[h3]Jaelnec, Freagon, Irah, Lhirin, Nabi, Yanin, Jordan and Madara – Forest north of Borstown, Bandit Farm[/h3]
After Irah transmitted her silent message to Kinder, the Angel of Mercy awkwardly nodded her little puppet-head in acknowledgment of the requests before clumsily waddling over toward where Madara was working on treating Bren. Her movements were unsurprisingly rather slow and funny-looking, since the legs of her makeshift vessel were stiff and lacking joints, meaning that she had to wobble and rotate her entire body with each step as she traversed the area, all while wiggling her little scarecrow-like arms at her sides in an effort to maintain her balance.
“My real body can fly,” she volunteered when she got to Madara before dropping down on all fours before directing one stubby hand toward Bren. A soft white light shone from it onto Bren, and the magic of one of the most potent healers among the angelic classes promptly caused the catatonic healer's injuries to mend rapidly. “It has big, beautiful wings. It is quite graceful, I think; magnificent to look at and capable of great mobility. How other angels find any kind of pleasure in inhabiting vessels like this crude thing... it is quite beyond me.”
It was unclear whether Kinder was speaking to Madara or Bren, but her tone struck a curious middle-ground between annoyance and tenderness. “There,” she said after just several seconds, “that is as much as I can safely do for him. He is practically unhurt now, but there may be some external scarring... though if he is a healer himself, he will likely be able to fix that himself once he regains consciousness.”

Once she was sure the objective of this entire excursion was well and truly cared for as she had been instructed, Kinder turned her attention to the bandits – who she supposed were actually crusaders – and swept her divine senses across the battlefield to check how many of them, if any, could still be saved. The two that Yanin had intentionally left with wounds that were not immediately lethal were quite recoverable, of course, but the rest... None of them had been mages, as Caleb had asserted at the beginning of the endeavor, and they were all human. With the average capacity of a human soul, Kinder figured that even if they clung to life hard enough to ignore the beckoning of the Wanderer, they would still only have about thirty seconds after death before their spark of life faded and they became undead. And it had already been far more than thirty seconds; as such, it came as no surprise to her that she did not sense any lingering spirits that would allow for revival. The dead here were, regrettably, truly dead, and not even an iriao, nor the Goddess of Mercy herself for that matter, could bring back the dead.
So it was that Kinder opted to focus her attention where it would actually make a difference and headed for Yanin's prisoners. The third prisoner that Quintin had executed had been the one Kinder had the highest hopes for since he was the most recent death, but she could tell that his spirit had departed almost instantly upon death. That man had not only accepted his end, he had welcomed it. But none of that mattered; with her body of sticks and straw gradually crumbling under the corrosive influence of divine taint, Kinder did as she was told and healed the crusaders just enough that their lives were no longer in danger.

Also immediately after communing with Kinder, Irah would find that she did not even need to wait for the Angel of Mercy to convey the message, as she immediately heard Caleb's voice in her head: “No need for her to pass on a message, Deo'irah. I can hear you. Or did you forget that I was asked to maintain a telepathic link with you?” Rather than wait for her to respond, the fallen thalk just continued without pause: “I think I will stay in here for now rather than rejoin you. I am managing to accumulate a substantial amount of divine energy in this shed; it would be a shame to let all this power go to waste.”

Checking the crusaders' bodies, Yanin would find very little in terms of anything that could elucidate their motives beyond the obvious. They generally seemed to have very little in terms of personal possessions on them in a way that suggested they probably stored most of their belongings elsewhere, though Yanin would also observe that the vast majority of the band's baggage and supplies were probably in their saddlebags. A few crusaders did wear jewelry, though most of it was very sparse, simple and cheap. Several simple rings – likely wedding rings as was tradition in many of the more popular religions – of steel or wood, a couple of crude bracelets of string feathers or colorful pebbles as pendants... things that were worth very little, but one might assume had sentimental value to their owners. One crusader had a dirty and weathered ragdoll tucked into his belt, and another had a child's wooden toy sword sheathed right next to his very real dagger. The most interesting memorabilia he was able to discover without going through the saddlebags was a silver locket one crusader was wearing around his neck, which contained a tuft of blond hair.
He would naturally also find that many of the crusaders had small amounts of money hidden away on them in a way that suggested they had been trying to hide the coins from their comrades. The amounts varied per person, of course, but in total it would come to 75 rodlin. He and Lhirin would also finish their count: they had the four still-catatonic crusaders that Freagon had applied restraints to, Yanin's two prisoners, and twenty-five dead for a total of thirty-one.

Over by the tree at the place of pride of the farm, Jaelnec and Quintin relieved the poor innocent plant of its gruesome decorations and gently laid the corpses side by side at its foot, allowing them to rest with some measure of dignity until such a time that a proper burial became feasible. As it turned out, Quintin had only been partially correct in his assessment of who had been hung there. Two were indeed an adult pair of penin, a man and a woman; young, dressed in cheap, weathered garb and with what appeared to be carpenter's tools still in place in their belts. But while the last three – another pair of man and woman, and finally a boy that looked less than ten years old – could easily be assumed to be human at a glance, a closer inspection revealed that they were actually nightwalkers.