Murder Creek runs the length of Klevnaf, north to south, from the springs under the Suftos Hills down to the Void. The water is dark. Not silt-dark or peat-dark, though the elves who live along it have heard both explanations and believe neither. The creek has run the color of old blood for longer than anyone alive remembers, and the name is older than the memory.
It is older than the civil war, and older than the kingdom the war broke apart. The creek is named for King Ghy the Elder, a Winter Elf king killed on its banks more than a thousand years ago. Who killed him, and why, no one now states with any confidence. What is certain is that by the time Istor XXVI was assassinated and his daughter and his uncle went to war over the throne he left, the water had been called Murder Creek so long that no one thought to ask which murder it meant.
Then it meant a second one. Istor's killing was the first death of the succession war, not the last, and the dead of that war went into the ground of Klevnaf and the water beside it, a great many of them into the creek itself. So the creek now holds two killings at different depths: Ghy's, a thousand years settled into the bed, and Istor XXVI's, recent and still working through the system. The old stratum sits quiet. The new one spreads. Wells dug near the banks have begun to darken, and tributaries that ran clear within living memory now carry the taste of the creek.
Those who drink from Murder Creek watch a king die. The vision is vivid and never twice the same. A drinker sees the killing from the corner of the room, then from the hand that does it, then through the dying king's own eyes, and over enough draughts the two murdered kings blur into one, an ancient death and a recent one telling the same story from every angle but never settling the one question a witness most wants answered. The elves of Klevnaf call the water sacred and cursed in the same breath and mean both.
Drink, and the old king shows you how a killing is done. Drink twice, and he shows you it from the inside. Past that you are no use to your captain, so most of us stop at one. — a Svedlind ranger, to new recruits
What the people downstream call the curse is not a curse in the usual sense of the word. The creek hates no one. It holds what the violently dead leave behind, it has been collecting that residue since Ghy bled into it, and it is collecting more of it now, faster than the water can carry off. That is the part that frightens them. An old curse would at least be finished with its work.