Knights of Anathaeum Kingfisher's Cry

The mottled gray of falling dusk cleft Isander's brow in shadows. It suited his mood. That dark cast made mirror of him, for he had come on business bleak as it was cold. Poachers this side of the Spine, spilling the blood of babes and disturbing the balance of the Loch. Dark thoughts indeed filled the Knight.

He knew not whence these men came, and nor did he care. Action had signed the warrants for their deaths, and Isander would see his hands tie the noose. Hunters for sport, profiteers who found arousal in cruelty, these were the folk he came to kill. Were it that they were found deserving of mercy, but the Knight had none to spare.

Spring unfurled around him, in verdant buds that plumped branches of the sparsely populated wood. The year's first melt drew nearby tributaries to babble. Running water, the hum of incessant wingbeat, a nattering of movement that beckoned from noise to near indistinguishable cacophony all filled his ears, steered him from blanking his mind. It offered him solace with which to comport himself, to relax the alert edge that afflicted his gaze.

He rode in silence, unbowed by the accoutrements of murder. Gauntleted hands held the reign loose, and his coat of maille and cloth sat slack upon him. His spear, butt couched in a stirrup and haft resting in the crook of an elbow, stood ready for use but unthreatening. Sweat had begun caking his neck and back, spots of color dampening his collar. Even this early in the season he felt the effects of a maddening sun; it roused warmth in him, quite in contrast to the heavy chill that seemed to stride atop the cresting eve.

Raising a hand, he bade his mount ease into a stop and cast his eyes to the map that sat astride his lap. The knoll to his left, ringed in weather smoothed stones and patches of mushrooms, could be twin to its visage christened "Erebit's Rest" on his map, right down to a log-bench that spoke of a civilized touch.

To his companions he said, "All reports agree that this group operates from these grounds. Sightings put them roughly here"—he held the map, gesturing with a thumb for their perusal—"and with the day running long as it is, I see we have two options: we wait for full dark to espy their fires, or we press on in search of tracks to come upon them while light yet remains in the sky."

Their merry few: a pair of knights in asynchronous pursuit, squires paired yet green about the collar to stand in defiance of uncertain odds. The scouting reports and farmer's gossip colluded little in the way of solid fact. Perhaps a dozen of the brigands roamed hereabouts, no more than thirty.

Isander flicked a glance to the dusk drawn knight and offered a nod. Some boyish remorse of his decried the notion of sneaking upon their prey under the guise of night. Honor served the righteous, he had to remind himself. The cowardly abused such grace. They skulked within the bounds of reason in full ken of the common folk's hesitation to extract retribution of their own volition, even here so deep in the heartlands of the Wyld.

Isander could afford no such hesitation. It was but a job that needed doing. A senseless one to be sure, one that promised to test what taste the knight had for spilling unblighted blood. That settled it.

"Dismount," Isander called, making example of himself in turn. In his brush to the forest floor, his boots cracked hard against compact dirt and half-budded weed. He wrapped the reigns loose around his wrist, keeping his spear close to shoulder while using its butt to brace against his step as he approached the moss-bitten knoll.

"We dine cold this eve," he said, squinting through the canopy at the near setting sun. Drawing a set of stakes from his saddlebags, he began to hammer in a crude post for their mounts.

"Squires Alouette, Nacht, distribute the rations once you've hitched your mounts. At dusk, we'll ring the area in pairs to scout the poacher's likely camp. Once we've a solid estimate of their numbers, with luck we might isolate some before falling upon them in full. Until then, we eat and enjoy what company the day yet provides."


Alouette Josai Nacht