Let go of the past

The trek back up to northern Boreas was thankfully a smooth and uneventful endeavor. With Mercury at the lead position, the two males made short work of the distance, not stopping through the night save for when they needed a short rest. They arrived to the pine forest just as the sun was sinking past afternoon and into evening, painting the summer sky with purple and indigo hues. They would only have a limited amount of daylight to search with, but Artorias would do his best with what he had. Mercury confirmed that this was the location where he had found Wren's blood, and it was just as the Aegis had feared. Nothing remained of a crime scene to be found—no blood, no signs of a struggle, no scattered evidence or even scent trails to speak of. The land smelled as if nothing had been here in some time. It was apparent that when Menagerie had broken, its members had all scattered to the wind, leaving behind the past and mysteries to pick up the pieces of.

A disheartened frown tugged at Artorias' lips as he began to pace the perimeter of the spot Mercury directed him to. He started his investigation from the outside and worked his way in, sniffing about at everything. Every tree, every rock, every upturned spot of dirt. Nothing he sampled carried the scent of Wren. Every so often he'd pick up a stale scent of Menagerie, but even that was mostly faded after all this time. Standing over where Mercury had said the blood had been, Art dug through the topsoil to sniff at what lay beneath the surface, hoping that perhaps something had seeped into the earth to provide some clues, but he came up empty-handed yet again. Lifting his head, the experienced navigator began to survey the lands around them, trying to reverse engineer what direction the assailants might have taken. "Do you remember any other details about the scene? The number of sets of tracks? Which way they went off in? Was there a blood trail or just splatter around here?" He looked to Mercury for some more information. Artorias didn't expect Mercury to remember such finer details when he had likely been in a panic coming across the scene, but without them, their search would die here.

"Artorias Carpathius" | "Carpathian" | "Corbin" | "Eira" | "Argent"