The beach was crowded with people mostly asleep on their feet. As it became apparent that they weren’t going to run screaming at the foe that very second, the tension left the villagers of Hartford, like a sandcastle of adrenaline washed away by the tidal wave of exhaustion.
Within a few minutes, fires had been lit, what little food hadn’t rotted in the field for lack of hands, or gone mad in the pastures for lack of sleep was cooking merrily. The Van Herrings were slowly coming down. Shabash leaned forward, elbows on his knees, head in his hands.
“Gods, when will I learn not to take a drink from Krev? If my head doesn’t stop pounding, may the gods strike…”
Whatever he wanted the gods to strike, they were improbably attentive this day. From some unknown plane, a wooden crate the size and velocity of an angry troll plummeted out of the clear night air and impacted directly where Shabash had been sitting.
Seebo, by some quirk of precognition, was behind Krev this time, and stayed entirely dry while the dragonborn was drenched in viscera. As he wiped green claws over his face, blinking the worst of the deluge out of his eyes, Seebo popped over his shoulder and read the word ‘CITRUS’ burned onto the side of the mysterious crate.
“Huh.”
The crate burst open to reveal a lizardfolk, all hard scales and harder attitude. Tall and lithe to the point of scrawny, he looked like the personification of hunger kept lean in a veal crate and sharpened to points. Breathing hard, the lizard’s eyes focussed in the relative brightness of the torches. He saw the gnome peering over the dragonborn’s shoulder and his eyes narrowed.
He lunged, shouting “In flight snack! Classy!”
Krev plucked the lizardfolk out of the air and held him aloft.
“No, new friend. Food that talks is not food. Is ok. We will teach you.”
~~~~~
Over on the saner side of the Van Herrings, Gurdis was making new friends as well One of Hartford’s doughty warriors had actually managed to remain awake, and was gently quizzing the fighter as to what, exactly, they were doing there. If it wasn’t too much trouble.
After a few moments of tuning in the ear to the peculiar dialect of Hartford, which can best be described as a sheep-farmer halfway down his second bottle of scumble, trying to give you directions to a place he had heard of, but most certainly never been.
“Tharr why they put me front. Pig-lifter Mun, they call’t me. Not sure rightly why. Barrn’t see no pigs here. Norr’ on t’beach. Down’t loike saaaaaaaalt, yussee.”
Gurdis had an expression of polit concussion on her face, much the same as a royal who has just asked a dunnikindiver what it is they do. She blinked twice, tried to rearrange the words into some semblance of sense, and dismiss the ones she was sure he had made up.
“You’re here to fight?”
Mun looked perplexed by this.
“Fight pigs?” he ventured, hope audible in his voice.
“No. Sorry. No. Fight a dread zombie pirate captain who wants to enslave your town.”
“Oh. Right then.” Mun straightened himself and stared manfully into the distance. Gurdis was struck by how close ‘manfully’ was to ‘holding in a fart’ on the facial expression chart. Struck by a moment of fellow feeling ,she chucked him on the shoulder, and beckoned him over to join the body of the Van Herrings.
Of course, as first impressions go, it wasn’t one for the history books. Krev was fighting with a lizardfolk who had somehow attached himself to the party, and Seebo was exacerbating the situation by blowing raspberries from Krev’s shoulder. Caelynn, normally the most level-headed of the group, was giving as good as she got. As they approached, Gurdis could hear what was being said.
“…Get it through your thick head, scaly. We have never, will never, and would never countenance something like a hurdy gurdy on this team.”
“Krev has killed for less insult.”
“Yeah! Bards suck!”
“I was your damn bard, you insolent little… I was Shabash, damn your soft, pink eyes!”
“Who’s Shabash?” said Gurdis, conversationally. The lizardfolk burst into tears. Gurdis wondered where he’d learned that trick. She cleared her throat to get the attention of the group, and was singularly ignored. Sighing, She took off her held and banged it against the handle of her greataxe like a steel bell. The fighting slowed and stopped as, one by one, they looked at her.
“What are we going to do?”
“Ooh, Kre has pla…”
“Shut up, Krev!” they all chorused, Mun a few beats behind, but clearly keen to join in.
The lizardfolk raised a cautious hand. “I think we need to fight Kel.”
This was greeted with an enthusiastic growling bark from Krev, and shouts from Seebo and Gurdis. To everyone’s surprise, Caelynn took a deep breath, and gave a decisive nod.
“Whatever we choose after, the Maiden is a danger to all. We need to act.”
Gurdis opened and closed her mouth a few times and Seebo sighed. “Best we get ready, then.”
~~~~~
The others were debating the best plan of attack, an activity that normally he would have joined in with jarring glee. But the tingle in the back of his brain was back. While the rest would have jeered about how on earth he could tell that from the usual madness his brain produced, he knew what it was. The Raven Queen was calling.
Oh, he could try to ignore it. He had ignored it before. It had become… increasingly uncomfortable. Krev was quite acquainted with being assailed by memories that were not his own, and haunting regrets and formless dread from the well of entropy. But before a fight that was likely to be hard, bloody, and probably fatal, it wasn’t going to be wise.
He wandered back toward Hartford. Every shack and hovel was empty. All of the town still standing were on the beach. Krev found what he was looking for. A hut in marginally better repair than most. Looked to be the village smiths, from all the ironwork. Excellent. Her dark wingedness didn’t much care for iron. It wasn’t a Fey thing. She was the goddess of entropy and forgetting and memory jumbled past all reason. Iron was her antithesis in every way. Obdurate and changeless, shaped by the hand and mind of smiths into a more complex shape, it was extropy to her entropy. Krev had idly wondered, when he was sure her attention was elsewhere, whether iron and steel might be the key to killing her.
He shut the door and wedged a sword through the handle. It was a secure as he was going to get. With a sigh, and a droop to his lips, Krev pulled a grey candle from his pack. Bloody thing never lit proper. After some coughing, and a regular grumble that he couldn’t have grown up with red dragon ancestry, he lit the pillar of grey wax.
The flame was tiny to the point of invisible; the smoke prodigious, He crossed his legs and settled down, humming a few bars of a tavern ditty as the room filled with choking grey smoke. He’d barely reached the second chorus of ‘The Wizard’s Staff’ when a ragged grey sheet of smoke formed, swirling thick as milk in the churn.
Flecks of dark lightning etched across the sheet, bringing neither light nor heat. A smell of stale piss and plaintive cries filled the room. In the sheet, a face formed, taller than the kneeling Krev, gaunt and terrible.
He didn’t shudder. He never had. He was willing to stare her in the face. Or he was mad enough not to care what she could do to him. He had never had the courage to examine that too closely. And the face, horrible as it was – ever-shifting, with lines of thought gliding across at the edge of decipherability – was still far preferable to her voice.
It was the voice of the end, thought Krev. It was the cold hard truth of the apothecary saying there was nothing more he could do, and his gold had run out. It was the smooth, edgeless ice of the inevitable. For an adventurer, there was always a last hope, forlorn as it might be. They were damn near destined to go out with a bang. This voice was the reminder that, whatever they did, however glorious the end, it would be nothing but a whimper to her.
The Raven Queen spoke, and this time, her chosen did shudder.
~~~~~
The merciless whimsy 