[h2][center][color=Rosybrown]Somewhere near the Duskwood Crossroads[/color][/center][/h2]

Something wasn’t sitting right with Gregory. 

Murders weren’t all that uncommon in Duskwood. Everyone knew that -- the only thing that was more common, perhaps, was one of the myriad threats in the haunted hood -- from zombies, to ghosts, to overgrown spiders, to garden-variety wolves-- to kill some wayward traveler, some poor child or foolish young man that’d wandered out from Darkshire just a little too far in the dead of night... It kept happening. Again, and again, and again, including everyone from inexperienced or overconfident locals, to Watchmen, all the way to greedy merchants making the mistake of traveling the roads without heavy escorts (or underpaid escorts, as it often was).

By all rights, then, the death of this particular merchant shouldn’t have been troubling at all.

Letting out an annoyed grunt, Watcher Dodds rose from his squatting position, lantern in hand, staring out over the wrecked cart with a deeply suspicious glare. The cart? Toppled by an abandoned farmstead, broken into pieces as if it’d been toppled over entirely.

The horse? Gone. Not a hint of its presence. The cargo? Vanished. Stolen, not a hint of it either. It was [i]clean[/i].

The merchant? 

There wasn’t much left of the merchant. Scraps of flesh, necrotizing bone, signs of animal scavenging... 

[i]That[/i] was the problem. Independently, any one of those facts would’ve made perfect sense. The merchant was bitten, likely by one of the spiders he spent so much of his time culling, his body dissolved, and the animals left picked over the scraps.

...Then there was the problem of the cart. It hadn’t merely been toppled, but truly wrecked -- not the work of the spiders out this far west. The missing cargo? Who could’ve stolen it? The one upside of living in Duskwood was the rarity of bandit attacks. It wasn’t profitable -- not in the least. You’d lose a dozen men for a single iron sword.

The wrinkles, however, didn’t stop here, as he’d quickly realized. Next, his eyes flashed back to the half-dissolved corpse.

[i]It’s still here.[/i] He reminded himself, reaching up to run a hand through his half-swept, golden blonde hair. He’d lost men to spider attacks, and they rarely, if ever, simply bit someone and left the body to rot, typically preferring to drag them away, wrap them in webbing, and wait for the corpse to dissolve after a good few bites of venom. 

A cart ruined, a body rotting as if bitten and somehow abandoned by one of the local venomous web spider...

And the merchant. The merchant. It’d been a simple enough matter to reach out to Marshal Stoutmantle for information, and, indeed, this wasn’t the first time the merchant had made this particular trip. Interviews with a handful of the Darkshire townfolk had shown that he’d been through before, and Stoutmantle’s records shown that, without fail, [i]this[/i] merchant made his way through Westfall without incident nearly a dozen times.

That was what was stumping Gregory Dodds.

There were only a few ways someone made it through Westfall safely -- dumb luck, heavy guard, or a handful or two of gold shuffled in the Defias Brotherhood’s direction.

The one time he didn’t make the trip safely, a strange series of events strike, on [i]his[/i]patrol route, and they add up less and less the more he looks at them.

Something was wrong, deeply wrong, and Watcher Dodds was damn sure he was going to get to the bottom of it.

With a grunt and a sigh, sliding his sword from its sheath, Dodds turned to make the long march back to Darkshire.