A sharp pain shot from the balls of the aging man's feet through his knees as his weight landed on the rocky soil alongside the dappled mare whose nostrils produced a burst of steam at her startled snort. The sun had yet to break over the snow covered peaks in the distance, but it was light enough for the man to see across the clearing and the crystalline mountain streams to the dark alipine timber opposite him through the cold, thin air of the valley ahead. It had been four days since the man departed Castle Lerwick where his celebration of Brewfest had been cut short by the arrival of the youth, bloodied and delirious, from the valley. The man expected the boy's tale to be overwrought, as such reports almost universally were in his experience, but the apathy of the local nobility still stirred anger. If fell beasts had descended upon the itinerate charcoal burners' camp at the headwaters of the Lerwick, the locals' skepticism of the Celestial Flame, emblazoned on the man's chest piece, would certainly be refuted, but, as the man lamented, he would likely not live to revel in the propriety of his own vigilance, however habitual and superficial.

Had the man's investigation not centered on a charcoal burners' camp, the smoke he had seen in the predawn twighlight may have offered some premonition of the mutilated corpses strewn about him now, or so he rationalized; had he been less preoccupied with his distaste for the secularism of the Riverlands, perhaps he would have noticed the unsettling sense that the barrier between the corporeal and the Unseen was thinner now than he had ever felt it to be. The man reached beneath his black cloak to the leather belt about his waste and retrieved the small glass phial of tincture. Scanning his surroundings while thumbing open the cork, he recited a prayer before quickly downing the liquor. The edges of his vision blurred as the anointed herbs took their affect. Ash and cinder gently flitted to the bloodied ground against the vista of the mountains as the man reached to draw his sword from the mare's saddle with his right hand and began to sign the Holy Intersection with his left.  Perhaps if the man had percieved the threat sooner, he would not have been so preoccupied as to miss the shadows moving between the dessicated tents of the unfortunate charcoal burners.

A burning pain seared through the flank of the dappled mare, lathered in sweat despite the frigid cold, as she fled the rising sun. Steam billowed from her nostrils as she ran, paying little heed to the gashes upon her flank which poured crimson rivulets in her wake. She was four days from Castle Lerwick where she had last known rest. The man's sword, half drawn from its scabbard, flailed wildly before working lose and clamboring to the rocky soil along the headwaters of the Lerwick. She was swifter now, without her rider, than she had been before.