Where the Wild Things Are, Part 2
Story Emits
There are a lot of vague rumors floating around Arx that yet another village has experienced a deadly animal attack, though details, and even location, are incredibly sparse. Alarmists are claiming that, like unfortunate Wealdstone, every man, woman, and child in this new village has been killed, but most feel this is surely exaggeration. Rabid wolves are being blamed, though some have begun talking darkly about how obvious it is that particularly murderous, barbaric shavs must be responsible.
It's only when one takes the time to gather those rumors up, to compare the vague details to each other, and to filter out wild embellishments that something becomes horrifically clear. This wasn't just one village.
It was two.
The evening starts out quiet, but it doesn't stay that way.
A woman, a decorated veteran from the Gyre War, runs screaming into the Hundred Cities Inn shouting on and on about having seen horrific monsters come fom the sea when she fought at Setarco.
One of the King's Own, a valiant man who has served for many a year, takes a sudden tumble down the palace steps and then, when others go to help him up, starts yelling about having fought an enormous demon in front of the palace.
Several members of the Culler family barge into the Murder of Crows with insane, horrifying tales of the dead rising from the Pit and then absurd claims of fighting along-side them to defend the Lowers. One of them runs his head into a wall and the others don't shut up about it even when a table gets thrown and things break out into a fist fight.
Two children wake up with nightmares of a giant flaming demon burning down everything along the Merchant Road.
Wails spring up from the Tragedy about missing orphans.
A Templar swears on his honor that he saw a giant made of corpses attack the Lodge of Petrichor.
A member of the Iron Guard starts screaming about a dragon.
A ranger can't stop babbling about seeing a castle appear out of thin air in the woods.
Three different prodigals, two in the Lowers and one living at the Unkindness, all start talking about some sort of poison in the air killing shamans.
And a small mob forms and storms its way into the graveyard over a short, copper-haired woman making a creepy leatherworker explode...which, when they calm down a little, they all agree actually happened quite a number of years ago and, well, it's a bit silly to be worked up over it now.
It calms down, of course. By the next morning people are laughing about it over breakfast, even if they're baffled as to why so many citizens all decided to have delusions at once. Some of the deluded even laugh a bit and agree they were being silly. But none of them actually forget.