Dungeon 174
4e
Sliver Wraith Seeker: ?
Sliver Wraith Guardian: ?
Abyssal Rotlord: ?
Gibbering Heads: A collection of the Horseman’s prior victims.
Cursing Heads: A collection of the Horseman’s prior victims.
Headless Horseman: Finally, his men found the beast’s nest. With great fanfare, the Horseman and his entourage set out to rid Tranquility of their tormenter. For two days, the villagers waited, fretting and worrying, hopeful and afraid.
Tranquility erupted in jubilation when the Horseman and most of his men returned. And though they were bloodied and bruised, the three reptilian heads they carried left no doubt that they were victorious.
For weeks more the Horseman stayed, getting to know the people, walking with Talitha through fields and gardens. Slowly his men returned to their homes, but the Horseman remained.
Eli van Hassen could take it no longer, yet neither could he simply order the Horseman banished or slain. He would have to turn the people against their savior, and that he could not undertake alone.
Talitha wept and argued, yet in the end, she acquiesced. It never crossed her mind to disobey, for she feared the loss of her own status within Tranquility—and in agreeing to her father’s demands, she sealed not merely the Horseman’s fate, but her own as well.
The following day, as he walked with Talitha through one of the van Hassen farms, the Horseman was set upon by a dozen of Eli’s guards. The Horseman swept up a rusty sickle that lay beside the barn and fought, slaying several before they overwhelmed him by weight of numbers.
Before the gathered villagers, growing ever more puzzled, ever angrier, the guards dragged the battered Horseman to a block of wood. There, at her father’s behest, Talitha told the people horrid lies, claiming the Horseman had taken terrible advantage, ravished her by force during their walks.
Eli waited until the crowd was utterly enraged before he waved his guards forward. Even as he screamed his innocence and begged Talitha to recant, the Horseman was forced down upon the wooden block. One guard raised a heavy axe, and the head of Tranquility’s beloved hero tumbled across the grass.
The corpse was unceremoniously dumped in a shallow grave beside the river, and as the villagers returned to daily life, bitterly bemoaning their “betrayal,” that should have been the end of it.
One week passed. Through a ceiling of clouds, the crescent moon gleamed a sickly blue. The folk of Tranquility retired early that evening, for the air smelled of a coming storm.
Yet what swept over them that night was not rain and lightning, but fog. The mists crept furtively through Tranquility, filling the streets, sending prodding fingers through doors and windows. The world ceased to be, buried under featureless gray.
A sudden, unending thunder deep within the fog resolved itself into the beating of a thousand hooves. Through the streets and fields of Tranquility they pounded, deafening in their fury, yet the villagers could see nothing moving in the mist.
When they emerged the following dawn, the villagers found their crops and gardens trampled under uncountable hoof-prints. The gates of the van Hassen estate hung from broken hinges, and the manor lay desolate, covered in the dust of decades. Eli and Talitha were never seen again. Neither was the estate staff, save a few who’d been elsewhere that night.
And the grave of the Horseman gaped open, a wound in the banks of the river.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7prrWqKmlnF6kv6h706GpnpmUqHy2usOemJ1ln6e2qLXNrGVrbGNmfnd7z5qenmVpag%3D%3D