04/08/2026: Blood and Smoke

Krelldutt and his group hold their position at the top of the stairs, hidden from the druids’ sight. Blinsky crouches low, tugging at Krelldutt’s sleeve, his voice barely a breath.

“Look at that.”

He points — covertly, so none of the others catch the gesture or the words.

Krelldutt follows the toymaker’s gaze upward. There, high in the great tree that sheds its pods in rhythmic bursts — each one cracking open to birth a fresh flight of creatures into the dark air — something is buried in the bark high among the branches. A spear. To Krelldutt’s eye it looks ancient, older than the tree itself, older perhaps than the ritual playing out below. Dark sap seeps from around the shaft, oozing slowly down the trunk.

He passes the observation quietly to the others.

Torgan studies the spear for a long moment, then gives a single nod. He will go for it — once the sun has climbed high enough to drive the druids back down beneath the roots of the tree, to whatever sleep they take in the dark below.

They have only to wait.

⚔

High in the boughs of an ancient oak at the crest of Yester Hill, Torgan works the shaft of a spear free from the heartwood. The rain has

picked up, and in the distance, from the east, there is the rumble of thunder. What was a grey mist thickens now into a downpour, slicking the bark beneath his hands. The spear comes loose with less resistance than expected, sliding clean from the tree on his second attempt — just as a crash of thunder, this one so much closer, jars his nerves.

He maintains his grip. The tip is either metal or stone — he cannot tell which — but it holds an edge that has not dulled in spite of however long it has been lodged there. The shaft is beautifully balanced, almost startlingly so. Carved into the wood near the base, in a script that runs old and deep, are two words in Dwarvish characters:

Blood Drinker.

He has no time to consider what he holds. The climb down is the problem now. He tries for the lower branches, reaches, misses his footing on the rain-wet bark, and falls. The drop is not far but it is not nothing either. He lands hard, rolls, keeps hold of the spear. From beneath the tree, barking erupts — close, urgent, already moving.

Three wolves close the distance faster than he can recover. He breaks for the treeline to the south at a dead sprint, but they run him down before he can disappear into the thick undergrowth. Within moments they have him, back against a tree. The first wolf bites across his arm — he pulls clear before it can drag him forward. The second is less forgiving. It seizes him by the leg and does not let go, clamping hard enough to send him stumbling, and its jaws lock. Torgan fights to keep his feet. He cannot. He is restrained, the wolf’s weight anchoring him in place while the rain hammers down through the canopy overhead.

Torgan enters his rage. The world narrows. He swings his greataxe at the wolf that has him pinned, puts it on the ground with a clean blow, and turns on the second. Two strikes, neither finding purchase through the animal’s evasions. The wolf that remains upright circles.

From the crest of the hill, a tall man in skins puts a shortbow to his shoulder and fires. The arrow catches Torgan in the shoulder. Two more druid archers appear at the rim of the hill, shortbows raised, beginning their descent.

Before the fight can go further, the man with the bow lets out a sharp, two-note whistle. The surviving wolves pull back — disengage cleanly, as though they have done this before — and lope east into the trees. The archer descends the rest of the way and approaches with his arrow still nocked but the bow only half-drawn.

He looks at Torgan and says, “If I were you, I would give up. There is someone upstairs who would like to meet you, sir.”

Torgan throws Blood Drinker. He does it deliberately, raising it clearly overhead before flinging it to his right, into the brush — far enough to be obvious, near enough that the druid watches it go. Then, without answering, he bolts south.

The archer shoots. The arrow finds him in the calf, and Torgan goes down, skidding into the undergrowth, landing in a tangle of roots and wet leaves. He lies still. The brush around him is dense enough that even from five feet away, a man could walk past without seeing him. Two of the druids do exactly that — passing on either side without breaking stride, speaking to each other in a language Torgan cannot understand. Their voices carry, first cautious, then frustrated, then edged with something that sounds like fear. They move east, toward the place where the spear landed.

Torgan does not move until the voices are gone. Then he pulls himself south through the undergrowth, one slow yard at a time.

⚔

Rakthe stands at the top of the stairs. Bayleaf and Komzin stand at the bottom. Between them, silence.

The body Fekre inhabits is already injured, still upright but visibly laboring — bloodied in the old sense of the word. Fekre has had time to settle into the posture and the weight distribution of a form that is not her own, but the fit is not perfect. There is something slightly off in the way the arms move, the way the head tracks a target.

Bayleaf closes the distance in a single rush, channeling his Divine Vow of Enmity as a bonus action — fixing the figure on the stairs as the object of his full attention — and brings his longsword across in a clean strike. The blow connects. He follows it with a Divine Smite, pulling radiant energy through the blade, and the sword momentarily brightens the dim of the temple corridor. Rakthe absorbs the hit with a grunt but does not fall.

Fekre moves Rakthe’s hand with deliberate precision and reaches for Bayleaf. The hand shoots wide. The reach is clumsy, overcorrected — she is not yet comfortable with the proportions of this host.

Komzin steps in. He calls on his fighting spirit, and there is a quality to the strike that follows that is not the slow work of a measured fighter — it is the kind of blow that ends things. Rakthe crumples. They sink to the stone floor of the stairs, unconscious, and from them something rises.

It is a cloud. Green — a dense, roiling green — and it moves with a purpose that has nothing to do with air currents or gravity. Fekre, expelled from her host, becomes this: an amorphous body capable of motion but not action, not yet, not until she finds another vessel.

She chooses Komzin.

The fighter’s eyes widen. The cloud presses in, and then it is inside him, and the sensation is — according to his expression — like being sealed into a space too small and too close and occupied by something that is not interested in his comfort. Fekre takes up residence. She turns Komzin’s body toward Bayleaf.

His blade swings at his ally. The blow goes wide — Komzin is fighting the hand that holds the sword, working against the motion, and the result is a miss that barely qualifies as an attempt. His second strike is no better. Bayleaf, with the advantage of knowing what is driving these attacks, weathers the assault without damage.

Then something shifts inside Komzin, and he expels her. The cloud spills out and off to the side of the staircase, roiling furiously. Rakthe lies at the top of the stairs, dying, time passing maddeningly fast.

Bayleaf turns to the cloud and slashes at it. His longsword is magical, the smite is radiant, and Fekre is a fiend: the combination produces results. In her amorphous form she resists the physical — but the full weight of the radiant flash from Bayleaf’s blade burns through her. The cloud dims slightly, splits, reconstitutes, boils furiously.

Fekre does not wait. She surges back at Komzin, and his psychic defenses fold again. The cloud disappears back into him, and his hands fly to his head as a burst of pain flares through his mind while she settles in. He has no time to recover before Fekre compels him to swing again. Bayleaf deflects. The attack does not land.

Komzin rallies.

Fekre spills out of him a second time, the cloud pulling back down the stairs. She is wounded, and the two men standing between her and any viable vessel have proven difficult to put down.

She — and Rakthe, still dying by inches on the stone above — are running out of time.

⚔

“I have lost sight of Torgan!” Blinsky sounds panicky.

Feesh shakes his head. “He has gone behind the hill, to the far side, moving as if chased.”

Danika touches Krelldutt’s elbow. “I’ll go.” Feesh’s brow rises, but he says nothing as he watches whatever is passing between the tavern keeper and the tortle. Krelldutt nods once, sharply, and Danika slips into the trees.

Incredulous, Blinsky gasps, “You’re letting her go alone?”

Krelldutt only nods, and watches her go.

⚔

Just inside the treeline, out of sight of the three still waiting at the top of the stairs, Danika transforms into a raven and flies south.