Madame Golivanth had searched high and low for any sign of the people on her list. For weeks, she had combed the Foreign Quarter, and the trade districts, and exhausted her network of contacts trying to track down information on their whereabouts.
As she entered her modest flat, she heaved a small, frustrated sigh. Her cat, Nicodamain, wandered up to her and flagged his tail for her, meowing his special caterwaul in a demand for affection. She stroked the cat's creamy fur, and scratched his blue-gray ears. The slender feline executed one of his favorite tricks, bounding from the floor to the shelf beside the door, and from there to her shoulders, and draped himself there, a living, purring fur stole. She smiled in spite of her weariness, and gave him another round of ear scratches.
Then her eye fell on a white scroll, resting on her desk upon the sapphire blue silk square she kept there specifically for messages.
Her face lit up with anticipation, and her violet eyes sparkled with a moment of new hope.
The scroll bore the seal and sigil of the wizard she'd hired to do a magical search for her quarry. If she had been a coarse, common human, she might have squealed with glee. But she was a mature, dignified elven lady of Mancera, and she contented herself with a pleased humming sound, deep in her throat. Nicodamain purred in answer, quite as if he'd brought the message to her personally.
She broke the seal and skimmed the introductory paragraph. Before she reached the end, her shoulders had slumped. "Regret to inform you..." she muttered, reading and commenting on the scroll at the same time.
"Yes, I'm sure you tried your hardest, I gave you enough gold to do so...nothing? Oh, yes, I'll be sure to go ask the spirit of a halfling, if I can find a priest willing to try contacting him, that will be a great interview...and lo, the woman warrior is missing too."
She walked to the window seat, and carefully perched there. She barely noticed Nicodamain's claws as they sank into her shoulder, as the cat balanced himself against her movement. The cat leaned toward the parchment, as if inspecting it along with his mistress.
"Oh, root rot!" she exclaimed as she finished reading. Nicodamain batted the scroll.
She tossed the scroll to the floor, where it flopped and rolled up partway. Nicodamain hopped down and began to attack the vellum, shredding it in a burst of playful violence.
"Nothing, Nico. Nothing! All this time spent, and nothing to show for it," she said. Nico cocked an ear at her, but continued to maul the scroll.
"The halfling - Aleth, what an ironic name - has vanished without a trace. He was last seen with the group, but no one knows what happened to him after that. Then part of him showed up in that awful cultist lair - but only his left hand. So what does that mean?"
The cat sneezed and pounced on the scroll, biting at it.
"Exactly," she nodded, "it means nothing at all. The rogue could still be alive somewhere, but he's hidden himself too well to be found by any arcane means. If he is dead, I might be able to contact him...but everyone knows halfling souls tend to move on quickly; and they're the most difficult ones to contact, apart from gnome ghosts."
She sighed. "And the warrior female - Violence, or Violet, depending on who I talk to..." She shook her head. "The woman took possession of a ship - supposedly it had retired from piracy, but I somehow doubt that. The ship left port and was never seen again, and from what I can learn, the first mate of the ship had every intention of murdering Violet as soon as he could manage it."
"Hmmmrow!" observed Nicodamain.
"I agree," nodded Mme. Golivanth. "But my wizardly aide claims that she's not dead, but not alive either. How can that even be possible? And how can she be at the bottom of the Eastern Ocean, when she set sail in the Bay of Fire? The two bodies of water are half a continent apart, and the northern seas are full of horrible monsters. Only madmen sail into them."
She sighed. "There's no way for me to account for these folk. All I can do is write up a basic summary of what the records state they did. We'll never know how good or evil they actually were, or anything interesting about them..."
She stood, and bent to rescue the mangled scroll from Nico. "They might as well have been nothing but pieces of paper, for all that is left of them now," she said, crumpling the vellum and tossing it into a waste basket.
Nico dove for the basket, chattering in cat laughter as he tried to fish the paper out again.
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