Wizard War - Alric's Waylet

The Church of Dracarian's northern clinic network runs a currency-cleansing station at Alric's Waylet, a crossroads village between Mellowbank and Wickhample. The weekly reports simply stop. Lloyd goes to check personally, tells only his aide Peter, and is taken before he reaches the market square. He is held in a lower cell behind a ward built from a corrupted inversion of his own Rite of Warding.

Peter reaches Starfall on schedule. Fey and Griva ride out the next morning, Nim carrying them at altitude. The village they find is staged: people going about their business, but no children, no dogs, chickens audible but unseen, birds perched in rows watching the road. The Reeve, Chester Alrick, delivers a rehearsed script about Lloyd having passed through and moved on. The well is freshly mortared shut, a house is barricaded from the outside, and a carved wooden horse lies half-buried in the mud.

Fey clears the square with a maximised, over-channelled Chain Lightning. Below, through the dry well, they find forty sedated villagers, the captive clerical team under Brother Fenwick, and a converted root-cellar laboratory. Senna — the Dawncrest operative running the site — is dropped by a Bon Mot critical followed by Vision of Death, and beheaded by Nim as she flees.

The writing desk is the windfall: months of Dawncrest research into weaponising Tethis' plague, the Architect's letters, and a reference to 'the subject in the lower cell' exhibiting advanced divine saturation. The most recent letter refers to Clarissa's usefulness in the past tense.

Clarissa Tomes walks in mid-search, does not fight, and surrenders — reasoning that Starfall is better than Dawncrest, without knowing Dawncrest had already written her off. Lloyd stays behind to run the recovery. Two villagers die; thirty-eight live.