Session 3

Sailing on as fast as the Wavedancer could manage, Rafael stared ahead at the forested shores of Eisen, looking for answers. The only option they had was to head on to the dig site, to try to deal with whatever Father Bernardo had sent.

As they landed at the closest cove to the dig site, the trees loomed, dark even in the noonday sun. Except for a swathe carved out, cut down to create a wide path through the Schwarzwald from the makeshift camp on the beach, empty but for a few long boats beached safely above the high tide. The Eisen sucked in a breath and shook her head. "That's bad news." Alexander nodded, inspecting the traces. "Yes - there's at least twenty of them, with horses and gear... maybe more." "No, not that - the woods. There are rules here. Never leave the path; never light a fire - never cut a tree. If you do, the monsters will come." Rafael paused, glancing at the blackness under the trees, cold in the summer sunlight. "Monsters?"

As they started down the path towards the dig, Ariadne's eyes were focussed on invisible threads, her fingers twitching as she gently tested them, and walked slowly towards the giant Ussuran. Her voice was a hiss in the dark, almost lost in the weirdly-rustling woods. "Your brother is alive; and south of us." Alexander's step didn't slow, his eyes didn't stop from their careful study of the foreign forest, eerily different to his native lands, but he nodded in slow satisfaction. "You shall be our compass, then. We walk the right path."

It was barely an hour later that they reached the dig - heralded by six Eisen holding muskets nervously, pointing into the afternoon gloom and starting at any flickering sunlight through the branches. Rafael stepped forward with his hands open, the polished smile of the Vodacce trader in place. "We're here to help."

As twitchy as they were, it took time and patience to gentle them to coherence – patience that Sebastien didn’t have. Embers of anger flared up, and his sharp threat caused the locals to level their muskets shakily. Rafael flashed a frown at the Castillian before standing straighter and more proud, a captain and commander of men. He barked out orders, and the men stumbled to follow him.

They were guarding an empty campsite around a mine entrance, heavily palisaded with new wooden walls. Most of the explorers, they explained, had set off to the south with a book three days before, the big Ussuran looking after the artifact and an escort of Klippe graduates guarding them. The lone Vesten explorer left in the camp welcomed the party and gestured them to investigate the mine and the diggings deep inside.

They weren’t expecting the room that had been broken into. Eight chairs – thrones, even – stood in a semi-circle around a cauldron large enough to fit a man inside and an empty altar, facing a giant stone door. Each throne held a symbol of a nation of Theah; and the cauldron contained what looked like liquid blackness; shadows that pooled and roiled in the lamplight, absorbing the faint glow of fire.

Something totally happened about the door opening, and things being traded for other things through it, that provoked the strong men of the group to shoulder it closed and shake it from its setting. I am super not sure what it was, though, so someone else can fill this paragraph in and/or tell me about it so I can update my purple prose.

As the door slammed to, the scrape of rock on rock filled the air, and the roof of the room began to sag and collapse. Alexander, the Ussuran, shoved Ariadne clear in the face of her howling protest. Sebastien, frustrated by the delay, danced up to the entrance where Lena waited; and Alexander set his shoulders and caught part of the ceiling. Driven nearly to his knees, he still kept enough space for Euan and Heinrich to manhandle two of the thrones out of the room – the one marked with Avalon’s Graal, and one with the Eisen Drachen. Rafael waited at the door till the point of collapse, holding back to make sure Alexander was able to slide out from under the rubble, and the pair of them raced nearly neck and neck up the passage as the dust of the rockfall filled the air.

Sebastien, casually looting the supplies needed for a journey through the woods from the nearly abandoned camp, looked up sharply at Euan and Heinrich and their giant, heavy stone chairs. “We’re leaving in fifteen minutes. And we’re not taking them with us.” Euan nodded cheerfully. “It’s okay – I know someone who can take at least one…”

The Avalon knight walked a little way away from the palisades, and a couple of minutes later, the air filled with a sense of pressure, a prickling sharpness of the Hunt. The bell of the hounds in full cry, a storm of hooves, and a man on horseback stood where no man had been before. The horse was beautiful, a giant to match its rider, and impossibly clean-limbed; usually only heavy-set shire horses stood this tall. Alexander didn’t even try to stop himself from greeting it, his words soft and foreign and lilting.

Euan and the Sidhe bargained briefly, but the alien creature seemed pleased with the gift to the Queen and the land. The Avalonian-marked throne vanished as the rider wheeled his horse and leapt into nothingness, following a path to a place no human could see. The other throne Lena discussed quickly with the Vesten, who agreed to portage it to Klippe Academy. They’d be there soon enough, after all. Then, almost soon enough to calm Sebastien, they took up supplies and headed deeper into the Schwarzwald.

The traces of ten men walking enough pack horses to supply them were clear to Alexander, and Sebastien and Lena both noted Klippe trail signs along the track. As the woods grew denser, the path wound around, and Alexander, near the head of the trail, grew restive. “We can follow my compass. Why waste time following where they went when we know where they are?” Sebastien’s eyes flashed, and he snapped back, “You follow the rules of the forest as long as reasonable. They went this way.”

The light was fading when they found the abandoned wayhouse in a clearing – and the freshly-dug grave nearby, with a sword as a gravestone. Rafael, searching around the shack, found blood spatters; signs of a fight, recent and deadly. The horses had been watered here, it looked like; and then some disaster had fallen. Sebastien and Alexander frowned at the grave, the memory of the creatures on board ship too close for comfort. “Is he likely to come back?” the Castillian asked Lena. Alexander shrugged, “It’s been days – it would not wait that long.” Sebastien, temper flaring up, snapped back, “These aren’t your woods.” Euan, trying to cheer him up, stomped over and announced, “Come on, not everything is trying to kill us!”

The dirt at their feet stirred, and a grasping hand wrapped itself around Euan’s ankle, neatly proving both Alexander wrong and Euan’s history of bad luck to be still on form… The freshly-dead corpse hauling itself out of the grave with whispers of “Rache; Verräter,” wasn’t the only one to welcome the travellers to this particular clearing; as a volley of ghostly shots rang out. Rafael threw out his hand to intercept one aimed at Ariadne’s head, hissing in pain as it shattered the bones in his palm. She slid close next to him and, in a brief moment of quiet, lifted her veil. His eyes shut instantly, and only the nearly silent gloved slap to his cheek was enough to make him startle as he stared down at her face, eyes black in the darkness. She whispered his name, and brushed a kiss across his lips before he could stop her. She whipped her veil back down and nudged him with the tips of her fingers; and his bullets flew faster and as accurately as fate would allow in the minutes that followed.

In the fracas, the tide of undead appeared to be aiming for the Klippe graduates, wearing their pins proudly – Sebastien’s Aldana-trained dancer reflexes and perfect ripostes blunted their attacks on him. Lena’s heavier, slower broadsword wasn’t nearly as effective as she struggled over to the first enemy. Between everyone else, the first monster was nearly destroyed when she got to it, but a dagger was embedded deep in her thigh. “Brother. You will be revenged.” She swapped their pins, leaving her Klippe symbol in the dirt and taking the murdered man’s in turn, and snapped its neck.

As the slew of ghosts and corpses were laid back into the ground a second time, a prickling chill ran through the warm summer night; and in the darkness of the forest’s edge loomed a shadow blacker than the night around it, with claw-tipped twiggy fingers and faint, cold glimmers of light dancing where eyes might be. “Join me under the trees, intruders…”

They readied themselves, and there was a breath – till someone threw a challenge at the Schattenmann, oldest and darkest of the creatures of the Schwarzwald. There was a pale, cold laugh drifting softly in the night breeze, and dark, heavy shapes of deep-maned wolves appeared out of the darkness, circling around them. A fragile pause, and then they leapt.

Barely moments later, they were whimpering and twitching away, proving no match for Euan and Heinrich’s tag-team of swordsman styles, Alexander’s brute strength, Sebastien’s rapier and Rafael’s rapidly-reloaded pistols. The creature in the trees giggled eerily, and there was a movement which may have been a nod of acknowledgement. “Until later, then.”

The travellers settled down into the wayhouse, barricading the door as best they could and attempting to ready themselves for sleep. It wasn’t long, though, before there were new noises from outside; the slow, shuffling of bare feet, the soft steady pad of strangers pacing towards the temporary haven. Outside, the faces of the dead roamed. An armour-clad Avalonian trod across the summer grass; an Ussuran, familiar to Alexander, stood drained of life; an Eisen woman wore Sebastien’s wedding ring on bony fingers; a boy with Lena’s features called for his parents; and other, stranger, faces lurked in the dark.

“Shadows,” Lena ground out from gritted teeth. “Nothing but dreams and shadows, sent to spook us.” Ariadne’s fingers twitched under their gloves as her fingers tugged on invisible threads. Her veiled murmur reached Lena’s corner in the broken quiet of the night. “The empty armour; that’s real. And the boy-child is tied to you.”

Lena’s head came up from where she was trying to relax, and she stared at the shuttered windows with blank, terrible eyes. Sebastien dropped from his perch to rest beside her, already on edge and ready for violence. “What do you need?” She stood slowly, leaning against the wall to rest her injured leg, strapping on her panzerhand and speaking almost absently, “The – child. In here. Unharmed.”

Sebastien bowed with only a trace of mockery – and more than a touch of pity. Then, with a tap tap tap of the rhythm of the dance, he opened the shutters, vaulted outside, hoisted the death-pale boy through the window to Lena, and started to fight. His blade danced with flashes of fire, reflected from the lantern where Euan opened the front door to greet the animate armour. “Brother Knight…” Euan’s hands were empty, and he spoke in Avalonian. “You vowed to never draw steel on a brother. Your watch is over. Let me take your place.”

Up in the hayloft, Rafael had been trying to rest alone, but the scent of blood was stronger there. The movement below him roused him enough to investigate; and as he raised his light higher, he saw the inimitable patterns of Porte blood spatter, fresh on the boards. The scent reminded him of other days. “Bellac.” The word was a curse as he climbed onto the roof with the easy grace of a sailor, pulling his pistols and spinning slowly in a circle, looking for his prey.

Alexander, armed with a pole that was closer to a pillar, swept through the sea of creatures with the simple vigour of someone well used to reaping and threshing. When most of the creatures were downed, he stared up at the skyline and caught movements in the air; wings flapping like a flock of bats. He scrambled up to the roof with brute efficiency, in time to get showered by a few chiropteran corpses as Rafael shot blindly into the air with freakish success. Then came another boom; this time of a heavy musket, the painfully real bullet hitting Euan in the shoulder. Rafael knew the rules of Porte; he twisted to face directly away from the shot, looking for the muzzle flash and powder smoke and finding it – in the edges of the woods. He dropped to one knee and sighted along his longest-bored gun, as Alexander batted the leathery-winged avians out of the air around him.

Inside the hut, Lena tied the last knot to secure the moving corpse that looked like her brother to a pillar, and blocked her ears to the sound of his voice. She scrubbed at her eyes, rubbing a dark paste across her eyelids, and headed out into the dark with the shadows of ghosts and the invisible lingering in her vision. Euan, catching sight of the same shadow as Rafael, charged across the clearing towards it, as Ariadne slid around the side of the hut to tug on the strings of fate in the dark.

There was a fierce giggle, and the Montaigne, hidden deeper in the forest than the gunman, ripped at reality. As Euan lunged at the silhouette, a portal opened inches in front of the man’s chest – and Ariadne stood pinned to the wooden wall, staring down at a foot of Avalonian steel piercing her chest, her veil hiding her horrified eyes. She dragged her gaze up to the figures in the treeline, and her jaw set in determination – she yanked at something, forcing both of them to loathe and fear any magics, even the ones that saved their lives. Then, as Euan pulled his sword back with a sickening lurch, she slid down the side of the building, leaving a trail of blood, black as her veils in the night.

Rafael sighted into the trees, and a single shot took the man’s face off. It took the Vodacce seconds to leap from the roof to where Ariadne slumped; and his hands almost shook as he felt the heat of her blood on his hands. Her eyes blinked muzzily behind her veils, and she whispered harshly into his ear, “None but my husband touches me. It’s better I die than my purity be -” Rafael’s slap across her face knocked her unconscious, and he abandoned his bandoliers of pistols to rapidly tear his shirt up for bandages.

Euan saw the second man sliding deeper into the trees, and set his jaw. The chill blade he’d taken from the armoured ghost firm in his grasp, the giant Avalonian stepped out of the clearing – and into the Schattenmann’s domain. Lena ground her teeth and started to lumber into a run towards him, wounded leg slowing her. Sebastien grabbed a pair of torches and fired his pistol through them, the sparks catching the pitch and flaring into light. He caught up with her and threw her one of the brands, readying his blade as the pair followed the Avalonian into the dark. Alexander stalked beside them, stepping through the underbrush.

At the hut, Rafael laid the bandaged Ariadne down and put his cloak around the boy wight, who still called for his mother and father. He paused, glancing at the door, then gently removed his rosary from its place and handed it to the child, who clung to it with chilly fingers. Rafael crossed himself, took a breath, and sat down with a wince; his back to a pillar, his face to the door. He loaded pistols one by one, and set them out in front of him. As the silence rose, he began to speak quietly in the dark, waiting for whoever would next come through the door. “Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum…”

The Klippe duo and the Ussuran followed the sounds of a fight in the dark, torches flaming and burning back unnatural shadows. They found Euan dangling from a dark, spindly arm, still struggling to fight the monster in the night. Sebastien hurled his torch, and it spun lazily end over end through the air, to strike at the Schattenmann’s wrist. The flame seemed to dissolve the darkness, and Euan fell with a clatter to the ground. Lena held her torch out and Sebastien took it without looking as she dragged Euan to his feet. Alexander shrugged back his cloak and called out in Ussuran to Matushka. The little mother of a foreign land answered his call, and he began to glow with a brilliant, pearly light. It struck the shadows like the rising of the sun, and as Sebastien lunged with his brand, the Schattenmann faded. In the distance, the scrabbling sounds of the last of their enemies fleeing was audible.

They slowly moved back to the hut; Euan and Heinrich barely supporting each other, Alexander’s eerie light fading. At the door, they found Rafael with two pistols levelled, waiting. The captain pulled them up and away, his bare shoulders slumping with relief. The others staggered inside, and Lena went over to the dead boy who whimpered in the corner. She checked him for a pulse, but even her ghost-wise vision saw nothing left of him alive. He could only repeat his cries for their parents as she untied him gently and cradled him, chill and small in her lap.

Sebastien stepped outside with a looted sword, and started digging in the summer soil. Alexander stood over the brother and sister and looked down with patient sympathy. “Kin-slaying is a great sin; but mercy killing is not. If you need someone else to do this thing, I am here.” Lena didn’t look up, one hand gentling through her brother’s hair and one sliding out a holly wood stake. “I won’t leave this to anyone else. Dieter, schatzie, it’s time to go home.” The Eisen woman took her brother’s body into the horse stall, and firmly shut the door behind her.

From outside, a faint, human whistle was audible in the empty woods, and the cheerful tramp of woodsman feet came up from the path to the south. Sebastien, finished with his gravedigging, stood ready, but the man hailed him easily. “Is there room at the holdfast?” “There could be; but it’s been a long night. Where do you come from?”

Inside, the stranger talked easily of his journey, and mentioned seeing eight men with horses in convoy at Konigsberg, a day’s walk away. One of them, he said, looked a lot like Alexander; and the giant Ussuran looked a little brighter at the statement. They shared food, late at night, and the man wandered to the stall. Lena, finished with her brewing, glowered and took the small bundle of cloak that was all that she knew of her family outside. Sebastien, in the hay loft, glanced down and closed the shutters with a click; enough to let her know that friends were close and the space was hers alone.

The Hexe took the results of her creation and uncovered Dieter’s face from the folds of cloth. Coating her tongue with the poisonous paste, she settled in for her last talk with her brother.

“They came to the house after you left. Men with your badge, they brought papers. Mother told me to run, to hide in the woods; Father went to speak with them. I ran. Lena, can I go home now? Where are they? The man they talked to, he had golden hair and he spoke like he was singing, not proper Eisen. I didn’t see any more, because mutti told me to run and hide. I’ve been in the woods for so long, Lena. Can I see mutti and vater? Did I do well?”

Lena’s voice was hoarse in the silence. “You’ve done so well, Dieter. You’ve been so brave. Go home now. I’ll send mutti and vater on to you soon, I promise. You won’t be alone for long.”

She held vigil that night; and as the pre-dawn greyness touched the edge of the clearing, the Vodacce came out of the hut. Rafael, in a borrowed shirt tight across his shoulders, stood bare-headed by the fresh-dug grave. “The boy should keep the rosary; please. I know it’s not your faith, but I don’t think Theus will mind.” Lena nodded, and the captain slipped the beaded chain around the boy’s neck and gently covered his face to protect him from the dirt.

The two of them knelt to scoop the soft earth over the child, and when they were done, Ariadne, silent behind her veils and not much bigger than the boy they’d buried, let slip a white paper flower onto the grave. The first rays of the sun made it shine like silver.

They turned away from the way station, Sebastien wordlessly handing Lena the bundle he’d packed for her. She blinked rapidly and nodded her thanks without looking at him as they walked on, heading south to Konigsberg and their enemies.