What Came Out
Session: 2025-05-28
The man who had been living in Ern Lindsor's house had his hands up, and then he decided to reach into his coat.
He produced a knife. The blade had dried blood on it.
Vath looked at it. The people in the mine had not been cut. He was fairly certain of that — he had spent time with those bodies, enough to remember what had been done to them. They had been crushed and drowned and dragged across coral, had their eyes removed, but they hadn't been stabbed. The knife was a claim of some kind, but it didn't fit the thing it was claiming.
Cain stepped forward and took it out of his hand.
"We own the mine," Cain said.
Bodean kept talking. He was the kind of man who believed that if he kept arguing long enough he could change which direction the sun rose. Cain put a gag in his mouth.
Pedro went inside. Half-eaten meal on the table. Nothing useful. He came back out.
They brought Bodean to the church.
Mirabelle examined him — pressed her hands to his face and chest — and something came out. Thick and dark, running from him like something that had been looking for an exit and found one. The taint, reduced. Not gone.
"He's been corrupted," she said. "I can't tell you if he's responsible." She said he had arrived about two weeks ago. That he seemed troubled. She recommended handing him to the authorities. She'd never seen anything like it before.
Vath had. Or close enough. Devy Cromwell sitting in the road, clacking two rocks together, talking about children and dancing. The same quality of absence — someone still in there, but not all the way.
He looked out from the church while the others talked.
A child was hiding at the tree line. Small — maybe ten. Dirty clothes, dirt on his hands, standing the way people stand when they've forgotten why they're standing. Vath watched him for a moment and didn't say anything. He made a note of it.
The Mayor arrived with three boys in armor and all of them on horses.
He acknowledged that the town had been suffering. He requested a feast of heroes from Elara at the inn, on the party's behalf. He took Bodean off their hands — he had the authority for it, official authority from Silverport, and he carried it easily.
They walked to the inn.
Cain made a fish from water.
Conjured the shape of one right there at the table — to show Elara what the fish-folk looked like. It was a practical thing to do and a strange thing to see. Elara nodded and studied it and didn't make a fuss.
They ate. The food was good — Elara had put real effort in, the kind of meal that said the Mayor's word had carried weight in this kitchen. Fire going, food warm, no one trying to drag anyone into the ocean. They ate until they were full and then they went to sleep.
Something woke him in the dark.
Victor was down. Poison — the food, he thought, or something in it — and the rest of them were on their feet with people in the room who had not been invited. Townsfolk. Cudgels raised. More of them at the edges of the firelight.
He didn't have time to count them. He had time to stand up and understand what was happening, which was that something in Serenholme had decided tonight was the night for it.
He reached for what he had.