Transcribed by Murk Lake, Seeker to the Old King

Capelle, Exterior, Age 4 U.C.

I’d like to think it’s your desire I’m tracking, and not my own nose for blood that keeps leading me into these dark places. All the stories these days are riddled with monsters, and the Moonlighter in me is growing restless with finding little more than words at the bottom of each rabbit hole.

But I may have finally found a trail to what you’ve been seeking. Once I’m close enough for my magic to sink its teeth in, there will be no shaking it off.

My search didn’t start off fruitful. No relics to hunt this time, or orders to follow. Only rumors, and only a Seeker would put value in those. But as rumor moves from one village to the next, it grows plump on the vine, ripe for truth. Sit in a bar for long enough and you’re bound to catch tales stranger even than what I’ve sent you over the ages; Calamity toppling Skyclipse, monsters made of smoke and liquor, talking fish, all heard from a friend of a sister of an enemy of a friend. But truth is often simple, and this story was not so hard to believe.

It started in Deck’s Crypt—with a name like that, you won’t be surprised to learn it’s a border town, Capellen side. Beneath a sliver of silver moon, a wounded man, or a wounded animal, peeled from the vast night and limped inside, drawn to the laughter and light of an inn. Now the murders there outnumber the lawkeeps two to one.

Though I drove my horse into a race with the wind, by the time I pulled rein in Deck’s Crypt, the moon had blinked and opened its eye once more, and everything was gone, even the floors of the inn. Torn out, the lawkeeps said. No amount of scrubbing could separate that much blood from wood, so it had to go. They’re replacing it with stone—less difficult to stain, and more resistant to Calamity. I’m sure the next monster to roll through will appreciate it.

I followed shambling footprints northeast into Capellen shrubland, where I shared a fire one night with a haggard traveler and his apprentice. The apprentice was impatient to get moving—kept her cloak pulled low over her eyes the entire time—but her master was friendly with his flask and warned me of something they’d passed down the road. Bandits, he thought, if particularly wrathful ones.

I spotted the broken ribs of the wagon the next morning. A torn scrap of tarp had caught on a splinter sparkling with morning dew, and waved on a breeze, still begging for mercy. The amount of blood inside a human body can fill a milk can. I believe that; you would too if five times that had soaked through the soles of your shoes up to your ankles. But I’ve never known bandits to bite flesh from their victims. Or leave valuables behind. Amongst the corpses I collected three coin purses and a silver ring holding a fleck if emerald. Miniscule valuables: barely enough to settle a Moonlighter, but not so little to have been overlooked by thieves. Call it the price for burying them.

Things became complicated when the next rumor of slaughter came from the Capellen Exterior. I asked myself what kind of monster could slip so easily past city gates. But either Capellens doesn’t think to record who enters their city, or the Queen has instructed them not to answer for a Samwhin crest; either way, the gate guards remembered no monsters passing them by. Minnows in a shark’s pond, all of them.

At least this time, I got there before the blood dried, and the city watch is better at sticking to procedure than the lumps they post at the gates.

It was a woman and a little boy. Both dead, with chunks taken out of them. The bite marks were still fresh, and whatever had chewed them up didn’t attack because it was hungry. A wolf after prey strikes for the throat. The mother had fought back—a cookpot large enough to cook a whole piglet had been knocked from the hearth, and now stew will need to be scrubbed from the floors as well as blood. Maybe they should have considered stone.

The city watch stuck on those clues like ants in honey. It must have been the act of a cruel stranger or a rabid dog—perhaps those are more rampant in Capelle than they are in Samwhin.

But the mother died with a knife in her hand, and for all the struggle she put up, the blade was clean. Yellow jackets are fragile but try to crush one in your hand and no threats of death will stop it from stinging. So, either the monster was too quick for her, or she had reason to hesitate before stabbing the thing she saw rip out her son’s throat.

I kept this detail to myself and stalked after the watch as they questioned the neighborhood, keeping to the shadows with my pen ready to strike. Capelle has the same order as a rats’ nest, and its citizens treat it with all the respect of one. Door to door, the answer was the same: “No one saw nothing”, and “Yar can take your questions elsewhere”. I was able to parse one thing from amidst the grammar—the mother had a husband, away trading cases of wine for wool along the border. His name was Sabe Leric and the neighbors knew him for his pies. He sounded the type of man a wife might hesitate to stab.

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The story began to take shape: something at the border had changed Sabe before he went to Deck’s Crypt, and he tore blood from bodies using nothing but fists and teeth. He must have awoken horrified and run back into the surrounding shrubland, or whatever he had become wondered away to find a new prey. It navigated alone until a wagon train appeared on the same narrow road. They might have seen a man covered in blood and stopped to help, or he might have chased them down, and Sabe had a second night bathed in blood and moonlight.

But then Sabe must have woken up, or maybe he was never asleep, because after that he ran for home, where things are safe and make sense. But when Sabe entered Capelle, the monster came too, and now Sabe had no home left. He’d run off somewhere, probably still digging soft tissue from between his molars.

Sabe was a creature on the run, but with no safe places left to turn and something in him with the drive to kill, he could have gone anywhere. But guilt is as much a reason to get stuck somewhere as love, and if Sabe was still human, he’d be carrying enough guilt to anchor any ship.

I started by checking the dark places.

Capelle has no Reliquaries, and no escape hatches worming beneath it. The tunnels it does have are channels for the city’s filth and not even rats could bear the stench. But while Capelle is known for its dye and silk, they are less known for the coal its treasures are forged from. Silk shops line the Harbor of Jewels like colorful birds, and don’t mention that they purchase their product raw from the Exterior, where it is spun by little creatures below ground. I could think of no darker place than a den of silkworms.

I went at night, as I prefer to do. They say all Moonlighters are lockpicks. This is untrue—only successful Moonlighters are lockpicks, and I can’t abide failure. Especially not in Your Majesty’s service.

I found Sabe lodged at the bottom of the second den I checked, beneath a shop nestled close to the city wall. The darkness was cramped with the scent of soiled decay and old sweat, bedded with leaf litter and soft, white silken cocoons. Sabe was curled like a cornered wolf, watching me with eyes that seemed lit from within by unnatural embers.

“Don’t come closer,” he rasped, and held out his hand to stop me, but retracted it when he realized the rusted stains on his skin. I doubt he was thinking when he wrapped his lips around four fingers and sucked. Like the wild animal he was, his attention drifted, and he began tearing a hangnail from his cuticle. “It wants to…,” he muttered, not to me. His nailbed gave and he absently licked the blood from his lips before swallowing. “It wants, it wants…”

I already knew this, my Moonlighter magic choked on it as soon as I’d stepped from the stairs. All treasure is, is bobbles with want poured in—it’s what makes anything valuable. Treasure in the hand of a Moonlighter is completion. But wanting hopelessly is an elixir spilt, wasted on the air, until nothing is left but the vessel. Sabe was a husk when I found him, with no more spark in him than the fat little worms popping under my boots.

Sabe shut his eyes and rocked in short bursts. The hand he pressed over his mouth did little to hide the globs of thick, brownish saliva dribbling from his chin, and my hope for collecting the story thinned. I reached for my belt, not sure if I should be drawing the dagger or the pen.

“That’s a lot of blood on your hands, Sabe.” Sabe shook his head and howled into his hand. I waited for him to calm. “But maybe it wasn’t you who put it there.” Sabe’s eyes clicked open, and they glowed red as coals. I dropped my hand lower for the dagger. “Tell me what happened. I can help you.”

I did still have hope of salvaging him, Your Majesty, but you can only train dogs to dig, not wolves, or whatever it was inside Sabe. As interesting as he was, the Select would have put him down for rabid.

“It was the grove,” he whined and crawled towards me on his knees, breathing like a bear climbing from its den. When he bared his teeth, blood was crusted black under his gums. “And the lights! Oh, the lights.” Sabe cackled and dropped his head, staring at his hands, filthy from days of slaughter and scrabbling among worms like an animal. “It wants… it wants…”

“What does it want?”

Clear questions and plenty of room to elaborate foster storytelling. But it was too late; Sabe had stopped answering. And whatever had been sleeping inside him woke up. Luckily, I already had my dagger in hand.

His death was quick, if bloody, but I’ve gotten good at cleaning up my messes these past years. A den of silkworms scrubbed clean draws less attention from the watch than a body in the basement.

I have questions, Your Majesty, as I’m sure you do too.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard stories of strange lights. North of Skyclipse, they say you can see spirits in the sky on clear nights, glowing green and yellow. I hear Mouse Writ abandoned his mission to investigate these tales from Badgerpool.

He only saved you time sir—a town like Badgerpool would have taken a foul liking to someone who reeks so much of spring. But, then you sent Songsparrow too, and she’s been gone many years.

Badgerpool is not the only place to be chasing stories of lights in the sky. My magic grows more ravenous, and my want is pouring out. Perhaps I will find something valuable to feed it at the border, amongst a grove.

That is where I will go next.

Until Calma,

Murk Lake

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You’ll recall what the Old King thought of that, Sire.

Signed,

Mercurial Lascar, Age 1.5 Until Calamity

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