Elinyra gave Dejan a nod, glad for his acceptance of their unusual scouts. An uneasy alliance, but she hoped a fruitful one.
Dejan generously paid for their rooms and retired for the night. Elinyra felt the call of slumber herself, but not without first seeing what exactly was hiding in the shadows of Lanoline.
Once she had removed the constricting layer of hardened leather armor, she settled cross-legged on her room's narrow bed - stuffed with a musty mixture of straw, aromatic bedstraw and cattail fluff.
She closed her eyes, took a few deep breaths, and tried to relax. To get anything more than brief flashes of an animal's sensory world, she would have to concentrate to the exclusion of her own surroundings. Reminding herself that a well-armed friend was only down the hall, she allowed herself to fall into a meditative trance.
It took time for the visions from her temporary companions to solidify. Her eyes snapped open, their normal green irises shifting to brown and her pupils shrinking and becoming subtly more canine.
He was hanging around the warehouse. She could smell the full depth of the odors around, hear the scraping of boots on wood planking and harsh metal grating as if she was there. Immediately she had an eerie feeling of being watched; a thought she attributed to the instinctual paranoia of a survivor in a hostile world.
The dog did not like this place. He approached the building with extreme caution, having the same gut feeling as the elf bonded to him: something terrible was happening here, concealed only barely by a facade of enterprise. Elinyra gently encouraged him to follow the scent of blood that became stronger near the back of the structure.
A metallic tang crossed her tongue when he tasted the dripping trail. She winced subconsciously in disgust. She didn't want to know where it had come from... But he knew it well. It was no swine nor fowl that had been butchered here. Elinyra shuddered.
The dog came around the back of the building in a measured gait, muscles tensed to react to the slightest hint of danger. Careful as he was, he still uttered a deep growl in surprise when he met two men in the alleyway who were carrying a third.
"...outta here!" One of them growled back and threw a half-hearted kick in the stray's direction. "Stupid fucking..."
"....smell is attracting pests..." The second grumbled. It took a moment for Elinyra to translate what they said; animals couldn't usually understand spoken words, only inflection and tone. Eventually the string of sounds formed snatches of distinguishable phrases among the gibberish.
The dog wanted no fight here, especially without the support of his pack. As he turned to flee, Elinyra saw something that jarred her out of her trance and severed her connection with him.
She couldn't tell if the third man had been dead or unconscious, but his hair was matted with the same blood that seeped down his face. His eyes had been removed, the sockets sewn together with coarse stitches.
Elinyra trembled in terror and anger as she tried to still her breaths and root herself against the wave of nausea in her stomach. She gripped the thin blanket beneath her until her knuckles turned white. What kind of charismatic false prophet, what imaginary dark god could make people do this to one another? To themselves? Why eyes?
She leaned back on the smooth wooden wall the bed was set against and steadied herself. She still had to check in with the black-and-white female who had gone to scout the tailor's shop.
----------
It turned out that she was much more interested in a pile of old rubbish that smelled strongly of cats than the conversation taking place in the bizarre tree house, but Elinyra managed to catch bits of the words spoken among the babble the dog heard. Eyepatches. Weeks. Needles. Smithy.
Elinyra persuaded the dog to wander more meaningfully around the trunk of the tree, but they found little good news about it aside from it being an odorous information exchange point for the city dogs.
It seemed the only approach point was a set of narrow stairs that had been half-built around, and half-carved into the ancient tree. That or a very long climb up a rope, which Dejan wouldn't be able to manage with his injury and Elinyra couldn't manage even with an extra arm.
She sent the dog a telepathic feeling of a soft pat on the head for a job well done before releasing the bond. She would report her findings to her comrade in the morning. He was likely asleep by now, and she also needed some rest - if she could sleep after seeing the victim of such a cruel defilement. And that feeling, that artifact of the alpha dog's paranoia, that lingered in her mind like a warning.
The next day, she told Dejan of what she had seen and heard.
"I believe we may have a better chance of getting into the warehouse undiscovered. Perhaps we could blend in with the workers?"
Dejan Damir The Everwatcher
