Your character has just arrived in a swampy, dim town. As they look around, their gaze is met with shacks and cabins. It smells of rotted wood and wet moss. They duck and step into a tattered tent, illuminated by a series of candles suspended in the air. At the back of the tent, an old hag raises her head, “What brings you to this dingy town? She begins, then pauses to study your face—”Ah, it’s you. I’ve been expecting you. Sit,” she gestures at a cushion, “Tell me your story.”
I was born under a red moon. Not that it meant anything then, but the midwives whispered, and my mother prayed harder than most. My village was a place of hills and ash trees, quiet but never still. Things moved in the woods. Shadows had names, if you dared to say them.
My brother disappeared when I was twelve. They found only his boots clean, placed side by side, with a silver coin resting on the tongue of each. We never found the rest of him.
I left not long after. Trained as a hedge guard, then a mercenary. Saw cities drown in flame. Watched nobles lie with honeyed words and children die with none. Learned to listen to the wind and the bones and the creak of a floorboard that shouldn't creak.
Then came the dreams.
Always the same: a drowned town, candles hanging in air like trapped souls, and your face though I hadn’t seen it till now. So, I followed the road until the dirt turned to muck, and the air turned sour.
Now here I am.
Tell me why you were expecting me, and what it is that waits in the swamp.
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