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| Action Id: 4115 | Crisis: | Participants: Silas and Bedivere | |
| Status: Resolved | Submitted: May 14, 2020, 1:42 a.m. | Public: True | GM: Kalakh |
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Action by Silas
Baron Silas Whitehawk leads a contingent of his military force westward (about a quarter of Hawkhold's forces), to where Pella's Wish once stood, for a more thorough combing of the area - in search of missed survivors or clues as to why that village was attacked and where the things that attacked it may be going next. He is not super optimistic that the search will be more fruitful than what the previous report relayed - his scouts are pretty good at what they do - but for his own peace of mind, he's making the effort to see it for himself and make sure. Outside of the ruins themselves, they also trek along the river the footprints disappear into.
His uncle Bedivere remains the general of his forces, and Silas may part from the party to do his own scouting while the larger force is nearby - where they could help him should he run into trouble.
When all's done, they will give whatever corpses remain a proper burial, even if the graves must remain unmarked and unnamed.
Action by Bedivere
As per usual MO, Uncle Lord Bedivere Whitehawk mixes together not only Whitehawk Troops but also fellow Knights of Solace who have worked together during previous missions to back up favorite nephew Baron Silas Whitehawk during his investigative operations.
With experienced decades behind him in strategic formation/positioning, this Marshal of Hawkhold (and War Minister of Whitehawk) will do his utmost best to set up their back up to help out in the best ways (if worst case ever comes).
With his sharp mind and his war wisdom, he charts out attack sites upon an Arvum map to figure out the big picture, hears out Silas's reports, and then ultimately contemplates likely potentials. Unlike Silas who is here to lead, Bedivere is here to read. Can he make sense of this whole mess?
A> Do the attack reports/sites -- also including those publicly known -- possibly show a geographical progression toward a future destination/target? C> Are there any relative cultures/landmarks/names/religions/resources/etc which are being specially targetted? B> What may be the overall agenda/finale, or are all these crazy attacks completely random? D > Anything else of potential note that a smart character might consider and likely know?
Result
It's a very long trek out to Pella's Wish, as the Mother is not close by any stretch of the imagination and the village is in Whitehawk lands more in name than anything else. They paid Hawkhold a meager amount of taxes every year, and that is, more or less, probably the only reason Hawkhold scouts were the first to discover the massacre.
There are rumblings along the way about horrible, cannibalistic shavs, but that particularly theory fizzles when they enter Pella's Wish itself. The carnage is almost beyond description. Doors have been smashed in where the houses and buildings are made of stone, and there are big holes in walls where they aren't. The ground has been torn up. Blood is everywhere. There are giant claw marks on doors, walls, nearby trees, and the bodies have either had massive bites taken out of them, or, where flesh is simply gone, the gouges of very pointed teeth in the bone. Not cannibalistic shavs, the soldiers reluctantly concur. Probably shavs wielding man-eating bears.
They don't find bear tracks though. The reason for the 'particularly sizable wolves' report becomes obvious; where tracks can be made out clearly, they certainly look like wolf tracks. Very...large...wolf tracks. And strange wolf tracks, as sometimes they can only find half a set, as if the wolf they came from just decided to stand right up on its hind legs. The single set of bare human footprints that was reported have nearly entirely faded, but they're found. Rain has cleared out most of the blood, but not ALL of it, as there are traces, and the footprints are much easier to follow once they reach the muddy river bank. A woman's footprints, Silas suspects.They go along the bank for a while, and one of Silas's more talented scouts points out that the footprints don't seem to be from someone who was running, or even walking particularly quickly. There are no signs of dragging that might indicate the owner was slow due to injury, which is what one would EXPECT when following what were bloody footprints. They're deeper than expected too, as if the person who left them was carrying something heavy, which would explain why even in the tall grass the scouts were able to locate them again. And then those footprints merely turn into the water. They don't come out again. It's as though their owner just decided to swim across the river, the extremely wide, wide river, a feat most humans would quell at, let alone while apparently burdened with a heavy load. They eventually find a bridge, and do check the other side, but if the owner of those footprints made it across, they aren't able to pick them up again.
The giant wolf tracks enter the village from east, north, and south, going from what seems to have been a slow walk to an astoundingly fast run. One seems to have leaped about twelve feet when entering. The woman entered as well; from the west, and much more slowly, though her prints are extremely light this time, and the scouts lose them only a short distance into the tall grasses.
As for the bodies, and there are quite a number of bodies, almost all of them have been dragged into what served as the town square, with the exception of the village's two guards, torn to pieces and left to lie where they were killed, their swords drawn but unbloodied. There was no battle here, not even a brief one. The smell is horrific, enough to turn the stomach of even the hardest soldier. The bodies in the town square aren't particularly whole either, there's no real way to count how many there are, only that, by the sheer amount of blood that's soaked into the ground, this is where most of them died. The shavs with man-eating bears theory gets a little more traction; why would man-eating bears drag all the people to one spot before killing them?
Compared to the rest of the buildings, the village's humble shrine is nearly untouched. Its door is nearly, but not completely torn off its hinges, there are only a few claw marks in the doorway. There's blood, but not enough to kill someone; likely the seraph was dragged out to die with the rest, and a very, very thorough inventory of the bodies confirms one is wearing clothing with what used to be the symbol of the Pantheon. But the shrine itself? Any damage is restrained to the main room, where the altars were clearly at least a casual sort of target. There's nothing in the room where the journals, white and black, are kept. Even the door is still locked before they force it open. The black journals might prove more helpful, but these are loaded carefully into a secure chest to be taken back later. The white journals, on the other hand, are fair game and a lot to sift through, which is a task Silas takes on himself while Bedivere and the force they brought see to the bodies.
Burying them in separate plots is impractical, and many of them are so torn up it's impossible to tell which body is which. The journals are all neatly marked with names, but there's no way to match names with faces. When this becomes clear, Bedivere directs the soldiers to dig a single, large pit behind the shrine, where a small graveyard already exists, careful not to disturb any of the already existing graves. When that's done, each body, or piece of a body, is carried gently into the pit, where they're laid out as respectfully as possible. Some of the more thoughtful soldiers even sift through belongings in the houses, choosing anything that doesn't seem particularly important to what's going on, but possibly important to their deceased owners, in order to put them into the mass grave as well (and Bedivere makes damned sure none of the soldiers actually pocket any of these items, or anything else, though it's not difficult, nothing is of particular monetary value).
Silas works his way through the journals, reading each as thoroughly as he can. They're all mundane, the sorts of things one might expect. Harvest season. Petty feuds. Small celebrations, and complaints about the weather. One man never stopped talking about his potatoes, to the point Silas starts wondering if 'potatoes' is an euphemism. He finally finds one journal by a young woman named Albree. Her journal is also entirely mundane, unless someone was looking for anything that might stand out, and Silas is. She talks about dreams a lot. Most of them happy, if not particularly remarkable. Occasionally she remarks about a dream that seems to be very similar to something that later happens. It's never anything big; a good harvest. A friend twisting their ankle. Dancing with someone during a festival.
The last entry about her dreams is different. Albree had a terrible nightmare in which beasts killed everyone else in the village. Everyone...else.
Silas and Bedivere both help to fill in the pit once all the bodies have been interred. A large stone is rolled on top, and there, carefully, are carved the names Silas collected from every journal. Albree's is included. It seems only right.
On the way back to Hawkhold, Bedivere goes over maps. Charts. Theories. It's easy enough to conclude that the village was surrounded before the attack began, a beast to the south, the west, and the north all at once, a three pronged attack that prevented anyone from escaping. And there were definitely at least three of them; he found three sets of tracks also leading down to the river about a mile away from where the woman appears to have crossed, and these, too, seem to have crossed. But why was it attacked? What was the purpose? He finds no pattern to the attacks they know about. Timing, though...there were attacks near Farhaven. A few days later, the strange livestock destruction near the Cloudspine. Right after the battle at Artshall, possibly within a day, Wealdstone was hit near Blancbier. Then Pella's Wish in the Crownlands, and Crossroads back up in the Northlands, at possibly the exact same time.
There's no possible way that all of these attacks have been carried out by the same group. It's even questionable whether or not the attack on Crossroads could have been carried out by the same one that hit Blancbier; whatever they are, they move fast, but not nearly THAT fast. There must be at least three; one that hit near Farhaven, and then later hit Crossroads. One that seems to have passed through the Cloudspine, and then hit Wealdstone. And then the one that hit Pella's Watch. But why? There are hundreds of villages in those vast swathes of territory that, so far, have gone untouched. Nothing further south in the Crownlands has been hit, though the things do appear to have crossed the Mother, and Bedivere finds that ominous. But why? What's the reason for any of this?
All they have is Albree's journal.