When they got upstairs into the guildhall, the group immediately went and found a table in a slightly quieter corner of the Shindig, the tavern connected to the Guildhouse. Both Ailmon and Shale still seemed subdued and uncertain.

Beer had been procured and Aran and Naia gave each other a sidelong, worried glance.

“Alright, so what happened?” Aran finally asked, when neither Ailmon nor Shale seemed poised to volunteer any information.

“Well…” Ailmon rubbed his bald head and then seemed to turn his thoughts inwards again.

“I had a sort of… vision, I suppose. It was weird.” Shale took a large gulp of beer, halfway emptying the mug.

“You had visions? Both of you?” Naia asked, an entirely inappropriate note of excitement in her voice. “I knew this was going to be a great job!”

“So, what did you see?” Aran asked, looking from the burly half-orc freelancer to the bone-dry bureaucrat.

“I… ehh…” Ailmon faltered. “It was quite… emotional.”

“Oh, this I gotta hear!” Naia took a dainty sip of beer and grinned.

“Well… I was all alone. I’d been taken away from my… family, I suppose. I felt like I was alone in utter darkness and sadness, and not at all sure what had happened or where I was.”

“Like a victim of a kidnapping?” Aran asked. “Could it, somehow, be something the mad priest experienced? And what the Hells happened? What was that …cloud that came from the corpse and–“

“Relax!” Naia exclaimed. “We’ll figure it all out in good time. First things first. So, you were all alone?” she asked Ailmon.

“Yes. I was terrified. I had somehow… I don’t really know… sensed my family disappearing? And I wasn’t sure who I was without them. As if I was in a panic at what was happening to me, but also somehow in a panic about my own identity without them. It was… very personal for me,” he finished in a low tone of voice, averting his gaze. He then took the dead man’s journal, which he had somehow managed to hold on to, and put it in a pocket of his grey, austere tunic. Then he took a drink from his mug with a certain finality, clearly indicating that he’d explained what he was going to explain.

“Do we know if the corpse had any family?” Aran asked nobody in particular.

Naia shrugged. “Probably, I mean, he was born at some point. Everyone has parents.”

“I’ve lived in Wallsen most of my life,” Shale said quietly. “There are a lot of sad people here and Sargon was definitely one of them. I doubt if he had any family that recognised him.”

“Oooh, sad!” Naia said and carelessly took another drink. “So, what did you envision?”

Shale lifted her mug, drained it, and held it up, wiggling it in a clear gesture of no story time until I get another one. Sighing, Aran went and ordered a new round.

“Alright, what did you see?” he asked when the drinks were on the table.

“I was in a…” She stopped herself, then began anew, “I had a body, but I didn’t understand it.”

No further information seemed forthcoming.

“Look, Ailmon practically told us someone’s sad life story. I mean, for Ailmon, that was wildly and emotionally informative.” Naia gestured at Shale with her beer. “But ‘I didn’t understand my body’ just won’t do. Come on! Your father is a bard, you have to have grown up on stories. You can do this!”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Shale rolled her eyes. “Great. Fine. I was in a body, and I didn’t know how to steer it. But I managed to wobble out a door, which I also didn’t understand, and get into the street. There, I gave something important to someone, a young woman. And judging from the way she reacted, I must have looked a bit weird. But she took the thing I gave her, even though I didn’t understand speech. There,” shale downed another generous gulp of beer, almost defensively. “That’s it.”

“What did you give her?” Aran asked.

“I’m… It was very, very important. Vital, that I should pass it on. I think it may have been a thing like this…” She opened her hand and put the small, greenish-purple stone from the dead man’s possessions on the table.

“You did not bring that crud-trumpet with you!” Naia exclaimed loudly and pushed her chair a little away from the table, staring at the stone as if it might bite.

“…Which brings us to the next lovely questions in a long line of things we don’t understand,” Aran interjected smoothly, turning to Naia. “What happened to you down in the basement? You knew something was going to happen.”

“I didn’t know the deader would sodding vomit on us!” Naia exclaimed vehemently.

“I’m not saying you did. I just want to know what was going on. You were nervous.”

“I wasn’t nervous! I’m never nervous!” she snapped.

“Alright, you can take that up with the handful of darkness you suddenly conjured. I’ve seen you defend yourself before, remember? That display in the basement? That was nervous!”

Naia crossed her arms. “Fine. It felt like something was going to happen. And it did.”

“How does that feel?”

“As if something was alive. In that vile little piece of shit!” She angrily stabbed a finger at the innocent-looking stone on the table.

“Alive? A rock?” Aran asked, not as incredulously as he would have liked. Absurd boisterousness and know-it-all attitude aside, Naia knew about magical forces, and he did not.

“Yes, why don’t you eat it and find out for yourself! Maybe your entrails are smarter than the rest of you!”

Ailmon cleared his throat, before Aran had a chance to respond, and stared pointedly at the both of them, an eyebrow slightly raised. Then he produced a small notebook and a stylus from his belt pouch. “Questions: what did the visions mean, and how were they produced? Furthermore, of possible importance, why were only Shale and I affected? You were as close as we were.” He pointed at Aran with the stylus after finishing the sentence on paper.

“Good… questions.” Aran took a drink from his tarbean tea.

“We also have a possible weapon in the form of Naia if she can somehow sense whatever it is that’s involved in this. And now, we need to look at the list of victims and determine where we want to start investigating.” Ailmon found the list Sef had given them and put it on the table. “The first death was the beggar, Nester. He was found five days ago in a tenement building entrance. He was bludgeoned to death. The next to die was a prostitute named Shandra who worked in a brothel called the Spire. She was found the morning of four days ago, stabbed.”

“I love brothels! So much energy there!” Naia commented. Everyone at the table gave her looks and she shrugged innocently, gesturing for Ailmon to continue.

Ailmon cleared his throat. “The next guild informant to die was a fellow named Corwin, who was found in his bed with his throat slashed. He was found three days ago. And finally, there was Sargon. Now, the question is if these are all the victims there are? There might be other murders not being noticed because the victims just weren’t guild informers. Especially since the first murder, Nester, was not committed with a knife. That seems strange. Like it wasn’t the same person doing it.”

“Maybe he was just warming up?” Naia suggested.

“Perhaps. We might learn more when we get there. So, where do we start? Do we go by geography and pick the closest location, or do we work backwards or forwards?”

“The brothel won’t be open until this evening, and we want to go there during opening hours, right? It would be impolite to barge in when night-working professionals are asleep,” Naia said.

“Good point,” Shale said. “Well, we already started with the latest, maybe the second latest would make sense? We work our way backwards? That would be Corwin.” She glanced at Sef’s list. “Corwin Notary,” she read out loud. “Supplied us with information on societies focused on the redistribution of wealth in the area. Found three days ago in his apartment on Murder Street number six - I’m not even kidding - with his throat cut.” She folded the note and put it in her belt pouch.

“As good a place as any to start,” Aran said. “And he was lodging in a house on Murder Street. That sounds ominously fortuitous for us.”

“Indeed,” Ailmon said dryly. “Wallsen charm comes in many flavours. Perhaps, however, we should consider Naia's expertise?” He raised an eyebrow and looked at Naia.

“Oh, no! I’m not doing that! I would have to go back down there and that’s not happening unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

Aran looked at her and then back at Ailmon, feeling like some sort of communication was happening between the two that he wasn’t invited to.

“Alright,” Shale interrupted. “Let me just see if I can find Ibbi before we go. He might be able to tell us, what he saw,” Shale said and went to the bar.