Description
When disfigured corpses begin appearing at random during the night in Baedorn, the citizens of the city-state cry demon and call for aid from Antenox, the order of legendary wandering knights who have for centuries slain without mercy both demons and those who would summon them. The order dispatches Drystan Nighttyr, a man who abandoned his future with the Holy Inquisition to join the order, so as to placate the fears of Baedorn's people by tracking down those responsible for the bodies. With him travels the magic-wielding Akkali, an unapologetically brutal Enkiri whose years spent enslaved to a demon-summoning mage makes her uniquely qualified to aid Antenox in their efforts. Drystan's task brings him back into contact with his old life in the Inquisition and his childhood friend Tiernan Brennan, now an Inquisitor Captain charged with much the same mission as he by his superiors within the Church. After a rather bitter reunion in which Tiernan thrashes him soundly for abandoning his brothers and then is nearly killed by Akkali in retaliation, the three find common ground in their search for the source of the patchwork corpses appearing in the night all over the city-state. They find it in the Shalewarrens, abandoned tunnels crisscrossing the Oribian, in the form of a madman driven by an equally mad ghost to assemble an army of homunculi to face a mysterious threat of which only they seem to know. A corpse-stealing espiri mage, however, becomes the least of their worries when they learn of something with a purpose far more sinister beginning to gather power in the trackless forests to the west...
Chapter I: Drystan
