Aftermath

Aftermath

 
The town of Blood Ax still reeks of smoke, the air heavy with the memory of fire. The trouble started on the evening of 16 Aers, 530, when flames rose from the docks just as daylight was fading. Sheriff DeRook wasted no time, rousing the militia and driving them hard to protect the riverside neighborhoods. Against the glow of burning warehouses, men and women worked side by side to keep the blaze contained. When the embers died down, only three smaller buildings had been lost. Three arsonists were hauled off in irons, but many more slipped into waiting boats and canoes, vanishing downriver under a shroud of chaos.

While the fire lit the sky, the jailhouse stood as the outlaws’ true prize. DeRook and his deputies held it firm, refusing to bend. Inside its iron doors, Nolan Hardin and the other prisoners remained caged. Their freedom was so close the outlaws could taste it, but fate had other designs. Just before sundown, on that same day, the Deputies of Monroe rode into legend—meeting a second outlaw band beyond the town limits and breaking their charge before they ever reached the cells. Steel clashed against steel, sparks flew in the gathering dusk, and bursts of spellcraft lit the battlefield in flickering hues of violet and gold. When the dust settled, the outlaws lay scattered, and the Monroe deputies stood victorious, leaving the jail unbreached.

Yet even as one threat was turned aside, another took root. About an hour after the first dockside blaze, a smaller gang slipped through the distractions and made for the courthouse. Kegs of black powder, hidden beneath cloaks and saddlebags, were rolled inside under cover of the spreading firelight. When the fuse was struck, the heart of Blood Ax shook with thunder. Stone and timber shattered, smoke boiled skyward, and townsfolk scattered in panic. By some stroke of providence, no lives were claimed—but nearly every record within those walls was reduced to ash. Property deeds, surveyors’ maps, wills, and legal writs—all gone.

For Blood Ax, it is a wound deeper than fire or powder. The region has not yet recovered from the ruin of Monroe, when the Blight devoured its libraries and records alike. Now, with another archive lost, the people of the river country find themselves adrift—no signposts to measure their land, their legacies, or even their names in the eyes of the law.

And as the smoke thins, only one certainty lingers: this war for law and order on the frontier has only just begun.