Keen

Despite the ritual-cast Silence which encased the enigmatic mechanism, Keen awoke, as she did every morning, to the dissonant, metallic thrum of the Nowhere Machine. Along the inner rim of the Flagstone District, just about everyone who worked during daylight hours used the machine's predictable morning cacophony as their daily wake-up call. One of the Ceruleans had explained to her, once, why the sounds of the fog-churning machine were able to escape the radius of the Silence spell: something about antimagic devices being disruptive to all spells, even ones they aren't specifically designed to counter. As long as it meant the Foul Legion, or the other Pentacle Armies, couldn't discover the Shrouded Vale, Keen could handle the noise.

Besides, the young tiefling thought as she began her morning rituals, the Flagstone District was far from the worst place to live in Shroudmont. The noise was a problem, certainly, but the poor folks living at the foul end of the Bilewater had drawn a far shorter straw than her, not to mention the new tenement sections carved out from the eastern cavemouth... Keen didn't care that it was a common practice for dwarven Outriders before the war, it just wasn't right to keep people buried like that, so far from what little light Shroudmont still saw through the Fog. Her prayers were shaky this morning, unsure of what she wanted from Dorrel, or what Dorrel might want from her. When her prayers had finished, she extinguished her lantern with solemnity and a furrowed brow.

Keen's walk to the fair end of the river would have measured only one or two miles as the crow flies, but the jumbled lattice of wooden ladders, rope bridges, and narrow, mountainside staircases which comprised the route from her home at Mount Venerate's lowest peak to her ground-level work station made the journey a difficult one. By the time she arrived at the North Tower, a three-story wooden fortification made patchwork by time and renovation, she was sweaty, out of breath, and a bit late, none of which were altogether out of character for her. She was red in the face as well, but in fairness, she was red all over, and the fact hadn't really fluctuated due to exercise. From the tower's second-level door and onto a sturdy wooden balcony, a cheery, aging dwarf emerged and observed Keen with twinkling eyes.

"You made it on time today," the dwarf said, his voice betraying a smile that was otherwise hidden by a dense, metal-banded beard. He wore a tabard emblazoned with the insignia of the Militia Scout Corps.

Keen frowned. "I'm not sure I did, Rorik." Technically, she couldn't be sure that was true-- sundials didn't work beneath the Fog, and she couldn't exactly afford an enchanted one. She had to gauge time like everyone else in the Shrouded Vale: through habit and guesswork.

Rorik nodded confidently, his beard-bands jangling against one another as the braids they held bounced and re-settled. "Of course you were. Your name was on the logbook just a moment after mine, and we both know I was here on time." Now, the smile had reached not only his voice, but his eyes as well, crinkling at the corners to give away what his beard concealed. Keen sprouted an unhidden smile to match his, and thanked him before entering the tower.

Throughout history, the monotony of guard duty has traditionally been accompanied by a number of time-wasting side tasks: whether the distraction in question is a game of cards, a round of dragonchess, or a spirited discussion on the likelihood of sexual prospects, soldiers from all nations and creeds have found myriad ways to not quite pay attention while keeping watch. Unfortunately, in a place like Shroudmont (if indeed, multiple such places exist), unoccupied time can always be filled with the hundred and one menial tasks that it takes to sustain an overcrowded, endangered population.

So it was that, each shift that Keen spent on guard, there was a new task to perform while, ostensibly, watching the river in case of accidental visitors. Actual dangers were rare, but the fog that covered the vale only prevented those outside from perceiving the area or its contents, or from remembering their passage if they moved through it; it did not bar travel, so if someone from outside the vale, mortal or no, happened to take the river south through what appeared to be an unremarkable mountain pass, it was the Scout Corp's job to spot them before they caused a problem. This river, once called the Bargewater, was the lifeblood of the city of Shroudmont: from the north side, its water was harvested and purified to be used as drinking or bathing water. Further south, there were Tanneries, Smithies, and Mills who used the river's water for manufacturing purposes; by the time it left the Shrouded Vale, it was foul, undrinkable stuff. South of the Peak, they called it the Bilewater. Her glance still dutifully flicking out from the north balcony to keep an eye on the wide, slow river, Keen worked at this week's odd job: mending socks.

"When we first settled," Rorik was saying, "we had only brought one or two acres' worth of Redseed, so planting enough to provide fabric for so many people has been tough. But the soil we found in the eastern cavemouth was rich in nutrients." The wide-set dwarf, whose hair and beard sported old age's full gradient of colors from youthful ochre, to middling grey, to venerable white at the roots, was making quick work of his seventh pair of torn-up socks. Keen was still working on her first.

"Of course, the Fog let us plant the Stalagwheat in the outer fields of the valley, so that freed up more of the proper cave space for textile crops," Rorik continued, his train of thought apparently untaxed by the multiple ongoing tasks.

"Mhm," Keen mumbled, glaring holes into the huge pair of already-hole-ridden socks which she had failed to darn for the last hour. After a moment's silence, she looked up to see Rorik looking at her with one bushy eyebrow raised.

"I'll tell you what," the kindly dwarf said, breaking the silence. "Let's play to our strengths. I'll just fix some of what you've started here--" Keen blushed as the thick-fingered man plucked the failed sock project from her grip, though again, it didn't really change her overall color. "Then, you can just watch the river for both of us."

Keen nodded seriously, not quite as embarrassed as she was relieved. Turning her gaze northward, she watched the curious, shapeless horizon that the river formed where it flowed beneath the dense wall of Fog. Until a year ago, Keen hadn't been a scout: she had been working as a mining assistant when she had spotted a figure moving through the Fog near the eastern caves and reported it to the Shroudmont Militia. Upon investigation, they had discovered that the figure was a Fiend, a scout for the Foul Legion; because of Keen's tip, they were able to kill it before it ever found its way out of the Fog. After that, Lieutenant Nackle had personally offered Keen a place on the Scout Corps: a controversial choice which made Keen one of two tieflings in the entire militia. It was also, of course, how she had earned her nickname.

Minutes turned to hours as Keen locked her steady gaze on the Fog wall. After being created by the Nowhere Machine, the Fog fit over the valley like an enormous, lumpy dome, but this place, where the gently-turning fog met the wide-mouthed river, there was something supremely unnatural about its movements. Just like during storms, when the Machine had to be turned to overdrive to maintain the critical mass of Fog as winds attempted to drive it away, this point of contact between the mundane river and the magical Fog seemed to defy the way either substance moved. Parts of the Fog wall stretched and contorted, holding its shape against the moving surface in a way that mundane mist would not. As Keen looked closer, she could swear she recognized a pattern to its movement, like the Fog was not truly amorphous, but was instead a single, repeating shape, surrounded by Fog but made of something else, like cloth around a body, or maybe skin around a bone. There, where the water tore at the bottom of the Fog, she could almost make out... a hexagon? Multiple of them? A repeating pattern, like a honeycomb structure... did the Fog have... bones?

A body.

Not in the fog, not something in the pattern, a literal, actual body emerged from the Fogwall, floating limply on the surface of the river like an abandoned raft. It was a human, or maybe an elf, around five and a half feet tall and clad in leather armor. At its side was an empty sheath, and from its neck, a stream of blood dyed the gently flowing river a more dangerous shade.

"Rorik," Keen croaked, her nervous voice breaking what had been an hour's companionable silence. Her cheerful partner glanced up from his proficient sock work, not comprehending her tone until he followed her gaze, then his brows deepened and creased as he jumped up, seizing the alarm horn and blaring it without hesitation. As he began to report their findings with a Scroll of Sending, another body emerged from beyond the Fog, then another. A militia unit marched to the North Tower at a steady jog as single bodies were replaced by pairs, then clusters; no more than five minutes had passed before the wide mouth of the river was choked with mortal remains. Blood filled the wide river, diffusing into the water until it became a homogenous, uninterrupted red. As Rorik rushed down the ladder to meet with the Militia squadron and make a plan of action, Keen watched, wide-eyed and unbelieving, feeling frozen in witness to this terrible omen. It was as if the Silence ritual that had failed to suppress the Nowhere Machine had found a new target in her. She clutched the holy symbol which lay hidden underneath her tabard. She knew, now, what she should have prayed for.