"That's great," Roselyn observed dryly, trying to ignore the shaking of her own hand as she took in the sight of the dead village and the manor looming through the fog. "That's the direction I want to be going." 

Mechanically, without focusing, she drew her pistol from her belt and went through the steps of loading it, making it ready to fire. She paused short of affixing the match-cord to the firing mechanism - that could be done quickly enough, and it wouldn't do for the weapon to go off prematurely and alert... whatever their 'ward' was so nervous about. 

She cast her gaze around the party as she did so. In a sense, they were the most disturbing detail about the hellish world she'd found herself in - without them, this forest would seem a surreal and shifting nightmare, the product of her terrified mind as she sat in the hold of the ship that brought her to her new life and tried not to think about the roiling abyss below. But these three did not belong - she would not have placed them here. It was real, then, and she had arrived.

Hadar, the mute, the Tiefling with the massive sword. Heinrich, the red-eyed nobleman. Anwyn, the girl with golden scales on her face - it must have been a disease, some kind of condition, but it was beautiful. [i]And me.[/i] The girl in the mask.

She was shaken out of her ruminations by a loud thump and a groan from within one of the cottages, causing her to start involuntarily. "There's something in that one," she said. "Survivor, maybe? Should we check it out?" She couldn't imagine what had happened to this place, or that anyone could survive it, remain squatting, trapped in the remains of a ruined home.

But then, people could survive all sorts of things.