Olivia yelped in surprise and promptly covered her eyes with her hands; she was mortified about having walked in on the King during his bath time but she didn't expect him to be so nonchalant about it, especially considering how youthful he looked despite almost certainly being older than her.
After turning around to face the door, she composed herself long enough to speak. "Y-yes, your Majesty... It's very alarming. There's some kind of cult group that have been traveling around the continent kidnapping women. Their most recent victim was the only one I could recover with the help of some Desolatian Guild members, and she happened to be a member of the Paradican Sisterhood of White Magic. Meaning, these cultists are traveling outside the country to search for more girls. We turned her over to them for the time being... From what we could gather, the cultists were using some kind of forbidden ceremony in a bid to resurrect someone they only referred to as The Queen.
"The women we came across were just... skin and bones. We thought they were already dead but... they were leftover failures to reach the goal of reviving this Queen of theirs. Unfortunately, I think the only girl we could save is what I can only call a vessel for the Queen to inhabit at any time. We never figured out how they managed to do this other than it most certainly is some kind of forbidden magic. No ordinary modern magic I know of is capable of binding a living soul to that of one who's long passed. The Queen was a... terrifying opponent; I think she even mentioned wanting to reclaim the throne from you. The amount of rage she had in her was palpable. We were able to knock her out, but it was almost impossible to leave the Forest Temple alive; the women were probably beyond our ability to help them since even they begged us to end them. But we hesitated for too long about what to do. The cult has them under their control like puppets... we managed to take down a few of them but it wasn't nearly enough.
"We were only able to leave because one of the Guild members was able to force their hand by threatening to harm the vessel. It was a foolhardy decision, but even if she was bluffing, they had taken her threat seriously enough to let us go. But the only one who the puppets answered to was a strange woman they called Lust. I'm afraid we won't be seeing the last of these cultists who called themselves Watchers. I'm very sorry that I failed to rescue any of the girls... I had to leave them behind."
