Word came soon after the incident that the temple was receiving several sick with strange disfigurements. As the queen, Rellick's charge went to see what was going on, and so Rellick travelled with her to ensure her safety. Oddly enough, the effects that they saw upon arriving at the temple were far from natural. Men had turned from elves to monsters, from full humans to partially animal. Nothing that one would encounter from a natural affliction.
All who could still speak told the same story. They had seen a lovely woman while wandering and she invited them to her cottage for tea. This was where stories diverged. Some blacked out while drinking tea, some remembered following the woman to her bed chambers before blacking out. But all woke up precisely where her cottage had been with no cottage to be seen and an unusual affliction.
The clergymen asked that Rellick help them investigate, in hopes that understanding the affliction would help heal it. Rellick agreed on the condition that the queen be kept safe at the temple until he returned. The clergy were more than happy to agree, and so Rellick set off into the forest to wander as the men had done, eyes peeled for a lovely woman. His stags stayed behind.
What he encountered was not what he would describe as a lovely woman, but rather a part bird creature. When it invited him for tea, he mostly accepted because it fit the bill. While a cottage appeared, the creature did not change, cluing Rellick into its nature. He did not drink the tea, instead making small talk to keep up the bluff that it had caught him in its spell, until it invited him to bed. As it laid out and pulled him to join it, he plunged a knife into the creature's chest. It didn't die from that, but was caught off guard enough to give him a chance to behead it. As the cottage faded around him, a few of the creature's feathers were taken, to avoid wasting the kill. He would later learn of what it meant to fletch an arrow with the feathers of a siren, but for the time being, he returned in victory.
