Chapter 38 #3
Garrett nodded, motioning at claw marks up on the wall. “Those are five feet high. The blood around them is likely Kern’s. He jumped to get away, and the monster jumped as well, severing him in two while carving marks into the stone beyond.”
Monster. That was how all the marks looked. Luna told him she was an ex-werewolf. He only had her word for it, though. He closed his eyes, thinking. Luna showed absolutely no sign of lycanthropy, as far as he could guess what those signs should have been.
She wore silver jewelry. She didn’t react to the full moon. She had no hair on herself from the neck down.
Again, a circumstantial idea, unfounded in reality. He sighed.
Garrett, meanwhile, stopped by a headless body. “Look at this one. The head looks bitten off. There are clear marks of massive teeth on the stump.”
He walked to him and looked. Indeed. Even he could see the pattern on the edge of the wound. “This isn’t a small man.”
“To bite off a head requires jaws and a mouth large enough. How did something that big get in?”
“Or out.” Alsen closed his eyes, releasing a detailed scan. He focused on the blood. He matched whatever blood he found with a body, pairing them together. In a moment, he had all pairings. “There isn’t a drop of blood here that wouldn’t be from a present corpse. Not one.”
“How did something do this without getting hit… what about outside?”
They headed out.
On the way, Alsen recognized one corpse as Maggie. She wasn’t even an adventurer. She came to open the guild and to serve some beer. She died as collateral damage.
Outside, Alsen breathed in the fresher air, his stomach still turning, and fired another scan. The entrance had a few marks of blood, as did the guard shoes, his, and Garrett’s.
But nothing beyond the immediate perimeter. “There isn’t a drop of blood anywhere outside of our and the guard’s shoes.”
He spotted Luna. She approached on the path, eating the last bits of the sausage she must have bought on the way here. She waved for a greeting.
They didn’t wave back.
“So,” Luna said as she got to them, swallowing the last bits. “What happened?”
Alsen motioned with his head to the guild.
She walked in.
He observed her, careful to see every detail. Luna stopped two steps after the door. She froze for a second.
Then, she spun, rushed outside, and hurled on the pile of vomit.
Garrett stepped to her to hold her hair, so she didn’t vomit on them. Alsen observed.
The expelled half-chewed pieces of the sausage she had just finished eating, and then a mixture of stomach fluids and grilled meat of various levels of decomposition. She really didn’t chew much.
Luna retched for a bit, her stomach having nothing left to offer to the pile. “Thanks,” she finally uttered.
Garrett let go of her hair, stepping aside. “I have also contributed to the pile.”
Luna looked at Garrett. Genuine pity washed over her face, filled up with sorrow. “I’m sorry about Theron.”
He nodded. “And Marena.”
“Oh, sorry… and everyone else, too.”
She didn’t mention Arleria, but Alsen knew she meant her. And she sounded genuinely sorry, on top of that. He appreciated the thought. “We have mostly examined the scene. We found no method of entry or exit for whatever being caused this massacre.”
Luna shrugged. “It could have been summoned. A mage walked in, summoned a monster, it killed everyone, he unsummoned it, and left.”
That idea hadn’t crossed Alsen’s mind. But he did spot the summoner class on the system skill tree, even with three specializations.
Unlikely, but it was a possibility. “Why were they here, though? The guild closes a few hours after sunset. This must have happened much later to be discovered only by the morning.”
Garrett’s jaw tightened. He reached into a pouch at his belt and pulled out a folded piece of parchment. He held it for a moment, then handed it to Alsen. “Because of this note. I saw quite a few of them circulating around the inns.”
Alsen unfolded it. The message read: ‘Harbinger tonight. In the guild at midnight.’
The time fit.
“What’s the Harbinger?” Alsen asked. “Who gave it to you?”
“Theron gave it to me,” Garrett said. “Yesterday evening. He said it had been passed around. Everyone was talking about it. A meeting at the guild at midnight, to deal with the harbinger.” He sighed. “They thought the harbinger was you.”
“Ehm… what?”
“There’s an old legend that dates to before the draconic age.
In short, it says that if the religions of the gods get destroyed, they shall one day send a harbinger to avenge them.
It’s nonsensical, idiotic, and a massive overreaction, but after the explosion above the mountain, everyone started thinking you were the harbinger for some reason.
I told Theron that we should just talk to you and clear it up. ” He paused. “He went anyway.”
Him? What? Alsen froze. They gathered to go after him? He hadn’t the faintest idea.
Well, obviously, as he would be the last person to find out by the very nature of the thing. His spell at the mountain inspired so much fear it sprang an ancient legend to life.
In a way, this all happened because of him.
Worse. Arleria came… fuck.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Last night, after they made out, Arleria had suggested she wanted to do more. Alsen ignored her. He went to dreamwalk instead. Had he not done that—had he postponed the Pellicle visit for another evening—she would have spent the evening with him.
She would never have come here. She would have been safe.
Alsen’s world spun. He stumbled a few steps, landing on his ass by a tree.
Fuck.
For a moment, Alsen looked like he had been switched off. Sagged against a tree, motionless, empty gaze aimed upward.
Luna sat down next to him. “You all right?”
“No...” he whispered, eyes watering. “They came here because of me.” His voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. Flat, disconnected, the words falling out of his mouth without his permission. “The harbinger thing. They came to deal with me. All of them.”
Luna said nothing.
“Arleria came here because I was too busy messing around with magic.” His throat closed on the last word. “She came here because I ignored her.”
“She might not have come to fight you.” Luna’s voice was quiet, even a little soft. “She cared about you, in a way. She might have come here because she found out the rest of them were going after you and wanted to stop them.”
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t verify that. Nobody could. But it sounded plausible, and the possible rightness of it made everything worse, because it meant Arleria had died trying to save him from a threat that never came.
The tears started without his permission. Not in a quiet, controlled way. The ugly way, with sounds he didn’t want to make, hitching breaths and a tightness in his chest that felt like something structural failing. He pressed his palms against his eyes, as if that could stop anything.
Luna put her arm over his shoulders, and let it happen.
He didn’t know how long it lasted. Long enough for his breathing to turn into hiccups, and then into a raw, scraped silence that hurt worse than the crying.
“I should have been here,” he said.
“Then you’d be dead too.”
He turned to look at her. Her expression held plenty of comfort, warmth, but also the coldness of the truth.
He would have been dead. He was strong, much stronger than most of the people in there, but the gap in power the monster showed was unlike anything he had seen.
With a messed up arm, without a plan, half-drugged on the residue of last night’s Pellicle herbs, he might indeed have died.
“They were still conspiring against you,” Luna continued. “They’d made their decision. It’s not your fault it wasn’t good.” She paused, picking a blade of grass from the ground. “That they didn’t ask you about it is their problem.”
He closed his eyes. He started the rumor.
But it was just a rumor. Nobody had to act on it. Nobody should have.
He exhaled. His chest still ached, but the worst of the pressure had broken. The grief remained, heavy and slow, but it had stopped actively crushing him. He wiped his face with his right hand. His left arm throbbed in its healing state, reminding him that everything still hurt.
“We’re going to find whoever did this,” Luna said. “I promise you that.”
He nodded.
She got up. “And we need to catch a meal. My breakfast didn’t last much.”
He almost laughed. It came out as a cracked exhale that could have been either a laugh or another sob. He got up.
Garrett stood where they’d left him. He leaned against the guild hall’s wall, examining his dagger. He slid it back into its sheath when they got up. He glanced toward the pathway to the guild. “We’ve got company.”
The sound of boots on cobblestone reached them from outside. A unit of guardsmen walked toward the guild, led by a man with gold-decorated pauldrons.
The guardsmen mostly carried stretchers and tools.
“Captain Renauld,” Garrett said, failing to form a smile.
Renauld stopped before the guild. “It’s good to see you alive.” He glanced at Alsen. “And you are Alsen, I suppose.”
“That I am.”
Renauld nodded. “My people are going to clean this up. We’ll do what we can for the bodies. Funerals will need organizing, and someone will need to notify families, where they exist. In the meantime, I’d like to hear what you two have found.”
Garrett provided a summary. Clean, efficient, stripped of emotion. He included the harbinger note context.
Alsen added the findings from his scans, no blood outside the hall, no clear entry or exit point for the killer, no magical residue that couldn’t be matched to a person inside.
Renauld listened without interrupting. When they finished, he folded his arms. “I’ve heard about the harbinger notes. My people found copies at three different inns.”
“You knew about the gathering?” Alsen asked.
“Adventurers can meet whenever they will.” He paused, his expression shifting into something uncomfortable. “I should mention, in the interest of honesty, that your alibi is already confirmed.”