"I was in jail," Elton says with a dark little laugh. "They never trusted me. Probably my accent. Couldn't be nothing else." Another dry chuckle. "I tried to warn them something was wrong, but no one wanted to listen, and when I pushed, they pushed back, kept me out of trouble while they 'dealt with a little problem around the caern.' When I got out, they were all dead.
"Well, not all. Patrick is still alive, and so is Melodie, though I hear she's lost her entire damn mind. More so than usual for a Silver Fang, I mean. And Nin is out there, though I hear she lost the Wolf—lost her Rage—after what happened. But I hear from her every now and then. They were all tough…"
His eyes brighten for a moment, as if he plans to jump in a car and pull an all-night road trip to track the three of them down. But then he slumps and shakes his head.
"This place is cursed, and stinks of death," the Shadow Lord says. "Let's fill a backpack with whatever we find here, and head back to my ends. Once we're there we can…"
He trails off, so you rise and search an outbuilding more accessible now that the dam is gone. Among the metalworking equipment, you find an extra pair of boots that fit, the same model of ruggedized tablet the horseman carried (also destroyed, this time by frozen mud), and—what's this? Another one of those lances. It looks exactly like the one the rider carried.
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