[h3]Jaelnec and Freagon, entering Borstown from the northeast[/h3]
A soft smile graced Jaelnec's lips as he rode down the road with his eyes closed. He listened to the steady sound of the hooves of Sabicia and Xilos on the dirt road as they traveled at a trot, the rhythm of the sound corresponding to the rhythm of his own movements in the saddle to create an almost hypnotic experience. He could hear the chain-links of his own hauberk rattling faintly with each of Sabicia's strides, could feel the scabbard of his sword tapping him gently on his left thigh with each sway. Nearby, somewhere to his right, he could hear the cheerful song of a robin and further away, behind him and to the left, he heard the slow, repeating tone of the call of a blackbird, all of it accompanied by the gentle sound of the leaves rustling in the breeze.
He felt the warm sun on his hands and arms through his leather gauntlets and shirt-sleeves, with the pleasant heat only occasionally fading to the chill of an early autumn wind. He could smell the scents of the forest gradually, very slowly intermingling with the smells of a town, just as the sounds of nature began to be accompanied with the sounds of hatchets on wood and voices in the distance. The sound of laughing children.

There was a brief flash through Jaelnec's mind at that sound: an image before his mind's eye of a very young, blond girl's smiling face, which prompted him to immediately open his eyes as he felt a cruel fist close painfully around his heart. For just a split-second he was convinced he could smell smoke and see the faint reflection of a bloodstained toy rabbit, only for the vague memory to fade and give way to the much more vivid present. He shuddered.
Though for just an instant he had been reminded of how he had been back then, Jaelnec immediately felt at home in his body as it was now: slender, yet muscular, strong and sturdy yet agile. He clutched the reins in hands to feel it better through his gauntlets; he inhaled deeply to feel the weight of the chainmail rest comfortingly on his chest through his gambeson; he clenched his thighs and calves and remembered the countless hours of training he had had to go through to become like this. Part of him almost wanted to reach for the hilt at his left hip and draw his bastard sword, just to remind him of the feeling of its weight in his hand and to feel the memory of his muscles bleed into his mind, assuring him that using it had become natural to him. He resisted the impulse, in equal parts because he was afraid that he might scare the townspeople and because he knew that reaching for his sword without reason would likely prompt a harsh scolding.
Instead he reached up and adjusted the wide brim of his hat, feeling the coarse fabric shift against the helmet he wore beneath it. The shade cast by the brim helped, even as the canopy of the forest began to give way and let more and more of the bright sunshine through, casting the world in radiant light. While Jaelnec greatly enjoyed the warmth of days like this, such particularly sunny weather was also troublesome in that the world become so bright that it became blurry to his eyes, shapes and colors bleeding into each other as his nocturnal, uniform jet-black eyes tried their best to adapt. On a day this bright, even just the sunlight reflected off grass and the light-gray dirt and brown dirt was enough to cause him discomfort bordering on pain.
He reflexively moved a hand up to brush back a few stray strands of honey-blond hair that had escaped his shoulder-length ponytail, only to feel his gauntlet-clad fingertips brush over the scar where it trailed across his right cheek, from his cheekbone, across his lips and toward his chin. Again he shuddered, huddling into his linen cloak as this mark immediately served its purpose of reminding him the consequence of defiance.
Sabicia snorted nervously, the mare he was riding seemingly sensing his discomfort, and Jaelnec quickly leaned down to pat her neck and assure her that everything was okay.

Glancing ahead, Jaelnec could plainly see his master, Freagon, riding the gelding Xilos just several meters away. The old man – a nightwalker like Jaelnec himself – sat stiff and straight in his saddle, facing straight ahead. His broad shoulders were outlined by his own cloak, though the cloak was down, allowing Jaelnec to see the knight's messy rat's nest of salt-and-pepper hair.
Without thinking and without really knowing why, Jaelnec's gaze was drawn to Freagon's left hip and thigh, where his scabbard was gently swaying back and forth. He stared at it, ordinary though it seemed at the moment, and felt a strange wistfulness come over him. Uninvited thoughts rose from the depths of his mind of how much he wanted to try to hold that sword himself, to feel it in his grasp, to cut the air with it. Roct: the sword of a true Knight of the Will.
It took a moment for Jaelnec to realize that his master had turned in the saddle, only for the young nightwalker to raise his gaze and meet that of his older kinsman. He let his eyes travel up from the scabbard, up where he could see the hem of Freagon's black coat within the cloak, past the almost blindingly brilliant shimmer of his gold-and-purple lutrium scale armor, to his face. The old man's skin was a mess of scars of all kinds, from burns and cuts and things Jaelnec dared not even imagine, which meant that the knight was mostly incapable of changing his expression, but rather seemed to wear a neutral, indifferent mien at all times. Even so his jet-black left eye – the right being hidden behind a large leather eyepatch – staring at him somehow managed to convey everything that his face could not: intense attention, impatience and expectation.

Jaelnec immediately jolted up straight in his saddle and started looking around frantically, trying his best to spot what it was that his master wanted him to notice, but seeing nothing out of the ordinary. They were still on the road on their way into Borstown, still a little ways uphill from the township itself with a nice view of the entire settlement. It easy to spot several buildings that were obviously bigger and than the others, namely what Jaelnec suspected was the inn, the local Fadewatcher station, what seemed like a winery and what had to be the manor house of the barony. There were people in the street, in the fields and a few along the treeline, but he did not see anything that seemed immediately obvious as something deserving of attention.
After a few seconds of this Freagon's eye narrowed slightly in disapproval, and the glow of the cigarette between his lips brightened as he inhaled deeply, then exhaled a large cloud of foul-smelling smoke.
“People are avoiding walking near those two buildings,” he said, his voice deep and a little hoarse, and he pointed toward the town, indicating two places near the central crossroad: one that looked like a regular house at a distance, a little southeast of the crossroad, the other that was the Fadewatcher barracks. “Most people are taking detours just to not get too close, and those who go there seem to be paying attention to those places specifically.”
Jaelnec took a deep breath to calm himself back down, anxious to feel his master's sharp glare on him like this, then asked: “What does that mean?” His voice was not as deep as his master's, but was young, healthy and strong.
“Not sure,” the knight shrugged, turning his attention once more from his page to the town ahead. “Could be lots of reasons, but most likely something happened. Recently. There's fresh fear in the air.”
Reflexively looking around again as if expecting to see the source of this fear spontaneously materialize out of the undergrowth, Jaelnec frowned. “Should we investigate?”
“We'll ride past on our way to the manor. If something important is going on we'll be able to tell from that. Otherwise we're here to see Bor.”
A worrying thought occurred to Jaelnec: “What if someone's hurt?”
He instantly knew that this was not an acceptable comment when Freagon turned in his saddle once more, fixing his dark stare on him with an intensity that made Jaelnec want to physically shrink so that he could somehow hide. “Have I missed something, boy? Did you become a healer while I wasn't looking?”
Jaelnec averted his gaze and spoke with a trembling voice: “No, Sir...”
“Really? You didn't suddenly discover that you were a healing elementalist, or learn an arcane spell of healing, or gain favored powers? Maybe you discovered a recipe for healing balms that you're secretly carrying with you? Or you've been researching surgery and medicine instead of sleeping?”
“No, Sir,” Jaelnec said, feeling a familiar sense of dread come over him. Though Freagon did not raise his voice and his expression remained the same, there was a coldness to his tone and his stare that never failed to make the twenty-five-year-old man feel like a ten-year-old child being lectured all over again.
“Neither am I. I am a Knight of the Will, and you are my page. My skills are better used elsewhere, and you follow me wherever I go. Or do you disagree?”
Jaelnec swallowed a lump in his throat. His master's last sentence was phrased as a question, but spoken as a challenge: Do you [I]dare[/I] to disagree? “N-no, Sir.”
“Don't stutter, boy.” Freagon turned back toward the approaching town. “If we are needed we will act, but someone needing help doesn't mean they need [i]our[/I] help. Now get your head out of your ass and pay attention.”
“Yes, Sir.”

Jaelnec licked his lips and started absorbing the world around him through the lens of a knight-in-training rather than a person, pushing back the appreciation he felt for this world that he was a part of to follow his master's wishes. He ignored fond thoughts of how fifteen years ago, before he became his mater's page, he had almost never felt the sun on his skin and mostly experienced the sunlit world through closed doors and curtains. He discarded the past, both the time spent with Freagon and the time before then, and focused on the present. Felt the world crystallize before his senses, not as a beautiful place full of life and wonder, but as a dark one fraught with danger and peril.
A world that needed his sword. A world that he was being trained to protect.

His gaze was drawn to the manor house of the town as he sensed movement there. Several people seemed to stumble hurriedly out of the front of the building, one of which looked notably smaller than the rest. One of them went to the front gate of the fence surrounding the small plot of land, and though it was impossible for Jaelnec to tell details from this far away and in daylight, it soon became obvious what was happening as the sound of an alarm-bell started chiming from down there.
“Go,” was all Freagon said, as both of them urged their horses to accelerate to a gallop, rushing through town with their cloaks fluttering behind them.
They rode for Bor Manor.

[h3]Yanin, Madara and Irah, main room inside Fadewatcher station, Borstown[/h3]
Upon hearing Yanin's rank within the Fadewatchers, the other man – whose tabard marked him as a simple watchman, the lowest rank within the organization – performed a reflexive salute. His younger fellow, who was also a watchman, glanced up at hearing the information but did not move, focusing instead on holding the lantern steady for Madara.
“None, sir,” the Watcher Yanin had addressed answered his questions. “They didn't say anything and didn't wear anything we could identify them from. They came from the northeast and left that way again, too. They didn't seem to be interested in anything else, they just went straight for our healer. They spoke with him first, then he closed his door in their faces, and that's when things got ugly. There were...” He stopped to think for a second before continuing: “There were twenty-two of them, though six of them are piled up in the basement now.”
He heaved a deep sigh. “I'm sorry I can't tell you more, sir. When the bandits ran it was just me, Cavin and a two of the baroness' guys standing, and we decided it would probably be more useful to try to save the wounded than pursuing the enemy into a losing battle. One of the baroness' guys did leave to try to track them, but I haven't heard anything about that since.”

At that point all of them were interrupted in what they were doing by the loud, sudden sound of an alarm-bell chiming relatively close by, and all of the local Fadewatchers that were capable of it – even the wounded ones – froze in place, eyes wide and desperate.
“The baroness!” the one that had been speaking said breathlessly, clearly terrified. “The baroness is calling for help! Please, if she's using that bell it's an emergency! Go! We'll handle things here, but we [I]can't[/I] lose the baroness!”

[h3]Jordan and Lhirin, outside the Fadewatcher station, Borstown[/h3]
As Lhirin was leaving and Jordan still contemplating what to do about the situation, the calm and quiet of the day was suddenly shattered by the chime of an alarm-bell from just down the street, from Bor Manor. Within a handful of seconds the sound of the bell would be accompanied by the sound of galloping hooves, as two horsemen came rushing down the street from the northeast toward the manor: both wearing armor, and both with swords at their side.