Legend of K'Darl: 1 - The Riddle of Shadow and Blood

The Riddle of Shadow and Blood

Spectral shadows shift and turn

A gaze so deep from eyes that burn

Sweeping out from dark of night

With blades of darkness slice and bite

Through flesh and limb they rend

No hesitation do they spend

O’er lives so trivial that meet their ends

The Land bleeds from wounds encroaching

Shadows shifting yet approaching

Numerous and yet numberless

Darkness, evil and soulless

Upon what do these twisted things feed

Killing the people for nefarious need

Perhaps all this for some other deed

The night grips with fear and burgeoning dread

Everywhere lay bodies of the innocent dead

Blood ties remain the only clues

Elder lines should sing the blues

Their bodies from the carnage missed

Secrets forgotten now again hissed

From evil mouths with evil minds

Our heroes all are distinctly pissed

Reaching out to defeat these crimes

To resolve the riddle of those Elder bloodlines.

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This poem falls in place of a chronicle for a new D&D campaign that I have just begun in a land known as K'Darl.
It follows on from one a group of friends and I completed a year ago. Now 500 years later we find that a long period of peace in the land, (essentially accomplished by the deeds of our heroes in that previous campaign) had come to an end. This is the Legend of K'Darl.
Our heroes are members of the Royal Guard, investigating a number attacks by "shadows" that are sweeping through the Western lands, massacring whole villages and closing on the major cities. The motivations of these spectres remain unknown.
All that our heroes have been able to establish so far is that they can be destroyed/banished (after a brief encounter) and that the only people whose bodies are missing from the carnage are those of the elder bloodlines; families that can be traced back to those that laid the foundations of this age of peace.

The Dungeon Master has chosen to write his own chronicle of the campaign, so I shall share with you my poems as we progress instead.