Chapter Text
It wasn’t that the tragedy came quickly: it was that the tragedy slowly stalked them in the dark and pounced when the night’s silence went dead.
Since Sheila had moved in, sharing half of what used to be solely Rosetta’s room with the aforementioned girl, Oísin’s raven familiar went back and forth between the Undead Wastelands and the tavern, delivering letters from parents to daughter and from daughter to parents. Sheila had last sent a letter two weeks ago, a response yet to be received.
When River made his way to Oísin and Lorviann’s village, he found the raven dead on the outskirts, Sheila’s letter still wrapped around its leg, and an arrow through its heart.
He was there for a reason: Hien was on that path, and had been for the past month. She said she would be there, charting the surrounding wild, undocumented areas, and left her seven-year-old boy in River’s care, something she had done countless times before.
But she was never gone for longer than two weeks. Kam got antsy, and while River did get worried, he, Rosetta, Wayne, and Sheila were being driven to the brink of insanity with a little kid screaming for his mama.
Hien was a seasoned adventurer: twenty years of exploring hung from her belt. If she was in trouble, Vagnakr had deduced, then she was in trouble-trouble.
“She’s dead,” River announced grimly. He could tell before he even got close to the unmoving woman: her skin was pale with a greenish hue, some limbs taking on a dark purple tint.
She wore an explorer’s attire with light armour, a mix of strengthened leather and iron. Her eyes were wide, frozen eternally with surprise. A large rotting wound was in her side; maggots were already squirming in the dead flesh.
Hien Diêp was dead—had been dead for three days.
Vagnakr was nearby, rumaging through Hien’s travelpack that was beside her. “What do you think killed her?” he asked, eerily pensive. River breathed out through his mouth as he examined the decay further. Seven inches in length, around two inches wide; who knows how deep.
“With this kind of damage, I’d have to say a heavy-handed weapon; either an axe or something axe-adjacent.” Weapons were generally not his thing.
“Hard way to go out,” Vagnakr muttered. He had resorted to turning the travelpack upside down and shaking it, dumping all the contents onto the barren ground. Charts, both empty and filled, some provisions, a waterskin, and a travelling journal. He started flipping through the journal. “Must have been ambushed.”
“Oísin and Lorviann’s village is a few hours down,” River said. His hands started feeling clammy. The smell of Hien’s rotting corpse was filling his head, the nausea slowly being churned in his stomach. He closed Hien’s eyes and backed away; there was nothing left on her person anyhow.
Vagnakr landed on an entry; short and sweet, there was a small sketch of Hien and her little boy in the top corner, happy and smiling. “I have a bad feeling, Adel.”
River sucked in a breath, ignoring how he immediately regretted that decision, inhaling the stench of putrid rot and something else sickingly sickly sweet. “I’d be surprised if you didn’t have one.”
Dead, dead, and dead.
Recently, River realised, a lot of his friends were dropping dead like flies: Dehma Cole (he could only assume), Hien Diêp (he had just come across her deceased form)...
And now, as he and Vagnakr wandered the burnt remains of what was once a coastal village, Oísin Diarmuid and Lorviann Dervla.
They were in a similar state as Hien when they finally found their bodies amid the carnage: wide, lifeless eyes; cold, blanched skin; maggots already eating away at their dead flesh. The only difference was that Oísin had half his face burned off, red and covered with blisters.
“Not long after Hien,” he surmised. Their skin was taking on a blueish hint, but it was barely there. The burnt house frames smelled recent, too.
“The whole village’s been massacred.” He glanced back to where Vagnakr was emerging from another pile of burnt rubble, the hunter’s face permanently set into a dark glower. He gripped two things tight in either hand, knuckles white underneath splatters of red dirt.
In one hand, he held a bent-in-half crossbow, the string snapped. In the other, sharp ivory stained a dark red with specks of dirt.
Vagnakr threw the crossbow at River’s feet. “Pillagers,” he spat. “And the Nether.” He presented what else he found: pigmen tusks.
—but we’re dealing with something on the home front. We’re just worried it’s not safe for her anymore.
River sighed through gritted teeth. “We come across a slaughtered village and you still go for the loot first.”
He looked back at Lorviann and the mercenary’s mangled arm, the limb almost ripped out of its socket, ignoring the daggers Vagnakr was aiming at his back with his glare. “You don’t get to judge me on this, you hear?”
Curt and sharp; a bitter side to Vagnakr he wasn’t fully acquainted with, but knew well enough not to go beyond mild antagonising. At the sound of the hunter stomping away, River moved to scavenge what was left of Sheila’s childhood home.
Sheila, he remembered, and suddenly all his movements as he searched for anything remotely intact or salvageable felt more precise and deliberate. Kam as well.
He found a stack of Sheila’s letters, the ones she sent home the past three months, bundled nicely with twine and tucked away in a cedar chest with other things. The wood was scorched, but its contents were still perfectly preserved. That was coming with him.
Then, onto the rest of the house’s remains.
Chandra didn’t understand.
Adel came back after a trip, a sombre air clinging to his frame as he placed a chest onto a nearby table. Chandra watched his face as Kam dashed up to him, abandoning the board game they were all playing downstairs: pained but straight. Sheila seemed to twitch in place anxiously. She almost ran up, too.
“Where’s Mama?” Kam asked. He bounced on his heels, darting his gaze from either side of Adel, as if thinking his mother—Hien, Chandra recalled—was hiding behind the man, even when he knelt, and would jump out at any second.
That boy treated everything like a game; he was all carefree and oblivious and self-centred. It was why Chandra didn’t like them much. That and the past two weeks of irritable tantrums.
Kam persisted. “You said you were gonna look for Mama. Where is she?”
Chandra resumed playing their game, uninterested. It was their turn anyhow. One, three, five…their game piece, a simple white token, overtook Kam’s blue one. They were two spaces away from winning now; two spaces away from inducing another childish outburst from the seven-year-old once he found out he was seven spaces behind and about to lose.
(“Don’t make that face,” their older sister, Rosetta, scolded them in a hushed tone.
They hissed, but complied.)
“Your mom’s…” Chandra’s interest was piqued at the hesitation, and they perked their ears up to listen to Adel strain for a response.
Sheila started picking at the carpet.
“Your mom’s on a really important adventure,” Adel said, and Chandra scrunched up their face, unimpressed. “She won’t be back for a while, but she asked me to look after you until she does.”
The answer was not the correct one.
“No, no, no!” The tantrum started, and Chandra covered their ears with a whine from the pitch. “Mama said she was gonna come back soon! Mama isn’t a liar!”
“Kam—”
“I DON’T WANT YOU!” Kam shrieked, receiving jolts from the room. Chandra whimpered, unobjecting when Rosetta tucked their bowed head under her chin and began shushing them. “I WANT MY MAMA! Tell me where she is!”
He started wailing, his hysterics too loud for Chandra to even keep their eyes open; they shut them close tightly, hoping the loss of one sense would help them focus on Rosetta’s voice only, and not the screaming. It wasn’t as effective as they had hoped.
“Kam, I know you’re upset, but your mom can’t come back now.”
Uncomprehensible screaming followed.
Their sister laid her hand over Chandra’s. It helped marginally, but they still winced hard at the noise.
“KAM!”
That wasn’t Adel’s voice.
Chandra still kept their eyes shut. Their ears rang even more after that final yell.
A short and stern voice cut through the air. “Kam—” Sheila’s voice, they realised, “—you do not hit people, you do not cry when you’ve done something wrong!
Sheila continued, “We’re going upstairs.” There was shuffling and more crying of incoherent objections from Kam before the noises ventured away, muffled completely.
Five beats of silence, of which Chandra was grateful for, before Adel let out a heavy sigh.
“You’ve never had to dealt with Kam like that before?” Rosetta asked, voice still quietened.
“Hien always came back in time,” Adel replied, the response not immediate.
“What…happened to her?” Rosetta’s voice dropped lower even more, as if Chandra couldn’t still hear their conversation.
The silence was blissfully deafening. Chandra listened to the beating of their sister’s heart, the pace quickened by fear. She was thinking, and the scenarios ran deep.
“Not here,” Adel said. “Not in front of Wayne.”
Did that mean going upstairs? The same floor as that wailing child? “Stay,” they croaked, curling up in the older girl’s arms. “Safe.” It was both an excuse and a truth.
They heard Adel sigh. “Come on, bud. At least give your sister breathing room.” Then Chandra was removed from Rosetta’s hold and settled into Adel’s, their face buried comfortably in the crook of his neck. “Too loud, huh?”
“Mhm.”
“All right, you can stay down here. Up for an early night?”
“Mm.”
They fell asleep soon after. When they awoke, Sheila was in an abhorrent mood; like Kam’s tantrum, just colder and quieter, but the air was just as sharp and loud.
Chandra didn’t understand.
River had to remind himself that the worst wasn’t over as he set Wayne on a nearby armchair (they always did like sleeping curled up in a ball, surrounded by cushioning), the young vampire having already dozed off.
Kam’s crying upstairs had subsided to almost near silence, and then came the rush pattering of Sheila descending back downstairs.
“I should go.” Rosetta scrambled to her feet. Her rapid flurry was stopped by a raised hand.
“You’ll find out either way,” Sheila said bluntly. She wrung her hands as she faced River, stone-faced. “What happened to Auntie?”
He could only sigh. “We found her in the forests skirting your village. She’s…been dead for a while.”
Sheila’s wringing turned into her squeezing her fingers, wrists, palms; so much so that when they were released, they faded from a cold white back to their original tone, before the cycle continued.
“And—” she stammered, “and my parents?”
River couldn’t say it. Not to her face. Not to the girl who begged her father to promise her one thing three months ago.
He grabbed the cedar chest from the table he placed it on and tentatively held it out for the blonde girl to take. “I’m sorry.”
It was taken with trembling hands, opened briefly, and gently shut again. Sheila brushed a thumb carefully over the engravings, tears steadily streaking down her cheeks. “T—they…”
Rosetta gingerly placed a hand on the snivelling girl. “Sheila—”
Her hand was shoved off. “I…I need to be alone.”
Sheila retreated upstairs, clutching the cedar box close to her chest, and River felt like breaking down, himself. He slumped into the nearest furniture, a couch, and held his head in his hands. His breathing came out in heaves.
The couch dipped on his right, and then Rosetta was resting her head against his arm.
“Love you, Dad,” she whispered.
He almost smiled. “Love you, too, Rose.”