The Bird That Wasn't
Session: 2026-07-08
Morning came bright and unkind. Vath had slept in the common house with Cain; Pedro and Victor had stayed in the mead hall, and Victor had spent the night recording Pedro's exploits as if he were a bard taking down scripture. Now the sun was up and the town was full of the specific quiet of men who had drunk too much and regretted the volume of it.
Vath felt fine. Better than fine — restless, wanting the road. He noticed the feeling and didn't examine it too closely.
Fabri was already packed. He stood at the edge of things with his bags in order, watching the party the way a man watches a coach he hopes will stop for him. He wanted East Point. He wanted them to take him there. He didn't say it plainly, but he didn't have to.
Pedro was in the square, working the crowd, being clapped on the shoulder by half the town. Somewhere in it Zephyr said, loud enough to carry, that Land Ho treated him better than his own family ever had.
Cain was standing within earshot. Cain said nothing.
They filled their wineskins, said their goodbyes, and turned south.
The road unspooled behind familiar country. They passed the house where they'd once pulled a family out of a bad night, and later the stretch where the undead had come at them. Fabri went quiet at that one, then stayed quiet a while after.
"Traveling through here without protection," Cain said, "isn't advisable."
He wasn't wrong. Vath said so with a look and kept walking.
Pedro had taken an interest in Fabri's clothing — the cut of it, the color, who made such things. Fabri warmed to the subject the way he warmed to nothing else. Then something clicked behind his eyes and he lit up.
"This is so fortuitous," he said. "Miriam — that's who I'm going to see in East Point."
Pedro allowed that he did not know how anyone could improve on his perfection, but that he'd be willing to let her try.
Fabri had spring in his step now, trailing Pedro like a hound that had found its person. Miriam had plied her trade in Seacrest for decades, he said. Retired to East Point. He could introduce them himself.
Vath filed the name away and kept his eyes on the treeline. Names had a way of coming back — though whether Miriam would be alive to answer to hers was another matter, and not one the road had told him yet.
The day passed without a dark rider on it. By evening they'd reached the split, where the road forked toward East Point one way and Vogler the other.
Vath dug the fire in — two holes, one to feed it and one to breathe, the kind that cooked without throwing its light across the countryside. Then he sat with Pantera.
She was still new to him. He worked with her the way he'd been taught to work with a thing that trusted you conditionally: patiently, without asking for more than it would give. When she'd settled he brought her over to Pedro for scratches, and Pedro obliged, and the panther leaned into it like any cat.
Victor sat apart with the journal — Mirabelle's journal, its energy still faintly wrong under his hands. He was trying to reason his way into it. Somewhere he'd read of high magic, arcane and divine both, that could take a person and drive them like a cart: dominate them entirely. It fit her, he said. She'd come with good intentions. She'd taken blame that wasn't hers. She'd thrown herself off a cliff, and when she came back she came back wrong. Something had been steering. Someone with a priest's training might see more in the pages than he could.
All the while an unseen servant carried tea to his elbow.
Cain took the last watch and blessed Zephyr as he did. Zephyr spent his own hours talking to Prudence and Deathbringer — the donkey's voice, in Zephyr's telling, something mournful and put-upon. Prudence, he reported, really wanted new shoes.
They woke, ate a little, and turned east.
The weather held fair. As the day wound down they pushed on toward the town rather than camp again; Fabri didn't think arriving after dark would be any trouble. Seawatch stopped in now and then to resupply, he said, but there wasn't much in the way of defense.
Then Fabri stopped talking.
You could usually hear a town before you saw it. This one made no sound at all. Not cold, exactly — but the air carried the smell of burnt wood, and Fabri's face said that was wrong, that they were far too close to hear nothing.
Cain pointed over the trees. A single tail of black smoke stood up from the far side.
Vath called a crow out of the dusk and put himself behind its eyes.
Four hooded figures near the well. Standing, shifting, moving with purpose. A dock with a boat half-sunk beneath it, and the smoke climbing off the wreck. Three bodies on the ground by the well, not moving. The town itself mostly whole — clothes still hung on the lines, goats still nosing about. Only the water and the boats had been touched.
Three dead. Four standing. He came back into his own skull and told them what he'd seen.
Victor said they should prepare. Zephyr wondered aloud whether the townsfolk were on the ship — and either way, that they'd need to talk to the figures to learn anything. Cain caught movement: something slid out from cover and ducked back behind a building.
An hour of good light left, maybe.
Vath summoned Pantera. She came small and low and ready, and he set his mind to holding her there.
A bird chirped somewhere ahead.
He knew the sound for what it was the instant he heard it. No bird made that call — not here, not now. A signal. Someone had just told someone else that the party had arrived.
Victor called for a Fog Cloud and Cain seconded it — "do it, man!" — and twenty feet of grey bloomed over the approach. Zephyr, unsure of the ground, started south along the western edge of the village. He got a warning the hard way: a figure that had been waiting with a bow already drawn loosed at his head and missed by a breath. Zephyr shouted the range — seventy feet, southwest — and pointed.
Vath moved up to him. Near the end of the run he caught another one tucked behind a house, and sent Pantera at it. She roared and closed the gap.
Pedro came through the fog like it was the curtain at the start of a match — a running leap, a landing that belonged in front of a crowd, a glance left and right at the enemies waiting on both sides. He looked delighted.
"Fabri, keep the animals safe," Cain called, and threw his blessing over Vath, Victor, and Zephyr.
Then the arrows found Vath. The first was nothing, turned aside by Zephyr. The second bit deep — obsidian, and the head shattered in the wound, chips of it working against him so the bleeding wouldn't stop on its own. Zephyr snapped a Command at the archer to drop its weapons; it didn't take, and he ran the thing down instead.
Vath opened the one in front of him with the scimitar, then spent a breath of magic to close the wound in his own side before it could cost him the rest of the fight. Pantera's claws came down beside his blade. Both hits landed hard.
Around the corner, Victor watched Pedro's entrance and decided it did rather resemble the way they opened a bout. He shifted for the angle and threw a Chromatic Orb. It sailed past its mark — but it burned the hood off as it went, and there was the face beneath: humanoid, and rat.
"They're Rat People," Victor said. "They're Rat People, Cain!"
And this one was alive.
After that it was close work in the grey.
The rat on Pedro broke off and shot at him twice, missing both. The one Vath had been carving backed into the fog and vanished from him; Vath let out a low sound, displeased to lose the scent of a thing he'd nearly finished.
Pedro took two daggers in the shoulders and grinned through it, then put a fist through a rat's guard hard enough to frighten it and a second one hard enough to end it — its face simply gave way. He rushed the next. Something hidden lunged out of the shadow to stab him and got an elbow to the skull for its trouble; another blow after that, but this rat didn't scare.
"I can't see through the mist!" Cain shouted, and reached past it anyway, tolling the dead over the enemy to the south.
The hidden one came back for Pedro and this time drove the dagger home — a bad hit, the worst yet — and slipped away again into the fog before anyone could answer it.
Zephyr caught two daggers of his own. The chain mail turned the second. As he recovered he saw something move wrong beneath the nearest cloak — a tail, coming free, its tip a wet gleam of obsidian, striking for the soft of his neck.
It missed.
The fog held its grey. Somewhere in it the rats were talking in a language of chirps, and the light was going, and the fight was not yet decided.