Retreat

A simple caravan raid turns into a bloody rout. With two men dead and their toughest fighter bleeding out, the Scum Kings are forced to flee into the dark woods with nothing to show for their failure but a single, useless captive. As the crew licks their wounds, their leader, Dray, is confronted with a grim accounting: they are poorer, more desperate, and have lost more than just blood.

A SIGNALBOX STUDIO PRODUCTION

🧠 Narrative Design: Mike Daltrey
⚡ Production: The Signal Box

System Note:

This human-designed series includes AI and other software tools in its production via our proprietary Signal Box platform.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
The Scum Kings created and written by Mike Daltrey, a
Signal Box Studio production, Episode one Retreat. The forest floor

(00:23):
is a tangle of thorns and grasping roots, and it's
trying to swallow us whole. Every step is a fight.
Branches whip at my face, leaving stinging cuts that I
barely feel. The only thing I feel is the hot,
coiling rage in my gut. It's a familiar friend. Faster.

(00:45):
My voice is a raw bark lost in the blackness
between the skeletal trees. You want their dogs to run
you down. Move behind me. I hear the grunts and
curses of my men, my so called kings of the gutter.
We're just slugs right now, crawling through the mud with
our tails between our legs. Steigan is the loudest, of course,

(01:08):
he is the big Northman is leaning heavily on Orso.
His massive frame, a dead weight, a crossbow bolt, short
and ugly, is still lodged in the thick muscle of
his shoulder. Cowards, he roars, his voice, thick with pain
and fury. Fucking arches in the dark. Let me face them,

(01:30):
let me split one skull or so just grunts with
the effort of holding him up. His face a mask
of cold concentration. Save your breath, stiggined, you'll need it
to bleed. His voice is as sharp and practical as
the dagger he favors. He's already moved past the rage

(01:52):
and is on to the grim math of survival. I
see it in the way his eyes dart around, not
looking for enemies, for a path, an advantage, any small
thing to salvage from this disaster. We were supposed to
be rich. The plan was simple, a merchant caravan, fat

(02:13):
with goods from the coast, moving slow on a forgotten
road and easy plucking. But the merchants had hired professionals,
hard faced men who didn't flinch. They had crossbows and discipline,
and they met our wild charge with a wall of quiet,
efficient death. We broke against them like a wave on rocks.

(02:36):
Two of my men are now just carrying on that road,
and for what a sob cuts through the night. It's Cob,
of course, the fat cook is stumbling behind us, his
face slick with tears and snot. They're going to kill
us all, Oh gods, we're all gonna die out here.

(02:56):
Shut your mouth, Cob or I'll shut it for you.
All over my shoulder. Fear is a disease. If I
let it fester, it'll kill us faster than any crossbow bolt.
Gix shoves the cook forward, a wide, unsettling grin plastered
on his painted face. In one hand, he's dragging our

(03:18):
only prize from this whole debacle, a single scrawny caravan
guard we managed to snatch. In the chaos, the prisoner
stumbles along a rope around his neck, his eyes wide
with terror. Gix finds the whole thing hilarious. Don't worry, Cook,
Gix cackles, his voice, a dry rasp. If they catch us,

(03:42):
I'll give you to them first, A nice plump distraction.
He yanks the prisoner's rope, making the poor bastard gasp
and trip chaos. Gix lives for it. From the trees ahead,
a shadow detaches itself from the deeper gloom brin. She
moves without a sound, a phantom in the woods. Her

(04:04):
green eyes glitter in the sliver of moonlight. She gives
a short, sharp jerk of her head. Clear for now,
she clips her voice. Like stones grinding together, they stop
following a mile back. They're not coming into the tangle
at night. Not this deep relief washes over the man,

(04:26):
a palpable wave of sagging shoulders and ragged breaths. Not me.
They stopped because they know we're no longer a threat.
We're just wounded animals, bleeding into the darkness. We're not
worth the effort. That stings worse than a clean defeat.
Find us a place. I order her something we can

(04:50):
hold with cover. She just nods and melts back into
the trees. She's the rest of us are just trespassers.
We follow a miserable procession of failures. Steigin's groans, COB's
whimpers gicks as quiet unnerving chuckles as he torments our prisoner.

(05:10):
It's the music of my kingdom. An hour later, Bryn
leads us to a shallow hollow, a sort of natural ditch,
carved out by ancient water and choked with the gnarled
roots of a dead ironwood tree. It's not a fortress,
but it's defensible. The thorns and rock falls on the

(05:31):
approach will slow anyone down and make them noisy. It'll
have to do here, I grunt, shrugging off my pack.
No fire, not a spark, drink what you have double
the watch the men collapse groaning. Steigan slumps against the roots,
his face pale and slick with sweat. Bryn is immediately

(05:54):
at his side, her knife out, not to threaten, but
to work with a brutal efficiency that makes my teeth ache.
She slices the cloth around his wound. Staigan bites back
a roar of agony, his knuckles white where he grips
a root or so, watches his face grim that bolt
needs to come out. Brynne glances up, her expression feral,

(06:19):
I know, hold him. I turn away. I don't need
to see it. I can hear it. The thick, wet
sound of the bolt being worked free Stigan's strangled gasp,
and then a low hiss of pain. I find a
spot on the edge of the hollow, my back against

(06:41):
the cold earth, and watch my broken crew. GX has
tied the prisoner to a tree and is now quietly
sharpening one of his jagged blades, humming a tune that
sounds like a dirge. Cob is curled into a ball,
trying to disappear. Sileang, the keeper of coin, is sitting

(07:01):
apart from the others, her ledger already open on her lap.
Though there's barely enough light to see. She's always counting,
always assessing. I run a hand over my face, the
stubble scratching my palm. I can still see it, the
way our charge broke, the disciplined line of guards, the

(07:22):
glint of moonlight on crossbow heads, My plan, my failure,
My rage had cooled, leaving behind something harder and colder,
a stone of pure black fury in my gut. A
few minutes pass in near silence, broken only by stiggins
pained breathing, and then footsteps in the dirt sea lane

(07:45):
stops in front of me, her form a slim silhouette
against the slightly less black sky. She doesn't need much
light to deliver bad news. She crouches down, her voice
a low, clinical whisper, devoid of panic or accusation. It's
worse that way, It's just the truth. Two men dead.

(08:08):
She begins, not looking at me, but at the numbers.
Only she can see that's Joik and Finn. We used
a quarter of our remaining arrows. Brynn is down to
her last dozen bodkins. The medical kit is nearly empty. Now,
just for stigging, we have two days of water, maybe

(08:28):
three if we don't wash. She finally looks at me,
her gray eyes as cold and hard as iron slags.
Dre she says, and the word hangs in the air
between us. Before the attack, we were poor, we were desperate,
but we were whole. She pauses, letting the weight of

(08:49):
it settle in the dark. Now we are poor, we
are more desperate. We have one useless captive, and we
are bleeding men and resources into the dirt. We have
gained nothing, we have lost ground. I don't say anything,
and Selaine shakes her head and walks away. There is

(09:10):
nothing to say. Signal box