In the name of...

[Rance]

So much death.

One of Myrkentown's most trusted cobblers had been found dead come morning, his fingers severed, his throat smiling in the early morning sunlight. The Guard had been baffled, not necessarily at the crime itself, but at its brutality. They found his elven wife dead and stuffed in her wardrobe, their only hint of her concealed body being the drying intestines wrapped like ribbon within the closed hinges of the closet door. Their children were dead as well, drowned in their own blood, still wrapped warm and swaddled in their bedclothes. Whispers spread fast in the morning of the murder, but they whispered not only of the cobbler's fate...

... they whispered, too, of the Smithy Gritchell, found dead in his bed with a curved blade driven deep in his chest. They whispered of a common old hag found in various parts and pieces around her cottage. They whispered of a young stable-boy whose body had been clearly contorted and mangled by a vicious spell of torture, his neck shattered and ribs splintered. These were not the only deaths. Myrkentown was abuzz in the morning with the news of blood and destruction wrought in the midst of the night, women found slaughtered, men found killed, and children as well.

The silent murderers in the night had shown no mercy, but not once had the Guard been alerted. The murders had been done in perfect silence, as if done by the shadows themselves, all in the sanctity of the victims homes and establishments. All fifty-eight of them.

And news spread as well of the disturbance at the Broken Dagger tavern on the same night, of dark-fleshed arrogance and battles waged in the name of a Dark Lady. Stories and lore in the past had spoken of dark elven surface raids, vicious and brutal hours of punishment and destruction summoned from the caverns of the Underdark upon chosen surface cities. Myrken's thousands of citizens had clearly become a target of one of these such raids, but it had all been done clandestine and perfect, without a trace except for the faces shown at the Broken Dagger. What frightened the citizenry, however, was the threat found in the early morning sun hammered to the doors of the Myrkentown Council Hall, a piece of parchment jabbed wrecklessly into the door with a shattered tooth, a note written in blood and jagged words.

We have come to reclaim a world once rightfully ours, explained the note in its cold and crimson lettering. Let the deaths of these commoners be your warning. In one week's time, we will await a member of the council at your filthy tavern. This land belongs to us. In the name of the dark priestess Faeryl, in the name of Audmathus, and in the name of Lolth Herself, we will not hesitate to cleanse this land of this humanity. May these still corpses be our herald. We await your response.

[Kylerryth]

On the edge of Myrkentown, the monument to battle, its pommel glowing -- the Red Heart still throbbed; the Red Eye still gazed -- stood silent and immense.

The longer one looked at it, however, the more real the feeling of being watched by it seemed.

It also seemed to convey without further display, blood-red words or otherwise, a morbid fascination with death, with the deliberate killing that had occurred in the town it observed -- and with the creatures that had been musicians in the hematic philharmonic.

BUT WHOM IS THE CONDUCTOR? mused Tveitan internally.

It thought about that question while it resumed establishing its hold on and over the townsfolk.

[Vanidor]

"They will come to our... filthy tavern, and find their deaths if I have anything to say about this matter. Nuts to them, if they think we will surrender our land so easily as that. Be cowed as easily as that." Kerrak stood nigh the letter that was still pressed hard up against the door. The frown he wore was harsh enough to stop a screaming child, that or make the screaming worse. He had his arms folded across his chest and eyes narrowed upon the vermillion lettering, as if concentrating his ire at the writer of this laughable missive. Lips compressed for a moment, and then those eyes would dart to his stalwart second. "Jons. Pull the men back in from the country side, all but Malcom's section of course, and set a strong patrol along the outskirts. Coordinate with Straka for this. Whatever petty despute we had before, it is time for it to come to an end."

And it had better, too. This would be a bad time for the bad blood between Straka and the Council to boil over. "Oh. And Jons. If you get the chance to run across Captain Daniels. Tell him I want to talk to him again. If it -does- come to a show down, I want that man on our side, hm? Go, and send Aeryn to me when you are done. We have some preparing to do." At this, Kerrak arched out his hand and tore the letter down from where it was stuck. The tooth was pocketed, and the Councilor for Defence went on about his duties. He'd leave the note on the main table in the council hall... just to make sure the other councilors (if they came by at all) saw it.

[Alyrra]

Vyctausa had spent another long night in the forest after the attack on the town had occurred. Yet not before she had seen some of the shadows slipping into some of the houses around Myrken. Following one of those creeping assassins into the home where they had been preparing to attack, she had slid in against the male's back with a soft whisper in their native tongue against his elongated ear. Soft words, murmured almost lovingly in a melodic tone against that sensitive flesh before her own blade sliced cleanly through the male's dark throat and she dragged him backward out into the night and away from the family that would have suffered at his hands.

If only she could have been fortunate enough for the assassination to go smoothly, and without the notice of another Drow lying in wait outside the doorway. The fierce pain of a dagger slicing through her upper arm brought her attention swiftly to one side before she tossed the useless body of the dead male at the other's feet and stepped over it without a thought to plunge her dagger up toward the other's ribs. Chainmail met the metal of her dagger in a soft hiss of protest before her other hand lifted to catch the wrist of the man aiming to gut her with his own sword. Spinning, and using his momentum and larger weight against him, she flipped the next male over one shoulder before following him down as he nearly caught himself on his feet upon finding the ground. Her black fingers found his snow-hued hair to jerk his chin upward with a hard twist of her wrist in those thick locks, even as she brought her dagger in another hard cut along this male's throat.

Sliding into the shadows almost instantly upon completing that second killing, the woman watched with glowing crimson eyes as signatures of heat made their way through the shadows away from other homes. She had been too late to stop more than the single home's destruction, but then, she could hardly take on the entire group of assassins sent out into the night. Certainly, one of the males would have noticed her fighting, but as of yet, none had taken the time to come after her. She bore their cursed darkness of flesh, and perhaps some were assuming that the males had irked her in some way while she made an assassination upon the family herself. Either way, she was not about to wait and find out about whether they would decide to come for her. Easing further into the shadows, she rounded on the house and darted toward an abandoned shed that she had discovered nights before. She could wait patiently until she was certain they were gone. When one had centuries to live, what was a few hours?

Though of course, with her actions tonight, it was highly probable that those centuries would never come to pass. Whoever had led the raid would know of the missing males soon enough. Was the life of a surface family worth her own? She would find out.