8 - 3 [Magus] Dance the Danse Macabre with The Godlings of the Pale River The Red Sparrow - 16th of Last Frost, Year 1125 A.E.

The band crept forth, their ears strained and twitching with every crunch of dry leaf under heel. Winter came slow to Kedweni land this sothron, and so there was a thin coating of detritus no matter where one stepped.

Almost as if it were the reaping season rather than the month of Last Frost proper, their steps made like the crackling of hoarfrost and thin rime.

Unavoidable, but not so noticeable, most oft. Bandits loved making feast and dance and song, deafening themselves to most sounds—and if they did hear? The blackhearts would probably think it was one of their own taking a piss, not naked steel ready to slit their throats and gut them like the beasts they were.

A few tense scoutings of the outside walls and then crumbled courtyard left Deoch shaken to the bone. He had seen the work of bandits before, of men that cared only for their base wants and needs. That made merry with the pain and suffering of others.

This was so much worse.

Men stricken upon stakes of wood, offal strung about, guts hung like ornaments. Bodies charred to the bone and gristle; tongues ripped from their moorings and bloated from the mouth like overripe fruit; ribs cracked open to show what lay beneath.

A feast befitting the Nine Hells had taken place here. One that the former occupants had not partaken of willingly. One that made the crows take a wide berth to avoid.

Gods Above, Below and In-Between, Deoch swore that even the roving bands of necrophages that plagued battle-fields—corpse-eating monsters—would not break their vile fast upon this place.

They were played with like… like puppets, strung up on the strings of their own guts.

Deoch found himself almost unwitting to look away from a particularly grisly sight. A man, strangled by his entrails was eyeless, looking into the middle-distance with hollow sockets. He hung from the stone of the Keep like meat at a butcher’s shop.

The corpse’s clothes were a mismatch of differing cloth sewn together, a black hat atop his head—strange that particular piece of apparel was, its richly dyed leather almost overflowing with the hue of Erebeian night. The man had probably taken it from some runaway lordling.

The bandit’s lips were parted with the kiss of a knife, a jagged and false grin as mad as a Highland hatter carved into his cheeks while still alive. The way blood dried around the wounds showed it was done when he yet drew breath.

Seven forfend, muttered Deoch silently as his hands made a cross of Oriath over his body; a warding gesture of the Sevenfold Faith.

With a shiver and a shake hard enough to make him dizzy, Deoch set about looking through the less… toyed with bodies.

Ethelden and Rodrick came to Deoch as he turned around a grey-haired body. The Red Sparrow let out a grunt equal parts worry and relief; not him.

The two woodsman strung out sentences in a handsign the band itself had wrought. That both Deoch and Stregor had devised through the years and long, sleepless nights. Together.

Signed Ethelden, his face a thing of hard lines and brow knit like thick sailor’s lashings. The lad was Stregor’s son-found, having been picked up as a pup in one of the many hovels of towns in the Kedweni Northwest.

Rodrick signed with shaky hands, his eyes wide and horror-struck—quite the expression he had plastered on his face given all of the band had it in some semblance. The problem lay that this was more, enough so to stand out amongst the general unease of the men and women of the Red Sparrows.

Rodrick turned and trodded forth just as he finished signing, not waiting a lick for confirmation that any would give chase.

Deoch followed after, unwilling to enter the Keep proper without having scouted the outside thoroughly. Whether for caution or simple delay, he was not sure.

This place felt wrong. Like a lute string untuned or the taste of weeks-old bread, there was a wrongness here that made Deoch’s hairs bristle and his neck itch.

A word flitted unseen at the edges of Deoch’s mind, an elf tying his tongue as he tried to recall.

What did that bard back in Sunforst call it? Dissident? No, dissiodant?

Deoch let out a breath of air like the draw of a bowstring, slow and steady as he found the word proper.

Dissonant.

To the westward side of the battlements, where the Keep walls fell to cobbles unworthy of the name, was something that should not be.

Upon the bare ground, bones and sinew, tendon and muscle, made a fetish circle of some dark and wretched godling. Strange and eld markings the color of moonless night, as if they were burnt into being, lay around the circle of viscera and corprus.

A skull, clear as snow and without any blood to mar its ivory, was placed in the middle of the macabre working stuck upon a wooden pole. Atop its temple was the likeness of a five-sided star, upside down with its tip to the nose and bi-pointed base to the sky—a common symbol, the inverted pentacle was, for witchcraft along the King’s Road.

The pentacle was done with a stitching of hair, well-oiled and long strands of a woman that had once taken good care of her locks. The sheer strength to pierce bone cleanly, or perhaps expertise, was unnerving.

No common seamster’s needle could do so to bone with such precision. Especially not with the quality of iron having fallen so low in the past decade with most of the good stuff being commandeered for the war efforts.

The warlock that had wrought all of this possessed skill and practice and proper tools to ply their trade most foul.

Huh, so this is why there’re no crows. No beasts of carrion, no flesh-eaters.

This is some warlock’s nine-damned scarecrow.

Deoch noticed movement at the edges of his vision, looking around to see a good quarter of his band creeping toward the macabre working.

A good few breaths passed as they simply watched, transfixed in horror at the terrible thing. Some close-by on their haunches and others standing farther away, hands to their agape mouths.

It was one thing to kill, for all of them here were killers. It was another to toy with the remains of men with such lack of piety. And so, they lay there, looking.

One Sparrow, in particular, caught Deoch’s attention.

A lad, the name Barry, was crouched near the witching circle. His fingers quested outwards to touch the fetish, almost unconsciously so, for his eyes looked somewhere not here.

Somewhere so very far away.

Deoch grabbed the lad’s wayward fingers before he could touch upon the eld symbols in black and damn himself to the Nine.

Deoch’s sign was straight to the point and aggressively short to convey the importance of the meaning bound therein.

The lad’s head shook awake, his eyes coming back to the here and now. He gulped a breath and nodded, seeming to have gathered his wits.

Barry stood up and walked backwards and away, the fetish circle not leaving his vision as if it would move should he not pin it with the spear of his sight.

Deoch would not begrudge such a response, for even he did not let the nine-damned thing out of his eyes either.

Those markings, the blackened things that seemed to writhe in the hollow dark when he closed his eyes, were like bad stars in the night—disaster; omens o’ doom.

They whispered of things known and told of things to come.

There would be a slaughter.