Nightmares Born.

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Myrken has enough trouble at the moment. Roving spirits. Rumors of Drow. Spiders in the tavern. Wolves tearing children apart. The dead come back to incorporeal life, driving men and women mad. Someone said Rodger's old cow, the one he was attached to and let die of old age, buried instead of eaten or burned as it should have been, was found munching on grass, as-you-please, as if nothing had ever happened.

Catch had good dreams. Almost-happy dreams. He had them because the nightmares slipped away while he slept.

All in one night, fresh tales of fresh horrors exploded.

Kelder's youngest son, the philanderer and ne'er-do-well, woke up with the head of an ass, and went bawling up and down main street until the blacksmith, in terror, had bashed the boy's brains in.

Little Teller Geoffry had gone out to the well to fetch water for his laboring mother. He was carried back hours later, his young, black hair turned white, and all he could say was Sir Treadwell's name, over and over.

They hadn't found him until after his mother miscarried. As well as every other pregnant woman for a mile, in a straight, purposeful line. Teller said that the Fat Man was dragging the babies behind him in a net, and then had said nothing more but the councilman's name.

Two farmers on separate plots had been quarreling about the lands between them for three generations, now. Even then, the screams and cries had been so terrible that Dellin and his boys had hitched up their plow-horses and went a-riding to Irand's place, and found nothing but a hole, burned black, where nothing would grow. Nothing there, except the strange lapping sound, those tanned boys had become so white and anemic that they all had to go to the Rememdium hours later.

And everywhere, everywhere, was the howling laugh of a Wolf that no one saw.



(ooc: An event. Play with it how you will.)

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Niven Smithy was lost, but he was not too particularly worried about it, because he also happened to be a little drunk, and even when he was sober he possessed little imagination. Myrkenwood's nights held no horrors for him, even with all he had lived through in his, admittedly short, two decades of life. He had his little Shoe-shop, and made nails and things for the farmers that did not wish to go in to town, and sometimes he did a little, rough carving. Townsfolk were a queer folk, so his Mum always told him, and that seemed to be the general consensus of those who lived in the backwaters and byways. Always bringing tragedy down on good, honest folk, they were, blackling Elves and Eye-eating beasts.

His horse stumbled, and Niven cursed the beast, but even drunk he knew better than to strike her. He may be a coarse, practical man, but he wasn't particularly cruel, not even to his beasts. And he'd be a poor farrier indeed if he couldn't feel that the mare had thrown a shoe. He cursed again, but this time at his luck, and swung himself off the trembling mare, drawing up her hoof to confirm that which he already knew. And he was still a mile or so from his shop, his home and his little farm that his new Wife tended. With staggering step he led the mare onward, down the road, and though he was not a cruel man, he did not see just how hard his mare shook. Far more than the stoic creature should be, if the pain of a thrown shoe was all that ailed her.

It was not until the Crossroads that Niven felt cold creep up his spine. Well. He knew where he was, now, and it was the one place he didn't really want to be caught out on at night, leading a horse. Used to hang thieves and brigands there, once, before Myrkentown's walls had been erected, and sometimes even after. The backwoods folk tended to care for their own. As unimaginative as he was, Niven still remembered the stories of nasty faerie-folk that inhabited such places, eager to trick unwary travelers, and how his younger brother had seen the dead men burst from their unmarked graves to shuffle towards the town a couple years back. Boy was never right, after that. Ran away to be a poet or an artist, or some such nonsense. Still, the place had a power that even his practical mind could sense, uneasily. His horse was more sensitive, and she shied and danced, despite the loose shoe, unwilling to go further, but forced onward by the pulling of the bit in her mouth.

And as the Crossroads came in to sight, he wasn't certain if it was the drink or the stories, or his normally-placid horse, weren't getting to him. Travelers themselves, maybe, he told himself. Because, after his heart stopped beating in his throat, Niven could see they were cloaked in grey, a tall fellow on a tall horse with a tattered flag across his back, accompanied by a rough-looking man with one eye and an equally rough-looking jenny-mule. Their charge seemed rather queer, a shrunken potato of a man, bound up to his fat, old donkey, who was in turn bound by a halter to the rough-man's saddle.

Either way, the men blocked the road, and they had not seen him, the two looking at the sign and arguing quietly among themselves, while the bound third seemed to be looking everywhere save the road, his head twisting this way and that on his stump of a neck. Faerie or no, Niven decided, his patience was wearing thin with the drink, and the Summer-to-Fall air was starting to get a decided bite to it. And the damn mare was lathering herself up over nothing.

"You sirs lost?" he called to them, marching straight up despite the way his mare rolled her eyes and tried to dig her hooves in. The two men turned to look at him, and Niven almost lost his nerve. They must be looking for the Town, all right. They had the look. But Niven was a backs-wooder, and he was drunk, so he pulled himself together before he could just push past them without another word.

The tall fellow was rather grey, his skin smooth, but cast like the Darkling-elves everyone liked to talk about. Maybe not so dark; those were supposed to merge into the night, and, if anything, this man's lean features shone out even more. He was just grey. Too grey than any man had a right to be, and bald, smooth as an egg. The other fellow glared out from under heavy, shaggy brows, with just the one eye, the other a long-scarred ruin. He had a couple of swords, Niven saw, but he had his hammers tied up on his mare's saddle, and he figured he could reach 'em in an instant.

The Bound one was strange, though. He had thought him lumpy, like a potato, but the next moment he looked like a strange, furry little man, with long arms and a human face, and then he just seemed like one of the fancy, inbred boys from town, drooling and cross-eyed. He alone seemed to think that Niven was not there, and kept to himself.

"You lost?" he demanded again, because he did not see how he could push past them all without the One-eyed man taking offense, and all he wanted to do was get home. The Egg-skull and the One-eye looked at each other, like master to subordinate, and it was One-eye that answered with a voice like dry grass bending before a wind.

"We were looking for the Rememdium," he said. Niven glanced at the madman, and he felt a little better. Folks knew about the Rememdium. Faeries didn't need their crazies locked up, did they? Strange as the company looked, they were only human, and Niven could deal with humans.

"You need t'head back there," Niven said briskly, pointing down the proper road. "Big, low building, hard t'miss. Place called the Broken Dagger's right by it, if you fellers had a mind t'see yer friend settled." It wasn't that he wanted to aid them. The madman was rather disgusted to look at, and made Niven queasy. But he couldn't see any other way to get them to leave, so he could pass, and if that took a few civil words, then he would gladly pay.

The two looked to each other again, and Niven was left to wonder why they looked so surprised. But they were all moving, now, the One-eye leading the madman's donkey, the grey man following them both. He reached out to grasp Niven's hand, which the farrier did not like, but did it out of good manners anyway. His grasp was cold, fish-like, and Niven had to fight down a grimace.

"Thank you for your aid," the Egg-head said, and as he drew his hand back Niven swore he saw something mechanical working within those robes. Too grey. The man was like those ceramic-headed dolls his sister used to play with, before she got that Plague. His voice, too, was something Niven would be glad not to hear again. It made him feel hungry, somehow. It made him want to go with the Three Men. "A favor for a favor, Ser. Don't go home tonight."

Niven only nodded, dumbly, wondering what the Hells and the Gods all this was supposed to mean, as the Grey Egg turned his horse after the others. He watched them until he was sure they were gone, and it was only then that he noticed his horse was missing, and swore all the more. The damn nag must have slipped away while the strange men distracted him. She couldn't have gotten far, not with that shoe, but if she'd gone anywhere at all, then it must have been home. Niven stumbled on, muttering to himself of crazed men and how proper folks should act, and godforsaken horses and the growing hunger in his belly, until the mist swallowed him as readily as it had swallowed the Three Men.


If he had remembered the grey Egg's advice, then he may have heeded it, the closer he drew to home. The next day had come, and the backwoods people who so scoffed at their Townsfolk cousins sent away for the constables, for it was Murder, a terrible sort of murder, that left the young Smithy Goodwife with her skull shattered, but not a brain of hers to be found. Niven, too, was nowhere, with only a shambling set of bloody footprints leading from his home to the cross-roads, where the dismembered remains of horse-meat lay scattered in gibbets and chunks, strewn all across the Crossroads. And from there? Niven's steps ceased, but there were more hoofprints, three sets of large to small beasts, that led to Myrkentown, and quickly disappeared.