Warbound

6. The Stranger's Cabin

Sancha was miraculously able to stay conscious for the rest of the ride to the stranger's safe house, although by no means did this mean she was lucid. Thoughts arose in her head unbidden before quickly being forgotten. She was leaned against a bale of hay for support and it occasionally stuck through her clothing and poked her bruised skin. Her head pounded with every jolt along the pocketed rocky road. Occasionally she would look over to the stranger and was struck with the feeling that they reminded her of someone she missed very badly, but she had trouble following the thought through to the end. She kept getting throne by the stranger's unfamiliar blonde braid that swung as the carriage rolled onward.

At some point in the dead of night, far from the commotion of the main roads, they arrived at their destination. They had rode southwest of Olfyield into the marshy forest that followed along the lakes that eventually gathered into the bay south of Intmont. It was a quiet and desolate place with few villages marking the map for miles, but there was a kind of safety in that solitude.

They unloaded the cart under the cover of darkness. Sancha didn't remember most of what happened after that, she had been incoherent for the past hour or so, delirious from the head injury. She wasn't aware that the cabin was ancient and blanketed in cobwebs. The gas lamps the stranger and Asa scavenged up from the rotting wooden cabinets were covered in flaking metal and the glass was browned with a thick coat of dust. They had to take the blankets outside and shake the dust from their worn folds but they were at least in acceptable condition.

The stranger used his magic to light some of the aged lanterns and torch sconces alongside the walls of the cabin. Asa immediately went to work on treating Sancha's injuries all through the night into the early hours of the morning. Asa hadn't let her finally sleep until the stranger came back from the woods with a mixture of herbs that would create a poultice Asa found agreeable. It was only thanks to the strangers' bright magic flames that they were able to forage for herbs in the darkened forest.

At some point Sancha had finally been allowed to close her eyes. Asa fell exhausted into the creaky cot beside her. The stranger left for the forest and didn't return until long after dawn.

Sancha was knocked out solid well into the afternoon. Finally she came to, worse for the wear but feeling significantly less nauseous than she remembered last night. It all came back to her in a blur: challenging the Warbound officials, the accidental summoning of the terror in the market square, the city in flame, and the few memories she had in bits and pieces of their escape into the night. She had come to decide most of the things were a mixture of hallucinatory fantasies and her paranoia being projected onto the real world.

She took in her surroundings in the old dusty cabin. It was rather bare bones, no decorations on the walls or signs of food stores or provisions. It had the structure akin to a barracks outpost, with a few small cots lying intermittently against the wall and tall open closets for storing armor and outfits ready at the door, but it was all empty. The homiest fixture in the place was a large hearth that had been left cold. No one had thought to light it in the night.

She looked around for Asa and finally caught their eye. "You look...cold." Sancha said.

Asa looked tired, and for lack of a better word, haunted. "I don't think our new companion noticed the cold." Asa replied.

Sancha wracked her memories and only dimly recalled the stranger from the previous night's events. She could only remember that he had worn a strange uniform cloaked in black. She wanted to ask more about who they were and where they were but Sancha was stopped by the look on Asa's face. They looked deeply troubled with an intensity Sancha didn't think she had aver seen on their face. She struggled for words of comfort, but felt that anything she could say would bring any solace to her friend. Asa must have been blaming themself for the cretaures summoning. They had accidentally tapped in to the connection that should have lead to The Saint, but it was intercepted by the terror instead.