Instigation.

Four men, half men from the light of the fire, their backs lost to the darkness.  Silent in their minds just as much on their lips.  The trip had been bumpy so far, wet stretches of marshy land just solid enough to run a wagon over slowly if you didn't mind unsticking it every few hours.  They were too tired to even swat at the bugs that hovered like veils around them that too rarely immolated themselves in the fire.  Had they a choice, they might have taken a more maintained road, trading days for miles.  The fact that those roads were open to traffic did not make them options, however.  All the maintained roads went by the elven lands.  Elves paid for them, so it only made sense, and if it were any other cargo, they would be resting in an inn with their wagon next to or in a barn and no flies buzzing at their ears.

As it was, taking their wagon by the normal roads would just get them held up and lightened of their possessions for a sum far lower than what they anticipated.  They could be rich, just for some discomfort along the road.  Far enough away from the moore, down in the low forests or the seacoast they might sell off their dwarven made cargo for ten to thirty times more riches than anywhere in the city of Durn and without having to deal in business with the elves.  So they sat, exhausted and unthinking with their dark package stowed away.

When the bandits struck, it was against minimal resistance, little more than willpower moving the men who sat there.  Blood flowed into the sticky muck of the ground and the horse bolted into the night.  Four corpses and two men in black in the silence of the new moon.  That was when the giggling started.  It sprayed out of the wagon like a waterfall, hissing through the air.  The cargo was ammused.  The cargo was awake.  The cargo, was scratching at its glass prison in order to collect the death that hung around the place.

The bandits, pragmatists, fled into the night.  Two days later a shepherd happened across the empty wagon, sunk an inch into the muck, and three corpses.  Each had his coins, his affects, and was undisturbed by the wildlife.  The shepherd's dog even refused to come near the place.

Two days after that, the rumors started.  One talked of a tall man, striding across the moors with the night furled about him like a cloak.  One spoke of sheep, spooked into a bog in the night with nothing there to chase them.  Another tale, repeated often, was that of a strange, bandage-wrapped man who say out on the moor in the paltry shade of one of the few trees.  He would not talk, just stare at travelers as they passed.

Two months later, the market dried up for shadowstuff from the mines.  The dwarves just stopped selling it.  Not even at exorbitant prices like they usually did when attempting a price spike.  The elves weren't saying anything concrete, but they were as mad as usual, sending out their assassins and ambassadors.  Trade ground to a halt in the city of Durn.

All this called them to town, drew them in just as surely as a treasure hoard or a dragon.