A Family Torn Asunder

[Vanidor]

There were eight of them. A family dispossessed from Derry by the bickering of headstrong nobles. They had moved to Myrken during the early days of the warring and had eventually restarted their family business, an apothecary shop, just off of Merchant's Row. Each had had a particular task when it came to the running of the place. A skill that bound them together. Oh, surely, each themselves could have operated the shop, selling the various unguents and potions to the customers that came by now and again. But it took eight of them to do it properly.

Darion, the father, had been particularly skilled at the finding of the herbs and various other gee-gaws that were needed in the creation of medicinal remedies. His hands had been chopped off and incinerated, before something wide had been driven into his chest.

Sara, the mother, could blow glass like no other. A talent that had been passed down through generations of her family. In the end, it was her lips and eyes that were torn bloodily from her face. She had been left, bound to her chair, to bleed to death whilst her family suffered.

Dwin and Zale, the twins, ran the store front. They had been talkers, the two, able to bring in customers with their witty banter and women with their sly smiles. Both had been dressed in dark clothing, and had had molten brass poured down their throats and over their faces.

Baeric, was the pride of the family. Baeric had returned from a successful voyage, trading his way from New Dauntless to Thessilane and down to Heath, before returning with a lovely wife from Heath, Jeska, and a year old daughter named Gwyendolyn. The mans legs had been hacked off, and the stumps melted in the same pots that had melted the brass. His wife was bound to a chair, her own arms removed and the legs of her husband crudely grafted into place. Of their daughter... Simply gone.

The last family member, also named Darion, had been a sort of surgeon. A sawbones. He had a rudimentary knowledge of how the body worked from his time spent in a college in Amasynia. An upright and proper man, Darion had been. He had been the one to urge his family to go to Myrken and start anew. They hadn't know of the storied Curse of Myrken then.

He had been nailed to the floor. Blood and gore spattered all around him, vital fluid covering him to the elbows. His surgical instruments, crude as they were, had been driven into his fingertips by someone, or something, with insane strength. Upon the bloody ruin of his chest a wide bladed dagger had been left, bloody and vile.

Something else was left as well. Footsteps that paced from the pile of broken and wretched dead, to a wide rune drawn in blood upon the inside of the door. It reeked of blood and death. It reeked of hatred. Oh. And here, it seemed, was the remains of the thought missing Gweyn. Her head, at least, flayed of flesh and left to grin sadly at her family, nailed to the center of the rune with a long spike.

This scene would be left in the confines of the family house, set behind the building they made their living in. A perfect time for such cruel madness to be done, when others were away visiting other family and friends during the long yule season. Left to rot away the winter, until someone would finally notice their ransacked shop.

[catch]

It was the spider that told him, his dear, precious spider, her sharp lips whispering into his ear. The Jacobs brothers did not mind, anymore, the comings and goings of Catch, who was, at best, a restless roomate. At his worst, none of them would get any sleep. Everyone was sleeping, dreaming, and Catch already did that when the sun came out, so he was all alone. But he wanted to be proper, so he tried his best to join everyone else in the dreaming. It was a night that he lay, humming and bed and drumming his knuckles against the wooden walls, when his spider told him of symbols and dolls.

Catch could smell the blood before he even came through the door. He was clever, so clever, to take his clumsy boots off, and creep with stealth into the once-shop, filled now with maggots and blood.

And the dolls. Catch held the spider in his hands, warming her fat, black body with his own fingers, and he put her to his mouth. There was a sense of wrong, here, of not-Right. The world seemed unreal, even moreso than he found it, full of halos and frost, cheery auras that brightened the night. It frightened him, the Wrong. But the spider soothed him, her pegged legs passing over his face, stroking it the way Iron Shoes liked to.

Even if he told, what would they say? They would come to the shop, and they would look about at the blood and the clotted masses of flies, and shake their heads at him with those sad, strange smiles. They would tell him nothing was there, of course, and nothing Catch said would change their minds. It seemed silly, now, his plan to go tell Ser Glenn right away.

The addled man stepped carefully over the man on the floor. He could have one doll, one doll only, and he must pick carefully. Not this man, no. Catch looked at the surgical metal on his hands, and he shuddered, turning away quickly before they tried to dive into his cleft. Dizziness crashed over him, like a wave, and he had to double over to let it pass, panting, his breath visible in the dead, cold air. He had only a little warning before he tasted the bile, and he vomited without knowing the reason why.

It was a long, long moment before he could straighten, could see the Woman, legs where her arms should go, and boys who were pretty as brass candle-sticks. Catch thought it would be a pity of Cloud-hair made them dance. They looked serene, belonging where they were, like flesh-gore trees. Catch stopped to carefully untie the Eyeless Woman, because she shouldn't be forced to sit still. Catch did not like being tied up; he imagined no one would.

It was not until he looked behind the door that he found what he wanted, what his spider thought he should fetch. A pretty face, all red, the way Miss Genny's face went when she was shy. The spider crept from his hands, freeing them, so that the addled man could put his big palms against the cheeks, sticky and crusted, flaking against his fingers. He watched a moment, his mismatched eyes wandering as they followed the path of a particularly large fly, crawling from between baby-teeth, dribbling down her chin.

Catch took the child's skull with him. He pulled out the driven spike with the off-handed ease of a man who does not understand his own strength, and he cradled the little thing under his arm as he shuffled out, into the snow.

He made certain to put his boots on, first, so he wouldn't catch a cold, the way Kacela and the Rememdium women insisted he would.

[Treadwell]

'Tis late night in Myrken Wood, and Aloisius H. Treadwell is out for a lazy sort of ride in his carriage, making his way from his toy shop to his home, there to spend the night with his wife. He is tired, and sluggish, and cold, and he'd much rather have just spent the night in the toy shop again, but with Alice's insistence at lunch urging him to get his rotund rump home tonight "or else there'll be no breakfast for you here in the morning!", the ride home was very much required.

The ride home is very much abbreviated, as well. Arnold--Treadwell's corpulent, elderly horse--comes to a skittish stop some yards from the shop in question, snuffing and snorting and worming about with his old eyes fixed on the building housing the blood and bodies.

"He isn't moving, M'lord!" comes the croaky, throaty call from Treadwell's driver, one of his loyal Tubbians, who here shifts his round bulk about and lets the reins ease up some in his gloved hands. "Besides, M'lord. . . something feels wrong, here, and smells wrong. I think I'm smelling blood?"

"Blood, mmph mmph."

A huff of a sigh shakes the Councilor, and up he goes, shuffling out of the coach and toward the store in question. Of course he knows whose shop it is. They're overdue on their taxes by a few days--maybe a week and some, now?--and he'd been meaning to come by about that. So, with a lantern in one hand and his cane in the other, Tready plods through the snow to the shop itself, tap-thumping his cane noisily at the front door and giving a call of, "Hullo in there! Open up, mmph mmph!"

No answer greets the old gentleman, of course. Granted, he has no skill at picking locks, but he does have keys to the shops in town, just for moments like this when he has to intrude into a locked building with good, justifiable reason. As Councilor of Administrative Sanctions, he controls a goodly portion of the town's real estate, and it's the reason his key ring is heavy, large, and weighty as he tick-ticks through keys, testing this one, then that one, until he finds the one to open this shop.

Stale air and the blood scented by his driver and horse nearly knock the snooping taxman to his cushioned behind; the scene, though, of the mutilated corpses encourages a much different response.

Any semblance of supper that had been left in Treadwell's gluttonous gut soon finds its way into the snowy mound just right of the front entrance, leaving the elderly fellow weakened, propped against the wall, dizzied, and shaken.

He waves a fat hand, gloved in yellow, at the fellow in his carriage, his words forcing the man, horse, and coach into motion as he stands there queasy and ill.

"They're dead--all of 'em! Just go on. . . fetch the coroner, mmph mmph, and some guards!"

[cyanotype]

A small building nestled alongside a bakery, hugging close in a snarl of fixed and fixed again wood, stone and thatch. A small sign hung from a chain on the knocker, proudly displaying 'THE DOCTOR IS ASLEEP. GO AWAY'. Below that, a far more formal engraving in unkempt, tarnishing brass, growing frost collecting in the bevels of the font.

"DR. FELIX HARNLOW II. CORONER. GENERAL PRACTITIONER."

It was with a barked question that the insistent, fervent rapping of the doctor's wooden door was answered. A small spy hatch was slid open with an irritable thud, the door within a door snapped aside with far more force than necessary.

"What kind o' time d'you call this? I'm 'avin' me dinner. There better be a lot o' dead folks for you t'be disturbin--"

With the interruption came the insistence that yes. Yes, there was. The coroner's face dropped, ever-present pipe hung loosely from a slack jaw. A small coiling of smoke snuck through the hatch as it was held open in a huge, drawling moment of bafflement.

"Oh. Right y'are, then."

The humourless, sinewy fellow quickly gathered together his leather bag, all bizarre instruments and dials, before he wrapped up tightly against the bitter weather that loomed outside the warmth of his little office. Pipe reinvigorated in preparation for the journey, he puffed at it bitterly as his mind broiled over what might await him, accompanying the one who had fetched him to the scene of the crime. Never a resting moment in Myrken.

[Treadwell]

Up comes the coroner, and up comes Treadwell's carriage again, and there stands, still shivering outside despite his multi-layered self, Aloisius Treadwell, rubbing his belly slowly and standing well clear of the vomited remains of his supper.

"Felix, mmph mmph! There--there happen to be, mmph mmph, quite a few dead people in there, sir! I was coming by to see what about this place was spooking my horse, hmm hmm, but this is much more your bailiwick than mine, good sir!"

The round, yellow-suited taxman-priest-toymaker nods and waves the coroner over.

"Now, begging your pardon about my not going back in there, mmph mmph! I've already lost the remains of my supper thanks to it, ahem, and I'd rather not deal with it all again!"

[cyanotype]

The Doctor seemed a hardy sort, forever blackening his lungs with that trusty pipe and apparently built of the most rugged of stubbled sinew. He raked an irritable hand through his hair as he approached the scene, the black streaked with ageing silver like a badger's snout.

"I'd bleedin' 'ope so, I left a perfectly good dinner for this."

He sniffed the air, and even out here, the tang of copper lingered in the air, unmistakeable as old, rotting blood. He felt his stomach twist.

"Don't trouble y'self, Councillor. Go an' get yourself another supper", he said, with no small amount of bitterness. He tensed, chin jutting, pipe askew with purpose as he made his way inside the forsaken house.

The bold steps he took into the house soon wavered when met with the first of the corpses, and had he the chance to eat the aforementioned dinner, he might have lost it there and then. Even for the travelled and jaded Doctor, this was a bit much.

"My god.." he uttered, in a mixture of disgust and awe. Once the initial shock faded, he rubbed his hands together with a slow and measured resolve, more and more details of the horrific scene crawling into view as the light crept in through the windows. Light streaked through the glass from the lanterns outside, through glass so splattered with crimson that it seemed stained, bathing the room in red lamp light as if he were in some awful, unholy church.

Eyes torn asunder from sockets, limbs cleaved and repurposed like some sick toy, the vicious glitter of surgical instrument; this was something deep, something visceral.. Something with purpose.

At first, he didn't know where to begin, overwhelmed with the creativity of a disturbed mind. He noticed the footsteps, though, echoes in blood as they trailed to the door he had just entered. He closed it carefully behind him, following the footsteps as if a mouse with trailing breadcrumbs, and was faced with the scrawling of vermillion, a rune smeared with the fevered precision of an addled mind.

"Hm.. " He grunted with thought, a small notepad brought from his pack, soon to be filled to bursting with every detail of the tableau, accompanied by the pensive curling of pipesmoke.