Tea, in the name of Myrken...

[Rance]

It was a mockery, a decrepit symbolism of the council of Myrken Wood, bathed in warm torchlight, a bountiful feast strewn like hatter-art across the table where laws were made, sanctions were passed, and fates were drawn for the Myrken Wood countryside. The stench in the air was like none that Ferdrek had ever experienced, and he stumbled aside, a hand pressed against the wall as he emptied his stomach onto the floorboards of the pompous council hall. This was the stink of decaying flesh, exhumed graves, things that should have fertilized the earth and been driven from human sight. Yet, here they were, displayed before the lone guard as if, through their silent faces, their dead mouths, their horrid wounds, they communicated some greater political concept.

The five chairs of the council hall, propagated about the lacquered table, were all very occupied, each by its own sickeningly situated corpse, garmented in the fineries of death. They were blood-stained and leather-fleshed replicas of life, mutilated beyond repair, seated about a feast of sour foods and vegetables teeming with insects. These were citizens of Myrken Wood long slaughtered, death smiling in the shadows of their sagging, bloated faces.

At the very head of the table sat a young girl with chestnut hair and pale flesh once named Susendra, her head slumped forward on the edge of the table. She bore a wound of bestial vulgarity in the middle of her chest and stomach, viciously torn by the blade of a rusted knife, hollowed, coagulated with the clumps of dried fluids. Few knew that it had been the tavern guard D’ran himself whose hand had inflicted this final wound, had stirred her innards with a blade the way one might mix soup. Her face – eyes and tongue removed, throat split – lay comfortably in a plate full of molding peas and potatoes.

To her left and right, there were two other bodies in council chairs, one an aging woman and the other a young boy, the perfect balance of age and childhood. They were crumpled in their seats, cradling their own meaty intestines, the lines of their mouths forever closed by spider-webbed stitches. The lids had been torn from their eyes, and their dry eyeballs were shriveled like crushed raisins within their sockets. They were garbed in the simplicities of Myrken peasantry, yet dressed just as gruesomely for this meal in swaths of dry blood and decayed skin. Unbeknownst, it had been the lady Cinjin who had murdered these two, just to rifle through their stomachs for a secret hidden within.

At the final two chairs, an elven man named H’varth reached across the table in posthumous loyalty to his slaughtered wife. Their ear-tips had begun to crumple, their faces adorned by the moldering lumps of rot. H’varth’s mouth had been drawn up into a lifeless smile. Though the weapon of his death had been since removed, the sword that had been driven into the back of his throat left its horrid message of pain. His wife sat sprawled in bountiful curls of elven gold, a tiny quarrel embedded cleanly into her forehead, their loving fingers twisted in a rigor-mortised link of love, elbows propped in seeping once-foods. The fair elf Reverie had been the cause of their death, as brutal a murderer as he who had instigated it.

Ferdrek Tumsen clamped a hand over his mouth, trying not to vomit yet again, slamming his spine against the closed portals of the hall’s entryway. It was not even the morbid dinner-party that had so shocked him. It was the paint of dried, blood-inked works splattered across the wall behind those restless corpses, a demand strewn in the wake of murders done, its message fateful and clear.

Join us for tea, won’t you?

Ferdrek Tumsen gasped, denying the revulsion in his stomach, the sword on his hip rattling as he approached the council table, covering his nose with the back of his hand. He discovered much more on his approach. A fly whisked past his ear.

At the place of Giscard Guillaume, a crystalline goblet was clenched within the free, wrinkle-fleshed hand of H’varth the dead elf, and on its rim was a tiny twist of parchment, lovingly inscribed with the councilor's name.

In the seat of Captain Kerrak, where H’varth’s beloved wife laid in her rest, a delicate porcelain doll-mask splattered in old blood was just out of reach of her fingers and their crumbling nails. Beneath it, signed in almost calligraphic perfection, was a bit of paper bearing the simple word Kerrak.

And finally, the third item. Ferdrek Tumsen had not noticed the sixth dead body, for it was so small and fragile. Tucked within the ribs of a dinner fowl, propped upon a silver platter, there lay the infant child of H’varth and his wife, a pudgy throat drawn across by a blade-tip, a stiff-skinned hand raised in death. In it was clenched a wooden baby rattle, and from the edge of the deceased infant’s smallest pinky, there dangled a sheet of parchment with Suede’s name.

Ferdrek Tumson could take no more. He had only meant to check upon the silence of the council hall as he often did so late at night, but this epitaph made his stomach churn and his spine quake in fear. He needed to be anywhere but here, and with a shriek of wretched terror, he spun away from the corpses, sobbing, meaning only to alert the guards and awaken the councilors to this crude message left for them…

… and he would have done so, had he not turned and impaled himself right upon the edge of a dirge-singing blade, its handle wrapped in dark fingers, its bearer grinning through the jagged stalactites of yellowed teeth. The previously unseen shadow smiled down upon him, and Ferdrek’s knees crumpled, driving him to the floor before the black-faced mystery, his quivering hands wrapping around the blade of that runed sword.

“Hello, human,â€

[Rattrap]

Cecil Ritter had no particular affinity for Drow. He had some experience with them, to be sure - the Paladin had to combat Dark Elves on more than one occasion. They were not unknown or unfamiliar; with this, he knew that trying to track them would do little good. Still, he had some progress...he had a place. He had a name. Two, in fact.

Necromancy, on the other hand, was something hard to slip by the Paladin. The energy represented the very polar opposite of his being; like an animal forewarned of a natural disaster, Cecil could detect the evil. A gut sense that lacked any concrete foundation...yet long since learned to be trusted.

Cecil found his way to the Meetinghouse on the dark evening, and wasn't surprised by what he found. He wasn't surprised by the need to draw his blade and defend himself, either - only the last, talking zombie was unexpected, with a message.

The Paladin handled the ambling, sword-bearing remains as they came, cutting them down as they came. For each of the dead, he prayed for powers to prevent their bodies' misuse any further. For each of the dead, Cecil even gave a buriel on the Meetinghouse grounds. All save the one that talked. The guards may not like it - being a scene of a crime, and a subject of investigation. But like them, Cecil had his duties. His served a power greater than the laws and conclusions the hideously arranged corpses would have given. All except that last, talking zombie.

Disfigured and dismembered, the last was kept to recite its message for the guards that would inevitably find the gore-covered Paladin in front of the meetinghouse.

It was a sleepless night.

[Waverley]

By the time of her arrival -- and she is dispatched with a great deal of haste indeed -- the animated corpses have already been slain for a second time. The advice she offers is to give their bodies to flame, but why would Ritter and company heed it? She has no authority here; she is, at most, an emissary. Despite her fears that the earth may not hold them -- for the One Faith had lost its hold over the girl years ago, and Ritter's prayers do not impress -- the corpses are buried beneath it.

But not before she's had the opportunity to inspect them, if only briefly. A few moments for each. Time enough to pluck a hair from the head, say; to scrape a little flesh from the backs of their twice-dead hands, some crusted blood from beneath their nails. Why, there's even a little taken from that message scrawled so gorily across the wall, and each of these gruesome things stowed away in tiny glass vials, for later examination.

There's a saying, amongst the superstitious, that a slain man's corpseholds a story in its lungs; that it keeps breath enough there to recite the details of its murder. That if a person's not too squeamish to lower their ear to its lips, they need simply press down on the cadaver's chest until it whispers that ghastly tale, gentle as a lover's secret. But there's no need for such extreme measures today. This new collection will tell tales enough, and the notes for one of them will read like so:


[INDENT]Usstan doer' wun gre'as'anto: I come in peace. Meetinghouse doors; the blood of Guard Meston, Order of Straka. Guards Jenkins and Bohemmin also slain. Guard Raifley left living to deliver news of Audmathus' arrival.

Bit by bit, she falls apart -- as will Myrken. As will you all. And when it is razed, I will stand above it to laugh. Doors of the Broken Dagger Inn; the blood of the elf Thorn. A section of her ear accompanied.

We have theorised, in the past, that Audmathus was responsible for the desecration of the Tolmers' graves. The elements seized today disprove that, as do those obtained in the aftermath of the Revenant Army raised by Audmathus, 203 AR. In light of this, suggestions of collaboration between Audmathus and Baie seem particularly ludicrous.[/INDENT]

[Rattrap]

It was true that fire was a sure way to keep the dead dead. However, judging by past actions, the Drow didn't bother with going underground. They simply created new bodies. And what was left of these would be of little use; so bury them, Cecil did.

The Paladin worked in silence around the woman performing her investigation. He wouldn't interfere - Cecil understood quickly what she was working to do, and what benefit it had. He would even inquire as to what meanings had been gleaned, when it appeared she had finished.

Cecil Ritter was his name, he'd likely impart at some point in their proximity. His armor and the glow of his sword as the last zombie fell would likely giveaway his status as a Paladin, though if that were inquired of, it too would be revealed.

He was another solitary agent working in Myrken Wood to banish evil, a task much better suited for those not so solitary.