Feast for Crows
The crows swarm over the bodies obscuring them from view. Serra stifles a wrench in her stomach and tastes the bile in the back of her throat as the stench of blood and smoke mix with the afternoon heat and dust in a stomach turning haze. The crows scream at her as she drives Nightbreaker forward. Her enormous warhorse wants no part of this filth.
Seven things hang from the branches of a lone oak tree. The smoldering remains of two wagons lay nearby in heaps. Serra knows what she will find when the crows clear, but for the moment she sees only a blood wet roiling mass of black feathers and sharp beaks. She hobbles Nightbreaker about a dozen paces from the tree and approaches on foot. The crows continue their cacophonic protests.
Most of the crows take flight or hover overhead as Serra reaches the first of the bodies. A few particularly greedy birds eye her evilly as they take last gobbets of flesh before flying off with a squawk. Drawing her long sword Serra slashes the rope strung around the neck of the thing that was once a man and it drops to the ground. Even though the crows have worked at the man for many hours, Serra can see clearly that the man was flayed before he was hanged. Not a bit of skin covers the flesh from head to toe. She whispers a brief prayer to Pelor and wishes she could forget the thought that the man was probably alive at the time.
Serra spends the better part of two hours cutting down the bodies and digging a massive hole in which to bury them. Six men, one woman, all human by the shape of them, will never see home again. They spent their last hour in the World in a horror that few can even imagine.
Reavers Here?
Serra has seen the work of Reavers before, but always far west of Berador, never to the east. The thought of those inhuman fiends preying on the farms and camps here sends a terrifying chill down her spine.
After burying the dead Serra studies the ground carefully. A long, cautious search of the area makes plain the tale. Serra finds a foxhole near the Road where one or two of the Reavers hid in wait for their prey. The others stayed nearby behind some scrub. They rode in on the two wagons screaming murder and hatred. At least a score of them, most mounted, commandeered the wagons and captured the people with very little fight. They drove the wagons south of the Road to the oak tree and set about their butchery. The slaughter complete they rode further south towards the piney forested hills.
Serra tracks the Reavers for a couple of hours. Riding across the clear land between the Road and the hills she can see in all directions clearly to the horizon. The tracks enter the forest and there she turns aside. To pursue Reavers, alone, into the forest would be suicide. She turns back for the Road, driving Nightbreaker for what little speed he has to give.
A Warning
And so she finds herself alone on the Road with no cover in any direction for several hours. With only two hours until nightfall she must make for the uncertain shelter of the Greywood. She must survive; she must make it back to Dalton; she must warn the people. And so she rides.
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