A Bored Lich

The carriage slowed to a stop. Thomas stood but nearly fell back into his seat. He might have woken up but his legs hadn't. He wobbled out the door and was smacked by the evening sunlight. "Olpi, what gives?" he groaned. "It's not time to make camp yet."

Olpi pointed thirty feet down the path where a shortsword jutted out of an unmoving form, half-buried by the snow. "What should I do?"

Thomas shrugged: "Just go around it."

"Wait," Olpi exclaimed. "W-we're just going to leave it?"

"What's the situation?" Doevm asked, craning his head to get a better look.

"It's just a corpse," Thomas waved him off as he sat next to Frey, who smacked him in the back of the head and walked out of the carriage. "What's his problem?"

Doevm sighed: "I'm glad we got you out of that mansion, young master Virility, because if we hadn't, you'd never be able to differentiate naivety from apathy." He turned to Elero. "Guard Olpi while the three of us examine the corpse."

"Understood," Elero said as she moved next to the driver's seat.

"It's just a corpse, why does this matter to us?" Thomas muttered as he followed Doevm over to Frey and the corpse. Frey lay the shortsword next to the corpse, which he had flipped over to reveal a middle-aged woman in common clothes. Open eyes and mouth, frozen over.

"Look, Thomas," Doevm said. "This person was murdered, which indicates that something dangerous is around us. Figuring out what happened could give us a way to avoid the danger or prepare for it."

Frey followed the blood trail left, off the path: "I guess she didn't run fast enough from the people who were hunting her." He stepped around the many footprints, picking broken arrow tips up and examining them. "She must have been stronger than she looked."

"Or she wasn't the target." Doevm countered. "Look. The other tracks continue right, off the path. They didn't bother to remove the shortsword because they didn't have time to."

"Bandits?" Frey asked.

Doevm nodded. "And since no one's screaming or shooting arrows at us, I assume something went wrong with the ambush." He glanced over at Olpi and Elero. Elero gave a thumbs up.

"How do you guys know this was an ambush?" Thomas asked.

"Firstly, the ominous corpse, exactly in the middle of the path," Frey began. "Secondly, we're currently sandwiched between a big hill and a dense forest. Thirdly, the broken arrowtips means the people who killed this lady would likely attack us from a distance away, hidden behind safe cover." Thomas stared at the giant for a solid second. "What?"

"Sorry," Thomas chuckled. "It's just that I've never heard you make a reasonable argument before."

Frey raised an eyebrow: "How often did you leave the manor?"

"Why do people keep asking me that?"

"Let's focus," Doevm chimed in. "Someone must have seen through the bandit ambush, likely as they were still setting it up. There was an attack, meaning we now either have a bunch of desperate, frightened bandits rushing around the area or something that has killed them all."

"Why wouldn't it be a knight or a squad of guards?" Thomas asked.

Doevm patted the corpse. "Knights or guards would at least drag the corpse off the road."

"So, what now?" Thomas asked. "Are we going to go find them?"

Frey looked to Doevm, who shrugged. "It's not our fight."

Thomas cocked his head to the side. "But you said-"

"In order to avoid or counter it, should it become a problem," Doevm explained. "I am not going to go picking fights, not yet anyway."

"But there's people who could get hurt if we just leave things like this," Thomas argued. "We're a strong group. I could probably do it single handedly."

"I thought it was just a corpse?" Frey asked.

"Now I know it's not just a corpse now," Thomas said. "All of you, just wait here. I'll be back within an hour."

Doevm and Frey exchanged worried looks but didn't argue.

"Let me know if you need help, mister hero," Frey said before he and Doevm hurried back to the warm carriage.

'I'm not naïve,' Thomas thought. 'I'll show them.' He plunged his hand into the snow, numb to its chilled touch, and raised it to his nose. He counted six scents, six transparent ribbons of different "colors" that continued off the path. One of the scents was of a different variety, stranger. It was neither human nor was it an animal but something in between. An inexplicable sense of familiarity caused him to question himself for a brief moment. He took a moment to search for any gaps in his memory, but came up with nothing. 'Doevm's been watching me. He would have said something if "I" had done this. I've had control. Still, maybe I can catch one of those bandits for a quick bite.'

Thomas followed the two strongest scents to an abnormally wide heap of snow. He plucked broken branches away and reached in until his fingers grasped around something hairy. He yanked and the snow heap tumbled off the object; a snow-white blanket, thick enough to bear the harsh winter. The blanket, however, couldn't protect against slit throats.

Two corpses hid under the blanket.

A blur of motion sank into Thomas's leg. He leapt back and drew his spear but there wasn't anyone around him. He almost wished a bandit would reveal himself, brandishing a crossbow and laughing. If that was the case, then Thomas could say it wasn't because of his own stupidity that he had to yank a bolt out of his shin. The wound healed with a gout of steam, eating a portion of his body fat away.

He stared down reality; the crossbows within the corpses' clutches. It was merely an accidental bump, but it had set them off. "Naïve." Doevm's voice echoed in Thomas's head. Thomas snapped the bolt in two and threw the pieces away.