Arc 1: Chapter 33: Unhallowed
“Something’s wrong,” Catrin said, as we approached the village.
I had noticed the same. There were no guards at the gate, and no sentry torches as there’d been the night I’d arrived. The streets of the lakeside community seemed quiet. Empty.
Out over the lake, the black towers of the Falconer castle jutted from a shifting haze of fog, cast in its own eerie glow against the black horizon. A ghost castle, brooding and watchful.
I wondered if the Baron watched us even then.
“Maybe something’s happening at the keep,” I said.
“Or maybe your hunter friends killed everyone,” Catrin suggested, half joking.
I grunted. I didn’t think the doctor was that dangerous, but it paid to be ready for anything.
We approached the village cautiously, but openly. Tiny blue lights flitted around us, illuminating the overcast gloom. They giggled like little bells and chased one another, toying with the frayed hem of my cloak or flitting in and out of my raised hood. They played with Catrin’s hair too, though she swatted at them, half annoyed and half charmed. They’d followed us from Irn Bale’s manor.
“You remind them of the Gilded City,” Irn Bale had said. “They are fickle creatures, but perhaps they will give you some comfort. Remember, Ser Knight, there is beauty in this world still worth fighting for.”
I wish I could believe it.
I glanced a the old church atop its lonely hill. It too lay quiet and dark. Had Olliard and Edgar returned there, tried to take sanctuary on hallowed ground? With two clerics, it could act as a veritable fortress against the Mistwalkers.