Page 1960 -- CC.

Chapter Two Hundred: 'The Horror at Bellvine...'
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...89 years ago...

The reports had been curious, to say the least. Livestock going missing. Strange lights in the night sky. Rumors of "inhuman creatures" skulking around the city.

But none of that was why Parson Miles had bothered to come investigate the quiet Stecatti town of Bellvine in person.

No, the only reason he was here was because of a report about an "unidentified black goo."

His peers in the Vanguard hadn't thought much of it, of course. A black goo? It was probably just a bit of spilled oil or some such thing, they'd said. Why was he even pointing it out? Everyone knew that worms from the Undercrust couldn't survive on the surface.

They all just assumed that that was what he and Overra had been worried about. Worms. Of course.

But Parson hadn't forgotten that encounter he'd had in Calthos, nearly forty years ago now. He was not the same man that he was then, but he still remembered it as clearly as if it were only yesterday. A strange man, appearing in a dust storm, identifying himself as "Ettol," and then disappearing amid a disturbing fountain of black and slimy vomit.

Parson had tried his damnedest to find out more about who that person was or what had happened there, but all he'd managed to discover was that "Ettol" was the name of an Ancient Melmoorian trickster deity. And that wasn't much to go on.

So after deliberating on it a bit further, he and Overra decided to keep this investigation off the Vanguardian record books--for the time being, at least.

Instead, they decided to rely on their other friends for help. "Ettol" had inquired about them, after all, so perhaps they were the missing pieces that Parson had never wanted to use. With so many years gone by and nothing to show for it, his questions had never done anything but burn in the back of his mind.

And now, for the first time since they were bratty little war orphans in Melmoore, all three of them were going to be in the same place again. Parson, Damian, and Germal.