The Robe and the Mosquito
They were back on the road to the Keep when the cultist found them.
Or rather, they found him — a man in plain travelling clothes walking in the same direction, suspiciously cheerful about it, who started a conversation about the sorry state of the world and very quickly moved toward the subject of a community of like-minded individuals who had answers for the sorry state of the world and were always looking for new members. He had a rehearsed quality about him, the energy of someone who had done this pitch many times and still believed in it.
The party stopped walking.
"What community?" Arya asked, with a tone of polite interest that was entirely fabricated.
He told them about the Cult of Chaos. Not by that name — he called it a fellowship, a gathering, a movement toward something necessary. He was working up to the invitation when Cylia stepped behind him and the conversation changed direction.
He was, in the end, cooperative. He tied easily, travelled without much complaint when given specific encouragement, and led them toward the forest with the resignation of someone who'd already calculated that non-cooperation had worse outcomes. He was going to take them to a meeting point, he said. Somewhere they could speak with real members.
The woods swallowed the path. The trees crowded in. At some point in the confusion of shadows and undergrowth, the cultist slipped his knots — which he'd apparently been working on the whole time — and simply wasn't there anymore.
They stood in the trees staring at empty air.
"He practised that," Cylia said.
"Probably," Arya agreed.
They walked back to the Keep without a prisoner and with a new appreciation for knot quality.
Back in the Keep, the party gathered in the tavern's back corner and thought through what they knew. The cult was active across at least two areas of the surrounding wilderness. They were organized — organized enough to have recruiters on the road, rituals at old landmarks, a presence that someone inside the Keep was almost certainly aware of. Maybe helping with.
"Someone here is connected to them," Cylia said.
Nobody disagreed. The question was how to find out who.
Arya had an idea that she described as a controlled provocation. The party had one cultist robe — recovered from the fight at the statue. She proposed leaving it somewhere conspicuous, along with a note:
Meet me at the statue in the woods at dawn. Come alone.
The right person would see it and respond. The wrong person would see it and report it, which would also tell them something.
They left the robe and note at the temple, which was the most-trafficked location in the Keep at the right time of day, and went to bed.
The next morning, the Keep was in an uproar.
Not a violent one — more the particular social chaos of a small community that has just discovered a secret was living among them. Voices carrying between buildings. Guards moving with purpose. The priest of the temple looking disturbed in the specific way of someone who had found something in his sacred space that had no business being there.
The party moved through the noise at the edges, watching.
They went to the woods at dawn as the note had said. If someone was going to respond, they'd come to the statue.
What they found at the statue was not a person. It was a symbol scratched fresh into the stone — crude, quick, clearly left in the night. It looked like an insect. Specifically, like a very large mosquito.
Arya stared at it for a moment. Then she looked at the scribe's map in her head, at the blank eastern section, at the area the scribe had marked with almost nothing. "That's a stirge," she said. "It's a marker."
"Pointing to what?" Elaazar asked.
"The fens."
Next episode: The fens are dark and wet and full of things that want to drain you dry — including one encounter that gets very strange, very fast, once Arya's pendant decides to make itself known.