The story in Ith was a chilling one. Renado and his friends had pieced part of it together, but sat together in the Verdant sharing drinks in near disbelief. It seemed that Lotha’s plan to defeat Axar by turning the rebels against him had succeeded, though no one yet knew of Axar’s fate, nor Lotha’s. When the mob had stormed the streets, a proper riot had ensued. Flaming arrows fell on sleeping houses, and cudgels broke the most important skulls. The revolution had, as Irrith suspected, claimed another Mage King.
In retaliation, the remaining seven rulers had released a literal rain of death upon several districts of their city. The death toll was high, and some townsfolk spoke of mass graves—or worse, streets of the city still littered with any who had been touched by the conjured black precipitation. But that was not the end. With their lesson of retribution taught, the Mage Kings sought the dismemberment of the revolution itself.
An old man, scarred by the things he had seen, told them the next part of the story in a crowded marketplace. With a hushed tone, he spoke of the horrific weeks that followed. Each day, the Mage Kings killed fifty of their own slaves and took fifty more from the public. They posted notices across the stricken city that these deeds would only end when the leaders of the insurgency had been handed over. A chaotic week had followed, as the rebellion failed. The leaders had not been turned over, but as dissent filtered the ranks, a clear darkness had claimed the city’s once hopeful morale. A new dawn of oppression had begun, and with their subordinates’ spirits broken, the daily sacrifices had waned.
Ren and his loyal men spent their days listening to stories that challenged even their sadness at the loss of their own homes in Sheld. One woman had lost her a husband a year ago, and all her friends in the days following the most recent riot. She had wandered away from them in a daze, her eyes half-glazed over and her dreams dashed upon the diseased cobblestones.
One woman, a harlot turned beggar who spoke to them at the mouth of her alley home, told them she knew a man who had fought in the rebellion. The man had fired arrows at Axar’s house, according to the questionable source, but might prove invaluable to the dispatch from the magicians of Vagren and the Isle of Dusk.
Making contact with this man was another story, as all those who had moved a hand that day now lived in hiding or a dozen feet down, in a pile of rotting corpses. Ren and his friends avoided the only mass grave they came into contact with, but the stench reached for many buildings around. They paid the beggar woman for her assistance, and assured her they would be by regularly to hear if she had found her rebel friend.