The corpse of Lord Reginald Hereford made a wet slap as it fell to the floor. Congealed blood splattered from the eviscerated body, staining the polished cherry floorboards an altogether more sinister red. Vaahnzerekh stood in the center of the deflated mass, dark bone frame glistening in the flickering lamplight. It stared at the congealed slime coating which dripped from itself to join the rest of the macabre ooze on the floor. High quality cherry wood was difficult to obtain in the desert country of Fallien, and the sight of the mess filled him with an errant moment of frustrated panic.

Haide only knew how hard it was going to be to clean the boards once the stain set in, it thought. But at least the blood was already days old. If the body had been fresh the entire corner of the office would have had to have been replaced.

It took a moment for the infiltrator to realize that it was still mimicking the dead Lord that it had been posing as for the last several days. Vaahnzerekh sent a mental command to end the mimicry protocol and felt the last remnants of Reginald Hereford cease. The Coronian merchant was finally and truly gone.

With no need to ruminate over the future of decorative accoutrements, Vaahnzerekh stepped out of the hollow shell that had been Lord Hereford and made its way to the man’s desk. Lord Hereford had been an important noble in the bygone days of the Corone Empire, and had fled to Fallien seeking refuge when the rebellion had claimed the island nation. Gaining admittance to the isolationist island had been difficult, but money was the universal language and Lord Hereford had spoken it well.

Once established, the exiled Lord had turned his business acumen to building a trade empire. He shipped exotic glass, spices, and more than a little poison to his contacts in Corone and brought back construction materials which were common in Althanas’ bread basket but hard to acquire in the deserts of Fallien. Unfortunately for the shipping magnate, his caravans had unearthed a relic during one of their excursions. This had led Lord Hereford to mount an expedition into the largely unexplored and incredibly hostile Empty Wastes of southeastern Fallien in the hopes that he’d be able to find the relic’s source.

He hadn’t, but the expedition had nonetheless come uncomfortably close to discovering the ruins of the Kron’tyr Empire’s largest tomb. Silent spies had watched the caravan’s progress and had assessed it to be a potential threat to the Kron’tyr reawakening. Unwilling to allow anything to complicate the process, the Storm’s Herald had tasked Vaahnzerekh with the complete dissolution of Lord Hereford’s estate. This was not the first time that it had performed this task.

It had been easy for Vaahnzerekh to kill Lord Hereford and assume the man’s identity. Hereford had been a cautious man, frightened of retribution for his crimes against the Coronian people finally catching up with him. But he’d also been a man who didn’t pay a piece more than he had to in order to get what he wanted. The thugs that Lord Hereford had hired to guard him were large and aggressive, but they were also lax, trusting in their size and reputation to ward away potential threats. They hadn’t expected slim black death to glide into their midst in the middle of the night, razor talons extended.

Vaahnzerekh had put one of those bloodied claws into the back of Lord Hereford’s head as the man had tossed about in a drunken slumber. It had then slid into the body and assimilated the man’s thoughts and memories. Hereford had been engaged in so many duplicitous dealings that it had been child’s play to dismantle the trade empire once Vaahnzerekh knew all of them.

Everything fell over the course of three days. Warehouses full of product burned or were seized by the authorities. Confidantes and underlings were found to have committed suicide or had otherwise been the victims of foul play, thin lines of crimson parting their throats. The location of a caravan’s route happened to find its way into the grimy fingers of a band of murderous thieves. And so it went.

The last of Lord Hereford’s favored concubines had finished looting what she wanted from the Lord’s palace and had fled into the cold Fallien night. Vaahnzerekh’s emotional mimicry had found it too difficult to simply kill the girl, young and frail as she was. Now that it had shut that off, the infiltrator pondered chasing her down to ensure that all loose ends were tied up but quickly dismissed it. She had known nothing of Hereford’s business that would turn any suspicion back towards the Kron’tyr.

Vaahnzerkh rifled through the drawers of the heavy oak desk that Hereford had used until it found the log books that it was looking for. It had painstakingly hunted down and destroyed all written manifests from Hereford’s business dealings during the last three days, even the ones that had no connection to the exploration of the Empty Wastes. Three swipes of Vaahnzerekh’s obsidian claws completed this endeavor, and then a spark from the pipe flint in the top drawer rendered their remains forever out of the grasp of prying eyes. No recorded trace of Hereford’s merchant empire remained to threaten the Kron’tyr. Now all Vaahnzerekh had to do was to open the man’s private lockbox and retrieve the relic that had led Hereford to his destruction.

Combinations were no deterrent when a thief had the ability to pull the combination from the user’s mind, and the location of a key could only be kept secure if the owner was alive to do so. It took less than thirty seconds for Vaahnzerekh to finish destroying the log books, open the hidden panel in the floor beneath the desk, and remove the lock box’s clasp. It removed the silk bag containing the relic from the lock box and opened it. What it saw inside resonated within Vaahnzerekh and it took a moment for it to realize that what it was experiencing was a sense of fear that it thought it had lost long ago when its consciousness had merged with the Storm. The flickering green glow of Vaahnzerekh’s eyes wavered slightly as it resealed the silk bag.

The Kron’tyr Empire wasn’t safe. It would never be safe again.