Whittling
Session: 2025-10-08
They left the church and they left Serenholme.
He didn't look back. There was nothing in looking back. The road existed. They took it.
Land Ho was the same as it always was, which he found himself grateful for without making much of it. The houses. The smell of the hall. The giant marlin somebody had pulled in and was already making into something worth celebrating.
He went up the hill first. The others found the hall or the shacks or wherever they went when they needed a moment of not walking.
Svala's hut. He'd been carrying the leaves wrapped in cloth since the shore — five large ones, intact, which had required some care. He unfolded them on her table and she looked them over the way she looked at everything, like she was holding them up against something he couldn't see. She confirmed they were what she'd asked for. She gave him the herb kit and didn't make a speech about it, which was right. He appreciated that.
The feast that evening was good. The party was at the table — all of them, which didn't always happen. Somebody spoke — about friendship, about family — and the words sat in the hall differently than they might have a few weeks ago. He looked around the table without being obvious about it. He wasn't sure everyone was feeling the same thing. He thought most of them were. He ate his food and didn't remark on it. Weight is weight, whether you name it or not.
In the morning there was a kid.
He was sitting on a post near the lodging shacks with a stick and a knife, turning the stick into something by degrees, watching the door. Fourteen, he said. From Mistyvale, a town somewhere west. He'd been there when the party's reputation arrived before them and had come to find them.
His friends had gone missing. And some local folks too — two hunters named Ned and Nerris, two boys, and a pair of twins. About a week for most of them. He mentioned the mine. He said something about ghosts, the way people say things they've been told to say but haven't decided to believe yet. Ghosts from a mine.
Vath listened to all of it.
The kid was doing well, actually. Not crying. Not falling apart. Just had a week of nothing happening and then made a decision about it. He'd walked to Land Ho with a stick and a knife and sat down to wait.
"We'll go," Vath said.
He might have been the first one to say it out loud. It didn't matter much. They were all arriving at the same place.
Two days on the road, give or take. Harrod's Wood most of it — familiar ground by now, which was its own kind of comfort. Quiet. He made himself useful.
He'd heard the word Mistyvale a few times and had built some picture of it from what Svala had said, but the picture hadn't included the shade. They came off the road into the town together and the whole of it sat under a canopy — trees planted with intention, everything cooler and darker than it had any right to be. Houses along both sides. Tanning racks on the margins. Some of the farms had mushroom patches in the low places where grass would have otherwise done nothing interesting.
He heard one of the others comment on it — the shade — and didn't disagree. The people moving around had bows on their backs and clothes grown through with vines and mushrooms. A mining town that had become a hunting town, somewhere along the way. He understood how that happened.
Near the center of town there was a jeweler's shop — gnomish work, glass case visible through the window, rings and set stones catching whatever light made it through the canopy. He noted it and kept walking. He'd have reason to come back to that shop.
The mayor was a wiry man, sixties or near enough. Tired in a way that had become structural. There was a small pickaxe on a cord around his neck, the size of a charm — Vath couldn't tell if it was meaningful or just familiar.
He had a list in his head and he went through it. Townsfolk scared. Herbalists' shop broken into. Boys, a week ago or thereabouts. Twins, four days.
He said it the way you say things you've already said too many times, to people who couldn't do anything, hoping eventually someone could.
He sent them to Tessa.
You noticed Tessa because it was difficult not to. Half-orc, tall the way that makes a room recalculate itself. The furniture in her workspace had a quality of being in the right place mostly because she'd placed it there and it hadn't moved since. There was a piece of wood on her table she'd been working on — a carving of something, not finished.
She told them what she knew. The mine was about a day's walk east. Locals said haunted; she tried not to say that word with any conviction. The town had stopped going there, she didn't know exactly when. Elrich had told her to stay away, so she had. The herbalists had lost a significant amount of stock in the break-in, though what exactly she wasn't sure.
Then she mentioned Bram. Ground to the north had shifted. A cave opening, or a hole — something that wasn't there before the earthquake. The mine was east. This was north.
He glanced at the others. Tessa had stopped talking and was looking back at all of them with the same thought arriving at the same time.
"Large area," she said.
He'd been east of Vogler when it hit. The ground had moved for almost a minute. He'd felt it in the soles of his feet in a way he still hadn't found the right description for. If that same movement had opened a hole in the ground north of Mistyvale, then whatever the earthquake had done, it had done it across the whole region. Not a local settling. Something much larger.
Same ground.
He filed that away and didn't say much more about it.
The Maple Seed Inn was run by a woman named Scilla Greeves. Middle-aged, human, the kind of innkeeper who could read arriving strangers without asking about them directly. The party took rooms and sorted themselves out the way they always did — some needing food, some needing quiet, some needing both.
He sat for a while before he slept.
Mine to the east. Cave to the north. Boys missing a week. Twins, four days. Herbalists robbed.
He thought about Rudel sitting on that post with his knife and his stick, watching the door in the morning light.
A week was a long time to sit still.