The Dreaming Mark and the Vessel of Fools

Tell it to the captain

"Oy, are you done yet? I got a bloody watch to get back to and I ain't lettin' some whelp of a spellbeggar like yourself keep me from it." The Guardsman never once let his gaze wander from the robed man in the room. There was just no trusting a mage like that, he'd said before, but it was Guard Captain Montag's insistence that kept them here to start with. "There's naught to find, no matter how you search," he added.

"I'll thank you to stay quiet while I'm working," said Randulf. There was a peculiar...vibration, he supposed, coming from the back corner of this improvised hovel. It'd been a storehouse for a nearby tavern, but nothing tavern-related had been stored here for the last year. The room had been filled with everything from withered saplings to slightly pretty rocks (pretty, but not valuable). The victim, not sprawled in typical corpse-like fashion but seemingly already laid out as if in a coffin, was right in front of the only door. Yet, some kind of energy was coming from the opposite end of the building, from the inside of a crate that the victim had been sleeping in. The victim's own life force, perhaps? No, the victim is dead, Randulf told himself. If this is anybody's life force, it's more likely to be someone else's.

"You found something? Or are you making that face 'cause you're coming up with a good story for the Captain?" The Guardsman's eyes were largely hidden behind the visor of his helmet - the only proper armor the city's guards tended to have - but Randulf could tell he must have been rolling them impatiently. "Come on, then, you spent enough time in this rat hole. Let's get you back to the Captain so I can go watch someone who's like to actually do something."

"If that's the way you feel, Guardsman, I expect you won't be likely to listen the next time I tell you I've caught you a murderer." Randulf rolled up the sleeves of his robe, revealing the tattoo-like markings up his forearms. "No, I've found a curious energy here. The victim, there, you've already checked that he's dead, yes?" The Guardsman only nodded in reply. "What I find curious, though...usually the recently departed leave some shred of their life force behind, close by their mortal form. It's how High Priests and Chosen are able to revive fallen comrades."

"That never sat well with me," the Guardsman said.

"Yes, I gathered you weren't a particularly spiritual type." Randulf swept his tattooed arms slowly about the empty crate, as if to feel something that wasn't there. "But no. Whoever murdered the man over there--" Randulf gestured towards the corpse with his head, as his arms were busy-- "either did it long enough ago that his spirit has already departed this plane, or more likely, was so thorough as to kill his spirit as well as his body." Randulf's right arm stopped, as if being pulled to that specific point in space. "Hmph. This is interesting."

"What's interesting? Cause it sure ain't interesting to me!"

"To be fair, Guardsman, you don't seem to be interested in much beyond hitting things with truncheons." He focused as hard as he could on that specific spot. "It's as I thought a moment ago. This is someone else's spirit. Someone who isn't in this room."

"Eh?"

"I didn't think I'd be so likely to see it used in a murder... body-swapping is difficult magic at best. But our victim - if he even is a victim - isn't the owner of this spirit. Which means, barring usage of soul-vessels or the like, we've got this spirit's body walking around with the dead body's spirit inside it. Someone's either very confused, or trying to fake their own death."

"Well, tell it to the Captain. You done now?"

"As done as I can be, I fear." Randulf wrested his arm away from its strange pulling sensation and unrolled his sleeves. He scrawled a quick note in his tome and nodded to his accompaniment. "I'd best make my report. If Captain Montag is as receptive as you've been, I doubt that'll take long."