94

You half expected her to break into hysterics upon hearing more of the circumstances, but instead she stares into the void increasingly stone-faced. When you speak of the strange shrieking and the thickening of the air it’s impossible to tell whether she’s even listening. Once you’re done and there’s nothing left that you can add, she doesn’t react at all.

There's a long silence until she drops out of her thoughts and looks around, as if wondering where she is. You can see her realizing she is now the sole person in charge of the farm, and she just lost two pairs of hands. She turns back to you.

“What’s your business in these parts anyway?”

You tell her a truncated version of your story, that you want to start a life in the Citadel; that you’re a nobody, you have no particular trade, that you used to work on a farm, but a much smaller and less sturdy one than this. As you speak she sizes you up, looking you up and down, trying to see what you’d make without all the blood and cuts and drooping rags.

“Three gold pieces and you stay the night if you help me run this place today and go to my uncle’s tomorrow so he can send me some hands.” she holds out her hand with three gold pieces in it.

You gape at her. She's just learned her family is dead from the mouth of a stranger and now wants that same stranger's help?

"I can grieve later." she says, apparently seeing right through you, "What happens where you come from when your relatives drop dead? Hold a massive ceremony? Come on, make up your mind..."

"They don't usually drop dead with no meat and two puncture marks!" you exclaim. "Doesn't that warrant investigation? What if the creature that killed him comes this way? I heard a beast out there!"

"Uncle will send some men for the farm and a few sellswords to go take a look. In the meantime, this place needs running and I can't do it all alone. Let wild monsters kill my farm, not my inability to keep it alive."

It looks a little backwards to you. Frequently at home some fool would venture too far into the wild and get mauled to **** by a bear or a direwolf. The correct response was to gather all the men together with pitchforks and axes and to have them hunt the beast, and its family, and slaughter them. Every one of those small massacres was one line of man-eating beasts cut short. Granted, the monster you almost encountered near the wreck carriage sounded a little more dangerous than a bear or a wolf, but there have to be people able to take it down. This is the Citadel!

On the other hand, you do need gold, and you'll be travelling into the fortress city anyway. Additionally, whoever her uncle is, if he can afford sellswords, he might be a valuable person to be on the good side of. You hold out your hand and she drops the coins into your palm.

"Mortimer Halfheart" you tell her, extending a hand to shake. She takes it.

"You'll need better rags. Follow me. My name's Elia."

Turn to 17.