Karak hissed softly, irritated by his companions’ constant movement and chatter. Try as they might not to, they kept distracting him with the noisy crunch of their feet upon the leaves and their incessant murmuring. Nuisances that added themselves to the already annoying buzzing of the insects that hovered ceaselessly over the two bodies.

Trying to ignore it all, he attempted to focus once more on the tracks left in the mud. Crouched over the ground, he slowly and carefully brushed aside some of the damp foliage covering it, revealing what had been left imprinted beneath. Removing one multicolored leaf after another, partial footprints slowly took shape before him like an ancient mosaic brought back to light. A mosaic that might have seemed indecipherable to an inexperienced eye alone. His knowledge, however, allowed him to follow its lines and fragmented shapes with clarity, to read it, almost to admire it in the same way one might admire a work of art. A work of art that secretly preserved a story only he was capable of telling.

“There was a struggle here,” he began, continuing to stare at the tracks on the ground. “But it did not last long, and there were few people involved… though I could not say how many.”

His companions, distressed by those words, suddenly fell still, and a profound silence enveloped them, broken only by the buzzing of the myriad insects.

Sensing that they now had even more questions than before, Karak provided them with further details.

“Someone tried to erase the footprints, but did not do a very good job. Besides the trail I followed to get here, there is another one coming from the west. Small-sized boots. A slight person. Perhaps a woman. They met here, and they were attacked here. But there is no other blood, except…”

He stopped, indicating the two already-fetid carcasses lying only a few paces away.

He rose to his feet and once again turned his attention to them, as he had done for some time before. It was not a pleasant sight, even for him. Two poor horses, presumably the ones taken from the Ravast stables, lay sprawled upon the ground with their heads smashed apart. Something exceedingly heavy, wielded by someone of incredible strength, had struck them with almost surreal force. Fragments of bone, flesh, and brain had been splattered all around, staining the forest’s colorful carpet with shades that had no place there, including the dark blood that had spilled copiously across the ground and gathered into a large black pool.

There were no other marks on their bodies, only those two devastating blows, upon which flies and insects were busily feasting.

Not exactly a practical way to kill horses, he thought. There were far simpler methods, not to mention that there could hardly be many men capable of wielding weapons so deadly. Besides, disposing of them made little sense. Thoroughbreds like these had to be worth a great deal, and the usefulness of mounts such as them was beyond question.

As he pondered, trying to make sense of it all, he instinctively glanced at the others.

Liris, only a couple of paces away and holding one hand over her nose and mouth to shield herself from the carcasses’ horrible stench, was now crouching over the footprints, careful not to step on them. Though clearly troubled by the situation, she was attempting to study them as well, but the frustrated expression on her face made it quite obvious that she was getting nowhere.

Goldrick and Tiresio, on the other hand, seemed strange.

The former had suddenly fallen silent and was barely reacting, staring blankly and motionlessly at the two carcasses as though desperately searching them for answers he could not possibly find.

The latter, by contrast, continued to look around apprehensively, pacing a short distance away within the depression in the ground, peering through the forest’s half-light and the increasingly dense fog in search of something that was not there.

Both, however, were clearly trying not to let it show, albeit with little success.

For some reason unknown to him, what they had discovered had disturbed them far more than it should have. Another one of those circumstances in which he could not understand certain behaviors of the other races that made no sense to him.

Or perhaps, he mused, there was something more to it.

“Nothing else?” Liris suddenly asked, getting back to her feet with the typical grimace of someone giving up on trying to understand something and resigning herself to letting someone else explain it. “No footprints leading away from here after this… massacre?”

Returning his attention to the scene before him, Karak once again examined the confused mosaic of footprints left upon the forest’s damp ground.

The question had struck at the heart of the matter.

At least as far as he was concerned.

“No,” he replied with a sigh. “Nothing else.”

“Are you sure?” Goldrick interjected, approaching him after finally emerging from the stupor into which he had sunk.

Looking closely at him, the middle-aged man seemed nervous and worried, the beads of sweat upon his forehead an obvious indication of it.

“I am sure,” Karak confirmed, choosing for the moment to ignore his companion’s distress. “There is only one confused trail heading north, but after a few paces it disappears among the bushes. Impossible to follow.”

“And so?” Tiresio asked, coming over to join the others, now taking part in the conversation as well.

Karak cast a glance into the undergrowth, where the footprints he had just mentioned vanished into nothingness. Beneath the tangled canopy of skeletal trees, a steep slope rose upward, leaving the depression and the fog that was increasingly swallowing it behind. Even less light filtered through the branches than before, making it difficult to see beyond a growing curtain of shadows.

Despite it being early afternoon, before long it would be almost impossible to distinguish shapes and forms among the vegetation.

“And so, nothing,” he replied at last, meeting the questioning gaze of the man with thick, dark hair. “The trail ends here.”

“You mean that…” Goldrick began, increasingly uneasy, but Karak abruptly interrupted him, his own irritation poorly concealed.

“I mean that it is exactly as it appears. Lucas and Anastasia probably met here, having secretly left the village as stated in the note. They intended to travel on horseback, but at this point they encountered someone else. Whoever it was killed their mounts and took them away. And I very much doubt it was done amicably, despite there being no trace of their blood. There are no other footprints to follow, and we are about half a day behind. On top of that, we are in a forest we know no better than they do. It is practically impossible to track them.”

He paused, scrutinising each of the others in turn from beneath the darkness of his hood before continuing.

“If you want my opinion,” he said, utterly unconcerned by the bluntness and brutality of what he was about to say, “I believe Lucas and Anastasia have already been killed by now. So whether or not we find their bodies is of no consequence. Their fate has already been decided. And we have no reason to continue this search.”

Having said that, he turned away and, cutting through the dense fog, began walking with determined strides in the direction from which they had come.

Goldrick’s protests, echoing through the depression that grew darker with every passing moment, barely reached him.

He did not care about the others’ reasons.

Only his own counted.

There were indeed a few things that did not add up, and he himself harbored doubts about more than one detail, yet the conclusion he had reached remained valid. And it mattered little that, in order to make it more convincing, he had omitted and adjusted certain details when speaking to the others.

He had no reason to remain in Ravast any longer.

The last spark of his interest had vanished, just like those footprints, among the mud and fallen leaves.