Mags
Mags tottered closer to the village, her head thudding with a dull headache that matched the soreness of her body.
Walking up what would have been recently the main road into the town, Mags saw several wrecked stalls where vendors had obviously sold their goods. Bile rose in her throat when she saw the disemboweled corpse of an old woman lying limp on a dusty rug, flies buzzing headily around the body.
This isn't the work of a dragon..
Then who? Bandits? It would be strange for bandits to raze a town so thoroughly. An evil sorcerer? Maybe if this was a tale told late at night, perhaps.
Entering the relative shade of the buildings around her, Mags had to step delicately past strewn wreckage, forcing herself to avoid staring at the bodies that had been hacked apart.
Slinking past a still smoldering wagon, she realized that the only thing that separated this from the other ruins she scavenged was time. She preferred it when all the bodies were dusty skeletons.
Coughing from the smoke, Mags reached for her water skin, only to remember it was empty. When had she last drank water? No wonder her head was pounding, she was dehydrated. And, judging by the gnawing ache in her stomach, long overdue to eat something as well.
Mags had just rounded a street corner, and saw a dangling wooden sign of a boar attached to a two story building. An inn.
And remarkably intact, as well. The only real sign that something was amiss was the dead body clutching a shattered bow and had a caved in skull. Walking up the dusty steps, she didn't have the slightest stirring of guilt over taking food and water from the dead. She had been doing it all her life, the only thing that was different was that these people had died recently.
The doors to the inn had been propped open, and she stepped through, blinking as she tried to adjust to the darkness inside the building.
The tables and chairs between the door and the bar at the far end of the room had been knocked over, scattered dice and cups lay on the ground. It looks like everyone had left the inn in a rush when the attack started.
Crossing the room, Mags went behind the bar, scanning the bottles and clay jars that held the eye wateringly stiff moonshine that was common in remote human settlements like these.
Shoved in one corner of the bar was a squat barrel with a scratched metal dipper laid across it's wooden lid. Aha!
Scrabbling with the barrel, she dragged off the lid and plunged the dipper into the almost sweet smelling water. Barely pausing to lift it to her head, she drank the entire dipper before plunging it back into the water. Pouring the water over her head, Mags lost grasp of time for several blissful minutes as she drank and washed herself.
The sounds of a cackling war cry pulled the girl from her reverie.
Are those.... Rogs?
She had dealt with Rogs in the past. She could do it again.