As related by William of Jerbiton to the council on a late winter's evening in 1126...

"It was early in the morning, shortly after dawn nearly two weeks ago. I had just returned from my customary turn about the tower grounds when a terrible commotion summoned me to the council chamber. It was Mauthin, in dire need of a magus. He was frantic and endeavored to explain as we bustled down to the village that a girl had been killed, apparently torn apart by some terrible wild beast.

The entirety of the populace was assembled at the place, just beyond the last hut on the edge of the fields. Archonus and a few grogs were trying to keep order, though hysteria was on the verge of getting the better of the people. He had had the good sense to cover the corpse, but even what remained visible was ghastly to behold.

There were small bits of flesh scattered about for some yards, and the ground was quite liberally soaked with her blood. The cloak draped over her body was already soaked through, and her right hand, which was uncovered, was stained with barely crusted blood in a way which bespoke splattering rather than a steady flow.

We lifted the covering after pushing the folk back a few more paces and found the poor thing in a terrible state. He entire chest had been apparently torn open, gouged with some sore of half-blunt intrument and it appeared immediately apparent that her heart had been torn out. The small bits of flesh scattered about her body were all that remained of it, as it appeared to have been devoured on the spot.

Otherwise her body seemed intact, and there weren't the signs of massive chase and struggle one would expect of an attack by a wild beast. The area was badly trampled for some distance around her however by our own people, but one set of human tracks did lead away from the place to the west off the peninsula. A few drops of blood in some of the rpints revealed that this was in fact the trail of her assailant.

The girl was wrapped more securely in blankets, and brought up to the tower for further investigation of her body and to clean it before burial. I further ordered the people dispersed, the ground tilled, and noisy preperations to be made for a pursuit.

At this point it became clear that Patroklos, the one-time shield grog of Dominicus and now a corporal of the turb was missing, and it further came to my attention that he had been somewhat enamored of the girl, to the point of courting her. The family revealed as much, as well as no particularly odd occurances.

Investigation of the corpse revealed that the assailant had been Patroklos, that he had gouged her heart out with his dagger, crudely, wildly, like a man posessed. Finally, Nils came to me with interesting information of a strange, tall, dark-skinned, red haired man of considerable self-important bearing who had been seen among the folk two days before. Those who saw him simply took him to be one of the magi and thought no more of it. He matched no description of any magus of Stormwatch however, and aparently he had left a inexplicably as he had come.

Not wishing the trail to cool any more than it already had, I summoned brother Gregory to attend to the body and set out with Roman, Moetz, and Alicia in pursuit of Patroklos.

We tracked him through arcane as well as mundane means, but his trail, leading as it did straight up into the mountains to the west slowed our pursuit and rendered any advantage our mounts gave us useless. The weather had cleared, and but for our grim business and the haste we required the early spring would have made for a beautiful and envigorating journey.

Patroklos led us on a four day chase through several Slavic villages and finally to the bluffs overlooking the plains of Larissa where he paused in exhaustion long enough for us to capture him. He was badly used by his flight, and as badly used by whatever had befallen him. It became clear that he knew himself to be guilty of the deed, though he denied it as baldly as he could, and when apprehended he made out to be as broken a man as I have ever seen.

Now, congruently with this pursuit occured another, the chase after our mysterious tall stranger with the red hair. Roman and I shared the belief that the actual heart of this mysterious murder led to him and we kept abreast of any rumor we came across.

Now, one evening shortly after apprehending Patroklos as we were staying at a small inn in a village on the edge of the mountains, word reached us of a local man who had fallen badly ill. Alicia went to attend to him, while we awaited her return. A curious child intent on spying on this strange travelling party caught my attention, and as fortune would have it his own wandering eye led me to a mysterious, tall figure in the night making steady, even hasty, progress toward the very hut where Alicia was working.

We ran into the night, and, coming upon the hut, found the old man's wife in the front room preparing tea. We introduced ourselves quickly as companions of Alicia's. No, she had seen noone else enter, and would we be staying for tea. Moetz remained with her for a moment while I burst into the back room.

The sight which me me there still leaves me with a tremble in my knees as I think to recall it. The sick man was there, on a raised bed, his chest agape. Blood covered the floor and the walls, and ran freely down his form. Sitting across his chest was Alicia, still devouring a hunk of dark, dripping flesh, and beside the bed, in hte shadows of the room stood a bizarre figure.

It was female, clearly, but of a complexion I have never seen before. Her hair was drawn into a connical collection of tight curls, and each of her four arms was bedecked with odd jewely of copper or bronze. A medallion of some sort flashed upon her chest and she seemed caught up in some kind of ecstacy. I fired almost without thinking.

Alicia fell immediately senseless, and the woman-thing crumpled to the ground with a murmur, gravely injured but not killed.

We cleaned the room of gore and arrayed the corpse of the man in such a way that his injury would not be obvious even when he was buried. The old woman we put to sleep, and we bore the mysterious four-armed creature from the hut in secret and left bloodgeld for the old man. We left the village entirely, not wishing to be in the vicinity when the evening's events came to be known.

Next day the creature awoke, and managed easily to elude our attempts at restraint. We spoke and it told us it's story.

It claimed to hail from a far off eastern land, beyond even Persia. It called itself half demon and the daughter of a god who had taken upon herself the task f hunting another being, a spirit of some sort, which ate the hearts of men for it's mother, Kali. The names and places were all strange to me, but the essence was simply that this woman-thing had been chasing for some twenty years after her charge, and the medallion she wore allowed her to pinpoint this spirit's location. Unfortunately it only worked when the thing was about to feed.

Roman took this with significantly more optimism than did I, but we agreed to try to aid this being anyway, of for no other reason than to verify it's story. Something did not fit - perhaps merely the expression on it's face just before my bolt struck home.

The spirit she had been following tended she claimed to follow a generally north-eastern course, so we struck out for Larissa. Our new companion adopted her travelling guise of the tall, red-haired man we had heard visited Stormwatch and whom we had seen in the village the night before. She was largely uncommunicative during the next two days of travel.

We reached Larissa and took lodgings. She entered a kind of trance sleep and indicated that the time was soon. Her medallion burned visibly now, and her chest was covered with small scars from the thing. It was evidently quite painful as well. When she left Moetz, Roman and I had some trouble keeping up with her she moved with such eagerness. We found ourselves shortly in a small cluster of huts outside the main city walls near the river. Somewhere within the spirit would strike shortly.

We allowed the creature to outdistance us briefly, and I sent my image, unbenounced to it, to accompany it in my stead. Roman attempted a very powerful spell to investigate the bizarre relationship between the medallion, the creature and the spirit (which supposedly lived within the medallion) and knocked himself into senselessness as a result.

He only barely managed to regain consciousness sufficiently to inform me as I sat in concentration upon my ruse that the spirit walked with her, and she would never be able to catch what she carried with her.

We had, meanwhile reached the hut of the intended victime, and as we entered we found a woman, pressing a pillow or bundle of blankets down upon the flailing form of a man she was straddling upon the pallet. The Creature stood by unperturbed. She continued to maintain that it was not quite time and in but a moment she would be able to capture the spirit.

Upon her third claim to this effect I could take no more and made no small ruckus, apparently so distracting all in the room that even the posessed woman looked up from her terrible work. The creature let out a howl of anger, and cast loose her binding spell, if that was truly what it was. There surely was some sort of spiritual battle waged in the room, and I must believe that she thought herself to be endeavoring earnestly to restrain the spirit which was so much a part of her.

Her predictable failure drove her from the room in a fury. I followed her to the edge of the river, where I tried to reason with her, to convince her of the futility of her quest, to persuade her that perhaps we could help end her suffering. She turned on me then, and I thanked God I'd had the wits to send an image rather than my person. Finally she waded out into the water, and with the words, "don't you see, I cannot stop chasing him" disappeared.

We returned forthwith to Stormwatch.