Alanna and Nywen had briefly investigated Veefra's corpse, but found that it was entirely pointless. There wasn't enough of her left for them to figure out any new clues as to what has been hunting the villagers, so they followed the harpy's directions further into the woods.
Nywen had remained silent and had been avoiding Alanna's gaze. She was pretty sure Nywen was seething. She wasn't sure how to apologize to the Rogue. She thought she did the right thing, but as adventurers they needed to be able to trust each other, and Alanna was wracked with guilt over breaking that trust. Out here it's supposed to be you and your party against the monsters.
She'd try to figure out a way to make it up to her later. It only took a few minutes for them to reach the hollow tree the harpy had mentioned. It was in a depression amidst the hills that had been infiltrated by filthy bog water, the tree at the center having mostly rotted away amidst the muck. However, all around the tree was a bed of white star-shaped flowers with red stems. Swamp lilies, Alanna realized.
Many different scents competed here. Rotting vegetation, the sulfurous smell of the swamp, the flowery undertone given off by the lilies, and what was unmistakably decomposition.
Wading through the water they reached the rotten tree, and true to the harpy's words, within its hollow core was another corpse. An elven man, presumably Erlathan. His body was yet untouched by scavengers and a little bit fresher than Veefra's, so they dragged it out and examined it.
Nywen took a small purse off of his belt. She opened it to reveal a few copper and a single silver coin. For a simple Peasant this was likely his month's wages, trading what the swamp had to offer. For an adventurer it was a pitiful amount, a single stay at an inn at best.
"Not robbed," Alanna concluded internally. It was one of the easiest ways to rule out bandits, they'd take anything of value. They began looking him over for injuries, to find only a single, tiny hole at his neck. There was very little blood, making Alanna first believe it must not have been the cause of death, but even after taking his clothes off they found no other injuries.
"Giant mosquitoes then," Alanna said out loud, believing the single puncture wound and lack of blood made perfect sense if those had been the culprit. "But why would he have ended up in this tree?"
Nywen grunted, though not in approval. Alanna shot her a questioning glance and the Rogue let out a long sigh.
"Giant mosquitoes are common where I'm from. They are not accurate, and will usually just aim for the center of mass. Won't just suck out your blood either, your insides are usually a mess afterwards. This is too deliberate, too clean."
Alanna chewed on her bottom lip in thought. She had no idea what kind of creature could be responsible then. Nothing would be able to land this clean of a puncture wound on a humanoid and then also hide the body.
Her nose began to sting. So close to the tree the smell of decay was everywhere... Which Alanna thought strange. Erlathan's body was not fresh but in the crisp early spring air his body had only just begun attracting flies. Yet, Alanna could hear many of them buzzing around. More than she could see.
Alanna followed her ears and tortured nose. She waded around until she felt the dirt rise amidst the patch of swamp lilies, at which point the smell of rot became overwhelming, and as soon as she pushed aside the flowers saw why.
Another dead body, this time one that had clearly been here for longer than the other two. Again an elf, again in a peasant's garb, definitely a woman, but so far gone there was no way to recognize them.
Nywen joined her and seemed briefly shocked at the third body. She waved away the corpse flies in agitation.
"This makes no sense, why would the villagers leave out a third missing person?" Nywen said. "It's not like we'd charge extra. There's no other villages in this area and this is in the middle of nowhere, so there's nowhere else she could have come from."
Alanna looked the body up and down, before seeing the body's auburn hair. It had survived the decay better than the rest of her, but an elf with auburn hair... That was rather unusual.
"Did you see any other elves with that hair color in the village?" she asked Nywen.
"No," she responded curtly.
"If Rumi had a sister or mother who just got lost, she would have told us..."
Alanna tried to think of other possibilities for the identity of the mystery third body, but as she turned to face Nywen, her foot crunched down on something. It was hard and black, breaking into little pieces underneath her boot.
The smell assaulted her immediately. It smelled like an old, rotting hide, one that wasn't treated properly to preserve it, but amidst that foul odor, she noticed the scent of the swamp lilies clinging closely to it. It was familiar.
Suddenly, inspiration struck her like a bag of bricks. She thought back to Solizzar's bestiaries and one of the more obscure entries in there. A very rare creature, born very rarely when a giant mosquito enters a place where magic has gone haywire, made of malleable flesh with an insatiable thirst for blood.
"Faceless," she breathed.
"What?" Nywen asked. "Faceless?"
Her heart was pounding in her throat. "Nywen, what was the moon like tonight?" she asked.
"Almost full, why?"
She looked up at the sky. The sun was well past its zenith, and her thoughts immediately turned to Illithor, sickly, tired and how he smelled vaguely of blood.
"It's a faceless!" Alanna yelled out as she turned and waded through the water with all her strength.
"Alanna, wait!" Nywen called out. "You can't just run off! What's a faceless?"
"A shapeshifting bloodsucker!" Alanna called back. "It drinks people's blood and disguises itself as them, and if it gets enough before the next full moon it pupates into something even worse! It's Rumi, and she's going to kill Illithor tonight!"
