“You want to do what?” The wolf’s voice cracked. He garbled gravel, and the words came out slurred. Corea had almost thought that she had heard it gasp.  Any pretense of fearsomeness seemingly vanished at the moment, and he sounded strangely human to Corea. She pressed the issue.

“You and your friend are roadmen. You are looking for work. I need help. You can help me.”

There was a strange sort of snuffling from inside the stable. She pinched the coin between her finger and thumb, staring down at it. 

“We need to do nothing.” Chains rattled from the barn. “We leave in hours.”

Corea stepped forward again, closer to the stable door. She heard a sharp and violent rattle of chains and a long, low growl.

“I have gold.”

“I don’t care.”

“But you are a roadman.”

“And you are a little girl. Go home. Be with your family.”

Corea felt the warmth of tears trickling down her cheeks. She took a sharp breath, hoping not to let the fear and sadness bury her.

“All I have is my brother and my dying grandmother, and my brother hasn’t returned from the patrol in days. I… I need to know if he’s dead.”

The wolf was quiet. She heard some shuffling of chains and the shifting of a heavy body, but mostly she heard nothing from within the small barn. 

From within the stable, his low voice carried in the air. She could feel it on her skin. But it carried a strange softness as well. “You are surrounded by monsters. Many. Too many. If you feel he is gone, you are probably right.”

“Mr. Eghart had sent him out and refused to try to find him…” she swallowed, “or whatever is left.” The mayor, a relative, nor his captain of the guard had been any help.

“And if he is one of the ghouls? What then?” the wolf asked. The voice was firm. Direct.

“I want him not to suffer,” she answered meekly.

“My companion tried to offer our services to your mayor. He refused us. We are moving on.”

“The mayor is an arsehole.”

There was a sound that almost sounded like a laugh from within the stable. Had the wolf actually laughed? It sounded horrid.

“You speak from experience, child?”

“Mayor Gorval never liked us. I work for his cousin, my uncle, Mr. Gorten, at the inn. We met last night there. I served you and the tall man you travel with.”

There was silence for a time. When the wolf spoke again, his voice was lower, as if there was a secret being discussed. A whisper from a mighty chest – it might not even have counted as a whisper. Not really. “What is your name?” the wolf asked.

“My name is Corea Gorse.”

…

Fuck.

The minute Erryl learned of this, he would drag Fang into a provincial mystery. Fang was already exhausted. Not physically, but in his soul.

Erryl had spiraled last night, talking of some vague family conspiracy in the town, positing connections to the isolation of the town and the fate of the original town, and the similarity of the names of people within the town. The “gor” in so many of these names convinced him there was some form of family conflict and secrets lurking around every corner.

Where Erryl saw conspiracy, Fang merely saw a brood. He spent much of his childhood in a provincial village where he was one of the few people with no blood ties to existing families, which all shared some variation on the name “Marrok.” For a time in his childhood, Fang had been Fain Maerok – he had been adopted. It was a name he carried with pride until the curse turned him into a monster. It was better than being a nameless bastard, which he had actually been at birth.

But the “gor” of these names, the relationship between these parties, and the strange nature of the village’s connection to the roaming dead were all too coincidental. Fang saw that, truly, but had tried to dissuade his traveling partner from pursuing it. Mysteries rarely paid.

The story, as Erryl had relayed it, was that the necromancer who caused the original Gordhurst to fall was still alive, still controlling the undead. The necromancer had a past with the mayor. The name of the original town was Gordhurst. This was ‘New’ Gordhurst, cobbled together from survivors. All the players of the fall of the old town were still very much at play.

There was a mystery here. Fang fucking hated it, and the minute Erryl caught wind of this conversation, he would set out to investigate. Fang liked Erryl, so he was obligated to help keep his companion alive, despite how annoying he was most times. Erryl was one of the few who almost treated Fang like a human. He listened to him when it mattered. It meant a lot.

Well, Erryl listened most of the time. When there was a mystery between his teeth, he wouldn’t move past it until the inevitable bloodbath that tended to be the end of all mysteries of Aurin.

“Gods fucking damn.”

The small voice of Corea Gorse, relative of Mayor Gorval, who was responsible for the fates of those within the town of New Gordhurst, who had been mayor of old Gordhurst, who had been connected to a necromancer, who had surrounded the town with the roaming corpses of the townsfolk of Gordhurst, admonished the Fang from outside the stable. “Language.”

Fang sat in silence, contemplating links between names and events he wasn’t entirely sure of. The scraping of a gold coin between slats of wood caught his attention. He watched the coin land with a tiny thud on the wooden frame just behind the stable door. It rattled in the morning silence until it came to a stop, and the sound of gold on wood punctuated the visitor’s simple request.

“Will you help me?”