"What?! Do you an that... all the other corpses have a drained body like this old man's?" Reidar asked back, who tried to calm the horses, after getting agitated to see Dag co out of nowhere and throw himself to the ground.
"That's right... their skin was enveloping nothing but the bones... there were also won and children... I will never forget this scene... how can the Jotunns be so cruel?! Reducing innocent people in these conditions... what have these children done to deserve such treatnt? What serious cri did they commit to die so excruciatingly?! Fuck!" Dag yelled, venting all the anger, fear, and nervousness of the mont.
Reidar approached him and helped him get up, shocked by his words, realizing that he was not exaggerating, knowing his Captain, who rarely grossed out like that, risking vomiting.
"Let's go back to the village... I think we've seen enough..." said the archer, inviting Dag to get on horseback.
"Yes... let's go..." he answered, speaking like an automaton.
The two companions rode slowly to the rocky coast ascent, returning to the village where Gridd and the other two Masters were waiting for them.
When they arrived at their destination, Gridd couldn't help but notice Dag's still-shocked face, who couldn't get those grieving images out of his head.
He told her everything he had seen, in detail: the pile of corpses, the sll of blood and rotting flesh, and the strange wound on the nape of every body.
"Hey, Dag... don't talk out here, let's go into the barn..." Ellen said, while she was listening to the story from afar and advised Dag and the others not to talk about it in the presence of the villagers, already frightened.
He and his companions obeyed, and when everyone was inside the large hut, Kjell closed the door, using a large wooden beam.
"Involuntarily I heard what you were saying to your sister. You talked about a particular wound... what was that?" she asked, while Kjell was also intrigued.
"All the corpses had sothing in common... first of all, the most obvious character was their muscle mass: even though they were stacked on each other, it was not difficult to notice that their bodies were incredibly thin, skin and bones. It was enough to look at them to understand that they no longer had fluids in their body and that this had accelerated the decomposition process" Dag stated.
Ellen did not interrupt the speech and squinted, trying to imagine the scene, while everyone else was hanging from his lips.
"From the incredible stench that that pile of corpses emanated, it seed that they had been abandoned there for weeks! The little flesh that remained in their body was completely rotten... the second detail that Reidar and I noticed was that of the hair".
"Hair?" Gridd asked, naively.
"Yes, Gridd... their hair was perfect, as sothing obvious for the body of soone who has only died for two days. But in contrast to the condition of the bodies it was a surreal scene, believe . Their faces were so dehydrated that their eyes had re-entered the orbits and their lips had disappeared, leaving their teeth uncovered. I was looking at the skull of a woman's corpse when a big cockroach popped out of her mouth!" Dag continued, making Gridd shudder in disgust.
"It's not normal, think about it... those bodies were nothing more than containers, like the skin of a snake after shedding. It was as if all their flesh had been extracted, leaving only the outer casing..." he replied, sighing and trying to think straight.
"And what about the wound behind the back of the neck? I heard that everyone had it, is that true?" Kjell said, stepping forward.
"Every single corpse, in the lower part of the neck, had the sa type of wound. It was not a simple cut, but a real rotting rip, carefully executed right at the height of the cervical vertebrae..."
"Uh?"
Ellen and Gridd looked at him with a confused face, not knowing that word.
"Yeah... I an here!" Dag exclaid again, pointing to the lower part of his nape, making others understand the exact point of the wound reported by the victims of the massacre.
Before they could discuss together the reason for those injuries, soone knocked violently on the barn door, causing them to jolt.
Kjell rose from the hay mound on which he was sitting and walked to the door.
"Master Kjell, Master Ellen! There's a boat!" soone yelled from outside, as Kjell moved the heavy beam that served as a rudintary lock.
When the door opened, one of the Clan's soldiers was unbalanced and fell forward on the straw, in the rush to warn his superiors.
"My boy, what happened?" Kjell asked, helping him get up.
"There's one of those boats not far from the coast! I think a second attack is coming!" the young warrior continued.
"An attack? In broad daylight? We assud they were following a tactic, but this doesn't seem like a very clever move..." Ellen thought aloud, who without adding anything else ca out of the barn and made her way to the embanknt of the overhang, from which the sea and the entire coastal stretch were clearly visible.
Dag, Gridd, and Reidar followed her, as did Kjell, who paused for a mont to talk to the soldier, asking for more details.
Making her way through the crowd of fishern, frightened at the idea of suffering a second attack, Ellen was the first to reach the vantage point.
Being a sunny day and not particularly cloudy, she didn't take long to spot the boat that people were scared of.
It was about half a kiloter from the lowest stretch of coastline and seed directed to the destroyed villages.
Its appearance corresponded perfectly to that of the descriptions of the fishern: a single sail hoisted on the mainmast in the middle of the ship, and the typical 'dreki' shape, with a low and enlarged trim.
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