The Wandering Isles: Session 69
Hatsu Toshitsugu watched the fight from the edge of a spreading gloom, then stepped forward when the creature would not be driven back. A cloud of darkness formed at his command, thick enough to swallow torchlight, but it did nothing to slow the thing. What rose to meet them was wrong in every way. A large, black-furred predator, upright and unnaturally lithe, moved with the patient cruelty of a thing that relished violence. Its fur drank the light around it. Its eyes were small, bright coals, and its mouth opened on a cluster of needle teeth. Long, hooked claws flexed and flexed again, and an old, ragged scent of iron and old rot clung to it like a halo.
The creature ignored everyone but Dash Heidmann. From the first glimpse it fixed on him with single-minded malice, as if it had come for nothing else. It hunted him, targeted him, and hunted some debt it believed Dash owed. The assault was savage. Every blow, every lunge, every vicious whisper of teeth against flesh felt designed to end him. Amaedrianna Blüdfist and the others watched with their blood cold, because the brutality of the strikes shook them to their core. It was as if the thing wanted Dash dead not for advantage, but for revenge.
The party split their efforts between stopping the foe and keeping Dash alive. Shields rose, wards wrapped around him, healing was fed in hurried blasts. They poured everything they had into holding him together. For a while it seemed like it might be enough. Then it was not. The creature broke through, striking true. Dash went down. With his final breaths he heard it whisper that now he knew how it felt, that it would return to find him, and that he better have what he stole. Those words landed like nails.
Slate ran. He slammed into the center of the fight, voice sharp and certain, and his words bent the edge of death back just enough. As others finished the killing blows the creature convulsed, then dissolved into a spreading, viscous ooze. Slate pressed his hands to Dash and spoke words of life. With a ragged gasp, Dash took another breath. The group felt that breath like a miracle.
They managed to kill the thing, but its body left behind that black, oily residue. When they returned to camp the tents were quiet in a way that made the survivors feel raw. Eldrin Drosk was gone, with the glowing fox called Chicken. Amaedrianna sent Albie the crow to find them. The bird found Eldrin fast, moving toward Weslyn Theiwyse on the riverbank, the fox’s glow bobbing like a small lantern.
While the others ate and tried to settle their shaking hands, Slate stayed with the slick pile the creature had been. He did what he had done once before in Hartwell. He absorbed the ooze into himself. As it folded into him, a memory broke the surface: a time he had buried deep inside. He saw a woman, Emilia Harrow, at his side. He watched himself making monsters, and a single word came through the fog—Gore.
The memory clarified into a cruel doctrine. The Gore beings did not die in any normal way. They crawled from their own ruined flesh and bore black ichor that carried a fragment of defiance against death. Where that ichor touched living flesh, it offered a perverse gift: the power to reject death once, and the curse of never truly resting. Slate felt his heart stop for a moment and then understand. He could give life to a creature. That knowledge tasted like metal and grief. It was a curse, but it was power, and Slate knew, with the bone-deep certainty of someone who had seen the shape of his own hands at work, that one day the choice to make life would be his.
He warned Hatsu to clean the ooze fast, and not to leave even a smear. If a fragment remained, the creature could come back. He approached Amaedrianna and handed her sword back, then slumped into his portion of food. The meal was small, the silence large.
Amaedrianna worried aloud that she might be like Slate, or like the things he had described, and she wanted to know if she could be one of those cursed vessels without knowing it. She decided she would hunt answers. Slate wanted the traces burned, every place the ooze could have touched purged by fire. Eos, Ekdíkisi Tintreach, asked Vathros, The Shadowed, if he had a hand in this, but the group declined to pin this on him. Hatsu wondered whether Remington Maleficum had some reason for drawing them together years ago. Slate, watching everyone, said he saw himself in them all. Eos cut him off gently, saying she saw Slate as Slate, and nothing else.
They slept badly, and then they started again. Dash woke and dressed in a new black suit trimmed with lavender. When Eos asked why purple, Dash said, simply, it was for her. Eos out at The Seal let Duckie the horse out and groomed him, making sure the animal was ready for the road. Amaedrianna, however, remained turned inward, catatonic. Dash checked on her, worry written across his face.
Two days later they reached a crossroads. One road bent toward Saigo no Toshi, Hatsu’s home. The other climbed toward a mountain tied up in Hatsu’s past. Hatsu walked in prayer, voice low, and they spent another day on the move before finding a cave defiled with ugly hate. Sacred walls had been smeared with insults. The air stank of sacrilege.
Inside, they found the bodies of guards and families, young and old. Scattered among them were tokens and small belongings, the intimate remnants of lives. Hatsu gathered a handful of ashes they had cremated earlier and poured them with shaking hands into a place where he prayed. He spoke aloud to the Mother of Light, admitting that the goddess did not intervene directly, but asking for guidance all the same. He promised that the slaughtered would rise in their memory, that they would cleanse the place with the fire in their hearts. He held his ancestors’ sword and said this could not be forgiven. He begged the group to stay by his side. He needed them.
They left the cave with a new, iron motivation. Amaedrianna said they should not sneak their way in. Hatsu insisted they bury the dead first. Slate and Hatsu spent long, hard hours digging. Dash moved bodies. It took two more days of labour. Amaedrianna took the time to remove a child’s stone and pin family items into the wall, then mend them into a kind of memorial.
They reached Saigo no Toshi a day later and were greeted by a sight that might have been made to shame the living. The outer walls were draped in bodies, cherry blossoms turned to ash, the grass burned away. From above Amaedrianna watched the city inside, strange and mostly whole beyond the walls. She spotted people she knew: Ironclad, Drel Morrix, and others. Eos shivered at the sight of Drel. Hatsu worried, not for Drel, but for Thrakgar, the man he felt responsible for so much death.
They watched the guarded gates and, seeing the force arrayed there, began to plan. They would not rush in blind. They would do this with intent. The vow to take back Saigo no Toshi settled over them like a cold, steady stone, and they began to turn that stone into a strategy.
