Two days passed in a blur of grim duty and quiet sorrow.
Roric had carried S.K.'s broken body, draped in a cloth, back to the city.
As he approached the outskirts, a pillar of dirty smoke stained the sky. A cold dread, separate from the grief already clutching his heart, took hold. The closer he got, the more his fears were confirmed. The fire was raging in the shopping district. And at its heart was what remained of the jewellery shop he had left.
The building was a blackened skeleton, timbers still glowing with angry red embers. The city watch had already cordoned off the area, but Roric, his face set like stone, was allowed through. The men he had so carefully bonded to the floor were dead. Not just dead, but utterly consumed. All that remained were charred, twisted shapes that were barely recognisable as human. The air smelled of ash and cooked meat.
A storm of conflicting emotions raged inside him.
First, he had failed to save his master. Now, any chance of getting answers from these thugs had been literally turned to ash. Their deaths pointed to a higher power, someone ruthless enough to silence their own men completely. But alongside that cold logic, a prickling sense of responsibility nagged at him. If he hadn't restrained them, would they have had a chance to run? Would they be alive?
A life was a life and it wasn't his place to decide who lived or died.
It was a thought that would have made some call him soft. His late wife, Raizelle, had often teased him for it.
"You have the heart of a hunter, Roric, but the conscience of a priest," she'd say with that smile that could light up a room. Then she'd add, more softly, "It's why I love you."
His rule was simple: he only killed for food, for survival. In a fight, whether against man or beast, his goal was to subdue, not to end. Only a direct threat to his life or the lives of the innocent could push him past that line. Now, he wondered if his principles had indirectly signed these men's death warrants.
Over those two days, he tried to arrange his thoughts. To accomplish that, his first task was to determine if it was one person or many. Logically, setting the fire and attacking S.K. in a forest miles away almost simultaneously suggested multiple actors. But Roric knew better. The world was full of Traits and artefacts that defied such simple logic. It was far more likely that a single, powerful individual with an ability or artefact related to speed or teleportation was behind both acts. A coordinated group would have left more traces. Which would go againstthe point of silwncingthese men. No, this felt clean, efficient, and solitary.
Studying the burnt bodies yielded little. The fire had been too intense. However, the physician assisting did make one grisly note: each of the dead men, before being burned, had a deep, precise wound on their tongues,kind of resembling a bite mark.
He returned to the forest, using his experience as a hunter to read the story written on the ground. He followed the path of S.K.'s desperate flight, the scuff marks where he'd stumbled, the snapped branches. He could almost see the old man running, terrified. He followed the trail to the clearing where it ended. He could see where S.K. had stopped, the broken arrifacts he'd used to defend himself and the spot where he must have released the thick fog after being slammed into the ground.
From here, the story went hazy, probably due to the effects of the fog. He couldn't tell what exactly happened.
This was were Lyle came in. The young boy, his arm now in a sling, had accompanied him here to help fill in whatever blanks. He retold the same story he'd given on that terrible night: sensing an evil presence, coming to investigate, being attacked in the fog, fighting back, being knocked out.
Roric listened, his eyes sharp. "Lyle," he began, his voice calm but firm.
"Tell me, what is your Stage?"
"Um, I'm at the Votary, stage." Lyle answered, shifting his weight.
"And your Trait? You mentioned sensing spirits."
" 'The Death'."
" An Existential class having authority over cause and effect huh?"
Roric said looking at the blood stains on the forest floor.
"How, precisely, does a Vortary-stage 'Death' hope to exorcise spirits? Spirits naturally oppose your Trait and Class. Besides,what means of sensing do you use? Is it Flow Perception or some other means?"
The questions came steadily, like a gentle but relentless rain. Lyle's answers became less sure. He stammered, contradicted small details, and looked at the ground. A less experienced man might have missed the cracks appearing in his story, but Roric saw them. Yet, he let it go. The boy had been through a traumatic experience. The fog itself did affect the mind. Pushing him too hard wasn't ideal.
The capital had been alerted about S.K.'s death. Officials crisp uniforms arrived to collect the remains along with Inquisitors who came to verify the cause of death. Roric met with Alaric, and told him the bare facts concerning only S.K's death,giving him only the information he needed to answer the Inquisitors and telling him he'd speak with him later in vivid detail.
An official report was filed, based only on what Roric had seen at the scene.
On the morning of the third day, Roric sat alone in his quiet house. The silence was deafening. He had no leads, no direction. Was this the end of it? Or was something larger just beginning? He didn't even know anything about the awakened beast his Elias had sensed, the very reason he'd been drawn into this whole scenario. His gaze fell on a picture frame on the mantelpiece. It was himself and Raizelle, holding their daughter Jamie as a baby. Their faces were full of a hope that felt like it belonged to another lifetime.
A soft sound from Jamie's room reminded him that the past was gone, but the present needed him. She was still asleep, a small lump under her blankets.
"No time for sulking." Roric muttered to himself. He pushed himself up, grabbed his worn leather jacket, and decided to take everything he had—the burnt bodies, the cut tongues, the mysterious killer, the shaky boy—to Alaric. They needed to decide what to do next.
As he walked through the streets, the city was waking up, oblivious to the darkness that had touched his life. He was halfway up the hill leading to Blackwood Keep when he saw Lyle and asked him to accompany him to the Keep.
Roric's mind was a whirlwind of grief, suspicion, and unanswered questions. He was going to his friend for help, but he was bringing a mystery with him, a mystery that walked right beside him, its footsteps matching his own on the cobblestones.