - and wasted no time picking out things from her pouches - a larger bottle bottle, a spool of thread, fabric - a set of implements rolled in leather - that she inverted and tied to her upper left arm like a toolbelt of sorts -, two tiny bottles and three vials that she fitted alongside the implements, three needles, assorted bandages in their own smaller bag-within-a-bag, two small bags of herbs...
The multitude of tiny bottles and vials she carried were an art form onto itself. Of painkillers that worked on humans alone, she had five different kinds on her, not counting the very minor secondary or ternary effects of concoctions of other primary uses.
One of them could remove virtually all pain where it touched exposed internal tissue, but too much of it in blood and it could kill, mostly because it was also slightly paralytic for the hour or two it was effective. If someone drank it, it did barely anything at all unless they also had a terrible case of ulcers. A second kind was mostly supposed to be taken with food or drink, but it also made one inebriated and drowsy. And in much higher quantities than that still, it could make one's body forget how to breathe and have a heartbeat. A third one, consumed or applied directly, helped quite well against pain and inflammation and fever, but it also made much harder to stop bleeding. A fourth one removed pain and inflammation, and also left you clear-headed, but if someone took more than a drop for five kilograms of body weight they allegedly turned slightly yellow and died a slow, painful death that was particularly hard to stave off - after several days of feeling perfectly fine after. She had not confirmed the latter fact for herself, but nevertheless had a bit of a morbid professional curiosity in regards to who and at which cost had figured that specific quantity in particular out... The fifth one, when applied directly, would alleviate pain and leave a pleasant warm sensation, but was also significantly weaker than the others, hence being less useful against the kind of debilitating pain that could give you a heart attack. It also did nothing when eaten, besides tasting positively vile for just about any mammal out there.
And then you had to remember how those, and all others, interacted between themselves. There were definitely reasons why she didn't permit anyone touch her vials' and bottles' contents in their pure form. She could genuinely state that she had nothing with the primary purpose purpose of causing death, but medicine used wrongly was just as harmful. Then again, a bottle of strong alcohol could technically kill just as well, and that was something people had been drinking for fun for millennia.

"I can help fixing your shoulder and mute the pain - if you could try to hold still and lean forward a little," Madara informed the man, her natural melodic mezzosoprano quiet, calm, giving him a second to accept that she was there as she wet her hands with a small amount of liquid from the larger bottle before actually touching him and starting to unravel the bandage covering the site. The fluid evaporated almost instantly, though the lingering smell indicated some kind of spirits.
There was some kind of commotion by the door, but she just about barely spared the follower of Reina a glance. She spoke, though, one hand briefly relieving itself as the second held everything in place, motioning towards the one of the occupied beds hosting the man with the head injury, but immediately resuming its work.
"If you have Reina's mercy by your side - or very potent anti-inflammatories - lend your aid to him first." He was the one she felt she could do the least for, and was also the most uncertain about.

If prayers could indeed summon followers, Reina must have had quite the sense of humour.

Irah bustled past the giant of a man guarding the doorway the moment he permitted it, her mouth forming the shapes necessary to say “thank you”, though no words came out. She caught the attention of the half-Palanter Madara very briefly, and the anticipation and tension within her eased significantly. The first thing she noticed was the sleeves: a colleague of hers, a barber-surgeon, was always meticulous about keeping his sleeves pristine, though the rest of his clothes often got to luxuriate in the rewards of his sanguinary work. He was more… elegant and refined, of course, being a true deigan–but there was something very sharp and striking about the figure of this apparent surgeon too that made the corner of her mouth wrinkle happily at the thought. She wasted no time indulging herself in these thoughts when there were those in need, however, and as she immediately directed her attention towards the one that Madara had pointed out to her.

From the corner of her eye she saw a yet-hale Fadewatcher scrambling to put a pot of water on the fire, and with her free right hand she beckoned him to put the pot down and directed some small measure of her focus towards the water in it. She could almost feel the water within it, the placidity and stillness reminiscent of what it felt like to use her magic, and she instead pushed forth all of the urgency she could muster and released it from herself as pure energy (accompanied by a quick prayer in Fermian asking Arhoun for his blessing). It would take a few seconds, to be certain, but the water first began to bubble gently at the edges before giving way to a rolling boil. She settled the water again, leaving faint trails of steam to wisp up into the air, before nodding at Madara. “The water’s boiled--I have two healing potions with me, but could make more in… maybe an hour, all told.” she spoke, her voice quick and calm.

"We’re not too late for these men–between myself and this surgeon, we should be able to administer Reina’s mercy without exposing them to the taint… He would expire from the taint before we could restore his fingers, but that head wound looks serious." she spoke internally, beckoning forth Kinder’s divine magic as she walked towards the bed and bent down ever-so-slightly to get a better look. Head wounds were rarely the sort of thing one wanted to leave to the surgeon’s knife if it could be helped: such a precious part of the body was easy to damage, and there was inevitably trauma when one delved into the innards of any mundane creature with a sharp blade. ”Blessed Reina, mother of Mercy, may your light shine forth and banish the Wanderer’s spectre.” she spoke, the prayer leaving her lips less as a conduit for the power she beckoned, and more to give the others the impression she was little more than one who wielded Reina’s favoured power. Truthfully, it was also a legitimate prayer: these were likely innocent men who had sought only to defend themselves and Deo’Irah’s heart fluttered at the thought of their noble sacrifice to protect what they had. Though she’d brought many back from the brink of death in her many, many years as a healer she never once questioned the motives of the people who received of Reina’s beneficence–but she did always prefer to heal those who were truly worthy of mercy.

She arched her hands delicately as she went to investigate the wound more closely, certain to heal only as much as could not be done through alchemical, internally magical, or physical means.

Looking over the dead presumed attackers, Yanin would find that most of them did not seem to carry much on them besides a scabbard for a missing sword, an empty quiver or a sheathed dagger on their hip or calf. Two of the six dead did each have a small pouch tied to their belts. Upon checking their contents, he would find that one contained four rodlin and the other seven rodlin.

Unfortunately it did not appear that any of them had any other clues on them. In fact, with how little they had on them, it seemed very likely that they did not bring everything they had to Borstown and likely had somewhere else that they left the rest of their things.


The girl nodded her head vigorously in affirmative. “Most of the time he gives people drinks that taste bad but makes them heal really fast, but sometimes he does magic, too!”
The older boy nodded his head in agreement, though less enthusiastically so. “Bren was our healer. He knew some alchemy and could do arcane healing, too.”


The Fadewatchers – both the seemingly intact one and the wounded ones – made no attempt to stop Madara and immediately cooperated with her without question. It was clear that these were desperate people, and that the two who seemed mostly healthy still had tried their best, but were immensely relieved to hand off the responsibility of treating the wounded to someone better suited to the task than themselves.

The slashed shoulder, upon closer examination, had received a deep cut across the side and front of the shoulder almost exactly at the joint. The bleeding seemed to be under control and his life out of danger, but she would know enough that without expert treatment – and ideally magical healing – this man might never regain the full use of his arm.


The Fadewatcher Irah examined barely even seemed to register her presence, his eyes staring off into space, unfocused and erratic. He babbled quietly to himself, seemingly delirious but also clearly in intense pain.

Checking the wound beneath the head-bandage, she found that the scalp had indeed been lacerated, though she would recognize that it was the type of injury caused by blunt force trauma rather than a bladed strike. The wound had almost completely stopped bleeding already, however, and it seemed as though the skull itself might be relatively intact. She would recognize that the more serious part of this injury was likely concussive force to the brain.

Healing brain damage through mundane or magical means was tricky under the best of circumstances, Irah knew, and she recognized that this would definitely be the kind of injury where divine healing would be a major boon. Knowing the process required for this healing to occur, Irah would place a hand so that there was skin-to-skin contact with the patient, upon which she felt the angel currently residing inside her shift its attention toward the Fadewatcher.
“Poor thing,” Kinder's gentle voice said compassionately in Irah's head. “Though my Lady can't answer your prayers, I will do my best in her stead. Receive Reina's mercy.”
Irah would feel the familiar sense of the divine spirit inhabiting her body flare up and suddenly get even hotter than it had been before, painfully so, as divine energy radiated from the angel, through Irah's body and into the wounded man. A faint white light could be seen where Irah and the Fadewatcher's skin touched, though no other immediate signs of magical healing could be seen: the head-wound did not close in the least, nor did any of his other minor injuries. Kinder knew to focus on what mattered and minimize the amount of divine taint she exposed both the patient and Irah to.

After a couple of seconds the Fadewatcher suddenly started blinking his eyes rapidly as he stopped babbling, suddenly seemed to shake and convulse as if having a fit, only for him to calm back down again as abruptly as it had started but a second later. He inhaled deeply and opened his eyes, only to swiftly find Irah's gaze and meet it with his own.
“M'lady,” he muttered through trembling lips, a desperate smile curving his lips as tears started to well in his eyes. “Thank you.”
As Irah removed her hand, the skin she had touched would be reddened and irritated, but otherwise healthy. She would know that this meant she had already exposed this man to an amount of divine taint that bordered on the unhealthy, but that in doing so she had likely mended what would have been permanent damage.

The sting of the energy flowing through her was intensely familiar, at this point, and though it should have been an unpleasant sensation to her, knowing that enduring it would give somebody a chance to live their life that had almost been cruelly taken away instead made it feel like a worthy burden, something she truly carried with pride. Thankfully, she had been blessed with a much greater resistance to it than most, and she would still be able to call upon Kinder’s powers again if more grievous wounds were present elsewhere–especially if the background chatter she could hear about the Healer being missing was true. Lhirin’s hypothesis was right, then–but she wasn’t surprised. He was far cannier at that sort of thing than anyone she’d ever met–though a few of her… colleagues came quite close.

”Thank you, Kinder–he should direct his thanks to you, in truth, but I know that neither of us do what we do for thanks. I may only take credit for the will that may bring you here, but I also believe that that is all Reina ultimately wants of us: to want her mercy to be here, in our hearts and in our world.” Irah allowed herself to muse while the work was done, but as she felt the telltale rash begin to appear beneath her fingers she knew it was time to stop, and pulled away. The convulsions were not irregular for injuries such as this, and Irah reflexively moved to steady him with her other hand. Before she’d gotten particularly far he’d stopped, however, though she did choose to continue the motion, dropping both of the vials in her free palm onto the bed before bringing it to his and holding it gently.

“Shh, shh–please, you must rest. It is my honour to bring Reina’s mercy to you, but the gift has its price: the taint. Focus on breathing.” Irah smiled in return, her expression a practised mask of kindliness. Though the slight smile that graced her lips was genuine, there was an intensity to how her eyes examined the rest of him for injuries more closely. She couldn’t judge his weight accurately beneath the armour, but if he were fit enough for combat she didn’t think they’d have to worry about using a healing potion for the rest of his injuries–better to let the surgeon do her work knitting flesh and conserve her magical supplies for more serious injuries.

“I’m going to attend the others, but call if you need me.” Irah spoke, letting out a deeply held breath of her own as she took a few deep breaths of her own, looking into his eyes to help him focus and match her rhythm. As she focused, she reached her will out to the water in the air, condensing it into a few droplets of cool water upon the man’s brow. She continued to focus until she’d condensed a small orb of water, floating just to her side, and a tendril of it flowed down towards the man’s mouth, for him to drink if he wished–the water would remain at his lips unless he motioned to drink. After a few seconds she squeezed his hand gently before scooping the vials back up and moving to where Madara was working, placing one of them down a little distance away from the supplies that she’d set out. She left just as quickly, turning on her heel, but said as she did so: “Healing potion–use it freely.”

Irah turned her attention next to the man with the compound fracture. Injuries like this were nasty and needed to be cleaned before they could be fixed magically. Irah could do it with steam, if truly necessary, but it would be extremely painful–there were better methods, especially with the surgeon and her plethora of options. She was careful not to touch him unless necessary to adjust him and get a better look at the extent of the damage, but made sure to bring a similar stream of water to his lips and motioned for him to drink freely as she examined his wounds more closely.

---

His ears picking up on the various exchanges around him, Lhirin sifted through it all while remaining utterly apart. Even as Irah entered, he stopped just before the fellow apparently guarding the door. Rather than saying much of anything, Lhirin simply looked the man over, his eyes slightly narrowed, gaze clinical. Lingering for an uncomfortably long time before turning to the inside of the station, Lhirin considered everything they’d learned.

The village had been attacked in the night, it seemed, by bandits no less. Based on the wounds and damage he’d seen thus far it did not seem that they’d used magic in their assault. Yet…they’d taken out essentially the entire troupe of Fadewatchers and apparently some of the men from Bors Mansion.

‘Bors Mansion,’ he thought, the words catching in his mind even as another conversation mentioned that they might know more than anyone here. Lhirin again surveyed things, noting that almost everyone here had something to do. A man guarded the door, two young fadewatchers assisted in the Station with the wounded, Irah and the surgeon worked to heal what ailed the men. Even the children had provided some essential information it seemed.

The healer–Bren apparently–was a magic user and an alchemist. Lhirin smiled slightly, but the expression was utterly out of place in the situation. It didn’t last, his affect becoming flat in the next instant before he stepped past Jordan and called into the Station.

“Mansion,” he said in Gazzerashei, the message clearly for Irah. Then, he turned on his heel, whipping past Jordan–though he did not yet know his name–and down one of the roads towards Bors Mansion. As small as the town was–and with such a swift gait–it wouldn’t take Lhirin terribly long to arrive at the walls–then gate–to the mansion. He just hoped that it wasn’t barred to him as he had many questions and felt it would waste time if he did not receive answers post haste.

The longer they waited…the further the bandits could get from Borstown with their quintessential healer. In Lhirin’s mind that was an unacceptable result. If he had to, he’d burn a hole through the gate or climb the walls to get in…. Such was his obsessive focus and so potent was his drive.

The small true deigan in the white garb of Reina quickly brushed past him, quietly mouthing 'thank you' before vanishing into the comparatively dim interior of the building, leaving her companion hanging a couple meters back, directly in front of human Fadewatcher guarding the door.
If the deigan woman, slight as she had been next to the human, had been about exactly the average height for their race, then the deigan man had evidently taken after whichever parent of his was ascended, as he stood nearly a head taller, albeit frailer. He was still almost half a head shorter than Jordan in turn, though, and though the human squire tended towards wiriness rather than sheer bulk, his armored frame was nevertheless significantly broader than that of the other.
The mostly-ascended deigan however lacked the healer's garb, and left a bit more haggard impression - as well as being armed. If his slight frame wouldn't have been able to take on much punishment otherwise, the hilt of the sword he was carrying rather heavily implied he didn't rely on strength, speed and endurance alone to fight. What he had was a rune sword - he was a magical fighter, then, and if the dark circles under his eyes were any indication, perhaps made more use of magic than was strictly taken healthy for him. And if Sir Yanin were to be cited, the mage you should worried about the most was often the one who looked the worst off - mages could be a bit counter-intuitive like that. Showed that they didn't mind damaging their body on their path to greatness, or had been too desperate to care many a time.
The deigan was staring at him a touch too intently for comfort, still gripping his sword as if ready to brandish, but not really doing much beside that. It should have been rather obvious what Jordan himself was doing. He looked like a Fadewatcher sans tabard and some pieces of his full armor, and was stood there blocking the door. He had long since dropped his hand from his sword, but the staring with hand-on-hilt of the other was getting a bit uncomfortable ... in a weird way, though, it was not dissimilar to how his master could sometimes stare someone down (or ignore them) without any real meaning to it.
One could assume the deigan was as much a guard to his female companion as a significant other. Should he reassure him that the inside was safe, or? After a time that felt too long for casual scrutiny, he shifted his focus to staring over Jordan's shoulder, mien thoughtful.
(Where had he been?)
Right, so Bren was indeed quite accomplished, both magically and alchemically - assuming he sourced his own medicine-
He didn't assign much meaning to the subtle smile on the male deigan's face - there was no obvious reason to smile, but perhaps he just remembered something, in thought as he appeared to be -, but his next actions were definitely a touch startling.
Without a word, an unspoken request, or indeed even the just stopping next to him and staring at him until he realized he was in the way like Sir Yanin sometimes did, the deigan decided to abruptly barrel through him, seemingly unaware that he was trying to just show an object notably heavier than himself aside.
"Hey!" Jordan yelped, voice a couple tones higher than his regular speaking tone, more out of surprise than actual loss of balance taking a step back into the building as he swung an arm out to further halt the oblivious intruder. He didn't try to reach for a weapon, just stayed physically blocking the other's advance, momentarily speechless past the first exclamation.
The man pushing against the metal on his arm said something in a language Jordan didn't know, evidently at the deigan woman, before just as abruptly breaking off his attempted intrusion, spinning on his heel, and beginning to stride off just like nothing had happened. You know, if you wanted to tell something to your companion, you could have just asked to be let in - not wanting to turn the spontaneous hospital room into the village gathering spot notwithstanding - or just said it over the door like normal people.
For about two more seconds, Jordan stood in the doorframe, blinking and mouth slightly agape, before addressing those in the room.
"What is his problem?" Still baffled, he looked from Sir Yanin, to the deigan woman, to the deigan man's rapidly distancing back around the edge of the door. "Should I go after him, or? I think he's headed for Bor Manor based on the direction he's going..."



The money was still there (and he left it in place), so whoever had piled the corpses up had not searched them through - but barring stripping them entirely revealing something more, it didn't appear they carried any clues to who they were and where they had set up camp.
As he re-emerged from basement, the healer in green tunic requested the boiled water and a number of containers to be brought closer, so he complied, setting the items next to her before motioning the slightly older Fadewatcher with the injured arm over to a table away from the others. He seemed to be the more collected one of the two who still stood, and currently unemployed by either healer. The healer in white seemed to be busy inspecting the Fadewatcher with a head injury.
"I'm Sir Yanin Glade, lieutenant at Brow's Nest, Etlon," he finally took to introducing himself if the local Fadewatcher complied and followed him as indicated. "Seems that trouble doesn't rest, even if we were meant to, and it really did a number on you. Does anyone here have an idea who these people were, what they wanted, where they are and how many of them are left?"
The local Fadewatcher presumably had a bit of time to reply before another deigan attempted forceful empty, said something in a rather distinct language that was none of the surrounding lands, then hightailed out just as quickly, leaving Yanin half-prepared to stand and brandish his sword, body turned and hand on hilt. There were probably a couple seconds for either the deigan woman or the local Fadewatcher to react before he made a call regarding Jordan's question.



The guardhouse had filled with a different kind of energy, one which was more busyness than despair. The other healer took over with the one with the head injury, leaving one less thing that might be hard to accomplish with the physical and chemical alone.
When the knight reappeared, she pointedly requested for a separate pot, a jug and five cups, briefly simply holding a hand over the bandage on the guard's shoulder as she swiftly and precisely counted drops from her chemical and alchemical assortment into the containers, finally adding some herbs to the cups and decanting a measure of boiled - and still steaming - water into each. Her fingers felt cool against his skin.
It caught Madara's attention that the other healer used magic to boil water, and informed her that she could have more healing potions in mere hour, if need be. Rather accomplished beyond relying on her deity to aid, then. She might have carried a rather wide assortment of medicine, but most of them were sourced from a select few trusted vendors, rather than concocted by herself. The herbs and single- or few-ingredient straightforward mixes were quite easy to replicate, but the more complex compounds where exact precision was paramount were best left to people who had dedicated their lives solely to that branch of sciences.

She wet the bit of bandage gluing itself to the site of the injury, the infused water feeling hot as it penetrated the fabric, but not scalding. Hot, but also rapidly numbing, until only a distant, dull reminder of pain remained, and the adjacent muscles seemed to lax, regardless of will. Oddly enough, even before the numbness set in, the water didn't sting, unlike even regular plain old boiled water normally would.
"Hold the light still, could you? If you're not used to, though, you might want to focus on gaze on something else," he noted to the uninjured Fadewatcher before directly the addressing the one she was tending to, who presumably had a much easier time focusing now that the pain had become a vague impression of itself. "I'll be cleaning and putting your shoulder back in order now - it might be a bit uncomfortable, but not painful." Weird was perhaps the more accurate term, feeling pressure, but not the bite.
Blood started seeping a little as she washed out the injury of any debris, but not nearly in the quantities it had before, even as she proceeded to bring out an implement to hook the severed tendon together, hold it in place and apply pressure with one hand as her other carefully added a kind of silvery, very thin threat to a curved, perfectly honed dark and shining gray needle and began to secure the two detached ends of a tendon together. Live tendons were more flexible, even harder to pierce than sinew; you needed a very sharp, rigid tool and a lot of patience. Tendons were difficult to cut, but if once already sliced in two, they could fray from ends if you were careless, which was not ideal if you planned to use the same one for, oh, the next sixty years or so.
For a minute or two, there was focused silence, until she broke off this bit of thread and removed the implement she had been using to hold the tendon in place. Madara wiped off her hands and cleaned them with spirits once more before carefully lifting the man's arm to flex it. There; now it should stay as one and be able to glide freely. Repairing a small nick in one of the minor medium-sized blood-vessels in the region (another snip of the thread thread with something vaguely resembling a small seam cutter), a bit of damage in the adjacent muscles (snip, another wash) and skin was comparatively quicker and shorter work.
Just a bit of salve and a smaller strip of bandage to keep dust away and her job here was mostly done. Additional magical healing would speed things up, but past that it was mostly taking off remaining armor, washing off blood and grime, and finding clean clothes. The thread she used was not a concern; the body knew how to dissolve it in a month or two.
The deigan woman handed her a small vial she held up to the light, observing its colour and consistency, before uncorking it to pick up its scent. Goldberry. She was reasonably certain she knew exactly what type of healing potion it was. Shouldn't interact adversely with anything she had, or intended to use. She added a small amount of it to a cup near her - about a sixth of the vial -, and then handed it to the man, wrapping the fingers of his good hand around it and making sure he could hold it before letting go.
"Here, this will help with healing and the blood loss," she noted. The tea - if it could be called so - was strongly herbal, slightly sweet, and would actually have tasted quite pleasant, if it were not for the distinct note of saltiness underlining it all. "The faintness in your arm will wear off in an hour or so - but be careful about stressing your shoulder for a couple weeks, especially the first few days. There are yet those here in more dire need, but if you need something, let us know."

The one with head injury received a steaming cup with a slightly different mix of herbs in passing as Madara mover her things along to the next one in need - the one with missing fingers and broken jaw-, briefly noting to Irah that she was done with the one with the shoulder injury.
As she was moving to take a closer look at him than before, however, there was a commotion at the door, with a second deigan crashing into their door-guard, shouting something across the room, and just as quickly scurrying off, leaving the guard rather confused.
"Huh," was Madara's only utterance.

A soft smile graced Jaelnec's lips as he rode down the road with his eyes closed. He listened to the steady sound of the hooves of Sabicia and Xilos on the dirt road as they traveled at a trot, the rhythm of the sound corresponding to the rhythm of his own movements in the saddle to create an almost hypnotic experience. He could hear the chain-links of his own hauberk rattling faintly with each of Sabicia's strides, could feel the scabbard of his sword tapping him gently on his left thigh with each sway. Nearby, somewhere to his right, he could hear the cheerful song of a robin and further away, behind him and to the left, he heard the slow, repeating tone of the call of a blackbird, all of it accompanied by the gentle sound of the leaves rustling in the breeze.
He felt the warm sun on his hands and arms through his leather gauntlets and shirt-sleeves, with the pleasant heat only occasionally fading to the chill of an early autumn wind. He could smell the scents of the forest gradually, very slowly intermingling with the smells of a town, just as the sounds of nature began to be accompanied with the sounds of hatchets on wood and voices in the distance. The sound of laughing children.

There was a brief flash through Jaelnec's mind at that sound: an image before his mind's eye of a very young, blond girl's smiling face, which prompted him to immediately open his eyes as he felt a cruel fist close painfully around his heart. For just a split-second he was convinced he could smell smoke and see the faint reflection of a bloodstained toy rabbit, only for the vague memory to fade and give way to the much more vivid present. He shuddered.
Though for just an instant he had been reminded of how he had been back then, Jaelnec immediately felt at home in his body as it was now: slender, yet muscular, strong and sturdy yet agile. He clutched the reins in hands to feel it better through his gauntlets; he inhaled deeply to feel the weight of the chainmail rest comfortingly on his chest through his gambeson; he clenched his thighs and calves and remembered the countless hours of training he had had to go through to become like this. Part of him almost wanted to reach for the hilt at his left hip and draw his bastard sword, just to remind him of the feeling of its weight in his hand and to feel the memory of his muscles bleed into his mind, assuring him that using it had become natural to him. He resisted the impulse, in equal parts because he was afraid that he might scare the townspeople and because he knew that reaching for his sword without reason would likely prompt a harsh scolding.
Instead he reached up and adjusted the wide brim of his hat, feeling the coarse fabric shift against the helmet he wore beneath it. The shade cast by the brim helped, even as the canopy of the forest began to give way and let more and more of the bright sunshine through, casting the world in radiant light. While Jaelnec greatly enjoyed the warmth of days like this, such particularly sunny weather was also troublesome in that the world become so bright that it became blurry to his eyes, shapes and colors bleeding into each other as his nocturnal, uniform jet-black eyes tried their best to adapt. On a day this bright, even just the sunlight reflected off grass and the light-gray dirt and brown dirt was enough to cause him discomfort bordering on pain.
He reflexively moved a hand up to brush back a few stray strands of honey-blond hair that had escaped his shoulder-length ponytail, only to feel his gauntlet-clad fingertips brush over the scar where it trailed across his right cheek, from his cheekbone, across his lips and toward his chin. Again he shuddered, huddling into his linen cloak as this mark immediately served its purpose of reminding him the consequence of defiance.
Sabicia snorted nervously, the mare he was riding seemingly sensing his discomfort, and Jaelnec quickly leaned down to pat her neck and assure her that everything was okay.

Glancing ahead, Jaelnec could plainly see his master, Freagon, riding the gelding Xilos just several meters away. The old man – a nightwalker like Jaelnec himself – sat stiff and straight in his saddle, facing straight ahead. His broad shoulders were outlined by his own cloak, though the cloak was down, allowing Jaelnec to see the knight's messy rat's nest of salt-and-pepper hair.
Without thinking and without really knowing why, Jaelnec's gaze was drawn to Freagon's left hip and thigh, where his scabbard was gently swaying back and forth. He stared at it, ordinary though it seemed at the moment, and felt a strange wistfulness come over him. Uninvited thoughts rose from the depths of his mind of how much he wanted to try to hold that sword himself, to feel it in his grasp, to cut the air with it. Roct: the sword of a true Knight of the Will.
It took a moment for Jaelnec to realize that his master had turned in the saddle, only for the young nightwalker to raise his gaze and meet that of his older kinsman. He let his eyes travel up from the scabbard, up where he could see the hem of Freagon's black coat within the cloak, past the almost blindingly brilliant shimmer of his gold-and-purple lutrium scale armor, to his face. The old man's skin was a mess of scars of all kinds, from burns and cuts and things Jaelnec dared not even imagine, which meant that the knight was mostly incapable of changing his expression, but rather seemed to wear a neutral, indifferent mien at all times. Even so his jet-black left eye – the right being hidden behind a large leather eyepatch – staring at him somehow managed to convey everything that his face could not: intense attention, impatience and expectation.

Jaelnec immediately jolted up straight in his saddle and started looking around frantically, trying his best to spot what it was that his master wanted him to notice, but seeing nothing out of the ordinary. They were still on the road on their way into Borstown, still a little ways uphill from the township itself with a nice view of the entire settlement. It easy to spot several buildings that were obviously bigger and than the others, namely what Jaelnec suspected was the inn, the local Fadewatcher station, what seemed like a winery and what had to be the manor house of the barony. There were people in the street, in the fields and a few along the treeline, but he did not see anything that seemed immediately obvious as something deserving of attention.
After a few seconds of this Freagon's eye narrowed slightly in disapproval, and the glow of the cigarette between his lips brightened as he inhaled deeply, then exhaled a large cloud of foul-smelling smoke.
“People are avoiding walking near those two buildings,” he said, his voice deep and a little hoarse, and he pointed toward the town, indicating two places near the central crossroad: one that looked like a regular house at a distance, a little southeast of the crossroad, the other that was the Fadewatcher barracks. “Most people are taking detours just to not get too close, and those who go there seem to be paying attention to those places specifically.”
Jaelnec took a deep breath to calm himself back down, anxious to feel his master's sharp glare on him like this, then asked: “What does that mean?” His voice was not as deep as his master's, but was young, healthy and strong.
“Not sure,” the knight shrugged, turning his attention once more from his page to the town ahead. “Could be lots of reasons, but most likely something happened. Recently. There's fresh fear in the air.”
Reflexively looking around again as if expecting to see the source of this fear spontaneously materialize out of the undergrowth, Jaelnec frowned. “Should we investigate?”
“We'll ride past on our way to the manor. If something important is going on we'll be able to tell from that. Otherwise we're here to see Bor.”
A worrying thought occurred to Jaelnec: “What if someone's hurt?”
He instantly knew that this was not an acceptable comment when Freagon turned in his saddle once more, fixing his dark stare on him with an intensity that made Jaelnec want to physically shrink so that he could somehow hide. “Have I missed something, boy? Did you become a healer while I wasn't looking?”
Jaelnec averted his gaze and spoke with a trembling voice: “No, Sir...”
“Really? You didn't suddenly discover that you were a healing elementalist, or learn an arcane spell of healing, or gain favored powers? Maybe you discovered a recipe for healing balms that you're secretly carrying with you? Or you've been researching surgery and medicine instead of sleeping?”
“No, Sir,” Jaelnec said, feeling a familiar sense of dread come over him. Though Freagon did not raise his voice and his expression remained the same, there was a coldness to his tone and his stare that never failed to make the twenty-five-year-old man feel like a ten-year-old child being lectured all over again.
“Neither am I. I am a Knight of the Will, and you are my page. My skills are better used elsewhere, and you follow me wherever I go. Or do you disagree?”
Jaelnec swallowed a lump in his throat. His master's last sentence was phrased as a question, but spoken as a challenge: Do you dare to disagree? “N-no, Sir.”
“Don't stutter, boy.” Freagon turned back toward the approaching town. “If we are needed we will act, but someone needing help doesn't mean they need our help. Now get your head out of your ass and pay attention.”
“Yes, Sir.”

Jaelnec licked his lips and started absorbing the world around him through the lens of a knight-in-training rather than a person, pushing back the appreciation he felt for this world that he was a part of to follow his master's wishes. He ignored fond thoughts of how fifteen years ago, before he became his mater's page, he had almost never felt the sun on his skin and mostly experienced the sunlit world through closed doors and curtains. He discarded the past, both the time spent with Freagon and the time before then, and focused on the present. Felt the world crystallize before his senses, not as a beautiful place full of life and wonder, but as a dark one fraught with danger and peril.
A world that needed his sword. A world that he was being trained to protect.

His gaze was drawn to the manor house of the town as he sensed movement there. Several people seemed to stumble hurriedly out of the front of the building, one of which looked notably smaller than the rest. One of them went to the front gate of the fence surrounding the small plot of land, and though it was impossible for Jaelnec to tell details from this far away and in daylight, it soon became obvious what was happening as the sound of an alarm-bell started chiming from down there.
“Go,” was all Freagon said, as both of them urged their horses to accelerate to a gallop, rushing through town with their cloaks fluttering behind them.
They rode for Bor Manor.


Upon hearing Yanin's rank within the Fadewatchers, the other man – whose tabard marked him as a simple watchman, the lowest rank within the organization – performed a reflexive salute. His younger fellow, who was also a watchman, glanced up at hearing the information but did not move, focusing instead on holding the lantern steady for Madara.
“None, sir,” the Watcher Yanin had addressed answered his questions. “They didn't say anything and didn't wear anything we could identify them from. They came from the northeast and left that way again, too. They didn't seem to be interested in anything else, they just went straight for our healer. They spoke with him first, then he closed his door in their faces, and that's when things got ugly. There were...” He stopped to think for a second before continuing: “There were twenty-two of them, though six of them are piled up in the basement now.”
He heaved a deep sigh. “I'm sorry I can't tell you more, sir. When the bandits ran it was just me, Cavin and a two of the baroness' guys standing, and we decided it would probably be more useful to try to save the wounded than pursuing the enemy into a losing battle. One of the baroness' guys did leave to try to track them, but I haven't heard anything about that since.”

At that point all of them were interrupted in what they were doing by the loud, sudden sound of an alarm-bell chiming relatively close by, and all of the local Fadewatchers that were capable of it – even the wounded ones – froze in place, eyes wide and desperate.
“The baroness!” the one that had been speaking said breathlessly, clearly terrified. “The baroness is calling for help! Please, if she's using that bell it's an emergency! Go! We'll handle things here, but we can't lose the baroness!”


As Lhirin was leaving and Jordan still contemplating what to do about the situation, the calm and quiet of the day was suddenly shattered by the chime of an alarm-bell from just down the street, from Bor Manor. Within a handful of seconds the sound of the bell would be accompanied by the sound of galloping hooves, as two horsemen came rushing down the street from the northeast toward the manor: both wearing armor, and both with swords at their side.

There was a tense moment of attention when Lhirinthyl–and she only used Lhirinthyl to admonish him or otherwise express her frustration--forgot for a moment all of the manners that she’d spent the trip back to Jihni'mah'jehla'nai and then from there to Rodoria trying to drill into him… and even more spectacularly than usual, forgetting not only basic social rules but also the concept of physical space. He then spoke to her in a different language from the others in the room, and not even in Fermian, which maybe someone might have been able to understand and simply assume they were speaking in their mother tongue–instead in Gazzerashei, of all things, just to tell her he was going to the Manor?! She took a brief second to steady herself as a fresh wave of nausea assaulted her senses, and a brief moment of dizziness caused her control of the little orb of water next to her to waver and ripple slightly. She took in a quick breath as the eyes of… well, most of the people in the room seemed to focus on her, and she quickly composed herself and spoke quickly:

"He is my bodyguard and travelling companion, and he’s going to the Manor to investigate. You should follow, we have the situation in ha–” she began, only for the clarion call of the bell to draw everyone’s attention. Everyone’s attention–even the wounded, who all froze in abject terror at the mere prospect. It was bad, then–and Lhirin was right just a little bit before everyone else. As usual. She took a look over at the other wounded, taking into account their injuries as best she could with the casual glance she’d be able to get. None seemed like they’d expire within the hour, the only imminently urgent case being the one that she and Kinder had just healed. The others would require some sort of longer-term convalescence, even with all of the tools at their disposal, and frankly the thing that they really needed was their own healer, returned hale and whole. She turned then to look at the surgeon, her expression focused and calm, her eyes flashing towards the door.

Something about the half-Palanter reminded her of Sel'kahr'wander–a… colleague of hers, a barber-surgeon. Unsurprising, given the shared overlap in their professions, but there was something about the sharpness of her features and her dress that really tipped it over the edge. The same primal edge, honed to something between graceful and savage–she could see it in the beautiful fit of her clothes and how the contrast of the thread glinted in the dim firelight, meticulous detail clear to Irah’s focused gaze. With how neatly organised and clearly well-cared for as her tools had been, it seemed to Irah that she seemed to be ready to go at a moment’s notice, like a predator in waiting. She burst into action herself with the same focus and drive, beginning to dart out of the room and speaking simultaneously:

"Mehknai bre... We should follow--quickly.” she said, her voice steely, and followed just behind Jordan (and Sir Yanin, if he acted more quickly than she) on their way out towards the Manor. Just to her right, clear as day across the way, was a well beside what Irah had presumed was the inn earlier and confirmed upon closer inspection. She made sure to rush out towards it, reaching out with her left hand as she did so, and she once more extended the force of her will out towards the water she knew must lurk below it. She quickly upturned her palm and clenched her fingers inward, feeling it rise up at her call and flow upwards towards her. It burst forth from the well quickly and smoothly, the bucket and rope previously hanging freely below flying up into the air with the force of the movement and falling to the side with a clatter. Irah drew around a hundred or so litres of water from beneath the ground, enough for a large bath, and with clearly-practised movements began to make it twist and turn into something of a halo, almost, floating above her. After a couple of seconds of focusing, and then a couple more to steady herself for whatever might come next, she turned to follow suit and observe the situation as it was. Lhirin, Sir Yanin, and Jordan would have no trouble getting in–Sir Yanin in particular seemed like he was exceedingly difficult to deny entry to, with the forcefulness of his gait and the imposing heaviness of his build. In the distance she could hear the galloping of hooves, much more closely than she expected, given the suddenness of what'd just happened, and her head twisted out towards the sound to catch the sight: two nightwalkers, armoured, and racing toward them. She paid them little other mind in that moment--figuring that Lhirin and the others would engage them should they be foes, to reassess the whole situation.

Then, from the winery across the street, Irah caught a glimpse of something quite unusual in the unusually bright and stark day: an individual clothed in what might as well have been Laon’s own night, with a similar hue in their skin that Irah had never encountered before. She blinked for a second before really registering the information, running towards the gate simultaneously, and with a flex of her right fingers and a pointing motion out towards the figure with her left she willed a ribbon of water to whip out from her towards the figure, frozen in an arc but poised and ready to lash out. She made no immediate assumptions about the figure, but given the timing of the bell and the skulking she was attempting to do in broad daylight, Irah elected simply to call out in Rodorian:

”Friend or foe?” and ceasing her own movements while still holding herself in that state of readiness.

With two unknown parties having joined the fray suddenly, she looked over toward Jordan and Yanin for further instruction, expression tense and alert, and then behind her to see if the surgeon had followed too and what she'd brought with her if so.

Nabisisstra supped from a cup, and sank back in the chair in which she sat, allowing her tired limbs to finally rest. The sweet red wine was a welcome relief indeed to her dry throat and palette, which had been used to little more than travel rations and boiled water for the last ten days or so, moving at considerable pace along what sufficed for a transportation network in Rodoria. She mulled over the differences between Rodoria and her home of the Amethyst Empire, far to the east, as she savoured the taste of one thing that at least both cultures shared... their taste for alcohol. The sight of horses and carts transiting broken and pitted dirt roads was indeed a far cry from the rail tunnels - and the magical engines hauling citizens and cargo - that linked her homeland's cities underneath the ashlands of Jevog Denûm, travel across the ash-blasted wastes being far too hazardous for ordinary folk to risk beyond the most desperate of circumstances... but then so too was the environment through which said roads twisted and turned. The common colour in Jevog Denûm had always been some form of grey, whether that be the colour of the stony mountainsides, the ashlands, or the turbulent skies above. Even her own kind often exhibited skin tones of some form of grey, though Nabi's own skin had been described as 'coal-black' on more than one occasion. Only when one delved beneath the surface did one enter into a world of different colours, of the cities of the Erashyir, nestled within the earth's safe embrace beneath the volcanoes and windstorms of the surface, but even then, the prevailing colours could still be harsh - reds and blacks comprising most of the shades used by Great Houses.

In Rodoria, things were very different. As Nabi had journeyed towards Borstown, she had borne witness to many different sights, sounds and even smells in the Rodorian countryside. By far the most common - and the ones that stuck in her mind - were the sights and sounds of peasant farmers and their families out in the fields, hacking away at their crop with sickles for the harvest, with carts and sacks of crops hauled by oxen, horses or other heavy draft animals back to rickety barns made of wood, with thatched straw roofs. Occasionally, Nabi entertained ideas of stopping in villages along the way and offering to help gather the harvest as a way of making a little coin on the side, but she thought better of it, especially in these times of uncertainty... and disease.

Ah yes. The disease.

Nabi took another drink of wine.

The locals called it "The Withering". An apt description, by all accounts - she had heard tales of folk being fine the one day, and then these foul, ugly splotches would appear on them seemingly overnight, and they would turn black upon applying even gentle pressure to the area, supposedly throwing the poor victim into howls of agony. People would waste away in their beds, turned from fine, strapping folk into barely-recognisable bags of bones in less than a week. There was no known cure, no way of knowing who would catch it next... if it was even possible to catch it in the first place. At least with a cold or cough, you knew that the bad air you breathed out could harm everyone else nearby, but with the Withering... it struck seemingly at random. A man in a household would be struck with the illness, but his wife and children, despite trying to care for him, would be spared... only for another person, perhaps half the street away who wasn't even aware of the first man's sickness to start with, to be struck down, without rhyme or reason. Outsiders were always the first suspicion in many villages - and Nabi could see the logic, even if she was often the target of such rumours, as often diseases tended to coincide with travellers arriving at some town or city. Nabi sometimes saw people looking at her with fear and distrust, whispering things behind hands or talking about her in hushed tones, thinking she couldn't hear them. The 'she-witch'. The 'foreigner'.

The 'Dark One'.

That last moniker followed her wherever she went in Rodoria, but even in Zerul, nobody would tell her the reason why. The most she'd been able to figure out in libraries - and overhearing conversations - was that there were old tales that abounded, of evil people who long ago dwelled in the ashlands of Jevog Denûm... but nothing else. Did the Rodorians think she was one of those evil people? Were those evil people the 'Dark Ones', and because she, too, had come from the ash wastes, that they thought she was one of them returned? If so, why did they not simply attack her-

The harsh tone of a ringing bell from somewhere in Borstown brought Nabi out of her thoughts. Immediately, and without even thinking, she jumped to her feet, ignoring the pain from her weary limbs as she did so, and drew her blade with a single motion, looking around for the source of the alarm. The vintner, too, had been interrupted by the sound of the bells, and had turned to look at Nabisisstra at the sound of her sword leaving its scabbard, and half-yelled in a panicked voice, "Th-the baroness! She needs help! Quickly, uh, d-down the street, to your left!" He pointed down the road, where Nabi could see a rather large and well-built manorial residence - evidently the home of the local ruler, or "baroness" as the vintner had said.

Nabi gave a single, wordless nod before vaulting over the table in front of her - knocking the half-empty cup of wine to the floor as she did so - and running outside, whereupon she saw two horsemen rushing down the street as quickly as they could, both wearing armour and carrying swords. Throwing back her hood, Nabi, too began running as quickly as she could in the direction of the manor house, sabre in one hand, and her other ready to draw her parrying dagger should she need to fight. Yet, almost as soon as she had started to run in the direction of the manor house, someone else - a woman with feathers where humans would have hair from a quick cursory glance - had conjured a ribbon of water and all but blocked Nabi's path. "Friend or foe?" she commanded, in accented Rodorian.

Nabi halted, and raised her hands cautiously in a gesture of - she hoped - non-aggression.
The woman had spoken in Rodorian, and so Nabi would respond in kind..."Friend. I mean you or anyone here no harm."

The deigan woman obtained a mien of acute exasperation and closed her eyes, seemingly trying to reconstitute herself. "He is my bodyguard and traveling companion, and he’s going to the Manor to investigate. You should follow, we have the situation in ha–”
Well, if his approach to investigating was the same as informing his companion-
Neither of them were given time to finish their thoughts before a bell rang out, loud, frantic. The expressions on the faces of the locals left no doubt in the nature of the sound. Well. Damn.
And how in the Realms had he known about it half a dozen seconds before the alarm was raised?
"Right," Jordan muttered, not even waiting for Sir Yanin to explicitly confirm that they were going to join in, making a quarter turn to sprint after the male deigan. His master was moving, too, and hadn't told or motioned him to stop, so ... there he had it.
"Mister!? I am coming with- " He didn't know either of the deigan's names, did he? Hoof-falls were gaining rapidly on them.
"Careful!" he shouted at the male deigan as he gritted his teeth and drew to the side just in time for the two horsemen to be able to come galloping through.
He was not entirely sure if he should permit those ones past, but nevertheless not entirely certain that they weren't the sorts who would try to trample him - or the male deigan. If you didn't care too much about the horse's well-being, or if the horse was driven or panicked enough to not care, hooves could do some serious harm, atop of them just being big enough to be quite persuasive. At other times, a hose might dance around and refuse to move forward an inch just because there was a leather cord on the ground. Horses were a bit weird like that.
In either case, a longsword was not the best tool to stop any number of horses galloping right towards you. Maybe if you swiped them from the side... What were the odds these two were just riding nearby when the bell rang, as opposed to being some kind of flanking operation?
Behind and to the side of him, there were a couple more people pouring out of the Fadewatcher station, his master ahead, the Reina's follower nearly on his heels; Jordan himself had just about made it to the corner of the wrought iron fence surrounding the manor's gardens, momentarily leaning to survey the manor surroundings through the rods as he was trying to formulate a course of action.
Sir Yanin caught up and half-tossed him a spear to supplement his own sword and dagger. He would probably hear a comment about how that was why his master himself often traveled in full armor to unfamiliar places... But later. Now was for hurrying the rest of the way along the fence, after his master.



The older local Fadewatcher saluted, and gave a rough report of what had happened, though a lot of it was confirming what they already knew or suspected. They had better assume there were at least sixteen. Perhaps to the northeast - didn't seem to be the kind to obfuscate their tracks. Mixed bunch, variably equipped - if their weapons and armor weren't looted, it was nevertheless bound to be each providing for themselves. So it wasn't high-grade professionals - though they could've been nevertheless contracted by someone with more backing power.
The tail not returning spoke of either distances or one more being added to this day's count. Following them with what few men the locals had left would have been a futile endeavor. It wasn't, strictly taken, impossible, that said Bor's man tracking them had found something worth spying on, but odds were, not probable. If he wasn't the sort to try and free the - not unlikely injured - healer on his own. Proverbial poking of the hornet's nest.
Remembering that he hadn't replied, only listening intently, Yanin slowly nodded as the watchman finished explaining their reasoning. And was subsequently distracted by the little altercation near the door. Since Jordan hadn't felt the need to draw a weapon, he had halted himself at 'ready to,' body half-turned and hand on hilt. Let someone do the explaining. The language the deigan man had spoken, though - it was uncanny. He might have been only able to speak two, but he should have been able to at least recognize any from the surrounding regions.
It bothered him.
The deigan woman specified that the other deigan was with her, just about, before an alarm cut in and the local Fadewatcher sputtered something about the baroness.
"They're back," Yanin concluded, head notching up like that of a hound which had just heard something in the distance, his somewhat flattened affect making it hard to determine whether it was a question or a statement of fact. "Or their employer is." Either way, the trouble had returned.
He moved, paying no heed to the looks of terror or the reiteration of the baroness's importance, only briefly half-kneeling down to pick up two of the spears from other discarded weapons and miscellaneous bits of armor near the door.
"I am borrowing these," he informed the locals as he vanished beyond the door.

In the streets, people were emerging and disappearing into the buildings; two horsemen galloping by, a dark figure who was either the most southern human he had ever seen or an inhuman kind not seen in these lands for centuries rushing out from the winery a short way further down from the manor, Jordan sprinting after the male deigan, his female companion, the healer following on Yanin's own trail, bursting forth copious amounts of water from a nearby well and floating the mass of fluid overhead as if it were a second nature to her.
Combat-healer? It didn't take a large amount of water in someone's face to choke them. Not very immediately lethal, but rather disabling even without killing. Fast enough, hot enough, frozen enough, and there were many more ways water could turn a tide.
"Your companion," he insisted in a low tone as he tossed the extra spear to Jordan and the Reina's follower caught up. "What kind of magic does he wield?" Could be important. Either for tactical advantage, or to know to stay cautious.
As the follower of Reina had already seen to questioning the intent of the foreigner from the winery, he turned a fraction of his attention to the two horsemen even as he rapidly gained upon the gate and observed whatever motion in the manor garden or windows he could through the bars of the fence, "And you. Identify yourself."
He didn't like armed strangers of unknown allegiance behind his back if he were to make his way (in)to a building under attack. Didn't help that the fence was hardly a cover in either direction, though one near would have easier time shooting through without hindrance.



Not being one to stay deterred by miscellaneous distractions for long, Madara gently tilted the Fadewatcher's head back to inspect his injured jaw ... only to be distracted again, this time by a ringing bell. An eyebrow arched in her face as the man under her fingers stilled, eyes widening in quite the horrific realization. The follower of Reina sent her an inciting look, even as the Fadewatchers panicked. She could appreciate a person who could keep her calm. No good came from a surgeon or healer that lost her head as soon as blood began to flow.
None of the three (four, if you counted the Fadewatcher the knight had been talking to) they were yet to tend to were bound to suffer from abrupt death in the next few hours. It appeared the general consensus was that a healer might be much more urgently some hundred meters to the south.
"I will be returning to you as soon as I am able," she noted, drawing back the fingers she had been running along the man's jaw.
She wouldn't be needing her backpack; not much use of her spare tunic or waxen tent-cloth, nor her food. Most of her medical supplies were contained in the large pouches to her sides, and the bandages she'd already extracted from its depths. Just the bandages and the larger bottle in addition to the supplies already in her pouches or on her arm or belt, then.
Both in hand, she rose, tying the third, fabric bag to her belt and fitting the bottle in a pouch. She was ready to head out, following on the others' trail.