Session 2 Journal
The pasture above Weber-Hollows was the first piece of evidence I have ever wished I could un-see. Cattle laid out in a circle the way a child arranges toys, stomachs opened with the deliberate care of someone who needed the wound to show. The blood had been used. Drawn into the symbol of Amaresis, plain enough that even a man who slept through theology could read it. That was the part that made me uneasy. Slaughter is rarely tidy. Tidy slaughter is a message.
I rolled what arcane sense I had over the scene and the answer came back wrong in a way I am still turning over. Faintly devilish. Almost demonic. Not the Herd. Not anything that should sign itself with a goddess’s name. Echo would not stay near the corpses. She has been wrong about many things, but never about that.
The descent itself was the small humiliation of the day. Fifty feet of ladder, and G.L.U. could not follow. He stood at the top with the cart and watched me go down without him, and I could feel it the way you feel a magnet pulling on a tool you are still holding. He is not supposed to feel left behind. I am not supposed to notice that he does. We will need to engineer a solution before this becomes a habit. A pulley. A harness. Something that lets the construct accompany the engineer instead of the engineer accompanying the ladder.
Benai was already at the site when we arrived. Alone, which is the wrong number of people to be standing next to that much blood. I have not decided whether he is a witness, a watchman, or something I should be writing down under a different heading. I wrote down the name and moved on. Further up the cliff path we heard an owl-bear and chose, sensibly, to remain uneaten. Goblin corpses were stacked in pits along the same trail. Someone is killing goblins faster than goblins usually die. That is also a message, even if I cannot yet read it.
The town itself was worse than the pasture, and that is saying something. Echo would not enter. We loaded her into the cart like cargo and she let us, which is how I knew the wrongness was not in any one person but in the ground itself. A pall. A blanket of something laid across the settlement so smoothly that the residents have forgotten the weight. I keep returning to the word illusion, but illusion is the lazy answer. I will hold it loosely until I have better data.
Aldrich-the-Lore-Master met us at the edge of town and put a hand on Tharion’s shoulder in a way I disliked on instinct. One of ours slapped him. He fled. I have notes to take on whether his behavior was compulsion or grudge or rehearsal. Jamarius-the-Glorious introduced himself at the store with the sort of warmth a knife wears on its handle. I am not a big fan. I will be polite about it.
Flinter-Barrows was the relief of the day. He fed us, told us his history, and the dread did not move when he entered the room. That alone is data. The town has a weight on it; he does not appear to be the one carrying it. He confirmed Weber Hollows was founded about fifty years ago by his father Arador-Barrows and a man called Isar he was close to. His wife Nora watched us with the polite suspicion of someone whose home has been visited by armed strangers before. His daughter Shiloh is nine and curious, and the quiet one in our party — K’roaa’ka — knelt and gave her an ancient arrowhead. He did it the way he does most things, without explanation, and Shiloh took it the way most children would. The family records, Flinter said, are kept in the Barrows-Family-Crypt, just over the bridge. I made a note. I make a great many notes.
The mimic was almost a relief. Lilith put a blade through one of its eyes. She tried to disappear afterward and the room declined to cooperate. The mimic survived. We will deal with it later, or it will deal with us, and either outcome is the kind of clean problem this town has been refusing to give us.
She also produced the card. She bought it on the road from a jester I have not yet met and would prefer not to. I cast Identify over it because that is what I do when the world hands me an artifact wrapped in someone else’s confidence. Legendary. Divine in nature. Worth, the spell said, more money than I have ever counted. The implication is that The-Creepy-Jester is selling cards he has no business owning, in numbers we do not know, on a road we are still traveling. I would like to know how he sleeps. I would like to know if he sleeps.
Azalea became a brown bear and bargained with another bear, which is the sort of sentence I never expected to write down. She freed a captive in exchange for a map of the local goblin territory. I am willing to grant that druids occasionally produce results that the rest of us cannot.
The party is also watching me. They have not said it plainly, but I felt it after the pasture. I touched something at the site and there is a hunger now that does not belong to me. I have not eaten enough today to explain it. Whatever was in that blood has settled where I can almost feel it but not quite name it, and the others are taking the careful, sideways glances of people who would rather not have to act on what they suspect. They are right to be cautious. I would be cautious of me too. I have decided to be honest with them before they have to ask. Tonight, at the fire. Not tomorrow.
So: cult, deception, or framing, with the goddess’s name written in cattle blood. A pall on the town that one good man is not the cause of. A lore-master who behaved like a problem and then ran. A crypt that holds the founding. Goblins that someone is harvesting. A jester who sells legends. And whatever climbed onto me at the pasture and is now, apparently, hungry.
It is exactly the wrong amount of trouble. The kind that does not let you choose which thread to pull first because all of them lead back to the same hand.