Day Three-Seventy-Nine: Suspicions

Seven people that I know of are now missing. I can only assume the sloth is to blame.

Edmund was just the beginning. The sloth has proven relentless. It's smashed all of the windows on the upper floor, each time grabbing a new victim. Grylock. Jeffrey's old bannerman. The fox hunter. Our Weekendist preacher. Harold. Hell, it managed to grab two noblewomen at the same time not an hour ago, pulling them through the broken window of the kitchen's back room. The only thing I found was a crumpled elephant hat.

In a fit of despair, Lonnie the Noble burst out the front door and ran. We haven't seen him since. Gods help him.

People are giving up. Again. Pubton has been through so much shit, has weathered so many bizarre trials, only for its people to be murdered by the most notorious of creatures. Even Grayson, who managed to impel peasants and nobles into driving back an unending legion of shadow creatures, remains horribly grim. I would not be at all surprised to learn of a suicide in the next few hours.

Yet something smells fishy to me. Something… doesn't seem right.

Sloths are things of myth. Granted, they are real, but they're so rare and so deadly that their reputation seems almost overblown. Sloths are said to level towns, to raze cities, to murder armies, to feast on the blood of entire cultures. It's often postulated that the Great War of the past, the war that established the Imperium, was waged against a small colony of sloths - and it was very nearly lost. 

This sloth is surely a thing to fear. Watching it linger by the golden tree, I know this to be true. It's a freak of nature, and a murderous demon. But it hasn't destroyed our town, even after four days, and it hasn't visibly killed anyone. Even at this distance I can tell it doesn't have a fleck of blood on its fur. Unless sloths possess some weird power of gobbling down meals whole, leaving no trace of the victim, I find it unlikely that we'd see nothing of their bodies.

And that's another thing. We haven't seen the sloth take anyone. Every time somebody disappears, we hear a smash and arrive to find them gone. The only person to actually see the sloth's arm come through the window was Grayson, and even under these circumstances I take his opinion with a massive grain of salt. Surely with seven abductions somebody would have witnessed the disappearances at least once.

All that is weird. Kinda circumstantial, but weird. Yet it took a long staring session to realize what's really weird about all this, something that makes me suspect there's more going on than just a sloth in Pubton.

I've become listless after the events of the past year, and the whole sloth thing didn't help. Sure, I propelled people to do something during Kierkegaard's shadowy siege, but a sloth is a sloth. You don't make people feel better during a sloth attack. You just don't. Missing my pals, I staggered up to the room where Edmund had been abducted, sat on the bed, and had me a good old cry. The window was still broken and open to the world because people are too afraid to make the noise needed to fix it, so my tears froze to my face pretty quickly.

Crying is odd. It brings the world to a screeching halt while you vent your frustrations, even if that venting is deathly silent. I've done my share of crying, though there hasn't been much in the last few months, and I've found that I notice things while crying that I might miss when I'm feeling happier. I noticed, for example, that our apartment back in Goblinoster smelled faintly of cheese while I was weeping over Eve's love, and I similarly noticed the absence of cookbooks in the kitchen while lamenting Robert's death. Never woulda thought that he memorized all of his recipes.

My frustration over the current losses spurred me to notice something about the room, or, rather, the lack of something. Glass.

When I came charging upstairs the other day and found Edmund missing, I found the window broken. There was a smattering of broken glass on the windowsill that cut my hand, and when I looked outside on the roof I noticed the rest of the glass in the snow. Burst right through.

But there was no glass on the floor. Not a bit of it. And if the sloth came through the window from outside, most of the broken glass should have been on the floor, not the rooftop.

There's nothing better than a bizarre revelation to stop the tears.

I'm going to try something tomorrow. Something insane. If I'm right, maybe… maybe this will all end. If I'm not, then… well, we're all screwed as we are now anyway. Why not give it a shot? I've been through bad things before…

If it goes wrong you go to Libby, diary.

Sincerely,

Dragomir the Mayor