Arild continued to search the ruins of his village, crying out as he found body after body. I didn't know what to say to him. There was nothing I could say to him that would ease his loss.
Arild had been trying for years to find a way back home but had kept failing repeatedly.
He had more friends in the beginning but lost them to the wraiths when they tried to kill one of them so they could go back home.
Anna and Lloyd tried comforting Arild, but it only worsened things. As Arild continued to wail his cries of sadness, we took him into the village.
It looked ordinary if you could call overgrown weeds growing out of the dusty remains of what once were ordinary buildings.
We split off to search the remains of Arilds village. You could see bodies everywhere, but it was hard to tell how they died.
Their bodies had decomposed into nothing but bones, and the clothes they wore were in nothing but tatters.
They were all shattered in no discernible way as if they had been going about their day doing their daily tasks, and then they suddenly just dropped dead.
I wanted to search the buildings, but there wasn't much to search. The building collapsed, with the roofs missing and walls toppled over.
The pieces that fell from the building were all covered in weeds and overgrowth.
Seeing that there was nothing here but sadness for Arild, I decided we should keep moving.
Arild wasn't happy with that decision, saying that he needed to bury his family and neighbors.
We spent the rest of the day gathering the remains of the villagers and digging a mass burial site for them.
After we helped Arild bury his village, we rested for the night and set off again the following day.
And we passed village after village, all in ruins.
Some were like Arild village and looked like everyone had just dropped dead.
In some of the other villages, Someone attacked others, the bodies were hacked apart, and the buildings looked as if they had been burned down.
Each village we passed filled us with more questions. One thing I figured out, though, is that there were only two ways that the villages were ruined.
The first one was the villagers suddenly dropping dead. At first, I thought it was a sickness, but they all seemed to have dropped dead simultaneously since they were all scattered about as if they were going about their day.
The second was a bit more obvious. The villagers were hacked apart, with their arms seeming to be the most damaged part of their bodies. They probably raised their arms in a futile attempt to stop whoever was attacking them.
The buildings were entirely gone, and the only proof they existed was the abnormal patch of weeds where they should've been.
We asked Arild if he knew anyone in these other villages, but he didn't. He told us that his village knew of other towns but never interacted with them because their beliefs were very different from the others.
He told us that it was common for hunters in his village to paint themselves green in his town because they believed in being one with the forest as if they were animals.
They most likely got the inspiration to paint themselves green based on the predators of the forest. The only one we saw was the green bear, but according to Arild, there were supposedly deeper in the forest that was all green.
Until he continued his explanation, it confused me that having hunters in their village would differentiate them from the other villages.
While his village had hunters and meat, the other villages they knew of didn't eat meat.
He didn't know much about them, but he did see that they had what he described as a barbaric ritual where they cut their ears to make them pointy to make them look like the spirits of the forest as an act of worship.
That intrigued us. If they cut their ears to look like the spirits of the forest, then they must have seen them at one point. Cutting their ears to be pointy meant only one thing.
Elves
The possibility and now probability that there were Elves excited Michael, Lloyd, and Anna. Michael and Anna were excited that they could finally meet a necessary race to help complete this fantasy world.
While Lloyd was excited at the prospect of being able to document and discover a new race.
He described them as vegetarians because they refused to eat meat and would be greatly offended if you offered them any, and they didn't like talking to outsiders of any kind.
They preferred to live up in the trees, and the lots I thought to be built were their gardens.
When we asked Arild for more information on them, he told us he knew only their name.
Alpǐ is what his people called them, but me and Anna didn't like the name that much, so we decided to change it to Elves.
*Myron*
"Just hold still, Biron," Myron said to Biron as he gave him a pseudo mark.
Myron needed help finding a wraith to give Biron a mark so he could follow the tracks further into the forest.
It wasn't until he found where the cave had collapsed and dug out a live wraith that he could give Biron a pseudo mark.
When Myron saw the collapsed cave, he quickly deduced that it must've been Lloyd and his guards.
He figured they must have done that to give Lloyd a pseudo mark because there was no way for them to head in deeper.
As Myron kept thinking about the marks, he recalled that second night of the expedition.
After losing so many of their men the first night, it was difficult for them to continue the expedition.
Myron tried to convince the others to turn back, but they told him they couldn't. If they were to turn back, then the deaths of their fellow men would be in vain.
But Myron knew better; they couldn't return without something to show for it, or they would all be stripped of their knighthood and titles. Some of them could have even been put to death.
Myron didn't care about his titles, which is what he tried to tell himself, but the truth was that he didn't want to die.
Initially, he was hesitant to go on the expedition, but a close friend convinced him to.
He convinced Myron by telling him that if he went on this expedition, he could return with wealth and glory, setting him up for life.
He knew that would be enough to convince Myron because he knew what Myron's character was really like.
He put on a strict but kind impression of a knight when, in reality, he was a lazy man. Myron was skilled beyond his peers all his life, but his laziness hid that skill.
He would do only the bare minimum and spend the rest of his time sleeping in his family's library. He preferred sleeping in the library since his family tended to avoid it, and it was quiet there. He tried reading some of the books to help himself fall asleep, and while he found them interesting, he could never finish them because he always fell asleep.
Myron wanted to live a life of sleeping in his family's library and nothing else, but his parents wouldn't live forever.
After his parents died, he had to take charge of his family's estate, and while he was very lazy, he was smart about it.
He knew that if he let the work build up, he would have less time to sleep and laze around, so he made it a point to finish whatever he needed to go back to the library and fall asleep.
Of course, that couldn't last either since human error or Mother Nature was bound to disrupt it. His family was highly ranked and regarded, thus securing his life of lazing.
He was hit by a series of bad weather that ruined his territory, and to make matters worse, his men failed to protect his tenants by letting bandits run loose and taking advantage of the chaos in his territory.
After great difficulty, he was able to bring his lands back under control, but he was now in financial instability, and his family's reputation was besmirched.
Since Myron was in a troublesome situation and was forced to work more than ever, convincing him to join the expedition was easy.
Thinking about why he went on the expedition in the first place veered his memories of the second night.
It was a welcome distraction since he didn't want to remember that night anyway, but some mysterious power now seemed to be forcing him to.
They had fewer men and were stretched thin, so they decided to take turns watching at night.
He was on one of the first shifts, and at first, it was quiet. He couldn't hear the trees groaning as they bent with the wind, birds, or bugs chirping and buzzing.
The lack of sound was unsettling, but Myron could only think, 'It'll be easier to fall asleep with how quiet it is.'
And he fell asleep. That was one of the few times he wished he wasn't an avid sleeper.
The moment he sat down and rested on a tree, closing his eyes, the wraiths came. They were quiet and careful not to wake him, dragging him away.
He was still asleep until they first cut him. He wished he was still sleeping so he wouldn't have to endure their sick ritual, but sadly, his wish didn't come true.
When morning came, his companions found him and cut him down and revealed to him that he wasn't the only one taken that night.