“Keep going, Soleiman,” Rumi said. Cheering him on weakly as he took the last steps out into the clearing. Weak from the walk, perhaps, or more likely weak from having repeated itself a few hundred times over the past few hours.

“You can do it- oh!”

“We’ve…” Soleiman gasped, slowly squatting down to let Rumi get off his back and back onto her feet. “Made it.”

Above them, the night hung lazily over the village, the scarlet beginnings of the morning starting to creep its way in from the forest behind them. For now, having emerged from the eastern approaches, they remained within the trees’ shadows as they observed the quiet settlement before them.

“Mesimeos,” Rumi said, beholding the shadowed sight before her.

Soleiman breathed out a sigh of relief, looking back briefly at the dark forest behind them. He hoped, with all his might, that some form of reprieve awaited them within the village’s embrace. The last few hours had not been kind to them, and it was hard to imagine the forest would be much different from last night if they were to venture back into it.

Cracking his back, he repositioned his bag from his front and back onto his back, before letting out a deep breath.

“Let’s try and find some of the villagers.”

It was only the very wee hours of the morning. It wasn’t so out of place to see that not a single person had gotten up and gone about their business. At the same time, though, they at least expected to see one or two early risers going about, given the size of the village.

Alas, evidently not, and the streets and houses of the village stood still under the hue of the crimson nightbreaking sky.

Slowly, they made their way to the dirt path that cut its way straight through the settlement.

And there was no one there.

Slightly concerned they’d have to rather rudely awaken the villagers from their slumber, the two of them exchanged looks of discomfort as they peered down the dark street. It was still too early for them to really see much.

“Strange. I thought Pallas would’ve told them we were coming,” Soleiman said, scratching his head slightly.

“Should we go and knock on one of their doors?”

“Mmh, yeah.”

Resigning to their fate, the two of them made their way to the nearest house.

Step, step, step.

Their facades cloaked in shadow, they found themselves hard pressed to really even tell what they were looking at.

Step, step, squish.

Rumi eeped slightly as she jumped backwards.

“What? What happened-”

Rumi grabbed Soleiman by the shoulder, yanking him back and out of the shadows. Her bandaged hand held against her mouth.

Slowly, Soleiman’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, his pupils widening and the shadows fading away as he stared at the ground before them.

Upon which lay a single corpse, its head pulverised into an unrecognisable pile of flesh and bone and cartilage. Splatters of blood emerging from what remained of it and out into a revolting flower of ruined flesh.

“Oh, crap-”

Soleiman turned as he fell onto his knees, dry heaving as he felt his stomach churn and twist and seize in sheer disgust at the sight hidden within the house’s shadow. Beside him, Rumi was doing much the same, though neither of them really had anything left in their stomachs to expunge.

Instead, they just kept heaving, tears falling out of their eyes as they gasped in between each gastrointestinal assault, the world spinning around them as they felt their heads throb.

Slowly, Soleiman managed to recover control, coughing to try and stabilise his composure as he quickly moved to try and comfort Rumi.

The two of them eventually got a hold of themselves again, though they didn’t turn back to face the mess of a body behind them.

“Soleiman, Soleiman,” Rumi said in between breaths. She dove into his arms, burying her face in his chest. Hiding her eyes from the outside. “I don’t think I can do this.”

Soleiman put a hand on her head, patting her slowly. He didn’t know if he could do it either. A village of corpses, mangled and molested. Divested of their life and desecrated by an unknown savagery.

“We…” he said, hesitating on his words. “We have to try and see what’s happened, Rumi.” The lack of conviction is his voice making it seem as though he were trying to convince even himself of what they had to do. “We can’t just turn back- we’ll get caught.”

She remained pressed up against him, evidently unconvinced.

“It’s alright, just stay behind me. I’ll… I’ll find out what happened.”

She emerged, head downcast. And through a shaky voice and weak breaths, she brought herself to face the horror.

“No… no, we’ll do it together.”

“You sure?”

“Mmh,” she sighed. “To make it easier.”

And so carefully, they proceeded. Stepping past the headless corpse and down the street. Their eyes slowly growing more and more accustomed to the shadowy darkness. They observed as each house’s door seemed to be either smashed open or left ajar, though some remained closed by the looks of things. Either way, there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to whether a door had been forcefully opened or left apparently untouched.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

As they walked, they came across two more corpses left out on the street, their heads similarly smashed and turned into splatters of blood that stretched crimson tendrils across the dirt. Like twisted hands, reaching out in agony at their gruesome deaths.

Eventually, they made it to the village centre. Though, beside the strange pile of tinder left unignited in the middle and the pile of stones- which seemingly had been spilt across the ground, there remained not much else to take note of. The whole area was clear apart from those two piles, leaving them nothing outside of staring out to the three paths that branched from there out into the forest.

Doing what was necessary, they hurriedly made their rounds across the rest of the village. Though they saw no more road-side corpses, nor any sign of Pallas or Qingxi having been there.

There was, rather notably, a group of corpses all horribly brutalised that lay strewn across the back gardens of the east branch’s very last houses. The greatest extent of violence not seen elsewhere in the village. And, judging by how Soleiman could barely make out one corpse from the other, the greatest resistance against whatever it was that had ravaged the settlement.

The two of them circled back to the village’s entrance. From what they could tell, Pallas at the very least had not been caught in the massacre that had enveloped the village. Similarly, judging by the lack of burns or chars on the corpses on both the roads and in the gardens, the Hashashiyyin were unlikely to have been involved.

Therefore, they reasoned, she was likely to have been greeted by a similar scene to the one they beheld.

“How are we going to tell where she went?” Rumi asked.

“...That’s a good question.”

Immediately, something that stuck out to him were the roadside corpses- which all seemed to have been destroyed in similarly unique manners. If anything was salient amongst the barbaric slaughter as a possible intelligent clue, that would’ve been it.

Though there was a chance the clue had been left in one of the houses, he thought it unlikely that Pallas would want the two of them to go through each and every house, subjecting them to the grizzly scenes behind each door.

“Maybe it has something to do with the corpses on the road,” he said.

“The… headless ones?”

Soleiman nodded. It wasn’t a pretty prospect, he admitted. Especially considering he would have to come to terms with the fact that his sister had smashed open the skulls of three different bodies just to leave them an esoteric clue on where they were supposed to go. But, it was also the most promising.

For the three roadside bodies were the only ones without their heads.

Steeling their stomachs, the two of them approached the corpse closest to them, the one Rumi had the displeasure of accidentally stepping upon.

The sky had progressed to the middle of the morning, and so it was much easier for them to closely analyse the body’s details. To take in every intricate detail that brutal masterwork of life had to offer, writ in broken bones and painted in spilt blood upon the canvas that was the packed dirt ground.

The body’s chest seemed to have been caved in on itself, as though a heavy object had been dropped onto it. Perhaps the same object that had been used to smash its head open. On top of that, though, its abdomen had been torn. With the cavity underneath that had been exposed seemingly lacking in bowels. As though something had taken them out.

Moving back up, they examined in closer detail the whole scenario based around the body’s head. There remained little to be seen of the head itself, though the blood splatter seemed to stretch quite far out. There, they saw as the blood seemed to pool around the smashed head, before stretching out into several trails that spiked outwards.

“You think it has something to do with their heads?” he asked Rumi.

“Maybe,” she replied. “But I don’t know what.”

They moved on to the next corpse.

Similarly, its head had also been smashed open. And the same pool of blood and the aggressive coronal splatter that almost seemed to encrown the corpse were present there too. This one actually seemed relatively untouched, the rest of its form relatively normal- barring the deep scratches and gashes across its arms and whatever remained of its neck. Though, it was hard to tell, given everything above its shoulders had been so terribly drenched in blood.

The next corpse too, had the same blood splatter and smashed head. Its form, though, was pretty oddly arranged. Though it lay prone on the ground, both of its legs- thoroughly torn up and shredded, remained to its left. More or less pointing back to the doorway of the house it had presumably been dragged from.

Now, with all three corpses thoroughly examined and with no leads or ideas on where Pallas could’ve gone, the two of them decided to return back to the first corpse they’d stumbled across.

“Alright,” Soleiman said, matter-of-factly. “So we know it probably has something to do with the heads.”

“Mhm,”

“...But what?”

Rumi gave no response. After a while, though, she mustered a thought.

“Maybe it has something to do with… the shape of the splatter?”

“Hmm.”

He squatted down, taking a better look at the bloody crown painted across the dirt brown earth.

It seemed, if he looked really, really hard- that three of the blood trails seemed to be slightly larger than the rest. As though they were either intentionally created or left uncleared.

“Three trails…” he said, mind absent as he drifted into his thoughts.

“...For three paths?” she responded.

He looked back up at her, mouth slightly open.

“For three paths,” he repeated.

Reinvigorated, he looked closer, observing the very geometry of the trails themselves.

Thinking back on it, it would make a good bit of sense that Pallas’ clue lay within the splatter itself. Just by virtue of the fact that she controlled blood as her power, the two of them likely had leaps and bounds more experience and familiarity with how blood spread than most other people. Even more so than even surgeons or butchers.

And… sure enough… some of the trails seemed different, somehow.

“These droplets,” he pointed out, using his finger to trace along the trail. “See how they’re shaped?”

Rumi knelt down beside him.

“They’re… more… uhm…”

“Narrow.”

“Oh…”

“Look, see. For all the other trails, the blood droplets start out narrow but then become more and more round the further out they go. Because generally, the nearer they hit the ground, the shallower they impact. And the shallower they hit the ground,” he said, gesturing with his hands, “the more they spread out,” his hand mimicking a droplet splashing across his other hand, the ground.

“I see…”

“But look, the ones here,” he said, pointing out the right-most of the three major trails. “They’re all narrow.”

“So… Pallas put them there?”

“More likely than not, I should think,” he concluded, standing up. “C’mon, let’s go check the rest!”

And sure enough, the other corpses showed a similar splatter pattern. The rightmost of the three major trails was always the one that seemed to have been manufactured. Though it did differ somewhat from corpse to corpse, with one of the trails being composed of unnaturally round droplets instead of narrow ones. Either way, they could tell which ones had been left by Pallas.

“Well, Rumi,” he said. “I think we know where we’re headed next,”

“We’re gonna have to go through the forest again?”

“...Yeah.”

Rumi groaned softly.

“Don’t worry. You can trust Pallas,” he reassured her, patting her on her head again. “Besides, we can rest while it’s still day. So when night comes… we’ll be prepared.”

“Mmh,” Rumi nodded in response, feeling the leather sheath of Qingxi’s sword affixed to her hip. “Okay.”