A dark scene in the Rawlinswood...
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* the man in red and black armor knelt slowly by the bloody woman. Robes shredded, her firm muscular showed through the tattered rags. Behind the pair stood a huge altar of gruesome construct: huge montrous bones, skulls of various beasts, and a large wooden bowl filled with viscous dark liquid. With deliberate care, the red-skinned man removed both metal bracers and placed them by his knees, then reached into his breastplate. A small man in bright robes standing nearby leaned forward to get a glimpse of the object as it emerged: a stained and ornate ritual dagger. *
* Guttural tones began to issue forth from the priest's lips as he passed the dagger in curving patterns over the body. The chant, elevating in growled shouts and descending to dull hums, reverberated in the dark grove of the forest until it seemed almost to carry on it's own. In a high tempo the dark cleric shouted and grabbed the dagger in his left hand, then thrust it sharply into his right palm. Blood splattered the grass, the woman, and the man's own torso and dripped in thin rivlets down his breastplate. A defeaning roar followed, coming not from the man's mouth but originating lower, deeper inside…and he thrust the dagger into the earth before the woman. The chant ceased immediately, and blood flowed from the earth on to the body. *
And then it stirred.
The woman rose, slowly and gracefully, to a sit next to the red-skinned man and the cleric began to speak. "I am…Mecc..." he said…" and the Lord...of the Hu-" and suddenly, he stopped. His eyes glazed, as did the young woman's, and both looked up at a spot above them, heads cocked and both kneeling and sitting in silence as though listening in reverence.
A short time passed, and them the chancellor of Norwick rose, and asked the woman and the halfling to leave.
"Stalk well…your prey." he bid them, and returned to his prayers.
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The young Eastern woman beside him returns to town with her apperance of calm visibly shaken, but a determined expression of her face. She bows many times to the halfling mage, offering 'many thanks' many times.
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Merin is seen leaving the hunting grounds of the Chancellor, seemingly indifferent to the ritual observed happening there. He does give the woman travelling beside him back to town safety a few glances, and magic flows quickly towards any threats
