[color=A0A0A0][h2]Fleuri Jodeau[/h2][/color]

Fleuri made his way to the door just as a massive metal-clad warrior emerged from the opposite the courtyard.

[i]That must be the Bors she mentioned.  That'd explain the state of the fort's gate,[/i] he silently noted as he looked back at the new arrival, not wanting to enter the fort until he was sure that the situation wasn't escalating into violence.  Truth be told, he couldn't really blame Alette for calling someone like Bors to her side, not while she was surrounded by Iron Roses.  A few tense moments later, once it was clear that the giant fellow hadn't been ordered to attack, Fleuri turned around and entered the fort.

The inside of the fort was a gruesome sight.  Previously Fleuri had assumed that the fort's defenders had been killed by the boar-tattooed mercs via some act of treachery, perhaps an infiltrator or two opening the gates during the cover of night.  The state of the corpses inside the fort, however, suggested something more disturbing.  It didn't look like a battle had taken place here, it looked more like a massive, lethal brawl had happened.  A few of Alette's mercenaries were also milling about and searching the place.  Perhaps Fleuri should've been a little concerned about mercenaries rummaging through kingdom property, but his mind was more focused on the shocking state of the bodies.

This wasn't the first time Fleuri had seen the aftermath of a battle.  Back when he was a squire, his mentor, a Reonite paladin, was investigating possible evidence of body-snatching going on in one corner of Thaln during the War of the Red Flag.  A group of traitor soldiers had carried out a number of successful ambushes in one corner of Thaln, and a few of the victims were always unaccounted for when the ambush sites were found.  At first they thought it was slaving, but when the ambushers were caught off-guard and defeated (in a battle that Fleuri, at the time, lamented that he had missed out on), the survivors swore they hadn't taken anyone alive.  Fleuri's mentor had a hunch that they should visit the battlefield where the ambushers were defeated.  To make a long story short, this eventually led to the two of them bringing down a coven of necromancers who were covertly amassing undead from the dead of both sides, but he never really forgot that first battlefield, and how what he saw now in the fort was nothing like that.

[i]Mercenaries don't discard their swords in the backs of their victims.  They don't forego their weapons to beat foes to death.  And if Alette's story is true, they couldn't have already been fully disguised when this happened,[/i] Fleuri noted as he looked over the bodies and examined what killed them.  [i]But if these are all Thaln's soldiers, that must mean...[/i]

"... They all killed each other," spoke one of Alette's mercs, a deathly pale-white woman in leather armor and a plethora of knives.

This conclusion painted a far more worrisome picture than murderous infiltration by mercenaries.  To compel the entire garrison of a fort to kill one another had to require immense magical power.  It was certainly be far beyond anything an average mercenary band ought to be capable of.  Perhaps Tyaethe, in her centuries of experience and knowledge of magic, would have some idea as to how this could've happened.

"Have you found anything here that might give a clue as to why these soldiers would kill each other like madmen?" he asked the pale girl.  No sooner had he asked this than he heard the voice of Tyaethe, confronting someone about something outside.  He hoped that the First and Youngest wasn't going to turn Alette hostile, because Fleuri didn't want to suddenly find himself in combat with all of these mercenaries.

"Apologies, I haven't introduced myself, have I?  Sir Fleuri Jodeau, Knight of the Iron Roses," he said as he turned back to the woman, hoping to break the ice and assure them that he had no hostile intent.

[@VitaVitaAR]