CHAPTER ONE
"Spare not a single darkfriend to live, for a single seed of evil can grow to choke the world."
Lord Captain Commander Toradon. Declaration of Command. NE 513.
The Child of Light called Halfhand stared down at the fleshless skull, its sun-bleached boney visage grinning back. What tales would you say if you could still speak, the Child of Light wondered as the high Illian sun cast dark shadows into the deep eye sockets. This particular skull lay in a pit of bones nearly twenty paces wide, filled with other bones long, short, thin, scattered, with dozens of visible skulls leering out with their frozen smiles. Halfhand stood up from bended knee, briefly brushing the red Illian clay dust from his cloak of entirely bright white except for the faded sunburst emblem on his left breast.
"All humans without a doubt." His partner still crouched at the edge of the pit of bones. Child Viellain, a gaunt man with slicked back graying hair in a matching cloak, except a red shepard's crook embroidered behind his sunburst. An Inquisitor of the Hand of Light, his skill and knowledge of the human body honed from decades in the Questioners' laboratories and inquisitorial chambers of the Fortress. He continued, "A few callouses of old healed fractures from hard living, but no true new osseous injuries to suggest at all how they died. As if all flesh turned to dust and sloughed off. I would guess maybe sixty complete skeletons. Men, women. Children."
Halfhand pondered this grimly. This was the first sign of any life since the two crossed into the Illian border two weeks past. They had rode through three small Illian villages prior, and each was void of any human life. There were clear signs of habitation, bowls and plates set out with rotted food of interrupted supper, children's toys still laid out in the street in the middle of play, and neglected livestocks pawing hungrily at the gates, but not a single trace of actual human persuasion. Until now.
He had believed this village was of the same pattern, until they had stumbled upon this eerie pit of human remains at the edge of the village, nearly by accident. A yawning pit of defleshed skeletons and an eight feet wooden pole buried deep in the center of the pit, dark charcoal words scrawled down in a shaky script. Repeating the same thing.
"The Hunger-" Halfhand had initially almost read them aloud, but was silenced by a finger to the lip from Viellain. The Hand shook his head, "Dangerous to speak anything that may be Words of Power. If this was an arcane ritual site..."
"I can feel immense evil here, Viellain." Halfhand grimaced in revulsion. He felt a dull throbbing ache from his mutilated left hand of his namesake. As a soldier of the Light for decades, he had seen his share of the aftermath of many bloody battles, even a few with hundreds listed on the final Butcher's Bill. But there on the battlefield, there was blood and sweat, and raw emotions of victory and loss, all evidence of the human condition and its sacrifices. This mass graveyard was the opposite: the remains of humanity cast away by someone or something in this pit of convenience without a shred of dignity, as if the lives lost were of little significance.
Viellain nodded, thoughtful. An Inquisitor of the Light was tasked to some extreme measures in their pursuit for truth, but yet even this sight surely must give him pause.
"It has been some time since the Light has seen this land." Viellain agreed. "But even this seems...unusual." He stood up in turn, reaching into his cloak. Unlike Halfhand, he wore a dark leather vest instead of a steel breastplate, where he kept dozens of lethal tools of the craft in hidden compartments. Instead, he drew out a beaten copper flask, unscrewed the cap and took a long pull. It was an unusual habit for a Hand of the Light, but Viellain was an unusual Questioner with unusual ideas. And woe to anyone who would challenge a Hand on anything they do. Since Halfhand had known him over the decades, the Questioner was never far from the drink, perhaps to drown out some ancient memories never to be spoken. "It seems you may have been right, Half."
Illian had closed off its border to the Light for the last two years but recently there has been dark stirrings on the wind. Nightmares creeping over the border into Altara and Murandy. Ravings from traveling peddlers, stories too difficult to believe, of cities given over to pleasures of blood and slaughter, and orgies of insane carnal hedonism. Many of those travelers were put to the question already by the Inquisitors, but the testimonies were almost invariably useless as those questioned already seemed reduced to loons. The sea around Illian's port grew tumultuous with unpredictable storms, with more ships disappearing than returning.
The Children of Light have become insular of recent times, but these events were too much to ignore. However, it seems the pair of old soldiers, a drunk and a washed up zealot, were all that the Order was willing to muster to investigate Illian. But, in the Light, they had both picked up enough trades of the hunt that they were uniquely equipped in this thankless task.
"We should move on from here before nightfall. I would not want to stay here tonight. I will do what I can for them." Halfhand kneeled before the pit of bones. He regretted that he could not give the full Last Ritual of Peace that these souls deserved, but their task was pressing and time wanting. But he could try to give them a shred of dignity. He removed the steel gauntlet from his good right hand, and placed his naked palm on the auburn dirt.
"May your souls find peace, may you return to the warm embrace of the Light, and let this protect you from the cold Void." He took a handful of dirt, letting it warm in his right hand, willing his Word of Command into the dirt, and then casting the dirt over the mass grave. But where he normally would find a reflection of warmths and peace, he instead felt emptiness before him as if the bone-white pit before him was a yawning chasm of hateful darkness, consuming his blessing like a ravenous hole of hunger. It almost seemed to pull and drag at the Child himself like a physical presence, and Halfhand pulled back in alarm as if avoiding the snap of the jaws of a bear trap, almost stumbling.
Viellain raised his brow at Halfhand's reaction, but the Child of Light just shook his head. Maybe it was exhaustion from the weeks' hard riding. This would not be a battle for him to fight right now. He turned his back to the pit, still feeling as if there was a dark presence watching him, and left the Hand to his own task.
Halfhand returned to check on their two mounts as Viellain started the cleansing fire to the wooden pole, letting fire consume the stake and reduce the ominous message to the sky in smoke. His massive black warhorse fed complacently from the overgrown village green. The Child of Light checked the heavy saddlebags, the left now filled with provisions for a month from the larder of those unfortunate who will no longer need them, the right with tools of the trade borrowed from the Fortress Armory. He checked that the massive battle hammer remained securely strapped in. Unlike the steel cavalry sword engraved with serpiginous runes with matching scabbard on his hip, this heavy hammer was a crude weapon of pure iron, the only marking a lacy trim of rust. Effective tools of the Light in a dark world that has forgotten peace.
When Viellain returned from his task, the Questioner mounted his own pale white thoroughbred, trained for speed and agility rather than battle. They set forth on their lonely quest again down the dirt packed road towards the next town, riding deeper into the grim unknown, a endless veil of dark gray clouds lining the horizon in front of them, leaving the last glimpse of sunlight a distant memory.