The threat level of the city decreased over the following week. No new instances of demonic incursion appeared. That included both infected coming toward the walls and newly infected individuals within the city itself. Fela made frequent rounds to confirm that nothing strange was going on even in the far corners of the city. No giant pits had formed in the swamp or anywhere leading toward Owlcroft, at least not as far as Alyssa was aware. That was despite the massive amount of pentagrams accompanying every deceased corpse. Irulon speculated that the Astral Authority had closed off the pit permanently, but also commented that something else might be needed to activate a formation of a pit.

Such a thing had only happened once in the history of this world. That one occurrence was over at Owlcroft and it had only happened a twenty or so years ago. Recently enough that Tzheitza and the Taker had been in their primes. Although the pit itself had been studied in its early days, its formation was a largely unknown event, mostly due to all the people in the area being dead or infected at the time. The suspicion that the formation occurred because of the pentagrams came about after investigations by the Observatorium found heavy similarities in some kind of magical nonsense that Irulon hadn’t fully explained.

Part of the problem in researching the pit was that no one actually wanted to go near it. A side effect of its aura of oppression combined with the large amount of infected wandering the area. Visits to the pit were often aborted part way. Only a few brave researchers ever made it all the way there, and there were often casualties among their guards. Apparently, the massive amount of infected climbing their way out of the pit that Alyssa had encountered was highly abnormal. Even without that, the presence of infected and the loss of life in such research excursions had actually caused the guild to reject most every request involving the whole area of Owlcroft. A policy that had further hampered research.

It really made Alyssa wonder what really had happened to that gaunt. It was supposed to have been dumped in the pit. She wondered if that had been some kind of joke or euphemism, or if Decorous had ordered it not knowing that his men would likely abandon the gaunt out in the middle of nowhere—which was what had probably happened. According to Martin, no caravan from Lyria had passed through with any gaunt, meaning that it had never even reached this city.

It probably wasn’t a problem. As long as the guards had dumped it far enough away from the city, anyway. With as slow as the gaunt moved, carrying it two weeks out from the city might take it a year to return. Assuming it started heading back immediately and didn’t simply fall into hibernation as Irulon said they were supposed to do.

Though that wasn’t here or there. What was here was a whole bunch of nothing.

“Find anything yet?”

“I don’t smell anything out here,” Fela said, sniffing at the air a few times. “I mean, yes, there are traces of humans, but we’re still close to the human village. Humans come and go all the time.”

“No smell of camps or food?” Alyssa asked, looking around the relatively flat plain to the far east of Illuna. Fezzik and Rokien had mentioned feeling watched quite a while ago, but between all the infected cleanup and the Astral Authority, Alyssa was only now getting around to actually investigating their worries.

The night before, she had spent a good several hours up on the eastern wall, just watching in the distance for any lights that might have been campfires in the distance. She hadn’t spotted any. And, thinking about it, she wasn’t sure that she should have expected any. She wasn’t calling Rokien or Fezzik liars. Far from it. It was just that their entire camp had recently been on the run from unknown pursuers. They were bound to be a little on edge even after a good few weeks in relative safety.

More than that, if there had been watchers, they would have needed food and supplies. Maybe they had several weeks worth of food on them, but knowing the preservation techniques in this world were lacking, Alyssa doubted that they could possibly have gone without resupplying throughout all the time chasing the monsters and then the few weeks of watching them. It made more sense for them to enter the city, maybe even disguising themselves as merchants, and keep up their observations from a point of relative safety and comfort.

“It’s hard,” Fela said, rubbing the back of her paw against her nose. “My sense of smell is all mucked up from that.”

“Oh…” Alyssa grimaced.

That.

The bodies of the infected had to be dealt with somehow. Nobody wanted to simply bury them in the ground and leave them to fester. A large pit had been magically dug far north of Illuna, well away from the city. All the body collectors who went around grabbing the marked deceased carried the bodies all the way up there. For the last three days, there had been a thin haze wafting over the city.

A cloud of incinerated infected.

Alyssa hadn’t been up to the actual burn pit and she had no desire to get near. The black plume on the horizon was disturbing enough just to look at. It thinned out to the point where she couldn’t really see it very well around the actual city, but there had been a faint smell. On its own, the smell wasn’t that bad. The real horror came from knowing where that smell and that smog had come from.

She did not want to know how much dead body dust she had breathed in.

Though it couldn’t have been as bad as what she had breathed in after dealing with the Justice. Luckily, most of that had been plant life. Wood, predominantly. Probably plenty of insects as well. Still, relatively little people… or things that used to be people.

“Well, we’ve done our best, I think. Unless you’ve noticed anything, Izsha?”

The draken sniffed, snorted, and shook its head. Alyssa took that as a no with a small addendum that the air quality was messing with its senses as well. Giving a few comforting pats on Izsha’s side, Alyssa looked back toward the city. They were quite a distance out, though they had been traveling for a lot longer than it would have taken to get here had they moved in a straight line. There was just too much ground to search. Even moving in a wide arc, zig-zagging the entire way while looking for traces of a camp, hadn’t helped them find anything.

If people were out here, they could easily have spotted the large draken and taken cover. They might even be able to use invisibility spells if any were arcanists. Just in case, Alyssa had used the soul observation spell. The same one that showed off Irulon as a dragon. It wasn’t as good as being able to close her eyes and see every soul around, but it was a close second. More importantly, she had been hoping that it would let her detect invisible people by way of seeing their soul.

Either it didn’t work or no one was out here.

“Let’s head back for now,” she said with a light sigh. Finding nothing would probably be a whole lot less reassuring to the monsters than finding something simply because the absence of observers wasn’t proof that there weren’t any. Still, overall, finding nothing might be for the best. Less to worry about that way.

Fela, still rubbing at her nose, gave a light nod of agreement as she climbed back onto Dasca’s back. The way she actually climbed rather than hopped or pounced was just evidence toward how much the bad air was affecting her.

As far as Alyssa understood the situation, the vast majority of the bodies in the immediate vicinity of Illuna had been collected and delivered already, so hopefully the smoke would blow over sooner rather than later. The first expedition had just left to go further into the forest. Two more were scheduled for tomorrow morning, both of which would start circling the affected area in opposite directions. They would not be dragging the bodies all the way back to Illuna, but rather gathering them up over the course of the day and burning them all at once.

She did not envy them in the slightest. Not only were they off on a long and slow march to find corpses, but they had to drag them and then burn them in close proximity? No thanks. No thank you.

“Wait,” Fela said, ears swiveling. Her head followed their swivel a moment after.

Alyssa tried to listen, figuring she had heard something. But her own ears couldn’t detect a sound aside from a gentle rustling of the sagebrush, grass, and scattered trees in the gentle breeze. Neither did she see anything in the direction that Fela was looking.

But apparently the draken did. Both Izsha and Dasca perked up, turning to face the same direction.

“What is it?”

“Don’t know. A noise. Not a natural noise either. It stopped though.”

“How unnatural are we talking? Like Astral Authority levels of unnatural or just a wagon wheel grinding against the ground?”

“I don’t think it was a wagon.”

“But it was closer to a wagon than the Astral Authority, right?”

“I guess?”

Alyssa stared off into the distance, not sure if she should be feeling relieved or not. The Astral Authority would have been bad, but they probably would have ignored them. The same might not apply to some random mortals of any type that were wandering around. “We’ll check it out, but let’s take care. If someone in the distance was setting up a weapon or a trap, we don’t want to run afoul of it.”

As soon as she finished speaking, the draken took off. Alyssa wasn’t sure how good their hearing was in comparison to Fela’s, but they had clearly noticed something that Alyssa had missed. Given that Fela hadn’t told them to slow down, whatever she had heard must have been a good distance away.

The draken only ran for a minute. Maybe not even that much. They came up to a small hill with a single tree on top. It wasn’t a very tall hill, but it was quite wide in diameter, if somewhat lopsided in shape. The slope was much steeper on the further visible side than what was closest to them, but the draken didn’t seem to care. Their charge slowed as they ran up the slope.

“It might have been further out,” Fela said. “But it was somewhere in this direction. Maybe…” Her voice trailed off as they crested the top of the hill.

Alyssa drew her pistol and spell cards upon seeing the other side, both down and pointed away from her friends. She flicked the safety off.

Bodies were strewn about. Humans, but it was hard to tell how many. Most were torn apart. Some looked completely crushed, flattened as if they had been run over by a road roller. It was similar to the scene of the plague house she had entered with the Pharaoh, except done in an open area. Two horses had clearly been mutilated as well, though not quite to the same degree as the human bodies. Her first thought was that a demon or infected had happened across this group, given its similarities to the plague houses. But no matter where she looked, she couldn’t find any mostly intact body that might have been an infected. Nor could she find any pentagrams, true demon created ones or otherwise. At the plague house, the infected there had laid out the body in a pentagram pattern.

A wild animal then? Perhaps a monster? If it was the latter, it wouldn’t have been one from the camp. This was quite a distance away and the human guards would surely have noticed and reported some monster wandering off and returning covered in blood.

And whoever did this had to have been covered in blood afterwords.

“What kind of noise did you hear here?” Alyssa asked, voice a terse whisper. Although she couldn’t spot a threat, something about the area made her tense. The bodies, probably. Seeing a bunch of inexplicably dead people would make anyone tense. For that matter, seeing a bunch of explicably dead people would make someone nervous if they came across them unexpectedly.

Fela didn’t answer immediately. She looked left to right, ears swiveling around and around as she turned her head. The draken were alert as well, taking their time in prowling around as they searched for any threats. Alyssa felt far more at ease than she otherwise would have been just knowing that she had three dependable allies to count on should anything go wrong.

“Still not sure,” Fela said softly after a long few moments of looking around. “Seeing this adds a little context, but not much… Maybe a knife against rock? Or a hardened claw. Not striking it, but scraping against it. It was just a sharp, high pitched noise that made me wince a bit.”

Like nails on a chalkboard. Alyssa frowned, looking around. The bodies were recent, but not five minutes ago recent. The blood and gore had the time to dry, but carrion feeders had yet to move in and start feasting on the corpses. Whatever had done this was probably long gone unless it had been injured. “There might be a survivor,” she said, looking a little closer at the bodies, trying to spot one that wasn’t quite as mutilated as the others. “Don’t spread out too far, but let’s split up a little. Just enough to search this area a little better. Keep each other in sight. Shout if you spot anything. And I mean anything. I don’t care if it is your long lost draken sibling or a little green man from Mars.”

“Mars?”

“It’s a… never mind,” Alyssa said with a shake of her head. “Izsha, let’s head around and see if there are any tracks. Either from survivors that might have been dragging themselves away or maybe whatever did this in the first place. Fela, stick with Dasca. Prowl through here and see if you spot anything that might be a clue. But try to avoid disturbing the bodies as much as possible. Don’t touch them, don’t step on them.”

Orders given, Alyssa sent off two quick Message spells. One to Irulon then one to Brakkt, just in case the princess decided not to inform her brother of what Alyssa had found. Brakkt was out on the western side of the city, making rounds and keeping up observation of the area even though there wasn’t much to observe. Irulon was still sketching out some grand plan and would probably resent being interrupted, but if she could think up any monsters or creatures that might have caused this massacre, Alyssa would welcome a response.

As soon as she finished sending Messages to the two, Alyssa called out. “Is anyone here? Anyone alive?”

It might not have been the wisest idea to shout for people, but Alyssa was relatively confident that she would be able to Spectral Chains anything that might try to attack her. When even angels couldn’t escape—except for Tenebrael—Alyssa wasn’t too worried about some mortal creature. Of course, she did have to be wary about a creature too large. Something as big as the Justice, or even Rokien and Fezzik for that matter, would turn her chains against her.

Still, she had a few more volatile backup plans for anything that couldn’t be chained.

“Anyone?” Alyssa shouted again, scanning the ground. There were obvious footprints pressed into the dirt. With probably ten people—though she still hadn’t been able to accurately count the bodies—they went this way and that while walking around the area. Some looked like they might have been trying to either retreat or attack, a guess mostly based on the heavier presses at the heels and scraping trails from side to side, but that could just be Alyssa’s own imagination coloring in what was otherwise just a trail leading from their camp to their latrine. Had Irulon been present, the princess would surely have been able to reconstruct the entire scene simply from a glance.

Alyssa didn’t even have a Retrograde Cognition spell to use… not that she would really want to use that spell at the moment. Retrograde Cognition left the user vulnerable for an extended period of time. Fela and the draken might protect her from most everything, but if something outlandish happened, like Adrael escaping from her prison and attacking, they would not be able to react at all.

A wheeze from a large bush made Izsha stop. Alyssa held her breath, straining her ears to hear as it started again. A low squeak of a breath of air, accompanied by a faint groan. There was definitely someone there. Or something.

Following her own rule, Alyssa immediately shouted for Fela as she directed Izsha to approach.

The bush was a yellow-brown thing filled with hundreds of thin grass-like strands, reaching up to about Alyssa’s shoulders had she been standing on the ground. She had seen several similar plants around the swamp, so it was probably the same type. This one lacked the luscious green coloration though. Probably a result of the lack of sufficient water up here. Because of its yellow-brown coloration, Alyssa could easily spot a pair of black boots sticking out from one side.

Rounding the bush, Alyssa saw the body in its entirety. An older man, bearded and clothed in torn scraps, lay on top of the bush in just such a way that looked as if he had been thrown on top. One arm was visibly broken and blood leaked from large gashes in the holes of his clothes. But he was breathing. He had a knife held limply in his hand, arm stretched to try to reach the dirt. It looked like he had been trying to carve some words into the ground, but hadn’t made it very far before passing out. The stiff branches of the bush didn’t help his knife-work. Between his sunburnt skin, gaunt cheeks, and dehydrated lips, he must have been lying there for a while. He might have woken up just long enough to try to write something before he passed out again.

That must have been what Fela had heard.

“Don’t worry. We’ll get you to the city. You’ll be fine. Fractal Lock will keep you safe until we can get you medical attention,” Alyssa said, not knowing if the man could hear her at all.