Chapter 2.5: It Strikes Again

At some point in the night, after spending time celebrating with the party and the rivals and the townsfolk and anyone else who happened to be there to have a good time, Tereze finds herself on the outskirts of Jigow at the small, rickety inn where she stashed her mother's thrall. The moon hangs brightly in the night sky and the streets remain crowded as she enters the small establishment and heads upstairs.

The night-shift innkeeper nodding off at the front counter doesn't notice your entry, and there doesn't seem to be anyone else within the public spaces of this building. As Tereze reaches the top of the stairs leading to the dimly-lit hallway, something feels off. Something deep inside her, some instinct, is telling her that something is wrong. It takes but a few seconds for Tereze to notice what's causing warning sirens in her head: the door to the room where her mother's thrall was staying is ever so slightly ajar, and the hall is eerily quiet.

Tereze places her dominant hand at her belt, ready to unhook her Warhammer from its bindings should things turn sour. With her other hand, she casts a spell, hoping her voice wasn't too loud as to draw attention to herself. Her knees bend slightly and her walk towards the door slows to a creep.
Peering in the cracked door, Tereze slowly moves to open it wider, instinctively holding her breath

As the magic washes over her eyes, Tereze's vision is opened to a whole new spectrum, the ebbs and flows of magic, faintly hanging in the air in a weave-like pattern, ready to be pulled and twisted at a spellcaster's will. But looking around before entering the room, Tereze does not see anything glowing in her new vision.

The first thing Tereze notices is the scuff on the floor, then the tipped-over chair, then a blood splatter across the wall, and finally a pair of feet sticking out from behind an overturned desk. One hell of a ruckus happened in here.

But as a dhampir herself, she's come to know that the blood of one afflicted with vampirism is slightly magical in and of itself as it rarely needs a heartbeat to slowly flow through the body and sustain the body. There is some blood in this room that is magical, but there is also some that is not.

"Weaver's ribbons... What on earth?" Tereze muttered as she dropped her hand from her waist and used both of them to heave the legged figure up and out of the chaos.

"You better not be who I expect you to be..." She sighs.

Sadly, Tereze finds precisely who she was (presumably) expecting the body to be... her mother's thrall who accompanied her on her trek to Jigow. There are multiple stab wounds in the torso area of the body, and after a quick assessment, Tereze surmises that the thrall died from bleeding out while unconscious; and sadly the irony of a vampire dying from blood loss is not lost on Tereze. It's hard to tell how long the corpse of a vampire thrall has been dead, since you could really say that they've been "dead" in the classic sense since they were turned, but Tereze guesses that the thrall drew their last cold breath at least an hour ago.

After another quick glance around the room, Tereze notices the draft blowing in from the open window, and then the panicked scuffs and handprints of nonmagical blood on the windowsill, leading out into the street below.