The Fugitive.
A man was sprinting across a snowfield so white it hurt to look at.
Three figures chased closely behind.
An arrow, loosed from a taut bowstring, pierced the fleeing man's leg with precision. His body crumpled. He rolled once across the snow and sprang up quickly to run again, but his pace was clearly slower now.
The slowing fugitive was soon caught.
Alguor Kingdom's senior ranger, Lagil, roughly kicked the man's back. At last, the long chase of the past few days had reached its end.
This fugitive had fled without hardly sleeping, sprinting through the snow-covered northern forest for three days at a pace rivaling even the elite rangers of the northern kingdom. He was a born ranger, through and through.
Lagil looked down at the fallen man and drew the longsword from his belt. The cold whisper of steel echoed in the snowy silence.
But unfortunately, this man was a fugitive who had stolen a sacred relic of the Holy Flame Church. The order from above was clear: retrieve the relic and take the man's head.
Even if the relic wasn't particularly important to the Holy Flame Church, the kingdom's upper ranks always wanted to stay in the Church's good graces.
After all, in the freezing north, the warmth of fire was everything.
Shk—
Red blood sprayed across the white snow.
With a clean strike that would impress even an executioner, the fugitive's head rolled across the ground. Lagil flicked the blood off his blade and gave a chin-nod of command.
"Search him."
The rangers descended on the corpse and searched the body with practiced hands. The man carried little.
A shriveled woman's hand, a blue cup, and a bit of coin.
Lagil pocketed the blue cup and the money without hesitation, then turned his back.
"We've recovered the relic. Let's go."
"Yes, sir."
"Yes."
Leaving the corpse behind, the rangers retraced their steps through the snow.
Later, as the day began to fade and the rangers were long gone—
The single hand laid across the headless fugitive's body began to twitch.
The shriveled woman's hand crawled up the man's torso and reached the collar.
Then it grabbed the man by the front of his clothes and began to shake him violently.
"Don't be angry, O Mother of Decay."
The headless body slowly rose from the snow, gently pried the withered hand from its neck, and tucked it into a pocket inside its chest.
"It was necessary to die here, just once."
The body picked up its own head, still talking to itself, and placed it on the severed neck.
Moments later, as if nothing had happened, the fugitive—
No, the Priest of Decay, Marnak, smiled faintly.
"The divinity contained in the relic has already been extracted, has it not? There's no reason to keep such a useless tail anymore."