A scourge of vampires has overrun the mine at Coldrock Diggings to the southeast of Tava’s Blessing. One would think that such tragic news could not remain buried for long, even in a desert, what with the miners failing to return home to their families, and the sudden end to production of the mine itself. However many of the miners families would have already been lost to the Withered Hand incursion at Tava’s Blessing, and it was the town’s shipyards who were the main client for the grit-rock that the mine produced.

Another reason the news of the vampire presence has not spread to the outside world is that the vampires themselves have so far not needed to leave the cover of the mine to hunt for food. For it appears the Withered Hand cultists have made numerous attempts to entreat this vampire coven for aid, only for the vampires to reject their pleas in the most unequivocal way imaginable, by feeding upon the cultist envoys and throwing their carcasses to their bloodfiend thralls.

It appears that vampire’s disgust for necromancy goes far beyond that felt by even the peoples of the desert. For vampires do not see death as a loss of their life, but a transcendence into something far more glorious, and that the living should not fight against them, but grovel and beg to join them. They believe the living raising the undead as minions to be abhorrent, and as outlandish as a Guar harnessing a farmer, or a skeever hunting a senche-tiger.  

Yet despite the most unambiguous of rejections, the Withered Hand continues to send more emissaries. This news fills me with fresh hope for the fate of the Alik’r, for as the Lizard folk of the Black Marsh used to say, ‘even a Mer will stretch out his hand to the Saxhleel when he is drowning in the swamps’.

S.K