The Chronicle

Expedition I

The Wandering Friars

20th–21st of Haelhold, 1089 · a sweltering, windless high summer

Four strangers, newly banded into the society they would call the Chroniclers and already out of coin, gathered in a rented hall in the outer city of Castle Brackenwold with a hundred silver to their name and three rumours between them.

The first, bought at ruinous expense from a gazetteer, spoke of the lost shrine of Saint Benester — an elegant mausoleum swallowed by the woods somewhere to the northeast, and perhaps a reliquary with it. The second: that Sanctus Primus, commander of the Order of Saint Faxis, had sent clerics to take a witch near the Whispering Caves who was said to be blackmailing him — and that they had come back empty-handed, so a bounty might be had. The third, a local man’s plea to clear his late grandfather’s laboratory of lingering dangers. They chose the shrine, with the blackmail held in reserve, bought a bedroll and a ten-foot pole, and set out.

They were city folk, and the tilled lanes north of the castle turned and doubled until the wood lay in every direction at once. Only Dallan’s woodcraft found the thread of the path again — but the hunting of it cost the whole day, and they came to the eaves of Dolmenwood with the light failing and camp still to make. Among the ancient hazel and beech, watched by inquisitive squirrels, they saw a dozen black-hooded figures filing through the glades, chanting in a Liturgic none of them spoke.

Braemble hailed them, and they proved friendly: a company of friars who led the party by a hidden path through a bramble thicket to a small, filth-choked chapel of Saint Clewyd. There they shared a camp and a tale — that they had once been highwaymen on the King’s Road, turned to the Church by a vision, and had wandered in penance ever since, “centuries after our natural deaths.” A friar laid a blessing on the party (a day’s worth of surer blows and steadier nerve). Fitchwick gathered firewood; Braemble sang for a supper of ration-surprise; and in the cleaned-out chapel they found an alms box of coins beneath the brambles, and a triptych that told the friars’ own story back to them — bandits, then penitents, then the wandering hooded twelve. They left the box untouched.

In the small hours, unseen searchers crashed about the outside of the bramble wall, voices insisting something was hidden there — but never found the way in. At dawn the friars gathered their bedrolls and filtered back into the trees, warning only of an infestation of giant ants to the northeast. And when they had gone, the hunters knelt to the clearing floor and found but one set of footprints in it: their own. The friars had been ghosts all along, and had never once said otherwise.

Turning north to skirt the ants, the party lost another day to the shifting wood and came upon a hillock riddled with caves — the Whispering Caves themselves, ringing with the noise of a market town that was nowhere to be seen. Through that fae echo they overheard a hard voice, named “captain” by the man beside him, declaring that the atrocities of harsh Longhorn rule in Lankshorn made war unavoidable — and that Lord Malbleat would be neutralised. Of the witch, and the shrine, there was no further sign.

Out of rations and out of daylight, they made a last cold camp — and that night nine cat-sized stirges came whirring down to the firelight. The company fell back to the cave-mouth while the creatures fixed on the flames; eight peeled away into the dark, but the last found them at the cave-mouth, and Braemble crushed it with a single swing of his mace. They ate it on the long, hungry road home, and came back to Castle Brackenwold dirty, empty-handed of treasure, and a little wiser: bring more rations.

Threads Left Dangling

• The shrine of Saint Benester is still lost, somewhere in the north-eastern wood.
• Giant ants infest the hex north-east of the ghosts’ chapel.
• The witch of the Whispering Caves — and Sanctus Primus’s unclaimed bounty.
• A “captain” and his men mean to “neutralise” Lord Malbleat of Lankshorn, whose seat lies near Redwraith Manor.
• The Wandering Friars, ghosts of Saint Clewyd’s hidden chapel, and the alms box left in the dark.

Expedition I · as set down by Shank Burl, Chronicler