PreCursive
patreon
Chapter 168 - Ruinous Haunts
🕑 Added 2024-04-12 17:00:09 +0000 UTCThe light from Sylvia’s Skill was dim, but it still allowed me to see the hallway around us as we descended. Thankfully, Hook and Dusk hadn’t gone very far. I would have been pretty pissed off if they had gone on ahead and left the two of us behind. As we linked back up with them, none of us spoke a word.
Even though we hadn’t gone too deep just yet, something about the atmosphere in here was oppressive enough that words escaped me. Empty sconces were illuminated on the walls, while cobwebs and dust caked every surface they could find purchase on.
The silence was all-encompassing.
Exchanging glances, we continued down the steps. As the group walked ever downwards, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the last time I had ventured into a tomb accompanied by a dwarf. Back in Hollow Hill, Azarus and I hadn’t known what we were getting into with the bunker. But we had been enthusiastic about it, even with as somber as the environs had turned out to be.
I didn’t feel any of that enthusiasm right now.
We had been descending for so long now that I was shocked when the stone stairs abruptly ended. We looked to have been deposited onto a landing of some kind, as not far from our position was what appeared to be a cracked and crumbling stone monument, shaped as a simple standing slab. Carved onto its surface were geometric patterns that combined in an…almost runic pattern, to my eyes. And yet these were not the linguistic runes that I was so used to by this point. It was a little disorienting, to see something in which I detected a hint of familiarity, but yet was so alien.
Beyond the monument stretched a long, dark hallway in which the light of our skills couldn’t pierce the gloom.
Still.
We couldn’t stop now.
Without a word from Hook, his floating light skill wobbled down the hallway past the monument.
We followed.
As we walked, I kept a paranoid eye on my surroundings. This left me with plenty of time to examine the mausoleum proper. To me, it didn’t look like the Orcs that had built this place used coffins in the same way that humans did. Instead, it almost looked like they…mummified their dead. Almost immediately after passing the monument, withered, cloth-wrapped corpses set into alcoves in the walls became visible. These alcoves were at least four high on each side of the hallway, with carvings in that same geometric runic script set into plaques next to each one.
What the hell was that language? It wasn’t being translated by Language Adaptation, so it must be runes of some sort. That was the only written language that wasn’t covered by the universal Skill. But long ago Grey had told me that the runic script that the people of Vereden had been handed down by the gods millenia ago, long before the War in Heaven. The Orcs were ruled by one of those remnant gods. How and why were they using a different script than one gifted by their very own goddess?
I…couldn’t help but notice a few other things, as well. The mummified corpses of the interred were visibly larger than any human I’d ever seen. The smallest one I saw, even as withered as it was, had to be over seven feet tall. Living Orcs had to be massive. These corpses alone were bigger than even Venix was.
The second thing I noticed was that some of the alcoves were absent of their occupants. Even if the slab had the runic name of an occupant carved into the stone plaque next to it.
I took a deep breath, and tried to put it out of my mind.
It only took a few feet for the hallway to begin to branch off, even as the main trunk began to wind in front of us. It felt like we began to encounter a new splinter off of the main hall every minute at this point. Some of them were blocked off, however. The ceiling had caved in on a few of these branching paths, leaving the opening obstructed with dusty red-brown stone and the dislodged corpses of the interred.
Hook, though, wasn’t deterred by any of this. He didn’t seem surprised by any of the signs of deterioration. He just kept walking on a beeline, leading us down the main hallway.
At least, initially.
Abruptly, the hall we were walking down ended in a cave-in. It had almost seemed to spring from nowhere. One moment, the hall was free and clear before our cautiously creeping forms. The next, blocked off by a wall of debris. It looked like the right wall had completely caved it, the victim of an extremely deeply reaching tree branch.
Hook cursed at the sight of it. “Damnit,” He whispered into the gloom. Even with as quiet as he was keeping his voice, it still echoed up and down the dead halls. The noise of his profanity returned to us, bounced off of distance stone walls almost mockingly.
Damnit damnit damnit, the mausoleum itself seemed to call back.
“This was our path forward,” Hook continued, ignoring the echoes.
I took a deep breath. “When, exactly, was the last time you were down here?” I muttered in a tone filled with strained patience.
“Ah…,” A note of almost-sheepishness filled Hooks's voice then. “About seventy years ago.”
“Seventy fucking years?!” I whispered furiously. “Of course it’s in worse shape now!”
“In fairness,” Dusk said, in a voice only slightly quieter than her already muted tone. “This tomb is over a millennium old. It is reasonable to assume drastic changes such as this would not occur in a fraction of that time.”
“Quiet,” Sylvia said sharply, holding her light higher. She peered into the darkness of a hallway that veered off to my left. “Listen.”
The three of us who were bickering feel silent. For a moment, the only thing that I could hear was my own breathing, as Syliva didn’t need to and Hook and Dusk had stopped. I joined them.
Absolute silence filled the halls of the mausoleum. My ears rang with the pumping of my own blood.
In the distance, far off in the distance on the path that Sylvia was staring down, I heard it.
A stone rattled, as if kicked by a foot.
Hook took a deep, slow breath. He stared down the path with narrowed eyes. “We can’t stop,” He said in a low tone.
“And we must keep moving forward,” Dusk picked up in a whisper.
I slowed my own pulse using my core ring, in a rare moment of control over my own physiological responses. “How familiar are you with these tunnels, Hook?”
Hook shook his head in response. “Not very. I only really know the straightforward path, and that’s bad enough. I deemed it too dangerous to explore this grave more than I did, all those years ago. But unfortunately, now we’re going to have to find another way forward.”
A humorless smile touched my lips, hidden from the others in the darkness. “Well. No time like the present, I suppose. Might as well start with this one.”
I saw the shadowed form of Hook’s head nod slightly in acknowledgment before he slowly stalked forward. Sylvia and I followed him, with Dusk deciding to bring up the rear.
We marched in formation silently, following the broad, squat back of the Nocturne Division lead. Gradually, our surroundings began to change. In the dim light provided by Hook and Sylvia’s Skills, I wasn’t able to realize what it was initially.
But my middle ring provided the answers.
The alcoves were starting to look more and more bare of occupants.
Judging by the tense posture of Hook before and Sylvia to my left, I wasn’t the only one to notice.
A scent filled the air abruptly, something I had never smelled before. I…didn’t know what to make of it.
It was dry, so impossibly dry. The slightest hint of rot and decay underlined it, just barely more than an impression of almost seemed like boiled bone. It was the scent of long-gone bad marrow that clued me on in it, you see.
I’d boiled more than a few bones for Fade, in the past.
Suddenly, ahead of us, Hook sent suddenly still. I couldn’t even see the rise and fall of his chest anymore. “Stop,” He said, in the barest suggestion of a whisper.
I froze, as did Sylvia to my side and Dusk behind me.
Over the top of Hooks head, his free-floating light Skill floated far enough ahead that its illumination seemed to be brushing just slightly against something. For a moment, I couldn’t understand what it was. To my eyes, it almost looked like a large crowd of grey pillars, standing tall and proud impossibly in the middle of our path.
Until one of those pillars shifted slightly.
Skitter skitter, went the rock that the withered foot of one of those ‘pillars’ had nudged.
Hook strengthened his light, without moving, breathing, or making any indication that he’d done so at all.
Suddenly, I could see what was before us much more clearly.
It was a crowd of what I could only describe as withered corpses, impossibly standing under their own power. But they were so, so, horrifically inhuman. The smallest of them was seven foot tall, with the largest being eight feet, their dessicated heads nearly brushing the ceiling. They were wrapped from head to toe in dusty linen bandages that hung loose on their paper-thin grey skin. It was stretched so tightly over their bones that all musculature looked to have been shriveled away, possibly centuries ago. No features were visible over those bones. No nose, no eyes, nothing to mark them as having been male or female when last they drew breath.
All that remained were monstrous undead, standing impossibly still and silent but for the occasional, slight shuffle.
My breath caught in my throat in horror. I lost my grip on my pulse as dread thundered across all levels of my ringed consciousness.
Unfortunately, I lost my grip on something else as well.
For the first time in my tenure as a warrior, from before I had been recruited as an Agent. From before Caer Drarrow, and all the battles I had been in. The lessons that Azarus had drilled into me time and time again in our training failed me.
The Oninite dagger in my right hand slipped from my hand, to clatter onto the stone of the floor below me.
The sound of the metal echoed up and down the halls, loud and clamorous. Sylvia and Hooks's heads snapped around to face me in startled panic and dismay, as I did the same at my hand that had betrayed me.
Rattle rattle rattle, the halls of the tomb seemed to mockingly echo back at me.
I scrambled to pick my blade back up, clenching a mortified hand tightly around the hilt.
When I straightened, I found that the skulls of the undead before us had turned to face our direction. In the depths of their empty eye-sockets, an eerie blue spark of fire began to burn. The front of the pack shuffled one foot forward, and its arm lifted in our direction. Its fingers curled into claws, as if to grasp at us.
Hook was the first to break out of our impromptu spell. “Back,” He said quietly. He began to shuffle backward without turning to face us. Sylvia and I were forced to move with him, or be forced to. “They’re not agitated yet, we can still disengage. They won’t pursue us if we don’t get any closer.”
Over top of his head, I could see more and more of the crowd of undead started to shuffle towards us slowly.
“Exactly how sure are you of that?” I asked him in a strained tone.
Hook didn’t answer me.
Dusk did.
“It doesn’t matter,” She said suddenly, in a tense voice. “We can’t retreat.”
I turned to ask what she was talking about, but as soon as I did, my question was answered without a word from her.
There was a second mass of undead slowly shuffling their way down the hallway behind us. At first, I was confused and terrified as to where they had come from. But then I watched as a corpse on the walls we had only just passed by suddenly animated and stood from its resting place.
It joined the group that was closing in on us, never making a sound.
My lips parted in shock at the sight.
“This,” Hook said, in a heavy voice behind me. “Is a trap. These aren’t naturally occurring undead.”
“There’s a Necromancer down here.”
<<Chapter 167 | Table of Contents | Chapter 169>>
Comments
Reid Thompson
12th or so paragraph (counting 1liners too), you have "became visible" twice in the same sentence.
