Sagehold
Embraced by the unwelcoming shadow of the building, she felt safe. Leaving home at night always stoked a sense of excitement and anxiety in her writhing core, only this time it had been locked away beneath layers and layers of practiced composure. Tonight, she had a job to do.
As she strode around the corner of the facade, the crumbling architecture blurred by the unconscionable brightness of the moon. Maybe it was another unintended side effect of her studies - the dull headache still hadn’t gone. A solemn line of lamps married to waterlogged posts stretched down the cobbled path, only to be consumed by the quiet mists of Stormsong Valley. She knew what she was looking for.
Tearing her vision from the road that seemed to huddle in upon itself to escape the darkness, she peered further into the center of the town. In the day, it would have been bustling. Now, it looked like a halfway finished nativity scene - squat, near-empty warehouses whose bowels had been evacuated all over the courtyard loomed on the far end, while quietly sleeping townhouses flanked her peripherals. Stacks on stacks of wooden planks, covered in sailcloth and marked lazily with chalk dotted the untread stone around an old fountain.
With the unmentioned grace of extensive forethought, the disciple’s legs carried her over to the fountain. Then, after a short pause, to the lavish door of a townhouse. A poster flapped in the slight breeze, pinned to the door by a nail. What it said, she hardly even registered. To read was a conscious effort.
Through the open door was a collection of scruffy looking dockworkers, townspeople and even a few affluent visitors who deigned to mingle with the commonfolk - not more than ten with all heads counted. In an instant, she knew something was amiss. Firstly, only one of the two faces she was looking for was in attendance. Secondly, she was standing in the open doorway like an idiot - possibly for much too long - and had halted the ongoing conversation in the room.
Wrenched back to reality as if by social pressure alone, she mustered a short smile. “Terribly sorry to interrupt. Please continue.” She sidled off into a corner of the antique room, flush with expensive furniture whose beauty had either grown or depreciated with age. She could not tell.
After a headcount, it came to seven. Five men and two women. The one she had been looking for, with his aquiline face, swept back hair and rigid posture, always seemed a bit too judging. It was easy to pick him out in a crowd by his height and frankly disappointing physical presence.
They were discussing something that flew completely over her head. Her attention came and went like waves.
“–The tally comes just short of last year’s–”
“–We’ve counted seven times–”
“–Where, by the Tide, could they possibly be going?”
She could never resist a mystery. It was curiosity that had gotten her into all of her worst situations, and yet she kept crawling back for more. But not tonight. Tonight, her focus was on that toothpick of a man lingering in the corner of the room, observing the discussion with a watchful eye. Finally, he spoke up.
“Ladies and gentlemen, would it be so absurd to suggest that there was simply a mistake somewhere in this year’s documents? Not everything need be a mystery - perhaps they simply chose someplace else to move.” He suggested, softly enough that the only gentlemanly response was an irritated, incredulous stare.
Thanks to the pages and pages of homework she had done, she hardly needed to listen. She only needed to know where his partner was, and she was alone in her head. There was only silence from the bird.
“These are living people, Becker. We can’t just write it off like we’d excuse some missing stock every now and then – and to make matters worse, the number has been climbing for months.” One of the men responded.
“Mr. Fields,” the ratlike man she now knew to somewhere be named ‘Becker’ began, with a hint of condescension like he was talking to a child. “In the wake of all these adventures and free companies, it has become an increasingly common occurrence for people to simply uproot themselves and wander elsewhere in search of glory. People aren’t going missing, they are leaving.”
It was with thinly veiled disbelief that his proposition was greeted, though he still smiled and nodded. “Consider my angle for once, and maybe you’ll reach a sensible conclusion within the next myriad.” He suggested, before ever so politely making for the door.
She followed, and everyone noticed. As soon as she had crested the door on her way after him, he was gone. But it would not be that easy to elude her. As if on cue, the squawking, gnashing and rumbling bounced around in her brain, somehow effortlessly strung into exacts. West road. Fast.
It took her legs no more than a second to begin carrying her with urgency past the townhouses and down to the left, chasing down the cobbled path like her life depended on it. She caught a flicker of his shadow cast by a lantern as he retreated into the alcove between two warehouses, and she pursued without thinking.
A single step past the threshold between the warehouses coaxed bile from the depths of her stomach, rising threateningly in her throat. The weaselly little man had stopped in his tracks, keeled over with the support of the wall as if he, too, were feeling the creeping urge to vomit.
The glistening filth that decorated the ground nearly betrayed that he already had – with the only caveat being that it glistened just a little too much to be simple ejecta. Their eyes met in the darkness, and there was no question of it.
It was a quiet exchange between two who knew they were about to die.
