McIan
Journeyman
As the Warden Captain of Yew, Itannar had seen a lot of grisly crime scenes already, enough to last a lifetime and more. These last three were unusually savage, and equally inexplicable. They were clearly the bodies of merchants visiting Yew from Minoc and Vesper specifically; evidence in back packs and the corpses themselves testified to that, even though some of the documentation lay scattered around the bodies, likely from vermin feeding upon the corpses. The peculiarity of the carnage lay in the clear and simple fact that the heads had been removed, and not as a killing strike, but after both death and elimination of much of the blood from the bodies.
Itannar decided it could be one of two things: likely it was a vendetta killing prompted by the mayhem surrounding not only disappearances but corpses found lying sprawled after collapsing due to excessive exhaustion and/or heart failure. The perpetrator or perpetrators evidently wanted to make sure any detectives would be confounded by the state of the bodies enough to throw off the trail – grotesque murder might not be the work of an ordinary person bent on single, personal, revenge, but some maniac instead. And the maniacs did abound. It was bad enough that some long dead or ghostly Piper was on the loose, but then there were others: the Moreno family, and, as he heard from the governor of Yew tonight, Suka had ransacked her office, making a mess out of it. Yet Itannar doubted it was either of them.
It made no sense. Decapitation would be a killing blow to be sure, but blood would have splattered until the heart stopped beating. Yet there was very little of it. And the wound revealed that the head had not been actually severed from the body, but wrenched off by someone very strong; an orc perhaps? That was a possibility except that, in his experience, orcs took the heads with them as trophies, a prize of war.
The second thing worried him more. He knew from legends and tales that blood-drinkers sometimes removed the heads from their victims not wanting them to arise as one of them. The usefulness of that tactic for them made sense: no competition, no excess killings from new undead to draw unwanted attention in an area.
He knew people did not want to hear about undead. He knew it was not a popular subject as many had long memories of former undead stalking the land, wanton and unbridled in their mayhem, carnage, seeming invincibility, and bizarre notions of who they were. But this was what it was and there was no changing it for good or ill. People would have to know of this possibility and be warned, like it or not. They could mock, evade, flee or ignore, but it would not change a thing if it were the case that undead were the perpetrators of these crimes.
For him, the trail began here, in Yew, and he intended to end it here.
Itannar decided it could be one of two things: likely it was a vendetta killing prompted by the mayhem surrounding not only disappearances but corpses found lying sprawled after collapsing due to excessive exhaustion and/or heart failure. The perpetrator or perpetrators evidently wanted to make sure any detectives would be confounded by the state of the bodies enough to throw off the trail – grotesque murder might not be the work of an ordinary person bent on single, personal, revenge, but some maniac instead. And the maniacs did abound. It was bad enough that some long dead or ghostly Piper was on the loose, but then there were others: the Moreno family, and, as he heard from the governor of Yew tonight, Suka had ransacked her office, making a mess out of it. Yet Itannar doubted it was either of them.
It made no sense. Decapitation would be a killing blow to be sure, but blood would have splattered until the heart stopped beating. Yet there was very little of it. And the wound revealed that the head had not been actually severed from the body, but wrenched off by someone very strong; an orc perhaps? That was a possibility except that, in his experience, orcs took the heads with them as trophies, a prize of war.
The second thing worried him more. He knew from legends and tales that blood-drinkers sometimes removed the heads from their victims not wanting them to arise as one of them. The usefulness of that tactic for them made sense: no competition, no excess killings from new undead to draw unwanted attention in an area.
He knew people did not want to hear about undead. He knew it was not a popular subject as many had long memories of former undead stalking the land, wanton and unbridled in their mayhem, carnage, seeming invincibility, and bizarre notions of who they were. But this was what it was and there was no changing it for good or ill. People would have to know of this possibility and be warned, like it or not. They could mock, evade, flee or ignore, but it would not change a thing if it were the case that undead were the perpetrators of these crimes.
For him, the trail began here, in Yew, and he intended to end it here.