Allied by Trauma

The scream came from inside the burgomaster's mansion. Hay-zel opened the door and found a young woman kneeling over an old man in a pool of blood. It was Kolyan, the burgomaster, and he was already dead. His daughter Ireena took one look at a drow and then a bugbear and ran upstairs, sure the creatures of the mist had come for her family.

Beowolfe talked her down. When she finally saw a human, she asked if the monsters had taken him prisoner too. "No," he said. "We are allied by trauma." From then on she talked only to him, held on to his cloak, and stroked his owl feathers without noticing.

They worked the room like a crime scene. Claws, not a blade, a few hours old. A man's footprints all around the body that came from nowhere and went nowhere. Hay-zel's spell lit a dark, wispy trail through the front door, in and out. Villagers had fought Kolyan the day before because he wouldn't hand Ireena over to the master. Ireena told them her father found her in the woods when she was five, and she remembers nothing before that. In the library, Hay-zel found a note in the margin of the family history: the servants have started to vanish. Under it, in a shaking hand, one word. Locked.

Ireena was pale and stumbling and said she'd caught a bug. Ismark checked her neck and said he saw nothing. Lucy knew he was lying. Genji spent his inspiration, slid her hair aside, and told the whole room: she's been bitten. Ismark broke. Five nights ago the master came to the house, took Ireena upstairs, and came back down saying she was sleeping quietly and that he would be back for her. She remembers none of it. Nash breathed frost over the old man so he could be buried with dignity, and everyone ran for the gates.

At the east barricade, Bildrath had his crossbow and Parriwimple had a tree trunk. Three waves came over the hill: zombies, then ghouls, then plague zombies and a wight with a bow made of smoke. Genji punched from twenty feet away. Hay-zel's purple flaming sword had Parriwimple cheering "Magic sword!" from the mud. The plague burst and dropped Genji and Parriwimple. The wight dropped Hay-zel twice. Beowolfe rolled three natural twenties, and Lucy burned the wight down. The gate held. Parriwimple never got back up, and Bildrath knelt in the mud beside him, saying his name.