Hunger's Bite
Twenty First Day of the Eleventh Month 293 AC
After bidding farewell to the Lord of Oakbarrel, you take stock of your plans for the Riverlands in light of the revelations of the last few hours. The conclusion is clear, whoever or whatever had caused this curse will have to be dealt with swiftly, and even once that is done House Lolliston's circumstances will require a delicate touch to ensure that trade flows again. Thus you dispatch Rina back to the Deep to join with your mother and Ser Kennos of Kayce in assuring the loyalty of House Shawney, House Wayn and House Vypren while you and Ser Richard deal with the likely conjurer. "A familiar task indeed, Ser," you say with a smile.
"At least it's not dockside thugs," he grumbles faintly, though you know him well enough to see the faint twitch of his lips even through the glamor.
Alas, familiar though Ser Richard's company is, the path before you is anything but straightforward. You cannot keep conjuring potential calamities to see how the curse tries to influence them all, and even were orchestrating smaller scale ill fortune to work, you would not try it. These people have suffered too much already from magic they cannot protect themselves against, or indeed even see. There are, however, other creatures than man abroad in Oakbarrel; ants marching in single file though the parched grass, moths congregating at sunset by the light spilling out from the windows, rats skittering in the dark.
Their simple minds are driven almost as easily as cloud and wind. After all, they have to do no more than their nature compels them to any way, gnaw through wood and bite through cloth, dig and tear and tunnel through. Near empty as the granaries might be, they are well on their way to feeding naught but the rats while insects invade homes and reinforce the sense of bubbling unease. The curse is not just about hunger, it is about fear that turns friend against friend and brother against brother, a perverse pattern like a parasite eating away at its host until nothing but an empty husk remains.
In that light, the executions you had stopped take on an even more sinister light, another piece in the mechanism of the village's undoing, another nail in its coffin.
You are not the least bit surprised to find rats in the castle dungeon, but it is far less common to see them boldly dart through patches of torchlight or clamber onto chairs as though searching for something beyond what their small minds can comprehend. After assuring yourself that nothing more than is apparent is watching you through small red eyes, you ask them by spell what they are seeking.
Food... Hungry... pain.
Cautiously, you hold out a pocket pie that was not that far from spoiling from being inside your cloak for the better part of three days. The rat devours it, then far more content to converse, it adds:
Meat... Strange Too-Sweet, Too-Big Meat.
"That settles that," Ser Richard says as the rat leads you to right to the two cells where the grain thieves were imprisoned. There does not seem to be any enchantment on them, nor is any of them veiled in a glamor to make them seem more than they appear, though drawing closer you catch sight of an odd talisman hanging by a bit of rough twine around the necks of one of the men. It looks like a dog's skull in front of a moon... or rather a jackal's skull before the sun eclipsed, the seal of the Horseman of Famine.
Yet you see no more signs of twisting of the flesh or wanderings of the mind now than you had seen this evening under the hangman's noose. Still veiled from sight, you touch the man's mind. Although he is not wholly willing, his mind is sunk enough in the fears and nightmares of the past day for you to find the answers you seek without resistance. He thinks the talisman is a lucky charm, 'Lady Limaes'... a foreign name, but one that does not awaken any suspicion.
How very odd...
What do you do?
[] Confront the likely cultist alone with only Ser Richard.
[] Include Lolliston armsmen, perhaps even the lord himself. What you are likely to find within will go a long way to persuading Lord Luther of the need for your aid.
[] Write in
OOC: I hope the update does not seem rushed, I'm purposefully trying to keep things flowing at a good clip since there's so much else left to do this month. Not yet edited.
