swaddlen64-blog

[swaddlen64-blog]

Prologue/Introduction

Blood spilled out of the body hanging upside down from the flag post in the town square. Throat cut, skin white and cold, the smell permeated around the dimly lit platform. Thick and pungent, blood and death. The body, naked and hairless, was male. His eyes stared out, sightless, though his face appeared calm. A stray observer would think, in other circumstances, surely, that the man died a peaceful death. Upon closer inspection, a smiling gash sunk deep into the man's throat. His head lulled inches above the ground, attached only by a slight chunk of flesh on the back of his neck. The pool of blood beneath him spread and spread.

A shout woke the otherwise quiet village, three hours before the rooster's caw would have. Old Hoyle, one of the most senior of the town councilmen, out on one of his regular insomnia-laced walks, had limped, cane, bum leg, and all, into the town square. Not an ounce innocent to the spoils and terror of war, Hoyle's heart nevertheless skipped a beat as his old eyes passed over the blood-drained body.

Hobbling as quickly as his pained legs would carry him, Hoyle pounded the Sheriff's door with the top of his cane. A murder! Just across the square from the sheriff's own home.

Another rap of the cane on the door. A crow fluttered down out of the night sky, as if appearing out of nowhere. Black on black, the bird perched itself a top the flag post, creaking its head quizzically at the dripping body down below.

A loud shuffle from inside the sheriff's house signified Hoyle had succeeded in waking the big oaf. Thank the Sun he got up. Likely spent the night guzzling ale at Tarran's. Probably just got home and passed out.

The door creaked open and Sheriff Burke, face flushed and hair matted to his forehead with sweat, gruffly berated Hoyle: "whaddya want, old man?"

"Sheriff, by the Sun, get dressed. There's been a murder."

Despite his annoyance at being awoken at this early an hour, Burke flashed a hand across his face, wiping away the sleep, and for once, he listened to the elder councilman.

A murder? In our town?

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Less than twenty minutes later, a large crowd had grown in the town square. Mayor Sem stood in the center, conversing hastily with Hoyle, with Burke, with the other councilmen. Villagers, awoken by the hustle and bustle, made their way out of their sleepy houses and gathered round the flagpole. Around the body. Women cried; children screamed, whether from the terror of seeing death for the first time or simply from being woken too early in the night was unknown. Men, many feigning bravery, stood resolute next to their wives, their families, begging their children to quiet. Assuring the lot of them that they'd be safe.

Out in the harvesting fields, cows mooed. More crows gathered, perched a top the houses and markets, looking over the grisly scene.

Garus, the town's Sun priest, waddled through the crowd in his bright white robes. When he saw the bloodied body, he gasped and, covering his mouth, began to recite the prayer of the Sun. The Moon priest, Balyr, had not yet shown up.

Mayor Sem, looking up from his conversation with the council, appeared to finally take notice of the large crowd that had gathered. The murmuring, the worry, the unknowing. Now was the time to step up, he knew. Only a mere three months into his mayorship, now was the time to truly start to lead. He turned to face the crowd, holding his hands out as he'd imagined a king or a prince might.

"My friends, I'm sorry that we have gathered for such a grim occasion--"

"Grim 'occasion'?" Someone shouted, interrupting, "A man’s been killed!"

More shouts, concurrences. The crowd became unruly. Screams, angry cries, children's fear.

"Friends, please calm down, please --" Sem tried to assuage the terror but the pandemonium had already set in. Shouts echoed over the crowd, each person frightened and trying to speak over one another.

"A killer is loose!"

"Are they among us?"

"Anyone seen Fred lately? He and Brant had that row a few days back. Fred says Brant stole a barrel of corn from him..."

"Agh! Fred couldn't do nothing like this. The old bastard can barely manage to wipe himself properly!"

"Monsters!"

"It's blood magic!" A group of teens laughed.

The sound of a punch, a gasp as someone tried to catch their breath after having the wind knocked out of them. Raucous discord as several folks in the crowd bickered and wrestled.

"You shut up with that bloody witchcraft! We need none of that here!"

"Oh the smell, the bloody smell!"

Someone vomited.

Too many voices at once, too much to handle. Sem was not prepared. He didn't know what to do, how to manage this. He was not ready, was not prepared. Suddenly, Old Hoyle stepped in front of the young mayor, placing a soft, yet firm hand on his shoulder.

"Silence!" the old man shouted and everyone quieted.

Hoyle peered over the crowd. Nearly everyone in the town, as far as he could tell, had assembled in the square. "Now, does anybody recognize this man?" He turned, his hand outstretched towards the hanging body as if displaying a hunting prize he'd just slaughtered and was attempting to sell. Recognizing the bad optics, Hoyle swiftly returned his hand to his side.

The crowd was silent. Except for the random fluttering of crows wings and the flickering of torch flames, there were no other sounds.

"Nobody? No one knows this man?"

Still, nothing but silence and the night.

"Then he did not come from our village." Hoyle said, stepping down from the raised platform the flagpole stood upon in the center of town. He paced in front of the crowd. "Someone brought the body here."

Murmurs, gasps, turmoil. The crowd, of course, was frightened and confused. Who could do such a thing? This little, quiet, riverside town did nothing but farm and fish and sew and mind it's own business. Who could have something, anything, against them?

Sheriff Burke, wrapping up his discussion with the other townguards made his way down the platform steps to join Hoyle. Though calling them townguards was a bit of a stretch. The group was made up of two drunkards, like Burke himself, and two young men, barely into the throes of puberty, probably with just the lightest sprigs of hair on their balls. Nothing to truly entrust the safety of a whole town with. But, it was what they had. It'd have to do.

Burke spoke up, "there was no trail of blood leading into the square." More murmuring. "whoever did this, muddy have slit the poor man's throat right here."

"Or whatever did this!" A man shouted from the crowd.

"Quiet!" Hoyle shouted. A crow cawed out, as if in response.

"I've spoken with the other townguards." The Sheriff said. "We will post up for the rest of the night, two at each entrance to the village. We'll make sure nothing enters our town. At first light we, and any able-bodied man who can, will travel out and search nearby in the river lands."

The crowd, unsatisfied, continued to surge with doubt and with fear.

"What if the killer is hiding here, hiding amongst us?"

"What if he's escaped while we all gather here?"

"Who says it's a 'he'?"

"A woman couldn't do something as gruesome as this!"

"Oh fuck off, I've seen monstrous women in my day!"

"Quiet!" Hoyle shouted again. Nearly forty years in service as a councilman of this quiet town. He'd seen nothing like this before, and was entirely unprepared to deal with it. But, it was moments like these that one must truly step up as a leader. And clearly Mayor Sem was unable to do so.

The Mayor, still up on the platform, willed himself to not look at the gruesome body hanging upside down next to him. The dripping blood had stopped, thank the sun and the moon, but still. The dead exert a certain depressive aura that makes a man almost want to join them.

Hoyle, through all his years in this town, had not seen anything quite like this. A dead cow attacked by wolves, sure. Maybe a sick horse that needed to be put down by its owner, yes. But a grisly murder like this? In their very own streets? Impossible.

A deep sense of foreboding swept across Hoyle as he stood in front of the crowd. The only way he knew to muster the strength to make himself feel better was to tell the people what they wanted to hear. Make them feel safe and he'd have done his job.

"Our sheriff and our guards will protect us through the night. They will hunt whatever did this tomorrow morning. There's no use searching now; it's still too dark." Hoyle encouraged. "Whoever did this may have escaped but they can't have gone far. It rained just a few hours ago. Their tracks in the mud will be preserved in the mud around our village."

The crowd didn't seem to accept this, but without other answers or explanations they remained silent. The Sheriff turned, nodding to the old men and the young pre-teens, who gripped their dull swords just a bit tighter and rushed off in opposite directions to stand guard at the two village entrances.

Meanwhile, someone again shouted out, incredulously: "if it's blood magic, we'll never find them!"

Another retorted: "Shove that blasphemy up your ass! Blood magic's not real, you know that!"

"You lot best stop talking bout magic at all, lest we get the Knights of the Phoenix patrolling through our Village! Or worse, those bloody Three Fingered Men..."

Hoyle's stomach felt queasy. And it wasn't just the mention of blood magic, or the thought of the Three Fingered Men paying the townsfolk a visit. He needed to do something. Needed to stop the rumors, the wild speculation amongst the crowd.

A cool breeze passed through the crowd and with it, any hope of quelling the spreading rumors in the town.

A deep, raspy voice called throughout the square, chilling everyone present to the very bone.

"The blood of the fallen shall haunt the living."

If Hoyle's heart, still beating, hadn't stopped at the first sight of the hanging body, it should have stopped now.

"Who said that?" whispered Mayor Sem.

All was quiet. Except for the ruffling of crow feathers, and the large assembled crowd, of course, it was as if tonight were no different from any other night. Then, the raspy voice spoke again:

"Your Sun and your Moon cannot save you from the Hell that swiftly comes tonight."

It was then that Hoyle noticed the faces of those in the crowd, staring rapt in horror past him and towards the center of the square. He whirled around so fast it made his old bones ache.

The body, now completely drained of blood and cooling, was...twirling slowly in the air. Suspended, somehow, by nothing. The eyes, the sightless dead eyes, were now glowing a deep crimson. The dead man's mouth was agape, a dark cavern from which the horrible voice escaped.

It repeated itself again, those same words, and with them panic and terror woke the crowd from its horrified stupor. Screams and shouts echoed throughout the town square. Hoyle was shoved to the ground as two of the other councilmen ran into the crowd to their wives. Children crying, crows cawing, chaos reigning. There was nothing the council could do now to calm the crowd. Everybody wanted to get as far away from the twirling dead man as they could.

Mayor Sem had fallen to his feet, just a few meters from where Hoyle lay. He whimpered, scared and confused. His youth now very apparent, Hoyle pitied the young mayor, the boy who never chose this leadership role, who had probably never even seen death first hand. Hoyle crawled, his bad hip burning with pain, to Sem's side. "Get up, boy! We need to move."

The sheriff and the other town guards had returned from their posts. They made their way to the Mayor and Hoyle, helping the old man to his feet.

Burke was the first to speak, shouting over the screams of the chaotic crowd, "Sir, what shall we do?"

"We need to quiet the townsfolk," Hoyle replied. Sem was shaking in Hoyle's arms. They watched the crowd running back and forth, mothers trying to find their children who'd been lost in the madness. Fathers desperately trying to traverse the crowd and get to their homes, whether to grab their own weapons or just to shack up and hide.

"They're not going to calm down," Burke said, solemnly. Nothing like this had ever happened in their quiet town. He hadn't seen this much pandemonium since the Battle of Brystell, years earlier. He'd moved here to seek a quiet life of drinking, gambling, and more drinking. It was looking like that quiet life had run its course. Burke turned and looked at the twisting body. The crimson glow of its eyes made his balls jump back inside the sheriff's body. He felt queasy, uncertain. Damn it, he was scared.

"Garus!" Hoyle called out, seeking the Sun Priest. The man, dressed in a billowy white robe emblazoned with the red and yellow symbol of the sun, had bowed his head in prayer. Garus stood in front of the rotating corpse, his long white hair falling over the rest of his face. Muttering under his breath.

Great good prayer will do for us right now, Hoyle thought. "Garus! Where is Balyr?"

The Sun Priest did not respond, acting as if he'd heard nothing. How could one hear nothing at a time like this? The town was alive with fear and death and anybody paying attention could notice nothing else.

Balyr, the Moon Priest, still nowhere to be found. "He's probably at that brothel in Mendellwood," Burke supposed. "Bastard always had a thing for the women up there."

"And the men," snorted another town guard. Burke smacked the man in his chest.

Suddenly, Hoyle's unease subsided, not into a good feeling, but into one he'd not felt for many, many moons. Dread. His heart, his mind, his very soul filled with dread.

The chaos and screaming had ceased, almost as quickly as it had begun. Replacing it were not shouts joy and happiness, no. The crows, all of which appeared throughout the night, gathering one by one like the crowd of townsfolk below, had perched themselves in rows along the tops of the buildings. They looked down over the square below, watching. Waiting.

In unison, the birds' heads turned upwards to the black sky, their beaks opening as if of one mind. A terrible shriek pierced the night, emanating from each crow, the sounds enveloping and multiplying into one murderous screech.

Children ducked, clutching at their mothers' robes, covering their ears with their little hands. Fathers paused where they were, looking up at the line of crows above them. Hoyle stared in awe, dumbstruck, worried. Tears burst from Mayor Sem's eyes. Burke had no idea what to think: was this really happening? Or a drunken nightmare he'd soon wake up from?

"It is time." The raspy voice called, escaping out of the swirling corpse's gaping mouth. The crows' shrieks immediately stopped when the voice spoke, though their heads remained pointed up at the sky.

Then, the man's white body, once suspended demonically in the air slumped to the ground with a sickening, wet crunch. The moment it fell prostrate onto the bloody stone below the crows heads whipped down from the sky, eyeing the crowd of townspeople who had stopped their chaotic running in an attempt to fathom what was happening in their once quiet town.

Moving as if like one solitary form, the crows black wings lifted them from their perches on the buildings and they each dove, faster than anyone could imagine a crow could dive, into the crowd. The massacre was quick, and certainly not painless.

Beaks pierced through thick jugular veins, ripping out throats. Talons tore into chests, wings beating, feathers flying. The villagers' screams filled the night air, mixing with the fluttering of wings, the cawing of the birds, the wet crunches as bodies fell and eyes were dug out by bloodied beaks.

It lasted only a few minutes, but soon everything went quiet. The birds, having done what they were summoned to do, flew off as quietly as they had arrived.

The bloody scene would not be discovered for four more hours, when a passing merchant arrived at the town's gates, curious as to why he had not been greeted as usual by Old Man Hoyle.

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