As Ambrose and Rellian near the old road, the fire suddenly gutters. Its smoke thins, revealing a narrow stone culvert beneath the track, black water glistening within.
A muffled scrape travels through the channel. Then comes the faint hiss of someone forcing breath back into silence, close enough that the stones seem to carry it.
Rellian Blackblade
Down. The road is a snare, and the culvert has company.
Behind you, branches crack along the ridge. The assassins crest it in scattered pairs, blades ready, sweeping the fir trunks and thorny brush below.
Eastern Assassins
Search every hollow. They cannot have crossed the road.
Rellian lowers himself behind the road bank, one hand raised for stillness. The culvert mouth remains dark, while the searchers descend toward your cover.
Rellian Blackblade
Choose now. Through the channel, across the road, or back into the trees.
✓ Quest Accepted
Escape the assassins
Director's note
Go through the channel
Ambrose drops into the culvert, boots finding slick stones beside the black water. Rellian follows close behind as the assassins descend the bank above.
Rellian Blackblade
Keep your shoulders low. The channel bends beneath the road, and sound will carry ahead of us.
They wade through the narrow passage, water cold around their ankles. Above, boots scrape over the road, then stop as the searchers notice the empty bank.
Eastern Assassins
The culvert. Check the mouth and the far ditch. They cannot have vanished.
The channel pinches beneath a low arch. Ambrose turns sideways and passes beneath it, while Rellian presses after him, one palm braced against the wet stone.
Daylight appears ahead through reeds and tangled roots. Ambrose emerges into a shallow ditch beyond the road, hidden from the searching line by the culvert's earthwork.
Rellian Blackblade
Quietly now. The road is behind us, and the old woods will cover our trail.
Rellian crawls clear and gathers his cloak from the mud. Above them, the assassins crowd the culvert mouth, their voices muffled by stone as the forest swallows the fugitives' passage.
undefined / undefined
A hard rain begins without warning, drumming on the road and spilling brown water through the culvert behind you. The ditch rises around Ambrose's boots.
Rellian Blackblade
The storm will erase our trail, but it will also fill this ditch. We move before the water takes the passage.
Rellian points toward a screen of alder trees beyond the ditch. Through the rain, a narrow animal path climbs toward darker woodland and higher ground.
At the culvert mouth, the Eastern Assassins emerge into the downpour. Their voices vanish beneath the rain, but one raises a horn and blows a broken, uncertain note.
Rellian Blackblade
Up the alder path. Do not cross open ground, even for a heartbeat.
Rellian catches Ambrose's cloak and pulls him beneath the alders as water rushes across the ditch. Mud sucks at their boots, while the rain folds the forest shut behind them.
The path bends uphill into thick firs. Below, the assassins search the flooded ditch, their pursuit reduced to blurred shapes and muffled calls as Ambrose and Rellian gain the trees.