9th of Reedwyme
The King’s Road was a ribbon of grey dust laid over a grey-green world. For three days, the Company of the Scarred and the Seeking Heart had walked it, the grim purpose of their quest settling upon them like the dreary, cloud-pocked sky. The memory of Master Elsbeth’s tower and the chilling words in her journals was a cold stone in Gwendolyne’s gut, a weight she carried for them all.
Then, the world changed.
A scent, rich and sweet, cut through the damp, earthy air. It was the smell of apples, so potent it felt like a memory of a brighter, healthier time. The road to the west continued to Castle Brackenwold. A well-kept dirt road branched from their own path to the south, marked by a weather-beaten sign: "CIDERY ROAD - Home of the Famed and Esteemed Thitheland Cider."
Shadwell Lank, ever the pragmatist, slowed his pace. "Now that," he said, his gravelly voice a low rumble, "is a sight for sore eyes and a balm for a dry throat."
Molly Addercapper, however, tilted her head, her expression one of intense focus. The plague-scars that marred her skin seemed to deepen as she tasted the air. "It's sweet," she murmured, "but there's something else. Something... cloying. Like flowers left to rot in the vase."
Before anyone else could comment, they saw him: a man trudging up the dirt path from the valley, his shoulders slumped in defeat. His clothes were the simple garb of a farmhand, and his face was a mask of dejection.
Gwendolyne, whose faith compelled her to offer solace to the suffering, stepped forward. "A good day to you, friend," she said, her voice kind. "You come from the orchard?"
The man looked up, his eyes weary. "Aye. Though there's little 'good' about it. You're travelers. Take my advice and stay on the King's Road. The apples… the apples are cursed."
Rodger Fraggleton, whose prominent scar seemed to darken whenever heresy was near, took a step closer. "Cursed? That is a strong word, my son."
"It's the only word for it," the farmhand lamented, his hands twisting into white-knuckled knots. "They look perfect. Red, shiny, crisp. But the venom isn't in the bite, it's in the sleep that follows. You eat one, and when you lay your head down that night, you're taking a terrible chance. Some... they say they have the sweetest dreams, and they pass on with a peaceful smile, gone by morning. The others? They live. But they spend the dark hours screaming, lost in such nightmares that they wake up hollowed out. We're calling it the 'Hush-Blight,' for the silence that follows."
The word 'blight' struck a chord in the party. For Molly and Gwendolyne, it was the very essence of their quest. This wasn't the Grey Blight they knew, with its slow, creeping decay, but it was a sickness of the land all the same. A magical wound upon the world, waiting to be understood.
"Who is responsible?" Rodger’s voice was hard, his hand instinctively finding the wooden holy symbol at his belt. His belief that witches and dark cults served the will of the Nag-Lord was an iron-clad certainty.
The farmhand flinched, leaning in so close the party could smell the fear on his breath. "Goodman Pummle is a good man of the Church," he whispered, his voice trembling. "But the orchard is old land... ancient land. There are things that happen at night." He swallowed hard, his eyes wide with remembered terror. "There's a witch in the north field. On moonless nights, she calls the beasts to her. I've seen it! The pigs... the whole sounder... they just stop their rooting and shuffling and trot right to her, silent as ghosts. They circle 'round her, and she... she speaks to them in a tongue that ain't right. The air gets cold, and they just stand there, listening, like they're in a trance. It's an unholy congregation! This isn't a natural sickness. It's witch-work, I tell you."
Rodger’s eyes burned with a zealous fire. This was no longer a detour; it was a divine challenge.
Shadwell, who had been listening quietly, weighed the man’s words like coins. He cared little for curses or cults, but he understood desperation. "And this Goodman Pummle?" he asked. "What's he doing about it?"
"Praying!" the farmhand scoffed, then his shoulders sagged again. "And weeping. His whole livelihood is turning to mush and malaise on the branch. He's at his wit's end. He’d give his last copper to anyone who could lift this curse."
With a final, weary nod, the man trudged past them and continued down the grey road, leaving the four companions in a charged silence, the sweet, sickly scent of the orchard swirling around them.
Rodger broke it first, his voice resonating with conviction. "We cannot ignore this. A pagan sickness festers here, a stone's throw from the King's Road. It is our duty to confront it!"
"It's more than duty, Rodger," Molly added, a sharp, analytical gleam in her eyes. "It's an opportunity. The Grey Blight is a tide, too vast to hold in one’s hands. This… this is a puddle. A contained phenomenon. If I can understand the magic at work here, it might give us the key to understanding the greater plague."
Shadwell stroked his chin, looking down the inviting green of the Cidery Road. "And he's a desperate man with coin," he stated plainly. "The mission ahead is long and will require resources. A grateful orchard owner is a powerful ally. This is the practical move."
All eyes turned to Gwendolyne. She looked from the dreary, endless King’s Road to the vibrant, yet corrupted, valley. The farmhand’s words echoed in her mind. A blight. A curse. A suffering flock. Her path had been set by the discovery in that dark tower, a duty to the fallen and the living. This was not a distraction from that path. It was a part of it.
"We go," she said, her voice clear and firm. "We go to Pummle's Orchard."
Leaving the King's Road behind, the Company of the Scarred and the Seeking Heart turned as one and took their first steps down the Cidery Road.
The Cidery Road descended into the valley, and for two miles, the adventurers were guided by two conflicting senses. From the distance rose a steady column of smoke, not the dark, oily plume of a burning building, but a pale grey pillar against the sky. Accompanying it was a sweet, apple-scented odour that grew stronger with every step—a smell that should have promised harvest and happiness, but now felt cloying and funereal.
The road ended abruptly at a large, two-storey cidery built of dark stone and thick, heavy timber. Before the building stood the source of the smoke: several massive, smoldering piles of apples, hissing as their skins blackened and split in the heat. Tending to these fruity pyres were a handful of workers, their movements slow and mechanical, their faces etched with the listless, hollow-eyed look of absolute dejection. Nearby, several pens held a number of pigs, who seemed to be the only ones profiting from the disaster as they fed on scraps of discarded apples.
Shadwell gave a low whistle. "What a waste," he muttered, thinking of the coin such a harvest would normally fetch. Rodger, however, saw the smoke as a desperate act of purification, a grim echo of a funeral rite.
Gwendolyne, her heart aching at the sight of such despair, approached one of the workers—an older woman with soot on her cheeks, who barely looked up from her long-handled rake.
"Sister," Gwendolyne said gently. "The farmhand we met on the road told us of a blight. Is this its consequence?"
The woman paused, leaning heavily on her tool. "The Hush-Blight," she rasped, her voice rough from the smoke. "This is our only answer to it." She gestured to the burning fruit with her rake. "We're trying to purge the trees of the sickness. Last year… last year we made the cider. The first batch of the Titheland." She shuddered, the memory raw. "Most of us workers who sampled it were wracked by screaming nightmares. But the lucky ones…" Her voice dropped to a haunted whisper. "A few enjoyed pleasant dreams, smiling as they slept, before dying quietly at dawn."
The confirmation of the horror sent a chill through the party. Before they could ask more, a stout man with a soot-stained apron and frantic eyes emerged from the cidery. He was shouting at the workers to stoke the fires higher before he spotted the four adventurers, his tirade halting abruptly. He took in their travel-worn gear, their weapons, and the determined set of their jaws.
"You're not from around here," he stated, his tone shifting from anger to a sliver of desperate hope. "I am Goodman Pummle, master of this gods-forsaken place." He waved a dismissive hand at the smoldering apples.
He looked from Gwendolyne’s holy symbol to Molly’s analytical gaze, from Rodger's righteous fury to Shadwell's calculating watchfulness. He saw not idle travelers, but a solution.
"My workers are broken, and my crop is poison," Pummle said, his voice low and intense. "I am out of options. But you… you look like you can do more than just pray or burn things." He locked eyes with Gwendolyne. "I will offer a reward of 1,000gp to anyone who can discover the cause of this blight... and eliminate it for good."
After accepting Goodman Pummle’s desperate offer, the party conferred. The raw terror in the workers' eyes was a more potent motivator than gold, but they had little to go on. Gwendolyne recalled the hushed, fearful words of the farmhand they had met on the King's Road, his tale of a witch and an unholy congregation of beasts. They decided to start there, gently questioning the cidery workers as they prepared to leave for the night.
Most were too consumed by exhaustion and dread to offer anything new, merely shaking their heads and muttering about the curse. One woman, however, hesitated as she gathered her shawl. "It's the pigs," she said, her voice barely a whisper. "Everyone leaves. The place goes quiet. But I... I forgot my tinderbox one night and had to come back. I saw them." She stared into the darkening orchard. "The pigs. They were walking away from their pens, all together, heading into the trees. No one's ever dared to follow them. No one but that young fool Finn who fled last week."
The party exchanged a look. It was the confirmation they needed. Their path was clear, not through the front door of the cidery, but by shadowing its strangest inhabitants. They found a secluded spot among the trees, a place where they could watch the pens unseen. As the last worker trudged away and a profound silence fell over the Titheland Cidery, they settled in to wait, their vigil focused on the pigs who held the key to this dark mystery.
“By the saints…” Rodger whispered, his hand gripping the scarred wooden staff he carried.
“I’ll track them,” Shadwell said, his voice tight. “Stay close. No noise.”
He moved like a shadow into the trees, the others following, their hearts pounding a nervous rhythm against their ribs. The journey was unnerving. The pigs moved with a purpose that felt utterly alien, navigating the rows of blighted trees without hesitation. The air grew cold, and Molly felt the hairs on her arms stand up, recognizing the thrum of potent magic—a deep, resonant power far beyond the frantic, corrupted energy she had sensed in Master Elsbeth’s tower. This was older, cleaner, and very dangerous.
Shadwell held up a hand, stopping them at the edge of a wide clearing. The space before them glittered, bathed in a cold, silvery luminescence that seemed to emanate from the very air itself. It was a light that didn't illuminate so much as outline things in sharp, impossible detail. In the center of this eerie stage stood a tall, plump elf-woman with long, silver hair, wearing a necklace of pigs' teeth and an upright, commanding posture. Around her, the pigs had gathered in a perfect, silent circle, their heads cocked as if listening to a sermon.
Her voice, when she spoke, was precise and forceful, each word a perfectly enunciated stone dropped into the silent clearing. “The categorical imperative of the sty, you see, is rooted in the immediacy of the trough,” she was explaining, pointing a long, elegant finger at a particularly large sow. “It is a pure existence, unburdened by the dread of what is to come or the regret of what has been. A state of sublime, philosophical peace.”
The party watched, frozen between awe and a creeping dread. This was the ‘witch’ the farmhand had seen. As if sensing their presence, the woman, clearly a fairy of some kind, snapped her head towards them, her eyes fixing on them not with surprise, but with the cool, appraising gaze of a collector who has just noticed a new set of insects scuttling at the edge of her display.
“Interlopers,” she stated, her tone one of mild annoyance. “You bring with you the frantic stench of purpose. It disrupts the tranquility.”
Gwendolyne found her voice first, stepping cautiously into the fairy-light. “We have come about the blight on the apples. We were told you were the cause.”
“‘Blight’ is such a dreary, mortal word,” the fairy said, turning her profile to them, admiring one of the pigs. “I merely added a seasoning. A touch of artistry. The scent of nightmares on a brisk night is a rare and fleeting perfume.”
“It is a perfume that has killed men,” Rodger bit out, his knuckles white on his staff.
The fey's full attention fell upon them, her head tilting with a look of genuine, if clinical, surprise. "Deaths?" she asked, the word sounding foreign and strange on her tongue. "Has it come to that? How exceptionally fragile your mortal vessels must be."
She gave a delicate, dismissive shrug. "I am Demozel Hazel, I am here with my younger sister Demozel Olive. We were once ladies-in-waiting to the Lady of Spring Unending, but we find ourselves at liberty now, and one must seek diversion. We took up residence here last summer to do just that." She gestured to the orchard. "I admit, I instilled the apples with a certain magical horror—a delightful spice. But I am merely the connoisseur of the nightmare's scent. The final disposition of the vessel is hardly my concern. Mortals die, after all. Why one would bother to object to the timing is quite beyond me."
She sighed, a sound of profound boredom mixed with genuine curiosity. "That is... puzzling. I merely draw out the nightmares that already exist within them. It is a scent I find mesmerizing, their terror, but the visions are of their own making. How can these creatures be so lost in thought, so bound by imagined futures and regretted pasts, that it causes them such exquisite pain?"
She paused, her gaze turning distant. "I prefer the pigs. They simply are. No future or past to agonize over, only the serene immediacy of the moment." Her eyes then narrowed slightly, a flicker of suspicion crossing her features. "The final sleep, you say, death?", her mouth grimaces in disgust at that last word, "I have no part in that. But my sister, Olive... she has always had a tiresome obsession with you mortals. She loves you all so dearly." A small, cold smile touched her lips. "She believes your existence is one of never-ending suffering, and she is always so very eager to help end it."
With a dismissive flick of her wrist, she pointed towards a darker part of the wood. "If someone is adding a 'conclusion' to my 'art,' it is likely her. You will find her in the grove to the west. Perhaps you can ask her. Now, leave us. The sow and I were approaching a breakthrough on the nature of existential mud."With a shared, fearful glance, the party backed away, leaving the unholy congregation behind. The path to the west was dark, the air growing thick with the cloying, sickly-sweet smell of decay. They found the grove, and within it, a scene of such quiet horror that it threatened to stop their hearts.
There, reclining serenely on a great, mounded bed of fallen, rotting apples, was another elf-woman. She was tall and slender, with short, golden curls that framed a face of beatific charm. It was her smile that was the most terrifying thing they had ever seen—it was warm, kindly, and utterly without mercy. And on her head, she wore a coronet fashioned from yellowed human teeth.
She was not alone. At her feet lay a farmhand, one of Pummle's workers, his eyes wide with a silent, waking terror, his body paralyzed in death. Demozel Olive was humming a soft tune, her slender fingers gently holding an apple, tracing patterns with it above his body. She looked up as the party entered the grove, her smile widening.
“Oh, tsk, tsk,” she said, her voice full of a terrible, gentle pity. “More poor, tired dears. Look at you, burdened by all that walking, and thinking, and feeling. You look so very weary.” She gestured to the dead man at her feet. “I was just helping this one find his rest. It is my chief desire, you know. To put you humans out of your misery and into a nice, dark grave.
It was not a threat; it was a sincere and generous offer, delivered with a warmth that was a thousand times more terrifying than any snarl. A wave of pure, cold dread washed over the party, rooting them to the spot. It was a dizzying, sickening realization—the kind that makes the world tilt on its axis. The hairs on their necks and arms stood erect, not from a simple chill, but from an ancient, predatory aura that radiated from Olive like heat from a furnace. This was a being with no regard for the concepts of good and evil, a creature to whom mortal morality was as meaningless as the fleeting patterns of dust in a sunbeam. In that moment, they understood their place. They were not adventurers confronting a monster; they were mice frozen in the placid, patient gaze of a cat who plays with its food not from malice, but simply because it can.
Shadwell was the first to react, his smuggler’s instinct for survival screaming. He gave a slight, almost imperceptible shake of his head. Gwendolyne took the cue, her mind racing.
“We… we thank you for your kindness, Demozel,” Gwendolyne managed, her voice steadier than she felt. “But we were sent by your sister. We must return to her with a message.”
Olive tutted again, a sound of gentle disappointment. “Oh, very well. But do hurry back when you’re done. The earth is so patient, and there is room for all of you.”
They backed away slowly, their feet making no sound on the damp earth. They did not turn their backs until the grove was out of sight, and then they fled, running with a desperate, silent speed back through the orchard until they collapsed behind the cidery, hearts hammering, the image of Olive’s smile and her crown of teeth burned into their minds.
“We have to leave,” Shadwell gasped, wiping sweat from his brow. “Pummle can keep his gold. We can’t fight them.”
“He is right,” Molly whispered, her voice trembling slightly. “The power they wield… it is fundamental. We are nothing to them.”
Rodger was pale, his certainty shattered. “This is an evil our prayers cannot reach.”
Gwendolyne’s mind was a whirlwind. They were prey. The knowledge was a suffocating weight, pressing the air from their lungs as they stumbled back through the darkened trees, the image of Olive’s kindly, murderous smile seared into their minds. They collapsed in the shadows behind the cidery, a small island of shared terror in the oppressive silence of the orchard.
“We have to leave,” Molly whispered, her voice trembling. “Now. Before they decide they’re bored.”
They sat in dejected silence for a long moment, the thousand-gold-piece reward feeling like a fool’s bounty on their own heads. Then, Shadwell, who had been staring grimly into the darkness, spoke, his voice a low gravelly rumble.
"They're only two of 'em, right?"
"What are you suggesting, Shadwell?" Gwendolyne asked, her own voice strained.
“Well,” he continued, a flicker of his usual bravado returning, though his tone was laced with uncertainty. “They’re powerful, maybe undying… but given enough swords, even their bodies break, right?”
Rodger looked up, his brow furrowed in thought. "Yes, you're right," he said slowly, latching onto the sliver of hope. "The stories say the fey-folk don't die of old age, but their physical forms can be destroyed. They can be killed. But enough swords? Pitchforks, you mean?"
A grim smile touched Shadwell’s lips. "You get my drift."
"You want to convince a handful of terrified farmers to rise up against those things?" Molly interjected, her voice sharp with disbelief. "They're a force of nature! People will die. Some of those people will almost certainly be us." She stared at Shadwell, her eyes pleading. "Why risk it?"
Shadwell kicked at a loose stone, his gaze fixed on the ground. "Hmpf..." He hesitated, the sound a mix of a scoff and a sigh. "Something in their plight... in Pummle and his workers... it reminds me of something." He looked up, his eyes dark with a memory he rarely revisited. "Rising up against cruel and pointless power oppressing good people. That feeling of powerlessness… I… I…” He stopped himself abruptly, his face tightening as if he had already said far too much. He turned away, leaving the unspoken words to hang in the cold night air, a reason far more potent than any amount of gold.
The silence that followed Shadwell's admission was heavy and profound, filled with the unspoken weight of his past. The raw emotion, so rarely shown by the pragmatic smuggler, had shifted something in the air. The terror remained, a cold knot in their stomachs, but it was no longer the paralytic dread of prey. It had been sharpened into the grim resolve of the cornered and the defiant.
It was Gwendolyne who finally broke the stillness, her voice low but clear in the night. "Alright." She looked at each of them in turn, her gaze lingering on Shadwell's hardened face. "We do this. If we are all in." It wasn't a command, but a question that hung in the cold air, waiting for consent.
Rodger, his own faith battered but not broken, gave a firm, decisive nod. Molly, though her face was pale and her eyes still wide with fear, nodded as well, a flicker of trust in her friends overriding her terror. Shadwell simply met Gwendolyne's gaze, his expression answer enough.
Seeing she had them, Gwendolyne continued, the leader in her taking charge. "We will camp near the King's Road tonight, away from this place. When the workers return at dawn, we will tell them what we have seen, and we will offer to stand with them against these… things." She turned to Shadwell. "How many do you think we would need?"
A grim but hopeful look passed over his face. "Honestly? I don't know. But I would feel slightly more comfortable with at least eight or so armed with more than just courage."
"Very well," Gwendolyne replied. "We will try to raise a militia. But the decision to fight must be their own."
"We could always ask for help in Castle Brackenwold," Molly interjected, the idea tumbling out in a nervous rush. "Maybe knights could be sent to rid the orchard of this evil." She let out a short, awkward laugh that held no humor. "Good cider must be a worthy reward for a quest like that, don't you think?"
Her attempt to lighten the mood only underscored their shared fear.
"We'll sleep on it," Gwendolyne said, her tone gentle but firm, bringing the debate to a close. "For now, let's get out of here and set up camp."
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