CHAPTER 1.41 - INTO THE BARROW: II
Thae scoops the shield out of Hugo’s hands and hustles to join Rian. The big man nods gratefully to the half-elf as Hugo’s and Anuk’s eyes follow the illumination, trying to spy beyond the door. Its wooden construction tells a similar story to the air in the barrow: a tale of desiccation over a huge span of time. The thing appears somewhat flimsy; portions of the panels are in poor repair or missing entirely. Punctures and gashes show the wood to be dusty, crumbling.
The holes are too small to offer any real vantage beyond confirming that there is movement behind the door. The dragging sounds stop and the wood shudders slightly as the handle begins to twist. Hugo’s senses are overly focused, paranoid that the sounds he is hearing lack organic softness. As if something composed of rock is fumbling with the mechanism. The comforting light of Anuk’s death bead flickers to life as Rian and Thae brace themselves to attack. Or defend. Or flee.
Impossibly slowly, his nerves exacting their horrible price, the door is pushed open by the shape it is obscuring. Human-shaped at least, that’s good. For an instant. But then the movement is…wrong, somehow, the silhouette just…registering as off to senses now swimming in adrenaline. He feels like screaming before the thing looks up with a white bone face, eye sockets dark and empty. The thing’s jaw is hanging at a strange angle, even as his brain unhelpfully inserts ‘well actually the jaw isn’t connected at all.’ His stomach is clenching, his mind spiralling at the illusion of ferocious intelligence in the thing’s eyeless sockets. He remembers the dull hatred in the face of the monster in the sewers as less directed, perversely cooler. He spins out until he hears Anuk murmur “bang!” and the world begins to make sense again.
Time loses its syrup texture, despite the logic of the world buckling. As the shreds of chain mail covering the thing’s torso billow around Anuk’s mote, Rian and Thae stab the thing in unison. Rapier and pike hit home as the explosion catapults the white sticks of the thing’s ribs into its empty chest cavity. Neither of the warriors’ attacks seem to accomplish much, although this is difficult to confirm as the light is thrown around wildly. The creature’s lack of mass, however, means it too is thrown.
Seeming to realise the issues with their attack, Rian and Thae back off, the former menacing their foe with the reach of his weapon, the latter more passive, hemming the thing in. In a more stable light, the creature is clearly visible as a skeleton, entirely denuded of flesh. It is dressed in the torn remnants of armour, metallic chain links coming adrift. Despite the aridity of the air, the metal all has a patina to it. The hooked weapon in the thing’s hands looks moth eaten and its blade has snapped off around a foot from the hilt.
The creature itself is unnatural, wrong on more counts than simply being animated bones. Its left foot is twisted, dragging along the ground as it moves. But its appearance is more fundamentally unsettling. The art in the round room, it seems, was less stylised than they had thought. The creature’s skull is narrower, longer than human. Its limbs are long and spindly, the skeletonised hands gripping the weapon somehow…wrong. Its movement is smoother, faster than the monstrosity he had encountered in the sewers, as though flesh is somehow an impediment. More worryingly, this creature has more animus to it. It was once a warrior, and while it is hemmed in, its attacks are effective, seem logical rather than the dulled stupor of the animated corpse.
After a short scuffle, the pair’s efforts are rewarded as Anuk’s blast detonates the elongated skull. The monster deanimates instantaneously, unconnected bones suddenly scattered by gravity. Hugo feels a pang of guilt, realising he did little more than watch the melee in dumb horror, crossbow in hand. As Rian and Thae check in with one another, the half-elf gives him a nod, eyes on the weapon. “Best that you saved your bolts; they would have achieved little.” They hold for a moment as Thae swaps to the beautiful Warhammer in preparation for the next bone thing. Rian nods slowly; with little to stab, smashing might work. The barrow has returned to silence.
Hugo isn’t certain but thinks he detects a reddish glow beyond the door. This is now hanging from its hinges, pushed and pressed in the scuffle. Thae looks around, querying their readiness. Sets off into the dim space beyond as they nod. This time, the half-elf is leading, Rian behind. Hugo opts for rearguard, not that his height would block Anuk’s shot. They emerge into a large rectangular room. The door is placed midway along the long wall, maybe 50’ in total, the room half as wide.
A short passage across the way joins into a deeper room, the span of Thae’s light unable to touch its far wall. Either side of the room, a pair of uniform passages, maybe 10’ long, push into another pair of large spaces. The room to their right turns out to be the source of the dim red glow, ceiling apparently illuminated. As they move towards the glow, the air seems even more parched, as though the light is warm.
The current room strikes Hugo as a barracks of sorts, but in near complete disarray. Hugo sees around ten beds, although accuracy is difficult. Most of the cots are pushed to the fringes of the space, higgledy piggledy against the walls. Three, or possibly four, beds weren’t moved, instead appear to have been crushed down and stomped to shreds. It seems so alien yet fits precisely with Hugo’s impression of these horrors. Some of the beds on the edge of things are in a flux state, the larger portion intact, with whatever portion lay in the skeleton’s patrol route utterly pulverised. His mind balks at the span of time this would have taken, the sheer lack of mortal concern.
The sheets and mattresses are thin; the latter stuffed with straw. They are difficult to investigate, the arid materials collapsing into dust and dry fibres, seemingly held together by stasis alone. At each corner of the room sat a large chest, or now the remains of them. These once held clothing, simple grey shifts only, and bedding. These, unlike the beds, seem to have been actively torn apart, driven by some purpose. Or madness. Not that that might be out of character for dead things, merely that the implied emotion feels like the domain of warm, breathing things.
Wordlessly, they move as a group towards the glow. There isn’t a whisper of movement they can detect from anywhere, the strange illumination pulling them forward. They emerge into a room that is day-bright, although the light is the colour of blood. The walls remain the featureless white stone through which they have been moving, but the floor of the room retains this only in a narrow strip around the walls. The remainder of the floor here is thick dust, a massive rectangular plot somewhat longer and broader than the sleeping quarters. Above them, the ceiling is a single sheet of glass or impossible ruby issuing light and heat. It is a gentle heat, far from stifling, but the air here is utterly dried out. Hugo feels his throat tighten further.
Rian stoops to grab a handful of the dust. Hugo watches him spit into his hand, rub in the saliva with his thumb, creating a muddy clod at the centre. The dust, he realises, must once have been soil. It has been subjected more directly to this baking than the other rooms they have visited, so he is unwilling to dig down, imagining the dust cloud that would raise. Certainly, the room seems devoid of life. Down to a microscopic level. It looks like a garden plot gone wrong, even assuming the eerie light would support plants. He wants to cough, his motions to leave unopposed by the others.
They cross the barracks, entering a near-facsimile of the garden room. It looks to have been carved out to a similar size, but the other room’s scrupulous straight lines are interrupted by a curtain of grey stone interposed before, and at an angle to, the western wall. This takes an organic, natural shape, straight in only the most optimistic sense. The ceiling here was a similar sheet of glassy material, but this one is dark, radiating nothing. At the transition, the seam between the grey rock and ceiling, the glass substance is crazed, a maze of tiny cracks with motes of red having dropped out to reveal white stone above. The red crystal is inarguably magic, implying to Hugo that it must be whole to function. Why the grey stone was not chiselled out as evenly as the white flummoxes Hugo, why the crystal was not fitted to this doubly so.
They still don’t want to make more noise than necessary, but he detects confusion and concern in his friends’ faces. Until Rian darts towards the grey wall as Thae passes the shield’s light across it. The big man has spotted a small hole, maybe 3 inches at its largest dimension, disappearing into the rock. A dark stain ties the hole to the floor, minimal but visible abrasion following the course of what looks like a stymied water flow. The man, on his knees, scans around the dust beneath the hole, excavating a little with his hands before muttering “rabbit” quietly.
They cluster around while he indicates a rabbit skeleton, one hind leg bone broken. A short hunt later and Rian excavates a shallow burrow a foot into the dusty soil. Another rabbit skeleton, this one intact. Thankfully inanimate, Hugo thinks. Something is tickling the back of his brain, some unifying image, but it’s beyond his reach. He begins to embrace optimism, the silence of this grave, but his pessimism reminds him of the number of beds for whom the occupants remain unaccounted.
-x-
They march back to the central room, face north towards the deeper chamber. Not as large as the ‘farm rooms’, this is still a grand space, some 50 feet by 35. Rising out of the floor ahead, between them and the door opposite, is a flat block of rectangular stone. A table, he thinks, or altar. The remainder of the space once contained wooden benches, tables pushed against the wall behind them. These have weathered identically to the beds, those out of the room’s paths standing desiccated but unmolested. Those in the way of…something…over the years have been pulverised. The thought of a little weight or power magnified over tracts of time skips Hugo’s mind back to the grey wall. What if water came from the hole erratically, only during particularly wet seasons?
He returns to the present as he feels his group jerking to attention, Anuk’s purple light flaring. The walls to their sides, he realises, are not uniformly straight. Each segment houses a semi-circular indentation like a…guard post, he realises, as the one into which Thae is centring the light seems to animate. Of course it isn’t a statue, he thinks, watching with dull contempt as Thae confirms that each of the four indents houses an armoured skeleton. A couple of these have shields, albeit dried out and in poor shape. One of the guards doesn’t even have a weapon, the bones of its forearm shattered. He still wouldn’t like to be stabbed by the thing, noting its sharply sheared radial bone.
Thae completes a sweep of the room, Hugo grateful that nothing else appears to be moving, his gratitude depleting as the groups to either side of them fall into formation, shield bearers to the front. Their movements are smooth, seem drilled. One of the fuckers is opening and closing its jaw, arrhythmic clacking corrupting the silence, raising the hairs on Hugo’s neck and arms. He wonders if this is purposeful intimidation, whether this guard would have been the tactician in life. Does it know its orders are lost to time, like all of its soft tissue? Or is this just some leftover, habitual motion dug so deeply into the lost being it continues to mimic past death?
He tries to shut his questions down as Rian and Thae reverse through the archway into the barracks, striving to cancel the skeletons’ pincer in the narrow archway space. Hugo, for his part, has slung the useless crossbow, black dagger unsheathed. He wishes his hand were steadier.
He tries to control his breathing, calm his fraying nerves.
