CHAPTER 1.42 - INTO THE BARROW: III
Things begin badly, slide towards worse. Rian has excellent reach on his pike, however two of the skeletons immediately begin to harry him, tying him up. As Thae engages, the other two collapse back, urging the cleric to push forward. The warhammer needs space, and as soon as Thae begins to swing, one of Rian’s skeletons peels off while the other rains blows towards the big man. It is putting itself at risk but briefly, closing to the point that the long weapon is becoming a stick or an unwieldy club. Meanwhile, the pincers having subdivided, Thae is being swarmed.
Hugo and Anuk are similarly stuck, one of her beads having skimmed too close to Rian’s head in an attempt to free him up. Hugo is still waiting for an opening he can use. As the broken-armed skeleton attempts to leap up and over Thae’s shield, the half-elf is forced back, nearly losing footing in the process. Hugo’s heart freezes, thinking his friend might be taken, but only stabber remains on the cleric. He hears Anuk’s gasp as she also realises the skeletons’ feint. Rian is struggling to bring his weapon to bear, and the light from Thae’s shield is swinging wildly. They hear a bellow of pain as the three intact guards swarm around the big man.
Anuk, at least, gets a good line onto one of Rian’s attackers as Hugo shoots a gout of fire at the one clinging to Thae’s shield. The screech of the thing’s sheared-off bone against the shield’s surface chills his blood. Neither of their shots have a great deal of success destroying the guards, however the co-ordinated assault is staggered. The strategy failed for now, the skeletons regroup into pairs to challenge their friends. Hugo notices Thae staring towards Rian, the big man stooping, moving awkwardly. He is obviously shielding his right side, but there is no time for communication beyond shaking his head, squaring up.
The skeletons are on the attack again, quicker to recover and re-organise than the invaders. While Rian and Thae manage to fend off the flurry of bone and blades, the guards are through the narrow passageway, rotating their pincer as they push the harried defenders back into the room. Literally brainless, the fuckers nevertheless demonstrate the wherewithal to keep Rian and Thae’s bodies shielding them from ranged attack. The big man is rallying, but his movements are less fluid, less precise as Hugo wonders just how badly he’s wounded, how terrible his pain.
Thae, at least, seems to be on an upswing. Literally. As broken-arm overextends trying to cow the cleric, the head of the Warhammer bursts the dehydrated centre of the skeleton’s shield. As Thae wrenches the weapon back, the creature’s whole body is dragged by the metal frame. Hugo feels a surge of optimism as the creature’s partner dodges its flying mass. He takes the opportunity to blast the thing, delighting as some element of its clothing beneath the chainmail ignites.
Anuk is having less luck, her blast too wide to hit the pair of skeletons crowding Rian. Rather than shying away from the shards of white stone exploding from the wall behind them, the skeletons separate as soon as her blast is expended. Rian is shifting, trying to narrow himself, his weapon unwieldy in this too-close combat. The man is good, predicts his vulnerability, even swings an elbow at one of his attackers which might have detached its head had the blow landed. Their attack hampered, they withdraw into the shadow of the man. Still, he cannot disguise the gasp of pain as another of their probing attacks finds its target.
Hugo can imagine the look on Anuk’s face, feels his own temper tear as he screams “FUCK” and races towards the big man, dark blade in his hand. He sees that Thae was already moving to cover Rian, leaps towards the half elf as he hatches a plan. Thae’s face registers shock, but it feels wonderful as his feet land squarely on his friend’s left thigh, using it as a springboard to propel himself towards the nearest of Rian’s attackers.
Cribbing from Thae’s example, Hugo grabs the top of the guard’s shield frame with his left hand, his right stabbing repeatedly around the protection. He isn’t used to this fury, shutting off his brain’s lucid plan-making, but at least it’s quieting his certainty that he’s about to die. Up close, he can smell the tang of Rian’s blood, knows that they must finish this quickly. He’s delighted to hear another of Anuk’s explosions off to his right. She’s switched to supporting Thae in line with his chaotic move.
He can’t pay attention to that, though, as the disconnected bones of the impossible creature recover from the surprise of his weight. He is suddenly flying towards the floor as the shield twists violently. He rolls between Rian’s legs, suddenly grateful for all his practice navigating Caladria along routes only a halfling could use. The woodsman seems as surprised as the skeleton when Hugo pops out from behind the man’s right leg, another blast from the fire ring catching the monster. Hugo worries his adrenaline is telling him the guard is coming apart, but it swings at them with a bizarre shudder-twitch. The spasmodic motion poses little threat to either of them.
Rian seems to have managed to draw breath, successfully keeping the burning skeleton’s partner at bay. The man roars as he swings the pike like a quarterstaff, clattering the thing back against the wall. Hugo hopes things are going well with the other two, as the illumination from Thae’s shield and momentary flashes of purple light are periodically accompanied by the pure, golden light he first witnessed outside the safehouse.
He sees an opening, scurries under the juddering skeleton’s guard as Rian menaces the pair. He slashes wildly at the thing’s legs, forcing it to stumble, then maniacally stabs upwards, banking on the profusion of bones around the pelvis to find a target. He can’t help but think this small blade, his small frame propelling it, is foolish. His fears manifest as, all of a sudden, he is encircled, blows raining down.
He curls instinctively, realises the ‘strikes’ he is feeling are light. He looks up into a shower of bones collapsing around him. His relief is brief as the thing’s long skull, teeth set in a hollow grin, cracks against his forehead in time with the shield hitting the ground and skipping away. Light explodes behind his eyes and a wave of nausea grips him. Of course the thing was wearing a metallic helmet as he suddenly feels leaden, moored to the floor draped in the creature’s mail. A perfect target, he fears.
He hears Rian grunt again in pain, worries that he left the man open to attack. As he blinks through stars, the big man’s pain becomes a yell of rage. As the flash clears from his eyes, Rian, his blood now splashing to the ground, forces the skeleton against the wall. The impact jars the thing, Hugo fancies he sees its limbs separate slightly, spaces between the bones lengthening momentarily. His senses are overwhelmed again. Thae’s column of golden light bathes the trapped, pinned thing and it, too, collapses into bone shrapnel. The fragments sizzle as they bounce on the hard floor.
Hugo frees himself woozily from the shreds of his erstwhile opponent’s armour. Rian, gasping from exertion and injury, uses the business end of his pike to snare the sole remaining guard. The thing has no chance as both Anuk’s and Thae’s destructive lights do their grisly work. Hugo briefly considers lobbing some flame the abomination’s way, instead shakes off the last shreds of mail, rubbing his throbbing forehead. As the other three catch their breath in the shocking silence, Hugo roots around in the carnage, extracts three finger bones.
He hears Thae querying Rian’s health, the big man trying to refocus the half-elf’s attention. Hugo, fighting headspin, demystifies part of the monsters’ uncanniness. The two middle fingers on their hands are fused together, merged into a double wide digit. It’s subtle, doesn’t seem to interfere with their grip, but affects their movements enough to enhance their strangeness.
Rian comes closer to losing his temper with Thae than Hugo has ever seen, as the cleric doggedly casts healing light over the man’s torso. He is directing them to the other room, appealing urgently that it’s “not secure.” Thae looks to Anuk then Hugo, sighs, then capitulates. Looking Rian square in the face, exuding concern, the cleric presses the ornate hammer into his huge hands. Rain looks stunned but grateful, instantly justifies Thae’s choice as he tests the swing. In the huge man’s hands, the head of the hammer becomes a blurred band of metal, lethal to a creature made of bones. Hugo’s enthusiasm dims as he realises this describes each of them.
-x-
Back in the guard room, Hugo understands Rian’s concerns. Across from them, behind the plinth, another door stands shut. To either side of them, a pair of short corridors push into the walls. The right-hand, roughly easterly, passage terminates at a door. To their left, however, the passage opens to a space of some kind. Gods know he could do with a rest, a clear of the cotton wool in his head. Rian, for all of his alertness, looks close to collapse. But anything could lie in wait in that darkness. And Hugo is half-certain that he heard a scrape of bone against stone from that direction. He feels decidedly unadventurous despite Atheran’s label.
They emerge cautiously into an odd space. The smallest room they have encountered, it seems to have been intended as octagonal, short walls at the cardinal ends linked by diagonals approximately double their length. Similarly to the non-functional farm room, however, excavation into the white stone seems to have been abandoned at another curtain of grey rock. This has not been shaped at all, it seems, again interrupting the geometric shape with something more organic, far from smooth. There’s a door mounted in the north wall, maybe a foot from where the grey stone merges into the diagonal wall.
The centre point of the room is a low circle of stone projecting from the floor. It’s been formed from slabs of the white stone, the first pieces of the barrow not carved into the featureless rock. Aside, he supposes, from the giant slab entombing the place. The short wall encloses a shaft into the ground, the suggestion of a well intensified by a pair of niches in the stone wall from which thick wooden beams once emerged. It brings to mind a gantry for a bucket and pulley, but long since collapsed. Even this representation of a well room evidences utter dehydration.
Hugo’s contemplation is interrupted as bony scrabbling and a parched moan issue from the shaft. Risking a look down the well, he recoils with confused horror at what he sees. What he sees staring back at him.
The white stone of the shaft exhibits pockmarks and natural striations where water once stood and circulated. Finally, he thinks, the white stone in a rougher, more natural form. The pale rock terminates suddenly some 20 feet beneath the ground. At the terminus is a plug or another sheet of grey rock, perfectly fitted to the shaft although again at an uneven angle to its bleached counterpart.
The grey rock is hard to see clearly, as detritus has been dumped into the hole. Some evidence of wood and metal, links of chain, a metal loop for a bucket, are apparent. These are, however, obfuscated by a worrying profusion of bones. Shattered, near powdered, there remain enough dense pieces to indicate a LOT of bodies.
The bones are not nearly so worrying as the creature half-standing on the grey stone, half-leaning against the white. Another of this place’s denizens, and very certainly undead. It has been partially skeletonised; the legs stripped entirely of flesh and organs. The torso is mostly denuded; skin sheared away to the base of the thing’s neck. The musculature of the left arm, too, has disappeared, seemingly cleanly, while some removal has taken place from the right hand. The fused middle finger bones continue to scrape horribly against the edges of the well’s wall as the thing strives for purchase.
Seared into Hugo’s brain, parts of the creature’s digestive system emerge from below the ribcage, gobbets of meat still clinging to the bones. While the thing has skin on its face, this is rotted, the nose absent entirely. But the guts, their bitten ends? Hugo’s mind fills in a trapped thing, endlessly starving. A source of meat projecting treacherously from its own self. And it is definitely trapped. Thrown into the pointless, dry well, discarded with other pieces of things. The fall had obviously shattered the thing’s leg bones, granting it a seasick posture, a hellish barrier to it ever escaping.
He hears Thae’s exclaim, in strangled voice, “Goddess’s mercy”. Then a pause and deep breath before the invocation from the safehouse. The noises from the thing become panicked, the scrabbling frenetic before finally, mercifully ceasing inside the tide of golden light. None of them look proud, none of them look brave in the warm illumination.
