The Church on the Hill
Session: 2025-01-15
The bodies were still dissolving when they broke camp.
Not the way they usually dissolved. Faster. Something wrong in the rate of it, like the process had been instructed. He noted it and kept moving.
On the road, Zephyr tried Remove Disease on a vial of the goo. A reasonable approach, Vath thought. Then everything went dark for half a second, and not just for Zephyr — there was something underneath it, not quite a sound. The goo launched itself out of the vial, hit the sand, and was gone.
They kept moving. The rocky shores to either side. He was watching the shoreline anyway, for the fern Svala had described — fish-tongue, a large plant, would grow near water like this. He found some.
Serenholme came up dark in the functional sense. Stone and weathered wood, built to last rather than to welcome. Boats in the harbor, half of them damaged in ways that hadn't been repaired. The vegetation sparse and small. A few people visible, keeping distance — not fleeing, just not approaching.
A man on horseback came out to meet them at the edge of town. Middle-aged, decently dressed, the self-possession of office.
Visitors. Welcome.
Mayor Regan Cromwell. Thaddeus introduced himself and the party's apparent purpose, which involved salt. Vath let that stand and took stock of the town behind him.
Something had happened here.
The Sea-stone inn had two old men at the bar who were clearly its primary residents. Pedro bought them drinks. The woman behind the counter — Elara Sangray — had the manner of someone who'd had few enough visitors that even mildly interested strangers counted as company.
Six months since anyone had come through. Ern Lindsor had handled the salt operations and gone missing roughly a month ago; relatives somewhere in Seacrest. The mine itself, half a day north, was sitting empty. Not much fish this year. A storm three weeks back, deaths in town.
Things were much better now, she said, in the particular way that means the speaker has decided to believe it.
Zephyr, beside him, went quiet in the way that meant the opposite.
The food came out after a while — standard enough, but with local herbs he didn't recognize. He made note of them the way he made note of things in the soil and the season. The vegetables were small in a way that told him something about what the ground had been through.
The church was on the hill.
He didn't know why he kept ending up at churches — he was a nature man, this wasn't his ground. But there was something in him that watched where communities put their devotion, what they reached toward when things came apart.
He went up in the morning. Church of Valkur.
He met Mirabelle there. She was tending the altar — or the appearance of it. Young, for this kind of work; something about the dedication didn't sit right with the posture. She turned and told him about what was being done here. Her voice was warm. She met his eyes the right amount — the specific, careful amount of someone who had decided how to seem open.
He thanked her and left.
He would think about this conversation more than once, later, and decide he had been right to watch the way she moved.
Back at the inn, Zephyr and Cain were working on Elara. The fish-creature account — the things from the water, the fight on the road. They gave her the net they'd taken from the fight as evidence. Between the two of them they got her convinced to bring it to the mayor.
He sat with his food and his herb notes and watched it come together. Whatever was wrong here, it had started before that storm.
He kept that conclusion to himself. There wasn't much to say about it yet.